Three prominent Harvard faculty members identified what they considered to be the most important issues facing the United States in the next decade at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Monday in front of a crowd of hundreds composed mostly of adults visiting the area for the Democratic National Convention.

University President Lawrence H. Summers moderated the panel.

“The decision we are going to have to make in the next decade is whether we are serious about government,” Summers said. “I would suggest to you that there are no examples of countries that achieve their national interests without being well and complicatedly governed.”

Dean of the Kennedy School of Government David T. Ellwood ’75 said that the government needs to concern itself with the changing makeup of the working population, stressing that “demography is destiny.”

Ellwood said because of the aging Baby Boom population, the number of native-born working adults aged 25-54 in 20 years will be no different than it is now. In addition, the number of children per household has decreased with the advent of reliable birth control in the 1960s, Ellwood said.

He said that to increase the size and productivity of the economy, the workforce will therefore be forced to rely upon older Americans and immigrants.

But Ellwood said present government policy is not attuned to the needs of immigrants. He said our present policy is to either deport illegal immigrants, or to train immigrants and then ask them to return to their home countries. Illegal immigrants are also not legally able to obtain the same level of public education as citizens.

“We are discouraging immigrants in every way we can from becoming part of larger society,” Ellwood said.

Ellwood said America needs to adopt a more realistic policy that focuses on raising the socioeconomic status of immigrant families.

Ellwood also said he was concerned about the disparity in birthrates for mothers from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Educated women are choosing to have children later in life, Ellwood said—partly because women have found their wages level out after they have their first child. Consequently, Ellwood said, educated women are also having fewer children.

Conversely, he said, uneducated women are having more children earlier in life.

Ellwood said that in the United States there has been an increasing correlation between the successes of parents and their children. The decreasing number of children born to educated parents and rising number of children of disadvantaged parents thus presents a potential problem to the U.S. economy, he argued.

Ellwood said he thought there needed to be research into making child-rearing less costly in terms of potential wages lost for women with high incomes, and to make professional advancement increasingly possible for women from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 said the United States needs to improve its educational facilities if it is to remain a superpower. She added that in the global economic structure, companies will invest in the countries with the most skilled people, even if that country is not the one with the most political clout.

“If we want to remain one of the richest nations on Earth and get the benefits associated with that, we have to remain highly skilled,” Hoxby said. “We need an educational factory that produces people with skills. That is something we do not have.”

She said that while the United States has doubled its educational funding since 1970 without seeing marked improvements, other countries have improved their students’ performances without increasing education spending during that same time.

“We need to require that everyone acquires a certain level of skills. It is not enough that they go to school and stay there for four years,” Hoxby said.

But Hoxby cautioned that she is unsure that the testing mandated by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act is the best solution to the problem.

Hoxby said the No Child Left Behind Act marked a step forward in legislation because it mandated that all children receive a certain minimum educational level and set a deadline to achieve that goal.

But Hoxby said certain elements of the law are broken.

She said the measurement for determining whether a school is succeeding or failing is often misleading and needs to be fixed by statisticians. She also faulted No Child Left Behind for setting goals without offering practical ways to achieve them. For example, she said, the law decrees that every teacher should be qualified without discussing incentives like raising salaries to improve the overall quality of teachers.

MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management Joseph P. Newhouse said the funding of Medicare is the major issue that needs to be addressed, given the current economic forecasts.

Newhouse said Medicare, which currently accounts for 13 percent of government spending, will rise to 16 percent of government spending by the 2020s, according to analysts. He said the government might have to raise taxes by as much as 16 percent to make up for the increased spending—a politically unpopular stance.

“There is no reason to believe the increased costs in medical care we’ve seen are going to stop,” Newhouse said.

Newhouse added that each candidate’s campaign pledge to cut the deficit in half over the next four years would clash with the need to increase Medicare spending to keep medical coverage at the present level.

“I don’t expect Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush to take it on in the next term. If they did, they would be doing their successors a huge favor,” Newhouse said.

Summers said that in addition to the issues the other panelists raised, the government would have to address an increase in industrial productivity that will ultimately mean fewer employees will be needed in manufacturing jobs.

The United States should also take advantage of its global societal dominance to confront issues such as income inequality, nuclear proliferation and global warming, Summers said.

He also said the United States needs to provide incentives to capable citizens to protect the country against terrorist attacks.

“We need as a society to make changes in public careers that are necessary to attract extraordinary people to careers, both permanent and temporary, in government,” Summers said.

—Staff writer Alan J. Tabak can be reached at tabak@fas.harvard.edu.