It Makes No Sense To Me

Did you read the article on population growth in the WSJ last week?  I don’t understand the infatuation with an ever-increasing population. Sure, if economic growth is the focus, then you need more consumers to buy your products and, therefore, a larger labor force to produce them. But surely, ever-increasing population growth is not sustainable. It has been postulated in the past that we would eventually run out of resources to sustain the population growth, but the current thought is that this is not true. As technology advances, say the pundits, we become more efficient and are better able to find new resources and efficiently use the resources we have to increase production. But logically, how can that be the case?  Sooner or later, you will have to reach the tipping point, especially if the non-productive segment of society continues to grow, as we have seen of late. And where do we put all these people without adversely affecting quality of life?  I, for one, do not find cities with expansive homeless encampments esthetically pleasing. The futuristic urban decay and overcrowding portrayed in science fiction works like Blade Runner are not that difficult to imagine for anyone who has seen the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, or even Detroit. To suggest that we continue engaging in urban sprawl at the expense of agricultural land or green spaces seems absurd. Do we continue upwards instead, making cities high-rise beehives?  Will Americans tolerate the cubicle living and work-centric existence of the Japanese? Not as long as we continue to offer a generous welfare state as an alternative. And as we attempt to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in favor of electricity, how can our aging power grid keep up? How exactly are we going to generate that electrical power to keep the growing population warm, their EVs charged, and the lights on? And the demographics don’t make sense. The population is indeed shifting as well, but it appears to be a political migration, moving towards lower tax havens without regard to the supposed existential crisis of climate change. Why, with headlines screaming rising seas and scorching heat, are we seeing migration from cooler climates like the northeast to the south, particularly Florida, the Carolinas, and Texas, all incidentally with significant amounts of waterfront? Is there something the elites aren’t telling us?  Is this some Orwellian ploy to have the working class live in squalor while the privileged political class continues to hypocritically live in their gated communities and jet around the world to their climate summits where they fabricate policy for the masses?