The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [93]
The effects of an aging population are considerable. First, there is the pension burden—fewer workers supporting more gray-haired elders. Second, as the economist Benjamin Jones has shown, most innovative inventors—and the overwhelming majority of Nobel laureates—do their most important work between the ages of thirty and forty-four. A smaller working-age population, in other words, means fewer technological, scientific, and managerial advances. Third, as workers age, they go from being net savers to being net spenders, with dire ramifications for national saving and investment rates. For advanced industrial countries—which are already comfortable, satisfied, and less prone to work hard—bad demographics are a killer disease.
The native-born, white American population has the same low fertility rates as Europe’s. Without immigration, U.S. GDP growth over the last quarter century would have been the same as Europe’s. America’s edge in innovation is overwhelmingly a product of immigration. Foreign students and immigrants account for 50 percent of the science researchers in the country and, in 2006, received 40 percent of the doctorates in science and engineering and 65 percent of the doctorates in computer science. Experts estimate that in 2010, foreign students received more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.’s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure is closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America’s potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future—all rest on its immigration policies. If America can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.
Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country—hunger and energy. As countries become wealthy, the drive to move up and succeed weakens. But America has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are looking to make a new life in a new world. These are the people who work long hours picking fruit in searing heat, washing dishes, building houses, working night shifts, and cleaning waste dumps. They come to the United States under terrible conditions, leave family and community, only because they want to work and get ahead in life. Americans have almost always worried about such immigrants—whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.
The Macro Picture
Many experts, scholars, and even a few politicians worry about a set of statistics that bode ill for the United States. The savings rate is just 5 percent, and was closer to zero for many years. The current-account deficit, trade deficit, and budget deficit are high. Median income is flat, and commitments for entitlements are unsustainable. These are all valid concerns and will have to be addressed by Washington. If America’s economic system is its core strength, its political system is its core weakness. But the numbers might not tell us everything we need to know. The economic statistics that we rely on give us only an approximate, antiquated measure of an economy. Many of them were developed in the late nineteenth century to describe an industrial economy with limited cross-border activity. We now live in an interconnected global