In part one of a three-part mini-series, we'll look at the global trend of shrinking populations and what it signifies for the future.
Is the world's population really in decline, what are the reasons for this, and what does it mean for the world?
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on fertility in the 21st century.
[00:00:30] In part one, in this episode, we are going to set the scene by talking about population trends, specifically, downward trends, and why this matters.
[00:00:42] In part two we are going to do a deep dive into in vitro fertilisation, otherwise known as IVF, and look at how this medical procedure has revolutionised the lives of couples all over the world, and literally allowed millions of babies to be born who might otherwise not have been.
[00:01:02] And in part three, our final part, we are going to talk about the future of fertility, and look at some of the potential developments that lie in store for how babies might be born in the future.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about the world’s shrinking population.
[00:01:24] On August 26th of 2022, Elon Musk, a father of 11, tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”.
[00:01:40] The tweet wasn’t explicitly about global warming, which Musk added he believed was a major risk.
[00:01:47] But it paled in comparison with population collapse.
[00:01:53] Now, you may remember a member-only episode we made back in 2021 about how beliefs about global population growth have changed over time, but in this episode we are going to focus specifically on the issue of global population decline.
[00:02:11] So, what is going on with the global population?
[00:02:15] What is happening to global birth rates, is it going to lead to global population collapse, what can be done to stop this, and what happens if we don’t?
[00:02:27] As a quick reminder, the late 18th century British scholar Robert Malthus had proposed that the world faced exactly the opposite risk: the global population was increasing too quickly, and there would be mass famines, wars and death as humans competed for a limited supply of food.
[00:02:50] Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop the scaremongering.
[00:02:57] A century and a half later, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were stories and reports about the world running out of space, there not being enough food to feed everyone, and how humanity was set to reproduce itself into extinction.
[00:03:16] To quote the opening sentence of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
[00:03:27] The world was teetering on the edge, and it was only a matter of time before the population grew so much that there would be mass famine, civil unrest and catastrophe.
[00:03:39] Now, that didn’t happen either, and the global population has gone from 3.5 billion when that ominous statement was published to just over 8 billion today.
[00:03:53] And in fact, today’s demographers and economists are focussing on a very different problem: a decline in global population, or as a paper from the Hoover Institution put it, The De-Population Bomb.
[00:04:10] So, let’s start with some statistics.
[00:04:13] In all of recorded human history, the human population has never experienced a year on year decline, the global population has always grown.
[00:04:25] And yes, this is even the case during wars, plagues and famines, which might kill tens of millions, but on aggregate, on a global level, in every year in recorded history, there have always been more people born than die.
[00:04:43] But, sometime close to the year 2100, according to demographers, this is going to change.
[00:04:52] The year will end with fewer people in the world than it started with.
[00:04:58] Probably not that many fewer, around 10 million fewer people, but this number will continue to increase as the global population continues to decline.
[00:05:11] So, what’s happening?
[00:05:14] On one level, the explanation is very simple.
[00:05:18] People, women specifically, are having fewer children.
[00:05:23] And, at the risk of sounding blindingly obvious, if there are more births than deaths, the population grows, and if there are fewer births than deaths, the population decreases.
00:05:37] Now, there are some nuances to this on a national level, like it doesn’t include immigration or emigration, and assumes that life expectancy stays the same, but over the long term on a global level, this holds true.
[00:05:54] There is actually a technical term for the amount of children that a woman needs to have for the population to remain stable. It’s called the “replacement rate”. It's typically around 2.1, but can be slightly higher in areas with higher mortality rates.
[00:06:15] In other words, for the population to remain the same, a woman needs to have an average of 2.1 children; one to replace her, one to replace the father, and 0.1 left over just in case.
[00:06:32] Globally, the fertility rate is still above this replacement rate; it was 2.3 in 2021, but this is down from a high of 5.3 in 1963.
[00:06:47] And as you will know, there is a huge variation in fertility rates by country.
[00:06:55] In the West African country of Niger, the average woman has 6.8 children, but in South Korea that number is 0.8.
[00:07:08] Even in the world’s most populous country until recently, China, the fertility rate is at 1.1.
[00:07:17] In Europe it is an average of 1.53 and the US isn’t much higher, at 1.78.
[00:07:25] And if you plot a graph of fertility rate against level of economic development, there is a very clear sign: the more a country develops economically, the fewer babies are born to every woman.
[00:07:42] This is a very clear trend, albeit with a few anomalies. For example, Israel which is a developed country but still maintains a high fertility rate, or countries like Jamaica, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Ukraine, which are less economically developed countries but still have low fertility rates.
[00:08:04] Now, we’ll get to some of the theories as to why this is in a minute, but let’s talk about the overall trend first: globally, fertility rates are decreasing.
[00:08:17] Even in countries with high fertility rates, they are decreasing - Yemen had a whopping 8.9 births per woman in 1986, and is now down to a casual 3.8.
[00:08:32] Assuming all countries develop over time and follow a similar pattern to developed countries, almost every country will end up with a fertility rate lower than the replacement rate.
[00:08:45] And the result of this is that some time in the latter half of the twenty-first century the global fertility rate will fall below the replacement rate, which will mean that population decline is inevitable.
[00:09:02] In some countries, it’s happening already.
[00:09:06] Japan’s population has been declining for 14 years in a row, South Korea’s population is set to start declining very soon.
[00:09:16] Italy’s population is now in decline, despite its relatively high levels of immigration.
[00:09:23] In the UK, where I am from, certain regions of the country would already be in decline were it not for immigration, for people arriving in the country.
[00:09:34] Namely Scotland and Wales. Were it not for immigrants moving to those areas, they would both be in population decline.
[00:09:43] So, why is this happening, and what does it mean?
[00:09:49] Well, economists and demographers point at several often interlinked factors that they believe play a part in why people are choosing to have fewer babies.
[00:10:00] You will no doubt be aware of these already, but it’s worth spelling them out.
[00:10:06] The first is the general theme of increasing equality between sexes. As societies develop, most at least realise that women should be treated as the equals of men, not as mere baby-making machines.
[00:10:22] That means higher levels of education and independence for women, it means that women participate in the workforce, and are allowed to have hopes and dreams of their own that go beyond producing children.
[00:10:37] While in many countries even 50 years ago, women might not have had the option to do anything other than get married and have children, fortunately women today have the autonomy to choose to forge their own path, have a career and their own independence before deciding if they want to start a family.
[00:11:00] And as a result, especially in developed countries, women are choosing to have children later and later.
[00:11:09] In the UK, in 1975 the average age of a mother at birth was 26, and it’s now 31.
[00:11:19] The reason this matters in terms of a shrinking population is, as you will know and as we’ll come on to talk about more in part two, the longer a woman waits to try to have a child, the harder it can be.
[00:11:34] Then there is the cost of having children.
[00:11:37] Whether it is the cost of childcare, the opportunity cost of one parent taking time away from their career to look after a child, or the simple fact that you have to look after another human being and provide for them, kids are expensive.
[00:11:54] I have two, which you might correctly point out also puts me below the replacement level of 2.1, and I know firsthand quite how expensive kids can be.
[00:12:06] There is also the harder-to-quantify factor of a declining sense of optimism among young people.
[00:12:14] In the paper I mentioned earlier, The De-Population Bomb, the author cited this sense that, in the US at least, during his research he found a general sense of doom and gloom among young people, a sense that they didn’t want to bring a child into a world that they were not enthusiastic about.
[00:12:36] Whether that's because of the higher cost of living, a society with more tensions, or fears about global warming, his conclusion was that unlike at any time in postwar American history, young people are starting to feel pessimistic about the future, and therefore less willing to have children.
[00:12:59] Another interesting element that he mentioned was, and again this is with respect to the United States, but I think it applies elsewhere too, an increasing focus on convenience and personal autonomy. We are used to a lot of our lives being easy, whether that’s being able to watch any TV programme whenever we want, or order food delivery at the tap of an button, or chat to anyone anywhere in the world, life has never been more convenient than it is today.
[00:13:33] And kids, well they are wonderful in so many ways, but they are a major inconvenience. I love my kids to bits, and my life is infinitely better with them in it, but boy are they inconvenient: they wake me up in the middle of the night, they dribble on me, I don’t have time to shower in the morning, they get ill and I look after them when they can’t go to school, they need to be dressed, washed and fed every day, they shout and cry.
[00:14:04] Again, I wouldn’t change this for the world, but purely on a convenience and lack of stress level, as I’m sure any parent would agree, kids are inconvenient.
[00:14:17] And for a generation that has grown up with everything being convenient, having the autonomy to decide exactly what you do and when you do it, it is understandable why giving all of that up, despite the unknown potential future joys it might bring, well I can see why some people might decide not to have kids.
[00:14:39] And these factors have all combined to create a society where many young people are saying they don’t want kids. To be precise, according to a survey from July last year, July of 2023, in the UK, only 55% of Gen Z want to have children, citing factors like wanting time for themselves, the cost of children, and fears about things like global warming.
[00:15:07] I imagine that you might see some of these factors and these fears around you, whether that’s in yourself, in your friends, families, or colleagues.
[00:15:18] It is all around us, because these seemingly distant statistics, numbers like “fertility rate”, are merely the results of the decisions that millions of people around the world are making every single day.
[00:15:34] Now, as to what happens next, it is undeniable that the global population is set to decline unless there are any major changes.
[00:15:45] But is this such a bad thing?
[00:15:48] People are free to make their own decisions, nobody should feel obligated to have children out of some sort of global duty to not let the population decrease.
[00:15:58] But, on a global scale, as Elon Musk suggested in that tweet I mentioned at the start, on some levels it is very bad news.
[00:16:08] From a purely economic point of view, if a population decreases, it tends to do so slowly, and this is preceded by a large demographic shift, where the old outnumber the young.
[00:16:23] And this is problematic. A country needs a working-age population to be able to support a population that is unable to work, whether that’s people who are too young to work, because they are children and they need to go to school, or because they are too old to work.
[00:16:40] When this happens, there is an increasing burden on the working-age population to support the ageing population, for example through higher taxes or increased government debt, and the situation can quickly spiral out of control.
[00:16:57] So, what can be done?
[00:17:00] Well, on a national level, you can stop your population decreasing by either encouraging citizens to have more babies or by encouraging people to move to your country.
[00:17:12] For most countries, the latter is much easier to do, it’s much easier to encourage immigration than to encourage people to have more children.
[00:17:22] In the country that I’ve been a foreigner in for the past 7 years, Malta, the government has implemented all sorts of parent-friendly policies, such as free childcare, but it still has the lowest fertility rate in Europe, and an ageing population.
[00:17:40] So it has looked abroad, by encouraging foreigners to come to the country.
[00:17:46] As a result, there are almost as many foreigners in the workforce as local people, and in many private sector companies there are more foreigners than Maltese, more non-Maltese than Maltese.
[00:18:02] And with this comes a whole host of questions about preservation of national culture and identity, which you will no doubt be aware of.
[00:18:11] So, other than encouraging people to move to a country, what else can be done?
[00:18:17] Well, one option is to encourage people to have more children.
[00:18:21] The most common are some form of economic incentives, which lessen the cost burden of having a child.
[00:18:29] But the effectiveness of these, at least in achieving the kind of results that are required to bring the fertility rate up close to the replacement rate, is questionable.
[00:18:41] What seems to happen is that when a financial incentive is provided for having children, a couple might choose to have children earlier, but they won’t necessarily have more children, so it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.
[00:18:58] And sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Japan, for example, has all sorts of financial incentives to try to get its young people to have more children, but they have had a very limited impact, exactly like in Malta.
[00:19:14] So it isn’t just a question of cost, and it’s not just a question of economic development, as the examples of countries like Israel, Jamaica and Ukraine show.
[00:19:27] In fact, the only factor that has been reliably shown to be correlated with the fertility rate is one that might seem blindingly obvious, and that is the amount of children that a woman says she wants to have.
[00:19:43] To quote the paper from the Hoover Institution again, “The single best predictor for national fertility rates happens to be wanted family size as reported by women”.
[00:19:58] In other words, if you want to see how many children will be born in the future, ask young women today how many children they say they want to have.
[00:20:09] This is of course a reassuring finding.
[00:20:13] Society should allow for women, and for men for that matter, to have as many or as little children as they want to have, not force them to have more or less.
[00:20:26] But if that is the case, and if parents don’t want to have as many children in the 21st century as they did in the 20th, what does that mean for humanity?
[00:20:37] Well, that’s obviously a big question, and one that economists, demographers and politicians are all struggling with.
[00:20:46] Technological developments may be the answer, with things like increased automation and artificial intelligence allowing for huge productivity increases that offset the reduced working age population, meaning that it simply doesn’t matter that there are fewer working age people.
[00:21:05] Some point to less strain on the environment, with fewer people leading to a reduction in environmental degradation and pollution.
[00:21:15] Others point to more manageable cities and towns, with smaller and more connected populations.
[00:21:21] Property would most likely become more affordable, as there would be fewer people and the same amount of houses, therefore demand would drop, as would prices.
[00:21:33] Good news for some, perhaps, but it would most likely cause huge economic challenges along the way.
[00:21:42] The only way to avert it seems to be to find some way of increasing the amount of children that young people say they want to have.
[00:21:52] As the American political economist Nicholas Eberstad put it, that challenge may be “civilisational in nature”.
[00:22:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the world’s shrinking population.
[00:22:09] As a reminder, this was part one of a three-part mini-series on the theme of fertility in the 21st century.
[00:22:16] Part two, will be on in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
[00:22:21] And then part three is going to be on the future of fertility, and some revolutionary ideas about how babies will be born in the future.
[00:22:30] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on fertility in the 21st century.
[00:00:30] In part one, in this episode, we are going to set the scene by talking about population trends, specifically, downward trends, and why this matters.
[00:00:42] In part two we are going to do a deep dive into in vitro fertilisation, otherwise known as IVF, and look at how this medical procedure has revolutionised the lives of couples all over the world, and literally allowed millions of babies to be born who might otherwise not have been.
[00:01:02] And in part three, our final part, we are going to talk about the future of fertility, and look at some of the potential developments that lie in store for how babies might be born in the future.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about the world’s shrinking population.
[00:01:24] On August 26th of 2022, Elon Musk, a father of 11, tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”.
[00:01:40] The tweet wasn’t explicitly about global warming, which Musk added he believed was a major risk.
[00:01:47] But it paled in comparison with population collapse.
[00:01:53] Now, you may remember a member-only episode we made back in 2021 about how beliefs about global population growth have changed over time, but in this episode we are going to focus specifically on the issue of global population decline.
[00:02:11] So, what is going on with the global population?
[00:02:15] What is happening to global birth rates, is it going to lead to global population collapse, what can be done to stop this, and what happens if we don’t?
[00:02:27] As a quick reminder, the late 18th century British scholar Robert Malthus had proposed that the world faced exactly the opposite risk: the global population was increasing too quickly, and there would be mass famines, wars and death as humans competed for a limited supply of food.
[00:02:50] Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop the scaremongering.
[00:02:57] A century and a half later, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were stories and reports about the world running out of space, there not being enough food to feed everyone, and how humanity was set to reproduce itself into extinction.
[00:03:16] To quote the opening sentence of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
[00:03:27] The world was teetering on the edge, and it was only a matter of time before the population grew so much that there would be mass famine, civil unrest and catastrophe.
[00:03:39] Now, that didn’t happen either, and the global population has gone from 3.5 billion when that ominous statement was published to just over 8 billion today.
[00:03:53] And in fact, today’s demographers and economists are focussing on a very different problem: a decline in global population, or as a paper from the Hoover Institution put it, The De-Population Bomb.
[00:04:10] So, let’s start with some statistics.
[00:04:13] In all of recorded human history, the human population has never experienced a year on year decline, the global population has always grown.
[00:04:25] And yes, this is even the case during wars, plagues and famines, which might kill tens of millions, but on aggregate, on a global level, in every year in recorded history, there have always been more people born than die.
[00:04:43] But, sometime close to the year 2100, according to demographers, this is going to change.
[00:04:52] The year will end with fewer people in the world than it started with.
[00:04:58] Probably not that many fewer, around 10 million fewer people, but this number will continue to increase as the global population continues to decline.
[00:05:11] So, what’s happening?
[00:05:14] On one level, the explanation is very simple.
[00:05:18] People, women specifically, are having fewer children.
[00:05:23] And, at the risk of sounding blindingly obvious, if there are more births than deaths, the population grows, and if there are fewer births than deaths, the population decreases.
00:05:37] Now, there are some nuances to this on a national level, like it doesn’t include immigration or emigration, and assumes that life expectancy stays the same, but over the long term on a global level, this holds true.
[00:05:54] There is actually a technical term for the amount of children that a woman needs to have for the population to remain stable. It’s called the “replacement rate”. It's typically around 2.1, but can be slightly higher in areas with higher mortality rates.
[00:06:15] In other words, for the population to remain the same, a woman needs to have an average of 2.1 children; one to replace her, one to replace the father, and 0.1 left over just in case.
[00:06:32] Globally, the fertility rate is still above this replacement rate; it was 2.3 in 2021, but this is down from a high of 5.3 in 1963.
[00:06:47] And as you will know, there is a huge variation in fertility rates by country.
[00:06:55] In the West African country of Niger, the average woman has 6.8 children, but in South Korea that number is 0.8.
[00:07:08] Even in the world’s most populous country until recently, China, the fertility rate is at 1.1.
[00:07:17] In Europe it is an average of 1.53 and the US isn’t much higher, at 1.78.
[00:07:25] And if you plot a graph of fertility rate against level of economic development, there is a very clear sign: the more a country develops economically, the fewer babies are born to every woman.
[00:07:42] This is a very clear trend, albeit with a few anomalies. For example, Israel which is a developed country but still maintains a high fertility rate, or countries like Jamaica, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Ukraine, which are less economically developed countries but still have low fertility rates.
[00:08:04] Now, we’ll get to some of the theories as to why this is in a minute, but let’s talk about the overall trend first: globally, fertility rates are decreasing.
[00:08:17] Even in countries with high fertility rates, they are decreasing - Yemen had a whopping 8.9 births per woman in 1986, and is now down to a casual 3.8.
[00:08:32] Assuming all countries develop over time and follow a similar pattern to developed countries, almost every country will end up with a fertility rate lower than the replacement rate.
[00:08:45] And the result of this is that some time in the latter half of the twenty-first century the global fertility rate will fall below the replacement rate, which will mean that population decline is inevitable.
[00:09:02] In some countries, it’s happening already.
[00:09:06] Japan’s population has been declining for 14 years in a row, South Korea’s population is set to start declining very soon.
[00:09:16] Italy’s population is now in decline, despite its relatively high levels of immigration.
[00:09:23] In the UK, where I am from, certain regions of the country would already be in decline were it not for immigration, for people arriving in the country.
[00:09:34] Namely Scotland and Wales. Were it not for immigrants moving to those areas, they would both be in population decline.
[00:09:43] So, why is this happening, and what does it mean?
[00:09:49] Well, economists and demographers point at several often interlinked factors that they believe play a part in why people are choosing to have fewer babies.
[00:10:00] You will no doubt be aware of these already, but it’s worth spelling them out.
[00:10:06] The first is the general theme of increasing equality between sexes. As societies develop, most at least realise that women should be treated as the equals of men, not as mere baby-making machines.
[00:10:22] That means higher levels of education and independence for women, it means that women participate in the workforce, and are allowed to have hopes and dreams of their own that go beyond producing children.
[00:10:37] While in many countries even 50 years ago, women might not have had the option to do anything other than get married and have children, fortunately women today have the autonomy to choose to forge their own path, have a career and their own independence before deciding if they want to start a family.
[00:11:00] And as a result, especially in developed countries, women are choosing to have children later and later.
[00:11:09] In the UK, in 1975 the average age of a mother at birth was 26, and it’s now 31.
[00:11:19] The reason this matters in terms of a shrinking population is, as you will know and as we’ll come on to talk about more in part two, the longer a woman waits to try to have a child, the harder it can be.
[00:11:34] Then there is the cost of having children.
[00:11:37] Whether it is the cost of childcare, the opportunity cost of one parent taking time away from their career to look after a child, or the simple fact that you have to look after another human being and provide for them, kids are expensive.
[00:11:54] I have two, which you might correctly point out also puts me below the replacement level of 2.1, and I know firsthand quite how expensive kids can be.
[00:12:06] There is also the harder-to-quantify factor of a declining sense of optimism among young people.
[00:12:14] In the paper I mentioned earlier, The De-Population Bomb, the author cited this sense that, in the US at least, during his research he found a general sense of doom and gloom among young people, a sense that they didn’t want to bring a child into a world that they were not enthusiastic about.
[00:12:36] Whether that's because of the higher cost of living, a society with more tensions, or fears about global warming, his conclusion was that unlike at any time in postwar American history, young people are starting to feel pessimistic about the future, and therefore less willing to have children.
[00:12:59] Another interesting element that he mentioned was, and again this is with respect to the United States, but I think it applies elsewhere too, an increasing focus on convenience and personal autonomy. We are used to a lot of our lives being easy, whether that’s being able to watch any TV programme whenever we want, or order food delivery at the tap of an button, or chat to anyone anywhere in the world, life has never been more convenient than it is today.
[00:13:33] And kids, well they are wonderful in so many ways, but they are a major inconvenience. I love my kids to bits, and my life is infinitely better with them in it, but boy are they inconvenient: they wake me up in the middle of the night, they dribble on me, I don’t have time to shower in the morning, they get ill and I look after them when they can’t go to school, they need to be dressed, washed and fed every day, they shout and cry.
[00:14:04] Again, I wouldn’t change this for the world, but purely on a convenience and lack of stress level, as I’m sure any parent would agree, kids are inconvenient.
[00:14:17] And for a generation that has grown up with everything being convenient, having the autonomy to decide exactly what you do and when you do it, it is understandable why giving all of that up, despite the unknown potential future joys it might bring, well I can see why some people might decide not to have kids.
[00:14:39] And these factors have all combined to create a society where many young people are saying they don’t want kids. To be precise, according to a survey from July last year, July of 2023, in the UK, only 55% of Gen Z want to have children, citing factors like wanting time for themselves, the cost of children, and fears about things like global warming.
[00:15:07] I imagine that you might see some of these factors and these fears around you, whether that’s in yourself, in your friends, families, or colleagues.
[00:15:18] It is all around us, because these seemingly distant statistics, numbers like “fertility rate”, are merely the results of the decisions that millions of people around the world are making every single day.
[00:15:34] Now, as to what happens next, it is undeniable that the global population is set to decline unless there are any major changes.
[00:15:45] But is this such a bad thing?
[00:15:48] People are free to make their own decisions, nobody should feel obligated to have children out of some sort of global duty to not let the population decrease.
[00:15:58] But, on a global scale, as Elon Musk suggested in that tweet I mentioned at the start, on some levels it is very bad news.
[00:16:08] From a purely economic point of view, if a population decreases, it tends to do so slowly, and this is preceded by a large demographic shift, where the old outnumber the young.
[00:16:23] And this is problematic. A country needs a working-age population to be able to support a population that is unable to work, whether that’s people who are too young to work, because they are children and they need to go to school, or because they are too old to work.
[00:16:40] When this happens, there is an increasing burden on the working-age population to support the ageing population, for example through higher taxes or increased government debt, and the situation can quickly spiral out of control.
[00:16:57] So, what can be done?
[00:17:00] Well, on a national level, you can stop your population decreasing by either encouraging citizens to have more babies or by encouraging people to move to your country.
[00:17:12] For most countries, the latter is much easier to do, it’s much easier to encourage immigration than to encourage people to have more children.
[00:17:22] In the country that I’ve been a foreigner in for the past 7 years, Malta, the government has implemented all sorts of parent-friendly policies, such as free childcare, but it still has the lowest fertility rate in Europe, and an ageing population.
[00:17:40] So it has looked abroad, by encouraging foreigners to come to the country.
[00:17:46] As a result, there are almost as many foreigners in the workforce as local people, and in many private sector companies there are more foreigners than Maltese, more non-Maltese than Maltese.
[00:18:02] And with this comes a whole host of questions about preservation of national culture and identity, which you will no doubt be aware of.
[00:18:11] So, other than encouraging people to move to a country, what else can be done?
[00:18:17] Well, one option is to encourage people to have more children.
[00:18:21] The most common are some form of economic incentives, which lessen the cost burden of having a child.
[00:18:29] But the effectiveness of these, at least in achieving the kind of results that are required to bring the fertility rate up close to the replacement rate, is questionable.
[00:18:41] What seems to happen is that when a financial incentive is provided for having children, a couple might choose to have children earlier, but they won’t necessarily have more children, so it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.
[00:18:58] And sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Japan, for example, has all sorts of financial incentives to try to get its young people to have more children, but they have had a very limited impact, exactly like in Malta.
[00:19:14] So it isn’t just a question of cost, and it’s not just a question of economic development, as the examples of countries like Israel, Jamaica and Ukraine show.
[00:19:27] In fact, the only factor that has been reliably shown to be correlated with the fertility rate is one that might seem blindingly obvious, and that is the amount of children that a woman says she wants to have.
[00:19:43] To quote the paper from the Hoover Institution again, “The single best predictor for national fertility rates happens to be wanted family size as reported by women”.
[00:19:58] In other words, if you want to see how many children will be born in the future, ask young women today how many children they say they want to have.
[00:20:09] This is of course a reassuring finding.
[00:20:13] Society should allow for women, and for men for that matter, to have as many or as little children as they want to have, not force them to have more or less.
[00:20:26] But if that is the case, and if parents don’t want to have as many children in the 21st century as they did in the 20th, what does that mean for humanity?
[00:20:37] Well, that’s obviously a big question, and one that economists, demographers and politicians are all struggling with.
[00:20:46] Technological developments may be the answer, with things like increased automation and artificial intelligence allowing for huge productivity increases that offset the reduced working age population, meaning that it simply doesn’t matter that there are fewer working age people.
[00:21:05] Some point to less strain on the environment, with fewer people leading to a reduction in environmental degradation and pollution.
[00:21:15] Others point to more manageable cities and towns, with smaller and more connected populations.
[00:21:21] Property would most likely become more affordable, as there would be fewer people and the same amount of houses, therefore demand would drop, as would prices.
[00:21:33] Good news for some, perhaps, but it would most likely cause huge economic challenges along the way.
[00:21:42] The only way to avert it seems to be to find some way of increasing the amount of children that young people say they want to have.
[00:21:52] As the American political economist Nicholas Eberstad put it, that challenge may be “civilisational in nature”.
[00:22:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the world’s shrinking population.
[00:22:09] As a reminder, this was part one of a three-part mini-series on the theme of fertility in the 21st century.
[00:22:16] Part two, will be on in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
[00:22:21] And then part three is going to be on the future of fertility, and some revolutionary ideas about how babies will be born in the future.
[00:22:30] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on fertility in the 21st century.
[00:00:30] In part one, in this episode, we are going to set the scene by talking about population trends, specifically, downward trends, and why this matters.
[00:00:42] In part two we are going to do a deep dive into in vitro fertilisation, otherwise known as IVF, and look at how this medical procedure has revolutionised the lives of couples all over the world, and literally allowed millions of babies to be born who might otherwise not have been.
[00:01:02] And in part three, our final part, we are going to talk about the future of fertility, and look at some of the potential developments that lie in store for how babies might be born in the future.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about the world’s shrinking population.
[00:01:24] On August 26th of 2022, Elon Musk, a father of 11, tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”.
[00:01:40] The tweet wasn’t explicitly about global warming, which Musk added he believed was a major risk.
[00:01:47] But it paled in comparison with population collapse.
[00:01:53] Now, you may remember a member-only episode we made back in 2021 about how beliefs about global population growth have changed over time, but in this episode we are going to focus specifically on the issue of global population decline.
[00:02:11] So, what is going on with the global population?
[00:02:15] What is happening to global birth rates, is it going to lead to global population collapse, what can be done to stop this, and what happens if we don’t?
[00:02:27] As a quick reminder, the late 18th century British scholar Robert Malthus had proposed that the world faced exactly the opposite risk: the global population was increasing too quickly, and there would be mass famines, wars and death as humans competed for a limited supply of food.
[00:02:50] Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop the scaremongering.
[00:02:57] A century and a half later, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were stories and reports about the world running out of space, there not being enough food to feed everyone, and how humanity was set to reproduce itself into extinction.
[00:03:16] To quote the opening sentence of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
[00:03:27] The world was teetering on the edge, and it was only a matter of time before the population grew so much that there would be mass famine, civil unrest and catastrophe.
[00:03:39] Now, that didn’t happen either, and the global population has gone from 3.5 billion when that ominous statement was published to just over 8 billion today.
[00:03:53] And in fact, today’s demographers and economists are focussing on a very different problem: a decline in global population, or as a paper from the Hoover Institution put it, The De-Population Bomb.
[00:04:10] So, let’s start with some statistics.
[00:04:13] In all of recorded human history, the human population has never experienced a year on year decline, the global population has always grown.
[00:04:25] And yes, this is even the case during wars, plagues and famines, which might kill tens of millions, but on aggregate, on a global level, in every year in recorded history, there have always been more people born than die.
[00:04:43] But, sometime close to the year 2100, according to demographers, this is going to change.
[00:04:52] The year will end with fewer people in the world than it started with.
[00:04:58] Probably not that many fewer, around 10 million fewer people, but this number will continue to increase as the global population continues to decline.
[00:05:11] So, what’s happening?
[00:05:14] On one level, the explanation is very simple.
[00:05:18] People, women specifically, are having fewer children.
[00:05:23] And, at the risk of sounding blindingly obvious, if there are more births than deaths, the population grows, and if there are fewer births than deaths, the population decreases.
00:05:37] Now, there are some nuances to this on a national level, like it doesn’t include immigration or emigration, and assumes that life expectancy stays the same, but over the long term on a global level, this holds true.
[00:05:54] There is actually a technical term for the amount of children that a woman needs to have for the population to remain stable. It’s called the “replacement rate”. It's typically around 2.1, but can be slightly higher in areas with higher mortality rates.
[00:06:15] In other words, for the population to remain the same, a woman needs to have an average of 2.1 children; one to replace her, one to replace the father, and 0.1 left over just in case.
[00:06:32] Globally, the fertility rate is still above this replacement rate; it was 2.3 in 2021, but this is down from a high of 5.3 in 1963.
[00:06:47] And as you will know, there is a huge variation in fertility rates by country.
[00:06:55] In the West African country of Niger, the average woman has 6.8 children, but in South Korea that number is 0.8.
[00:07:08] Even in the world’s most populous country until recently, China, the fertility rate is at 1.1.
[00:07:17] In Europe it is an average of 1.53 and the US isn’t much higher, at 1.78.
[00:07:25] And if you plot a graph of fertility rate against level of economic development, there is a very clear sign: the more a country develops economically, the fewer babies are born to every woman.
[00:07:42] This is a very clear trend, albeit with a few anomalies. For example, Israel which is a developed country but still maintains a high fertility rate, or countries like Jamaica, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Ukraine, which are less economically developed countries but still have low fertility rates.
[00:08:04] Now, we’ll get to some of the theories as to why this is in a minute, but let’s talk about the overall trend first: globally, fertility rates are decreasing.
[00:08:17] Even in countries with high fertility rates, they are decreasing - Yemen had a whopping 8.9 births per woman in 1986, and is now down to a casual 3.8.
[00:08:32] Assuming all countries develop over time and follow a similar pattern to developed countries, almost every country will end up with a fertility rate lower than the replacement rate.
[00:08:45] And the result of this is that some time in the latter half of the twenty-first century the global fertility rate will fall below the replacement rate, which will mean that population decline is inevitable.
[00:09:02] In some countries, it’s happening already.
[00:09:06] Japan’s population has been declining for 14 years in a row, South Korea’s population is set to start declining very soon.
[00:09:16] Italy’s population is now in decline, despite its relatively high levels of immigration.
[00:09:23] In the UK, where I am from, certain regions of the country would already be in decline were it not for immigration, for people arriving in the country.
[00:09:34] Namely Scotland and Wales. Were it not for immigrants moving to those areas, they would both be in population decline.
[00:09:43] So, why is this happening, and what does it mean?
[00:09:49] Well, economists and demographers point at several often interlinked factors that they believe play a part in why people are choosing to have fewer babies.
[00:10:00] You will no doubt be aware of these already, but it’s worth spelling them out.
[00:10:06] The first is the general theme of increasing equality between sexes. As societies develop, most at least realise that women should be treated as the equals of men, not as mere baby-making machines.
[00:10:22] That means higher levels of education and independence for women, it means that women participate in the workforce, and are allowed to have hopes and dreams of their own that go beyond producing children.
[00:10:37] While in many countries even 50 years ago, women might not have had the option to do anything other than get married and have children, fortunately women today have the autonomy to choose to forge their own path, have a career and their own independence before deciding if they want to start a family.
[00:11:00] And as a result, especially in developed countries, women are choosing to have children later and later.
[00:11:09] In the UK, in 1975 the average age of a mother at birth was 26, and it’s now 31.
[00:11:19] The reason this matters in terms of a shrinking population is, as you will know and as we’ll come on to talk about more in part two, the longer a woman waits to try to have a child, the harder it can be.
[00:11:34] Then there is the cost of having children.
[00:11:37] Whether it is the cost of childcare, the opportunity cost of one parent taking time away from their career to look after a child, or the simple fact that you have to look after another human being and provide for them, kids are expensive.
[00:11:54] I have two, which you might correctly point out also puts me below the replacement level of 2.1, and I know firsthand quite how expensive kids can be.
[00:12:06] There is also the harder-to-quantify factor of a declining sense of optimism among young people.
[00:12:14] In the paper I mentioned earlier, The De-Population Bomb, the author cited this sense that, in the US at least, during his research he found a general sense of doom and gloom among young people, a sense that they didn’t want to bring a child into a world that they were not enthusiastic about.
[00:12:36] Whether that's because of the higher cost of living, a society with more tensions, or fears about global warming, his conclusion was that unlike at any time in postwar American history, young people are starting to feel pessimistic about the future, and therefore less willing to have children.
[00:12:59] Another interesting element that he mentioned was, and again this is with respect to the United States, but I think it applies elsewhere too, an increasing focus on convenience and personal autonomy. We are used to a lot of our lives being easy, whether that’s being able to watch any TV programme whenever we want, or order food delivery at the tap of an button, or chat to anyone anywhere in the world, life has never been more convenient than it is today.
[00:13:33] And kids, well they are wonderful in so many ways, but they are a major inconvenience. I love my kids to bits, and my life is infinitely better with them in it, but boy are they inconvenient: they wake me up in the middle of the night, they dribble on me, I don’t have time to shower in the morning, they get ill and I look after them when they can’t go to school, they need to be dressed, washed and fed every day, they shout and cry.
[00:14:04] Again, I wouldn’t change this for the world, but purely on a convenience and lack of stress level, as I’m sure any parent would agree, kids are inconvenient.
[00:14:17] And for a generation that has grown up with everything being convenient, having the autonomy to decide exactly what you do and when you do it, it is understandable why giving all of that up, despite the unknown potential future joys it might bring, well I can see why some people might decide not to have kids.
[00:14:39] And these factors have all combined to create a society where many young people are saying they don’t want kids. To be precise, according to a survey from July last year, July of 2023, in the UK, only 55% of Gen Z want to have children, citing factors like wanting time for themselves, the cost of children, and fears about things like global warming.
[00:15:07] I imagine that you might see some of these factors and these fears around you, whether that’s in yourself, in your friends, families, or colleagues.
[00:15:18] It is all around us, because these seemingly distant statistics, numbers like “fertility rate”, are merely the results of the decisions that millions of people around the world are making every single day.
[00:15:34] Now, as to what happens next, it is undeniable that the global population is set to decline unless there are any major changes.
[00:15:45] But is this such a bad thing?
[00:15:48] People are free to make their own decisions, nobody should feel obligated to have children out of some sort of global duty to not let the population decrease.
[00:15:58] But, on a global scale, as Elon Musk suggested in that tweet I mentioned at the start, on some levels it is very bad news.
[00:16:08] From a purely economic point of view, if a population decreases, it tends to do so slowly, and this is preceded by a large demographic shift, where the old outnumber the young.
[00:16:23] And this is problematic. A country needs a working-age population to be able to support a population that is unable to work, whether that’s people who are too young to work, because they are children and they need to go to school, or because they are too old to work.
[00:16:40] When this happens, there is an increasing burden on the working-age population to support the ageing population, for example through higher taxes or increased government debt, and the situation can quickly spiral out of control.
[00:16:57] So, what can be done?
[00:17:00] Well, on a national level, you can stop your population decreasing by either encouraging citizens to have more babies or by encouraging people to move to your country.
[00:17:12] For most countries, the latter is much easier to do, it’s much easier to encourage immigration than to encourage people to have more children.
[00:17:22] In the country that I’ve been a foreigner in for the past 7 years, Malta, the government has implemented all sorts of parent-friendly policies, such as free childcare, but it still has the lowest fertility rate in Europe, and an ageing population.
[00:17:40] So it has looked abroad, by encouraging foreigners to come to the country.
[00:17:46] As a result, there are almost as many foreigners in the workforce as local people, and in many private sector companies there are more foreigners than Maltese, more non-Maltese than Maltese.
[00:18:02] And with this comes a whole host of questions about preservation of national culture and identity, which you will no doubt be aware of.
[00:18:11] So, other than encouraging people to move to a country, what else can be done?
[00:18:17] Well, one option is to encourage people to have more children.
[00:18:21] The most common are some form of economic incentives, which lessen the cost burden of having a child.
[00:18:29] But the effectiveness of these, at least in achieving the kind of results that are required to bring the fertility rate up close to the replacement rate, is questionable.
[00:18:41] What seems to happen is that when a financial incentive is provided for having children, a couple might choose to have children earlier, but they won’t necessarily have more children, so it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.
[00:18:58] And sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Japan, for example, has all sorts of financial incentives to try to get its young people to have more children, but they have had a very limited impact, exactly like in Malta.
[00:19:14] So it isn’t just a question of cost, and it’s not just a question of economic development, as the examples of countries like Israel, Jamaica and Ukraine show.
[00:19:27] In fact, the only factor that has been reliably shown to be correlated with the fertility rate is one that might seem blindingly obvious, and that is the amount of children that a woman says she wants to have.
[00:19:43] To quote the paper from the Hoover Institution again, “The single best predictor for national fertility rates happens to be wanted family size as reported by women”.
[00:19:58] In other words, if you want to see how many children will be born in the future, ask young women today how many children they say they want to have.
[00:20:09] This is of course a reassuring finding.
[00:20:13] Society should allow for women, and for men for that matter, to have as many or as little children as they want to have, not force them to have more or less.
[00:20:26] But if that is the case, and if parents don’t want to have as many children in the 21st century as they did in the 20th, what does that mean for humanity?
[00:20:37] Well, that’s obviously a big question, and one that economists, demographers and politicians are all struggling with.
[00:20:46] Technological developments may be the answer, with things like increased automation and artificial intelligence allowing for huge productivity increases that offset the reduced working age population, meaning that it simply doesn’t matter that there are fewer working age people.
[00:21:05] Some point to less strain on the environment, with fewer people leading to a reduction in environmental degradation and pollution.
[00:21:15] Others point to more manageable cities and towns, with smaller and more connected populations.
[00:21:21] Property would most likely become more affordable, as there would be fewer people and the same amount of houses, therefore demand would drop, as would prices.
[00:21:33] Good news for some, perhaps, but it would most likely cause huge economic challenges along the way.
[00:21:42] The only way to avert it seems to be to find some way of increasing the amount of children that young people say they want to have.
[00:21:52] As the American political economist Nicholas Eberstad put it, that challenge may be “civilisational in nature”.
[00:22:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the world’s shrinking population.
[00:22:09] As a reminder, this was part one of a three-part mini-series on the theme of fertility in the 21st century.
[00:22:16] Part two, will be on in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
[00:22:21] And then part three is going to be on the future of fertility, and some revolutionary ideas about how babies will be born in the future.
[00:22:30] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
