Jennifer Sciubba: The Weirdest Thing Ever to Happen to Humans

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Natural selection selects for things that make more of themselves. I mean, the entirety of Darwin's thesis could be restated as there will be more of things that make more of themselves. Which is why if you give a pine tree infinite soil in water and sunlight, you will get infinite pine trees. And that's also true of bacteria and dolphins and pill bugs. Give some raccoons infinity trash. There will be infinity raccoons. And so you would think that this would also be true of humans. And for a long time, we worried with good reason that this would be the case, that we would keep providing more resources and they would keep being more of us. As we cured diseases, as we increased sanitation, as we produced more food, the human population doubled from two to four billion in 50 years. And then it doubled again from four to eight billion in another 50 years. But there will not be 16 billion humans 50 years from now. In fact, it looks like there will never be 16 billion humans. Not only that, we might not hit 10 billion. And there might be fewer people on earth than 2100 than there are today. There are people who argue very strongly that this is extremely good news. And there are people who argue even more strongly that this is very bad news. But the thing that really confuses me is that there are also people who will argue that this isn't news at all. One thing I know for sure, this is definitely news. It is wildly different from the story that I was taught in my environmental studies classes just 20 years ago. In some ways, it may be the weirdest thing that has ever happened to humans. Populations have declined before, but only for extremely bad reasons, famines, wars, and plagues. This is weird and interesting and confusing. Everyone has their own pet theories about why it's happening, but it is not as clean as you might imagine. In fact, we don't really understand why it's happening. And that's crazy. And then there's the question of what it means for our capacity to innovate, for our ability to care for the elderly, for our ability to maintain our cities, for biodiversity, for the climate, for the earth, and for humans. Jennifer Shuba is a political demographer. She's also the president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that has been studying global population data for almost 100 years. She pays close attention to not just population and immigration and how all of these numbers play out, but how political leaders take those numbers and use them, and sometimes misuse them. Her most recent book is toxic demography. I want to talk to her about how weird this all is, about why every clean explanation for why it's happening seems to fall apart, and how people are reacting to this, about which problems are real, and which problems just maybe kind of feel real and heavy, but maybe aren't as big of a deal. But also about whether we are once again, about to be very confidently wrong about the future of humans. Jennifer Shuba, welcome to my podcast. It's called Humans. Thank you so much. I can't wait to talk about all the weirdness with you. We're so weird. Are we going extinct? I love that you call it weird, 'cause I also think it's really weird, and it's weird enough that I haven't gotten tired of studying this one day in my entire conscious life, also coming out of an environmental studies background as well, and are we going extinct? I don't think so, and I don't think there's any chance that we will, but is there gonna be a lot of drama between now and whatever happens? Yeah, there is. Oh God, there's gonna be a lot of drama between now and whatever happens. So one thing that I think about this in the frame of, so I got my masters in environmental studies like 20 years ago. Even then I was reading Beyond Malthus, the population bomb had gone out of fashion at least, but the story that we had been telling ourselves turned out to be so wrong, but the story that I got from that education turned out to be not what we ended up with, and so there's a part of me that wonders like, you study this in great detail. Are we sure, are we sure that this is definitely happening? I actually think it's a two part question. Were we wrong and are we sure? Because when I think about what I also learned, we are like right on the same timeline and the same kind of background, but I kind of flipped off into the politics part of things and steep into the population, but the way we were taught and the way everything was framed is that this would go on forever, but that's what made it into our educational materials and what didn't make it into our educational materials was, what are all of the policies and educational shifts, adjacent trends that are happening that actually ended up changing the population trajectory? It's like we just learned it, I did anyway, from this biological standpoint, where humans and their environment, the natural environment, but not humans and their environment, and the whole range of sociocultural issues that were around them, if we had studied it that way, which kudos to the program that I helped set up at Rhodes College with others, we intentionally framed it to say, you need to study all of this together 'cause you're gonna see a really different picture. So I don't know so much that it was wrong, per se, as that maybe we weren't looking where we should have been looking. And also probably, I think that there is an element in like this is very hard to get away from, of like, it's easy to look at the scariest thing and the scariest thing is that like, if there's gonna be 16 billion of us, that just seems like an impossible problem. And like, why wouldn't you think that there would be when we doubled in 50 years twice in a row? - Yeah, yeah. And I think some of that's a communication piece too, because if only we were better at communicating, and if only our human brains and attention span could handle nuance, we would say, if this, then that. - Yeah. - And that's where we are right now too, because you also ask, are we sure about where we're heading now? Well, I think the most useful way to look at where we're headed now is to say, if this trend continues, then this is what it will look like. It will look like a world of fewer billions. It will look like a world where, you know, the number of shrinking countries is vastly larger than it is today, much older global population. Some of that is baked in to be sure, but some of it is not. And so what's helpful, I think, about it, if this, then that is you say, but if something else, it would look different. Is there anything we can do if we want to to shape a different future? - This is so interesting to me, because there has to be a good reason for the if. You know, if my grandmother was a bike, is not a particularly useful if, but if population trends continue the way that they have gone, and there's good reason to think that they will, because in countries that started out, that hit a fertility of two children per women, they didn't stay there. They tend to have universally continued to decrease with various pauses here and there. - Absolutely, I think that's a great point. And many people, I think the first time I was really introduced to demography, it was it's like a glacier and it moves slowly, but it has a big impact. And you hear different ways that people describe it, but what I love about it is there's much less uncertainty. So the ifs are much more realistic than if my grandmother was a bike, because we know that to me, it's powerful because it reduces the bounce of uncertainty. I mean, for example, we know how many 65-year-olds there will be in 40 years. - Wow, what else lets you look out that far? - We do have a good idea of the people who have already been born and what's gonna happen to them. - So much of the future world is shaped by who's already born, especially when we live to be three quarters of a century or more years old. So some of the ifs we can relax into. We know some of this. - Right, and an interesting stat that I heard you say is this year is peak 18-year-olds in America? - Oh, yeah, so they're freshmen, they're finishing their freshman year of college. So the peak 18-year-olds are there wrapping things up. And that means that I have friends who have gone through the college admissions process this year. I was like, oh, they have a slightly smaller cohort, nerdy, nerdy, as is going to affect their prospects for admission, maybe it doesn't shake out that quickly, but here's some anecdotally that it does. So if you're in the business of college admissions, if you're in the business of building desks that are used in kindergarten, or something like that, or adult diapers, and you can have some more certainty than if you're in other kind of businesses like eyeliner or something. - Yeah, this is a weird thing, I think, especially for higher education, where it's like, oh, so what you're saying is like we're gonna be competing for smaller and smaller cohorts of students from here on out. - If our students are defined as, and this is where I think like talk about power in if this than that, if your students are 18-year-olds, which I've always been part of small liberal arts colleges, but if your students are those 68 year olds who are like, well, dang, I got it. I feel really good and I'm going to keep going and I've always wanted to be a nurse. Now you've got something different. Yeah, I think it is actually at this point the majority of college students in America are what we call non-traditional students. This is the thing that I, of course, am in because I have a nonprofit in the educational media space and that world, you talk to college presidents and they are thinking a lot about how college is not a four-year experience. It's like a thing that people come, they go out of, they come back into, they come out of and go back and do and they're like, we're always going to be learning new things. I like that model honestly and so that could totally be a way that like this shifts and it is just like one example of like, if you take this seriously and you probably should because all trends kind of point in this way, then like, it doesn't mean panic, everything crashes. It means a different world and it's not like we've never had a different world before. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little bit about why we think the if is strong? So first of all, can we like define total fertility rate? Okay. We talk about like what's happening in the world, like give us a picture of where we are in this strange transition. Yeah. So the thing that we really can latch on to to make it as simple as possible to understand how drastic these changes have been, we can use a measure like total fertility rate which is basically the average number of children expected to be born to a woman in her lifetime if age specific rates prevail. Okay. So long, long definition there to be exact about it, but it's like, if this stuff keeps going, this is what we could roughly expect in terms of births. And so what's nice about that as a number is that it is comparable as a snapshot across countries. So you could just use this one to say, like, what's the difference between, you know, the United States and, you know, China, for example, and you could say, ah, well, the United States women on average have about 1.6 children in their lifetimes. And then China now have only about one child in their lifetime on average. And so this is a shift. And this is, I think that a bunch of people will have just gone, huh? I know. Because that's not what we think. And particularly like what really makes people say, huh, is when, you know, this topic comes up that I'm like, yeah, India is below replacement fertility and people are like, India. India? I thought that they were having like six babies per mom. Yeah. It's a great example of how quickly things changed. And in ways that if you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't have expected. But, you know, when Paul Erlich goes to India in the late 1960s and wants to study butterflies and he doesn't find enough butterflies and he gets mad. What does he find instead? A whole bunch of people. And when you read the opening paragraphs of the population bomb, I mean, they're pretty offensive. These describing the people, what they're doing on the street, what they're doing everywhere. And there's people, people, people. And those people now have below replacement fertility rates. And in some areas of India, way below replacement fertility rates, it's a really remarkable. And we've seen a shift at the global scale as well. We now have a world where the total fertility rate is really right around that replacement level and replace it level just simply define it as basically replace both parents. So it's two, like a little above two because not everybody makes it to live long enough to reproductive years. So we're about 2.2 on average for the globe. What a shift. And it is still headed downward. Yeah. It is still headed downward and we see countries. There's almost like an instinct in my chest. Can I talk a little bit about ecology for a second? Because this is how it works in ecology. Populations replace themselves. And it feels like that's sort of the natural law. Like if you have a particular area of forest, you're going to have a stable number of pine trees and you're going to have a stable number of deer, you're going to have a stable number of mice. But this is not because they like have figured out how to be in concert with their environment. Yeah. It is because they have reached the carrying capacity of that environment. It can carry no more mice. And so like the mice have more babies than will survive to adulthood. And if there's a little bit more like mouse resources, then the mouse fill up to that new carrying capacity really like mice do this very quickly. Other species do it much more slowly. But you've immediately hit that new carrying capacity and then like, you know, over time you see that the carrying capacity will flow like higher and lower. There will be an amount and they will always be at it. And so there's a little bit of a vibe that you could carry out of that, which is that organisms find their like natural spot. But they don't. They are forced into the natural spot, forced by circumstance. And we are not forced by circumstance into a natural spot. And so you might think if you just sort of like have a vibe around this that we'd hit to and we'd be like, we did it, everybody. We're going to be at replacement rate because that's what things naturally do. They naturally get to the replacement rate. But they don't. There isn't something special about 2.1. We will go up and down and all round and like we don't really know what's going on. And we were much higher than that for a long time. And now the world, two thirds of the world lives in a country with below replacement rate fertility. And that doesn't seem to necessarily have like a clear bottom. So like South Korea, I think, is the country with the lowest fertility rate. Yeah. I think they're still the lowest to, you know, probably 0.75 you can hear anecdotally from folks over there in stats that it's actually probably a little bit lower and just waiting on those numbers to come out. We'll see. But yeah. And you know what? It's interesting about the carrying capacity part of things too, just to pick up on what you said. If it were the case that the reason that humans were having fewer and fewer children is because well, maybe we did hit carrying capacity, it just didn't look like we thought it would. Maybe it was itself a vibe than actually our reproductive patterns would look really different because, you know, those in these higher income countries, they're not feeling the carrying capacity in the sense of relationship with the environment. And yet they have far below replacement level fertility. Yeah. And the people who live in the world in places that they are much more live closer to their environment, meaning they're much more immediately dependent upon availability of land, fresh water fisheries, et cetera, they actually have higher than replacement fertility rates often quite high. So the carrying capacity one is really tough to apply to the human species. And this is like what's so strange. This is why I keep thinking, like, God, this is weird because like the evolutionary drive is like things that make more of themselves, make more of themselves. And so any trait that lets you make more of yourself is selected for. And so there tends to be a very strong drive toward the creation of babies, not always. There's different kinds of species. But there's a very strong drive toward the protection or the raising, the kind of organism that we are, very strong drive toward the creation, very strong drive toward the protection and carrying for those. So we were for almost all of our history, of course, at carrying capacity, very small increases in population as we develop new technologies. Then when there's this inflection point, you know, you can kind of count it at the onset of agriculture. You can count it at other times. But it really hit with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and scientific revolution and understanding our world much more deeply where we just got way better at making our babies not die. Yeah. Which is like, wow, one of the things that I love the most about people is like, of course, we want so badly for this one thing, which is just don't have our babies die. And we've gotten much better at that over the last 100 years. Yeah. Of course, we still have a drive like sex feels good. Yeah. And that's the way that babies are made. So like we have all that like machinery is still in place. But like we're making different decisions and it is, it turns out like we're too complicated for those old systems to like work on us in a weird way. Can I ask you a question about this? How much of this do we think could be that we're reproducing ourselves now in really different ways? I mean, think about, I know I'm kind of just coming to this as we sit here and talk about this because you know, you're someone who's got a bunch of like, I don't know, infinite number of videos of yourself online. I have a much smaller number of videos of myself online. But they exist. And so I'm just out here procreating an Adobe Premiere. Exactly. Like, you know, I see myself, I have two kids and, you know, I can look at them and I see myself in them. So I have reproduced, you know, an end of two with them. Yeah. You got your replacement right? It will go work. Thanks. But I sure do reproduce myself a lot of other ways. And so does most people if they have, you know, social media, etc., how much do we think that this idea of what drives us is seeing ourselves out there in the world and our legacy lasting? I don't know. Yeah, I'm going to take this another layer of abstraction because that seems like the right thing to do now, which is we understand in a really deep way, like even if we don't understand it, we know it that we aren't just biological. We are also cultural. And so when we think about agency in the world, there is a way that for a long time, the biggest piece of our agency in the world was our children. And now maybe that is not the case. Now we have all these other sort of like openings for agency in the world. And we understand ourselves because it is true, even though we don't think of it in this frame, I think, all the time. We understand ourselves to be so cultural and so technological that we are doing the thing. Yeah. Really, that's an interesting thought because like it maybe says, well, what if the population will go down, but actually like humanity will kind of continue to increase because people will have more agency. People will be like creating more in a way like we will be building humans. It seems like the end of the conversation conversation and we're doing it at the beginning. This is an interesting series of thoughts. We are in a way like if we can provide more agency for the people who are here, maybe it isn't about like there's all these moral arguments. about like why there should be more people because we want to increase thriving. There's a desire in my chest for there to be some logic that we have not yet uncovered to this, that it is actually about like an instinct that we have, that we don't know, that we are more than biological. - I think even beyond an instinct that we have uncovered, I think there are some other ways to think about this moment where we are and where we're headed. And I think a lot of us are talking about them, but they are just not adopted by the people in power. And what I mean by that is there's still too much emphasis on how many of us are there. And there's still far too little emphasis on, you know, what the quality of life actually is or who matters. I mean, you think about places where there's still tremendously high infant mortality rates, you know, almost five million people die every year. Children die before their fifth birthday. Like that is not a world that we would consider to be at all a thriving world. And so why do we not think more in terms like that? We know that this exists, but we're just so fixated on the wrong thing. And I think we could get ourselves to the point. In fact, honestly, what's the real likely outcome of all of this shift is that we do force ourselves into a point where we say it's not just about the number of people, but it's about how well we live and the most important step that comes after it is possible to live a good life with a smaller population. That's the piece we haven't quite done yet. And there's so much panic because we've never seen this before in all of human history. We don't yet know how possible it is to live a really good life with a smaller population. - It's so weird that this also sort of coincides with this period of, you know, mechanization, robotization, whatever intelligence artificial intelligence has. And it feels all more related than you would think that it is. - Yeah, I don't think we've let ourselves live a good life. I mean, don't you think about that all the time too? It was supposed to be that technology would free us from things. - Yeah. - What have we done instead? We've increased our productivity. I mean, once we have these, you know, AI tools at work are all like, look how much more I can get done in the same number of hours a day. I did not rest at all from this. So we have headed in the wrong direction. Will there be a point when we finally reap the benefits of all that effort? - Yeah, I don't know. It is interesting. I've been thinking a lot about the Jevons paradox. Do you know this? - No. - This is this idea. There's this guy, I don't know his first name, but his last name was Jevons. And there was this fear that England would run out of coal at the sort of, you know, beginning of the industrial revolution. And of course, it turned out to be a completely legitimate fear. But a lot of people were like, well, look, you know, this new steam engine just got invented and it's like 10 times more efficient. So we're going to use 10 times less coal. And Jevons was like, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to use 100 times more coal because what we have just done is we have made it 10 times cheaper to produce energy with coal. And so we're going to do things with coal that you never thought possible with coal. And I, Jevons, also have no idea what those things are going to be, but they're going to be something. And indeed, you know, like nobody was predicting locomotives when they were building pumps to pump water out of coal mines. So you have this new thing where it's like, oh, we're going to make ourselves much more productive with our intelligence. And it's like, will we sort of reach the point at which we're like, okay, we're good. We did it. Or it is intelligence like coal where it's just like, we've made, you know, manipulating information in useful ways. It's what I'm going to use as a surrogate for intelligence. We've made that much easier. And so what we will find is actually, we have a like much more need. The demand for information being manipulated in useful ways is much higher than we ever thought possible. And higher than our demand for reproduction or our drive for reproduction. Well, isn't that the crazy thing? And maybe like it's because like we're like, oh, look at all of this agency I get to have in the world with all of my manipulation of information because that is what humans really are. There is a book, I don't know, I can't remember what it's called, but I read it by some other colleagues in the demography space. And they made the case over and over again that like, we want the human population to go up because the whole thing about morality is like human thriving. You can't have increased human thriving if you have decreased number of humans. I didn't find myself resonating with that argument. No, and I think one of the things that misses is a lack of imagination. And I understand that if what we have, and really it's understandable, what we have for our body of evidence is what has happened in the past. And if what has happened in the past is that we saw human thriving go up as we saw the number of people go up and you can sort of play a bit of a logic game with that, then it seems like that must be the future. But it also suffers from this lack of imagination that it could actually look different in the future and that honestly, we just maybe haven't had the right evidence to understand this. And part of this is the research space itself. So we don't have granular data. So do you really want to understand what it looks like to have human thriving in terms of shrinking populations then you would have the most granular time series data on Japan. And you would be able to do the most amazing studies. But we don't really have that. So much of this shrinking countries idea is new. There have been shrinking parts of countries in the past. Most of the time there have been shrinking parts of countries is because something bad has happened. Like Detroit or something, collapse of an industry. So we don't have a, what if it's not because there was some pandemic or there was some economic crisis? What if it was just this natural shift, which is like we don't know. So if you don't know, you could say it must be awful or you could say, why would it be good? Yeah, it isn't analogous to a thing we've experienced before. No. It is wholly new. One of the things that you've been thinking about and working on a lot is, okay, we've got this wholly new thing. And so people are immediately projecting their anxiety upon it. I've heard you talking about how like you tell people of fact about the world and one thing you can guarantee is that they're not going to feel neutral about it, but that's all you can guarantee. That's it. So like as a political scientist in the demography space and in the environmental studies space, this is such a valuable set of like weird things you've found yourself having skills in. One, why do you think that this is something that people react to so strongly and immediately project their anxieties onto? Well, I mean, even as you and I come to this conversation today, I'm obviously quite familiar with your work, but there are nuances to how you might feel about population that I would only know by carefully watching your face as we go through this, like, where's his trigger point? What is the number? See, this is too bad. We have cameras on because I like, I'm like studying and reading, you know, do you? I don't know where I'm at. I know. So you can let me know afterwards. Because you can tell somebody this 2.2 number, right? Like we're placed in level utilities at 2.2, but you might say, thank goodness or you might say, what can we do to raise this? Let's do anything at all costs. I think that the right reaction is fascination and curiosity, which is very hard to do, especially because it doesn't really resonate as strongly as the crisis framing. Yeah. I am also aware that there are problems, like there are directed obvious problems that we're just going to have to deal with. It seems very clear that this will be a thing. We are already experiencing it. You know, like every cohort under the 18-year-olds is smaller than the one before. I mean, not everyone, but like there's a clear trajectory in the US. And also this is not a US thing. This is also true in all of the Nordics. It's like in the places of the great of social welfare states. Thailand, yeah. Thailand, it's India. All these places are very different from each other and yet it's happening all over the place. Which is so like every like immediate thought about why it's happening is like, well, what about this country where it's also happening? But like there's definitely like a place to start is like real problems that we know we're going to have to deal with that are almost like sidebarred because they're not as like hot and argumentative as the other things that people bring up. And I want to get to those. But first can we just talk about like some of the real problems that this presents? Yeah, and there are quite a few. And I think, you know, there are reasons why we don't talk about them. Mostly it is that they're politically hard to deal with. So I think a lot of this is where I get to put the politics hat straight on with an answer to it. So there is something about population that always gets under people's skin. And it's like, you know, when we think about people, it is not just counting widgets. This is different religions, this different races, this different, you know, education levels, et cetera. And so inherently we all carry with us a lot of baggage. And so it's never just about people. It's about what baggage are these quote unquote people carrying with them. And that's why you get some of these big feelings about it. But there will be really tremendous impacts of the shift that we're seeing today. Just think about the center of gravity of a population from the youngest stage to the oldest stage. And so if you lined everyone in the United States up from the youngest person to the oldest person, and you ask the person in the middle, raise your hand. How old are you? That goes up over time. I think we're still at 38 years old, but we're headed towards 39, 40 years old, up, up, up. Japan, it's up, you know, obviously much older, like a decade older. And so that means the center of gravity is higher. Well, the way that our economies operate, this is the key. They operate under the premise that we need infinite economic growth. Full stop. Infinite economic growth seems to have come from an infinite supply of people, leaving those childhood dependent ages where they're just, you know, taking, taking taking and doing nothing for the economy, aging into the workforce where they are considered productive, useful members of society. And we count them as not dependents. And then aging, you know, gently into their once again become old age dependents where they have lost not only economic productivity, but I'll promise of economic productivity, which children, you know, still have. And we're just set up to think like that's the way it works. So when you change the center of gravity of a population to these much older ages, you see that there's not a big supply of people aging into the workforce, the workforce itself is shrinking. And then here's the big one far more older people and they live much longer. So everything about the way that we not only are set up institutionally like social security system as a pay as you go system, where current workers pay for current retirees, that's not going to work in this new era. But I think also it's the thinking that it's not going to work, that we only define success as infinite consumption. How much we consume is our marker of a success? Well, that sustained in a population that is going to be half the size in 2100 than it is today. You have to consume twice as much. I'm out of hours in the day. And I have kind of a pretty high consumption. I try not to, you know, I've got my environmental background, but I'm also a member of this society. And so just by being in existing in this society, I'm consuming. For sure. Yeah, I mean, we've transitioned a lot of that already to consuming of services rather than goods. And there's also a ton of services that we consume that are, like, sort of produced once. And then they can be consumed infinite number of times, you know, e-book is like this. So is an Instagram, you know, consumption can sound like, you know, my gene jacket and my car. But it, you know, a lot of consumption now is not physical and kind of can be infinite if allowed to be, but not, it can't be infinite in terms of like the number of people consume. Yeah. Like, there will still be just one Instagram instance per person. Yeah. And will it be, you know, if you're looking at these huge proportions of people who are, you know, between 80 and 85 years old, like, does their consumption of Instagram, even in the year 2050 make up for the fewer gene jackets that they're purchasing? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. So in, like, extraordinarily practical terms, social security needs like an immediate bandage. Right. And then like a long-term rethink, which is really intense. It's really hard, especially if you're like 18 right now and you're paying a dissociative security. Like, oh, I'm not getting my money out of this. And so, you know, when we think about where does the crisis part of this come from? And also, I think this is why we have all this emphasis these days on fertility rates by politicians. The crisis comes from that it is politically, most of the time, nearly impossible to shift these institutions. Right. Because all of the people vote. And if most of them are 65, they're voting for the interests of 65-year-olds. But even before that, you know, that's actually how I had come to the study of this, like, when I made the switch from environment to population was really being driven by this question, does the size of political groups determine their political power? Okay. And so this is something that I had started to look at, like, in dissertation days and the early odds for population aging. And so what I had found then, which let's underscore 20 years ago, aging was not nearly as intense as it was now. It wasn't as widespread. It was that the fascinating thing is that no matter what age you are, your interests were often defined much more by everything else in your life, except for your age. So it could be the region where you live or it could be your race or it could be, you know, your education level. But not so much like, man, I love being 46 years old now, like, me and all the other 46-year-olds in the world. We are all of an exactly equal mind about how we want the world to be. So I do think we need to put some caveats around this that it is easy to assume that an older world means that everyone's only voting in the interests of older people. And forget that older people really disagree with each other quite a bit as well. Like that is part of it. There's no doubt that we have to leave part of this in there. But I think the other is the current set of institutions favor the current powerful people. That's different than thinking about population aging. And it's just hard to change them. And you also end up with a sense of loss for people. You can also start to break down people have done studies where it's like, even if there's someone is, you know, 40 years old, they might say, I don't want to change social security. And you can even say, like, this will benefit you to say, no way. Or you might tell them, you're going to try to raise the retirement age by two years. And it's not even going to affect you for 20 more years. And they say, no way. Well, they're not older yet. The older people actually are like knock yourself up. Raise retirement age as much as you want to because it doesn't affect me. So that's the paradox is that, you know, when we have to do these really difficult things politically, it's not always the older people who are keeping them out. And it's not always that people vote in those interests, but it's hard. And you know what's easier to throw a bunch of cash out there and say, let's just make more babies. Right. Which I do have to say, since you put that at the end here, I can't imagine that's going to work. I did a little back of the napkin calculation for like, the services provided by children before we set up like social security and retirement benefits and Medicare. And the reason why having a bunch of kids was like seen as a sign of status and like, you know, referable to the other outcome is that like, you know, those kids, maybe we're going to help you with agricultural work, but the big thing is like somebody was going to take care of you when you were older. You would have people who loved you in the world. And now that service is still provided by children, don't get me wrong. I do that work. But is provided like a lot of it is provided by the state. And at the same time, the cost of having children used to be basically neutral. You know, like they need a lot of food, but they'd also be working in the fields. But now it's not neutral. And so if you take both of those things into account, it's not like $2,000 gets you even a percent of the way to the economic benefit you used to get from a kid versus the economic cost you now get from a kid. Like we would need a baby bonus of like $200,000 to even get close, be doing like a meaningful fraction of the change that has occurred. And that seems to me like the clearest. Right. Of course, this is how people are like thinking, but it's just sort of like it you know, sort of adds up together and it changes the way society as a whole like fields about parenthood and large families and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We can't underestimate those costs or perception of those costs. Like we're talking about data, right? Yeah. And it's not just money too. It's like the opportunity cost and the wrecking your body, like the pain, the danger, like the physical danger that you go into and pregnancy, all these things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've existed for a long time, but we do seem to be at this moment where those are much more at the forefront. And that's where I think it's not the end of the story. I think we finally got in ourselves to understand that it is an integral part of the story. And now in the you know, research community and the science communication community, we've got to go one step further and say, why? Like why do you feel that way? So we know that the fact that people feel that way is pressuring fertility rates downward and it's around the world. The way meaning like the costs of a kid are high costs, like mostly all of it sounds like a real pain. Yeah. It's scary. You don't know how healthy the kid is going to be like to unknown to uncertain and this around the world, right? And that's what's so amazing about this shift is that we're talking about women and men in Vietnam and in Korea and in Colombia and in Canada. And people are feeling the same way about this. And so there's something about the moment where we are here in the 2020s that people are like, that's not worth it. Yeah. I have a little pet theory that I think I've heard you reference who knows, but like this would be good news if it were the case that we kind of have a world that expects women to sacrifice. Yeah. And then we were like, what if like women had more agency? What if they had more control over their lives? And so they have that control, but we still have the world that expects women to sacrifice. Yeah. One of the weirdest things that I find very weird and other people don't find this weird is that rich people in America are now having more kids than poor people. Yeah. And everybody's like, of course, like that makes perfect sense. And like, yeah, it does. But that's not how it used to be. Like that's not how the world has typically been. It tends to be that people in poorer countries and in poorer communities have more kids. That indicates something happened. Yep. Yep. That sounds right to you. Yeah. Because, you know, if you think about the really wealthy people like basically outsourcing, outsource is all of that. When you have a tremendous amount of money, you can outsource as much of the child bearing and rearing as possible. There's going to be some constraints. There's not always some things that can't be outsource, but you can outsource so much of it. But when you have just slightly less than a ton of money, it's too expensive to outsource a lot of it. That's the thing is like you can be really firmly middle class. Sometimes even upper middle class and not be able to afford outsource as much of it. Yeah. You know, another thing I think we could think about, what if we weren't focused on women, what if we were focused on men? I don't know about evidence around this. But this is my new pet theory is yeah, we've asked women to sacrifice a lot. Women now have more agency. And you know what we're doing in answer? We're asking men to sacrifice more. And men, we know not all men want to have kids either. And maybe they're like, well, thank you, but no, thank you. So that seems like a lot fewer vacations to me. Maybe not. So, you know, we can actually like slice this a different way and say, how have men shifted and how they want to have families and how they want their family life to look? And some of them Or write on board like let's do it. Let's, but some of them are like, you know, thanks. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, what a world we find ourselves in. - Indeed. - So there are these real problems. And like, you know, what do you do with higher education? And housing could get really weird. Where like all these 18-year-olds, this is a big cohort of 18-year-olds. They're all gonna need housing. But then every year after they get housing, we're gonna need fewer houses. And we'll have a bunch considering the scale of the housing crisis in America right now. It's very hard to imagine that in 30 years, we will have too many homes. - I know. - But that's true. We might not have them in the right places. - That's right. But I think we do have to be careful. Like the answer is not just invest in as many homes as possible if you're 20 and hope that that's your retirement. 'Cause you may find that you don't. Nobody wants 'em. - Yeah, that's wild. This is a reason to rent that I hadn't thought of before. - Yeah. - Depending on where you live. But of course, the markets where probably the most demand will be are out of reach of almost every 28 year old in the world. But then there are these really sort of salient debates in this space, really like people are having fights. And it's a lot of peripheral sort of western superiority, white supremacy coming into it. There's like a lot of anxiety about, you know, cultural identity and et cetera. Like these conversations feel like they're going to play a very important role. As much as I am ashamed that our species is having them. - An important role in determining what we decide to do if anything about this moment. Yeah, I think, you know, this is where I have a personal crisis of conscience about my own role in trying to raise the awareness of this issue is that when you can raise awareness, but you don't get to control what people do with that information. And it feels like a moment where so many more people said, wow, that is interesting. First, I was like, how crazy is this? Look at this shift. And then this is why I think it matters and why I think it doesn't. And people say, oh, that is fascinating. And I'm going to take it in a different direction. And so I think we are at this moment where awareness of this topic has, like my mind is blown and peers of mine as well. We cannot believe how many people are paying attention to the population issue in ways that there was like almost silent for decades. I mean, we just could not get people to pay attention to this. You'd tell people you did population and demographics. And they're like, well, next, they take their cocktail and they turn around, they're like, no. I do have to say like all of the numbers we have are because of the work of people. I just want to like put a pin in that. Like this is not numbers that came out of some, like God bestowed them down upon us. Like there's so much work to understand the earth with the level of granularity that we have, which is not as granular as it should be. And there's lots of gaps in our data. But like, oh my God, it's amazing that we even know this is happening. But yeah, I just wanted to say thank you to all of the people who for the last 100 years have been doing this work. - Absolutely. And we just really hope there's a huge crisis in terms of federal data. There's a huge crisis in terms of global data around the demographic and health surveys, which PRB is really involved in advocating for. We may know less in the future. That's not a good thing. - Wow, I hate that sentence so much. - I know, I mean, the promise of technology or technologists was that we would always know more, but you actually may know less. So watch out for that. But there's such a swell of attention to this issue now. And I do see it moving like late 2025 and into 2026. I did start to feel like it was evolving in a positive way beyond just, did you know about this? And now people are like, oh, I do know about it. And then they would say, one more step of evolution. At first, it was, did you know? And we need to make more babies. And now I do think there's a much more nuanced conversation. Like, we're probably not gonna be able to do that. But we're still on it. We're not moved off of this. But the solution set that's proposed has got a little more variety to it than it did six, nine months ago. - Oh, interesting, that's-- - Yeah, well, that's my, again, we're going on vibes here. My vibes come from, you know, who's asking me what question? - Yeah, interesting. - And they have shifted, yeah, they've shifted. - Before we get to that, how do you feel about these? Like, some of the things where people are like, okay, now I have this issue in my head. And so I'm going to apply my racial anxieties to it. Oftentimes, or, you know, it's different anxieties in different places. - Different anxieties, anxiety is about gender. You know, all of this, you see the number through the lens that you're already carrying with you, right? And so some people see this and they see that it's a breakdown of their religion, right? Like, this is, this is existential from like a human and their relationship to God. And aren't we supposed to procreate? Some people look at this and they're, you know, major business owners and they see it as the end of their economy. Some people look at it and they're the mayor of their town and they see it as the end of their town. Environmentalists, look at it and they see it as the beginning of earth healing, right? - There could be space for the earth to do earth stuff. - Finally. - I was recently talking to Hannah Ritchie from our world and data and she was like, in terms of climate, this probably won't have a huge impact. - Yeah. - Because it's just so slow that by the time the impact arises, we need to have been in the new energy paradigm for a while. But then at the same time, for biodiversity, anything to take agricultural pressure off of the land is a really big and useful impact for the long term. If you have a greater population and they're thriving more, that means that they're eating more meat, which means that more land, which means that less life, less biodiversity. So. - Yeah. With some fun nuances from a study in Japan that I read, which was because humans had been cultivating this particular area of land for over 2,000 years, the whole biodiversity was around humans and this land. So when they depopulated, the biodiversity went down. Isn't that different? So hey, let's just talk about unknowns with the population. There's a new one. - This is the kind of trend where like prediction is garbage. Like it's just, it's too big and too weird and it interfaces with too many things. And also it's kind of a little too slow. You know, it is the glacier that you were talking about where we're talking about things that happen over decades. And so like all of the things that are gonna happen in the next 50 years, we don't know what they are and so we don't know what-- - But we know in the shorter run though. I think like really, I mean, but once you go beyond that, it's for fun. It is well, wouldn't that be interesting? I mean, I think anything over 30 years, it's for fun. - For fun. Yeah, interesting. So let's get into the conversation about the what to do stuff because like first of all, what to do, you have to sort of like say there's the what to do in terms of, you know, I think about this in like a climate change metaphor where it's like, okay, we must prepare for the climate to change. And then there's the, how do we make the climate change less? So in this circumstance, what do we do to shore up social security, you know, against a shrinking population? And then also what would we maybe do to make the population not drink? For that first thing, I guess that's going to be sort of like policy by policy, we're going to be crunching it out and hopefully governments will be functional enough to deal with these problems. - Yeah, but there's so much room for experimentation there. I just would love to find the right set of decision makers who were up for that and the right set of funders who maybe wanted to understand it as well because our minds focus are always on the national level. Like what national level policies could we change? Like a retirement age? Let's just take that one. Actually, forget social security because, you know, every country has different like China, they're not thinking as much about social security, but you do think about things like a retirement age. And so, you know, you think national level policy about retirement age, okay, that is so fraught that honestly you might as well forget it. But that doesn't mean that you're forgetting the whole universe of policies around it, including remove discriminatory laws. That's something that you could do. That's like a backdoor way and it doesn't get as much, you know, it's not gonna have the same political heat on it as raising retirement age, but you can also have company by company. What are they interested in doing? There are leaders who have went out of their way to say, we're gonna take less profit for a greater social good or a greater environmental good. Like there's tons of stories around that, right? Well, they could also have like, what if you define that good in terms of older people? None of it's really been around population. And yet I still saw some stories yesterday about some of the major companies in the US, two of them pulling their family benefits. They're like, never mind. And I thought, what? So, but you could, you know, big companies, that's who employs people. And so, what are you doing in terms of giving people like consulting agreements if they wanted to continue to work? It's not that you have to make everyone work longer. Not everyone's gonna have the help to do that. There's so much inequality, but you can make it easier for people who do want to work. Then you could go down to community levels, et cetera. I mean, just, just get the picture that it doesn't all have to be some big national policy that swoops in with one, you know, stroke and changes at all. Yeah, I mean, I think that like the changing nature of retirement is like another variable here that people wouldn't necessarily think about. Like if, you know, if you work your whole life as a carpenter and you're 65 years old, like you don't want to retire. You don't want to be doing carpentry. And that's a lot of what work used to be. Work used to be a lot of like using over the muscles of human bodies. And that's mostly not what work is now. And indeed, a lot of carpenters are now contractors and they don't have to do that thing anymore. They like have conversations and send emails for a living. So you can see the opportunity to like have different kinds of work. And that would mean that like maybe that allows for sort of economic productivity that like provides an avenue of resilience. - Yeah, yeah. - Of resilience and it's just, you know, we do still again suffer from a lack of imagination around it, you know? - The lack of imagination is interesting here because like, it sounds like a failure, but at the same time it's like, this is a hard thing to imagine about. - Yeah. - It desperately needs sharp minds and funding for them to be doing the work of trying to figure out what's going on. So if you're that kind of person, surprise, there's another place you can spend your money to make the world like handle itself better. Sometimes I talk to rich people and they're like, I just don't know how to deploy my capital and I'm like, boy, I got some tips. - We got a list. - Come to us, come to us. Because there is something we can learn and social science can be hard because we're not allowed to do experiments on people. - I'm not allowed. - We're not allowed. - Not allowed. - It's not okay. It's not cool. There's a bad history of that. We do not do that anymore. Nor should we be allowed. Let me say. - Oh yeah, there it is. - But we're not allowed and we shouldn't be allowed. But there's so many natural experiments out there. Like we have these really cool projects at PRB where we work with the Appalachian Regional Commission for example and we're able to understand what's happening in like the county level or the small city level and how people are really navigating the changes that they feel in their neighborhoods and communities. And those stories are really powerful if they can bubble up to the surface and be told, you know, what is this happening in Kansas that can inform decision-making in Western New York. For example, or take it even bigger, what can we learn from the shifts that have been happening in South Korea. And so there's just a lot of opportunity here to really learn from one another about what's working well. But it's been, it's been a real slog to get people to even understand that the population is shifting and that what's happening is not an anomaly. That's the difference. We were like, that's weird. Sure it's gonna go back up. And the depopulation is the next one. So we've talked about fertility rates declining. I think people got it. What the next thing people need to get is the depopulation is real and it's coming and it maybe doesn't look the way you thought it did. And you know, who's the slowest on this is Americans and American business people. They're like, it is not coming and I'm not going to ever talk about this. Thank you for your time. - Just because like that's too much. - It's too much. - We don't wanna deal with that thought. - Do not wanna deal with the thought. We can't have 30% fewer people to advertise too. That breaks everything. - Yep. And the only thing that has shifted that conversation this year is the major drop in immigration to the United States. Because it was really propping up so much of U.S. population growth. In fact, almost all of U.S. population growth was coming from immigration. - I just saw a really interesting statistic. The U.S. unemployment rate has stayed steady, but it has stayed steady in part because we have far fewer people entering the labor force. Because population is going down and because immigration has cratered. And so we used to like need 200,000 new jobs every month and now we need like 50,000. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - The economy has actually slowed down quite a lot but that hasn't hit unemployment numbers immediately. So that's a very interesting thing. But at the same time, you do want there to be more people doing jobs because that's accomplishing things. That's a weird thing that people don't tend to think of jobs as. They tend to think of jobs as good people have a job. That's what we want. But in addition to that, those people are doing work. - Yeah. - They're getting stuff done. They're solving problems for people. - We hope so. - I think usually if you're getting paid to do something, you're solving some kind of problem somewhere. Though oftentimes maybe just for your shareholders of the company or your boss or whatever. - There are people too. (laughing) - Yeah, I'm sorry, thank you Jennifer. Thanks for, yeah. I mean, as shareholders are all of the retirees. So that's not all, but a lot of the retirees. What a situation we've got ourselves in there. But hopefully the economy hasn't crashed by the time this podcast comes out. If it has, just know that right now, right now, it's Dr. Rick Renhye. (laughing) But I think there will be a lot of immediate thoughts for how to like, oh, we should just do X, Y, and Z and that will solve this problem. It doesn't seem like that is the case. Can we get into that a little bit? In terms of like actually like getting the birth rates back up, solving this problem, quote. - Yeah, every time we think we know what it is. And you know, and I've talked about this before and I think it's the policy makers and social scientists have something in common, which is we want to take a whole bunch of variables figure out which one to two are the most powerful and then we base everything on that. Like that's how we get published. - And it just like grab a lever and shove it into that variable and push. - There you go. And then therefore you get the outcome you want. But every time we thought we get this, like, ah, it is lack of childcare. Then maybe you're able to have somewhere around the world where it's like, well, actually they have universal childcare and it's still going down, or maybe it's a housing issue, an expense issue, fill in the blank. It's never just that one thing. And you know, if you ask somebody who, and I have a lot of these conversations with people, they're not on podcast, they're after the podcast, right? Like you stop recording and then you just keep talking or you give a talk and you go to dinner, that's when the good stuff happens. And people will say, you know, the list of things, especially young people, like in their 20s, early 30s, the list of things they want to accomplish before they start a family and their parlance is so long. And it's like they keep moving the bar for themselves. And a way that tells you it was never really just about that house, that job, that graduate degree. It is this larger shift towards thinking about the value of children and opportunity costs. And so we are going to see, talk about predictions. We're going to keep seeing rolled out policy makers around the world as they have always done as we argue in toxic demography, a set of policies that tries to shift the fertility rate. They try to engineer the ideal population. We're going to just keep seeing these, they're not going to move the needle in terms of births. - Right. - But they might make lives better, but they might not move the needle in terms of births. - That mean that's so interesting. Like the sort of, I don't know a hard thing to say here is that the birth rate goes down as thriving goes up. Like a lot of places in the world where the birth rate is still high are areas of intense conflict, areas of poverty, areas where there's not enough. And the places where the lowest birth rates are the ones where people are best off. And like that's what we want. What that doesn't mean is that that holds forever. - That's right. Like is it shaped like a you or I guess, you know, by the way around? Because what we're wondering now, at least what I am wondering now is, if people perceive that they are not thriving, but they're in a setting that is thriving, like let's say I'm in a high income country, but I do not perceive that I am thriving, that is a pressure way down on fertility rates. - I mean, is there any sense that high inequality is particularly bad for this? - That's a good question. I think when we look at by different educational, like we have some stats by education, at least in the United States that I've seen before, and you would see that you have higher fertility rates of those with the absolute least education, meaning like not yet a high school degree, for example. But then you could overlay race on it, and you actually see that in the United States, blacks are not in the highest income group, Asian Americans, white Americans are in the highest income groups, and yet fertility rates are lower for blacks in the US in this particular point. So it's a really complex picture. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I have this sense that there's these two kinds of thriving. There's like the amount of wealth you have, and then there's like the amount of wealth your society is set up for. So like very obviously, the poverty rate, like the amount of money you can make and still be in poverty in the US is much higher. But at the same time, like you are still in poverty in the US if you have that much more money, because society is set up to extract money from the average person. That average gets dragged higher, and like we just see this over and over again, we're like so much of the economy now, because this is where you can make money, is now oriented toward providing services and products for the very wealthy. Because like the margins are a lot better. They're just like better customers if you can convince them to become your customer. And then you have a society that is like, feels entirely inaccessible for everyone, for like literally 70% 80% of people. - And yet aspirational, which is really-- - And also aspiration. I think that like young people feel that very hard, where they feel both the inequality and the aspirational at the same time. And also like a kind of like some nihilism comes along with that, a little bit of anti-social behavior can come along with that, where it's like, I'll get mine, doesn't matter. Like obviously society is not set up to be like a kind and pro-social place. So why would I be a kind and pro-social person? - Yeah, and those are hard to articulate as variables, but that stew pushes it down. - Yeah, but I have no idea to what extent it does. It's just a thing that I think about a lot. - Yeah, and at the lot of researchers. - And so I'm anchoring on it, you know? Like I'm anchoring on this, just like, you know, the strong thermons of the world, though he is dead, would be anchoring on anxiety about like white replacement or something. Another clearly true thing here is one of the effects is that like there are fewer teenagers having kids, which were like, good, we like that. That's a good trend. And maybe people want to have kids, they put that off until their 30s. The first kid takes a little while and coming, is harder on the body than it would have been if it had happened a decade before. And then that second kid is like, that doesn't seem worth it. Or, you know, you have a couple of miscarriages along the way and like, that's that. - Yeah, yeah. - Should we just be studying fertility more? Should we be studying like the process through which a body makes a baby more? So that people can have babies when they want to in their lives? - So there's two pieces to what you ask there. So one, should we just generally speaking? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talk about it. population numbers in the aggregate, but they are an aggregate of individual experiences. And if you're thinking about infertility, you know how like if you've gone through it yourself or you're a loved one, our friend has, you know how incredibly painful that experience is. And so for the should we do this generally, absolutely, there's so much more to learn about it. The second part, though, is should we do this because doing it will end up giving us so many more babies that it reverses our low fertility rate, fixes the economy and like rainbows and sunshine. No, because it doesn't actually have that big of an effect on the number of babies. Yeah, even if every if every 40-year-old could have the number of babies that they want to have, we would not end up at 2.2. No, no, we wouldn't. And you know, it can be really tough with this whole set of things that we're talking about. Should you do this policy like, I don't know, should you make sure that old people are taken care of and are not left to suffer by themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Should you, you know, help people, women, men be able to both work and also know that their child is getting quality care. Sure. Yes. But, you know, should you do it because it makes more babies, aka widgets in this case, right? Because all humanity is wiped when you're really talking about we do this to make babies. Yeah. Then that, no, that's not why you do it. Has any country anywhere ever had a meaningful impact on its own demographics? Oh, so many of them have yes. Intentionally? Yes, intentionally. Okay. But it may be not in a way that we'd want to replicate. So if you think about demographic engineering, which is, you know, a term that I really love, the idea that the people in power want to shape their population into whatever it is that they see as their idea at the time. I mean, we could go back like, this could be biblical for us to be like, oh, why did you conduct that census? And because you wanted to make sure you wiped out that whole race. Ah, yes. Yeah. That is demographic engineering. So when we say do they have a meaningful impact? Yeah, you can go all the way back to it. Like genocide is a great way to have a meaningful impact in demographic engineering that we don't want to replicate. Don't do it. Honestly, I think it matters that there were, it's hard to use the word success because you don't want to think of genocide as a success. But if your goal was to have a certain outcome and you achieved it through genocide, then that would be defined as success. That gives the feeling that you can engineer a population. And you know, what else has given the feeling that you can engineer it, and this will bring us to today, is that we saw such a sharp drop in births last century at the same time that so many leaders wanted a sharp drop in births. So those two things happened at the same time. There was some causality there, right? Like you can think about millions of sterilizations in India, for example, or you could think about so many campaigns in China around childbearing, or you could even think about Iran putting in place so many family planning clinics that people were able to do this in a much less coercive way and get access to that. Again, though, there's a sense that we wanted this to happen and it did. So now here we are at a moment where the want is different. We want birth rates to go up, say many people in power, and we're going to do some stuff and we're going to talk about it and it's not happening. So I think that's really where the crisis point is that it is much harder to engineer higher fertility rate than it was to engineer some of these other outcomes. Interesting. I wasn't actually sure because like looking at the whole world, you know, like a lot of places didn't intend to have their fertility rates do anything in particular and they still went down. So I had some feeling that like, you know, China did this like cruel one child policy that had a lot of terrible outcomes, but maybe didn't actually long-term affect the population that much, but like definitely did. But if you look at like neighboring countries, all of their populations also decreased. Taiwan didn't do that, right? But so many of them when you really start to peel into it and this is what was really fascinating about getting to right toxic demography. I focused on Asia, for example, Singapore, South Korea, China, and Japan. And you can really look since let's say just 1940 till today, it's an unbelievable variety of population policies that look all sorts of ways. I mean, it can be things like whose name is the house in? That's still talking about engineering population right all the way down to trying to say we would like these women of this particular ethnic background with this particular education to have more babies and everybody else not to do it. And so even though on the surface not everyone had one child policy, every leader cares and they all try to put in place something to shape this. So you've said that in the last six or nine months, you've started to hear like more interesting or ideas in this space. Can you tell me what those are? Yeah, the shift has really been, okay, we know that nothing's really going to raise this. So what do we do? Okay. So the shift has been we give up. Well, it's only certain people. I mean, then the policymaker space, yeah. So what I came out of reading a billion accounting and toxic demography and after the spike, all of those books kind of ended and I was like, so you say there's a problem and you say that we've tried everything. Yeah. And nothing worked. Is that actually kind of where we are? You know, what I noticed the most in 2026 is a lot of like I'm at a nonpartisan institution, a lot of Republicans started coming and saying, let's talk a little more about immigration. Can we go back to that? And I thought, oh, that's different because it's less about, you know, it's not different historically in the US. Sure, like we know this matters, but it was, okay, we're not thinking that the births are going to come back up now, but we're still thinking about overall population and we're thinking about the future of American population growth. So let's talk about immigration. So that is one and that's one space and that have multiple instances where, you know, see that shift. Do you see people shifting about moving away from just raising a fertility rate to building family? These are like nuances and discussions here, but there are still plenty of people who are still trying to raise the rates. And what I worry a lot about is how much of a crisis do people feel like we're in? And if those people are in power, what are they willing to do to get out of it? And so worry about rights. Yeah, I think that that is entirely legitimate and like it's a big world and there will definitely be places. And I think it's fair to say we've already taken steps backward in America. We will take steps back. And really, like if you look at the lever, it's like taking right away from women. Like that's the big thing that you would identify if you look at the problem with a careful eye. Yeah, and there's only two outcomes when you do that. One outcome might have been the one that was intended in the first place, which was you took those rights away. And so there become I guess accidentally a lot more babies. That's one outcome. The other is that you could take rights away and women just opt out. And so if you look at China, for example, you know, there've been a lot of messages from the podium, from leadership saying like get out of the workforce, get back into the home. You hear anecdotally things that, you know, I can't totally verify, but what's happening like with rights at the local level. And there are increasingly women who are just trying to opt out of this in a way that maybe echoes what has happened in South Korea, not with the same kind of rights situation, but, but you know, definitely an atmosphere of inequality and gender inequity. And a diversion between what men and women think are the right ways to be in a society. That's right. And we are also getting that diversion in America. And it doesn't raise the fertility rate. Like that's the thing you want to say is like a bunch of like men and women not getting along, not being able to be in relationship with each other. Turns out it's not good for maybe making no. And that's where, you know, I'm not sure that people who may be sitting around like I definitely picture them in dark boardrooms, you know, thinking about like taking rights away. I hope you would realize that it have unintended consequences. I think a hundred percent that we would have that backlash and that it would not help. That is a little bit of a sign that like maybe something somewhat hopeful is like the idea that you think this is a lever. It's not. If you try and pull on that, it will have the opposite effect. And so what we actually need is a society where like everybody understands that everybody has agency and like we get to live our lives the way that we want to live them. And then we have to figure out how to because like again, I love that you say like everything beyond 30 years is just playing around. We don't know. No. And mouthless didn't know. And Ehrlich didn't know. And we don't know. We know that we have to deal with problems that we have right now. And that's what we should be focused on. And we should focus on solving the problems. Like yes, help people to form families. Yes, free child care. Yes, better understanding of fertility. All of these things are great. Like little solutions to the big problems that will add up to like making it through this. Like I actually think that we'll be able to do that if we focus on the actual problems. Yeah, rather than just our big anxieties. Yes. That like for some reason project 200 years into the future. When did that ever work? No, no. It's focused on the actual problems. And imagine that there could be a solution. Again, like no, I keep coming back to the failure of imagination. But you know, sci-fi is so interesting. And dystopian literature is definitely a big influence on how I came to these topics in the first place. Okay. Interesting. But it is also dystopian. And anything anyone is writing right now about future population, it is so dark. And then there's just no doubt in my mind that that fixation on dystopia of the future actually drives more uncertainty and pessimism that pushes fertility rates down. I mean, young people do not feel optimistic about the future. And having a child is the ultimate vote in the future that it will be good. And so I've even thought like what a space there is for making in a non-political world. Keep your agency way. Like a whole effort around maybe the world could be good. And having children is fun. And you know, I love Angus Herbie and his good news. There's a ton of good news out there. I think you do it as well in your newsletter. There's so much that we can really celebrate, but we don't fixate on that 'cause, you know, it doesn't really sell as much, that's for sure. - Yeah, I mean, threats are always the thing, especially uncertain threats, which population is a great uncertain threat and you can interpret it in so many different lenses. I mean, it's not just the smartphones because like this effect was happening before smartphones, but also smartphones aren't the only thing that like, created a media environment that focused on whatever was the most attention grabbing thing possible, which is going to focus on the scariest stuff possible. - That's right. I think the one thing that gives me hope is, is I think it's still the case that romance books are half of books sold. I'm like, hey, somebody out there is thinking about love and happiness and the future. - People are still horny. - And they love love, they love love. - Yeah, that too. I'm sorry, also, they love love. I'm curious why you got into dystopian literature and also how it led you to where you are. - I think about myself in high school when you're really trying to figure out, who am I, what am I interested in studying? 'Cause that's make these big decisions in college and just being a big reader and being interested in like, I don't know, 1984, still is very strong in my mind and that's of course being really interested in politics. And it's like this confluence of caring about the environment, thinking even about like, "Soyland Green" movie, which I used to teach out of as well. And all of that, imagining of the future that had come up in this time of real crisis, that's what I'm interested in, like the '70s, like, imagine the future and it was just never good. It was like, we'll never gonna make it. - Interesting, I did an analysis of all the Hugo winners and I tried to do like a sentiment analysis on like, is the vibe like, humans are good, humans are bad, humans are neutral? It was peak, humans are bad in the '80s. Which I kind of was surprised by. I thought it would've been today. - Wow. - And it was actually peak, humans are good right now. That isn't an analysis of like what's popular, it's an analysis of like what the Hugo voters voted on. But that was really interesting to me. - Yeah. - I hope that it's like a sign of something. I don't know that it's a sign of anything big. I did that because of a conversation I had on this podcast with Andy Rear about this topic. Who writes really hopeful science fiction. - I think so. - Not necessarily hopeful, but just pro-human, you know? - The people are still around. They may be living on the moon and bouncing back and forth through a tunnel, but they're around. - Yeah, it's all messy, but it is like human self-problems. That's what we do. - Yeah, and I love that. I think that's actually what's missing from us talking about this whole population thing. Is this gonna go on forever? Well, no, because it in some ways is a problem set and human self-problems. - Well, and also there is like a eventually, there's a selection effect. So if there are cultural or even biological properties that resulted people having more kids in the long, long term, those things will be selected for. Those cultures will thrive in a way that the ones that don't have those effects won't. - Which is the fodder for a lot of the really scary stuff right now, people are like. - I think that there's, yeah, there's certainly it's like, oh, will we all be omissioned in the future because they still have lots of kids. I do not think that that is how it will shake out. I think that there will be ways that people will apply their brains to the problem and be like, what would be like a nice way to live? And part of that we'll have to be this thing that we talked about earlier on, where we like wanna have agency in our world because we understand ourselves to be procreating not just through our genes but through our ideas. - Yeah. - And, but I think that that will be available. And maybe it will be available like a lower population. So more people get to have more to have more agency with. I think that that could be like a good outcome, but like everything beyond 30 years is just play. - It is. - We are in a weird spot. I don't know what my kids' lives will be like. You know, that is the difference between now and in history when you could sort of assume, well, I mean, evidence bore out that each generation expected to do better than the one before them and they did. And now you look at my kids and we remain really hopeful in the house and try to filter some stuff because of what I know about uncertainty and negativity. But, you know, they're still politically aware we're in the DC suburbs. So, you know, they know a lot more than the average kid. - Gotcha. - Just from friends. But I think I have no idea other than statistically when they would probably get married or how many kids they would have or things like that. But, is that gonna hold for them in 20 years? No idea. - No idea. Well, final question I want to ask if there's anything that you've learned from this work that you would like everybody to know, what would it be? - I would say that trends are not inherently good or bad. And I think the one exception to this could be, although I've thought to myself, is this bad? One exception could be life expectancy has gone up if we take a really long view. That's probably inherently good. Other than that, especially because the big reason is the fewer babies are dying. - Baby's dying, exactly. So, like, surely this is the one exception to a demographic trend is not inherently good or bad. It's so powerful to say that it's not inherently good or bad because it lets you understand that there are things that you can do to adjust to whatever cards you've been dealt. I mean, certainly it wasn't the case that every country in the world that had a really high fertility rate descended into civil conflict, no. And it's the same that not every country this depopulating is going to completely collapse. And so, this gives you a range of options and it gives you some hope. - It's going to be so weird. - Yeah, we're just going to keep studying this. - Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer and Greg Ripon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media, Andrew Wong, composed the music and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. - Let's do it one more time. - Hear me. - Hear me.