Half A Billion Americans?
While I’m prepared to continue to treat this article with some degree of interest (despite obviously sycophantic and pandering sentences such as youthful, exuberant, multi-coloured America and ageing, decrepit, inward-looking Europe), I see three main problems with its conclusions.
The first is that the demographics of 2050 reflect the data collected in the 2000 census. Others have already pointed out the methodological and political inconsistencies in the 2000 census. I’d add that given that the 2000 census “surprised” relative to the 1990 exercise, the assumptions of this article are at best highly speculative.
The second (assuming the article’s speculative demographic trends continue) is that with such a huge population of mostly underclass young adults that US society contues to reflect the societal structure of a first-world nation. Personally I think that’s quite a long shot. I’d expect the US to alter to resemble Southern Hemisphere superpowers such as Brazil instead.
Indeed, given that US social mobility has been declining for decades, and in fact US social mobility now ranks only in the second tier of developed nations such as France (compared with the more socially mobile English and Germans), I think I see this trend clearly evidenced.
Thirdly, the assumption that half a billion Americans can continue to consume such a vast and disproportionately large and unsustainable quantity of natural resources (fresh water, gasoline, electricity, land) in the style to which the society has become addicted is ludicrous. The US profited greatly from the conquest and genocide of the native populations and the importation and deployment of the European biota within the “virgin” lebensraum has delivered military victories, territorial hegemony, and maximised returns for many generations.
However, the advantage the US enjoyed in natural resources relative to the older, more worked and exploited European geographies is quickly vanishing. I expect much of the US to revert to a lower-level, less intensive agricultural exploitation that will perforce shed much of its European biota features. This biota simply evolved within a vastly different ecology and the harsher, more arid expanses found in the US (relative to Western Europe) are only capable of supporting a crude simulacrum of the European biota using massive inputs of energy, aquifer draining, and pathologically large ranges.
The destruction or reversal of the European biota throughout much of the US will doubtless be accelerated by the living demands of the new couple of hundred million or so Americans. Thus I expect many of them to live at a lowered socioeconomic level — if not at a subsistence level — while the agricultural and economic support systems evolve towards some new homestasis.
Others have also remarked on the amazing cultural shift within certain areas of the US towards a tribal religious fundamentalism that contrasts ever more severely with the more “mannered” (think Norbert Elias here) humanist ethos displayed along the north-east and north-west seaboards. The effort required to shift resources from the richer, fertile areas along the coasts and major rivers to the arid regions may prove excessive and a loss of political will and economic ability lead to a localized political destabilization or defederation of the Union.
There may indeed be half a billion “Americans”, but there may not be a “US” as we recognize it today.