Today, we’re diving into a pretty eye-opening discussion about America’s changing demographics and what it means for the future. You heard it right—our population is shrinking, and if we don’t start paying attention, we might just walk right into a demographic disaster! I’m talking about a serious drop in the number of young folks entering the workforce and schools, which could turn college into an exclusive club rather than a common place for growth and learning. We’ve got five predictions on how this shrinking pool of young people will impact everything from crime rates to cultural shifts in music and even government policies. So grab your favorite snack and settle in, because we’re about to unpack how fewer kids today could lead to some big changes tomorrow! We're diving deep into some serious conversation today, and trust me, it's not all doom and gloom! Picture this: you wake up one day and realize there aren’t as many young folks around as there used to be. Yep, that's the gist of it! James A. Brown takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the implications of America’s declining birth rates and what that means for the future. We’re not just talking numbers here; we’re exploring how this trend might turn college into an elite activity, impact crime rates, and even change the music landscape! James breaks down his five predictions with humor and insight, making sure to keep it light whilst tackling heavy topics. Plus, he shares some listener responses that are both thought-provoking and honestly relatable—like the pressures we all face in today’s economy. So grab your favorite snack, kick back, and get ready to rethink what the future holds for our society—it’s gonna be a wild ride!

Takeaways:

1. The podcast discusses how America is facing a demographic crisis with fewer young people, leading to potential social and economic transformations.
2. James A. Brown highlights the concept of 'peak 18', emphasizing that the number of 18-year-olds will decline over the next 18 years, impacting various sectors.
3. One prediction suggests that as fewer young people enter college, higher education may become increasingly exclusive, particularly affecting regional and community schools.
4. The podcast humorously addresses that crime rates may fall, as younger people are typically more involved in criminal activities, suggesting a shift in societal dynamics.
5. The discussion includes light-hearted predictions about music trends, noting that popular music may have a longer lifespan without new acts emerging frequently.
6. James shares listener feedback, addressing concerns about societal pressures and the phenomenon of Americans feeling financially squeezed, impacting family planning.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. jamesabrown.net
2. jamesedailynote.net

News moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around, you might miss it.

That's why the Daily Note slows down the news.

No jerseys, no Masters, just better questions about America.

This is the Daily Note with James A.

Brown.

Oh, yes, indeed.

This is the Daily Note, and I'm your host, James A.

Brown.

Thanks for joining me.

You could be anywhere else in the world, but you're here with me.

And I thank you for that, sincerely.

You can check out my work@jamesabrown.net that's jamesabrown.net I've got a great show for you today, and it's all about a conversation that you and I have been having for the last few days.

Not long ago, I sat in this chair and told you something that's been keeping me up at night that honestly has been.

It's stressful to think about.

I told you that America is running out of young people.

And I want you to think about that statement for a little bit because I know how it sounds, maybe hyperbolic, and that's not what I do here.

I'm not saying it to get attention.

It sounds dramatic.

It sounds like I might be exaggerating to make a point, but I'm not.

They weren't.

There's not enough of them.

They weren't born either.

We can't go back and have those babies now.

That's the thing about demographics that people often overlook.

The future is already written.

It's sitting there in hospital records, in birth certificates.

It's just waiting to hit the rest of the world.

We hit peak 18.

Nearly 3.9 million kids graduated from high school.

That's the most we've ever had and the most we'll have for quite some maybe ever.

From here, the numbers go down year after year for at least the next 18 years, probably longer.

That's not a guess.

That's just counting the children who code through our hospitals day by day.

And I made five predictions about what that's going to mean for us.

But because I think that's one of the most undertold tales of our time, My first prediction was that college would become an elite activity.

Not because we want it that way, although there's probably a few that do.

Not because, you know, some committee decided to do it, but because There won't be enough 18 year olds to fill those classrooms.

And there will be a domino effect that follows.

The big schools, the famous ones, you know, the Harvards of the world, the ones with the billion dollar endowments and probably hundred million dollar endowments are going to be okay.

They'll always have more applicants than they'll accept.

In fact, I think they'll probably thrive in this environment.

People will always want to go to Yale and Stanford, you know, Cal Berkeley, but regional schools that serve local communities, community colleges that give working families a shot.

People like me, I went to a small school, Niagara University.

I think those schools, those schools are going to suffer.

I know many schools like them already have.

My second prediction was that crime is going to fall.

And before we give anyone credit for it, because I bet every politician on the planet will try to take credit for it.

It's not gonna be because of that.

Crime is a young person's game.

Not exclusively.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

There are people who are older who commit crimes, but for the most part it's kids, especially young men.

Crime peaks in the late 20s, in the, in the late teens and early 20s, then it drops pretty much forever.

I mean, think about it.

You have jobs, you have kids, you have girlfriends, you have responsibility.

Time gets busy.

Anyone who's had, who's gone through that period knows that your life changed is dramatically, whether you're in school or not, in your mid-20s and going into your 30s and 40s, like me.

My third prediction was that budget shortfalls are going to be aplenty.

The way we've structured our society, the young pay for the old.

And when we have fewer young people, there's going to be fewer people to pay to keep the axles greased.

The structure was built to assume that there will always be more.

And we're headed into a world where there's going to be less.

Yeah, down array.

My fourth prediction was a little bit lighter.

The music that's gonna be, that's popular now and been popular over the last, let's say 20 years will be popular.

They'll have a longer life span than previous generations of music, simply because there's going to be fewer kids pushing up those new acts, those new styles up the charts and then add on top of it.

What's happened with innovation, the fact that we all have the access to the world of the history of recorded music at our fingertips.

We're not going to see as many new acts pop.

So we're going to end up with a whole lot of the same.

And my fifth prediction is that the government is eventually going to try to pay people to have kids.

Tax credits, cash payments, baby bonds.

They'll try something because that's always the first response when numbers get bad enough.

We've seen it in other parts of the world and we'll go into that later, will throw money at the problem and help people respond.

Now those were my predictions and I heard from a lot of you.

I read comments, I got emails and I wanted to share some of what you said.

A handful of the responses, the ones that really made me think, you know, am I right?

Am I wrong here?

And it and walk you through my thoughts, my responses to you.

This one was on Newsbreak.

His handle is semper fi MT 75.

He said, don't worry folks, I'm breeding fast enough to cover a couple of stragglers.

I appreciate that.

We could use more of it.

Then they got serious.

I think it's he I will point out that counting high school graduates is a poor metric when we have ample documentation that American education, that the American education student system is an abysmal failure.

And I agree that the education system has lots of problems, but I don't think it's a poor metric.

For counting 18 year olds because we're not just, we're not just looking at the people who are graduating at different schools and counting them.

I'm counting 18 year olds purely if you look at birth certificate birth records, there's simply not going to be as many 18 year olds next year as there are now and so on and so forth.

And there but there are some really interesting points about what he said.

When you think about it, we are seeing men disappear not just from the workforce but, but from schools.

We're seeing tons of dropouts all over the place.

And I think if we took a more macro view, as Semper Fi is asking us to, I think we may actually be strangely more scared about the results.

There is a possibility that we're wrong here.

I don't think we are.

You know, and I think if you, if you look in a macro sense, as Semper Fi continued, that yes, we're having less children.

That's a global phenomenon.

Even Africa's birth rates are plummeting.

Meanwhile, Korea has less than 100 years left before the complete societal and cultural collapse happens.

We still have time comparatively.

And look, I think that's a fair point, but we do have time.

And I think what I would like to get across and what I hope I got across before is what we do with that time is what's important.

How do we adapt our systems to adjust to a world where there's simply going to be fewer of us supporting more of us, where the pyramid of.

Age of lifespans is turned upside down?

It's not something that you hear talked about very often.

What do you do when there are few of us, fewer of us to come, When there aren't as many people as we need to pay Social Security to pay taxes?

We're seeing this with churches these days where they're contracting, you know, Catholic churches in particular, but lots of churches.

We're seeing this with some colleges, as I mentioned.

What do we do next?

We'll dive into that a little bit later.

This is the Daily Note, slowing down the news.

Hello and welcome to the Daily Note.

I'm James A.

Brown.

Thanks for joining me.

You can check out my work@jamesabrown.net that's jamesabrown.net I was continuing a conversation that you and I have been having online about my last episode where I shared with you some of the things that trouble me about our population.

There are fewer of us.

There's no ways about it.

We can't talk our way around it.

So I picked a handful of comments that happened on News Break that I got on TikTok, that I got on Instagram and where have you some emails as well.

And I'm going to respond to them one by one.

Georgia K. Said that people aren't having 10 plus kids anymore.

And that's it.

That's, that's, that's the most succinct way to say it all.

Another person responded to her that Americans are being squeezed.

And that's, that's how we got there.

Think about it.

We this downward trend started with the Great Recession, happened not long after I graduated from College.

I graduated in 06.

Great Recession starts in 08.

I graduated amidst one of the biggest housing bubbles in history.

And then there was a major bailout of the banks.

And my generation made a choice that was, you know, on one level, logical, but, you know, there are consequences for it.

And that was before we saw this inflation that followed as we bailed out the banks.

And then over the next decade, we printed money, printed money to, to do everything.

We didn't make any hard decisions as a government, as a society.

Instead, what we did was just.

Kick the can down the road.

We didn't want to deal with it.

And what happens to a population when you do that?

A population is saddled with student debt when you don't deal with this growing inflation.

I remember going to the grocery store in college and yes, I was buying lots of junk because that's what you do when you're, you know, a 20 year old kid.

You're not.

Most of us aren't really thinking about our nutrition too closely.

Maybe we should, but we weren't thinking that way.

I remember walking around with a full grocery cart for 40 bucks, 50 bucks.

Now I go to, you know, in my neck of the woods, Wegmans or Tops, and I walk out with a bag, a grocery bag, sadly a paper bag, because it's required by law where I live crazily.

And for 50 bucks we are getting maybe a quarter, a fifth of what we were able to do 15 years ago, 20 years ago, let alone wages.

You move into a white collar job, you're not making a whole lot more in these jobs than we were making 20 years ago.

Even if you do move up, if you do progress, if you do acquire skills, Everyone feels that squeeze.

I write about it a lot in my daily column.

You find that on jamesabrown.net that we all feel like, well, we all know something's wrong.

And we can feel this sort of tug that we have to think through every little purchase.

We have to budget more closely.

Not just because we have more responsibilities, although that is part of this, but simply because, you know, 100 grand is not 100 grand now, is not 100 grand 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

And we were told that, hey, if we, if we doubled down and invested in ourselves through student debt, that we would be able to, to afford a middle class lifestyle.

And I think what's true for me, and what's true for a lot of Americans is that we can't, at least not the lifestyle we were promised.

Now it's not that I'm not whining here, but what I am trying to do is acknowledge that this is a real problem.

If you are going through your 20s, you're going through your 30s, these are your formative years where you're trying to meet a mate.

As hard as we've made that on ourselves, that's a whole other show to come.

But as we go through all of this, if we feel that it's harder to get through, to pay for basic things, to afford a house, to afford a car, to, you know, filling those cars in those houses with children in car seats, I understand the logic of not wanting to do it.

So that all goes back to what an anonymous person wrote me, is that people are feeling squeezed.

If we're honest about it, that explains a lot of what's going on in the world today.

That squeeze is shaping our behavior.

It's making us make decisions that we wouldn't have otherwise.

It's not the only reason, but it's a big one.

We'll go into some more.

This is the Daily Note Live.

I'm James A.

Brown.

More in a moment.

Slowing down the news.

Want to talk to James?

Send him an email at james the daily note.net this is the Daily Note.

Oh, yes.

This is the Daily Note Live.

I'm James A.

Brown.

Thanks for joining me.

We continue in our discussion about what's happening with our population.

It's one of these things that I am very concerned with.

What's happened is that we've reached peak 18 for at least 18 years.

We're not going to have as many 18 year olds.

We're going to see a downward slope in our population.

And when you have fewer and fewer people entering the workforce, fewer and fewer people entering college, you get to, you're going to change.

Society's going to change.

There's no way around it.

So I shared this with you.

I spent the better part of an hour breaking this down with you and I got a lot of response on this one.

So I wanted to walk through some of the things that you shared with me.

One of my favorite usernames I've seen in recent years was Polemic.

I love Polemic.

I love Polemicist too.

And Polemic said that I keep trying, I'm assuming trying to have a child, but my wife says she feels like she's 60 years old.

I read that one a few times and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

What does it feel like to be so tired that you feel decades older than you actually are?

And then I started thinking a bit deeper on it.

And I understood.

Life is hard.

Not always, but it certainly can be.

You're juggling lots of responsibilities when you're in a relationship.

You, you, it's not just what's going on in your life, it's what's going on in your partner's life.

You're juggling family, you're trying to have some friends, you're trying to get through things.

I don't know if Polemic's family has some illnesses.

I have stressful job.

There's lots of things that can add some stress on you and make you reconsider.

Whether you have children at all.

It also reminds me of another thing that's happening and Look, I'm certainly one of the culprits here.

We are waiting longer than previous generations to settle down and have families.

So by the time if you are waiting till you're my age, when you're 40, or you're waiting to your 30s, you're going to have less energy and it's going to be harder to do just being frank about it.

And I think that habit, which there's lots of, you know, study on it, on why people make the decisions they do, it certainly shapes.

Not just how we approach building our, our, our families or if at all, but it, it also, It also shapes whether our family, whether our family happens at all.

The stressors on us.

The longer we wait, the harder it is to happen.

So polemic.

I hope you get to have a kid.

I really do.

I really do.

J Davi wrote me.

He said, I believe this one was on TikTok.

They don't care about black people having kids.

They're talking about white people.

He's totally wrong there.

I think he's incredibly wrong.

Look, this is cutting across just about all races.

This is very little to do with any individual race having kids, not having kids.

And if you look around, and if you look around the whole world, you see that it's not just white people or Asian people not having kids.

It's even black people, even Africa.

We're seeing some dips in population.

I think we'll touch on that in a little bit, a little bit more.

Kwon says our government commits most of the crime, which feels felt off topic until I thought about it.

I think that for me comes down to trust.

And I think.

That it's trust in our society, it's trust in our ability.

To support our families, it's trust that we can hold up our end of the bargain.

It's definitely a weight that I feel at times that I won't be able to do all that I think that I will need to do to support those youngins.

The system gets so heavy at times that it feels like, man, is this worth it?

I also think that.

I also wanted to address the fact that.

It's not that they're entirely wrong.

I mean, I did been some time in the previous episode talking about the age crime curve and how young men commit the vast majority of crime.

But Kwon has a point.

I mean, look, you know, government corruption, white collar crime, you know, like, there's certainly a lot of crime that does come out of the government.

It's not everything, it's not everybody, but it is, you Know, it is certainly something.

I mean, we live in a world with Jeffrey Epstein and we're having a former president and Bill Clinton being called to account.

The current president was accused of all sorts of crimes, and it seems like same thing with the Biden administration, also accused of crimes.

So you could argue it on that level.

You could certainly argue that, you know, that we've committed countless war crimes.

You know, it's not entirely nuts to say that the government commits crimes, most of the crimes.

That seems like a stretch.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't go there, exactly.

You know, politicians do take bribes from industries that they're supposed to regulate.

You know, you know, the way we've structured our system, that.

Our politicians, especially Congress members, are constantly fundraising.

So when you're constantly fundraising, you're constantly attached, seeing yourself to wealthy people, wealthy donors.

Most wealthy donors want something and in return, they're not just handing out money because they're nice.

I think what he's getting at there, at least, you know, my interpretation of it is that there's this sense that there are two sets of rules, one for normal people and another for people with money and power and connections.

And if you're rich enough or powerful enough or well connected enough, that the rules that apply to everyone else don't really apply to you.

That's, that's the sense that I get from that statement.

I might be totally wrong there, but, you know, that's what I take away from it.

I understand it.

I think most people get it and feel it and can't.

It would acknowledge that he's on to something there.

And I think that there is a logic that if you're in a world where you don't, you don't trust the people who run the planet, who run the country, run our cities, our towns, our states, to, to operate it fairly, I can see the logic, no matter how flawed it is, that you may want to pull back, you may not want to have families.

I do think that that's not a rationale that's grounded in reality, because I don't know that there's ever going to be a time where you could be honestly looking at government of any kind and be able to purely, purely defend, depend on them to do the right thing.

They're people, you know, they're not.

They're not.

They're not.

They're not you.

They're representing their own interests.

This is the Daily Note live.

I'm James A.

Brown, back with more in a minute.

Slowing down the news.

Want to talk to James, leave him a comment on jamesabrown.net this is the Daily Note.

This is the Daily Note Live.

I'm James A.

Brown.

Thanks for joining me.

You can check out my work@jamesabrown.net that's James A. Brown.net you can send me an email at jamesedailynote.net or leave me a voicemail.

We might have you on the show.

I started all this with a number that's 3.9 million.

That's the highest number ever recorded in America.

And that's going to be the last time we see a number that high for at least 18 years, probably longer.

I thought I was talking about demographics and birth rates and what happens when the pipeline of young people start to shrink.

I thought I was talking about numbers and trends and projections.

And then I heard from you.

It's not what some of you took it as.

You taught me something I should understand.

From the beginning.

A number of people told me that we still have time compared to Korea, compared to Japan, compared to all the other countries that are dealing with the same problem.

And no doubt you are correct.

I'm not doubting that.

You're not wrong.

But having more time doesn't mean we have enough time.

The canary is in the coal mine, screaming.

And some of you said the obvious.

You know, people aren't having a ton of children anymore.

We've skewed smaller for lots of reasons.

We've moved into cities.

We've technology, the cost of having family.

We've moved away from farms.

You know, at one time in history, having children was about having free labor.

As weird as that sounds, it's definitely part of the rationale for having big families.

At one point, That doesn't matter so much.

And I think of my grandma.

Her family was gigantic.

And I believe she had something like, I want to say, 13 siblings.

And most of them didn't live to be older.

And that's part of why we had many kids.

We just didn't have the kind of health care we have now.

A lot of childhood illnesses that killed people we don't worry about anymore.

You know, kids, child mortality is not nearly as high as it once was.

You know, kids aren't seen as your retirement plan.

And there's all sorts of, you know, new reasons.

You know, there's the dinks phenomenon, double income, no kids.

There's lots of couples who simply can't have children.

You know, if you're a gay or a lesbian person, you're probably going, if you're going to have a family at all, you're going to adopt in most cases.

But the one that really stuck out to me, and I'd like to end on is that Americans are being squeezed, That our system is pulling us every which way, crushing us.

That many of us feel that we can barely support ourselves, let alone another person, even if we want to.

That we have shaped a system where we don't have third places so we don't meet randomly, not as much anymore.

We've moved all our dating online into algorithms, so we're dependent on the algorithm to give us someone to build that family with.

And the algorithm itself is built to sustain a company which benefits from keeping you on the algorithm.

So you not meeting somebody and staying with them, all of this sets up a cocktail of just of consequences that I think we're going to be dealing with for quite a long, long time.

If we, and I want to leave you with this, I believe that this is the most important issue of our time.

That how we figure out how to deal with all this will shape how the second half of my life goes and how the kids who are born life goes and all your family and all your friends and I don't think we've got any answers that are good yet.

We, of course, could pay people to have kids, but, you know, I wonder about that kind of person, the person who would take that check.

You should want to be a parent, Not be incentivized to.

Ideally, All of this is a series of massive concerns, a series of really troubling ones.

I think.

We need to truly, truly reconsider where we are and where we're going.

Once again, I'm James and James A.

Brown.

What do you think?

Let me know in three ways.

You can leave me a comment on jamesabrown.net.

We might have you on the show.

Am I right?

Am I wrong?

Tell me.

Take me away, Professor Don.

On that note, I'm James A.

Brown, and as always, be well.