20minute discussion. Good afternoon, everyone. Im going to get us start right on time here today since we have a lot to discuss. Its my privilege to well you to todays event, demographic decline, national cries or moral paining here at American Enterprise institute. My name is ryan streeter, the director of the domestic policy studies here and im glad that weve got such a great panel and what i think will be a real interesting discussion for you today so im going to introduce our panelists and moderator starting on the far right over here which is purely a positional statement with Nick Eberstadt, the political commentator here where he writes and researchers on demographics and Economic Development and has a thing to say about north korea from time to time which if things get real slow we can get into that. Man of diverse interest. Hes testified before congress on numerous occasions and served as a consultant and advisers to the u. S. Government and in 2012 nick was awarded the prestigious bradley prize. Next to him is philip cohen, associate of professor at university of maryland and has had a longstanding interest in gender, family and social change and hes published extensively on the gender of labor within families and between men and women outside of families. In addition hes maintain and strong issue in measurement issues in household and Family Structures. Phil, well to aei. Lyman stone next is an adjunct fellow here and also a Research Fellow at institute for family studies. He blogs about migration, Population Dynamics and regional economics at his blog in a state of migration. He also writes regularly for voxx, the big idea and the federalist and his work has been covered in new york times, post and wall street journal and our fearless moderator is Karlyn Bowman who deals across all social and economic topics. In addition she has long publicly comment on the evolution of american politics through the lens of key demographic and geographic changes so please join me in welcoming our distinguished guests. [ applause ] thank you very much, rink, and i would also like to add my welcome to everyone here and to our cspan audience today. Demographic change has been much in the news in the last couple of weeks. Those of you who spent seven hours listening to the cnn debate on Climate Change heard a question from the audience to Bernie Sanders who was asked whether or not he would talk about the population explosion and its relationship to Climate Change. He said in fact would be part of his campaign and that the other end. Rhetorical spectrum elon musk gave an interview to jack ma, an alibaba forum on Artificial Intelligence and said that the biggest threat Going Forward is not the population expense but demographic winter and population collapse. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between these two rhetorical extremes but it is certainly true if you look at the data over the last 50 years, and i think about 50 years ago eight countries were total fertility rate was below replacement. Thats now nearly 100 countries. Well turn to lyman stone and phil cohen and Nick Eberstadt is cleanups, batting cleanup. Each them is going to speak for about eight minutes and then perhaps ill ask a question if we have time and then well turn to all of your questions. Lets again. Lyman. So my question is basically we framed this as is it a National Crisis or a moral panic . So basically is it a big deal . Is demographic decline a big deal or is it not so im going to argue its a big deal. In fact, its worse thaub thing and how ill do this is by comparing well, what do you think it is right now and my benchmark is the Census Bureau. What does the Census Bureau think is going to happen in the most recent population forecasts. I could have shown you the congressional budget office, the Social Security trustees, any of these groups, but they are basically pretty much all very similar to this. What you can see is the census says growth continues, right, and it may be slows down a little bit toward the middle of the ken try but base cli this is a business as usual scenario, so shouldnt we just trust that if thats what senseups says, dont they know . Im going to argue that actually they are wrong. So the first reason they are wrong is because they greatly overestimate births so census forecast was published in 2017, but the most recent finalized data they had was 2016. We now have the Great Fortune of final 2017 and 2018 data and we can see how accurate they were in the first two years. They were really inaccurate. They overestimated births by 220,000 babies. Thats a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths that they underestimated deaths. A lot about this is bets of despair, opioids, suicide, alcohol. They underestimated deaths considerably, and finally on net migration, their error here was much smaller, but they did overestimate net migration in these years as well. When you correct for the errors, you get the 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimates, so they have an estimate system and a forecasting system that will are accept raft. Their 2018 population forecast, one year after it was published was 724,000 people too high which is a larger error than is generally considered permissible lets say in a private forecasting market. So if we correct for those errors, if we ulgts same assumptions about future trends and mortality and Life Expectancy change, if we just change the intersect, where we start from, the yellow line is what we get. 34 million fewer americans in 2016. That trajectory looks different, a meaningful decline in growth rates. Objection right here, if i stop, weve kind of proved the point. The consensus view of what is going to happen is wrong. Its much optimistic. Growth will be much lower than you think. I wanting to farther, but assumptions that guide that future trajectory romania incorrect as well. You look at different fertility assumptions so ive got the historic fertility rate which is a bit of a concocted number but its basically if birth rates by age stayed consistent over a womans whole life span how many babies would she have . This number is never quite acrashlgts right, because birth rates change but its a reasonable enough indicator, so we can see that the blue line at the bottom with the dots, if fertility rates fall to 1. 4 children per woman, which is like italy or japan or hungary, and then we can see at the top like what if fertility rose to 2. 2 which is the high test would have been since 1971, so this should give us a lot of different population scenarios to work, and the base scenario is assuming some degree of fertility recovery over the next several decades, and what we see theres a 60 million person difference between the highest and lost scenarios. The lost fertility scenario gets the population declined by the middle of the stray which i dont think most people are going to say population will be declining and i dont think the Real Estate Market is planning for that. At i highest risk, even if you assume the unrealistic per filth at 2. 2, you dont get to census own forecast. That i recall error was just too big and then look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning that a lot of times, fertility when we talk about low fertility, people like steve king said, like we cant replace we cant continue the culture with other peoples babies, like theres a dichotomy between our babies and other peoples babies, and when i talk about declining fertility, whats the line you see here . Its hispanic babes and hispanic mother. Thats the big decline in fertility and if we look at peoples achieved fertility versus desires and the biggest shortfalls and the desires are from the survey here which phil will also cite, basically the people with the biggest shortfall in fertility, its not hispanic women, its africanamerican women and asian women and faith american women so if fertility is to increase in america, it will almost certainly be disproportionately be nonwhite fertility so when i talk about white fertility and do we want fertility to rise, we are mostly talking about nonwhite fertility, that this isnt really about whats happening with white fertility which has been really stable so ultimately higher birth rates more diversity and you can also do this out in the population model and see it pan out and lets go to migration. We can go to different migration scenarios. What if payingration falls and what if it rises, and it has been rising for several decades and, again, theres a 40 million person population, and even that high scenario where immigration rigsz by a third which should be a big change doesnt get you to the census current forecast. We can also look at deaths so one way to express deaths is Life Expectancy. We can say what if recently lisks pectsy hlife expectancies have been failed, what if we get real good life extension technologies, what effect does this have . Its a huge effect. The only way to get to census current forecast is to assume that Life Expectancy is going to rise considerably. However, while that might sound like a rosie scenario we can then look at population share by age, so, yeah, we have a lot of people in that scenario and very few of them are working ages so, great, population growth, maybe thats lovely, but there will be problems associated with that as well, which means really fertility and immigration are your two channels for population growth with with a more stable age mix so you can see that in all the other lines in the middle. They dont real change the action mix a lot. Whats real going happen . Given you lots of scenarios and talked very quickly with lots of graphs. First we can think about immigration. What is actually likely to happen . Fertility rates are declining in countries that have historically sent immigrants to america, mexico, much of latin america. East asia is developing very rapidly. The push for migration is less there as well. India is almost below replacement fertility now. Africa, fertility is declining very quickly as well and we dont get a lot of immigrants from africa yet unfortunately. Meanwhile, there are more ruch countries opening to migration. The foreignborn shafer population in europe is rising very rapidly. Also rising in japan. Also rising in korea. There are more and more developed countries saying, hey, were aging. We want to offset this with immigration which is a reasonable strategy but it gets heard has global fertility rafrmgts declines and the number of potential defendant nations rises. At some point it gets more manned more challenging and finally theres a u. S. Policy question. Can we count on immigration policy remaining open and stable forever and i think most us note answer is no. As much as i personally would very much like that, would like a lot more immigration, its unlikely that our policy mix will be perpetually open to high levels of immigration as we can see in turn conditions. Then with fertility, its a bit less concrete, cost of child bearing is rights and the opportunity cost of child bearing is rising because of lost time and out of work and theres questions of the ultra low fertility rates, lots of different terms but will we drift into a new paradigm where people just only want one kid . Were not there. Maybe we will get there. With mortality, this is one where i think theres a real case for pessimism and in case you cant tell thats usually my attitude here but deaths of despair are not declining and were not pining a way to deal with this. Were seeing a geographic spread. In many large parts of the country low rates of deaths in these areas which means theres a lot of upside potential for deaths of despair so whats going to happen . Going to be worse thaub thought. It will be worse than any of our current forecasting agencies are expecting. All of our longterm Budget Planning is wildly optimist nick terms of whats going to happen with population. I would say thank you. However, that is a dark note to end on, but it is where im ending. Say youre welcome. Phil. Great. Perfect segue. I hope this is on. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. Im happy to be here and participate in this conversation. I actually will have some of my own projection graphs also which will becism lersch but ill make a couple of sort of political points first. I have to advance it on here. Theres a lot of sort of on the on the in the american right theres a lot of kind of mumbojumbo about demographic decline where sort of mystical statements like the health of the nation is measured by whether or not thats not a measurable theres no health of the nation. So you might think that places with higher birth rates are better off than places with lower birth rates, thats totally wrong, so it it sort of has this kind of has this sort of emotional charge to it and, you know, you might think theres nothing real wrong with just making, you know, banal statements like children are good or whatever but in the case of america, these throwaway lines that are not associated with real numbers and measures and so on have real consequences. This is from the guy who shot up the mosques in new zealand. Birth rates, birth rates, birth rates. We have to get the birth rates to change. No matter what we do this is the number one thing. The democratic decline crisis, and im not putting this on lyman, appeals to White Supremacists a lot in the same way that states rights appear to racists a lot. You might be able to make had a nonrates of argument about it, but you cant sort of ignore the coincidence that a lot of racists real like what youre saying so its its i mean, you can, but its im suggesting its kind of irresponsible so very to deal that associate between this idea of demographic decline and the political implications of it, and they are not hard to imagine that this is a census forecast so the scale may be off but the jiflt of it is that the white pop slayings there or will increase a little bit more. Early graphs start in 1800. I like the longterm series. Throws off how you look at the current situation. If you are concerned about the composition of the u. S. Population from a rates of perspective theres a lot of material work with here basically in the projections and in the future where were heading. I want to suggest though that as an actual problem of demographic decline, its really the solution is real right in front of us which is immigration, and if people dont like it or its politically not feasible or whatever, the problem is not the lack of people but wanting to let people in this country and if youre worried about who is going to come and so on its even harder to move yourself from the race perspective. When you look at the long term composition of immigrants, you can see why theres a political problem especially on the right with immigration which is the and the great majority are from latin america increase and a very small sar and the question is immigration good, to the question is immigration policy good for america . Im not a politician and not elected to represent an american stepsy so i dont have to end it at the u. S. Border. So a lot of people want to come here. America have have issues to wows out with that and i bush amer a america. A little more on the demography. I think the sphere overblown. Even if you tyke everything that lyman said that we wont meter the census projections. The idea of population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is a scary madeup term and were not having population decline any time soon. When people say demographic decline include amorphous things like well have a little decline and unprecedented and terrible and little decline in Life Expectancy and the birth rate is falling and, therefore, we have demographic decline. Were not talking about population decline. Italy, spain, germany, france, unit kingdom got below replacement nearly tilt in the 1970s populations are not declining and italy a little bit and if they dont have immigration it will happen and thats what the replacement number means and just to keep that in perspective and these are birth cohorts, completed fertility, cumulative fertility, so i hope you can see, thats nice and big, the darkest line is the people born the women born in 1960. They got to two births per woman. The 1970 cohort got up a little bit higher and the 1975 cohort higher still and real after that that we start to have this issue, but if you look at that hine thats squeaking up in between there. Thats the first socalled group that i use and people born around 1980, and can you see if you parse out the lines, they start out lower the and then they caught up a little so now they are actually ahead of the 70 and 65 and 60 generation alternate time in their life so can you see essentially whats happening with them is some evidence of delay and catchup, and were in the range of one to two babies per come. Coverage up is not the difference at ale. Talking about the difference of six and two then catchup becomes an issue. And whats struggling lyman they are well below the previous known cohorts and if they turn the corner like a hurricane so to speak and start and the projection ends up tracking them further north then well never get a cohort that doesnt replace itself. Weve not yet had a cohort of women that did not replace themselves. Okay. A couple of projections, probably running late on time. Youre fine. Take your time. A couple of projections, and these are not census projections, although i use their projection tool which is excellent, and if you go to my blog family and equality you can fiptd link. Ill put it up tomorrow. Can you play with the numbers yourself. So the the line that heads down, if you take just todays birth rates and todays death rates and nothing else and you just run those numbers, then we would lose 100 Million People by the end of the century in terms of total population, okay, so thats sort of thats the disaster scenario thats very bad. And, however, if you just add current level of migration, if you just take the krensups numbers, not their estimates not their projections by estimates for immigration by age and sex and plugged that in every single year. Then that essential lip solves the entire problem of declining population and you can see from 25 to 23. Does a little bit on inninging and s