Demographic Constraint: Why Aging Societies Struggle to Invest in the Future

Date: Monday, September 14, 2026
Time: 12 – 1:15 pm
Location: Hybrid, Live Only.

In-person: Yawkey Center for Student Services, 100 Bay State Road, Room 613B in Boston

RSVP via Zoom for both in-person and virtual attendance. RSVP kindly requested for in-person attendance. Required for Zoom.

“Demographic Constraint: Why Aging Societies Struggle to Invest in the Future” with Guest Speaker Emma Zang, Associate Professor of Sociology, Biostatistics, and Global Affairs, Yale University

Fertility decline matters not just because populations may get smaller, but because it changes the age structure of a population. As societies grow older, they lean more and more on a smaller generation of children, even as the costs of pensions, healthcare, and long-term care keep rising. This book talk asks a simple question: why do societies that so badly need children still find it hard to lower the cost of having and raising them? The book argues that aging itself gets in the way. It creates fiscal, political, and organizational limits on how much a society can keep investing in families. And when governments do act, they usually help with money and time but overlook the insecurity, exhaustion, and coordination burdens that parents face. Drawing mainly on China, with comparisons across East Asia and Europe, the book shifts the question. Instead of asking whether governments can restore high fertility, it asks whether the decline can stabilize before the imbalance between generations starts to feed on itself.

Speaker Bio: Emma Zang is a demographer whose research spans fertility, population aging, family change, health, and quantitative methods. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Duke University. At Yale, she founded the Population Studies Workshop and an interdisciplinary conference on AI in social science research methods, and she directs the Z-Café Lab, a platform connecting computational population research with broader public conversations. She frequently advises think tanks on social policy in the United States and China. Her scholarship has received awards from leading demographic and sociological associations, and her research has been covered by more than 500 media outlets worldwide.