America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population

A piece in The Economist, entitled "America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population" cites research by Prof. Christopher Berry on the impacts of population loss on public services:

Research by Christopher Berry of the University of Chicago finds that, as cities lose population, the cost of providing public services tends to stay about the same. “Virtually nowhere reduces the public sector in line with the population,” he says. Exactly why that happens is unclear: it could be that servicing a given geographical area entails fixed costs, regardless of population; it could be that laying off municipal workers is politically tricky. Whatever the reason, the result is that the remaining taxpayers must pay more simply to support the same services.