With Great Demographics Comes Great PowerJuly/August 2019 153
Yet the United States’ demographic advantage is not merely a func-
tion o numbers. For over a century, the United States has beneÃted
from a large and growing cadre oÊ highly skilled workers. Research by
the economists Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee on educational at-
tainment suggests that between 1870 and 2010, Americans were the
world’s most highly educated people in terms o average years o
schooling for the working-age population. In 2015, by their estimate,
56 million men and women in the United States aged 25 to 64 had
undergraduate degrees or graduate degrees: twice as many as in China
and almost one-sixth o the global total. The United States leads the
world in research and development, as measured by international pat-
ent applications and scientiÃc publications, and in wealth generation,
with Americans having accumulated more private wealth since 2000
than the Chinese have in recorded history.
THE TASK AHEAD
Despite these advantages, all is not well for the United States. Warn-
ing lights are Áashing for a number oÊ key demographic metrics. In
2014, U.S. life expectancy began slowly but steadily dropping for the
Ãrst time in a century. This drop is partly due to the surge in so-called
deaths o despair (deaths from suicide, a drug overdose, or complica-
tions from alcoholism), especially in economically depressed regions
o the country. Yet even before the decline began, U.S. progress in
public health indicators had been painfully slow and astonishingly ex-
pensive. Improvements in educational attainment have also been
stalled for decades: as o 2010, American adults born in the early 1980s
had, on average, 13.7 years o schooling, only fractionally higher than
the average o 13.5 years for their parents’ generation, born in the early
1950s. Meanwhile, employment rates for American men o prime
working age (25–54) are at levels not seen since the Great Depression.
Further, it is possible that consensus projections for U.S. popula-
tion growth are too optimistic. Such projections generally assume
that U.S. fertility will return to replacement levels. But U.S. fertility
fell by about ten percent after 2008 and shows no sign o recovering.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2017,
the United States’ ¢μ stood at 1.77, the lowest level since the 1970s
and below those o European countries such as France and Sweden.
Most demographic projections also assume that the United States will
maintain net immigration at its current level o roughly one million