By James Pethokoukis
An expanding population can be a big plus if you think faster technological progress and economic growth to be desirable. More people mean bigger markets to sell to and a larger workforce to make products and deliver services. Less obviously, perhaps, a bigger population means potentially “more researchers, which in turns leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards,” explains Stanford University economist Charles Jones in his 2020 paper, “The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population.” The more discoverers, inventors, and innovators the better.
So it’s good news from a pro-growth perspective that US births increased last year—up 1 percent from 2020—for the first time in seven years, according to federal figures released Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Yet the longer-term trend looks to be one of decline. Births plummeted during the Global Financial Crisis and never really recovered. “This minor blip up still leaves us on a long-term trajectory towards lower births,” said Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
And unfortunately, the immigration numbers don’t look any more encouraging. Goldman Sachs estimates that a slowdown in the growth of the country’s foreign-born population between 2019 and 2021 has left the US population “around 2 million smaller than it would otherwise have been, and the labor force around 1.6 million smaller.” And the bank doesn’t foresee much happening in Washington anytime soon that would significantly alter that trend. It also notes that estimates from the Congressional Budget Office “suggest that the gap might grow wider.”
Too few immigrants is an easier policy problem to solve than too few births, of course. But you wouldn’t know that by what’s been happening in the American political system. Then again, maybe I am overestimating our desire for faster growth and tech progress, not to mention more productive capacity that can help fight inflation.
The post US Births Have Ticked Up, but Overall the News on Population Growth Is Bad appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.