Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post on the US Population
- Lex Rieffel
- Jun 23
- 4 min read
People who follow this website know that I have a deep interest in demography. In recent years, most of my writing on this topic has been to explain why shrinking populations (due to falling fertility rates) are a good thing and not a crisis. What’s new here is that I have never before on the same day sent letters on this topic to two different newspapers. The Washington Post published theirs, but the Financial Times did not, even though in my opinion their letter was much more substantive. Here are both of the letters so you can decide which was more worthy of being published.
Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post
(dated June 12, 2025, as presented on its website; it was published in the print edition dated 14 June 2025, on page A16)
Bullish on a bust
In his June 11 Wednesday Opinion column, “Why reversing the baby bust is so difficult,” Eduardo Porter provided some of the reasons for the falling birth rate in the U.S. and offered some steps for stopping it from falling further. One step is to reverse the trend of falling immigration. If this trend continues, he argued, “it could quickly lead to labor shortages.”
What’s wrong with labor shortages? There is no better way of ensuring that the real incomes of workers will rise, income disparities across the population will diminish and technological innovation will be encouraged. More fundamentally, what’s wrong with having a smaller population?
The 1940 Census put the U.S. population at over 132 million. I was born the next year. We weren’t exactly poor and starving. Today, our population is almost 342 million, more than doubling in the space of 80 years. With immigration and a higher birth rate, it might be easy to double our population again, but it is inconceivable to me that my grandchildren would be better-off in a much larger population.
Instead, it would be smart to have an open debate about the “right” population for the U.S. as global warming begins making the good life as we know it significantly more difficult. As of 2021, most of the countries in the world now have fertility rates (the number of children that women of childbearing age are having, on average) below the replacement rate of 2.1 children and therefore are on course to have shrinking populations. One of the biggest contributions the U.S. could make to slowing global warming is to have a smaller population.
It is also likely that a smaller population would be a more prosperous population.
Lex Rieffel, Washington
N.B. My letter is the sixth and last to be found on this Washington Post webpage:
Letter to the Editor of the Financial Times
Sent 11 June 2025
Martin Wolf laments the slowdown in global GDP growth recently highlighted in a World Bank report ("An ever riskier world", June 11). At a workshop in Spain four years ago*, Mr. Wolf was quoted as saying that doing nothing to stop the trend of global warming before it passes the benchmark of 1.5C degrees above pre-industrial levels would "risk a climate Armageddon".
At the same time, Mr. Wolf argued that slowing or stopping global GDP growth is not the right solution; instead "technological transformation is the only way forward". But isn't believing in a technology solution waiting for deus ex machina, in other words a miracle? Of course, all of humanity should be working to find new technologies to mitigate the threat of global warming. However, isn't growing global consumption driving global warming? Doesn't a reduction of consumption imply a reduction in production, i.e., GDP?
And why is so little attention being paid to the demographic dimension of global warming? Wouldn't stopping population growth contribute more in the next 20-30 years to mitigating global warming than any technology on the horizon? Shouldn't we view as a good trend the shrinking populations in China and other countries (even in Europe)?
Declines in fertility--the number of children produced by women of childbearing age on average--around the world have been widely reported, and lamented. Often the primary reasons for the decline below the replacement rate of 2.1 children include the cost of raising children and discrimination against women in the workplace. More and more, however, there is evidence that a significant driver of low fertility is anxiety about life in a world of chaos due to a number of political and economic factors including climate-driven mass migration.
Perhaps what policymakers should be looking for are ways to improve household well-being without growing measured GDP by adjusting the sources of GDP, by spending less on producing guns and prison guards and more on teachers and housing for the unhoused , for example.
Lex Rieffel
1722 19th Street NW, apt 202
Washington DC, 20009
N.B. I am a former US Treasury Department economist and former Brookings Institution scholar. (And a 50-year reader/subscriber of the FT !)
N.B.Martin Wolf’s op-ed, published in the FT’s print edition on 11 June 2025, can be found here behind its paywall:
It is possible to read his op-ed by googling “martin wolf 10 june 2025 an even riskier world”
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