Students across campus envy European social programs, from universal healthcare and free higher education to generous retirement pensions, hoping the United States can enact similar programs domestically. Yet, each year our aging population and declining birth rate make these idealized initiatives less feasible.
Across the globe, fertility rates are declining to alarming levels. The total fertility rate is 1.2 children per woman in China, 0.8 in South Korea, 1.3 in Japan and a marginally higher 1.6 and 1.7 in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. These birth rates are well below the rate of population replacement and stability: 2.1 births per woman, which accounts for two children to replace both parents and the mortality of some individuals before they reproduce. As a result, larger proportions of the global population are older each year. This phenomenon, known as population aging, is hitting the United States hard. By the end of the decade, there will be more Americans over 65 than below 18; by the end of the century, there will be almost twice as many senior citizens as minors.
A graying population creates serious economic challenges. A shrinking workforce will have profoundly negative effects on economic growth. And an increasingly silver-haired citizenry means that the growing proportion of the population in retirement is dependent on the economic output, taxpaying capacity and caring abilities of the shrinking share of working-age people. The smaller workforce must support a larger group of retirees who continuously live longer with increasing life expectancy. As social safety nets and welfare programs must carefully balance contributions from workers with withdrawals from retirees, a ballooning retiree population threatens the viability of programs like Social Security and Medicare. Falling tax revenue and growing expenditures create a thorny problem that could require unpopular tax hikes, benefit reductions or some combination of the two. An aging population thus makes Nordic-style social programs financially unrealistic in the United States.
So, should people start having more babies?
Many say no, for environmental reasons. As the climate changes, simple logic dictates more children and a larger population will increase aggregate consumption in a way that exacerbates pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Celebrities have famously rallied behind this view, from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to Miley Cyrus, who summed up the perspective: “We [millennials] don’t want to reproduce because we know the earth can’t handle it.”
Fortunately for millions of unborn babies, this perspective is shortsighted and wrong. The demographic shift to smaller populations isn’t happening nearly fast enough to prevent the Earth from surpassing its warming benchmarks. Simply put, by the time the global population is significantly smaller, it will be too late. Focusing on population decline as a climate solution is an excuse for climate inaction in other areas. Rather than attempting to limit populations, nations should consider how they can limit their emissions.
To prevent the economic and social devastation an aging population could precipitate, much like what has been seen in Japan and Italy, we need to close the fertility gap. Though an influx of immigrants will sustain the short term population, a 3.5 times increase in the current immigration rate is required to prevent long term population aging. With recent national debate about current immigration levels — let alone the required 3.5 times increase — and impending restrictive policies under the Trump administration, we cannot rely on immigration to solve our demographic challenges. Americans must have more children.
Birth rates have declined in the United States for a number of reasons: the high cost of raising children, delayed marriage and child-bearing, housing affordability costs and changing societal norms. At the center of this crisis is a simple fact: it’s too expensive for many to have many kids.
The near-term fix is simple: those who can afford to have more children should. For many Yalies, who are likely to occupy the higher end of the income bracket, this means throwing a couple kids into their life plans. Good luck!
JOSHUA DANZIGER is a first year in Trumbull College. He writes a monthly column on geography, demography and the state. He can be reached at joshua.danziger@yale.edu.