For years, we worried about overpopulation, but the reality is now there aren’t enough babies being born to replace a greying population across the globe. Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss depopulation occurring on five continents, why pro-natal programs cost a lot but aren’t seeing results, and what this means for how we measure economic growth in the future. His article “The Age of Depopulation” was published in Foreign Affairs.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich published a book called “The Population Bomb.” It warned about what seemed like an irreversible trend of human population growth as more and more people produced more and more babies. Erlich Worried we were skating dangerously close to the limits of what the planet could possibly support or predicted. Unrelenting suffering and global famine. If we didn’t do something to discourage people from having so many children. Many people were alarmed by the book, but although they couldn’t know it at the time, global fertility rates were already on the decline. Now it seems the greatest hazard to life as we have known it, is that too few new lives are coming into the world. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Most of the citizens of this planet now reside in countries with fertility levels below the replacement rate. Some places have tipped over into what is called net mortality, which means more people die each year than are born. It’s hard to say where it all might level off, but in any case, my guest says it’s important that we understand and begin to prepare for this extraordinary reversal of fertility now. Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Wendt, Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. His article, “The Age of Depopulation,” appears in Foreign Affairs magazine. Nicholas, welcome to Think.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:01:21] Thanks so much for inviting me, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:01:23] Just to get a handle on how this is all playing out. Fertility rates are dropping in most of the world in many places to below the replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman. But we haven’t yet stopped adding to the global population. Right? For now, that number continues to rise.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:01:41] Absolutely. We have we’ve seen a continuing pattern where more and more countries are falling below the level needed for long term stability at this point. Certainly, more than two thirds of the people in the world live in below replacement countries, maybe as many as three quarters. But because of what we might think of as population momentum, because of the previous growth in generations, it’s going to be it’s going to be a while. It’s going to be at least another decade or so before we might possibly get to a peaking of global population.
Krys Boyd [00:02:27] And in recorded history, we’ve only experienced a global population decline once. Is that right?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:02:35] Well, we don’t have very good statistics for, you know, ancient history. We know that. We know that we have a global decline in the 1300s after the after the bubonic plague swept through Asia and Europe and the Middle East. That one is for sure. It’s not at all impossible, but we had a succession of earlier deep populations that we can’t track very well. But we but it’s been about 700 years since we have a full blown deep population for the planet as a whole.
Krys Boyd [00:03:18] So today we know people are having fewer babies on average, but it’s not happening at the same rate in every country.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:03:26] Very different in very different places, in some places, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Most parents are happening more than the replacement level, more than a little over two kids, on average, probably about four. Sub-Sahara as a whole, it’s probably over four kids on average. But there are other places around the world where the average level is down to an amazingly low one birth per woman per lifetime. And in the let’s call them the pioneers in places like South Korea, it’s down to an astonishingly low 0.7 births per woman per lifetime. If that level were continued over over the rest of the generation, each each cohort would shrink by two thirds. There would only be one woman reaching childbearing age for every three women in the generation above them.
Krys Boyd [00:04:27] Wow. Many people, of course, have tried to pinpoint why this is all happening and why now. But I guess it’s probably not one single thing, but a combination of factors.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:04:39] You know, social scientists have been trying to understand the determinants and correlates of differences in fertility ever since the term demography was coined back in the 19th century. And there’s a mountain of theories and there are a mountain of papers on this. The the best predictor that I have seen is quite simply the number of children that women say they want. And that’s reassuring because that means that human beings aren’t rabbits and we’re not robots. But it begs exactly the question you asked What is it that changes the desire for numbers of children? And that’s something that I think probably is beyond the can of social science, as you probably want a Nobel laureate in literature to give you an answer to something like that.
Krys Boyd [00:05:34] Well, the fact that we don’t have a discrete answer might explain why various government efforts around the world to encourage people to have more children have fallen well short of their goals.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:05:45] I think you make a very good point. And the fact of the matter is that pro natal policies have proved all around the world to be very expensive and to have very limited demographic impact to the extent that one can regularly observe any demographic impact. It looks a little bit like a roller coaster. It seems that baby bonus may slightly shift the timing for a second or third child, but then after achieving a little bit of a blip, there’s a slump. And whether on on net there is an impact is a real question.
Krys Boyd [00:06:30] Did you find any evidence that declines in fertility might be linked to people’s individual anxieties about adding to the population, given the uncertainty of things like political unrest and climate change?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:06:41] Well, certainly. Certainly if you talk to young people in the United States and in the West, there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of anxiety about climate change and the future of the planet. But you have to remember that below replacement birth levels are also prevalent now in least developed countries. And very poor places like Myanmar, like Nepal, are both least developed countries on the UN’s roster. One birth per Woman per lifetime reported in the enormous city of Calcutta in India. Less than one birth per woman per lifetime in Mexico City. So I think there are a whole range of considerations and calculations that are underway right now, and there may be many, many different motivations.
Krys Boyd [00:07:40] You write that women in countries with precipitous declines in fertility rates have become aware of the possibility of ways of life that don’t include a lot of resources spent raising children. I mean, this sounds so obvious to us, but how does that compare with what seemed possible or might have seemed possible for women just a handful of generations ago?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:08:00] Think of how mass communications have changed in the last couple of generations. I mean, most stunningly and most recently with the proliferation of smartphones more or less everywhere. We think of this as a kind of a Western contrivance, mainly. But it’s not the the smartphone is more it is almost everywhere nowadays. And personal personal iPhones or Androids, whichever you’re talking about. And the the connection to a world beyond one’s own family and beyond one’s own community can’t be can’t be neglected as a it’s an it has a incalculable. But that does not mean insignificant impact in all that’s underway right now.
Krys Boyd [00:09:01] So if we don’t see a lot of large families, we have no model to follow with more than 1 or 2 kids. It’s interesting because I think many of us have assumed for a long time that humans are just biologically wired to to to do the things that make us reproduce ourselves.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:09:20] Well, I’m glad you brought that point up, Krys, because when I started in this racket about half a century ago, sociobiology was very much in vogue. And to oversimplify a bit, it held that we we are hardwired through our DNA to do certain things, one of them being to reproduce ourselves. It’s very hard to look at what’s going on in South Korea or Taiwan or Thailand today, or less than one birth per woman per lifetime on current trends. To think that this that the socio biological imperative is is evidently at work. It’s a lot easier to think about the theories of mathematics of theorists like Rene Sherrard, who talked about the importance of social limitation. We talked about the importance of social learning in seeing what is around you, learning from that one thing. And if manetics is part of the dynamics that we see underway, the social imitation, it may be very much more difficult to return to higher birth level norms. If the social learning about how to how to do large families has evaporated in certain places.
Krys Boyd [00:11:01] So what tends to change when a society tips over into net mortality, which means more people die in a place than are born?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:11:11] Well, in an arithmetic sense, it’s pretty predictable. I mean, what what tends to happen under non catastrophic circumstances and we’re talking about net mortality under conditions of orderly progress, is that the smaller and smaller birth cohorts are rising to replace those above them. And this means the first you see a peaking and then indefinite decline in the size of the working age population, barring compensatory immigration, of course. Next. The same thing happens with the entire population, which is when you get to that mortality that you were describing, something else happens, too. And this is a little bit less intuitively obvious, or at least was for me when I started trying to learn about all this stuff. Societies with relatively small numbers of kids go gray. Population aging is an inescapable consequence of sub replacement fertility. You never think of it. You’re turning the population pyramid upside down. And so as long as below replacement fertility prevails over long periods of time. We’re going to be seeing an inescapable graying of societies.
Krys Boyd [00:12:43] Just to make sure everybody’s on the same page here. When we’re talking about falling fertility, we’re not actually talking about the inability of humans to reproduce. Right. I mean, at least physical problems with conceiving and carrying a baby to term are not a major cause of these fertility declines.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:12:59] It doesn’t seem like this is the case yet. I mean, I do think that it’s probably reasonable to be mindful of things like estrogen in the water supply, microplastics and other things which may eventually have some significant consequence concerning infertility in modern populations. So far, the clear driver of these big fertility drops is changes in desired family size. We’ve got a very close tracking, not perfect, but very close tracking at a national level between how many children women say they want and what the national fertility level looks like.
Krys Boyd [00:13:50] Nicholas, why are fertility rates notably lower in urban areas as compared with more rural places around the world?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:13:58] Usually fertility decline has started in urban areas, and I suppose you could say that all of the things that make urban areas different from rural areas might be part of the mix, may be more costly to raise children in urban areas, a different mentality in urban areas, more education, sometimes more income, but some something of something about the mentality of urban life may also be involved because when we compare income levels around the world to fertility levels around the world, that’s not as good a predictor as what women say they want. And women can say they want surprisingly low levels of children, even in some relatively poor, relatively rural areas.
Krys Boyd [00:14:55] So we’re looking at a lot of societies that might end up with an imbalance of old and young people, at least compared with what we have today. There are, of course, seniors, people over 65, and we’ll note that folks of this age cohort are arguably in better health in many places than ever before. But no matter what access we have to healthy food and lifestyles and health care and economic security and housing security folks refer to as the super old, which is like 80 plus. Inevitably, they’re going to need some extra support.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:15:28] Sure, and let’s call 80+ super old. At least we’ll do that for now until we get until we.
Krys Boyd [00:15:34] Get there are ourselves
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:15:35] Separated society. But we do see a health explosion all around the world. And people in their 60s and 70s and 80s are on are on average healthier than in the past. And they never before. But nevertheless. It’s hard at the moment to imagine a world a generation from now, let’s say, where 80 plus men and women are mainly going to be dependent upon the resources they’re not earning themselves. And remember as well that the fastest growing contingent of the world’s population is going to be the 80 plus group. It’s already the fastest growing. And that’s going to continue. And we’re going to see we’re going to see an aging wave and places that I think would sound like science fiction to many today by 2050. And that’s just a generation from now. It’s all but inevitable since people have already been born who are going to be in their 80s. It’s all but inevitable that, say, 1 in 10 persons in China will be 80 or older. 1 in 6. And South Korea.
Krys Boyd [00:16:54] So this is obviously a potential problem at the macro level for countries and governments, and we’ll talk about that. It’s also a problem, though, at this much more intimate individual level, there will be growing numbers of people who reach that super old age without any descendants who might be available to look after and advocate for them.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:17:14] It’s a blind spot for population researchers, and that’s also for policymakers. We’ve got a worldwide system of population statistics that are path dependent upon decisions that were made about censuses in the Roman Empire and in the Xin Dynasty. Those empires wanted to learn about military mobilization and taxes. So they counted. They did head counts and they did household counts. We don’t have any demographic data on relatives, on how many nieces or cousins people have with super low fertility. The family kinship networks necessarily atrophy. And this is going to mean in places, for example, like Japan a generation from now that women are approaching retirement age may have slightly greater than 50/50 odds of having no biological grandchildren. This is a world that we’ve never seen before.
Krys Boyd [00:18:28] So how are governments around the world responding to conditions that if they are not really challenging today, Absolutely will be within a couple of decades based on this demographic shift?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:18:41] It’s going to involve a big learning, a big re learning big for a world that none of us have any experience in. Global population growth is really the elevator music to everything that we do and policy and commerce in society. So it’s not only going to be governments, it’s going to be corporations, it’s going to be communities, it’s going to be family. It’s going to be individuals that are going to have to learn to adjust to a world in which the expectation is smaller and older, more or less definitely.
Krys Boyd [00:19:21] Nicholas, in the world all of us have inhabited so far who are listening to this conversation. Youthful generations inevitably rise up and make change, and they have new ways of seeing social issues. They innovate, they start trends. What could happen to culture if the largest demographic group everywhere becomes and remains much older people?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:19:43] I think the received assessment is that older people will be more risk averse and more culturally resistant to change. I wonder whether that’s really going to turn out to be true. I mean, one of the things we’ve seen over the course of this past century that with more education, with better health, people are people are working longer hours, they live longer, they’re, I think, more flexible and more adaptable. I don’t know that the world is ever going to change from having, you know, young, vibrant, beautiful, rising generations be the fashion setters. But I can imagine I can imagine a an older world in which vibrant innovation, new ideas, you know, continue to change the world and alter the realm of the possible.
Krys Boyd [00:21:03] Makes me think about. Lately, people are talking about this new album by the Cure, and its frontman, Robert Smith, is now 65 years old and he is very much doing his thing, as he has for decades now.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:21:16] Well, we’ll take a quick visit. We have seen in the longest living countries in the world, we have seen life expectancy in these life pioneers rise by about three months per year for almost two centuries. We don’t see any sign that that’s stopping. So it is not entirely nuts to think that we may be heading towards a world where life expectancy reaches a century and its life expectancy reaches a century. We’re going to have a whole lot of rethinking to do about what parts of life are we raising children in? What parts of life are we taking off? What parts of life are we working in? There’s a lot of there’s a lot of opportunity and potential there. It’s not all scary.
Krys Boyd [00:22:10] We’ll note that plenty of people live to a ripe old age and then die without significant assets to leave to anybody. But I wonder if there are some potential benefits to the children of these much smaller families when there are children who theoretically stand to inherit more wealth than if it were divided among larger numbers of adult siblings?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:22:30] Theoretically, theoretically larger inheritances for at least some theoretically more attention from parents, more investment in their human capital. So I think we I think we have to be I think we have to be cognizant of how we got the population explosion wrong as we look towards depopulating possible future for all of the pride and angst and worry that we heard about in the 60s and 70s. We now can see that so much of that was just overblown and just a mis assessment. The population explosion was due to an explosion of health. It was due to the doubling of life expectancies on the planet during the course of the 20th century. And if you have to have a population problem, I guess I’ll take your health explosion any day in the same way. We may be. We may be, I’m unduly pessimistic about what an aging, shrinking world would be like, especially if we know that health improvements are doable and likely education and skill improvements are doable and likely, and that scientific progress is not going to be derailed.
Krys Boyd [00:24:00] So different doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophic. We are sort of resistant to change and were made uncomfortable by the idea that the future may not look like the past.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:24:11] Well, I think we’re uncomfortable not knowing about a future that we’re not sure we’re going to be able to navigate and control. I mean, it’s it is unknown. But I argue in this essay you mentioned that there are reasons, I think, to be cautiously optimistic given the given the tremendous advances that we made in the past century in figuring out how to routinized improvements and productivity and improvements in plenty. I would argue that this future, this future is ours to lose. We’ve got the potential for maintaining and improving prosperity and human well-being in a shrinking aging world. There are going to be some obviously unexpected problems that we’re going to have to learn how to deal with. But human beings are pretty adaptable animals.
Krys Boyd [00:25:18] For a long time, businesses have almost defined success according to growth. Will that likely change in the future?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:25:28] It’s going to have to change. It’s going to have to change because there are going to be there are going to be fewer customers. There are going to be fewer workers. There are going to be fewer. Investors are going to be fewer inventors. So. What the what businesses are going to have to recalibrate to is thinking about how to maximize value added, maximized productivity and maximize profits in a world of shrinking population. We will will most likely be seeing increased increased productivity per worker, but we might actually see, you know, smaller GDPs.
Krys Boyd [00:26:22] Let’s talk about the U.S. specifically. How do we stack up against other industrialized countries seeing birthrates falling below replacement?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:26:31] Well, as as he will know if you’ve ever gone abroad and talked to people in other countries. Americans are a very funny bunch of people or a rich country. We have a relatively high birthrate. At this point, we’re still below replacement, to be sure, but we’re not as far below replacement as any country in East Asia. Most countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, so forth. But as of now, the United States birthrate is higher than Mexico’s. For the first time since these sorts of numbers have been recorded. And in addition, the United States has been a magnet for immigration. And without going all Horatio Alger on you, since there are always problems in assimilating, moving to a new country, things like that. The United States has a pretty good record of assimilating newcomers into loyal and productive citizens on the basis of relatively high fertility or rather less low fertility and steady flows of immigration. The United States is on track to continue to increase its population at a modest pace over the coming generation, increase its working age population at a modest pace and to go gray, but to go gray more slowly than some of the other places we’ve been talking about.
Krys Boyd [00:28:15] Yeah, it is interesting, Nicholas, You know, one of the biggest concerns U.S. voters across the political spectrum have noted in this election year is immigration. How to ensure that we keep it at a level that does not somehow threaten national stability or economic prosperity. There could be a time in the very near future when countries are competing to attract immigrants.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:28:37] Well, I’m not sure that all countries or societies will be able to compete for talent from abroad or for labor from abroad. Some places just don’t seem to be comfortable with this. I think immediately of a place like Japan where despite political deliberations about trying to become a more immigration friendly society, that’s very, very little has happened over the last 2 or 3 decades. But in places like the places like the U.S., places like Switzerland, places like Singapore, very, very different types of countries, of course. Capitalizing upon the promise of immigration has been a key to success in the past, and this is likely going to become a the key to success for countries that are capable of doing so in the future.
Krys Boyd [00:29:46] What makes the U.S. a valued destination for immigrants? To this day, despite the fact that we don’t always welcome all newcomers with open arms.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:29:56] Well, it’s not anything in our brilliant immigration policy, that’s for sure. One of the things which is startling to see is the net flow of inventors to the United States. There’s not a close second. And it’s nothing that it’s nothing that we can credit Congress or the White House or Washington, DC for.
Krys Boyd [00:30:22] So as we perhaps in the future in the United States recognize that we want to draw immigrants, where in the world might they come from? As populations are falling in many of the places from which our immigrants have typically come in the past.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:30:42] I think that. Immigrants will be coming from all different parts of America, potentially could come from all different parts of the world as they do today. Of that, the big draw for immigrants in other countries to a place like the United States is the prosperity and opportunity that they would have potentially in the USA or in other countries that are attempting to welcome such talent. If there are big differentials in income and opportunity between the country that talent is coming from and the country that’s receiving that talent, you know, you could have every country in the world shrinking and you still could have big flows of immigration.
Krys Boyd [00:31:43] What might the fallout be for places that experience a kind of brain drain of their most ambitious and educated residents?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:31:50] We’ve seen over the past couple of generations that there are benefits for sending countries as well as for receiving countries. And one of the most important benefits for the sending countries are the remittances that migrants send back home. Today, the flows of remittances from migrants are many times higher in aggregate than all of the global development assistance budgets. I have a guess that the money is being spent a little bit more wisely as well. So. I don’t think that it’s I don’t think it’s going to be a lose lose proposition. But we’ll be seeing in the future, I think there are going to be benefits for for everybody involved. And that’s also true, by the way, for for international flows of commerce and finance. If the world if the world heads towards indefinite shrinking and also pervasive aging, we’re going to need to have an open trade system and an open system of for finance and investment, because we’re going to have to try to do everything that we can to make for efficiency and productivity, to be able to lift, you know, lift the world towards greater prosperity.
Krys Boyd [00:33:22] I’m Gen-X, and we’re already worried about the solvency of Social Security. We stand to receive a somewhat less than than the boomers before us. And the generations that follow mine are even more concerned. What kinds of changes will we need to make to systems to provide for people financially as they age?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:33:44] Well, the pay as you go system of taxing earners to finance the retirement and the health care of retirees is a wonderful contrivance. As long as you have a population pyramid in which each generation is larger at them than the one, the one that came after it, we’re we’re turning towards an upside down population pyramid now more or less everywhere, slower in the U.S. than other places. But as a general rule. As a general rule. That pushes pay as you go systems towards a death loop. They don’t work. They become infeasible. So we have to start thinking right now about how we make the shift from from pay as you go to self financing for retirement, health, finance, things like that. The trouble with a big transition like that is it’s very hard to figure out how to do what with all winners and no losers. There’s going to be a notch. There’s going to be a notch group that’s going to take a double hit. If you have good foresighted public policy to compensate that group so that they don’t suffer. But. For want of compensation for that group. Everybody will suffer if you don’t make these important transitions.
Krys Boyd [00:35:37] So let me let me make sure that I’m understanding you correctly. I mean, self-financing one’s retirement is all well and good. If you have at least a middle class income, many people would argue maybe an upper middle class income. We know lots of people don’t have this. You’re saying maybe we need to switch government provided help to those who legitimately struggle to save in their earning years at work.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:36:03] We’re going to have to come up with a whole new approach towards saving and towards encouraging saving from very early ages. I mean, we can take a look right now, for example, at one of the kind of the pioneer schemes where this is underway. For example, in Australia, it’s an almost it’s an almost mandated form of savings. What we’ve what we’ve seen so far with the Australian experiment. Is that, you know median. Is that net worth for for the lower decile groups, for the lower half of the income distribution? It’s much higher than in the United States. People have more means as a consequence of this. There are always unintended consequences of any sort of big policy impact like this. But you should pay attention to it because we may find out that the unintended consequences are smaller than the unintended consequences of doing things the way that we see now.
Krys Boyd [00:37:15] What about basic necessities? What things might become more expensive? What things might become less expensive as national and global populations fall over time?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:37:26] Well, look at real estate. Look at housing. I mean, that’s a if if you like wide open spaces, you may be in luck if you stick around for a while. There may be there may be less pressure on housing costs, but that will also depend upon decisions about urban agglomeration and things like that, which, you know, we could end up having a smaller world which is more densely populated and cities. So I would want to caution about that. One of the one of the big questions is going to be about health care costs and especially long term health care for people who are struggling with dementia and Alzheimer’s. That could turn out to be a big lifetime expense for for populations and societies in the future. If we do not come up with a medical answer to dementia. We’ve we’ve taken the last two decades of, you know, investing and we’ve invested tens of billions of dollars in trying to come up with a, you know, a medical way of addressing dementia. And we’ve got almost zero success. It’s about the only area of the life sciences where we don’t have a lot to show for what we’ve done over the past two generations. I think that’s eventually going to change. But if it does not, we’re going to have a lot larger proportion of the population as 80 pluses in the future. And we know that’s the most at risk group.
Krys Boyd [00:39:08] Can we assume that most people who are not suffering from a brain illness like dementia will, as a matter of course, just work well into older ages than in typical than is typical now when we kind of think of retirement at 65 as if not our birthright, something that we’ve been cheated out of. If it doesn’t work out for us.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:39:32] I think it’s it seems quite, quite plausible to imagine that healthier older populations will work to older ages into into their 60s and 70s. I don’t know how commonplace working into one’s 80s will be in the future, but an awful lot of the an awful lot of the potential for for increased prosperity in the future I think will involve working to older age just by people who wish to. But at the very least, eliminating the discrimination against older people who want to be economically active.
Krys Boyd [00:40:26] Nicholas, what about ongoing skills training? Like, you know, my own industry, having worked in it for 30 years, has changed a lot. What will we need to do to keep older folks who still want to engage in the workplace up to speed rather than relying on maybe the old ways of doing things?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:40:46] Super important question. For for much of for much of my life, I’ve been hearing about lifelong learning. And for the most part, lifelong learning is this kind of empty slogan that’s being bandied about now. People’s training ends when they’re in their 20s, let’s say, and they’re working into their 60s or now maybe we’re thinking about working into the 70s. Do we see a problem here? So, however. However it unfolds, a formula for continuing training, continuing upgrading of skills is going to be increasingly important, I think, for an aging and shrinking world.
Krys Boyd [00:41:34] How my living standards change around the world as populations fall.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:41:41] Well. I think we can be fairly confident that health is going to continue to improve, that nutrition is going to continue to improve that education and skills are going to. Continue to improve since there are just so many incentives both for societies and for individuals to kind of skill up. One of the one of the big changes in living standards I don’t think will be. Material. I think it will have to do with families. The family structure is going to be changing. So inescapably, with fewer children, fewer blood relatives. The whole or the whole question of where one draws one’s kind of most immediate circle of trusted and beloved people from is going to be a big question for the future as as families change so much. I mean, one of the things that strikes me today, there’s never been so, so many people on Earth as there are today. And we see so much loneliness around us. It’s just a very bizarre paradox, isn’t it?
Krys Boyd [00:43:07] You address something else in this piece that I would not have thought of that I think I’m going to continue thinking about after having read it and after our conversation. And that is war, which almost by definition is fought by the youngest and the fittest among us. It has always required painful sacrifice to send young people into harm’s way. I wonder, though, if you think the nations of the world will become more reluctant to start wars as as youth becomes ultimately a rarer and more precious resource in academia?
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:43:39] There is this concept, this theory of geriatric peace, which is kind of what it sounds like, that as societies get grayer, populations get older, they become more risk aversion most disposed towards international conflict. I think the theory of geriatric is probably works perfectly well for Belgium, let’s say, you know, for a constitutional democracy with an open society and affluent population. But we’ve got two aging, shrinking dictatorships now that seem to be pretty bellicose. We’ve got a Russian federation which has invaded its neighbor Ukraine, and we’ve got the People’s Republic of China certainly menacing its neighbor, Taiwan. I don’t think we know yet how how the nature of international conflict will change with the proliferation of shrinking aging societies. And I don’t think we know yet what the willingness or or aversion to cash ought to sustain and casualties will be like in a world of only child armies.
Krys Boyd [00:44:56] Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Wendt, Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the article “The Age of Depopulation,” which appears in Foreign Affairs magazine. Nicholas, thanks very much for making time to talk today.
Nicholas Eberstadt [00:45:10] Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:12] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
