Fast forward to the past

Charlie Larga, or the collective of writers who use that name, seems to have been born around 1950, when the population of the United States was about 154 million. By 2020 it had more than doubled.

The population of the world did even better, rising from approximately 2.6 billion to nearly eight billion. Yet most of us remained fed, housed and occasionally able to find somewhere to park.

I doubt that many Americans in 1950 expected their country’s population to double within the following 70 years. Had you suggested it, they might have worried that the United States would run out of food, water, gasoline, building land, and booths at the local diner.

Instead, agricultural production became vastly more efficient, new sources of energy were developed, the interstate highway system was built, enormous suburbs were built, and methods of extracting, transporting and conserving resources improved. New problems were created, of course, but the country did not collapse under the weight of all those additional Americans.

This makes me wonder what people mean when they say that America must be made great again.

My assumption is that they are not yearning for the United States to have precisely the population it had in 1950, but perhaps they are yearning for the way America appeared to feel in 1950.

This was the America of inexpensive land, affordable houses, large automobiles, plentiful industrial jobs and families confident that their children would be wealthier than they were. It was a country whose factories supplied the world and whose currency sat at the center of the international financial system.

In the popular imagination, it has become something resembling the movie Grease: polished automobiles, milkshakes, high-school dances and young people singing cheerfully about their romantic problems. Grease was actually set in 1959 and made in the 1970s, which makes it represent two levels of  nostalgia. Even so, it probably provides a more accurate picture of the America people wish to recover than any economic policy paper.

The difficulty is that the prosperity and confidence of postwar America did not arise simply because Americans had discovered the correct tax rates or elected unusually clever politicians.

The economies of Europe had been shattered by war. Britain had won but was nearly bankrupt and the empire was falling apart. Germany had been bombed and partitioned. France, Italy and much of the rest of the continent needed reconstruction. The Soviet Union had lost millions of people and suffered enormous physical destruction.

Japan had been devastated by conventional bombing before atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. and its cities, factories and infrastructure required rebuilding, and China was best known for silk, porcelain, and fireworks.

The continental United States, meanwhile, had not been bombed at all. It emerged from the war with expanded factories, modern infrastructure, immense productive capacity and much of the world owing it money.

It would be difficult to devise a more favorable competitive position without employing Auric Goldfinger as an economic consultant.

The Bretton Woods system placed the dollar at the center of the postwar monetary order. Other currencies were tied to the dollar, while the dollar was convertible into gold at $35 an ounce at a time when the United States held about three-quarters of the world’s official gold reserves.

Gold therefore mattered in a way that can seem rather strange today. In the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, the villain does not intend to carry all the gold out of Fort Knox in trucks. Even Oddjob would have found that heavy work. Goldfinger plans to make the American gold reserve radioactive, making it unusable and vastly increasing the value of his own gold. (Good thinking, Goldfinger!)

The scheme made sense to cinema audiences because Fort Knox was not merely a large subterranean bunker filled with shiny metal. American gold underpinned the dollar, and the dollar underpinned much of the Western financial system, so an attack on the gold was an attack on the economic order itself.

James Bond saved Fort Knox, although the Bretton Woods system survived for only another seven years, by which time Bond had moved on from gold to diamonds. President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold in August, and Diamonds Are Forever arrived in cinemas that December. Bond was no longer protecting bullion at Fort Knox but chasing smuggled diamonds through Las Vegas, because Blofeld was hoarding the diamonds to construct a laser satellite with which he intended to hold the nuclear powers to ransom.  (Nice idea, Blofeld!). Goldfinger was history, Bretton Woods was dying, and international finance had entered the space age.

The America of 1950 was therefore living through a remarkably unusual historical moment. Its principal industrial competitors were either rebuilding from destruction or had not yet become industrial competitors. The United States possessed an overwhelming share of global manufacturing capacity, financial power and monetary gold.

No president can bring those circumstances back. Restoring America’s relative position in 1950 would require Europe and Japan to become ruins again, China to cease being an industrial power, and most of the developing world to return to poverty. Even the most enthusiastic supporter of American greatness should hesitate before ordering that particular package from Amazon.

Nor is it obvious how reducing population growth would recreate the prosperity of the period. The America of the 1950s was not a country frightened of expansion. It was building houses, interstate highways, schools and factories. Its population was young, its birth rate was high, and millions of people were moving to live in little boxes in growing suburbs and singing about it.

Today’s United States has the opposite demographic problem. Its population is aging, and a growing number of retirees are moving into Adult Living Facilities and must be supported by the earnings and payroll taxes of workers if their savings run out.

Social Security does not necessarily require the population to grow forever. It can also be supported through higher productivity, higher wages, increased taxes, later retirement or reduced benefits. But a growing supply of younger workers certainly makes the arithmetic easier and a shrinking workforce makes it harder.

There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting less immigration or slower population growth. A smaller population might mean less congestion, reduced pressure on housing and natural resources, and perhaps better wages for some workers. But that would require an honest discussion of the trade-offs.

It is difficult simultaneously to demand fewer immigrants, more domestic manufacturing, cheaper food, inexpensive elder care, lower taxes, rapid economic growth and completely secure retirement benefits. These objectives do not fit together as neatly as a row of gold bars in Fort Knox.

There is also the question of how many people the United States could actually support.

Florida is now the third most populous state, yet anyone driving through the center of the peninsula or across the panhandle will pass vast stretches of terrain that appear almost empty. Some of this land is agricultural, forested, marshy, protected or privately owned. But land use is not ordained by God for eternity. Forests can be cleared, marshes drained, farms made more productive and settlements built more compactly. After all, places like Orlando and Gainesville were once mosquito infested swamps.

None of those changes would necessarily be desirable. It would even be physically possible to convert much of the Amazon rainforest into leafy suburbia, although the environmental consequences would be appalling. The point is not that we should do such things, but that a country’s present land-use map does not establish its permanent carrying capacity.

Future Americans might not all expect a detached house surrounded by a sprinkler-watered lawn. Toilets need not always be flushed with drinking water. Wastewater can be recycled. Solar-powered desalination could provide fresh water to coastal cities. Food production, construction and energy generation will continue to change in ways we cannot predict.

The question is therefore not simply how many people can be squeezed into the available acreage. It is how many people could live well under different assumptions about technology, housing, water, energy and acceptable environmental change.

Perhaps the population of the United States will never double again. Current expectations suggest that it will not. But few people in 1950 foresaw the population doubling by 2020, just as few imagined smartphones, solar farms, genetically improved crops or hamburgers delivered by someone following directions from a talking map on a telephone.

“Make America Great Again” works wonderfully as a slogan because everyone can supply a private definition of greatness. For some, it means military power. For others, secure factory jobs, cheap houses, social conformity, fewer foreigners, or simply the remembered confidence of childhood.

But the economic greatness of 1950 was created by population growth, industrial expansion, unrivalled productive capacity, a dollar supported by most of the world’s monetary gold, and the unfortunate fact that all America’s competitors had recently been flattened by bombs, some of them nuclear.

We can recreate the hair-styles and automobiles. We can remake Grease yet again. James Bond can rescue Fort Knox as often as television schedules permit., but recreating the unique economic circumstances and the world of 1950 may prove to be tricky.