That’s not merely the opinion of my proud father, the usual author of this Connecting California column. And that’s not the idle boast of a 7-day-old infant. My value is a hard demographic and economic fact for California—and a huge burden for me.

Few Californians know it, but our state has a shortage of children. California’s birth rate has fallen to 1.94 babies per woman—below the 2.1 babies-per-woman fertility standard necessary to maintain a population over the long term. And migration to California from other states and countries is down. The result: Over the past decade, the state’s number of children under the age of 10 declined by 187,771. This decade, California is projected to lose another over 100,000 of us. While children were one-third of all Californians in 1970, they will be only one-fifth by 2030, according to a recent report on this shortage from University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers.

This older California is a problem both for you—those Californians old enough to read this—and for me.

For you, having fewer kids around means you have a smaller talent pool from which to develop the adults needed to replace you as employees, citizens, and consumers. And you’ll need plenty of replacements, since the state is seeing unprecedented growth in the number of retirees. Indeed, with the number of old people growing and the number of kids shrinking, each new child born in California is more valuable than the last. We infants will need to support you and buy your houses.

For me, the child shortage means greater pressure than you’ll ever know. According to the USC report, I will have to be nearly twice as productive economically and socially as my aunt Katie, a newly minted California lawyer born in the mid-1980s. Call me precocious in taking over my dad’s column, but I don’t have any time to waste.

You would think that the state would be grateful for my arrival, with brass bands, a donation to my college fund, maybe a public statement from the governor praising the fertility of my mother and prodigious virility of my father as a model for all Californians (did I mention he’s editing this?).

But no. I suspect some of my fellow Californians wish I’d never been born.

For those who see overpopulation as a great threat, families with one or two children are at best tolerable nuisances. I am the third child in my family.

On the right, many people complain about all the taxes being paid to support my education. On the left, especially in environmentally conscious enclaves along the coast, it’s practically an article of faith that couples should have no more than one child. Their argument: I consume too much, pollute too much, and accelerate climate change.

My reaction: You can’t keep taxes low and save the planet without me. Yes, consumption practices must change to slow climate change, but improving the environment is expensive. Without enough children to produce economic growth, there won’t be enough resources to do it.

Big families are also, in many ways, more efficient. I can testify that I’m wearing nothing but ratty hand-me-downs from my big brothers. My family’s friends Jim and Agnes McAllister have 11 kids and say they often encounter people who are indignant about the size of their family. “What I sometimes say is: My 13 people in my Ford Econoline van are more efficient than your three or four people in your Mercedes-Benz by a long shot,” Jim tells my dad. “Economies of scale really do kick in.”

And those on the right who call us children “tax eaters” talk as though having a kid is downright profitable. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it will cost $241,080 to raise a child born last year for 18 years; when my dad plugged estimates for my health, education, and child care into the USDA calculator, the figure for me was nearly $500,000, not including college.

When you consider those high costs, it’s my parents who are subsidizing the state’s future—and its future taxpayers, especially those who can’t or won’t have as many children as they do. Maybe my parents should take us three little economic assets someplace where we’d get a better deal.

Many countries offer payments to children via parents or special accounts. In the United Kingdom, Prince William will get what is called the child benefit for baby George. Singapore tries to encourage family formation by increasing its payments for additional children; if I had been born there, my parents would have received $8,000 as a “baby bonus” and a special savings account—the Child Development Account—with a government match for their contributions.

So am I saying that California should open a savings account for me and send me a big check?

Yes.

Short of that, treat me like the rare and precious resource I am in this graying state and tie more benefits to me.

And if you won’t make policy changes, there is at least one other thing those of you of childbearing age could do to ease my burden. My fellow Californians, for your future and for mine, I beg you: Get busy.

The post I’m a Rare and Precious Baby. So Pay Me. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The doomsayer narrative presupposes that any place not booming with growth must be a failure. But any change can be taken as a sign of doom. If the number or proportion of white residents is declining, doomsayers cry “flight,” which is bad. Conversely, if minorities are declining, that must be a sign of gentrification, which is also bad. If the population is getting older, that’s a sign of failure, and if it is getting younger, then where have all the wise older people gone? Any demographic change can be spun as criticism to advance an agenda.

The doomsayer critics playing with demographics typically cite three reasons for the state’s woes: Business taxes are too high, development regulations are too strict, and planners are dictating lifestyles that people don’t want. Meanwhile, the people of California wonder if some of these claims are true. Demographers are experts, after all. Aren’t they?

Meg Whitman, running for governor in 2010, was only one of many politicians in recent years to adopt the doomsayer narrative. “We are, you know, crushing the California dream,” she told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “And people are moving to Colorado and Arizona and Texas and Utah, because it’s simpler and easier to do business.”

A more recent instance of doomsaying appeared in a Wall Street Journal interview with Joel Kotkin, the contrarian writer on urban matters. The feature, headlined “The Great California Exodus,” received a great deal of attention for its shocking tale of California’s demographic failure. “Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states,” read the introduction. “This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving.”

Shocking, but misleading–and dangerous. Crying wolf will only succeed in getting the public to ignore all the demographic trends, some of which indeed have vital importance. A more realistic picture of California’s health and attraction is painted by a different measure of migration, one that in fact leads to the opposite conclusion.

People can leave a state for many reasons. California has many dabblers who try it out and then head home. Migration is a sorting process that can work in California’s favor, acting like a gold pan that sifts through aspiring talent and keeps the best. (New York is even more extreme in this respect.)

Do Californians really care how many New Yorkers move back to New York or on to Las Vegas? For the most part, no. What local residents care about is how many of our own friends, especially our children, leave the state. If native Californians start fleeing, then we know we are in trouble. So what do the data tell us on this?

California, in fact, holds its own. When it comes to retaining native sons and daughters, California has the fifth-strongest attraction of all 50 states. Among California-born adults who were at least 25 years of age and old enough to have moved away, fully 66.9 percent were still choosing to reside in the Golden State in 2007, the last year of high migration before the recession held people down. Texas, with 75.1 percent of native Texans still living in the state, has the strongest loyalty, and the other three rounding out the top five are Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia. California’s top-five ranking is all the more impressive when you take into account the state’s high living costs and other negatives. We must have something going for us.

Nevada, as you can see here, ranks in the bottom five of states’ retention of native-born population, despite being touted as a beacon for those fleeing California. If you can’t hold your own, you’re not worth the chips you’re built on. On this key measure, California is a full house, Nevada a busted inside straight. And yet you’d never know how enticing California is for its native-born residents from the overwrought narratives.

When it comes to the question of how much growth is desirable, the last decade of booming population growth in California was the 1980s, when over 6 million people were added. That is Kotkin’s apparent standard of excellence. But the 1980s were a big anomaly. It might have had something to do with Texas being in an oil bust and the Midwest hitting the worst of its rustbelt slide. Or perhaps it had to do with Ronald Reagan occupying the White House and launching a campaign of defense spending to outmuscle the Soviets, with much of the spending focused on southern California’s aerospace companies. California, in that decade, was a magnet without competition.

But, rest assured, California is hanging in there. This giant state has an economy that is equivalent in production to the eighth-largest nation in the world. The state certainly is afflicted with political gridlock, but so is Congress. It’s an American malaise. California still has unique assets to be deployed in the 21st century economy.

In reality, the demographic picture in California is brighter than it has been in decades, provided we meet one key challenge. New studies show that the state’s immigrants have settled in and the growth in the workforce now rides on the skills of homegrown Californians, many the children of immigrants. The main threat in California isn’t about business climate or the types of homes being built. It is about the defunding of higher education and the failure to invest in the next generation of workers, taxpayers, and homebuyers. If there is any doubt about California’s future–and this is no crying wolf–that is the demographic challenge to keep your eyes on.

Dowell Myers, a professor in the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, is the author of Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America.

*Photo courtesy of John-Morgan.

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