Dealing with the population crisis
Here is a set of political positions that, even though they go together naturally, in combination will offend everyone, both left and right:
- Most of the developed world aligned with the West, including Western Europe and the United States, suffers from a fertility crisis. This is bad. We need more people if we want to (1) stay at the top of the world order rather than drop to the bottom and be dominated by bigger players and (2) keep our national economies going and continue to produce more prosperity.
- Therefore, we need more immigration. This is emphatically not limited to highly skilled workers, but includes low-skill, less productive immigration, too. After all, we need both more production capacity and a bigger market, and each additional person helps with both (unless they are very old or sick, but those tend not to be the people who like to migrate anyway).
- At the same time we have to reward people for producing more offspring. This very likely means that significantly more resources need to be diverted from singles and single-child families to families with 2 or more children, so much so that not starting a family early on is taxed substantially. This will be a regression in both personal freedom and gender equality, but lead to a much-needed recovery of fertility.
People as different as Robin Hanson and Matthew Yglesias have written about the topic – not necessarily in the way I summarized it above – but I have yet to see a party platform that incorporates all of it in combination.