And here’s another counter-intuitive suggestion. A decrease in population promotes an increase in population. From a New York Times op-ed by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun:
Nicola Gatta, the mayor of Candela in southeastern Italy (population 2,700), is desperate to reverse two decades of population decline and literally keep his town on the map. If you accept his invitation to move there, he will pay you about $2,300.
It’s probably no coincidence that mayors in small Italian towns are making such offers at about the same time as a populist coalition is on the verge of taking over Italy’s government.
The last time that populism — what we broadly define as political movements that ostensibly set the interests of “ordinary people†against elites as well as an “other†— swept across Europe and the United States was marked by the same combination of slow economic and fertility growth that today prevails in advanced industrialized countries in the West and Asia.
I don’t know enough about Italian or Hungarian politics to comment about those countries so I’ll focus on the U. S. Populism is increasing in Texas, too, right along with the population. When you combine that with a casual observation that although population in Japan is actually declining, not just slowing in its rate of increase, it suggests an alternative interpretation. Japan has very low immigration. Is it possible that populism increases with immigration?
Or, more precisely, when people don’t think that their political leaders are paying enough attention to them, they tend to become more populist.
