Economic growth isn't a desirable thing in and of itself. What really matters is wealth per capita. If growth is flat and population is down, that's a better situation where growth and population are both increasing at the same rate.

it will be very difficult to maintain the economically active population over total population ratio constant, you need a corresponding increase of productivity to offset the increased burden over the few working...

Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%, hardly a catastrophe. 10% average in Europe is not horrible. If you take Spain (24%) or Greece (26%) yes, is bad, but is not sustainable and most probably things will improve in a few years... but I'm talking about decades of population reduction.

>Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%...

U3 is a fanciful number, both because people are using disability insurance as a way to collect benefits indefinitely and because once you give up looking for a job you don't count as unemployed. The US has the lowest labor force participation rate in decades.

Another way to increase younger population is also to encourage immigration in that population group. However, for other reasons, this will never be acknowledged as a reasonable measure :)

Eh, what? Not only is this acknowledged as reasonable in many countries, it's policy.

The anti-immigration sentiment often seen in the US (sometimes even on HN), and in a lot of European countries seems to say otherwise.

There isn't much anti-immigration sentiment in the US. What we have in the US is anti illegal immigration sentiment.

In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.

I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.

While that may be technically true, AFAIK it's hard for someone to immigrate to the US. If I wanted to move to the US tomorrow, I believe it would involve me having to get a job before I got there.

One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.

We have over a million legal immigrants a year, so even if you can't get in easily somehow a whole lot of other people are managing.

Well, some countries have a pretty open immigration policy because of low population grow.

I'm pretty sure this idea will not survive the next 30 years; raw manpower is no longer the main driver of economic growth and wealth creation.

I agree that raw population grow is not a sustainable solution, but at least you need to grow at the replace rate or you're in trouble.

Care for the elderly is still an intensive task. Maybe yes, in 30 years it will be done by (Japanese) robots but we're not close yet.

You have the economic burden too: how much more productive each working individual has to be if it has to offset an increased ration of non working individuals?

Lastly, I don't think a country is sustainable with a dwindling population unless it can be physically and culturally isolated and has an important deterrent against military action