In the 1970s he was Staff Director of the Select Committee on Population in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the 1980s he served as Commissioner to the U.S. Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development.

Great Britain's Royal Commission on Population in 1949 asserted that "the failure of a society to reproduce itself indicates something wrong in its attitude to life, which is likely to involve other forms of decadence.

In the New York Times (April 6, 2014), Teitelbaum and Winter warned against the "dark prophecies" about population decline, noting that such concerns have a long history of exaggeration that persist to this day.

[3] In making his case for pro-natalist policies in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs (September/October 2004), Longman has criticized Teitelbaum for focusing a historical lens on the problem of population decline: "The matter cannot be settled by pointing to history, because no previous society has experienced aging on the scale and at the speed of that now occurring throughout the world….

Thus, he helped support the formation of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project based at the National Bureau of Economic Research and led by Harvard labor economist Richard B. Freeman.

He initiated a Sloan Foundation grants program to improve data collection and analysis about postdocs, and provided start-up support for the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA), founded in 2003 and now based in Washington, D.C.[1] Teitelbaum has brought historical approaches to the understanding of labor market conditions for scientists and engineers in the United States.