Tyler Goodspeed
Tyler Goodspeed is chief economist of ExxonMobil and a Hoover Institution Griffin Fellow. An economist and economic historian, he previously chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers and has held academic appointments at Oxford, King’s College London, and Stanford.
Global Fertility Has Fallen Below Replacement, With Population Peaking Near 9 Billion
Economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde argues that global fertility has fallen below replacement, though population momentum could keep the total growing until it peaks at about 9 billion in the mid-2050s. His projection is far below the UN’s medium variant, which he says assumes a recovery in fertility that recent data do not support. The shift, he argues, is no longer confined to wealthy countries: middle-income countries including Mexico and Tunisia are also recording very low fertility.
Three Centuries of Recessions Undermine the Boom-Bust Theory
Tyler Goodspeed argues in a Hoover Institution presentation that recessions are usually misread as the inevitable result of excess in the preceding boom, when the longer historical record points instead to shocks filtered through institutions that either absorb or amplify them. Drawing on UK and US data back to 1700, he says expansions do not die of old age, recession warnings routinely fail, and downturns are often given retrospective moral labels — from dot-coms to housing — that obscure what actually caused the contraction.