WI: The US had 400 million people?

DominusNovus

Presume that the annual population growth rate of the US since WW2 is higher - about 25% to 33% higher will do it (so that, in a year in which the US population grew by 1%, it would instead grow by 1.25-1.33%) - so that, by the present day, the US population has hit 400 million. Let us assume that this is relatively evenly split between births and immigration, so that the demographic profile of the nation isn't drastically altered anymore than it needs be.

That is a total increase of just under 22%. Assuming the GDP/cap remains relatively constant (no reason to assume that, but its a good starting point - an argument could be made in either direction if you wanted), then the US GDP total would be about $25 trillion.

So, what is different in this 2020, and in the intervening decades?

EDIT: Making a slight change to the scenario, just so things can be more gradual. This will be an increase of 17% growth after WW1, instead of 25-30% growth after WW2. Both get you to just about 400 mil in 2020.
 
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GeographyDude

DominusNovus said:
. . . Let us assume that this is relatively evenly split between births and immigration, so that the demographic profile of the nation isn't drastically altered anymore than it needs be.

That is a total increase of just under 22%. Assuming the GDP/cap remains relatively constant . . .
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On first glance, no change, only bigger.

But . . . more total people making movies. So, maybe more quirky, offbeat movies find an audience which is plenty big enough. As well as more exceptionally made Hollywood movies on relatively safe subjects.

And, maybe someone before Steve Jobs tours the surprisingly open Xerox PARC (“dealers of lightning”). Jobs himself says he was so blown out of the water by the GUI (graphical user interface) that he at first didn’t see the inter-connectivity between machines and the object oriented programming.
 

Thisisnotausername

More environmental concerns due to additional land development, higher consumption of fossil fuels and other resources. Global warming probably moderately worse, although with greater environmental concerns and a somewhat increased rate of technological development, progress on things like renewable energy and carbon sequestration might be further along. Higher housing costs, or possibly lower costs if things like YIMBYism come to prominence earlier due to the higher housing prices (for reference, a quick estimate suggests that the US would reach its OTL current population of 330 million or so some time in the 90s) and managed to get cities to enact denser zoning or whatever. Concerns about the US's inability to compete with China will be less pronounced, especially if the US's heightened growth rates show no sign of flagging while China continues to have its OTL demographic problems, although there will be more concern about overpopulation and environmental damage. Regional population distribution will be somewhat different due to environmental concerns such as limited water supplies in the southwest hitting sooner, although this might just result in additional investment in things like dams and desalination plants instead.
 

DominusNovus

GeographyDude said:
On first glance, no change, only bigger.

But . . . more total people making movies. So, maybe more quirky, offbeat movies find an audience which is plenty big enough. As well as more exceptionally made Hollywood movies on relatively safe subjects.

And, maybe someone before Steve Jobs tours the surprisingly open Xerox PARC (“dealers of lightning”). Jobs himself says he was so blown out of the water by the GUI (graphical user interface) that he at first didn’t see the inter-connectivity between machines and the object oriented programming.
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Are movies any more offbeat now than they were 20 or so years ago?


Thomas Jefferson said:
Younger population on average
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Given that I’m positing this trend would have started in 1945, that means that the effects would be felt everywhere in the <55 voting bloc in 2000. While the younger generations (in this case, Gen X) would be larger, so would the Boomers.
 

Thomas Jefferson

sirjackalot said:
Do you have a source for that?
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Actually, this exit poll says that Gore won voters over 65 by 51-47, and tied with 18-24 year olds by 47-47, which is counter to the usual trend of younger voters being more socially liberal. Now that I'm thinking of Al Gore and the "lockbox," the politics around Social Security and Medicare would look very different in this scenario. With a larger working-age population supporting Greatest Generation retirees, the funding challenges for these programs would be less significant issue.
 

Hcira1

The biggest effect I can think of politically would be how these extra 70 million people would be distributed. Much of the west already has water availability problems, and while they can handle more growth of course, 70 million is a lot of people. How many more people can a state like California fit? The housing problem is already huge there with the super high rents and homelessness and everything, so I would imagine that it would see disproportionately less of the growth than other states. The states that would benefit the most from this would gain house seats (and thus electoral votes) at the expense of the states who don't benefit so much from this. Perhaps Texas challenges California by 2021 in this TL for the title of largest state?
 

DominusNovus

Hcira1 said:
The biggest effect I can think of politically would be how these extra 70 million people would be distributed. Much of the west already has water availability problems, and while they can handle more growth of course, 70 million is a lot of people. How many more people can a state like California fit? The housing problem is already huge there with the super high rents and homelessness and everything, so I would imagine that it would see disproportionately less of the growth than other states. The states that would benefit the most from this would gain house seats (and thus electoral votes) at the expense of the states who don't benefit so much from this. Perhaps Texas challenges California by 2021 in this TL for the title of largest state?
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California can fit loads more people, it just chooses not to. It is the 11th most densely populated state. They'd just have to have more reasonable housing regulations and rely much more on desalination. Desal would increase the cost of living, but not dramatically so.

EDIT: Making a slight change to the scenario, just so things can be more gradual. This will be an increase of 17% growth after WW1, instead of 25-30% growth after WW2. Both get you to just about 400 mil in 2020.

If you want to go nuts, 30% increase gets you to 466 mil.
 
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Anderman

Donor
Current projections are that the USA will reach 388 million in 2050, shortly after that the population will reach 400 mill.
So all problems shown in this thread will come to pass anyway.
 

Optical_Illusion

I think shift to the "sunbelt" would happen earlier; the structural problems that make coastal cities expensive would probably still remain, since they relate to how post-'70s urban housing is going to go up because it has such a high value on national and world markets, while the labour productivity of US workers and their ability to capture it via union etc is going up much slower. (In short pre 70s US workers had high value relative to US houses in the major cities, and that's less the case over time).

Economically, higher domestic demand and internal market size might give some more lee-way for corporations to keep certain types of American manufacturing open (by protectionism / managed trade deals), or more gracefully manage their decline, in face of rising global competition for manufacturing (subsidised by nations who view this as key to development) and rising demand for US dollars. But this is ultimately more in the hands of politics than an inevitability that can be linked to demographics.

Political movements to "face reality" that market demand (globally and internally) for manufactured goods by US workers falls relative to demand for US assets and currency, and then use non-market mechanisms to redistribute wealth to smooth transition to "the new reality", well, those might happen earlier and more successfully, but it's in the gift of political contingency again.

I don't know if age demographics would mean much power shift between either major political party. In general, in our time line we find that every thesis of "The coming X majority" has crapped out and died in the face of actual reality (parties change and compete, individuals shift on the margin over time and are not fixed, etc). So I don't think we could say much about how that would turn out, other than they'd have to look somewhat different to what they do IOTL to compete politically.
 
TheMann

TheMann

I think the biggest question is, as everyone points out, where these additional people live. That would change just about anything about the nation's politics, culture, economy and society. If its more people on the coasts it has one effect, more people in the South or Midwest or Northeast or Northwest it has quite another. Before one could possibly explain the answer to the question of what an additional 70 million Americans does to the nation you'd have to know for sure where those people were, and indeed what the demographics of those people are.
 
Miguel Angel

Miguel Angel

DominusNovus said:
The point is what would be different if we already reached this point.
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TheMann said:
I think the biggest question is, as everyone points out, where these additional people live. That would change just about anything about the nation's politics, culture, economy and society. If its more people on the coasts it has one effect, more people in the South or Midwest or Northeast or Northwest it has quite another. Before one could possibly explain the answer to the question of what an additional 70 million Americans does to the nation you'd have to know for sure where those people were, and indeed what the demographics of those people are.
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In fact, it could be argued that even another 7 million Americans (or maybe just 7 more!) would have butterflies. That is why the first response to this thread saying that Al Gore would have won the 2000 election seemed so specific to me (and subsequent conversation); the most likely outcome would surely be that the country would be so different that it wouldn't even be a Bush v Gore election.
 
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