2020 Foresight

SW: What’s changed?

TG: The critical issue is not longevity. That has only a marginal impact. The real issue is fertility. An average of 2.1 children per woman during her childbearing years is the replacement rate. Anything more than that will lead to a very young society. Anything less than that will result in aging. We’re on a track, long term, for population decline. Japan is already there. Japan’s labor force began to decline more than a decade ago. This is not just a Minnesota or national phenomenon. This is a worldwide phenomenon.

SW: Take us back a couple of decades.

TG: In the 1970s, we saw very high fertility rates in much of the world. The world was expanding very rapidly. People were worried that we would all be piled on top of each other like cord wood, and our combined body heat would ultimately melt the core of the earth. That’s not an exaggeration, there were people who talked like that.

But what happened was a dramatic change around the world in fertility rates. In much of Europe, fertility rates are way below what has ever been observed in a national population. Italy, France, Germany—fertility rates around 1.3. That means in a generation or two, there will be no children. There are almost no children now.

SW: So Malthus was wrong?

TG: We’ve gone from one set of issues to another. Famous for writing An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus believed that there was a tendency for populations to expand to some kind of limit—that they would run out of resources and starve to death. The so-called Malthusian devil. But no society has actually come close to that outcome.

SW: Back to Minnesota, what surprises people about our state?

TG: The biggest surprise is that Minnesota is not an old state. We are not a young state. We are just about at the national average on age structure.

The other thing that surprises people is the history of the Minnesota economy. Some felt back in the ’80s that Minnesota’s economy was really awful, that we were a really poor and depressed state and would remain that way. But the facts are that Minnesota is an exceptionally prosperous place. It doesn’t get much better than Minnesota. In terms of education, health insurance, and income, we are way above average.