- September 9, 2012
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
The current exponential population growth evokes, in spite of its seeming economic benefits, has a number of disadvantages which affect social, cultural and, paradoxically in a way, economic sphere. First of all, the current population growth is mainly provided by the growing immigration. As a result, the flow of immigrants, on the one hand, provide national labor market with a large amount of cheap but low qualified labor force, while, on the other hand, immigrants start replacing native-born Americans from the labor market, especially in the segments where no high qualification is needed. Hence, the unemployment can potentially grow, if immigration becomes uncontrollable.
Furthermore, immigrants cannot afford health insurance and need the support from the part of the state that deteriorates the economic situation in the country. At the same time, the growth of the population is naturally accompanied by the risk of the spread of such diseases as AIDS.
On the other hand, the current population grows lays the foundation for the problem of the rapid population decline in a relatively long-run perspective. To put it more precisely, as the current generation grows older and dies out, it is likely to result in a rapid population decline because the birth rate are disproportionally low compared to the population growth. Therefore, the adult population is growing but birth rates remains low. As a result, the number of retired people will outweigh the number of active, working population even more consistently in the future than it does now. Finally, the population decline will lead to a considerable economic slow-down and cultural crisis. The population declines breaks cultural links between generations since younger people cannot learn cultural traditions of the older generation that simply dies out.