To wrap-up our series on Demography Shifts, Colleen (MPP ‘21) sat down with Goldman School Visiting Assistant Professor Mia Bird, who started as an MPP student at GSPP before pursuing an MA in economic demography (and then returning again to GSPP as a PhD!). Professor Bird discusses the different approaches that demographers and policymakers might take toward demographic shifts, shares her perspective on how demography can help destabilize stuck-in-the-past policy models, and offers thoughts on how demography and policy mightwork together in the future. Colleen and Sarah (MPP ‘20) tease out some of the lessons they’ve learned about demography throughout this series and consider their responsibility to fold the demographic perspective into their work as future policy leaders.

Transcript

Colleen: [00:00:09] Hello, everybody. Colleen Pulawski here and welcome to Talk Policy To Me. I'm here remotely today with Sarah Edwards because we are all practicing social distancing over here at the podcast, and we are super excited to sit down and wrap up our series on demographic shifts with you all today.

Sarah: [00:00:25] With this series, we set out to understand how policy and demography interact, and we particularly wanted to look at this during a time when our demographics are rapidly changing here in the U.S. and in California.

Colleen: [00:00:38] So last time Sarah and I sat down together, we talked through a bunch of questions that we had about the demography policy relationship. And since then, we've gotten to hear experts talk about this relationship in the domains of fertility, transit and education. And we've had some really specific demographic shifts get teased out for us in these domains as we've explored potential policy solutions.

Sarah: [00:01:00] And we thought it might be nice before we move on from demography to zoom back out again and revisit the questions that we had set up at the beginning of the series. What are the takeaways from the demography policy relationship that we can package up and put into our back pockets as we become future policy leaders?

Colleen: [00:01:18] So to talk all of this through, I sat down with Goldman School professor Mia Bird to return one last time to a 30,000 foot view of this intersection between policy and demography.

Mia: [00:01:35] Hello, my name is Mia Bird. I am a visiting assistant professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, and in what feels like a past life, I ventured over to the demography department and got a master's degree in economic demography and spent a lot of time thinking about marriage and family and fertility during that phase of my life and how those demographic trends really intersect with public policy.

Sarah: [00:02:00] So we've talked a lot about how we see policy and demography being deeply connected. But how does someone with a degree in both disciplines see it? Why was Mia as a MPP student, motivated to seek out this training in demography?

Mia: [00:02:15] Oh, I feel they're so interrelated. A lot of the work I was doing was focusing on the social safety net, and particularly women and kids, and really thinking about the dynamics around our welfare programs. Essentially, you know, there was a shift before I started graduate school from AFDC, which is Aid to Families with Dependent Children to TANF, which is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. And this was a pretty major change in how we supported mostly low income women and kids. And so what had been on my mind coming into grad school is what is a weakening of the social safety net, if you could characterize that shift in that way. What does that mean for sort of all women in families, all women, women with young children, women who don't have very high earning potential? You know, what effect is there sort of an existence value of a strong social safety net? And that was sort of a motivated question for me coming to graduate school. And somehow I found my way back to it many years later in finally writing my dissertation. And so for me, it seemed like there were certainly pieces of that that were very much about public policy. But when we were facing questions about, you know, promoting marriage, disincentivizing childbearing among low income families, these were big pieces of what was called welfare reform. And so when we were thinking about those questions, for me, I was sort of searching for another framework to use and thinking about answering those questions. And so really a demographic sociological framework was what worked best. And so I moved over to demography and then also took quite a few sociology classes as well. And sort of together they helped to form sort of an additional framework that built upon sort of that economic lens that we have here.

Sarah: [00:04:10] Another thing we've talked a lot about in this series is how California and the demographic shifts we're seeing here are kind of a proxy for a future America. What did Mia think about that?

Mia: [00:04:21] California is obviously a big state, a pretty wealthy state when you think about average per capita income, that also a state with high levels of inequality that I think the trends and the levels are reflective of what's been going on in the nation, the ways in which California is racially diversifying at a rapid pace, I think are reflective of what we can expect nationwide and what we're seeing and in some of the other states already. And, you know, the way that California has been grappling with transition and how we structure our families and how we support low income families. California has a relatively strong social safety net, you know, in terms of things like paid family leave when we're thinking about. What are the supports or child care support? What are the supports that needs to be in place to allow women to have children, to allow families to have children? And we think about sort of some of the things other countries that are similar to the U.S. are experiencing with really declining birth weight rates. What kinds of public policies are proactive in solidifying sort of supports for families? And California has really been at the forefront in a lot of ways in terms of something like, for example, paid family leave, which now we're talking about nationally the California has had for decades.

Colleen: [00:05:36] So I really liked how Mia noted here that California has been proactive in many ways in making policy. And we've talked a lot and asked a lot of questions here about how we can be proactive in response to demographic shifts instead of reactive. So I asked Mia about that as well.

Mia: [00:05:51] It's a great question. I mean, I think demographers work in big, long term trends and really a lot of these dimensions underlie so many causal drivers. So changes in the age structure often are fairly slow, although you can have these blips caused by something like a big war, for example, like the baby boomers. But often changes are relatively continued and slow. And so we can anticipate them. And, you know, in the case of programs like Social Security and Medicaid, you know, we have anticipated for a long time that we have an age structure problem, but we haven't been able to do anything about it. For demographers, that's hard. You know, there are other things, you know, that the diversifying of the population, we can see that happening over a long period of time. And so the questions around how do you adapt your political system, how do you adapt your educational system, particularly around language issues, How do you diversify sort of access to the social sphere, to the economic sphere in this country in response to that? These are always, you know, demographers would hope that policymakers would act more proactively, I think. And, you know, really thinking about morbidity and mortality. I think that's something that demographers see as so central to trends that are going to impact our economy, trends that are going to impact our sort of social well-being. And so when we see huge differences, for example, in morbidity and mortality rates, life expectancy across socioeconomic groups, that's a huge concern for demographers and really something that we could proactively address through policy.

Sarah: [00:07:31] It's interesting when we think about that these shifts are long and slow and that we should be able to anticipate them in our policymaking and not be all of a sudden surprised by a demographic shift. But so often we don't anticipate them. Is that mainly a function of politics, do you think?

Colleen: [00:07:49] Mia pointed out some reasons to think that yes, that is exactly the case.

Mia: [00:07:53] When you are talking about trends over time that are going to have equity issues across generations and so many issues do the aging of the population. Climate change, obviously, so many of these issues are about costs being created by the people that currently have the most voice in the political system and then being borne by folks that have no voice, who are not even born or who have a limited voice in the political system. And so I think it's particularly hard for our political system to respond proactively when the costs, the timing of the costs are structured that way. A lot of the issues that we need to address that are sort of responding to a shifting demographic structure are talked about. It's just very hard to make presence sacrifices for future outcomes. And for me, when I'm thinking about sort of defining that public problem and I'm thinking about how am I framing it and how am I quantifying it and describing it, and then what are the causal stories I'm telling? And I think often we don't take that big step back to think about what are some underlying demographic drivers that are part of this story. And, you know, they're often the kinds of causal stories that we can't necessarily address through policy, but that we need to understand in order to bring policy, good policy to bear. And then sometimes there are things we can do through public policy to try to shift those demographic trends toward the future. If we think that's a positive thing and that's going to be helpful to achieving our goals.

Colleen: [00:09:33] So I do think it's really interesting to think about using demography as a narrative tool for policymakers or policy analysts and how even if our goal isn't to change the underlying trend, understanding it and framing it for folks can really help us craft more responsive and effective policies.

Sarah: [00:09:50] And I think that's really important. You know, I think policy training and the policy training we get here at the Goldman School is within this model of it's really deeply focused on the economics, and that's obviously incredibly relevant, but often. We can sometimes flatten these important narratives and these important realities that come up when we look at the demographic changes and the demographic shifts that are happening. So it's interesting to think about how we can really bring these together to make a better policy system.

Colleen: [00:10:21] And I think that speaks to me as point about understanding the causal stories behind the problem that you're trying to solve through a public mechanism and how some of these models tend to leave out some of those stories. And demography can be a really powerful tool for helping us fold them into our policymaking and policy analysis. And I think Mia had great ideas and thoughts about how we can think about starting to do that. Practically.

Mia: [00:10:50] Demographers often see demographic trends as much more stable and sort of fundamental. And policy analysts really want to see these things as trends we can influence through public policy. And so I think they bring those tendencies to the table. But actually, I think they worked quite well together. What has happened, and I'll give you a specific example, is that the framework that for me underlies what we do at GSPP is very much an economic framework. And what I've seen is that that framework has grown and grown and grown to encompass more and more insights from other fields. And so one example of that, back when I was a student, there was a field in economics, economic demography that you could take a field exam for. And so that's something I did, and that's really the intersection of economics and demography, the expansion of the framework to incorporate the insights of demography. And so one example of that is, you know, we had this idea for so long in economics that a family made these decisions in some sort of joint way that either partners fully agreed on all the decisions they made or if one person was making a decision for the family, such as, you know, how to allocate resources or time, that that decision was made altruistically. So fully incorporating the utility of all the family members. And that was sort of an underlying theory of economics that made everything else work, because that meant that that households, when they were consuming, were actually, you know, the utility of all members was well-represented. And those consumption patterns and demography helped to destabilize that. And economics grew and it grew to understand that, you know, that's not necessarily the case. And so what we do have is a dynamic often, you know, in a household that has two adults or two parents, for example, you have a dynamic that leads to consumption and household. Those household members, those marital partners, for example, they might have different levels of power in determining those household choices. And that when we're thinking about efficiency and we're thinking about utility maximization, that actually really matters. And so thinking about how public policy, at least from my perspective, how public policy can do a better job of empowering household members and making sure also that the the well-being of non consumer members like children, are well represented and sort of that household utility function that when we give some kind of income support or a tax credit to the household that it's used in the way that it's intended, that's a key question. You know, how do things get how does power get allocated within a home? That was really, I think, an expansion of economics to think about game theory within the household context and to broaden in that way.

Sarah: [00:13:50] This definitely speaks to what we talk about all the time at Talk Policy To Me, that policy is personal and we cannot forget that.

Colleen: [00:13:58] Absolutely. I think that's something that I've really taken away from this series and from my time thinking about policy through this demographic lens is how we can use demography as a tool to help us illuminate the personal in policy and help us think about the lived experience and the individual stories, and to think about how issues occur differently for different people along different intersections of identity and how there's so much nuance in a way, an issue or a problem plays out, and that we need to have tools and mechanisms for us to fold those stories and to fold those narratives into the way we design solutions for public problems. I'm so excited about thinking about demography as just one way to do that, and it really inspires me to continue looking for more tools to help personalize policy, not only in how we think about it, but also how we make it.

Mia: [00:15:03] With respect to what the younger generation of adults in this country really need to be advocating for in the public policy space. I don't think demographic change has ever been more important to be thinking about and to be talking about and really to be using to discuss these issues and kind of make the case for policy intervention.

Sarah: [00:15:39] Thanks for tuning in over the last couple of weeks for our series on demographic shifts. It's been so fun to listen and learn together about how these two fields intertwine and how looking through the demographic lens can really help us to be crafting better policies.

Colleen: [00:15:56] We cannot wait to kick off our next series on democracy. In light of the recent primaries and the upcoming November election. You certainly won't want to miss out. We'll be talking about how we structure our voting institutions, the youth vote, the census, and a whole bunch more.

Sarah: [00:16:15] Thanks again for listening. Keep an ear out for our next episode coming soon. In the meantime, everybody stay healthy, stay safe, and keep on taking care of each other.

Colleen: [00:16:34] Talk Policy To Me is a production of the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. Music on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. Our audio engineer is Michael Quiroz. I'm Colleen Pulawski.

Sarah: [00:16:53] I'm Sarah Edwards.

Colleen: [00:16:55] Catch you next time.