Is population decline a problem to solve or to rethink? | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on August 1, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Across the globe, populations are in precipitous decline. People are simply not having children at the fertility rate needed to sustain our global demography. Here in the U.S., the fertility rate in 2023 hit a historic low, according to the CDC. That means not enough new workers, on whose taxes the rest of us depend as we age. What else do we need to know about the issue, and importantly, what can be done about it? Jennifer Sciubba, President and CEO of the non-profit Population Reference Bureau, joins The Excerpt to offer a new perspective on the issue.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I’m Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, August 1st, 2024. This is a special episode of The Excerpt. Across the globe, populations are in precipitous decline. People are simply not having children at the fertility rate needed to sustain our global demography. Here in the U.S., the fertility rate in 2023 hit a historic low, according to the CDC. That means not enough new workers on whose taxes the rest of us depend as we age. So what else do we need to know about the issue? And importantly, what can be done about it? My guest today is Jennifer Sciubba, president and CEO of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau. Jennifer, thanks for joining me.
Jennifer Sciubba:
Thank you so much, Taylor. I’m glad to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
So let’s just get right to it, starting here. The generally recognized total fertility rate at which a population is stabilized is 2.1, meaning people should be having that many babies to maintain our population. But, Jennifer, that’s not happening. What is our fertility rate now? And describe for us just how bad it is.
Jennifer Sciubba:
I wouldn’t use the phrase bad or the word bad there because when we say 2.1, this is a math thing. Of course, because we’re just talking about replacing two parents with a little margin of error to account for those who do not make it to reproductive age, unfortunately. But it’s a theoretical number when we’re thinking about actual population. So to try to aim for that as a number, I think, is where we make this mistake. There’s no reason why we would ultimately end up at exactly that number as an individual country. So in the United States, we are below this replacement level rate. We’re somewhere in the 1.6 range, between 1.6 and 1.7. Globally, we are actually at about 2.25. So globally, we actually see those numbers trending downwards towards replacement level as well.
Taylor Wilson:
So what are the biggest factors causing this drop?
Jennifer Sciubba:
So in the United States, we have achieved a big goal that we set out to do, which is to bring down teen pregnancy rates. So that’s responsible for a good chunk of our decline from higher to lower fertility rates. Also, the U.S. really mirrors what we see as a global trend, which is having gone over a long period of time from higher numbers of children per woman on average to lower numbers, as we see education levels rise across the population, as we see women getting work opportunities outside the home to bring in incomes to their families. So we kind of follow that general trend. We also, though, follow the trend among our peers, other high-income countries that have seen a continued decline past that replacement level rate to even lower levels.
Taylor Wilson:
You touched on the global trends a bit here, Jennifer. Globally, where is the falling birth rate impacting people the most, and how does that compare to us here in the U.S.?
Jennifer Sciubba:
The United States actually fits pretty well with other peers in terms of our income level. We’re all below replacement level, and it’s just how far below that’s interesting. If we really look at this, maybe this group of countries that we would consider ourselves in a club with, we perhaps at the higher end of that, maybe more like a France kind of situation than a Korea situation because Korea is at the lower end of that. We would call these ultra-low fertility rates, or that below 1.4 children per woman. There are actually quite a few of those as well. Many Eastern European countries fall in line there. We see Japan and South Korea. So if we’re comparing ourselves to those group, we’re not quite at that ultra-low fertility level yet.
Taylor Wilson:
Are there places where birth rates remain high?
Jennifer Sciubba:
There are a few places and a decreasing number of places where they remain high, but they’re still important for us to keep in mind. So when we look at the countries in the world that have an average of five or more children per woman, there are only 8 out of around 200. But those eight will see, of course, a doubling of their populations over the next 30 years. So they’re rapidly growing and kind of bring us back to these math principles here. We see that this becomes an exponential growth. It’s really down everywhere. It’s just how far and how fast it’s down that differs around the world.
Taylor Wilson:
So, Jennifer, what kinds of negative impacts do we see from declining populations? I mentioned tax collection in the intro. Are there other big ones that would change the way we live?
Jennifer Sciubba:
I think they’ll all change the way we live. So when we say, “Is this negative or positive?” The negative comes from if we don’t try to change anything. If we just keep going about business as usual, thinking about every structure in our society that was built on the idea of infinite population growth, then we’re really going to feel those crunches. But those countries that adapt to this first and best will come out on top. So we might think about the workforce, for example. We know that we have hit peak workforce in many economies. So what does that mean? How do you adjust to that? States have different options for this. Countries around the world can choose to increase immigration, but what kind of immigration? They can choose certain skill sets, for example.
Countries can also work to help keep people in the workforce longer by providing opportunities for them to upskill or reskill and by taking laws off the books that actually discriminate against having older workers. In some contexts, they can really work to bring more women into the workforce who have been excluded as well. So it’s the idea that if we leave everything the same and we have, for example, just a pay-as-you-go social security system where today’s workers pay into a pot for their current retirees as those proportions of the population shift, that becomes really unsustainable.
Taylor Wilson:
I’m curious, are there any upsides to some of these population shifts, these birth rate shifts that we’ve been talking about?
Jennifer Sciubba:
By itself and in and of itself, this is a good news story. If we’re talking about shifting from high to low, I’m a student of population history and the foreign policy, and I know how much money, time, and effort was poured into helping bring education levels around the world, helping to bring those up, getting more women educated, having access to family planning, for example. So that actually worked, and now we see these lower fertility rates there. So we also see population aging because we’re living longer, which is great. Thank goodness we’re living longer. We really have worked hard for this.
Taylor Wilson:
Many experts have weighed in on how many people our planet can reasonably support with food and other resources. You’ve touched on this a bit. Some have put that number at 10 billion. Is an overall declining population across the globe part of this narrative about maximum lives the planet is able to sustain, and if so, how?
Jennifer Sciubba:
Absolutely. We think about what is the carrying capacity of the earth, and this has been a question for a really long time. If you go back to when Earth first had its 1 billion people, it hit that 1 billion mark. This is the same time that Malthus, famous for thinking about Malthusianism, said that there are too many people and we’re not going to be able to feed everyone, and we see this echoed as we hit every other billion milestone. We will reach peak population this century, probably in the 2080s, and probably at that 10 billion mark. So it’s just adding about two more billion people. If we’re at the global level, it’s not that big of a deal. In my lifetime, we’ve added four, and I’m not that old. So in that sense, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s where they will be, and that’s where this has more credence because there really is a relationship, of course, between population, resources, and the immediate environment.
So we know this population growth will be concentrated in some of the world’s lowest-income countries, and their ability to handle that growth in a way that becomes an opportunity for them. This is the workforce of the future, for example, rather than spend their time really struggling to have stability and prosperity. That’s the real challenge that we have today. Environmentally, eventually, it could be a good thing, but I worry that we will rest on our laurels and we will hope that deep population equals a cleaner environment. Forget how much consumption really matters to drive that environmental impact.
Taylor Wilson:
It’s an interesting point. So various countries around the world have been trying to tackle this issue for a while. You mentioned South Korea earlier. The president of South Korea has called the rapidly falling birth rate in his country a national emergency. Very strong words recently creating a new ministry with the express mission of tackling this crisis. Are there any policies that have been particularly successful around the world?
Jennifer Sciubba:
We’ve often thought of the bar for success as a radical shift in those fertility rate trends. So success would be getting to this theoretical 2.1, for example. If that’s the case, then no, not really. But if we change our definition of success and we think about what kind of policies make people’s lives better, then yes, anytime we can alleviate some of the financial burden of having children, that can really help at the household level. Whenever we make maternity and paternity policy, that parental leave can really improve the experiences of individual families, and, of course, the same for childcare and childcare expenses, housing, jobs, and all of those things. They all are societal goods that they may not move the needle in terms of raising births, but they can really make having children a much smoother path for people.
Taylor Wilson:
Turning to the future, what will the U.S. population look like in 60, 80, 100 years from now?
Jennifer Sciubba:
Size-wise, the U.S. population depends on whether or not we continue immigration at these levels. So most of the U.S. population growth is these days from immigration. It’s not from births, and that’s not going to change. So I actually would expect those births to keep trending downwards a bit. So what do we end up doing on immigration? Now, I’m a political scientist, and I’ll tell you, we’re not going to do anything about it. I don’t think we’ll have any reform. We’ll have a lot of talk about it, a lot of stress and bluster, but we won’t really see any reform. So I think if U.S. immigration stays around the levels where it is now, we would expect to see population growth in the U.S. We, of course, also would see some different kinds of composition shifts. U.S. population will grow older. We know that that is the case. We also know that it will grow more racially and ethnically diverse, especially at younger generations. So that’s the America that awaits us in a few decades.
Taylor Wilson:
I’m happy you’ve mentioned older folks. I’m curious, both in the U.S. and around the world, what leaders should be considering to properly plan for, really, this radical shift in age, given that there will be many more older people who are living longer. What’s that mean functionally for the world we live in?
Jennifer Sciubba:
The first step for them is acceptance. I’m often really disturbed when I speak to policymakers that, rather than accepting that this is for sure the case, they’re still trying to reverse it. What worries me about that is that we’re wasting precious time to put in place the types of systems that can help us adjust to that. In the United States, health is a big key. So we can’t work longer if we aren’t healthier. Our peers in terms of something we call health spans, think about lifespan and health span, those years, we work healthy, our peers are Mexico, Russia, and China. We would like our peers to be Southern Europe, for example, or maybe Japan, because that allows us to work longer, healthier. Now, of course, not everyone wants to work longer, but we need to at least have this baseline system where those who want to can do so or those who have to can do so.
Taylor Wilson:
Finally, Jennifer, what is the biggest thing you want more people to know about population decline?
Jennifer Sciubba:
I think I want people to recognize that a lot of folks in the world, a lot of those in power, really worked for decades to help us live longer, healthier lives, which led to population aging, and to have greater opportunities for education and income-earning activities, which, in part, led to lower birth rates. So when we look at it as nothing but doom and gloom, I think we forget that intentionality behind it. But I think we also need to recognize that the world of the future is going to look different, but if we prepare for this and we make really tough changes, we can actually thrive in this world. Then also, that population aging is not necessarily the same as individual aging, where there’ll be no innovation anymore, or we’ll just be societies that are dusty and gray. There will always be young people, middle-aged people, and older people, just in different proportions. So we need to work towards thriving multi-generational communities.
Taylor Wilson:
Jennifer Sciubba, fascinating insight and perspective for us here. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt.
Jennifer Sciubba:
Thank you.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I’m Taylor Wilson, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.