NC Family Staff | November 23, 2024 | SHARE: 
Across the world the birth rate is falling, resulting in an aging population. This presents a host of problems and concerns, especially regarding how it affects caring for older generations. In the United States, legal immigration can temporarily help to build out the population, but it is not a permanent solution. So what can be done to mitigate these challenges?
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Dr. Hunter Baker, Provost and Dean of Faculty at North Greenville University, to discuss the impacts of our aging population and what solutions are available to correct these concerns.
Spotify • Apple Podcasts • iHeart Radio • Audacy • Amazon Music
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. It’s easy to look at the world today and see an overwhelming list of issues that need our attention. However, today’s guest believes that the issue of growing disparity between an aging population and diminishing numbers of young people has not yet received the attention it deserves. Dr. Hunter Baker is provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University. He’s written and lectured widely on matters of religion and liberty, and is a fellow of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy and the Land Center for Cultural Engagement. He joins us today to reflect on some of the points he raised in his recent article entitled “There is a Silent Crisis Growing in Our Society, But Are We Prepared to Face It? Dr. Hunter Baker, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
HUNTER BAKER: I’m happy to be with you. Thank you.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS
Well, tell us more. What is this silent crisis that you’re seeing?
HUNTER BAKER: If you’re in higher education like me, you’ve heard for years this fear of a demographic cliff, that we will have too few 18-year-olds, and so that is a concern, certainly for those of us concerned with enrollment. But if you think about it, there are actually some much bigger problems with too few young people, and that is that we have a society that is basically structured along the idea of having a group of old people that is supported by a much larger group of young people. In fact, our social security system, our Medicare system, these things are built explicitly upon those ideas, financially speaking. And the problem is, is that we are having fewer and fewer young people, while our numbers of old people is fairly large. I mean, for example, many of the baby boomers are still with us. And of course, people are living substantially longer than they once did, and so we’re having a disparity where we have too few people who are going to be able to care for a growing elderly population, not only financially, but also just in terms of just ordinary, everyday needs.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, is the solution to get these young people to go out and have a bunch of babies? Or do we need to kind of take a look at the way that we have set up our society? What do you suggest?
HUNTER BAKER: Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have to have more babies. We are in a situation where, and this is not only the US. In fact, the US used to be one of the countries that did not have such a big problem. We were reliably above replacement in terms of our reproduction, while countries in other parts of the world had fallen below. While we have a problem, other nations are much worse. For example, South Korea is far, far below replacement. Right now, many of the European nations, east and west, are below replacement, and they’re trying all kinds of methods to increase their population, you know, various financial incentives, things like that. So, to some extent, you can’t replace just having more people. This is also sort of something that is unspoken in the immigration debate. I have often told my students that one of the reasons that Western nations are importing large numbers of people from other countries is in order to try to shore up their systems.
Now you ask the question about, well, should we structure things differently? Yes, it’s true that we could try to reform Social Security. I mean, right now, even though people don’t want to hear this, it’s just a transfer program. People who are working now pay for people who are old, even though it’s presented to people this way, we do not have a program where you pay into your own account and then you take money out of your account when you get older. That does not exist. We have a situation where the people who are working now are paying for the people who are retired now. So yes, we could do something about that, but, you know, first of all, it’s almost politically impossible, you know, Social Security has often been thought of as the third rail, so we’ve only been able to make incremental changes, such as kind of extending the age. And that’s, you know, that’s not unreasonable. People are more youthful as they age. So, we can do some of that, but none of that addresses this problem of, how are we going to deal with large numbers of people who are in their 80s, 90s, or over 100. You’re going to see more pressure toward euthanasia, and that’s part of why I wrote my piece. I think that we need to find a way to address it through family. I think that we need to reconnect our generations, and we need to find ways for families and churches to help each other as we try to figure out how to care for an aging population.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. I think that’s a good point. I read that a lot of these young people that are not having kids would if they felt like they were financially able to do that. Do you think that’s the case? Is our society not supporting young people enough to allow them to have these families?
HUNTER BAKER: Well, I think it’s always, it’s always a choice. If you look at neighborhoods that were built in the 1950s at a time when, when we were having way more children, what you would see is pretty small houses. Probably with kids kind of sharing bedrooms pretty widely, the boys and the girls, and so I think our standards have changed. I think that now we expect to have more, to consume more, to travel more, and children are much less of a priority for many people. So, are we in a time where it’s difficult to buy a house? Yes. Are we struggling with our money being devalued through inflation, yes, but I think that there’s probably more going on than just that in terms of our tendency not to have children right now.
And part of that, of course, is probably that the landscape has changed so much. Not only do we have the birth control pill, but women work almost as a matter of course now, instead of staying home with children. And that career is going to depress child bearing and delay child bearing. Any other reasons why you think this is happening, or do you feel like you’ve hit the top ones? I think another thing is that people are maturing later, as somebody who teaches in a college environment and has done for a long time, I think that virtually all of my colleagues out there would agree that people are coming to us younger. I don’t mean objectively younger, but what I mean is that today’s 19-year-old is maybe yesterday’s 16-year-old. And I think that that comes from growing up in a wealthier society, growing up in a society with much more screen time and video games and entertainment. But all of which is to say is that I think people feel probably less ready for family earlier on than they once did. So, I think that contributes as well.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: I don’t want to get too far off course, but are we coddling our kids? Is that’s what is that what’s happening? I just wonder, what are parents doing? Because my husband is a retired college professor, and he says the same thing, that these kids are different now, and sometimes we tend to blame it on COVID and that whole couple of years that happened there, but it seems beyond that. What’s happening, do you think, that our kids are coming so much younger, as you say?
HUNTER BAKER: I think it’s just the overall wealth of the society. I think that the wealthier society is, the more that it will tend to dote upon its children and to try to give them a fun and magical childhood. I think we all try to do that. I think that we try to smooth things out for them, make things easy for them. You know, those of us in the college world, we talk about the helicopter parents who are trying to do everything for their kids. I can remember the challenge of going to Florida State and having to find my textbooks. And you know, that was actually a bit of a job to do. And now, you know, we’re all kind of setting up these systems where the textbooks are delivered as a package to the students. You know, they’re just various, in every way we’re kind of making life easier and with less friction, which is nice and good, but it doesn’t help our children develop as much.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Yeah, I just really need to jump back to the comment that you made about immigration, because especially right now with President Trump coming back in and I noticed this morning that one of the first hires was his immigration person, and he’s calling him, like, chief of deportation. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot here by considering immigrants to be somewhat of a burden?
HUNTER BAKER: Yeah, so there’s two things going on. I mean, first of all, you must have an orderly process for immigration. You have got to know who is coming in, and you have got to be able to keep track of them once they are here. So, there are a lot of different ways that could be achieved. I think that part of the reason so many people immigrate illegally is because our system is very inefficient and difficult to navigate. You know, you hear about people waiting years and years. When it comes to Mexico, I have always thought that the solution is fairly simple. We could have a workers visa type of a system that is not much harder to navigate than getting a passport or something like that. And that way people would come in, they would pay taxes, we would know where they were. So, I just think that we should make the legal immigration system work much more smoothly. I do understand why illegal immigration is a problem, because it’s a bit of a recipe for chaos, but we should solve the problem by making the legal immigration system better.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Talk a little bit about policies in general that you think lawmakers could do to support either having families or somehow figure out, because these kids that are coming up today are going to have huge burdens right as they’re trying to care for these parents who may run out of money.
HUNTER BAKER: I am not sure how good the policy options are. So, when we talked about the failure to replace the population, there have been many countries trying to deal with this, and it turns out that tax credits or even significant bounties, you know, just paying women straight up for having children, or giving a large maternity and paternity leave, things of that nature, while they help people’s experience, they don’t seem to lead to more children. So, I don’t know that there is, really, a good policy answer out there. So, what I would suggest is, is that we need to build our social capital, and the biggest avenue for doing that is, is through the church and through schools. We need to present family as an attractive option, we need to underline the benefits. We talk so much to people about, oh, how much it’s going to cost them to have children. How much do we emphasize all the positives of having kids? I cannot think about how different my life would be without having been a parent, without having had children. And after our first child, I was very comfortable with that, and I would have been happy to stop. And my wife was like, no, you know, she wanted to have another child. I’m so glad. I love that child. You know, that child, that second child, is just this huge benefit to my life. She makes me so happy. You know, now she’s in college. I miss her, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have missed out on the experience of having that child. And so, I think that we need to help people have a vision for how great it is to be a parent, to have that in your life. And I think that we need to also help people to be thinking through how they’re going to take care of their aging parents. I think about, my father was an only child, and when his mother became very infirm in her 90s and then lived quite a while, it was a very big burden for him by himself. And so, my sister and I had to step in to help. You know, he’s in his 80s, he’s trying to help his mother, and he needed us. And so, if people have more than one child, that spreads the number of people who can coordinate and try to help bear these burdens and to take care of the people who blessed us when we were young, but we need to be thinking in those terms. And so, this is really a, it’s a spiritual matter. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a human life matter. It’s not just about kind of government and policy. It’s about who we are as a people.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right, good point. Well, we’re just about out of time for this week. Before we go Hunter Baker, where can our listeners go to follow your work, read your article, of course, and find more resources on this very important topic.
HUNTER BAKER: So, the article that we’ve referenced today was at Blaze Media. Most of my output these days is with World Magazine. They have a website where they have World opinions, and I write for that regularly. And I’m on Twitter and Facebook just as Hunter Baker. I think I’m the oldest Hunter Baker out there, so I’ve got the socials.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, all right. Well. Dr. Hunter Baker, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
– END –
