Where We Might Have Been Going

At least one lesson should be clear from the demographic aftermath of the Rockefeller Commission: our "hands off" approach to demographic policy has been anything but, and the resulting massive growth and its consequences should put to rest the notion that we are better off not planning our demographic future than planning for it.

The chart below³⁰ illustrates where we might be today if we had adopted a population policy in 1970 based upon NPG's recommendations to encourage a gradual transition to an optimum population of 150 million.³¹  Pursuing such a goal would have meant reducing immigration to 100,000 a year, accompanied by incentives to temporarily reduce fertility from 2.0 in 1970 to 1.5 by 1985. After 2005,  incentives would encourage fertility to gradually rise back to replacement level by 2050.
 

The NPG projection is compared with the current middle series Census Bureau population projection, which approximates our actual demographic trajectory.³² Under the Census Bureau projection, fertility is assumed to continue its recent rise from 1.7 in the 1970s to 2.1 today, reaching 2.3 in 2050.  Immigration is assumed to remain steady at 800,000 annually.³³ The rise in fertility is due primarily to the influence of the higher fertility rates of Hispanic immigrants, and the immigration rate of 800,000 approximates the prevailing rate of 800,000 to one million annually.

The differences between projections are dramatic. Instead of a population of 263 million in 1995, the U.S. population would have been only 226 million, a difference of 37 million. As we move toward the ends of the projection, the population differences become enormous. Under the NPG projection, the U.S. population would peak at 227 million in 2010 and decline thereafter, reaching 202 million by 2050.  Under the Census Bureau projection, which captures current trends, the United States' population will rise to 394 million by 2050 – a difference of 192 million people from the NPG scenario – and the population will still be growing.
 
 

Where We Ought to Be Going

Looking back is certainly instructive, but the policy implications of doing so are limited: we can't turn the clock back to 1970 in order to follow a different demographic path. We can, however, look to the future and enact policies today that will enable us to achieve an optimum population size tomorrow. 

In doing so, however, we need to be aware that some of the policies that would be required would generate substantial resistance from policy makers, just as they did during the 1970s. Rather than craft a modified domestic population policy, Nixon rejected the conclusions of the Rockefeller Commission outright because his opposition to liberalized access to abortion and contraception was absolute. 

Immigration policy was just as controversial.  Although the Rockefeller Commission proposed the adoption of policies that would lead to the eventual stabilization of the U.S. population, the Commission did not recommend a necessary reduction in immigration to meet that goal. Why? Because passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 was perceived as part of civil rights legislation (the Act ended the much-maligned quota system, replacing it with a system that gives preference to family members), and the Commission did not want to be perceived as attempting to roll back civil rights. 

Certainly access to abortion and contraception are issues that continue to divide Congress today, and their inclusion in any demographic policy would likely generate significant opposition. Immigration rates today are more than double what they were in the 1970s, so more substantial reductions in immigration would be necessary today to achieve population stabilization, and an even more acrimonious fight would ensue over such a proposal. 

Challenging Pro-Growth Attitudes Fundamental But perhaps the greatest opposition to the creation of a national population policy will not be in response to specific policy proposals, but simply to the idea that growth is something that must be controlled.  For two centuries we have fostered pro-growth attitudes, and these views have become central to our understanding of progress.

The number of Americans who prefer two-child  families has greatly increased over the past two decades.

Businesses measure success through growth, and thus the business community heralds reports that the U.S. population has increased: more people mean more customers. Religious communities generally favor growth, perceiving large families as blessings. The political community adores growth because enlarged districts bring the possibility of additional votes and re-election. Growth also means increased political power: growing states may gain political representatives; shrinking states will surely lose them.

Although opposition to the creation of a national population policy will be substantial, we cannot afford to back away from difficult choices simply because they are difficult.  Nixon's decision to dismiss demographic analysis because it raised controversy has kept the United States on an unsustainable population path. Rather than continue down this road it is time face our difficult choices and to join most other nations in taking an active role in determining our demographic future.

The good news is that some U.S. communities may already be questioning our pro-growth policies. The same cities that herald their higher-than-average growth rates are implementing initiatives to fight suburban sprawl. Communities that embrace growth are looking for relief from traffic, school overcrowding and a declining urban quality of life. Pro-growth communities want to know how they can permanently protect their open space and water, and coastal communities are looking to reverse declines in their fisheries.

Even more encouraging, direct measures of public opinion reveal that Americans show a growing preference for small family size in the United States.   According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of Americans who prefer two-child families has increased from 41% in 1972 to 55% in 1994, with declines in the percentage of Americans who prefer substantially larger families.³⁴
 
 

An Optimum and Sustainable Population – More Needed Than Ever

The desire of Americans to ameliorate the consequences of growth combined with evidence that communities are looking for sustainable solutions to over-development and urban sprawl indicates that the United States may be ready once again to pursue a much-needed domestic population policy.  The first step would be to adopt as an explicit target, the goal of reducing the U.S. population to a sustainable and optimum size of not more than 150 million people.

A low-immigration and a low-fertility choice  beginning in the early 1970s would have led to  a far more sustainable population size today.

The Rockefeller Commission anticipated that if the appropriate demographic conditions were achieved within 20 years, the U.S. population would stabilize at 278 million. Today's population is nearly that size already, and it is clear that such a large population cannot be sustained indefinitely.  Rather, NPG advocates that we prepare for a slowly declining population size, resulting in a sustainable population of not more than 150 million people.  This population size would be sufficient to provide all the goods and services needed by U.S. residents while improving quality of life and substantially reducing our impact on the environment.  To achieve this demographic goal, two conditions would need to be satisfied:

First, enact an all-inclusive cap on immigration of 100,000 a year.  Since immigration will be the largest contributor to future U.S. population growth, this is a critical first step in shifting the country to a sustainable demographic path. Reducing immigration will also reduce overall U.S. fertility, since first-generation immigrants tend to have larger-than-average families. As we have seen, the Census Bureau projects that if current trends continue, U.S. fertility will increase over the next 50 years primarily due to the influence of immigration.

While reducing immigration poses a difficult political issue, it might be useful to ask whether the United States could achieve its demographic objectives without changing the level of immigration.  Such an effort would be possible, but to reach it we would have to offset the contribution of immigration through much lower fertility rates. Three considerations argue against this approach. 

First, even considering the political difficulties involved, it is far easier to achieve immigration reduction than to achieve fertility reduction, since immigration can be regulated directly by Congress. Policy makers can only indirectly influence fertility rates.

Second, even if we were able to achieve a population size of not over 150 million without adjusting immigration levels, we would then need to reduce immigration to stabilize the population at that level, unless we were willing to maintain dramatically reduced fertility rates to support high levels of immigration. 

Third, large fluctuations in fertility rates will present age structure problems, just as the baby boom now poses a crisis for Social Security.  Large fluctuations in immigration rates would have a much smaller consequence for the U.S. age structure.

The demographic reality is that ultimately immigration rates would need to decline, and doing so now moves us toward our optimum population much more reliably than trying to do so later.
 

Incentives to achieve a voluntary and temporary reduction in fertility to below replacement level Reducing our population size and stabilizing it at not more than 150 million would require that U.S. total fertility be maintained at below replacement level, but only for several decades.  A gradual decline in fertility to no lower than 1.5 children per woman, followed by a slow increase back to replacement level (2.1), would be ideal in terms of achieving a "soft path" to an optimum population.

A sustainable US population size of  approximately 150 million would help  preserve our natural environment.

This soft path to an optimum population is illustrated in Table 1, under what the U.S. population would have been if NPG's recommendations regarding immigration and incentives to reduce fertility had been adopted in 1970. 

A variety of options are available to help achieve this goal without inappropriately involving the government in individuals' childbearing decisions. 

First, the United States could increase its support for contraceptive research and access.  Every year, nearly six million women in the United States become pregnant, and nearly 50% of these pregnancies are unintended.³⁵ Eighty-five percent of teen pregnancies are unintended,³⁶ and births to teens account for nearly 13% of all births.³⁷  Simply addressing these issues would result in a substantial decline in fertility. In addition, the United States could abandon incentives for increased childbearing by, for example, restructuring the dependency tax deduction.

By advocating a smaller population, the United States could begin to influence cultural and institutional biases toward growth, as well.  Local communities that felt free to endorse the idea of growth control rather than growth management might reinforce couples' decisions to have small families, and vice versa.  Finally, additional research could reveal how our economic policies might influence childbearing decisions. 

For instance, a first-of-its-kind study conducted in 1990 reveals that the personal exemption for dependents in the United States increases fertility.  The study found that a $50 increase in the tax value of the exemption leads to an additional 6 to 12 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.³⁸
 
 

The good news is that about two-thirds of current U.S. biologic growth (net natural increase, births minus deaths) is due to population momentum from the baby boom.   That is, pre-1970 fertility which we can do little about – the large majority of women from this generation have already completed their families or are reaching the end of their child bearing years. Actually, most women in this generation have been quite responsible regarding their family size, with total fertility of about 1.8 births per woman. In fact, overall U.S. total fertility has been (and barely remains) below replacement level since 1973. The bottom line is that if  it were not for high immigration, population momentum would be exhausted and the natural increase component of U.S. growth would end by sometime in the first half of the next century.

Were the United States to immediately enact an all-inclusive cap on immigration at 100,000 a year and provide incentives to voluntarily and gradually reduce fertility to sub-replacement levels, we could see U.S. population growth stop by 2050. Once growth stops, the U.S. would then begin a very gradual transition to a smaller, sustainable population. NPG President Donald Mann has outlined the path to an optimum population in a position paper "Why We Need A Smaller U.S. Population and How We Can Achieve It." Although the path outlined in this paper begins in 1990, we could still easily follow a similar course and end up with a stationary and optimum population of no more than 150 million by sometime shortly after 2110. 

While our nation would have been better off had we been able to move toward an optimum population nearly 30 years ago, it is not too late to set our path right today.  In urging Congress to consider the problem of population growth, Nixon said "When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth."³⁹

Unfortunately, policy makers 30 years ago weren't up to the challenge. Now more than ever, we need dedicated activists working together with NPG to establish policies that will stop our unsustainable growth and begin the transition to a sustainable optimum population.