The Power and the Money

What would it take to get one billion Americans?

What would it take to get one billion Americans by 2100? Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining why that would be a worthy cause in his book titled … well … One Billion Americans, but he doesn’t really say what it would take to get there. At best you can say that he proposes a bunch of policies that would be good in-and-of-themselves and will raise population growth on the margin. That’s pretty weak tea.

So what would it take? Well, here I’m going to focus on 2060 and 2100, since the Census Bureau projects out that far and I’m marginally likely to be alive, while my kids will be in their forties and (they better!) have kids of their own. According to the Census Bureau, the United States will have about 404 million people by 2060. The census projection then creeps upwards to 426 million by 2099 before starting to shrink.

The problem with that projection, as Lyman Stone will tell you, is that the Census is relying on outdated statistics. Both birthrates and net immigration have plummeted since they put together their estimates. I constructed a simple population model and plugged in actual Trump-era birthrates — i.e., 1.74 children per women instead of 1.89 and net migration of 0.6 million per year instead of 1.1 million. (I assumed the same improvement in mortality.) The result is a United States with only 362 million people in 2060. And that 2060 population will be falling, shrinking to 331 million by 2100 … a million fewer people than today.

So what could we do? Well, we could adopt Canada’s immigration policy. Using the net migration numbers for the “status quo” scenario put out by Canada’s Conference Board, American net immigration would rise to 2.7 million people by 2030. That’s about 4½ times the current number. Now, the current number has been pushed down by the Trump Administration, but immigration would still run about 2½ times the amount we averaged in 2000-16. (My calculations assume a ten-year phase-in period.)

But it would mean that the United States would accept a number close to all net migration into high income countries. According to the U.N., high income nations took in about 3.2 million people per year in 2015-20, down from a peak of 4.7 million per year in 2000-05. Now, I have no doubt that there is a lot of pent-up demand to emigrate held back by U.S. restrictions. But the United States is so big compared to Canada or Australia that it’s a real question whether we could attract this level of immigration over the next 80 years even if we wanted to. It is doubly unsure whether we could attract those numbers using the Canadian-style points system; we would almost certainly need to give bigger weight to other factors than Canada does or lower the cut-offs. 

And even that wouldn’t get us to 1 billion. Rather, the U.S. would hit 465 million in 2060 and 594 million in 2100. That’s a healthier population than you get under current policy, but it isn’t exactly the kind of dynamic growth that Yglesias (or I) would want to see.

To get to one billion by 2100 (or 570 million by 2060) you would also have to raise the total fertility rate (TFR) to 2.4 children per women. That is not a historically high number, but the only developed nation to maintain numbers that high is Israel. And even there, the number for secular Jews is only 2.2. At a TFR of 2.2, a Canadian immigration policy would get the USA to 534 million by 2060 and 851 million by 2100. A more realistic (but still hard!) TFR of 2.0 would get us 503 million by 2060 and 730 million by 2100.

But 730 million is not one billion.

I understand that hitting that target wasn’t Yglesias’s point. Rather, his point was twofold. (1) Here is a frame for a bunch of good policies! (2) Why the hell are most Americans afraid of aiming big anymore? For me, (2) is the salient point. We’re a technophilic nation, so it’s not that we’re afraid of change in general. What we’re afraid of is a certain kind of change, one involving big collective endeavors. We cower from building new cities, new roads, skyscrapers in our back yards, nuclear power plants, the Green New Deal. That’s a bad thing. We should stop. We will have a better future if we stop.

But sadly, absent some incredible rise in fertility or an unlikely drop in mortality, that better future won’t involve one billion Americans.

The green energy revolution arrives now

 I went to Israel a few months back. One of the reasons for my trip was to investigate the Arava Power Company. Arava operates a solar farm in the Negev desert. As you can imagine, the Negev has great conditions for solar; the cost for the local utility is less than the wholesale price of the electricity from other sources. Here is their demonstration plant.

And here is the next phase of the project.

Pretty impressive, no? What, no, you say? It isn’t impressive? I guess I can see why you’d say that, considering as it is just an empty field. I have two answers for you. The first is that Arava finally started work on the new project, with the first panels installed in October; serious work got underway jointly with ET Solar and EDF this month.

So the project is underway. But that answer isn’t interesting. The interesting answer is why the company has had so much pushback against its plans to build utility-scale solar in an environment where it should be cheaper than the alternatives.

The simple answer: from the utility’s point of view, solar power is not cheap. The reason is intermittancy. Not just intermittancy in the sense of the sun not shining at night, but intermittancy in the sense that passing clouds (and even the Negev has passing clouds) can cause output to drop 95% in a matter of minutes. That means that the utility needs to keep gas plants ready — and on days with the risk of clouds those plants will need to be spun up and burning fuel in order to start generating quickly.

The Israeli government has been abetting the utilities, holding up permits and unpredictably altering the feed-in tariff for solar. Arava officials told me that the government also weirdly decided to raise the land rent (land in Israel is state-owned) on solar farms. (The link is worth clicking; it corroborates what the Arava people told me.) Solar in Israel is moving, but not that fast.

But now from California comes news that could change everything. 

Cheap storage would, of course, utterly transform the economics of renewable energy. Intermittancy would no longer be that important. Even at a small scale, it would be worth it: no more worries about passing clouds. And on a large scale, of course, cheap storage would no longer matter that the sun doesn’t shine at night.

So what happened in California? It wasn’t a technical breakthrough; those are always being announced. Nope, it was that storage won bids put out by Southern California Edison for new capacity in the wake of the decision to close the San Onofre nuclear plants.

That is big news! If storage really has become competitive with peaker plants, then the door is open to an entirely new energy landscape ... as long as storage continues to fall in price. Keep an eye out.