The population boom goes bust
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For years, we worried about overpopulation, but the reality is now there aren’t enough babies being born to replace a greying population across the globe. Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss depopulation occurring on five continents, why pro-natal programs cost a lot but aren’t seeing results, and what this means for how we measure economic growth in the future. His article “The Age of Depopulation” was published in Foreign Affairs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich published a book called The Population Bomb. |
| 0:16.5 | It warned about what seemed like an irreversible trend of human population growth. |
| 0:21.0 | As more and more people produced more and more babies, |
| 0:23.5 | Ehrlich worried we were skating dangerously close to the limits of what the planet could possibly support. |
| 0:29.6 | Erlick predicted unrelenting suffering and global famine if we didn't do something to discourage people from having so many children. |
| 0:36.9 | Many people were alarmed by the book, |
| 0:39.0 | but although they couldn't know it at the time, global fertility rates were already on the decline. |
| 0:45.7 | Now it seems the greatest hazard to life as we have known it is that too few new lives are coming |
| 0:51.1 | into the world. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. |
| 0:56.6 | Most of the citizens of this planet now reside in countries with fertility levels below the |
| 1:01.4 | replacement rate. Some places have tipped over into what is called net mortality, which means |
| 1:06.4 | more people die each year than are born. It's hard to say where it all might level off, but in any |
| 1:11.9 | case, my guest says it's important that we understand and begin to prepare for this extraordinary |
| 1:16.9 | reversal of fertility now. Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Went Chair in Political Economy at the |
| 1:23.2 | American Enterprise Institute. His article, The Age of Depopulation, appears in Foreign Affairs |
| 1:28.9 | Magazine. Nicholas, welcome to think. Thanks so much for inviting me, Chris. Just to get a handle |
| 1:34.8 | on how this is all playing out, fertility rates are dropping in most of the world, in many places to |
| 1:40.5 | below the replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman, but we haven't yet stopped |
| 1:46.0 | adding to the global population, right? For now, that number continues to rise. Absolutely. |
| 1:52.0 | We have, we've seen a continuing pattern where more and more countries are falling below the level needed for long-term |
| 2:04.1 | stability. At this point, certainly more than two-thirds of the people in the world live in below |
| 2:10.7 | replacement countries, maybe as many as three-quarters, but because of what we might think of |
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