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[00:02:01.240 --> 00:02:07.000] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:13.080 --> 00:02:14.360] All right, everybody.
[00:02:14.360 --> 00:02:16.680] Hey, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:16.680 --> 00:02:19.480] Brought to you by, of course, the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:20.440] Hey, check it out.
[00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:21.240] Here's an issue.
[00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:22.600] We're still in print.
[00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:24.520] There's a lot of online magazines.
[00:02:24.520 --> 00:02:28.920] I proudly announce that we've been in print since 1992.
[00:02:29.080 --> 00:02:29.800] That's super cool.
[00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:39.560] You can go to any bookstore or just go to skeptic.com/slash magazine and get your issues there or back issues all the way back to 1992.
[00:02:39.720 --> 00:02:46.680] Anyway, okay, so today's episode, I have a special topic for you today on, well, what is it on?
[00:02:46.680 --> 00:02:50.600] Overpopulation or underpopulation or depopulation?
[00:02:50.600 --> 00:02:56.120] Something's going on here that has just recently come to everybody's attention.
[00:02:56.120 --> 00:03:02.920] I'm going to introduce this topic by reading one of my short columns from Scientific American from May 2016.
[00:03:03.240 --> 00:03:10.520] Wow, so we're talking exactly nine years ago, which I titled Doomsday Dumb on this particular topic.
[00:03:10.520 --> 00:03:26.520] If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise, an essay on the principle of population by the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus.
[00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:51.120] On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus' observation that populations tend to increase geometrically, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on, whereas food reserves grow arithmetically, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success.
[00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:54.960] That's the driver of evolution, also known as natural selection.
[00:03:54.960 --> 00:04:01.200] On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse.
[00:04:01.200 --> 00:04:13.920] Quote: The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race, Malthus gloomily predicted.
[00:04:13.920 --> 00:04:25.200] In order to avert doomsday, policymakers embraced social Darwinism and eugenics and resorted to draconian measures to restrict family size, including forced sterilizations.
[00:04:25.200 --> 00:04:34.320] In his book, The Evolution of Everything, the evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley sums up the policy succinctly: better to be cruel than be kind.
[00:04:34.640 --> 00:04:43.760] The belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science.
[00:04:43.760 --> 00:05:04.880] The English poor laws, for example, implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food for the poor, for example, were severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exasperate poverty.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:22.160] The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Charles Trevelyn, was an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.
[00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:26.960] Later in the century, Francis Galton advocated marriage between the fittest individuals.
[00:05:26.960 --> 00:05:34.600] Here's what he said: What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.
[00:05:34.600 --> 00:05:42.280] Followed by a number of prominent socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and H.G.
[00:05:42.280 --> 00:05:47.240] Wells, who openly championed eugenics as a tool of social engineering.
[00:05:47.240 --> 00:05:54.120] Okay, we often think of eugenics and forced sterilization as a right-wing Nazi program implemented in 1930s Germany.
[00:05:54.120 --> 00:06:12.920] But as Princeton University economist Thomas Leonard documents in his book Illiberal Reformers, the New York Times editor Adam Cohen reminds us in his book, Imbeciles, both of them, eugenics fever swept America in the early 20th century, culminating in the infamous 1927 Supreme Court case, Buck v.
[00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:21.240] Bell, in which the justices legalized government sterilization of undesirable citizens, their word.
[00:06:21.240 --> 00:06:32.200] The court included prominent progressives Louise Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the latter of whom famously ruled: three generations of imbeciles are enough.
[00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:34.680] Yeah, that's a SCOTUS decision.
[00:06:34.680 --> 00:06:38.600] The result was a sterilization of some 70,000 Americans.
[00:06:38.600 --> 00:06:55.000] Here was the Supreme Court's reasoning: It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
[00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:57.080] Yeah, this is in the United States of America.
[00:06:57.080 --> 00:06:57.880] Hard to believe.
[00:06:57.880 --> 00:06:59.400] Okay, last section here.
[00:06:59.640 --> 00:07:00.880] To bring us up to speed.
[00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:10.680] Then there was Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, in which the biologist famously proclaimed, the battle to feed all of humanity is over.
[00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:12.520] Many doomsayers followed.
[00:07:12.520 --> 00:07:20.000] That same year, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote in a highly influential essay in Science: the freedom to breed is intolerable.
[00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:28.400] World Watch Institute founder Lester Brown proclaimed in 1995: humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.
[00:07:28.400 --> 00:07:36.160] In a 2012 Scientific American article, he affirmed his rhetorical question: could food shortages bring down civilization?
[00:07:36.160 --> 00:07:44.800] In a 2013 conference at the University of Vermont, Paul Ehrlich assessed our chances of avoiding civilization collapse at only 10%.
[00:07:45.760 --> 00:07:58.960] Okay, the problem with Balthusians is they treat humans as no different from a herd of deer just breeding along, and they just ignore all the solutions that people are capable of coming up with.
[00:07:58.960 --> 00:08:10.880] To help make sense of all this, because if you've been paying attention, unless you've been on Mars starting the new civilization with Elon, Elon's been tweeting frantically about the underpopulation or the depopulation.
[00:08:10.880 --> 00:08:14.080] So, to bring some sense to this, I have as my guest today, Dr.
[00:08:14.080 --> 00:08:20.400] Dean Spears, who's an economist, demographer, and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
[00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:31.920] He's the founding director of RICE, R-I-C-E Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a nonprofit that works to promote children's health, growth, and survival in rural India.
[00:08:32.560 --> 00:08:36.160] Let's see, their research, his co-author, by the way, is Dr.
[00:08:36.160 --> 00:08:37.600] Michael Garuso.
[00:08:37.600 --> 00:08:38.240] Here's the book.
[00:08:38.240 --> 00:08:41.040] Let me give it a proper introduction here in just a second.
[00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:52.240] Combined, their research on health, population, and climate change has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, Nature, Climate Change, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:54.400] They both live in Austin, Texas.
[00:08:54.400 --> 00:08:59.800] And here's the book: After the Spike: Population Progress and the Case for People.
[00:08:59.800 --> 00:09:00.520] How about that?
[00:09:00.520 --> 00:09:02.840] Somebody's finally making a case for people.
[00:09:02.840 --> 00:09:03.880] Dean, nice to see you.
[00:08:59.440 --> 00:09:06.760] Thanks for being patient while I read that.
[00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:08.360] Thanks so much for having me.
[00:09:08.360 --> 00:09:09.400] Glad to be here.
[00:09:09.400 --> 00:09:22.600] It's incredible that, I mean, when I was in, from the time I was in college, all the way through years of being a college professor, all we ever heard about was the coming, you know, collapse due to overpopulation.
[00:09:22.600 --> 00:09:30.280] And I mean, I had professors talking about we should put like addictive birth control medicine in the water or something, you know, just something.
[00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:36.680] Polly Eric said that in his book, or he sort of floated the idea to put sterilants in public water supplies.
[00:09:36.680 --> 00:09:38.280] And so, but you're right.
[00:09:38.280 --> 00:09:41.400] Right now, global depopulation is the most likely future.
[00:09:41.400 --> 00:09:48.760] And what global depopulation means is that each generation, each decade, will be smaller than the one before.
[00:09:48.760 --> 00:09:51.240] And that's the most likely path we're on.
[00:09:51.240 --> 00:09:55.160] Within a few decades, the world's population will begin to decline.
[00:09:55.160 --> 00:09:59.080] And there's no reason to think that once it happens, it'll automatically reverse.
[00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:05.800] And so that's why we're here talking about a case for people, because the big question before us is, should we welcome that?
[00:10:05.800 --> 00:10:08.040] Or should we want something else to happen?
[00:10:08.840 --> 00:10:11.080] Now Earlier didn't welcome that.
[00:10:11.640 --> 00:10:12.200] Yeah, I know.
[00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:14.360] Let's back up a second and give us the bigger picture.
[00:10:14.360 --> 00:10:22.840] So I don't know, 100,000 years ago, or maybe even 50,000 years ago, there was a bottleneck, and maybe there was only 1,000 humans, and now there's 8.2 billion.
[00:10:22.840 --> 00:10:25.080] How do populations grow?
[00:10:25.080 --> 00:10:27.720] And what's around?
[00:10:27.960 --> 00:10:33.960] So for a long time, the size of the human population was small and not changing very fast.
[00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:38.280] So, 10,000 years ago, there were fewer than 5 million people.
[00:10:38.280 --> 00:10:41.080] That's about the size of Metro Atlanta today.
[00:10:41.320 --> 00:10:46.000] By the beginning of the Common Era, it was maybe 200 million.
[00:10:44.840 --> 00:10:49.040] But that started to change a few hundred years ago.
[00:10:49.360 --> 00:11:00.240] We were 1 billion in 1800, doubling in the century after that to 2 billion, doubling again or quadrupling after that to today's 8 billion.
[00:11:00.240 --> 00:11:10.480] And so, for centuries now, the populations, for a couple of centuries now, the population's been growing fast, but not because people are having more babies.
[00:11:10.480 --> 00:11:18.960] The reason the size of the world population has been growing is because we've become much better at keeping one another alive, and especially at keeping children alive.
[00:11:18.960 --> 00:11:27.840] Infant mortality rates, child mortality rates have fallen due to things like the germ theory of disease, improved sanitation, better nutrition.
[00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:31.680] So, children today have a much larger chance of surviving to be adults.
[00:11:31.680 --> 00:11:40.000] And so, we went through, we've gone through a period where, since more of the babies who are born are surviving, the population's been growing fast.
[00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:53.120] But all along, while death rates have been falling and while the size of the population has been growing, birth rates have also been falling for as long as we have record, for not just decades, but for centuries.
[00:11:53.120 --> 00:12:01.280] And so, we're soon going to reach a point where the number of deaths per year will be greater than the number of births per year.
[00:12:01.280 --> 00:12:05.600] I mean, if you think about it, the infant mortality rate can only go down to zero, right?
[00:12:06.320 --> 00:12:10.240] There is a downward stop on how low infant mortality can go.
[00:12:10.240 --> 00:12:16.640] So, eventually, the lines are going to cross, and that'll be the year in which we start to have depopulation.
[00:12:17.280 --> 00:12:28.800] Yeah, this is so counterintuitive that you just said as long as we've been keeping records, birth rates are falling, and yet we keep climbing and climbing and climbing.
[00:12:29.040 --> 00:12:35.480] So, that's just momentum from the past plus public health measures and things like that.
[00:12:36.040 --> 00:12:41.000] Yeah, I mean, it's still the case that the world's average birth rate's at 2.3.
[00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:45.960] So still above an average of two kids per two adults.
[00:12:46.280 --> 00:12:50.120] But the growth rate in the world population has been slowing.
[00:12:50.120 --> 00:12:51.880] I mean, you mentioned Ehrlich.
[00:12:51.880 --> 00:12:56.440] His book, his Dumerist book, came out in 1968, right?
[00:12:56.440 --> 00:13:05.320] And 1968, by his terrible luck, also turned out to be the year in which the growth rate in the human population peaked.
[00:13:05.320 --> 00:13:14.600] So ever since then, our numbers have been growing more slowly because the decline in birth rates has been chasing down the decline in death rates.
[00:13:14.600 --> 00:13:24.520] And it's interesting, even then, maybe there wasn't the evidence base that we had now, but even then, birth rates were falling.
[00:13:25.640 --> 00:13:34.680] Already in the 1970s, many countries crossed below the two children per two adults threshold that would stabilize the population.
[00:13:34.680 --> 00:13:44.600] So we should distinguish depopulation, getting smaller generation after generation, population growth, and then there's also conceptually the possibility in the middle of stabilization.
[00:13:44.600 --> 00:13:47.160] And so there's a birth rate that would exactly balance it.
[00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:48.280] And it's complicated.
[00:13:48.280 --> 00:13:49.880] Nobody knows exactly what that numbers are.
[00:13:49.880 --> 00:13:50.760] It depends on details.
[00:13:50.760 --> 00:13:57.880] But we can hold in our head to imagine an average of two kids per two adults based on how people work, how reproduction works.
[00:13:57.880 --> 00:14:02.280] If you have below two kids per two adults, you're eventually going to get depopulation.
[00:14:02.280 --> 00:14:09.720] So, already in the 1970s, many countries, many regions even, were passing below that average of two.
[00:14:09.720 --> 00:14:17.600] Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, even Cuba went below an average of two kids per two adults in the 1970s.
[00:14:17.920 --> 00:14:25.360] So, by 1980, one in five people already were living in a country with a birth rate below two.
[00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:27.280] And it's kept falling since then.
[00:14:27.280 --> 00:14:29.040] Now, that figure is two-thirds.
[00:14:29.040 --> 00:14:32.560] Two-thirds of people live in a country where the birth rate is below two.
[00:14:32.640 --> 00:14:44.160] So, that, yes, includes richer, more developed countries like Japan or Europe or the U.S., but it also includes countries throughout the middle-income and developing world.
[00:14:44.800 --> 00:14:49.200] Both Canada and Mexico now have a birth rate lower than the United States.
[00:14:49.200 --> 00:14:52.480] Latin America is at 1.8, China's at 1.
[00:14:52.480 --> 00:14:55.280] My own research is mainly focused on India.
[00:14:55.280 --> 00:15:12.240] And what got me into writing about low birth rates and depopulation was realizing somewhat happenstantially when I was doing research on another project that birth rates in India crossed below two in their most recent National Demographic Survey and now are below two.
[00:15:12.240 --> 00:15:16.960] Young women, even in poor parts of India, say that they want below two children on average.
[00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:20.800] And so, it's not something that's just in the rich and developed parts of the world anymore.
[00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:25.920] And it's a trend that's been going on for not just decades, but centuries towards lower birth rates.
[00:15:25.920 --> 00:15:31.040] And so, for all these reasons, we should think that global depopulation is the most likely future.
[00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:32.640] It's astonishing.
[00:15:32.720 --> 00:15:34.400] Just so counterintuitive.
[00:15:34.400 --> 00:15:42.960] It's okay to be slightly technical here because I've often heard the replacement levels 2.1, and then you clarified in your book 2.05.
[00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:44.160] Can you explain why?
[00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:44.640] Right.
[00:15:45.200 --> 00:15:53.920] So, conceptually, the replacement birth rate is the number of kids on average that would cause the size of the population to stabilize.
[00:15:53.920 --> 00:15:56.560] And so, why isn't it exactly two, right?
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:15:58.000] Well, there are a few reasons.
[00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:03.000] One is that not all children survive to adulthood.
[00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:08.520] So, the higher early life mortality rates are, the higher the replacement birth rate would be.
[00:16:08.520 --> 00:16:16.760] So, in some parts of India, for example, like the poor state where I do my research, Uttar Pradesh, it might be a number like 2.5 or 2.6.
[00:16:17.400 --> 00:16:22.680] But eventually, you know, but early life mortality rates are falling everywhere, and eventually they're going to be close to zero.
[00:16:22.680 --> 00:16:28.200] So, you know, if we're thinking about the very long-term future, we can probably just sort of round that down.
[00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:37.320] But then the other complication is that boys and girls, male babies and boy babies, male babies and female babies, aren't born in exactly equal numbers.
[00:16:37.640 --> 00:16:39.320] And there are theories about that.
[00:16:39.320 --> 00:16:54.920] We don't really need to sort out the exact theories about that, but it's just that if what you want is to have a next generation of females the same size of the last generation of females, you're going to need ever so slightly more than two births on average.
[00:16:54.920 --> 00:17:00.120] And so that's where we get this number, like some people say 2.05, some people say 2.1.
[00:17:00.120 --> 00:17:03.320] It doesn't really matter for our purposes.
[00:17:03.320 --> 00:17:04.120] I mean, the U.S.
[00:17:04.120 --> 00:17:09.400] as a whole right now is at 1.6, which is well below both 2 and 2.1.
[00:17:09.400 --> 00:17:20.920] As long as the world as a whole goes towards an average below 2, which the UN projects will happen in 2064, then eventually depopulation will come next.
[00:17:21.560 --> 00:17:24.840] So there's currently 8.2 billion people alive.
[00:17:24.840 --> 00:17:28.840] How many people have ever lived before the 8.2 billion today?
[00:17:28.840 --> 00:17:30.120] And how do you know?
[00:17:30.440 --> 00:17:36.840] Yeah, so there's an estimate that it's about 120 billion people who have ever lived.
[00:17:36.840 --> 00:17:48.400] And so, you know, the way you can know is, you know, think back to earlier we were saying that there were about 5 million people 10,000 years ago.
[00:17:48.640 --> 00:17:51.120] So past population sizes are pretty small.
[00:17:51.120 --> 00:17:57.920] So even if you might not know exactly what year the first human ever lived, I mean, you're adding up small numbers when you go back.
[00:17:58.560 --> 00:18:09.920] And once our total is in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions, you're not going to be that wrong exactly what you assume about a distant past where the numbers per years were in the singles of millions.
[00:18:10.400 --> 00:18:14.160] So we use the records we have, interpolate between it.
[00:18:14.720 --> 00:18:22.320] This is a research project that was done by the Population Reference Bureau, and that comes up with some finite number of births that have ever happened.
[00:18:22.320 --> 00:18:26.000] And the number that they put on it is 120 billion.
[00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:30.880] So 120 billion people ever born, about 8 billion people alive today.
[00:18:31.200 --> 00:18:39.680] When humanity reaches its peak in 2084, which isn't 2064, when the birth rate goes below 2.
[00:18:39.680 --> 00:18:44.000] It'll take a few more decades to work through the age structure of the population.
[00:18:44.160 --> 00:18:52.000] When humanity starts to peak and then decline in 2084, the projection is that there'll be 10.3 billion people, and then we decline.
[00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:56.640] Now, remember, I said that over the past century, our numbers have quadrupled.
[00:18:56.640 --> 00:18:59.120] And over the century before that, our numbers doubled.
[00:18:59.120 --> 00:19:03.600] So that tells us that populations' exponential growth can be fast.
[00:19:03.600 --> 00:19:09.680] And exponential decay is the exact same equation, just with a negative sign at the growth rate.
[00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:22.720] And so depopulation could also be just as fast and just as exponential, which means that we could fall by billions in just a couple hundred years.
[00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:29.360] And as a result, you can sort of do the same procedure of estimating how many future lives there could ever be.
[00:19:29.400 --> 00:19:47.400] And as long as birth rates in the future for the world as a whole go below two and stay below two, as long as the birth rates stay below two for the world as a whole, then each generation will be smaller and our numbers will be going down and down and down and down and down.
[00:19:47.400 --> 00:19:50.840] Now, we shouldn't take any projection like that too literally.
[00:19:50.840 --> 00:20:06.200] Nobody has a crystal ball and knows exactly what's going to happen, but it means that just like we can put a number, a ballpark figure on the total number of births that have ever happened, we could put a ballpark figure on the total number of births that would happen in the future.
[00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:14.200] And that would be around 30 billion future births, future human lives, if the world's birth rate goes below two and stays there.
[00:20:14.200 --> 00:20:15.560] So what does that mean?
[00:20:15.560 --> 00:20:28.360] If there have been 120 billion births so far and 30 billion births in the future, then that means that humanity would be four-fifths over if birth rates are going to go below two and stay there.
[00:20:28.680 --> 00:20:30.680] Yeah, such an astonishing thing.
[00:20:30.680 --> 00:20:44.680] I mean, it can't possibly, can it, get down to like the last people on Easter Island, there's 10 of us left, and it's like, no, I don't think we should assume that we would exactly follow the math of that exponential decay down.
[00:20:44.680 --> 00:20:47.240] Eventually, something else big would break.
[00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:49.880] Something else big would break in our societies and our institutions.
[00:20:49.880 --> 00:20:51.480] It would knock us off that path.
[00:20:51.480 --> 00:20:53.800] That probably wouldn't be good either.
[00:20:53.800 --> 00:21:06.440] I mean, you could imagine something that wrecks enough of our systems, our education, our economy to put us in, you know, to cause a problem and change something.
[00:21:06.440 --> 00:21:09.720] I'm not saying that we know this is exactly what's going to happen.
[00:21:09.720 --> 00:21:32.880] But I think the reason that this if-then is worth thinking about, the reason that it's worth thinking through the math of if birth rates go below two and stay there, then humanity is four-fifths over, is that it really tells us something about the magnitude of the change that we're talking about and how unprecedented it is to think that, no, it's not that we're headed towards growth unending.
[00:21:32.880 --> 00:21:37.040] We're headed towards humanity could have a finite total size.
[00:21:37.680 --> 00:21:41.040] Here's the little peak on the cover of your book here.
[00:21:41.040 --> 00:21:43.120] And so we are just down below here.
[00:21:43.120 --> 00:21:52.640] So a few more decades, we're going to hit what, 10 point something billion, and then we'll be back down to where we are now at 8 billion by what, 2100 or so?
[00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:56.160] Yeah, within the 2100s, but we wouldn't stop there, right?
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:56.480] Yeah.
[00:21:56.640 --> 00:22:08.720] You know, when you, when you, so you were talking about sort of the 1970s type movement against overpopulation, and a slogan that they had was zero population growth, right?
[00:22:08.720 --> 00:22:10.720] So that's another way of saying stabilization, right?
[00:22:10.720 --> 00:22:14.480] So back in the days of Ehrlich, somebody would have called for zero population growth.
[00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:22.000] But if it was zero population growth, an exact balancing of coming and goings, that's not what's going to happen.
[00:22:22.240 --> 00:22:28.960] When you throw a ball in the air, it doesn't just reach the top of its gravitational arc and stay there, it falls down.
[00:22:29.280 --> 00:22:33.200] The same forces that pulled it up eventually accelerate it down.
[00:22:33.280 --> 00:22:41.600] So the fact that birth rates are falling, they're not just going to reach the point where the number of births each year will equal the number of deaths each year.
[00:22:41.600 --> 00:22:45.360] Eventually, the number of births each year will be below the number of deaths each year.
[00:22:45.360 --> 00:22:48.160] And so, yes, we'll hit a peak.
[00:22:48.400 --> 00:23:00.200] But this is sometimes you hear a mistake that you see in journalistic accounts or headlines or commentators to say population growth is going to stop.
[00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:03.880] No, population growth is going to turn negative.
[00:22:59.680 --> 00:23:05.000] Right.
[00:23:05.560 --> 00:23:08.040] Yeah, just a couple of things from stuff you said.
[00:23:08.040 --> 00:23:19.240] I think part of the problem of like figuring out where the start is here, you know, when you start counting, is that there is no zero point when our species began.
[00:23:19.240 --> 00:23:25.720] As Richard Dawkins famously says, at no point did a Homo erectus mother give birth to a Homo sapiens child.
[00:23:25.720 --> 00:23:27.480] That's just not how evolution works.
[00:23:27.480 --> 00:23:30.520] And so there is no, you just have to start somewhere.
[00:23:30.520 --> 00:23:34.840] I guess the demographers started like 50,000 BC, something like that.
[00:23:35.080 --> 00:23:37.000] So, you know, there's a little fuzziness there.
[00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:46.200] Then I've had a lot of the longevity people on the show who always point out that this meme, like, we live twice as long as we used to, so we can just keep going.
[00:23:46.200 --> 00:23:52.680] You know, you get the singularity people, you know, we're going to reach escape velocity and live 200 years and 500 years and so on.
[00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:53.080] No.
[00:23:53.400 --> 00:23:59.720] What we're talking about there is just more and more people are making it into their 20s and 30s.
[00:23:59.720 --> 00:24:02.920] And then if you make it there, you're more likely to make it into your 50s and 60s.
[00:24:02.920 --> 00:24:07.400] And if you make it there, you're more likely to make it into your 70s and 80s, relatively healthy.
[00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:17.320] And what the rational ones are doing is just saying, let's just get as many as we can up into the, say, your 90s, being relatively healthy without major disease.
[00:24:17.560 --> 00:24:19.400] That's a rational goal.
[00:24:19.400 --> 00:24:25.000] But of course, then we run into the problems you talk about in your book from an economic perspective.
[00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.240] You know, us baby boomers, I just started collecting my Social Security.
[00:24:29.240 --> 00:24:37.800] Well, don't we need a bigger population coming up to feed into that system, so I keep my monthly check and I want to live another 20 years or so?
[00:24:39.400 --> 00:24:40.040] Yeah.
[00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:43.800] Yeah, um, no, that's, I mean, to speak to one thing you said, that's right.
[00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:48.960] Some people, times we get this question about will people living longer be the solution?
[00:24:44.840 --> 00:24:51.200] Um, and so let's imagine something extreme.
[00:24:51.280 --> 00:24:56.800] Let's imagine that we all live twice as long and live to be 150 instead of 75.
[00:24:56.800 --> 00:25:02.720] I think that's an extreme hypothetical, but would that prevent depopulation?
[00:25:02.720 --> 00:25:08.000] No, because that would that would change the level, the number of people alive at a given time.
[00:25:08.000 --> 00:25:26.000] But as long as all of those people who are living to be 150 years old are still having an average of you know 1.6 births and then eventually someday dying, maybe 150, maybe 120 years later, then each generation, each birth cohort, is still going to be smaller than the one before.
[00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:33.680] So, yes, at any one given time, the size of the population would be larger, but it would still be exponentially shrinking.
[00:25:33.680 --> 00:25:50.400] If, additionally, whatever sort of medical miracle made us live to be 150 caused us to have a longer reproductive span, so maybe you have two kids in your 20s, another two kids in your 40s, another two kids in your 60s, another two kids in your 80s.
[00:25:50.400 --> 00:26:00.640] If something like that happened, yes, then that would take us off the path to depopulation, but it wouldn't be because we were living longer, it would be because we were having more kids.
[00:26:00.640 --> 00:26:04.400] So, fundamentally, it would still be about the average number of births.
[00:26:04.400 --> 00:26:06.400] Yeah, here's another stat from your book.
[00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:13.680] In 2012, 146 million children were born, the most ever, and it's been declining ever since.
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[00:27:41.240 --> 00:27:41.560] That's right.
[00:27:42.200 --> 00:27:42.600] What?
[00:27:42.600 --> 00:27:45.960] We've already passed the year of peak births.
[00:27:46.280 --> 00:27:48.040] Yep, astonishing.
[00:27:48.360 --> 00:27:58.680] So, if every country on Earth suddenly shifted to 2.1 or 2.05, would that then stabilize populations, or how long would it take?
[00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:01.240] It would take a few decades to work through.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:07.560] I mean, just like I was saying, the year that we fall below two isn't going to be the year that the population peaks.
[00:28:07.800 --> 00:28:11.720] And, you know, of course, mortality rates are still falling in a lot of countries.
[00:28:11.720 --> 00:28:14.720] And so, you know, that's something that's going to continue to play out too.
[00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:27.760] But, you know, as soon as the population would shift to a stabilization birth rate, then that would start a process of equilibration over a few decades that would then stabilize the size of the population.
[00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:37.200] So the sooner the birth rate shifts to a stabilization rate, the larger the equilibrium size of the population would be.
[00:28:38.480 --> 00:28:43.440] You write about the bet between Paul Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon.
[00:28:43.440 --> 00:28:56.720] So I'd like you to review that, but in a larger context of an observation I've noticed, the difference between biologists talking about this problem and economists talking about this problem, it seems very different.
[00:28:57.360 --> 00:28:57.920] Right.
[00:28:58.400 --> 00:29:04.720] So Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich had a bet over the prices of raw materials.
[00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:18.560] And so Paul Ehrlich was worried about overpopulation and thought that we would eventually use up our finite stocks of resources and we simply wouldn't have access to things we needed.
[00:29:18.560 --> 00:29:29.280] Julian Simon, an economist, saw that scarcity creates an incentive to create, discover, or to come up with alternatives.
[00:29:29.280 --> 00:29:48.240] So if what you need is chromium or tin or nickel and you don't have enough chromium or whatever it is, then the very fact that it's scarce is an incentive to either dig deeper and find more of it or come up with some sort of alternative so you don't need so much of it.
[00:29:48.240 --> 00:29:52.000] And so they had a bet based on the prices of these raw materials.
[00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:54.560] The bet ran for a decade.
[00:29:55.200 --> 00:30:03.400] And I don't have the exact fact at my fingertip, but I think it's true that the price of all of the materials in their bet went down.
[00:30:03.720 --> 00:30:06.040] So, you know, Simon won handily.
[00:30:06.360 --> 00:30:14.920] And it's taken as a demonstration that there was something misguided about this overpopulation thesis.
[00:30:14.920 --> 00:30:25.000] Now, there's something else misguided about this overpopulation thesis, which is that we're not overpopulating in the sense that we're not going to have unending population growth.
[00:30:25.320 --> 00:30:31.560] And already one could have seen that birth rates were falling even back then.
[00:30:31.560 --> 00:30:39.640] So sometimes I am asked the question: you know, if Ehrlich got it so wrong, how did, you know, maybe you're getting it wrong too, right?
[00:30:40.120 --> 00:30:41.720] Maybe you're making the same mistake.
[00:30:41.720 --> 00:30:51.240] And it's a good question to ask, especially for somebody who doesn't spend their days with their sleeves rolled up in the nuts and bolts of population science.
[00:30:51.560 --> 00:31:12.200] But this is where I think it's important that you're bringing out that Ehrlich's academic field and training is in biology, not in the human social sciences, not in the human decision-making, the culture, the economics, the sociology of what people choose to do.
[00:31:12.440 --> 00:31:17.240] And in particular, people decide how many children to have.
[00:31:17.880 --> 00:31:20.600] People have long been deciding how many children to have.
[00:31:20.920 --> 00:31:26.920] The world's average birth rate in 1800 has been estimated to be a number like six.
[00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:30.040] In 1900, a number like 5.5.
[00:31:30.040 --> 00:31:31.880] In 1950, a number like five.
[00:31:31.880 --> 00:31:38.120] In other words, falling even before the advent of modern hormonal birth control.
[00:31:38.120 --> 00:31:43.160] France had a birth rate of three at the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:31:43.480 --> 00:31:50.080] And so it isn't just about access to modern technologies like hormonal birth control.
[00:31:50.080 --> 00:32:08.640] Perhaps butterflies or deer or other animal species truly do have the maximum number of children that they can biologically, ecologically have, but that's not and hasn't ever been the case for humans.
[00:32:08.640 --> 00:32:14.480] Humans have economies, cultures, decision-making, societies, reasoning to decide how many children to have.
[00:32:14.480 --> 00:32:23.120] And humans have for a long time known where babies come from and made decisions about how many children to have.
[00:32:23.440 --> 00:32:24.560] Yeah, certainly.
[00:32:24.560 --> 00:32:30.080] Here we might make the distinction that evolutionary biologists make between R and K-selected species.
[00:32:30.400 --> 00:32:37.200] R-selected species, rapid, have lots and lots of offspring and get just as many as they can upstream.
[00:32:37.200 --> 00:32:42.000] Take salmon as the example, and hope that some make it to reproductive age and continue the species.
[00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:44.080] Others are K-selected, like elephants.
[00:32:44.080 --> 00:32:47.280] They just have one or two and they put all their resources into that.
[00:32:47.280 --> 00:32:50.240] Humans are more like K-selected than R-selected.
[00:32:50.240 --> 00:32:54.000] We just have a few and then put all our resources into it.
[00:32:54.000 --> 00:32:59.440] And so, by the way, parenthetically, I had one of my favorite books here called Generations.
[00:32:59.760 --> 00:33:15.040] Gene Twangy, the social psychologist, has documented the effects of this declining number of offspring that children, let's just say children, offspring, sound like talking about rats or something or salmon.
[00:33:15.360 --> 00:33:19.520] If you have six or seven, you're far less risk-averse for each one.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:29.520] But if you have one or two, largely because of technology and birth control and public health measures and so on, life can develop slower.
[00:33:29.520 --> 00:33:38.680] So, this is her explanation, by the way, for why hygeners or Gen Z, today's youth that are coming of age now, are so much slower to develop everything.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:47.640] They date later, they get driver's license later, they develop their careers slower, they get married later, they have their first child instead of 19 for my generation.
[00:33:47.720 --> 00:33:52.040] They have the driver's license later, like they don't go on the day you can get it and get their driver's license.
[00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:54.520] I know, I know.
[00:33:55.960 --> 00:33:56.680] A decade.
[00:33:56.680 --> 00:34:01.880] In Oklahoma a few decades ago, you went the day that 15 and a half.
[00:34:01.880 --> 00:34:03.400] I want my learner's permit.
[00:34:03.400 --> 00:34:06.680] I'm going down to the parking lot at Target and drive around with my dad.
[00:34:06.680 --> 00:34:08.200] Yeah, yeah, I remember it well.
[00:34:08.200 --> 00:34:13.720] Yeah, no, and 10 years slower to have their first child, 19 versus 29 now for iGens.
[00:34:13.720 --> 00:34:29.240] So, her theory on why there's so much helicopter parenting is that you're far more risk-averse if you just have the one or maybe two, and therefore helicopter parenting and super, super careful coddling, as it's sometimes called.
[00:34:29.240 --> 00:34:35.160] But anyway, that's a slight diversion there, but I think it's an interesting effect along the lines of what you're talking about here.
[00:34:35.160 --> 00:34:42.760] By the way, just the metals that Julian Simon identified were chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten that you listed.
[00:34:42.840 --> 00:34:43.240] There you go.
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:46.440] Yeah, he so Simon won that bet.
[00:34:46.440 --> 00:34:55.480] But just in general, I mean, when you read the biologists talking about this, they do treat people in a very negative way, like we're just cattle.
[00:34:55.480 --> 00:34:58.600] And I find economists far more optimistic about people.
[00:34:58.600 --> 00:35:02.520] You know, people are generators of ideas, for example.
[00:35:02.520 --> 00:35:04.520] I think you have a whole chapter on this.
[00:35:04.600 --> 00:35:04.840] Exactly.
[00:35:05.160 --> 00:35:06.280] Thinking about that a little bit.
[00:35:06.280 --> 00:35:16.960] Yeah, so I mean, that's one of the reasons why depopulation matters and why we should want to avoid it: that we're all made better off by sharing the world with more other people.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:21.600] Other people alongside us, or other people who live before us.
[00:35:21.840 --> 00:35:28.000] And that's importantly because other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives.
[00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:31.600] Other people are where science and knowledge comes from.
[00:35:31.600 --> 00:35:41.520] Now, here's a question that I might sometimes ask my students in class: Why are our lives so much better than 200 years ago?
[00:35:41.520 --> 00:35:54.240] Why do we have shoes on our feet and glasses to correct our vision, plenty to eat, antibiotics if we need that, vaccines if we need that, climate-controlled work environment, shorter work days, podcasts for that matter?
[00:35:54.240 --> 00:35:57.360] Why do we have all of this that people didn't have before?
[00:35:57.520 --> 00:36:06.080] It's the same rocks beneath our feet, the same chromium and tin is out there somewhere, the same wind blowing, the same sun shining.
[00:36:06.080 --> 00:36:11.840] It's because we know more about what to do with all of that than anybody knew 200 years ago.
[00:36:11.840 --> 00:36:32.800] We know how to harvest that wind and that sunshine as energy, and we know how to dig up that silicon and turn it into computer chips, which can then be statistical software or something to regulate chemotherapy drugs or Mario Kart, if that's what you want.
[00:36:33.360 --> 00:36:37.920] So we know better what to do with the resources that we have because of knowledge.
[00:36:37.920 --> 00:36:40.320] And where did that knowledge come from?
[00:36:40.320 --> 00:36:45.920] Why do we know about the germ theory of disease and soap and antibiotics and people didn't it before?
[00:36:45.920 --> 00:36:50.240] Because of what other people have learned who came before us.
[00:36:50.240 --> 00:37:00.000] Sometimes intentional RD, you know, professors like me doing their research, sometimes just the actions of learning by doing a nerve.
[00:36:59.480 --> 00:37:13.160] A nurse taking care of an underweight baby has an idea for tying on the baby doing skin-to-skin contact, and she tells it to another nurse, and that becomes part of the kangaroo mother care process that helps keep babies alive.
[00:37:13.480 --> 00:37:19.080] But it's humans doing things, noticing things, thinking things, and we learn them from one another.
[00:37:19.080 --> 00:37:23.240] So, this is an important idea in the economics of long-term living standards.
[00:37:23.240 --> 00:37:35.080] And an economist named Paul Romer won a Nobel Prize in 2018 for the theory of endogenous economic growth, where endogenous means, if we're talking about, if you can say case selection, I can say endogenous.
[00:37:35.080 --> 00:37:37.960] And endogenous means comes from the inside.
[00:37:38.200 --> 00:37:43.640] It's the idea of technology and ideas being discovered by people.
[00:37:44.280 --> 00:37:53.400] And the crucial insight is that ideas and knowledge are a special type of economic resource.
[00:37:53.400 --> 00:38:00.520] Special in part because they power progress in living standards, but special especially because they don't get used up.
[00:38:01.160 --> 00:38:07.960] If I have a sick kid and I treat that sick kid with an antibiotic pill, that pill is gone.
[00:38:07.960 --> 00:38:09.560] Nobody will ever take it again.
[00:38:09.560 --> 00:38:10.840] It's over.
[00:38:10.840 --> 00:38:23.400] But the idea, the knowledge, the recipe for that pill, and more importantly, the germ theory of disease that came behind it continues undiminished for somebody else to use.
[00:38:23.640 --> 00:38:25.960] So ideas and knowledge are like that.
[00:38:25.960 --> 00:38:29.800] They're the special sort of economic resource that doesn't get used up.
[00:38:29.800 --> 00:38:31.880] And they're the thing that people create.
[00:38:31.880 --> 00:38:39.800] And so this is the core of where long-term improvement in living standards, reduction in poverty, comes from.
[00:38:39.800 --> 00:38:53.280] People have ideas, people make discoveries, people learn things, and then that grows our stock of knowledge resources that the next generation can use but doesn't use up.
[00:38:53.280 --> 00:38:55.920] Progress comes from other people.
[00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:02.400] And that's what brings us back so importantly to what we might lose in a depopulating future.
[00:39:02.400 --> 00:39:12.880] If we're on the path to depopulation instead of on a path to stabilizing the population, then we're going to miss out on many of those ideas and discoveries and creations.
[00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:28.960] And we're not going to be on the trajectory to achieve progress towards an abundant future, to achieve the same sort of improvements in health, in survival, improvements against poverty that we could if we were accomplishing more together.
[00:39:28.960 --> 00:39:32.400] Progress doesn't just happen automatically.
[00:39:32.720 --> 00:39:34.240] We need other people.
[00:39:34.240 --> 00:39:36.320] We need one another to achieve it.
[00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:38.240] And so other people are win-win.
[00:39:38.240 --> 00:39:42.160] Their lives are good for them and good for all of us.
[00:39:42.480 --> 00:39:52.320] Yeah, another way to think about it is if you have 5 million people like you estimate 10,000 years ago versus 5 billion today, just to make it an even number there.
[00:39:53.200 --> 00:40:06.960] And if creativity comes from, I don't know, let's say 0.01% or six sigma out from the mean of the most creative, intelligent people or whatever, you're just going to have far more of them if the pool from which you're selecting is 5 billion rather than 5 million.
[00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:08.720] So there's just more ideas floating around.
[00:40:08.960 --> 00:40:11.840] Yeah, I mean, that's one model that can generate the result.
[00:40:11.840 --> 00:40:22.560] I mean, I also think it's important to note that in, for example, Romer's theory, you could have everybody being the exact the same and still generate the same result.
[00:40:22.960 --> 00:40:29.360] You know, if everyone's going about their business and they have, you know, whatever percent of a chance of discovering something.
[00:40:29.480 --> 00:40:34.200] The important thing is that ideas accumulate, right?
[00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:41.640] The core mechanism is that the stock of ideas is building, not going down, and more people add to it.
[00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:44.600] And so what matters is how quickly is that happening.
[00:40:44.600 --> 00:41:13.080] Now, I sort of misspoke a second ago when I said the stock of ideas doesn't go down, because although that's true in the standard economic models of this, of course, it is possible that we could lose our knowledge, that we could not have enough of us to organize and teach and curate our ideas, to have things like libraries and universities and podcasts and pass on the information to the next generation.
[00:41:13.320 --> 00:41:17.720] So it could be even worse than just missing out on progress.
[00:41:17.720 --> 00:41:29.400] If it is the case that we need human activity to maintain our stock of knowledge and to have it ready to go at our fingertips in a useful form, which is frankly something we spend a lot of the economy on.
[00:41:29.400 --> 00:41:35.240] We spend a lot of the economy on education, on ideas, on knowledge, on books, on libraries, right?
[00:41:35.240 --> 00:41:41.320] Given that that is something that we invest in so much, it's plausible that it could be even worse than missing out on progress.
[00:41:41.560 --> 00:41:45.880] It could be that there are some ideas that we won't have available when we need them.
[00:41:45.880 --> 00:41:58.200] I mean, think about a special, you know, maybe once-in-a-lifetime problem of something like COVID comes along and we need a vaccine, a new idea for it.
[00:41:58.520 --> 00:42:06.680] Are we going to be more likely to come up with that in a world with 8 billion of us or in a world with 8 million of us?
[00:42:07.560 --> 00:42:11.320] And then that has this property of the formula.
[00:42:11.320 --> 00:42:13.800] Once you've discovered it, everybody can use it, right?
[00:42:13.800 --> 00:42:16.240] But where are we going to be more likely to find it?
[00:42:17.200 --> 00:42:27.200] Lots of things in economics have this property where you just need it once and for all, and then you can share it.
[00:42:27.840 --> 00:42:34.160] So think about a podcast like this or a radio program.
[00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:45.760] Anyone, once this is up on the internet, it's going to be there whether five people download it or 5,000 people download it or 500,000 people download it, right?
[00:42:46.080 --> 00:42:51.760] You just need it to be out there, and if there are more people, they can all enjoy it.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:59.040] So what is going to be the world in which there's more good stuff out there for you to access, right?
[00:42:59.040 --> 00:43:02.160] One where there's more people or fewer people.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:03.680] Clearly, the one with more people.
[00:43:03.680 --> 00:43:13.520] They're going to be creating more podcasts, creating more radio programs, creating more streaming television, whatever it is you like.
[00:43:13.520 --> 00:43:19.280] There'll be more of that available in a world with more people that then can be used.
[00:43:19.280 --> 00:43:32.960] And so there's this old fear that other people are eating your slice of the pie, that other people are consuming it, and so you can't have it.
[00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:41.440] But that's not how it works because that overlooks the fact that somebody has to bake that pie in the first place.
[00:43:41.440 --> 00:43:48.400] And the fact that there are other people who need and want the same thing you do makes it more likely for you to get it.
[00:43:48.360 --> 00:43:53.280] You know, where are you going to get to try the newest restaurant?
[00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:57.200] In a city with other people or in an empty rural place?
[00:43:57.200 --> 00:44:00.520] Where are you more likely to find the niche medical care you might need?
[00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:04.200] In a city with other people or in a depopulated rural place?
[00:44:04.520 --> 00:44:09.400] I mean, I grew up in Oklahoma when my mom was sick with a really rare form of cancer.
[00:44:09.400 --> 00:44:13.080] There wasn't anyone who lived near our house who knew what to do about it.
[00:44:13.080 --> 00:44:17.720] And so we had to drive to a big city to find someone who had heard about it.
[00:44:17.720 --> 00:44:28.600] And there are lots of stories like that for important medical treatments, for trying new things like a concert or a restaurant, or think of airplane flights.
[00:44:28.600 --> 00:44:33.720] Where are you more likely to be able to get on a flight to the place where you want to go?
[00:44:34.040 --> 00:44:37.720] In a city, in a place where there are other people who want to be on it with you.
[00:44:37.720 --> 00:44:44.840] Other people make it economically feasible for you to get what you want to need.
[00:44:44.840 --> 00:44:48.280] So don't think that other people are eating your slice of pie.
[00:44:48.280 --> 00:44:50.440] Other people are why your pie is there.
[00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:52.520] Other people are why your podcast is there.
[00:44:52.840 --> 00:44:54.920] Other people are why your medical treatment is there.
[00:44:54.920 --> 00:44:59.560] It's because other people need and want what you do that it's possible for it to exist.
[00:44:59.880 --> 00:45:01.240] Well, perfectly stated.
[00:45:01.240 --> 00:45:09.080] I think people just, again, counterintuitively have a difficult time thinking of economics as something other than zero sum.
[00:45:09.080 --> 00:45:10.200] I just was in England.
[00:45:10.520 --> 00:45:11.640] You have to create the things.
[00:45:11.640 --> 00:45:12.920] It's not just about shooting.
[00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:13.400] Yes, yes.
[00:45:13.560 --> 00:45:14.040] Yeah.
[00:45:14.280 --> 00:45:20.440] But also, I mean, just like I was just in England interviewing this famous astronomer for a documentary.
[00:45:20.440 --> 00:45:28.600] Anyway, we got off on this and he was ranting about Jeff Bezos' yacht and how just obscene this is when there's starving kids in Africa still.
[00:45:29.720 --> 00:45:34.440] But but but but but their starvation has nothing to do with Jeff Bezos' yacht.
[00:45:34.440 --> 00:45:36.520] I mean, it's not like he stole it from them, right?
[00:45:36.520 --> 00:45:37.880] But that's what it feels like.
[00:45:37.880 --> 00:45:39.960] You know, that guy has this much.
[00:45:39.960 --> 00:45:41.480] Elon has way too much.
[00:45:41.480 --> 00:45:42.920] What's the right amount?
[00:45:42.920 --> 00:45:45.280] But somehow it's taking away from me.
[00:45:45.440 --> 00:45:47.200] I don't, what has it got to do with me?
[00:45:44.600 --> 00:45:47.600] He's not hurting me.
[00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:59.520] Yeah, I mean, so I'm a development economist, and my research is my home territory of research is about the health and well-being of children in rural North India, a place called Uttar Pradesh.
[00:46:00.160 --> 00:46:24.480] And, you know, a lot of my work is either been about sanitation, like, you know, the things about germs and keeping germs away from children, like with latrines, or more recently, about low-cost neonatal health care, things to keep babies' temperature stabilized, promote breastfeeding, and promote neonatal survival this way.
[00:46:24.480 --> 00:46:38.080] And what's so important about either a good pit latrine or a good kangaroo mother care lactation consulting program is that the physical inputs aren't that expensive.
[00:46:38.320 --> 00:46:48.560] What's important is knowing what to do, the idea, the knowledge, understanding how important it is to keep feces safely contained and away from children.
[00:46:48.560 --> 00:46:56.000] Understanding that what you don't want to do is take a baby away from the mom and wash it off and make it cold.
[00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:00.640] You want to keep it right there on the mom's chest, keep it warm, and promote breastfeeding.
[00:47:00.640 --> 00:47:06.320] And those are things that we learn from other people, that we learn from the knowledge and experience.
[00:47:07.920 --> 00:47:14.000] You don't need to reinvent kangaroo mother care in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh.
[00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:24.720] You can use the same ideas they're using in Baraj district, which are in any event using the same ideas that people used in Colombia, where people first started practicing kangaroo mother care.
[00:47:24.720 --> 00:47:47.640] And so, just because what you were talking about was global poverty, I exactly think it's important to emphasize that if what you care about is continued improvement in living standards for the global poor, reductions in early life mortality, that has a lot to do with progress towards an abundant future with ideas and with discoveries.
[00:47:47.640 --> 00:47:49.800] And that's part of why we need other people.
[00:47:49.800 --> 00:48:06.200] Yeah, my other favorite book is amongst many is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, in which he talks about the explanations, discovery of explanations of causality in the world, and that that's what people do that other animals don't do as well.
[00:48:06.200 --> 00:48:10.360] And that, you know, there's no limit to the solutions we could find.
[00:48:10.360 --> 00:48:11.720] And every solution we find will.
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[00:49:39.280 --> 00:49:44.160] Create new problems, but we'll find new solutions to those problems, and it just accumulates that way.
[00:49:44.320 --> 00:49:54.240] A couple other things I think people also counterintuitively don't quite understand like geometric growth rate or compound interest.
[00:49:54.240 --> 00:50:05.520] Like one of these little quizzes on these rationality measures that cognitive psychologists use is: if a field of weeds doubles every day for 30 days, when will it be half?
[00:50:05.520 --> 00:50:07.040] You know, it's day 29.
[00:50:07.040 --> 00:50:08.080] People are like, what?
[00:50:08.640 --> 00:50:16.720] It's just, or compound interest, as Einstein famously said, you know, is one of those things that, you know, are really difficult to understand, but really important.
[00:50:16.720 --> 00:50:24.000] You know, just like or you economists talk about, you know, a 2% growth rate in an economy versus a 3% growth rate.
[00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:26.240] Non-economists, like, what's the difference?
[00:50:26.240 --> 00:50:27.200] It's like 1%.
[00:50:27.200 --> 00:50:29.520] No, it's like a 33% difference.
[00:50:29.520 --> 00:50:30.320] It's like a third.
[00:50:30.320 --> 00:50:31.520] It's huge.
[00:50:31.520 --> 00:50:32.320] Right?
[00:50:32.640 --> 00:50:35.360] Or it's a very different doubling time, for example.
[00:50:35.760 --> 00:50:42.480] You know, doubling in, you know, 30-something years versus doubling in 20-something years.
[00:50:42.960 --> 00:50:43.520] Right.
[00:50:44.080 --> 00:50:46.080] So, but I had a question on that.
[00:50:46.080 --> 00:50:58.880] If the population collapses, depopulates like you project, or even if it stabilizes, we get to 2.1 by, let's say, 2,100 or so, can economies still grow at 3% rate?
[00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:04.440] Do you need more and more people and more customers and more producers and so on?
[00:51:05.160 --> 00:51:07.320] Yeah, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball.
[00:51:07.320 --> 00:51:09.480] I can't tell you this percent or that percent.
[00:51:09.960 --> 00:51:21.400] But I think there are two key reasons that, two key ways in which, you know, economic growth and progress towards improving living standards.
[00:51:21.400 --> 00:51:29.000] And, you know, I just want to actually take a second and pause on this phrase economic growth.
[00:51:29.000 --> 00:51:36.920] Because I think a lot of people would want to raise their hand and say, you know, why do we want economic growth in the first place?
[00:51:37.160 --> 00:51:50.360] And so I want to just hold here for a second because I don't want to downsell the importance of improving living standards and making people's lives better off, including poor people.
[00:51:50.360 --> 00:51:59.080] I think a lot of people hear the term economic growth, and if their eyes don't just glaze over completely, then they might think that I mean something like the stock market.
[00:51:59.400 --> 00:52:01.320] But that's not what economic growth is.
[00:52:01.320 --> 00:52:06.760] Economic growth is all the things that are being produced.
[00:52:06.760 --> 00:52:31.000] So a world in which, back to what I study, going from a past just really very recently, say 20 years ago, when most babies in India were born, or in a place like Uttar Pradesh, were born at home, to a present where most babies are born in a healthcare facility.
[00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:34.760] So nobody or not, there wasn't very much.
[00:52:34.760 --> 00:52:39.480] People weren't buying and selling health care at birth, medical care.
[00:52:39.640 --> 00:52:44.920] There might have been a traditional midwife or something, but it was basically not a market transaction 20 years ago.
[00:52:45.200 --> 00:52:57.120] It was happening at home and it was relatively unsafe to a present where many more births are happening in facilities.
[00:52:57.600 --> 00:53:04.880] And say the government is paying a nurse's salary or a nonprofit is paying a nurse's salary or the family is paying for private health care.
[00:53:04.880 --> 00:53:08.080] Of course, there are differences amongst those things and those differences matter.
[00:53:08.080 --> 00:53:18.560] But what I want to draw attention to is that that shift to babies being born in facilities, that's a form of economic growth, and that matters, and that saves lives.
[00:53:19.680 --> 00:53:29.680] You know, whatever it is, you know, whether it's having glasses, having a new vaccine, just people moving out of poverty, that's economic growth.
[00:53:29.680 --> 00:53:34.800] And so we shouldn't let people say economic growth, who wants that?
[00:53:34.800 --> 00:53:36.880] I don't care what the stock market is.
[00:53:36.880 --> 00:53:39.040] Okay, that wasn't an answer to your question.
[00:53:39.040 --> 00:53:41.120] Your question was about population.
[00:53:42.080 --> 00:53:42.720] Sorry.
[00:53:43.120 --> 00:53:44.720] No, it's a good clarification.
[00:53:44.720 --> 00:53:46.320] People do not understand what that means.
[00:53:46.480 --> 00:53:47.360] That's good.
[00:53:47.680 --> 00:54:01.520] And yeah, I think there are at least two big reasons why a smaller future population could knock us off the path we could otherwise be on towards higher living standards.
[00:54:01.520 --> 00:54:12.640] One is that we wouldn't accumulate so many good ideas and discoveries and inventions and knowledge, and we might even have a harder time curating and putting to good use the ideas we already have.
[00:54:12.640 --> 00:54:18.880] And then two is that we wouldn't have the benefits of other people needing and wanting the things that we need and want.
[00:54:19.280 --> 00:54:27.600] You know, the fact that if more people want niche medical care or podcasts or whatever it is, it makes it more likely for you to happen.
[00:54:27.600 --> 00:54:29.640] So that's not the whole case for people.
[00:54:29.040 --> 00:54:33.720] I also think it matters that people get to be born to live good lives.
[00:54:34.040 --> 00:54:39.560] That doesn't mean that anybody has to be a parent if they don't choose to, but I think that matters.
[00:54:39.560 --> 00:54:49.560] But this is an important part of the case for people: that we're better off, we have faster progress towards higher living standards in a world of other people for these reasons.
[00:54:49.880 --> 00:54:53.080] What do you make of the, I think they're called antinatalists.
[00:54:53.080 --> 00:54:55.320] They're against people being born at all.
[00:54:55.320 --> 00:54:55.880] Have you followed that?
[00:54:56.120 --> 00:55:03.320] Yeah, I mean, there are some extreme versions of that who want there to be zero births.
[00:55:03.320 --> 00:55:09.080] And I don't know that I have a constructive thing to say about that.
[00:55:09.720 --> 00:55:12.040] But there are first.
[00:55:12.360 --> 00:55:13.400] There are also.
[00:55:14.040 --> 00:55:31.080] I mean, we can talk about sort of a less extreme version of it, which is something that I think it is more understandable that people say, which is, you know, humans have caused environmental problems, humans have caused pollution, humans have caused climate change.
[00:55:31.080 --> 00:55:35.800] And so, isn't the solution to all of that less humans?
[00:55:35.800 --> 00:55:39.880] If more people is more problems, more pollution, don't we need less people?
[00:55:39.880 --> 00:55:50.840] And I think it's important to say, yes, we do and have had big environmental challenges, and people have caused or contributed to them time and again.
[00:55:50.840 --> 00:55:53.800] Human activities cause greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:55:54.920 --> 00:56:03.640] So it's natural that you would think that, but that doesn't mean that fewer people is the solution we need now.
[00:56:03.880 --> 00:56:12.440] It doesn't mean that fewer people are going to get us off the hook for our environmental challenges or that we should welcome depopulation as a solution to our environmental challenges.
[00:56:12.440 --> 00:56:14.760] I mean, let me tell you a story about that.
[00:56:15.120 --> 00:56:21.360] In 2013, the particle air pollution in China was terribly, terribly bad.
[00:56:21.360 --> 00:56:24.960] So, this is measured by PM 2.5, little particles in the air.
[00:56:25.600 --> 00:56:30.000] They get into your lungs and they stunt the growth and development of children.
[00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:34.480] They cause mortality in older adults.
[00:56:34.800 --> 00:56:37.040] Particle pollution was really bad.
[00:56:37.360 --> 00:56:43.360] And in 2013 in China, it was called the air apocalypse.
[00:56:43.360 --> 00:56:47.920] It was something like 700 on a scale of 0 to 500, according to the U.S.
[00:56:47.920 --> 00:56:49.440] Embassy in Beijing.
[00:56:50.080 --> 00:56:52.720] And people were evacuated.
[00:56:52.720 --> 00:56:56.560] It was international news, a crisis.
[00:56:56.880 --> 00:57:00.800] And so, what I want to ask is what happened next?
[00:57:00.800 --> 00:57:02.960] What happened in the decade after 2013?
[00:57:02.960 --> 00:57:07.760] Well, one thing that happened is that the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people.
[00:57:07.760 --> 00:57:13.280] That's an addition larger than the entire population of Canada or Argentina.
[00:57:13.280 --> 00:57:18.320] And so we're often told that population growth makes environmental problems worse.
[00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:24.080] And so maybe we should then ask: how much worse did the particulate air pollution in China get?
[00:57:24.080 --> 00:57:31.200] And the answer is that over that same decade, particulate air pollution in China declined by half.
[00:57:31.520 --> 00:57:34.640] And that's because what people were doing changed.
[00:57:34.640 --> 00:57:40.240] I mean, back to our theme earlier: people aren't butterflies or rabbits or whatever.
[00:57:41.280 --> 00:57:44.880] You know, authorities implemented new regulations and requirements.
[00:57:45.200 --> 00:57:48.000] Industries installed new technology.
[00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:52.320] Coal-fired power plants were either shut down or didn't do the same things as before.
[00:57:52.640 --> 00:57:56.880] New resources were devoted to monitoring and development.
[00:57:57.120 --> 00:58:00.280] And particle air pollution in China fell while the population grew.
[00:57:59.920 --> 00:58:01.480] And it's not just China.
[00:58:01.800 --> 00:58:11.800] Global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen over the past decade, even as the world's population grew by over 750 million people.
[00:58:11.800 --> 00:58:20.760] And so these facts challenge the familiar story that environmental damage has to move in tandem with population size, one for one.
[00:58:21.560 --> 00:58:25.400] It's also just not how we've made environmental progress before.
[00:58:25.400 --> 00:58:31.080] The idea that to confront our environmental challenges, we have to have fewer people.
[00:58:31.080 --> 00:58:36.600] I mean, I told you the example of China, but think of any case in which we've made an environmental challenge.
[00:58:36.600 --> 00:58:41.400] You know, in the 60s and 70s, the concern was burning leaded gasoline in our vehicles.
[00:58:41.640 --> 00:58:45.960] You know, lead is a neurotoxin, we don't want it around.
[00:58:46.600 --> 00:58:52.760] But it wouldn't have been a solution, and it indeed wasn't the solution to have there be fewer people, right?
[00:58:52.760 --> 00:58:54.680] That's not how we got rid of lead.
[00:58:54.680 --> 00:58:58.280] We got rid of lead by switching to unleaded gasoline.
[00:58:59.560 --> 00:59:07.240] In the 1980s, the problem was the hole in the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons.
[00:59:07.240 --> 00:59:17.960] And, you know, in the 1980s, the world's population grew by 800 million people, but we addressed ozone depletion by banning chlorofluorocarbons with the Montreal Protocol.
[00:59:17.960 --> 00:59:28.120] In the 1990s, the world's population grew by more than 800 million people, and we brought acid rain under control by amending the Clean Air Act to regulate sulfur dioxide.
[00:59:28.120 --> 00:59:43.080] Yes, people do destructive activity and pollute, but whenever we've made progress against pollution, whenever we've made progress, it's come by ending or changing the destructive activity part of people's destructive activity, not the people part.
[00:59:43.080 --> 00:59:50.400] And so that's what we need to do again now: change our energy systems and our economies to be less polluting to confront today's challenges.
[00:59:50.720 --> 00:59:54.560] But don't think that a smaller population is what's going to get us off the hook.
[00:59:54.560 --> 01:00:02.880] The bank shot through population just wouldn't have been a serious response to the challenge of the past, and it won't solve anything for our problems today.
[01:00:02.880 --> 01:00:08.400] If we need to produce less greenhouse gas, and we do, then our targets should be greenhouse gas emissions.
[01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:09.680] Not people.
[01:00:09.680 --> 01:00:10.160] Yeah.
[01:00:10.160 --> 01:00:14.240] Yeah, as Matt Ridley says, we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.
[01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:19.600] And as the economist Mark Skousen says, we will never run out of fossil fuels.
[01:00:19.600 --> 01:00:21.760] He says this to his Chapman University students.
[01:00:21.840 --> 01:00:22.800] They're like, what?
[01:00:23.120 --> 01:00:25.920] And, you know, it's just a basic supply and demand.
[01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:32.000] You know, the price will just go up so high for extracting that last barrel of oil that it's never going to happen, right?
[01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:33.920] So we'll just find new sources of energy.
[01:00:33.920 --> 01:00:35.360] People solve problems.
[01:00:35.360 --> 01:00:40.080] Okay, let's talk about solving this problem that you've identified, I think, quite clearly in your book.
[01:00:40.080 --> 01:00:42.080] That is this depopulation.
[01:00:42.240 --> 01:00:43.840] We're heading in that direction.
[01:00:43.840 --> 01:00:46.160] Seems like there's not much anybody could do.
[01:00:46.160 --> 01:00:47.440] It's just going to continue.
[01:00:47.440 --> 01:00:48.640] What can governments do?
[01:00:48.640 --> 01:00:54.000] Okay, so my example is: you know, the government nudges through tax breaks, for example.
[01:00:54.000 --> 01:00:56.080] I get a tax break for having kids.
[01:00:56.080 --> 01:01:00.720] So apparently, the government wants me to have kids, and they want me to be married, so I get to deduct that.
[01:01:00.720 --> 01:01:04.320] And they want me to own a home, so I deduct the interest on my mortgage.
[01:01:04.320 --> 01:01:08.400] They want me to drive an electric car because they paid me to buy one.
[01:01:08.400 --> 01:01:11.760] And I get to deduct some taxes and I get to drive in the diamond lane.
[01:01:11.760 --> 01:01:14.240] The government's already doing all sorts of things like that.
[01:01:14.240 --> 01:01:17.280] What's wrong with just nudging people in that direction?
[01:01:17.600 --> 01:01:18.000] Right.
[01:01:18.000 --> 01:01:28.320] I mean, so first we can think about whether that is, in fact, raising birth rates back up to two to a level to stabilize the populations.
[01:01:28.400 --> 01:01:30.040] Or just sort of look at the statistical facts.
[01:01:29.760 --> 01:01:35.240] And so, you know, there are many countries that have much more generous welfare states than the United States.
[01:01:35.880 --> 01:01:40.920] Child care subsidies, child tax credits, university, public university is free.
[01:01:41.080 --> 01:01:44.840] So, you know, in the U.S., the average birth rate right now is 1.6.
[01:01:44.840 --> 01:01:46.920] In Denmark, it's 1.5.
[01:01:46.920 --> 01:01:49.640] In Sweden and Norway, it's 1.4.
[01:01:49.640 --> 01:01:52.600] In Finland and Canada, it's 1.3.
[01:01:52.600 --> 01:01:59.960] So if you look at the places where these sorts of policies are in place, you don't see higher birth rates.
[01:01:59.960 --> 01:02:01.480] You see lower birth rates.
[01:02:02.120 --> 01:02:06.120] And I think if we think about that, that makes sense.
[01:02:06.120 --> 01:02:09.720] I mean, let me sort of ask you to consider a hypothetical.
[01:02:10.680 --> 01:02:21.240] Would you have agreed to marry somebody different for a few thousand dollars for a $3,000 tax credit or something like that, right?
[01:02:21.240 --> 01:02:22.520] And no, right?
[01:02:22.760 --> 01:02:24.200] I sort of ask people that.
[01:02:24.280 --> 01:02:26.120] No one's ever said yes yet.
[01:02:27.240 --> 01:02:38.280] And that's because who you married, how you made your family formation decisions, is one of the biggest decisions in constructing your life and writing your own autobiography.
[01:02:38.680 --> 01:02:43.880] And even a $3,000 tax credit isn't going to change who you marry.
[01:02:43.880 --> 01:02:59.080] And so, given that we can all see that about that sort of family formation decision, I think we should recognize the limited power of government spending of this sort to influence our decisions about how many kids to have.
[01:02:59.400 --> 01:03:29.120] I'm not saying that a child tax credit of $4,000 or $5,000 would result in literally the exact same set of babies being born as would be born without it, but we should expect it to be a much smaller deal in the decisions people make, to not be what might bring society back up to two, just like we don't see higher birth rates in the societies that have things like that.
[01:03:29.120 --> 01:03:49.280] I think whatever the change is going to be, it's going to have to be a much bigger rethink in parenting and care work and frankly, whether to welcome depopulation or think it's something to avoid.
[01:03:49.280 --> 01:04:27.520] I mean, if the question is wha

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
.600] In Finland and Canada, it's 1.3.
[01:01:52.600 --> 01:01:59.960] So if you look at the places where these sorts of policies are in place, you don't see higher birth rates.
[01:01:59.960 --> 01:02:01.480] You see lower birth rates.
[01:02:02.120 --> 01:02:06.120] And I think if we think about that, that makes sense.
[01:02:06.120 --> 01:02:09.720] I mean, let me sort of ask you to consider a hypothetical.
[01:02:10.680 --> 01:02:21.240] Would you have agreed to marry somebody different for a few thousand dollars for a $3,000 tax credit or something like that, right?
[01:02:21.240 --> 01:02:22.520] And no, right?
[01:02:22.760 --> 01:02:24.200] I sort of ask people that.
[01:02:24.280 --> 01:02:26.120] No one's ever said yes yet.
[01:02:27.240 --> 01:02:38.280] And that's because who you married, how you made your family formation decisions, is one of the biggest decisions in constructing your life and writing your own autobiography.
[01:02:38.680 --> 01:02:43.880] And even a $3,000 tax credit isn't going to change who you marry.
[01:02:43.880 --> 01:02:59.080] And so, given that we can all see that about that sort of family formation decision, I think we should recognize the limited power of government spending of this sort to influence our decisions about how many kids to have.
[01:02:59.400 --> 01:03:29.120] I'm not saying that a child tax credit of $4,000 or $5,000 would result in literally the exact same set of babies being born as would be born without it, but we should expect it to be a much smaller deal in the decisions people make, to not be what might bring society back up to two, just like we don't see higher birth rates in the societies that have things like that.
[01:03:29.120 --> 01:03:49.280] I think whatever the change is going to be, it's going to have to be a much bigger rethink in parenting and care work and frankly, whether to welcome depopulation or think it's something to avoid.
[01:03:49.280 --> 01:04:27.520] I mean, if the question is what sort of legislation or government policy should we be pursuing in order to stabilize the population instead of depopulating, I might worry that that's asking the wrong question and starting from the wrong place, that we're not yet at the point where it makes sense to be jumping to a policy or a legislative solution because we're frankly not at the point where most people have a consensus that depopulation would be something to avoid and that we should try to stabilize the population.
[01:04:27.600 --> 01:04:35.280] Instead, most people, if they think about it at all, might welcome depopulation or just think that it's a perfectly acceptable default.
[01:04:35.280 --> 01:04:46.800] And so that's not a solution, that's not a situation where any sort of policy change is going to be likely to be appropriate or to be effective.
[01:04:46.800 --> 01:05:05.400] And so, if somebody's asking what to do, I think a good place to start is with learning the facts and getting up to speed about the situation and starting having these conversations with people, starting to raise the question to people about whether depopulation is something to welcome.
[01:05:05.720 --> 01:05:10.680] I mean, I don't want to be, I don't want to sound too pessimistic.
[01:05:10.680 --> 01:05:16.040] I wouldn't have written a book about this if I didn't think that change were possible.
[01:05:16.360 --> 01:05:25.240] But the main reason that I see to be optimistic and to think that change might be possible is to think that we're just at the very beginning of facing up to this challenge.
[01:05:25.240 --> 01:05:29.000] And most people haven't come to terms with the magnitude of this yet.
[01:05:29.000 --> 01:05:35.800] And so depopulation, yes, is the path that we're on, but it's not inevitable.
[01:05:36.440 --> 01:05:45.480] And, you know, as we've said so many times today, humans make decisions in their societies responding to information and knowledge and incentives.
[01:05:45.480 --> 01:05:50.440] And so that's why we think that something else might be possible, but it's not going to be automatic.
[01:05:50.760 --> 01:06:04.840] Maybe review for us briefly the two attempts by governments to make populations go down, like China with the one-child rule, or in the other direction with Ceaușescu's Romania trying to have more babies.
[01:06:04.840 --> 01:06:08.040] And both of these programs ended disasters.
[01:06:08.360 --> 01:06:08.680] Right.
[01:06:08.680 --> 01:06:22.360] So both were disasters in terms of imposing a harsh and coercive will of the government on people's lives and on their private and family decision-making and harming people in many ways.
[01:06:22.360 --> 01:06:37.640] But neither policy achieved the big change, lasting, enduring big change in birth rates, that people that the designers might have expected.
[01:06:37.640 --> 01:06:43.800] So, in the case of Romania and Ceaușescu, it's relatively easier to see that in the data.
[01:06:43.800 --> 01:07:04.160] You see, right after the decree 770, which more than banned abortion, implemented, required pelvic exams at work for women to see if they were pregnant, so that they could be prevented from having an abortion, a truly awful policy.
[01:07:04.400 --> 01:07:11.200] And you do see an immediate spike in birth rates once that happened because people didn't see it coming.
[01:07:11.520 --> 01:07:19.360] But then, once people understood that this was the regime and the situation, they started making different decisions for their lives.
[01:07:19.360 --> 01:07:33.200] And you see birth rates in Romania falling over the next years, you know, roughly in parallel with the rate that they were falling in other sort of middle-developed countries at that time.
[01:07:34.320 --> 01:07:36.960] And so, so people adjusted.
[01:07:38.800 --> 01:07:53.440] Then in China, you know, where there was the one-child policy, which had the opposite intentions to force people not to have children, to very harshly penalize people who do have.
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[01:09:20.840 --> 01:09:21.880] Have children.
[01:09:24.760 --> 01:09:32.280] People sometimes say, well, of course we know that the government can control birth rates because we see that China had a one-child policy.
[01:09:32.280 --> 01:09:35.000] We see that birth rates in China are low.
[01:09:35.000 --> 01:09:37.960] Therefore, it must have been the one-child policy that did it.
[01:09:38.360 --> 01:09:56.200] But the thing is, if you look at other middle-income countries, including China's Asian neighbors, but also in, for example, Latin America or India, that were undergoing similar socioeconomic development and transformations at the same time, improvements in education, improvements in female literacy, improvements in living standards.
[01:09:56.200 --> 01:10:16.720] If you look at other countries that were similarly developing and changing over the same time period, you see declines in birth rates over the same time period that were just as large or larger, which suggests that China would have been very likely to have the same sort of decline in birth rates, even without the one-child policy.
[01:10:14.840 --> 01:10:19.760] So it wouldn't have been the one-child policy that caused it.
[01:10:20.080 --> 01:10:29.920] That's not to say that China would have landed at exactly the same birth rate out to three decimal points, but it would have been in basically the same place.
[01:10:30.240 --> 01:10:44.000] And so facts like this tell us that there's just a lot less oomph for leverage in government coercive control about birth rates than we're accustomed to believing.
[01:10:44.640 --> 01:10:46.480] Okay, you bus get this question.
[01:10:46.480 --> 01:10:50.400] What is the carrying capacity of the earth in terms of people?
[01:10:50.400 --> 01:10:51.760] What's the right number?
[01:10:52.080 --> 01:10:53.280] I don't know.
[01:10:53.280 --> 01:10:54.960] I don't think anybody knows.
[01:10:54.960 --> 01:11:01.680] I think that's beyond our climate science and our social science.
[01:11:04.080 --> 01:11:26.400] If you are convinced that the right number of people for the population to stabilize at is some number lower than we have today, then what I, I can't offer you proof that that's not the case because I don't think anyone knows what the exact correct number is.
[01:11:26.400 --> 01:11:29.360] But here is, or greater than today, for that matter.
[01:11:29.360 --> 01:11:33.680] Here's what I think we can say, which is important.
[01:11:34.000 --> 01:11:54.640] If you want the population to stabilize at 8 billion people, if you want the population to stabilize at 10 billion people, if you want the population to stabilize at 4 billion or 2 billion or 1 billion people, whatever size you might want the population to someday stabilize at, that's going to require an average birth rate around 2.
[01:11:54.640 --> 01:12:11.160] And so, even if what you want is for the size of the world population to someday stabilize at around 2 million people, once birth rates fall below two, that's going to require an increase in the birth rate and being able to sustain higher birth rates at around two.
[01:12:11.160 --> 01:12:25.880] And so, whatever size you might want the population to stabilize at, including one much lower than today, you face fundamentally the same open question of social science, which is what might cause birth rates to go up and then stay there.
[01:12:25.880 --> 01:12:29.880] And that's a big open question because it's unprecedented.
[01:12:29.880 --> 01:12:40.360] There have been 26 countries where, in birth cohorts since 1950, we've seen lifetime average birth rates fall below 1.9.
[01:12:40.360 --> 01:12:46.200] And in zero of those 26 countries, have we ever seen it go back up to two?
[01:12:46.200 --> 01:12:50.840] And so, there's no blueprint ready to go.
[01:12:50.840 --> 01:13:03.080] So, whatever size you might want the population to someday stabilize at, we face the same question of how to support people in choosing a birth rate of two.
[01:13:03.960 --> 01:13:26.440] So, but in terms of like developmental economics, can we get to the point where there's no more poverty and then up from there, where you get like a post, what's sometimes called post-scarcity economics or trekonomics, where everybody has a duplicating machine and you can order tea, Earl Gray, hot like Captain Picard, and you can have anything you want.
[01:13:26.440 --> 01:13:36.440] I mean, or is it going to be a hedonic treadmill, like some economists say, and people will never be happy because they'll always want more of whatever it is the other guy has?
[01:13:38.680 --> 01:13:39.320] I don't know.
[01:13:39.320 --> 01:13:44.120] That sounds like a question about the Four Noble Truths or something, whether people will ever be happy.
[01:13:45.840 --> 01:13:59.600] I mean, I do think that even if we had radically more wonderful technology, a lot of the costs and the hassle of being a parent would be the same.
[01:13:59.840 --> 01:14:17.200] You know, even if we had a baby button that you could push and get a baby without having to have pregnancies or infertility or miscarriages or the risks and pain of childbirth, even that would be wonderful.
[01:14:17.200 --> 01:14:20.400] That would improve a lot of people's lives if we had a baby button like that.
[01:14:21.280 --> 01:14:30.720] It would have improved my family where we had three miscarriages and a lot of sadness and uncertainty.
[01:14:30.720 --> 01:14:32.480] I think it would be really meaningful to people.
[01:14:32.480 --> 01:14:56.960] I'm not sure that even a baby button like that would, well, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take us off the path to depopulation because the thing is, as hard and challenging as pregnancy, becoming pregnant, and childbirth are for many people, having a kid is something that takes many years and decades after that.
[01:14:56.960 --> 01:15:00.800] You know, once the kid's on the outside, the work isn't done.
[01:15:01.440 --> 01:15:12.880] And so I think, you know, if we're talking about science fiction futures, I think even a future with artificial wombs would probably still be one that's on the path to depopulation.
[01:15:12.880 --> 01:15:18.880] I mean, we do have a lot more now than people had in the past to help us raise kids.
[01:15:18.880 --> 01:15:25.680] And, you know, I don't just mean things like iPads for them to watch or the snoo to rock them to sleep.
[01:15:25.680 --> 01:15:31.240] I mean, I mean, you know, dishwashers and laundry machines and innovations like that.
[01:15:31.240 --> 01:15:41.800] I mean, I think, you know, if my kid wakes me up in the middle of the night and says, I peed my bed or I threw up in bed, I can take all the sheets, put them in the laundry machine, press go.
[01:15:42.040 --> 01:15:51.400] You know, I'm rich enough that we own a second pair of sheets, which not everybody would have in the past, and put it on the bed, you know, give them a snuggle and back off to bed.
[01:15:51.400 --> 01:15:53.400] That's easier than it would have been in the past.
[01:15:53.720 --> 01:15:57.560] But on the other hand, it's not that much easier, right?
[01:15:57.560 --> 01:16:04.680] Like you're still getting woken up in the middle of the night by your sick kid, and that's still a pain.
[01:16:04.760 --> 01:16:07.800] And, you know, you're still going to be tired in the next morning.
[01:16:07.800 --> 01:16:15.000] So if we have magical machines that can make us tea, is that going to solve the problem?
[01:16:15.000 --> 01:16:15.880] I don't know.
[01:16:15.880 --> 01:16:23.640] You know, care work and being a parent is probably still going to be pretty human effort and time intensive.
[01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:30.440] Okay, let's kind of wrap up here and look at the kind of deeper causal issues here.
[01:16:30.440 --> 01:16:32.920] Why are people having fewer children?
[01:16:32.920 --> 01:16:38.360] Okay, so this is women making decisions about family size.
[01:16:38.360 --> 01:16:46.360] And if you educate and economically empower women, they're just less likely to have more children.
[01:16:46.360 --> 01:16:49.000] Is it something along those lines that you often hear?
[01:16:49.000 --> 01:16:54.360] Therefore, the solution to overpopulation is to educate and empower women and it'll happen naturally.
[01:16:54.360 --> 01:16:58.920] Something like that, a bottom-up, since it's not top-down from the government, it's bottom-up.
[01:16:59.240 --> 01:17:14.520] And then one last point, like back to Genean Twangy's generations, because I asked her, why is it people are, you know, just developing their careers slower and not getting married and not having children until later and only having one child?
[01:17:14.520 --> 01:17:18.400] I mean, it's not like somebody sat them down and said, this is the plan for your generation.
[01:17:18.720 --> 01:17:27.360] And our explanation was really just kind of cultural shift and norms in which everybody you know is waiting to have children and get married.
[01:17:27.360 --> 01:17:30.720] So you don't even really think about it because that's the norm now.
[01:17:30.720 --> 01:17:32.320] Something like that.
[01:17:32.640 --> 01:17:38.240] You know, there are a lot of theories out there about why birth rates are low and falling.
[01:17:38.480 --> 01:17:41.600] You know, professors like me are paid to make theories.
[01:17:41.760 --> 01:17:43.440] So there are lots of ideas out there.
[01:17:43.440 --> 01:17:44.000] Okay, give us a question.
[01:17:44.320 --> 01:17:51.120] But I don't think any of them explain and capture the overall bigness of falling birth rates.
[01:17:51.120 --> 01:17:55.840] Both the bigness over time, that this is something that's not newly emergent.
[01:17:55.840 --> 01:17:58.320] It's been happening for decades or centuries.
[01:17:58.320 --> 01:18:07.680] And the bigness across space that we see low and falling birth rates in societies around the world, including ones that are really different from one another.
[01:18:07.680 --> 01:18:08.800] And so you're right.
[01:18:08.800 --> 01:18:17.280] One theory that we sometimes hear, especially from social conservatives, is that it's about the decline of religion.
[01:18:17.280 --> 01:18:23.200] And so we need to go back to a more religious time or the decline of marriages.
[01:18:23.520 --> 01:18:32.000] But if you look, you know, in a Pew survey, 90% of people in Latin America said that they're Christian, and the average birth rate there is 1.8.
[01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:41.440] And in India, you know, almost everybody has religion as an active force in their life, and birth rates there are below two.
[01:18:41.440 --> 01:18:50.040] And if you think it's about marriage or what you were saying about delaying, you know, entry into parenthood.
[01:18:50.040 --> 01:18:58.080] Look again in India, where it's now below two, where almost everybody gets married, almost nobody gets divorced.
[01:18:58.400 --> 01:19:03.480] You know, many or most, I don't have it at the top of my head if those marriages are arranged marriages.
[01:19:05.160 --> 01:19:13.080] And the average age of having a first kid is in the early 20s, a number like 20 years old.
[01:19:13.080 --> 01:19:17.560] So that's not a society where people are delaying childbearing.
[01:19:17.560 --> 01:19:27.800] And, you know, as important as this narrative about conflict between career and family, especially for women, is in a place like the United States or Europe.
[01:19:27.800 --> 01:19:33.240] In fact, Career and Family is the title of Claudia Golden's book about this conflict.
[01:19:33.240 --> 01:19:35.240] She's a Nobel Prize winner in economics.
[01:19:35.640 --> 01:19:49.320] As important as that might be in some places, here again, I think we learned something important by looking at the example of India, because in India, female labor force participation is 40%, which is to say pretty low.
[01:19:49.320 --> 01:19:51.320] And still we see below replacement birth rates.
[01:19:51.320 --> 01:19:56.280] So that's not the conflict that's driving low birth rates there.
[01:19:56.520 --> 01:20:00.600] Nor, you know, look at South Korea, where the birth rate is below one, right?
[01:20:00.600 --> 01:20:03.720] I don't think that's anybody's idea of a feminist paradise.
[01:20:03.720 --> 01:20:08.520] It has the most unequal gender pay gap in the OECD statistics.
[01:20:08.840 --> 01:20:19.320] So none of these theories that we hear, whether it's marriage or religion or feminism or about the economy, you see this in places where the state's a big part of the economy.
[01:20:19.320 --> 01:20:22.280] You see this in places where the state's a smaller part of the economy.
[01:20:22.680 --> 01:20:25.240] Birth rates are below two in Vermont.
[01:20:25.240 --> 01:20:27.320] Birth rates are below two in Texas.
[01:20:27.320 --> 01:20:31.920] Birth rates are below two in Massachusetts and birth rates are below two in Utah.
[01:20:31.720 --> 01:20:32.320] All right.
[01:20:32.920 --> 01:20:54.720] And so I don't think we have a theory that explains the bigness of this yet, which is one of the reasons why I think that global depopulation is the most likely future, because it's seen in so many different places and has been ongoing for so long that it's likely to be reflecting something pretty big and robust.
[01:20:55.040 --> 01:20:55.920] Amazing.
[01:20:55.920 --> 01:20:56.800] Gosh.
[01:20:56.800 --> 01:21:01.920] Okay, I guess the Elon method is not the solution for most of us.
[01:21:02.000 --> 01:21:08.080] Have a bunch of babies with a bunch of different baby mamas and you have enough money to keep everybody happy and quiet.
[01:21:08.080 --> 01:21:19.920] I don't know if you saw that Wall Street Journal article on him about he has like a whole department of people that do nothing but run his family issues, all the different wives and girlfriends and children and so on.
[01:21:19.920 --> 01:21:23.120] That's obviously not the solution for most of us.
[01:21:23.680 --> 01:21:24.320] So I don't know.
[01:21:24.320 --> 01:21:31.280] Maybe it's just it is a cultural shift as we become more aware of the issue of depopulation.
[01:21:31.280 --> 01:21:36.000] And maybe we need a shift in the emphasis on people.
[01:21:36.000 --> 01:21:39.920] Your issue here on what is your title here?
[01:21:39.920 --> 01:21:40.800] People are, what is it?
[01:21:40.800 --> 01:21:41.760] People are good.
[01:21:41.760 --> 01:21:43.120] Or the case for people.
[01:21:43.120 --> 01:21:44.400] Yeah, the case for people.
[01:21:44.400 --> 01:21:45.280] Maybe that's it.
[01:21:45.280 --> 01:21:47.920] Maybe we've had such a negative attitude toward people.
[01:21:47.920 --> 01:21:51.200] You get these anti-natalists and so on.
[01:21:52.000 --> 01:21:53.120] It's great to be a parent.
[01:21:53.120 --> 01:21:54.160] It's fun to have kids.
[01:21:54.160 --> 01:21:55.520] Just do it.
[01:21:55.840 --> 01:21:57.680] Maybe not at two in the morning.
[01:21:58.000 --> 01:21:58.480] Yes.
[01:21:58.480 --> 01:21:59.520] Well, that's true.
[01:21:59.520 --> 01:22:00.720] I guess.
[01:22:01.360 --> 01:22:02.320] Yeah, all right.
[01:22:02.320 --> 01:22:04.960] All right, Dean, that's a good place to end it.
[01:22:05.280 --> 01:22:07.360] This is just such a fascinating subject.
[01:22:07.360 --> 01:22:08.320] Here it is again.
[01:22:08.320 --> 01:22:11.920] After the spike, population progress and the case for people.
[01:22:11.920 --> 01:22:13.120] Yeah, check it out.
[01:22:13.120 --> 01:22:13.840] Great read.
[01:22:13.840 --> 01:22:14.720] Really enjoyed it.
[01:22:14.720 --> 01:22:16.240] Just data-driven.
[01:22:16.240 --> 01:22:16.720] Love that.
[01:22:16.720 --> 01:22:19.120] All the economic stuff, really important.
[01:22:19.120 --> 01:22:20.080] Enjoyed that.
[01:22:20.040 --> 01:22:21.360] Um, thank you for your work.
[01:22:21.360 --> 01:22:21.840] Thank you for your time.
[01:22:22.080 --> 01:22:23.120] Thank you for having me.
[01:22:23.120 --> 01:22:31.480] And um, let me say, I remember reading your book in 1992, yes, exactly.
[01:22:29.040 --> 01:22:35.080] Yes, yes, I got it from the borders in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[01:22:29.280 --> 01:22:36.440] Oh, you're the one, okay.
[01:22:36.600 --> 01:22:37.880] Vividly remember it.
[01:22:37.880 --> 01:22:48.440] Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
[01:22:48.440 --> 01:22:51.000] You chose to hit play on this podcast today.
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Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

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[00:02:01.240 --> 00:02:07.000] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:13.080 --> 00:02:14.360] All right, everybody.
[00:02:14.360 --> 00:02:16.680] Hey, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:16.680 --> 00:02:19.480] Brought to you by, of course, the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:20.440] Hey, check it out.
[00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:21.240] Here's an issue.
[00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:22.600] We're still in print.
[00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:24.520] There's a lot of online magazines.
[00:02:24.520 --> 00:02:28.920] I proudly announce that we've been in print since 1992.
[00:02:29.080 --> 00:02:29.800] That's super cool.
[00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:39.560] You can go to any bookstore or just go to skeptic.com/slash magazine and get your issues there or back issues all the way back to 1992.
[00:02:39.720 --> 00:02:46.680] Anyway, okay, so today's episode, I have a special topic for you today on, well, what is it on?
[00:02:46.680 --> 00:02:50.600] Overpopulation or underpopulation or depopulation?
[00:02:50.600 --> 00:02:56.120] Something's going on here that has just recently come to everybody's attention.
[00:02:56.120 --> 00:03:02.920] I'm going to introduce this topic by reading one of my short columns from Scientific American from May 2016.
[00:03:03.240 --> 00:03:10.520] Wow, so we're talking exactly nine years ago, which I titled Doomsday Dumb on this particular topic.
[00:03:10.520 --> 00:03:26.520] If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise, an essay on the principle of population by the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus.
[00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:51.120] On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus' observation that populations tend to increase geometrically, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on, whereas food reserves grow arithmetically, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success.
[00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:54.960] That's the driver of evolution, also known as natural selection.
[00:03:54.960 --> 00:04:01.200] On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse.
[00:04:01.200 --> 00:04:13.920] Quote: The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race, Malthus gloomily predicted.
[00:04:13.920 --> 00:04:25.200] In order to avert doomsday, policymakers embraced social Darwinism and eugenics and resorted to draconian measures to restrict family size, including forced sterilizations.
[00:04:25.200 --> 00:04:34.320] In his book, The Evolution of Everything, the evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley sums up the policy succinctly: better to be cruel than be kind.
[00:04:34.640 --> 00:04:43.760] The belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science.
[00:04:43.760 --> 00:05:04.880] The English poor laws, for example, implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food for the poor, for example, were severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exasperate poverty.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:22.160] The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Charles Trevelyn, was an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.
[00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:26.960] Later in the century, Francis Galton advocated marriage between the fittest individuals.
[00:05:26.960 --> 00:05:34.600] Here's what he said: What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.
[00:05:34.600 --> 00:05:42.280] Followed by a number of prominent socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and H.G.
[00:05:42.280 --> 00:05:47.240] Wells, who openly championed eugenics as a tool of social engineering.
[00:05:47.240 --> 00:05:54.120] Okay, we often think of eugenics and forced sterilization as a right-wing Nazi program implemented in 1930s Germany.
[00:05:54.120 --> 00:06:12.920] But as Princeton University economist Thomas Leonard documents in his book Illiberal Reformers, the New York Times editor Adam Cohen reminds us in his book, Imbeciles, both of them, eugenics fever swept America in the early 20th century, culminating in the infamous 1927 Supreme Court case, Buck v.
[00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:21.240] Bell, in which the justices legalized government sterilization of undesirable citizens, their word.
[00:06:21.240 --> 00:06:32.200] The court included prominent progressives Louise Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the latter of whom famously ruled: three generations of imbeciles are enough.
[00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:34.680] Yeah, that's a SCOTUS decision.
[00:06:34.680 --> 00:06:38.600] The result was a sterilization of some 70,000 Americans.
[00:06:38.600 --> 00:06:55.000] Here was the Supreme Court's reasoning: It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
[00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:57.080] Yeah, this is in the United States of America.
[00:06:57.080 --> 00:06:57.880] Hard to believe.
[00:06:57.880 --> 00:06:59.400] Okay, last section here.
[00:06:59.640 --> 00:07:00.880] To bring us up to speed.
[00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:10.680] Then there was Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, in which the biologist famously proclaimed, the battle to feed all of humanity is over.
[00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:12.520] Many doomsayers followed.
[00:07:12.520 --> 00:07:20.000] That same year, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote in a highly influential essay in Science: the freedom to breed is intolerable.
[00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:28.400] World Watch Institute founder Lester Brown proclaimed in 1995: humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.
[00:07:28.400 --> 00:07:36.160] In a 2012 Scientific American article, he affirmed his rhetorical question: could food shortages bring down civilization?
[00:07:36.160 --> 00:07:44.800] In a 2013 conference at the University of Vermont, Paul Ehrlich assessed our chances of avoiding civilization collapse at only 10%.
[00:07:45.760 --> 00:07:58.960] Okay, the problem with Balthusians is they treat humans as no different from a herd of deer just breeding along, and they just ignore all the solutions that people are capable of coming up with.
[00:07:58.960 --> 00:08:10.880] To help make sense of all this, because if you've been paying attention, unless you've been on Mars starting the new civilization with Elon, Elon's been tweeting frantically about the underpopulation or the depopulation.
[00:08:10.880 --> 00:08:14.080] So, to bring some sense to this, I have as my guest today, Dr.
[00:08:14.080 --> 00:08:20.400] Dean Spears, who's an economist, demographer, and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
[00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:31.920] He's the founding director of RICE, R-I-C-E Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a nonprofit that works to promote children's health, growth, and survival in rural India.
[00:08:32.560 --> 00:08:36.160] Let's see, their research, his co-author, by the way, is Dr.
[00:08:36.160 --> 00:08:37.600] Michael Garuso.
[00:08:37.600 --> 00:08:38.240] Here's the book.
[00:08:38.240 --> 00:08:41.040] Let me give it a proper introduction here in just a second.
[00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:52.240] Combined, their research on health, population, and climate change has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, Nature, Climate Change, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:54.400] They both live in Austin, Texas.
[00:08:54.400 --> 00:08:59.800] And here's the book: After the Spike: Population Progress and the Case for People.
[00:08:59.800 --> 00:09:00.520] How about that?
[00:09:00.520 --> 00:09:02.840] Somebody's finally making a case for people.
[00:09:02.840 --> 00:09:03.880] Dean, nice to see you.
[00:08:59.440 --> 00:09:06.760] Thanks for being patient while I read that.
[00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:08.360] Thanks so much for having me.
[00:09:08.360 --> 00:09:09.400] Glad to be here.
[00:09:09.400 --> 00:09:22.600] It's incredible that, I mean, when I was in, from the time I was in college, all the way through years of being a college professor, all we ever heard about was the coming, you know, collapse due to overpopulation.
[00:09:22.600 --> 00:09:30.280] And I mean, I had professors talking about we should put like addictive birth control medicine in the water or something, you know, just something.
[00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:36.680] Polly Eric said that in his book, or he sort of floated the idea to put sterilants in public water supplies.
[00:09:36.680 --> 00:09:38.280] And so, but you're right.
[00:09:38.280 --> 00:09:41.400] Right now, global depopulation is the most likely future.
[00:09:41.400 --> 00:09:48.760] And what global depopulation means is that each generation, each decade, will be smaller than the one before.
[00:09:48.760 --> 00:09:51.240] And that's the most likely path we're on.
[00:09:51.240 --> 00:09:55.160] Within a few decades, the world's population will begin to decline.
[00:09:55.160 --> 00:09:59.080] And there's no reason to think that once it happens, it'll automatically reverse.
[00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:05.800] And so that's why we're here talking about a case for people, because the big question before us is, should we welcome that?
[00:10:05.800 --> 00:10:08.040] Or should we want something else to happen?
[00:10:08.840 --> 00:10:11.080] Now Earlier didn't welcome that.
[00:10:11.640 --> 00:10:12.200] Yeah, I know.
[00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:14.360] Let's back up a second and give us the bigger picture.
[00:10:14.360 --> 00:10:22.840] So I don't know, 100,000 years ago, or maybe even 50,000 years ago, there was a bottleneck, and maybe there was only 1,000 humans, and now there's 8.2 billion.
[00:10:22.840 --> 00:10:25.080] How do populations grow?
[00:10:25.080 --> 00:10:27.720] And what's around?
[00:10:27.960 --> 00:10:33.960] So for a long time, the size of the human population was small and not changing very fast.
[00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:38.280] So, 10,000 years ago, there were fewer than 5 million people.
[00:10:38.280 --> 00:10:41.080] That's about the size of Metro Atlanta today.
[00:10:41.320 --> 00:10:46.000] By the beginning of the Common Era, it was maybe 200 million.
[00:10:44.840 --> 00:10:49.040] But that started to change a few hundred years ago.
[00:10:49.360 --> 00:11:00.240] We were 1 billion in 1800, doubling in the century after that to 2 billion, doubling again or quadrupling after that to today's 8 billion.
[00:11:00.240 --> 00:11:10.480] And so, for centuries now, the populations, for a couple of centuries now, the population's been growing fast, but not because people are having more babies.
[00:11:10.480 --> 00:11:18.960] The reason the size of the world population has been growing is because we've become much better at keeping one another alive, and especially at keeping children alive.
[00:11:18.960 --> 00:11:27.840] Infant mortality rates, child mortality rates have fallen due to things like the germ theory of disease, improved sanitation, better nutrition.
[00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:31.680] So, children today have a much larger chance of surviving to be adults.
[00:11:31.680 --> 00:11:40.000] And so, we went through, we've gone through a period where, since more of the babies who are born are surviving, the population's been growing fast.
[00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:53.120] But all along, while death rates have been falling and while the size of the population has been growing, birth rates have also been falling for as long as we have record, for not just decades, but for centuries.
[00:11:53.120 --> 00:12:01.280] And so, we're soon going to reach a point where the number of deaths per year will be greater than the number of births per year.
[00:12:01.280 --> 00:12:05.600] I mean, if you think about it, the infant mortality rate can only go down to zero, right?
[00:12:06.320 --> 00:12:10.240] There is a downward stop on how low infant mortality can go.
[00:12:10.240 --> 00:12:16.640] So, eventually, the lines are going to cross, and that'll be the year in which we start to have depopulation.
[00:12:17.280 --> 00:12:28.800] Yeah, this is so counterintuitive that you just said as long as we've been keeping records, birth rates are falling, and yet we keep climbing and climbing and climbing.
[00:12:29.040 --> 00:12:35.480] So, that's just momentum from the past plus public health measures and things like that.
[00:12:36.040 --> 00:12:41.000] Yeah, I mean, it's still the case that the world's average birth rate's at 2.3.
[00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:45.960] So still above an average of two kids per two adults.
[00:12:46.280 --> 00:12:50.120] But the growth rate in the world population has been slowing.
[00:12:50.120 --> 00:12:51.880] I mean, you mentioned Ehrlich.
[00:12:51.880 --> 00:12:56.440] His book, his Dumerist book, came out in 1968, right?
[00:12:56.440 --> 00:13:05.320] And 1968, by his terrible luck, also turned out to be the year in which the growth rate in the human population peaked.
[00:13:05.320 --> 00:13:14.600] So ever since then, our numbers have been growing more slowly because the decline in birth rates has been chasing down the decline in death rates.
[00:13:14.600 --> 00:13:24.520] And it's interesting, even then, maybe there wasn't the evidence base that we had now, but even then, birth rates were falling.
[00:13:25.640 --> 00:13:34.680] Already in the 1970s, many countries crossed below the two children per two adults threshold that would stabilize the population.
[00:13:34.680 --> 00:13:44.600] So we should distinguish depopulation, getting smaller generation after generation, population growth, and then there's also conceptually the possibility in the middle of stabilization.
[00:13:44.600 --> 00:13:47.160] And so there's a birth rate that would exactly balance it.
[00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:48.280] And it's complicated.
[00:13:48.280 --> 00:13:49.880] Nobody knows exactly what that numbers are.
[00:13:49.880 --> 00:13:50.760] It depends on details.
[00:13:50.760 --> 00:13:57.880] But we can hold in our head to imagine an average of two kids per two adults based on how people work, how reproduction works.
[00:13:57.880 --> 00:14:02.280] If you have below two kids per two adults, you're eventually going to get depopulation.
[00:14:02.280 --> 00:14:09.720] So, already in the 1970s, many countries, many regions even, were passing below that average of two.
[00:14:09.720 --> 00:14:17.600] Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, even Cuba went below an average of two kids per two adults in the 1970s.
[00:14:17.920 --> 00:14:25.360] So, by 1980, one in five people already were living in a country with a birth rate below two.
[00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:27.280] And it's kept falling since then.
[00:14:27.280 --> 00:14:29.040] Now, that figure is two-thirds.
[00:14:29.040 --> 00:14:32.560] Two-thirds of people live in a country where the birth rate is below two.
[00:14:32.640 --> 00:14:44.160] So, that, yes, includes richer, more developed countries like Japan or Europe or the U.S., but it also includes countries throughout the middle-income and developing world.
[00:14:44.800 --> 00:14:49.200] Both Canada and Mexico now have a birth rate lower than the United States.
[00:14:49.200 --> 00:14:52.480] Latin America is at 1.8, China's at 1.
[00:14:52.480 --> 00:14:55.280] My own research is mainly focused on India.
[00:14:55.280 --> 00:15:12.240] And what got me into writing about low birth rates and depopulation was realizing somewhat happenstantially when I was doing research on another project that birth rates in India crossed below two in their most recent National Demographic Survey and now are below two.
[00:15:12.240 --> 00:15:16.960] Young women, even in poor parts of India, say that they want below two children on average.
[00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:20.800] And so, it's not something that's just in the rich and developed parts of the world anymore.
[00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:25.920] And it's a trend that's been going on for not just decades, but centuries towards lower birth rates.
[00:15:25.920 --> 00:15:31.040] And so, for all these reasons, we should think that global depopulation is the most likely future.
[00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:32.640] It's astonishing.
[00:15:32.720 --> 00:15:34.400] Just so counterintuitive.
[00:15:34.400 --> 00:15:42.960] It's okay to be slightly technical here because I've often heard the replacement levels 2.1, and then you clarified in your book 2.05.
[00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:44.160] Can you explain why?
[00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:44.640] Right.
[00:15:45.200 --> 00:15:53.920] So, conceptually, the replacement birth rate is the number of kids on average that would cause the size of the population to stabilize.
[00:15:53.920 --> 00:15:56.560] And so, why isn't it exactly two, right?
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:15:58.000] Well, there are a few reasons.
[00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:03.000] One is that not all children survive to adulthood.
[00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:08.520] So, the higher early life mortality rates are, the higher the replacement birth rate would be.
[00:16:08.520 --> 00:16:16.760] So, in some parts of India, for example, like the poor state where I do my research, Uttar Pradesh, it might be a number like 2.5 or 2.6.
[00:16:17.400 --> 00:16:22.680] But eventually, you know, but early life mortality rates are falling everywhere, and eventually they're going to be close to zero.
[00:16:22.680 --> 00:16:28.200] So, you know, if we're thinking about the very long-term future, we can probably just sort of round that down.
[00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:37.320] But then the other complication is that boys and girls, male babies and boy babies, male babies and female babies, aren't born in exactly equal numbers.
[00:16:37.640 --> 00:16:39.320] And there are theories about that.
[00:16:39.320 --> 00:16:54.920] We don't really need to sort out the exact theories about that, but it's just that if what you want is to have a next generation of females the same size of the last generation of females, you're going to need ever so slightly more than two births on average.
[00:16:54.920 --> 00:17:00.120] And so that's where we get this number, like some people say 2.05, some people say 2.1.
[00:17:00.120 --> 00:17:03.320] It doesn't really matter for our purposes.
[00:17:03.320 --> 00:17:04.120] I mean, the U.S.
[00:17:04.120 --> 00:17:09.400] as a whole right now is at 1.6, which is well below both 2 and 2.1.
[00:17:09.400 --> 00:17:20.920] As long as the world as a whole goes towards an average below 2, which the UN projects will happen in 2064, then eventually depopulation will come next.
[00:17:21.560 --> 00:17:24.840] So there's currently 8.2 billion people alive.
[00:17:24.840 --> 00:17:28.840] How many people have ever lived before the 8.2 billion today?
[00:17:28.840 --> 00:17:30.120] And how do you know?
[00:17:30.440 --> 00:17:36.840] Yeah, so there's an estimate that it's about 120 billion people who have ever lived.
[00:17:36.840 --> 00:17:48.400] And so, you know, the way you can know is, you know, think back to earlier we were saying that there were about 5 million people 10,000 years ago.
[00:17:48.640 --> 00:17:51.120] So past population sizes are pretty small.
[00:17:51.120 --> 00:17:57.920] So even if you might not know exactly what year the first human ever lived, I mean, you're adding up small numbers when you go back.
[00:17:58.560 --> 00:18:09.920] And once our total is in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions, you're not going to be that wrong exactly what you assume about a distant past where the numbers per years were in the singles of millions.
[00:18:10.400 --> 00:18:14.160] So we use the records we have, interpolate between it.
[00:18:14.720 --> 00:18:22.320] This is a research project that was done by the Population Reference Bureau, and that comes up with some finite number of births that have ever happened.
[00:18:22.320 --> 00:18:26.000] And the number that they put on it is 120 billion.
[00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:30.880] So 120 billion people ever born, about 8 billion people alive today.
[00:18:31.200 --> 00:18:39.680] When humanity reaches its peak in 2084, which isn't 2064, when the birth rate goes below 2.
[00:18:39.680 --> 00:18:44.000] It'll take a few more decades to work through the age structure of the population.
[00:18:44.160 --> 00:18:52.000] When humanity starts to peak and then decline in 2084, the projection is that there'll be 10.3 billion people, and then we decline.
[00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:56.640] Now, remember, I said that over the past century, our numbers have quadrupled.
[00:18:56.640 --> 00:18:59.120] And over the century before that, our numbers doubled.
[00:18:59.120 --> 00:19:03.600] So that tells us that populations' exponential growth can be fast.
[00:19:03.600 --> 00:19:09.680] And exponential decay is the exact same equation, just with a negative sign at the growth rate.
[00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:22.720] And so depopulation could also be just as fast and just as exponential, which means that we could fall by billions in just a couple hundred years.
[00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:29.360] And as a result, you can sort of do the same procedure of estimating how many future lives there could ever be.
[00:19:29.400 --> 00:19:47.400] And as long as birth rates in the future for the world as a whole go below two and stay below two, as long as the birth rates stay below two for the world as a whole, then each generation will be smaller and our numbers will be going down and down and down and down and down.
[00:19:47.400 --> 00:19:50.840] Now, we shouldn't take any projection like that too literally.
[00:19:50.840 --> 00:20:06.200] Nobody has a crystal ball and knows exactly what's going to happen, but it means that just like we can put a number, a ballpark figure on the total number of births that have ever happened, we could put a ballpark figure on the total number of births that would happen in the future.
[00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:14.200] And that would be around 30 billion future births, future human lives, if the world's birth rate goes below two and stays there.
[00:20:14.200 --> 00:20:15.560] So what does that mean?
[00:20:15.560 --> 00:20:28.360] If there have been 120 billion births so far and 30 billion births in the future, then that means that humanity would be four-fifths over if birth rates are going to go below two and stay there.
[00:20:28.680 --> 00:20:30.680] Yeah, such an astonishing thing.
[00:20:30.680 --> 00:20:44.680] I mean, it can't possibly, can it, get down to like the last people on Easter Island, there's 10 of us left, and it's like, no, I don't think we should assume that we would exactly follow the math of that exponential decay down.
[00:20:44.680 --> 00:20:47.240] Eventually, something else big would break.
[00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:49.880] Something else big would break in our societies and our institutions.
[00:20:49.880 --> 00:20:51.480] It would knock us off that path.
[00:20:51.480 --> 00:20:53.800] That probably wouldn't be good either.
[00:20:53.800 --> 00:21:06.440] I mean, you could imagine something that wrecks enough of our systems, our education, our economy to put us in, you know, to cause a problem and change something.
[00:21:06.440 --> 00:21:09.720] I'm not saying that we know this is exactly what's going to happen.
[00:21:09.720 --> 00:21:32.880] But I think the reason that this if-then is worth thinking about, the reason that it's worth thinking through the math of if birth rates go below two and stay there, then humanity is four-fifths over, is that it really tells us something about the magnitude of the change that we're talking about and how unprecedented it is to think that, no, it's not that we're headed towards growth unending.
[00:21:32.880 --> 00:21:37.040] We're headed towards humanity could have a finite total size.
[00:21:37.680 --> 00:21:41.040] Here's the little peak on the cover of your book here.
[00:21:41.040 --> 00:21:43.120] And so we are just down below here.
[00:21:43.120 --> 00:21:52.640] So a few more decades, we're going to hit what, 10 point something billion, and then we'll be back down to where we are now at 8 billion by what, 2100 or so?
[00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:56.160] Yeah, within the 2100s, but we wouldn't stop there, right?
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:56.480] Yeah.
[00:21:56.640 --> 00:22:08.720] You know, when you, when you, so you were talking about sort of the 1970s type movement against overpopulation, and a slogan that they had was zero population growth, right?
[00:22:08.720 --> 00:22:10.720] So that's another way of saying stabilization, right?
[00:22:10.720 --> 00:22:14.480] So back in the days of Ehrlich, somebody would have called for zero population growth.
[00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:22.000] But if it was zero population growth, an exact balancing of coming and goings, that's not what's going to happen.
[00:22:22.240 --> 00:22:28.960] When you throw a ball in the air, it doesn't just reach the top of its gravitational arc and stay there, it falls down.
[00:22:29.280 --> 00:22:33.200] The same forces that pulled it up eventually accelerate it down.
[00:22:33.280 --> 00:22:41.600] So the fact that birth rates are falling, they're not just going to reach the point where the number of births each year will equal the number of deaths each year.
[00:22:41.600 --> 00:22:45.360] Eventually, the number of births each year will be below the number of deaths each year.
[00:22:45.360 --> 00:22:48.160] And so, yes, we'll hit a peak.
[00:22:48.400 --> 00:23:00.200] But this is sometimes you hear a mistake that you see in journalistic accounts or headlines or commentators to say population growth is going to stop.
[00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:03.880] No, population growth is going to turn negative.
[00:22:59.680 --> 00:23:05.000] Right.
[00:23:05.560 --> 00:23:08.040] Yeah, just a couple of things from stuff you said.
[00:23:08.040 --> 00:23:19.240] I think part of the problem of like figuring out where the start is here, you know, when you start counting, is that there is no zero point when our species began.
[00:23:19.240 --> 00:23:25.720] As Richard Dawkins famously says, at no point did a Homo erectus mother give birth to a Homo sapiens child.
[00:23:25.720 --> 00:23:27.480] That's just not how evolution works.
[00:23:27.480 --> 00:23:30.520] And so there is no, you just have to start somewhere.
[00:23:30.520 --> 00:23:34.840] I guess the demographers started like 50,000 BC, something like that.
[00:23:35.080 --> 00:23:37.000] So, you know, there's a little fuzziness there.
[00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:46.200] Then I've had a lot of the longevity people on the show who always point out that this meme, like, we live twice as long as we used to, so we can just keep going.
[00:23:46.200 --> 00:23:52.680] You know, you get the singularity people, you know, we're going to reach escape velocity and live 200 years and 500 years and so on.
[00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:53.080] No.
[00:23:53.400 --> 00:23:59.720] What we're talking about there is just more and more people are making it into their 20s and 30s.
[00:23:59.720 --> 00:24:02.920] And then if you make it there, you're more likely to make it into your 50s and 60s.
[00:24:02.920 --> 00:24:07.400] And if you make it there, you're more likely to make it into your 70s and 80s, relatively healthy.
[00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:17.320] And what the rational ones are doing is just saying, let's just get as many as we can up into the, say, your 90s, being relatively healthy without major disease.
[00:24:17.560 --> 00:24:19.400] That's a rational goal.
[00:24:19.400 --> 00:24:25.000] But of course, then we run into the problems you talk about in your book from an economic perspective.
[00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.240] You know, us baby boomers, I just started collecting my Social Security.
[00:24:29.240 --> 00:24:37.800] Well, don't we need a bigger population coming up to feed into that system, so I keep my monthly check and I want to live another 20 years or so?
[00:24:39.400 --> 00:24:40.040] Yeah.
[00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:43.800] Yeah, um, no, that's, I mean, to speak to one thing you said, that's right.
[00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:48.960] Some people, times we get this question about will people living longer be the solution?
[00:24:44.840 --> 00:24:51.200] Um, and so let's imagine something extreme.
[00:24:51.280 --> 00:24:56.800] Let's imagine that we all live twice as long and live to be 150 instead of 75.
[00:24:56.800 --> 00:25:02.720] I think that's an extreme hypothetical, but would that prevent depopulation?
[00:25:02.720 --> 00:25:08.000] No, because that would that would change the level, the number of people alive at a given time.
[00:25:08.000 --> 00:25:26.000] But as long as all of those people who are living to be 150 years old are still having an average of you know 1.6 births and then eventually someday dying, maybe 150, maybe 120 years later, then each generation, each birth cohort, is still going to be smaller than the one before.
[00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:33.680] So, yes, at any one given time, the size of the population would be larger, but it would still be exponentially shrinking.
[00:25:33.680 --> 00:25:50.400] If, additionally, whatever sort of medical miracle made us live to be 150 caused us to have a longer reproductive span, so maybe you have two kids in your 20s, another two kids in your 40s, another two kids in your 60s, another two kids in your 80s.
[00:25:50.400 --> 00:26:00.640] If something like that happened, yes, then that would take us off the path to depopulation, but it wouldn't be because we were living longer, it would be because we were having more kids.
[00:26:00.640 --> 00:26:04.400] So, fundamentally, it would still be about the average number of births.
[00:26:04.400 --> 00:26:06.400] Yeah, here's another stat from your book.
[00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:13.680] In 2012, 146 million children were born, the most ever, and it's been declining ever since.
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[00:27:41.240 --> 00:27:41.560] That's right.
[00:27:42.200 --> 00:27:42.600] What?
[00:27:42.600 --> 00:27:45.960] We've already passed the year of peak births.
[00:27:46.280 --> 00:27:48.040] Yep, astonishing.
[00:27:48.360 --> 00:27:58.680] So, if every country on Earth suddenly shifted to 2.1 or 2.05, would that then stabilize populations, or how long would it take?
[00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:01.240] It would take a few decades to work through.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:07.560] I mean, just like I was saying, the year that we fall below two isn't going to be the year that the population peaks.
[00:28:07.800 --> 00:28:11.720] And, you know, of course, mortality rates are still falling in a lot of countries.
[00:28:11.720 --> 00:28:14.720] And so, you know, that's something that's going to continue to play out too.
[00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:27.760] But, you know, as soon as the population would shift to a stabilization birth rate, then that would start a process of equilibration over a few decades that would then stabilize the size of the population.
[00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:37.200] So the sooner the birth rate shifts to a stabilization rate, the larger the equilibrium size of the population would be.
[00:28:38.480 --> 00:28:43.440] You write about the bet between Paul Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon.
[00:28:43.440 --> 00:28:56.720] So I'd like you to review that, but in a larger context of an observation I've noticed, the difference between biologists talking about this problem and economists talking about this problem, it seems very different.
[00:28:57.360 --> 00:28:57.920] Right.
[00:28:58.400 --> 00:29:04.720] So Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich had a bet over the prices of raw materials.
[00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:18.560] And so Paul Ehrlich was worried about overpopulation and thought that we would eventually use up our finite stocks of resources and we simply wouldn't have access to things we needed.
[00:29:18.560 --> 00:29:29.280] Julian Simon, an economist, saw that scarcity creates an incentive to create, discover, or to come up with alternatives.
[00:29:29.280 --> 00:29:48.240] So if what you need is chromium or tin or nickel and you don't have enough chromium or whatever it is, then the very fact that it's scarce is an incentive to either dig deeper and find more of it or come up with some sort of alternative so you don't need so much of it.
[00:29:48.240 --> 00:29:52.000] And so they had a bet based on the prices of these raw materials.
[00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:54.560] The bet ran for a decade.
[00:29:55.200 --> 00:30:03.400] And I don't have the exact fact at my fingertip, but I think it's true that the price of all of the materials in their bet went down.
[00:30:03.720 --> 00:30:06.040] So, you know, Simon won handily.
[00:30:06.360 --> 00:30:14.920] And it's taken as a demonstration that there was something misguided about this overpopulation thesis.
[00:30:14.920 --> 00:30:25.000] Now, there's something else misguided about this overpopulation thesis, which is that we're not overpopulating in the sense that we're not going to have unending population growth.
[00:30:25.320 --> 00:30:31.560] And already one could have seen that birth rates were falling even back then.
[00:30:31.560 --> 00:30:39.640] So sometimes I am asked the question: you know, if Ehrlich got it so wrong, how did, you know, maybe you're getting it wrong too, right?
[00:30:40.120 --> 00:30:41.720] Maybe you're making the same mistake.
[00:30:41.720 --> 00:30:51.240] And it's a good question to ask, especially for somebody who doesn't spend their days with their sleeves rolled up in the nuts and bolts of population science.
[00:30:51.560 --> 00:31:12.200] But this is where I think it's important that you're bringing out that Ehrlich's academic field and training is in biology, not in the human social sciences, not in the human decision-making, the culture, the economics, the sociology of what people choose to do.
[00:31:12.440 --> 00:31:17.240] And in particular, people decide how many children to have.
[00:31:17.880 --> 00:31:20.600] People have long been deciding how many children to have.
[00:31:20.920 --> 00:31:26.920] The world's average birth rate in 1800 has been estimated to be a number like six.
[00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:30.040] In 1900, a number like 5.5.
[00:31:30.040 --> 00:31:31.880] In 1950, a number like five.
[00:31:31.880 --> 00:31:38.120] In other words, falling even before the advent of modern hormonal birth control.
[00:31:38.120 --> 00:31:43.160] France had a birth rate of three at the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:31:43.480 --> 00:31:50.080] And so it isn't just about access to modern technologies like hormonal birth control.
[00:31:50.080 --> 00:32:08.640] Perhaps butterflies or deer or other animal species truly do have the maximum number of children that they can biologically, ecologically have, but that's not and hasn't ever been the case for humans.
[00:32:08.640 --> 00:32:14.480] Humans have economies, cultures, decision-making, societies, reasoning to decide how many children to have.
[00:32:14.480 --> 00:32:23.120] And humans have for a long time known where babies come from and made decisions about how many children to have.
[00:32:23.440 --> 00:32:24.560] Yeah, certainly.
[00:32:24.560 --> 00:32:30.080] Here we might make the distinction that evolutionary biologists make between R and K-selected species.
[00:32:30.400 --> 00:32:37.200] R-selected species, rapid, have lots and lots of offspring and get just as many as they can upstream.
[00:32:37.200 --> 00:32:42.000] Take salmon as the example, and hope that some make it to reproductive age and continue the species.
[00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:44.080] Others are K-selected, like elephants.
[00:32:44.080 --> 00:32:47.280] They just have one or two and they put all their resources into that.
[00:32:47.280 --> 00:32:50.240] Humans are more like K-selected than R-selected.
[00:32:50.240 --> 00:32:54.000] We just have a few and then put all our resources into it.
[00:32:54.000 --> 00:32:59.440] And so, by the way, parenthetically, I had one of my favorite books here called Generations.
[00:32:59.760 --> 00:33:15.040] Gene Twangy, the social psychologist, has documented the effects of this declining number of offspring that children, let's just say children, offspring, sound like talking about rats or something or salmon.
[00:33:15.360 --> 00:33:19.520] If you have six or seven, you're far less risk-averse for each one.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:29.520] But if you have one or two, largely because of technology and birth control and public health measures and so on, life can develop slower.
[00:33:29.520 --> 00:33:38.680] So, this is her explanation, by the way, for why hygeners or Gen Z, today's youth that are coming of age now, are so much slower to develop everything.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:47.640] They date later, they get driver's license later, they develop their careers slower, they get married later, they have their first child instead of 19 for my generation.
[00:33:47.720 --> 00:33:52.040] They have the driver's license later, like they don't go on the day you can get it and get their driver's license.
[00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:54.520] I know, I know.
[00:33:55.960 --> 00:33:56.680] A decade.
[00:33:56.680 --> 00:34:01.880] In Oklahoma a few decades ago, you went the day that 15 and a half.
[00:34:01.880 --> 00:34:03.400] I want my learner's permit.
[00:34:03.400 --> 00:34:06.680] I'm going down to the parking lot at Target and drive around with my dad.
[00:34:06.680 --> 00:34:08.200] Yeah, yeah, I remember it well.
[00:34:08.200 --> 00:34:13.720] Yeah, no, and 10 years slower to have their first child, 19 versus 29 now for iGens.
[00:34:13.720 --> 00:34:29.240] So, her theory on why there's so much helicopter parenting is that you're far more risk-averse if you just have the one or maybe two, and therefore helicopter parenting and super, super careful coddling, as it's sometimes called.
[00:34:29.240 --> 00:34:35.160] But anyway, that's a slight diversion there, but I think it's an interesting effect along the lines of what you're talking about here.
[00:34:35.160 --> 00:34:42.760] By the way, just the metals that Julian Simon identified were chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten that you listed.
[00:34:42.840 --> 00:34:43.240] There you go.
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:46.440] Yeah, he so Simon won that bet.
[00:34:46.440 --> 00:34:55.480] But just in general, I mean, when you read the biologists talking about this, they do treat people in a very negative way, like we're just cattle.
[00:34:55.480 --> 00:34:58.600] And I find economists far more optimistic about people.
[00:34:58.600 --> 00:35:02.520] You know, people are generators of ideas, for example.
[00:35:02.520 --> 00:35:04.520] I think you have a whole chapter on this.
[00:35:04.600 --> 00:35:04.840] Exactly.
[00:35:05.160 --> 00:35:06.280] Thinking about that a little bit.
[00:35:06.280 --> 00:35:16.960] Yeah, so I mean, that's one of the reasons why depopulation matters and why we should want to avoid it: that we're all made better off by sharing the world with more other people.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:21.600] Other people alongside us, or other people who live before us.
[00:35:21.840 --> 00:35:28.000] And that's importantly because other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives.
[00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:31.600] Other people are where science and knowledge comes from.
[00:35:31.600 --> 00:35:41.520] Now, here's a question that I might sometimes ask my students in class: Why are our lives so much better than 200 years ago?
[00:35:41.520 --> 00:35:54.240] Why do we have shoes on our feet and glasses to correct our vision, plenty to eat, antibiotics if we need that, vaccines if we need that, climate-controlled work environment, shorter work days, podcasts for that matter?
[00:35:54.240 --> 00:35:57.360] Why do we have all of this that people didn't have before?
[00:35:57.520 --> 00:36:06.080] It's the same rocks beneath our feet, the same chromium and tin is out there somewhere, the same wind blowing, the same sun shining.
[00:36:06.080 --> 00:36:11.840] It's because we know more about what to do with all of that than anybody knew 200 years ago.
[00:36:11.840 --> 00:36:32.800] We know how to harvest that wind and that sunshine as energy, and we know how to dig up that silicon and turn it into computer chips, which can then be statistical software or something to regulate chemotherapy drugs or Mario Kart, if that's what you want.
[00:36:33.360 --> 00:36:37.920] So we know better what to do with the resources that we have because of knowledge.
[00:36:37.920 --> 00:36:40.320] And where did that knowledge come from?
[00:36:40.320 --> 00:36:45.920] Why do we know about the germ theory of disease and soap and antibiotics and people didn't it before?
[00:36:45.920 --> 00:36:50.240] Because of what other people have learned who came before us.
[00:36:50.240 --> 00:37:00.000] Sometimes intentional RD, you know, professors like me doing their research, sometimes just the actions of learning by doing a nerve.
[00:36:59.480 --> 00:37:13.160] A nurse taking care of an underweight baby has an idea for tying on the baby doing skin-to-skin contact, and she tells it to another nurse, and that becomes part of the kangaroo mother care process that helps keep babies alive.
[00:37:13.480 --> 00:37:19.080] But it's humans doing things, noticing things, thinking things, and we learn them from one another.
[00:37:19.080 --> 00:37:23.240] So, this is an important idea in the economics of long-term living standards.
[00:37:23.240 --> 00:37:35.080] And an economist named Paul Romer won a Nobel Prize in 2018 for the theory of endogenous economic growth, where endogenous means, if we're talking about, if you can say case selection, I can say endogenous.
[00:37:35.080 --> 00:37:37.960] And endogenous means comes from the inside.
[00:37:38.200 --> 00:37:43.640] It's the idea of technology and ideas being discovered by people.
[00:37:44.280 --> 00:37:53.400] And the crucial insight is that ideas and knowledge are a special type of economic resource.
[00:37:53.400 --> 00:38:00.520] Special in part because they power progress in living standards, but special especially because they don't get used up.
[00:38:01.160 --> 00:38:07.960] If I have a sick kid and I treat that sick kid with an antibiotic pill, that pill is gone.
[00:38:07.960 --> 00:38:09.560] Nobody will ever take it again.
[00:38:09.560 --> 00:38:10.840] It's over.
[00:38:10.840 --> 00:38:23.400] But the idea, the knowledge, the recipe for that pill, and more importantly, the germ theory of disease that came behind it continues undiminished for somebody else to use.
[00:38:23.640 --> 00:38:25.960] So ideas and knowledge are like that.
[00:38:25.960 --> 00:38:29.800] They're the special sort of economic resource that doesn't get used up.
[00:38:29.800 --> 00:38:31.880] And they're the thing that people create.
[00:38:31.880 --> 00:38:39.800] And so this is the core of where long-term improvement in living standards, reduction in poverty, comes from.
[00:38:39.800 --> 00:38:53.280] People have ideas, people make discoveries, people learn things, and then that grows our stock of knowledge resources that the next generation can use but doesn't use up.
[00:38:53.280 --> 00:38:55.920] Progress comes from other people.
[00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:02.400] And that's what brings us back so importantly to what we might lose in a depopulating future.
[00:39:02.400 --> 00:39:12.880] If we're on the path to depopulation instead of on a path to stabilizing the population, then we're going to miss out on many of those ideas and discoveries and creations.
[00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:28.960] And we're not going to be on the trajectory to achieve progress towards an abundant future, to achieve the same sort of improvements in health, in survival, improvements against poverty that we could if we were accomplishing more together.
[00:39:28.960 --> 00:39:32.400] Progress doesn't just happen automatically.
[00:39:32.720 --> 00:39:34.240] We need other people.
[00:39:34.240 --> 00:39:36.320] We need one another to achieve it.
[00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:38.240] And so other people are win-win.
[00:39:38.240 --> 00:39:42.160] Their lives are good for them and good for all of us.
[00:39:42.480 --> 00:39:52.320] Yeah, another way to think about it is if you have 5 million people like you estimate 10,000 years ago versus 5 billion today, just to make it an even number there.
[00:39:53.200 --> 00:40:06.960] And if creativity comes from, I don't know, let's say 0.01% or six sigma out from the mean of the most creative, intelligent people or whatever, you're just going to have far more of them if the pool from which you're selecting is 5 billion rather than 5 million.
[00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:08.720] So there's just more ideas floating around.
[00:40:08.960 --> 00:40:11.840] Yeah, I mean, that's one model that can generate the result.
[00:40:11.840 --> 00:40:22.560] I mean, I also think it's important to note that in, for example, Romer's theory, you could have everybody being the exact the same and still generate the same result.
[00:40:22.960 --> 00:40:29.360] You know, if everyone's going about their business and they have, you know, whatever percent of a chance of discovering something.
[00:40:29.480 --> 00:40:34.200] The important thing is that ideas accumulate, right?
[00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:41.640] The core mechanism is that the stock of ideas is building, not going down, and more people add to it.
[00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:44.600] And so what matters is how quickly is that happening.
[00:40:44.600 --> 00:41:13.080] Now, I sort of misspoke a second ago when I said the stock of ideas doesn't go down, because although that's true in the standard economic models of this, of course, it is possible that we could lose our knowledge, that we could not have enough of us to organize and teach and curate our ideas, to have things like libraries and universities and podcasts and pass on the information to the next generation.
[00:41:13.320 --> 00:41:17.720] So it could be even worse than just missing out on progress.
[00:41:17.720 --> 00:41:29.400] If it is the case that we need human activity to maintain our stock of knowledge and to have it ready to go at our fingertips in a useful form, which is frankly something we spend a lot of the economy on.
[00:41:29.400 --> 00:41:35.240] We spend a lot of the economy on education, on ideas, on knowledge, on books, on libraries, right?
[00:41:35.240 --> 00:41:41.320] Given that that is something that we invest in so much, it's plausible that it could be even worse than missing out on progress.
[00:41:41.560 --> 00:41:45.880] It could be that there are some ideas that we won't have available when we need them.
[00:41:45.880 --> 00:41:58.200] I mean, think about a special, you know, maybe once-in-a-lifetime problem of something like COVID comes along and we need a vaccine, a new idea for it.
[00:41:58.520 --> 00:42:06.680] Are we going to be more likely to come up with that in a world with 8 billion of us or in a world with 8 million of us?
[00:42:07.560 --> 00:42:11.320] And then that has this property of the formula.
[00:42:11.320 --> 00:42:13.800] Once you've discovered it, everybody can use it, right?
[00:42:13.800 --> 00:42:16.240] But where are we going to be more likely to find it?
[00:42:17.200 --> 00:42:27.200] Lots of things in economics have this property where you just need it once and for all, and then you can share it.
[00:42:27.840 --> 00:42:34.160] So think about a podcast like this or a radio program.
[00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:45.760] Anyone, once this is up on the internet, it's going to be there whether five people download it or 5,000 people download it or 500,000 people download it, right?
[00:42:46.080 --> 00:42:51.760] You just need it to be out there, and if there are more people, they can all enjoy it.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:59.040] So what is going to be the world in which there's more good stuff out there for you to access, right?
[00:42:59.040 --> 00:43:02.160] One where there's more people or fewer people.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:03.680] Clearly, the one with more people.
[00:43:03.680 --> 00:43:13.520] They're going to be creating more podcasts, creating more radio programs, creating more streaming television, whatever it is you like.
[00:43:13.520 --> 00:43:19.280] There'll be more of that available in a world with more people that then can be used.
[00:43:19.280 --> 00:43:32.960] And so there's this old fear that other people are eating your slice of the pie, that other people are consuming it, and so you can't have it.
[00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:41.440] But that's not how it works because that overlooks the fact that somebody has to bake that pie in the first place.
[00:43:41.440 --> 00:43:48.400] And the fact that there are other people who need and want the same thing you do makes it more likely for you to get it.
[00:43:48.360 --> 00:43:53.280] You know, where are you going to get to try the newest restaurant?
[00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:57.200] In a city with other people or in an empty rural place?
[00:43:57.200 --> 00:44:00.520] Where are you more likely to find the niche medical care you might need?
[00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:04.200] In a city with other people or in a depopulated rural place?
[00:44:04.520 --> 00:44:09.400] I mean, I grew up in Oklahoma when my mom was sick with a really rare form of cancer.
[00:44:09.400 --> 00:44:13.080] There wasn't anyone who lived near our house who knew what to do about it.
[00:44:13.080 --> 00:44:17.720] And so we had to drive to a big city to find someone who had heard about it.
[00:44:17.720 --> 00:44:28.600] And there are lots of stories like that for important medical treatments, for trying new things like a concert or a restaurant, or think of airplane flights.
[00:44:28.600 --> 00:44:33.720] Where are you more likely to be able to get on a flight to the place where you want to go?
[00:44:34.040 --> 00:44:37.720] In a city, in a place where there are other people who want to be on it with you.
[00:44:37.720 --> 00:44:44.840] Other people make it economically feasible for you to get what you want to need.
[00:44:44.840 --> 00:44:48.280] So don't think that other people are eating your slice of pie.
[00:44:48.280 --> 00:44:50.440] Other people are why your pie is there.
[00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:52.520] Other people are why your podcast is there.
[00:44:52.840 --> 00:44:54.920] Other people are why your medical treatment is there.
[00:44:54.920 --> 00:44:59.560] It's because other people need and want what you do that it's possible for it to exist.
[00:44:59.880 --> 00:45:01.240] Well, perfectly stated.
[00:45:01.240 --> 00:45:09.080] I think people just, again, counterintuitively have a difficult time thinking of economics as something other than zero sum.
[00:45:09.080 --> 00:45:10.200] I just was in England.
[00:45:10.520 --> 00:45:11.640] You have to create the things.
[00:45:11.640 --> 00:45:12.920] It's not just about shooting.
[00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:13.400] Yes, yes.
[00:45:13.560 --> 00:45:14.040] Yeah.
[00:45:14.280 --> 00:45:20.440] But also, I mean, just like I was just in England interviewing this famous astronomer for a documentary.
[00:45:20.440 --> 00:45:28.600] Anyway, we got off on this and he was ranting about Jeff Bezos' yacht and how just obscene this is when there's starving kids in Africa still.
[00:45:29.720 --> 00:45:34.440] But but but but but their starvation has nothing to do with Jeff Bezos' yacht.
[00:45:34.440 --> 00:45:36.520] I mean, it's not like he stole it from them, right?
[00:45:36.520 --> 00:45:37.880] But that's what it feels like.
[00:45:37.880 --> 00:45:39.960] You know, that guy has this much.
[00:45:39.960 --> 00:45:41.480] Elon has way too much.
[00:45:41.480 --> 00:45:42.920] What's the right amount?
[00:45:42.920 --> 00:45:45.280] But somehow it's taking away from me.
[00:45:45.440 --> 00:45:47.200] I don't, what has it got to do with me?
[00:45:44.600 --> 00:45:47.600] He's not hurting me.
[00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:59.520] Yeah, I mean, so I'm a development economist, and my research is my home territory of research is about the health and well-being of children in rural North India, a place called Uttar Pradesh.
[00:46:00.160 --> 00:46:24.480] And, you know, a lot of my work is either been about sanitation, like, you know, the things about germs and keeping germs away from children, like with latrines, or more recently, about low-cost neonatal health care, things to keep babies' temperature stabilized, promote breastfeeding, and promote neonatal survival this way.
[00:46:24.480 --> 00:46:38.080] And what's so important about either a good pit latrine or a good kangaroo mother care lactation consulting program is that the physical inputs aren't that expensive.
[00:46:38.320 --> 00:46:48.560] What's important is knowing what to do, the idea, the knowledge, understanding how important it is to keep feces safely contained and away from children.
[00:46:48.560 --> 00:46:56.000] Understanding that what you don't want to do is take a baby away from the mom and wash it off and make it cold.
[00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:00.640] You want to keep it right there on the mom's chest, keep it warm, and promote breastfeeding.
[00:47:00.640 --> 00:47:06.320] And those are things that we learn from other people, that we learn from the knowledge and experience.
[00:47:07.920 --> 00:47:14.000] You don't need to reinvent kangaroo mother care in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh.
[00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:24.720] You can use the same ideas they're using in Baraj district, which are in any event using the same ideas that people used in Colombia, where people first started practicing kangaroo mother care.
[00:47:24.720 --> 00:47:47.640] And so, just because what you were talking about was global poverty, I exactly think it's important to emphasize that if what you care about is continued improvement in living standards for the global poor, reductions in early life mortality, that has a lot to do with progress towards an abundant future with ideas and with discoveries.
[00:47:47.640 --> 00:47:49.800] And that's part of why we need other people.
[00:47:49.800 --> 00:48:06.200] Yeah, my other favorite book is amongst many is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, in which he talks about the explanations, discovery of explanations of causality in the world, and that that's what people do that other animals don't do as well.
[00:48:06.200 --> 00:48:10.360] And that, you know, there's no limit to the solutions we could find.
[00:48:10.360 --> 00:48:11.720] And every solution we find will.
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[00:49:39.280 --> 00:49:44.160] Create new problems, but we'll find new solutions to those problems, and it just accumulates that way.
[00:49:44.320 --> 00:49:54.240] A couple other things I think people also counterintuitively don't quite understand like geometric growth rate or compound interest.
[00:49:54.240 --> 00:50:05.520] Like one of these little quizzes on these rationality measures that cognitive psychologists use is: if a field of weeds doubles every day for 30 days, when will it be half?
[00:50:05.520 --> 00:50:07.040] You know, it's day 29.
[00:50:07.040 --> 00:50:08.080] People are like, what?
[00:50:08.640 --> 00:50:16.720] It's just, or compound interest, as Einstein famously said, you know, is one of those things that, you know, are really difficult to understand, but really important.
[00:50:16.720 --> 00:50:24.000] You know, just like or you economists talk about, you know, a 2% growth rate in an economy versus a 3% growth rate.
[00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:26.240] Non-economists, like, what's the difference?
[00:50:26.240 --> 00:50:27.200] It's like 1%.
[00:50:27.200 --> 00:50:29.520] No, it's like a 33% difference.
[00:50:29.520 --> 00:50:30.320] It's like a third.
[00:50:30.320 --> 00:50:31.520] It's huge.
[00:50:31.520 --> 00:50:32.320] Right?
[00:50:32.640 --> 00:50:35.360] Or it's a very different doubling time, for example.
[00:50:35.760 --> 00:50:42.480] You know, doubling in, you know, 30-something years versus doubling in 20-something years.
[00:50:42.960 --> 00:50:43.520] Right.
[00:50:44.080 --> 00:50:46.080] So, but I had a question on that.
[00:50:46.080 --> 00:50:58.880] If the population collapses, depopulates like you project, or even if it stabilizes, we get to 2.1 by, let's say, 2,100 or so, can economies still grow at 3% rate?
[00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:04.440] Do you need more and more people and more customers and more producers and so on?
[00:51:05.160 --> 00:51:07.320] Yeah, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball.
[00:51:07.320 --> 00:51:09.480] I can't tell you this percent or that percent.
[00:51:09.960 --> 00:51:21.400] But I think there are two key reasons that, two key ways in which, you know, economic growth and progress towards improving living standards.
[00:51:21.400 --> 00:51:29.000] And, you know, I just want to actually take a second and pause on this phrase economic growth.
[00:51:29.000 --> 00:51:36.920] Because I think a lot of people would want to raise their hand and say, you know, why do we want economic growth in the first place?
[00:51:37.160 --> 00:51:50.360] And so I want to just hold here for a second because I don't want to downsell the importance of improving living standards and making people's lives better off, including poor people.
[00:51:50.360 --> 00:51:59.080] I think a lot of people hear the term economic growth, and if their eyes don't just glaze over completely, then they might think that I mean something like the stock market.
[00:51:59.400 --> 00:52:01.320] But that's not what economic growth is.
[00:52:01.320 --> 00:52:06.760] Economic growth is all the things that are being produced.
[00:52:06.760 --> 00:52:31.000] So a world in which, back to what I study, going from a past just really very recently, say 20 years ago, when most babies in India were born, or in a place like Uttar Pradesh, were born at home, to a present where most babies are born in a healthcare facility.
[00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:34.760] So nobody or not, there wasn't very much.
[00:52:34.760 --> 00:52:39.480] People weren't buying and selling health care at birth, medical care.
[00:52:39.640 --> 00:52:44.920] There might have been a traditional midwife or something, but it was basically not a market transaction 20 years ago.
[00:52:45.200 --> 00:52:57.120] It was happening at home and it was relatively unsafe to a present where many more births are happening in facilities.
[00:52:57.600 --> 00:53:04.880] And say the government is paying a nurse's salary or a nonprofit is paying a nurse's salary or the family is paying for private health care.
[00:53:04.880 --> 00:53:08.080] Of course, there are differences amongst those things and those differences matter.
[00:53:08.080 --> 00:53:18.560] But what I want to draw attention to is that that shift to babies being born in facilities, that's a form of economic growth, and that matters, and that saves lives.
[00:53:19.680 --> 00:53:29.680] You know, whatever it is, you know, whether it's having glasses, having a new vaccine, just people moving out of poverty, that's economic growth.
[00:53:29.680 --> 00:53:34.800] And so we shouldn't let people say economic growth, who wants that?
[00:53:34.800 --> 00:53:36.880] I don't care what the stock market is.
[00:53:36.880 --> 00:53:39.040] Okay, that wasn't an answer to your question.
[00:53:39.040 --> 00:53:41.120] Your question was about population.
[00:53:42.080 --> 00:53:42.720] Sorry.
[00:53:43.120 --> 00:53:44.720] No, it's a good clarification.
[00:53:44.720 --> 00:53:46.320] People do not understand what that means.
[00:53:46.480 --> 00:53:47.360] That's good.
[00:53:47.680 --> 00:54:01.520] And yeah, I think there are at least two big reasons why a smaller future population could knock us off the path we could otherwise be on towards higher living standards.
[00:54:01.520 --> 00:54:12.640] One is that we wouldn't accumulate so many good ideas and discoveries and inventions and knowledge, and we might even have a harder time curating and putting to good use the ideas we already have.
[00:54:12.640 --> 00:54:18.880] And then two is that we wouldn't have the benefits of other people needing and wanting the things that we need and want.
[00:54:19.280 --> 00:54:27.600] You know, the fact that if more people want niche medical care or podcasts or whatever it is, it makes it more likely for you to happen.
[00:54:27.600 --> 00:54:29.640] So that's not the whole case for people.
[00:54:29.040 --> 00:54:33.720] I also think it matters that people get to be born to live good lives.
[00:54:34.040 --> 00:54:39.560] That doesn't mean that anybody has to be a parent if they don't choose to, but I think that matters.
[00:54:39.560 --> 00:54:49.560] But this is an important part of the case for people: that we're better off, we have faster progress towards higher living standards in a world of other people for these reasons.
[00:54:49.880 --> 00:54:53.080] What do you make of the, I think they're called antinatalists.
[00:54:53.080 --> 00:54:55.320] They're against people being born at all.
[00:54:55.320 --> 00:54:55.880] Have you followed that?
[00:54:56.120 --> 00:55:03.320] Yeah, I mean, there are some extreme versions of that who want there to be zero births.
[00:55:03.320 --> 00:55:09.080] And I don't know that I have a constructive thing to say about that.
[00:55:09.720 --> 00:55:12.040] But there are first.
[00:55:12.360 --> 00:55:13.400] There are also.
[00:55:14.040 --> 00:55:31.080] I mean, we can talk about sort of a less extreme version of it, which is something that I think it is more understandable that people say, which is, you know, humans have caused environmental problems, humans have caused pollution, humans have caused climate change.
[00:55:31.080 --> 00:55:35.800] And so, isn't the solution to all of that less humans?
[00:55:35.800 --> 00:55:39.880] If more people is more problems, more pollution, don't we need less people?
[00:55:39.880 --> 00:55:50.840] And I think it's important to say, yes, we do and have had big environmental challenges, and people have caused or contributed to them time and again.
[00:55:50.840 --> 00:55:53.800] Human activities cause greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:55:54.920 --> 00:56:03.640] So it's natural that you would think that, but that doesn't mean that fewer people is the solution we need now.
[00:56:03.880 --> 00:56:12.440] It doesn't mean that fewer people are going to get us off the hook for our environmental challenges or that we should welcome depopulation as a solution to our environmental challenges.
[00:56:12.440 --> 00:56:14.760] I mean, let me tell you a story about that.
[00:56:15.120 --> 00:56:21.360] In 2013, the particle air pollution in China was terribly, terribly bad.
[00:56:21.360 --> 00:56:24.960] So, this is measured by PM 2.5, little particles in the air.
[00:56:25.600 --> 00:56:30.000] They get into your lungs and they stunt the growth and development of children.
[00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:34.480] They cause mortality in older adults.
[00:56:34.800 --> 00:56:37.040] Particle pollution was really bad.
[00:56:37.360 --> 00:56:43.360] And in 2013 in China, it was called the air apocalypse.
[00:56:43.360 --> 00:56:47.920] It was something like 700 on a scale of 0 to 500, according to the U.S.
[00:56:47.920 --> 00:56:49.440] Embassy in Beijing.
[00:56:50.080 --> 00:56:52.720] And people were evacuated.
[00:56:52.720 --> 00:56:56.560] It was international news, a crisis.
[00:56:56.880 --> 00:57:00.800] And so, what I want to ask is what happened next?
[00:57:00.800 --> 00:57:02.960] What happened in the decade after 2013?
[00:57:02.960 --> 00:57:07.760] Well, one thing that happened is that the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people.
[00:57:07.760 --> 00:57:13.280] That's an addition larger than the entire population of Canada or Argentina.
[00:57:13.280 --> 00:57:18.320] And so we're often told that population growth makes environmental problems worse.
[00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:24.080] And so maybe we should then ask: how much worse did the particulate air pollution in China get?
[00:57:24.080 --> 00:57:31.200] And the answer is that over that same decade, particulate air pollution in China declined by half.
[00:57:31.520 --> 00:57:34.640] And that's because what people were doing changed.
[00:57:34.640 --> 00:57:40.240] I mean, back to our theme earlier: people aren't butterflies or rabbits or whatever.
[00:57:41.280 --> 00:57:44.880] You know, authorities implemented new regulations and requirements.
[00:57:45.200 --> 00:57:48.000] Industries installed new technology.
[00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:52.320] Coal-fired power plants were either shut down or didn't do the same things as before.
[00:57:52.640 --> 00:57:56.880] New resources were devoted to monitoring and development.
[00:57:57.120 --> 00:58:00.280] And particle air pollution in China fell while the population grew.
[00:57:59.920 --> 00:58:01.480] And it's not just China.
[00:58:01.800 --> 00:58:11.800] Global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen over the past decade, even as the world's population grew by over 750 million people.
[00:58:11.800 --> 00:58:20.760] And so these facts challenge the familiar story that environmental damage has to move in tandem with population size, one for one.
[00:58:21.560 --> 00:58:25.400] It's also just not how we've made environmental progress before.
[00:58:25.400 --> 00:58:31.080] The idea that to confront our environmental challenges, we have to have fewer people.
[00:58:31.080 --> 00:58:36.600] I mean, I told you the example of China, but think of any case in which we've made an environmental challenge.
[00:58:36.600 --> 00:58:41.400] You know, in the 60s and 70s, the concern was burning leaded gasoline in our vehicles.
[00:58:41.640 --> 00:58:45.960] You know, lead is a neurotoxin, we don't want it around.
[00:58:46.600 --> 00:58:52.760] But it wouldn't have been a solution, and it indeed wasn't the solution to have there be fewer people, right?
[00:58:52.760 --> 00:58:54.680] That's not how we got rid of lead.
[00:58:54.680 --> 00:58:58.280] We got rid of lead by switching to unleaded gasoline.
[00:58:59.560 --> 00:59:07.240] In the 1980s, the problem was the hole in the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons.
[00:59:07.240 --> 00:59:17.960] And, you know, in the 1980s, the world's population grew by 800 million people, but we addressed ozone depletion by banning chlorofluorocarbons with the Montreal Protocol.
[00:59:17.960 --> 00:59:28.120] In the 1990s, the world's population grew by more than 800 million people, and we brought acid rain under control by amending the Clean Air Act to regulate sulfur dioxide.
[00:59:28.120 --> 00:59:43.080] Yes, people do destructive activity and pollute, but whenever we've made progress against pollution, whenever we've made progress, it's come by ending or changing the destructive activity part of people's destructive activity, not the people part.
[00:59:43.080 --> 00:59:50.400] And so that's what we need to do again now: change our energy systems and our economies to be less polluting to confront today's challenges.
[00:59:50.720 --> 00:59:54.560] But don't think that a smaller population is what's going to get us off the hook.
[00:59:54.560 --> 01:00:02.880] The bank shot through population just wouldn't have been a serious response to the challenge of the past, and it won't solve anything for our problems today.
[01:00:02.880 --> 01:00:08.400] If we need to produce less greenhouse gas, and we do, then our targets should be greenhouse gas emissions.
[01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:09.680] Not people.
[01:00:09.680 --> 01:00:10.160] Yeah.
[01:00:10.160 --> 01:00:14.240] Yeah, as Matt Ridley says, we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.
[01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:19.600] And as the economist Mark Skousen says, we will never run out of fossil fuels.
[01:00:19.600 --> 01:00:21.760] He says this to his Chapman University students.
[01:00:21.840 --> 01:00:22.800] They're like, what?
[01:00:23.120 --> 01:00:25.920] And, you know, it's just a basic supply and demand.
[01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:32.000] You know, the price will just go up so high for extracting that last barrel of oil that it's never going to happen, right?
[01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:33.920] So we'll just find new sources of energy.
[01:00:33.920 --> 01:00:35.360] People solve problems.
[01:00:35.360 --> 01:00:40.080] Okay, let's talk about solving this problem that you've identified, I think, quite clearly in your book.
[01:00:40.080 --> 01:00:42.080] That is this depopulation.
[01:00:42.240 --> 01:00:43.840] We're heading in that direction.
[01:00:43.840 --> 01:00:46.160] Seems like there's not much anybody could do.
[01:00:46.160 --> 01:00:47.440] It's just going to continue.
[01:00:47.440 --> 01:00:48.640] What can governments do?
[01:00:48.640 --> 01:00:54.000] Okay, so my example is: you know, the government nudges through tax breaks, for example.
[01:00:54.000 --> 01:00:56.080] I get a tax break for having kids.
[01:00:56.080 --> 01:01:00.720] So apparently, the government wants me to have kids, and they want me to be married, so I get to deduct that.
[01:01:00.720 --> 01:01:04.320] And they want me to own a home, so I deduct the interest on my mortgage.
[01:01:04.320 --> 01:01:08.400] They want me to drive an electric car because they paid me to buy one.
[01:01:08.400 --> 01:01:11.760] And I get to deduct some taxes and I get to drive in the diamond lane.
[01:01:11.760 --> 01:01:14.240] The government's already doing all sorts of things like that.
[01:01:14.240 --> 01:01:17.280] What's wrong with just nudging people in that direction?
[01:01:17.600 --> 01:01:18.000] Right.
[01:01:18.000 --> 01:01:28.320] I mean, so first we can think about whether that is, in fact, raising birth rates back up to two to a level to stabilize the populations.
[01:01:28.400 --> 01:01:30.040] Or just sort of look at the statistical facts.
[01:01:29.760 --> 01:01:35.240] And so, you know, there are many countries that have much more generous welfare states than the United States.
[01:01:35.880 --> 01:01:40.920] Child care subsidies, child tax credits, university, public university is free.
[01:01:41.080 --> 01:01:44.840] So, you know, in the U.S., the average birth rate right now is 1.6.
[01:01:44.840 --> 01:01:46.920] In Denmark, it's 1.5.
[01:01:46.920 --> 01:01:49.640] In Sweden and Norway, it's 1.4.
[01:01:49.640 --> 01:01:52.600] In Finland and Canada, it's 1.3.
[01:01:52.600 --> 01:01:59.960] So if you look at the places where these sorts of policies are in place, you don't see higher birth rates.
[01:01:59.960 --> 01:02:01.480] You see lower birth rates.
[01:02:02.120 --> 01:02:06.120] And I think if we think about that, that makes sense.
[01:02:06.120 --> 01:02:09.720] I mean, let me sort of ask you to consider a hypothetical.
[01:02:10.680 --> 01:02:21.240] Would you have agreed to marry somebody different for a few thousand dollars for a $3,000 tax credit or something like that, right?
[01:02:21.240 --> 01:02:22.520] And no, right?
[01:02:22.760 --> 01:02:24.200] I sort of ask people that.
[01:02:24.280 --> 01:02:26.120] No one's ever said yes yet.
[01:02:27.240 --> 01:02:38.280] And that's because who you married, how you made your family formation decisions, is one of the biggest decisions in constructing your life and writing your own autobiography.
[01:02:38.680 --> 01:02:43.880] And even a $3,000 tax credit isn't going to change who you marry.
[01:02:43.880 --> 01:02:59.080] And so, given that we can all see that about that sort of family formation decision, I think we should recognize the limited power of government spending of this sort to influence our decisions about how many kids to have.
[01:02:59.400 --> 01:03:29.120] I'm not saying that a child tax credit of $4,000 or $5,000 would result in literally the exact same set of babies being born as would be born without it, but we should expect it to be a much smaller deal in the decisions people make, to not be what might bring society back up to two, just like we don't see higher birth rates in the societies that have things like that.
[01:03:29.120 --> 01:03:49.280] I think whatever the change is going to be, it's going to have to be a much bigger rethink in parenting and care work and frankly, whether to welcome depopulation or think it's something to avoid.
[01:03:49.280 --> 01:04:27.520] I mean, if the question is what sort of legislation or government policy should we be pursuing in order to stabilize the population instead of depopulating, I might worry that that's asking the wrong question and starting from the wrong place, that we're not yet at the point where it makes sense to be jumping to a policy or a legislative solution because we're frankly not at the point where most people have a consensus that depopulation would be something to avoid and that we should try to stabilize the population.
[01:04:27.600 --> 01:04:35.280] Instead, most people, if they think about it at all, might welcome depopulation or just think that it's a perfectly acceptable default.
[01:04:35.280 --> 01:04:46.800] And so that's not a solution, that's not a situation where any sort of policy change is going to be likely to be appropriate or to be effective.
[01:04:46.800 --> 01:05:05.400] And so, if somebody's asking what to do, I think a good place to start is with learning the facts and getting up to speed about the situation and starting having these conversations with people, starting to raise the question to people about whether depopulation is something to welcome.
[01:05:05.720 --> 01:05:10.680] I mean, I don't want to be, I don't want to sound too pessimistic.
[01:05:10.680 --> 01:05:16.040] I wouldn't have written a book about this if I didn't think that change were possible.
[01:05:16.360 --> 01:05:25.240] But the main reason that I see to be optimistic and to think that change might be possible is to think that we're just at the very beginning of facing up to this challenge.
[01:05:25.240 --> 01:05:29.000] And most people haven't come to terms with the magnitude of this yet.
[01:05:29.000 --> 01:05:35.800] And so depopulation, yes, is the path that we're on, but it's not inevitable.
[01:05:36.440 --> 01:05:45.480] And, you know, as we've said so many times today, humans make decisions in their societies responding to information and knowledge and incentives.
[01:05:45.480 --> 01:05:50.440] And so that's why we think that something else might be possible, but it's not going to be automatic.
[01:05:50.760 --> 01:06:04.840] Maybe review for us briefly the two attempts by governments to make populations go down, like China with the one-child rule, or in the other direction with Ceaușescu's Romania trying to have more babies.
[01:06:04.840 --> 01:06:08.040] And both of these programs ended disasters.
[01:06:08.360 --> 01:06:08.680] Right.
[01:06:08.680 --> 01:06:22.360] So both were disasters in terms of imposing a harsh and coercive will of the government on people's lives and on their private and family decision-making and harming people in many ways.
[01:06:22.360 --> 01:06:37.640] But neither policy achieved the big change, lasting, enduring big change in birth rates, that people that the designers might have expected.
[01:06:37.640 --> 01:06:43.800] So, in the case of Romania and Ceaușescu, it's relatively easier to see that in the data.
[01:06:43.800 --> 01:07:04.160] You see, right after the decree 770, which more than banned abortion, implemented, required pelvic exams at work for women to see if they were pregnant, so that they could be prevented from having an abortion, a truly awful policy.
[01:07:04.400 --> 01:07:11.200] And you do see an immediate spike in birth rates once that happened because people didn't see it coming.
[01:07:11.520 --> 01:07:19.360] But then, once people understood that this was the regime and the situation, they started making different decisions for their lives.
[01:07:19.360 --> 01:07:33.200] And you see birth rates in Romania falling over the next years, you know, roughly in parallel with the rate that they were falling in other sort of middle-developed countries at that time.
[01:07:34.320 --> 01:07:36.960] And so, so people adjusted.
[01:07:38.800 --> 01:07:53.440] Then in China, you know, where there was the one-child policy, which had the opposite intentions to force people not to have children, to very harshly penalize people who do have.
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[01:09:20.840 --> 01:09:21.880] Have children.
[01:09:24.760 --> 01:09:32.280] People sometimes say, well, of course we know that the government can control birth rates because we see that China had a one-child policy.
[01:09:32.280 --> 01:09:35.000] We see that birth rates in China are low.
[01:09:35.000 --> 01:09:37.960] Therefore, it must have been the one-child policy that did it.
[01:09:38.360 --> 01:09:56.200] But the thing is, if you look at other middle-income countries, including China's Asian neighbors, but also in, for example, Latin America or India, that were undergoing similar socioeconomic development and transformations at the same time, improvements in education, improvements in female literacy, improvements in living standards.
[01:09:56.200 --> 01:10:16.720] If you look at other countries that were similarly developing and changing over the same time period, you see declines in birth rates over the same time period that were just as large or larger, which suggests that China would have been very likely to have the same sort of decline in birth rates, even without the one-child policy.
[01:10:14.840 --> 01:10:19.760] So it wouldn't have been the one-child policy that caused it.
[01:10:20.080 --> 01:10:29.920] That's not to say that China would have landed at exactly the same birth rate out to three decimal points, but it would have been in basically the same place.
[01:10:30.240 --> 01:10:44.000] And so facts like this tell us that there's just a lot less oomph for leverage in government coercive control about birth rates than we're accustomed to believing.
[01:10:44.640 --> 01:10:46.480] Okay, you bus get this question.
[01:10:46.480 --> 01:10:50.400] What is the carrying capacity of the earth in terms of people?
[01:10:50.400 --> 01:10:51.760] What's the right number?
[01:10:52.080 --> 01:10:53.280] I don't know.
[01:10:53.280 --> 01:10:54.960] I don't think anybody knows.
[01:10:54.960 --> 01:11:01.680] I think that's beyond our climate science and our social science.
[01:11:04.080 --> 01:11:26.400] If you are convinced that the right number of people for the population to stabilize at is some number lower than we have today, then what I, I can't offer you proof that that's not the case because I don't think anyone knows what the exact correct number is.
[01:11:26.400 --> 01:11:29.360] But here is, or greater than today, for that matter.
[01:11:29.360 --> 01:11:33.680] Here's what I think we can say, which is important.
[01:11:34.000 --> 01:11:54.640] If you want the population to stabilize at 8 billion people, if you want the population to stabilize at 10 billion people, if you want the population to stabilize at 4 billion or 2 billion or 1 billion people, whatever size you might want the population to someday stabilize at, that's going to require an average birth rate around 2.
[01:11:54.640 --> 01:12:11.160] And so, even if what you want is for the size of the world population to someday stabilize at around 2 million people, once birth rates fall below two, that's going to require an increase in the birth rate and being able to sustain higher birth rates at around two.
[01:12:11.160 --> 01:12:25.880] And so, whatever size you might want the population to stabilize at, including one much lower than today, you face fundamentally the same open question of social science, which is what might cause birth rates to go up and then stay there.
[01:12:25.880 --> 01:12:29.880] And that's a big open question because it's unprecedented.
[01:12:29.880 --> 01:12:40.360] There have been 26 countries where, in birth cohorts since 1950, we've seen lifetime average birth rates fall below 1.9.
[01:12:40.360 --> 01:12:46.200] And in zero of those 26 countries, have we ever seen it go back up to two?
[01:12:46.200 --> 01:12:50.840] And so, there's no blueprint ready to go.
[01:12:50.840 --> 01:13:03.080] So, whatever size you might want the population to someday stabilize at, we face the same question of how to support people in choosing a birth rate of two.
[01:13:03.960 --> 01:13:26.440] So, but in terms of like developmental economics, can we get to the point where there's no more poverty and then up from there, where you get like a post, what's sometimes called post-scarcity economics or trekonomics, where everybody has a duplicating machine and you can order tea, Earl Gray, hot like Captain Picard, and you can have anything you want.
[01:13:26.440 --> 01:13:36.440] I mean, or is it going to be a hedonic treadmill, like some economists say, and people will never be happy because they'll always want more of whatever it is the other guy has?
[01:13:38.680 --> 01:13:39.320] I don't know.
[01:13:39.320 --> 01:13:44.120] That sounds like a question about the Four Noble Truths or something, whether people will ever be happy.
[01:13:45.840 --> 01:13:59.600] I mean, I do think that even if we had radically more wonderful technology, a lot of the costs and the hassle of being a parent would be the same.
[01:13:59.840 --> 01:14:17.200] You know, even if we had a baby button that you could push and get a baby without having to have pregnancies or infertility or miscarriages or the risks and pain of childbirth, even that would be wonderful.
[01:14:17.200 --> 01:14:20.400] That would improve a lot of people's lives if we had a baby button like that.
[01:14:21.280 --> 01:14:30.720] It would have improved my family where we had three miscarriages and a lot of sadness and uncertainty.
[01:14:30.720 --> 01:14:32.480] I think it would be really meaningful to people.
[01:14:32.480 --> 01:14:56.960] I'm not sure that even a baby button like that would, well, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take us off the path to depopulation because the thing is, as hard and challenging as pregnancy, becoming pregnant, and childbirth are for many people, having a kid is something that takes many years and decades after that.
[01:14:56.960 --> 01:15:00.800] You know, once the kid's on the outside, the work isn't done.
[01:15:01.440 --> 01:15:12.880] And so I think, you know, if we're talking about science fiction futures, I think even a future with artificial wombs would probably still be one that's on the path to depopulation.
[01:15:12.880 --> 01:15:18.880] I mean, we do have a lot more now than people had in the past to help us raise kids.
[01:15:18.880 --> 01:15:25.680] And, you know, I don't just mean things like iPads for them to watch or the snoo to rock them to sleep.
[01:15:25.680 --> 01:15:31.240] I mean, I mean, you know, dishwashers and laundry machines and innovations like that.
[01:15:31.240 --> 01:15:41.800] I mean, I think, you know, if my kid wakes me up in the middle of the night and says, I peed my bed or I threw up in bed, I can take all the sheets, put them in the laundry machine, press go.
[01:15:42.040 --> 01:15:51.400] You know, I'm rich enough that we own a second pair of sheets, which not everybody would have in the past, and put it on the bed, you know, give them a snuggle and back off to bed.
[01:15:51.400 --> 01:15:53.400] That's easier than it would have been in the past.
[01:15:53.720 --> 01:15:57.560] But on the other hand, it's not that much easier, right?
[01:15:57.560 --> 01:16:04.680] Like you're still getting woken up in the middle of the night by your sick kid, and that's still a pain.
[01:16:04.760 --> 01:16:07.800] And, you know, you're still going to be tired in the next morning.
[01:16:07.800 --> 01:16:15.000] So if we have magical machines that can make us tea, is that going to solve the problem?
[01:16:15.000 --> 01:16:15.880] I don't know.
[01:16:15.880 --> 01:16:23.640] You know, care work and being a parent is probably still going to be pretty human effort and time intensive.
[01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:30.440] Okay, let's kind of wrap up here and look at the kind of deeper causal issues here.
[01:16:30.440 --> 01:16:32.920] Why are people having fewer children?
[01:16:32.920 --> 01:16:38.360] Okay, so this is women making decisions about family size.
[01:16:38.360 --> 01:16:46.360] And if you educate and economically empower women, they're just less likely to have more children.
[01:16:46.360 --> 01:16:49.000] Is it something along those lines that you often hear?
[01:16:49.000 --> 01:16:54.360] Therefore, the solution to overpopulation is to educate and empower women and it'll happen naturally.
[01:16:54.360 --> 01:16:58.920] Something like that, a bottom-up, since it's not top-down from the government, it's bottom-up.
[01:16:59.240 --> 01:17:14.520] And then one last point, like back to Genean Twangy's generations, because I asked her, why is it people are, you know, just developing their careers slower and not getting married and not having children until later and only having one child?
[01:17:14.520 --> 01:17:18.400] I mean, it's not like somebody sat them down and said, this is the plan for your generation.
[01:17:18.720 --> 01:17:27.360] And our explanation was really just kind of cultural shift and norms in which everybody you know is waiting to have children and get married.
[01:17:27.360 --> 01:17:30.720] So you don't even really think about it because that's the norm now.
[01:17:30.720 --> 01:17:32.320] Something like that.
[01:17:32.640 --> 01:17:38.240] You know, there are a lot of theories out there about why birth rates are low and falling.
[01:17:38.480 --> 01:17:41.600] You know, professors like me are paid to make theories.
[01:17:41.760 --> 01:17:43.440] So there are lots of ideas out there.
[01:17:43.440 --> 01:17:44.000] Okay, give us a question.
[01:17:44.320 --> 01:17:51.120] But I don't think any of them explain and capture the overall bigness of falling birth rates.
[01:17:51.120 --> 01:17:55.840] Both the bigness over time, that this is something that's not newly emergent.
[01:17:55.840 --> 01:17:58.320] It's been happening for decades or centuries.
[01:17:58.320 --> 01:18:07.680] And the bigness across space that we see low and falling birth rates in societies around the world, including ones that are really different from one another.
[01:18:07.680 --> 01:18:08.800] And so you're right.
[01:18:08.800 --> 01:18:17.280] One theory that we sometimes hear, especially from social conservatives, is that it's about the decline of religion.
[01:18:17.280 --> 01:18:23.200] And so we need to go back to a more religious time or the decline of marriages.
[01:18:23.520 --> 01:18:32.000] But if you look, you know, in a Pew survey, 90% of people in Latin America said that they're Christian, and the average birth rate there is 1.8.
[01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:41.440] And in India, you know, almost everybody has religion as an active force in their life, and birth rates there are below two.
[01:18:41.440 --> 01:18:50.040] And if you think it's about marriage or what you were saying about delaying, you know, entry into parenthood.
[01:18:50.040 --> 01:18:58.080] Look again in India, where it's now below two, where almost everybody gets married, almost nobody gets divorced.
[01:18:58.400 --> 01:19:03.480] You know, many or most, I don't have it at the top of my head if those marriages are arranged marriages.
[01:19:05.160 --> 01:19:13.080] And the average age of having a first kid is in the early 20s, a number like 20 years old.
[01:19:13.080 --> 01:19:17.560] So that's not a society where people are delaying childbearing.
[01:19:17.560 --> 01:19:27.800] And, you know, as important as this narrative about conflict between career and family, especially for women, is in a place like the United States or Europe.
[01:19:27.800 --> 01:19:33.240] In fact, Career and Family is the title of Claudia Golden's book about this conflict.
[01:19:33.240 --> 01:19:35.240] She's a Nobel Prize winner in economics.
[01:19:35.640 --> 01:19:49.320] As important as that might be in some places, here again, I think we learned something important by looking at the example of India, because in India, female labor force participation is 40%, which is to say pretty low.
[01:19:49.320 --> 01:19:51.320] And still we see below replacement birth rates.
[01:19:51.320 --> 01:19:56.280] So that's not the conflict that's driving low birth rates there.
[01:19:56.520 --> 01:20:00.600] Nor, you know, look at South Korea, where the birth rate is below one, right?
[01:20:00.600 --> 01:20:03.720] I don't think that's anybody's idea of a feminist paradise.
[01:20:03.720 --> 01:20:08.520] It has the most unequal gender pay gap in the OECD statistics.
[01:20:08.840 --> 01:20:19.320] So none of these theories that we hear, whether it's marriage or religion or feminism or about the economy, you see this in places where the state's a big part of the economy.
[01:20:19.320 --> 01:20:22.280] You see this in places where the state's a smaller part of the economy.
[01:20:22.680 --> 01:20:25.240] Birth rates are below two in Vermont.
[01:20:25.240 --> 01:20:27.320] Birth rates are below two in Texas.
[01:20:27.320 --> 01:20:31.920] Birth rates are below two in Massachusetts and birth rates are below two in Utah.
[01:20:31.720 --> 01:20:32.320] All right.
[01:20:32.920 --> 01:20:54.720] And so I don't think we have a theory that explains the bigness of this yet, which is one of the reasons why I think that global depopulation is the most likely future, because it's seen in so many different places and has been ongoing for so long that it's likely to be reflecting something pretty big and robust.
[01:20:55.040 --> 01:20:55.920] Amazing.
[01:20:55.920 --> 01:20:56.800] Gosh.
[01:20:56.800 --> 01:21:01.920] Okay, I guess the Elon method is not the solution for most of us.
[01:21:02.000 --> 01:21:08.080] Have a bunch of babies with a bunch of different baby mamas and you have enough money to keep everybody happy and quiet.
[01:21:08.080 --> 01:21:19.920] I don't know if you saw that Wall Street Journal article on him about he has like a whole department of people that do nothing but run his family issues, all the different wives and girlfriends and children and so on.
[01:21:19.920 --> 01:21:23.120] That's obviously not the solution for most of us.
[01:21:23.680 --> 01:21:24.320] So I don't know.
[01:21:24.320 --> 01:21:31.280] Maybe it's just it is a cultural shift as we become more aware of the issue of depopulation.
[01:21:31.280 --> 01:21:36.000] And maybe we need a shift in the emphasis on people.
[01:21:36.000 --> 01:21:39.920] Your issue here on what is your title here?
[01:21:39.920 --> 01:21:40.800] People are, what is it?
[01:21:40.800 --> 01:21:41.760] People are good.
[01:21:41.760 --> 01:21:43.120] Or the case for people.
[01:21:43.120 --> 01:21:44.400] Yeah, the case for people.
[01:21:44.400 --> 01:21:45.280] Maybe that's it.
[01:21:45.280 --> 01:21:47.920] Maybe we've had such a negative attitude toward people.
[01:21:47.920 --> 01:21:51.200] You get these anti-natalists and so on.
[01:21:52.000 --> 01:21:53.120] It's great to be a parent.
[01:21:53.120 --> 01:21:54.160] It's fun to have kids.
[01:21:54.160 --> 01:21:55.520] Just do it.
[01:21:55.840 --> 01:21:57.680] Maybe not at two in the morning.
[01:21:58.000 --> 01:21:58.480] Yes.
[01:21:58.480 --> 01:21:59.520] Well, that's true.
[01:21:59.520 --> 01:22:00.720] I guess.
[01:22:01.360 --> 01:22:02.320] Yeah, all right.
[01:22:02.320 --> 01:22:04.960] All right, Dean, that's a good place to end it.
[01:22:05.280 --> 01:22:07.360] This is just such a fascinating subject.
[01:22:07.360 --> 01:22:08.320] Here it is again.
[01:22:08.320 --> 01:22:11.920] After the spike, population progress and the case for people.
[01:22:11.920 --> 01:22:13.120] Yeah, check it out.
[01:22:13.120 --> 01:22:13.840] Great read.
[01:22:13.840 --> 01:22:14.720] Really enjoyed it.
[01:22:14.720 --> 01:22:16.240] Just data-driven.
[01:22:16.240 --> 01:22:16.720] Love that.
[01:22:16.720 --> 01:22:19.120] All the economic stuff, really important.
[01:22:19.120 --> 01:22:20.080] Enjoyed that.
[01:22:20.040 --> 01:22:21.360] Um, thank you for your work.
[01:22:21.360 --> 01:22:21.840] Thank you for your time.
[01:22:22.080 --> 01:22:23.120] Thank you for having me.
[01:22:23.120 --> 01:22:31.480] And um, let me say, I remember reading your book in 1992, yes, exactly.
[01:22:29.040 --> 01:22:35.080] Yes, yes, I got it from the borders in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[01:22:29.280 --> 01:22:36.440] Oh, you're the one, okay.
[01:22:36.600 --> 01:22:37.880] Vividly remember it.
[01:22:37.880 --> 01:22:48.440] Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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