The De-Population Bomb

throughout almost all our history the population of the United States of America has grown and grown and grown from Two and a half million people in 1776 to 330 million people today but what if that growth stops what if our population shrinks what then one man has devoted himself to studying that very question Dr Nicholas eberstadt on uncommon knowledge now [Music] thank you welcome to uncommon knowledge a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute Dr Everest I should say by the way that we're filming today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington Dr Nicholas ebersdet earned

both his undergraduate degree and his Doctorate in political economy from Harvard Dr eberstadt's many books and papers include poverty in China and the end of North Korea in recent years Dr eberstadt has been examining population and demography first he recognized that other countries have a problem publishing Russia's peacetime demographic crisis in 2010 in more recent years he has been describing this country's problem publishing men without work America's invisible crisis in 2016. our topic today well let me just read the title of a long essay Dr everstat published a National Review not long ago Can America

cope with demographic decline Nick thank you for joining me thank you for inviting me Peter it's a pleasure to see you it's a pleasure to have you to myself to read an everstat essay with Nick everstadt all right Nick eberstadt I'm quoting you over the past decade and more since the crash of 2008 and the Great Recession really America's birth Trends have taken a fateful turn veering well below the replacement level close quote what is the replacement level what does it mean to Veer below what makes us suppose this is ominous the replacement level or

a net reproduction ratio of one means that there's one baby girl born for every child bearing woman who's going to make it up to childbearing age herself what this means is that a society is on a long-term trajectory for population stability without compensating immigration or anything like that to keep things at stability or above for 30 years before the crash of 2008 almost 30 years the United States was the Lone large Rich society that was at replacement or slightly above the replacement level above this let's say 2.1 births per woman per lifetime level roughly speaking

we have uh we have slumped steadily since 2008 we've been uh on an escalator going down and of course the covid shock uh didn't get everybody into the bedrooms having babies uh it actually had the opposite effect the United States is now maybe on track to be 20 percent below the replacement level uh if current trends continue which is a weasel word we always have to use because demographers are really pretty clueless about forecasting fertility into the future but if current trends continue uh the United States would be on a track without compensating immigration to

shrink 20 percent for each generation each succeeding generation and this is entirely new in our history we had a blip in the 1970s which some of us are old enough to remember weren't a super great time in the United States where snapshot calculations of replacement rates had us below replacement for a while what was really going on in those days was that there's a big shift in timing of kids women were deciding to have their they ended up deciding to have about the same number of babies they just decided to have them later if you

did the snapshot for a couple of years it looked like there was a dip below replacement what's going on now does not look like a shift in timing it looks like there may be a shift in the total number of desired children that young people wish to have all right so there is there is this is tremendously arresting to put it mildly you get a country growing and growing and growing and now in historical terms quite suddenly it looks as though the growth may stop absent immigration will come to immigration the next question of course

is well what does it matter the European Union is ahead of us if that's the way to put it there they expect their populate their fertility level has been down for several decades they expect their population to begin shrinking what within a decade or so at the end of this interview I think at the end of this interview Russia's in worst case China from the point of view of population is in worse circumstances still in spite of having eliminated the one child policy Chinese just aren't having children the birth rate is I think you the

number you gave was 1.3 yeah it's it's plunged since the end of the uh coercive one child policy for some fascinating reason all right so the question would be for those immediately seeking reassurance well well this may be happening to us it seems to happen all over let us call broadly construed the modern world and other countries are in worse shape we're still retaining our relative position we still have relative growth and then Nick everstadt says well maybe but the formula by which the U.S ascended to its current status of wealth and power was predicated

on over two centuries of continuous and exceptional population growth unique among Western countries in Tempo and scale close quote we don't know how to be a country without economic without population growth the last time that we faced the Specter of population decline which might be a clearer term than demographic decline which sounds you know kind of like spanglerium the last time we faced the Specter of population decline was in the Great Depression for reasons that we can imagine right not a time of great optimism about the future almost no immigration and the projections from the

1930s had us peaking and declining by 1960s those were as wrong as demographic projections so often turn out to be um it didn't happen that way but we're back to a moment where it is very uh plausible to think our population May Peak and decline the latest information from the Census Bureau reports that U.S population growth measured U.S population growth never been as Tiny as it was last year the uh and that's births deaths and immigration make for the total we've never had a Confluence of births deaths and immigration that ended up with such a

fractional increase in U.S population since we started collecting measurable statistics and and the question would be why does that matter to our health our buoyancy our economic growth I mean I'm I'm thinking of crude the thoughts you can count on thoughts that come to my mind to be crude thoughts Nick so I'll offer a crude thought that can be pretty crude but I think to myself all right real estate yeah all those overbuilt neighborhoods in Las Vegas all the building in Florida those huge tracts being erected in Texas what happens if nobody is around to

live in them you get you get a whole econ there's a banking borrowing legal system that does property you get a whole sector of the economy predicated on the existence of growing numbers of human beings and that just goes away if the population stops growing is that correct and there are other there there's some tie between economic growth and population growth and if population stops growing economic growth gets harder it's more complicated than that but tease that out for me yeah so you know we can look at it two ways we can look at it

as you know kind of like the head count Rancher sort of way of looking at population we look at its components and what we might call the productivity or human capital the quality of Human Resources if we want to get into this a little bit more I was always a skeptic of the population scare back in the 70s and even into the 80s the idea that we were going to end up denuding the world like locusts by just having too many people because looking at the components of population change the population explosion wasn't driven because

we you know were breeding like rabbits was because we stopped dying like flies it was because it was a health explosion well if you have to deal with a population problem I'll take a health explosion any day of the week right because you can mess it up but you've got a lot of potential there um I'm also I'm I would want to caution against people who are alarmist about population decline in a world that is bursting with health and bursting with Innovation and technological potentialities we've got we've got an escalator that we can work with

that's moving in the right direction there we have to you have to be a pretty mindful about what you do but if you surf that wave a aging and shrinking Society can not only maintain its Prosperity but improve it if we look at what's happening now in the U.S I mean you can see what we can see what's troubling if we break it down into births deaths and immigration um people will have a debate about what the right number of births is and I don't think that I can tell parents how many children they should

have people know themselves what they take the right number of children as leave that aside for a moment everybody agrees that less deaths is better than more deaths and longer lives and better health is better than the opposite the United States has been moving in a very troubling direction for the past decade we've basically flatlined in improvements in life expectancy even before coved we were creeping along with covid of course we've had a severe almost catastrophic setback in health levels for the United States and apart from covet itself as you know Peter we've had this

problem of deaths of Despair in the United States with suicide and drug poisonings and cirrhosis and all of the rest which looks a little bit too much like Russia for Comfort I'd say so the increase in deaths that we have seen over the last decade and more it should be a flashing red warning sign for US immigration we're the arithmetic of American population growth has been the arithmetic of our exceptional immigration flows which came in a way of up to World War one and then resumed again in the 60s really um during the covid Calamity

despite all of the um comedy or tragedy that we see on our Southern border today it appears that immigration uh tanked and that net immigration we don't have any good immigration statistics no other open Society has good immigration statistics we find out in the rear view mirror by looking at the residual after we look at Birth deaths and population change it appears that our net immigration has tanked as well and we're already seeing the effects of that in the United States with the spike in unfilled job openings since covid yeah so that's immigration is a

hot button political issue I happen to be of the variety that thinks that on the whole immigrants have made terrific Americans and uh and that we've benefited tremendously from the international talent that has come to our country uh that it's if we want to uh if we want to fix the uh immigrant welfare problem we fix the welfare state and we uh we have rule of law and control our own borders so all of that said uh you know immigration has uh immigration has tanked then we get to the birth question right can I put

a pause on that one because I want you're getting into a handful of items that you mentioned in this article and I'd like to go through each of them at least briefly in theory I'm repeating something you said a moment ago in theory it should be perfectly possible for a modern society not only to maintain Prosperity but to increase it in the face of pervasive population aging and the demographic stagnation or depopulation so the the population gets older it begins to get a little bit smaller but as long as they do this and this and

this and this would involve Innovation it would involve being smart about education developing human capital you list the thing then there's no reason why an older and smaller population should continue to be perfectly prosperous all right this path entails advances in research and knowledge Creation with incessant innovation in the business sector labor markets and the policy Realm now let me take you through the Nick everstat checklist of how we're doing dynamism economic dynamism quoting you Nick knowledge creation may still be preceding a pace it is devilishly difficult to measure and wealth creation continues at a

remarkable pace yet dynamism in our economy and Society is on the Wane in some significant and easily verifiable respects America is vitalizing churn is heading down and America's Health progress has gone badly off course you've discussed Health a moment ago but what do you mean about churn vitalizing churn well there are lots of different ways you can look at the kind of dynamism of a society and an economy one way of looking at it is new business creation new startups in relation to the existing number of Enterprises or businesses as best we can measure this

it's been going steadily South since we started to collect these numbers in you know the late 70s early in spite of the rise of Silicon Valley despite the rise of Silicon Valley despite new McDonald's everywhere despite everything that we see the measured if you measure dynamism that way it's been less another obvious measure of Mobility is like whether people get up and move Americans used to be get up and move the jobs are in Florida you move to Florida so uh leave aside covid because I was a lockdown time and it's completely um unlike any

other time from the mid 80s until the day before uh the Wuhan virus came to the United States um America's uh proportion of population moving in any given year even to an apartment next door in the same building was heading south and it's dropped by about half since the uh since the mid 80s now you have to qualify that a little bit by saying well there's a lot of remote work you can do stuff at home that you never could do before and that's all true but I'm not sure that that gets us over this

particular hump that we just described [Music] um education again I'm quoting you between the emphasis this is a staggering thing between the end of the Civil War and the late 1970s got a little over a century between the end of the Civil War in the late 1970s the United States was almost always the global leader in education attainment but over the past two decades Adult Educational attainment has been advancing at scarcely a third of that historical Pace even as other countries surpass Us close quote what happened we still haven't got a good answer to this

because this is one of the big problems in America that somehow is managing to hide in plain sight Elsewhere on another homework assignment I talked about the new misery in the United States and things like the death of dis deaths of Despair it took our Health Sciences economy a decade and a half to realize that the poor whites were killing themselves in these tragic new ways this problem of slower improvements in educational attainment has been in our face for almost 40 years and so far as I can tell not more than a handful of economists

and Educators have even noticed it I do not have the answer for why it has happened I can tell you where it is happening the epicenters are native born Americans native-born American men native born American anglo-man there's a big overlap with the deaths of Despair problem I can identify it I can't explain to you why it's happening but its results its consequences are alarming there's a general correspondence General correspondence between improved educational attainment and improved productivity if you do back of the envelope and I like to be simplistic if you do back of the envelope

the slowdown in educational attainment Improvement looks like it's costing us at the moment about four trillion dollars a year compared to our previous historical Trend it's a lot of money here's a related item I think it's related you'll explain the labor for course again quoting you Nick in an aging Society making the most of existing Manpower is of the essence but America is also failing at this task the backbone of the U.S Workforce is still the so-called prime age male cohort men from 25 to 54 years of age but the current the current prime male

work rate as two and a half points lower than it was in 1940. 1940 sounds like the second world war it's not Pearl Harbor isn't bombed until 1941. 1940 is the tail end of the depression and prime age male Workforce participation is two points below what it was then this is staggering the work rate this is another part Peter of this new Misery the big problems hiding in plain sight in America for some reason um the work rate the employment to population ratio as as we'd say for men civilian non-institutional men 25 to 54 years

of age is as we speak worse than it was in the 1940s census which was taken as you indicate in March of 40 when the national unemployment rate was 15 percent so we right now have depression level employment rates for prime age men in the U.S all right government quoting you once again budget discipline and social policy reform are necessary for maintaining prosperity in an aging Society but America appears to have no appetite for either pay as you go arrangements for old age pensions and health care may be an ingenious contrivance for a society where

working age taxpayers greatly outnumber elderly beneficiaries but the arithmetic becomes unforgiving If the ratio of funders to recipients plummets all right if I'm not mistaken you're talking about social security which accounts for roughly a quarter of the federal budget and you're talking about medical spending Medicare Medicaid the children's health insurance program at Obamacare those four programs account again for another 25 percent of federal spending what you are saying is that because we have set this up the way we've set it up one half of federal spending is simply becoming untenable we've got a kind of

a Ponzi scheme problem on our hands and as you indicated Peter as long as you've got a growing base to the pyramid in relation to the recipient Peak you can be pretty generous when when things flip around uh you've got whipsawed really fast we haven't we do not seem to have any appetite in either political party for balancing our budget and controlling our national finances the way we would with our household household budgets and we have gotten into the very uh dangerous habit of uh borrowing to pay for current consumption uh it's one thing to

borrow money for a National Emergency or for a war you might even make the argument that it's okay to take out bonds to build infrastructure where you can amortize on some sort of you know um Roi scale you know but when you are basically using your credit card uh to go to the safe way and things are not going to work out too well because today is uh consumption for seniors like myself are being financed by uh The Unborn and that's not a good business model immigration I'm going to quote you one more time Nick

only one policy can hope to affect long-term consequences in population size and that policy is immigration on the whole this is a straightforward simple declaratory sentence but it's not straightforward on the whole assimilation works well in America I'll have to come back and ask you to explain that yet the Biden administration's witless posture on immigration it's maddening insucians about our Southern border and stubborn lack of concern about illegal immigrants seems almost designed to provoke anti-immigration outrage so assimilation works well I'll ask you to explain that in a moment and your larger point is because the

simulation works well some kind of sensible immigration policy where we control our borders but let people in according to sensible criteria and then don't demonize them ought to command bipartisan support and in fact it it it creates people running around this town pulling out their hair gnashing their teeth it's as maddening an issue as we have in American politics but let's start with assimilation works well in America on the whole assimilation works well take a look at what happens with the children of newcomers in the United States overwhelmingly they end up as loyal and productive

Americans as great citizens they learn English they get a medication they work hard and they believe uh maybe more than more than native born Americans in the American dream they're brought here they're attracted by the American dream and uh risking all of your human capital in a passage to the United States uh takes a certain amount of guts in general um pluck grit let's put it that way compare us to for example Europe which is a prosperous Democratic uh area full of open societies assimilation works well for a lot of newcomers there but if you

do the compare and contrast I know which country I want to have the assimilation record of it's going to be the USA there is much more problematic record in Europe's a mixed bag but on the whole there's a much more problematic record with uh uh becoming citizens with getting education with uh going into employment uh and with um with resentment of the country that they've chosen as their home or the parents have chosen as a home our our record of assimilation is very good by International comparison there are other countries that also look pretty good

like Canada like Australia like New Zealand Israel but for a large country there's no country that's got an assimilation record as good as ours but you'd stop short I know you'd stop short I'm stating this just to give you the chance to address it there may be a tickle of a worry here you've just said native born American males especially native born white American males are underperforming yes despairs of death are up we've got work performance workplace perform Workforce participation is down we have here a sorry group of people let in the immigrants to do

what the jobs these guys should be doing so I took economics also I mean admittedly it was back in the Stone Age but I learned at that time that if you have more of a supply of something you make it less expensive we have a big supply of lower skilled labor from abroad in the United States um the economics one I took uh back shortly after the Civil War would tell me that that would have a depressing impact on wage levels for Less skilled Americans and I think that is true I think that is true

that being said the patterns of employment for Less skilled American men beer no correspondence to what we would think of we would be recognizing from that natural experiment the differences in attachment to the workforce seem to have to do a lot with things like family structure which is not got to do with wages and with uh attachment to various social welfare programs with one's criminal record which again isn't necessarily A jobs wage question and we've just had we've just ran a complete per almost perfect natural experiment in the covid time we had a drop off

of about a million immigrants who would have been in the labor force and what happened we had an increase in unfilled jobs by about 4 million during the covid time employers are begging for workers this I don't know no there was no time in my life I don't think when workers had as much bargaining power as they have now right and this isn't all for coders and hedge funds they're not just looking for those it's in the service Industries in restauranting hotels and other things where really the only skills you need are showing up on

time every day drug free and there may be a longer term impact from this natural experiment but we've had two years of it and it has not been drawing people back off the couch ouch population growth is slowing it looks like a permanent new trend soon enough the population will begin sinking to remain a prosperous vibrant economy in these circumstances we need to do this and this and this and this and we're not doing this and this and this and this which brings us right back to the first question why don't we just get the

birth rate right back up if the federal government is so good I would almost be willing to argue this is the only thing the federal government is any good at and that is spending other people's money why don't we just encourage higher birth rates through various forms of subsidies tax relief and so forth and Nick everstadt's reply is again to quote you Nick incentives to boost birth rates are likely to be costly and to elicit only modest and perhaps fleeting demographic results close quote how come and and we have experiments attempting to subsidize birth in

great increases in birth attempts to subsidize it one way or another they're taking place in Singapore France Hungary I think Sweden as well so we we must know something about these experiments right the results well we've seen the results of the experiments um they are I will give you my reading on them my reading is not uncontested because baby bonus programs have got a lot of proponents in Europe and some here in the US already my reading is that it's uh very expensive for temporary passing blips in fertility increase which lead to subsequent slumps the

swedes have been you can buy babies forward so to speak yeah you can change you can change timing if if some if some parents are on the fence about a second or a third child let's say and all of a sudden there's a baby bribe that's offered to them they may decide to have the child now um but instead of having it three years later or four years later and if you look at that in aggregate you get what the Swedish demographers call the Swedish roller coaster which is you put in a new subsidy for

kids the birth rate goes up and then it goes back down further to below where it was when you first put the subsidy in because you haven't changed people's mentality you haven't changed people's desire about family size if you really want to get into the business of turning women into baby ranchers you'd have to to do something about the opportunity cost of their time so maybe you'd want a program that involved let's say 50 percent of the GDP I don't think anybody is going to be uh proposing that anytime soon all right this gets us

right to the heart of of your essay and of the matter quoting you yet again the single best predictor for National fertility rates happens to be wanted family size as reported by women now you note there are polls that ask women how many children they'd like and you know that this doesn't correlate perfectly with birth rates but it's the best indicator in one sense this is a reassuring even heartening finding it highlights the agency at the very heart of our Humanity you're talking about free will there people choosing their family size but if we permit

the non-material realm of life to figure into our inquiry we may conclude that proposals to revive the American birth rate through subsidies vastly underestimate the challenge the challenge May ultimately prove to be civilizational in nature close quote okay so I look at first of all that hits like a two by four civilizational in nature and on the one hand I think to myself wait a minute aren't we all supposed to be delighted that in this modern world women are in a position to participate in the workforce they're in a position to choose more carefully more

explicitly more intentionally the number of children they'd like to have aren't we supposed to believe that that's a wonderful thing and that releasing that many women to the workforce should increase the dynamism and growth of our all that good good good good good good on the other hand I think back to what little I remember about American demographic history and we got low birth rates during the Depression because everybody was poor right and they were discouraged and they didn't want to bring children into that world and then we got low birth rates during the second

World War because life was frightening and the men were away risking their lives and then we get Harry Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower and my own reading of that history is that it's complicated Truman was probably a much better president than he's generally granted but set all that aside what happens is whether you agree with this or that policy whether you think Ike should have pushed back harder against the New Deal both of those presidents said with regard to domestic policy at least let's just leave it alone let's give people a settled set of rules

a settled America so they can have families and they did and you and I are both Baby Boomers we are both products and we think to ourselves this is an achievement of American history that we struggle through the depression and we win the second world war and then we achieve enough stability and prosperity to permit people to do what they most want to do and that is to have children and that is good it is a triumphant moment in American history so what's going on here why should it be may I put it one more

way I'll put it a different way you have four kids I've got you by one shouldn't it don't those of us who've had children feel that having children was the biggest thing that we'd ever done in our lives the best thing that we've ever done in our lives why aren't children a luxury good why don't we have more of them as we become a richer Society instead of fewer all right these are the bundles of questions Nick in my in my head when when I read that we've got a civilizational challenge our civilization no longer

likes life why so the demographers have all of these really neat little tools and if you give them assumptions they can calculate what trajectories are going to look like in the future but demographers cannot tell you uh what those assumptions should be they cannot they cannot actually put the uh parameters into the black box and for that I think economics is fine so far as it goes but what you really need instead of a Nobel Laureate in economics as a Nobel Laureate in literature because you're talking about Zeitgeist you're talking about the human heart you're

talking about all of the things that bring meaning to humanity and fears of humanity in ways that economists aren't so good at calculating or much less demographers we've as parents we know how wonderful children are and what a blessing it is to be a parent but one thing that I will say about children is for all of their boundless benefits they're not convenient and we have we have moved increasingly into a world and this is just one take on a much more complicated set of questions that you've asked but we've moved into a world in

which convenience uh is prized and which and in which autonomy personal autonomy uh is cherished and in which constraints on personal autonomy uh are increasingly viewed as onerous you don't have to be uh Leo Tolstoy to see what that means about desire for children add to that the big change in lived lived experience in the lived reality for young people today as compared to those you know we can all talk give Grandpa's War stories about what life was like back in the 1980s but people who were thinking about having children today do not live in

Reagan's America they live in a place that's got this new misery shaping it so much Europe provides a case study in how a sea change in values can lead to a sea change in demography over the last two decades the world view of American Youth and younger adults has become much more European that's what you're saying sure and not in a good way and not in a good way all right again I I go back to this going back back and forth back and forth on the one hand I really I struggle against the thesis

it's not a thesis it's a set of observations very beautifully laid out I'd rather it weren't so let's put it that way and then I keep well all right this is civilizational challenges there's very little that little Robinson or great big everstat can do about that so again how do we find a way to live with this and I I go one more time to the question what what difference does it make Europeans lead good lives despite the difficulty in assimilating the one million immigrants that Angela Merkel permitted to enter Germany despite the lack of

dynamism in their economy they rely on us in all kinds of ways for technological innovation for military protection so still in Decline though they may in some basic way be Europe's a comfortable place to live so why not why not just settle into a comfortable decline and Nick everstat replies consider the moral and ideological baggage that sub replacement fertility is likely to drag along with it pessimism hesitance dependence self-indulgence resentment division do we really think there will be less of these in a 1.5 child America explain that well if we were well-behaved robots and each

robot mom and dad had an average of 1.5 robot Rising generation entrance we could manage uh we could manage population decline uh perfectly well for the all of the other reasons that I've mentioned improving education improving Health improving technology all of the new possibilities they're coming forward the devilish difficulty I think is the swamp of attitudes and values that are associated with sub replacement fertility in the richest and most productive societies that Humanity has ever yet created or seen and in Europe and in the United States in affluent societies we have seen this ideational moral

if you will Revolution over the past several Generations that has uh led to the Triumph of solipsism if you will and the downgrading of the sort the very sorts of obligations that are necessary to nurture a rising generation and to continue a society we can uh we can Outsource we can increase uh immigration from abroad to take care of the head count question what we can't do without a sort of an ideational call it a moral uh transformation is get back to a place where people are confident and um brave enough to uh maintain a

uh maintain a natural rate of replacement for society the land of the free and the home of the brave and bravery ought to be construed as the guts to have kids well roughly if it's good for National character you know I mean we got out on you know we got out a little bit we got on the bus or a Subway uh Metro um what strikes me uh so strongly about um young people I meet today and I realize I may not have a representative sample it's just how afraid they are they're afraid of everything

they're afraid of the they're afraid the planet's doomed uh they're afraid about committing to a job much less committing to a relationship much less committing to having kids it's beyond it's a sort of an angst that we don't it's hard to find a good historical analogy for that this angst in our country further you're right would a 1.5 child America really be willing to make incessant patriotic sacrifices to defend itself and its allies or to preserve the post-war liberal economic and political order upon which our prosperity and security so greatly depend close quote and those

list of items we went through on what we as a society need to do and are failing to do we were talking about just that what we as a society need to do here is the question of what we need to do in the world The World Is A Dangerous Place and for all its faults and all our crudenesses and stupidities and what the way we've conducted our foreign policy over the last 75 years the world is a Freer and a safer place because if Americans are willing to sacrifice would a 1.5 child America really

be willing to make the sacrifices there is no scientific reason that a sub-replacement population shouldn't be able to step up to patriotism or see the challenges in the world and deal with them what I was suggesting there is that if we look at the real existing situation that we have if we look at the tangle of perverse values attitudes outlooks that seems to accompany our particular slump into below replacement fertility that tangle is also a tangle that has big implications for not just sacrifice within the family but sacrifice outside the family you do offer you

do offer hope or at least an example of one way out of this the civilizational undertow now drawing Western societies into ever deeper sub replacement is not inevitable I cling to those two words right there not inevitable Israel provides proof to the contrary explain that explain Israeli well so demographics when I when I started uh trying to understand population Trends a couple of generations ago I wrote a study with a dear friend of mine about Israel and we were more or less entirely wrong about this we argued back in the late 1970s that Israel was

going to have to release the West Bank and Gaza for demographic reasons because they were a western society that was going to head down towards sub-replacement fertility and the population of Palestinian origin was 876 babies and you can just draw the lines and see where things went but a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to uh Palestinian demographic dominance of Greater Israel it didn't happen and the reason it didn't happen is because Israeli jewry did not agree to go into a sub-replacement instead over the last generation fertility levels in Israel have actually gone up uh

and now foreign it's not just the Orthodox not just the Orthodox even people who describe themselves as not terribly observant uh the it's across the board so far as we can see and for Israeli jewry as a whole it's above three births per woman per Lifetime on average which is I don't need to emphasize to you way different from any other affluent open Democratic Society these days and the Arab birth rate has declined the Arab birth rate has plummeted right the uh and uh which is by the way is true in all of the rest

of the arabic speaking world I just want to repeat this because I I had this wrong myself and so other people may have a missile we're told over and over again that the among the Orthodox in Israel the birth rate is very very high and that's true yep but your argument is not the argument simple Observer observation of the facts actually even among secular Jews in Israel the birth rate is well above replacement on the whole yes on the whole and it has been going up and it has been going up hours has been going

down that of Europe has been going down China has been going down yeah and Israel has been going up and so that says something well this is something spectacular and all about all kinds of things but one in particular the role of women what do we know about Israeli Society at least among secular non-orthodox Israel Israeli jewry is that the women participate in the IDF they fight in the Army they're fully integrated into the workforce this is not a choice between a modern society and a high birth rate this is a modern society with a

high birth rate is that correct absolutely it's a serious country with a serious approach to its demographic future and uh it's one that the this is not the result of government policy this is not a particular government policy or a particular baby bonus this is a mentality perhaps you write it would be crude and simplistic to say that Israelis want their country to have a future and want their descendants to be part of it but then again such a reading might not be all that far off base so it's what people believe I I'm just

I found myself in a conversation with a young Israeli woman this is in France a couple of years ago and somehow or other we'd only just met it was a business conference actually had nothing to do with think tanks somehow or other this question of demographics came up and I asked why Israeli demographics were different from those in the rest of the West and she said I think my country Israel I think my country is still a Cause is that it until you come up with a better explanation Peter that sounds like a pretty good

one okay Nick our friend Roger hertog major figure in Wall Street for many many years put me up to interviewing you on this he said Nick is doing but what he said is Nick is the only person doing really serious sustained work on this apart from anything else Roger said this because he knows Wall Street in detail the economic implications haven't even begun to be taken seriously on Wall Street where they have incentives for getting these things right um you write something about this and everybody stops action to see what the latest that Nick has

written but we do that because it's there aren't a dozen other people studying why is this is it because it's so Grim so unbelievably grim that nobody that there's even among intellectuals even in think tanks there's a kind of denial we'd rather not we'd rather not look at that why why is this why is this not really part of the national conversation I want me to remember what I was saying about things big things that are hiding in plain sight right we've got we've got this data Revolution we've got this information Arrow we've got these

fantastic statistical tools but they don't do you that much good if you don't ask the right questions or you don't see the things you know hiding in plain sight and there's no I don't think there's any science to that we've got um we've got a lot of really well trained demographers economists statisticians um but I think that in a lot of the academy there's um there's an incentive to kind of play small ball there's an incentive to come up with an elegant little permutation on a formula that'll get you tenure um you will notice that

I'm not uh in the University I'm in a think tank so I don't have that same set of disincentives to work with why people in business are not noticing this is a in a way a more interesting question I think I mean I gather that the richest guy in the world seems to think that demography that's exactly right Elon Musk does see this and he tweets about it yeah yes yeah the biggest challenge we face now is depopulation all right all right so we have Nick everstadt and the richest man in the world that's not

bad I'll take that company that's that's not um Nick let me quote you another time here a couple of last questions now people under 40 do not have much memory of an America with a vibrant private sector-driven economy they came of age during a strange historical run of unusually poor political leadership from Clinton to Biden they have arguably known only substandard presidencies red and blue alike you're talking about our kids of course theirs is an America where public confidence in the nation's basic institutions has undergone a gruesome and wholesale slide do we wonder that Millennials

expectations and desires about family and children might be diverging from those of their morning in America parents well that that went through me like kind of a knife because of course you and I like so many of our friends came here during the 80s and during the 80s we felt as though the country was going someplace sure taxes got cut we thought that was an achievement now we understand the importance of low taxes federal budget came more or less under control at least shrank relative to growth in the private sector we stand up to the

Soviets lo and behold the Soviets throw it in and we win the Cold War and America seems a pretty glorious place and my thinking and your thinking is conditioned by that experience and our kids thinking just isn't so so what do you say here's the question Nick because you're a wise man now I'm going to ask this is a question to you in your capacity as a wise friend and not as a demographer let's imagine Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th Century and there he is in North Africa and he's receiving bulletins about the

sack of Rome and this High civilization that meant everything to him is gone he watches as across the Mediterranean Rome Falls and yet he leads an impressive and good enough life that he comes down to us is Saint Augustine if we're stuck with this America of creeping despair and of continuing loss in its relative importance in the rest of the world what do you say to your kids about how to lead a good life in different circumstances from the ones in which you yourself grew up sure um well I mean the future starts here and

the future starts um in your own little circles and there's uh there's no there's no reason that you can't be a micro optimistic even if you see some pretty pessimistic things going on uh and if you believe that you are in charge of your own destiny that's a pretty good starting point um there's a lot there's a lot that went on that we missed Peter I'm afraid to say after we won the Cold War these trends that I mentioned uh the uh the failure to generate wealth for the bottom half of our society decade after

decade the Slowdown of Education these are not immutable none of these Trends are immutable and uh I still don't think that we're at the stage in the game where it's smart to bet against the United States of America there are things which may be going on now that nerds like me won't be able to recognize for years because we look in the rear view mirror by the nature of our craft and there are things that government and experts can't predict that have revolutionized and transformed our society before including great religious Awakenings and as my much

better half of Mary everstat has said from time to time she'd settle for a minor Awakening that wouldn't be so bad either so okay so this really is the last question and I'm going to ask my Boomer friend this is Boomer to Boomer 1970s [Music] economic stagnation by the end of the decade inflation is in double digits Arab oil embargoes Soviets Advanced throughout the world that they get countries in Africa Central America expand their navy blue water Navy and we have a collapse in National morale particularly with a defeat in in Vietnam and then the

agony of Watergate and then in the 1980s through policy but still the economy rebounds and there's a restoration of national morale which I'm not making up all the polls pick it up and that Reagan re-election slogan of mourning again in America is Rings true enough to the American people to enable him to carry 49 out of 50 states and at the end of that decade the Berlin Wall comes down we go from 1979 the Iranian hostage crisis and that National humiliation to the fall of the Berlin Wall in one decade do we possess the resources

political spiritual human capital is this country still capable of another actives of national self-renewal absolutely of course it does I mean we've have we've got strangely similar circumstances as you uh beautifully indicated not the least of them being an incompetent uh humiliating uh Miss begotten White House at the moment a lot of Carter flashbacks these days for for those of us who are old enough to have the pleasure of having lived through that um and of course we've got the resources there is there really is no close second in the world if you look at

China in its particulars which would be the competitor to us there isn't a really a close second yet we do not have the same uh absolutely unlimited reach that we had at the end of the Cold War but that's such an unnatural unhistorically unusual situation the we've got the resources in our country and we've got the people in our country who of course can do this again the one thing that I would caution about is that we have 40 Years of poison distributed through our societies through an increasingly maligned University system and we have seen

a a gramsian March through the institutions of severely problematic points of view in the old days would have been unmockingly called Un-American or anti-American we have that poison to drain from our society before we can I think really flourish again but that's certainly not impossible either it looks hard right now but if you recall 1979 what 1979 looked like very few people would have bet at that moment where we'd end up at on Christmas day in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR Nicholas eberstadt thank you thank you so much Peter it's always a pleasure

for uncommon knowledge the Hoover institution and Fox Nation recording today in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington I'm Peter Robinson thank you [Music]