Future outlook on population stabilization

Sky News, The full story first. A here Before we start, just a reminder, you can become a member of our subscriber club, which we're calling moreore Stuff Matters, by becoming a Sky News insider. With the subscription, you'll get each new episode a week ahead of everyone else, exclusive bonus episodes, and access to our community forum where you can chat with the Stuff Matters team, other listeners and ask us questions for future Q and A's To subscribe, go to skyneews. com forward slash stuff matters. And if you use the code stuff thirty three, that's ST U F F three three you get a third off your first yearly subscription. So go ahead, join our club. We would love to have you You can find the terms of the subscription in the show notes. rightight Let's get on with the actual podcast Do you want to start with the Britax Ramer or do you want to start with the Maxi Cozy Pel? The Britax Ramer seams on top of the pilees. Yeah. this is good. And this has got an iso fixed base already fitted to it. and it's hefty, okay? So it's really heavy. So this is this sort of the size of your entire torso is just this yum. Now I'm opening the car, okay? Before we go any further, I also issue a kind of health warning. What you're hearing here is me at my most vulnerable showhing my producer Jake the exquisite torture That is trying to fit one of my children's car seats into my car. And honestly, Jake, you're going to see It is the misery of miseries. I haven't even properly begotven this already looks. I hate it. Okay. We get inside the car. Yeah try up one. This is the Britax Roma. o, and I'm gonna to clamp it behind my seat. And then immediately you discover actually a hold on. This thing which is a backwards facing seat, won't fit, so I need to move my seat forward. There we go In the knowledge, I'm not going to have much legroom in this journey now. At the bottom of this isop fic base is a set of kind of metal arms The need to fit into two little iso fix points that are beneath the seat After a fair amount of heavy breathing and fury, you're constantly swearing and cursing and also just making noises you never expected. It's like and things like that. I finally fit the Britax Rama into the back seat. The problem is I now have to fit a second car seat alongside it This is supposed to be the simple bar It's never bloody simple. Oh my God. After literally about fifteen minutes of this, which is actually pretty good going in the scheme of things, it's not I've finally got both of the car seats in.ook I'm tired now. I'm out of breath, tired. What do you see there? You see two car seats next to each other. And here's the critical thing, okay. So I now have two children who are safely sated in their eye size seats. But what happens if you have one more? It is essentially impossible or near impossible to fit A third childse sea in between the other two backstory for this is that Over time, as the regulations determining what kind of protection these car seats need to have got more and more onerous, which has made cars more safe. The car seats have got bigger and bigger, making it harder and harder to fit a few of them abreast I know from know talking to many friends that if they're thinking about going from having two to three children One of the first things that comes up is, o my God, we have to get a new car because you literally can't carry three children behind you no. You couldn't do it For a long time it's been like this pet theory is one of the things that is constraining people from going from two to three children the fact that they would have to buy a new car at the same time And that's part of economics. It's just what are the constraints and the incentives that people have at any given moment to take a certain decision. And obviously, parenthood, families, we like to think it's all about love and all of these things. and of course, a lot of it is There's other stuff that's going on as well. There's You know, how much are you able to afford a new car How much are you able to afford a new house with a garden? If you have a family, that kind of thing becomes kind of important. There has been some economic research about this car seats thing A study by economists in America has looked at what happened when different states in America introduced different car seat regulations. And one of the things they found is that those rules prevented people from having children The numbers they came to suggest that But The net effect of child safety seats was that one hundred forty eight thousand fewer babies were born in the US since nineteen eighty Its of extraordinary when you think about it That's worth discussing, notot just if like me, you're scarred from putting the seats in your car, Becauseuse it gets to one of the biggest issues facing the world right now. L gone are the days of the baby boom, now the fertility rate across England and Wales has buckled. New data released by the CDC shows the number of children women are having has decreased for a second year in a row. The record level decline last year is leading to fears there or may not be enough children to sustain the next generation. And it's not just here or the U.S. Fertility rates, so technical term for the average number of children the average woman has in her lifetime are in free fall pretty much all across the world, in rich poor countries in Europe, Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, this is a global issue. And here's the thing If you want your population stable in the long run The fertility rate needs to be about two point one or a bit higher in countries with higher infant mortality. That is known as the replacement rate. And in Europe, North America, South America, Asia retty much everywhere We're well below the replacement rate. getting lower So in the UK, we're at about one point four children per woman. In the US, it's one point six in Japan, just one point one. In China It one Based on recent history those numbers are only going to get lower Why We are safely nestled into a podcasting vehicle. And what's the journey we're taking in this episode? What I want to understand is is that thesis about car seats really right? Does it stack up everywhere around the world? or is it bogus? Are there deeper things going on at the moment? and are we just fixating on convenient explanations Car seats are really just the beginning of our investigation today. sort of demographic and economic who done it into two big questions Why are we having fewer kids? Does it really matter Along the way, we'll speak to two people at the front lines of trying to understand that. A demographer who's tried to imagine what a depopulating planet Earth would actually look like And a sort of Sherlock Holmes Indiana Jones style adventurer academic traveling the world to try to understand What's going on here And you're listening to Stuff Matters, a podcast from Sky News, where we take an object, crack it open like an atom or safer a walnut and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. Today, Tall seats By the way If you haven't done it yet, make sure you follow the Stuff Matters feeed in your podcast app. You'll get notifications about every new episode and you can go back and listen to all the old ones. They are very fun I promise you Back to car seats and whether they might be a clue One of the biggest issues facing humanity Let's begin. with a man called Dean Spears. He's a professor at the University of Texas where I study children in developing countries, especially India. and my most recent research is about the long term future of the human population Dean and his co author, Michael Garusso recently wrote a pretty striking book. after the spike and it asks Fundamental question is something lost if billions of people are never existing to experience life when lives never happened by the billions. You know my take is yes. Now, not all that long ago, the conventional wisdom was that planet Earth was heading for overpopulation. sometometimes we think we know the destiny and we don't. We all saw the overpopulation scares of the twentieth century where people like Paul Erlich, a famous biologist and environmentalist in the sixties worried that you know because birth rates were high then and the population was growing then, it was going to continue to grow, and you that turned out not to be the case. timeim It seemed to be pretty alarming Back then, in the nineteen sixties, the global fertility rate was five point three children per woman So that turned out to be the peak It was nineteen sixty eight when Paul Erlich released his book The Population Bomb. Erlich, who died only recently in march twenty twenty six at the ripe old age of ninety three enormously influential And his message was, well There are too many people T many people being born too little food to feed them Not enough planet to fit them on It was an argument that made him pretty famous Herery is in nineteen eighty on The Tonight showh with Johnny Carson There's three point six billion people in the world today, and we're adding about seventy million a year, and that's too many. The things that supply us with all of our food, ultimately with all of our oxygen, with all of our waste disposal are now severely threatened I'm a doom sayer because I do believe doom is coming. I'm in favor of both halting population growth and then starting to slowly reduce the population size so we can get down to a size which can be managed eventually B backook of Erlks the population bom It starts with him in India, which is the place where I research and it starts with him, you know worrying about really feeling afraid of peopleople people, people, people, as he puts it. and of course people who he sees as different from him. And so he experiencing India in the nineteen sixties, just thinks it's self evident that this is something to be afraid of and that an overpopulating world is a problem It's a really vivid moment, isn't it? at the start of the book. He's kind of an entetomologist, isn't he? So, it's almost like this swarm of insects around him rather than human beings. Yes, that's right. his academic training is in butterflies Very quickly in the book, he says that the battle toeat all of humanity is over and that you know mass starvation is effectively inevitable. And you know he goes on in that tone to say that maybe we should consider putting sterils in the water supply seriously so that people are you know involuntarily sterilized and not able to form the families they want. Does it talk to something kind of innate or intuitive in humanity. because Erlich wasn't really the first person to talk on this theme. I mean, the famous example is Thomas Malththus back in the kind of, you know late eighteenth kind of early nineteenth century talking about prospect of people starving basically because there are going to be too many people and we don't have the resources to feed them. So is it just that when people talk in this slightly apocalyptic fashion about overpopulation, it appeals to people because we feel like There might be a risk of there being too many people around We're not yet accustomed to seeing other people as win win the way that we should. know Part of what we're trying to do in our book after the Sike is really raise the awareness that other people's lives are win win. they're good for them and they're good for you. But especially in a history where we've talked so much about overpopulation, so much about resource constraints s that's hard to perceive. Could you explain what is And how did we get here So the spike is our term for the long term history of the human population by history. I mean past, present and future So if you were to look across all of human history for a very long time, there just weren't that many of us For a long time, the size of the human population was pretty flat, pretty stable. At the beginning of the common era, there were only three hundred million of us all around the world. That's fewer than in today is the United States or about the same as Utra Pradesh and Bihar to Indian states and thenen that changed And by eighteen hundred or so, there were about a billion of us for the first time, and the size of the population was beginning its exponential growth That wasn't because people were having more babies as far as anyone can work out Humanity's birth rate retty much the same for thousands of years. it was about five children per woman What really changed in the middle of the twentieth century, the thing that sort of inspired Paul Erlich to write the population bomb It was something else What actually happened is that humanity got better at keeping the children who we have alive. Through innovations like sanitation, the Germ theory of disease, improved nutrition. And so as more of us survived, in particular, as more children survived, the size of the population started growing from three billion in the nineteen sixties to five billion in the late eighties, six billion by the turn of the millennium overver eight billion today. Even as more children were surviving infancy, the fertility rate, so that's the number being born was actually dropping It's worth taking a moment to absorb that. For most of modern history, even as everyone fretted about overpopulation The fertility rate is either being flat or falling. I was struck by that from your research and your book Yes, so it's been known for a long time that birth rates been falling. No, that doesn't mean down in every country, down in every year, there are you know fluctuations like the twentieth century baby boom. But if you average over a long enough period, we really do see this long term downward trend You know, it's even been known that birth rates were falling below this replacement level of about two children per two adults Now The thing is, we were already seeing a world that was falling below two in many places when Erilic was riding. So by nineteen eighty, one in five people lived in a country with a fertility rate below two children per two adults on average. And so that means in the seventies, Europe as a whole, Japan, Australia, Canada, and for that matter, Cuba ' crossing this threshold. And so you know, Erlk's book coming out in nineteen sixty eight meant that the crossing point that's going to be so important for determining whether we go towards a long term future of population growth, population decline or stabilization was already being reached In other words, we're living out a very, very long run trend But what's really significant about the present moment is that now, after all those years, We're finally approaching the moment When more people are dying than are being born On average for the world as a whole, the total fertility rate right now is two point three and it's falling and someday soon, nobody knows exactly when we'll cross below an average of two children per two adults. And not long after that, the size of the world population will begin to decline. And nobody knows the exact year, but it's very likely to be within the lifetime of children alive today Maybe even within the lifetime of us. And so plotted on the scale of human history, the time between now and the peak in the sizical population is just a tiny point at the top So that's the spike that Dean wrote about population. human And then what happens next? What happens next is exponential global depopulation unless birth rates rise That's the first big claim of the book that no future is more likely than long term global depopulation We are approaching Cliff Edge Beyond which is a world of rapidly falling populations What should we do about it And here I have the unhappy news that I don't know and nobody else does either. There is no textbook. There is no textbook. This is new, this is unprecedented. To some extent we haven't wrestled with it enough. We haven't been conscious of it enough Exactly, many people still think that we're on the path to overpopulation you know By now intuitive as that might feel Ply not true All of which raises the question Why is the fertility rate falling? Is it things like car seats Whis it He gs If I live in Texas and car culture is serious here, I wouldn't be surprised if there really are people in the United States for whom the logistics of transporting children in car culture is one of the factors that made them think a third kid doesn't feel feasible But That's not why birth rates are low there, and it's certainly not why birth rates were below to in Andra Pradesh twenty years ago or falling below to in Australia or Cuba in the nineteen seventies, right? So it could be part of a story. There are these reinforcing mechanisms where we're building a world around small families, but that's just as much effect as it is caused It's a long term trend happening in many places. So any one explanation is unlikely to be fundamental unless it covers a long term trajectory in places where things are really different All of which raises a question Is there any single explanation and more to the points Can we find it before this episode is over Stick around and find out Did you ever watch Mary Poppins? Yeah ye. Yeah. So you know, Dick Van Dyke,' in the early scenes, he's got all those musical instruments. He's like a one man little orchestra. He's got cybals, he's got drums I like to use every tool in the box. I will read economics papers, sociology, anthropology, political science. I want to be the Dick Rand Dyke detective, so to speak Alice Evans is a visiting professor of economics at Stanford and teachers at Kings's College Do you focus on I'm currently writing a book called The Great Gender Divergence, which is about how the entire world has become more gender equal over the past hundred years and why some societies are more gender equal than others And then as part of this globe trotting research, including quality research in almost every world region, I then started to notice these very different rates in fertility and started to ask why In this case, globbe trotting really does mean globbe trotting. I've been doing about three months of qualitative research every single year for the past sixteen years. you know in Zambia, I was living in a slum, I was living in a swamp or Chinese university in Hong Kong. you know, I try to approximate whatever is the sort of average condition so I can get a sense of what's going on I was walking through the markets in Mumbai and I got chatting to a Muslim trader and he said, Oh would you like to come for coffee? And I jumped on his scooter. And then he says, wouldould you like to meet my family in Deravi, the bigig S slam? And I'm like, Oh yes, I'd love to So I'm just always seizing theseities. It's not academia as people would imagine it, really? It's like the Indiana Jones ofem. ''s ' you're explorer. Yeah, I'm an explorer who seizes any opportunity. Anone invites me and I'm like, yes, I'd love to come. I'd love to explore. You say yes. You always say yes. It's on these slightly extraordinary forays around the world, Alice starts doing detective work into the decline in fertility rates What was the strand that you started picking when you were you were traveling around the world What is it that's leading you on to think about fertility as well So when I was in South Korea, I read loads of literature on the decline in fertility and I found that very interesting, and I considered a range of hypotheses. So for example, some people talk about the parenting arms race in that South Koreans invest so heavily in their children, know sending them to maths private tuition till ten PM at night. And that's certainly grueling, right? The oder is It takes so much work and so much investment to equip your children with the academic and professional skills they need that it's nighon impossible to have more than one or two children But while the theory might make sense in South Korea, birth rates are falling prettyret much everywhere. So it doesn't fully explain the mystery. So In her detective work, instead, Alice tries to think of something that applies almost universally across the entire world Then I saw a graph that I found so fascinating and it really showed that the decline in fertility perfectly tracks The rise in Singles And then I thought, wait a minute. Wait a minute, isn't this happening globally? And I was pbbling together more and more data and I saw this decline in marriage and coupling also in Iran And I knew it was happening in Latin America as well. And somehow I just hadn't connected the dots before. I knew that there' been this massive decline in marriage in Latin America. I knew that that was now moving into a massive decline in coupling. And then I knew that in the US fifty five percent of people under thirty five are currently single. Pew data tells us that, you know many twelve, twelfth graders don't even want to be married We've also seen an increase in solitude across the EU. So in Sweden, sixty percent of households are single adult households plunge infertility actually be a symptom of something else. fact that people aren't gettingetting together at all And so I realiz that across the world, we do see this rise in solitude, this rise in singles And this seems associated with the darkline infertility. That is not a complete explanation. For example, within India you have a very high rate of universal arranged marriages, but you also see a decline in fertility So there are lots of different moving parts. I'm not saying it's all about solitude, but that was certainly my journey. And I like to you know consider every hypothesis. No matter how bonkers I like to explore it, you know some people in Europe and the US might say, o, it's all about house prices or it's all about overrededucated women. And I'm thinking, well Can house prices explain what's going on in Guatemala? O can overducated women explain why fertility is now so low, you know one point four in Turkey and Tunisia? You know, whichich are certainly not feminist utopias. So child seats, I'm guessing are just another one of those hypotheses that you've got to look at as Sherlotock Holmes. Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely In our case, it was kind of like, okay bit of academic research saying When baby seats became obligatory, then it was harder to fit as many children in the car and then there's this kind of ceiling at two children because otherwise you have to buy a new car. But that might not dare I say, be the definitive explanation. I think to be honest, that sounds a little bit bonkers because your enforcement varies dramatically worldwide and even in countries with very weak rule of law, like across Latin America, know Colombia is not known for its strict state enforcement rule of law, but I believe that total fertility rate is currently one point one So those are just economists and you know, economists like causal inference, they like to carefully identify effect. So your point is It's bigger than child seats. It's bigger than it's bigger than house prices. So that's another popular one here in London in particular The House process one is important. so I think that People are more likely to have long term relationships and pursue children and families. if it's more attractive than the competing alternatives. So babies have to tussle, right? The babies have to do a fist fight in this competition where you're thinking Is coupling and babies the most fulfilling, socially respected, rewarding thing I can do House prices are extraordinarily high. then people who are already in stable long term relationships may be thinking, well, can we afford a second or a third but we can't fit in that extra bedroom. And certainly, if we see this very high rates of house prices in London, then that could be a constraint for couples that already exist. I don't think that can be a full explanation because it wouldn't explain why people are living alone so often. You know, if house prices were a big issue, you would expect people, young men and women to live together, but the point is they're not even coupling in the first place Right? A house prriice won't explain the dramatic falling coupling So Is it that's deterring people from having relationships I think of marriage very simply is that people marry for three reasons one of three reasons, love, money, or respect You know, in conservative societies, marriage is necessary for social respect. You know, this was true in East Africa a hundred years ago. It's true in India today Now, if the cultural society liberalizes, then you might marry for money, that is, if men earn so much higher and you know you can get a much better bargain by marrying But in societies like South Korea or Latin America, where women are increasingly earning and could be economically autonomous, then many to up their offer, right? If they're not offering you the money, if they're not offering you the big fiscal incentive and a marriage isn't necessary for social respectability, that you're only going to marry if he is, you know, charming, attentive, loving, adoring, perhaps even monogamous Right? But if men aren't giving that very attractive package, then in each society, The more disadvantaged men with own worse financial package, or who are less charming you, perhaps more introverted, or perhaps you know, violent, aggressive, they're going to struggle to match. So gosh, I was struck that love came at the bottom of the thre. that wasas that just the sequence that you were explaining it in R, well, okay So Western cultures are unique in that they have elevated love as a crucial component for marriage for Well, let's say one thousand five hundred years, at least, you know, incrementally. But that's part our kind of literature, isn't it? Absolutely Absolutely. You know the nineteenth century classics, women's fiction elevated women choosing a man for devotion, companionship And I think that certainly motivated men to be more sociable, more caring, more attentive to these cues of what women value. But that was quite distinct in so much of South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Northfrica, then marriages were arranged by parents So there is far less onus on men. please women If you don't grow up with that culture over generations and instead your loyalty is to your mother, then your offering to women may not be based on companionship. So once the social respectability and economic incentive wane and you're not offering the love, you're not offering the companionship, the devotion, the commitment Then women may say and in the words of one of my Turkish interviews with this woman from Kona, thank you next What I find so fascinating in my research in Mexico, in Malaysia and also Turkey is this big shift in women's aspirations in that even though love, companionship, devotion, caring about women's feelings, their wants and welalth was a crucial part of Western literary canon Those aspirations and expectations are now globalizing to women of the world. Because on women's smartphones, they can choose content that affirms their status, their freedoms, their wants, their desires I was in Mexico in a women's book club in Puebla and they were telling me one of their favorite shows is the Marvelous Ms Mazel In Malaysia, they were telling me how much they liked Emily in Paris. Now Emily in Paris, not that I watch it myself, but it's really about a young woman making her own way, independently assessing whether men make the great. Like if a guy is boring or offfish or inattentive, then she moves on to the next guy. So I call this culturally leapfrogging in that women in conservative or patriarchal countries are leaping to the egalitarian frontier. They're thinking, is this guy good for me and going to make me happy? And it's thanks to things like Emily in Paris. Emily in Paris is kind of the Jane Austin of its day. It's helping, you know, it's encouraging people to think about love The nature of new technology is that women in Turkey don't have to watch Turkish national broadcasting. sameame in Malaysia, same in Mexico. Instead, you can get a Chinese smartphone pretty cheaply, you know, the equivalent of sixty pounds And you can watch whatever you enjoy. So you can bypass all these local patriarchal gatekeepers, but men may simultaneously be watching the content they enjoy. And in Mexico that could be regaton music, which affirms sort of male bravado and sexual conquest So we're not necessarily all on the same journey Is that really the entire explanation for falling birth rates Is there something else going on at the same time As she continues her detective work Alice thinks Well they might just be When I was seventeen, eighteen sixteen My friends would often come round and play at my house on N sixty four. So If you wanted to play with Diddy Kon your Mario Kart, you had to be a Golden eye. Yeah, Golden eye, greatreat one. We weren't connected online. So if I wanted to play multiplayer, other friends had to come over. Simultaneously, my friends would come over and hang out in my garage because that was the most entertainment we could have in Kent byy virtue of poor technological poor entertainment options, the girl next door was relatively appealing that we'd hang out in my garage on white plastic chairs and chat and ban her and make jokes And through that, you know, we to become more sociable, we gain social skills, we build our social networks Where is now Technology is so advanced that you get this constant stream of dopamine hits that no matter where you are in the world or what you want to do, you don't have to Hang out with your friends to have a good time And so the comparable girl or boy next door now needs to compete. with ever engaging, ever tantalizing alternatives, whether that is Instagram or Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. And you know here I am in California, The Bay Aa, all the software engineers in the world, all these companies are investing, how can I make my app ever more engaging. So the geniuses of the world were maximum capital inlows, you know, billions of dollars of forever making apps that are more engaging, keeping us hooked Perhaps the story here isn't just about economics It's about something else nology Social media. smartphones, our addiction to those little glowing screens that are always around us. I was in Norway, you go to little cafes and everyone is on their smartphones. I was in Indonesia when I was staying on a little island at a Madrasa. Then we went up river on a little tugboat Fishing were sitting by a little pond A guy at the corner is scrolling on his smartphone totally removed from the rest of the group. There's no escape. Honestly, I was in little villages in the Mexican mountains and mothers were telling me their biggest problems was their teenage sons were hooked on their phones in their bedroom. We're just going we're kind of going inwards, basically. Yeah, so that entertainment technology is getting better and better. You know, now you don't have to play Golden Eye by coming to Alice's house. You can play by yourself. If you look at the younger generation, twenty year old men in the UK are spending as much time alone as older men in their sixties and seventies. As it happens, there is data that suggests that smartphones drive down birth rates John Berr Murdock at the FT recently made this amazingly striking shot based on data from researchers at the University of Cincinnati Essentially, they looked at places where four G internet was rolled out, and they found that in the places where fast internet was installed first, and hence people could be on their smartphones even more of the time birth rates went off the edge of a cliff In countries like the US, the UK and Australia Birth rates for young people were actually pretty stable in the early two thousands up until two thousand seven At the same time, smartphones became ubiquitous Something similar happened in Poland and France in two thousand nine In Mexico, Morocco, Indonesia in twenty twelve. and in West African countries like Nigeria and Ghana in the mid twenty ten s a tantalizing theory smartphones, they stop going out. they stop meeting new people and well You know what happens or doesn't happen next If people aren't socializing so much, if they become more introverted then they have social anxiety. and that can be reinforced by the specific content on social media. So for example, in New York, young women were telling me about this new meme, which is called Protect Y Space, celebrating the idea that if someone is rude, aggressive, or somehow uncomfortable then you should just cut them out If you see this cultural movement Oh socializing of staying indoors of refusing to socialize with other people whose views you disagree with, for example, or if you see young women becoming radically more left wing and progressive Or for example, if on social media there is a circulation of Depression memes, anxiety memes I was in Canada for three months. I was interviewing twenty something, so many of them saying, you know, I don't want to bring children into this world. Young people are glum about the future. So there are all these little things that might be going on related to both The idea of smartphones outcompeting human alternatives, and also the specific content that is circulated But there's a few problems with this thesis First, Smallphones weren't the only thing to happen around two thousand seven, two thousand eight, when fertility rates for young people in many countries crated There's also the financial crisis which meant people had less money, which is often a sure farire way of dampening their enthusiasm for having more children And then there's another issue And I totally agree. which is that all this stuff, the crisis, the internet, smartphones, They're all recent forces Remember, a lot of people point to the fact that TFR's total fertility rates, know around the world in most countries have just been falling not just in recent years, but for decades. and that a lot of this predates things like iPhones Is that a part of this Absolutely. So I think the real shift is Once women can control their bodies and their fertility and their marriages. And that must be one of the most fundamental revolutions of humanity which we should all celebrate only pursue children if it's more desirable attractive than the available alternatives. And then what I'm trying to say is that there will be a bunch of factors that could shift that trade off. Right. So it's about accelerating some of those trends. Yeah, certainly So the point about smartphones isn't that they're a sort of DausX Macina bringing down fertility It's that they accelerate social and economic forces which were already in play Either way whatever the cause for this phenomenon It does seem like we are heading towards population raises a question Should we well commit That's after the break. Hey, it's producer Jake. Don't worry, I'll handang you right back to Ed and this episode of Stuff Matters. But before that, just quickly, you'll have heard Ed mention our Stuff Matter suubbscribers Club, which you can join by becoming a Sky News insider. So costs to doll ninety nineents a month for which you get ad free listening, early access to new episodes exclusive bonus episodes and you can also hang out with me and Ed and other listeners in our subscriber forum To join the club, you can go to skyneews. com slash stuff matters. If you use the code stuff thirty three, it stuff thirty three You can get a third off your first yearly subscription Included in that are also our sister podcasts electoral Dysfunction with Beth Rigby and our U. S. politics podcast, Trump one hundred When terms and conditions apply, you can only become a Sky News insider if you're over the age of eighteen and you're in the UK. Subscription, auto renews at a regular price unless cancelled via my account. You can cancel anyt time, effective at the end of the billing period. That's enough of me back to Ed What's particularly important is that there hasn't yet been any example of a country where the lifetime average birth rate has gone well below two And then we see it rebounding up to that level. So we don't have any examples of a reversal once birth rates have fallen low. It's literally unprecedented to try and get the line back up again So much of this is literally unprecedented. I mean, everything that we're here experiencing in a large interconnected world where we have podcasts and we can talk to one another live across the ocean I'm wearing glasses. you might have taken an antibiotic in the last month. All of that has been developed in a large and growing world with other people in it. And so anyone who looks at the prospect of global depopulation, starting within, you know a few decades within the lifetime of a child born today and feels confident about what's going to happen is probably being overc confpident about an unprecedented future What's interesting is that When you think about it? The cities we live in the infrastructure we use It's all been built for a growing population Imagine what our world would look like if it were vastly T you Streets without crowds smaller schools Cavernous airports with fewer and fewer passengers Well, that might sound actually kind of a little bit appealing. Dean sees it differently What conclusions do you come to about what that world might look like and what the consequences might be Well, I go back to this idea that other people are win win. Their lives are good for them and good for you. And that's economics It's a surprise because we're used to thinking of other people as competition If they eat my lunch, I don't get to. If they take this book out of the library, I don't get to. It's ero su Zero sum thinking exactly But that just really misunderstands how other people contribute to building the world that we benefit from, even when they're on the demand side of the economy, even when they're consumers. ' you let's think of that example of lunch, right? I'm here at a university campus. If I want to go find lunch outside, I'll go, I'm in Austin. I might look for a taco truck. And if I want to find that, if I want to buy some tacos for lunch I need there to be a taco truck there. But the taco truck is only going to be there if the driver and the cook think that there are going to be people who want to buy tacos. It's only going to make sense to offer that if they think that other people beyond me also want to pay for it, also are hungry. So for me to get the lunch that I'm looking for, I need other people to want it too So that's called the economics of scale effects. And what they all arise from is this idea of fixed costs, which is a cost of just doing something, being in business rather than not doing it at all, no matter how many people come to your business. But it's not just that, it's also things like art and culture and media. I mean, a podcast like this, it costs every bit as much to produce, whether ten people listen to it or ten thousand people listen to it or more than that, right And so a world where there are more listeners, more people who are interested in learning the sorts of things I'm interested in learning about is a world in which more of that culture and media and art is going to be produced. It's true for medical innovation You know, if somebody invents a new drug, that knowledge doesn't get diminished when more people use it. It's true for schools and public services. So many of the things that we rely on and that bring our lives value only make economic sense and more than that only are feasible, whether as policies or art or just lunch, if other people are around to want them too M people It doesn't just mean more pollution and more waste It also means More ideas Breakthroughs More of the good stuff making the world a better place notot just technological progress, but social progress, new ideas about how much one of us should value one another's interests and wellbe equally. So much of that has come in this period of a large and growing population Do you view this as a moral argument or is it a purely a rational evidence based argument I think there's both. So there's definitely the moral side where we do have to confront the values question of is it good that other people get to be alive? Is something lost if they don't? But other parts of it are just questions of economic fact The driver of long term progress, the reason that we have so much now that other people in the past didn't have is ideas and knowledge If we give one sick kid an antibiotic pill and she swallows it, it cures her disease, that antibiotic pill is gone. no one's ever going to take that particular pill again but the knowledge behind it The formula for it and more broadly the biology and Germ theory of disease, that continues undiminished, for somebody else to use, for another doctor to use, for another researcher to improve upon. So that's just the thing about population economics. Idas like that don't get used up if more people use them, but they might go undiscovered And since that's the core engine of why living standards are so much higher today, poverty is lower today than before, a world with fewer other people in it is a world where we won't be making as fast progress against disease, against global poverty, to higher living standards So what do you talk to people who say today Well, I see the state of the climate. I see the way things are going I want to forego having children because I'm so worried about the face of the planet First of all, if somebody's looking at the world or just looking at their lives and they're deciding that being a parent isn't what's right for them, I'm not here to tell anyone to do something different with their lives or that they're making a mistake. What I want to ask is whether we might all be making a mistake together when we don't do more to make parenting easier, fairer, better supported, more feasible for all of us not just now but over a long term. And yes, we have big environmental challenges and people cause them. One very important issue here is timing The size of the human population is projected by the UN to peak six decades from now in the twenty eighties. Other population demography groups put it in a little bit sooner, but we're still looking at decades from now Several decades from now, it just isn't the timing that any reasonable person has in mind for the urgency of our climate challenges. We need to decarbonize much faster than that On the other hand, we do need to solve and confront our environmental challenges. And here's the good news Humanity has made progress against environmental challenges before. and it's always happened in a world where the human population was growing. I mean consonsider China. In twenty thirteen, China's smog crisis was world famous, partarticulate air pollution from Fires and coal plants and vehicle exhaust darkened the sky, and newspapers called it the apocalypse So what happened after that? In the ten years after twenty thirteen, the size of the Chinese population grew by fifty million people What happened to the air pollution particulate pollution in China declined by half That's because leaders and the public there decided that the smog was unacceptable. Authorities implemented new regulations and requirements. so We have made progress against our environmental challenges before. It's not imaginary. Whle oil is another whale oil, leaded gasoline, acid rain in the nineties, right? And we've always done it in a growing way Have you found these arguments to be considered controversial when you've made them I think it's changing. I don't think that anybody who is serious about climate science and policy these days really thinks that any change to birth rates or the population is going to be what gets off the hook. But These old ideas linger for a long time and so And a lot of people feel them. Like I hear them quite a lot, peopleople saying they're going to limit it to one child or two children for environmental reasons Can you paint a picture of what this more, you, potentially depopulating world looks like Yeah, I think a person like me, a dad in their mid forties who is taking their kid to school They're going to have to drive further because schools are going to have to close and consolidate. They won't have as many options to tune in on their you know, whatever they have to listen to a podcast too because it just won't make the same economic sense to produce so many forms of media. Or well actually important stuff, like medical research that helps people live longer. Treatments for cancer, newew technologies improving people's lives, cleaning up the world. Of course, this is a long term future, you know, more than decades out, but these sorts of things are going to be what spools out and accumulates and puts the world on a trajectory towards less progress than it could have. Is that the future we want? O should we want something else instead? One of the things to recognize is that something else instead doesn't have to mean long term population growth could mean population stabilization. with our numbers neither growing nor shrinking over the long term So that's claim two of the book. Stabilization someday at some size It's not anything we can do right now, but stabilization someday at some size would be better than long term global depopulation. Think back to some of the innovations we've talked about in previous episodes LEDs, which allow us to have light everywhere to an extent that our ancestors would have marveled at rare earth metals that enable us to create ammazing pieces of technology Supply chains that allow us to have fresh fruit from exotic countries permanently available for incredibly cheap prices So much of that was the fruit Ecuse the pun of human endeavour more and more people working out more and more ways to satisfy the demands folks around the world But what happens when there aren't as many people? And more to the point What can we do about it I want to be very clear because at least here in America, that immediately sends people to thinking about questions of reproductive freedom and justice and health carere. And that is not what I'm talking about This is not easy territory The debate about birth rates is also becoming increasingly politicised these days Over many months, it was an impending ruling that had rattled a nation. Right or wrong, this judgment represents a fundamental shift for women and for choice across this land part of America's social fabric has just been unwoked We can and I think should agree that there's something valuable about getting to be alive and still also agree that everyone should have the freedom to choose to be a parent or not to be a parent, to have access to contraception and health carere and abortion, that these are just two separate questions, whether something's valuable and whetherone should be forced into it Nor is it just reproductive rights that get brought into the debate? I think a lot of people worry that the only path forward for stabilizing the population would be to roll backwards progress towards gender equity, towards freedom and good lives and education and careers, or the freedom to not do a career whatever people want for girls and women and you the revolution that we've seen throughout society and the economy and home life I want to be very clear, that's entirely backwards If women are seeing a society where for so long, all of the burden of making the next generation has been placed on just some of them and thinking, no thank you, we don't want it, then making that worse, making parenting less fair, making parenting more burdensome is not going to be a way to cause people to feel like they want to or can feasibly have more children This is In other words enormously controversial territory there is at least one thing that most people agree on The only way forward is going to be to make parenting better and fairer and more feasible for everyone so that more people, men and women feel like they can aspire to it But even making parenthood and childcare easier and cheaper for everyone That's not necessarily the silver bullet, some people think it is. If you look at the Scandinavian countries which are the most family friendly, you know, providing childcare, providing support for women working, you know in Finland, you get a baby package They're seeing very, very steep declines in fertility. and I mention, I think that's largely because of the steep rise in single adult houses. So I think there that's an example about why it's very important to be clear eyed about the causes. I mean, getting it right is going to be difficult As entertainment technology improves, then the government incentives will have to continuously battle against women's alternatives. So if men are still a bit offish or borish or not entirely monogamous, then the government would need to give more and more and is that going to be financially sustainable This, in other words is really, really tricky Understanding these phenomena. That's also really important because there are a few bigger issues in the world right now Fertility is falling everywhere all at once, and so we should try to understand some of those global causes But of course there's going to be local variation. And I think any theory of the global decline in fertila should do those two things. It should think what is happening everywhere all at once and then what might be different in particular dynamics, and they may not be repeated entirely. So our journey that began in the back of a car trying desperately to get an iso fixed point into its socket Es someomewhere else entirely. I'm always kind of struck actually, particularly when talking to environmental activists, about the extent to which there's this pervasive notion that the world is overpopulated and that the answer right now is People need to have fewer children unexpectedly controversial to make the case we need more humanity in the world Now I'm not sure that car seats are the definitive explanation for why fertility is falling around the world. In fact having thoughts about it, I'm not entirely sure they're an explanation at all At the very least, they're a reminder of this shift that's happening around the world Young people today will live to see world population Falling And that's something we have never seen before So what does that do to change our attitudes towards humanity all of the amazing things that we can do. You know, six decades ago, in the nineteen sixties, somebody had come out and said, what we need to do is get rid of the internal combustion engine in order to address climate change. They would have lost their platform. It wouldn't have been a remotely reasonable thing to say, but today, we alive now might live to see the end of the internal combustion engine. and we certainly are living to see new opportunities and new progress against climate challenge that people back then couldn't have remotely imagined the details. So I think the same thing could be true for how humanity responds to global depopulation looming decades in the future Pople in the future will have ideas that we couldn't In the meantime, I'm going back into my car because actually I never managed to fit that final isoFix catch. So I'll be done in Actually don't waake up There's loads more in my conversation with Alice Evans that we couldn't possibly fit into this episode whether robots could help take care of our aging population why Orthodox religious communities have higher fertility rates than everyone else and what that might mean for politics here and everywhere. Do you want to hear that Join our suubbscribers Club by becoming a Sky News insider. Just go to skkyneews dot com slash stuff matters Next time on stuff Matters, we are talking about Howitzers a centuries old weapon that Surprisingly might tell a story the future of war What's really dystopian is to see what it does to the landscape just got. Bidw a fiber optic covering an entire village When the sun's shining, it all kind of shimmers in the air as it's draped over the trees and houses. That's what the battlefield looks like. It gets to a deeper question How can we afford to defend ourselves in a world racked once again Conflict If you're a Sky News inssider, you get to hear that episode one week before everyone else So Subscribe Matters is presented by me, Ed Conway, and the series producer is Jake Ayevich The production team includes assistant producer Valeria Rocker, specialist producer Efa Urel, and video producer Charlie Bell Our bonus episodes are produced by Siler Aarisio. Our editor is Philly Beaumont, and the Sky News commommissioning editor is Paul Stanworth Sound desesign and mixing by Luke Haten, original music composed by Klong and Ed Conway Thanks for listening and don't forget, if you want to hear exclusive bonus content and get early access to new episodes, Sky News Insider and join our club. M stuff matters. Just go to skyneews. com forward slash Stuff matters