should we tax the childless we would not be wise to propose a policy called taxing the childless and I've never proposed that although I did write an article once where that was the headline and what I suggested in that article was a number of things one is that we have a real issue of childlessness and two few children secondly that we should acknowledge that and we've never had a government that has acknowledged it and thirdly we then need to look at a iety of policies to address it now what would those policies be uh there are a whole range of things and my new book which is coming out uh later this year um no one left will address very systematically what other countries have tried what appears to work and what doesn't and by the way I think policy will anyway only get us so far but if we are looking at policies we have to look at the tax and benefit systems now at the moment in the UK and in many other countries we have a benefit system that gives you money if you have children is it high enough too low uh does it CLW money back in the right way should it go to an endless number of children all all Up For Debate but it's absolutely accepted if you have children you get extra benefits uh called child benefit now it used to be called family allowance and that's very normal now I don't have a problem with at least discussing whether we should reflect having children in the tax system as many many people do now of course the easy answer then is tax cuts for the childless but we know that the government's running a very big deficit so rather than just say I'm a demographer and I think you should throw money at this issue my issue um as if no other people from defense to health to every other cause uh aren't calling on the government for money rather than that I'm saying maybe we should have something that is tax neutral possibly but which recognizes childbearing and changes the tax burden so that you pay a little less if you have children and a little more if you don't so that is the slightly long- winded answer to a question a very blunt question it needs a slightly more nuanced answer forgive me I definitely wanted to chat about it because I've seen the um numerous headlines that were quoting that article and a lot of them were outraged obviously like in terms of like how dare you potentially penalize women for x y and Zed that was always the the lens through which those headlines were written but not many actually struggled with the problem that people that haven't got children that are then paying into the system and paying taxes to support our system are essentially relying on other children's or or other people's children to support them in their early in their late life and is it can't remember the statistic you might know but it's something the elderly takes about 75% of the the the government's sort of spending if you like so the the costs are massive for looking well it very much depends how you cut government spending and and I think one thing for example we know is that older people require much much more spend uh in the Health Service perhaps five or six times as much when they're in their 80s as when they're in their 20s or 30s and the whether you look at it through the lens of government um spend or you look at it through the lens of the availability of Labor when people are elderly they need more Health Care they need very often social care they're very likely to retire and you can change the retirement date but it doesn't make that much difference and people react to it very strongly so I think you've exactly correctly put your finger on the problem which is that if we don't have enough children we will end up and we increasingly are ending up as a society and more and more countries are in the same situation many are worse than us where we have more and more people of retirement age and fewer and fewer people of working age now I'll just give you a couple of statistics on that when I entered the workplace in the 1980s and a lot of us late baby boomers were coming into the workforce if you looked at the over 65s to the 20 to 65 so the um retirees and yes you can change the the date a little bit as a share of the working population it was a quarter now it's a third by the end or by the middle of the century so just in sort of 25 years 30 years or so it will be a half so in other words we'll have gone in my my lifetime if I'm still alive in the 2050s in my from my 20s to um say my 80s or 90s would have gone through from having four workers for every retiree to having two workers for every retiree and when the retirees are so intense in consuming government expenditure and the um working population is having to pay the tax then the whole system is not going to work now one thing I did want to say though in response to your particular point about the outrage on my article I have no problem with outrage um I think everything I said is reasonable and I'll stand by it but I do not object to people objecting to me and having a good debate I think one of the reasons to write the article and to write the books that I've written is to make sure that people are starting to discuss these things because it's a bit late so the point I made when I wrote the article and there was a lot of publicity around I went on the radio and the T of the point I was making was this nobody says how unfair I don't have a child I don't get child benefit now there are Thousand and One reasons you might not have a child at home for example I don't get child benefit because my children are all grown up right other people don't get child benefit because they chose to have children other people didn't get child benefit because they couldn't have children but nobody says uh this is outrageous and um I couldn't have children but I should still get child benefit it's not my fault so um nobody has a problem with that around the benefit system I don't see why people should have a problem with it around the tax system if you actually um are prepared to see people uh not get child benefit because they can't have children then similarly you should be prepared to see the tax system uh adjust in a similar way now you may agree or disagree but I don't think you've got any right to be outraged because I don't see any body being outraged by the child benefit system no I I think as a as a culture we are slightly um over sensitive to any potential infringement of what we consider our freedom and it tends to kill the debate about the problems that are actually quite pressing and quite difficult and like I said I haven't seen in many of those headlines that the actual wrestling with the problem at hand that the Aging population with the limited um amount of working aged adults to support that generation and how that Society is going to look so I just wanted to open up with it because I did think that the times chose the headline wisely well wisely if you want to get publicity I have a friend who I told I was writing this article and he when I as soon as he saw it he said that's clickbait I didn't know what the meaning of the word clickbait wasn't now I do but you know when you write an article um you don't choose the headline and I've got no objection I did a podcast with someone the other day and he was very good I thought he asked me very good questions we had a a very good discussion and then he entitled the thing um something like um wokeness is a death cult well I didn't say that I don't really I mean I'm I'm very anti-woke but I wouldn't quite call it that but and I think is some sort of link between low fertility and Wess and issues around fertility and and arguing about demography and whether you can do that in a worken but all that's fine that doesn't mean I said wokness is a is a death cult but I think when you stick your head above the parapet you've got to be prepared to stand by what you say and what you write um in the understanding that people are going to put put strap lines and headlines on it to get attention which is just the way the world and algorithms work today I completely understand that so I'm I'm not going to object to it