Transcription
We got more deaths than births in the UK for the first time last year. The fact that you've gone from seven or eight workers per retiree when Japan was thriving to one to one, and in Britain we're moving rapidly from three workers to every retiree to two, it's falling dramatically—as low as two-thirds of a child per couple in Korea, which means 100 grandparents, 33 parents, 11 children. So I think this is a completely unprecedented scenario. I think we are entering uncharted waters, and I'm quite concerned there is going to be a competition for the young and well-educated. This is a ticking time bomb, isn't it?
Dr. Paul M: Welcome to Trigonometry.
Thank you very much. You are, of course, a demographer, and your latest book is called *No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children*. We want to talk about demographics with you. Your area of expertise is something you've been talking about extensively. So, first and foremost, it's an issue that has come to the fore in public conversation, uh, even though it's kind of a fringe issue still to many people. But why is it a significant thing, and what is going on with demographics, particularly in the Western world, but and perhaps also beyond?
It's a significant thing because people matter. Whether you're looking at economics, you're looking at history, um, you're looking at current affairs—what's going on in the news, flows of refugees, working-age populations, unemployment—it's all very much driven by the size of population, the growth or shrinkage, where they're moving to or where they're moving from. And I've kind of made it a bit of a mission of mine, quite apart from the pronatalism which we'll come on to, to try and help explain the past, the present, and the future in terms of what was going on in terms of population and then how did that affect the way things turned out. Say, for example, my second book, uh, which is about the history of population change, I look at a whole range of things from the Louisiana Purchase and the Americans moving across the whole continent to the origins and the outcome of the First World War to the end of the Japanese economic experiment. That's *The Human Tide*, and I show how in each of these—in many events of history which are well known to people—there was the hidden hand of demography; not the only thing that was going on, but you can't really understand the event unless you get the demographic dimension. And then the next book after that, my third book, *Tomorrow's People*, was really to say, well, if that's true of the past, if population change has driven the past, it must be changing the present and the future. What's going on in the world today? What is it that we see happening in current affairs in the news? And what's the future going to look like when we understand how population is developing? So you then ask—we ask me—what's actually going on now? I take a very global look. The answer is you go through a demographic transition. I mean, very crudely, poor countries—which was the whole world before 1800—lots of kids, not always maximum; some people taken out of the marriage market for various reasons, marriage was delayed, so there were various social mechanisms for controlling fertility, but broadly women had lots and lots of children; they couldn't control their fertility very effectively; people died young; lots of children died in their first year. And so, I mean, if you'd had a population with six children, which was pretty pretty normal, and they hadn't all died off—if you'd tripled every generation—I calculated that by the beginning of the fourth or fifth century, I can't remember which, with a quarter of a billion people at the era of Julius Caesar, by 4 or 500 you'd have had one meter per person standing meter in the world. The reason that didn't happen was not because people weren't having large families—six at least—but because there was this—this was Malthus's—well, this endless downward pressure on population growth of people dying; and if they—if the war didn't get them and disease didn't get them—eventually the planet couldn't possibly have fed that many people, and the planet's ability to feed people grows very, very slowly. So it takes from Caesar to Queen Victoria for the world's population to quadruple, and that was the old regime. Then you have this incredible demographic transition; it's a long story, I won't go into it in detail, but essentially, first of all your mortality rate falls; you're still having loads of kids; they're not all dying off; people are living longer; population explodes; and then eventually fertility rates go down, and that happens first in the British Isles, in North America, and then it spreads. So parts of the world today are still in that demographic transition; you'll see countries in Africa still have very high fertility rates; they're really bringing their mortality rates down, even though they're still quite poor; they're having population explosion. More and more of the world is is moving into that point where they have low death rates, long life expectancies, very low infant mortality, but very few children. But instead of the thing settling at about two kids, which would lead to a stable population, it's falling dramatically low—as low as two-thirds of a child per couple in Korea, which means 100 grandparents, 33 parents, 11 children. So my fourth book, the most recent one, is really saying why is this happening? What can we do? I think just the fact that people know more about it, that people become more aware of this incredible demographic vortex that we're facing is worthwhile. So that's kind of my—the progression of my thinking and my writing on demography.
So the inevitable question—look, I think there are lots of people who are interested in addressing this and trying to solve it in some way, uh, for the reasons that we'll discuss, given the consequences of it—but in order to solve something you do need to understand why it's happening. And I have not heard—and this is why you're here—anybody where I've gone, okay, this person's like got it; they've described the entire set of the causal reasons. So why are we having fewer children? Why are we below replacement? You'd really want it to be a simple answer; you'd want someone to say, aha, I've got the answer. But unfortunately, it's not that simple because it's so general; because we're seeing it in Jamaica and Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, and Finland; because it's so general, almost becoming universal outside sub-Saharan Africa and a few countries in Asia, um, people think there must be a single cause and therefore it must be simple. Actually, probably if you had a God's-eye view or a much cleverer demographer than me—maybe who will exist in the future—um, they could crack it, but the best that we can do today is to say it's multicausal, and you can group those causes into two buckets: the material and the cultural. So let's start with the material. So we know in Britain, for example, housing's very expensive. The trouble with that as a universal explanation is where housing is cheap—some cities in China are built lots of flats—parts of the UK have relatively cheap housing, parts of Germany, parts of the Balkans, I don't think the whole of Russia and Ukraine has expensive housing, but they all have low fertility. So that doesn't mean it's not causing low fertility in parts of the UK and lots of the rest of the world, but if you lifted that as a cause—if everybody could get cheap housing—it wouldn't solve it. So housing's part of it; expensive childcare, but again, if you look at parts of the world where childcare is very, very subsidized, fertility rates are still very low—parts of the Baltics, parts of Germany. If you can get the childcare, it's very subsidized. So again, I'm not dismissing—I've got children of my own who are having children of their own—I'm not dismissing the cost of childcare as important, but it—it's a cause, but if—if you get rid of that cause, there are other things depressing fertility rates. So I always say that material factors are important, but they won't solve it by themselves. So what's the other thing that's going on? The other thing that's going on is cultural, and culture is much more difficult to put your finger on. There seems to be something about modernity which is depressing fertility rates, and there are a whole range of explanations. There's something to do clearly with women's aspirations and education, and I always say, you know, I welcome women's education, aspirations. I'm the son—my mother was the prime earner when I was a child; my wife has earned more than me; my daughters have both got as good education as my son, and they're leading their careers. I don't want that to change, but we need to find a way to reconcile that with producing a demographic future for ourselves. So there's something about women's rights and feminism and education, but we've got to—I don't want to get rid of that; we can't get rid of that. And if the problem is too few people in the workforce, it wouldn't help if we did. So we've got to find a way, and I think younger, better minds than mine will come up with those sorts of solutions: how can we have a 2030s feminism that's not like the 1950s, but that combines women fully self-actualizing and having children? So there's something about women, something about relationships, uh, people are having less sex, people are getting married later, people are coupling up later, unless there seems to be a political divergence between men and women that could be part of the picture as well. I think at root, though, there is a lack of a pronatal culture. So all these things will exist; we will have feminism; we will have women's education; and we may have something of a breakdown of relationships and a load of other cultural effects and a decline of religion. But ultimately, if we have a really pronatal culture—if we had a culture and a civilization which really valued having children, where that was really high status, where that was something people really aspired to—it would overcome all those issues. And the example I always give is Israel, where they are extremely wealthy, extremely densely populated, extremely urban, extremely educated; women's rights are by far the best in the Middle East, um, and yet people are still having children—an average of more around three per—per couple—whereas it's less than two in every other OECD country. So my point is, all these things that seem to be militating against people having children, they're all there, but if people really have the priority, if people want it, uh, if people make it the most important thing in their lives, uh, if it's valued as it should be, and if the lack of children was understood as the problem it is, then through all of these issues we would overcome. So I think the ultimate cause—sorry to give you such a rambling answer—the ultimate cause for me is what do people really value in their lives? And if they value having children enough, they'll have them.
Which brings me to the one thing you haven't mentioned in your analysis, which applies very much to Israel, which is that the people who have the highest birth rates in Israel are the ultra-religious. To what extent is the decline in religiosity affecting birth rates?
Well, my PhD supervisor, Eric Kaufmann, who I think you've had on this show, um, wrote a book called *Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth*? I'm very proud of that book because I'm the first person mentioned in the acknowledgements; I think it's the first time my name ever appeared in print. And he was wrestling with this problem; we often talk about it, um, can we have a secular society which has a decent fertility rate? Now, Eric's view is, in the long term, if you have communities that have a high fertility rate and at the same time are very good at walling themselves off, as the ultra-Orthodox are in Israel and outside, then they will grow exponentially. And if you run that forward a few hundred years, that has an amazing effect statistically. Again, against that, I have a friend, um, who comes from a traditional Catholic family, and I think she only had three kids—she married late—but one brother's got 13 and one's got 12, and the sister's got 10. The trouble with those sorts of communities is—Catholicism has evolved as the majority religion; they are not particularly good at walling themselves off; they don't have to live near the church as you do have to live near a synagogue if you're walking on Shabbat; they don't have—they have a school network, but they find those very traditional Catholics find it very hard to control those schools and keep them really traditional. And so I suspect a lot of those kids won't have 10 or 12 of their own. So there are high-fertility religious groups, but I think they dissipate, and then there are high-fertility religious groups that retain their young. If you can do that, you—you've got a growth model. Now, I'm not sure that will carry on for that long; I don't know how many generations families of seven, eight, and nine in the current environment will be able to hold on to all their children; there are so many pressures. For example, I know some Ultra-Orthodox Jews in England who resisted—they've got six children, so sort of moderate family for their community—they resisted the internet for their children. Along came Covid; the kids had to go online for schooling. So there are so many pressures, uh, you—to retain your children for generation to generation—very difficult. So I think Eric's thesis is these groups will grow and grow and grow ultimately, and I think it's almost impossible to know whether that's the case. So the question really is, if religion is breaking down, if secularism is the way forward or the future—and I'm not here to stand on a pulpit and sort of argue for religion—then can we invent a secular—just like feminism—can we invent a feminism that is fully aligned to pronatalism? And there—there's lots of historical precedent for it; Mary Wollstonecraft's whole literature of feminism about pronatalism and anti—it's a debate within feminism; there are pronatal strands within feminism. I think we have to invent a secularism that doesn't rely on religion, um, for—to have children. First reason is, I don't want to live in a—while I'm happy to have groups and sects, and we can accommodate them in a liberal society—if they became the majority, I think our liberal societies would collapse. I don't think we would be—we would no longer have the overarching infrastructure. I mean, again, an example I give is a friend of mine who's a dentist, and he—most—he's a dentist for children; most of his patients are Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and they need him, and um, they—it's not that they couldn't be dentists, but you have to study biology, and you have to go to university, you have to do a load of things they'd rather their children didn't do. To keep the utilities going—using the term in the broadest sense—if dentistry is a utility, to keep the lights on, we can't all be ultra-religious um, sects that retain their young, hold off the rest of the world. So I don't think we can—that's the model that is not the model for the future, um, and what concerns me is that we end up in a world where these groups do have large numbers of children, and that they then assimilate into a secular core where they dissipate. It reminds you rather like the 18th-century city of London; high-fertility countryside endlessly attracting people to London, but London was a population sink; people didn't have large families; it was very unhealthy. And I think secular society could end up being like that; it sort of draws in these growing religious groups, and it functions because it manages to assimilate them to a certain extent or some of their offspring, but it doesn't regenerate itself. So, you know, my appeal is just as we need to invent a pronatal um, feminism, we need to invent a pronatal secularism. I don't think we can rely on religion to do it. And in Israel, whilst you're absolutely right, if you divide the population according to um, self-identifying religiosity, the more religious, the more children, but even the self-identified seculars have two children, so that's better than any other country in the OECD. So I don't think it's inevitable that secular societies need be low fertility; we just have to rethink things, I think.
Paul, and you mentioned that we don't have any precedent for this. Is there really never been a—a time in—in—in the history of major civilizations when they stopped reproducing in the way we are?
No, no. So first of all, some people say there was—there was in Rome, but my—and that's part of the collapse of the Roman Empire. I don't believe—first of all, the data from Rome is really bad; secondly, I don't—I think the data we have on Rome is Rome rather than the Roman Empire, right? And Rome could always attract people from elsewhere, particularly in the late Roman Empire where citizenship was—was kind of generalized. I don't think methods of birth control were general enough or understood enough to really control fertility in the Roman Empire. So I think among the elites—among certain elites who perhaps were quite clever at certain practices or were prepared not to marry or whatever—they were—they were probably did have low fertility rates. The French worried about it in the 18th century, but I think until at least France in the late 18th century, globally it was only ever an elite phenomenon; it was a small number of people who found ways to meet their sexual requirements or not and not have a very high fertility rate. I don't believe it was common in the Roman Empire, and I think the best historians of Rome would agree that it was an elite phenomenon, noticed by—so in terms of other places, I mean, again, people have controlled their fertility through various practices, like there was a lot of um, infant mortality, uh, as we talked about, that was natural, but in terms of people actually controlling it, there's a lot of infanticide in certain societies, which was kept very quiet—China, Japan—um, there was um, the whole institution of not marrying in the Catholic church and sending boys and girls to—to monasteries, which was statistically—probably at—at its height statistically significant enough to reduce fertility a bit; um, there was late marriage, and you do see a certain—certain relationship between the economy and—and agriculture and people getting married and having children. So in a premodern society, if you had a few bad harvests and things were difficult, people didn't get married; that tended to delay fertility because people mostly had their children within marriage. And then you had a good series of harvests; there was a bit more money around, a bit more food around; people got married a bit earlier; the fertility rate went up. So there was some regulation, but I don't believe we've ever had a society in the past where we've kept this number of people alive into old age, which, by the way, I think is a wonderful thing, as I'm 60, I'm aiming for another 20 or 30. We haven't—so we—we certainly never seen something where we've got that many people at the top end, and I do not believe we've remotely seen a society where we've had fertility rates down below one and a half historically. What we have seen historically is the Black Death or the Thirty Years War, and that cuts populations, but it's tended to cut them across the board. Something like Covid—you remember it was very much the older population. God forbid we should have something that killed—you know, something like that that killed—then you could see it. But historically, I'm not aware that we ever have. So I honestly think we have—the traditional population pyramid was like that, and it wasn't always exactly like that; there might have been a war that particularly took out a chunk in the middle, or—but I think essentially until modern times people haven't been able to control their—their fertility sufficiently, and people haven't lived long enough—life expectancy was too short. So I think this is a completely unprecedented scenario. I think we are entering uncharted waters, and I'm quite concerned.
And the reason I ask about this is it sort of sounds to me like human beings have never had this experience before, so we don't know—we don't really know exactly how to deal with it. Would I be right in saying that historically speaking every major civilization would have seen reproduction and the expansion of its population as a good thing to be—to be sought, frankly? And you know, rulers would have wanted to have a bigger manpower pool to go to war and—and so on and so forth. Do you think our attitude to children is quite—I was going to say unnatural, but at least historically atypical?
I think it's not absolutely universal what you're talking about, but societies and cultures that didn't value having children didn't make it into history or through history. I mean, you do have—so, for example, yes, the whole tradition in Catholicism of um, celibate priesthood, celibate um, religious and so on, um, reduced fertility rates. On the other hand, within marriage, uh, fertility was encouraged, um, certainly as you get to the sort of Malthusian period where—well, if you go back to Ibn Khaldun, if you go back to the Arab writers, if you look at the history of writing on this subject, but particularly into the 18th century when you had—Mists who wanted to grow their national populations, accumulate gold, and be able to fight wars, it was obvious that large numbers of people were a good thing, um, so I don't think you've had a really anti-natal civilization or society that's succeeded. And where you got those kind of anti-natal—I mean, the Shakers in the United States, a famous case—they didn't believe—
In having any children, and they surprise, surprise, have died out, so there's almost a kind of Darwinian process at work. And um, to some extent, particularly where you've got high rates of mortality and lots of people are dying off, if you don't have a pronatal culture, if the average isn't sort of five or six children per woman, you're not going to make it as a society. So I think it is unprecedented, um, and yes, there is something about modernity which is anti-children.
Now you might say, "Oh, is that really the case?" It's not as pro-child as it should be. And maybe in the past, where people haven't been able to control their fertility that well, you didn't need a pronatal culture. So I'm not saying we need to go back to the past because they had a prenatal culture and that's why they had lots of children. They had lots of children partly for the reasons we've said—that there was a kind of Darwinian sense; if societies didn't have them, they'd die out, which instilled a certain culture. But just work through history. But I think the lack of ability to control it meant you didn't really need a pronatal culture.
Now then you get to the kind of 70s and 80s when contraception was very, very common. I mean, it was really coming in from the late 19th century, but it became really universal and available in the developed world. And at first, it's interesting, fertility rate didn't fall off a cliff; it went below replacement, but not very much. But I think for my generation, there was still very much an unspoken expectation, an unspoken norm: you've got married in your 20s and started having your family then, and that's what I saw most of my friends doing. You know, reasonably well-educated people, people who'd been to good universities or not, it didn't really matter; that's what you got on and did. And you might have had two or three, and that would—and I think it was kind of unthinking in a way; it was very much how we were—I wouldn't say programmed, but that was the atmosphere, that was the environment at the time.
I think we're now in a world of hyper-individualism, a hyper-self-actualization, and that's not altogether bad. I don't want to get up on a pulpit and say, "Oh, you must be more collective; you must think about the country." But if we don't have some kind of counterveiling ideology, if we don't have some kind of countering belief—call it neo-pronatalism—so in the natural state, people were naturally pronatal; now we need to reinvent that pronatalism to push against all the exciting other things people could be doing with their lives.
You know, you talk about ideology, and it brought to mind the memory I had when I was—uh, I was in New York, I was in Greenwich Village, and I was in a coffee shop, started talking to this older gentleman in his 80s, and we started having a really lovely conversation. And he said he had children. I went, "Oh, you have grandchildren?" And this really sad look came across his face when he went, "No, my children are worried about the environment, and they think having grandchildren is selfish because it would damage the—the planet and the globe and global warming."
I mean, how big a factor does that play into it? The fact, not only that, but this idea that the human being is a scourge upon the Earth, that all we do is drain resources, that we are toxic—to quote Bill Hicks—"we're a virus with shoes"—how much does that play into the—into people not wanting to have babies and children? It's quite hard to quantify, although there are studies that show quite a lot of young people today are worried about this issue, um, and that it plays into the low fertility rates. I can't put my finger on it and say that's x% of the problem, but undoubtedly it is a part of the problem. And so we need an array of arguments against it. So let me give you my best uh shot. In fact, there's a chapter in my book about um why this is wrong and pernicious.
So first of all, a child born today, if we believe the progress of net-zero technology, will not emit very much. A small child doesn't actually create that much emissions. By the time he or she is 20, living in his own place, driving a vehicle, we will be pretty close to net-zero. If you actually look at the progress Britain has made in reducing carbon emissions—um, maybe a bit phony because of the way we import and so on—you could certainly see in 20 years' time a child born today won't have that much impact. So that's kind of argument number one. Argument number two is that in order to progress as a human species and as a planet, we need lots of young, creative minds. So the planet—the technology that existed in 1900 could no way support 8 billion people, right? We are now 8 billion people—better fed, better educated, better housed, better clothed, better health, living longer than we ever have done. That's only because we've got new technology. Now we're—the population is at least going to top out. If we can carry on with that creative endeavor, uh, we will solve our environmental problems. A country like India, getting wealthier and wealthier now, has the space for more tigers, and the tiger population's taking off; it wouldn't be if it weren't an inventive, creative, and increasingly wealthy society—still poor, but it's at a level that it can think about the environment. A country like Japan—not enough young people, less and less inventiveness—so to come up with the environmental solutions, we need technological solutions; those will be produced by young people. Aging societies will not produce them. So that's argument number two. Argument number three is that if you are a person who lives in the real world who says, "I'm not going to have children because I want to save the planet," but I expect there to be a bus driver when I get a bus, I expect someone to clear—clear my bins once a week, I expect someone in the restaurant to take my order or prepare my food, when I'm old I expect to have a carer—in other words, you continue to consume the labor of others, but you are not—you're too grounded to produce it or too environmental or too green or too worthy—all you will do is you'll either find that labor's not there for you, or you'll suck into your country a lot of immigrants from very low-emissions countries. Now we may get to talk about immigration; that's a whole different—different argument. But just in terms of the environment, if you are taking someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo to do the jobs for you in Britain, or from Syria to do the jobs for you in Germany, or from Guatemala for the states, these people, when they come and they aspire to a local lifestyle, even if they remain relatively poor relative to the country they've arrived in, their emissions can go up 50, 60 times. So you are not saving the planet—unless you go and live on the blasted heath and sort of, I don't know, till or something—you are not saving the planet; you are merely shifting people to meet your consumer requirements from low-emissions to high-emissions countries.
So I hope those three arguments are at least part of a riposte to someone who thinks, "I won't have children and I'll save the planet." We'll get you back to the interview in a minute, but first, that, my friends, is a sound of another sale on Shopify, the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow your business. I know that building a business takes work—look at my face, I'm exhausted—but the lovely thing about Shopify is that no matter how big you want to grow, Shopify is with you every step of the way. Shopify is a commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide, whether you're selling handmade jewelry, art prints, or podcast merch like us—buy our merch—Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can successfully grow your business. Shopify even gets you selling across social media marketplaces like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. TikTok just makes me angry; I'm too old. So if you're ready to get serious about selling, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/SLTtrigger. And now back to the interview.
We always focus with these conversations on women, as well we should. It's not their fault, but um, but actually we need to talk about the men in this. So I'm going to—I know a lot of women who are my age, a little bit younger, and they get into relationships with men, and they get promised that children, whatever else, and all of a sudden the man turns around and says, "Actually, I don't want to have kids." That's it. And then what you normally see is the woman using her most fertile years on a man who has essentially sold her a lie. Now I don't think that's the case for every woman, of course not, but how much of this is an issue with men and men not wanting to have children?
It is an issue with men, although men say they want to have roughly the same number of children as women do. So both men and women in Britain and the states and a lot of other developed countries say they want to have two to three. The difference between men and women is that women feel the clock ticking more intensely, but it isn't really ticking more intensely. So I think better education for women in terms of their loss of fertility in their 30s would help, make them a little more urgent and a little more pressing, um, but also men should understand that because most men will not manage to secure a partner of fertile years—years and years later. I mean, we always have examples of some 80-year-old who's married a 20-year-old, you know, but unless you're a tech billionaire or a film star—is probably not going to happen—or a podcast—he hasn't secured a woman of fertile years and ended up a real superstar podcaster perhaps—um, but generally it won't happen for you either. Now I think men don't—all right, men don't have that—men don't have that sense of urgency. Yeah. So I think educating both sexes on the decline of female fertility, educating them on the sheer likelihood of a man securing a woman of fertile years as a partner once he's passed a certain age—so give us the stats on both of those.
Well, okay, so—so—um, the—the men securing a partner of fertile years, I can't give you the stats on, but I do know that the age gap between partners has declined significantly. So my—my parents were 11 years apart; um, I've got a good friend whose parents were 22 years apart. That wasn't—I mean, 22 is a bit of an exaggeration; it was much more common when my parents were young. They didn't go to university; the men found jobs and got to a sort of level maybe in their mid-20s or late 20s when they could have a—have a family and could afford it, and then they very often married younger women. In our generation, or my generation and your generation, people are more likely to meet at university, and therefore I'm sure the data would show, or I imagine the data would show, that the actual age of—partnering—so if you just take say first—first child born, what's the age gap between the parents—it would decline, I imagine, um, but I don't have the data on that. Um, on women's fertility, the fact is that—I mean, as we were talking beforehand, you get the odd case of people having children very late. Um, the dentist I married—I mentioned—didn't marry a dentist—the dentist I mentioned earlier um had three children, and then his wife had another child in her 50s—unexpected—and everyone was delighted—early 50s. So these sorts of things do happen, but again, they're rogue events, and one shouldn't rely on them. The fact is that fertility probably peaks in your early 20s, but you don't really have to start worrying about it for most people until you're into your 30s. But between 30 and 35, there is a considerable drop-off. So the 30s are a critical period. Once you pass 35, you—the chances of you having a problem are greater and greater. So you know, there is a curve; it could be taught in schools. And um, I think people are deluded in thinking they can put it off—off—off—and off. So you'll never get rid of that problem of the man who messes the girl around and says he doesn't want any children and then—because it goes on to somebody else. But I think if everybody understood the numbers and the—the pace at which the clock is ticking, and if we had a culture that was more pronatal, that gave more credit and more status and more um value to parenthood and to young dads, say, um, could shift it. I don't think we shift it by me sitting on a podcast preaching at young men to—to commit, but I think we need a change in the environment where that kind of commitment is more natural and more normal. Because men want to have kids and be dads at a younger age. I think it's a very important point—the education, and this particularly goes for women, because when you talk to a lot of women about having kids, they go, "Well, I'm going to leave it till, you know, 37, 38," and I—and I go, "You—" I mean, if you can have them—there's some women who can't get pregnant past a certain age—early 30s or whatever else. So the idea that you can put it off and put it off is might be a fantasy for some people. I think the other thing is the technology. So IVF has got better and better, but it's still not fail-proof; it's still less and less effective the later you leave it; it's still more and more expensive, and it's not a pleasant or easy procedure. I mean, fortunately, I haven't been through it; my wife hasn't been through it, but it's not something you should—so I think it would extend the window, and that's good, but I think the worry is that people come to rely on it—"Oh, I froze my eggs; there's IVF; I'm fine; I don't have to worry about it"—and um, as a friend of mine said to me who's quite involved in this world and who's um senior in the—in the body that uh regulates these things in the UK, when we were—she had four children in her 20s and then got serious about her career—she said when we were um first married, you know, we could try for children in every menstrual cycle with a reasonable chance of success; the—the shots you get with IVF are far fewer; they're more complicated, difficult, painful, and it's not something you should rely on. No, absolutely. And the chances of you being able to bring a baby to term in your late 30s or obviously vastly different to if you're in your early 20s, for example. The other thing I would say is we had our children, and again I'm not saying, "Oh, I did the perfect thing; everyone should follow me." We had our children in our late 20s and early 30s, and we had a lot of energy in those days, and we got a lot of parental help. Um, now when we're looking after our grandchildren—I mean, it's one of the greatest joys in life, but it's quite tiring. And I think the later you leave it, the harder it is to do. The other thing is if the generations get very spaced out—if you're in your early 40s looking after a newborn, you're very likely to have parents who need quite a lot of help. So the more spread out the generations are, the more stress you put on that middle generation that is having to deal with elderly parents as well as children. One of the things in China that is said to be a problem is there are so many only children because of the one-child policy, marrying each other; they then have four parents with no um support other than these children. I mean, I've got a 92, 91-year-old mother, and she's amazing and wonderful, but she does require a bit of support; she's got two children—not just me—she's got seven grandchildren, and we all rally around, and it's quite doable. But if you're in your 40s—and you had a parent who was in his or her 40s when you—and you're an only child, and your wife or husband was in the same position, the—the prospect, the effort—taking them to hospital, looking after them—all the things you need to do with older people that a good child should do—makes it even more. And of course, at that age, the grandparents can't help; um, it just makes the whole thing impossible, frankly.
All right, Paul, well, let's talk about how we're going to get ourselves out of this. Um, I think it's important to address—so there are countries which have attempted to address this. My understanding is none of them have been successful. Is that correct?
No, that's incorrect. It's incorrect because you never really know what the counterfactual is. So take a country like Hungary. Hungary—okay, let me rephrase then. I think it's important—what I mean by they haven't been successful is we want to get to 2.1; they haven't got to 2.1, and they haven't made huge progress in that direction. There have been a small number of cases. So Georgia is a good case where famously the head of the church said, "Any third child or a child in succession more than number three, I will personally baptize," and that seems to have had an extraordinary effect. I mean, how long-lasting it is, I don't know, but it does seem to have ticked the fertility rate back up above—above two. And Mongolia, Kazakhstan—I mean, these are quite—say it's an obscure—is of course a very Anglo-centric view of the world, but these aren't countries we know much about, but they have succeeded through a number of means in raising their fertility rate. And a country like Hungary, where they still have a well below replacement fertility rate, has brought the—the fertility rate up. Now there are technical reasons for that—when you—the way that the total fertility rate is calculated—I won't bore you with the details—but as people delay having children, as the average age of having a child gets later and later, it somewhat depresses the fertility rate, and then when that stops—just stopping it—means the fertility rate tends to go up. So part of that is there in Hungary, but the fact is if Hungary had not gone up from 1.1, 1.2 to 1.5, 1.6—it's not at replacement—but replacement is not the magic number. It's great to be there, but it's a hell of a lot better to be 1.5 than 1.1 in terms of how fast you age and what kind of support you're going to have to give to the elderly versus the working-age population. So clearly countries have tried all sorts of things; there's no really easy way of knowing what succeeded and what hasn't, and what the counterfactuals are and what might have happened if they hadn't had those policies. Let me give you the example of France. France became very aware of its lack of fertility a very long time ago. The French, for some reason—it's still a bit of a mystery—managed to get their fertility rate down very, very early—I'm talking about the end of the 18th century—and I talk a lot about this in my book, *The Human Tide*, because France ceased to be the demographic superpower of Europe; it lost a lot of wars eventually and—and became very second fiddle to the United Kingdom. And um, the point where France really got this was 1870, 1871; they lost the Franco-Prussian War; they were outgunned; they were out-organized, but they were also outnumbered by the—the Germans, the Prussians, and their German allies. And France became a bit obsessed by pronatalism. Now what happened is they didn't really get their birth rate up, but eventually Germany and England had a birth rate that fell, and France has had a persistently higher fertility rate than other countries in Western Europe. It's still below replacement, but it's doing much better than other parts of Western Europe. And the reason for that is it had a long tradition of pronatalism. So when Macron says "demographic rearmament," no one thinks he's weird as they would if [inaudible] said it. Um, and what they actually do—and we may get into the details of policy—is, for example, the tax system is much better the more children you have in France than in other countries in Western Europe. And actually, if you look at France, you could say, "Well, is it really government policy?" and so on. I spend a lot of time in a part of the world most people don't know exists, which is French Catalonia. So Northern Catalonia was actually in France; it's the department of the Pyrénées-Orientales, and if it's very Catalan, but if you compare the fertility rate there to the fertility rate in Catalan—in Spanish Catalonia—you'll find quite a gap. So it's not about Catalan culture; it's actually—it's kind of an experiment; it's about government policy. And the thing about pronatal policy is there's no single silver bullet; you have to experiment; you have to try a range of different things; you have to think about material and cultural incentives. So how can we create that? You know, culture can be downstream from politics. Look at how people were very against um homosexuality in the 60s; the politicians changed the law; the population got there; the population is very much against the end of the death penalty in the 60s; the politicians changed the law; eventually the population came in line. Now it's not to say that that's the only direction these things will go, and it could go the other way. Often culture is upstream from politics. What I'm trying to say is if politicians got this and realized it was an issue and addressed it comprehensively, part of the pattern would be: how do we change the culture? How do we change the education? What do people learn in schools? How often are the environmental arguments reposted? What are the role models? I mean, I often think—I think I wrote in my last book, you know, we need more role models like young men having large families—relatively large families—like Prince William and—and David Beckham. And someone pointed out to me they're not really young men, but of course from my perspective they are. But I think it's also very interesting—sorry, I'm a bit of a tangent—but there were two bumps of the postwar baby boom, and I called them the "Anne and Charles bump" and the "Andrew and Edward bump," because it was precisely around 1948, 1950 and 1962, 1964. So I'm not saying everyone just copied the Queen, but there was a sense that the Queen—the late Queen—was a role model in that. So I think it's about role models; it's about um the state sending the right signals; it's also about financial things; it's also about housing and childcare; it's a whole raft of things that we can do. We have to be experimental; we have to try all sorts of different approaches; we have to change them over time. So I haven't got a single set of policy prescriptions, but what I do think is that we aren't even starting to do this because—as we are at the moment—none of the front-ranking politicians are talking about it. So it's almost as if—the analogy I gave the other day was—it's like I'm saying we need railways, and I've designed this railway engine, and people say, "Well, tell me more about this and that," and they—no one's intending to build any—any rails, right? There is no rail network in the country, but they want more and more specific designs about the railway engine. There are lots and lots of different ideas out there; we don't know what will work; different things will work at different times. But can we at least start it by saying the government is serious about that? And we seem—after 50 years of sub-replacement fertility—nearly 55 years—we don't even seem to have got off the—the ground. So we're still talking about the engine, which is lovely, but no one's putting any tracks in.
Paul, do you think part of the issue is that, for some weird reason, people frame this as a right-wing issue?
I think they do in the Anglo world, as I've said. So—um, I wrote an article in the *Sunday Times* about why we need to have more children, and I said we should probably differentiate on tax. So ideally, we'd give tax cuts to people with kids, but it may be that we can't afford to do that, so we have to vary the tax. That might mean higher taxes to people without children. So they chose to entitle it—"Is it time to tax the childless?" which I never objected to; I thought that's absolutely reasonable title; it's a bit clickbaity, but fine. I mean, they've got to sell newspapers. And I got unbelievable invective. I mean, I was practically accused—really—oh, I mean, I was practically—I was practically accused of being a Nazi and—welcome—and um, there was a certain well-known left-wing podcast which I will not mention which called me—what did they call me—"sinister and unhinged." But I actually went on that um podcast, and I was introduced to the person who had called me "sinister and unhinged," and he had no memory of that. And when he dug back—this was like a year and a half later—he actually apologized to me on Twitter, and I really take my hat off to him for that. So I think there's a bit of a change in the atmosphere. I think I can go on—I got a good review for a previous book in *The Guardian*, which slightly surprised me. It's only a—so again, as I say, you know, [inaudible] was attacked by [inaudible], gave out praise. The trouble with the left is the heroes of yesterday are not the heroes of today. If you point out to somebody that—that—uh, the Soviet Union or Cuba was giving prizes for women or—they—they say, "Well, that wasn't socialism." So it's always—it's kind of embarrassing to be associated with Stalin. Yeah, okay, but Castro—I mean, I wouldn't want to be—but some people are—or Che Guevara or whatever—um, you know, the—so the left is always changing its heroes, and it's sort of changing its story. But I think there is—just as within feminism there is a rich seam historically of pronatalism; so within the left there is a rich seam of pronatalism because you know people say to me, "Oh, you just want to create the next generation of slaves for capitalism," or whatever. But I always say, "Why was the Soviet Union pronatal?" Because if you want your economy to keep going—whether it's a centrally planned economy or a free market economy—or you can't do it—we may come on to talk about AI and why technology is not the solution—but unless you believe abracadabra, we're not going to—workers—you can't do it without—about people. If you want your society, your culture, your tradition, your nation to thrive, which people on the left traditionally have done, then you need a next generation. So, as I said, it's only really—I think it's a very Anglo thing to think that it's a right-wing thing. And I'm very pleased that people on the left are starting to acknowledge that, starting to think about it, and—um, you know, I don't apologize for the fact I am on the right, whatever that means, but—try and make this appeal to—you know, I am moderately religious, but I try and make this appeal to people who are fully secular, and I try and make this appeal to people on the left, and you know hopefully fewer and fewer of them will call me unhinged and sinister.
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One of the things that you've um mentioned a couple of times uh that I—I wanted to raise with you as well as part of this conversation is immigration and the cultural impact uh and—and how all of this ties together. One of the things that—that I think the tabloids particularly like quoting your research about is that by 2066—at least the last time uh you—you were quoted on this—white British people will become a minority in this country. Is that still on course to happen?
Well, I was only quoting the work of um David Coleman, who's a demographer at Oxford. Um, those numbers are being revised as we speak—not by me—but by a friend of mine; I probably shouldn't reveal who it is, but he will—he will make his research known when he's ready—someone associated with—with the political world uh in this country. Um, I think you can do the numbers, and then of course the answer is always—"So what? Does it matter? Does it have an effect? Do—do we care? Aren't human beings all utterly interchangeable?" And I think there are a range of answers you can give to that. So first of all, as I've told you, I am the son of immigrants; I don't have a drop of British blood in me. Uh, my parents changed their name from a—a German name to an English name. I feel very affiliated and associated with this country, but I—I'm grafted on, if you like. Now—traditionally, if you thought about a nation or an ethnic group, there was always something—called—a friend of mine, a theorist of nationalism called Anthony Smith—Professor Anthony Smith from the LSE—he's no longer with us—he used to speak about the myth of common ancestry, which is to say that for a nation to cohere, there needed to be some sense that the majority of its people stemmed from the same origin. It may be a myth; it may be untrue, or it may be true. And geneticists can show this much more—I mean, I always remember I went to Sri Lanka, and a—a C professor said to me, "We're all Tamils"—in other words, there was a tiny, tiny sense—immigration years and years ago—lots of South Indians came and accreted to it—and that was a myth of common—people have their myths; genetics proves facts uh in a way that it couldn't sort of 30, 40 years ago. Um, but most nations traditionally—most ethnic groups have, by definition, associated themselves with having a single common ancestry. Now we live in a cosmopolitan, liberal world where people think that's not the case anymore; it doesn't matter; uh, it doesn't count; and anyone who thinks that it does count again is some sort of looney right-winger. Okay, I think we should still be able to have the conversation about what the ethnic composition of the country is now, what it will be in the future. After all, "white British"—if you say "white British," you—it's a category in the—in the census; people are invited to identify themselves as white British or not by the state. So—um, I think we can at least do the modeling; we can look at the numbers; and then people can say, "Does it matter or doesn't it matter?" And again, better minds—than my sort of humble demographer's mind—will determine and—and contribute to that debate about whether one person is totally interchangeable with another—whether Koreans' uh demographic problems can be solved by bringing a lot of people from Bangladesh because Bangladeshis and Koreans are no different—or whether actually a sense of common ancestry is important to a country to make it cohesive, and cultural continuity can't really be achieved when you have people from all sorts of countries coming together and becoming ultimately a majority.
Well, it seems to me it's a flow issue as well, because I think that you can integrate people over time, provided that it's in certain numbers, you choose them carefully, there's a very strong structure for people to be integrated into—and I guess the issue that is inevitably coming to the fore out of everything that you're saying is if we fail to reproduce, the quantities of immigrants that we are going to need to come in and do the social care work, do work in the National Health Service, to do—deliver food and all the rest of it—the quantities of people we're going to need are going to be such that integration, which is already a struggle, let's be honest, is going to become utterly impossible.
Well, it's going to become impossible because uh not only because of the numbers but also because fewer and fewer countries are having enough children to send their surplus, if you like. So in Britain, we used to—Polish and traditionally Irish and Polish immigrants—um, who generally integrated fairly rapidly and not in massive numbers, although Irish over a long time. But if you look at the 20-somethings in Ireland and Poland today, because of their low fertility rates, and if you look at how they've caught up with Britain economically or are catching up with Britain, they won't have loads of 20-somethings, and they won't be hugely attracted to come here. So we will have to take our immigrant workforce from countries that are more and more culturally distant in greater and greater number in terms of—the relationship to fertility. I wrote—again, I wrote a paper with Philip Pilkington on this—it's my concept of the trilemma, which is—is that you can have two of three things—and—and Philip quantified it effectively—you can have what I'd call ethnic continuity—if one is allowed to talk about such things—the sense of a—a people that is indeed descended from people in the same country, of the same nation; you can have an economy that functions because you've got a reasonable support ratio—reasonable ratio of workers to—retirees; you can have those two things, and you can have low fertility—small families. You can have two—think of it as a triangle—you could have two, but you can't have all
Ship building. They'd have said, "Well, what will people do?" We are always in…so first of all, we're always inventing new technology which replaces jobs. Again, the example I give in the book is: thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people in this country were involved in breeding horses, feeding horses, growing food for horses, building the places you stable. The whole thing went, effectively, between, let's say, the early 1890s and the end of this, the end of the interwar period. The number of horses collapsed. We never hear about that, do we? Because people found other things to do.
So where are we now? We still have new technology. We still have innovation. We still have job replacement. It may be that all the cab drivers will go because we'll have…but I've been hearing that for a long time, so I'm a little bit cynical about how quickly, or skeptical about how quickly it's happening. And the other thing is that if you look at the economic data, if we were on the cusp of this, we would be seeing huge productivity gains. So GDP per hour worked would be going up. We'd either have, say, to put it simply, the same workforce massively increasing its productivity, or we'd produce today's economy with fewer and fewer people. Have an unemployment problem. But anyway, per hour work, our…um…productivity would be going up. As we've had all these wonderful new technologies the last 30, 40 years: the laptop, the PC, the laptop, the internet, etc., etc. None of these have actually increased productivity, and there's a whole discussion among economists as to why that is. And we could be on the cusp. You know, I might be here in five years' time and I was totally wrong, and we're all sitting around with nothing to do because the podcasts are made by AI, and the demography…let's not go too far, mate. We…we just…we just got to a point where we're quite happy with this.
What you're saying is you could be here five years from now eating your hat. Yeah, but I don't think I will be. It's fun. Know this time could be different again. And um, when you actually look around the economy, so many of the jobs we see that people are doing today are not jobs that are easily…including the lower end, less well-paid jobs…are not jobs that are easily going to be replaced by AI. If you understand AI and you understand the maths and the…and the brain science, there is a view that it's a long, long, long time before we're going to have someone picking up the bins. It's a long, long, long time before we're going to have…I mean, someone…sorry, a computer or a robot…long, long time before AI is going to take Granny to the toilet. It's a long time before AI is going to fix my tap, fix my roof, um, be a brain surgeon. You know, AI may help these activities to a limited extent, but the idea that it's going to replace labor is unlikely, I think, within the sort of timeframe that we can see.
Populations are going to collapse. So again, think of 100 Korean grandparents, 33 children, 11 grandchildren. That is a pretty fast pace if a…the generation's 25 to 35 years. Are we really going to see AI doing all of this by then? Call me skeptical. I don't think so. And the demographic problem is very tangible; the technological solution is somewhat tenuous, to put it mildly.
Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we head over to our Substack, where our supporters get to ask their questions to you, our final question is always the same: What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Paul answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description to go to our Substack to see this. Can you fix a population decline issue without first addressing the marriage issue? Is there a way to balance education and family life, or will the increasing time in education keep pushing back starting a family? Can we adjust and learn to live with fewer people without substantially reducing our standard of living?
Well, the obvious one is fertility, but we have been talking about that. Um, so the thing that kind of…my…my sort of Second Crusade, if you like, is that the whole woke agenda and the whole…um…decolonization agenda wouldn't exist, is pushing out an open door; it wouldn't exist if the door were…were firmly shut. And the reason it's not firmly shut is that the country as a whole, Britain, most of the West, does not fully appreciate its cultural, its scientific, its technological background and what it's achieved. And in order to address that, in my little way, my friend Ed West and I have been doing these podcasts called The Cannon Club. The idea is just to introduce an expert on…anakorena…on Romanesque architecture, on Shostakovich, on Thomas Mann…just to give people a better sense. And obviously it's a very small enterprise at this stage, but I think if people were fired up and charged up…when I think of my childhood, I knew lots of people who left school at 12 or 14 who'd fought in the services in…in the war, who'd gone…heard Myra Hess playing the piano in the National Gallery, and who aspired to this great civilization. And to be fair, in the Soviet Union, once they'd gone through…prct cult…and they'd gone through socialist realism, that was a society of all its ills which said, "These are the great fruits of human history, even if they were produced by Bourgeois Society, they should be available to everybody." So I knew these quite working-class, lower-middle-class people, little education, who aspired…in that generation, people born in the interwar period or before the First World War. And then when I was working, I was working with all these very bright Oxford-educated, Harvard kids who…who wouldn't…who didn't have a clue. So I think we really need a cultural rearmament if we're going to push back against the kind of decolonizing of our societies, our culture, and our academia. And I think that's what we're not talking about, and that's what Ed and I are trying to do.
That is the most elegant podcast plug I've ever heard. Well done. All right, head on to our Substack where we ask Paul your questions. Given the continuing growth in a finite system is impossible, are we approaching a point at which we should be looking to achieve homeostasis and therefore should be working out how to make that work rather than demanding more babies? [Music]