is a declining birth rate a blessing or a curse pervasive theories on population collapse are causing alarm and Wealthy Nations but if the global population is growing are we ignoring Solutions through immigration or changing Dynamics in our Workforce do we need more people or fewer more prosperous ones who will put less pressure on our planet I'm Andrea sanki and today's newsmaker is our global population [Music] it can be a delicate debate with religion and culture weighing heavily on the question of whether having large families is good or bad for our societies and for our planet declining fertility rates pose potential obstacles for our economies with governments having fewer tax taxpayers to accommodate more retired people but it could be argued that managing depopulation presents an opportunity to ease the pressure on our planet with fewer but more prosperous taxpayers able to support the elderly while immigration can help spread the wealth of richer countries onto the developing world now remember concerns about where our population and demographics are going date back decades in the 1960s the overriding fear was that a population explosion would lead to catastrophy in a seminal book called the population bomb the demographer Paul elich predicted it was going to lead to war famine and complete depletion of natural resources and it's true that some of that has happened our current population of 8 billion has caused man-made global warming leading to a predicted sixth mass extinction and we are struggling to try to bring the planet back into balance well over the last 300 years the population has indeed exploded in the year 1700 there were just 610 million people but once the Industrial Revolution took hold combined with improvements in agriculture health care and women joining the workforce the rate of growth began to slow until recently that didn't mean that the population explosion wasn't still taking place people were having slightly fewer children but there were by now so many people that the overall population was heading to totally unsustainable numbers and fears over that explosion LED some countries to take drastic measures China introduced its Infamous one child policy and India instated a highly controversial sterilization program just three years ago the United Nations forecast the global population would increase to 11 billion by the end of the century but since then some Studies have shown that Peak population is expected to be less and the decline in fertility rates even more abrupt leading the global population to decline either before or around the turnament the century and in quite a few countries that population decline is already happening especially in East Asia nowhere is it more evident than in one of the world's wealthiest countries South Korea it now has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 68 births per woman and falling the rate needs to be 2.1 births per woman to keep a country's population stable the government has tried and failed via various social policies to increase its birth rate but the option of immigration has has proven unpopular now if current trends continue the country's population is set to fall from its current 51 million to 36 Million by the year 2072 a drop of 30% in just 50 years the South Korean government has boosted child care services extended paid paternity leave and even offered Financial incentives known as baby vouchers in 2022 president Yun admitted the government had spent more than $200 billion to increase the birth rate yet it's still in Decline while Italy has a similar problem with fertility rates starting to decline in the 1980s the country's right-wing prime minister Georgia Malone is so concerned she's created a Ministry of family and birth the government's cut VAT on baby products and increased family allowances but as with South Korea Financial incentives seem to have little effect and then there's Japan it's one of the first countries in the world to experience population decline line and its effect there has been extraordinary nearly 14% of all houses in Japan are empty they even have a name Akia and there are 9 million of them slowly decaying mostly around the countryside it's also led to the closure of nearly 9,000 schools in the last 20 years I think we need to face up to the reality of demographic Decline and start debating as soon as possible how we want to proceed closing a school is a very difficult issue it said that it takes 10 years from the start of discussions to the closure if we want to take action in the next 10 years we need to start discussing it immediately so what is the best way to manage our planet's population and shifting demographics well joining me now to debate that and more are from Valley Forge Pennsylvania founder of pronatalist dorg Malcolm Collins Jennifer schuba is the president of the population reference Bureau and from College Park Maryland sociology professor and demographer at the University of Maryland Philip Cohen thanks all so much for being with me uh Philip I'll start with you first of all explain how we have a population that is set to hit 10 billion by around 2058 yet we're talking about population collapse well uh I'm not talking about population collapse because I think that's sort of alarmist and unnecessary but we are probably headed toward towards population decline uh later in this Century um the population increased in the world mostly because mortality decreased you know people people started surviving childhood more and uh as a result of we had larger Generations uh and still having having births at higher rates so that gave us a huge population boom uh uh mostly in the last century and and you know as we've reached to eight eight billion people it it might appear that we're headed towards um you know exponential growth and eventually becoming you know just a the planet becoming a ball of flesh but um actually um uh uh the birth rates are are falling dramatically around the world um and by by the end of this Century we will have pass that point uh of growth and start um and start a period of decline unless something um dramatic changes now that's pretty pretty well baked in because of the declining birth rates we've already had but is that a good thing well um if we can get ourselves out of a a constant growth mindset you know the idea that we can that we should always that the population and the economy always must be growing forever um you know if you stop and think about it there's no way that can ultimately be sustainable so we're going to have to figure out how to work with declining population eventually um and we'll have some time you know as as the birth rates fall um we may over the course of the next few hundred years um lose a few billion people and be back to where we were you know in in in the last century which was fine having six billion people was perfectly reasonable for for the Earth so we can work it out but we will have to do some um some careful management and some redistribution of resources uh to to make that work right so manage depopulation is the is the term I've heard because say this exponential growth that we've been witnessing over the last couple centuries was never sustainable but Malcolm why do you think we're in trouble I mean you are technically what one of those alarmists that maybe Philip was alluding to go ahead yes and I heard you know when I started caring about this issue I heard a lot of people saying you know you you shouldn't be so alarmist about this you know the developing world is always going to be uh you know heavy in population and yet we've seen you know you can look this recent piece in America's quarterly uh Latin America's fertility decline is accelerating and no one knows why and demographers in the region are beginning to use terms like vertiginous to describe the rate of population or fertility crash that we're seeing in Latin America when I started caring about this I was in Korea and everyone was saying oh don't worry about it it won't get that bad you know it'll level off somewhere um and now in Korea at their current fertility rate not not where it's projected current for every hundred Koreans there's only going to be Sixth great-grandchildren and and that is alarm like like insanely optimistic because um their fertility rate is continuing to decline 11.5% year-over-year just this last year and even if they somehow got their population fertility rate back up it really wouldn't make a difference because 60% of their population is over the age of 40 right now I feel like coming back to the US and and talking about these issues or coming to Europe and talking about these issues I got a chance to go back in time 20 years and warn people that there does not appear to be a floor on this and right now in the world generally speaking the only countries that are above repopulation rate are countries where the average person is earning less than 5,000 USD per year now it should be our goal to raise these countries out of poverty yet we are raising them out of poverty with an economic system that is built on the Assumption of constant growth which was because the number of consumers and producers was growing exponentially so what we advocate for is to take this issue seriously and build new economic systems to to uh uh head off this train wreck okay I mean I I'm not so sure when you talk about the the growing populations in developing countries um what about bringing some of those populations opening up a little more immigration and you could argue that could be a win-win because not only do we grow in a country like the United States where you are we don't only grow our population the way you think is necessary but we also can allow people from developing countries to earn the wages in wealthy countries that will be brought back to the developing world so that everyone can effectively Prosper it could be a win-win that would work if we were at the population scenario we were 10 years ago but as I mentioned Latin America fell below repopulation rate all the way back in 2019 they are dealing there was this great article on The Economist recently they are dealing with hugely stretched social security systems because of their aging populations we are just exporting our own laziness to developing countries that are less able to deal with the fact that they are putting taxes and State dollars into training people during nonproductive childhood years then we get their productive labor as adults and now they have to deal with an even older population because we've been draining their countries but you could say okay okay okay we'll only take immigrants from countries that are still above repopulation rate but because those countries are predominantly under 5,000 USD per year now you've created an economic incentive for Europe and the United States to prevent those countries from ever escaping poverty I told a reporter this and they're like do you really think the United States would de would sabotage the developing countries economies just for the sake of our own and I was like yes of course they would they that's like rmo like let let me ask Jennifer then about this and Jennifer if you can comment as well on the analysis that says we are only as a global Society I'm not just going to say about the us we are only thinking about the survival of our own economies and our species as well at the expense of the planet and other species some of which we've run into Extinction yeah I think this quote that talking about really is about a mindset shift H which Philip alluded to as well actually all of us have I think are are are pushing this forward that we have to have a general mindset shift because if you really think about it every Theory we had about economics politics in sociology that those theories were developed under conditions where it looked like there would be exponential growth and where the values were around exponential growth and so we have a lot of thinking to do to catch up with the way that the demographic reality has changed and I think for a lot of people the idea that we have shifted from um this overpopulation rhetoric to one of population decline that's new I still talk to people who think uh you know when I released a book about eight billion people they said wow that's so many I can't imagine how many more there will be I'm like well we actually kind of know how many more there will be but our thinking hasn't quite caught up so you know we talk about immigration some of that rhetoric is also caught in the past where we think about a world where people are really on the move and there's just um lots of people always flowing over borders and of course the media can can make it seem that way but demog demographics around the world are shifting and our migration patterns will probably shift along with them bringing a new set of issues so we need lots of new thinking about this let me ask philli though I mean okay let's be honest because you said this you know we we can't turn into a giant ball of human flesh on this planet so fewer people at the this point are technically better you know for the planet humans have caused as I said the extinctions of so many plants and species already and a six mass extinction is actually in the cards right now so do we have the right to insist that we need to keep growing and we actually have an obligation to keep doing so the the way Malcolm thinks we do um no and the issue is um uh growth as a process has a lot of positive consequences um it stimulates creativity and uh sort of dynamism um and it and it has some economic effects that we like unfortunately the larger population that growth produces causes a lot of problems so we like the dynamic of growth but the outcome of growth is not is is unmanageable in the long run um and on the the flip side of that is the dynamic of population Decline and I I won't talk about collapse or depopulation because that's not what we're talking about but the if we eventually which we probably will get to a declining number of people that process of decline produces a dynamic that is that we're not really um uh that we're not really equipped to handle at the moment so it will it you know it it has sort of negative Economic Consequences um and cultural consequences that we don't like you know and and if you look at Korea it's a good examp the most extreme example on Earth um but but but a sharply declining population has negative con consequences so um we're going to have to deal with that as a as a as a coming reality but the idea that we can that we can always grow ourselves out of any problem we have is certainly shortsighted okay Malcolm I could see you itching to get in there go ahead yeah I I want to be clear that the pronatalist movement is not about preventing population decline that is impossible at this point if we are on the Titanic we are hitting the iceberg every time now we are just trying to alert people to the sever of the situation and trying to get as many people on lifeboats as orderly as possible uh you know we can say oh this isn't a crisis but then we're also like but you know our entire civilizational structure is set up on the Assumption of population growth like the global economy is and we really don't have a plan or a way to handle it when things start shrinking on average and it's better that we get out in front of this issue uh especially because this doesn't happen either would it be better to make that plan instead of just growing the population as per the older models well the the best thing we can do in a plan is to find a way to motivate uh at least near stable fertility rates in environments where people have freedom and are economically productive because if we don't do that then the only cultural groups that survive are going to be those groups that restrict people's freedoms every let me ask let me ask you this though because you're speaking from the from the perspective of an of a US citizen and in the US we've seen an constantly increasing number of a children in state care which is also I've heard very set to grow because of the limitations now on on Reproductive Rights in many Southern States so you'll have half a million PE kids in the US in state care right now you also have a decreasing often decreasing job market with you know medium skills job market that's being automated uh and that there aren't as many medium wage jobs aail able now because technology is taking over plus you have a serious homeless problem in the United States and it's it it comes out of you know you may think you have a very strong family structure in the family that you've created but many people do not and people fall in the cracks and then we have another massive social issue on our hands with a growing population of people that can't contribute to society the way you want them to yeah so you just named a number of tax holes right um and we're going to increasingly have less taxes come in as the population declines at an age where we have even more people living off of systems like Social Security and eventually those systems are just going to go bust you know this isn't a problem about like wealthy people not having as much money as they used to have it's a problem of a lot of old people not getting the care they need and dying slow avoidable deaths okay but let me ask Jennifer can they get that care they need if you know this growing youthful population isn't as prosperous as it once was right I think this that that question sets us up to say we can't breed our way out of this which I I think putting that forward as the solution is a huge mistake because what it does is it just says well we don't need to try to change anything we don't need to adapt all we need to do is try to make more babies and the demographic reality is that even if these birth rates go up now we have decades ahead of Aging populations and so our focus in this conversation has been on depopulation thinking about overall population shrinking but along with that first first comes population aging which is inevitable and that's that is the reality I will deal with for the rest of my life my children will deal with for the rest of their lives and so just to put the focus on the absolute number of people and to put the focus on creating more babies completely ignores that these larger systems you know in a lot of f low fertility countries youth unemployment is a huge issue and so that's part of the reason why people don't really want families or if they want to start them feel like they can't do it and so we need to start shifting away from thinking about absolute numbers and I really think that if we focus on helping people have better quality lives the eventual byproduct of that may be higher fertility but you end up with a huge backlash when you focus on those numbers um we keep thinking about Korea we've talked about Korea a couple of times there's a huge feminist backlash there to really trying to raise fertility rates from a government level that's because not everyone wants the bureaucrats in the bedroom right and there is a huge worry that individual rights will end up being restricted in the name of overall growth so by putting all of our focus and attention on those numbers I think we take away the individual experience the family experience and the community experience and that's where our real solutions lie yeah Philip and there go ahead go ahead yeah um uh it's really important to understand that you know people don't have children for the social good you know that that that's not that that's not that's not how individual decision making works and there really is no experience yet in the world of a government promoting uh increasing fertility rates without producing um drastic negative consequences in terms of uh human Liberty uh especially for women I mean well there there's no experience really of of producing Rising fertility rates yet it's not a problem that we've had um but but when governments try to intervene um on on the population um behavior in terms of more children or less children um uh the consequences are often drastic U for or for Human Rights and Freedom so I think Jennifer is exactly right that if we can improve um the conditions of living um then um some people may decide to have more children I mean we're in a little bit of a bind because the decline in fertility has been really really good and produced great consequences especially for women uh and for and for gender equality um and a lot of things you do that may promote um people having more children also um have the consequence of increasing opportunities and give people more choices of things to do other than have children um so I I don't think you can you know you we haven't figured out a way to ride that line where we're we're you know we're providing child care for people which oh we think that's going to make them have more children well actually it also makes them makes their careers more viable and they may decide to have fewer children um trying to manage that is is not really feasible at least in terms of any anything that anybody has discovered so far but we do know how to make life better especially as Jennifer says for the Aging population um because um that's coming no matter what uh and we can do things to uh improve their health and well-being improve their productive uh years um some people people are happy to work longer into older age um with um with uh dignity and and good jobs uh and some people want to have retirement um but but we can we can do we can do better in Old in older ages for and Philip quickly um I I also wanted to look at at this angle that you know this this argument you've heard people make that it's you know developing countries that don't have the resources to support a growing population are the ones having more children but then we have the issue of children in developing countries developed countries excuse me also leaving the biggest carbon footprint you know one child in a developed country leaves the same I think as about nine or 10 in a developing country and then it harms those developing countries and and prevents also their kind of their economic growth prospects as well because they're dealing with massive climate change issues so disproportionately how can we also kind of factor that in uh when we look at the global population Dynamics and who should be looking at growth on a fair scale well growing population right at the World level growing population creates environmental problems um on the other hand like you you mentioned earlier um uh migration uh immigration to wealthier societies um uh uh produces very important positive effects both for the receiving and for the sending uh societies uh and again is a question of human Freedom if people want to move to places with stronger iies and more opportunities that's something they should be able to do as human beings and that has positive consequences but we have to manage that and it becomes a political problem at that point yeah Malcolm yeah uh well one thing I really want to note here which is something that you've highlighted is not everyone is like you can have more kids and if you just have a ton more kids who are on welfare or something like that you haven't really made the problem any better what we're really dealing with globally isn't so much a population collapse but a taxpayer collapse um and the two core things that affect fertility rate the most are one a person's economic productivity the more economically productive a country is or an individual is the less likely they are to have kids and those are the kids that are more likely to be economically productive themselves which is going to compound this problem the second is the person's cultural group the secondary problem we has here is intra generationally um uh you know declining for IL has been great for women's rights intergenerationally it's going to be terrible for women's rights and that is because if it turns out that every cultural group that accepted women's rights uh Falls way below fertility rate and it makes up a smaller portion of the global population in the future and all the groups that started restricting those rights end up becoming bigger and bigger in their cultural footprint then in the future of humanity women will have far less rights and we're already seeing this in places like China where they're restricting access to for fertility control and birth control we are Marching head first into a future of a handmaid's tail I I I need to get a woman's perspective on that then Jennifer well I you know I think there could potentially be an issue with with um this line of reasoning because we assume that a cultures don't change and we assume that just because we have a child within a culture they stay within that culture and that's absolutely not the case and we've seen tons of cultural shifts in fact how did we get here to having this convers ation today a massive planetary cultural shift towards a small family Norm so I think we need to allow for the fact that cultures are mutable I think also it is the very focus on absolute numbers and on births and average number of children born per woman listen carefully to those words that puts those rights at risk if we do start to shift to thinking about um why are people having uh different family formation patterns today than they had in the past and we kind of take it away from just the focus on women then I think we bring ourselves back to that point I made about quality of life for everyone okay me in a country like China when we try to restrict rights around women you see these backlashes Jennifer Shuba that will have to be the final word so unfortunately we're out of time uh for this edition of the newsmakers I'd like to thank all three of my panelists so much for being with us fascinating discussion our viewers of course were joining us as well remember you can follow us on X and do be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel I'm Andrea thank you we'll see you next time [Music]