Seth Wenig/AP/File

Workers replace old water pipes with a new copper one in Newark, New Jersey, Oct. 21, 2021. In recent years, residents in Newark and Benton Harbor, Michigan, have had to use bottled water after tests revealed high levels of lead.

Even as officials move swiftly to clear away Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed after being hit by a container ship, the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented push to upgrade its transportation networks.

The nation has never spent so much money on transportation, dams, sewer and water systems, electric transmission lines, and other networks. As a share of gross domestic product, today’s effort is bigger than infrastructure spending under the New Deal and the most spent in the last half-century.

Looking strictly at the surge in transportation funding, experts on both right and left are cheering what the Biden administration has billed as a once-in-a-generation investment.

Whether the nation will get once-in-a-generation results, however, remains unclear. Inflation has eroded some of the federal funding boost. There are concerns that state and local governments are spending on mundane fixes instead of innovative projects with more bang for the buck.

“How far do the [federal] checks go? It’s an open question,” says Adie Tomer, an infrastructure policy expert at the Brookings Institution. Voters won’t know until the spending bills run their course.

Still, the funding surge is so big that it will make its mark, infrastructure experts agree.

“By 2025, we’ll see some improvements,” says R. Richard Geddes, a professor and founding director of Cornell University’s infrastructure policy program. “There will have been an effect on the quality of U.S. infrastructure because of the IIJA,” the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed with a bipartisan majority in the early days of the Biden administration.

Making wise spending choices

But has the money been well spent so far? Experts question some choices that states and localities are making under the infrastructure act, especially when looking strictly at transportation improvements.

For example, when Hani Mahmassani, director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center, searched nearby IIJA projects, he found a $19 million grant to Chicago’s O’Hare airport to upgrade a terminal with, among other things, a family restroom accessible to people with disabilities.

“Is this what we do for a once-in-a-generation type of opportunity?” he asks. Such projects are important but should be funded out of routine maintenance budgets, he adds. “Fixing toilets should not require an act of Congress.”

Elsewhere, there are signs of innovation and opportunities for more transformative transportation projects.  

Damian Dovarganes/AP

Car commuters line up to enter I-110 Harbor Freeway in the rain in downtown Los Angeles, March 6, 2024. The biggest piece of the U.S. infrastructure push supports state-funded improvements to streets and highways.

The biggest piece – and the fastest one out of the gate – is state-funded improvements to streets and highways. State departments of transportation regularly apply for federal highway funds, so when the new money was made available in 2021, they were best placed to move quickly.

How federal dollars support local budgets

The impact of the federal boost varies by geography. In large states, which fund a lot of their own road maintenance, the roughly 20% boost from Washington was nearly eaten away by high inflation in construction materials, says Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. 

For smaller states, federal funding can amount to 80% of highway funding, making the recent surge far more important. Tiny Rhode Island, for example, boasts five notable road construction projects currently underway, paid for largely by the new infrastructure dollars.

Other projects have taken off much more slowly. Local governments, far less familiar with the demands of federal appropriations, have been slower than states to ask for money. And a $5 billion program to fund electric vehicle charging stations across the U.S. has so far only produced only seven of them, scattered across four states, according to The Washington Post.

The broader challenge is that while the U.S. roads network is vast, it is also old.

The last big push in road-building – the peak construction of the interstate highways – happened more than 50 years ago. Almost half of the nation’s roads are now in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in its latest assessment in 2021. Those deficiencies cost the average American motorist more than $1,000 per year in wasted time and fuel, the ASCE estimates. It gave the nation’s roads a grade of D.

Experts are optimistic the new spending push – which includes federal infrastructure spending beyond the law’s new funds – will improve that grade. But they caution that maintaining an aging infrastructure should be an ongoing commitment. “It’s like climbing up a hill of sand,” says Mr. Tymon. “We hope it’s not a once-in-a-generation improvement.” 

Some transportation networks are in better shape than roads. The nation’s ports earned a B-minus from the ASCE in 2021 and railroads got a B. In both cases, private companies often pitch in to pay for maintenance. Some experts are pushing for more private investment in other transportation networks. 

In search of investment and innovation

“We need to promote public-private cooperation,” says Mr. Geddes at Cornell. “There’s trillions of dollars of private capital on the sidelines waiting to invest.”

The new infrastructure law includes funding innovations, such as expanding the use of private activity bonds, which allow states and localities to raise money to fund private infrastructure projects. The law also requires local governments to look at all models of infrastructure projects, including public private partnerships. “You can’t just default to what you’ve always done,” says Joshua Schank, managing principal at InfraStrategies, a transportation consulting firm based in Southern California.

One area ripe for innovation is urban transit, he adds. Subway, bus, and commuter rail systems are struggling to regain ridership in a post-pandemic era in which fewer people commute to work. Instead of bunching train and bus schedules around rush hour, they’re providing more service during other parts of the day. Another experiment: microtransit (like an Uber but carries several passengers, making multiple stops and costing less).

The rebuilding of Baltimore’s Key Bridge offers another opportunity for innovation. Stricter rules will automatically require better designed and protected piers than the one that collapsed when the cargo ship rammed it on Tuesday. The rebuilding can take advantage of advanced concrete and design innovations to make it more resilient.

When New York state replaced the Tappan Zee Bridge with the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in 2020 over the Hudson River, it included dedicated bus lanes, a shared-use pedestrian/bike path, and more than 300 sensors measuring everything from temperature to fatigue on the cables and concrete corrosion. 

The Key Bridge could become even more cutting-edge.

“You can have lanes switch to ‘bus only’ or HOV [high-occupancy vehicles] very quickly,” says Mr. Schank. “You can have, eventually, better communication with cars themselves that can provide safety benefits. ... Whenever you have the opportunity to rebuild infrastructure that’s been around for a while, there’s an opportunity to bring innovation.”

After a century in which the global population grew almost fourfold to 6.2 billion people, stoking fears of overpopulation, conflict, and ecological collapse, a turning point awaits. 

At some point in the 2060s, 2070s, or 2080s, the world population, currently 8 billion, will peak around 10 billion, according to forecasts, and then start to decline. An end to humanity’s relentless expansion is in sight. 

When it comes, debates about population growth, which have been driven by beliefs that humanity is too fecund for the Earth’s carrying capacity, will acquire a different character. What goes up fast can come down just as fast, measured in decades and centuries, setting the stage for an era of population shrinkage that seems both inexorable and unfathomable. 

Shrinkage is the logical result of tumbling birthrates today, not just in rich democracies like Germany and South Korea but also in most corners of the planet. “No future currently looks more likely than a long span of global depopulation,” says Dean Spears, an economist and demographer at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Depopulation raises complex questions about how best to sustain a flourishing society where institutions can endure. Aging societies with declining populations are already a reality in countries like Italy and Japan, where rock-bottom fertility rates have shrunk the workforce and strained public finances. But the scale of the demographic transition in the next century or two, when every country and region would be affected, is far more challenging to imagine or fully anticipate. 

Junji Kurokawa/AP/File

A kimono-clad older woman walks across a street in Tokyo. Older voters increasingly outnumber younger ones in Japan.

Until recently, the United States had avoided what demographers call the fertility trap, in which smaller families beget smaller families. But a sustained drop in birthrates since 2008 and a period of lower net immigration have pushed its population pyramid closer to that of Europe, with fewer young people to support a growing retiree population.

One in 5 Americans will be age 65 or over by 2028, the same proportion as those under age 18, for the first time in U.S. history. 

The effects of smaller birth cohorts are already being felt in K-12 schools. Higher education is next in line: The number of college-age students is forecast to peak in 2025 and then decline sharply for several years, putting pressure on smaller, less selective colleges. A study by McKinsey estimated that for colleges and universities not ranked in the top 100, total enrollment could fall by 12% compared with 2012, when large cohorts of millennials filled campuses.

Colleges also braced for an enrollment dip in the 1980s due to smaller high school classes of Gen Xers. But that dip was offset by more women attending college compared with past generations. 

To survive the post-2008 baby bust, colleges may need to enroll more underrepresented minority and low-income students, and adjust fees and programming to help students complete degrees without a mountain of debt. Higher education could also be retooled for older students in ways that reflect the demographic shift underway, rather than relying on classes of high school seniors. “There are lots of ways to think about people who enroll in college,” says Sarah Hayford, a sociologist and demographer at Ohio State University. 

Sankhadeep Banerjee/NurPhoto/AP

A woman holds her baby at a hospital in Mumbai, India, July 10, 2023. As fewer babies are born, India's population, now 1.4 billion, is expected to drop to 1 billion by 2100.

How to address falling fertility rates

What about the economy writ large in a low-birth society? Employers, both private and public, will face pressure in recruiting among a working-age population that is shrinking due to lower birthrates. Filling labor-intensive health and social care jobs will be a priority, given that an aging U.S. population is living longer with chronic conditions, though it’s not living as long as Europeans. 

Like most economies, the U.S. relies on a surplus of younger workers whose taxes fund retirees’ pensions and medical care. A declining ratio of working-age adults to dependents, which a slowing birthrate produces, will force governments to raise revenues, reduce Social Security checks, or do both. In its latest demographic forecast, the Social Security Administration noted recent declines in U.S. fertility rates but assumed that births would rebound close to replacement level by midcentury, thus easing the pressure on social-insurance programs. 

Most demographers are skeptical of such a rebound, noting that other countries, including European countries that spend far more than the U.S. on family benefits, haven’t managed to reverse similar fertility declines. Without a rebound in birthrates, the U.S. will have far fewer young people entering the workforce when millennials reach retirement age than boomers have had. 

Indeed, were it not for a post-pandemic spike in immigration, the current U.S. workforce would already be shrinking due to retirements by older workers. In February, the Congressional Budget Office said that higher-than-forecast net migration would mean more than 5 million additional workers over the next decade, boosting demand and expanding the U.S. economy by 2%. 

An attractive destination for migrants, the U.S. could plug gaps in its workforce by admitting more “prime-age” (between ages 25 and 54) foreign workers. This would, in turn, bolster the birthrate as newcomers start families. “People who immigrate to the United States or any other place tend to be of childbearing age,” says Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina. 

But this policy lever, even if politically palatable to U.S. voters, has built-in limitations. Immigrants also grow old and retire. And immigrant families adopt the norms of their new countries. Hispanics used to have larger-than-average families, which reflected the culture of their homelands. Today, most of Latin America has below-replacement birthrates, and Hispanic American women have similar fertility rates to those of native-born women. 

The bigger issue is that fertility rates are falling everywhere, even in Africa, which is forecast for the fastest population growth this century. Most of humanity lives in countries where women will bear, on average, between one and two children, a rate that yields an exponential contraction as successive generations become smaller than the last. 

Demographic arithmetic is one of exponents: Just as populations expand when adults have multiple children who then go on to have their own large families, the reverse is also true. When two adults have a single child who, together with another “only child,” births just one child, you see the change, a 75% drop – four grandparents, two parents, one child – in just two generations. This is exponential population decline. 

Professor Spears is a development economist who studies infant and maternal health in northern India. He notes that smaller family sizes in India match a global trend that spans countries with widely varying societies and economies. 

A global baby bust will make it impossible for shrinking countries to import enough workers to replace their own, he says. “Once the birthrate of the world as a whole is below two, we no longer have the easy and valuable answer of welcoming immigrants and instead have to ask the conceptually deeper question of, what sort of human society do we want? Do we want a human society that’s stabilizing? Or a human society that’s depopulating, or something else?”

Vadim Ghirda/AP

A family climbs stairs to the city's central park in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Feb. 26, 2023. Most people live in countries where women will have just one or two children.

Working together and family-friendly policies

Last year, Professor Spears published an opinion piece in The New York Times about the challenges of a depopulating world. He noted that lower fertility meant “tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries.” He said humanity should consider “how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population.” 

The online responses from readers were caustic. Most balked at the idea of worrying about future generations and instead bemoaned present-day population pressures. 

One reader lamented, “I remember a planet with less than half as many people, and it was wonderful.” Another wrote, “If our diminishing population means some of the damage we’ve caused may slow and even be reversed, then I see that as cause for celebration, not concern.”

Professor Spears says he’s grateful for all the responses to his article, which he has now collected for a future book. “It’s a conversation that’s starting, and that’s good,” he says. 

One political response could be investment in pro-natal programs that would, if successful, pay for themselves over the long run. Congress has also taken up bipartisan calls to support an expansion of child tax credits, but demographers say a modest financial benefit to parents won’t do much by itself. 

If policy nudges don’t work, could coercion?

In the 20th century, governments intervened to limit family sizes, most notoriously in China, which imposed a one-child policy. Faced with a depopulation tsunami, politicians might restrict reproductive rights for women to boost birthrates. In the U.S., an analysis of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision found that the ruling, which ended the federal right to abortion, led to a 2% bump in births in 13 states with abortion bans, compared with similar states without them. 

Critics say reproductive health restrictions would be inhumane and counterproductive in boosting birthrates. (South Korea, the country with the lowest birthrate, banned abortion for more than six decades.) Fiscal incentives, coupled with shared caregiving responsibilities, are more likely to yield extra births than a top-down dictate. 

Lyman Stone, a demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, says even modest family-support policies “would show up on a long-term population trajectory” and be meaningful for couples struggling with the cost of having children. 

As a thought experiment, he points to the slowdown in births among women in their 20s and suggests that society could be reorganized to reverse this trend. Imagine we “give everybody under age 30 a modest universal basic income. Everybody’s going to go to college,” he says. 

This would likely incentivize young couples to start having children earlier and more often since their age for a first child strongly predicts a woman’s lifetime fertility. Under this scenario, “your 20s have two purposes: Find a skill and have babies.” 

A pro-natal fiscal overhaul would ask older voters to bear much of the cost. That may become harder, though, in democracies with aging societies. In Japan, older voters, who often dictate where scarce resources are spent, increasingly outnumber young voters. Far from redirecting welfare to help support young families, retirees may instead put their priorities first. 

Such dilemmas would be less acute if the global decline in birthrates decelerated or stabilized in the decades ahead. The world’s future population size is ultimately unknowable. However much demographic data you feed into models, a degree of humility is necessary, analysts say.

“We didn’t have any reason to expect the [post-1945] baby boom,” says Professor Hayford. “Sociologists and demographers don’t have a perfect handle on what predicts population trends.” 

This is the third in a three-part series on falling birthrates in the U.S. and the world. The first in the series, about U.S. parents having fewer children, can be found here. The second, about a county in Iowa where immigrants are powering population growth, is here.   

Facundo De Luca’s year has been off to a rough start. Climbing gas prices have eaten into the 18-year-old driver’s income, and he’s frustrated by what he feels are endless financial constraints: “I go to the store, and I can’t buy anything for myself. It’s too expensive,” he says.

And yet Mr. De Luca, who works for a ride-hailing service, is feeling hopeful about the future of his country, which he sees as “prosperous,” he says. “I have faith.”

That trust lies in right-wing libertarian President Javier Milei, who came to office last December on a promise of turning Argentina’s economy around by drastically reducing government payouts, slashing the size of the state, and dollarizing the economy. 

Just over 100 days into his term, Mr. Milei is struggling to bring his banner proposals to fruition. His so-called omnibus bill, which included privatizing state-owned companies and granting the president the power to legislate, has stalled in Congress. On top of legislative struggles, inflation is projected to hit 275% annually, poverty levels have climbed over the past four months, and decreasing purchasing power is hitting all economic sectors.

But his die-hard supporters, an estimated 33% of the electorate, remain by his side. 

In part, this is due to Mr. Milei’s fiery personality, and reliance on rhetoric that tears down traditional politicians whom he has convincingly blamed for Argentina’s decades of economic woes. He has also set clear expectations, at least in the short term: In February, Mr. Milei warned things would get worse for Argentines financially before they would get better. 

Agustin Marcarian/Reuters

One hundred days into his administration, President Javier Milei is struggling to pass some of his banner policies designed to resolve Argentina's economic troubles.

But as the divisive leader hits dead end after dead end trying to move his reform package through Congress, observers question just how long his welcome mat will extend among Argentines hungry for change. 

“His voters don’t expect legislative action” right away, says Paola Zuban, director of Argentine pollster Zuban Córdoba. “But they won’t be able to hold on for long.”

Economic baby steps?

Despite Mr. Milei’s lack of legislative progress, parts of the economy have shown tepid signs of stabilization. In January and February, due to his massive cuts to state spending, Argentina posted budget surpluses for the first time in almost 12 years. The country risk, a score investors use to gauge whether to invest, has decreased based on hopes that Mr. Milei will prioritize fiscal discipline. And thanks to a major currency devaluation, the once sizable gap between the official and parallel dollar exchange rates – which is the difference in what a dollar costs when exchanged through government-regulated channels versus what it goes for on the black market – has narrowed substantially. 

But these changes haven’t made a tangible difference in day-to-day life. 

Sergio Boh runs an empanada restaurant in the trendy Palermo neighborhood, where dining and nightlife draw hordes of foreign tourists each month. His costs have shot up since December, touching everything from the price of meat to the price of dough. That gets passed on to his patrons, with the menu price for his meat-filled turnovers nearly doubling since December. 

“I don’t have any savings,” says Mr. Boh. “What I earn today I spend tomorrow.” 

He works upward of 12 hours a day to keep the restaurant’s lights on and considers himself an ardent Milei supporter.

Max Klaver

Sergio Boh poses in front of his empanada restaurant March 22, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“I wanted change,” he says of his support. “There’s so much corruption here, not just in the government, but in the police, in hospitals, in schools,” which he expects Mr. Milei will resolve. He gives the president until December – one year in office – for his political and economic reforms to bear fruit.

Not all Milei voters are as optimistic. 

“His level of popular support over the past 100 days has declined,” says Santiago Giorgetta, director of Buenos Aires-based pollster Proyección Consultores. Mr. Milei’s approval rate has fallen from 55% in December to 46% today, says Mr. Giorgetta.

“Hope”

It was the prospect of order, offered by Mr. Milei, that attracted Mr. De Luca to the president’s movement. Mr. De Luca, the young driver, cites government corruption, street protests, and violence as some of his primary concerns, issues on which he gives this administration solid marks so far. 

But monthly inflation is one of the primary indicators that Mr. Milei’s supporters are watching, says Juan Cruz Díaz, director of Cefeidas, an Argentine political risk consultancy. 

If Mr. Milei can give his voters “the sense that inflation is going down, that will give him a lot of credit,” says Mr. Giorgetta. There have been two consecutive months of disinflation – despite overall inflation remaining sky-high. And Mr. Milei might delay relaxations on certain price controls for another month or two to keep those figures low. It could provide concrete numbers to point to as he asks the population for more patience.

Agustin Marcarian/Reuters

A butcher chops chicken in a Buenos Aires market. Although President Javier Milei won recent elections on promises to tackle inflation, he has not yet curbed it.

There’s also been a small shift in Mr. Milei’s base of support, which analysts say could serve as a boon. Those who supported center-right candidate Patricia Bullrich in the first round of last year’s general elections, and then went on to vote for the now-president, are emerging as his most die-hard supporters. They also tend to be slightly better off socioeconomically than the average Milei fan.

His more financially insulated backers could provide him with a cushion in dealing with political blows in the coming months, even if average citizens are struggling to make ends meet. The next round of policy negotiations is tentatively slated for May.

Roughly 43% of Argentines say they’ll give Mr. Milei between three and six months from when he took office to tackle the inflationary crisis, according to a recent poll by Proyección Consultores. Fewer than 20% give him more than a year.

Mr. Milei’s “connection with the population is his greatest asset,” says Mr. Cruz Díaz.

For now, that’s enough. But it will be very difficult for most Argentines “to tolerate the [fiscal] adjustments that are coming, even if they ideologically support Milei,” says Mr. Giorgetta.

“Hope,” he says, “is the last thing to die.”

AP

Beyonce, right, poses for a photograph in the audience during the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Feb. 4, 2024.

The country music industry felt a bit of an earthquake when Beyoncé, who hails from Texas, dropped her long-anticipated album “Cowboy Carter” on March 29. (Her full name is Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter.) While not all the songs are country music, the album nonetheless marks the formal entry of a prominent Black songwriter into a genre that has long depicted mainly white rural life.

Some fans of country have accused her of cultural appropriation. The album itself will serve as a response. It includes guest appearances by Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, both country royalty. And the first notes Beyoncé shared with the public from "Cowboy Carter" signaled she isn’t dabbling in the genre’s traditions. The single “TEXAS HOLD ’EM,” released last month, opens with unadorned notes on a fretless banjo by Rhiannon Giddens, a prolific modern reclaimer of Black string band music.

That signals a deeper intention. Her album fits into a wider project of African Americans artists reclaiming stories once told by others or erased from history – through food, film, art, and literature. At a time when more societies are grappling with cultural diversities, such storytelling asserts that dignity is inherent to the individual expressing the story.

Art installations such as the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and Netflix documentaries about recovering Black Southern cuisine have caught the restorative and unifying effect of tenderness and empathy.

In his newly published collection of portraits across the South, for example, photographer Rahim Fortune includes an image of a man holding a broad-rimmed Stetson hat across his heart. Entitled “Praying Cowboy,” the photo is one of several capturing Black rodeo and horsemanship that neatly encapsulate an extraordinary turn underway in the telling of the American story.

“These images amplify the sense of communal love that can be found in rural southern communities,” Mr. Fortune told Vogue when he first published “Praying Cowboy” following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. “We want these images to be a form of visual healing.”

Storytelling is the essential element of country, a genre that sprang from Scottish, Irish, and English musical traditions. Yet some of its core elements – the musical structure of the blues, lyrical narration, the banjo – can be traced back to enslaved Africans.

“Most of that history has been erased, some has been hidden and precious little has been acknowledged,” said Alice Randall, the first Black woman to write a song that reached No. 1 on the country music charts and author of a forthcoming book entitled “My Black Country.” The restoration of that history, she said in a 2020 interview with the Public Relations Society of America, involves “an essential aspect of being human and becoming humane.”

That reach for the universal aspects of music resides in the renaissance of Black storytelling to which Beyoncé has tuned her voice. As Eric Weisbard, a music historian, told The Economist, by turning her talents to a host of genres, Beyoncé shows she has “no limit artistically.”