Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 3 (00:00):
I am just.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Pleased and privileged to welcome Nick Eberstat back to the show.
I think Nick Everstat is one of the most interesting
thinkers out there. I will call him a political demographer,
but he can tell me that that's completely wrong and
change how he should be described. But Nick is a
(00:23):
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and writes about demography
and the impacts of changing population on the world, and
wrote a fascinating piece just recently called the Age of Depopulation,
and he joins us to talk about it. So, Nick Eberstatt,
welcome back to the show. It's good to talk to you.
And is political demographer fair or is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Oh? People have called me a lot worse. I'm glighted
to be back. Sorry, I've had a little bit of
a glitch with the with the zoom no problem.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, and your and your phone connection is actually great, so.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
It works out, works out really really well.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
So let's start with the scale. Can you please describe
to us the global scale of depopulation.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, we're still growing, I mean, and it would take
it would take like a meteor strike to stop us
from growing in the next decade or so. But the
Foundation for future growth has been undermined by today's child
(01:33):
bearing friends. And I can't tell you for sure that
the world has tilted below the replacement threshold of fertility
on a planetary scale, but we're heading there very quickly.
In every continent except Sub Saharan Africa or Africa already
(02:00):
at below replacement fertility. And the drop in child bearing
in recent years I don't think is widely appreciated because
this is something that's happening quietly and voluntarily. But I
first went to Calcutta about fifty years ago. But the
(02:21):
latest reports in a lot of kids there. Then, latest
reports from health officials in Calcutta are that the huge
city is down to one birth per woman for lifetime.
Mexico City, Mexico City is below one berth per woman
(02:41):
for lifetime. It is possible, maybe likely, that Mexico will
have a lower birth level this year than the United
States of America. You go around the world to different
places off of the coast of Africa, Mauritius is thirty
plus percent below replacement of Latin America, and Caribbean is
(03:02):
below replacement in aggregate all of Asia and aggregate is
below replacement. India for God's sake is below replaced unbelievable.
I mean, this is this is not you know, your
father's uh, you know, a demographic universe, and so it is. Uh,
it is just a matter of time and possibly not
(03:23):
that much time right before before we see uh, the
global increase in human numbers peak and then head into
an indefinite decline. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
As I was, as I was finishing up my previous
segment of the show introducing, uh, you know, kind of
previewing you coming on the show, I said, it's the
most important thing going on.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
In the world that nobody is talking about. And I
believe it. I really believe that one other thing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
This is just sort of tangential, and you feel free
to comment on it if you like.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I've thirty forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Forty years ago, when I was young, I would hang
out with some frequency with my dad's first cousin, a
really nice lady named Merle, and she worked for some
nonprofit called the Population Crisis Center, and their job was
to travel around the world trying to get women in
(04:27):
poor countries to use birth control. And I maybe have
abortions too, I don't know. I was a teenager or
early teens probably, But anyway, my point is there were
all these organizations out there that were trying to depress
population growth.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
At the time, and now probably a lot of those.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Same countries have the exact opposite problem.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Well, and it's so ironic ross because I mean, I
got interested in this same question back in the early
seventies because of the population explosion, you know, that's what
it was called in you know, the global numbers were
increasing more rapidly than they ever had before in history
(05:09):
most likely. But why why were they increasing? It wasn't
because people were suddenly breeding like rabbits. It's because they
finally stopped dying like flies. What was driving the human
surge in numbers was a health explosion. It wasn't exactly
a population explosion. It was entirely due to this health explosion. Now,
(05:30):
if you're going to have a population problem, I'll take
a health explosion in a day of the week, you know,
because you may not capitalize upon all of the opportunities
it presents you, but you know those are yours not
to grasp. And the world today, with vastly more people
than it had fifty years ago, is richer, more educated,
(05:55):
better fed. There's much less poverty. I mean, I just
saw study a little while ago about India estimating that
extreme poverty in India is now down to under one percent.
Who would have guessed that when I was in Calcutta
fifty years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Remarkable? And yeah, I've been to India three times.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The first one was not nearly fifty years ago, but
long enough ago that it probably felt a lot more
like what you saw than what it's like right now.
All right, let's keep going. So it's common knowledge and
I'm putting that in air quotes that as countries get
richer and less agrarian, their birth rates decline. But you
(06:39):
right that we are seeing this trend toward massively fewer
babies in countries that aren't getting particularly richer, suggesting maybe
there's something else going on.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
There's definitely something else going on as well. I mean,
it may be good enough to say that when country
is come rich and developed, people have fewer kids, because
that's what we've seen. But if you look in a
lot of other places, like in some of the least
developed countries, in places like Nepal and Burma, Meanmar, which
(07:16):
I don't think anybody is going to accuse of being
very rich they're also voluntarily below replacement. So it's more
than just the materialist you know, March. And even when
the long term voluntary decline in fertility began began in
(07:36):
Europe in the seventeen hundreds, didn't start in England, which
was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. It started in France,
which was compared to the UK. It was poor, it
was illiterate, it was rural, and not to put too
fine a point on it, it was also Catholic. So
(07:57):
understanding of why and how people shift into these below
replacement patterns of child bearing needs to be kind of
looked at a little bit more carefully.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
We're talking with Nick Ebstat from the American Enterprise Institute
AEI dot org. His fascinating new article is called The
Age of Depopulation. That one is quite an in depth
of long, long piece, but one line jumped out at me,
probably more than any other. Nick, and you were talking
(08:31):
about how women all over, including the Paul and Burma,
don't want to have so many kids anymore, and use
the term volition for that, meaning what they want, And
this is your sentence. Volition is why even in an
increasingly healthy and prosperous world.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Of over eight billion people.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
The extinction of every family line could be only one
generation away.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well, I mean, if it is a volunteer very choice.
It's a choice to have children or a choice not
to have children. And the remarkable thing, now, Ross is
how many people seem voluntarily to be opting for childlessness
or I think as it's now being called for a
(09:18):
child free existence, you.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Know, I wonder about that. I'm so my brother passed
away some years ago. So I'm the only male left
in my in my family line, and I got two boys,
but I have no idea if either one of them
wants kids. And so I'm reading that quote from you,
I'm like, well, if my kids don't have kids, you know,
(09:42):
Kaminsky's gone.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
My line of Kaminsky is gone.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah. Yeah, Well you know, when again, when I was,
when I was a college boy, and this is taking
us back in half a century, the hip thing in
some academic circles was to groove on sociobiology, and the
(10:07):
sociobiologists informed us that human beings were hardwired to do
all these things. And one of the things which we
were supposedly hardwired to do was to reproduce to continue
our genetic code into the future. Well, uh, to go
(10:30):
by the evidence of our senses today, that socio biological
a nostroum needs a pretty serious re examination. And actually
I would say that you know, EO. Wilson is out,
you know, the father of sociobiology, and the other dead
(10:51):
white guy who's kind of in is Renasi or art
with the mimetic theory that people learned through social imitation,
that they learned through social learning. And my much better
half Mary Everstad, in one of her recent books, talks
about the cat stuck in the tree phenomenon. She writes
(11:17):
that whenever the fire department comes out to get these kiddies,
they're invariably pets that had been raised apart from their
own kind and haven't learned from others how to climb
up and how to scale down. And it may be
the same way with families. If we lose the social
(11:38):
knowledge about what large families are like, or even families
are like, it may be a lot easier to reduce
fertility than to bring it back up.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
All right, So I have literally ninety seconds with you here,
one quick comment and then a question to finish up.
So I do think humans are hardwired to do that thing.
But I think by the use of contraception, I think
they're hardwired to do the act right. But I don't
think that's the same as being.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Hardwired to have families.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So you do the thing that your body wants to do,
but you use various chemical or physical means to prevent
it from causing children, and so that part of what's
hardwired is satisfied, and the other part of having kids isn't.
Actually what's hardwired? Do you think that's a silly concept
or maybe something to it?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I think I think that's that sounds very sensible. It's
it comes. It comes as an overall package, and if
you don't have the overall package, it's kind of hard
to you know. Okay, the Mohicans problem.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I want to get one last thing in quickly, and
this this is worth a whole hour of conversation, but
I just want you to give me the shortest answer
you can if we when we go into this era
of depopulation, even the United States, which is in a
better situation than most, but globally, how screwed are all
these governments that are basically just pyramid schemes? Also called
(13:06):
entitlement programs with militaries. Right, So many of these countries
are just pyramid schemes with militaries.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
How hosed are.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
We Well, it's kind of like saying, the will the
picnicker is down by low tide drown? They won't brown.
If they adjust, they move up the of the beach.
If they stay exactly as they are, they're not going
to be happy campers. But one of the things we've
seen with human beings is what an extraordinarily adaptable animal
(13:36):
we are. There's no species that's as adaptable as us.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Yes, and there's no species our.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Ingenuity on this.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I think we can adapt, yeah, but there's no species
less adaptable than politicians. So we seem barely human in
the context of how you describe the human the human species.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
And I don't think they're going to.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Do anything until it's until it's too late, because they're
all going to think it's not going to be a
problem until somebody else else is in office.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Like I said, we could talk all day about that,
but I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Nick Eberstatt is just a brilliant, fascinating thinker and writer
at the American Enterprise Institute AEI dot org his new piece,
The Age of Depopulation.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Nick, thank you very much for making time for us.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure, all right, all
the best, Okay,
I am just.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Pleased and privileged to welcome Nick Eberstat back to the show.
I think Nick Everstat is one of the most interesting
thinkers out there. I will call him a political demographer,
but he can tell me that that's completely wrong and
change how he should be described. But Nick is a
(00:23):
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and writes about demography
and the impacts of changing population on the world, and
wrote a fascinating piece just recently called the Age of Depopulation,
and he joins us to talk about it. So, Nick Eberstatt,
welcome back to the show. It's good to talk to you.
And is political demographer fair or is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Oh? People have called me a lot worse. I'm glighted
to be back. Sorry, I've had a little bit of
a glitch with the with the zoom no problem.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, and your and your phone connection is actually great, so.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
It works out, works out really really well.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
So let's start with the scale. Can you please describe
to us the global scale of depopulation.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, we're still growing, I mean, and it would take
it would take like a meteor strike to stop us
from growing in the next decade or so. But the
Foundation for future growth has been undermined by today's child
(01:33):
bearing friends. And I can't tell you for sure that
the world has tilted below the replacement threshold of fertility
on a planetary scale, but we're heading there very quickly.
In every continent except Sub Saharan Africa or Africa already
(02:00):
at below replacement fertility. And the drop in child bearing
in recent years I don't think is widely appreciated because
this is something that's happening quietly and voluntarily. But I
first went to Calcutta about fifty years ago. But the
(02:21):
latest reports in a lot of kids there. Then, latest
reports from health officials in Calcutta are that the huge
city is down to one birth per woman for lifetime.
Mexico City, Mexico City is below one berth per woman
(02:41):
for lifetime. It is possible, maybe likely, that Mexico will
have a lower birth level this year than the United
States of America. You go around the world to different
places off of the coast of Africa, Mauritius is thirty
plus percent below replacement of Latin America, and Caribbean is
(03:02):
below replacement in aggregate all of Asia and aggregate is
below replacement. India for God's sake is below replaced unbelievable.
I mean, this is this is not you know, your
father's uh, you know, a demographic universe, and so it is. Uh,
it is just a matter of time and possibly not
(03:23):
that much time right before before we see uh, the
global increase in human numbers peak and then head into
an indefinite decline. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
As I was, as I was finishing up my previous
segment of the show introducing, uh, you know, kind of
previewing you coming on the show, I said, it's the
most important thing going on.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
In the world that nobody is talking about. And I
believe it. I really believe that one other thing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
This is just sort of tangential, and you feel free
to comment on it if you like.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I've thirty forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Forty years ago, when I was young, I would hang
out with some frequency with my dad's first cousin, a
really nice lady named Merle, and she worked for some
nonprofit called the Population Crisis Center, and their job was
to travel around the world trying to get women in
(04:27):
poor countries to use birth control. And I maybe have
abortions too, I don't know. I was a teenager or
early teens probably, But anyway, my point is there were
all these organizations out there that were trying to depress
population growth.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
At the time, and now probably a lot of those.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Same countries have the exact opposite problem.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Well, and it's so ironic ross because I mean, I
got interested in this same question back in the early
seventies because of the population explosion, you know, that's what
it was called in you know, the global numbers were
increasing more rapidly than they ever had before in history
(05:09):
most likely. But why why were they increasing? It wasn't
because people were suddenly breeding like rabbits. It's because they
finally stopped dying like flies. What was driving the human
surge in numbers was a health explosion. It wasn't exactly
a population explosion. It was entirely due to this health explosion. Now,
(05:30):
if you're going to have a population problem, I'll take
a health explosion in a day of the week, you know,
because you may not capitalize upon all of the opportunities
it presents you, but you know those are yours not
to grasp. And the world today, with vastly more people
than it had fifty years ago, is richer, more educated,
(05:55):
better fed. There's much less poverty. I mean, I just
saw study a little while ago about India estimating that
extreme poverty in India is now down to under one percent.
Who would have guessed that when I was in Calcutta
fifty years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Remarkable? And yeah, I've been to India three times.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The first one was not nearly fifty years ago, but
long enough ago that it probably felt a lot more
like what you saw than what it's like right now.
All right, let's keep going. So it's common knowledge and
I'm putting that in air quotes that as countries get
richer and less agrarian, their birth rates decline. But you
(06:39):
right that we are seeing this trend toward massively fewer
babies in countries that aren't getting particularly richer, suggesting maybe
there's something else going on.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
There's definitely something else going on as well. I mean,
it may be good enough to say that when country
is come rich and developed, people have fewer kids, because
that's what we've seen. But if you look in a
lot of other places, like in some of the least
developed countries, in places like Nepal and Burma, Meanmar, which
(07:16):
I don't think anybody is going to accuse of being
very rich they're also voluntarily below replacement. So it's more
than just the materialist you know, March. And even when
the long term voluntary decline in fertility began began in
(07:36):
Europe in the seventeen hundreds, didn't start in England, which
was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. It started in France,
which was compared to the UK. It was poor, it
was illiterate, it was rural, and not to put too
fine a point on it, it was also Catholic. So
(07:57):
understanding of why and how people shift into these below
replacement patterns of child bearing needs to be kind of
looked at a little bit more carefully.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
We're talking with Nick Ebstat from the American Enterprise Institute
AEI dot org. His fascinating new article is called The
Age of Depopulation. That one is quite an in depth
of long, long piece, but one line jumped out at me,
probably more than any other. Nick, and you were talking
(08:31):
about how women all over, including the Paul and Burma,
don't want to have so many kids anymore, and use
the term volition for that, meaning what they want, And
this is your sentence. Volition is why even in an
increasingly healthy and prosperous world.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Of over eight billion people.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
The extinction of every family line could be only one
generation away.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well, I mean, if it is a volunteer very choice.
It's a choice to have children or a choice not
to have children. And the remarkable thing, now, Ross is
how many people seem voluntarily to be opting for childlessness
or I think as it's now being called for a
(09:18):
child free existence, you.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Know, I wonder about that. I'm so my brother passed
away some years ago. So I'm the only male left
in my in my family line, and I got two boys,
but I have no idea if either one of them
wants kids. And so I'm reading that quote from you,
I'm like, well, if my kids don't have kids, you know,
(09:42):
Kaminsky's gone.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
My line of Kaminsky is gone.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah. Yeah, Well you know, when again, when I was,
when I was a college boy, and this is taking
us back in half a century, the hip thing in
some academic circles was to groove on sociobiology, and the
(10:07):
sociobiologists informed us that human beings were hardwired to do
all these things. And one of the things which we
were supposedly hardwired to do was to reproduce to continue
our genetic code into the future. Well, uh, to go
(10:30):
by the evidence of our senses today, that socio biological
a nostroum needs a pretty serious re examination. And actually
I would say that you know, EO. Wilson is out,
you know, the father of sociobiology, and the other dead
(10:51):
white guy who's kind of in is Renasi or art
with the mimetic theory that people learned through social imitation,
that they learned through social learning. And my much better
half Mary Everstad, in one of her recent books, talks
about the cat stuck in the tree phenomenon. She writes
(11:17):
that whenever the fire department comes out to get these kiddies,
they're invariably pets that had been raised apart from their
own kind and haven't learned from others how to climb
up and how to scale down. And it may be
the same way with families. If we lose the social
(11:38):
knowledge about what large families are like, or even families
are like, it may be a lot easier to reduce
fertility than to bring it back up.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
All right, So I have literally ninety seconds with you here,
one quick comment and then a question to finish up.
So I do think humans are hardwired to do that thing.
But I think by the use of contraception, I think
they're hardwired to do the act right. But I don't
think that's the same as being.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Hardwired to have families.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So you do the thing that your body wants to do,
but you use various chemical or physical means to prevent
it from causing children, and so that part of what's
hardwired is satisfied, and the other part of having kids isn't.
Actually what's hardwired? Do you think that's a silly concept
or maybe something to it?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I think I think that's that sounds very sensible. It's
it comes. It comes as an overall package, and if
you don't have the overall package, it's kind of hard
to you know. Okay, the Mohicans problem.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I want to get one last thing in quickly, and
this this is worth a whole hour of conversation, but
I just want you to give me the shortest answer
you can if we when we go into this era
of depopulation, even the United States, which is in a
better situation than most, but globally, how screwed are all
these governments that are basically just pyramid schemes? Also called
(13:06):
entitlement programs with militaries. Right, So many of these countries
are just pyramid schemes with militaries.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
How hosed are.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
We Well, it's kind of like saying, the will the
picnicker is down by low tide drown? They won't brown.
If they adjust, they move up the of the beach.
If they stay exactly as they are, they're not going
to be happy campers. But one of the things we've
seen with human beings is what an extraordinarily adaptable animal
(13:36):
we are. There's no species that's as adaptable as us.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Yes, and there's no species our.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Ingenuity on this.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I think we can adapt, yeah, but there's no species
less adaptable than politicians. So we seem barely human in
the context of how you describe the human the human species.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
And I don't think they're going to.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Do anything until it's until it's too late, because they're
all going to think it's not going to be a
problem until somebody else else is in office.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Like I said, we could talk all day about that,
but I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Nick Eberstatt is just a brilliant, fascinating thinker and writer
at the American Enterprise Institute AEI dot org his new piece,
The Age of Depopulation.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Nick, thank you very much for making time for us.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure, all right, all
the best, Okay,
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