José A. Tapia
José A. Tapia is associate professor of politics at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
November 2024Field Notes
On Demographic Decline, World Population, and World Prospects for the Twenty-First Century
The article by Jason E. Smith in Field Notes of July-August 2024 (“After the Wave, Winter: Demographic Decline and the ‘Production of Men’ in the 21st Century”) contains interesting analyses and insightful ideas on demographic aspects of capitalism. Smith reviews in enlightening ways how different theorists, Marx in particular, have linked population growth and the development of capitalism. There are, however, some assertions in the article that I think are worthy of critical remarks.
The world is now again facing a global economic crisis. This one is, of course, a very specific one.
On January 17, 2019, the Wall Street Journal published a statement signed by 3508 American economists, including four former chairs of the Federal Reserve, 27 Nobel laureates in economics, 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, two former secretaries of the US Department of Treasury, and several economists who were my professors twenty years ago. The statement is so short that it is worth it to reproduce it in full.
As Guy Routh explained forty years ago in his magisterial book, The Origin of Economic Ideas, economics has preposterous origins. Since the time of Adam Smith, the new academic discipline was linked through the emerging class of merchants and manufacturers to the rich and powerful in general, and fulfilled the ideological role of presenting the emerging capitalist system as the best of all possible worlds.
Advertising, cars, airplanes, air-conditioning systems, meat, and disposables are typical elements of present-day capitalism with large carbon footprints; that is, they imply major CO2 emissions.
In the first part of this essay (Field Notes, November 2017), I argued that in the United States changes in greenhouse emissions, particularly of CO2, have been strongly linked to changes in the economy.
Let me start with a blunt statement: It seems to me quite likely that weather calamities will get worse in coming decades and major climate catastrophes implying many fatalities, perhaps many hundred million deaths, will occur before the end of the century.
