The De-Population Bomb

Uncommon Knowledge

Hoover Institution

Politics, History, News:politics, Science, News

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2022

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb, in which he described a disastrous future for humanity: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” That prediction turned out to be very wrong, and in this interview Nicholas Eberstadt tells how we are in fact heading toward the opposite problem: not enough people.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Throughout almost all our history, the population of the United States of America has grown
0:05.8	and grown and grown, from 2.5 million people in 1776 to 330 million people today.
0:15.3	But what if that growth stops?
0:17.9	What if our population shrinks?
0:21.0	What then?
0:23.2	One man has devoted himself to studying that very question.
0:27.1	Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt on Uncommon Knowledge Now.
0:41.1	Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.
0:45.2	Dr. Eberstadt, I should say by the way that we're filming today at the American Enterprise
0:49.3	Institute in Washington.
0:51.6	Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt earned both his undergraduate degree and his doctorate in political economy
0:57.0	from Harvard.
0:58.0	Dr. Eberstadt's many books and papers include poverty in China and the end of North Korea.
1:04.9	In recent years, Dr. Eberstadt has been examining population and demography.
1:10.8	First he recognized that other countries have a problem, publishing Russia's peacetime
1:15.2	demographic crisis in 2010.
1:18.1	In more recent years, he has been describing this country's problem, publishing men without
1:23.2	work.
1:24.2	America's invisible crisis in 2016.
1:27.9	Our topic today, well let me just read the title of a long essay Dr. Eberstadt published
1:33.3	a national review not long ago.
1:36.2	Can America cope with demographic decline?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hoover Institution, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hoover Institution and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.