It’s 2020 and Talk Policy to Me is back with a brand new series on Demographic Shifts.

Over the next few episodes, we’ll dive into some of the most pressing demographic shifts taking place here in California, and discuss what their implications are for policymaking both here in California and across the country. In this short kickoff episode, hosts Colleen (MPP ‘21) and Sarah (MPP ‘22) ground us in a shared definition of demography, share a preview of some of the shifts we’ll be diving into later in the series, and pose some big-picture questions that these changes raise from the policy perspective.

Transcript

Colleen Pulawski: CalFresh, the EITC, Pell Grants, labor laws, we typically think about policies in relation to the people they impact, whether that's mothers, students, workers or people with low incomes. 

Sarah Edwards: So today we're talking a little bit briefly about the place where people and policymaking meet. We're looking at demography. 

Colleen Pulawski: All right, Talk Policy To Me listeners, so we talk a lot about how policies are crafted to meet the needs of the populations they serve, but how do we think about policymaking for a population that is rapidly changing? So Sarah and I are with you today because all of us over here at the podcast have been thinking about demography and how our population is changing. And we've decided we're going to do a whole series of episodes grappling with what the current shifts in demographics here in California mean for policymaking both in the state and nationwide. So, Sarah, why are we talking about California? 

Sarah Edwards: Because it's the best state, obviously. No. Well, there's a few reasons. California's a really great state to look at. So the states often seen as this testing ground for policy innovation and policy experimentation and oftentimes new policy structures and approaches are tried here in California before they become taken up across the country. 

News Clip: Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW have struck a deal with the California Air Resources Board to increase fuel standards far beyond what the Trump administration wants. 

News Clip: California will soon become the first state to require solar panels on all new homes and on residential buildings smaller than four stories. 

News Clip: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that requires publicly traded companies to include women on their boards of directors. 

News Clip: In California, our governor's called for a data dividend. 

News Clip: State lawmakers passing the California Consumer Privacy Protection Act with unanimous support, promising to give control back to consumers in three ways. 

Sarah Edwards: So with that in mind, we'll be spending a few episodes diving deeper specifically into some of the demographic shifts that are taking place here in California. We'll be exploring how leading policymakers, academics, practitioners and demographers are thinking about them today. 

Colleen Pulawski: And before we get into all of that, Sarah and I thought we should set us all up in this episode because we still have a lot of questions ourselves. So first off, let's just define demography. It feels intuitive, but when you get down to brass tacks, what does it mean? 

Sarah Edwards: So essentially, it is the study of the statistics of human populations. And what statistics does that include? Kind of everything. So its births, its deaths, its changes in the populations, racial makeup, its changes in the population's income structure and its things like the incidence of diseases. 

Colleen Pulawski: So it sounds like really anything's fair game. Anything that changes over the course of a human life span, the lifespan of a society. 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. 

Colleen Pulawski: Okay. So now that we're all working from the same definition, what kinds of demographic shifts are we talking about here? In what ways is the population in California changing the most? 

Sarah Edwards: So we're experiencing straight up population growth in California. In 2019, California became the first state to have a population of 40 million people. 

Colleen Pulawski: Okay, put that into perspective. Is that really big? 

Sarah Edwards: It is. It's it's the biggest state. And it also was a doubling from 1970. And it's expected to keep growing. The numbers projected to hit 50 million before the year 2060. 

Colleen Pulawski: What's causing all of this population growth? Are we just having like a bunch of babies here in California? 

Sarah Edwards: The birth rate, California has actually dropped significantly since 1970 and mothers are having their kids at older ages than in the previous generations. 

Colleen Pulawski: What age are mothers tending to have kids now, in California? 

Sarah Edwards: So in California, it's around 27, and just to put that in perspective, nationally, in the 70s, it was 21. 

Colleen Pulawski: OK, so it's not being driven by births. So then it must be being driven by immigration. 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah, I think both immigration and migration rates, so people coming to this country and people coming to the state from other states. But the immigration piece is really important. So there's around eleven million people in California that are immigrants, which is about a quarter of the state's population. 

Colleen Pulawski: With this explosion in our immigrant population, we must be becoming a lot more diverse. 

Sarah Edwards: We are. Yeah. So the state is definitely becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. In the 80s, about 70 percent of the state's population identified as white. And in 2018, it was around 40 percent. 

Colleen Pulawski: So are there any particular groups that are driving this change? 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah the group that's growing the fastest is really the Latinx population. But there's also been growth in the Asian-American Pacific Islander group as well as, it started as a small group but it's definitely getting bigger, the group of people that identify as two or more races. 

Colleen Pulawski: Okay. So shifting gears a little bit, I feel like I hear a lot about aging and retirement here in California. What's going on with the elderly folks? 

Sarah Edwards: So California's aging population is definitely growing. As the baby boomer generation has been aging out of the workforce, we've really seen an expansion in what we identify as seniors, and when we talk about that, we mean people over 65. So in the 70s, the senior population was about 9 percent of California's population. And in 2018, it was close to 15 percent. People are, there are more people getting older and also people are living longer. So the group of people over 65 is just continuing to grow at a growing rate. By 2030, it's expected to be almost 20 percent, essentially a fifth of our state. 

Colleen Pulawski: That is a massive proportion. A fifth of the state could potentially be out of the workforce. Or we might have more people above the age of 65 needing to stay in the workforce, depending on how Social Security plays out, how the housing crisis plays out. 

Sarah Edwards: It's so true. And I think that is really one of these cases that we're so interested in because policy has been based on a certain understanding of what our country's demographics look like when it comes to the ratio of retired people to working people. And as that shifts, we really have to think about what policy needs to do to keep up. 

Colleen Pulawski: OK. So I feel like we've got a pretty good high level portrait of how our population is changing here in California, what it looks like, who are the different groups. Keeping in mind that we do have a housing crisis here in California and that we're going to see a population of 50 million by 2060? Where are all these people going to live? 

Sarah Edwards: Great question. I think what houses or apartments or how we're gonna pay for it, that is obviously still an open question. But essentially the data says that these people will be living in urban areas. So right now, about 95 percent of California's population lives in an urban area. 

Colleen Pulawski: That's huge. Ninety five percent. So nearly everyone in California lives in an urban place. 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah. And it's different than the rest of the country, where it's about 80 percent of population lives in urban areas. 

Colleen Pulawski: Okay, so all of these are pretty massive changes in the makeup of our state. And having all these stats and figures in hand, my logical next step as a policy student is what public policy question should we be asking in response to all of this data? I have three big picture questions that I'm hoping and I think we're all hoping to get some answers to over the next few episodes. So the first one being how do we navigate the tradeoffs and tensions between making policy for the needs of today's population versus tomorrow's? Like those are two very different approaches to making policy. We often make policy in reaction to the needs of people on the ground today. I feel like we oftentimes have a fighting fires approach to making policy and sometimes down the line that gets us into a little bit of trouble when we've made a policy, but by the time it actually takes effect, it's operating for a functionally different population than the one it was meant to originally serve. And it's not always as effective as we would have hoped. And policies are really sticky. And so by the time we realize, oh, you know what, we really need a new policy response. It's really difficult to move away from a policy that might have taken years to implement or might have had a really difficult political passage. And a lot of political capital was spent getting it into law. So these these tradeoffs and tensions between doing things today and doing things for tomorrow, I think is just a really complicated one that we need to be thinking about as policy analysts and future policymakers. 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think it'll be really interesting to kind of dive into some of these really specific examples to look at how that has played out and maybe what we can be doing differently. So what's your next question? 

Colleen Pulawski: Okay, So question number two is, okay, so say we want to start making policy for tomorrow's generation. We want to be a little bit more projective with our policymaking instead of reactive. How good are we at projecting the future? Can can we even do that? How do we make policy for a population that we don't even know yet exists? We think it's going to look a certain way, but there could be serious socio cultural changes that send us on a different track. So can we tell the future as policymakers? 

Sarah Edwards: Yeah. That's a really interesting one. And I think there's so many ways in which we're trying to look at California in isolation. But when we look at things like immigration, obviously policy choices made at a national level affect our state and our state's population shifts. 

Colleen Pulawski: Totally. So then my final question is just thinking about how do all of these changes intersect with each other and how do they intersect with other policy areas? How are we making sure that if we're trying to be projective, if we're trying to take demography into account, how are we painting a nuanced, complex portrait rather than just taking these groups and taking these shifts and siloing them off and looking at them discreetly, how do we think about their intersection and what that means for the future? 

Sarah Edwards: That's so, so relevant, right, because we can think about the way that our population is aging and also diversifying. That it's those two things do not happen in isolation. 

Colleen Pulawski: Yep. 

Sarah Edwards: So high level, we're essentially looking at is public policy keeping up with these demographic changes? 

Colleen Pulawski: I think a great synthesis of all of these questions is are we keeping up? How are we doing in the public policy sphere when it comes to all of these changes in our society? So with all of that, we're going to leave you on a cliffhanger and let you all tune in next week for the very first episode in our upcoming series on demographic shifts, where we're going to tackle all of these questions and a lot more. We can't wait to explore with all of you how framing public policy issues through a demographic lens might be able to help us make more responsive, effective policies and programs for today and for tomorrow. 

Sarah Edwards: Well, thanks for listening, everyone, and make sure to tune in next week. 
Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. For shownotes, visit us at TalkPolicytoMe.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. 

Colleen Pulawski: Talk Policy To Me's executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbank. Michael Quiroz is our audio engineer. I'm Colleen Pulawski. 

Sarah Edwards: I'm Sarah Edwards. 

Colleen Pulawski: Catch you next time.