20minute discussion. Good afternoon, everyone. Im going to get us start right on time here today since we have a lot to discuss. Its my privilege to well you to todays event, demographic decline, national cries or moral paining here at American Enterprise institute. My name is ryan streeter, the director of the domestic policy studies here and im glad that weve got such a great panel and what i think will be a real interesting discussion for you today so im going to introduce our panelists and moderator starting on the far right over here which is purely a positional statement with Nick Eberstadt, the political commentator here where he writes and researchers on demographics and Economic Development and has a thing to say about north korea from time to time which if things get real slow we can get into that. Man of diverse interest. Hes testified before congress on numerous occasions and served as a consultant and advisers to the u. S. Government and in 2012 nick was awarded the prestigious bradley prize. Next to him is philip cohen, associate of professor at university of maryland and has had a longstanding interest in gender, family and social change and hes published extensively on the gender of labor within families and between men and women outside of families. In addition hes maintain and strong issue in measurement issues in household and Family Structures. Phil, well to aei. Lyman stone next is an adjunct fellow here and also a Research Fellow at institute for family studies. He blogs about migration, Population Dynamics and regional economics at his blog in a state of migration. He also writes regularly for voxx, the big idea and the federalist and his work has been covered in new york times, post and wall street journal and our fearless moderator is Karlyn Bowman who deals across all social and economic topics. In addition she has long publicly comment on the evolution of american politics through the lens of key demographic and geographic changes so please join me in welcoming our distinguished guests. [ applause ] thank you very much, rink, and 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 couple of weeks. Those of you who spent 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 would be part of his campaign and that the other end. Rhetorical spectrum elon musk gave an interview to jack ma, an alibaba forum on Artificial Intelligence and said that the biggest threat Going Forward is not the population expense 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 the data over the last 50 years, and i think about 50 years ago eight countries were total fertility rate was below replacement. Thats now nearly 100 countries. Well turn to lyman stone and phil cohen and Nick Eberstadt is cleanups, batting cleanup. Each them is going to speak for about eight minutes and then perhaps ill ask a question if we have time and then well turn to all of your questions. Lets again. Lyman. So my question is basically we framed this as is it a National Crisis or a moral panic . So basically is it a big deal . Is demographic decline a big deal or is it not so im going to argue its a big deal. In fact, its worse thaub thing and how ill do this is by comparing well, what do you think it is right now and my benchmark is the Census Bureau. What does the Census Bureau think is going to happen in the most recent population forecasts. I could have shown you the congressional budget office, the Social Security trustees, any of these groups, but they are basically pretty much all very similar to this. What you can see is the census says growth continues, right, and it may be slows down a little bit toward the middle of the ken try but base cli this is a business as usual scenario, so shouldnt we just trust that if thats what senseups says, dont they know . Im going to argue that actually they are wrong. So the first reason they are wrong is because they greatly overestimate births so census forecast was published in 2017, but the most recent finalized data they had was 2016. We now have the Great Fortune of final 2017 and 2018 data and we can see how accurate they were in the first two years. They were really inaccurate. They overestimated births by 220,000 babies. Thats a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths that they underestimated deaths. A lot about this is bets of despair, opioids, suicide, alcohol. They underestimated deaths considerably, and finally on net migration, their error here was much smaller, but they did overestimate net migration in these years as well. When you correct for the errors, you get the 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimates, so they have an estimate system and a forecasting system that will are accept raft. Their 2018 population 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 ulgts same assumptions about future trends and mortality and Life Expectancy change, if we just change the intersect, where we start from, the yellow line is what we get. 34 million fewer americans in 2016. That trajectory looks different, a meaningful decline in growth rates. Objection right here, if i stop, weve kind of proved the point. The consensus view of what is going to happen is wrong. Its much optimistic. Growth will be much lower than you think. I wanting to farther, but assumptions that guide that future trajectory romania incorrect as well. You look at different fertility assumptions so ive got the historic fertility rate which is a bit of a concocted number but its basically if birth rates by age stayed consistent over a womans whole life span how many babies would she have . This number is never quite acrashlgts right, because birth rates change but its a reasonable enough indicator, so we can see that the 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, and then we can see at the top like what if fertility rose to 2. 2 which is the high test would have been since 1971, so this should give us a lot of different population scenarios to work, and the base scenario is assuming some degree of fertility recovery over the next several decades, and what we see theres a 60 million person difference between the highest and lost scenarios. The lost fertility scenario gets the population declined by the middle of the stray which i dont think most people are going to say population will be declining and i dont think the Real Estate Market is planning for that. At i highest risk, even if you assume the unrealistic per filth at 2. 2, you dont get to census own forecast. That i recall error was just too big and then look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning that a lot of times, fertility when we talk about low fertility, people like steve king said, like we cant replace we cant continue the culture with other peoples babies, like theres a dichotomy between our babies and other peoples babies, and when i talk about declining fertility, whats the line you see here . Its hispanic babes and hispanic mother. Thats the big decline in fertility and if we look at peoples achieved fertility versus desires and the biggest shortfalls and the desires are from the survey here which phil will also cite, basically the people with the biggest shortfall in fertility, its not hispanic women, its africanamerican women and asian women and faith american women so if fertility is to increase in america, it will almost certainly be disproportionately be nonwhite fertility so when i talk about white fertility and do we want fertility to rise, we are mostly talking about nonwhite fertility, that this isnt really about whats happening with white fertility which has been really stable so ultimately higher birth rates more diversity and you can also do this out in the population model and see it pan out and lets go to migration. We can go to different migration scenarios. What if payingration falls and what if it rises, and it has been rising for several decades and, again, theres a 40 million person population, and even that high scenario where immigration rigsz by a third which should be a big change doesnt get you to the census current forecast. We can also look at deaths so one way to express deaths is Life Expectancy. We can say what if recently lisks pectsy hlife expectancies have been failed, what if we get real good life extension technologies, what effect does this have . Its a huge effect. The only way to get to census current forecast is to assume that Life Expectancy is going to rise considerably. However, while that might sound like a rosie scenario we can then look at population share by age, so, yeah, we have a lot of people in that scenario and very few of them are working ages so, great, population growth, maybe thats lovely, but there will be problems associated with that as well, which means really fertility and immigration are your two channels for population growth with with a more stable age mix so you can see that in all the other lines in the middle. They dont real change the action mix a lot. Whats real going happen . Given you lots of scenarios and talked very quickly with lots of graphs. First we can think about immigration. What is actually likely to happen . Fertility rates are declining in countries that have historically sent immigrants to america, mexico, much of latin america. East asia is developing very rapidly. The push for migration is less there as well. India is almost below replacement fertility now. Africa, fertility is declining very quickly as well and we dont get a lot of immigrants from africa yet unfortunately. Meanwhile, there are more ruch countries opening to migration. The foreignborn shafer population in europe is rising very rapidly. Also rising in japan. Also rising in korea. There are more and more developed countries saying, hey, were aging. We want to offset this with immigration which is a reasonable strategy but it gets heard has global fertility rafrmgts declines and the number of potential defendant nations rises. At some point it gets more manned more challenging and finally theres a u. S. Policy question. Can we count on immigration policy remaining open and stable forever and i think most us note answer is no. As much as i personally would very much like that, 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 turn conditions. Then with fertility, its a bit less concrete, cost of child bearing is rights and the opportunity cost of child bearing is rising because of lost time and out of work and theres questions of the ultra low fertility rates, lots of different terms but will we drift into a new paradigm where people just only want one kid . Were not there. Maybe we will get there. With mortality, this is one where i think theres a real case for pessimism and in case you cant tell thats usually my attitude here but deaths of despair are not declining and were not pining a way to deal with this. Were seeing a geographic spread. In many large parts of the country low rates of deaths in these areas which means theres a lot of upside potential for deaths of despair so whats going to happen . Going to be worse thaub thought. It will be worse than any of our current forecasting agencies are expecting. All of our longterm Budget Planning is wildly optimist nick terms of whats 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. Phil. Great. Perfect segue. I hope this is on. 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 becism lersch but ill make a couple of sort of political points first. I have to advance it on here. Theres a lot of sort of on the on the in the american right theres a lot of kind of mumbojumbo about demographic decline where sort of mystical statements like the health of the nation is measured by whether or not thats not a measurable theres no health of the nation. So you might think that places with higher birth rates are better off than places with lower birth rates, thats totally wrong, so it it sort of has this kind of has this sort of emotional charge to it and, you know, you might think theres nothing real wrong with just making, you know, banal statements like children are good or whatever but in the case of america, these throwaway 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. Birth rates, birth rates, birth rates. We have to get the birth rates to change. No matter what we do this is the number one thing. The democratic decline crisis, and im not putting this on lyman, appeals to White Supremacists a lot in the same way that states rights appear to racists a lot. You might be able to make had a nonrates of argument about it, but you cant sort of ignore the coincidence that a lot of racists real like what youre saying so its its i mean, you can, but its im suggesting its kind of irresponsible so very to deal that associate between this idea of demographic decline and the political implications of it, and they are not hard to imagine that this is a census forecast so the scale may be off but the jiflt of it is that the white pop slayings there or will increase a little bit more. Early graphs start in 1800. I like the longterm series. Throws off how you look at the current situation. If you are concerned about the composition of the u. S. Population from a rates of perspective theres a lot of material work with here basically 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 real right in front of us which is immigration, and if people dont like it or its politically not feasible or whatever, the problem is not the lack of people but wanting to let people in this country and if youre worried about who is going to come and so on its even harder to move yourself from the race perspective. When you look at the long term composition of immigrants, you can see why theres a political problem especially on the right with immigration which is the and the great majority are from latin america increase and a very small sar and the question is immigration good, to the question is immigration policy good for america . Im not a politician and not elected to represent an american stepsy so i dont have to end it at the u. S. Border. So a lot of people want to come here. America have have issues to wows out with that and i bush amer a america. A little more on the demography. I think the sphere overblown. Even if you tyke everything that lyman said that we wont meter the census projections. The idea of population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is a scary madeup term and were not having population decline any time soon. When people say demographic decline include amorphous things like well have a little decline and unprecedented and terrible and little decline in Life Expectancy and the birth rate is falling and, therefore, we have demographic decline. Were not talking about population decline. Italy, spain, germany, france, unit kingdom got below replacement nearly tilt in the 1970s populations are not declining and italy a little bit and if they dont have immigration it will happen and thats what the replacement number means and just to keep that in perspective and these are birth cohorts, completed fertility, cumulative fertility, so i hope you can see, thats nice and big, the darkest line is the people born the women born in 1960. They got to two births per woman. The 1970 cohort got up a little bit higher and the 1975 cohort higher still and real after that that we start to have this issue, but if you look at that hine thats squeaking up in between there. Thats the first socalled group that i use and people born around 1980, and can you see if you parse out the lines, they start out lower the and then they caught up a little so now they are actually ahead of the 70 and 65 and 60 generation alternate time in their life so can you see essentially whats happening with them is some evidence of delay and catchup, and were in the range of one to two babies per come. Coverage up is not the difference at ale. Talking about the difference of six and two then catchup becomes an issue. And whats struggling lyman they are well below the previous known cohorts and if they turn the corner like a hurricane so to speak and start and the projection ends up tracking them further north then well never get a cohort that doesnt replace itself. Weve not yet had a cohort of women that did not replace themselves. Okay. A couple of projections, probably running late on time. Youre fine. Take your time. A couple of projections, and these are not census projections, although i use their projection tool which is excellent, and if you go to my blog family and equality you can fiptd link. Ill put it up tomorrow. Can you play with the numbers yourself. So the the line that heads down, if you take just todays birth rates and todays death rates and nothing else and you just run those numbers, then we would lose 100 Million People by the end of the century in terms of total population, okay, so thats sort of thats the disaster scenario thats very bad. And, however, if you just add current level of migration, if you just take the krensups numbers, not their estimates not their projections by estimates for immigration by age and sex and plugged that in every single year. Then that essential lip solves the entire problem of declining population and you can see from 25 to 23. Does a little bit on inninging and stops the population decline. That america is going to look a little different so you might want to think about that. The previous one, orange lines, assumption no increase in mortality. Not assuming a crash either but just that mortality goes on as usual. I plugged in current japan for the u. S. In 2018. Japans Life Expectancy, what they have now by 2018, if you get there then you can see both numbers are there and final lip in the i dont lymans disaster scenario of fertility falling all the way to 1. 4 and if you let it the drop to 1. 6 by 2030, 2050, doesnt make that much difference. So im not seeing the disaster in terms of total numbers basically any time soon so you can go back to worrying about the climate. I want to point out that i like to i like to show this one, although this one this one is informative but it doesnt show you everything. These are not birth rates but changes in birth rates by age since 1989, and i just want to put this in perspective. So the dark lines the darkest line are 15 and 17yearolds and the next 18 to 19 so basically fertility is falling for younger women and rights for older women on a percentage basis. Of course, those numbers in the 40 to 44 are quite low but the percentage rise has been very rapid. People talk about the teen birth rate. Monitor the teen birth rate. Is it the up . Is it down . Its down. Thats great and this is all about women and theres one trend, and this has mostly been good and cause women have more opportunities so they have been doing other things instead of having children and its good for those children and it also comes with later marriage which is associated with lower rates of divorce and Better Outcomes for children so the idea that that if you start mucking around with fertility, it has to come in here somewhere, so where are you going to get the more births if you want to like raise fertility . Well, i assume nobody wants more births under age 20, no one in respectable policy circles. Cant be those and people start getting nervous at higher ages so you have to realize that youre talking about now the age of increasing birth rates for a group of women who are taking advantage of advantages weve had in terms of education and career. Women mostly want this and its mostly been good. However it is true and this is the General Social survey data that there is an increase share of when people reach age 40, if you ask them how many children have you had and ask them separately what do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have you get about 25 of people whose that ideal number they give you is higher than the number they had. This absolutely do the no mean that something has gone wrong in their lives, all right . Other things may have gone so great that they have put that one ideal aside, right, or if you treat children as a luxury can you put it in the category of, well, how many boats do you think everybody should have . Well, i think everybody should one at least. I have none and i probably never will and so that doesnt mean that my life is a failure but it means i havent achieved what i hoped i would have achieved. If you real want to study the question is there something going wrong in peoples lives than would be concerning in a different way than the question of the Economic Health of the country and the future and so on but does this indicate so of in the jd advanced way that something is troubling with our society, that people are not having the number of children that they want to have that would be a problem but i dont think that this necessarily shows, it so wed have is to look at the choices that people actually made in order to understand whether or not the tradeoffs were overall advantageous. Ill make a couple of wrapup points. What is the prospect of sort of pronatal policy in the United States . Its not very good and the reason is because its very hard to design a policy that you im not a political expert. Its hard to make a pronatal policy thats not going to ent up leading to the more of the wrong kind of people being born from the point of view of people who make policy. Its hard to design a pronatal policy thats not going to make poor women and women of color have more children and thats not really what they had in mind. I dont really see it really in the cards which is why i think the political talk about demographic decline and sort crisis atmosphere is bad because i dont think it leads to a positive policy outcome but does inflame the rates of right and thats shame. Okay. A quick other number two. If youre trying to is it social engineering if i thought conservatives were against social engineering . People are choosing how many children they are having, isnt that good, you know. When poor women were trying to have children that that the american right didnt think they could afford to have they were very comfortable punishing them by taking away their welfare and when rich women decide they dont want to have the children that somebody else thinks that they might want to have all of a sudden this is a national cries that they are not able to achieve their fertility and finally, and we dont have to go into that direction in, what were trying to do is help women achieve their fertility goals and families, we want families to be able to have the number of children that they want to have because thats whats good and what a good society does and thats what Healthy People do and thats what a government does thats supporting its people then i think its really great and its a shame that some. People who hold that position are prevented from their deeply held morldle moral and religious convictions for advocate for reproductive freedom. Thats a tangent and im done. Thank you. Nick. So im going to try to make three points. Point number one. If i were able really accurately and really robustly to forecast future fertility trends for the United States and future Immigration Trends for the United States, we wouldnt be meeting in this lovely auditorium. Wed be meeting in my palazzo or my 400foot yacht but theres a reason these projections have always been error prone, and the reasons are theres no robust really reliable method yet as long as human beings have volition for longterm forecasts of fertility trends, and its just the same. Its actually worse with Immigration Trends because they are so intrinsically political. So i dont know if were going to reach a peak americans in the next generation. I dont know if were going have the u. S. Population shrink. I dont know if its going reaccelerate, i just dont know. The second thing, however, is in this world necessary ignorance i have been very skeptical for, you know, all of my career in the scare stories about the population explosion, and im also pretty skeptical about population decline as being a necessary catastrophes for society. My view is population change is a form of social change and some people deal with that differently. If you have better informed policies you can deal with social change better than if you probably dont and that gets to the question of where the u. S. Might be heading, and my third point is this. I can imagine a future for the United States where total population is shrinking and were Overall Society is craig. Were median ages is increasing and the proportion of people over of 65 or whatever you rise is rights and where the society is becoming increasingly prosperous. Were in the on this path right now. Were on a very worry some path. If we should ever hit this population shrinking infliction point and certainly it is a troubling path considering the gradual social aging thats occurring in all the affluent societies and ill show you what i mean here. For a shrinking age to pros pes you need higher rates of labor force participation. Im looking at guys in the u. S. Right now. The situation with women is a little bit better but not a whole lot better. Last weeks jobs report showed that the employment to population ratio for guys is it 2564, it doesnt matter which you use but its about the same as the 1950 census and they whether asking about the Previous Year which was 1939 so were basically at employment rates of 1939 if youre talking about the guys. You can look a little bit closer at this and say maybe maybe this is due to a havoc demand for jobs and weve had a steady increase in the number of learn youre workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers, you dont have to have an advanced degree and yet the total number of guys who are out of labor force hasnt really moved that much since the crash itself. Theres something going on here that doesnt look so good, especially in the prospect of an eventually and shrinking already aging society. Again, one of the things that you would want for society is health el age. Not what were seeing for the mortality trends and the conventionally aging population. We just lost a decade of Health Progress in the United States and this only takes us up to 2017 Health Progress by the way wasnt so hot in the couple of decades right before this, but now were on the on the other end, the j end of the curve, and thats not what we want either. Education. This is the proportion of 20 somethings in the u. S. From the 60s to now who have a bachelors degree or high. Notice again whats happened with the guys. The proportion of guys with bachelor degrees in their late 20s is a little bit lower than lets say 2010, then it was in the 1970s. Part and parcel of preparing for a Healthy Aging society is increasing Educational Attainment. It would be nice if people learn things to while they are in school, but thats yet another thing that is problematic for the United States dealing with these future problems. The final thing has to do with immigration. Is immigration a deus ex machina . So far i would say immigration has been pretty great for the us and 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 this but i would say what you see here in europe is not what i would want to see in the us. This is more or less what is going on now in the eu. This shows you the proportion of younger people who are neither implored employed nor an education and training theres a slightly higher line that is i guess for other people in the highest of all his people born elsewhere outside of the eu. This looks to me like people are not assimilating into kind of the Human Capital that societies are going to need for the future. I would say so far we have dodged this bullet and hope we continue to do so but i dont have any sense of complacency or hubris about thinking we can do this permanently. Thank you to all of you for this very thoughtful presentation. Weve been discussing demonstration and first i want to act if you disagree with the same problems. Just trying to overlay what memory what that looks like. I dont think we have a case of immigrants having twice the unemployment rate. It slower. Laborforce participation is higher. s v i dont know enough about europe to read this graph but i might, i dont know whats going on with that. Gender would be an issue would be my first thought on that for the question of what happens to society, also what happens to immigrants. In one sense, if you reduce the border to basically a check point where you check for arrest warrants and otherwise let people in, a lot of people would come in they would come until coming wasnt good anymore, right . I used to think of this in terms of the us and x ago in most undocumented immigration is from mexico. If you combine those populations and redo the border of both countries the average income would be lower and the average for mexico area would be higher and it would eventually even out. I think thats basically fine. The issue is besides our own selfinterest which is, people care about that, theres something that must be preserved that will be dasher people not sharing the cultural background coming here in large numbers, i admit thats an open question and i think it could go the other way though. You could end up with a net positive in terms of culture change of course. I answered your question. These countries are clearly completing thats like a silent auction though, are we really competing for immigrants . What should the immigrations policy look like . This is where we see perhaps more disagreements than others. 78 of republicans said that a large number of immigrants and refugees represented a critical threats to the vital interest of the United States but most important, what should Us Immigration policy look like . I look at this graph up here and i wonder if the different in 1999. What i mean by that, or in 2004 or some prior period, its coming dashes labor immigration. You are either here for education or here for work. Your Family Member came for work and often they are motivated to get you to work as well. They recently from a continent a sixth as many migrants as needed, and has accepted 12 times this many. Of course crises in syria afghanistan and all of these to sources, they didnt really know he had to settle that and didnt have experience with refugee resettlement. At the same time asylumseekers are intending to be temporary so how much of what we see with Employment Trends are with people who intend this to be temporary during a crisis . Some of these people are stateless and legally cannot acquire employment. Luckily we have institutions that promote integration and i think that is actually the point. Whatever your poss whatever, they are important for the forecast. If we get 2 Million Immigrants into new york city and they are all french people this will have a very different political response then if each town gets two or three more immigrants from different countries. Different cultural, different political, different economic impacts. Policy encourages people to have a stake in immigration. The great replacement Conspiracy Theory was mentioned. Theres a rhetoric that immigrants are replacements. We should be trying to find policy avenue to help people view them as reinforcements but these are people contributing to your society and culture. I dont think our institutions do that. The canadian style visa sponsorship system you have to have a system that encourages a welcoming community to facilitate integration. A better integration policy . It is more extreme for females than for males at least with laborforce anticipation. Yes it is certainly true that 95 of the planet would be financially better off if they moved to the usa. But the people who ultimately get to choose who comes in to any country are the people in the country. We had very low level of immigration in the United States from the 20s until the 60s and theres a reason for that. The reason is because of what happened in the first gilded age in the 1880s and 1890s. They were totally open borders because its expensive hard and dangerous to get here, but we had pretty open immigration policies. We saw extremely big wealth and in some differences develop in the United States. Does any of this sound familiar . And then among less skilled native on 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 continued into the 1900s and started in different statehouses across the us a couple of bills to congress that didnt pass. Then we had this forcing event which was world war i when people couldnt anymore. After that we have a radical, restrictive policy going to place. Maybe its the guy in the that would like to see a situation with winners and no losers but we may be closing our eyes if we think that there are no losers in the immigration system. You dont want to be a politician but we have to figure out a way for People Living here already. I dont know what the totals are or what the flow is but i dont gets out of bounds for people who think their interests are being hurt to raise their hands and say we have a political process that is supposed to protect us as well. Im skeptical about paul questions because at least according to trump 94 of republicans support him which makes me suspect that self identification as a republican is very tied up with support for trump so if thats true, then youve pulled members of an integration into Immigration Movement of what their views are. I think the point about community and reception is extremely well taken and goes to your point as far as making immigration something that works for senders and receivers. I guess we could think about japan a little. They may be having a proportional increase but its still pretty small, at least not enough to address the population. That was rhetorical. If you are having a demographic crisis from the fertility and all the problems associated with decline, economic stagnation, lack of entrepreneurship, things that we are afraid of, and you refuse to about immigrants that would help with that problem, then immigration is a problem. The problem is something cultural in a society which refuses to allow you to see the humanity in your neighbors in some vital way. I think the key part of the problem is to work on that problem. We may have to get to the point where americans can recognize their humanity and neighbors. I will leave the japan one because i dont know the stats, but building on that a little bit, there is a sense in to go back to the tweet heard around the world with this other peoples babies comment, it triggered something in this idea that is latent with some people, that theres a substitution between our babies and their babies. That these are rifle goods. I think we see this as well. And impetus in democratic forecasting to see these, 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 two point 2. 9 from about 3 to below 2 over the course of the 20s while this was happening. It had been declining gradually but declining with child mortality. When people feel that their community is not going to survive, or threatened whether by suicide or opioids or genghis khan invading horde, or because, my fatherinlaw is a pastor. As he would say funerals are out to bring baptisms. It creates a feeling of threat. Is it legitimate . Is it not . It exists. People feel this. So i think a vital part of creating a welcoming society for immigrants is fertility among people who live there saying your Computer Community is not under threat. You have a future. You are going to hit the scale that you need to keep supporting your Church School seminary, soccer league, whatever you value. This other community is going going to join you and show these things so one of my big worries with low fertility is that we are going back to a society where 100 of population growth comes from immigration and natives are aware of that. They will say we arent okay with this. People want to feel that they are part of a lasting transcendent community. So we probably want the fertility rate to rise because we want intimate intermarriage. We want communities that can welcome people into a healthy and growing community. This is part of a welcoming community, one that values what it has to share with people who are coming. You alluded to some of the problems of low fertility societies. They dont innovate, cant sustain Social Security, cant project power because they dont have money to spend on defense. Are there are a lot of evidence on those points . Those are things people worry about Social Security and old it oldage support is very big one of the things in this scenario that would matter is if people wanting children wanted immigrants to help take care of their children. The care issues are real but cultural vitality and all that stuff, i dont know if we really had the record to evaluate that. Dont ask me about project power. I just dont want to judge. Low fertility societies, we havent touched on . The problem with low societies we havent touched on . China and japan, one of the things which we didnt mention looking at headcounts, the family arrangements. You have not just a changing headcount that radically changing family and living arrangements. The projections that ive seen suggest that japan is on a path to the current cohort of twentysomethings. They mainly end up without grandchildren. How a society like that future of japan will function seems to me to get into the Science Fiction portion of the program. I think we really need to bear in mind not just the headcount but the living arrangements and Family Structures as well. I think i read that people in japan are actually renting children to be with them on the weekends because they had so many people who are single and alone. I want to touch on deatha youve all alluded to it. The social Capital Project tried to break down these statistics arguing that suicide and alcoholism deaths are not significantly different from the earlier parts of the century but how do we address the depths of despair . One of my hobbies for a long time was looking at and the warsaw pact countries. The stuff that we see today looks a little too close for comfort and is kind of a echo of the rising adult mortality trends that he saw back in those societies then. I never thought that i would live long enough to see Life Expectancy in east germany higher than Life Expectancy in the United States but here we are today. If you think you can look at that stuff as a mirror that reflects something on where we are, and there are many ways that it cannot because its a different clinical arrangement, and many other Different Things as well, one of the things which i think the Public Health community missed was the role of stress and psychosocial effect is in that longterm Health Problem in part because it was something no one was measuring i have to wonder whether that is also part of what we are seeing here in the United States, the response of Public Health system, but in a way its astonishing that it took a decade and a half for american researchers and a Life Science Community to realize the low education, middle aged anglos had these lifeanddeath rate. It didnt sound like that group is terribly well protected one final question. What prenatal policies have worked elsewhere on things like bonuses, tax incentives . What turns these numbers around . You may be changing timing more than total numbers and encouraging people to have the second or third child sooner. Basically the policies are some combination of child credit paid leave education and so on. The history of countries tinkering with fertility rates is not very good. Its hard to do that in a free society. If people are happier and healthier, the wealth tax. It wouldnt be a prenatal policy, just improving peoples outlook. What we observe for baby bonuses is a timing affect. Shifting from having a baby from 29 to 25. However, as anyone who has done demographic forecasting is aware, this doesnt matter in terms of the age of the population and the growth. If you can shrink the generational space by three or four years this is a lot of population growth. It turns out that it makes a lot of money for Social Security if we have the same amount of kids that have them ever so slightly earlier. Great, lets get a timing affect. This is good especially when we are paying people for it. I agree with concerns about tinkering with fertility policy because you are in a nasty space quickly and a lot of places but we are talking about policy that will reduce Child Poverty by like 95 , just handing families in much of cash basically. This is not a bad thing. And if it also compresses generational space and reduces the gap between the children that women say they want to have, theres a little bit of a cohort effect but potentially research in canada found a bit of a core hurt affect. If we increase childbearing a little bit, great will a cash bonus do everything . No. Im sympathetic that making a Livable Society as part of this and having a functional educational and Health People system for families as part of this. But we may have different views of who will pay for it. Its just a great word. A lot of these policies actually do have a track record of having an effect. 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. But it is a viable option combined with dasher moving removing workingclass marital penalties and can face penalties for getting married. Its no surprise marriage rates are falling. All of this work has been done on the fertility levels. There are also these exceptions , the one that i find most persuasive is wanted fertility levels. What women say they want. Its not a perfect indicator but a lot closer than other ones and that makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. If the most important determinant is desired fertility we can ask questions about what affects fertility and then we are in a big area of investigation and research. If thats true, may be voluntary prenatal policy can have some influence but my impression is even though its a nonzero impact can be pretty expensive with a pretty modest demographic impact. Now we will turn to your questions and if you can wait for the microphone and identify yourself please . David i dont mean to throw fire on the gasoline here but any thoughts on whether the decline of the impact fertility rates the lex couple of . Could you tell us a little more about it . A family wage paid to support a family with one paid worker who is the man. Did the event model have to do with falling fertility . Probably. Would bringing it back raise fertility . I dont think you will find out and i dont think so. They sort of had this theory, for a while the theory was we need to make sure we had these well paid salary men. This comes from the east asian policy context, particularly japan, and their efforts to reinforce it. It doesnt work. This will surprise a lot of people. The reason why a lot of people are working is because they want to work because they have career ambitions. You are just going to be able to pay the mail read winner enough that those ambitions just dont exist. You are in a situation with high occupational closure limiting who can work and a lot of people who want to get inconsistent, unstable bad jobs that dont support families and a few people who make big. Because practices of extreme gender differentiation and women not working, and because women did not want that, contributed to the increasing age of marriage. That was basically the end and you put that off as long as you could. That policy was decreasing fertility because, im exaggerating, because it signaled gender inequality and women didnt want to enter into that. If you look at total fertility rates, mid80s until the clash of 08, it was a little bit above 2. 0. Theres a differentiation between latino and everybody else but the drop that weve seen, the end of exceptionalism, whatever you want to call it . It was not timed with and for a considerable period of time i wasnt clear whether this was postponing or a new norm. I think its harder and harder to make the case that this is just postponing. In the back. Does other housing rezoning policies you think havent impact on fertility rates . To make more money in order to have children but pay financial cost to do so. The fb fda does this report where they look at the cost of raising a child. They look at how much money families with kids spend and statistically allocate that to the child. If you look at the categories like healthcare all these Different Things, and then you compare it to price changes, pretty much every category is that prices have risen. Materially better circumstances where the amount of family spend has risen considerably less than the cost and price of housing meaning families are having a real crunch where we are seeing families with a severe housing stress, the real housing consumption is declining. Commute times are rising even though more people are working from home suggesting people are living further from work, having a more miserable time in traffic jams and allows people to live close to work and close to amenities which means removing barriers to that whether they are formal zoning or other use rules or in many cases building codes that make certain areas and buildable even though there is to knowledge he. Wait for the microphone. Aei washington examiner. I didnt hear too much about where future immigrants are going to come from. I think what weve seen is that weve moved toward what pres. Trump says is for which is more high skill and less low skill immigration and what democrats nominally say they are there for which happened because latin immigration particularly from mexico or otherwise, has gone way downhill. We are begetting more high skill immigration from the east and south asia. There are some parts of africa where population growth is not declining. Youve got a reservoir of what 160 Million People in nigeria immigrants we been getting from africa, i understanding is, pretty high skill. Pretty high education. 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 consequences positive and negative from that . Subsaharan africa is the only big area of the world that is very much above net replacement. Barring some sort of unimaginable catastrophe that will not change over the next generation. There is an increasing share of the conventionally defined working age manpower which will be coming from the sub sahara. There will be a lot of people in that region who are going to be relatively high skilled potential migrants around the world even though there is, i think, a terrible crisis underway for the sub sahara as a whole. The advance and Educational Attainment is not increasing as fast as i think a lot of us would like. And, proving Educational Attainment wins on its own merits. It seems like a reasonable conjecture to imagine there will be more high skilled migrants globally. 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 as mentioned, they have some of the best observed integration records in terms of income employment education, their children do well here. With literally the one exception being from somali communities where there are administrative issues and resettlement programs that go back many decades. I dont think its going to be a huge surge because there are only a couple ways to get here. And education visa and the classes growing but not fast enough to be producing an enormous amount of admissions. A work visa which is difficult to get if you dont have a Network Already a lot dont say lets send to nigeria. Refugee migration more and more african countries are effectively managing crises locally which is wonderful but that means there are less resettlement from some of these countries. And then you get the fourth channel where it really is not an option which is undocumented arrivals. Theres no land border and obviously maritime aside from a few container smuggling situations you are not going to get mass migration there. I wish there were serious effort to recruit the next generation of americans from subsaharan africa. We should. It would be smart. Aside from what it would do for us in terms of the diplomatic connection that china is competing in, but we are not establishing a visa program to recruit highly skilled sub saharan africans. Its not where we are right now. One final question. Lets put both of them on the table, in the back and right here. Amy mcewan. I was just curious. Someone briefly mentioned the High Net Worth production rates. I see mixed anecdotal evidence that there are low larger and smaller High Net Worth families. Im curious what that statistic looks like and if we could also get this question as well. I was going to say conrad was from the research center. Just a followup to the kind of breadwinner homemaker question earlier. It seems anecdotally that in the workplace there are more Flexible Working arrangements, maternity leave, things like that that maybe werent in place when women first enter the workforce. Im wondering if maybe the decline in fertility when women first start entering the workforce may reverse as there are more arrangements like that that give people those options. Right there. My question is given that demographic change makes people worried you think the American Public would be better served by having a more complete understanding of the dynamics youve talked about or is ignorance list . 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 data income which i dont touch with a 9 foot pole because its hard to use. Generally very wealthy people have higher fertility because they can afford it so they tend to achieve desires so to speak. Has that changed . I dont know. On the issue of his ignorance ignorance is better, the panic about immigration is greater than the panic about demographic decline. Im an educator and i feel it would be better if people understood the true story which would have to include what immigration actually is, who the immigrants are, what it means to them and what it means for americans when they come here. Knowns going to advocate for ignorance that i do think to get back to the first point that i made, we really have to consider how everything we say can be taken out of context and we are not responsible for that. Especially for those of us whom that happens to all the time we are sort of owed to pay back a little bit of explanation and resisting that stuff so even if we cant prevent it from happening or prevent information for being used from nefarious purposes at least we can combat that after the fact. Its not just demographics 101 explaining what fertility and fertility mortality means and how other arithmetic works. It would be great if we could get that far but its also looking at our own demographics and not leaving things to hide in plain sight. Got 20 million, maybe, invisible felons who are not behind bars because we dont bother to count people with that status. Weve got this problem of stagnating educational levels which we dont bother to talk or ask about why its happening. We have the men without work thing that i keep getting at which was more or less outside of policy discussion for almost 2 generations. We can do more by going through the abcs but we can also do better work about what is happening in society and maybe that will reduce panic as well. A comment on more Flexible Work arrangements. There is Research Suggesting that Flexible Work arrangements do increase birthrates. Theres a study in germany looking at expansions of dsl among highly education women sorry. Now we would say thats slow internet but it was fast at the time it was implemented. It increased the share of those who worked from home and increased the birth rate because it turns out its easier to watch kids from home been at the office. Big fan. I work from home. On that note i want to think analysts for a wonderful discussion. Thank you all for coming for a wonderful discussion. [ applause ] ladies and gentlemen, the recipients of the medal of valor and who wrote commendations