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 its mostly been good. However, it is true and this is the general survey data, there is an increasing share of people of when they reach age 40, if you asked them how many children have you had and then you asked them separately, what is your ideal number of children for a family to have . You get 25 people who the ideal number is higher than the number that they have. This absolutely does not mean that something has gone wrong in their life. Other things may have gone so great that they put that one ideal aside. Or if you treat children as a luxury you can put in the category of how many boats do you think everybody should have, i think everybody should have one at least but i have none and i probably never will but that does not mean my life is a failure, i have things i did not achieve that i hoped i wouldve achieved. So you really want to study the question, is something gone wrong in peoples lives, that would be concerning in a different way than the Economic Health of the country in the future and so on. But this indicates in the advanced way that something is deeply wrong with our society and people are not having the number of children that they want to have. That would be a problem. But i dont think this necessarily shows it. So we would have 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 rough appointswrap uppoints. It is not trigger, the reason is because it is very hard to design a policy, im not a political expert, its hard to make a pro rata policy that is not going to end up leading to more of the wrong kind of people being born from the point of view of people who make the policy. It is hard to design a pronated policy that will not make women of color have children and thats not what they have in mind. I dont really see in the cards which is one of the reasons why the political talk about demographic incline in the crisis atmosphere is bad because i dont think it leads to a positive policy outcome but it inflames the recess rate. And that is a shame. A quick other, number two, is this social engineering, i thought conservatives are getting social engineering, people are choosing how many number of kids they want to have. Isnt that good . When poor women were trained to have children that the american right did not think they could afford to have, they were comfortable punishing them by taking away welfare. When richer women decided to have children that some videos think they might want to have, all of a sudden its a National Crisis in the not been able to achieve fertility. And finally, if what we are trained to do is help women achieve their fertility goal, we want families to be able to have the number of children that they want to have because that is what is good for good society and thats what Healthy People do and thats what our government does, support people then i think its really great in a shame that some of the people who hold that position are prevented to have moral and religious convictions from advocating him the same people when they try to have for your children. That is also a contradiction in this debate. Nick. I am going to try to make three points. Point number one, if i were able to really accurately and really robustly to forecast future fertility trends with the United States and future Immigration Trends with the United States we would not be meeting in this lovely auditorium, we would be meeting on my 400foot yacht. But there is a reason that these projections have always been, the reasons are there is no robust really reliable method yet as long as human beings have coalition. For longterm forecast of fertility trends and its just the same, actually worst with Immigration Trends because they are so political. So i do not know if we are going to reach a peak americans in the next generation, i dont know if we are going to have the less population trend, i dont know if it will be accelerate, i just do not know. The second thing, in this world of necessary ignorance, i have been very skeptical through all of my career in the scare stories about the population explosion and i am also pretty skeptical about population decline as being a necessary catastrophe for societies. My view is, population change is a form of social change and some places deal with social change better than other places and if you have prepared intelligent policies you can probably deal with social change better than if you do not. But that gets us to the question of where the less may be heading. And my third point, this, i can imagine a future for the United States where total population is shrinking and we are Overall Society and median age is increasing in the proportion of people over 65 or whatever you call old is going to be rising in the society is becoming prosperous. Prosperity coincides with more populations in older populations. But we are not on this path right now. We are on a very worrisome path if we should ever hit this population shrinking Inflection Point and certainly it is a troubling path considering the graduals of social aging that is occurring in all the affluent society. Ill show you what i mean here. So, number one, fort shrinking an aging society to prosper, you need to have high rates of lab r force participation. Im looking at the situation with guys in the u. S. Now in the situation with women is a little bit better but not a whole lot better. Last weeks job report showed that the employment population ratio for guys is 25 54, it does not matter which you choose, they are about the same reported in the 1940 u. S. Census, the census was asking people question about the Previous Year which is 1939, we are basically at about 1939 levels of employment rate or at least for guys. Not what you would want if you are ahead into the shrinking and aging land. We can look a little bit closer at this. You can say maybe this is a problem of lack of demand for jobs and that certainly could make the argument after the great recession. But we have had a steady increase in the in the number of Unfilled Positions in the u. S. And they are not offer headphones managers and chemical engineers. A couple of millions of those jobs are for people in the leisure industry, hotel, restaurants, construction workers, you have to be strong for that but you dont have to have edit degree necessarily. And yet the total number of guys who were out of the labor force has not moved that much since the crash itself. It is something going on that does not look so good especially in the prospect of eventually shrinking and already aging society. One of the things that you want for an aging society is healthy aging. This is not what we see right now with the mortality trends for the conventionally defined working age population. We just lost a decade of Health Progress in the United States, this only takes us to 2017. Health progress was not so hot in the couple of decades right before this. But now were on the other end of the curve. Education, this is the proportion of twentysomethings in the u. S. From the 60s to now who have a bachelors degree or higher. Notice again what has happened with the guys. The proportion of guys with bachelor degrees in their late 20s is actually a little bit lower than 2010 then it was in the 1970s. Part of the important parcel of a Healthy Society is educational agreement. It be nice if people learn things where they were at school but increasing Educational Attainment. That is yet another thing that is problematic for the United States in dealing with future problems. Then the final thing has to do with immigration. Is immigration with the u. S. , i say immigration has been pretty great for the u. S. An american newcomers have been assimilated into loyal and productive new americans intercourse not perfect, but you have to say compared to other things and looks pretty good. But you made thi may disagree, e is not what i would want to see in the u. S. , this is what is going on more or less now and that you and what im showing you is three lines showing the proportion of younger people who are neither employed nor in education or training in the lowest line in the you countries are for the native born eu 28 people in a slightly higher line that is for other eu people in the highest line of all our people who were born elsewhere outside of the eeo. And when i see this, this looks like people are not assimilating into the Human Capital with these societies will need for the future. I would say so far we have dodged this bullet and i hope we will continue to dodge it but i dont have any sense of complacency about thinking we could do this permanently. Thank you very much and thank you to all of the speakers. Very thoughtful presentations. We been discussing immigration and i like to ask you whether you do disagree with nick about the point he made about assimilation in a one a return to immigration. I was trying to overlay from memory what that looks like in the u. S. I do not think we have a case of immigrants having twice unappointed. No. It goes lower. And im surprised that i dont know enough about europe but i suspect i dont know what gender would be an issue that would be my first cut on that. But what happens to the society when you have a lot immigration is a very big question and also what happens to the immigrants. I have sort of if you reduce the border to basically a checkpoint where you have arrest warrants and let people in, a lot of people would not come in they would come until coming was not good anymore and then they would feel it was not better. And i used to think about this just like the u. S. And mexico when most of the undocumented immigration was from mexico, if you combined the mexico and u. S. Population and redrew the border around both countries, the average income for the u. S. Area would be lower and the average income in mexico would be higher and would even out. I think that is basically fine, i think the issue, do you have is the size of self interest, people care about that, is there something very special about america that must be preserved that would be at risk for people who do not share the cultural background on coming here in large numbers and i admit thats an open question, i think it could also go the other way and you could end up in the positive in terms of culture change. Large countries are clearly competing for immigrants and alluded to that. Its kind of like a silent auction, are we competing for immigrants . Thats a good point. But what should u. S. Immigration policy look like . This is one of the areas where part of the world and Public Opinion we see deeper disagreement than perhaps any other loophole from the Chicago Council leaked showed 79 or the 70 of republicans said a large number of immigrants and refugees have a critical threat to the United States compared to 19 of democrats. What should the u. S. Immigration policy look like . When i look at this craft appear, i wonder if it looked different in 1999. What i mean by that, or in 2004 and some prior. I wonder in the u. S. We are very fortunate that most of the immigration is coming as labor immigration. And we say, youre either here for education or you are here for work in the come on a family visa, your Family Member came for work and often theyre motivated to share the work as well we do have a very generous support system. That wouldve been true for european immigration. Very recently it has not been. Europe change from a country that accepted in total Something Like a fifth or sixth as many crisis migrants to one that accepted 12 times as many. Historically the u. S. Was a country that accepted lots of refugees and a lot of asylumseekers in the crisis in syria and afghanistan change that and i think they did not really know how to handle that, they did not have a lot of expensive refugee settlement. It had a lot of difficult experience in and at the same time, asylumseekers are by definition intending to be temporary, so how much of what we see in european and point trends are people who intend this to be temporary during a crisis. Also birthright citizenship, how any of these people are stateless and legally cannot acquire employment. We have institutions that promote integration in america and that point is actually the point, whatever your policy, also we talk about total numbers, i care about total numbers, there are an important to the forecast. But also how they are received in the community that receives them. If we get 2 Million Immigrants into new york city and they are all french people, this will have a very different political response than if each town gets two or three more immigrants and all from different countries. Because they would have been different political and cultural impacts. Getting people and having immigration policy encourages people to have a stake in immigration. I appreciate that phil mentioned the great replacement conspiracy theory. All too often especially on the right, there is a rhetoric that immigrants are replacement. We should be trying to find policy avenues avenues as reinforcement and this is additional people contributed to your society and culture. I dont think her institutions do that right now. And you can think about visas or canadians visa sponsorship are all options for getting that. But to actually encourage the community to facilitate immigration. First, phils question, it is more extreme for females and males mixed with labor force participation. Yes it is certainly true that 95 of the plaintif plana planee better off if they moved to the usa. But the people who ultimately get to choose on who comes to any country or the people in the country this is National Serenity in place of ogres. We had a very very low level of immigration in the United States from the 20s until the 60s. There is a reason for that. The reason is what happened in the first gilded age in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s and 1900s, they were not totally open borders because it is dangerous to get her but we had pretty open immigration policies and we saw extremely big wealth differences, income differences develop in the United States, does any of this sound familiar. And then among less skilled native 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 in the 1900s and started in different statehouses all across the u. S. , a couple of bills to congress that did not pass and then we have the forcing event and that was world war i when people cannot move anymore. After that, we had a really radical restrictive policy going to place and i kind of like the optimality guy in me that i would like to see, the situation with winners and losers, we may be closing our eyes if we think there is no losers in immigration situation. We have to think we dont want to be a politician but we have to figure out a way that works for people in human beings that theres nothing here already. I dont know what the totals are and what the flow is but i dont think its out of balance for people who think that their interest are being heard to raise their hands and say we have a political process that is supposed to protect us too. Your reaction . I just have something brief about that. It is interesting that extreme partisan and skeptical that the bipartisan divide because according to trump 94 support him. And republicans are very tied up with trump. And essentially what you have if that is true then you hold a group of members of an antiimmigration movement about what their views of immigration are. So i think that is a problem. And i think the point of community in reception is extremely well taken and goes to point also, as far as making immigration workable for senders and receivers. It is interesting and i guess we can think about japan a little, japan may have a proportional increase in immigration but still pretty small. Or at least not enough to address the population and ill let you into that in a Second Period but if you are having a demographic crisis from low fertility and youre having all the problems associated with demographic decline and lack of entrepreneurship and all the things that we are afraid of and you refuse to allow immigrants in that would help with the problem, then immigration is not really a problem in your problem is something cultural which refuses to allow you to see the humanity and your neighbors in some vital way. I think that the key part of the problem to work, which before we can get to it the immigration policy we may have to get to the point where americans can recognize the humanity in their neighbors. I will leave that because i dont know the status of the top of my head. But building around all of it, i think the sense around the world and the other peoples babies, triggered something in the idea that is latent that there is a substitution between our babies and their babies. That theres arrival he good. And in demographic forecasting that mortality adjuster fertility itself from three to below two in ten years and and been declining gradually but also withdraw mortality. And when people feel like theyre community is awkward to survive, when people feel like it is threatened whether by suicide or opioids or genghis khan invading or because my fatherinlaw the pastor would say his funeral is outnumbered then baptisms. It creates a feeling of threat. Is it legitimate, is it not . It exists in people feel this. So i think a vital point of welcoming society for immigrants is fertility among people who live there. That is not saying, your community is not under threat, you have a future for your culture, you will hit the scale and need to keep supporting your church, seminary, school, soccer league, whatever you value and other community will join you and share these things in my big worry with low fertility with declining fertility, we are going to society where 100 of population growth comes from immigration and natives are aware of that. And we are not okay with us, our community is clearly not persistent and people want to feel their part of a lasting transcending community. So we probably want the fertility rate to rise because we want intermarriage between natives and foreignborn. We want communities to welcome people into healthy growing community. So this is part of a welcoming community is a community that values what it has to share with people who are coming. All elude to some of the part oproblems with the fertility, psyd, dont innovate, Social Security, they cannot project power because they dont have the money to spend on defense, do we have a lot of evidence on those points . No, those are two things people worry about. Social security and sub port is very big. And one of the things in modern scenario which matter and of people having children wanted immigrants to help people take care of children. So the care issues are very real, the issues of vitality and all that stuff, im not sure if those are or if we have the record to evaluate that. And i cant project power. [laughter] one of the arguments. I do not want to judge. Other problems of low fertility in society we have not touched on . The low fertility in societies that we have not touched on . China or japan both one of the things that we did not mention, looking at headcounts, the family arrangements, and you have not just a change in headcount in japan and china but you have changing families and living arrangements and the protections ive seen and maybe youve seen other one suggest that japan is on a path to see twentysomethings, mainly end up without grandchildren. And how a society like that future of japan will function and it seems like getting into the sciencefiction portion of the program. Im not imagining how that will work. I think we really need to bear in mind not just the headcount but the living arrangements in the Family Structures too. I think i read that japan and the people in japan are actually renting children just to be with them on the weekends because we have so many people who are single and summoning people alone. I want to touch on death and despair you all alluded to it and i know the social Capital Project tried to break down some of the statistics arguing that suicide and alcoholism are not significantly different from what they were in earlier last century. But the opioid addiction obviously and drug addiction is soaring. How do we address the desperate despair on this very big question. One of my hobbies for a long time was looking at Health Trends in the soviet union and the other countries. The stuff that we see today looks a little bit too close for comfort to have an echo of the rising adult mortality transit we saw back in those societies. I never thought that i was among enough to sea Life Expectancy in east germany outside the Life Expectancy in the United States. But here we are today. If you look and you think that you can look at that stuff as a mirror that reflects something on where we are and there are many ways because of the completely different political arrangements and many other affects as well. One of the things which i think the Public Health community missed was the role of stress and psychosocial factors in the longterm Health Problem and partly because that was something that nobody was measuring and i have to wonder whether that is also part of what were seeing here in the United States, we should have a much more responsive public Health System. In a way it is astonishing to me that it took a decade and a half for american researchers and Life Science Community to realize that the low education middle aged were having this rise and death rate, it does not sound like that group is very terribly protected. My final question before we turn to your questions, what pro nato policy have worked elsewhere and things like tax incentive, what turns these numbers around . If anything. There is some explained to that, and the problem is, you may be changing timing more than total numbers, you may encourage people to have second or third child sooner but basically the policies are, some combination of child credit paid leave education and so on, and things i mostly would like, i dont know, the history of countries tinkering with fertility rates looking back to china, it is not very good, it is hard to do that in a free society but if were talking about death of despair, if people are happier and healthier and we have a wealth tax [laughter] decline would have more children but that would not be a pro nato policy it would just be improving people. In the sense of pronatalist him. Most of what we observe for bonuses or these things is timing effect. If people shifting from having a baby at 29 to 25. However, as anyone who is done in a demographic forecasting is aware, how do you fix matter in terms of the age of population and growth of population, you can shrink the generational space by three or four years, this is a lot of population growth, in fact, the trustees of Social Security fund actually include a scenario where they look at changing and it makes a lot of money for Social Security, if we have the same a lot of kids who ever so slightly earlier and so great, lets get the timing exact. This is good especially when we are paving people, i agree with the concerns about tinkering with facility policy. But were talking about policy that will reduce Child Poverty by 95 . Handing families a bunch of cash. This is not about thing. And if it also compresses generational space slightly and reduces the gap between Children Women are having and they say they want to have, and if there is some research with a little bit of research and canada that found a bit of a cohort effect and one in germany as well if we increase childbearing a little bit, great. Now will cash bonus to everything . No. Im sympathetic to the view that death and despair making a liberal society is part of it and having a functional education and Health System for families as part of this. But, we may have different views of how to pay for it. [laughter] but, a lot of these policies actually do have a track record of having effective costing money, and if you would like to have birthrates that people want in a world where they want lots of things, you do have to pay for. But, its a valuable option with other leverage points like removing workingclass marriage penalties that are in the tax code in the welfare system. And where families can say 15000 penalties for getting married. In terms of the benefits that they lose. Those numbers are falling. There has been all this work in the century for low fertility levels and you can correlate anything like this and there always is exceptions to the role. The one that i find most persuasive is wanted fertility levels, what women say they want as fertility levels and we dislike, its not a perfect indicator but a lot closer than other ones. And it makes sense that a certain amount of sense to me. If that is true, if the most important determinant is desired fertility, then we can ask all sorts of questions about what effects desired fertility and then were often a big area of investigation and research but if that is true, yes maybe perennial policy, voluntary printing a policy can have some influence but my impression even though its a nonzero impact, it can be pretty extensive or pretty modest demographic impact. The panel has covered an enormous amount of ground in a short time and now we will turn to your questions and if you can wait for the microphone and identify yourself. Right here. I dont mean to throw gasoline on fire but any thoughts on whether the possible connection between the decline of the fortis model impact the fertility rates over the past few decades in the United States customestates . Could you tell us a little more about it. Living wage, family wit wageo support one paid worker who is the man and did the decline of the model have to do with falling fertility, probably. Would bring in a back race fertility, income i dont think you find out, and be i do not think so. There has been efforts on this direction and some Southeast Asian countries. They sort of had this theory, it is sort of gone for the new theory but the theory was basically we need to make sure we have well paid salary men in the salary men comes from the east asian policy context particularly japan on the efforts to reinforce it, they dont support families. It does not work. Because the reason why, this will surprise a lot of people, the reason why a lot of people are working because they want to work and they have career ambitions. You will not just be able to pay the male breadwinner enough that those missions do not exist. So youre in a situation we high occupational closings where women can work in the same time a lot of people want to see get inconsistent bad unstable jobs they do not support families and few people that make it big. In the japan case, because the Family Structure and practices within families of extreme gender in differential and people not working and women did not want that, i think that contributed a lot to the increasing age of marriage. In other words, it was basically the end when the women got married. You put that off as long as you could. So the policy in that case was not increasing fertility, is decreasing fertility because it meant and signaled extreme gender inequality and women did not want to enter into that. If you look at total fertility rates in the u. S. , and this is not cohort, a little bit cheating. But if you look at the. Rates from the mid80s until the crash of a weight, it was a little bit above 2. 0. And as you pointed out, there is a differentiation between latino and more or less everybody else in the house come down. But the drop that we have seen, the end of american demographic exceptional list or whatever you want to call it did not come with the in a fordism, it was a time of crash. And for considerable period of time i was not clear that this was postponing or a new norm. The tickets harder and harder after ten plus years to make the case that this was just postponing, if you postpone long enough you forgot. I work here. I am curious, does other housing or zoning policies that you think would have an impact on fertility rates, i know weve seen a lot of young couples moving out of city centers where they make more money in order to have children in the suburbs. Yes, the usda does a report every year when they look at the cost of raising a child, they look at how much money families with kids fund and they statistically allocated to the child. If you look at the categories they bring out like housing, healthcare, childcare, over the law of 20 years and compared to price changes in the consumer pricing act in those categories, pretty much already under every category, prices have risen, and families are having better circumstances for the kids, spending more except, in healthcare where the amount of family spent has risen considerably less than the cost of housing which means families are having a real crunch than what we actually see with families with a severe housing stress, the real housing consumption is declining. We see that now Square Footage of housing is smaller and we see that for 15 years, commute times are rising even more people working from home. People are living farther and farther from work, having more miserable time in traffic jams. So this is a very real housing stress impacting families but we need this to allow people to live close to work, close to amenities and that means removing barriers to that whether formal zoning or just other use rules nor even in many cases building and making certain areas unbuilt even though theres technology. It is very important. Other question. Please wait for the microphone. Michael with aei. I did not care too much about future immigrants where they will come from, i think what weve seen over the last ten years that we have moved toward what President Trump says more high skill, less skilled organization and what democrats say they are for and not happen because line immigration particularly from mexico but otherwise has gone way downhill. We are getting more high school immigration probably from east and south asia. Africa, he has on his graphs a little bit, there are some parts of africa where pot relation growth is not declining very much. You have a reservoir of 160 Million People in nigeria and immigrants we have been getting from africa and my understanding is pretty high skilled, pretty high education, nigeria, ghana, except for places where we got refugees like somalia. And we have epo paeans here. Will we see a surgeon immigration from africa which might be the consequences positive and negative from that . As you know, the only big area of the world that is very marked above in that replacement. In some sort of unimaginable catastrophe that will not change like most of 45 , of the perspective conventionally defined working age manpower but the world as a whole will come 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 a terrible education crisis underway for the sub sahara as a whole. The advance and Educational Attainment for the region is not increasing as fast as i think a whole lot of us would like and improved Educational Attainment, and the own merit for what it does there. It seems like a reasonable conjecture to imagine that there would be more high skilled migraines globally with subsaharan regions. Would it be easier to head to europe, maybe. But we have had a pretty good track record with african migrants in the United States. Since 65. We will probably get more african migrants in the future which is great and the actual have some of the best integration records in terms of income and appointment education, their children do quite well here. And with the one exception being somali communities were there is also administrative issues and resettlement programs in some cases. In that go back many decades but i do not think itll be a huge surge because theres only a couple ways to get her. Education visa, and the middle class is growing and will continue to do so but not fast enough and not good enough to be producing an enormous amount of omissions into the american universitys. A work visa which is difficult to get if you do not have a network already, not a lot of Companies Say lets send a recruiter to nigeria. Maybe they should but that is not how it works right now. Or, refugee migration and actually worn more african comfort under countries are effectively managing locally but its actually fewer less resettlement from some of these countries. And then you get your fourth channel which is really not an option which is undocumented arrivals but no border and obviously a maritime aside from a few container smuggling situations you will not get mass migration. So i do not think, i wish there were serious effort to recruit the next generation of americans, we should be doing it, it would be smart and aside from what we do from us in terms of the diplomatic connection in the region that china is competing. But that is not what we are doing, we are not establishing the visa program recruit africans. One final question. Theres actually two. Lets put both of them on the table. Someone briefly mentioned the High Net Worth reproduction rate, i do not see that anywhere. I seen evidence that there is smaller hi network families suggesting that high network has not adjusted in the way other parts or other income groups have. If we can get this question two. I work for religious liberty, just a followup to the homemaker question earlier, it seems that there is more Flexible Working arrangements, that may be more in place when women first entered the workforce and wondering if the decline in fertility happens when women enter the workforce in reverse has more arrangements like that to give people those options. My question is, given the demographic change makes people worry, do you think American Public will be better served by having a more complete understanding of the dynamics that you talked about, or is ignorance bliss, does it better that they do not understand the change underway . You can take any of those questions. I dont know the answer to the High Net Worth question, the only survey that would get is a survey of income and participation which is the data set that i do not touch with the 9foot pole, and its very, located to choose. The other surveys will not have those people very well. Generally people have a higher fertility because they can afford it and they can achieve their desire so to speak. But has it changed i dont know. On the issue of ignorance, i think the panic about immigration right now is greater than the panic about demographic decline. And im an educator, i feel like it would be better if people understand the true story, that would have to include the story of immigration and what it actually is, who their immigrants are, and what it means for them and what it means for america when they come here. And i do think its going to advocate for ignorance but i do think to get back to the reverse point we do have to consider how everything can be taken out of context. And we are not responsible for for that. And especially for those of us of whom that happens all the time. We sort out to pay back a little bit with explanation and resisting them for this information being used in combat after the fact. And when demographic education, it is not just demographics of explaining what fertility means and what mortality means and what immigration means and how the arithmetic works. That would be great. But it is also looking at her own demographics and not leaving things to hide in plain sight. We have got 20 million because we dont bother to count people with that status, we have this problem of stagnating educational levels which is more or less outside of policy discussion were to generation. So we can do more by going to the abcs and that will reduce some of the panic as well. More Flexible Work arrangements and they are good. There is actually Research Suggesting flexible do to increase birth rate. So there is a study in germany looking at expansion on dsl among highly educated women who are more likely to have fast at the time it was him lamented and increase the birth rate. It turns out easier to watch a kid from home. It is great we should have more of it. Im a big fan. I work from home. On that note, i want to think the panelist for wonderful discussion im sure they will stay for a few minutes to answer questions but they do offer coming for a wonderful discussion. [applause] the communicators is next with senator Marsha Blackburn who talks about Big Tech Companies and her priorities as chair of the Senate JudiciaryCommunity Technology task force. The. For 40 years he spent in providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme CourtPublic Policy events from washington dc and around the country so you can make up your own mind. Created by cable in 1979, cspan is brought to you by your local or cable or satellite provider. The film, your unfiltered knew of government. Host joining us this week on the communicators is senator Marsha Blackburn, member of the commerce and science subcommittee on medications and technology. Senator blackburn appeared on this program is a member of the house but this is her first appearance as a senator. Welcome back. Thank you so much. Good to join you once again. Host i wanted to ask you about the issues you worked on