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Comments
Walt W. Rostow9
I have written three books about economic growth:
The Stages of Economic Growth (1960); The World Economy (1976);
and Theorists of Economic Growth (1990). In each case I looked
forward as well as backward. But I focused mainly on how the underdeveloped
countries might achieve levels of output that the industrialized
countries had already achieved, what we all confronted along the
way, and how we should face these problems. I put aside the long-term
prospect, but I recognized and commented on it.
The long-term prospect is, simply, that the earth
is finite, and trees do not grow to the sky. At some stage physical
output and population (which are not the same thing) will cease
to expand.
There are three possibilities. First, economic
growth could stop because people said, in effect, that enough
is enough. They could say that levels of real income had reached
the point that all they required was that existing capital and
output be maintained for an existing way of life. They would work
as hard as necessary to provide for that static way of life, including
the maintenance of the capital stock—which incidentally requires
considerable production—and leisure would have to be limited.
There is no reason to believe we are within sight
of that point; even in our richest societies, people have little
trouble spending extra money.10 Maybe someday but not now. Individuals
may peel off for a life in the spirit of Walden Pond, but this
will not be the course chosen by most of us.
Second is the possibility of a shortage of raw
materials, food, energy, air, water, etc. A vast literature starting
with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the best seller The
Limits to Growth has explored this theme in the past 40 years.
I devoted some 87 pages of The World Economy to this subject,
emerging with the view that we could probably surmount these problems
of physical shortage if we conducted wise but possible policies,
which I attempted to outline.11
The third possibility is that human fertility
will decline below the 2.1 replacement level, and population will
shortly decline—not level off—but continue relentlessly
to decline. This is happening. The long run is upon us in this
form. The decline of population will begin in Japan in 2007; the
decline in the working force will begin as early as 2001—that
is, next year. The future of the human race is now in the hands
of people, not of anonymous automatic forces.
The following tables tell the story for the whole
world economy.
The latter point is underlined in this chart.
Not only mainland China but South Korea, Thailand—and I would
add Taiwan—have fallen below the replacement rate.
Another way to portray the human condition is
that the death rate has leveled off due to the epidemic of cancer
and circulatory diseases, but fertility has continued to fall.
This process has been accompanied by an aging
of populations and a disproportionate decline in the working force.
As time moves forward inexorably, there will be fewer and fewer
in the working force to look after more and more old folks.
A population policy to deal with this turn in
our fortunes is needed at once. It should include three elements.12
One, a time-buying program that will expand the
workforce during the period from the beginning of the fall in
fertility to the reattainment of a stable replacement rate, which
is 2.1 children per woman. The major sources for this time-buying
program are immigration, a rise in the retirement age, and the
training of disadvantaged young people in workplace skills. The
latter is not a social luxury, nor a moral duty, but a practical
necessity giving the need to maintain the workforce as population
ages.
Two, a policy consensus achieved by each particular
country—including the men and women of that country—that
will permit it to reach and maintain the fertility rate of 2.1.
Three, acceptance, as a goal, of a constant population
with continued R&D and innovation, and, therefore, a continued
increase in real wages and the quality of life.
Some General Principles
From the beginning, the full resources of the
media and the political process need to be mobilized, backed by
the major political parties, and supported by widely respected
private leaders. The two necessary themes are (1) the fall (or
expected fall) of fertility below 2.1 is potentially an urgent
and mortal problem for modern societies, and it must be countered
as promptly as possible by a universal effort; and (2) if successful,
the policy offers a long-term solution to population, environmental,
and welfare concerns. This means we must go back to a 2.1 replacement
rate plus continued R&D and innovation to replace investment
dependent on an expanding population and thereby to permit increased
real income and improved quality of life.
The citizens in advanced industrial societies
have been accustomed to small movements in the right direction,
e.g., increasing the retirement age by 2 years from 65 to 67,
small increases in elite immigration, a few additional nurseries,
a modest increase in subsidies for having additional children,
etc. Such small measures have not reversed the falling fertility
rate. They have the feel of "too little, too late,"
and in any case, it is felt we have plenty of time to deal with
the problem of population. But we don’t have plenty of time.
There must be a program that matches the size of the problem,
that conveys a sense of urgency, not business as usual.
The simple diagrams below indicate very roughly
the three periods envisaged in this transition:
Three Phases: Alternate Objectives
I. The time-buying program that expands the workforce temporarily
and limits the fall in output
II. Getting back to 2.1 through measures taken by the whole society
that permit women to play their part in the workforce and increase
the motivation to increase fertility
III. The long-run reconciliation of a stagnant population and
rising real wages
There are two diagrams presented because each
country may ultimately seek a population level below the level
at the start of the transition, or at the previous level, or,
less likely, above the previous level.
Phase I.
Maximizing the Workforce During the Period of
Its Decline (and the Population’s)
Hamish McRae has listed a set of measures to
enlarge the workforce to compensate for the decline it will otherwise
suffer.13
- Retirement ages will rise.
- Female participation in the workforce will climb.
- Part-time working (including working at home) will continue
to increase.
- University students will be expected to work part-time while
studying, a process already begun.
- Greater efforts will be made to reduce unemployment.
- Retraining for different jobs several times in a career will
become more normal.
- Volunteer labor will be used to a greater extent.
- There will be more pressure on children to learn marketable
skills.
It is worth making some additional comments
on this list.
The heightening of existing efforts to
move men and women from the welfare rolls, or, indeed, some of
those in prisons, into the workforce—this is not a matter
of morality or budgets but a way of enlarging the workforce while
reducing public expenditures.
Immigration is obviously a way of increasing
the workforce in the short run in compensation for the decline
in the indigenous existing workforce, but it should be regarded
as a time-buying method rather than a long-term solution as compared
to bringing the population of a given country back to a replacement
fertility rate. Immigration will dry up from a given source—say,
Mexico—as that country experiences a rise in income per capita
and goes through the demographic transition. The possible playback
effects in the politics of a receiving country of an "excessive"
immigration level will also affect the possibilities. The method
used by some of the Japanese firms when confronted with a local
labor shortage—of sending some plants abroad—may have
a wider application. And the limits and possibilities of extending
the retirement age radically will justify exploration.
In short, there are some considerable possibilities
for enlarging the workforce in the face of its attenuation by
demographic forces. They are extremely important in this phase
given the decline of the existing workforce in relation to the
expansion of welfare demands for the dependent population. But
they are not a substitute for bringing the fertility rate back
to 2.1.
Phase II.
Period of Expanding Fertility Back to 2.1.
There is one thing to be said, in general,
about the second stage of this transition. The quicker we get
to Phase II, the better. Starting now means we are already dealing
with a degenerating situation.
The longer we permit this degenerative
condition to continue—symbolized by the falling proportion
between the working force and the dependent population—the
harder and more expensive it will be to achieve the turnaround
symbolized by Phase II.
The specific tasks of Phase II follow:
First, the men and women of society must
achieve a treaty—or a deep understanding—that men, and
the society as a whole, will have to make arrangements to permit
women to reconcile having two children with advanced education
and a maximum career in the workforce, of which she is capable.
Second, countries will have to decide after
domestic political debate what target population they will seek—above,
at, or below the initial population level.
Third, the envisaged increase in fertility
will add, of course, to the flow of dependents, although children
are less expensive for the public budget than dependents beyond
the retirement age.
Fourth, for a time the fertility rate will
have to go higher than 2.1 for those countries that have fallen
below that level, assuming they wish to attain a level of population
above the nadir represented in the charts. For those now above
2.1, with the fertility rate falling, the task will be to halt
the fall in fertility at 2.1 and thus achieve the chosen population.
Fourth, in general, Phase II continues
measures of Phase I and lasts, say, 16 to 22 years depending on
the years of schooling absorbed. These will be years of maximum
strain, depending on the swiftness and extent of the time-buying
measures set in place in Phase I, but the beginnings of the rise
in the fertility rate will indicate that the job can be done and
will be an important optimistic turning point in the transition.
Finally, the homegrown expansion of the
workforce should supersede, in part, the desired (or imposed)
limits of workforce expansion, e.g., the increase in fertility
will gradually match the decreased flow from the hitherto disadvantaged
people as the limits of transfer to the workforce are reached.
Similarly, we will learn the limits on immigration and of the
flow from the increased retirement age to the workforce, which
may exhibit diminishing returns as time passes.
Phase III
The Political Economy of a Static Population
at Chosen Level
As fertility rises to 2.1 and population
continues to fall at a diminished rate, the long-term problem
will become increasingly clear: to maintain full employment in
a world lacking the stimulus to investment of a rising population.
Hopefully there would be agreement on the
gap to be filled, and there will be rough agreement on how much
of the gap-filling can be done by the private sector, although
there will be some political debate on that score.
We might also have some debate on the priorities.
On the side of the public infrastructure, new bridges, improved
roads, new school buildings, smaller classes, possibly increased
expenditure for the exploration of space are among the possible
lines of investment. On the private side, increased investment
in a post-petroleum generation of automobiles and the rapid exploitation
of the possibilities of science are possible. But some part of
the gap may be filled (as envisaged by various economists of the
Great Depression of the 1930s) by a fall in taxes and a consequent
increase in private consumption.
Conclusion
The greatest lesson that emerges from examining
this scenario of three phases in the transition is the importance
of Phase I: setting time-buying targets high and holding out from
the highest and most effective political level of a positive image
of the outcome.
John Haaga14
Dudley said earlier he was going to set the hounds
on Wolfgang, but that’s hardly what’s happening. I think
I have to agree with what both Wolfgang and Professor Rostow have
said.
There is one thing, though, I think we need to
remember, which is that there’s a tendency to focus on the
falling fertility rates and the lowering of projections of world
population as being the good news and the important news for the
future. I would like to remind everybody there are parts of the
world where the old fashioned population explosion that we all
read about and heard so much about around the time of 1970, around
the time of the first Earth Day, when Paul Ehrlich’s book
The Population Bomb really called this to everyone’s attention,
is happening.
For the first half of the 1990s, my family and
I lived in Bangladesh. If you remember the map that Wolfgang showed
of population densities in 2000, there was one little dark maroon
patch around the left armpit of the Indian subcontinent, and that
was Bangladesh.
The densities there are unimaginable for Americans.
I used to explain this to neighbors and to students by asking
them to think—just a thought experiment— think of everyone
in the world— the Pope, Deng Xiao-ping, everyone in the world—moving
to the U.S. tomorrow. The average densities in the U.S. would
then be a little over half what they are today in Bangladesh.
The population is still growing. They have far
more people entering the labor force each year than can find jobs
in the modern sector. They’ve had great success with exporting
clothing and textiles, but they really need a new industry like
that practically every two years in order to keep up with population
growth.
So we have to hold two ideas in our heads at
the same time. There are the old fashioned population bomb ideas
that are relevant for many parts of the world, important parts
of the world, and there are the more recent concerns about population
aging and declining fertility relevant for still other parts of
the world.
There’s one other thing I’d like to
do, which is to personalize this a little bit. I think in the
U.S. we often feel we’re a nation apart, and in a lot of
ways we are. We look at what’s going on in the developing
countries today and think that this is part of our remote history
or something, but it’s really not. The demographic transition
is part of our family history for Americans.
We’ve talked mostly about fertility rates.
I’d like to talk about mortality rates.
This graph shows death rates by age for males.
I apologize for making it males. Males for demographers are the
weaker sex, but there’s a reason and I’ll tell you in
a moment.
The top line shows death rates by age for males
in the U.S. in 1918. The middle line is Kenya for the late 1980s,
fairly typical as Wolfgang said for a developing country in Africa
now. The bottom line is for the U.S. in 1997, which is the most
recent available. What you see is the tremendous progress that
has been made in the U.S. in one lifetime. Mortality rates have
fallen at every age, especially in infancy and childhood.
Now, I chose these dates because I think about
these numbers in relation to my family. My father was born in
1917 in Tennessee, so the rates in the top line are those that
were prevailing nationally in his first year of life. Tennessee
at that time was almost certainly worse than the national statistics,
if they had kept good statistics, which they didn’t. It was
developing country statistics then, exactly as Wolfgang said for
Africa.
The infant mortality rate was around 125 per
1,000 babies, and life expectancy at birth for men was about 53
years. That’s less than the life expectancy now for men in
Ghana or Togo. Now, for African Americans at that time it was
certainly worse. Life expectancy for them was a little under 40
years then, which is as bad as the African countries where AIDS
is the worst problem today.
My father, like most members of his cohort, lived
right through the Depression and World War II, well past what
we would have calculated as their life expectancy in 1917, because
mortality rates were falling at every age during most of his lifetime.
By the time I was born in 1953, infant mortality in the U.S. was
35 per 1,000 and life expectancy was about what it is in Egypt
today.
In 1980, when my oldest son was born, infant
mortality was down to 14 per 1,000 and life expectancy for males
was 70 years, which is the equivalent of Jamaica today.
So my father was Togo, I was born into Egypt,
and my son, Jamaica. That’s a big portion of the variability
in the world today in mortality rates. It’s a lot of progress,
all in my father’s lifetime—three generations of an
American family.
Comparable changes have been even quicker for
the people in Asia, Latin America, and now even in many parts
of Africa. I began in this business working on demographic surveys
in Malaysia. There, all of this decline that I talked about for
the twentieth century in the U.S. was packed into a much shorter
period, a few decades, in Malaysia. What was wonderful about traveling
around the country and interviewing people and talking to them
was that the older women in our sample were remembering a time
when Malaysian rates were like those in the poorest parts of Africa.
The youngest people in the sample were telling
me about a time that was very much different. In fact, mortality
rates in Kuala Lumpur were better than the mortality rates in
the District of Columbia, where I live. So you could get basically
this massive change in human history just by interviewing either
40- or 50-year-old women or 20- or 30-year-old women in the same
country.
So it’s been a remarkable experience, this
demographic transition. We’ve lived through it in our country,
and it’s much more recent than people think. It’s part
of all of our family history.
These child deaths are nearly all preventable
now throughout the world. We have very good and very cheap technology
for saving children.
Again personalizing: In my father’s family,
Germans in Tennessee, right about that time when mortality rates
were comparable to those in West Africa now, there were three
little boys all younger than ten, all coincidentally named Otto,
and they all died the same year. This was a devastating tragedy
for the family. It was something that I heard about, and it’s
the kind of thing one hears about in family histories.
Death was a common experience. I think everyone
here, in all of our families, there would be something similar
if we went back into nineteenth century history or even the early
twentieth century. Maybe they’re not all named Otto, but
there would be a story about devastating child deaths. Even though
it was so common, it was still a human tragedy for the families
involved. So when we look at these declining mortality rates,
it’s interesting for us statisticians, but it’s an amazing
change in the possibilities of life for the families that are
part of the populations that we’re studying.
Thank you.
Steven H. Murdock15
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and
an honor to be considered among these very distinguished scholars
here today.
My job is to bring the discussion down to a more
local level, to a Texas level, but before I do that, I want to
put out a warning that when you have this many demographers together
you need to be very careful about believing us too much.
That is, I remember that my very first book on
population projections had a very important footnote at the bottom
of the first page that said that a wise demographer once said
that no demographer should ever make a projection for a period
that he or she did not expect to exceed his or her own lifetime,
meaning he or she did not have to be around to answer for the
accuracy of the projections that had been made.
The second thing I think you should be aware
of is that when you look at projections, they are generally less
accurate for smaller areas, which means literally that you should
probably believe Dr. Lutz and Professor Rostow a great deal, John
somewhat, and me hardly at all, because I want to talk about a
single state, Texas.
I believe that the world population patterns
have both direct and exemplary, if you will, implications for
Texas. Whatever the projections are, and they vary somewhat from
one source to another, but if you look at somewhere between a
2.5 to 4.0 billion increase in the world’s population between
now and the middle of this century, I think there is no doubt
that this has implications for areas such as Texas because of
several key characteristics of the Texas population.
Texas is growing about 2 percent per year. In
Texas and the United States as a whole, immigration plays a major
role in population growth, and as you probably know, the United
States is the largest recipient of immigrants in the world. Texas
is one of the major players when it comes to immigrants to the
United States. We received the third largest number of immigrants
in the 1990s, and if you look at undocumented immigration, the
most recent estimates from the INS are that we are the second
largest recipient. This suggests to me that Texas is likely to
continue to have significant growth as a result of world population
growth.
So I think it is important to realize that this
suggests to some of us that the population of Texas may essentially
double in the next 35 to 40 years.
Well, there are other implications beyond enhancing
the state’s level of growth, and that is if you look at the
characteristics of immigrants to the United States, they accentuate
yet another major demographic pattern for Texas, and they maintain
yet a third pattern for Texas. They accentuate the very rapid
diversification of our population, which I will talk about this
afternoon, because a majority of immigrants are from Latin America
or Asia.
And if you look at Texas, Texas has the second
largest Hispanic population and the fourth largest Asian population,
which are the major immigrant groups immigrating to the United
States. I think all the major patterns that we see in terms of
the world will have implications for continued population growth
and diversity in Texas.
The other factor that they bear on is that we
are a relatively young state with a relatively young population,
and immigrants tend to be young adults. They tend to be young
adults with children, and this will likely maintain a somewhat
younger profile for Texas population.
Another example of the effect of world demographic
change is that if you look at the world in terms of developing
and developed countries—a term that I don’t like very
much but that we continue to use in the demographic literature—what
you see is one set of countries, developed countries that are
primarily of European heritage in one form or another, whose problems
are increasingly going to be those of the aged.
You see another set of countries, the developing
countries, whose racial and ethnic profiles are different from
the first set. It includes Asian countries, Latin American countries,
African countries, and for these countries the challenge is one
of education, of creating educational and employment opportunities
as they go forward in trying to develop their societies.
What do the world’s demographic developments
suggest for Texas? I will argue in my presentation this afternoon
that those two components are similar to the two segments of the
Texas population—one of which is an aging Anglo population,
another of which is a young minority population—and the needs
and the resources of the two are very, very different.
So in a kind of final sense, what these national
or international patterns suggest to me for Texas is that the
challenges for Texas are likely to continue to be very intense
as we go forward in time. And I have a friend who—thinking
about e-economies and this sort of thing— talks about the
e-needs of Texas, the four e-needs of Texas. He says those are
education, the need to ensure accessibility and attainment in
the education of our youth. He talks about economic competitiveness
and ensuring through that education and training that all Texans
are competitive in this the twenty-first century.
Third, he talks about the e of equity and the
issue of increasing the equity among Texans as we go forward in
time. And fourth, he talks about something that our next session
is going to talk a great deal about, and that is environmental
quality and the need to ensure environmental quality in Texas.
Well, we could talk a lot more than this. I will
just sum up with one other factor. It’s interesting as we
look at world patterns that are taking place to note that in many
ways, as we look at the demographic patterns that we will spend
more time looking at this afternoon, that what is happening to
Texas’s population is that we are internationalizing our
population in the same way that our economy is being internationalized.
I think it’s important to recognize that
you can take that analogy a little bit farther. I’m often
asked, "Aren’t we going to have an unusual population
in 2030 or 2050?" It is not the population of Texas in 2030
or 2050—that will be much more diverse and have many different
characteristics than the population of today—that is really
going to be the unusual or different population. It is the population
that we have had that has been out of sync with the characteristics
of the world’s population and the characteristics even of
the national population. The population of Texas in the future
will be much more like the world’s population, reflecting
our economic and demographic involvement in the world’s economy.
Thank you.
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