Panic at the American Enterprise institute, i am the director of the maastricht policy studies and im glad we have a great panel and what will be an interesting discussion. Im going to introduce you to our panelist and moderator starting on the far right which is truly a statement with nick in the economy at aei where he researchers it and writes extensively on development. He also has a finger to disable north korea from time to time. And if were slow we can do. He has testified before congress on numerous occasions and served as a consultant advisor in the u. S. Government. In 2012 pews were the procedures bradley prize. Next to him, Philip Cowans a professor of sociology at the university of maryland he is a longstanding interest in gender family and social change. In particular published extensively within families between men and women outside of family spirit he has maintained a strong interest in measurement issues and household Family Structure. Welcome to aei. A Research Fellow in the institute for family studies. He blogs about migration, Population Dynamics and regional economics in the state of migration, he also writes regularly the big idea and for the federalist and his work for extensively in the New York Times and wall street journal and many other places. Our fearless moderator today a senior fellow at aei where she compiles and analyzes American Public opinion on a wide variety of issues ranging across all economic and social topics. She has long publicly commented on the evolution of America Politics through the lens of key demographics and geographic changes. Please join me in welcoming the distinguished guest. [applause] they can very much. I would also like to add my welcome to everyone here and the cspan audience today. Demographic change has been in the news in the last week and he spent seven hours listening to the cnn debate on Climate Change for your questions on the audience into Bernie Sanders who is asked whether or not he would talk about the population exposure and in the relation to Climate Change. He said that would be part of his campaign. In elon musk gave an interview to ali baba for 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 and the rhetorical extremes and is true if you look at the data over the 50 years ago. Fertility rate was below and nearly a hundred countries. Adding cleanup, each will speak for about eight minutes. And then perhaps i will ask questions if we have time and then turn to your questions. Lets begin. So, my question, basically we refer to this as a National Crisis or moral panic. His demographic decline and big bill or not, i will argue that its a big deal and worth anything. The main way to do this is comparing, what do you think it is right now, in my benchmark the census bureau, what does the sickness we all think will happen in the most recent population forecast. I shouldve shown you the Social Security trustees, any of these groups but theyre basically pretty much is closed on oval but towards the middle of the century, basically this is business as usual scenario. Shouldnt we just trust them . Dont they know . Actually they are wrong. They greatly overestimate, the forecast is polished and in 2017 the most recent finalize data was 2016. With the Great Fortune of 2017 and 2018 data we can see how accurate they were in the first two years, they were really inaccurate the overestimated birth by 220,000 babies. That is a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths that the underestimated death, a lot is about death by despair, suicide, alcohol, the overestimated the underestimated death, considerably. And finally on migration, the error was much smaller at the overestimated net migration as well. When you correct for these heirs, you get the 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimate when they have an estimate and a forecasting system, they are separate. One year after it was published was 724,000 people too high. Which is a larger era impermissible than a private forecasting market. If we correct for those errors, if we use the assumption about future trends and all the stuff in mortality and Life Expectancy, it should not change the intercept, where we start from, and the outlines is where we get. 34 million americans in 2060. Thats a meaningful decline in growth rate. So you start to say, okay. If i stop, this proves the point. A consensus view of what is going to happen is wrong it will be much lower than you might think. But i want to go further and tell you not only the assumption with the trajectory is incorrect is what. So with a fertility assumption, the fertility rate which is a bit of concocted number but basically if it stays consistent over whole lifespan, how many babies which you have . This number is never quite accurate because birth rates change, its a reading more than indicated. We can see the blue line, if fertility rates fall, it is like italy or japan or hungry, and then we can see the what if fertility rose twopoint to, the highest it wouldve been since 1971. So this should give us a lot of different population scenarios to work with. The biggest degree of fertility recovery over the next several decades. We see theres a 60000000 difference between the highest and lowest scenarios in 2017. The lowest fertility scenario get to a population decline by the middle of the century. Which do nothing most people are saying yeah, by the 2050s population will be declining. We will not need this many houses. I dont think the Real Estate Market is planning for that. At the highest and, even if you assume the unrealistic increase in fertility up to twopoint to, you still do not get since the own forecast. The air was too big. So we can look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning, a lot of times were talking about low fertility, we cannot continue the culture with other peoples babies, like in other peoples babies. Hispanic babies and hispanic mothers, thats the declining fertility, if we look at fertility, versus the desires, the bigotry fall between the General Social survey, basically the people with the biggest shortfall in fertility are not 900 nonhispanic women, it is africanamerican women and asian women and native american women. If fertility is to increase in america, it will almost certainly be disproportionately nonwhite fertility. When i talk about raising fertility or do we want fertility to rise, we are most talking about nonwhite fertility, this is not what is what happened with white fertility which had been stable for a long time. Ultimately higher birth rate, more diversity. You can also use the model and seaplane. Lets go migration, we can look at different migration scenarios, what if migration falls, raises, as you can see it has been falling for several decades. And again, theres a 40 million person population different, even the high scenario where immigration should be a big change and it does not get used to the forecast. We could also look at deaths, one way to express death is Life Expectancy. What if recently Life Expectancy has been falling because of despair, what if we get bad about death of despair, what if it spreads, what if her Health System gets more is personal. What if we get really good Life Extension Technology and we deal with death of despair. Its a huge effect, and the only way to get to this forecast is to assume that Life Expectancy could rise considerably. However, i might sound like a rosy scenario but we can then look at the population shared by age. We have a lot of people in that scenario. Very few of them are working age. Great, population growth, maybe thats slow but there will be problems associated with that as well. In the fertility and immigration are your two channels for population growth with a more stable age mix. You can see that all that in the middle. They dont change that a lot. What is really going to happen . Giving you these scenarios, i talked very quickly, lots of graphs. So first we can think about immigration, what is actually likely to happen. Fertility rates are declining in the country of historically since immigrants to america, mexico, latin america, east asia is developing rapidly, the push for migration is less in india is below replacement rate fertility. They may be africa fertility is declining and we do not get a lot of immigrants from africa yet unfortunately. Meanwhile there are more Rich Companies opening to migration. Before population in europe is rising very rapidly and raising in japan and korea, there are more in more developed countries saying hey, were aging, we want to offset this with immigration. Which is a great strategy but it gets harder as global fertility rates decline in the number rises. Some point gets more challenging. Finally, there is a u. S. Policy question. Can we count on immigration policy to be stable forever . I think most of us know the answer is no. As much as i personally would very much like that, it is unlikely that a policy mix would be perpetually open to highlevel, we can see changes now. Its a bit like concrete in the opportunity is rising in terms of fertility rates in european is asian and lots of different terms used but will we drift into a new paradox where people only want one kid. What are there, maybe we will get there. With mortality, this is a real case for peck and his and. And usually that is my attitude here. But but death of despair is not declining. We are not really pioneering the way to deal with this. In fact in many large parts of the country still has very low rates of death. So there is a lot of potential for death and despair. So, what will happen . It could be worse than he thought, it could be worse than any of our current forecasting agency. I would say, that is where im ending. Youre welcome. [laughter] great a perfect segue. [laughter] thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. Im going to be participating in this conversation. I actually will have my own projection also which will be simpler and ill make a couple of political first. There is a lot in the american right, there is a lot of mumbojumbo about the demographic decline with a mystical statement, the health of the nation is measured by whether theres no health of the nation. So you might think with places with higher birth rate are better off than lower birthrate. That is totally wrong. So it sort of has a emotional charge to it. And you might think there is nothing really wrong with just making off statements like children are good or whatever. But in the case of america, these throwaway lines that are not associated with real numbers and majors have consequences. This is from the guy who thought of the mosques in new zealand, birthrates, birthrates we have to get retreat to change the matter what we do this is the number one thing. So, the demographic decline crisis is not putting this to White Supremacists a lot. The same way states rights appeal to racists in america a lot, you might be able to make a nonracist argument about it but you can ignore the coincidence that a lot of racists really like what youre saying. , you can but im suggesting is the responsible. We have to deal with the association between the idea a demographic decline in the potable and location of it. They are not so hard to imagine this is a census forecast and the scale here may be off but the chance of it built the white population is pretty much there or will increase a little bit more lets start in 1970, i noticed it started in the 1800s,. [laughter] it throws off the way 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 rhesus perspective theres a lot of material to work with in the projection. And in the future we are heading. I want to suggest that as an actual problem of demographic decline, it is really the solution was which is immigration and people dont like it or dispos politically unfeasible, if not a lot of people its the lack of wanting to let people into the country and if the problem is you want certain kind of people in a cultural problem and worried about who is going to come, then essentially its even harder to associate yourself with the perspective. Good luck. When you look at the longerterm composition of immigrants, you can see why theres a political problem especially with immigration which is the composition of immigrants which is now the great majority on latin america and asia increasing but a very small share from africa. The question, is immigration good, it is very different from the question of what is the correct integration policy and immigration policy good for america were good for us as opposed to them, im not a politician and elected constituency so i dont have to set a moral horizon to end at the u. S. Border but i think a lot of people want to come here and immigration is good for them, that is good. In america may have issues to work out without and i wish america luck and im happy to help. But it is not a moral given that the big issue is how to figure out how is good from it. I want to make that point to preach. A little bit of more demography. I think the fear is overblown. If you take everything and said we will not meet the senses projection and that may have applications for the budget planning, population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is a scary madeup term and we are not having population decline anytime soon. Okay, when people say demographic decline, they often include things like a little decline on president and completely terrible period of life in t expectancy. Their populations are not declining. Italy maybe a tiny bit. Eventually if they do not have immigration, it will happen because thats what the replacing number means. But it does not mean decline right now. Keep that in perspective. These are birth cohorts and completed fertility in the chemo to fertility and i hope you can see, its nice and big, the darkest line is a people board in 1960s, they got to about two births per woman by the time they got to 45. The next cohort had a little bit more in the 1970 cohort got a little bit higher, the 1975 cohort higher still and after that that we start to have this issue. But if you look at the line squeaking up in between there, that is the first bunch of millennials, i dont use that term scientifically but for reference, people born around 1980 and you can see they started out lower and then caught up a little. There is actually head up to the 65 and 60 generation at that time in their life. So you can see essentially what is happening with them, some evidence of delay and catch up. And were in the range for womens catching up in your 30s is not possible at all. If were talking about a different between six and two, it becomes a biological issue. But those last two lines are what is troubling, they are both well below the previous cohorts and the unknown question if they turn the corner like a hurricane so to speak in the projection and subtracting them further north, then we will never get the cohort that does not replace itself. We do not have cohorts of women that do not replace themselves. A couple of projections and im probably running late on time. These are nonsenses projections. Although i use the production tool which is excellent and if you go to my blog family you can look it up to her and play with these numbers yourself. So the line that heads down if you take todays birthrate in todays death rates and nothing else and you run those numbers, then we would lose 100 people bn people by the end of century. If you just at the current level of migration, if you take the census numbers and author estimates but the rear estimates for immigration by age and, and plug that in every single year and have a million images per year, that solves the entire problem of declining population. And it reduces the percentage of the population that is old by the end of the century and 25 23. Its on aging and the population decline. Now america will look pretty different. So you might want to think about that. That includes the previous one the orange lines which are still there, an increase in mortality, a crash immortality, it just assumes mortality goes on the way it is. I have a little trouble with the software so i plugged in japan, current japan for 2018, we can say we have japan Life Expectancy by 2080. If we get there then you can see both numbers rise a little, that is not doing so much in the forecast, and i did not do disaster scenario of total fraternitfertility falling. I am not seeing the disaster in terms of total numbers basically anytime soon, you can go back to worry about the climate. I want to point out, i like to show this one although this one is informative but it does not show you everything. These are changes and birth rates by age since 1989. I want to put this into perspective. So the dark lines are 15 17 yearolds and 18 19 yearolds. Fertility is falling for older women and rising for younger women. Of course those numbers are still low, the percentage rise has been rapid. Basically the whole fertility regime is shifting from earlier birth to later birth. People talk like the team birthrate isnt something, we monitor it, is it up, down, if its down its great. These are all the same women. So theres one trend which is rising age of birth. This is mostly good. This is mostly been because women have more opportunity, so they been doing other things and set of having children and good for those children. It also comes with later marriage which is associated with lower odds of divorce and other Better Outcomes for children so the idea that if you start looking around with fertility, have to come in here somewhere, where are you going to get the more birth, i assume nobody wants more birth under age 20, no one in respectable policy circles. It cannot be those. Then people get nervous at the higher ages. You have to realize, youre talking about the age of increasing birthrate for the group of women who are taking advantage of these per woman in terms of education and career and so on. Women mostly want this and