Taps Coogan – September 16th, 2022

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Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute recently sat down with Uncommon Knowledge’s Peter Robinson to discuss the implosion in fertility rates in the US (and elsewhere) and why that’s such a looming economic and social problem for the nation.

In addition to highlighting the relevant demographic trends which we discuss so often here at The Sounding Line, Nicholas Eberstadt makes the point that America’s exceptional economic growth over the past couple hundred years was in no small part enabled by robust fertility rates and immigration rates that were higher than most of our Western peers. Furthermore, the sorts of things needed to live prosperously with a declining and aging population, rapid increases in per-capita productivity, rising labor participation, improving public health, etc… are not only not happening, but moving in the wrong direction.

He also notes that the last time the country seriously contemplated the reality of peaking populations was during the Great Depression. Fertility and immigration rates dropped at the time and projections of the day had the US population peaking in the 1960s, projections which of course turned out to be very wrong.

All in all, the discussion is a call for national renewal.

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