MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES
Midwest Research Institute
Kansas City, Missouri
December 3, 1980
Peter A. Morrison
Director, Rand Population Research Center
Santa Monica, California
Accommodating The Demography Of The 1980’s
I am here today as a demographer. As such, I am representative of a small group of
people with narrow expertise. We demographers try to anticipate human behavior over several
decades. Frequently our forecasts end up looking good and sometimes a bit exaggerated. Today,
I would like to consider how the population in the nation, in this region, and – to the extent that I
have been able to assemble some numbers – in this metropolitan area will be transformed in the
1980’s and beyond.
Our population is now in a state of transition – between the period of sustained growth
that came after World War II and extended into the 1960’s, and an end state when growth will
eventually disappear. We probably will reach that end state, or at least approach it, by no later
than the year 2050, and we could reach it as early as the year 2020. It is, however, the transition
and not the end state that matters, and that is what I want to discuss today. The effects of the
transition are going to show up in several ways:
•
In the characteristics of the future family, its shrinking size and its more diverse
forms
•
In the population’s age structure, which is becoming considerably older
•
In the kinds of areas people are choosing to live, in this decade and in the decades
ahead
Equally important, these effects will occur unevenly across the nation’s regions and
cities. Changes will appear earlier and more abruptly in some places, and later and more
gradually in others. We see this even now in the Midwest. In Kansas City we have a microcosm
of growth – an overall slowing down, as is happening in most large metropolitan centers, but
with great unevenness within and beyond the immediate boundaries of the city.
Today, I would like to review these demographic trends and the impact that I think they
will have. I want to highlight a few topics that I know will concern many of you in the audience:
things like declining school enrollments; the composition of the work force; health care for the
elderly; the welfare and upbringing of children in a rapidly changing family context; and the
weakening foundations of retirement systems like Social Security, which are funded on a pay-asyou-go basis. I also want to sharpen your awareness more generally of the issues that are
associated with demographic change and with the changes that lie ahead. I hope at least to help
set the stage for public debate on how to accommodate the changes that lie ahead.
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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Let’s begin by considering the growth trend on a national basis in sheer numbers of
people. Figure 1 shows the annual increment of growth in the United States. The past trend, the
solid line on the left, shows the peak growth during the years of the Baby Boom, when the
population was increasing by 3 million people per year. That was followed in the late 1960’s and
the 1970’s by the slowing of growth to less than 2 million per year – the Baby Bust, which
resulted in declining school enrollments.
Shown on the right are three future projections extending to the year 2025. The dotted
line in the middle, the Census Bureau’s Series II projection, is the one we’ve been tracking most
closely. If we continue on this course, growth will disappear around the middle of the 21st
century. If we shift to Series III, growth will disappear sooner, around 2020. It’s a good bet that
future growth will fluctuate somewhere between the bottom two projections you see in the chart,
Series II and Series III.
The key factors in the slowdown of population growth have been the declining birthrate
and the shrinking size of families. A generation ago, families were having upwards of three or
four children. Today, the two-child family is the norm. The shrinking size of the American
family has profound implications that extend beyond the rate of population growth.
First, the two-child family norm means relatively more family members will be of
working age; that is, the adult ages, when they will be generating income rather than consuming
it as young dependents. That means for a family potentially more income and relatively fewer
mouths to feed. If we carry out the simple arithmetic, we can conclude that per capita family
income will be higher relative to what it might otherwise have been.
This per capita income increase will be amplified by a closely related development, the
sharp increase in the number of wives earning income. Wives are commencing work earlier in
life; they are continuing to work after children arrive; and their attachment to the labor force is
becoming more permanent than it was in the past.
The changes that have taken place are truly remarkable. In 1950 only 24 percent of all
married women were in the labor force. Today, the figure stands at nearly 50 percent. By 1990,
at least 55 percent of wives will be bringing home paychecks. This increase in the number of
working wives, of course, will transform the economic circumstances of many families. Fewer
children and more earnings will put more discretionary income into the hands of husbands and
wives.
Changing family size and economic circumstances are only part of the story, however.
We can see one of the most striking demographic developments when we look more closely at
how people are arranging and rearranging themselves. Households and families are the two
social units into which the population is grouped for economic, residential, and consumption
purposes.
Households have taken on so many forms in recent years that we can no longer speak
casually of the “average household” as if there were one dominant type. What used to come to
mind was a married couple, the husband the breadwinner and the wife staying home with a
couple of children – the “classic family” of American nostalgia. Many of today’s families depart
from this traditional model. Today’s generation of children is the first to be raised in a society
where divorce is commonplace, where couples live together and bear children outside of
marriage, and where single-parent families are increasing faster than two-parent families.
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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First, let’s define the terms “household” and “family.” A household consists of everybody
who occupies the same housing unit – a house, an apartment, or whatever. A family is one type
of household, usually one in which the occupants are related – typically a husband and wife – but
it also could be a lone parent with children or other groupings of relatives living under the same
roof. About three-fourths of all households are family households.
The remainder, which I’ll refer to as non-family households, are mostly people who live
alone. Every family is a household, then, but not all households are families.
Figure 2 illustrates the various types of households and how they increased their share of
the total during the 1970’s. These diverse types are, of course, the product of dynamic processes
– households are continually forming, dissolving, and merging. Marriages today often end in
divorce, as we know. But, also, divorces often end in marriage. And some young adults are
testing out new forms of partnerships before jumping into marriage.
In looking through the changes here between 1970 and 1979, you will notice that married
couples with children are shrinking as a percentage of all households. This is because more and
more couples are choosing to put off parenthood or to forego it entirely. One-parent families –
mostly lone mothers with children – are on the upswing as more marriages dissolve and more
unmarried women become parents. Incidentally, demographers estimate that by 1990 one-half of
American young people will have spent some portion of their childhood or adolescence in a oneparent family situation.
We see the most dramatic shift, though, in the rapidly expanding segment of non-family
households, most of which are people living alone. Part of the explanation is that young adults
today are not forming families as readily as before. More of them are postponing marriage or
choosing to remain single. Among women in their mid-20’s, over one-third are still unmarried,
compared with less than one-fifth 10 years ago. This upward trend should continue as more
women establish the foundations for lifelong careers.
All in all, households are becoming increasingly fragmented and living arrangements
more varied. The same living quarters are being shared by fewer people, in many cases by people
who live either alone or in other kinds of non-family situations.
Within a metropolitan area, different types of family and household structures tend to sort
themselves out in different parts of town. We find heavy concentrations of one-parent families
and non-family households in the urban core. In the suburbs we find more families, but there will
be increasing numbers of married couples without children choosing to live in the suburbs. So
these complex interactions go far beyond demography.
The implications of these changes are extremely varied. Those of you in real estate and
housing – whether you build them, sell them, or finance them – must know the smaller
households and new living arrangements have produced new segments within the housing
market. With more and more one-parent families, special needs arise – for day-care, for after
school supervision of children, and for more flexibility at work for single parents who have to
juggle the responsibilities of home and child-care with those of a job.
Those of you in the private sector will also recognize that demographic shifts are
transforming markets for consumer products. For example, Roman Meal, the largest bread
company in the United States, has just introduced loaves containing 12 slices of bread, half the
size of the usual 24-slice loaf. They looked at the same data you see here – more childless
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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families and more single-person households – and concluded that 24 slices was just too much
bread.
The same logic applies to the design of corporate benefit packages for employees.
Employee benefits have always had as their underlying premise the “classic family” of American
nostalgia mentioned earlier. Today, however, benefit packages have to be reshaped to fit the
more varied needs of contemporary families and households. With so many wives in the work
force, not everybody needs the same benefits. If one employer already covers the family’s health
insurance needs, the employer of the other adult might provide other benefits of equivalent
value: educational benefits for children’s schooling, for example. The rationale for what is
termed a “cafeteria approach” will become more compelling as time goes by.
Let me turn now to the population’s changing age profile. The wide fluctuations in the
American birthrate earlier this century have left an indelible imprint on the nation’s age
structure. The rate was quite uneven; as a result, the population’s overall rate of growth masks
considerable variations across different age groups. These variations are apparent in Figure 3,
which describes the 1970’s.
What about the future? As the large Baby Boom generation, which is now in the 15 to 35
age range, matures, there will be important changes at certain ages:
•
In the high school and college ages – 15 to 24 – numbers will shrink by one-fifth. In
the 1980’s, it will be tough to find a young person to mow your lawn or bag your
groceries, let alone enlist in the service or fight a war.
•
Numbers of people in the prime working ages – 30 to 50, let’s say– will increase
sharply: 44 percent over the next decade and a half. Promotion squeezes may appear
in certain fields as younger workers eager to move up the promotion ladder find that
older workers, who have seniority, cling to the higher rungs.
•
People entering the retirement years – usually 65 and older – will increase 26 percent
over the next decade and a half.
Some of the implications are obvious, but some are not. One point is already a matter of
history, and we’ve learned some difficult lessons on the way. As the birthrate dropped in the late
1960’s, it was apparent that school enrollments would begin declining in the early 1970’s and
continue to decline thereafter. It was equally clear that fewer pupils would mean a reduction of
state and federal funds, and would perhaps cause teacher layoffs. But many teachers are tenured,
which limits the affected school district’s ability to shrink. And I don’t have to tell you how hard
it is to close an underused neighborhood school.
As one local illustration, the Shawnee Mission School District has repeatedly faced the
painful task of closing schools because of declining birthrates. In just the last two years, for
example, district enrollments have dropped about 8 percent.
Beyond the problem of declining enrollments, there is a broader underlying issue. How
do we adapt to an absence of growth? Throughout the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, teachers and
professors were trained in increasing numbers despite warnings of an impending oversupply. But
there were no mechanisms by which to respond. No university dean in his or her right mind
could advocate a 25 percent cut in teacher training.
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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So there we see a forerunner of what we will have to deal with generally in the 1980’s:
Learning how to make things shrink in an orderly fashion. It is not a mirror image of growing.
We know a lot about how to grow, politically and institutionally, but we’ve had very little
experience in making things contract in an orderly fashion. Contraction and shrinkage have taken
place in a painful way in cities like Cleveland but now will be taking place in many metropolitan
areas where things aren’t necessarily going wrong. What we should learn to focus on are the
mechanisms that allow things to shrink in an orderly way.
There is another obvious point here also. The demand for housing is certainly going to
remain strong throughout the 1980’s, at least as soon as we get the interest rates down. The Baby
Boom generation is now maturing into the prime home-buying age, roughly the early 30’s, and
of course prices are soaring.
And, as we look ahead further into the future, the ranks of the elderly population will
expand sharply as the Baby Boom generation begins to turn 65. That will be just 30 years from
now. This will greatly accentuate the health-care needs that are peculiar to old age. It also will
weaken the foundations of Social Security and other retirement systems that are funded on a payas-you-go basis. In order to remain viable, such systems will have to collect more dollars from a
shrinking work force to pay the benefits of an overgrowing number of pensioners.
This so-called “graying” of the population represents perhaps the most fundamental and
far-reaching demographic shift of our time, and I’d like to spend a few minutes considering how
these shifts will give greater prominence to the health needs of the elderly.
People over 65 now number 24 million, which is 11 percent of the total population. The
coming years will see a swelling of the ranks of the elderly population – and their particular
health care needs – partly because of increased longevity, but mostly because of the large
number of people born during the Baby Boom.
Several transformations are now under way. First, the over-65 population will increase
from 11 percent of the total population now, to between 18 and 23 percent by the year 2035.
Second, people in their late 70’s and 80’s will form a larger proportion of this elderly population.
Right now, people over 75 account for 38 percent of all those 65 and over. That figure will rise
to 47 percent by the year 2035.
The full force of these shifts will start to be felt around 2010 – 30 years from now – when
the Baby Boom generation begins to turn 65. Starting then, these increases will accelerate
sharply.
Finally, a very large proportion of the elderly will be widows, many of them living alone
in poverty in central cities.
Quite certainly, the health care needs of the elderly will rise on a per capita basis as the
structure of the elderly population shifts toward the very old ages. If the current U.S. population
were distributed by age as demographers expect it will be in the year 2035, the number of days
the population spends in the hospital would be at least 25 percent higher than it is today. At 1980
prices, that would imply an additional annual expenditure on hospital care of around $20 billion.
Also, personnel and facility needs will shift toward rehabilitation and the return to
optimal functioning, rather than cure. The elderly who are alone, especially, will need a variety
of support services, such as homemaker assistance, visiting nurses, and, eventually, nursing
homes, to cope with the difficulties of being alone in declining health.
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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Finally, possibly the most important consideration is where the pressure of all these
developments is likely to be heaviest. That will be in the central city, where the elderly poor are
becoming disproportionately concentrated. The financial strain imposed on Truman Medical
Center is an illustration.
When this surge of people turning 65 hits early next century, the graying of the
population will have important implications for pension and retirement systems that operate on a
pay-as-you-go basis. The trouble with the Firefighter’s Pension Plan is a local example.
Before I move on to my final topic, let me give you Morrison’s abbreviated version of
what life in the 21st century will be like. It really boils down to three very simple propositions.
The first is that women will be running the world instead of having babies. The second is that so
many of us will be elderly then that all of today’s empty classrooms will be converted to nursing
homes. Finally, the private pension systems will all be bankrupt, and there will be a slight
difference with Social Security when you turn 65. What you will receive is a letter that reads:
Dear Mr. Morrison:
Welcome to the Social Security System. Attached is a list of ten names. At the end
of the month please send $100 to the name at the top. Type your name at the
bottom. Be sure not to break the chain...
Let me turn now to the last of my topics, the new areas that people are favoring as places
to live. Over the decades, migration has shifted the nation’s statistical center of gravity steadily
westward and southward (Figure 4). Back around 1800, our map would have balanced squarely
in the middle of Maryland. Ever since then, this hypothetical balance point – the center of the
world, so to speak – has been edging toward Kansas City! Just last year, the nation’s center of
gravity crossed the Mississippi River, and it now lies barely 200 miles from where we stand at
this very moment. It is closing in on Kansas City at 3 feet per hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a
year. That should generate some excitement at the Chamber of Commerce!
Migration, of course, changes much more than the nation’s center of gravity. The 1980
Census, more than others, is forcing attention on the political effects of migration. Legislatures
will have to grapple with the question of whose seats to abolish and where to put new districts.
Population movements changed fundamentally in the 1970’s, speeding growth up in
some areas and slowing it down in others. Peripheral rural areas that emptied out during the
1950’s and 1960’s are now filling up with newcomers. Migrants are favoring smaller
communities instead of large cities. The larger metropolitan centers– including Kansas City, the
nation’s 28th largest – are evolving gradually toward population stability, or something close to
it.
The combined effect of these new migration trends has been to reshuffle the locations of
growth and decline. Again, we have the theme of adapting to a world in which things no longer
grow, or living in a world where things that previously declined are now growing rapidly, as in
non-metropolitan areas.
I want to give you some perspective on these changing migration trends and where they
are leading. First, let’s consider regional shifts. During the 1970’s, growth was stunted in much
of the Northeast and Midwest as migrants headed for the South Atlantic, South Central, and
Mountain states. Missouri’s population increased 5 percent, the same as Kansas, both roughly
half the national average. Metropolitan Kansas City registered a 5 percent gain during the
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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1970’s. That’s below the national average of about 10 percent for metropolitan areas of
comparable size, but it’s far ahead of other such areas in the North Central region.
What about the future? You can take your pick of various forecasts; none has a very
reliable track record. Figure 5 shows one plausible scenario for the next 20 years. These are
Census Bureau projections. Although they are not forecasts, they do indicate approximate rates
of increase, assuming a continuation of existing migration trends. For our purposes, that’s as
plausible as any assumption we might choose.
The entire population of the United States will increase roughly 17 percent over the next
20 years. That’s a useful benchmark for comparison. The population of the West North Central
region, as you see in the illustration, will be somewhat lower, about 11 percent. For Missouri, the
projected 20-year increase is about 12 percent. For Kansas, it’s only slightly lower, 9 percent.
What accounts for these regional population shifts? You are probably familiar with the
usual list of economic and job-related factors. But there is more to it than jobs and prosperity.
Evidence is mounting that today’s migrants are being attracted by amenities and the noneconomic factors that make up what people construe as quality of life.
One obvious sign of what is happening is the change in the settings people now favor as
places to live, explained in Figure 6. Many people now are opting for the smaller community
settings. This general movement away from large cities and toward small communities –
deconcentration, as I call it has assumed several forms. The first I’ve labeled “size
deconcentration.” Migrants increasingly are shunning the very large metropolitan centers, those
whose populations are in the million-plus range, in favor of smaller ones like Springfield,
Lawrence, Lincoln, and St. Cloud – all under a quarter million in population, and all gaining
population at least twice as fast as the West North Central region as a whole.
Second, the traditional pattern of suburban growth has penetrated further into the territory
beyond the existing metropolitan boundaries, what I would label “metropolitan sprawl.” These
are the widening zones of growth within 50 or 100 miles of the major downtown centers; in your
area, the kind of growth under way in Clinton County, for example.
Under the “non-sprawl” heading are two other types of deconcentration under way in the
more remote reaches of non-metropolitan America. Small urban centers with perhaps 5,000 to
10,000 people are emerging as freestanding miniature cities. Also, there is a kind of rural
renaissance, in which tiny communities are springing up in totally rural areas. An exemplary case
is the broad region around 150 miles southeast of Kansas City in the general vicinity of Camden
County.
In closing, let me suggest that population shifts act as both catalyst and constraint. As a
catalyst, they generate underlying economic stresses, strains, and rivalries in the job market, in
the housing market, and among the regions and localities affected by flows of migration. Surely
the emerging problems with public pensions and the Social Security system exemplify how
demographic change can destabilize public programs.
Demographic change imposes constraints on public aims and the means by which these
aims can be advanced. Under circumstances where growth is slowing or has stopped,
demographic constraints are especially difficult to contend with. Adjustments that were once
easy become the object of contention and dispute, like whose neighborhood school to close in the
face of declining enrollment, or who should retire to make way for younger workers.
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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The local geography of growth and decline is especially significant because, by and large,
people can and will move away from what they regard as unpleasant, and toward what they
desire. This continual reshuffling of population across municipal boundaries generates conflict,
between the elderly and the minorities left behind in central cities, and between suburbanites and
rural people who are beyond the metropolitan fringe and do not want their country life-style
destroyed by hordes of newcomers.
We demographers are in the business of anticipating problems, not solving them. What
demographic analysis can do is draw attention to the imbalances that are built into the
population’s structure or that are brought about by its changing spatial distribution. This includes
the total number of people in the community, how old they are, their participation in the work
force, the ways they arrange and rearrange themselves into families and households, whether
they have children and how they raise them, and where they choose to settle in the city, the
suburbs, or beyond.
The monitoring of demographic trends, periodic analysis of what has changed and what
the changes mean, and other forms of demographic reporting build public recognition and help
pave the way for local leadership to act. The necessary technical capabilities certainly exist in
Kansas City – in the City Development Department, the Mid-America Regional Council
(MARC), and the Greater Kansas City Area Development Council. These agencies have already
assembled very impressive data bases that can serve as the core of city-wide and metropolitanwide monitoring systems.
Demographic “early warnings” enable communities to anticipate the effects of population
change and to adjust their actions to the resulting constraints. The challenge I leave with you
today is to devise a process that is workable at the local level for actively choosing the posture
that this metropolitan area will adopt in accommodating the demographic shifts on the horizon.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
QUESTION: How does the move to smaller communities relate to the increased price of
energy? Doesn’t this kind of move require longer driving distances?
ANSWER: People are not necessarily moving to more remote suburban settings. They
are instead choosing to live in smaller metropolitan areas like Columbia, Missouri, rather than
larger metropolitan areas like Chicago. We see clear evidence of this. People are saying that they
don’t mind giving up the economic advantages that might accrue in the larger and more lucrative
urban centers – advantages such as higher salaries or more promising job prospects. They would
like to trade a little of that for a life in what more and more people are regarding as a
comfortable, livable community.
So, this trend doesn’t necessarily mean that people have to commute further to jobs. If
you think about the distance between the suburbs and the downtown of cities of differing sizes –
let’s say a town of 100,000 versus a city of more than a million like Kansas City – you will see
that you may end up using less gasoline.
I’d like to elaborate on how the population can seem to be dispersing when the price of
gasoline is going up. If you do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, you will conclude that it
is a lot cheaper to buy a few hundred extra gallons of gasoline than it is to sell your house and
buy a new one closer in. One has to do with $500 more fuel, which can easily be offset by a car
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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made in Japan that gets 50 percent more mileage; and the other has to do with a decision that
may cost you tens of thousands of dollars after you take into account the tax situation. So, the
fact is that energy is not the determining factor in where people locate.
QUESTION: I read, not recently but two or three years ago, that nearly the total increase
in American population in the previous five years or so had been from immigration, either the
legal or the illegal variety, and that if you cut that all out, we had already reached zero population
growth. Would you care to comment?
ANSWER: The estimates I have seen are that somewhere in the vicinity of 40 percent of
our present population growth comes from legal and illegal immigration. Nobody knows for sure
how many undocumented newcomers we absorb each year, but it is substantial. It is an
interesting component of growth because it is one over which we have legislative control. I can
tell you that some of the figures you read on the volume of illegal immigration into this country
are grossly exaggerated. These figures are based on very fragile evidence. They typically come
from apprehension rates kept by the INS; that is, if we apprehend 100 people crossing the border,
there must have been 900 more that crossed unnoticed. It’s anybody’s guess what the ratio is.
What’s important to remember is that many of the undocumented aliens don’t take up permanent
residency. They have a seasonal cycle, entering for three or four months and then returning, year
after year. So the presumption that everyone who enters the country adds a permanent resident is
incorrect. The estimates I have seen are in the vicinity of 4 million to 9 million illegal
immigrants per year in a total population of 225 million, so it is not as large a percentage as some
might contend.
QUESTION: In view of this pretty dramatic westward shift of the population, what are
the federal agencies doing about more regionalization of their efforts, that is, less of a
concentration in the Northeast?
ANSWER: I guess the answer is, “Not much.” Obviously there are mandated changes in
political representation based on the new Census Bureau figures. However, we don’t have much
of a regional policy in this nation and never have; government hasn’t looked at the map and
asked, “What is the larger logic of this? Where are we going, and is it where we want to go? Do
we want to do some national interior decorating?” That has been a part of the mission of the
Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (which is now scheduled to
be abolished). There isn’t anything really coherent.
QUESTION: Do these projections you have made take into account the possibility,
however remote, that massive improvements may be made, say, in cardiovascular diseases,
cancer cures, or other medical discoveries which might lengthen life?
ANSWER: Over the past decade or so, Americans have been living a little longer than
actuaries had expected. The increase in longevity is not dramatic, but it suggests that projections
are off target. Justifiably, we can ask: “What if we have Breakthrough X or Breakthrough Y?” It
turns out that there is something called “competing risks.” If you don’t die of X, you will then
succumb to Y soon enough. “Breakthroughs” don’t really increase life expectancy all that much.
Perhaps more important is whether the graying of the population will be more intense in
some areas than others. This is a very important aspect of the future. First, some areas of the
country are proving very attractive to retirement migrants. The Ozarks and parts of the Upper
Midwest have become very popular as retirement areas. People drawn to these areas generate a
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Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
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kind of “mailbox economy” because they receive pensions and, in turn, create jobs for others
(such as the Mom-and-Pop stores there). Another aspect is equally important but might not have
occurred to any of us had some geographers not pointed out that “aging in place” will occur.
Take all the people who moved to the suburbs in the 1950’s. Waves of people settled certain
pieces of geography; those people are now arriving at the “empty nest” stage and will be elderly
citizens in another decade or two. By and large, the vast majority will stay put. Most elderly
people don’t move around a lot, although they may change residences within a city. Thus, if you
look at how the population is distributed in terms of the historical movements of recent decades,
you have a kind of picture – motion picture if you run it ahead a bit – of where the future elderly
are going to be 10 or 20 years from now. They will be concentrated heavily in the older suburbs
and in the declining central cities. The graying of the population will be quite uneven in spatial
terms. So when I talk abstractly about the elderly population rising from 11 percent to between
18 and 23 percent, that could mean that in a city like St. Louis, where the elderly population now
is nearly one-fifth, the fraction will be much higher in the future.
QUESTION: If a city can’t grow in numbers of bodies, should it try to envision growing
in per capita income?
ANSWER: This is what I had in mind when I mentioned attaining a state of prosperous
stability. In the past, we have equated growth with prosperity and stability, and decline with
distress. That will not be the case in the future. Just because population is not registering growth,
something is not necessarily wrong. What may count for much more is the nature of the
population and its economic self-sufficiency or prosperity, even in a world in which the numbers
are shrinking considerably. I think that is a much more hopeful scenario for the 1980’s and
1990’s when growth is going to be slowing down nationwide.
QUESTION: What can we do in metropolitan Kansas City in your opinion, Mr.
Morrison, to prove your projection wrong, as far as our rate of growth is concerned?
ANSWER: There’s the old established principle of “chasing smokestacks” – in this case,
high technology industry. You might see if you can entice fragments of Silicon Valley in
Northern California to land here. I know they are shifting to places like Austin, Texas, and
Portland, Oregon. My advice would be to think in terms of future growth industries and make the
transition directly to them – communications and information processing, for example. Whether
that is feasible here is beyond my expertise. I’ve heard your economy is very diversified and
well-balanced; my advice would be to focus not on the magnitude of growth but on its
composition. You will have greater success if you phase out 1,000 manufacturing jobs and phase
in 500 jobs in telecommunications or data processing.
QUESTION: Are demographers taking into consideration the increase in unwanted
pregnancies among teenagers?
ANSWER: Having studied this problem, I am familiar with it. There is a basic conflict
between ethical and religious values that emphasize life and rational values that suggest solutions
to problems. In the case of unwanted parenthood, there are simple solutions to problems, but
many people feel uncomfortable with these solutions on religious or ethical grounds. We have
moved toward an ever higher percentage of children being brought into the world as wanted
children. At the same time, there is a clearly identified segment of the population, adolescents,
who become involved with parenthood at an age that most would regard as too early. One can
© MRI, 2000
Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
Page 11
approach it either from the standpoint of prevention or from the standpoint of cure. Either way
there are clear-cut actions, and also equally clear-cut lines of moral and ethical debate.
QUESTION: But you haven’t really tried to take that into consideration?
ANSWER: I haven’t, because it would be the subject of another lecture.
QUESTION: What about your projections?
ANSWER: Oh yes, the numbers are taken into account. The assumption is that as fertility
rates decline, there will be a concentration of childbearing in certain age brackets. Adolescent
childbearing is no longer increasing. It is becoming more and more concentrated among very
young adolescents. There you have a problem where numbers don’t mean so much. It is the
problem of a 14-year-old as opposed to an 18-year-old. They are taken into account in these
projections, but they don’t figure for very much, actually. It doesn’t make an awful lot of
difference in terms of numbers of people.
QUESTION: What are the occupations that women are going to move into most rapidly
in the years ahead?
ANSWER: I can’t honestly answer that because I haven’t looked at the projections, but I
can give you some recent figures that will suggest where the trends are leading. There is, as you
know, a pink ghetto out there. The vast majority of women are confined to a narrow part of the
occupational structure, primarily secretaries and teachers. What’s changed is that a small but
rapidly growing fraction of women is moving into professions such as law and medicine, and
also into unconventional kinds of occupations like construction or truck driving. Undoubtedly,
more and more women will move into career occupations. Much of that is tied in with the fact
that women have been remaining on jobs long enough to recognize that there are productive
roles in life other than childbearing and homemaking; indeed there may be a combination of
several productive roles. I foresee a convergence between the careers of men and women.
COMMENT: Just an observation, there may be some reversal of roles, too. The last
figure I heard was that the nation was short 175,000 nurses. Most of these jobs were historically
filled by females, but because the wage scale is increasing, more and more men are pursuing
nursing careers.
ANSWER: The most fundamental development is the breakdown of traditional
constraints. Choices are now available that weren’t available a decade ago.
© MRI, 2000
Peter A. Morrison, December 3, 1980
Page 12
PETER A. MORRISON is Senior Staff Member at The Rand Corporation and Director
of Rand’ s Population Research Center in Santa Monica, California. Dr. Morrison’s research
focuses on the application of demographic analysis and methods to a
variety of social issues: non-metropolitan population growth, central city
decline, rural poverty, adolescent parenthood, energy demand, and
applied demographic forecasting. He is a member of the Board of
Directors of the Population Association of America, has been
Chairman of the Committee on Urbanization and Population
Redistribution of the International Union for the Scientific Study of
Population, and has served on the Population Research Committee of
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Dr. Morrison is widely published and has written more
than 30 articles focusing on demographic trends shaping the
nation’s future, with particular emphasis on migration. He has
testified before subcommittees of the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives. Dr. Morrison holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from
Brown University.
Top
MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES was a lecture series sponsored by the
Midwest Research Institute as a public service to the midcontinent region. Its purpose was to
present new viewpoints on economic, political, social, and scientific issues that affect the
Midwest and the nation.
Midcontinent Perspectives was financed by the Kimball Fund, named for Charles N.
Kimball, President of MRI from 1950 to 1975, Chairman of its Board of Trustees from 1975 to
1979, and President Emeritus until his death in 1994. Initiated in 1970, the Fund has been
supported by annual contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Today it is
the primary source of endowment income for MRI. It provides “front-end” money to start highquality projects that might generate future research contracts of importance. It also funds publicinterest projects focusing on civic or regional matters of interest.
Initiated in 1974 and continuing until 1994, the sessions of the Midcontinent Perspectives
were arranged and convened by Dr. Kimball at four- to six-week intervals. Attendance was by
invitation, and the audience consisted of leaders in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The
lectures, in monograph form, were later distributed to several thousand individuals and
institutions throughout the country who were interested in MRI and in the topics addressed.
The Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Kansas City, in cooperation with MRI, has
reissued the Midcontinent Perspectives Lectures in electronic format in order to make the
valuable information which they contain newly accessible and to honor the creator of the series,
Dr. Charles N. Kimball.