This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 9th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Fertility rates in the United States are at historic lows. For Lyman Stone, Senior

Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, those low birth rates are of serious

concern. He says you should be concerned too. We spoke last week. You note in a recent article that the American

fertility rate has fallen to its lowest point in history, 1.73 babies per woman according to some recent CDC data. So what? Why should we care about that?

Why should we care about there not being enough people to continue our culture, our government,

our way of life? Well, I would say you could care about it if you have any care at all about the future.

But more specifically we could care about it because the average American says they want somewhere

between 2.3 and 2.6 kids.

So there's, if nothing else, an academically interesting question about why people say they want these kids but are not actually having them. We'd also care about it because it impacts the financial viability of Social Security, Medicare.

But we could also care about because it impacts the financial viability of your own 401k or the

ability to resell your house. If there's no people in the future to buy hot dogs and

iPhones, then companies that make hot dogs and iPhones are not going to be very good

retirement securities. So at the end of the day, all of society is basically social security. It depends on a future generation and growth in that future generation in order to provide the benefits and returns

to savings that older people count on.

So how well in your view does, would let's say a system of mass immigration to the United States,

that is broad welcoming immigration policy, would that stem the tide?

Is that, are we, are we, am I missing something in suggesting that

maybe immigration is an important way to replace the relatively low birth rates in the United States?

Yes, so I'm in favor of higher immigration. I think I probably have a lot of fellow

travelers at Cato on that.

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