TRIGGERnometry - Population Collapse is a Massive Problem - Dr Paul Morland

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

Dr Paul Morland is an author and broadcaster who writes and speaks about population and the big demographic trends across the world, both contemporary and historic. | SPONSOR. We use Ground News to escape the echo chamber and stay fully informed. Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan. Follow Dr Morland on X - https://x.com/MorlandDemog | Subscribe to the Canon Club Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-canon-club/id1773506253 SPONSOR. Shopify! Sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ SPONSOR. MUD/WTR. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code TRIG at https://mudwtr.com/TRIG Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 05:14 Why Are We Having Fewer Children? 10:27 The Decline In Religiosity And Birthrates 17:31 Explaining "Replacement Rate" 27:57 What's Stopping Young People Going Elsewhere For A Better Deal? 34:26 Why Is Our Attitude To Children Now So Different To The Past? 38:19 The Effect Of Anti-Human Propaganda Through Climate Change Activism 43:59 How Much Of This Is Down To Men Not Wanting Children? 52:02 How Do We Get Out Of This? 01:03:44 The Cultural Impact Of Immigration 01:15:40 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We got more deaths and births than the UK fought the first time last year. The fact that you've gone from 7, 8, 9 workers per retiree when Japan was thriving to 1 to 1. And in Britain, we're moving rapidly from 3 workers to every retiree to 2. It's falling dramatically low, as low as 2 thirds of a child per couple in Korea, which means 100 grandparents, 33 parents, 11 children. So I think this is a completely unprecedented scenario. I think we are entering uncharted waters and I'm quite concerned. There is going to be a competition for the young and well-educated.

This is a ticking time bomb, isn't it? Dr. Paul Mullen, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much. You are, of course, a demographer and your latest book is called No One Left, Why the World Needs More Children. We want to talk about demographics with you, it's an area of expertise, is something you've been talking about extensively. So first and foremost, it's an initial. issue that has come to the fore in public conversation, even though it's kind of a fringe issue

still to many people. But why is it a significant thing and what is going on with demographics, particularly in the Western world and perhaps also beyond? It's a significant thing because people matter, whether you're looking at economics, you're looking at history, you're looking at current affairs, what's going on in the news, flows of refugees, working age populations, unemployment. It's all very much driven by the size of population, the growth or shrinkage, where they're moving to, where they're moving from. And I kind of made it a bit of a mission of mine, quite apart from the pronatalism, which we'll come on to, to try and help explain the past, the present and the future in terms of what was going on in terms of population,

and then how did that affect the way things turned out? So, for example, my second book, which is about the history of population change, I look at a whole range of things from the Louisiana purchase and the Americans moving across the whole continent to the origins and the outcome of the First World War, to the end of the Japanese economic experiment. That's the human tide. And I show how in each of these, in many events of history, which are well known to people, there was the hidden hand of demography, not the only thing that was going on, but you can't really understand the event unless you get the demographic dimension.

And then the next book after that, my third book, Tomorrow's People, was really to say, Well, if that's true, the past, if population change has driven the past, it must be changing the present and the future, what's going on in the world today? What is it that we see happening in current affairs in the news? And what's the future going to look like when we understand how population is developing? So you then ask me what's actually going on now? I take a very global look. The answer is you go through a demographic transition. I mean, very crudely, poor countries, which is the whole world before 18. 100, lots of kids, not always maximum.

Some people were taken out of the marriage market for various reasons. Marriage was delayed. There were various social mechanisms for controlling fertility. But broadly, women had lots and lots of children, and they couldn't control their fertility very effectively. People died young. Lots of children died in their first year. And so, I mean, if you'd had a population with six children,

which was pretty normal, and they hadn't all died off, you'd tripled every generation. I calculated that by the beginning of the fourth or fifth century, can't remember which, with a quarter of a billion people at the era of Julius Caesar, by four or 500, you'd have had one metre per person, standing meter in the world. The reason that didn't happen was not because people weren't having large families, six at least, but because there was, this was Malthus as well, this endless downward pressure on population growth of people dying. And if the war didn't get them and disease didn't get them eventually, the planet couldn't

possibly have fed that many people. And the planet's ability to feed people grows very, very slowly it takes from Caesar to Queen Victoria for the world's population to quadruple. And that was the old regime. Then you have this incredible demographic transition. It's a long story. I won't go into it in detail. But essentially, first of all, your mortality rate falls. You're still having loads of kids.

They're not all dying off. People are living longer. Population explodes. And then eventually fertility rates go down. And that happens first in the British Isles and North America, and then it spreads. So parts of the world today are still in that demographic transition. You'll see countries in Africa still have very high fertility rate. They're really bringing their mortality rates down, even though they're still quite poor.

They're having population explosion. More and more of the world is moving into that point where they have low death rates, long life expectancy is very low for mortality, but very few children. But instead of the thing settling at about two kids, which would lead to a stable population, it's falling dramatically low, as low as two-thirds of a child per couple in Korea, which means 100 grandparents, 33 parents, 11. children. So my fourth book, the most recent one, is really saying, why is this happening? What can we do? But I think just the fact that people know more about it, that people become

more aware of this incredible demographic vortex that we're facing is worthwhile. So that's kind of my progression of my thinking and my writing on demography. So the inevitable question, look, I think there are lots of people who are interested in addressing this and trying to solve it in some way, for the reasons that we'll discuss, given the consequences of it. But in order to solve something, you do need to understand why it's happening. And I have not heard, and this is why you're here, anybody where I've gone, okay, this person has like got it. They've described the entire set of the causal reasons. So why are we having fewer children? Why are we below replacement? You'd really want it to be a simevalon.

you'd want someone to say, aha, I've got the answer. But unfortunately it's not that simple. Because it's so general, because we're seeing it in Jamaica and Japan, Thailand and Taiwan and Finland, because it's so general, almost becoming universal outside sub-Saharan Africa

and a few countries in Asia, people think there must be a single cause, and therefore it must be simple. Actually, probably if you had a gods-eye view or a much cleverer demographer, me, maybe who will exist in the future, they could crack it. But the best that we can do today is to say it's multi-causal, and you can group those causes into two buckets, the material and the cultural.

So let's start with the material. So we know in Britain, for example, housing's very expensive. The trouble with that as a universal explanation is where housing is cheap, some cities in China have built lots of flats. Parts of the UK have relatively cheap. Housing parts of Germany, parts of the Balkans. I don't think the whole of Russia and Ukraine has expensive housing, but they all have low fertility. So that doesn't mean it's not causing low fertility in parts of the UK and lots of the rest of the

world. But if you lifted that as a cause, if everybody could get cheap housing, it wouldn't solve it. So housing's part of it, expensive childcare. But again, if you look at parts of the world where childcare is very, very subsidised, fertility rates are still very low. Parts of the Baltics, parts of Germany, if you can get the childcare, it's very subsidised. So again, I'm not dismissing. I've got children of money. own who are having children of their own, and not dismissing the cost of childcare as important. But it's a cause, but if you get rid of that cause, there are other things depressing fertility rates. So I always say that material factors are important, but they won't solve it by themselves.

So what's the other thing that's going on? The other thing that's going on is cultural. And culture is much more difficult to put your finger on. There seems to be something about modernity, which is depressing fertility rates. There are a whole range of explanation. There's something to do clearly with women's aspirations and education. And I always say, you know, I welcome women's education and aspirations. I'm the son. My mother was the prime earner when I was a child. My wife has earned more than me. My daughters have both got as good education as my son and they're leading their careers. I don't want that to change. But we need to find a way to reconcile that with producing a demographic future.

for ourselves. So there's something about women's rights and feminism and education, but we've got to, and I don't want to get rid of that. We can't get rid of that. And if the problem is too few people in the workforce, it wouldn't help if we did. So we've got to find a way, and I think younger, better minds than mine will come up with those sorts

of solutions. How can we have a 2030s feminism that's not like the 1950s, but combines women fully self-actualizing and having children. So there's something about women. It's something about relationships. people are having less sex, people are getting married later, people are coupling up later and less.

There seems to be a political divergence between men and women. That could be part of the picture as well. I think at root, though, there is a lack of a pronatal culture. So all these things will exist. We will have feminism. We will have women's education, and we may have something of a breakdown of relationships. And a load of other cultural effects and a decline of religion. But ultimately, if we have a really pronatal culture, if we had a culture and a civilization which really valued having children, where that was really high status, where that was something people really aspired to, it would overcome all those issues.

And the example I always give is Israel, where they are extremely wealthy, extremely densely populated, extremely urban, extremely educated, women's rights are by far the best in the Middle East. and yet people are still having children, an average of around three per couple, whereas it's less than two in every other OECD country. So my point is all these things that seem to be militating against people having children. They're all there. But if people really have the priority, if people want it, if people make it the most important thing in their lives,

if it's valued as it should be, and if the lack of children was understood as the problem it is, then through all of these issues we would overcome. So I think the ultimate cause, sorry to give you such a rambling answer, the ultimate cause for me is what do people really value in their lives? And if they value having children enough, they'll have them. Which brings me to the one thing you haven't mentioned in your analysis, which applies very much to Israel,

which is that the people who have the highest birth rates in Israel are the ultra-religious. To what extent is the... decline in religiosity affecting birth rates? Well, my PhD supervisor, Eric Kaufman, who I think you've had on this show, wrote a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth. I'm very proud of that book because I'm the first person mentioned in the acknowledgements. I think it's the first time my name ever appeared in print. And he was wrestling with this problem. We often talk about it. Can we have a secular society which has a decent fertility rate? Now, Eric's view is in the long term. if you have communities that have a high fertility rate and at the same time are very good at

walling themselves off as the ultra-altodox are in Israel and outside, then they will grow exponentially. And if you run that forward a few hundred years, that has an amazing effect statistically. Against that, I have a friend who comes from a traditional Catholic family, and I think she only had three kids because she married late, but one brother's got 13 and one's got 12 and the sister's got 10. And the trouble with those sorts of communities is Catholicism has evolved as the majority religion. They are not particularly good at walling themselves off. They don't have to live near the church as you do have to live near a synagogue if you're

walking on Shabbat. They don't have, they have a school network, but they find, those very traditional Catholics find it very hard to control those schools and keep them really traditional. And so I suspect a lot of those kids won't have 10 or 12 of their own. So there are high fertility religious groups, but I think they dissipate. And then there are high fertility religious groups that retain their young. If you can do that, you've got a growth model. Now, I'm not sure that will carry on for that long.

I don't know how many generations families of 7, 8, 9 in the current environment will be able to hold on to their children. There are so many pressures. For example, I know some ultra-Orthodox Jews in England who resisted. They've got six children, so sort of moderate family for their community. They resisted the internet for their children. Along came COVID. The kids had to go on a lot of them.

line for schooling. So there are so many pressures, and to retain your children for generation to generation is very difficult. So I think Eric's thesis is these groups will grow and grow and grow ultimately, and I think it's almost impossible to know whether that's the case. So the question really is, if religion is breaking down, if secularism is the way forward or the future, and I'm not here to stand on a pulpit and sort of argue for religion, then can we invent a secular, just like feminism, can we invent a feminism that is fully aligned to pronatalism and there's lots of historical precedent for it,

Mary Wollenstonecroft, there's whole literature of feminism about pronatalism and anti-native. It's a debate within feminism. There are pronatal strands within feminists. I think we have to invent a secularism that doesn't rely on religion for two reasons to have children.

First reasons I don't want to live whilst I'm happy to have groups and sects and we can accommodate them in a liberal society. If they became the majority, I think our liberal societies would collapse. I don't think we would be, we would no longer have the overarching infrastructure. I mean, again, an example I give as a friend of mine who's a dentist,

and he's a dentist for children. Most of his patients are ultra-Orthodox Jews. And they need him. And it's not that they couldn't be dentist, but you have to study biology and you have to go to university. You have to do a load of things that'd rather their children didn't do. to keep the utilities going, using the term in the broadest sense, if dentistry is a utility, to keep the lights on,

we can't all be ultra-religious sects that retain their young, hold off the rest of the world. So I don't think we can, that's the model, that is not the model for the future. And what concerns me is that we end up in a world where these groups do have large numbers of children and that they then assimilate into a secular core where they dissipate.

reminds me rather like the 18th century city of London, high fertility countryside, endlessly attracting people to London, but London was a population sink. People didn't have large families, it was very unhealthy, and I think secular society could end up being like that. It sort of draws in these growing religious groups, and it functions because it manages to assimilate them to a certain extent or some of their offspring, but it doesn't regenerate itself. So, you know, my appeal is just as we need to invent a pronatal feminism, we need to invent a prenatal secularism. I don't think we can rely on religion to do it. And in Israel, whilst you're absolutely right, if you divide the population according to

self-identifying religiosity, the more religious, more children, but even the self-identified seculares have two children. So that's better than any other country in the OECD. So I don't think it's inevitable that secular societies need be low fertility. We just have to rethink things, I think. And Paul, we've talked about the causes and the potential causes. What are the effects of this crisis that we're talking about now? So let's take the number. If we have a replacement rate of one, there's a lot of people who are watching this, who are listening to this, it goes, well, I've got no idea what that actually means.

That's just a stat to me. So let's talk about what a replacement rate of one means, how we got to it. And then let's look at the effects cascading through society as a result of that number one. The news we consume doesn't just inform us. It shapes our perspective on the world. But with so many hidden agendas and echo chambers, how do you know you're getting the full story? That's where Ground News comes in.

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the replacement rate is the number of children a woman would need to have, and it's measured by women, but just because it's measured by women, we shouldn't think it's only the responsibility of women. I do think that's important to say. Maybe we'll come on to talk about how important men are in this. But per couple, let's call it per couple.

Each couple of these have a couple of kids, obviously, to replace themselves. Now, if we go back to the 18th century, or the 17th century, or parts of the world until relatively recently, you needed to have a lot more than that. If four of your six children were going to die before they completed their fertility, you need to have six. And one of the explanations as to why fertility comes down from very high to at least moderate is people know their children aren't going to die. But let's assume

everyone lives, more or less everyone in our modern societies lives to 50, say, the end of their fertile years roughly. Then two would suffice, obviously, because two people get replaced by two people. Now, that doesn't mean the population won't grow. I mean, forget migration for a minute, that obviously in or out will affect the side of the population. But also, if the interval between births grows, then the population would decline a little bit until that's stabilised. If you had a lot of old people dying off, like a lady-baby boomers like me at a point we're all dying off, then the population could decline.

So the converse of that is what's happened in Britain. We've had below replacement fertility since the early 70s. But think of the population pyramid back then. Not many old people. They had all died young, or lots of them had their different. quite big families. So you had lots and lots of young women relative to the population, having not many children, but they'd still have more births each year than that small number of people dying off. The replacement is the long term. Eventually, if you're below replacement,

you'll have more deaths than births. We got below replacement in Britain in the early 70s, only last year for the first time. Did we get more deaths than births? Ignoring migration, we got more deaths than births than the UK fought the first time last year. In Germany, they had more deaths and birth since the 1970s. So you have what you can call organic population decline. Ignoring the ins and outs, more deaths and births, the population starts to decline. Before that happens, the working age population starts to decline. Now, when I joined the workforce in the 1980s, there were about two of us joining for every 60-something

leaving. And there was unemployment, there were problems. Nevertheless, there was a Thatcherite population dividend. In other words, what is a population dividend? Not that many old people, still in the 80s, there weren't that many. Lots of boomers coming into the workforce. They weren't having that many children or marrying early. You didn't have to spend that much on education.

You don't have to spend a ton on the old in terms of intensive health care and pensions. Lots of young people entering the workforce. That's when an economy does very well. When does an economy not do very well? Take Japan. Back in the 1960s, there were seven or eight or even nine people of working age for every retiree in Japan. So roughly 20 to 65 versus 65 plus. There were 7, 8, 8, 9 workers paying taxes to support that small,

or helping out, whether you look at it in terms of government financing, or money generally, or just the labour force. You can carry that number of old people very easily when you've got 7 or 8 people of working age to support them. So Japan's population went up. And then they've had a very, very long period of very low fertility, more deaths than birth, declining working, age, declining population, they have a declining population every year now. Of course, they don't

have that much immigration. They have a bit. When Japan gets back down to 100 million, circa 2050, there will be one worker for every retiree. That's 120 to 65 year old to a 65 year old plus. Now, you can move that retirement age a little bit, or even a lot, but it's not going to change the fact that you've gone from 7, 8, 9 workers per retiree when Japan was thriving to one to one. And in Britain, we're moving rapidly from three workers to every retiree to two. And we'll go that way as well. The problem is not the absolute number of people. I think there are great reasons to have children. I've had three of my own. In some ways, I regret I didn't have more. If I'd known I was going to be a pronatalist sitting here banging the bully pulpit, I would have exceeded to my wife's request and had another one. But I think children are wonderful, their life-enhancing, etc., etc., you know, I could wax lyrical. But that's That's a question ultimately of preference and taste. The economics is quite scientific. And I think the Prime Minister before last of Japan talked about societal collapse.

We've never seen societies in which the pyramid looks like that rather than that. The natural pyramid was like that. As older people lived longer, it turned into something like that. But if older people haven't had enough children and their children haven't had enough children like career, as I said, 100 grandparents, 33 children, 11 grandchildren, and it looks like that. We don't know what these societies are going to be like, but we can guess. So, for example, I think the sclerotic nature of all European economies is down to the fact that they've all had far too few births for a couple of generations. They're all sclerotic, they're all old,

they're not inventive, they're not creative, they're not energetic, and they've got more and more old people using very intense health services, needing pensions, needing social care, and fewer and fewer people paying the bills. In fact, I just wrote a paper for policy exchange with my friend

Philip Pilkington called small families or small government, small state. The basic argument there was if you happen to be a Factorite or a small state conservative, you need to understand that with the kind of demography we've got today, you're

never going to get back to a state that is not spending tons of money and taxing very heavily, unless you're prepared to wind up the whole welfare state. Because the balance of the elderly to the working age population means either you're going to abandon the old people, or if you're not going to abandon them, you're going to provide them with any kind of decent civilised services. You're going to have to have a heavier and heavier tax burden on a fewer and fewer number of young people. Those young people will be less and less creative, because they just aren't enough of them. We see that in Japan, the decline of young people in Japan, decline of patents. You can track it quite clearly. There's no energy in society. And I look around Britain today,

and I was born in 64, so I see Britain in many phases. I look around Europe today and compare it to the Europe I first sort of discovered when I was in my teens and 20s. And I think so much is down to the fact that people haven't had enough of their own children. So much is down to this aging, this massive requirement from immigration from overseas, which we may talk about. And I wish politicians understood this better. I think does Rachel Reeves, when she sees the problems of the economy, when she struggles, she probably really does want growth, but does she understand the fundamental problem she's up against from a demographic point of view?

And after 50 years of having below replacement fertility in the UK, we've never had a front-ranking politician talk about it until Kirstong. And what did he have to say? I'm not going to tell children how many, I'm not to tell parents how many children to have. I mean, no one's talking about telling people or forcing people, but I thought that was the most unhelpful contribution to the debate. I'm a left-leaning cosmopolitan type, and it doesn't fit in with my values, so I'm not going to go there. And as I always say, I've sort of repeatedly said on podcasts in my writings, pronatalism should not be a left or right thing. There's a long tradition of prenatalism on the left.

Marx wrote extremely eloquently against Malthus from a prenatal point of view. The Soviet Union in the East European countries gave medals to mothers. Cuba gave tax benefits to people to have children. Macron, the man of the centre, talks about demographic rearmament. It's only in the Anglo world that we seem to think there's something sinister. Excuse the term because, of course, it means left, sinister and right wing about having children, whatnot, and it's about having to be, about being a proponent of the need for a society to have children. Paul, what you're really describing here, and you put the case very eloquently, is this is a ticking time bomb, isn't it?

It's a terrible ticking pine bomb, and again, people don't always understand this. A friend of mine in the States put it in terms of bank accounts, which I thought was quite good. So we see Korea, we see two-thirds of a child per couple. We see that's a disaster, but actually Korea has an advantage, and Korea's advantage. it didn't start happening until the 80s. So, although it's like they're running their bank account down very fast, but they've got quite a lot in the bank. Japan has a much higher fertility rate than Korea.

It's like 1.2 versus 0.8 or 0.6. But they've had it for so long, but it's got into the demographic structure. In Britain, we never had a super low fertility rate. We're now getting a very low, but for a long time is at 1.8, 1.9, 1.7, too low. But it was slowly eating away the demographic fabric. It was slowly eating away the bank account, if you like.

So we were never running the bank account down terribly fast, but we've been running it down for a very, very long time. And the problem is that to reverse it, first of all, the first thing we need, we'll probably talk about this and more, is some government acknowledgement. Then we need some government policy, including changing the culture,

which is not easy if government's taking, it takes a long time. And even if it started tomorrow, we're then going to have the extra burden of lots of children to look after, precisely when we've got the burden of lots of older people to look after. So it's really difficult to turn around. It's a long-term process. My friend Philip Pilkington, who I've mentioned, an economist, says that a lot of people think it's a bit like the economy.

Oh, inflation's too high. We'll raise interest rates in an 80 months or six-month or whatever. There's a short-term horizon and inflation will come down. That's not what this is like. This is deeply cultural. No one's been talking about it for the 50 years we've been running our bank account down, as it were. And when we get it, when we turn it around,

it's going to be decades before the effects are really felt because a newborn child doesn't enter the workforce for 20 years. But if not now, when, if we don't start from here, we wouldn't start from here, ideally, but this is where we are. So I think we need to have these sorts of conversations. And we do need to have these conversations because you're talking about taxing the young in order to support the old, which is, I mean, you could argue we've been doing that for quite a while

already, economically speaking, and then you go, well, if that's the case, why are young people going to stick in this country? That sounds like a terrible deal. So what's the point of them being here? If I was that young person, and that was a deal offered to me, I'd be like, I'm leaving, mate, and I'm going to go somewhere where I'm wanted. That's exactly right. Now, in some countries, that's going to happen more than in other countries in Britain, for example. We have a very mobile work force, people speak English, people are very plugged into the global economy. It's true that the problems we have here are going to be the same in lots of other developed countries, but you'll have places where it isn't the case, Dubai, say. Or there'll be a country that says, the young

people come here. If you come here from overseas, we're not going to tax you. There'll be opportunities. It's much harder in a place like Japan, where people are more monolingual and they're more likely to be very, very embedded in their country and culture. But I think you're absolutely right. There is going to be a competition for the young and well-educated. in the future and the idea that they'll just stick it out. And, you know, I see this with my own family, the younger generations of my family, nephews, and he's children, the tax burden they're already under, and we ain't seen anything yet.

The tax burden they're already under makes them think very carefully. So on this current trajectory, you will get exactly what you're talking about. People will leave. The tax base will decline even further. The whole thing will become unsupportable. And that I think is why even the Prime Minister of Japan, who's probably got his youngsters more long. locked in than the youngsters here is talking about societal collapse.

We don't know how it will collapse, but we can envisage it. We can envisage it that you say we cannot withdraw these services politically. These older people vote. They're insisting on it, triple lock, NHS, etc., etc. We cannot leave old people to rot in their own houses or flats. We wouldn't want to. We can't support that without a level of taxation or borrowing that the taxation will crush the economy and drive off the young, so we borrow.

No coincidence that Japan. Japan, which has had this problem the worst for 50 years, has got the highest debt to GDP ratio in the OECD to 250% roughly versus 100%. So you borrow up to the point that you hit a sort of the kind of moment we had under List Trust. You can argue whether that was really manufactured or it was part of the market. But the fact is there'll come a point when people will say actually buying government bonds in a world where the population is declining, the tax base is declining, I'm not going

to do it. And you'll have to raise interest rates to the point. that it makes it worth the while and the economy. There are a whole range of ways that you can see that the economy and society is going to come under enormous pressure, if not collapse. I don't want to be too apocalyptic. But I just don't see how the thing carries on, as it is at the moment, with our expectations of a kind of civilized society for older people

without some kind of revival of fertility rates. Paul, and you mentioned that we don't have any precedent. for this. Is there really never been a time in the history of major civilizations when they stopped reproducing the way we are? No. So first of all, some people say there was in Rome, but my get,

and that's part of the collapse of the Roman Empire. I don't believe, first of all, the data from Rome is really bad. Secondly, I think the data we have on Rome is Rome rather than the Roman Empire, right? And Rome could always attract people from elsewhere, particularly in the late Roman Empire, where citizenship was kind of

generalized. I don't think methods of birth control were general enough or understood enough to really control fertility in the Roman Empire. So I think among the elites, among certain elites who perhaps were quite clever at certain practices, or were prepared not to marry, or whatever, they probably did have low fertility rates. The French worried about it in the 18th century. But I think until, at least France, in the late 18th century, globally, it was only ever an elite phenomenon. it was a small number of people who found ways to meet their sexual requirements or not and not have a very high fertility rate.

I don't believe it was common in the Roman Empire. And I think the best historians of Rome would agree that it was an elite phenomenon noticed by... So in terms of other places, I mean, again, people have controlled their fertility through various practices. Like there was a lot of infant mortality, as we talked about, that was natural. But in terms of people actually controlling it, there's a lot of infanticides in certain societies, which was kept very quiet, China, Japan. There was the whole institution of not marrying in the Catholic Church

and sending boys and girls to nunnerism monasteries, which was statistically significant enough to reduce fertility a bit. There was late marriage, and you do see a certain relationship between the economy and agriculture and people getting married and having children. So in a pre-modern society,

if you had a few bad harvests and things, were difficult, people didn't get married, that tended to delay fertility because people mostly have the children within marriage, and then you had a good series of harvest, there was a bit more money around, a bit more food around, people got married a bit early, the fertility rate went up. So there was some regulation, but I don't believe we've ever had a society in the past, where we've kept this number of people alive into old age, which by the way, I think is a wonderful thing as I'm 60, and hoping for another 20 or 30. We haven't, we certainly never seen some of the something where we've got that many people at the top end. And I do not believe we've remotely

seen a society where we had fertility rates down below one and a half historically. What we have seen historically is the black death or the 30 years war. And that cuts populations. But it's tended to cut them across the board, something like COVID. You remember it was very much the older population. God forbid we should have something that killed Chul, you know, something like that that killed Chow. Then you could see it. But historically, I'm not aware that we ever have. So I honestly think we have, the traditional population pyramid was like that, and it wasn't always exactly like that. There might have been a wall that particularly took out a chunk in the middle, but I think essentially, until modern times, people haven't been able to control their own fertility sufficiently, and people haven't lived long enough, been able to live life expectancy was too short. So I think this is a completely unprecedented scenario.

I think we are entering uncharted waters, and I'm quite concerned. And the reason I ask about this is it sort of sounds to me like human beings have never had this experience before, so we don't really know exactly how to deal with it. Would I be right in saying that historically speaking, every major civilization would have seen reproduction and the expansion of its population as a good thing to be sought, frankly? And, you know, rulers would have wanted to have a bigger manpower pool to go to war and so on and so forth. Do you think our attitude to children is quite, I was going to say unnatural, but at least historically atypical? I think it's not absolutely universal what you're talking about, but societies and cultures that didn't value having children didn't make it into history or through history. I mean, you do have, for example, yes, the whole tradition in Catholicism of celibate priesthood, celibate religious and so on, reducing. fertility rates. On the other hand, within marriage, fertility was encouraged. Certainly as you get to

the sort of mercantilist period where, well, you go back to Ibn Caldun, you go back to the Arab writers, you look at the history of writing on this subject, but particularly into the 18th century when you had mecanalists who wanted to grow their national populations, accumulate gold, and be able to fight wars. It was obvious that large numbers of people were a good thing. So I don't think you've had a really anti-natal Civilizational Society that succeeded And where you've got those kind of anti-natal I mean the shakers in the United States are famous case

They didn't believe in having any children And they surprise surprise have died out So there's almost a kind of Darwinistic process at work And to some extent Particularly where you've got high rates of mortality And lots of people are dying off If you don't have a pronatal culture If the average isn't sort of five or six children per woman

you're not going to make it as a society. So I think it is unprecedented. And yes, there is something about modernity, which is anti-children. Now, you might say, oh, is that really the case? It's not as pro-child as it should be. And maybe in the past, where people haven't been able to control their fertility that well, you didn't need a pro-natal culture. So I'm not saying we need to go back to the past

because they had a pro-natal culture, and that's why they had lots of children. They had lots of children partly for the reasons we've said that there was a kind of Darwinistic, If societies didn't have them, they'd die out, which instilled a certain culture, but just worked through history. But I think the lack of ability to control it meant you didn't really need a prenatal culture. Now, then you get to the kind of 70s and 80s when contraception was very, very common. I mean, it was really coming in from the late 19th century, but it became really universal and available in the developed world. And at first, it's interesting, fertility rate didn't fall off a cliff.

It went below replacement, but not very much. But I think for my generation, there was still very much an unspoken expectation, an unspoken norm. You got married in your 20s and started having your family then, and that's what I saw most of my friends doing. You know, reasonably well-educated people, people had been to good universities or not. It didn't really matter. That's what you got on and did. And you might have had two or three. And I think it was kind of unthinking in a way. It was very much how we were, I wouldn't say program, but that was the atmosphere.

That was the environment at the time. I think we're now in a world of hyper-individualism. a hyper self-actualization. And that's not altogether bad. I don't want again to stand on a pulpit and say, oh, you must be more collective, you must think about the country. But if we don't have some kind of

countervailing ideology, we don't have some kind of countervading belief. Call it neoponatalism. So in the natural state, people were naturally pronatal. Now we need to reinvent that pronatalism to push against all the exciting other things people could be doing with their lives. You talk about ideology,

And it brought to mind the memory I had when I was in New York, I was in Greenwich Village, and I was in a coffee shop and I started talking to this older gentleman in his 80s, and we started having really lovely conversation. And he said he had children. I went, oh, do you have grandchildren? And this really sad look came across his face when he went, No, my children are worried about the environment and they think having grandchildren is selfish because it would damage the planet and the globe and global warming.

I mean, how big a factor does that play into it? The fact, not only that but this idea that the human being is a scourge upon the earth, that all we do is drain resources, that we're toxic, to quote Bill Hicks, we're a virus with shoes. How much does that play into people not wanting to have babies and children? It's quite hard to quantify, although there are studies that show quite a lot of young people today are worried about this issue, and that it plays in. into the lay fertility rates. I can't put my finger on it and say that's X percent of the problem.

But undoubtedly it is a part of the problem. And so we need an array of arguments against it. So let me give you my best shot at, in fact, there's a chapter in my book about why this is wrong and pernicious. So first of all, a child born today, if we believe the progress of net zero technology, will not emit very much. Small child doesn't actually create that much emissions. By the time he or she is 20, 25, living in his own place, driving a vehicle, we will be pretty close to net. If you actually look at the progress Britain has made in reducing carbon emissions, maybe a bit phony because of the way we import and so on. You could certainly see in 20 years' time, a child born today won't have that much impact. So that's kind of argument number one.

Argument number two is that in order to progress as a human species and as a planet, we need lots of young. created minds. So the planet, the technology that existed in 1900 could no way support 8 billion people, right? We are now 8 billion people, better fed, better educated, better house, better closed, better health, living longer than we ever have done. That's only because we've got new technology. Now the population is at least going to top out. If we can carry on with that creative endeavor, we will solve our environmental problems, our country like India, getting wealthier and wealthier, now has the space for more tigers and the tiger population is taking off. It wouldn't be if it weren't an inventive, creative and increasingly wealthy

society. Still poor, but it's at a level that it can think about the environment. Country like Japan, not enough young people, less and less inventiveness. So to come up with the environmental solutions, we need technological solutions, those will be produced by young people. Aging societies will not produce them. So that's argument number two. Argument number three is that if you are a person who lives in the real world, who says, I'm not going to have children because I want to save the planet, but I expect there to be a bus driver when I get a bus. I expect someone to clear my bins once a week.

I expect someone in the restaurant to take my order or prepare my food. When I'm old, I expect to have a care of there. In other words, you continue to consume the labour of others, but you are not, you're too grand to produce it, or too environmental or too green or too worthy. All you will do is you'll either find that labour's not there for you or you'll suck into your country a lot of immigrants from very low emissions countries. Now, we may get to talk about immigration.

That's a whole different argument. But just in terms of the environment, if you are taking someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo to do the jobs for you in Britain or from Syria to do the jobs for you in Germany or from Guatemala for the states, these people, when they come and they aspire, to a local lifestyle, even if they remain relatively poor, relative to the country they've arrived in, their emissions can go up 50, 60 times. So you are not saving the planet. Unless you go and live on the

blasted heath and sort of, I don't know, chew berries or something, you are not saving the planet. You are merely shifting people to meet your consumer requirements from low emissions to high emissions countries. So I hope those three arguments are at least part of a repost to someone who thinks, I won't have children and I'll save the planet. We'll get you back to the interview in a minute. But first. That, my friends, is the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business.

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like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. TikTok just makes me angry, I'm too old. So, if you're ready to get serious about selling, sign up for a £1 per month trial period. at Shopify.co.uk.U.K. Slagherr. Go to Shopify.com.com.uk slash trigger. And one more time for luck. That's Shopify.com. dot UK slash trigger. And now, back to the interview. We always focus with these conversations on women, as well we should, because it's their fault. But actually, we need to talk about the men in this. So I'm going to, uh, I, know a lot of women who are my age, a little bit younger, and they get into relationships with men, and they get promised that children, whatever else, and all of a sudden the man turns

around and says, actually, I don't want to have kids, that's it. And then what you normally see is in the woman using her most fertile years on a man who, this essentially sold her a lie. Now, I don't think that's the case for every woman, of course not, but how much of this is an issue with men and men not wanting to have children? It is an issue with men, although men say they want to have roughly the same number of children as women do. So both men and women in Britain and the States and a lot of other developed countries say they want to have two to three.

The difference between men and women is the women feel the clock ticking more intensely. But it isn't really ticking more intensely. So I think better education for women in terms of their loss of fertility in their 30s would help, make them a little more urgent and a little more pressing. But also men should understand that because most men will not manage to secure a partner of fertile years years and years later. I mean, we always have examples of some 80-year-old who's married a 20-year-old, you know. But unless you're a tech billionaire or a film star, it's probably not going to happen. Or a podcast says he hasn't secured a woman of fertile years and knocked her up.

A real superstar podcaster, perhaps. But generally, it won't happen for you either. Now, I think men just don't... They're so right, man. Men don't have that sense of urgency. So I think educating both sexes on the decline of female fertility, educating them on the sheer likelihood of a man securing a woman of fertile years as a partner once he's passed a certain age.

So give us the stats on both of those. Okay, so the last... The men securing a partner of fertile years, I can't give you the stats on, but I do know that the age gap between partners has declined significantly. So my parents were 11 years apart. I've got a good friend whose parents were 22 years apart. That wasn't that uncanny. I mean, 22 is a bit of exaggerating.

It was much more common when my parents were young. They didn't go to university. The men found jobs and got to a sort of level maybe in their mid-20s or late 20s when they could have a family and could afford it. And then they very often married younger women. In our generation, or my generation and your generation, people are more likely to meet at university. And therefore, I'm sure the data would show,

or I imagine the data would show, that the actual age of partnering, if you just take, say, first child born, what's the age gap between the parents? It would decline, I imagine. But I don't have the data on that. On women's fertility, the fact is that, I mean, as we were talking beforehand, you get the odd case of people having children very late. The dentist I mentioned, married a dentist.

The dentist I mentioned earlier had three children and then his wife had another child in her 50s, unexpected and everyone was delighted. Early 50s. So these sorts of things do happen. But again, they're rogue events and one shouldn't rely on them. The fact is that fertility probably peaked in your early 20s. but you don't really have to start worrying about it for most people until you're into your 30s. But between 30 and 35, there is a considerable drop-off.

So the 30s are a critical period. Once you're past 35, the chances of you're having a problem are greater and greater. So, you know, there is a curve. It could be taught in schools. And I think people are deluded in thinking they can put it off and off. So you'll never get rid of that problem of the man who messes the girl around and says he doesn't want any children and then

kind of goes on to somebody else. But I think if everybody understood the numbers and the pace at which the clock is ticking, and if we had a culture that was more pronatal, that gave more credit and more status and more value to parenthood and to young dad, say, we could shift it. I don't think we'd shift it by me sitting on a podcast. I was preaching at young men to commit. But I think we need a change in the environment where that kind of commitment is more natural

and more normal because men want to have kids and be dads at a younger age. I think it's a very important point, the education. And this particularly goes for women, because when you talk to a lot of women about having kids, they go, well, I'm going to leave it till, you know, 37, 38. And I go, you, I mean, if you can have them, there's some women who can't get pregnant past the past a certain age, early 30s or whatever else. So the idea that you can put it off and put it off is, might be a fantasy for some people. I think the other thing is the technology. So IVF has got better and better. But it's still not fail-proof. It's still less and less effective the later you leave it.

It's still more and more expensive, and it's not a pleasant or easy procedure. I mean, fortunately, I haven't been through it, and my wife hasn't been through it. But it's not something you should. So I think it will extend the window, and that's good. But I think the worry is that people come to rely on it. Oh, I'm phrasing my eggs. There's IVF. I'm fine.

I don't have to worry about it. And as a friend of mine said to me, who's quite involved in this world, and who's senior in the body that regulates these things in the UK. When we were, she had four children in her 20s and then got serious about her career. She said when we were first married, you know, we could try for children in every menstrual cycle with a reasonable chance of success. The shots you get with IVF are far fewer. They're more complicated, difficult, painful, and it's not something you should rely on. No, absolutely. And the chances of you being able to bring a baby to term in your late 30s are obviously vastly different to if you're in your early 20s, for example.

The other thing I would say is we had our children. And again, I'm not saying, oh, I did the perfect thing. Everyone should follow me. We had our children in our late 20s and early 30s. And we had a lot of energy in those days, and we got a lot of parental help. Now, when we're looking after our grandchildren, I mean, it's one of the greatest joys in life. But it's quite tiring. And I think the later you leave it, the harder it is to do.

The other thing is if the generations get very spaced out, if you're in your early 40s, looking after a newborn, you're very likely to have pay. parents who need quite a lot of help. So the more spread out the generations are, the more stress you put on that middle generation that is having to deal with elderly parents as well as children. One of the things in China that is said to be a problem is there are so many only children because of the one-child policy marrying each other. They then have four parents with no support other than those children.

I mean, I've got a 91-year-old mother and she's amazing and wonderful, but she's a does require a bit of support. She's got two children, not just me, got seven grandchildren, and we all rally round and it's quite doable. But if you're in your 40s and you had a parent who was in his or her 40s when you were, and you were an only child, and your wife or husband was in the same position, the prospect, the effort, taking them to hospital, looking after them, all the things you need to do with older people that a good child should do makes it even more. And of course at that age, the grandparents can't help. It just makes the whole thing impossible, frankly.

All right, Paul, well, let's talk about how we're going to get ourselves out of this, because I think it's important to address. So there are countries which have attempted to address this. My understanding is none of them have been successful. Is that correct? No. That's incorrect. It's incorrect, because you never really know what the counterfactual is.

So take a country like Hungary. Hungary has been. Okay, let me rephrase, then. I think it's important. What I mean by they haven't been successful is we want to get to two. point one, they haven't got to 2.1, and they haven't made huge progress in that direction. There have been a small number of cases. So Georgia is a good case, where famously the head of the church said, any third child or a child in succession more than number three, I will personally

baptize. And that seems to have an extraordinary effect. I mean, how long lasting it is, I don't know, but it does seem to have tick the fertility rate back up above, above two and Mongolia, Kazakhstan. I mean, these are quite, I'd say it's obscure as, of course, a very Anglo-centric view of the world, but these aren't countries we know much about, but they have succeeded through a number of means in raising their fertility rate. And a country like Hungary, where they still have a well-below replacement fertility rate, has brought the fertility rate up.

Now, there are technical reasons for that. When you, the way that the total fertility rate is calculating, they won't bore you with the details, but as people delay having children, as the average age of having a child gets later and later, it somewhat depresses the fertility rate. And then when that stops, just stopping it, means the fertility rate tends to go up. So part of that is there in Hungary. But the fact is, if Hungary had not gone up from 1.1, 1.2 to 1.5, 1.6, it's not a replacement. But replacement's not the magic number. It's great to be there, but it's a hell of a lot better to be 1.5 than 1.1 in terms of how fast you age and what kind of support you're going to have to give to the elderly

versus the working age population. So clearly countries have tried all sorts of things. There's no really easy way of knowing what succeeded and what hasn't and what the counterfactuals are and what might have happened if they hadn't had those policies. Let me give you the example of France. France became very aware of its lack of fertility a very long time ago. The French, for some reason, it's still a bit of a mystery. managed to get their fertility rate down very, very early.

I'm talking about the end of the 18th century. And I talk a lot of this in my book, The Human Tide, because France ceased to be the demographic superpower of Europe, it lost a lot of wars eventually and became very second fiddle to the United Kingdom. And the point where France really got this was 1870, 1871, they lost the Franco-Prussian War. They were out-gun, they're out-organized, but they're also out-numbered by the Germans.

the Prussians and their German allies. And France became a bit obsessed by pronatalism. Now, what happened is they didn't really get their birth rate up, but eventually Germany and England had a birth rate that fell. And France has had a persistently higher fertility rate than other countries in Western Europe. It's still below replacement, but it's doing much better than other parts of Western Europe.

And the reason of that is it had a long tradition of pronatalism. So when Macron says demographic rearmament, No one thinks he's weird as they would if Kirstama said it. And what they actually do, and we maybe get into the details of policy, is, for example, the tax system is much better the more children you have in France and in other countries in Western Europe. And actually, if you look at France, you could say, well, is it really government policy and so I spend a lot of time in a part of the world most people don't know exists, which is French Catalonia. So Northern Catalonia is actually in France. It's the Department of the Pyrene Oriental. And it's very Catalan.

But if you compare the fertility rate there, so the fertility rate in Catalan, in Spanish Catalonia, you'll find quite a gap. So it's not about Catalan culture. It actually must be, it's kind of an experiment. It's about government policy. And the thing about pronatal policy is there's

no single silver bullet. You have to experiment. You have to try a range of different things. You have to think about material and cultural incentives. So how can we create that culture can be downstream from politics? Look at how people were very against homosexuality in the 60s, the politicians changed the law, the population got there.

The population is very much against the end of the death penalty in the 60s. The politicians changed the law. Eventually, the population came in line. Now, it's not to say that that's the only direction these things will go in. It could go the other way. Often culture is upstream from politics. What I'm trying to say is if politicians got this and realized it was an issue and addressed it comprehensively,

Part of the pattern would be how do we change the culture? How do we change the education? What are people learning schools? How often are the environmental arguments repostive? What are the role models? I mean, I often think I read in my last book, you know, we need more role models like young men having large families, relatively large families, like Prince William and David Beckham.

And someone pointed out to me they're not really young men, but of course, from my perspective they are. But I think it's also very interesting, sorry, I'm a bit of a tangent, but there were two bumps of the post-war baby boom, and I called them the Anne and Charles bump and the Andrew Edward bump, because it was precisely around 1948, 1950, and 1962, 1964.

So I'm not saying everyone just copied the Queen, but there was a sense that the Queen, the late Queen, was a role model in that. So I think it's about role models, it's about the state sending the right signals. It's also about financial things. It's also about housing and charging. It's a whole raft of things that we can do.

We have to be experimental. We have to try all sorts of different approaches. We have to change them over time. So I haven't got a single set of policy prescriptions. But what I do think is that we aren't even starting to do this because, as we are at the moment, none of the front-ranking politicians are talking about it. So it's almost as if the analogy I gave the other day was it's like, I'm saying we need railways. And I've designed this railway engine.

And people say, well, tell me more about this, that. and no one's intended to build any rails, right? There is no rail network in the country, but they want more and more specific designs about the railway engine. There are lots and lots of different ideas out there. We don't know what will work. Different things will work at different times, but can we at least start it by saying the government is serious about that?

And we seem, after 50 years of sub-replacement fertility, nearly 55 years, we don't even seem to have got off the ground. So we're still talking about the engine, which is lovely, but no one's putting any tracks in. Paul, do you think part of the issue is that for some weird reason, people frame this as a right-wing issue? I think they do in the Anglo world, as I've said. So I wrote an article in the Sunday Times about why we need to have more children, and I said we should probably differentiate on tax.

So ideally we'd give tax cuts to people with kids, but it may be that we can't afford to do that. So I have to vary the tax. that might mean higher taxed people without John. So they chose to call, to entitle it, is it time to tax the childless? Which I never objected to. I thought that's absolutely a reasonable title. It's a bit click-baity, but fine.

I mean, they've got to sell newspapers. And I got unbelievable invective. I mean, I was practically accused. Really? Oh, I mean, I was practically accused of being a Nazi. Welcome. And there was a certain well-known left-wing podcast, which I will not mention, which called,

which called me, what did they call me, sinister and unhinged. But I actually went on that podcast, and I was introduced to the person who had called me sinister and unhinged. And he had no memory of that. And when he dug back, this was like a year and a half later, he actually apologised to me on Twitter. And I really take my hat off to him for that. So I think there's a bit of a change in the atmosphere.

I think I can go on. I got a good review for a previous book in The Guardian, which sort of slightly surprised me. It's only a, so again, as I say, you know, Malthus was attacked by Marx, Stalin gave out prize. The trouble with the left is the heroes of yesterday are not the heroes of today. If you point out to somebody that the Soviet Union or Cuba was giving prizes for women, or they say, well, that wasn't socialism. So it's always...

It's kind of embarrassing to be associated with Stalin. Yeah, okay, but Castro, I mean, I wouldn't want to be, but some people are, or Che Guevara or whatever. So the left is always changing its heroes, and it's sort of changing its story. But I think there is, just as within feminism, there is a rich seam historically of pronatalism. So within the left, there is a rich seam of pronatalism because, you know, people say to me, oh, you just want to create the next generation of slaves for capitalism or whatever. But I always say, why was the Soviet Union pronatal? Because if you want your economy to keep going, whether it's a centrally planned economy or a free market economy,

You can't do it. We may come on to talk about AI and why technology is not the solution, but unless you believe abracadabra, we're not going to lead workers, you can't do it without people. If you want your society, your culture, your tradition, your nation to thrive, which people on the left traditionally have done, then you need a next generation. So, as I said, it's only really a, I think it's a very Anglo thing to think that it's a right-wing thing. And I'm very pleased that people on the left are starting to acknowledge that, starting to think about it. And, you know, I don't apologize to the fact I am on the right,

whatever that means, but I try and make this appeal to, you know, as I am moderately religious, but I try and make this appeal to people who are fully secular, and I try and make this appeal to people are on the left. And, you know, hopefully fewer and few of them will call me unhinged and sinister. Although I thought it was a certain illan about it. That's true. Well, you're talking sense, so I think people can hear it hopefully across the political spectrum. People of the trigonometry audience, we know coffee is the fuel that powers many of you through the day, including me. But what if there was a way to get that energy without the jitters and inevitable crash?

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One of the things that I think the tabloid particularly like quoting your research about is that by 266, at least at the last time, you were quoted on this, white British people will become a minority in this country. Is that still on course to happen? Well, I was only quoting the work of David Coleman, who's a demographer at Oxford, that those numbers are being revised as we speak, not by me, but by a friend of mine. I probably shouldn't reveal who it is, but he will make his research known when he's ready to, someone associated with the political world in this country.

I think you can do the numbers and then of course the answer is always so what? Does it matter? Does it have an effect? Do we care? Aren't human beings all utterly interchangeable? And I think there are a range of answers you can give to that. So first of all, as I've told you, I am the son of immigrants, I don't have a drop of British blood in me, my parents change their name from a German name to an English name.

I feel very affiliated and associated with this country. But I'm grafted on, if you like. Now, traditionally, if you thought about a nation or an ethnic group, there was always something called a friend of mine, a theorist of nationalism called Anthony Smith, Professor Anthony Smith from the LSE, he's no longer with us. He used to speak about the myth of common ancestry, which is to say that for a nation to cohere, there needed to be some sense that the majority of its people stemmed from the same origin. It may be a myth, it may be untrue, or it may be true, and geneticists can show this much more.

I mean, I always remember I went to Sri Lanka and a Sinhalese professor said to me, we're all Tamils. In other words, there was a tiny, tiny Sinhalese immigration years and years ago. Lots of South Indians came and accreted to it. And that was a myth of common. People have their myths. Genetics proves facts in a way that it couldn't sort of 30, 40 years ago. But most nations traditionally, most ethnic groups have by definition associated themselves with having a single common ancestry.

Now, we live in a cosmopolitan liberal world where people think that's not the case anymore. It doesn't matter. It doesn't count. And anyone who thinks that it does count, again, is some sort of leony right-winger. Okay. I think we should still be able to have the conversation about what the ethnic composition of the country is now, what it will be in the future. After all, white British, if you say white British, it's a category in the census. People are invited to identify themselves as white British or not by the state.

So I think we can at least do the modelling. We can look at the numbers and then people can say, does it matter or doesn't it matter? And again, better minds than my sort of humble demographer's minds will determine and contribute to that debate about whether one person is totally interchangeable with another, whether Koreans' demographic problems can be solved by bringing a lot of people from Burundi because Burundians and Koreans are very different,

or whether actually a sense of common ancestry is important to a country to make it cohesive, and cultural continuity can't really be achieved when you have people from all sorts of countries coming together and becoming ultimately a majority. Well, it seems to me it's a flow issue as well, because I think that you can integrate people over time, provided that it's in certain numbers you choose them care for, there's a very strong structure for people to be integrated into. And I guess the issue that is inevitably coming to the fore out of everything that you're saying is if we fail to reproduce the quantities of immigrants that we are going to need to come in

and do the social care work, do work in the National Health Service, to do, deliver food and all the rest of it, the quantities of people we're going to need are going to be such that integration, which is already a struggle, let's be honest, is going to become utterly impossible. Well, it's going to become impossible because, not only because of the numbers, but also because fewer and fewer countries are having enough children to send their surplus,

if you like, say, in Britain, we're used to Polish, traditionally Irish and Polish immigrants, who generally integrated fairly rapidly and not in massive numbers, although Irish over a long time. But if you look at the 20-somethings in Ireland and Poland today because of their lay fertility rates,

and if you look at how they've caught up with Britain economically or are catching up with Britain, they won't have loads of 20-somethings and they won't be hugely attracted to come here. So we will have to take our immigrant workforce from countries that are more and more culturally distant in greater and greater number. In terms of the relationship to fertility, I wrote again, I wrote a paper with Philip Pilkington on this. It's my concept of the Trilemma, which is that you can have two of three things. And Philip quantified it effectively. You can have what I'd call ethnic continuity, if one is allowed to talk about such things, the sense

of a people that is indeed descended from people in the same country or the same nation. You can have an economy that functions because you've got a reasonable support ratio, reasonable ratio of workers to retirees. You can have those two things, and you can have lay fertility, small families. You can have two. Think of it as a triangle, you can't have two but you can't have all three. And the models I give for that are Japan, choosing to have small families, not mass immigration, so they want the ethnic continuity, they don't want to have large families, and effectively they are gradually fading as an economy, wants the land of the rising sun. Britain, trying to keep the lights on, trying to not go up to 250% tax, government

debt to GDP ratio, also not having very big families, about having smaller families, and the way what Britain then effectively surrenders in any kind of ethnic continuity, if that matters, and mass immigration. And only Israel in the developed world, which we've already mentioned, is having enough children that if it wishes it could completely stop immigration and still keep the economy rolling. So I think we have to understand the trade-off between those three things. Part of that is my address back to people on the right.

You know, I've been on G.B. News with Nigel Farage, for example, having this conversation. If you want to restrict immigration and you want the economy to function, you have to think about fertility. Of course there are lots of things we could do on immigration. Lots of people come to this country and don't work or can't work or are accompanying or supported by. So we don't have a laser focus on only bringing in a workforce. When people come to work, you don't have to give them automatic citizenship rights or rights to stay.

So a whole range of things about the nature of the immigration policy. But ultimately, people who are concerned about immigration, mass immigration and integration, do need to think about fertility. Well, right. If you don't have enough kids, you're going to have to bring in other people to do... Or you're going to have to effectively disappear. Which is, well, yes, which is where we come back to the one point that you raised, which is always the question at the back of my mind, which is there's this conversation about AI and robotics floating around. And do we really need supermarket cashiers anymore? Well, it seems like we're starting to get to the point where we do we really need people to drive buses in the age of a... elect, you know, self-driving cars? Do we need Uber drivers? Do we need, you know, is our demand

for essentially a lot of the jobs that are now being filled by immigration are low-skilled, low-wage jobs, aren't those exactly the jobs, Paul, people will say to you that are going to get demolished by AI and robotics, and actually we just need to sit tight and 20 years from now, we're not going to have this problem. I doubt it. So in the book, I've got a chapter on this, I look back to the Luddites who said they're bringing machinery. They had something called the Industrial Revolution will happen. Of course, they didn't call it that. We won't have jobs that smash the machines.

Now, they didn't succeed. They, in turn, was smashed as a political movement or as a movement. And the Industrial Revolution gave rise to a huge number of jobs. And if you'd said in 1800, most people will not be working in agriculture. It'll be a small shed. People say, well, that's what people do. And if no one's working in agriculture because of machine, then there'll be no job. Equally, if you'd said in 1900, very few people were work in industry and the ports and the mines and the shipbuilding, they'd have said, well, what will people do?

We are always invent—so first of all, we're always inventing new technology which replaces jobs. Again, the example I give in the book is thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people in this country were involved in breeding horses, feeding horses, growing food for horses, building the places stable. The whole thing went effectively between, let's say, the early 1890s and the end of the interval period. The number of horses collapse. We never hear about that, do we? Because people found other things to do. So where are we now? We still have new technology.

We still have innovation. We still have job replacement. It may be that all the cab drivers will go because we'll have, but I've been hearing that for a long time. So I'm a little bit cynical about how quickly or skeptical about how quickly it's happening. And the other thing is that if you look at the economic data, if we were on the cusp of this, we would be seeing huge productivity gains. So GDP per hour worked would be going up. We'd either have, say, to put it simply, the same workforce massively increasing its productivity,

or we'd produce today's economy with few and fewer people, have an unemployment problem. But anyway, per hour work, our productivity would be going up. As we've had all these wonderful new technologies the last 30, 40 years, the laptops, the PC, the laptop, the internet, etc., none of these have actually increased productivity. And there's a whole discussion among economists as to why that is. And we could be on the cusp. You know, I might be here in five years' time, and I was totally wrong.

And we're all sitting around with nothing to do because the podcasts are made by AI and the demography. Right, this not got too far, right? We just got to a point where we're quite happy with this. What you're saying is you could be here five years from now, eating your hat. Yeah, but I don't think I will be. His funeral, this time could be different again.

And when you actually look around the economy, so many of the jobs we see that people are doing today are not jobs that are easily, including the lower end, less well-paid jobs, are not jobs that are easily going to be replaced by AI. If you understand AI and you understand the maths and the brain science, there is a view that it's a long, long, long time

before we're going to have someone picking up the bins. It's a long, long, long time before we're going to have, I mean someone, sorry, a computer or a robot, long, long time before AI is going to take Granny to the toilet. So a long time before AI is going to fix my tap, fix my roof, be a brain surgeon, you know, AI may help these activities in a limited, to a limited extent, but the idea that it's going to replace labour is unlike. I think within sort of time frame that we can see populations are going to collapse. So again, think of 100, Korean grandparents, 33 children, 11 grandchildren, that is a pretty fast pace if a generation's 25 to 35 years.

Are we really going to see AI doing all of this by then? Call me skeptical. I don't think so. And the demographic problem is very tangible. The technological solution is somewhat tenuous, to put it mildly. Paul, thank you so much for coming on on the show. Before we head over to our substack, where our supporters get to us there. questions to you. Our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about

that we really should be? Before Paul answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description to go to our substack to see this. Can you fix the population decline issue without first addressing the marriage issue? Is there a way to balance education and family life or will the increasing time in education keep pushing back starting a family? Can we adjust and learn to live with fewer people without substantially reducing our standard of living? Well, the obvious one is fertility, but we have been talking about that. So the thing that, kind of, my sort of second crusade, if you like, is that the whole woke agenda and the whole decolonization agenda would not exist. It wouldn't exist if the door were firmly shut.

And the reason it's not firmly shut is that the country as a whole, Britain, most of the West does not fully appreciate its cultural, its scientific, its technological background and what it's achieved. And in order to address that in my little way, my friend Ed West and I have been doing these podcasts called the Cannon Club. The idea is just to introduce an expert on Anna Karenina, on Raymondesque architecture, on Shostakovich, on Thomas Munn, just to give people a better sense. And obviously, it's a very small enterprise at this stage. But I think if people were fired up and charged up, when I think of my childhood, I knew lots of people who'd left school at 12 or 14, who'd fought in the services in the war, who'd gone and heard Myra Hess playing the piano in the National Gallery,

and who aspired to this great civilization. And to be fair, in the Soviet Union, once they'd gone through prolet cult and they'd gone through socialist realism, that was a society of all its ills, which said these are the great fruits of human history, even if they were produced by bourgeois society, they should be available to everybody. So I knew these quite working class,

low-middle-class people, little education, who aspired in that generation, people born in the interwar period or before the First World War. And then when I was working, I was working with all these very bright, Oxford-educated, Harvard kids who didn't have a clue. So I think we really need a cultural rearmament

if we're going to push back, against the kind of decolonizing of our societies, our culture, and our academia. And I think that's what we're not talking about. And that's what Ed and I are trying to do something about. That is the most elegant podcast plug I've ever heard. All right. Head on over to our substack where we ask Paul your questions. Given the continuing growth in a finite system is impossible,

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