Is the world running out of babies?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Forget everything you know about an exploding world population.
The sad truth is, our birthrate is plummeting globally to the point where there soon won't be enough young workers to take care of the aging population.
What happens then? Can you financially incentivise people to have kids? Should we be thinking harder about immigration?
And why does this subject - and its pronatalist rhetoric - so often become the domaine of the authoritarian right?
We'll hear from Elon, Jordan and Jacob - about why we should all be having more babies.
Plus Robert Colville and Stephen J Shaw.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Production: Shane Fennelly and Arvind Badewal
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The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.4 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:13.2 | No country has been known to ever recover from long-term low birth rates. |
| 0:18.3 | So if we think this is going to lead to some blissful state where |
| 0:22.0 | we're going to get down to maybe one, two billion and life will be blissful, it's not that. |
| 0:26.5 | We're tail spinning down with no examples of how to get out of this. |
| 0:30.7 | So that's nice and cheery then. For the last 200 years, the world population has been growing. |
| 0:39.9 | But in a couple of decades' time, we are expecting that to peak. You just heard from one demographer there, Stephen Jay Shaw, spelling out |
| 0:45.9 | how bad things could get. Today, we're going to ask why we're no longer having enough babies |
| 0:51.5 | to regenerate the global population. And we're also going to explore |
| 0:56.0 | how this whole subject has been co-opted by parts of the hard right. Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:06.7 | The Newsagents. It's Emily. |
| 1:11.5 | There's no John. |
| 1:13.0 | There's no Lewis. |
| 1:15.1 | But we do have Elon Musk, |
| 1:16.2 | Jordan Peterson, |
| 1:17.9 | and Jacob Rees-Mogg. |
| 1:18.8 | Let's hear them. |
| 1:20.1 | I think one of the biggest risks to civilization |
| 1:20.9 | is the low birth rate |
| 1:23.0 | and the rapidly declining birth rate. |
| 1:25.5 | If people don't have more children, |
... |
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