Plus, America’s baby bust. Forget terrorism and the national debt. The author of a provocative new book tells us why the nation’s falling fertility rate is the biggest threat America faces.
GIGOT: A nuclear Iran, cyber warfare, the spiraling national debt – all front-page news at the moment and all viewed as threats to American life as we know it. But what if the greatest menace to the health of the United States is us and our declining population? My guest this week says the nation’s falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems and it’s only going to get worse. Jonathan Last is a senior writer at “The Weekly Standard,” and author of the new book, “What to Expect When No One is Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.”
Jonathan, welcome. Good to see you again.
JONATHAN LAST, SENIOR WRITER, WEEKLY STANDARD & AUTHOR: Good to see you.
GIGOT: So we’ve been told for years, decades that the world had too many people. Now you’re saying the United States may have too few. Explain that.
LAST: Yes, well, hundreds of years, actually.
(LAUGHTER)
It goes back to Thomas Malcolm (ph), you know, the danger of overpopulation around the corner. And it turns out that hasn’t been the case. Growing populations has been the source of lots of good things. People live longer and with higher standards of living. We’ve had declines in commodity prices.
But what we’ve seen since 1968 is a marked decline in fertility rates across the globe. It started across the West and has spread across the developing countries as well. What we worry about now is that most the models projected in the next 50 or 60 years, global population is going to peak somewhere around 10 billion and then begin declining rapidly. And the question really, is how far and how fast.
GIGOT: The U.S. replacement rate is about 2.1 children for every woman, every mother, and the U.S. fertility rate is 1.93. But that’s much better than Japan, where it’s 1.4, or Italy. Are we better off relatively speaking than these other countries?
LAST: Our fertility rates, truth be told, is fine. If we could sustain 1.9 fertility rate, I wouldn’t have written the book. The problem is there are a lot questions of whether or not it’s sustainable in the long run. Our fertility rate is really the result of massive immigration over the last 35 years, which has saved our bacon. Without that immigration, demographically, we’d be in much, much worse shape.
But there are two problems with this. The first problem is that when we get Hispanic immigrants to America, they come with much higher fertility rates and they then regress to the mean very quickly. The leveling effect of American culture pulls their fertility rates downward. And secondly, the source of immigration, regardless of the policy decisions we make here, the source may be drying up as well. Fertility rates in Mexico and Central and South America are collapsing as well.
GIGOT: Why is the declining population or a stable – I guess you’re saying, even a stable population is a problem. What is – what other problems does that create?
LAST: You know, a stable population would be fine, but the declining population, what worries us isn’t the numbers game, really. It’s what happens to your population profile. Because when your fertility rates are sub replacement for a long period of time, your age profile inverts so you wind up with many more old people than young people, and that’s the real danger. You think about the problem with entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, all of those problems become tremendously exacerbated when you have more old people than young people. And then there are problems with the macroeconomic effects as well. The recessions we’ve seen in Japan since the 1990’s, a lot of financial problems and economic problems we’ve see –
LAST: – in southern Mediterranean countries and Europe are largely driven by demographics. They have too many old people and not enough young, productive people.
GIGOT: Why don’t we just solve this by letting in more immigrants? That’s always been one of America’s secrets, say in contrast to Japan where they let in few immigrants. America could go back to that kind of – that solution. Won’t that help us?
LAST: Well, immigration is a big part of any solution. You look, there are no industrialized countries which have gotten close to the replacement rate without any massive immigration. The problem is you wind up needing more and more immigrants. What immigrants don’t do – they help the fertility rate – but for complicated mathematical reasons I won’t go into on television –
(LAUGHTER)
– they don’t provide what demographers call the rejuvenation effects to your population profile. So that’s part of the solution. You need lots of immigrants. But you also need to have people having a reasonable number of babies.
GIGOT: Right. OK.
And obviously, having children requires personal sacrifice. So somebody, one of the parents might –
LAST: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
GIGOT: – have to stay at home. One of the parents – you know well. One of the parents, you might have to sacrifice career advancement. And historically, people have done that. Americans now are less likely to do that or are less willing to do that. How do you engineer such a big cultural change to get people thinking about that again?
LAST: You know, what’s interesting is that societies have tried engineering these cultural changes for a very long time. You can go back to the falling years of the Roman Empire to see attempts at social policy. And it almost never works. It’s very difficult to get people to have kids.
GIGOT: The roman analogy, that’s not very optimistic.
(LAUGHTER)
:popcorn