Growth and Change in the American Population: How Separate Are We?

J. Dudley Fishburn, Moderator

Life for Baby Boomers and Their Children

John G. Haaga

I thought of my role in today’s program as the humble but necessary one that they call in radio the "continuity person"—the person who links what we just heard with what we’re about to hear. This morning we’ve talked about the growth of world population, which is mainly the continuing saga of the demographic transition in developing countries. This afternoon we’ll be talking about "The World of our Grandchildren." I’d like to focus on two themes that lead us from one to the other:

1) Our own population dynamics in the U.S. are part of this global picture. In part this is because we also went through the demographic transition, and it’s often surprising how recent the changes were. The demographic transition is for most of us part of family history. It’s also because we are a nation of immigrants, and since 1965, most of our immigrants are from developing countries where the demographic transition is an even more recent memory or a current phenomenon. In school textbooks, in academic research, in conferences, we typically keep the discussion of developing countries and of U.S. population completely separate. I’m delighted that this Society decided to deal with them together because that makes intellectual sense.

2) Our society and economy and culture, and our policy agenda, are all much affected by recent demographic past. Demographic history isn’t "history." Demography also isn’t destiny. We have to adapt to some profound changes in the age and racial/ethnic composition of our population, and we can do that smartly or dumbly.

The Demographic Transition in the United States and in Mexico

Why was there all this growth, and why concentrated in the developing countries this century? It is mostly due to good news—not due to increased fertility followed by increased mortality, as Thomas Malthus expected two centuries ago, but to lower mortality followed by lower fertility.

In this figure, the top line for each country is the "crude birth rate," the number of births per year per 1,000 residents; the bottom line is the "crude death rate." Along the horizontal axis are years, running from 1875 to the present. The gap between these two lines measures the "natural rate of increase of the population," net of international migration.

The United States and the other countries that began the transition in the nineteenth century had a longer, gentler decline in these rates, and they were never too far apart. Mexico, along with a few other parts of Latin America and Asia, began to see a decline in mortality rates before World War II, but the big improvement has come since the war.

In Mexico, as in most of the world, fertility rates did not decline until well after the mortality decline. In Mexico in this century, as in most other developing countries, the declines that took a century or so for us are all happening in a couple of decades. They are on "fast forward." Rates of natural increase in Mexico in the late 1950s and 1960s were above 3 percent. At that rate, a population would double in a couple of decades.

The rates have come down from their high point, but still, Mexico has had to cope with very high rates of growth in the meantime.

There’s one respect in which the United States was unusual even among rich countries. We share with France the distinction of having one of the earliest sustained fertility declines in the world, beginning about 1800, and of having our fertility decline precede the mortality decline.

The improvement in individual health has been even more dramatic than the crude mortality rates shown in Figure 1 suggest. The proportion of older people in the U.S. population has been growing (as we’ll discuss later), so to have the number of deaths per 1000 people still going down is a real achievement. It is easier to see this if we consider an age-independent measure, like life expectancy at birth—how long a typical American newborn would live, if mortality rates at every age stay at their current level. This has improved through most of the last century, from under 50 years in 1900 to 77 years today.

Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were signs of a leveling off of the rate of improvement. A writer in the Population Bulletin for August 1952 put it this way: "Curiously enough, none of these modern miracles has increased the life prospect of middle-aged people. During the half-century that 20 years were added to the life expectancy of the average U.S. baby, less than a week was being added for people of 50." Shortly after that was written, mortality improvement at the oldest ages resumed, and in fact, improvement has been faster in percentage terms at the oldest ages. If there’s a limit to the improvement, as many argue, then we’re probably not near it yet.

The Role of Immigration

Besides the speed of change, there’s another respect in which our population growth has differed from that of the countries going through the transition in this century. During much of our transition, the U.S. was a major receiving country for international migration.

From Independence till about 1920, the growth of the U.S. population was due about half to new immigration and about half to natural increase of the population already here in 1790.

Beginning in 1924, when a very restrictive Immigration Act was passed, we had four decades of very low immigration. During the Baby Boom years (1946–64), U.S. population growth was mainly due to natural increase, the excess of births over deaths. Since 1965, we’re back to the historic half-and-half: About half of our population growth is due to immigration and half to natural increase. But because we’re now at the tail end of the demographic transition, natural increase is down to about half a percent a year. Immigration is high in absolute numbers but low as a percentage of the resident population. So population is growing at just under 1 percent a year, compared with 3 percent during much of the nineteenth century.

How Do Our Choices about Immigration Affect the Future Population of the U.S.?

The next figure shows three possible futures for 50 years from now, differing only in what they assume about average immigration rates over that period. These are based on projections done by Barry Edmonston for a panel on immigration appointed by the National Academy of Sciences. His medium projection assumes 820,000 immigrants per year, about what it has been recently. The low projection assumes about half that, and the high projection assumes 50 percent higher (about 1.2 million). If we dropped suddenly to zero immigration, then our population would peak at about 312 million in 2035 and decline slowly after that.

One point to note is that under any reasonable scenario, the proportion of Americans with Asian and with Hispanic ancestry is going to rise. These two groups have grown rapidly, especially since the profound changes in our immigration laws in 1965. Exactly how fast they grow will depend somewhat on immigration in coming decades, but they will continue to grow more rapidly than the White and the Black non-Hispanic populations.

To produce these projections, Barry Edmonston had to make reasonable assumptions about the future course of birth, death, and immigration rates for these groups. He also had to make some assumptions about intermarriage and racial/ethnic identification. In our statistical system in the recent past, "you are what you say you are," and what people say is affected by the often complicated reality of their ancestral origins. The projections shown here are based on an assumption that people would continue to intermarry with the other groups at about the same rates as in the recent past and that children would identify with parental race/ethnic groups at about the same rates. But these things change over time, as indeed do our racial and ethnic categories.

I hope to have grandchildren in the U.S. population in 2050, but I can’t be sure which of these boxes they will check on the census form that year. I can’t even be sure the boxes will still have these labels. There have been several major changes in the way we collect and display data on subdivisions of the U.S. population in my lifetime. Beginning with the 2000 census, we no longer require people to check just one box. I hope to survive through at least a few more changes in our racial and ethnic classification system. Changing them is a nuisance for statisticians, but it does help remind us all that these are artificial labels and not something handed down on Mount Sinai or discovered in a lab.

The Aging of the U.S. Population

Figure 3 illustrates another way in which recent demographic history leads to some profound changes in the near future. These are two sets of estimates and one of projections for the U.S. resident population in the years 1950, 2000, and 2030. These are so-called age pyramids. They’re just like lining up two vertical bar graphs and tipping them over on their side. Each horizontal bar corresponds to a five-year age group, with older stacked on top of younger, and with males on the left and females on the right. The size of each bar reflects the number of people in that age and sex group in that year.

For most countries with high fertility rates, these figures do in fact look like pyramids. The U.S. in 1950 had a peculiar shape like the nib of a fountain pen—the big gang of pre-schoolers is the first of four Baby Boom cohorts. In the year 2000, we can see that same group, minus some who died and plus some immigrants, in the 50–54 year age range.

If you look at the population above the line denoting age 65, just eyeball it, you can see it is growing in absolute size and also as a proportion. This is only partly due to the unusually large Baby Boom cohorts about to move across that line. It is also due to the steady size of the cohorts coming along behind them. Each one is now about the same size as the one above it. This is characteristic of countries that have reached "replacement-level fertility." And each succeeding cohort keeps more of its members further into old age, which is the result of the improvements in life expectancy.

Note the unusual position of the early Baby Boomers. Above them all their lives have been smaller cohorts, the pyramidal situation characteristic of growing populations. Below them is the shape of the future, characteristic of stable populations.

There has been a lot of discussion of what this aging population means for the future of social security, Medicare, long-term care, and politics. But the changing age structure will also mean a very different experience of youth and middle age.

Life is different in any kind of organization or labor market, public or private, depending on the age structure of the population. Prospects are different, if looking up from your place in one of these cohorts, you see above you a whole bunch of elders. On average, promotions come slower. Some hotshots are going to shoot to the top in any kind of population. But it was easier to respect seniority and wait your turn when the population as a whole, and the labor force, was "young." We in the early Baby Boomer cohorts may be living through the last of the good times for middle-aged persons of middling talents and energy. We spent our early careers in a time of rapid growth of the labor force, where the number of new entrants coming along behind us was always larger than the number ahead of us holding fast to jobs we wanted. Our younger brothers and sisters, and our children, are having very different experience of the labor force.

Population aging is hardly unique to the United States. Many of the rich countries of the world have higher proportions of their populations age 65 and over. In fact, in Japan, the proportion of the population over age 80 is the same as our proportion over age 65. Many countries have more lavish public pension plans, and most already have higher rates of taxation, especially payroll taxation, than does the United States. They thus face more difficult and imminent problems adjusting to population aging.

This table shows the percentage of the population aged 65 and over for the United States and its ten major trading partners. The European countries and Japan have older populations than the U.S., mainly because of persistently lower fertility rates. China and the other Asian trading partners still have a younger age distribution than does the U.S. now, but their populations are aging as well, because of recent rapid fertility declines and gains in life expectancy. This 18 percent for the U.S. in the year 2025 is often considered a kind of threshold—it’s the proportion of over-65-year-olds in Florida now.

Is the Early Baby Boom Cohort Ready for Retirement?

I mentioned the odd position of the early Baby Boom cohorts. So far we’ve only talked about the changes wrought by fertility and mortality decline, but there have been other profound social changes that leave us entering older years in a very different position from our parents at the similar ages.

First, our families. Early Baby Boomers are less likely to be currently married, more likely to be single or divorced, than our parents were at this age. This has all sorts of implications for the quality of life, for all. Just to take one example, the strongest predictor of entry into a nursing home for older men is marital status.

We can expect to live longer than our parents did. When he turned 50 a few years ago, President Clinton gave a nice talk using the phrase "more yesterdays than tomorrows"—this table has data on exactly how many.

Notice that the gap in life expectancy between men and women at age 50 has narrowed a bit since 1970. This is mainly because of convergence in smoking rates. Men are less likely to make it to age 50 than women are, so the gap in life expectancy at birth is still 6 years.

The average number of children we have has dropped. This is an especially rapid drop, over one child per woman in 30 years. The drop was less precipitous before and since. We are the first and probably only generation of Americans to have more siblings on average than children.

Finally, education—we are much more highly educated than our parents were, on average. This matters for all sorts of things, health as well as wealth. The percentage with college degrees has increased for both men and women, and though I don’t show it here, of all the racial and ethnic groups.

If you look at more recent cohorts, though, this isn’t true any more. For people in their late twenties, all the increase in college graduation rates since the 1970s has come about for women and minorities. White non-Hispanic men and Hispanic men have made no progress, and Black men’s increases have recently leveled off. During this same period, all growth in real income has been for college graduates, who are still a minority of the population.

We’ve become used to things getting better, generation to generation. For most of us in the Largest (not necessarily the Greatest) Generation, that’s been our experience. But such progress is by no means guaranteed. We keep coming back in our discussions to education, and this obsession is justified. My retirement will be more comfortable and more affordable for the country if the small cohorts coming along after me are well educated, productive—and eager to pay taxes.

Implications for Texas

Steven H. Murdock

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and have a chance to talk to you about something that’s a very dear topic to me. I call it the Texas challenge, looking at population change and what the implications of those changes are for Texas.

Now, like some of my colleagues—not really this group, this group is pretty restrained—but like some of my other demographic colleagues I may get just a little bit preachy during this discussion. Now, if I do, I will do so because some of you probably know that demography is a divine calling. We know it is because there’s a Book of Numbers in the Bible, and it’s all about censuses.

What I want to do is talk about some major demographic trends that I argue are so important that if we do not understand them for Texas, we cannot effectively plan for the future of Texas. Normally I look at four, but because of time I will examine just three of these changes. I am going to discuss rates and sources of population growth in Texas. I’m going to look at the aging of the population (although John’s done a very good job of looking at that nationally), and I’m going to look at the increase in the minority population.

What I want to do relative to each of these is to give you a little history and then talk about why they are important—why should you care about these demographic trends anyway? You are not, after all, a bunch of pointed-head, ivory-tower academic demographers. You people do things in the real world, so why should you care about these factors? And then we will discuss the future and some of the work we have done examining some of the implications of these particular factors.

Let us start off by looking at population growth. Here is a chart that shows that in every decade since Texas allowed the U.S. to join it, it has grown more rapidly than the country as a whole. If you look at the most recent decades, you see we grew by 27 percent from 1970 to 1980, compared to 11 percent in the country as a whole; in the 1980s by 19 percent, although we often think of that period as a relatively slow growth period; and in the 1990s—and the most recent data we have is for July 1, 1999—we have increased our population about 18 percent, again, not quite twice as fast as the country as a whole.

When you look at trends in Texas population—and you’ll have to excuse this chart. I have a colleague at Texas A&M who says, "Do you know what I like about you, Murdock? You take a chart, put 800 numbers on it, put it in front of a group of people, and then you say, ‘As you can plainly see.’" Well, this is one of my as-you-can-plainly-see charts.

Really the part that is important in this chart is this very bottom line. Populations grow by one of two mechanisms: natural increase, which is the excess of births over deaths, and through migration. And migration can be immigration from other countries or it can be domestic migration, migration from other states. One important thing in this bottom line is that 58 percent of all Texas population growth in the 1990s—and this is not atypical for Texas—has been as a result of natural increase, the excess of births over deaths.

So to put it in another way, if nothing happens to cause immigration or migration to Texas, we increase our population almost 200,000 persons a year just as a result of natural increase.

Well, how phenomenal is that rate of natural increase? Well, if Texas had no other population growth for the last several years except natural increase, we would have still been the third fastest-growing state in the entire country just because of our level of natural increase.

The second thing that’s important here is to note that we had about 715,000 immigrants. That is a relatively large number of immigrants. But often I am asked whether we are a lot like California or like New York. If the reason for asking this is to ask whether we are a large state—yes, we are the second largest state, having surpassed New York in the early part of the 1990s—then it is an appropriate question, or if it is to ask if we are a diverse state, then it is an appropriate question. But if it is to suggest that we had the same level of immigration as those two states, it is incorrect in this sense. The number of immigrants for California for the same period of time was 2.3 million immigrants, and for New York it was 1.2 million immigrants.

The other factor that is different is this third factor. We had 571,000 persons who came to Texas from other states. Both California and New York lost more people to other states than they gained from other states during this particular period of time.

If you look at our growth, it has been such that from 1990 to 1999 we increased our population by three million persons. To put that in perspective, that is roughly equivalent to having added another city of Houston plus another city of San Antonio to our population in just nine years. We are the eighth fastest-growing in percentage terms, and you can see the states that are growing faster in percentage terms are relatively smaller. And if you look at us in terms of the largest states, only Florida and Georgia are growing anywhere nearly as rapidly as we are.

New York, for example, has increased its population by only 1.1 percent. I like to say that that is proof positive that you cannot have extensive population growth if you have bad picante sauce.

Our growth is not everywhere, however. If you look at Texas, there are really three parts of Texas that are growing quite rapidly. One area is along the Texas and Mexico border, so Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville are three of the four fastest-growing metropolitan areas in Texas, and Laredo and McAllen were the second and third fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the entire country from 1990 to 1998.

The second area is down through what I refer to as the central corridor of Texas, taking I-35 from Dallas–Ft. Worth, going all the way down to San Antonio. You can see rapid growth there. And the third area is in the Houston area, which you can see has increased by over 600,000 persons. But there are areas that are growing slowly as well: parts of West Texas, parts of the Panhandle, parts of East Texas and Southeast Texas are growing much more slowly.

Our growth in fact is such that one of the things we need to recognize in Texas is that we have become a very large, a very urban, a very complex state. After all, as you know, we have three of the ten largest cities in the United States. We have more metropolitan areas than any other state in the country. We are the fourteenth most urban in percentage terms.

This chart shows population change, with the darker shading showing faster growth, you see a crescent of rapid population growth in East and Central Texas. We did a little article that was picked up by the Wall Street Journal about a year ago, and we pointed out that if you start over at Longview–Marshall, go all the way over to Denton, go on down I-35 down to San Antonio, and go down I-10 to Houston and Beaumont, what you will find is that we are now three counties away from having a contiguous metropolitan area of 13.1 million persons that would be larger in geographical size than L.A. and would be third behind New York and L.A. in terms of population size, and two of these three counties are metropolitanizing relatively rapidly.

One of the things to recognize is although most parts of Texas have increased—about 190 of Texas’s 254 counties increased in the 1990s—that growth is yet quite concentrated. For example, if you take natural increase, basically one of every three people born in Texas is born in either Harris County or Dallas County.

If you look at domestic migration—now, this is that high-tech migration that we often hear a lot about—80 percent of all the people who came to Texas from other states went to just five counties: Collin County and Denton County in the Dallas area, Ft. Bend and Montgomery in the Houston area, and Williamson County in the Austin area. And if you look at immigration in terms of destinations, 50 percent of all of our immigrants go to just three counties: Harris County, Dallas County, and El Paso County.

Let us turn to aging. One of the things that John pointed out is the fact that we are aging as a population, and this is true in Texas as well. When you look at this chart you might think this is a chart that only a demographer could love, because what it shows is the median age in Texas in 1990 was 30.8 years. Now, if I look at this group correctly, many of us would like to be that age again indeed.

But what’s important about our aging both in the country and in Texas is the relative rapidity with which we are now aging. Let me give you an example for Texas.

In 1950 the median age in Texas was 27.9 years. In 1980, 30 years later, it was 28 years. We increased median age by one-tenth of one year in 30 years. Then from 1980 to 1990 we got three years older in median age terms, and when the 2000 census comes out it will show that we will have become older again.

Why are we aging? John pointed this out very well. We are aging because of an infamous group of people called the baby boomers, those people born between 1946 and 1964. They are about 30 percent of the U.S. population. They are about 30 percent of the Texas population. As they go, so goes the country in many ways.

If you look at the 1980s, this group in this chart was the baby boomers, and they have been the fastest-growing group again this decade. And if you do not believe they are an important group of people, if you travel quite a bit, like many of you do, one of the things you will probably find, like I have found, is that every major media market in America that I have been to has an oldies radio station. Now, what do they play? Fifties, ’60s, ’70s music.

Now, personally I refer to those as classics, but why are they playing that music—because they love us? No, because they love our money, and the important thing about this group of people is to know that yes, in the long run their aging leads to the kind of issues we have talked about on social security and other factors. But it is also important to remember that their immediate effect is to make us a middle-aged society.

It is probably more appropriate to refer to us between now and about 2020 or 2030 as a middle-aged society than it is an elderly society, and when you begin to look at that group of people, that means that many of the factors we are talking about between now and then are going to involve middle-age issues.

The second factor is that there is a clear relationship in Texas and in the United States between minority status and youth status. This is our estimate for 1998, but our 1995 estimate showed the same thing, and that is that for the population under 25 years of age, already half of that population was non-Anglo. It was composed of African American, Hispanic, Asian, or members of other racial and ethnic groups. On the other hand, if you took the population 65-plus, it was about 74 percent Anglo.

Another factor that may be important for Texas is the increase in its minority population. I think it is the most important factor for Texas because Texas was already by 1990 a very large minority state. By 1990 four of every ten Texans were minority population members. About the same percentage of our population is African American as in the country as a whole—about 12 percent—but whereas about 9 percent of the U.S. population in 1990 was Hispanic, about 26 percent of Texas population was Hispanic and basically one of every five Hispanics in the country lives in Texas.

About 2 or 3 percent are in the "Other" category, which, as we define it, consists primarily of Asians, although it also includes American Indians and others.

If you want to get an idea of why ethnic and minority issues are so important to Texans, let me just show you where Texas ranks in terms of other states. We have the second largest Hispanic population, the third largest African American population, the fourth largest Asian or Pacific Islander population. And yes, we have the eighth largest American Indian population of any state in the country.

Why are these differences so important demographically? If you look at the Anglo or non-Hispanic White population, in the ‘80s it increased by 10 percent; the Black population increased 17 percent; the Hispanic population, 45 percent; the "Other" population, 78 percent. Now, notice that that 78 percent is on a relatively small base, but if you look at net population change, what is interesting here is that one out of every two net additions to Texas population in the 1980s was Hispanic and two of every three were non-Anglo.

If you think the 1980s was a long time ago, let me show you the 1990s. The 1990s followed a similar pattern. Although these numbers are smaller because they are for eight years and not for ten years, you can see that the relative magnitude of growth is the same. And in fact when you look at net change, what is interesting is whereas 49 percent of the net population increase in Texas in the ‘80s was Hispanic, the census bureau estimates that 58 percent of the growth in the 1990s was due to the Hispanic population.

If you add all non-Anglo populations together, non-Anglos accounted for 66 percent of the net population growth in Texas in the 1980s but for 75 percent of net population growth in the 1990s.

But what are some of the implications of these demographic changes? Why should you care about these dull old demographic factors anyway? I argue that for a variety of historical, discriminatory, and other reasons, these demographic characteristics are tied to socioeconomic characteristics, so knowing these linkages and understanding how they may affect our population becomes not only a demographic issue but a social and economic issue.

Here is a chart that I find very, very depressing, because it is a chart that shows that all other things being the same, we make as much money as we are going to make when we are middle-aged, and we make less money when we are younger and when we are older. This means I am making as much money as I am ever going to make, and that is indeed depressing.

The same thing is true for societies. If they are concentrated in younger or older ages, all other things being the same, they are poorer than if they are concentrated in middle ages.

Unfortunately what you find, depending upon the time and the place, is that African American and Hispanic incomes are between 55 and 75 percent of the incomes of Anglos. I also want to point out that in 1990, 55 percent of adult Hispanics in Texas had less than a high school level of education.

This has had a great deal of personal meaning to me. I have been at Texas A&M—well, almost forever. I am in my twenty-fourth year—and that does not seem like so long to me, but I can tell you when you go in front of a group of 18-year-olds and they say, "How long have you been here?" and you say, "Twenty-four years," you look at those faces and you know they are thinking, "My God, this man has been here longer than I’ve been alive. How old must he be?"

Well, one of the things that has bothered me all the time I have been there is that every president we have had has been smarter than I am, and I could never figure out why. I asked my colleagues; I didn’t like their answers. I asked my family; I really didn’t like their answers. But then I found this chart. It shows SAT scores, and I can tell you it would not matter whether we had such a chart for Texas or California or any other state. It would not matter whether we had 1997 or 1999 or 1989 or some other year.

What you would see is that as your income goes up, whether we are talking about the verbal or the math score, so your score goes up. This means that all of those presidents have been smarter than I am because they have made more money than I have. It also means that all we need to do if we want to make Texans smarter is make them richer.

Well, where was Texas as we entered the 1990s? And I want to take just a minute to note that we have some new data that came out about a month ago, and I will tell you where we rank now. In terms of median household income, we ranked 32nd as we entered the ‘90s and as we entered 2000 we ranked number 31 among all the states. We stayed at our 31st ranking on per capita income.

In terms of the percentage of our population made up of high school graduates, we ranked 39th in the 1980s—and if these estimates are correct—we now rank 45th in the country. We continue to rank 23rd among all the states in terms of the percentage of our adult population made up of college graduates.

So where are we going? We project Texas will have about 34 million people by 2030. That is a lot of growth from about the 20 million that we have today, but it is slower growth than we have had for the last couple of years. If the growth rates of the last couple of years were to continue, we would have more like 38 million people rather than 34 million people.

What may be most critical relative to some of the factors we talk about is that we project by 2008—and I now believe it will be before 2005—Texas will be less than half Anglo in terms of its total population and that by 2030 it will be about 36 percent Anglo, about 10 percent African American, about 46 percent Hispanic, and about 8 percent will be members of other racial and ethnic groups.

We will also get older. By 2030 about 18 percent, about one in every six Texans, will be 65 years of age or older. But there is something else here that is important to know. Note that in that period of time, about 25 percent of Anglos will be 65-plus, but less than 12 percent of Hispanics will be 65-plus.
One time when I gave this presentation, a gentleman said, "Aren’t you saying we are going to have a group of old Anglos being taken care of by a large group of young minorities?" That is absolutely correct as you begin to look at the population dynamics in Texas. Eighty-seven percent of the net additions to Texas population between now and 2030 are projected to be minority population members.

What are some of the implications of these patterns? A few years ago, we completed an analysis for the Texas Legislative Council (which is one of two groups that directly serve the Legislature of Texas) of the implications of these demographic trends for Texas, if they go forward with the socioeconomic relationships that we have discussed today, and if we do nothing to change these relationships.

The population changes from about 61 percent of our population being Anglo to about 37 percent; a similar proportional change is shown for households. The labor force goes from about two-thirds Anglo in 1990 to two-thirds minority by 2030.

By 2030, one of every ten kids in Texas public schools would be minority population members. Sometimes when I give that statistic people say that sounds too high. Well, already last fall it was 55 percent statewide. If you take our largest school districts, the Houston Independent School District and the Dallas Independent School District, what do you think the minority proportions were last fall? Ninety percent in both school districts.

By 2030 about 60 percent of all kids in Texas colleges and universities will be minority population members, and—very important for the private sector—by 2030 half the household income would come from a household that had a minority population head as well as about half of all the consumer expenditures. Somewhat over 50 percent, in fact, of all consumer expenditures would come from households that have a minority population head.

What are some of the other implications of this? If we do not change the socioeconomic differentials that exist in Texas society, Texas labor force in 2030 will be less well educated than it is today, and in fact, the Texas population will also be poorer.

We took our figures and looked at what it meant in terms of household change for the college age population. What we found is that if we do not change the socioeconomic differentials in Texas population, the average Texas household in 2030 would be $4,000 poorer in 1990 constant dollars than it is today, and we would be poorer indeed with about a 3 percent increase in our poverty rate.

Well, let me briefly summarize, because I must be about out of time. What do these three factors mean, and what are some of their implications? First of all in regard to population change, under almost any scenario I can see, Texas is likely to have continued population growth, and that does not mean continued population growth at the same rate that we have had in the last few years. But the reason I am relatively confident that we will continue to have at least modest growth is because of our natural increase rate.

All other things being the same, we are increasing our population about 200,000 persons a year just as a result of natural increase. That growth will not be everywhere. It will be different from area to area, and planning for long-term growth particularly as we look at environmental issues will become increasingly important.

What about the aging of the population? There are two or three things about this that I would like to comment on very quickly.

One of these is that in the long run we have some very difficult decisions to make about the elderly. Lester Thurow, in a book called The Future of Capitalism, frankly suggests that we will not be able to afford to support the baby boomers when they are elderly in the manner to which their parents have become accustomed. The reality of it is that the resource allocation picture is likely to have to change between the young and the old, depending on what we want to do relative to our future.

There’s a second thing about the aging that we need to recognize, however. If we look at the relationship between middle aging and income, the fact that all other things being the same we make as much money as we are going to make when we are middle-aged and we have less money when we were younger and when we were older suggests that if we are going to fix the things that need to be fixed in Texas, we had better do it now. It will not be easier when one in six Texans is 65 years of age or older and on some form of fixed income.

And there’s a third factor. I bring this up with a lot of hesitation because it is controversial, but I think we must talk about it. We must discuss it openly.

I do a lot of discussions, a lot of presentations to school officials, and recently I’ve had things happen that have bothered me in conversations with a couple of superintendents who have come up to me and said, "You know the chart that you showed that indicated that the minority population is primarily young and the Anglo population is older?" And I say, "Yes." And one of these gentlemen said, "Let me tell you about my school bond issue that failed."

And he said, "You know, when I checked to see the areas where it failed, I found it failed in areas of my district that were primarily residence areas for Anglos, and older Anglos particularly. And in one of these areas, one superintendent said, "one of these gentlemen actually said to me, ‘Look. I am not ready to raise my taxes to educate—quote—those people’s kids.’" There’s a danger for Texas in our demographics, and that is we cannot let the divide between old Anglos and young minorities become a dangerous chasm between different parts of our population.

If I as an aging Anglo do not understand that when I am retired, the quality of roads that I will have, the quality of police services and fire services will depend upon how well the working age population is doing—and that working age population will be primarily minority. If I forget that, it will be to my own detriment. We must recognize that our fates are interrelated.

Finally, let me comment on the most important factor, Texas’s changing racial/ethnic composition. I argue that the most important factor for Texas is to increase the socioeconomic achievement of our minority populations. I could argue this from some social, humanitarian, or egalitarian perspective, which I might, but I could be the biggest bigot that ever walked the face of Texas, and I would have to say the same thing: Why?

Because I know demographically that 87 percent of the net additions to our population between now and 2030 are likely to be minority. I know that by 2030 two of every three of our workers, seven of every ten students in our elementary and secondary schools, six of every ten kids in colleges, and over half of our consumer expenditures are going to come from households that have a minority population head. And if we do not change the socioeconomic differentials that are out there, Texas will be poorer, Texas will be less competitive in the future than it is today.

The reality of it is that the future of Texas is tied to its minority populations, and how well they do is how well Texas will do.

Thank you.

World

Wolfgang Lutz

I want to thank you for this time to comment, as it says in the program, from a global perspective.

There are, of course, trends in one part of the world that are linked to developments in other parts of the world. This is especially true for migration, which is a big demographic factor for the United States and a very big factor for Texas, as we have just heard.

I would like to pick up on two statements, one made by John about international competitiveness with a view to the strong population aging the main competitors of the United States are experiencing. The other, mentioned by the previous speaker, is the prospect of a possible decline in the average educational attainment of the labor force in Texas.

I would like to add to this second point that the educational attainment in the rest of the world, as I mentioned earlier this morning, is changing significantly. The most important player—partly because of its sheer size but also because of its strong recent investment in education—is China. According to our projections, in about 15 years, China will have more people with secondary or tertiary education than Europe and North America combined. This is partly because it has such a large population but is also because it invested so heavily in primary and secondary education and, more recently, in college and advanced education.

So far, China is not yet a serious competitor in the kind of high tech that North America, Europe, and Japan to some degree monopolize. I think this will change in the future as China becomes a key player with a very highly and well-educated population. But we should look not only at the number of people but also at their education and skills. Age structure certainly has a major impact. I do not want to play this down—we have heard a lot about it—but skills and educational attainment also make a difference.

The second point I want to make is that the people who come to Texas or to the United States are not the average people of a developing country. They are the more educated, the more mobile, the more motivated people. Their departure may create a significant problem in their home countries that we used to call "the brain drain." Take, for example, the Indian programmers who are coming by the thousands and tens of thousands to California, and most recently to Germany and other European countries. As we heard earlier, India has not invested in the general, broader education of its population—half of its population is still illiterate—but rather has invested in elitist education. Now these elites are leaving the country to work in other parts of the world. This is not very good for India unless these people stay in contact with India, unless they return—and some of them do—unless they send money to their families in India or transfer knowledge, which is probably the most important in the long run. This issue of the brain drain should not be forgotten when we talk about immigration as a solution to many issues. It needs to be taken into account although it is a complex issue.

I would like to turn my attention to what we heard in the morning about the environment. Although the topic of this meeting is population and the environment, we have not really explicitly discussed how population growth affects the environment. I want to give you a few examples.

Population and environment relationships are very controversial. You may remember that, during the world population conference in Cairo in 1994 or the environment conference in Rio in 1992, there was a lot written about this controversy in the newspapers. Let me give you two statements. Norman Myers of Oxford University wrote, "Population growth plays a prominent and probably predominant part in environmental problems. The most productive and readily available mode of adaptation to the global warming threat would be to reduce population growth," implying developing country population growth. This statement seems to make sense because most of the population growth occurs in a developing country and, clearly, additional people are contributing to additional emissions.

Here is another statement by a group of women mainly from developing countries, who call themselves DAWN: "Population control in the South is a new form of Northern imperialism. White men fear the fertility of our wombs and do violence to us, but the real environmental problem is Northern over consumption."

There is also some truth in this statement. You heard during last week’s climate conference in the Hague that the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, releases more than a quarter of the total CO₂ emissions in the world and is by far the largest contributor to global warming.

But these two statements are slightly contradictory. The question is how to resolve these issues. Is there anything a scientist can say to make this ideological controversy more rational?

I’ll use the trends in the country of Tunisia to illustrate part of this problem. Figure 1 shows the population of Tunisia increasing, almost doubling over the last 30 years. The per capita income increases; there are very steep CO₂ emissions. You can see that a very sharp increase in CO₂ emissions has been encompassing the fact of population increase and some increase in income.

Several people have attempted to decompose the increase in emissions into its components. Can we say what proportion of increase in CO₂ emissions is due to population growth and what proportion is due to growth in affluence or income? There is a third factor to be considered: technology. Technology can be dirty or clean, and by switching from one to the other, CO₂ emissions may be reduced without a decline in affluence.

The model or paradigm most frequently used to study this is called the I = PAT equation. It was originally proposed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. I, which is the impact on the environment—this can be CO₂ emissions or deforestation or any activity that is detrimental to the environment—can be decomposed into three factors: P for population, A for affluence (assuming that the richer you are, the more you pollute) and T for technology (depending on whether you are using an environmental friendly or not so friendly technology). This can be calculated in terms of numbers:

We can see total CO₂ emissions as being equal to the population times the GNP (the national income) divided by the population (the per capita income) times the CO₂ emissions per units of national income, which is the technological efficiency of producing a certain unit of income or of a certain output.
This identity can be shortened into CO₂ = CO₂. The main purpose of this identity is to show that it is not any single factor that is contributing to the environmental problems but that it can be split into a combination of different factors.

It is a useful first approach, but it is not a good tool for actually assigning blame. Let me explain why this simple formula is not sufficient for explaining what is going on. All efforts to decompose this numerically have been problematic and cannot readily be used, so what is wrong with the I = PAT equation?

The three factors that are included in the identity are rather arbitrary. One could easily include other factors or more factors. For example, one could choose households instead of individuals as the emitting unit. An average household has a kitchen or an oven; it does not matter how many people live in the house. The number of households are the emitting units.

Let’s do a simple decomposition analysis. The total growth rate in energy consumption for the period from 1970 to 1990 has been increasing by 6.7 percent. Of this, 2.2 percent is due to population growth, 3 percent to income growth per person, and 1.5 percent to changes in technology. Because this is a developing country, we used the decomposition formula shown in Figure 2. We can say that about one-third is due to population and about two-thirds is the combined effect of income, growth, and technology.

In the industrialized countries (see Figure 2) we had only a 2.1 percent increase, and there only one-third, 0.7 percent, was due to an increase in population size. It is interesting to note that the income per person increased by 2 percent but that technology had a negative impact. There has been a reduction in emissions due to more efficient technology. If we take 0.7 of this 1.4 percent, we still have one-third to population and two-thirds to this combined effort. If we take households rather than population as emitting units—the number of households times affluence times technology—the picture looks quite different than in the developing countries.

Suddenly in the industrialized countries, we have three-quarters due to the demographic variable number of households. While the population increased slowly in industrialized countries, the number of households increased rapidly for various reasons: People like to live alone, causing a change in lifestyle, they marry late, and they have higher divorce rates. Probably the most significant reason is population aging. The number of households has seen a very rapid growth in all industrialized countries because most elderly people have their own households. It has been even more rapid than the household growth in developing countries.

What proportion of the emissions is due to households and what is due to the number of people? We made some empirical analyses, where about half of the CO2 emissions are household specific and the other half are due to the number of individuals.

In the real world, the interactions between population and the environment are very complex with all kinds of feedbacks and interdependencies. To address this appropriately, one must choose a "complex systems perspective." This approach assumes a nonlinear complex interaction between the ecological systems and the human systems. How can we study this?

At the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, we have completed in-depth studies on population-development-environment (PDE) interactions in different parts of the world: Mauritius, the Yucatan Peninsula, and most recently, Namibia, Botswana, and Mozambique. We examined the population by age, sex, and educational status, included other socioeconomic characteristics, and then related this to the natural environment. In doing so, it is important to understand that we are not independent of the environment. We are part of nature. We cannot exist, we cannot breathe, we cannot do anything without air, water, energy, land—without nature.

Between the population and the environment, there is a sphere of manmade environment that may be called development. It includes production, consumption, development, trade, policies, social infrastructure, and political institutions. They mediate between a change in the number of the people and, for example, the air—the question of biodiversity, other species and forests, water availability, land, soil composition, topography, and energy.

We have developed some interactive computer models to describe these complex interactions for specific sites. We can study some of these interactions or several jointly. We can see how the population affects air, emissions, or water, and we can look at the mediating economic factors. Through such a rather complex and differentiated approach, we can gain a better understanding of the complex population-environment interdependencies.

In short, there is a clear relationship. Population affects the environment at many different levels. Rapid population growth certainly has a negative, stressful effect on the environment. But it remains to be determined in rather specific cases: What are the specific impacts? What are the best coping strategies for populations to deal with changing environments? Unfortunately, there is no universal formula that can explain it; it requires some in-depth scientific analysis.

Thank you.