“The More, the Better, As Europe and Asia become ‘veritable old-age homes,’ the U.S. will enjoy the benefits of a growing population,” says The Journal’s upbeat review of Joel Kotkin’s new book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. The review was written by Nick Schultz, editor of American.com, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Schultz says Kotkin is “convincing.” Not so fast! Kotkin and his reviewer are misleading investors. Why? The book focuses on population growth in a vaccuum, failing to factor in the consequences of 50% ‘more people’ worldwide on increased commodity demand, resource needs and the environmental limits of growth here in America. You decide:

Inevitably, Europe and Asia will decline, Mr. Kotkin predicts, and America will thrive. Indeed, the U.S. will emerge, he says, ‘as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history. What about the billion-person behemoth across the Pacific? Not to worry. Mr. Kotkin thinks that, by midcentury, China’s one-child policy will cause it, too, to suffer from the burdens of an aging population. If Mr. Kotkin is right about America’s “next hundred million” people being the key to its happy destiny, where are these people going to live? In the suburbs, he believes—and why not? For most Americans, Mr. Kotkin writes, the suburbs represent ‘the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community.’ He adds that, even with one hundred million more people, the U.S. ‘will still be only one sixth as crowded as Germany.’ In short, there is lots of room to grow. 

Mr. Kotkin’s vision of America’s next four decades—expanding, browning, adapting and thriving—is largely convincing. He’s no Pollyanna, however. He worries especially that upward mobility is more difficult than it once was and that class polarization is a real possibility, because a knowledge economy like America’s tends to widen class divisions. The result is ‘an expanding affluent class of the highly educated, a stubbornly impoverished population, and a shrinking middle class.’ Here is one area where Mr. Kotkin might have said more. The collapse of the family …  

Actually, there’s an even more important area of which much more could be said: Read my MarketWatch column about WWIII in 2050: “The Coming Population Wars: a 12-Bomb Equation” for a different perspective. In it I review evolutionary anthropologist Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” in a broader context:

“U.N.’s official projections that the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion, up dramatically from 6.6 billion. … In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called ‘the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.’ Why? Population is the new ‘third-rail’ for politicians. So they ignore it. Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America’s population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode 50% … with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.”

Conservative politicians and think tanks are indeed “Pollyannas” when they focus only on “Next Hundred Million in America in 2050″ and ignore the fact that by 2050 “if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive.”  How to solve that problem? My tip for long-term investors: Think “alternative energy” for 2050.