Jonathan V. Last: The Demographic Baby Bust and its Consequences

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

The birthrate in the United States, and in many other countries around the world, has been declining for decades. The US birthrate now is at 1.8, which is below the need for a stable population—the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Yet the profound consequences of this change take generations to play out. In this Conversation, Jonathan V. Last, author of What To Expect When No One's Expecting and Executive Editor of The Bulwark, shares his research into demographic decline and spells out some of the current and potential future consequences that might follow from it. Last argues that we're likely to see a steep fall in the global population beginning later this century, which could produce alarming geopolitical dangers. As for America, Last notes that declining fertility could put major pressure on the social safety net—and change the nature of our society. This is a sobering and important Conversation on a neglected but extremely important subject.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. I'm very pleased to be joined today
0:18.8	by a long-time friend and colleague Jonathan V. Last worked together at the weekly standard for over two decades I guess.
0:26.0	22 years. Unbelievable. Good years. And now at the Bullwork you're doing a fantastic job editing that.
0:32.0	I don't really do much except occasionally
0:34.8	forward a piece to you which you improve and I don't even write the pieces I just forward
0:39.6	ones that come in and you improve them and it's that's been terrific on the side somehow
0:44.4	while dealing with a million current events you wrote a terrific book
0:47.9	what six years ago I think 2013 what to expect when no one's expecting America's coming demographic
0:54.7	disaster and I thought we could talk to take a little break from all Trump and
0:59.2	everything else and talk demographics which are important underlying facts.
1:05.0	The most important thing in the world.
1:07.0	Is it, you think?
1:08.0	Basically. Yeah, Moynihan used to say that demography is destiny.
1:11.0	I always slightly rebelled against it, but I don't know why it seemed like it was
1:14.1	taking away too much power from us you know what I mean destiny is too strong a word I would I always say is the
1:19.5	demography sort of shapes the contours of what's possible.
1:23.0	That's good.
1:24.0	I think of demographics as like the tectonic plates
1:28.0	operating under everything else.
1:30.0	And so you have economics, you have culture, you have politics, all those things happening.
1:37.0	But the shape of them is always influenced in a very deep way by demographics.
1:41.8	And you can go too much nuts on on this like you can become like a
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