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