Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility

[MUSIC PLAYING] The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. Today on the show, why it's so hard to make decent vegan cheese and attribute to that colossus of the saxophone, Sunny Rollins. [MUSIC PLAYING] But first, in the India of the 1950s, families were huge. Parents might be one of six in their generation. Grandparents might have 10 siblings. Children were everywhere, and overpopulation was an obsessive concern. By the 1960s, slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them two or three children enough. In the 1970s, things took a cruel turn. Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized. Many of them forcibly. As recently as 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the unbridled population explosion happening in our midst. [SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] Many new crises he warned created for our upcoming generations. Things have taken a very sharp turn. Upcoming generations are getting smaller and fast, and that is a warning to the world. India's experiencing a baby bust in many parts of India, fertility has fallen really remarkably quickly and much more quickly than people had anticipated. Tom Sass is our South Asia bureau chief. So if you look at the total fertility rate, a TFR, a measure of how many kids and average women has over her lifetime, it's now 1.9 for the whole of India, and it's falling quickly. So that's below the replacement rate, which is what's needed to keep the population stable in the long run. But within that, you see some states that have fallen to levels comparable with rich countries in Europe. So Tamil Nadu, which is a big industrialized state in the South and West Bengal in the east, have both got a TFR of 1.3. That's the same as Finland and Maharashtra, which is a big Western state, has a TFR of 1.4, which is the same as Norway. Which is remarkable for a country that worried for so long about overpopulation? That's right. So that has been the dominant way that India has thought about this, and people have thought about India. And now you have this kind of demographic whiplash, where suddenly India is looking at this future that looks quite different. And that's a future where its population could peak in about two decades. And then it could fall almost as sharply as it's risen. So that future isn't here yet. But the number of births in India have already peaks about 25 years ago. And that's going to translate into fewer people, overall, in the future. And this has happened for a lot of good reasons. But it also creates challenges that India's sort of hurtling through this demographic transition very quickly. In southern states like Tamil Nadu, you're already seeing that they're starting to close a lot of schools, having to import a lot of workers, and really start to think about how to build systems to care for the elderly. And that's all happening at a point when India remains relatively poor. But it does fit into our wider story we've talked on the show a lot about declining fertility rates and the problems that will come with that. That's right. But most people hadn't thought of that being a trend that happens quite like this in the poor world. So in the past, it's been thought of something that happens when you reach a certain stage of development. We've seen that story play out in the West, in East Asia, now increasingly in Latin America. But actually, if you look around the world now, over 2/3 of all countries are below replacement rate. We see middle income countries, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Turkey, that have been the long way below that rate for a long time. But now poorer countries are joining them as well. So Sri Lanka has a TFR of 1.3. Tunisia is 1.6. Morocco has just fallen below replacement rate. One of the most striking examples is that Nairobi, that's the capital of Kenya, may be approaching the replacement rate. So these are not the kinds of places people think about when you think about low fertility. And you're seeing these kind of falls happen, often despite marriage remaining near universal, and often even though few women are working. So why the change in why is this trend coming to poorer countries? So I think you can look at three really big factors. So first of all, and demographers have emphasized this for a really long time, girls education. So when girls go to school, they gain on more autonomy in life decisions, fertility falls. There's no coincidence that in the '90s, you saw a big surge in girls attending school in India and Africa, and that's starting to play out now. And in fact, the places where we don't see fertility falling now are the places where you still don't have much formal education for girls, so places like Niger, Chad, or Northern Nigeria. And the second factor is that once you have that education, you see parental aspirations rise, and then you get into a kind of educational arms race. So India's a great example of this. Almost 40% of Indian children are now going to fee-paying schools. So a lot of parents are deciding to have fewer kids so that they can invest in segmented better schools. And that's risen very substantially in the last few years. You can imagine a similar thing playing out in Africa as well. And the third factor is a bit harder to measure, but it's basically culture. So as it becomes aspirational to have one or two children, that then starts to spread within a country. And this is where people are starting to look at the role of smartphones. So smartphones could be really quite a powerful tool for diffusing these new type of cultural norms. So if you're a poor woman in a village, you become more exposed to the lifestyles of richer peers and cities. Now we don't have really good studies yet that prove this, but it's a very interesting hypothesis for why these kind of effects might be happening more quickly in the poor world than we expected. And what does that mean then on a global scale, if you're saying that the majority of countries now below replacement rate, what's the long run of that? At the biggest scale, it means that peak human is probably sooner than we think. And we should be skeptical about claims that Africa is going to grow quite as large as some people have suggested in the past. I think it also means that potentially it would be harder for all countries to bank on importing the kind of migrant labor that they might have thought they were going to help them tackle worker shortages. If poor countries reach low fertility earlier, it probably adds another layer of difficulty to the task of development and getting richer, not the only one, so that will be alongside old problems like building institutions, tackling corruption. And it's not to say that you can't get rich if you've gone through this demographic transition. So China and Vietnam are both examples of countries that actually went through this transition at an even lower level of wealth than India. But it does make it harder because it means that you don't have the wind at your back and it means that poorer countries maybe have a narrower window when they're going to be in this demographic sweet spot. So what's to be done if we want to avoid the problems that you describe? What are the policies? Well, I think what most countries are finding is that there isn't a great deal that you can easily do to move the needle. So these fertility trends are driven by pretty deep economic and cultural forces and whether to have a third child or not does not seem to be the kind of decision that parents can easily be nudged to make by say a cash incentive. In India, you're probably going to see some of those types of policies that haven't really worked at all in the West. You'll probably also see religious leaders and politicians exhorting parents to go out and procreate more, and that probably won't work either. But what these countries can be doing is really starting to think about how to prepare for these new demographic realities. And that means things like getting more women into the workforce, thinking about how to build systems for old age care and pensions and social security. Tom, thanks very much for your time. Thanks, Jason. [MUSIC PLAYING] Tom's India reporting was one of our cover stories in print this week. Quick word about the other, the subject also of this week's episode of The Economist Insider, our subscriber-only video series. Insider gives you unprecedented access to our news room. Each week, our senior editors take you behind our journalism, from dynamic debates to the latest developing stories, explaining what today's events mean for tomorrow. This week, my colleagues zero in on what we're calling Gen Z Socialism. It's not that Gen Z came up with it or that every. Gen Z. Backset, but it's a strand of thinking precision engineered for the social media era, and many young people are buying into it. Maldonnie in New York, Polansky in Britain, Melanchion in France, these leftists have swapped old school collectivist ideals for price controls, nationalizations, and to pay for it all hefty wealth taxes. Our editor-in-chief Zanimentin Beadows and a panel of our journalists unpack these selfish socialists policies and ask what their popularity means for mainstream politics. If you're a digital subscriber, insider is already included in your subscription, nothing extra to sign up for. And if you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips from Insider via the link in the show notes. Okay, I've arrived into the studio to the smell of cheese, two pizza boxes, and the very expectant looking face of Sam Colbert, podcast producer, what's going on? Hi Jason, so our producer very kindly has got us two pizzas here, one with normal cheese and one with vegan cheese. Now when I say vegan cheese to you, what comes to mind? I wonder if it's made of real vegans. Very guy, I guess we'll find out when we open. No, I mean, it didn't truth. I'm suspicious of vegan cheese, I gotta say. I think most people are. I am vegan, so this is the stuff I eat, but I feel like as I've been speaking to people about this, most people who don't eat vegan cheese have had one experience of having had it and been totally turned off. And so you know, you want me to suffer that same phase? I was going on. Now it's your turn. Okay. I think on top here we have a normal margarita pizza. I want to point out to you how beautifully the cheese is melted, right? You've got that gooey stretch, very pleasing, it looks delicious. Look Sam smells like a normal pizza. Now here's pizza too. Okay, first of all, they've started with shredded vegan cheese. And what I want to point out to you is you can still see the shapes of the shreds. And this is what I've been told. It's a scientific problem where basically the vegan cheese locks up in place and doesn't quite do that nice, melty, gooey thing that real cheese does. This turns out to be a very difficult scientific problem. Okay, so taught me through it. Why is this such a tricky thing for science to solve when it has had such triumphs in, for example, ice cream? So the problem has to do with casing. Milk consists of two proteins. There are way proteins and casings. And casing is the building block of cheese. So this is the stuff that binds together fats and nutrients in a way that forms the network that gives cheese that nice gooey stretch. And then when that network matures, it gives it these complex, lovely flavors of an aged cheese. And you would think that you could swap out that casing for a plant protein, but plant proteins are structured entirely differently and can't at all do that thing. And so you have to find some other way to solve that problem. Another way. What is the way to do it? So if you go to a supermarket today and you look at the vegan cheeses on the shelf, the standard mozzarella type vegan cheeses, they are generally made of an oil and a starch. So often it's coconut oil and you imagine coconut oil is solid on the counter and then you heat it up and it melts. That's what you want cheese to do. That will be supplemented with tapioca starch. So if you think of a tapioca ball, it has that nice gummy tacky stretch. Like in bubble tea. Yeah, that's exactly. So you put those together and you get that nice melt and stretch. The problem is, as we saw with our pizza, it only melts kind of. It tends to lock up. It also isn't very flavorful. Generally, the final product is pretty bland and to recreate artificially the great taste of a nice ripened cheese that would just be prohibitively expensive. And it also isn't very healthy. So it's high insaturated fat and has basically no protein, which you might expect in actual cheese. When you say it would be prohibitively expensive, what's expensive and why? Some flavors are very easy to replicate. So the orange flavor in an orange soda is a pretty simple specific flavoring that is cheap to produce. And in theory, any flavor can be replicated by just recreating the right combinations of molecules. But cheese flavors are so distinct and varied that to recreate that combination of flavor molecules would just become so expensive that you couldn't achieve anything close to cost parity with actual cheese. But this is surely the very kind of thing that a bunch of Silicon Valley types will be aiming to crack with the very latest science. Yes. And a lot of Silicon Valley types have tried. And there was a real heyday for this kind of effort. So five, 10 years ago, there was a boom in plant-based foods, companies like Beyond Meat, and Impossible Foods had these enormous valuations and celebrity backers lined up to invest in them. You had Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio putting money behind Beyond Meat and people like Oprah, Winfrey, and Jay-Z and Natalie Portman supporting Oatley, which is a big maker of oat milk. And so I spoke to people who wanted to do for cheese what those companies had done for burgers and oat milk. They wanted in on this plant-based revolution. I interviewed a guy called Oliver Zon who founded a company called Climax Foods in Silicon Valley. He had been a data scientist at Google and at SpaceX. And he promised to use AI to make a zero-compromise vegan cheese that was, quote, "better in every way" than the real thing. AI coming to the rescue of absolutely everything. Okay, so how to come up. Well, for that particular company, the timing was unfortunate in that the plant-based boom busted. So some of those companies Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Oatley, are now at a fraction of their former valuations. And there's been a real cool on venture capital money for plant-based food research. Simultaneously, consumer demand has dipped. It did not meet the expectations of that moment. And so it turned out that for companies like Climax, making a zero-compromise vegan cheese was just harder and more expensive than anticipated and they increasingly got squeezed by the changes in the market. And so for now, you have bigger companies that are trying to iterate, say, by adding a little protein without adding too much cost. But vegan cheese continues to wait for its breakthrough. Oh, milk moment. And we have here to prove that point. One pizza which you admitted full disclosure right out of the gate you say is going to suck. Sorry. I want you to describe for me the taste, the mouth feel of what you're about to experience. I mean, not a lot of cheesy taste it has to be said. It's really squishy. It's very salty, I don't know if they're compensating on the taste by adding more salt. I think so. That's all part of it. This is not doing it. I'm afraid. I guess I'll finish this pizza off. My juice became your lunch. I found it. Don't throw it my first time. My pleasure, Jason. [Music] Though he lived in mere two blocks away, Sunny Rollins hadn't noticed those steps on Delansey Street before. John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent and is standing in for Anru this week. One summer day in 1959, he climbed up. There at the top, he found himself on the Williamsburg bridge. Subway cars were rattling over, hooting boats passing underneath. All around him were pillars and abutments in which he could hide. Close above him was the open sky. Cornier Knot, it gave him a spiritual feeling to be there. This was the ideal place to practice his music, which was not just any music. His tenor saxophone, endlessly inventive, seamlessly melodic. Percussive or romantic was already famous. Since 1953, he had been cutting records the leader of small bands, but in 1956 came saxophone colossus, with tracks like the Urbane's Strode Road. That put him in the same league as his heroes, Charlie Bird Parker and John Coltrane. His head was already full to bursting with scraps of musical material he had laid down over the years. A-toots his brother played on the violin, Fatswalla on the family's piano roll, jukebox tunes and bars, pop songs and ballads from cheap gramophones, and a jazz that sounded all over Harlem from clubs and open windows. The pianist Thelonius Monk, who you can hear him playing with on the way you look tonight, mentored him, and the saxophone as Coleman Hawkins lived up the street. He revered both of them, and from eight years old, totalling the alto sax his mother had given him. He knew a musical life was for him too. His improvisations drew on all of this. He loved playing quotes, and after any number of rhythmic and harmonic variations, each one could be joined to another. An Aria from here, an occasional swinging Broadway ballad, like Sturry with a fringe on top from Oklahoma. A cheeky half-heard riff, it was as if all music had a natural unity, and he believed it had. He would walk onto every stage with his mind a blank, waiting for a fresh thought or a fresh note to fall upon it. Because he played with Bird, Coltrane, the trumpeter Miles Davis in the drummer Max Roach, he was often called a bebop star, but he wouldn't be pigeonholed that way. The freshness of bebop when it appeared in the 1940s, with its speed, intricacy and long solos certainly suited him. Its strictures didn't, because he was naturally free. He often fused jazz with Calypso and homage to his mother who came from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. St. Thomas was one of the most celebrated tracks on saxophone colossus. Another, Blue Seven, mixed jazz with blues. For a time he got rid of pianists who annoyed him because they limited his harmonic range. He liked Trio's best, a drummer and a bassist faithfully following along. And he could lead them anywhere for his jazz. Especially he felt on the album's freedom suite, a night at the village vanguard, and way out west, which was big picture stuff, in which everything came together. It was the unification of music. It was all one. God, perhaps. His serenity, on stage and off, disguised his rough road to fame. Because as a young man, he saw Charlie Parker as his Messiah, and Bird was on drugs. He used heroin himself to see if he could end up playing like that. All it did was set him to stealing, for which he eventually served ten months at Breckers Island. In 1955, at some tough rehabilitation, he was clean again, and he stayed that way. It was Bird himself who had told him to stop and consider what he had to give to music. That set him thinking. He had always considered music, like God bless the child written by Billy Holiday. As a gift to him, ever since he had blown his first note as a child. He had been in 7th Heaven then, and it continued with each performance. As with few exceptions, but some down days, he reveled in the gift he had been given. But the question was, was he truly giving back to his audiences, or just playing for himself? To mangle his own golden rule a bit, was he doing to others as had been done to him? He never really found the answer to that question. But he was looking for that, as much as for the ultimate sound. It seemed to be his karma ever to search for these things. He got a lot of bad stuff he was paying for. But that was the purpose of being in this inconsequential world, to learn, to try to get wisdom, to come back and try again if you didn't. And to keep on pushing that music as he had on Williamsburg Bridge, which for his multitudes of admirers was gift and glory enough. John Fasman on Sunny Rollins, who's died aged 96. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jett Gill. Her deputy editor is Sarah Lawneuk and our sound designer is Will Ro. Our senior producer is Henry Atomic Farlin. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. And our senior development producer is Will Regaloway. Our producer is Anne Hanna and our assistant producer, Cunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Eleanor Sly. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend intelligence. This week it's a dive into the "Fire" movement. Financial independence retire early. Grow envious as self-denying young folk devote their every moment and every penny into clocking out for good ever earlier. Making the rest of us look like chops.