Welcome and Introduction

Good morning. This is the chance for us to be completely outrageous. We will be talking about a subject that none of us know anything about—and therefore I hope you will all join in—which is our grandchildren’s future, the year 2050.

It’s the kind of conversation we should really reserve for late at night after a dinner such as we had last night. The early hours of Sunday morning are harder to deal with in this capacity, but I’m sure you will all jump in and help us out.

All ideas, however outrageous, will be gratefully received, and to show you that it doesn’t matter if you make a fool of yourself, I intend to make a fool of myself now by predicting the kind of world in which we might be living by 2050. It will of course be a world in which China will be the major power. China, which will by that time have merged with Taiwan, will have colonized Japan, will be pushing north into the empty regions of Russia, and will be casting more than envious glances at the open spaces of Australia.

China will have some two billion people with a wealth equal to that of the United States today on an individual basis. Taken as a whole, it will be vastly wealthier than America. It will be glowering at its main rival—the United States of Canada, America, and Mexico, that fine country in 2050 of 600 million people. It would perhaps be slightly more willing to flex its muscles if it didn’t have the example in its mind of the small nuclear war in 2030 between India and Pakistan that wiped out 200 million people in the Himalayan region and that was a salutatory reminder to all people of the folly of war.

And anyhow, by 2050 America has its all-powerful Star Wars nuclear shield up and finally working to prevent any possibility of an initial strike.

In Europe, of course not many people are left. The population of Italy has fallen by 30 percent, which need not be a bad thing. It means that my grandchildren will be able to see the pictures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence rather than just the back of someone else’s head.

The European Union by that time, of course having a single currency, will stretch from the Urals in Russia to the Atlantic. It will encapsulate a mere 300 million people, who constitute at that stage only a tiny fraction of the world’s population and its wealth. Europe in 2050 will be feeling the pressure of its neighbors: those 300 million people on that narrow strip of sand between Casablanca and Istanbul, pressurizing its southern border.

But if those are the threats in 2050, what are the things that we can have our grandchildren look forward to? A world, of course, awash with energy. Fuel cell technology powering our cars, powering our houses at virtually no cost; unlimited energy from clean nuclear fuel—by this time the brains at the chemistry and physics department at The University of Texas will have gotten their minds around that. Unlimited fuel and unlimited information, the cost of information—of all kinds of information—being zero and the amount of information and one’s ability to use it being infinite.

In fact, if it weren’t for those glaring populations elsewhere in the world, it would be a glorious time to be alive, and boy, will you be alive for a long time. Your grandchildren by 2050 will have had any little bits of DNA that may have needed correcting already corrected in the womb. They will be looking forward to a life span of, well, 100, 150 years, and of course will be completely immune to many of today’s killers. The computer chip imbedded at the time of birth will make quite sure that there’s an immediate alert if anything does go wrong with the DNA programming.

So it will be a great time to be alive.

What will be the divisions? They won’t be "Are you black or white or yellow or anything else?" They will be "Do you come from a family of parents who are married?" There will be a new class. There will be a division between those children who are brought up in stable homes with funny things (good parents who happen to be around for the first 15 years of their life) and those who do not know their parents, certainly do not know their fathers. All of the massive studies that have been done in the United States and in Europe show that this in the future will be the single biggest divide there will be in society. It will be a divide between those children who come from married homes and stable homes and those who do not. It will show up in the grades for exams on Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, the grades in the physics or chemistry papers that they’re getting, and in the jobs that they subsequently get.

They will be good human beings: open, liberal—and I use that in the British context. I’m always aware it’s a word that doesn’t travel the Atlantic necessarily well, but open minded, tolerant of everything except intolerance. That is the result of the freedom of information flow that they will receive.

They will be worried by the 400 million people who have been displaced by 2050 by the rising waters caused by global warming. These will be people who live along deltas and estuaries, whether it be in New Orleans or Bangladesh. They will know that the height of the sea will rise by another eight inches within their own lifetime, flooding yet more vast plains.

Water indeed will be on our grandchildren’s minds, and not just that which is flooding in from the sea. Water will be the main worry and concern, the main subject of war in 2050, because that is the one thing that will not be plentiful. It won’t be plentiful in New Mexico and it certainly won’t be plentiful in the enormous cities of Central China and Africa and of Asia.

One country will cast an envious eye over another country’s river supply and will be willing to go to war to make sure that it gets its water. There will be the certainty of rationing because there will not be enough, not nearly enough to go around.

But if these are the worries that our grandchildren will have, they will on balance be a happier generation than ours, and that is because, by and large, human beings progress. Our lot gets better. We are more reasonable. When we look back at the past, we look at the past as being unreasonable, and you can be quite sure that your grandchildren when they’re my age will look at all of us as being completely unreasonable.

So with those few remarks and having made a complete fool of myself, I hand over to the sober Steven Murdock, who will show us how it’s going to be in 2050 in Texas.

Steven H. Murdock

t’s going to be awfully difficult act to follow, and I’m not going to be nearly as insightful as I think you have been.

I would say as a starting point that we should know that all the things any of us up here say about the future that our grandchildren will live in, you can be certain will be wrong in one part or another, at least to some extent or another.

I’m always reminded of my younger years when as a young demographer I was doing a lot of work on economic demographic modeling, and I was doing a presentation at a professional meeting. A very distinguished colleague of mine who I had a great deal of respect for sat in about the second row, and all the way through my presentation he shook his head. And it was one of those things that I found myself centering all my attention on him by the end of the presentation.

At the end of the presentation, I went running over to him and I said, "What did I say wrong? What was wrong with my presentation?" And he said, "There’s nothing wrong with your presentation." He said, "Your presentation was very sound. It was very well thought out. It was very conceptually and empirically presented in terms of the clarity." He said, "The problem is that projections are a young man’s game. When you get older like I am, you know better."

Well, I’m older but no wiser perhaps, because I continue to do projections, but I do think we need to always put those kinds of warning signs up when we talk about the future.

Well, what are some of the things that we can guess about Texas’s future? One that I think we can be pretty certain of that I mentioned yesterday is that we will be in a more populous Texas. In fact, as you begin to look at Texas and some of the parts of Texas that we talked about yesterday that are linked, I think that we will see urban complexes in Texas that are very much like what we see on the East Coast and the West Coast. And I say that because to many Texans, at least when I first came to Texas, to indicate that we would be urban like either coast was something that was completely unacceptable.

But I think that’s a reality. We’re going to have large urban complexes, and our urban areas will increasingly become like the urban areas of the rest of the country. One of the things that has been different about Texas’s urban areas is that, in a sense, we have had a lag in terms of patterns that were occurring in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago in terms of the manner, for example, of central city growth and the nature of that growth.

But our cities are beginning to follow those same patterns, and so if we look not only to those eastern and western urban complexes for an idea of what life might be like in parts of Texas, we can also get an idea of the problems and issues that are occurring in Texas.

For example, both of our two largest counties—that is, Dallas County and Harris County—now have extensive out-migration of certain population groups from those areas to the suburbs and to other areas. The urban complexes are increasingly populated by immigrants so that the kind of patterns that we’ve associated with other parts of the country’s large urban areas are clearly becoming evident for Texas as well.

We will see a much larger Texas overall. As you know, yesterday we suggested you’d see 34 million people perhaps by 2030. By 2050 it will be larger than that, I believe. It will be an area that—despite the fact that we will be larger, I think one of the things that it is important to note for the U.S. and then for Texas as a subpart of the U.S. is that we’re going to be this decreasingly important part of the world’s population. The U.S. at 4.5 percent or so of the world’s population will be perhaps 2.5 percent of the world’s population, and Texas a subpart thereof.

So there will be a lot bigger world out there that we will be interacting with, that we will be attempting to compete with as well. A gentleman yesterday noted that perhaps we’d all be on Internet and be able to do all of our work from Internet sites at remote locations, and someone else pointed out I think very correctly that yes, that is an advantage except the whole world will now become your competitors, and you will compete for Internet kinds of items.

We will certainly be a more diverse Texas. I mentioned yesterday that we will in the first part, I think, of this decade become less than half Anglo. We will be a population that we project by 2030 will be about 36 percent Anglo, about 10 percent African American, and about 46 percent Hispanic, and about 8 percent will be members of other racial and ethnic groups, primarily Asian.

We will be an area where there will be more intermarriage, where there will be more linking of groups in one form or another. We will be a Texas where I would say, by 2050, Governor Hernandez will look at Lieutenant Governor Gonzales and perhaps the Speaker of the House by the name of Wang, and we will have a very different Texas in terms of what we have seen historically in a variety of ways.

As I mentioned yesterday, I think whether or not that is a difficult situation or an advantageous situation for Texas will depend a great deal on how we handle that diversity.

We’ll obviously be an older Texas, at least in terms of some population components. I mentioned by 2030 we’d have about one in six Texans that would be 65 years of age or older, and we are going to have to handle in Texas, as well as in the country, the difficult situation of what we do in terms of benefits and so forth that are provided to the elderly.

Often, when we look at this in the U.S., we think of this as a national issue. Everyone knows about social security and the debate about social security, but it is not all in the national picture. Let me give you just one example.

Two sessions ago, we were asked by the Texas Legislature to take these demographics and look at the implications of a property tax factor that we have in Texas sometimes called the 65-plus freeze, which is that when you turn 65 in Texas the value of your property locks in and it never appreciates again. Now, your taxes may go up because the jurisdiction may raise the rate for your taxes, but the value of your property basically locks in.

Well, if you look at that as we did and look at the aging of the population and if you take average levels of appreciation in housing values for the last 20 years, what you’ll find is that by 2030 local school districts in Texas because of this provision could be forgoing—because you forgo if your property appreciates and there is money lost that would otherwise be gained—the average school district in Texas would forgo an amount equal to $1 of every $5 that they were collecting as a result of the 65-plus freeze.

We also have many agencies in Texas that we are telling to be self-supporting. Take one that’s recreational related. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is told to become increasingly self-supporting relative to parks, relative to its programs, and what happens in Texas when you reach 65 relative to hunting or fishing? It’s free, absolutely free.

Well, these are little kinds of factors, but the point of it is that we’re going to have to start to consider whether we want to change some of those factors as we become an older population, and I am not at all suggesting we should do away with the 65-plus freeze. Every year I get older, the more important and the more logical that becomes to me. But certainly we’re going to have to make some tough decisions, and it’s not just at the national level. It’s going to be at the state level, and it’s going to be at the local level.

But it is, I admit, hard for me even in a very futuristic view to imagine a politician running for statewide or local office on a platform of taking benefits away from the elderly. I’m not sure of the electability of that.

I think another factor—and John yesterday did talk somewhat about this and we did this morning a little bit—is that we are going to be a much more diverse range of households than we have had in the past. When we think stereotypically about families and households, we tend to think of that ideal Texas/American household. You probably all know what that is. I know what it is from growing up in the ‘50s from sitcoms. It consists of a mother and father, two children—one male, one female, with the male preferably two years older than the female—and one collie dog.

Well, the reality of it is that in Texas in 1990, only 28 percent of our households were married-couple-with-children households. Basically three of every four households in Texas were some other form of household, so as you look at services and we look at planning things, we need to take into account these sorts of factors.

Over 30 percent of births in Texas are to unmarried women. Now, what’s different about that than the past is those are not teenage women. These are not necessarily young adults. I mean, they are young adults, but they’re not necessarily women who did not make a choice to bear children on their own, and as was very well pointed out earlier, this is a factor that is going to be increasingly important.

We’ve already come to the situation where a decreasing proportion of kids live with two parents. In 1960 about 88 percent of the children in America lived with two parents. In 1998 that was down to about 68 percent—20 percent in that period of time—and all patterns suggest that the diversity of households will change. Singlehoodness will increase as well.

We’re at one of the highest rates of singleness—that is, people who never marry any time in their lifetime—that we have ever had, and so the diversity of household forms, the diversity of household types that was mentioned earlier will affect Texas as well.

I say that because sometimes people think, well, we must have substantially different patterns in Texas. We do to some extent, but those patterns frankly are primarily a result of our other diversity—the fact, for example, that Hispanic households tend to be more likely to be married-couple-with-children households than Anglo households are. So our overall statistics look a little different than the country primarily because of our diversity, but the diversity of household types that we’ve seen and talked about is something that we are going to deal with as well.

We are going to have to face a number of environmental issues in Texas, and I don’t claim to be an expert on the environment so I’m not going to espouse too much about things I know very little about. But clearly issues such as water—we are for the first time trying to plan the future of water use in Texas as a result of Senate Bill 1 a few years ago, and groups are meeting all over the state. But the fun part of that hasn’t started yet, and that is the starting to make decisions about who gets water and who does not get water, and that’s going to affect a great deal of development decisions in Texas and, indirectly, the allocation of growth in Texas.

Where that will occur and what the implications will be I’m not going to even guess at, but I think that water will be among those issues that will be very critical to understanding particularly what happens in particular parts of Texas.

We do have air quality and water quality issues that we are going to have to deal with as we get those urban complexes that I talked about a few minutes ago, so environmental issues, although many of you spent very little time the last couple of days talking about them, are going to be big issues I think for Texas.

The last thing I will simply say is this. What Texas will be like for our grandchildren is not carved in stone. Demography is not destiny, at least not total destiny, and that’s a hard thing for a demographer to have to say, but it’s a reality. We can change the futures, particularly from the ones that some of us were talking about yesterday, through our private and public actions.

Sometimes I’m asked about the Texas Challenged work that we have done and said what would we like to be the final effect of that, and my answer’s always the same: I would like for every projection that we have made in the Texas Challenged book and work to come out to be untrue. In 2030 and in 2050, I would like my grandchildren to say, "Boy, our grandfather was really a fool, wasn’t he? He thought we were going to have all these problems and here we are in a very integrated, efficient, competitive Texas. Why did he ever think what he thought about our future at the turn of the century?"

To me that would be what I’d really like to have happen, and I believe it is a future we can have, but it is a future that we will have to make. It will not happen without both our private and public actions.