America’s Shrinking Workforce: How Demographic Trends Are Reshaping the U.S. Economy

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Text: Wednesdays With Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series

Slide with an open laptop with text Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series on the screen, a red mug with the Travelers umbrella logo, and a plant. In the upper right corner is the speaker's video. Text: Joan Woodward

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JOAN WOODWARD: Hi there, everyone. Welcome and we're really appreciative you're here today. My name is Joan Woodward, and I have the pleasure of leading the Travelers Institute, which is our public policy and educational arm of Travelers. Today we're going to talk about America's changing demographic and, most importantly, its impact on the economy.

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Before we dive in, I want to start with a quick disclaimer about today's program.

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Text: America's Shrinking Workforce: How Demographic Trends Are Reshaping the U.S. Economy. Logos: Travelers Institute (registered trademark) Travelers, Big I Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, Metro Hartford Alliance, University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business.

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I'd also like to thank our webinar partners today, the MetroHartford Alliance, the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center at the University of South Carolina's Darla School of Business and the BIG I. As you may know, I talk regularly to groups around the country about the state of the economy, and my economic, public policy and political outlook talk covers a lot of ground, if you've seen me before.

One of the economic challenges I address in my speeches is exactly what we're talking about today, the inverted population pyramid, when a shrinking working-age share of the population must support a growing elderly one. So you can imagine, I was thrilled to hear that the Aspen Economic Strategy Group has a new report on this topic. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group is a program of nonpartisan Aspen Institute focused on promoting evidence-based solutions to significant U.S. economic challenges.

We're putting a link to the report in the chat right now. That multivolume report, Demographic Headwinds, The Economic Consequences of Lower Birth Rates and Longer Lives, examines the broad economic consequences of two simultaneous trends that are reshaping America-- one, the falling birth rate, and two, rising life expectancy.

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Text: Today's Speaker: Luke Pardue, Ph.D. Policy Director Aspen Economic Strategy Group Aspen Institute.

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We're fortunate to have the coauthor of that report, Luke Pardue, with us today.

Luke is the Policy Director at the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland and has worked at the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board. Luke is going to start us off with a rundown of the report, and then we'll get into a discussion and, of course, answer your questions. So put your questions in that Q&A feature, and we're going to get to as many as we can.

So, Luke, thanks so much for your time today. The virtual floor is yours.

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Luke Pardue's video appears in the top right corner. Text: Demographic Headwinds, The Economic Consequences of Lower Birth Rates and Longer Lives, Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Logo: Aspen Institute

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LUKE PARDUE: Great. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to talk about these trends in the report that the Aspen Economic Strategy Group just released. The report is entitled Demographic Headwinds, The Economic Consequences of Lower Birth Rates and Longer Lives, and I'll be happy to walk through those consequences with you. I think it's useful just at the start to set the stage what we mean by these demographic headwinds, these demographic shifts that we're seeing, and what the economic consequences are so that we can have a nice conversation afterwards.

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Text: About the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, The Aspen Economic Strategy Group (A.E.S.G.) is a program of the Aspen Institute composed of a diverse, bipartisan group of distinguished leaders and thinkers with the goal to promote evidence-based solutions to significant US economic challenges. Leadership. Co-Chairs Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Timothy Geithner. Director Melissa S. Kearney. Policy Director, Luke Pardue

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Just in terms of a little bit of background, as Joan briefly mentioned, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group-- we are a program of the Aspen Institute, devoted to advancing bipartisan, evidence-based solutions to significant U.S. economic challenges. We are led by our Co-Chairs, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, two former Treasury secretaries. Melissa Kearney is our Director, and then I'm the Policy Director of the group. And so I'm excited to dive into some of this data right now.

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A graph titled Life Expectancy and Total Fertility Rate, 1940-2018 shows the year from 1940 to 2020 on the x-axis, total fertility rate from 1 to 4 on the y-axis, and life expectancy at birth (years) from 60 to 90 on the z-axis. A red dotted line labeled Life expectancy at birth increases steadily from under 1.5 fertility rate and under 65 years in 1940 to almost 3 fertility rate and about 79 years in 2020. A solid blue line labeled Total Fertility Rate (T.F.R.) starts at under 2.5 fertility rate and 75 years in 1940, increases and peaks at 3.75 and 87 years in 1955, then decreases sharply to under 2 fertility rate and 67 years after 1970 and stays around that until 2020. A horizontal dotted line at just above 2 fertility rate and 70 years is labeled Replacement rate (2.1.). Text: The birth rate in the US has been on a downward trend since 2007, falling to a historic low in 2023. At the same time, average life expectancy has risen by 8 years since the 1960s. Taken together, these trends are creating both a slower-growing and aging US population.

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So the first thing that I think is helpful to go through is just, what are these demographic shifts that I'm referring to? And there are two dual trends that I'm looking at, which is, one, the decline in the birth rate in the U.S. over the last two decades, specifically, and then, two, the longer lifespans that older Americans are experiencing. So here on this chart that I'm showing, you can see two lines. The blue line is what we call the total fertility rate. This is a measure of birth trends in the United States that measures how many children a woman might expect to have over the course of her life if she followed current fertility trends.

And this goes back to the 1940s, '50s, '60s. And you can see the big bump that happens in that period is the baby boom, when the total fertility rate reached about 3.8 children per woman. And then, after the baby boom, had fell considerably, but held steady at around 2.1 for several decades. And that's important because 2.1 is a level that economists and demographers think is what's necessary for a population to replace themselves over time. So that 2.1 level is called the replacement rate.

And we held steady there for several decades before, in 2007, seeing a sharp and a sustained decline in births in the U.S. And over the past two decades, the total fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen from 2.1 to a record low of about 1.6 in 2024. And then, just recently, last week, the CDC, which measures these birth trends, released new provisional data for 2025 that showed that birth rates reached a new historic low in 2025, with the total fertility rate reaching 1.57 births per woman. So we're seeing a continued, sustained decline, since about 2007, in births in the United States.

And then, on the other end, what we're seeing is expanding lifespans for older Americans. And this is a relatively simple trend to explain, which is to say that, in terms of increasing technology and healthcare, increasing accessibility of healthcare, Americans are living longer. In 1960, a person born might expect to live to 70 years old. In today, a person born might expect to live to about 78 years old, on average. So we're seeing a decline in birth rates and an increase in life expectancy.

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A figure titled Figure 1: Workforce age, 1976 vs. 2024 with two charts below. Chart A title Workforce age distribution in 1976 and 2024 shows Percentage on the x-axis with 0% in the center then increasing both left and right, and Age range on the y-axis. Dark blue bars labeled Share in 1976 show the greatest amount of younger workers then slowly decreasing as workers get older. Light blue bars labeled Share in 2024 show the greatest amount of workers in their 30s then slowly decreasing as workers get older and the lowest percentage of youngest workers in their 20s. Chart B titled Change in workforce age, 2024-1976 shows Percentage shift on the x-axis and Age range on the y-axis. The greatest percentage shift is in the youngest workers. Text: Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Logo: aspen institute. Notes: Panel A shows the age distribution of workers in the United States in the first and last sample years: 1976 and 2024. The bars report the share of full-time private-sector employment accounted for by workers in each age group. Panel B plots the change in these shares between 1976 and 2024. The sample includes full-time private-sector employees who worked at least 24 weeks during the prior year and earned positive wages. It includes workers between 16 and 65 years old. Statistics are weighed using CPS weights. Source: I.P.U.M.S. C.P.S. (Flood et al. 2024), authors' calculations. Longer life expectancies and improved health have led to an older workforce. As workers stay in their roles longer, there are fewer opportunities for younger workers to move into high-paying and managerial jobs.

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And so, I'd be happy to go through just a few important economic implications of these trends. And so the first one is in the U.S. workforce, what we're seeing. And this doesn't necessarily have to do as much with the decline in birth rates as it does with the second trend of the rise in lifespans. And what we're seeing is that, as Americans are living longer, older Americans are working longer, which is, in part, a good thing. Firms think that these workers are more productive. They have on-the-job skills and firm-specific experience that firms want to hold on to.

But, amid a economic environment of slower job growth and declining business dynamism, what that also means is that it's creating this congestion in the workforce. As older workers hang on to their high-paying, managerial jobs, younger workers are not able to move up the career ladder in the same way that they used to. And that has knock-on effects because they're not seeing the same amount of earnings growth or career growth, which means that, early in their career, they can't buy homes or afford to start a family. And so this congestion in the workplace, as we like to call it, is having large, significant economic implications for younger workers.

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Text: Figure 4: Decomposition of effects of rising old-age dependency ratios on old age entitlement spending and deficits. B. Aging effects on primary and total deficits. A chart below shows Fiscal Year from 1965 to 2055 on the x-axis and Percentage of GDP from negative 5% to 15% on the y-axis. A blue line labeled Primary deficit starts at 0% in 1965 then has increasingly bigger peaks and troughs until 1985 when it decreases to the lowest percentage negative 5% in 2000, then has three more peaks of increasing value, going to almost 15% in 2020. A solid blue line continues to plateau after the dotted vertical line at 2025 labeled projection, while a dotted blue line slopes gradually downward. A red line labeled Total deficit follows the same trajectory but trends slightly higher. Text: Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Logo: aspen institute. Source: Authors' calculations based historical budget estimates from C.B.O. (2025b), long-run budget projections from C.B.O.(2025d), population data from the Human Mortality Database (n.d.), and long run demographic projections from C.B.O. (2025a). The aging of the Baby Boom generation is driving the rise of the old-age ratio in the US (ratio of elderly Americans to working-age population). This rise is responsible for all of the projected increase in the US budget deficit over the next 30 years.

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Secondly, these demographic headwinds are creating some shifts in the federal budget, and they have driven, and they are continuing to drive, the large and rising federal budget deficit that the U.S. is seeing. And this mainly has to do with the fact that, as that big bump that I showed you in fertility in the 1950s, in terms of the baby boom-- as the baby boom generation ages, they're entering retirement age. And many of them have already entered retirement age, but many of them are continuing to enter retirement age.

And as they retire, they take advantage of old-age entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. And the way those programs are funded is that the obligations of those retirees are paid for by current workers. And so the program was in a pretty good financial position when the baby boom generation was working because there was a bunch of workers that were funding the obligations of existing retirees. But now we don't have as many workers because birth rates fell after the baby boom, and that means that we don't have as many workers paying taxes to support their obligations, and so now the structure of the Social Security and Medicare programs are not as sustainable.

And so, a coauthor, Lisa Dettling, with myself, actually ran an analysis that asked how much of the aging of the population and the obligations of Social Security and Medicare are driving the U.S. fiscal situation, and we find that basically all of the rising debt in the U.S. is driven by Social Security and Medicare obligations that current workers can't pay for. So that's another significant implication of these twin demographic headwinds.

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Text: Figure 3: Enrollment and per enrollee expenditure changes among regular school districts with stable boundaries. Below is a chart with Change in log enrollment from 1994 to 2019 from 0 in the center to 1 on each side on the x-axis and Change in log expenditures from 1994 to 2019 from 0.8 to 1.3 on the y-axis. A solid red line shows the trend of the dots on the graph from 1.3 at 1 sloping downward with a cluster of dots from 1.1 at 0.5 to below 0.9 at 0.5. Text: Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Logo: aspen institute. Text: Source: Author's calculations using data from the Common Core of Data (2025) produced by the National Center for Education Statistics, as pre-processed by the Urban Institute and made available through its Education Data Portal. The underlying data on just under 9,000 school districts have been grouped into 30 bins based on the size of each district's change in enrollment. Each circle represents the means of the changes in log enrollment and log per capita expenditures from 1994 to 2019 across the districts within each bin. Best fit lines have been estimated separately on the underlying school district observations for the districts with enrollment changes above versus below 0. Historically, states experiencing population growth have been able to take advantage of economies of scale to slow per-capita spending growth. But scaling down services as communities experience population decline will present substantially greater challenges than scaling them up.

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And then, finally, the last implication has to do not with the federal budget, but with state and local finances. So, even over the past decade, we've been seeing this phenomenon of local population decline, driven by low fertility rates. Certain places in America are seeing their populations decline already. Indeed, over half-- or I should say about half-- of U.S. counties in the U.S., in the 2010s, saw their population decline. And that trend, amid declining fertility, is expected to continue and actually expand in the future.

And one thing that we see is that this trend has really important implications because state and local governments pay for a lot of everyday services-- education, healthcare, transportation, roads, bridges, metro systems. All of these are largely provided for by state and local governments. And they're easy to pay for when there's lots of people to spread those high costs around, but as there are fewer people, and indeed, as the population shrinks, it's going to be much more difficult to pay for a lot of these services.

Here in this chart, what the author of this paper, Jeffrey Clemens, showed is that, as these counties saw growing populations, it was actually really easy to increase services, to scale up these services. It's easy to build another large interstate highway or a metro transit system, or build a new school, when you have a lot of people to spread those costs around. But now, as these counties are facing declining populations, it's actually much more harder to scale down, to consolidate those services, just because they involve high fixed costs.

And so when counties see population decline, per-resident costs skyrocket. And as I said, this is a phenomenon that many counties are experiencing right now, but more and more counties are going to have to figure out how to navigate continuing to provide these services amid declining populations, going forward.

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Text: Thank you!

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So, in brief, those are the three large economic implications that we've seen or examined through-- in this volume, but I'd be happy to dig into any of them and to answer your questions.

JOAN WOODWARD: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Luke. That was a great, quick overview. We asked him to do it quickly so we can get to all your questions.

So let's start, Luke, with fertility rates. Your report clearly shows that, in the US, rates have declined sharply after 2007. So what does this research suggest is driving that? Why 2007-- it was the great financial crisis, a year before it started, but why do you think?

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's an important question and one that economists are continuing to think about. And we're continuing to think about it mainly because a lot of the research doesn't really point to any single specific driver of the decline in fertility rates. One thing that's important to keep in mind is that the U.S. has seen a decline in birth rates since 2007, but it is actually taking place in the context of a more widespread decline in births among pretty much all high-income countries.

Indeed, the U.S. is actually pretty far behind some of these other countries, like Japan, like China, like high-income countries in Europe, in terms of the decline in birth rates. And so it's widespread internationally. And then, also, even within the United States, we're seeing that the decline in births is spread across many different subsets of women-- across education groups, for instance. And so this is what we think of as much more of a broad-based decline than being concentrated in any specific group.

And my own research, along with my colleague Melissa Kearney and Phil Levine, try and look at many different possible drivers-- student loans, childcare costs, housing costs, even looking at trends like religiosity to try and find correlates with the decline in births across states.

And there's no real single trend that we can point to, and so that leads us to conclude that what we're seeing is much more along the lines of a broad shifting of priorities, especially among younger women, in terms of the ways that their goals and aspirations were formed and the other ways that they prefer to spend their time these days, especially as they're in their 20s and 30s. And so it's much more of a broad-based trend that's driven by societal attitudes and structures more than any specific economic factor.

JOAN WOODWARD: So you did mention China and Japan. I want to talk about that because China clearly had their one-child-policy families. You might want to explain what that is, but it is what it sounds like. The birth rates declined greatly in China and Japan. And how did that work out for their economies, and what can we learn from that?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot that we can learn, both from China and Japan and, more broadly, internationally. And I think it's a good thing to draw those lessons, but more frequently than not, the lesson is what not to do, or what policies might not be the most effective. And particularly, coercive policies, we found, are certainly not effective or preferable for this sort of trend.

And so, as you said, China and Japan are around 1 or 1.2 births per woman, in terms of their total fertility rate. Many countries, like Italy and Spain, in Europe, are around the same birth rates. And so, as I mentioned, this trend is very widespread. And what I would say is, first of all, one lesson from international experience is just how hard it is to reverse many of these norms and societal attitudes once they become hardened or ingrained in society. Japan is a country that is becoming much less welcoming to children just in everyday public life, and that creates a cycle by which it's hard to reverse these trends.

One country that you all might not have expected to see today is Poland, which is also seeing a large fertility decline. They actually just instituted, about in 2016, a very broad-based, widespread, generous child allowance that particularly incentivizes second and third children. And that has actually seen some positive effects, not necessarily reversing the birth rate, but at least arresting the decline in births in the country. And I think we can draw lessons just in terms of the fact that we're going to need very widespread, generous, highly salient policies in order to reverse these trends in the U.S.

JOAN WOODWARD: And are policymakers in the U.S.-- I mean, they focused on this? They clearly are focused on-- we'll talk about this later-- the Social Security Trust Fund going bankrupt shortly. But are they focused on incentivizing families to have children? And is it social engineering? Would we want governments-- like you just said, Poland is offering these quite generous incentives. How would you think U.S. society would view that?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure. I think that the way that-- First of all, one of the reasons that we put out this volume is to increase general public attention on the economic implications of these trends. I think that it is often overlooked. Social Security is highly salient. People always pay attention to the solvency of Social Security. And I think a lot of these other implications, particularly on state and local governments, are often overlooked.

And so one of our goals was actually to create a little bit more attention and urgency because part of the silver lining is that we're very early in this trend, compared to other countries that are having a more difficult time, so it's likely that we might have a bit of an easier time reversing some of these trends. And in terms of policy solutions, I think that's really where we need to look, which is relaxing-- to the extent that these trends reflect constraints that young families face who might otherwise have children, we can continue to relax those constraints.

And specifically, it really ties into this affordability debate that's happening. And I think that's the way that we should think about what it means to raise the birth rate, to make raising a family more affordable and accessible, because a lot of these-- there might not be one single issue, although we can point to housing and childcare costs. A lot of these are much more broadly about how people feel. It's just not affordable to have a family, to get ahead today.

JOAN WOODWARD: Yeah, and we saw that in our data, too. I think the government posted, most recently, first-time homebuyers-- it used to be the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 27, 28. It's all the way up to 40. So the affordability issue in homebuying, clearly, is something we look at all the time.

LUKE PARDUE: If I can plug one piece of research, actually, right there, because housing is really central to this issue. Again, my colleague Melissa Kearney and one of her coauthors did this report, actually, that looks at the baby boom and said, what was happening during that period, domestically, that might have contributed to the baby boom? And they actually find that the introduction of low-down-payment, long-term, fixed-rate mortgages through the government, through the Federal Housing Agency, through other means, contributed to about 10% of the rise in births over that period.

And so I think that that really points to the role of public policy in creating housing affordability that allows families to feel like they have this foothold to start a family. And there's something really central about the role of housing, I think, that policymakers can look to. And again, that data points to the magnitude of the issue that we're facing there.

JOAN WOODWARD: Yeah. In fact, back when the financial crisis hit, and President Obama and the Republicans agreed to all the stimulus bills, just like we had stimulus bills out of Washington during COVID, one of them that I thought was the most economically efficient was the $10,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit, which I think was in place for two or three years and then went away. But if you give young folks and others a $10,000 incentive to buy that house, I thought that was a good economic policy.

OK, we talked about fertility. Let's go on the other end of the spectrum, which is people are living longer. And this is really good news. Our healthcare system today is the best in the world, but it's also one of the costliest in the world. So the economics, though, are really sobering, of people living longer-- a lot more elderly folks; fewer workers paying in taxes to support them; the increase in spending, as you mentioned; Medicare, Social Security, further ballooning federal deficit.

So I think we have a slide here showing the number of workers paying into Social Security, as well as the retiree that's benefiting from those workers. And you could see, over these decades, how many workers-to-retiree ratio is really-- it's problematic.

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Text: Boomin' and Ready For Social Security. A figure below is titled Worker to Retiree Ratios. 1950 has a 16 to 1 ratio. 1960 has a 5 to 1 ratio. 2020 has a 4 to 1 ratio. 2040 has a 3 to 1 ratio. An image of a Social Security card. Text: Social Security reserves projected to deplete in 2033. Starting in 2033, there will be a 23% across-the-board cut in benefits. Source: Social Security Administration/ U.S. Census Bureau

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LUKE PARDUE: I have similar data, and what we can see is that, just in terms of the working-age population that supports these retirees, as you're showing-- in 2020, there was about 24 people for every 100 aged 65 or older. And by 2025, that's-- sorry, there's about 24 elderly Americans for every 100 working-age adults. And by 2025, that's risen to 35. And so again, the financing structure of Social Security was really great when we were back in that 1950 period, but it becomes a little bit more sobering in 2020 and a lot more sobering in 2040.

JOAN WOODWARD: So, entitlement reform-- we talk about it a lot in the country. Nothing ever gets done. Obviously, the third rail of politics. What do you recommend? How is this cycle going to break and have policymakers really focus on these programs, entitlements and others you say are the largest part of the ballooning deficit? What can we do in the public sector, the nonprofit sector, to incentivize our policymakers to focus on this?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure. I think the way that I like to start this out is by pointing out the fact that maybe the primary forcing mechanism is the fact that, once the Social Security Trust Fund expires, by law, we will begin to see benefit cuts. So I think it's 2033 or 2034 when the trustees expect the trust fund to be depleted to zero, the trust fund that we've built out and is currently paying benefits. Once that hits zero, elderly Americans are expected to see about a 24%, 25% across-the-board cut in benefits.

And so no action, doing nothing, is actually equivalent to acquiescing to a benefits cut for elderly Americans. And in terms of what to do once we reach that forcing mechanism, or hopefully before, if we can actually get our act together and think ahead a little bit, is thinking about a framework that really gets Social Security back to its original aims of being an old-age entitlement program that provides income security against the risk that elderly Americans outlive their savings. And that's really what it was meant to do.

And we can do that by shoring up the revenues-- revenue is almost certainly going to have to be part of the conversation-- and also thinking about some of the structure of the payouts and the way that benefits are calculated. So, on the revenue side, one thing I'll point out is that there's a greater and greater share, as the economy evolves, of wages that are not being subject to Social Security taxes. Social Security taxes individuals' earnings up to a maximum, and an increasing share of earnings are above that maximum in recent decades. And so, we can think about the specifics of the policy, but it just means that much, much more of the wages that are being paid out to workers aren't being subject to Social Security taxes and aren't contributing to revenue.

And then, on the benefit side, I don't think I'll make many friends by pointing this out, but the wealthiest retired couples often claim $100,000 a year in Social Security benefits. And I think that fact alone is evidence that we're getting away from this original structure of Social Security as an income security program. And many more Americans across the income spectrum are getting paid out much more than they put into the system.

And so I think we can think about ways to adjust the benefit formula that elderly Americans are-- at least, the workers today who will become elderly Americans later-- how they expect to be paid out, just to reflect the original intention of this program, less as a retirement program that is incredibly generous and pays out more than you put in, but as an insurance program against outliving your savings.

JOAN WOODWARD: No, totally agree. I mean, you talk about taking the wage cap off. For those who don't know, you're only taxed at 6.2% on your first-- I think it's $175,000 of income, and then you have no Social Security taxes after that. So taking that wage cap off, which is what they did in 1983-- the Greenspan-Moynihan commission took off the wage cap for Medicare payroll taxes, so you're paying 1.45% on every last dollar you make.

So that's certainly something policymakers could do and do pretty quickly. Or they could raise it. They could raise it from $175 up to $200 or $500 or name your price.

OK, I want to get in a little bit deeper to what you call the congestion effect in your report. I found this fascinating. And we have a program at the institute called Forces at Work, looking at all the implications for the workforce-- workers compensation, the elderly folks staying longer in their jobs-- or more tenured, I guess, is the right way to say it.

You talk about the age divide, which describes the congestion effect, where older workers, again, are staying longer, blocking those young folks from advancing, and maybe even reducing entry-level job openings, which we hear a lot about today. Of course, that person can't buy that home or start a family if they're stuck at that ceiling, so is there something that policymakers could do to correct that?

LUKE PARDUE: Surely. I mean, I think this is an area where international experience is also instructive-- mainly, again, because many of these countries have been dealing with this issue in a way that we're just starting to deal with. I'm thinking again of Italy, of Japan. These countries that have aging populations are much farther along in this congestion. And particularly Europe-- you can see a lot of issues with youth unemployment that is tied to these demographic trends.

Again, unfortunately, I think a lot of the conclusions lead to a "what not to do" playbook because they fundamentally miss this dynamic, which I think you nicely laid out, which is that it is a very good thing that older workers are working longer and are able to contribute productively to the economy for a longer amount of time. I mean, sometimes when I talk about this, I fear falling into this trap of talking about how boomers are holding on to their jobs, and we should just institute mandatory retirement ages or something like that.
But again, it is actually a really good thing that these older workers are able to work longer because they have firm-specific knowledge. They know how to get things done. They have soft skills, that-- like leadership and management, that are able to help people navigate their firms. And this is a revealed preference dynamic from firms because they're keeping these older workers on. If they weren't productive, they wouldn't be. And so I think, in a lot of ways, this is a very positive development.

But amid this environment where younger workers don't have other job opportunities, and there's not a lot of jobs growth or entrepreneurship, new business formation, it is creating these challenges for younger workers. And in terms of that international evidence, mandatory retirement ages and voluntary retirement ages have been the name of the game in Italy and Japan. And again, those haven't really been effective because they miss the point. They slow economic growth because these older workers that have this productivity and knowledge are being forced out.

And there's even, say, subsidies for firms to hire younger workers. But what, again, that means is that younger workers might be shuttled into these firms that are less productive and are dependent on these subsidies. And so none of this is really good news for encouraging broad-based economic growth. But what I would say is that there are policies that address this fundamental challenge we're seeing, which is, how do you capture this productivity, the upside of having all of these older workers, while also enabling the dynamism and the growth for younger workers that we'll need down the line?

And a lot of that can be captured in public-policy incentives for firms to invest in on-the-job training. Older workers who impart their knowledge and their skills to younger workers in a greater way is one avenue. And more broadly, again, this is driven by a lack of dynamism and growth in the U.S. economy. And so, to the extent that we can invest in capital, invest in policies that spur new business formation, then we'll be able to see younger workers have those opportunities that they're not seeing today.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, great. Let's talk about something that you did not include in your research in this report, immigration. So we all know that's part of the mix. How do you see immigration fitting into-- or complicating, maybe-- the demographic picture? Because clearly, in the last year and a half, two years, we've seen an incredible decline in folks coming to the U.S., and how do you think about that?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure. And just to put that in the picture, I think we've been seeing these really large swings in immigration over the past several years. But over the long term, what we've been seeing is that immigration has played an increasingly large role in driving population and labor-force growth in the U.S. And amid a background of declining birth rates, the math is pretty simple that, absent net immigration to the U.S., we'll start to see net population decline by 2030. And that is to say that births will be outnumbered by deaths in the United States, domestically, by 2030.

And so, again, if there's no net immigration, we don't see any population growth at that point. And so immigration has a huge role to play in driving population and workforce growth over the near term. And the way that I like to think of immigration is a policy that might be able to soften some of the demographic headwinds we're facing domestically. I mean, raising birth rates can increase the number of adults and the number of workers in the labor force 20 years from now, which we should aim to do, which is a good thing. But in the meantime, immigration can raise those rates today.

And specifically, one thing we like to point to is the role of high-skill immigration because those high-skill immigrants, who have-- often have STEM degrees, have Ph.D.s, come in with new business ideas or technological innovations, actually spur that dynamism that I just talked about that was so important. They often create new firms. They create jobs. Rigorous economic evidence has shown that they're actually a net fiscal bonus, so they solve some of our fiscal strains.

And I think the policy solution there is really being strategic. Even within the overall numbers that we agree on or more or less have settled on. We can be more strategic about who we want to choose to let in and to contribute to economic growth. And so I don't want to be naive. I know immigration's a very politically sensitive topic, and it brings out strong opinions. But I think there are some common-sense reforms that we can settle on that will make the immigration system a little bit more of an asset and a tool that can soften these demographic headwinds.

JOAN WOODWARD: Wonderful, great. I agree 100% on that.

OK, I'm going to take some audience questions here because I've been watching the Q&A, and we've had a lot on AI. And I know your team is actually working on a new report of the impact of AI on the job market. We're going to invite you back for the whole hour to spend on that. But for today's conversation, how might advances in AI play into the dynamics that we're talking about here?

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah, that's a good question, and it's definitely one that we could actually just spend the entire hour on. And I'm excited to come back and to spend that hour because the first thing is to say that there's just so many different factors at play, and there's so much uncertainty over the path of technological progress over the timeline, over not only the capabilities of AI, but over adoption from businesses, how they integrate it into their business, which is really where the rubber meets the road.

But I'll just focus on a few things and set the context that way. I'm somebody, personally, that thinks that AI is going to dramatically transform the global economy. I think that, depending on the timeline we consider, those consequences get more and more existential. But at least in the near term, people will continue to play a role, and a central role, in the economy.

At a most basic level, if you look at the jobs report month to month, we're seeing basically all the jobs in the U.S. economy right now being created in healthcare. And in large part, that's one sector that is particularly dependent on people and, to go back to our last conversation, actually, a lot on immigration, which has part of the role to play. But thinking particularly about jobs like home health aides and different technicians-- those are jobs that people need to fill right now. And maybe, eventually, over that much longer timeline, we can think about the role that AI will play.

But at least in the near term, in many critical industries, people will continue to play a role, and even in white-collar jobs. I think a lot of people just take it as a basic fact that AI is going to wipe out the white-collar economy. I think Dario Amodei, at Anthropic, says that about half of all white-collar, entry-level jobs will be destroyed within some timeline.

But economists like to point out that there are many technological innovations that actually increase the demand for workers. There are categories that might exist 10 years from now, categories of jobs that we don't even know what those words mean, put together. If you told somebody 10 years ago that there would be a job called AI Prompt Engineer, I don't think that they would understand each individual point of that. And now that's a job that's satisfying a lot of labor demand.

And so I think that it's really important. It's really easy to point out or to visualize a job being automated away. That's something that's been clear to us that we can see. But it's a little bit more nebulous to envision what it means for a new job to be created. And again, over different timelines, jobs might be created and then, again, automated away. There'll be a lot of these shifts. But at least over the short and the medium term, I think people will continue to play a central role in the economy.

And in general, my disposition is that more people are going to be better able to help the country meet both the challenges and the opportunities that AI presents. So I don't really-- sometimes, again, this conversation gets a little bit into, how can AI help us get out of these demographic headwinds that we're seeing? And I think the conversation is a little bit more nuanced than that.

JOAN WOODWARD: Yeah, agreed. Well, more to come on that. We'll definitely invite you back when that study is published.

I want to shift to something that I think former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill said, which is all politics is local. And we all talk macro, and we're looking at the big picture. But at the end of the day, your local community is where you live, you breathe, your kids go to school, you work. So I want to talk about the state and local problems that these demographic shifts are impacting the state and local government budgets.

So your report shows that roughly half the U.S. counties lost population between 2010 and 2020, driven by declining birth rates. The report warns that declining enrollment could force school closures and that scaling down is much harder and costlier than scaling up. Are there examples-- domestically, internationally-- of governments managing these demographic contractions that our policymakers could learn from?

LUKE PARDUE: Certainly. And again, that point that you made about the number of counties that are facing declining populations is, I think, really important because that's the minimum, the baseline in the 2010s. And actually, just a few months ago, the census released new data that shows that, in 2025, two-thirds of our 3,100 counties across the nation experienced population decline. So this is a trend that has already been large and widespread and is only going to become more widespread.

And I do think some of the good news is that, as counties and different cities experience population decline, we can start to have a little bit of an evidence base on what works, what doesn't work and what new opportunities there might be to pursue. So our author of the paper here, Jeff Clemens, who did a lot of really interesting data analysis on the actual local experience, likes to contrast two different experiences, particularly as it relates to the decline in enrollment in schools. And that's important because schools are at the bleeding edge of these population trends. As there are fewer kids born, the first place where we start to see it is declining school enrollment.

So one example that he likes to point out is Cleveland and St. Louis. And so both of these cities have seen sharp population declines and declines in enrollment since about 1990. Both-- I think I have the number right-- is about declines in enrollment of about half, so really significant declines in K-to-12 enrollment. But they've had different experiences in how they navigate them.

St. Louis is a city that's been able to continue to maintain about the same level of per-pupil costs while keeping test scores the same, so they've been able to navigate this in a pretty good way, being able to contain costs and maintain educational performance. But Cleveland is a city that has seen costs explode and has seen test scores decline. And so the question is, what can you draw from that?

And I'm going to be honest. We're continuing to look into what specific questions-- what specific methods both of these cities use, but one interesting thing to point out is that it seems like St. Louis was better able to manage the consolidation of schools in a way that maintained educational quality. St. Louis, I think, consolidated schools by about 36%, and then Cleveland consolidated by about 20%. So St. Louis consolidated schools much more, was able to contain costs amid a declining number of kids, while Cleveland didn't necessarily take that tack as much and saw costs continuing to rise.

But the question is, how do you navigate teacher contracts, a lot of these high fixed costs of maintaining facilities? And so these are some of the nitty-gritty questions that we're going to have to get into. But the good news is that certain cities we can point to as being able to-- or having navigated this situation in the past to a bit of a better extent.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, get your questions ready. Put them in the Q&A. We're going to take a few in a minute. So a lot of pretty depressing stuff we just talked about. Your report frames this as large headwinds for the economy, with this upside-down pyramid, if you will. Are there any silver linings, economic silver linings, that your research found?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure. I do like to always go back to the point that longer lifespans are actually a good thing. We paint this as a demographic headwind just because it's creating some knock-on effects that are having negative economic implications, particularly for younger workers. But by and large, it is certainly a good thing that older workers are living longer and that they are able to contribute productively to the economy for a longer amount of time.

I mean, that is undoubtedly a good thing. It means that some of these other workforce issues-- declining labor force, decreased immigration-- are alleviated by the fact that older workers can continue to work. It also means that they're able to continue to pay taxes from their wages for a longer amount of time, easing some of our fiscal strains, and perhaps delay retirement, delay claiming Social Security for a little bit. So that trend is undoubtedly, at its highest level, a positive trend.

And then I think the positive effects-- or I should say, some of the silver linings-- are the fact that we're still, in an international experience, relatively early on in this process, compared to other countries. The U.S. has a total fertility rate of about 1.6 right now. Like I said, Japan and China are at 1, 1.2. Other countries in Europe are at about 1.2. And so we're at a point where we can have a conversation about what to do about it, where there are manageable solutions still.

Raising the birth rate will involve an "all hands on deck," improving housing affordability and creating new child tax credits and making raising a kid, childcare more affordable. But we're at a point where we're not necessarily facing the magnitude of challenges that other countries are. And so this is part of why we decided to talk about this issue today, because there are some really feasible solutions within policymakers' tool kits today.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, that's good news. So what's next? Your group, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group-- we talked about AI, in terms of a new report coming out shortly. What else are you working on?

LUKE PARDUE: I mean, of course, AI is top of mind for many people, so we'll certainly be putting out some new research and policy ideas there, and I'm excited to come back. But more broadly, as I said at the start, our mission is to advance evidence-based solutions to many of these challenges, which is great because it allows us to step back and think about what these big challenges are for the U.S.

One area that we think about a lot is America in an international context. So we've seen a growth in prosperity and economic dynamism over the past half century that's been driven by an increased connectedness to the rest of the world. The connectedness of the global economy drove both prosperity and global peace for a while. And now we're seeing a little bit of a reordering of priorities where national security and supply-chain resilience are taking hold as other priorities.

And so we like to think a lot about, how do we maintain some of those benefits of an interconnected global economy while recognizing that there are some other challenges that we need to be realistic about? And so that's something that we're thinking about. And the second point that we'll be looking at, specifically, early next year is one that might be natural, is other advances in technology.

One I'm particularly interested in is digital currency. I think stablecoins-- two years ago, if you had talked to me about them, I might not have paid much attention to what you were saying. But it is becoming a growing presence in not only the U.S. economy, but in global money flows. And so just thinking through right now, taking a step back and thinking about how that fits into the U.S. economy, to the monetary system. Any potential risks of the financial system will allow that to grow and capture the benefits, I would say, in a safe, responsible way.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, thank you for that. Let's get to some audience questions. So first up is Doris Sugarman. If the U.S. faces both a declining labor force and rapid AI automation, what should policymakers prioritize-- expanding the workforce through immigration and incentives that we talked about, or preparing for a future with less human labor demand?

LUKE PARDUE: Sure. I mean, that's a good question. I would say, first of all, again, not to sound naive, but I think that policymakers can do multiple things at once. We should be able to walk and chew gum and think about challenges over different time horizons that allow us to meet the immediate needs of our economy, while also thinking ahead, and how to think about what some of the longer-term challenges are.

And by that, I mean, again, we're going to need people to contribute to the economy for the foreseeable future. And once we get into these longer timelines, as I said, some of the conversation becomes a bit existential. But I think that, especially right now, expanding the workforce and creating greater labor supply should be a priority. Again, to point to healthcare, that's a place where we're seeing a lot of jobs growth, and immigrants traditionally have taken a lot of those on-the-ground jobs.

And so, just in terms of what jobs we need today, and who-- which people can fill them-- that needs to be a priority. But I think setting up institutions over the long term that are flexible and that are resilient to meeting the needs of different amounts of labor supply and different skills is going to be really important. So I don't necessarily think of this as an either/or, but a both/and, just on, maybe, different timelines.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, good. Another question from Anthony Vandermoore. Are there particular industries that will be disproportionately impacted, and why? What are the biggest blind spots companies have today, regarding workforce contraction risk? Good question.

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah, this is a good question. I like it because I could point to healthcare, again, as an industry that's going to be incredibly affected, both on the labor-supply front, as I just mentioned, or on the demand front, because an aging population is certainly going to continue to increase demand for healthcare services. But if one of my goals here might be just to help people think about this in a much broader way.

There's that phenomenon where you see a new word, and then you start to see it everywhere, and I think this is one of those trends that acts in the same way, where, once this enters your mind, you can start to see it show up everywhere. And it has to do with a fundamental reshaping of the way the economy operates. I was just reading an article in The Wall Street Journal about the maker of Huggies diapers has to figure out a new, cheaper way to design their diapers because of the affordability crisis and because they're seeing demand fall, because there are fewer births.

And that's just one area where we're starting to see some of the changes in demand being caused by these shifts show up. And I mean, just thinking about home ownership, there was another article in, I think, the Financial Times about how baby boomers are also experiencing some of these shifts, or they're facing challenges in housing affordability and are actually becoming one of the biggest demographic groups to live together just because it's getting so expensive to afford housing.

And so, just thinking everywhere about how this different way that the U.S. population is living is, I think, going to be really important. And so, I would actually point to some of those more beneath-the-radar points as factors that we might want to pay attention to while also, of course, paying attention to the big rocks, like healthcare.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, sounds good. All right, another question from Brian Duffy. Brian wants to know, is it possible, in the long term, for an economy to grow if its population is shrinking so quickly. Very good question.

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah, that's a good question. Is it possible to grow? I mean, theoretically, yes. So, in terms of what creates economic growth in a country, economists like to point to growth in the population, and particularly labor-supply growth. Just as the number of workers grow, we can continue to see growth, and then growth in productivity, which is to say the amount of output that workers can produce with a given set of inputs.

And so, traditionally, we've seen a mix of both. We've seen productivity growth through productivity-enhancing innovations, and we've seen economic growth through robust population growth. And so if we don't see that population growth, what it means is that we're going to have to make up for it in terms of much greater productivity growth. And of course, that's theoretically possible, and that's what this question around AI centers on, which is whether or not we're going to be able to see the type of productivity growth, or the magnitude of productivity growth, that will allow us to maintain our standard of living amid declining population sizes or shrinking, at least slower, population growth.

And so certainly, theoretically, yes. I mean, again, it gets into a deeper question, this question of how to maintain economic growth amid shrinking populations, because the question then becomes, who is sharing in this economic growth? Even just thinking about AI, we’re supposed-- we might be expecting to see not only these innovations raise productivity but also raise prosperity. And if we can share in that, then I think that that satisfies a lot of the aims of what we're looking to do.

But the question is, who is sharing in that prosperity if we're seeing a declining population, and what does it mean to be a country that has widespread prosperity among all of its people, but not many people? So I think it gets into those questions. And that's the way in which I think this AI conversation is a little bit orthogonal to the question of declining populations.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, here's another really good one from Julie Reed. She wants to know, is the birthrate declining in France and other countries that have maternity-friendly leave policies? Some countries, as we know, have six months or a one-year leave policy. And is that incenting women to have more babies, or is the birth rate declining in those countries that are very friendly with their leave policies?

LUKE PARDUE: So I can tell you, I don't necessarily have France's fertility trends top of my mind, but I'm almost positive that they are declining. And yeah, that's a good question. I can generally say that when we look in the U.S., there's not much correlation between some of the generosity of these leave programs, particularly at a state level, and birth rates. Again, it gets to this point that there's no silver bullet.

That is certainly a step that we should and that we need to take, and that will help people on the margins feel like it's more accessible and more attainable to have a child. But we shouldn't expect huge, large reverses in birth trends when we institute any of those policies. I think setting realistic expectations is important. And so yeah, I mean, that is to say that we might expect to see small, marginal changes, but those are steps in the right direction.

And just one more important point to make along those lines is that even small changes over time-- if a relatively small number of Americans have more children today, those changes can compound over time. And so I think it's a really important mindset just to think about how making raising a family more accessible, more attainable-- how creating more generous family leave programs can do that and can create small changes that compound over time is part of the policy toolkit.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, another good question coming in from Lucas Britt. I read that the drop in fertility rates was due to an ongoing trend in lower teenage pregnancy, which is a good thing, obviously. Has age group emerged as a factor in your current research and analysis?

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah. I think the age trends are really interesting and important. And what we saw in the latest report from the CDC that was just released last Thursday was that, broadly, these age trends are continuing, which is that births among younger women, among teens 15 to 19, and among women 20 to about 34 years old, are continuing to decline. So we're seeing a decline in births not only among teens, but among younger adults.

And then what we're seeing is that older women are having more births. Women about 35 to 44 are seeing a slight increase in their birth rates. And so what that means is that, in a way, American women are deferring births later in their life. So we're seeing people that might have had births in their 20s, in their 30s in prior cohorts, have births in their 30s or in their 40s today.

The decline in teen births is a good thing. I think that decline in births among, say, 20- to 34-year-old adults reflects that shifting priorities. There's other things that they would prefer to do, to spend their time on, in their young adult years while then, once they're in their 30s, considering childbearing.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, another question coming in, interesting. A lot of people are asking this question, so I'm going to hit it now. I know this conversation is focused on how the declining birth rate affects the economy, but what are your thoughts on large populations, overpopulations in the world, affecting our environment and concerns with the longevity of our planet? Good question.

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah. That is actually a point that we think about a lot. And I think it's really important just to think in terms of the timeline that both of these different challenges operate on. I don't think we need to consider the science of climate change. I think there's definitely steps we need to take to think about the challenges that overpopulation or an increase in births might pose to the climate, to our natural resources.

But there are two things that I will say. And here I'm drawing from the third paper that I didn't necessarily highlight here, but we've included in the volume by Kevin Kuruc, who's a professor of economics at Middlebury. And what he says is that, at a basic, fundamental level, the timelines over which we need to address climate change does not line up with the timeline over which we need to think about population changes.

If we think about 2050 as a goal for thinking about some of these environmental challenges that we have for addressing those environmental challenges, which many environmentalists do, about 90% of the people that will be around in 2050 are around today. So birth trends and birth rates don't really affect the size of the global population on the time scale with which we need to address some of those climate challenges.

And then, on the second point, I think there's a lot of conversation around the strain on natural resources that an overpopulated globe might pose. But the fact of the matter is that, due to technological advances, we're not really seeing, when we say, look at prices of natural resources, any sort of strain. And so I think a little bit-- the conclusion that I reached from some of the data is that, again, the environmental challenges are certainly real, and there are things that we have to think about, but they don't really play into some of the challenges, with respect to fertility or the demographic headwinds, particularly within the United States.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, another good question coming in from John Chisler. He wants to know, aren't women getting more doctorates degrees, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees in the last five or six years than men? And does education, or highly educated societies, just choose to have less children? How do you think about education versus fertility rates?

LUKE PARDUE: Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll answer it with respect to the current situation that the United States is in just because it's the most relevant, and it's the one that I'm the most familiar with, which is to say that the decline in birth rates within the United States that we're seeing right now is actually widespread across women of pretty much every educational level.

Of course, as the question points out, we do see lower levels of childbearing among women who have higher levels of education, like a bachelor's degree or a Ph.D. But the decline-- relative decline among those women who are relatively highly educated, compared to, say, women without a college degree, has actually been similar in magnitude, which is to say that both women who don't have a college degree, women who have a college degree, or women who have some sort of advanced degree have all seen declines in birth rates within the United States.

And so that's one of the factors that I point to when I say that this decline in births in the United States is widespread. It's not concentrated among any single group.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK. Luke, I want to thank you so very much for joining us today. It's just been fascinating, and you're such a good presenter. So we're going to invite you back on the spot, here, to come talk about your AI report and other reports you're working on. And we really appreciate the work that the Aspen Economic Strategy Group has done, so thank you so much.

LUKE PARDUE: Thank you. And I really appreciate the questions and the engagement, and I'll accept your invitation on the spot as well.

JOAN WOODWARD: All right, that's perfect. That's perfect. All right, to the rest of my audience, we're going to talk about some upcoming programs. But please, please, fill out the survey. It's in the chat link.

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All right, so next up, next week, April 22, next Wednesday, Ashaunta Epps, a LPGA Class A member golf pro-- she's going to join us to explore how leaders can apply the principles from her new book, A Perfect Swing, to rebuild resilience, purpose and performance in their personal and professional lives. Oh, and yes, she's going to talk about golf. Golf has been a big thing for us in our Charlotte office, where we've held a number of SHE Golfs clinics over the years with our agent and broker partners. So Ashaunta, our head golf pro at those events, will join us next Wednesday.

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Then, on May 20, we're going to be joined by cyber risk experts and claim professionals. They're going to talk about the latest Travelers quarterly cyber threat report. June 10, we're going to have Jamie Rhome-- he's the Deputy Director of the National Hurricane Center on for a deep dive in the 2026 hurricane-season outlook. And he will take us behind the scenes of the National Hurricane Center there in Miami. And then, on June 17, please join us for a practical session on showing up with trust and powerful presence at work with my friend Pam Sherman.

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