California is Aging Fast and Socialism Won’t Make Us Younger
California, long associated with youth, is getting old — and twice as quickly as the national average. The walker seems likely to replace the surfboard as the state’s defining feature.
California’s over-65 population, the Stanford Center on Longevity notes, will double in 20 years, while the nationwide population this will take 30 years to double.
By 2060, the state’s median age is projected to be over 45. In 1970, it was nearly 28.
The aging of California is made more difficult by the steady loss of working-age people, particularly in middle-aged families. Since 2000, more than 4 million net domestic migrants have moved to other parts of the nation from California, a pace that has accelerated in recent years.
Even immigrants seem to have stopped coming, and not only because of President Donald Trump’s policies. LA’s foreign-born population actually declined in the 2010s, as immigrants looked elsewhere for work. In the de-industrializing economy that is California outside of the high-tech sector, immigrants are propelling a poverty rate that is the highest of any state.
California has stopped building schools and factories. Instead, we build hospitals to accommodate the old. Rapid aging is also a natural byproduct of extremely high house prices. These lead young people, particularly those with children, to leave the state.
The gap between California homeownership rates and those in the nation at large is now at a record high, notes Berkeley’s Terner Center. Between 1980 and 2020, the share of 25-to-35-year-olds in California who owned their homes declined from 39.4% to just 15.5%.
So it is no surprise that people in their 30s and early 40s, according to IRS numbers, are precisely the group deserting the state most rapidly, including in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps most revealing, California now ranks last in per capita terms of attracting new residents, a stunning reversal from its traditional role as a beacon to the rest of the country and the world.
The precipitous decline in state’s total fertility rate is therefore no surprise. Long above the national average, California’s fertility rate is now the nation’s 10th lowest, far below that in key competitor states like Texas.
Read the rest of this piece at California Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Image: Graph from State of California Dept. of Finance.
