Now policy experts analyze shifting demographic numbers in the u. S. And what they mean for the countrys future. The American Enterprise institute hosted this power and 20minute discussion. Good afternoon, everyone. Im going to get us started right on time here today since we have a lot to discuss. Its my privilege to welcome you to todays event. Demographic decline, National Crisis or moral panic here at the American Enterprise institute. Im ryan streeter, prikt director of policy studies. Im so glad to have a great panel and what i think will be an 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, the henry went chair and economist here at aei and he writes extensively on demographics. And he has a thing or two to say on north korea, so if things get slow, we can get into. Hes testified before congress on numerous occasions and has served a a consultant and adviser to various units of the u. S. Government. In 2012 nick was awarded the prestigious bradley prize. Next to him is phillip cohen, professor of sociology at the university of maryland. He has a lngstanding interest in gender, family and social change. In particular he has published extensively on the division of labor within families and men and women outside of families. In addition, hes maintained a strong interest in measurement issues and household and family structure. Phil, welcome to aei. And lyman stone is an adjunct at aei and fellow at the research 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 voxs the big idea and for the federalist and his work has been extense sily covered in the new york times, the post, wall street simprournl other places. Our fearless moderator is carlin bowman, a senior fellow at aei where she analyzes American Public opinion ranging on social and economic topics. Shes commented on the evolution of american politics through the lens of key demographic and geographic changes. So, please join me today in welcoming our distinguished guests. Thank you very much, ryan. I would like to add our welcome to everyone here and our cspan audience. Demographic change has been much in the news in the last week. As you 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 toll Climate Change. He said, in fact, that would be part of his campaign. At the other end of the rhetorical spectrum, elon musk gave an interview on Artificial Intelligence and 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 rehoer c rhetorical extreme. I think ten countries were below fertility rate. Were going to turn to lyman stone and each will speak for eight minutes and then, perhaps, ill ask a question if we have time and then well turn to all of your questions. Lets begin, lyman. All right. So, my question is, basically, we framed this as is it a National Crisis or a moral panic . Basically, is it a big deal . Is demographic decline or is it not . So, im going to argue, its a big deal. In fact, it is worse than you think. And the main way im going to do this is by comparing to, well, what do you think it is right now . My benchmark is the Census Bureau . What do they think is going to happen in their most recent population forecast. I could have shown you the congressional budget, trustees, any of these groups but theyre all very similar. The census says, growth continues, right . And it maybe slows down a little bit towards the middle of the century but this is basically business as usual scenario. So, shouldnt we just trust that, if thats what census says . Dont we know . Im going to argue that actually theyre wrong. The first reason theyre wrong is because they greatly overestimate births. Census forecast was published in 2017 but the most recent finalized data was 2017. We now have final 2017 and 2018 data. We can see how accurate they were the first two years. They were really inaccurate. They overestimated births by 220,000 babies. So, thats a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths. They underestimated deaths. So, a lot of this is about deaths of despair as theyre labeled, opioid, suicide, alcohol. They overestimated im sorry, they underestimated deaths considerably. Finally, on net migration, their error was much smaller but they did overestimate net migration in these years as well. When you correct for these errors, their 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimates. They have an estimate sxm forecasting system. Theyre separate. Theyre 2018 population forecast 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 we just change the intercept, just where we start from, the yellow line is what we get. 40 million less. Thats a meaningful decline in growth rates. So, you start saying, okay, right here, if i stop, weve kind of proved the point. The view of what is going to happen is wrong. Its too optimistic. Growth will be much lower than you might think. I want to tell you not only that but the estimations that guide that future trajectory are incorrect as well. So, we can look at different fertility assumptions. I have just the historic total 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 accurate, right, because birth rates change but its a reasonable enough indicator. So we can see that blue line at the bottom with dots if the rates fall to 2. 4 births per woman and at the top, what if fertility rose to 2. 2, which is the highest it would have been since 1971. This should give us a lot of different population scenarios to work with. In the base scenario is assuming some fertility recovery over the next several decades. What we see is theres a 60 million person difference between the highest and lowest scenarios in 2070. That lowest fertility scenario actually gets you population decline by the middle of of the century, which i dont think most people are saying, yeah, by the 2050s, population will be declining. We just wont need this many houses. I dont think the Real Estate Market is planning for that. At the highest end, even if you assume this unrealistic increase in fertility, up to 2. 2, you still dont get to census own forecast. Their error was just too big. So, we can do similar then we can look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning, a lot of times fertility when we talk about low fertility, like steve king said, we cant continue the culture with other peoples babies. Theres this dichotomy define our babies and other peoples babies. When i talk about declining, fertility, whats the line you see here . Its hispanic babies, hispanic mothers. Thats the big decline in fertility. If we look at achieved fertility versus desires, the biggest shortfalls are from the social survey, which i believe phil will also cite, basically the people with the biggest shortfall in fertility, theyre not nonwhite hispanic women. Its asianamerican women, native american women. If fertility is to increase in america it will be disproportionately white fer till. When we talk about, do we want fertility to rise, were talking about nonwhite fertility. White fertility has been pretty stable for a long time. Ultimately higher birth rates, more diversity. You can also do this out and the population model and see it pan out. Lets go to migration. We can look at different migration scenarios. What if migration falls, if it rises. It has been rising. Theres a 40 million person population difference. Its a big difference. Even that high scenario where immigration rises by a third, which should be a big change, doesnt get you to the census current forecast. We can look at deaths. One way to express death is Life Expectancy. We can say, what if recently Life Expectancy has been falling because of deaths of despair. What if we get bad at deaths of despair . What if our Health System gets more and more dysfunctional or if we get Good Technology and deal with deaths despair, what effect does it have . Its huge. 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 rosy scenario, we can look at the population share by age. Yeah, we have a lot of people in that scenario. Very few of them are working age. 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 a more stable age mix. You can see that with all the other lines in the middle. They dont change the age line much. Whats really going to happen . Ive given you all these 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 asia is developing very rapidly. The push for migration is less there as well. India is below rate. Africas fertility rate is declining as well and we dont get a lot of immigrants from africa yet, unfortunately. Meanwhile, there are more rich countries opening to migration. The foreignborn share of population in europe is rising very rapidly. Its also rising in japan. Its rising in korea. More and more developed countries say were aging. We want to offset this with immigration, which is a reasonable strategy but it gets harder as global fertility rates decline and the number of potential destinations rises. 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. 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 ultralow fertility rates. Im calling it european asian. Will we drift into a new paradigm where people only want one kid . Were not there. Maybe we will get there. With mortality, heres a real case of pessimism. Thats usually my attitude. Deaths of despair are not declining and were not really pioneering a way to deal with this. Were seeing a geographic spread in many large parts of the country still have very low parts of death in these areas, which means theres a lot of upside potential for deaths of despair. Whats going to happen . It will be worse than you thought. It will be worse than any of our forecasting agencies will be expecting. All of our longterm Budget Planning is wildly optimistic in 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. Youre welcome. Youre welcome. Perfect segue. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here. And participate in this conversation. I actually will have some of my own projection graphs also, which will be simpler, but ill make a couple of political points. First i have to advance it on here so i can have my notes. Theres a lot of sort of on the in the in the american right theres a lot of mumbo jumbo about a demographic decline with the sort of mystical statements like, the health of the nation is measured by whether or not were having 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 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, in all statements 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. So the demographic decline falls to White Supremacists a lot. In the same way state rights appeal to states, you might be able to make a nonracist argument about it but cant sort of ignore the coincidence that a lot of the racists really like what youre saying. So its i mean, you can, but its kind im suggesting its kind of irresponsible. 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. 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 more. This starts in 1970. I noticed, by the way, lymans graph started in 1800, which gives you a i like the longtime series. But it kind of throws off the way you look at the current situation. Or at least you just 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 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 really right in front of us, which is immigration. And if people dont like it or its politically not feasible, whatever, then thats 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 harder to disassociate yourself with the racist perspective, so good luck. When you look at the longer term composition of immigrants, you can see what why theres a political problem especially on the racist right with immigration, which is the composition of immigrants which is 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 or what is the correct immigration policy from the question of, is immigration policy good for america or good for us as opposed to them or Something Like that. Im not a politician. Im not elected to represent an american constituency or something so i dont have to set my moral horizon arbitrarily to end at the u. S. Border. I think a lot of people want to come here. Immigration is good for them. Thats good. America may have issues to work out with that. I wish america luck. Im happy to help. 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. Now, a little of more demography. I think the fear is overblown. Even if you take everything lyman said that were not going to meet the census projections and that may have big implications for the budget planni planning, but population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is really a scary, madeup term. Were not having population decline any time soon. When people say demographic decline they often include things like, well, we had a little decline unprecedented and completely terrible. Little decline in Life Expectancy and the birth rate is falling, therefore, we have demographic decline. Keep it in perspective were not talking about population decline italy, spain, germany, france and the United Kingdom go to blow placement fertility in the 1970s and their population is not declining italy a tiny bit. If they dont have immigration, it will happen. Thats what the replacement means. It doesnt mean decline right now. These are birth cohorts and its their completed fertility, cumulative fertility. I hope you can see. Oh, thats nice and big. The darkest line is the people born, the women born in 1960, they got to just about two births per woman by the time they got to 45. The next cohort five years later had a little more. The 1970 cohort got up a little bit higher. The 1975 cohort higher still and its really after that that we start to have this issue. If you look look at that line thats squeaking up in between there. Thats the first bunch of socalled millenials, a term i dont use scientifically but just for reference. People born around 1980. If you parse out those lines, they started out lower and then caught up a little. Now theyre actually ahead of the 65 and 60 generation at that time in their life. So, you can see essentially whats happening with them is some evidence of delay and catch up. Were in the range of one to two babies per woman. Catching up in your 30s is not impossible at all. If were talking about the difference between six and two, then catchup becomes a biological issue. Those two lines is whats troubling lyman is theyre well below the previous cohorts. The unknown question is if they turn the corner like a hurricane, so to speak, and start and the projection ends of tracking them further north, then well never get a cohort that doesnt replace itself. We have never had a cohort of women that did not replace themselves. A couple of projections. Im probably running late on time. Your fine. Take your time. A couple of projections. These are not census projections. Although i use their projection tool, which is excellent. If you go to my blog family inequality, ill put it up tomorrow. You can play with these numbers yourself. So, the line that heads down is if you take just todays birth rates and todays death rates and nothing else and just run those numbers, then we