The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Are We Headed Towards a Population Collapse?

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

China's population is now shrinking. India's could follow within a generation. South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate. Italy has the fastest shrinking population in Europe and Canada's birth rate dropped from 1.6 children per woman to 1.26 in less than a decade. Almost everywhere you look, fertility rates are dropping. What does a world look like with a shrinking population? Can you grow an economy with fewer and fewer people? Can governments do anything to arrest the declining rates and incentivize their population to have more kids? And could those solutions become darker and darker and imperil women's rights? Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, authors of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, discuss the looming threat of population collapse. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith, a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Almost six years ago, we had on this program, two authors of a book that seemed to fly in the face of conventional thinking, thinking that had existed for decades.

The book, Empty Planet, The Shock of Global Population Decline. Since then, well, fertility rates around the globe have declined. And so we welcome back those authors. In the nation's capital, John Ibbitson. He's also the writer-at-large for the Globe and Mail. And with us here in studio, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. Great to have you guys with us here on our program again all these years later. Let's start with, this is something from the Lancet. This is a Lancet study that suggests by the year 2050, more than three quarters

of countries will not have high enough fertility rates to sustain population size over time. This will increase, says the Lancet study, to 97% of countries by the year 2100. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had this to say last year, quote, Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society. And let's get 20 seconds from the world's richest man while we're at it.

Here's Elon Musk, Sheldon, if you would. And I think for most countries they should view the birth rate as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity. And all the policies in the world don't matter. John, let's go to you first. How would you characterize the danger that population decline represents today? It's a significant danger. We said in Empty Planet that we didn't know whether population decline was a good thing or a bad thing. We just knew it was a big thing. These years later, we now are pretty sure it's a bad thing. Great for the environment. Let's be emphatic about that. In terms of biodiversity, in terms of fighting climate change, fewer people is great for the environment. Let's be emphatic about that. In terms of biodiversity, in terms of fighting climate change, fewer people is great for the environment. But the social and economic costs

are grave. Every year there are fewer young people available to pay for the costs of older people like me, pension costs and health care costs and all those other costs. They find themselves burdened, working harder, making less, paying more in taxes to look after the elderly. And as we're seeing across the world, those young people are becoming increasingly restive, unhappy with the burden that they're being forced to share, unhappy with the fact that for many of them, they'll never be able to afford to own a house, for example.

And they're reacting sometimes just by voting for conservative parties, but sometimes they're acting out more powerfully than that. Overall I think it's not a good thing for the society that we live in or the economy that we work in to have fewer people being born. Darrell this is a hard thing for many of us of a certain generation to get our heads around because of course when we were growing up we were told overpopulation was going to kill this planet and we needed to do something about it. Let me share some numbers with you and then I want to put a question after that.

South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate at 0.68. Italy, where 80% of the people are Roman Catholic, has the fastest shrinking population in Europe. Their birth rate is 1.2. Canada's birth rate has dropped to 1.6 children per woman, sorry, from 1.6 to 1.26 in less than a decade. Help us understand why this decline is happening. Well, it's a matter of choice. I mean, people have just decided that they really don't want to participate to the degree that our ancestors did in the production of the next generation. And it is a global situation. There are certain parts of the world that that do have higher than replacement rate fertility

and replacement rate is 2.1 just to give people some context for those numbers that you were mentioning. So each woman in a country needs to have one for herself, one for a partner, and a little bit extra for those who can't or won't have kids in the future. And as a result of that, almost all of the developed world is below that number. And the reason for that is because basically we've decided that we don't want to participate to the degree the way that our parents and our grandparents did in the creation of the next generation, which basically says maybe Charles Darwin was wrong in this one instance in which it's not really a competition to participate and create in the future. It's a competition not

to participate in the future. John, if it is a well-thought-through choice, why are we making, not we three, but I mean we as a society, why are we making that choice? It's the result primarily of urbanization, both in the developed world and in the developing world. When you move from the countryside to the city, children stop being an asset and become a liability from another pair of hands to work in the field to just another mouth to feed. When you move from the countryside to the city, women have access to information and education that they didn't have before. They become more empowered and when they become more empowered, they demand control over their

bodies. And when they demand and get control over their bodies they choose to have fewer children as well the power of religion declines in an urban environment the power of the clan declines in an urban environment you're not surrounded by aunties trying to get you to marry you're surrounded by co-workers who couldn't care less all of those things point towards a society in which women having control over the number of children that they can have choose to have fewer. Here's where I get I'm gonna go off script here and get a little personal for a second John I know you don't have kids Darryl what about you you got one you got one wanted more but couldn't so that's your story yeah how many people do you think are in similar

circumstances where they'd like to have more children, but either for cost or they couldn't or other reasons, this is what they're facing? Well, there is, you know, two measures of future fertility. There's the difference between desired fertility and expected fertility. And desired fertility is always higher than expected fertility. So the issue of cost absolutely does play a factor in this. But what probably plays a bigger factor is people waiting for a very long time to start their families. And since we produce the next generation in the way

that we produced previous generations, when you wait a long time the biology starts to work against you. The difficulty of finding partners to raise children together with is a really big problem. I mean, marriage rates are reducing, people are getting married older. All of these cultural things kind of come together and work against the ability of people, even if they want to have kids, and even if they're able to afford to have kids, to maybe just opt out of the situation because of the circumstances of their lives and the decisions that they've made. So yes, there is a gap between desired fertility and expected fertility,

but there's really not anything that anybody's figured out to be able to close that gap. John, you write so much about politics, so let's talk a little politics. We've had a lot of people come on this program trying to explain the political moment in which we find ourselves. What role do you believe low birth rates play in driving the political changes we have been seeing over the past decade? I think they're contributing to something that none of us ever expected to see, which is a broad shift among millennial

and Gen Z voters towards conservative parties and conservative politicians. Young people, especially young men, voted for Donald Trump in unprecedented numbers in the last American election. We know that younger voters are one of the most important cohorts driving Pierre Pauliev's popularity here in Canada. We have seen, from Korea to France and elsewhere in Europe as well, moves towards conservative, even sometimes far-right

political parties by young people. And I think it is simply their frustration at not being able to access the kind of opportunities that older people such as us enjoyed when we were young, and they're lashing out. I want to ask you,rell about this the rate at which things are happening because it took most of human history for our population to go from one billion excuse me to reach one billion but then only about 200 years to get to eight billion so that was massive and fast. Could the decline be just as quick? Well that's the part we don't know. And the one thing that John and I say about our book, which we wrote five years ago, was that if we underestimated anything,

it was the speed at which this was going to happen. COVID was certainly an accelerator to this. The aging of the population is taking place faster, and fertility decline is taking place faster than we anticipated. And you know the people who do the most work in terms of tracking this, you mentioned the Lancet study but there's also the work that comes out of the UN, every year adjust the peak population number down and every year they move the peak population closer to the time that we're living in right now.

So my view of what's going to happen on the other side of this, I mean, you mentioned all of humanity to get to a billion people, but another stat that might be interesting is that from 1950 to today, we've gone from two and a half billion to eight billion. It's happened in less than a century. So just as everything was unpredictable, a lot of things were unpredictable on the way up, it's probably going to be pretty unpredictable on the way down too as to exactly what this is going to be. And frankly Steve, you know it's great that you're having this show because hardly anybody's really thinking about this issue these days. They're

thinking about a lot of other things but this is going to be something from a political, economic, social, any aspect of the human species that you can look at is going to be a significant issue for us as we go forward and faster than anything I think anybody's really anticipating right now. Well John, in fact a researcher from Georgetown University has said in a piece that the two of you recently wrote, this is a mental health issue, it's an infectious disease issue. It's an aging in place issue. It's a geriatric care issue. Does population decline basically insinuate itself into almost every aspect of society?

Yes, it does, including the struggle to cope with that decline. And that struggle takes several forms. And some of those forms are very unpleasant. The best way in which to respond to declining fertility and declining population, we believe, is through supports for women, enhanced parental leave, enhanced policies to the conventional relationship, have the husband take part of that parental leave, enhanced daycare on site, programs that make it possible for a woman to have a child and then go back to her career without any real impairment.

We might call that the Swedish model. There's another model, which we might call the Hungarian model, which is you pay women to stay home and have babies. In Hungary, it can be quite lucrative to have four kids. You essentially pay no income tax. We don't think that's a very good model. We think it's regressive. We think it deprives us of generations of progress in women's rights and it's to be avoided. There are other models as well.

There's a degrowth model, one that says we must simply come to terms with the fact that we are going to be a society in decline and move to a more essentially socialist way of allocating resources. Again, we don't think that gives you the kind of resources that you need to function in a modern society with health care and education and pensions and the like. All of these models have drawbacks. Some of them, especially those that try to restrict the rights of women, are in fact

quite dangerous. Well, Daryl, you just have to look next door at the province of Quebec. They've been quote-unquote bribing women for generations to have more kids. It doesn't seem to be working. Can you pay women enough to stay home and have more children? The answer is no. You can't. And you know it's interesting in Canada. I remember reading a headline, I think it was last summer, about the amount of money that the federal government is spending on child care in Canada and the expansion of the child care system and you know over the space of the last five years and over the same space the fertility

rates dropped from 1.6 to 1.3. So you might not even argue that there's a negative correlation between the two things. Obviously there isn't but the fact is it's a spurious relationship. In other words one doesn't affect the other. People are making the decision to have smaller families for reasons other than just economic and as a result of that all of these well-intentioned kind of liberal technocratic solutions, you know getting rid of the career penalty for women, you know making children you know almost free if you possibly can in countries. But if you take a look at the countries that have done the most in this space, all of them

have declining fertility rates. So it tends to be a bit of a... it's the answer we would like, but it tends to be a bit of a spurious correlation. John, can you just sort of play it forward for us? We talked about South Korea, we talked about Japan. If those countries continue to go in the direction in which they're currently going, 25, 50 years from now, what do those societies look like? In the most extreme case, for example, Korea could lose two-thirds of its population by the end of the century. And again, as the Japanese have said, how do you keep a

society functioning when you're losing two thirds of your population? It's a huge geopolitical issue as well, Steve, because one of the countries that's losing people every year is China. I believe they're up to about two million a year now that they're dropping. They have, again, one of the world's lowest fertility rates. We talk about an aggressive expanding China

that's trying to take control of the world's economy and trying to supplant the United States as the dominant geopolitical force. My fear is exactly the opposite. Empires in decline are dangerous things. China's empire is in decline. Its population is declining. It's getting older. It has the same young rest of population that are not being afforded the opportunities they thought they were going to have. I'm worried about what the Chinese government is going to do to lash out in an attempt to distract the population from the growing unhappiness over the results of population decline. So does it go without saying, John, that a couple of generations ago when China decided to impose a one-child policy on all families that that was a failure? Well, it was cruel and it was a

failure, but it would have happened anyway. The funny thing about the one shot policy is it happened even as the Chinese fertility rate was declining. They would have gotten to where they are now with and without the one shot policy. The one shot policy just added misery to people's lives that wasn't necessary. Okay, Darrell, let's talk about Canada because our population in the last, I guess, couple of decades has gone up a lot. We're at 40 million people right now, which is an unprecedentedly big number for us.

So why should we worry? Well, we should be very, very worried because the thing that we've been relying on in order for that to take place is immigration. And it's absolutely, I don't think this is too strong a word, tragic the way that immigration has been played with in this country over the space, particularly of the last decade. And a consensus that existed across the political parties, across our, basically across our society to a large degree about the desirability of immigration has been shattered.

And as a result, the Canadian population is predicted to shrink over the next two years because the government's had to cut back on what has been extreme immigration over the last while and the public is not supporting that anymore. Many of our political institutions and political actors are asking questions about it now. So one of the things that we argue about in, argue, I guess, state in Empty Planet was maybe Canada is an example for the rest of the world in terms of how you can smooth the decline that we're all inevitably going to go through.

But the biggest variable that we had working, the biggest tool that we had working in our favor, we've basically destroyed in terms of public opinion. Destroyed? Is that putting it too hard? No, I think we're only seeing the initial reactions to what was going to happen around the immigration issue. I think that it's given what's happened over the last while has given permission because this is just a Canadian thing. This is one of the things about this issue. It's not a Canadian thing, it's a global thing

and Canada is just participating in it and some of the forces that we saw come to the fore that were kind of unspoken things that existed in subcultures I think in Canadian politics that we're seeing in places like Europe and in the United States these days are gonna get a bit more of a hearing than they used to and that to me, that's tragic.

John, let me get you to build on that in this respect. You know Japan is understandably concerned because they are I think it's fair to say wary of immigration there. Some people might even say xenophobic as it relates to immigration. We are not in spite of what our friend Darrell here says we've been very pro-immigration for 75 years or so certainly since the end of World War II. If you can make the case that we need immigration in order to prevent population decline, do you think that can arrest some of the difficulties

that Daryl just described? Well, let's make a best case scenario. Let us assume that the next government, whether it is liberal or conservative, successfully reestablishes the consensus in favor of moderate levels of immigration in order to compensate for low fertility. So we get it back to 250,000 a year, 300,000 years, something like that, something like what it was a decade ago.

We still have a problem with labor shortages. like what it was a decade ago. We still have a problem with labor shortages. We still don't have people to fill the spaces that are needed to handle all the hamburgers in McDonald's and make all the beds at the hotels. So those labor shortages are going to emerge and that's gonna create pressure to increase the intake and that's gonna create more resistance.

The other problem you have is we're running out of source countries. So I said, China used to be one of our largest sources of immigrants, but China is losing population. The Philippines is another major source of immigrants. Their fertility rates have dropped well below replacement rate to their considerable arm just in the last few years, and they're going to soon not be able to export people. And India, the world's largest country, we predicted that India would get to a placement rate towards the end of this decade.

We were wrong. They're already at replacement rate. So a generation from now, India will start to lose people. We may not have sources of immigrants, even if we have the desire of their will to bring them in, sooner rather than later. Daryl, you could always depend on African nations to want people to come to Canada.

Canada is seen as an attractive destination for many people who wanted to leave African countries. Not going to be the case for very much longer? No, and in fact we said in the book, you know, that it is really the only place in the world that has surplus population and a young population that may be interested in moving. But the problem with the African population moving is what we're talking about is something very different than the thing that created the consensus around Canadian immigration, which was the cream-skimming of the immigrant population through the point system. That we're bringing in people who were going to be easily assimilated, people who were educated,

people who already had jobs, we're going to make a net contribution to the Canadian economy immediately. That's not describing the immigrant population from Africa in the main. There are elements that are obviously fitting within that category, but in the main they're not. And this is one of the problems they have with African immigration in Europe at the moment. So yes, from a pure numbers point of view, possibly, but from a desirability point of view in terms of the population's ability to assimilate and contribute immediately,

that's going to be a bit of an issue. John, I want to pick up on something you alluded to just a few minutes ago, which was the notion of China declining in size and yet being militarily strong, and what the regime over there might resort to in order to maintain their position in the world. And I want you, if you can, to kind of paint a picture of a world where that phenomenon is happening in many, many countries that were accustomed to seeing themselves as strong players in the world,

but because of their declining population, maybe darker forces are afoot. What does a world like that look like? Well, it's a dangerous and unstable world. It is a world in which China, again, facing growing unrest in its own streets by the young population, feels that it can distract them by, let's say, invading Taiwan. It's a world in which Russia, which has a declining population, very low fertility rate, decides that the best way to overcome that problem is by annexing other

countries and acquiring their populations. It is a world in which there's a great deal of internal strife. Even in societies like the United States, which have immigration, which have some of it unplanned, but they have immigration, they have the same problem that we have, for example, which have some of it unplanned, but they have immigration. They have the same problem that we have, for example, which is tremendous trouble recruiting people. The only good news in all of this could be the country's going to have trouble waging war

because they're going to have trouble finding the soldiers that they need to wage them. But that's a best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is one of growing instability around the world. Daryl, this is a bit of an odd question, but let's try it here. If we're having trouble making our own replacements, can you imagine a world where cloning becomes a more significant phenomenon?

Well, it's interesting that you had, and actually appropriate, that you had Elon Musk on at the start of this in a clip, because he's somebody who's been banging on about this. It's interesting in the United States, I mean, we heard about childless cat ladies in the election campaign. Horrible thing to say, but representative of a certain element of the American population

in which the fertility rate issue is becoming a motivating political position and it's combination of come more religiously fundamental people combined with this odd mix of people in the technology sector who are aligned with what Elon Musk is saying about this being the biggest issue facing humanity over the space of over the next century and they're looking for technological solutions from it for it. Everything from extending people's ability

to actually produce popular, be able to reproduce longer term, but also looking at ways of producing people in other sorts of ways. So it seems like it's science fiction, but there are people giving this serious consideration, and I do know in the venture capital world that there's actually money going into this.

John, we do precious few programs on this channel where there are no solutions to the problems we talk about. Is this one of those shows where we just don't have a solution to this? I think in the case of Canada, the best thing that we can do is, again, try to reestablish a consensus in favor of immigration and bring in as many people as we can do is, again, try to reestablish a consensus in favor of immigration and bring in as many people as we can in a controlled and responsible way.

We also need to do everything we can to support women in the workforce so that they can have children if they want to have them, they can have them younger if they want to have them, without sacrificing their careers in doing so. But we, look, there's a dark side to all of this, a very dark side to all of this. The people who are talking about finding solutions tend to be powerful men. And they tend to be powerful men who perhaps aren't too worried about the rights of women being circumscribed. They may be powerful men who are saying women spend too much time at school. There are politicians saying that overeducated women have trouble finding attractive men

who can help them bear children. These sorts of very ugly, dark arguments that harken back to a distant past are the real danger and you're starting to hear that inside certain elements of the conservative movements, especially in the United States, especially among the far right in Europe, they are the antithesis of feminism and they would roll back everything that we've achieved over decades. So there are things that we can do, but there are also things we have to be very careful

not to let happen. Well, I got to ask this question, then, Daryl, to you as a follow-up, particularly since we just had Margaret Atwood on the program. I was just going to ask that. I mean, we've got, are you saying Gilead is on the way? You know what?

Margaret Atwood, her book may at some point move from fiction to documentary. That there are elements in certain parts of the world that this is kind of their view. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but looking at the choices that women make as not necessarily being about their own bodies and their in their own lives but being assets that need to be somehow harvested by the state. I don't think that that's

that far off the beam given what we see happening in places like Hungary where they've put everything in place that John talked about you know basically rewarding women to do exactly what we're talking about here but also taking over things like in vitro fertilization they've nationalized it I mean Xi in his last women's Congress in China ended the conference by saying all right this is all great you're all here now I've got one message for you go home and have babies so I don't know that it's that far away and and and that that unthinkable. So I think Margaret Atwood has done everybody a

great service by raising the possibility of what this could look like if we get back into some sort of a regressive kind of a situation. Now not exactly the same way not for exactly the same reasons and all the rest of it but this this this fundamental point that we could as John, roll back on some of these rights that have been so important for women in the development of society and the improvement of society over the space of the last, particularly the last century, I'm afraid of what's going to happen. And I think people should be afraid of what's going to happen. You know, they shoot part of the Handmaid's Tale in Toronto.

And my hometown, Cambridge, Ontario. Well, and I was going to say, I bet many of us, people watching this, listening to this, have at some time or another seen the Handmaids in their red outfits in the streets of Toronto shooting scenes for the show and doing a double take thinking, what in the he double hockey sticks is going on here?

I hope you're wrong about this, but you don't think you are, right? Well, like I said, not in exactly the same way but it's the question. One of the things you know, for example, on the abortion issue, it's always been about the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies versus the rights of the unborn and you can fall wherever you want on that continuum and you can have whatever discussion you want to have about that. I don't want to opine on the issue of abortion. But at some point there might be a situation in which the state comes forward and says, guess what, we have a right to.

We have a right to. Because that child, that unborn child is our asset as well because we need to deal with these types of issues. So we could see that moving not just from this but also into issues like gay rights and gay marriage and things that we thought were done that may come back as a result of this. So when Elon Musk said at the start of this show that this is one of the most significant issues that humanity is going to be confronting over the space of the next century that hardly anybody is talking about and thankfully you are Steve, this is real. John, I want to see whether or not science can help us out in any of this.

We know that male and female fertility rates are a problem right now for too many people. Is science on the cusp of doing something there to improve the fertility rates of the genders? If they are, I'm not aware of it. My background is thought in science, my background such as it is, easy in studying societies and how they work and how politics works. I think the best hope for us might just be a change of attitude. I mean, again, the world, the worst world is one in which signals get sent. So it's not handmaid's tale, but it's do women really need all that much education? Surely a woman could have one or two children before her career takes off.

Subtle hints inside the society that women really should, for the good of the greater society, buckle down and have a couple of kids. That again is a world I don't want to be a part of. But it may just be natural. It may just be we have a generation or two of only children who fall in love with another only child and they say, you know what, I'll bet you it'd be great to have half a dozen kids running around on Christmas Day. Let's make that happen.

I think we might naturally somehow reverse population decline just because we get tired of only having one or no kids. That would be the organic way of doing it and it would take two or three generations. And let me just get you to finish up, John, with this. You do spend a lot of time keeping an eye on governments, both here at home and around the world.

Are governments adequately seized of this issue to want to do something about it? Not here they aren't. They certainly are in East and Asia. When we came up with empty planet, the first country outside Canada to divide rights was Korea, and then came Japan, and then came China, and then came the United States.

So I think this is almost a generational divide between Eastern Asia and the Western societies. I don't think this is top of mind right now for governments in Ottawa or Washington or London't think this is top of mind right now for governments in Ottawa or Washington or London. It is increasingly top of mind for governments in Eastern Europe because it's serious there. It may very well be top of mind in Moscow as well.

What do you see, Daryl, in terms of governments taking this issue seriously? A lot of it right now is in denial because it's dominated by liberal technocratic people who are trying to find normal types of public policy solutions to these issues. And they still believe that it's a question of market failure and that if you could create the right incentives, that people

will do what we need them to do in order to preserve our societies. Except every governing instrument that they've applied to this has not really worked. I mean, it's improved a little bit, gone back then. It's not shown a continuous ability to resolve the situation. has not really worked. I mean it's improved a little bit, gone back then, it's not shown a continuous ability to to resolve the situation. So at some point what we're going to start moving to is a more fundamental conversation and

that's when it starts to get scary as John mentioned. Gentlemen I want to thank both of you for your participation in tonight's program and for putting this on our agenda because this is something we all need to think a lot more about and do something about. So people who are watching or listening, go have kids, right? Go have kids. John Ibbitson in the nation's capital, Darrell Bricker, Ipsos Public Affairs. Thanks to you both.