Phillip Longman

Phillip Longman (born April 21, 1956, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany) is an American demographer.

Focusing his attention on how demographic and social change interact and affect government finance, the environment, foreign policy, and the development of society generally, Longman published his first book, Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America in 1987.

During this period, his name became much more widely known in the academic community: his articles became published by such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs and The New Republic.

In 1997 Longman published his second book The Return of Thrift: How the Collapse of the Middle Class Welfare State will Reawaken Values in America, which argued that people today are spending in an unsustainable manner with the accelerating decline in fertility rates threatening the financial collapse of the welfare state throughout the world.

This book expressed his strongly held opinion that sub-replacement fertility and resultant population decline is likely to have catastrophic economic consequences for those nations suffering from it and is also likely to reduce societies' ability to adjust to newly emerging problems because of unwillingness to innovate or take risks.