Im really glad weve got such a great panel and what i think will be an interesting discussion for you today. So, im going to introduce our panelists and moderators starting on the far right over here which is purely a positional statement with nick aberstaff the henry went chair in political economy here where he writes extensively on economic development. He also has a thing or two to say about north korea sometimes. Hes served as consultant. He was awarded the bradley prize. Next to him is Phillip Cohen who is the professional of sociology. He has a long standing interest in gender and family change. In addition hes maintained strong interest in measurement issues in house hold and Family Structure. Phil, welcome to aei. And limen stone, he blogs about migration, population dynamics, and regional economics at his blog in a state of migration. He writes for the big idea and the federalist and wall street wall street and mawall street other things. She compiles and analyzes Public Opinion on a variety of issues ranging across all topics. She has publicly commented on the evolution of american politics through the lens of demographic and geographic changes. So, please welcome our guests. Thank you very much, ryan. I would also like to add my welcome to everyone here and to our cspan audience today. Demographic change has been much in the news in the last week. As those of you who spend seven hours listening to the cnn debate on Climate Change heard a question from the audience to Bernie Sanders who was asked whether or not he would talk about the population explosion and its relationship to Climate Change. He said in fact that would be part of his campaign. And that the other end of the rhetorical spectrum, elon musk gave an interview to jack mad on Artificial Intelligence in which he said the biggest threat to the world Going Forward was not the population explosion but demographic winter and population collapse. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between these two rhetorical extremes, but it is certainly true if you look at some of the data over the last 50 years. I think 50 years ago 8 countries fertility replacement was reblow replacement. Thats now 100 cases. Each of them are going to speak for 8 minutes and then perhaps ill ask a question if we have time. Then well turn to your questions. Lets begin. All right. So, my question is basically we frame this as is it a National Crisis or a moral panic. Basically, is it a big deal . Is demographic decline a big deal or is it not . Im going to argue its a big deal. In fact, it is worse than you think. The main way im going to do this is comparing it to what do you think it is right now . What does the Census Bureau think is going to happen . I could have shown you the budget office, but theyre basically all similar to this. You can see the census says growth continues, right . And it maybe slows down a little bit towards the middle of the century, but basically this is a business as usual scenario. So, shouldnt we just trust that if thats what census says . Dont they know . And i argue that actually theyre wrong. So, the first reason theyre wrong is because they greatly overestimate births. So, censuss forecast was published in 2017 but the recent finalized data was 2016. We have the Great Fortune of 2017 and 2018 data. We can see how accurate they were. They were really inaccurate. They overestimated births by 220,000 babies. So, thats a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths, that they underestimated deaths. So, a lot of this is about deaths of despair as theyre labelled, opioid, suicide, alcohol. Sorry, they underestimated deaths considerably. And then finally on net migration, their error here was much smaller, but they did over estimate net migration in these years as well. When you correct for these errors, you get the 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimates so, they have an estimate system and forecasting system there are separate. Their forecast, one year after it was published was 724,000 people too high which is a larger error than is generally considered permissible, lets say, in a private forecasting market. So, if we correct for those errors, if we use the same assumptions about future trends and all this stuff and mortality and Life Expectancy change and just change the intercept, just where we start from, the yellow line is what we get. 34 million fewer americans in 2016. That trajectory looks r have different. Thats a meaningful decline in growth rates. So, you start to say okay, right here if i stop, weve kind of proved the point. The consensus view of what is going to happen is wrong. It is too optimistic. Growth will be much lower than you might think. But i want to go farther. I want to tell you that not only that but the assumptions that guide that future trajectory are incorrect as well. So, we look at different fertility assumptions. Ive got just the historic total fertility rate which is a bit of a concocted number. But its basically if birthrates by age stayed consistent over a womans whole life span, how many babies would she have. This number is never quite accurate, right . Becausing birthrates change. But its a reasonable enough indicator. So, we can see that blue line at the bottom with the dots if fertility rates fall to 1. 4 children per woman which is like italy or japan or hungary. Then we can see what if fertility rose to 2. 2 which is the highest since 1971. So, this would give us a lot of different scenarios to work with. The base scenario is assuming fertility recovery over the next several decades. Theres a 60 million person difference between the highest and lowest scenarios in 2070. That lowest fertility scenario gets you population decline by the middle of the century which i dont think most people are saying by the 2050s population will be declining. We wont need this many houses. The Real Estate Market isnt planning for that. If you assume the unrealist increase in fertility, you dont get to censuss own forecast. Their error was just too big. Then we can look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning a lot of times fertility when we talk about low fertility, people say like steve king said, we cant continue the culture with other peoples babies. Theres this dichotomy between our babies and other peoples babies. When i talk about declining fertility, whats the line you see . Its hispanic babies and mothers. Thats the decline. If we look at peoples achieved fertility versus desires the biggest short fall basically the people with the biggest short fall in fertility, theyre not Nonhispanic White women. Its africanamerican women and asian women and native american women. So, if fertility is to increase in america, it will almost certainly be disproportionately nonwhite fertility. So, were mostly talking about this isnt whats going to happen to white fertility which has been stable for a long time. Ultimately higher birthrates, more diversity. You can do this out in the population model and see it pan out. Lets go to migration. We can look at different migration scenarios. What if migration falls . What if it rises . As you can see it has been falling for several decades. And again theres a 40 million person population difference. Its a big difference, but again even at high scenario where immigration rises by a third, it should be a big change, doesnt get you to the censuss current forecast. We could also look at deaths. So, one way to express deaths is Life Expectancy. We can say what if recent Life Expectancy has been falling because of deaths of despair. What if we get bad at dealing with deaths of despair . What if they spread . What are the Health System gets more distupgs thats the green line. Or what if we get Good Technologies and deal with it great, what effect was it have . Its a huge effect. The only way to get to current forecast is to assume Life Expectancy is going to rise considerably. While that might sound like a rosy scenario, we can look at the population share by age. We have a lot of people in that scenario and very few of them are working age. So, great, population growth. Maybe thats lovely, but there will be problems associated with that as well which means fertility and immigration are two channels for population growth with a more stable age mix. You can see that in all those other lines in the middle. They dont change the age mix a lot. So, whats really going to happen . Ive given you the scenarios. Ive talked very quickly with lots of graphs. So, first we can think about immigration. What is actually likely to happen . Fertility rates are declining in the countries that have historically sent immigrants to america, mexico, much of latin america, east asias developing very rapidly. The push for migration is less there as well. India is almost below replacement rate for fertility. Africa fertility is declining a lot and also we dont get a lot of immigrants from africa yet unfortunately. The population is europe is rising rapidly. Its also rising in japan and korea. There are more and more developed countries saying were ageing. We we want to off set this with immigration which is a reasonable strategy. But it gets harder as global fertility rates decline and the number of potential destinations rises. So, at some point this gets more and more challenging. Finally, theres a u. S. Policy question. Can we count on immigration policy remaining open and stable forever . I think most of us know the answer is no. As much as i personally would very much like that, i would like a lot more immigration, its unlikely that our policy mix will be perpetually open to high levels of immigration as we can see in current changes right now. Then with fertility, its a bit less concrete. We can say cost of child bearing is rising. The opportunity cost of child bearing is rising in terms of lost wages and time out of work. Theres also this question of these ultra low fertility rates. Im calling its europeanization. Theres lots of different terms used. Will we drift into a new paradigm where people just want one kid . Were not there. We may get there. This is a case for pessimism. Thats usually my attitude here. Deaths of despair are not declining, and were not really pioneering a way to deal with this. In fact were seeing a geographic spread. In many large parts of the country have low rates of deaths in these areas which means theres upside potential for deaths of despair. So, whats going to happen . Itll be worse than you thought. Itll be worse than any of our current forecasting agencies are expecting. All of our longterm m Budget Planning is wildly optimistic in terms of what is going to happen with population. I would say thank you. However that is a dark note to end on. But it is where im ending. Say youre welcome. Yeah, youre welcome. Great. Perfect segue. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. Im happy to be here and participate in this conversation. I actually will have some of my own projection graphs also which will be simpler. Ill make a couple of sort of political points first. I have to advance it on here so i can have my notes. Theres a lot of sort of in the american right, theres a lot of mumbo jumbo about demographic decline with sort of mystical statements like the health of the nation is measured by whether or not were having thats not measurable. Theres no health of the nation. You might think that places with higher birthrates are better off than places with lower birthrates. Thats totally wrong. So, it sort of has this kind of it has this sort of emotional charge to it. And, you know, you might think theres nothing really wrong with just making, you know, sort of banal statements like children or good or whatever, but in the case of america, these throw away lines that are not associated with real numbers and measures and so on have real consequences. This is from the guy who shot up the mosques in new zealand, birthrates, birthrates, birthrates, we have to get the birthrates to change, no matter what we do, this is the number one thing. So, the demographic decline crisis im not putting this on appeals to White Supremacists a lot. In the same way that states rights appeals to racists in america a lot. You might be able to make a nonracist argument about it, but you can sort of ignore the coincidence that a lot of races really like what youre saying. So i mean, you can, but im suggesting its irresponsible. So, we have to deal with that association between this idea of demographic decline and the political implications of it. And theyre not so hard to imagine. This is the census forecast. So, the scale here may be off. But the gist of it is that the white population is pretty much there or is going to increase a little bit more. This starts in 1970. I notice by the way his early graph started in 1,800 which gives you a sense of i like the longtime series. But it kind of throws off how you look at the Current Situation or at least you have to keep it in mind. If you are concerned about the composition of the u. S. Population from a racist perspective, theres a lot of material to work with here in the projections and in the future where were heading. I want to suggest, though, that as an actual problem of demographic decline, its really the solution is really right in front of us which is really immigration. And if people dont like it or its politically not feasible or whatever thats not the problem. The problem is not the lack of people. The problem is the lack of wanting to let people into the country. And if the problem is you want a certain kind of people and its a cultural problem and youre worried about who is going to come and so on, then essentially now youre even now its even hard to disassociate yourself from the racist perspective, so good luck. When you look at the longer term composition of immigrants, you can see why theres a political problem especially on the racist right with immigration which is the composition of immigrants which is now the great majority is from latin america and asia increasing but very small share from africa. The question of is this is immigration good is very different from the question of what is the correct immigration policy from the question of is it good for america or good for us as opposed to them or Something Like that. Im not a politician so i dont have to set my moral horizon to end at the u. S. Border. So, i think a lot of people want to come here. Thats good. America may have issues to, wo out with that, and i wish america luck. Im happy to help. But its not a moral given that the issue we have to do is figure out how to make this good for america. I just want to make that point just to be preachy. A little bit more demography. I think the fear is overblown. Even if you take everything lineman said that were not going to meet the census projections, the idea of population decline population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is a scary made up term. And were not having population decline any time soon. Okay. People when people say demographic decline they often include amorphous things like weve had a little decline, little decline in Life Expectancy and the birthrate is falling therefore we have demographic decline. Were not talking about population decline. Italy, spain, germany, france, and the United Kingdom got to below fertility in the 1970s and their populations are not declining, italy maybe a tiny bit. Eventually if they dont have immigration, it will happen because thats what the replacement number means. Just keep that in perspective. These are birth cohorts and theyre cumulative fertility. The darkest line is the people born, the women born to just about to go as per woman by the time they get to 45 the 1970 cohort got up a little higher in the 1970 cohort higher still and its not after that that we have this issue. The line sneaking up is the first round ofs millennials, which i dont use scientifically, where born around 1980. They started out lower and then caught up a little. They are ahead of the 65 and 60 generations that time. What is happening is some evidence of delay and catch up. Catching up in your 30s is not at all. If we are thinking 6 and 2 then it becomes a biological issue. Both are well below previous cohorts and the impression is if they turn the corner like a hurricane and the projection ends up tracking them for the north we will never get a cohort that doesnt replace itself. We have not yet had a cohort of women that did not replace themselves. A couple of projections, im probably running late on time youre fine. Okay, projections. These are not as his projections although i used their tool which is excellent. If you go to my blog family and a quality you can play with these numbers themselves. The line that heads down is if you take just todays birthrates and todays death rates and nothing else, and you run those numbers. Then we would lose 100 Million People by the end of the century in terms of total population. Thats the disaster scenario thats very bad. However if you add the current level of migration, just take the census numbers, not projections but estimates and you plug that in every year we continue to have about 1 Million Immigrants per year which essentially solves the problem of declining population and reduces the population of who are old. That america is going to look any different so you may want to think about that. Those orange line assumes no increase in mortality. Im not assuming a crash in mortality but it assumes mortality goes on the way that it is. Ive just plugged in japan, current japan in 2080. We can dream that we have the life expect what they have now, i 2080. If we get there you can see both numbers rise a little which is doing so much in the forecast. I didnt to zoom the disaster scenario of total fertility falling down to 1. 4 but if you let it fall to 1. 6 it doesnt make that much of a difference in light of the increasing Life Expectancy and immigration. Im not seeing those numbers anytime soon so we can go back to worrying about the climate. This is informative but doesnt show you everything. These are changes in birthrates by age and i just want to put this in perspective if. The darkest line are 1517year olds so fertility has fallen for younger women and rising for older women on a percentage basis. Those numbers are quite low but the percentage rise has been rapid. Basically the whole regime is shifting from early birth to later birth. We bought monitor the team birth teenage birth rate. Is it up as it down . But these are all the same women right . Theres one trend which is rising age of birth. This has mostly been because women have more opportunities so they been doing other things instead of having children, and is good for those children. It also comes with later marriage which are associated with lower odds of divorce and other outcome for children. The idea that if you start mucking around with fertility it has to come in here somewhere. Where are you going to get more births if you want to raise fertility . I assume nobody wants more births under age 20, no one in respectable policy circles, and people start getting nervous at higher ages. So you are talking about now, the age of increasing birthrates for the group of women who are taking advantage of the improvements that we have had in terms of education and career and so on. Women mostly want this and it has mostly been good. However it is true, and this is the gen. Social survey data, that there is an increasing share of people that when they reach age 40 and us them separately what you think is the ideal number of children that a family should have you get 25 of people whose ideal is number that is higher than they have. This doesnt mean something wet wrong in their life. Other things may have gone so great that they put that one ideal aside. Or, if you treat children as a lecturer you can put it as how many votes do you think everyone should have . I think everyone should have one. I have none and probably never will but that doesnt mean my life is a failure, it means that i have things that i didnt achieve that i kind of hoped i would achieve. If you want to study the question of if theres something going wrong in peoples lives, that would be concerning in a different way than the Economic Health of the country in the future. Does this indicate something is troublingly wrong with our society . That would be a problem but i dont think this necessarily shows it. Would have to look at the choices people actually made in order to understand whether or not the tradeoffs were overall advantageous. A couple of wrap up points, what is the prospect of prenatal policy . Not very good. The reason is, its hard to design a policy im not a political expert, but its hard to make a policy thats not going to end up leading to more of the wrong type of people being born. Its hard to design a prenatal policy thats not going to make women or women of color have more children and thats not really what they have in mind. I dont really see it in the cards. Which is one of the reasons that i think talking about the democrat the demographic i dont think it leads to a policy outcome but does inflame the racist right and thats a shame. Is this social engineering . I thought conservatives were against social engineering. People are choosing how many children they want to have. Isnt that good . When poor women were trying to have children that the american right didnt think they could afford to have they were comfortable punishing them by taking away their welfare but when richer women said they can have the children someone else may want to have all of a sudden its a National Crisis. We dont have to go in this correct direction but if what we are trying to do is help women achieve their fertility goals, we want families to be able to have the number of children that they want to have because thats what a good society does. Thats what Healthy People do and a government supporting its people. I think its great and its a shame that some of the people who hold that position are prevented from similarly if when they try to have fewer children. But thats a tangent, and im done im going to try to make three points. Point number one. If i were able accurately and robustly to forecast future futility trends for the United States and Immigration Trends we would not be meeting in this auditorium. We would be meeting on my 400 foot yacht. But theres a reason that these projections have always been errorprone. The reasons are that there is no robust, really reliable method yet as long as human beings have volition, for long term forecasts and its just the same, if not worse, with Immigration Trends because they are increasingly political. I dont know if we are going to reach peak americans in the next generation or have the population shrink. I dont know if its going to accelerate. I just dont know. The second thing is in this world of necessary ignorance i have been skeptical for all my career in the scare stories about the population explosion and am also pretty skeptical about population decline as being a necessary catastrophe. My view is that population change is a form of social change in some places deal with social change better than others. If you have prepared relatively intelligent policies you can probably deal with social change better than if you dont. My third point is this. I can imagine a future for the United States where total population is shrinking and where Overall Society median ages increasing in the proportion of people over 65, whatever you call old is going to be rising. We are becoming increasingly prosperous. It coincides with smaller populations and older populations but we are not on this path. We are on a worrisome path if we should ever hit this population shrinking inflection point. Certainly it is a troubling path considering the gradual social aging in all of these societies. Number one. For a shrinking and aging society to prosper, you need to have higher rates of labor force participation. Im just looking at the situation with guys in the us now, the situation with women is a little bit better but not a whole lot better. Last weeks job report showed that the employment to population ratios for guys, 25 54, or if youd like 2064 better it doesnt matter what you choose. The census was asking questions about the Previous Year which was 1939. We are basically at 1939 levels of employment rates for at least the guys. Not what you would want if you are about to head into aging land. We could say maybe this is a problem of lack of demand for jobs, but certainly you can make the argument after the Great Recession but we had a steady increase in the percent of number of unfilled position and chemical engineers. A couple million of those jobs are for people in the leisure industry, hotel, restaurant tours, construction workers, you have to be strong but dont necessarily have to have an advanced degree. Yet the total number of guys out of the labor force hasnt really moved that much. Theres something going on that doesnt look so good especially in the prospect of an a shrinking and already aging society. One of the things that you would want is healthy aging. This is not what we see with mortality trends for the working population. We lost a decade of health progress. This only takes us to 2017. Wasnt so hot in the couple of decades right before this and thats not what we want either. Education. This is the proportion of twentysomethings from the 60s to now who have bachelors degrees or higher. Notice again what has happened with the guys. The proportion of guys at bachelor degrees is actually a little bit lower like in 2010 than it was in the 1970s. Part and parcel of preparing for a Healthy Society is increasing educational obtainment. It would be nice if people learns to learn things while in school. Thats yet another thing that is problematic for the United States dealing with future problems. The final thing has to do with immigration. Is immigration a deus ex machina . So far i would say its been pretty great for the us. American newcomers have been assimilated into loyal and productive if new americans. Of course not perfect, but compared to other things it looks pretty good. You may disagree with me about but what we see here in europe is not what i would want to see in the us. This is what is going on more or less now in the eu. These three lines show the proportion of younger people who are neither employed nor in education or training. The lowest line in the eu countries are for the eu born native 28 people and thats a slightly higher line. The highest line of all our people born elsewhere outside of the eu. This looks to me like people are not assimilating into the Human Capital that these societies are going to need for the future. So far we have dodged this bullet we will continue to that i dont have any sense of complacency or hubris of thinking we can do this permanently. Thank you to all of you. This was a very thoughtful presentation. First i would like to ask if you do disagree. Just trying to overlay from memory what that looks like. I dont think we have a case of immigrants having twice the unemployment rate. Its lower. Laborforce participation is higher. I dont know enough about to read the draft but i suspect i dont know. Gender would be an issue, that would be my first cut. For the question of what happens when you have a lot of immigration is a big question. And also what happens to the immigrants. In one sense if you reduce the border to basically a check point where you check for arrest warrants but otherwise let people in, a lot of people would come in they would come until coming was good anymore. I used to think about like the us and mexico when most of the undocumented immigration was from mexico. If you combine those populations and redo the border around both, the average income for the us area would be lower and mexican area would be higher and it would eventually even out. I think the issue is, decides our own selfinterest, people care about that, is there something very special about america that must be preserved that would be at risk from people who did not share its cultural background . I admit thats an open question and i think it could go the other way. You could look at a net positive culture change of course. Countries are clearly competing. Are we really competing for immigrants . What should a policy look like . In my part of the world we see deeper disagreements than perhaps any others. A new poll from the council showed 70 of republicans say a large number of refuges provided a threat to the United States compared to 19 of democrats. But most important, what should immigration policy look like . When i look at this graph i wonder if it looked different in 1999. Or 2004. In the us we are fortunate the most of our immigration is coming as labor immigration. You are either here for education or here for work and if you come with a family beside your Family Member came for work and often they are motivated to get you to work as well. Very recently it hasnt been. Europe changed from a country that it a continent really, that accepted in total Something Like 1 5 or 1 6 crisis migrants that we did to one that except did 12 times as many. Historically the us was the country that accepted lots of refugees and a lot of Asylum Seekers a. And then all these different sources changed that. I think they didnt really know how to handle that. They didnt have a lot of experience with refugee resettlement. There has been a lot of difficult experimentation and at the same time asylumseekers are by definition intending to be temporary. How much of what we see with Employment Trends is people who went intend this to be temporary . How many of these people legally cannot acquire employment . We have institutions that promote integration and i think that Integration Point is the point. Members are important for the forecast but also how they are received in the community that receives them. If we get 2 Million Immigrants and they are all french people, this will get a very different political response then as each town gets two or three immigrants from different countries. Different economic impacts. Having immigration policies encourages people to have a stake in immigration. The great replacement Conspiracy Theory right . All too often theres a rhetoric that immigrants are replacements but we should be finding avenues to help people view them as reinforcement. This is additional people contributing to your society and culture. I dont think our institutions do that. You can think about placebased visas or the canadian style sponsorship system are all options but you have to have a system that encourages a welcoming community to facilitate into its more extreme for females than for males but holds up for males as well. I cant say anything about the education and training part of it. It is certainly true that 95 of the planet would be financially better off if they moved to the usa. The people who ultimately get to choose who comes in to any country are the people in the country. We had a very low level of immigration in the United States from the 20s until the 60s and theres a reason for that. The reason is what happened in the first gilded age of the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, and 1900s. They werent totally open borders because it was expensive hard and dangerous to get here, but pretty open immigration policies. We saw extreme wealth and income differences develop in the United States. Does any of this sound familiar . And then among less skilled nativeborn americans whose wages were arguably being depressed by less skilled immigrants coming in, there was a huge antiimmigrant movement that started in the 1890s and started across the us. Got a couple of bills to congress that didnt pass and then we have this forcing event and people couldnt move anymore. After that, we had a really radical, restrict the policy go into place. Maybe its the guy that would like to see a situation with winners and no losers but we may be closing our eyes if we think there are no losers in this immigration situation. We have to figure out a way that it works for people in the human beings that are here already. I dont know what the totals are or what the flow is. I dont think it is out of bounds for people who think their interests are being to raise our hands and say we have a political process that is supposed to protect us to. Philip . Something brief about that, its interesting that the extreme partisanship, pulls that go by partisan divide because according to trump 94 of republican support him which makes me feel that self identification as a republican is tied up with support for trump. If thats true, then youve polled a group of members about what their views about immigration or. I think thats a problem. This point is extremely well taken and goes to your point as far as making immigration something that works for senders and receivers. Its interesting and i guess we could think about japan a little. They may be having a proportional increase but its still pretty small yes . Or not enough to address the population that was just rhetorical. If you are having a democratic democratic crisis from low fertility and all the problems associated with democratic decline like lack of entrepreneurship, and you refuse to allow immigrants that would help with that problem, then immigration is not really a problem. Your problem is something cultural which refuses to allow you to see the humanity in your neighbors in some vital way. I think the key part of the problem right now is to work on that problem. Which before we can get to it, we may have to get to the point where americans recognize the humanity in their neighbors. I will leave the japan one, but building on that a little bit, again to go back to sort of the tweet heard around the world, with this other peoples babies comment really triggered something and this idea thats latent with people that theres a substitution between our babies and their babies. That these are rivals. I think we see this as well, the impetus in democratic forecasting because growth can come from one or the other. Practically speaking, the first wave of successful nativism to happen was coincident with the first time in American History that mortality adjusted fertility fell below 2. 9 and it fell from three to below 2 in about 10 years over the course of the 20s. It had been declining gradually but had been declining with mortality. When people feel that their community is not going to survive and people feel threatened by suicides, opioids, or genghis khan invading hordes, my fatherinlaw is a pastor and says funerals are out numbering that it creates a feeling of threat is a legitimate, is it not . It exists. People feel this. I think a vital part of creating a welcoming society is fertility among people who live there. Not saying your community is not under threat. You have a future for your culture and hit what you need to keep supporting your church, your school, whatever you value. This other community is going to join you ands share these things. One of my worries with low fertility is that we are going to have a society where 100 of population growth comes from immigration and natives are aware of that. Our community is clearly not going to persist people want to feel that they are part of a lasting, transcendent community. We want fertility rate to rise because we want intermarriage. We want communities that can welcome people into a healthy, growing community. This is part of a welcoming community, a community that values what it has to share. You alluded to some of the problems of low fertility, they dont innovate, cant sustain social security, cant project power because they dont have money to spend on defense. Is there a lot of evidence on those points . No. Those are the things people worry about. Social security and oldage support is big and one of the things that would matter if people having children wanted immigrants to help take care of their children. The care issues are real cultural vitality and all of that stuff, im not sure we have the record to evaluate that. Dont ask me about project power. One of the arguments has been raised. I just dont want to judge. About low fertilitys and societies we have it touched on . China and japan, one of the things we didnt mention is looking at kind of headcounts. Like the family arrangements right . You have not just a change in headcount but radically changing family and living arrangements. The projections ive seen, they be using others, suggest that japan is on a path of seeing a current cohort of twentysomethings mainly end up without grandchildren. And how society like that will function, it seems to get into the Science Fiction portion. I think we really need to bear in mind not just the headcount but the living arrangements in the Family Structure as well. I read that the people in japan are actually renting children just to be with them on the weekends because there are so many people who are single and alone. I want to touch on death. Youve all alluded to it and the social Capital Project time to try to break down some of these statistics saying alcohol deaths are not as as they were but opioid and drug addiction. How do we address the depth of despair . One of my hobbies for a long time was looking at the union and warsaw pact countries. The stuff that we saw today is of the rising adult mentality trends that we saw in those societies. I never thought that i would live long enough to see Life Expectancy in east germany higher than the United States but here we are today. If you think that you can look at that stuff as a mirror that reflects some on where they are and there are many ways that it cannot, its a completely different lyrical arrangement and many other things as well. One of the things that i think the Public Health community missed was the role of stress and psychosocial fact is factors in that longterm health problem, in part because it was something no one was measuring. I have to wonder if that isnt also part of what we are seeing here in the united dates. We should have a much more responsive public Health System but in a way its astonishing to me that it took a decade and a half for american researchers and the Life Science Community to realize that the low education, middleaged anglos are having a rise in death rates. It doesnt seem like that group is terribly well protected. One final question. What pro needle policies have worked elsewhere on things like birth bonuses, tax incentives, what these numbers around if anything . And there is some experience with that and the problem is you may be changing timing more than total numbers. You may be encouraging people to have their second or third child sooner but the policies are some combination of child credits, paid leave, education, and so on. The history of countries tinkering with fertility rates, im looking back, is not very good. Its hard to do that in a free society but if people were happier and healthier, if we imposed a wealth tax they probably would have more children but that would not really be a pro needle policy. It would just be improving peoples outlooks. Most of all we observed for baby boomers these types of things is a timing effect. People shifting from having a baby from 29 to 25. As anyone who has done demographic forecasting is aware, these matter in terms of the age of population and the rate of growth. If you can shrink the generational space by three or four years, theres a lot of population growth. The trustees include a scenario where they look at changing median age. It takes a lot of money if we have the same amount of kids if we have them ever so slightly earlier. Great, lets get a timing effect. This is good especially when we are paying people for i agree with concerns about tinkering with fertility policy, but what we are talking about is policies that will also reduce Child Poverty by like 95 , right . Handing families a bunch of cash basically. This is not a bad thing. If it also compresses generational space and reduces the gap between children that women say they want to have and what they have, this is a little bit of a cohort effect but particularly research in canada found a bit of a cohort effect. If we increase total childbearing a little bit, great. Really cash bonus do everything . No. Im sympathetic to the view that making a Livable Society as part of this. Having a functional educational Health System is part of this. But, we may have differing views of the pescatore health and whos going to pay for it. Its a great word. A lot of these policies do have a track record of having an effect that costs some money . If you would like to have birth rates that people want, in a world where they want lots of things, you do have to pay for it. It is a viable option when it comes to removing workingclass penalties baked into the tax code and welfare system. Families could save five, 10, 15,000 benefit for getting married. No wonder marriage rates are falling. There has been all this work done for centuries, you can call eight like anything, there are always these maddening exceptions. One rule i find most persuasive is wanted fertility levels, what women say they want to. They are not perfect. Its not a perfect indicator but is a lot closer than other ones. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. If that is true and the most important determinant is desired fertility, then we can ask all sorts of questions and then we are on to a big area of research. If that is true, voluntary pro needle policy can have some influence but my impression is even if its a nonzero impact it can be pretty expensive and a modest demographic impact. Weve covered an enormous amount of ground so we are going to turn to your questions. If you could wait for the microphone and identify yourself please david prison fellowship. I dont mean to throw fire on the gasoline but any thoughts on whether the decline of the so called model impact futility fertility rates in the past century . Do you mean the a living wage, or a family wage to support a family with one paid worker who is the man. Did the decline of that model have to do with falling fertility . Probably. Would bringing it back raise fertility . I dont think you will find out, and you, i dont think so. There have been efforts in this direction in some Asian Countries because they had the theory that basically we need to make sure we had well paid salary men. It comes from the east asian policy contexts. The reason why, this will surprise a lot of people, the reason why people are working is because they want to work because they have career ambitions. You are going to just pay the male breadwinner enough that those ambitions just dont exist. So you are in a situation where you have high occupational closure and get inconsistent, unstable, bad jobs that dont support families and a few people who make it big. In the japan case because of the factors of extreme gender differentiation and women not working, and because women didnt want that, i think contributed a lot to the increasing age of marriage. That moment you got married was basically the end and you put that off as long as he could. The policy was not increasing fertility, it was decreasing because it signaled extreme gender inequality that women didnt want to turn to that. If you look at the grades from mid80s until the crash of 2008, it was a little bit above 2. 0. As you pointed out, theres a differentiation between latino and more or less everybody else. The drop that weve seen at the end of american demographic exceptionalism or whatever you want to call it, it was timed with a crash. For a considerable period i was not clear whether this was just postponing or a new norm. I think its harder and harder to make the case that this is just postponing because if you postpone long enough then you forgo. In the back . Im curious. To other housing and zoning policies that you think would have an impact on fertility rates with young couples moving out of without having pay a financial cost to do so . The usda does this report where they look at the cost of raising a child. What they really do is look at how many how much money families with children spend and statistically allocate that to the child. If you look at healthcare and childcare and all these different things, and then compare that to price changes, and pretty much every category is that prices have risen by way more. There are material material better circumstances except in housing where the amount has risen considerably less than the cost and price. Families are having a real crunch. We are actually seeing families with a housing stress in a real housing consumption. The Square Footage of how this is falling, beyond this, commute times are rising. This suggests people are living farther and farther from work, having a miserable time in traffic jams, and theres a real housing stress impacting families that we need, the density that allows people to live close to work, close to amenities, and that means removing barriers whether they are formal zoning or other use rules and building codes that make certain things on buildable. Its very important. Michael . Aei washington examiner. I didnt hear too much about where future immigrants are going to come from. I think what weve seen over the last 10 years is that weve moved toward what pres. Trump says hes for his more heiskell, less low skill immigration. Democrats say, therefore, in this kind of happened because latin immigration particularly from mexico but otherwise, has gone downhill. We are begetting more heiskell immigration. Lyman has it on his graphs a little bit. There are some parts of africa where population growth is not declining. You have a reservoir of hundred 60 Million People in nigeria . Immigrants that weve been getting from africa, my understanding is pretty high skilled. Nigeria, ghana, except for places weve been getting refugees like somalia. Are we going to see a surge in immigration from africa . What might be the positive and negative consequences from that . Subsaharan africa is the only big area of the world that is very much above that. Barring some unimaginable catastrophe thats not going to change over the next generation. Theres an increasing share like 45 maybe of the conventionally defined working age manpower and as a whole will be coming from sub sahara. There will be a lot of people in that region who are going to be relatively high skilled potential migrants even though there is, i think, a terrible education crisis underway for the sub sahara as a whole. The advance and Educational Attainment for the region is not increasing as fast as, i think, a lot of us would like. And improvement of Educational Attainment wins on its own merit for what it does there. It seems like a reasonable conjecture to imagine there would be more high skilled migrants globally in sub saharan regions. Would it be easier to head to europe . Maybe. Weve had a pretty good track record i think with african migrants in the United States since 65. We will probably get more in the future which is great. They actually have some of the best observed integration records, their children do quite well here, with literally the one exception being some symbolic communities where there were administrative issues that go back many decades. I dont think its going to be a huge surge because there are a couple of ways to get here. And education visa. Classes will be going but not enough to be producing an enormous amount of admissions into universities. The work visa which is difficult to get if you dont have a network already, a lot say lets send recruiters to nigeria. Maybe they should but thats not happening right now. More and more african countries are effectively managing crises locally which is wonderful but theres actually fewer settlements in some of these countries. And then you get your fourth channel which really is not an option which is undocumented arrivals. Obviously the maritime, aside from a few snuggling situations, youre not going to get mass migration there. I wish there were serious efforts to recruit the next generation of americans from subsaharan africa. We should be doing it. It would be smart. In terms of what it would do for us in terms of a diplomatic region china is competing in. We are not establishing a visa program to recruit high skilled subsaharan africans. Thats not where we are right now. Lets put both questions on the table. First in the back and then right here. Im a financial analyst. Someone briefly mention the late reproduction rates but i do not see that presented anywhere. I see mixed anecdotal evidence that there are smaller High Net Worth families in smaller ones meaning that may be the High Net Worth has not adjusted the way that other income groups have. Im curious what that statistic looks like. And if we could also get this question to. Hes from the retreat center. Just a followup to the breadwinner homemaker question earlier. It seems at least anecdotally that in the work place there are more Flexible Working arrangements, maternity leave, things like that, but maybe were not in place when women first entered the workforce. Im wondering if maybe the decline in fertility that happened when women first started entering the workforce, there are more arrangements that give people those options . Im sorry, right there. My question is given that demographic change makes people worry, do you think the American Public would be better served by having a more complete understanding of the dynamics youve talked about, or is ignorance bliss . Is it better they dont understand the change underway . Any of you can take any of those questions. I dont know the answer to the High Net Worth question. The only survey would be the survey of income anticipation which is a survey i dont touch with a 9 foot pole because its complicated to use. Generally very wealthy people do have higher fertility because they can afford it so they tend to achieve their desires so to speak. On the issue of is ignorance better, i think the panic about immigration is bigger than the pandemic of panic of jihad demographic design. I would have to include the story of immigration and what it actually is, who immigrants are, what it means to them, and what it means for americans who come here. Known as going to advocate for ignorance but back to the first point that i made, we have to consider that everything we say can be taken out of context and we are responsible for that but for those of us where that happens all the time we sort of owe to pay back a little bit of explanation and resisting that so even if we cant prevent it from happening or prevent information for being used for nefarious purposes at least we can combat that after the fact. Demographic education, its not just demographics 101 explaining what fertility means and what mortality means and immigration and have the arithmetic works. That would be earlier. Its also looking at our own demographics and not leaving things to hide in plain sight. Weve got 20 million may be invisible felons not behind bars because we dont bother to count people with that status. We got this problem of stagnating educational levels which we dont bother to talk about or even ask about why its happening. We have this problem, the men without work thing that i keep getting at which was more or less outside policy discussion for two generations. We can do more by going through the abcs but maybe that will some of the panic as well. More Flexible Work arrangements, a comment. There is Research Suggesting that Flexible Work arrangements to increase birthrates. There are studies looking at among highly educated women, faster rates, im sorry. We would say thats slow internet that was fast at the time it was implemented. It increased the share who work from home and the birthrate because its easier to watch kids at home than from the office. I work from home. Big fan. I want to think panelist for wonderful discussion. Im sure they will stay a few minutes but thank you all for coming for a wonderful discussion. Thank you. Ournal continues. Host this is mike lillis of the hill, senior reporter, here to talk about congress returning from the august break. Lets start with the brick itself. Any significant changes when legislators were back in their districts and how does that