Ramstad: Stop hindering yourself, Minnesota. Let the economy grow.

Minnesota, why are you hitting yourself?

You know that old bit of roughhouse. You did it when you were little, or maybe not so little. You grabbed your sibling or friend around the back, pinned their arms to their chest and started slapping them with their own hand.

Then you’d keep repeating: “Whatcha doing? I’m not hitting you. You are. Why are you hitting yourself?”

That old tease comes to mind when I see things like the Minneapolis City Council imposing wage requirements on Uber and Lyft that are so high the companies decided to leave the Twin Cities market.

Or St. Paul voters approving rent controls so strict that multifamily construction and transactions ground to a halt in the city.

Or Arden Hills leaders and residents dragging their feet for, yes, decades to develop the largest piece of empty land in Ramsey County.

Or commissioners in Minnesota counties with declining population adopting resolutions against a “sanctuary state” bill, when the bill isn’t happening.

These are all relatively small harms to Minnesota’s economy, and yet so unnecessary. They’re the actions of people who don’t realize how quickly the state is changing. Or they think there’s so much icing on the cake they can swirl some around and it won’t hurt anything.

They don’t recognize not only is there less icing in Minnesota these days, in some parts of the state there’s less cake.

For them, I can’t believe I have to write this: Minnesota needs to keep growing, so stop making it a less attractive place.

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released the 2023 estimates for county-level population change, which showed 40 of Minnesota’s 87 counties lost population from 2022 to 2023, and 36 are below the April 2020 census level. Hennepin and Ramsey counties, home of Minneapolis and St. Paul, are among those that have declined over the three-year period.

As birth rates began to slow markedly in the 1990s, demographers could tell that the 2020s would be the slowest-growing decade in Minnesota’s history, with forecasts for 5% growth. From 2020 to 2023, however, Minnesota’s population has grown 0.5%, and the decline of the urban counties is a surprise.

In 2019, the Twin Cities area was forecast to be the fastest-growing part of the state in the 2020s, with the two urban counties solidly part of that growth. Instead, the pandemic’s remote-work phenomenon and retirements sent about 30,000 people from those two counties to the suburbs or elsewhere. Ramsey County’s population is down about 3% since 2020, and Hennepin’s 1.8%.

Whenever I write about demographic change, or the effects of it on things like housing and child care, a few readers will reach out with messages to the effect that, “Things are fine. We have enough people anyway.” Or perhaps something like, “The environment can’t take more people.”

People who are trying to recruit workers or attract people to move to Minnesota tell me they sometimes hear the same complacent assessments. “Our demographics have changed so dramatically but people’s heads aren’t really there yet,” Deb Broberg, executive director at RealTime Talent, a workforce consulting firm in St. Paul, told me last week.

If Minnesota’s population declines, the fixed costs of the state have to be borne by fewer people. To maintain our economy or grow our wealth, we will have to depend on gains in productivity or development of resources. The latter upsets environmentally minded people. Minnesota is riven by debates over extracting more metals from the Iron Range, timber from its woodlands and crops from its farmlands.

Economic growth, led by population growth, is also the best way for poor people to get the opportunity to grow their incomes and wealth. The alternative is redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, to which there are obvious limits. No state or country has shown an increase in overall well-being when an economy is in decline.

On Friday, the Commerce Department will release its first estimate of fourth-quarter economic growth by state. Minnesota exceeded the nation’s GDP growth in the first quarter last year and was below the national rate in the second and third. The most recent revised figure for fourth-quarter U.S. GDP was 3.2%.

There are actual controversies and tradeoffs to consider about population growth and the economic growth it drives. For instance, immigration, the fastest way to grow population, comes with near-term costs and imposes more competition on Minnesotans who have been historically left behind. Let’s debate those matters and solve them in ways that help us grow.

Otherwise, there’s only one thing I can say to Minnesotans, with or without elected power, who ignore or don’t recognize the constraints on growth:

I’m not hitting you. You are.