Question of the Day: Do We Need More Babies?

I'm asking this quite apart from the "natalism vs. antinatalism" debate. It could very well be that for real economic growth and a healthy economy with growing prosperity, we need constant population growth as well, which doesn't mean, however, that bringing more children into this hellhole of a world is in any way moral, just or right.

Here, Bill Bonner asks if "The Great Correction" (and because it is a "correction" not a recession, whatever its nature, people know that there is no recovery, only the government's phony, manipulated "recovery", which is why all talk of a "double dip" sounds crazy to sane, rational people who see through the state's lies; there is just one big "dip", and we're still in it and will remain in it for the foreseeable future) is more than some suppose:

But what if there were more going on than a simple financial correction…even a correction of a 60-year credit expansion?

What if the Great Correction were greater than we thought? More ambitious…more aggressive…and more dangerous?

In the space of the last 500 years the human population grew approximately 1000%. If it were a financial chart, you’d look at it and think — ‘uh oh…it’s a bubble.’

What if we were approaching a correction?

Reuters reports that the population of Japan is falling like a stone. Some 20 million Japanese are expected to disappear in the next 30 years.

Declining, graying populations are not what you need for economic growth. Old people don’t spend much. Dead people spend even less.

As a result, the economy shrivels up like a 90-year-old.

Read more: Dead Men Don't Spend

And Bryan Caplan wrote not long ago about the connection between population and prosperity:

The case against population is simple: Assume a fixed pie of wealth, and do the math. If every person gets an equal slice, more people imply smaller slices. The flaw in this argument is that people are producers as well as consumers. More sophisticated critics of population appeal to the diminishing marginal product of labor. As long as doubling the number of producers less than doubles total production, more people imply smaller slices.

These anti-population arguments have strong intuitive appeal. But they face an awkward fact: During the last two centuries, both population and prosperity exploded. Maybe the world just enjoyed incredibly good luck, but it makes you wonder: Could rising population be a cause of rising prosperity? -Population, Fertility, and Liberty

As for myself, I don't know, but I can't justify the true crime of bringing a new life, unasked, into the world and throwing the inevitable suffering that being alive brings with it, onto another. I'd rather be ethical than ensure I'm going to collect a decent Social Security check in my old age (or have a "prosperous" economy with endless growth). Massive Ponzi schemes (Rick Perry was right) need constant new blood (suckers) to maintain themselves, and I'm not willing to force that evil on anyone. The incredible selfishness of the very idea that we must create new babies to have a "healthy" economy is disgusting, regardless of whether or not a growing population and a growing economy go together like capitalism and the state.