From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is interesting times.

50 years ago, the world feared a population bomb,

an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war, and disaster.

But for most of my career, I've been trying to persuade people that actually

population decline is now the greater peril. And in the last few years, the world has finally

caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We're undeniably headed towards a period

of global population collapse, one that threatens

to maroon today's children, mine, and yours if you have them, which, by the way, you should,

in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies. Our guest today has literally traveled the

world studying this issue, trying to answer the

hardest question, not just why birth rates have declined, but why they've declined so far and

so fast in so many different places. So, Alice Evans, welcome to interesting times.

Indeed, thank you so much.

So you're a sociologist at King's College London, is that correct?

Yes.

And you write a lot about, and I think you're working on a book, about the key social forces

shaping the decline in fertility around the world. And those include in

particular the failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. And those issues

are part of why I'm especially interested in talking to you. But before we dive into why population decline is happening, I'd like to try and sort of

quantify the issue a little bit and maybe help sound the alarm for some of our listeners who,

unlike myself, haven't been obsessed with this issue for years or decades, and may still assume

that we're living in a world where

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