The De-Population Bomb

Throughout almost our entire 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 happens if that growth stops? What if our

population

decreases? himself to study that same question Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt on uncommon knowledge now thank you, welcome to uncommon knowledge a member of the American Enterprise Institute Dr. Everest I should say, by the way, that we are filming today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington Dr Nicholas Ebersdet earned his undergraduate degree and PhD in political economy from Harvard.

Dr. Eberstadt's numerous books and articles include poverty in China and the end of North Korea in recent years. Dr. Eberstadt has been examining population and demographics first. He acknowledged that other countries have problems publishing. Russia's peacetime demographic crisis in 2010 in more recent years has been describing the problem of this country publishing men without jobs. America's invisible crisis in 2016. Our topic today, well, let me read the title of a long essay. Dr. Everstat published a National Review not long ago. Can the United States cope with demographic decline? Nick, thanks for joining me, thanks for having me, Peter, it's nice to see you, it's nice to have you just to read an Everstat essay with Nick Everstadt, okay, Nick Eberstadt, I'm quoting you. the last decade and more since the crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession really the birth of the United States Trends have taken a fateful turn deviating well below the replacement level close quote what is the replacement level what does it mean to veer below What makes us assume that this is sinister?

The replacement level or a net reproduction rate of one means that one girl is born for every woman who will reach childbearing age, what this means is that a society is on a long-term trajectory toward population stability without compensating immigration or something like that to keep things at stability or above for 30 years before the 2008 crisis, almost 30 years, the United States was the only large wealthy society that was at the replacement level or slightly above the replacement level replacement, above this, let's say 2.1 births per woman level per lifetime, broadly speaking, we have fallen steadily since 2008, we have been on an escalator going down and of course the covid shock did not lead everyone to rooms to have babies, actually had the opposite effect.

The United States is now perhaps on track to be 20 percent below replacement level if current trends continue, which is a weasel word we always have to use because demographers have no idea how to forecast the fertility in the future, but if current trends continue, the United States Without compensating immigration, states would be on track to shrink by 20 percent for each generation in each successive generation and this is completely new in our history. We had a problem in the 1970s that some of us are old enough to remember. Wasn't that a great moment? In the United States, where snapshot calculations of replacement rates kept us below replacement level for a while, what was really happening in those days was that there was a big shift in when women decided to have their children and ended up deciding to have more or less the same thing. number of babies they just decided to have them later if you took the snapshot of a couple of years it seemed like there was a drop below replacement what's happening now it doesn't seem like a change over time it seems like there may be a change in the total number of children that young people want to have, is tremendously impressive, to put it mildly, a country grows and grows and grows and now, in historical terms, suddenly it seems that growth can stop immigration absent immigration will come to the next question, of course , is: what does it matter?

The European Union is ahead of us, if that's the way to put it, they expect their population, their fertility level has been low for several decades, they expect their population to start reducing which within a decade or so at the end of this interview I think that at the end of this interview Russia, in the worst case scenario, China from the point of view of the population is still in worse circumstances despite having eliminated the Chinese one-child policy. they're just not having children the birth rate is I think the number you gave was 1.3 yes it has plummeted since the end of the coercive one child policy for some fascinating reason okay so the question would be for those seeking immediate peace of mind.

Well, this may be happening to us, it seems to happen everywhere, let's broadly interpret the modern world and other countries are worse off, we still retain our relative position, we still have relative growth and then Nick Everstadt says, well, maybe time, but the formula by which the United States rose to its current state of wealth and power was based on more than two centuries of continuous and exceptional population growth, unique among Western countries in pace and scale. Close Quote: We don't know how to be a country without an economy without a population. growth last time we faced the specter of population decline, which might be a clearer term than demographic decline, which sounds like something like spanglerium.

The last time we faced the specter of population decline was in the Great Depression for reasons we can imagine. true, not a time of great optimism about the future, there is almost no immigration and the projections of the 1930s had us peaking and declining in the 1960s, those were as wrong as projections often turn out to be demographics. um, it didn't happen that way, but we. We are returning to a time when it is very plausible to think that our population can peak and decline. The most recent data from the Census Bureau reports that measured U.S. population growth has never been as small as it was last year, and that's births, deaths . and immigration represent the total, we have never had a confluence of births, deaths and immigration that ended with such a fractional increase in the US population since we started collecting measurable statistics and the question would be why that matters for our health, our buoyancy. our economic growth, I mean, I'm thinking raw thoughts, the thoughts that you can count on are thoughts that come to mind as raw thoughts, Nick, so I'll offer a raw thought that may be quite crude, but I think to myself same everything.

Right real estate, yeah, all those overbuilt neighborhoods in Las Vegas, all the buildings in Florida, those huge tracts being built in Texas, what if there's no one around to live in them? You get a complete economy. There is a legal system of bank loans that protects you. get an entire sector of the economy based on the existence of an increasing number of human beings and that simply disappears if the population stops growing, it is that correct and there are others, is there some link between economic growth and population growth , and if the population stops growing economically the growth becomes more difficult, it's more complicated than that, but figure it out, yeah, so you know we can look at it in two ways, as you know, something like head count, the way in which the ranchers look at the population we look at. its components and what we could call productivity or human capital the quality of Human Resources if we want to delve a little deeper into this I was always skeptical about the fear of the population back in the 70s and even until the 80s the idea that we were going to end up despoiling the world like locusts simply by having too many people because, when looking at the components of population change, the population explosion was not driven because we know we reproduce like rabbits, it 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, because you can screw it up, but you have a lot of potential there, um, I am too. m I would like to warn against people who are alarmist about population decline in a world full of health and technological and innovative potentialities.

We have an escalator we can work with that moves in the right direction. There we have to be very conscious of what we do, but if we surf that wave, an aging and shrinking society can not only maintain its prosperity but also improve it. If we look at what's happening now in the US, I mean, you can see. What can we see? What is worrying if we divide it into births, deaths and immigration? People will have a debate about what the correct number of births is and I don't think I can tell parents how many children they should have.

The people themselves know it. what you consider the correct number of children, put that aside for a moment, everyone agrees that fewer deaths is better than more deaths and longer lives and better health is better than the opposite America has been moving in a very worrying direction in the past decade, we have basically stagnated in improvements in life expectancy even before greed, we were dragging along with covid, of course, we have had a severe, almost catastrophic, setback in health levels for the United States and, aside from greed itself, as you know, Peter, we have had this problem of deaths of despair in the United States with suicides, drug poisonings, cirrhosis and everything else that looks too much like Russia for comfort .

I would say the increase in deaths that we have seen in recent years. decade and more should be a flashing red warning sign for American immigration we are the arithmetic of American population growth has been the arithmetic of our exceptional immigration flows that reached up to World War I and then resumed again in the 1960s Really, during the Covid Calamity, despite all the comedy or tragedy that we see today on our southern border, it seems that immigration plummeted and that net immigration we do not have good immigration statistics, no other open society has good immigration statistics .

Find out in the rearview mirror by looking at the residual, after looking at birth deaths and population change, it appears that our net immigration has also plummeted and we are already seeing the effects of that in the United States with the increase in jobs without cover. job vacancies since covid, yes, so immigration is a hot political issue. I happen to be of the variety that thinks that, in general, immigrants have made fantastic Americans and that we have benefited greatly from the international talent that has come to our country, uh, that is if we want to, if we want to fix the welfare problem of immigrants, we fix the welfare state and we have the rule of law and we control our own borders, so all that being said, you know, immigration has, immigration has.

Then we come to the question about birth. Can I pause on that because I want you to be addressing a handful of elements that you mentioned in this article and I'd like to go over 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 also to increase it in the face of the general aging of the population and demographic stagnation or depopulation, so the population ages. starts to be a little bit smaller, but as long as they do this and this and this and this would involve innovation, would involve being smart about education, developing human capital, list the thing, then there's no reason why a larger and smaller population must continue.

To be perfectly prosperous, okay, this path involves advances in research and knowledge. Creation with relentless innovation in the business sector, labor markets and the political sphere. Now let me explain to you Nick everstat's checklist on how we are doing dynamism, economic dynamism, quoting you Nick. Knowledge creation may still be proceeding at a pace devilishly difficult to measure and wealth creation continues at a remarkable pace; However, the dynamism of our economy and society is declining in some significant and easily verifiable aspects. Progress has gone badly, of course, you talked about Health a moment ago, but what do you mean by dropout, vitalizing dropout?

Well, there are many different ways to look at the type of dynamism of a society and an economy. One way to see it. It is the creation of new companies, new companies in relation to the existing number of companies or businesses, as best we can measure, it has gone steadily south.since we started collecting these numbers, you know, in the late '70s and early, despite the rise of Silicon Valley. the rise of Silicon Valley despite the new McDonald's everywhere despite everything we see, if you measure dynamism that way, it has been less another obvious measure of mobility is whether people get up and move, Americans used to get up and move, the jobs are in Florida, you move to Florida, so leave out Covid because it was in a time of lockdown and it's completely different than any other time from the mid 80's to the day before that the Wuhan virus reached the United States.

The proportion of the U.S. population that moves in any given year, even an apartment next door in the same building was heading south, has fallen by about half since the mid-1980s. Now you have to qualify that. a little bit saying that there is a lot of remote work where you can do things. at home something that you were never able to do before and that's all true, but I'm not sure that that will help us overcome this particular problem that we just described: education again. I quote you between emphasis. This is an astonishing thing.

Between the end of the Civil War and the late 1970s, just over a century passed between the end of the Civil War and the late 1970s, the United States was almost always the world leader in educational achievement, but in In the last two decades, adult educational attainment has advanced at just one-third of that historical pace, even as other countries surpass us. Quote what happened. We still don't have a good answer to this because it's one of the big problems in America that is somehow managing to hide in plain sight. Elsewhere, in another assignment, I talked about the new misery in the United States and things like the death of these deaths of despair.

It took our Health Sciences economy a decade and a decade. means to realize that poor whites were killing themselves in these tragic new ways, this problem of slower improvements in educational attainment has been around for almost 40 years and, as far as I can tell, only a handful of economists and educators They haven't even noticed it. I don't have the answer to why it happened. I can tell you where it's happening. The epicenters are native Americans. Native American men. Anglo-native American men. There is a lot of overlap with the despair problem deaths. I can identify it I can't explain to you why it's happening but its results its consequences are alarming there is a general correspondence General correspondence between better educational attainment and greater productivity if you do it the other way around and I like to be simplistic if you do it the other way around the about the slowdown in educational attainment It appears that improvement is currently costing us about four trillion dollars a year compared to our previous historical trend.

Its a lot of money. Here is a related item. I think it's related. You will explain the work, of course, again. To quote you, Nick, in an aging society, making the most of the existing workforce is essential, but the United States is failing at this task as well. The backbone of the U.S. workforce remains the so-called prime-age male cohort, ages 25 to 54, but the current male prime labor rate is two and a half points lower than it was in 1940. 1940 sounds like World War II, it's not Pearl Harbor, it wasn't

bomb

ed until 1941. 1940 is the end of the depression and the golden age.

Male participation in the labor force is two points below what it was so this is amazing the work rate this is another part Peter of this new Misery the big problems are hiding in plain sight in America for some reason um the rate of work the employment-population ratio as we would say that for non-institutional civilian men aged 25 to 54 is, at the moment, worse than in the census of the 1940s, which was carried out, as you indicate, in March 40, when the national unemployment rate was 15 percent, so right now we have depression-level employment rates for prime-age men in the US, okay, the government cites it one more time.

Budget discipline and social policy reform are necessary to maintain prosperity in an aging society, but the United States appears to have no appetite for either pay-as-you-go deal. Old-age pensions and health care may be an ingenious resource for a society in which working-age taxpayers vastly outnumber elderly beneficiaries, but the arithmetic becomes relentless. If the ratio between funders and beneficiaries plummets, if I'm not mistaken, you're talking about social security, which is about a quarter of the federal budget, and you're talking about medical spending, Medicare, Medicaid, the children's health insurance program in Obamacare, those Four programs again represent another 25 percent of federal spending.

What you're saying is that because we've set this up the way we've set it up, half of federal spending is simply becoming unsustainable, we have a sort of Ponzi scheme problem in our hands and, as you indicated, Peter, as long as you have a growing base for the pyramid in relation to the recipient Peak, you can be quite generous when things change, uh, you've been hit very quickly, no, we don't seem to have any There is no appetite in any of the political parties to balance our budget and control our national finances the way we would our family budgets and we have acquired the very dangerous habit of borrowing to pay for current consumption.

It's one thing to borrow money for a national emergency or a war. You could even argue that it's okay to take out bonds to build infrastructure where you can pay off on some kind of Roi scale, you know, but when you're basically using your credit card, uh, to play it safe, things aren't going to turn out very good because today is. The consumption of older people like me is being funded by The Unborn and that is not a good business model. Immigration. I'm going to quote you again Nick, only one policy can hope to affect the long term consequences on population size and that policy is immigration in general this is a simple declarative sentence but it is not in general assimilation works well in USA.

I'll have to go back and ask you to explain, however, that the Biden administration's foolish stance on immigration drives those concerned about our Southern border crazy, and the stubborn lack of concern for illegal immigrants seems almost designed to provoke anti-immigration outrage, so so assimilation works well. I'll ask you to explain in a moment and your most important point is that, because the simulation works well, some kind of sensible immigration policy where we control our borders, but we let people in based on sensible criteria and then we don't demonize them , we should have bipartisan support and, in fact, that creates people running around this city pulling out their hair and gnashing their teeth, it's as infuriating a problem as we are. have in American politics, but let's start with assimilation works well in America in general assimilation works well take a look at what happens to the children of newcomers to the United States they overwhelmingly end up as loyal and productive Americans as great citizens They learn English, they get a medicine, they work hard and they believe, perhaps more than native Americans, in the American dream, they were brought here, they are drawn to the American dream and, uh, they risk all their human capital on a ticket to the United States.

Joined. It takes a certain amount of guts in general, um, courage, let's put it that way, compare us to, for example, Europe, which is a prosperous democratic area, uh, full of open societies, assimilation works well for many newcomers there , but if the comparison is made and On the contrary, I know which country I want to have the history of assimilation: it will be the United States. There is a much more problematic record in Europe. It's a mixed bag, but overall there is a much more problematic history with becoming citizens and receiving an education. go to work uh and with um with resentment towards the country that they have chosen as their home or the parents have chosen as their home our assimilation record is very good in international comparison, there are other countries that also look quite good like Canada like Australia, like New Zealand, Israel, but for a big country, there's no country that has as good a record of assimilation as ours, but you'd fall short.

I know you would fall short. I say this just to give you a chance to address it. there may be a bit of concern here, you just said that Native American men, especially white Native American men, are underperforming, yes, death despair has increased, we have job performance, workplace performance , workforce participation has declined, we have a group here that I'm sorry. A lot of people let immigrants in to do the jobs these guys were supposed to do, so I took economics. I also want to say it was in the Stone Age, but I learned at that time that if you have more supply of something, you achieve it. less expensive, we have a large supply of low-skilled labor from abroad in the United States.

The economy that I picked up shortly after the Civil War would tell me that that would have a depressing impact on the wage levels of the least skilled Americans and I think that's true, I think it's true that, that being said, the employment patterns for men less qualified Americans do not correspond to what we would think, we would be recognizing from that natural experiment that differences in attachment to the labor force seem to have a lot of effect with things like family structure that have nothing to do with wages and with adherence to various welfare programs with criminal records, which again is not necessarily a job wage issue and we just did a full analysis. by almost perfect natural experiment in the time of covid, we had a drop of about a million immigrants who would have been in the workforce and what happened, we had an increase in job vacancies by about 4 million during the time of the covid, employers are asking 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, and this is not all for coders and funds of coverage, not only are they looking for those it's in the service industries in restaurants, hotels and other things where really the only skills you need are to be on time every day without drugs and there may be a long-term impact of this natural experiment , but we've had two years of it and it hasn't been getting people off the couch, alas, population growth is slowing, it seems like a new permanent trend, very soon the population will start to sink to remain a prosperous and vibrant economy in Under these circumstances, we have to do this and this and this and this and We are not doing this and this and this and this, which brings us back to the first question: why don't we recover the birth rate if the federal government is so good?

I would almost be willing to argue that this is the only thing the federal government is good at and that is spending other people's money, so why don't we encourage higher birth rates through various forms of subsidies, tax breaks and the rest? Nick Everstadt's response is again to cite Nick's incentives to boost the birth rate. The fees are likely to be expensive and achieve only modest and perhaps fleeting demographic results. Close quote: How is it possible and? We have experiments that try to subsidize birth rates with large increases in birth rates. Attempts to subsidize it in one way or another are being carried out in Singapore, France.

Hungary, I think Sweden too, so we must know something about these experiments, right, the results, well, we've seen the results of the experiments, um, they are. I'll give you my read on them. My reading is not indisputable because baby bonus programs have many advocates in Europe and some here in the US and my reading is that it is very costly for temporary spikes in fertility increases that lead to subsequent declines, the Swedes have been, you can buy babies in advance, so to speak, yes, you can change. It can change the timing if some parents are on the fence about a second or third child, say, and are suddenly offered a baby bribe, they may decide to have the child now, um, but instead of having three. years later or four years later, and if you look at it all together, you get what Swedish demographers call the Swedish roller coaster, which is you put in a new subsidy for children, the birth rate goes up and then it goes back down to where it was when the subsidy was first given because the mentality of the people has not changed, the desire of the people about the size of the family has not changed, yesIf you really want to get into the business of turning women into small ranchers, you'd have to do something. about the opportunity cost of their time, so maybe you would want a program that involved, say, 50 percent of GDP.

I don't think anyone is going to propose that in the short term, all right, this takes us right to the heart of In your essay and in the topic that quotes you again, the best predictor of national fertility rates is the size of desired family as reported by women. Now you notice that there are surveys that ask women how many children they would like and you know that this doesn't correlate perfectly with birth rates, but it is the best indicator in some sense. It is a reassuring and even encouraging finding. It highlights the agency at the very heart of our Humanity.

You're talking about free will. There are people who choose the size of their family, but we do allow it. To include the non-material realm of life in our research, we can conclude that proposals to revive the American birth rate through subsidies grossly underestimate the challenge. The challenge may ultimately prove to be civilizational in nature. hits like a two-by-four of a civilizational nature and on the one hand I think, wait a minute, aren't we all supposed to be delighted that in this modern world women are able to participate in the workforce in which are? in a position to choose more carefully, more explicitly, more intentionally, the number of children they would like to have, aren't we supposed to believe that that is a wonderful thing and that releasing so many women into the workforce should increase the dynamism and growth of all that? well, well, well, well, on the other hand, I think about what little I remember about American demographic history and we had low birth rates during the Depression because everyone was poor, right, and they were discouraged and they didn't want to bring children into that world and then we had low birth rates during World War II because life was scary and men were away risking their lives and then we have Harry Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower and my own interpretation of that story is that it's complicated that Truman was probably is a much better president than is generally believed, but leaving all that aside, what happens is whether you agree with this or that policy, whether you think Ike should have rejected the New Deal more forcefully, both presidents they said regarding domestic politics, at least just leave it alone, let's give the people a set of established rules, an established America so they can have families and they did, and you and I are Baby Boomers, we are both products and we think to ourselves that this is an achievement of American history that we fought for. the depression and we won the second world war and then we achieved enough stability and prosperity to allow people to do what they want to do most and that is have children and that's good, it's a triumphant moment in American history, so what is happening?

Why should it be? I'll say it another way. I'll say it another way. You have four children. I have you for one. It should not be like that? Those of us who have had children, don't we feel that having children? It was the greatest thing we've ever done in our lives, the best thing we've ever done in our lives, why children aren't a luxury good, why don't we have more of them as we become a richer society instead of less , okay, these are the bundles of questions that Nick has in my head when I read that we have a civilization challenge our civilization doesn't like life anymore, why do demographers have all these really cool little tools and do they you give?

They can calculate what the trajectories will be in the future, but demographers can't say what those assumptions should be, they can't, they can't really put the parameters in the black box and that's why I think economics is fine to the extent that he says, but what you really need instead of a Nobel Prize in economics as a Nobel Prize in literature because you're talking about the Zeitgeist, you're talking about the human heart, you're talking about all the things that give meaning to humanity and fears. of humanity in ways that economists are not that good at calculating much less demographers, we as parents know how wonderful children are and what a blessing it is to be a parent, but one thing I will say about children is for everyone. of your unlimited benefits are not convenient and we've moved more and more into a world and this is just one version of a much more complicated set of questions that you've asked, but we've moved into a world where convenience uh is appreciated and which and in what autonomy personal autonomy is valued and in what limitations on personal autonomy are considered increasingly onerous, you don't have to be Leo Tolstoy to see what that means about the desire to have children, add to that the great change in lived experience in the lived reality of today's young people compared to those they know, we can all talk, tell Grandpa's War stories about what life was like in the 1980s, but people who were thinking about having children today they do not live in the Reagan era.

America lives in a place that has this new misery that is shaping it so much. Europe provides a case study in how a radical shift in values ​​can lead to a radical shift in demographics over the past two decades, the worldview of American youth and younger adults. become much more European that's what you're saying for sure and not in a good way and not in a good way, again, I come back to this, back and forth, back and forth, on the one hand, I really fight against the thesis is not A thesis is a set of observations very beautifully presented.

I'd rather it wasn't, so let's put it that way and then I'll keep it nice. They are challenges of civilization. There is very little that little Robinson or great Everstat can do. I talk about it again, how do we find a way to live with this? And I return once again to the question: what difference does it make for Europeans to lead a good life despite the difficulty of assimilating the million immigrants that Angela Merkel allowed to enter Germany despite the lack of dynamism of its economy? They depend on us in all sorts of ways for technological innovation and military protection, so they are still in decline, although in some basic ways they may be in Europe a comfortable place to live, so why not just settle in A comfortable place? decline and Nick everstat's answers consider the moral and ideological baggage that sub-replacement fertility likely carries with it pessimism hesitancy dependence complacency resentment division Do we really think there will be fewer of these in an America of 1.5 children?

Explain that well if they were well-behaved robots and each robot mom and dad had an average of 1.5 robots. Incoming rising generation that we could handle, we could handle population decline, perfectly fine for all the other reasons I've mentioned: improving education, improving health, improving technology. With all the new possibilities that are emerging, the diabolical difficulty, I believe, is the morass of attitudes and values ​​associated with substitute fertility in the richest and most productive societies that Humanity has ever created or seen, and in Europe and elsewhere of the world. In the United States, in wealthy societies, we have seen this ideational moral revolution, so to speak, over the last few generations, which has led to the triumph of solipsism, so to speak, and the degradation of the kinds of obligations that are necessary to feed a rising society. generation and to continue a society that we can, we can, outsource, we can increase, immigration from abroad to take care of the head count, which we cannot do without a kind of ideational, call it moral, transformation is returning to a place where people are confident and brave enough to maintain a natural replacement rate of society, the land of the free and the home of the brave and bravery should be interpreted as the guts to have children quite rudely if it is good. for the national character, you know, I mean, we go out, you know, we go out a little, we get on the bus or the subway, uh, Subway, um, which is so striking to me about the young people that I know today and I realize that maybe he hasn't done it. a representative sample is simply the fear that they have, they are afraid of everything, they are afraid of, they are afraid that the planet is doomed, they are afraid to commit to a job let alone commit to a relationship let alone commit to having children.

It is beyond, it is a kind of anguish that we do not have, it is difficult to find a good historical analogy for this anguish in our country. Furthermore, you are right, would an America of 1.5 children really be willing to make relentless patriotic sacrifices to defend itself and its allies or to preserve the postwar liberal economic and political order on which our prosperity and security so depend. Close quote and that list of items that we go over about what we as a society should do and are not doing. We were talking. About that, what we, as a society, must do here is the question of what we must do in the world.

The world is a dangerous place and with all its flaws and all our rudeness and stupidity, and the way we have led our lives. foreign policy over the last 75 years the world is a freer and safer place because if Americans are willing to sacrifice, would one and a half children really be willing to make the sacrifices? able to step into patriotism or see the challenges in the world and address them, what I was suggesting there is that if we look at the actual existing situation that we have, if we look at the tangle of values, attitudes and perverse perspectives that seem to accompany our particular downfall in below replacement fertility that entanglement is also an entanglement that has great implications not only for sacrifice within the family but also for sacrifice outside the family that you offer you offer hope or at least an example of a way out of this the civilizational hangover now leading Western societies into deeper and deeper replacement is not inevitable.

I cling to those two words. It is not inevitable that Israel will provide evidence to the contrary. A while ago I wrote a study with a dear friend of mine about Israel and we were more or less completely wrong about this: in the late 1970s we argued that Israel was going to have to liberate the West Bank and Gaza for demographic reasons because they were a Western society was going to heading towards below replacement fertility and the population of Palestinian origin was 876 babies and one can just draw the lines and see where things went, but a funny thing happened on the way to Palestinian demographic dominance of Greater Israel. it didn't happen and the reason it didn't happen is because the Israeli Jews didn't agree to go into a sub-replacement instead over the last generation fertility levels in Israel have actually increased uh and now abroad they're not just the orthodox. just the Orthodox, even people who describe themselves as not very observant, uh, from what we can see, it's widespread and for Israeli Jews as a whole, it's more than three births per woman per lifetime on average, which Which I don't need to emphasize.

For you, it is very different from any other open and prosperous democratic society these days and the Arab birth rate has declined, the Arab birth rate has plummeted, which, by the way, is true throughout the rest of the world of He speaks Arabic. I want to repeat this because I was wrong myself and other people may have a missile. They tell us over and over again that among the Orthodox in Israel the birth rate is very, very high and that is true, yes, but their argument is not the argument simple observant observation of the facts actually even among secular Jews in Israel the birth rate is well above replacement in general yes in general and it has been going up and it has been going up hours Europe's has been going down China has been going down, yes, and Israel has been going up, and that says something, Well, this is something spectacular and it is about all kinds of things, but one in particular, the role of women, what do we know about Israeli society, at least among the secular?

Non-Orthodox Israel Israeli Jews is that women participate in the IDF fight in the army are 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 The rate is that right, absolutely, it's a serious country with a serious approach to its demographic future and, uh, it's one where this is not the result of a government policy, it's not a particular government policy or a bonus for Babies in particular, it's a mentality, maybe 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 a part of it, but of course that reading might not be that far off the mark, so it's what people believe.

II found in a conversation with a young Israeli woman this was in France a couple of years ago and somehow we had just met it was a business conference it actually had nothing to do with think tanks in one way or another this demographic question came up and I asked her why Israeli demographics were different from the rest of the West and she said: I think my country, Israel, I think my country is still a country. The reason is that until you find a better explanation, Peter, that sounds like a pretty good one, okay, Nick, our friend Roger, a major figure on Wall Street for many, many years, asked me to interview you about this, said Nick is doing, but what he said is that 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 dawn. taken seriously on Wall Street, where they have incentives to do these things well. You write something about this and everyone stops acting to see what the problem is. The last thing that Nick has written, but we do it because there are not a dozen other people studying why this is because it is so bleak, so incredibly bleak that no one, not even among intellectuals, even in think tanks, there is any kind of denial of us. We would rather not we would rather not look at that why why why is this?

Why isn't this really part of the national conversation? I want you to remember what she was saying about big things hiding in plain sight, right? We have this data Revolution we have this information Arrow we have these fantastic statistical tools but they don't do you much good if you don't ask the right questions or you don't see the things you know hiding in plain sight and no I don't think there's any science to that we have um , we have a lot of very well trained demographers, economists, statisticians, um, but I think in much of academia there is, um, there's an incentive to play small there's an incentive to come up with an elegant little permutation in a formula that will give you the tenure um, you'll notice I'm not in college, I'm in a think tank, so I don't I don't have the same set of disincentives to work with, why don't people in business realize that this is, In some ways, a more interesting question.

I guess I mean, I gather that the richest man in the world seems to think the demographics are exactly right, Elon. Musk sees this and tweets about it yes, yes, yes, the biggest challenge we face now is depopulation, okay, okay, so we have Nick Everstadt and the richest man in the world, that's not bad. I'll stick with that company that isn't Nick. Let me quote you a couple of last questions another time. Now people under 40 don't have many memories of an America with a vibrant, private-sector-driven economy; They came of age during a strange historical streak of unusually poor political leadership from Clinton to Biden.

It could be said that they have only known poor presidencies, both red and blue. You're talking about our children, of course, theirs is an America where public trust in the nation's basic institutions has been shaken. A frightening and widespread slide, are we surprised that Millennials' expectations and desires about family and children may be diverging from their morning parents in the United States? Well, that went through me like some kind of knife because, of course, you and I like a lot of our friends came here during the '80s and during the '80s we felt like the country was going somewhere sure that the taxes we thought it was an achievement now we understand the importance of low taxes the federal budget was more or less under control at least it was reduced relative to growth in the private sector we faced the Soviets lo and behold the Soviets launched it and we won the The Cold War and the United States seem like a pretty glorious place and my thinking and yours are conditioned by that experience and our children's thinking just isn't like that.

So, what do you say? Here's the question Nick, because you are a wise man. Now I am going to ask you this question 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 receives bulletins about the sack of Rome and this High civilization that meant everything to him has disappeared, he looks at the Falls of Rome across the Mediterranean and, However, he leads an impressive and good enough life to What comes to us is St. Augustine, if we are trapped in this United States of progressive despair and continued loss of its relative importance in the rest of the world, what would you say to your children about how to lead a good life in different circumstances than those in which you yourself grew up, sure, well, I mean, the future begins here and the future begins in your own little circles and there is no, no, there is no no reason you can't be micro optimistic even if you see some pretty ones.

There are pessimistic things happening, uh, and if you think you're in charge of your own destiny, that's a good starting point, um, there's a lot of things that happened that we miss Peter, I'm afraid after we won the Cold War . These trends that I mentioned, the inability to generate wealth for the bottom half of our society decade after decade, the slowdown in education, these are not immutable, none of these trends are immutable and I still don't think we're at the game stage. in which it is smart to bet against the United States of America, there are things that may be happening now that nerds like me won't be able to recognize for years because we look in the rearview mirror by the nature of our craft and there are things that the government and the Experts cannot predict that we have revolutionized and transformed our society before including major religious Awakenings and as my much better half Mary Everstat has said from time to time I would settle for a minor Awakening that wouldn't be so bad either, so this is really the Last question and I'm going to ask my friend Boomer.

This is Boomer to Boomer. Economic stagnation of the 1970s by the end of the decade. Inflation is in double digits. Arab oil embargoes. Soviets. Advanced. Around the world, countries in Africa, Central America expand their blue water Navy and we have a collapse in national morale, particularly with a defeat in Vietnam and then the agony of Watergate and then in the 1980s through political , but still the economy recovers. and there is a restoration of national morality that I am not inventing, all the polls show it and that slogan of Reagan's reelection of returning to mourning in the United States is Rings faithful enough to the American people to allow him to win 49 of 50 states . and at the end of that decade the Berlin Wall falls, we go from 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis and that national humiliation to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a decade, do we have the resources, political, spiritual, human capital, Is this country still capable of another? national self-renewing assets absolutely of course yes, I mean, we have eerily similar circumstances, as you uh wonderfully pointed out, among them being an incompetent uh humiliating uh miss spawn of the White House right now a lot of Carter remembers these days that For those of us who are old enough to have the pleasure of having lived through that and of course have the resources there, there really isn't a close second in the world if you look at China in its details of who would be our competitor, there's no really close second place, but we don't have the same absolutely unlimited reach that we had at the end of the Cold War, but that's such an unnatural, ahistorically unusual situation, that we have we have the resources in our country and we have people in our country which, of course, can do this again, the only thing I would warn is that we have 40 years of poison distributed in our societies through an increasingly maligned university system and we have seen a Gramian march through the institutions of severely problematic views that in the old days would have been called without derision as anti-American or anti-American, we have to drain that poison from our society before we can, I think, really flourish again, but that's certainly not impossible either, it seems difficult right now, but if you remember 1979, what 1979 was like, very few people would have bet on that time that we would end on Christmas Day 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR.

Nicholas Eberstadt, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much Peter, it is always a pleasure to have unusual knowledge. The Hoover Institution and Fox Nation film today at the American Enterprise Institute offices in Washington. I'm Peter Robinson, thank you.