U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays. “A Demographic Crisis.” “A Blinking Light Ahead.” “The Death of Hope.” Those are some of the dire headlines that have been written in recent years about the sluggish pace of U.S. population growth, which in 2021 fell to its lowest rate ever — just 0.1 percent. While the pandemic played a major role in driving last year’s decline, the country’s population growth has been slowing for much of the last decade, depressed…

How Will the Ukraine War End?

U.S. officials have said that Russia appealed to China for military and economic support. Biden warned China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that granting that request would incur “consequences,” though the administration has not specified what those consequences might be. “The administration’s dilemma is that China is the world’s second-largest economy and the origin point of countless global supply chains,” wrote Phelim Kine of Politico. “Unlike Russia, whose relative unimportance to the function of Western economies made it relatively easier to sanction, China is a dominant player in everything from electrical appliances…

3 Big Questions Looming Over the Glasgow Climate Talks

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Six years ago in Paris, world leaders celebrated a breakthrough in global climate politics: After more than two decades of failure, nearly every country finally agreed to reduce “as soon as possible” the amount of planet-warming greenhouse gases they were pumping into the atmosphere. Those leaders knew, though, that their pledges were woefully insufficient to avert disaster and would need to be ratcheted up at a later date. That is…