Should we be worried about overpopulation or depopulation?

25:29So it's still something like four kids per two adults. But that number has also been falling over the last 50 years. And demographers tend to project that it will continue to fall into the future as Sub-Saharan Africa continues its development in terms of rising incomes, rising opportunities, rising education. So let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about what we know about why birth rates fall and how good we are at predicting this stuff.

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28:15And we're back. Mike, at the end of that last segment, you were talking about how birth rates in the Sahara region have gone from 4 to, Are they dropping from four or did they go from higher than four to four? They've gone from something like six in the middle of the 20th century to something like four today. So how good are we at predicting this kind of stuff in like a 10-year frame, for example? So in a 10-year frame, professional demographers are good at predicting population trajectories. The reason that demographers are pretty good at predicting population sizes over a course like 10 years is that the population just has a lot of inertia in it.

28:54So no matter what happens to, maybe we're sticking too much on calculus here, but a fertility rate is a flow and population is a stock. And so you can change the flow as much as you want instantaneously, and it's going to have no immediate effect on the stock. So in terms of predicting the population tomorrow, I can predict that very well, even though I don't know how many babies will be born today, because most of that prediction is built up in the stock of people who are already alive. We know how people age and die in their later years. We can predict that with pretty good statistical accuracy.

29:28And so the uncertainty is really about fertility, and changes in fertility actually take a long time to play out into changes in population size. Now, how good is anyone at predicting whether fertility rates will stay low, not just in the next decade, but in the next half century, the next century? I think we should be pretty clear that nobody knows for sure. But what we're seeing around the world is a convergent pattern of low fertility, fertility below two. And history is not a guarantee of future performance. Is that what they say in stock market predicting? But if we look around, we shouldn't ignore history.

30:06And if we look around the world at all of the countries where over a full childbearing lifetime, fertility rates have ever fallen below 1.9. There's 26 countries in that category. And none of those have lifetime fertility rates, meaning over the course of a woman's entire life, ever risen above two again. So that 0 and 26 record isn't a guarantee of what will happen, but it would be something that we would do well to take seriously as a risk for the future. So I want to understand what we know about why this is happening and then also talk in a minute about things people have tried and why that might or might not work.

30:43But what do we know about the overall trends that are causing this? So surprisingly less than you might think. You know, everybody has a theory of why birth rates are low and falling, but everybody's theories are different. And none of them really captured the bigness of falling birth rates. And by bigness, I mean, we've talked about how it's something that's been going on, not just for years or decades, but for centuries. And also that's happening in societies that are very different from one another around the world. And so - So we can't blame it all on Joe Biden, for example. We can't blame it all on Joe Biden.

31:17And you can't blame it all on any one thing. There's going to be no silver bullets. So you hear people, you know, depending on, as you say, their sort of preconceptions thinking about, well, maybe it's about capitalism or the free market or neoliberalism that's causing the problem. Or maybe somebody might say it's about feminism or the retreat from marriage or the decline of religion that's causing the problem. But whatever your theory is, you can find an exception. So for me, I learn a lot by thinking about India, which is the country that I study in my research and where I work. And so India is now not only the world's most populous country, but the world's most populous below replacement country.

31:57It's below two also, even though India was the place in the middle of the 20th century that was the center of these overpopulation fears. And what makes India so interesting is that it's a society where religion continues to be important in almost everybody's lives, not just on a piece of paper, but actually something that's part of their practices. Almost everybody gets married and at young ages. Almost everybody gets married at young ages and starts having kids at young ages. And here's what's particularly striking is that female labor force participation in India is still pretty low in international comparison.

32:33So in a place like the U.S. or Europe, there's an important story about conflicts between career and family being part of why people aren't having so many children. And in fact, that's the title of Claudia Golden's book. She's a Nobel Prize winning economist, Career and Family. And this is very important in many people's lives. But even that's not the explanation that works everywhere because it couldn't be what's going on in India because so many of the women aren't working in the paid labor force but still having below replacement birth rates. And so no theory is right or applicable everywhere.

33:07And so part of what's so striking is that, yes, there's variability across countries, but that variability is shrinking as birth rates fall everywhere. Countries are becoming more similar in this way. And so what we're seeing is a convergent outcome. And that's part of what makes us think that depopulation is so likely. So Mike kind of already addressed this, but while I was reading the book, this was a question that kind of kept going through my mind. So I want to sort of bottom line this. So we don't understand why birth rates are falling. So we don't know for sure that things won't change when we hit a population size of 6 billion, for example.

33:43But we have really good data on trends, which suggests we should be concerned about this. Would that be a fair way of sort of summarizing the argument? Yeah, and I think we could say more, too. I think we can sort of do a little bit of introspection here. Sometimes we can too quickly jump to the idea that, well, this is like an unsustainable trend. You know, birth rates can't keep falling. I mean, the first thing to say there is that birth rates wouldn't need to keep falling where they're already low. They would just have to stay low. And then the question is, couldn't it be the case that people could continue to choose to have the sort of families that they do now?

34:16I mean, in a world that was shrinking, that fell to 6 billion or 4 billion, I think it's quite plausible that if nothing else in society changed, people could look around and think, you know, lots of people thinking that two kids is the right number for them, some people thinking one, some people thinking zero, some people thinking three or more. I think people could continue to make those sort of choices even as the population was falling. Sometimes people think that there's going to be some natural rebound to two, that two is some sort of special number when it comes to fertility. And two might be the number that a lot of people choose, but two is not a special number in terms of a population average.

34:54We've never had a population average in any population at any time that just held exactly at two. When birth rates fall, they fall right across two, and there's no magnetic force pulling them back up to two. So I think there's lots of reasons to think that low fertility could continue even in the face of a falling global population. I think you're bumping up on something really interesting there, which is implicitly doing differential equations. You know, you're telling us that people don't respond to the density of people around them. It's not like families get together and they're like, hmm, there's lots of kids in the kindergarten, let's have fewer kids.

35:28Or while kindergartens seem empty, let's have more kids. That's not sensitive to the population itself, right? And it's more than that. It's that it might not even seem that different. And so, you know, In Texas right now, the average is 1.8. What if the average instead were 2.1? That would make the difference for the world as a whole between depopulating and growing. But I don't think life would seem very different, living in a society with an average of 1.8 from living in a society with an average of 2.1. When you're jogging around the park or going to the store, it would feel pretty similar.

36:04And I think, you know, back to the question of how did this all slip under everybody's radar and how did we get on the path of depopulation without everybody noticing? I think part of it is because, at least in the United States, where we were right around this two level for a long time, 1.8 is just not going to feel that different from 2.2. But it's going to have very different consequences for the long-term future. And the story we're sort of getting to is that birth rates and rates of production of children somehow depends on a lot of complicated factors that it's not always obvious to dig out.

36:38And it reminds me of this story I remember from my wife being in graduate school. She had a friend who was working to study this population of Hutterites, a small religious community in the Midwest. And they have like an enormous fertility rate, like huge numbers of children. And I remember these researchers studying like, why is it? Why are they so fertile? And eventually the answer was they just have sex every day. And that's why they have so many kids. And so it's not like, you know, we want to populate the earth or kindergartens are too empty. It's just like a product of lots of choices people are making about their days.

37:11But their numbers are going down too. Yeah, we talk a bit in the book, not about the Hutterites, but about like the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish. And we talk about it because I think a sort of a certain kind of math inclined person would hear these arguments and think, huh, well, it's one thing to say that many populations have birth rates that would lead to decline. But there are these subcultures like the Amish that just have tons of kids. Right. So even if we're not having a lot of kids in the rest of America, the Amish are having a lot of kids. And you could do a sort of extrapolation to think, well, if the Amish keep having more and more kids, they're going to build up to be a larger and larger fraction of the population.

37:49And, you know, so, you know, we look this up and the recent population growth rates of the Amish are something like 4 % a year. And if you just extrapolate that naively, then, you know, in 200 years, there's going to be a billion Amish in the world. But we don't think that argument makes an awful lot of sense for a couple of reasons. One is that sort of high fertility enclaves, whether it's the Amish or any other, their fertility is also going down, like Kelly alluded to. So, you know, maybe last century, the Amish were having eight kids per two adults. Today, the estimates put it at something like five or five and a half kids per two adults.

38:28It's hard to know there's not a census of the Amish the way that there's like a census of Texas. So reason one is that even among high-fertility subcultures, what counts as high fertility is changing over time. And, you know, Sunday, high fertility might mean two kids instead of one, rather than five kids instead of three. The other reason that we shouldn't count on the Amish outnumbering grains of sand on the beach is that people don't always adopt the cultural practices of their parents. We see cultural change all over the world. South America is changing from being more Catholic to becoming more Protestant over time, just as one example.

39:06But, you know, in our own lives, I think we've all had the experience of being teenagers and projecting one cultural practice or another of our parents. So these links that connect generations aren't perfect. And you really have to push this idea of cultural heritability pretty far to think that even as the Pennsylvania Dutch ran out of Pennsylvania farmland because, you know, they're spilling across continents because there's just so many of them. that somehow these cultural practices and preferences are going to be inherited one for one from parent to child. I think some of that cultural stuff is at play with the Hutterites because we, Hutterites are communal.

39:41So my husband and I spent a lot of time reading about them when we were trying to decide if communes would be a good model for early space settlements. And so we became sort of experts in Hutterites and they were also lamenting their declining birth rates. I keep waiting for somebody to make a weird owl joke here. Nobody's going to talk about how we're not going to be living in the future Amish paradise. No, we missed that cultural touchstone. Let's talk a little bit about why depopulation could be bad. So, you know, as an ecologist, the idea that we might have four billion people, like I don't want there to be zero people.

40:15I like people and I don't want any people to die. But if people are choosing to not have as many babies and we end up with something like four billion, it doesn't sound so bad to me initially to have fewer people that we invest more in. But you all make a pretty good argument about more people being better for a lot of reasons. So let's hear about why we don't want billions of people fewer on this planet. Well, first I want to hold on that 4 billion thing for a second because I think it's important. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking, yeah, let's have some depopulation. and what I want is a future where the world stabilizes at some number like 4 billion or 3 billion or 2 billion, then that sort of future would fundamentally require the same thing we're talking about here, which is an increase someday in birth rates.

41:05The population is not just going to suddenly hang and hold still at 8 billion or 10 billion, and it's not just going to suddenly hang and hold still at 4 billion either unless birth rates go back up. So in our book, After the Spike, what we're considering is would it be better to have a future of depopulation generation after generation, or would it be better instead to have a future of stabilization? And not to hide the ball, we make the case for a future of stabilization. Now, we don't say where. That's beyond what anyone could know given the science we have. But let's take 4 billion. For the world's population to ever stabilize someday at 4 billion, that means after a period of depopulation, birth rates around the world are going to have to go back up to 2 and stay there.

41:49And I just want to bottom line that to make sure people caught that because you're arguing that if birth rates stay below replacement, we won't just go from 8 billion to 4 billion. We'll go to 2 billion and 1 billion and half a billion and you just keep going down. Right. When your rocket ship gets to the planet that you want to be on, how do you slow down and stop? When the global population gets to the size that you want to stabilize at, 4 billion or 3 billion or whatever, if you want to stay there, then just like at any other size, birth rates would have to be an average of 2. So this is my conciliatory message that we're on the same team here if you want the size of the population to stabilize somewhere.

42:27And we face the same question of how would we ever get back to a birth rate in an average around two. Okay. Now, another question, and it's the one that you asked, which is why would we want that? Why would we want the size of the population to stabilize or to avoid depopulation generation after generation? And here's one reason why we think that depopulation matters and that we should want to avoid it. Because we're all made better off by sharing the world with more other people. Other people alive alongside us. Other people who were alive before us. Other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives.

43:07And other people are where science and knowledge comes from. I like people, too. People are awesome. We can drill down on that, too. I mean, why are lives better now than a couple centuries ago? You know, why do we all get to have shoes on our feet and glasses to correct our vision? Plenty to eat, climate-controlled work environment, shorter work days, a library of literature, AI in our pocket, you know, social safety net systems to protect the elderly and disabled. Why are living standards so much higher today than not all that long ago? it's the same sun overhead. It's the same wind blowing.

43:43It's the same dirt underneath our feet. But knowledge is the difference. We know better what to do with these things. We know how to extract the minerals from the rocks and make glass and solar panels and computer chips. We know how to farm more efficiently to grow more food, more calories per acre of that dirt. And we know how to do that with less human labor. We know how to make soap to keep us from getting infections. We know how to make antibiotic pills to treat infections. And we have a germ theory of disease so that we know what an infection is. And we know all of these things because of people that came before us.

44:17We know better how to organize a kindergarten or a cancer drug trial or a parliamentary democracy. These things, ideas, discoveries, process improvements, innovations, they are why we all, on this call and listening to this podcast, get to expect more out of life and better things out of life than people did not all that long ago. though. This notion is something that economist Paul Romer won a Nobel Prize for in 2018. And his realization that he sort of formalized in the language of economic math was that an idea isn't scarce in the same way a parcel of land or a physical object like a hammer is scarce.

44:57Instead, an idea can be reused and shared endlessly. You know, we've been talking about differential equations. I took differential equations as an undergraduate engineering major. Maybe, Kelly or Daniel, you had the same textbook as I did. But when I read the words out of that textbook, it didn't cause the words to disappear from your copy of the textbook, right? We get to reuse these ideas over and over again. And so once Newton or Leibniz invents calculus, or maybe if they didn't live, somebody else would have, then we all get to benefit from that over and over and over again. So ideas and scientific knowledge are a sort of special resource that never gets depleted no matter how much it's used.

45:39And that's sort of one of the core reasons why sharing the world with a lot of other people or getting to live at a time after a large population has already existed is just a huge benefit to us. And it's more than just expanding the population and creating new innovations, right? It's about maintaining our quality of life. We need a certain number of people to keep making t-shirts and pencils and teaching our children like the world. Our infrastructure can't survive on a tiny population. But it makes me wonder if we're going to do a ridiculous extrapolation. Tell us about sort of the numbers of people we expect to have on Earth.

46:13If birth rates don't change, how many people will we have on Earth in 10 years, 50 years, a thousand years? Extrapolate all the way out to, you know, 25 ,000 years. Are we going to end up with like 20 people on the planet? Okay. We don't know, right? We don't have a crystal ball, but we can make if-then assumptions, right? You know, if the birth rates end up like this, then we can say something about how the future would evolve. And so one easy and plausible case is to imagine the worldwide average birth rate of 1.5, which is what it is right now in Europe, you know, a little bit less than in the U.S.

46:48and a little bit more than in Canada. So 1.5, that's the next generation being 25 % smaller, the next generation after that being 25 % smaller again. So if the world were like that, then every decade, we would see the size of the world population fall by 10%. And every century, the size of the world population would fall by two thirds. And that cumulative exponential decay would continue and we could get quite small in just a few hundred years. If instead of it being 1.5, we're an average of one, like in China today, then you can see the next generation is going to be half the size. The generation after that, the grandchildren's generation is going to be a quarter the size.

47:31And so the fall could be very fast. Now, how does all of that play out? How does that, you know, cash out in something big breaking or something breaking down or not having the discoveries we need or even the librarians to staff the libraries that we can maintain the knowledge we have. That's hard to know, but we can learn something about it by thinking about sort of comparing more populated places like cities and less populated rural places. You need enough other people around who want and need the same sorts of things that you want and need in order for those things to exist, to be feasible, to be provided by a government or a business or a nonprofit.

48:12Other people wanting and need what you want is how you get it. And that's true if what you want is well-functioning public transportation because a network of trains and buses can't operate without enough riders. It's true if what you want is a green energy infrastructure built on the work of scientists and engineers and implementers. And it's true for all of us as a whole if what you need is a vaccine for a novel virus or a cure for a rare disease. It's the sorts of things that only the niche medical specialization of a big world could produce. And so as there are fewer and fewer of us, we're not going to be able to provide those sorts of discoveries, products, innovation, creation that are only possible with other people.

48:55So other people may sometimes be your, you know, another person may sometimes be your competition, but other people, there being other people over the long run are why things like this can exist and their resource of abundance. Let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about some, let's say, less than compassionate methods that have been used in the past to try to improve birth rates. And what are some more ethical options we could consider in the future for improving birth rates?

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51:27And we're back. And we are talking about how the average birth rate globally has fallen below two and the implications of that. So when I think about ways for trying to improve birth rates, the first thing that come to mind are some authoritarian governments who have tried to control birth rates in ways that I'm not super comfortable with, to put it lightly. So let's review some methods that have not worked when countries have tried to improve their birth rates in the past. What do we know does not work? Well, all of them. All of them. There isn't an example of government coercion, whether trying to coerce higher birth rates or trying to coerce lower birth rates, resulting in the sort of lasting, big picture, sustainable change to birth rates that could knock the population off of a path of depopulation and onto a path of stabilization.

52:23I mean, I want to take a step backwards here. You know, we're making the case that a stabilized future population would be better than global depopulation. We also think that a stabilized population is compatible with commitments to environmental stewardship, to reproductive freedom, and to progressive priorities more broadly. And we want other people to think so, to be a part of this conversation. So we don't want anyone to misunderstand that if somebody chooses to have no children or few children, that's not for anyone else to say whether they're making a mistake. And that's a question of an ethical starting point.

53:00But it might still be that all of us together are making a mistake when we make it hard for people to choose larger families and choose to have children. So you can talk about this and talk about whether stabilization is the future we want without it, you know, necessarily invoking the idea that anyone should be coercing anybody else. Now, that said, it's an important and reasonable thing to worry about because there have been examples where governments have tried to compel people to have kids they don't want to have or to compel people not to have kids. So, you know, the classic example that people think about is China's one-child policy where the government of China made it, you know, illegal and with harsh and coercive implementation to have what they consider to be too many children.

53:49And sure enough, if you look at the birth rate in China over this time period, it fell. However, that doesn't turn out to be evidence that the one-child policy is why birth rates in China fell. And the surprising fact is that if you take the birth rate in China over time, so make a plot where you're looking at the birth rate in 1980, the birth rate in 1985, the birth rate in 1990, what you see is the birth rate in China fell over time while the one-child policy was in effect. But if you also look at what happened to birth rates over time in any other middle-income developing country that was also undergoing the same sort of increase in living standards, increase in education, specifically increase in female education, you see birth rates falling in basically the same parallel way.

54:38That that was happening all around the world in countries about that sort of level of socioeconomic development. And so what that tells us is that it probably wasn't the one-child policy that was responsible for the big-picture decline in birth rates in China. That's not to say that China would have ended up in the exact same place without the one-child policy, but somewhere pretty similar. And it's certainly not to say that the one-child policy didn't do a lot of harm to people's lives in China. But the birth rate is probably where it would have been otherwise. And wasn't there—I can't believe that I'm forgetting the name of the country and the leader.

55:11Was it Ceausescu? Somebody tried to increase birth rates by making birth control unavailable or something like that. Correct my historical inaccuracies, please, and tell us that story. No, you are correct. Yes. So this was Romania. This was 1966 or 67, Ceaușescu. He implemented Decree 770. And what Decree 770 said was that birth control was no longer going to be available or legal, that abortion was going to be illegal. And just to put this in context, in Romania prior to that time, abortion was more freely available than it's ever been for like the whole of the United States. So this was a big change in Romania.

55:54And that big change overnight did cause birth rates to rise overnight. So, you know, you pull the rug out from people, you change what's available to them, and birth rates did climb between 1966 and 1967. I think they something like almost doubled. But in the years that followed, birth rates started tacking back down. And, you know, within something like a decade, they've fallen two thirds of the way back from where they started prior to the policy as people made other plans and built their family planning around the new coercive regime. So that policy did a lot of harm to people and, you know, just a lot of harm.

56:36I mean, women died. Pregnancy became very unsafe. So it was awful. But it was awful without achieving the goal of boosting birth rates super high. And, you know, Ceausescu was overthrown. He was lined up against the wall and shot. And so if your formula, and I know this is not anyone on this call's formula, but if it's anybody's formula to try to bring birth rates up by, you know, a dictator coercing women to have children they don't want, That's not a sustainable option for anybody, including that dictator. So you want policymakers in the audience to hear that as a cautionary tale? It's a good message.

57:17So in either direction, trying to push numbers up or push numbers down, we don't have good evidence that it works. And it's incredibly unethical the way it's been done. Yeah, I think we even have, I say even something a little bit stronger. We have good evidence that it doesn't work. What about other things like trying to provide more child care or making college cheaper or more family planning? Aren't there ethical ways we can make it easier for people to have more kids? There are lots of ethical things that we can try and that countries have tried. Unfortunately, the track record there isn't as great as one would hope it would be.

57:51So I think we still have a long way to go to figure out what might work. You know, on this question of making child care more affordable, more available, you know, if you look to Scandinavian countries, for example, places where college tuition is free, where there's universal health care, where there's child care that's not only heavily subsidized or free for, you know, pre-K child care, but it's also provided, like it's available. I don't know what your experiences are, but my experience as a parent is like it's just hard sometimes to organize child care for when work is on but school is out or, you know, summertime it's a patchwork of things.

58:29But even in places where child care is better organized, free, where tuition is free, where health care is more available or free, provided socially by the government, these aren't places with high birth rates. And so, yes, I think there are things that there's plenty left still to try in the toolkit of what, like, free liberal societies can do to make lives better and easier for parents. But I don't think anybody, not governments, not social scientists, have figured out what that special sauce is yet. I want to sort of say that maybe that's not so surprising. I mean, think about the sort of policies that we hear of, you know, a few thousand dollar baby bonus or something like that, right?

59:10You know, let's do a thought experiment. Would you have agreed to marry somebody other than the person who you married for about$5 ,000? I don't think very many people are going to say yes to that, right? Our spouses listen to the podcast, so we can't actually answer that question. Well, okay, so it's not a fair test. Well, anonymize. I didn't do my research procedures, right? But I think, you know, these are people's biggest decisions forming their family. What's their life story about? What autobiography am I writing, right? You know, a few thousand dollars will help a lot. And, you know, if you ask me or you ask Mike, we'll say that society should do more to help parents, must do more to help parents, right?

59:52But when we say do more, we're meaning something a lot bigger. And it just shouldn't be a surprise. If we don't think that a few thousand dollars is going to change who you're going to marry, It's probably not going to change your biggest picture decisions about how to form your family and form your own life story in other ways, too. And so, yes, by all means, let's support parents, support families. Let's do that. But let's not be surprised when that doesn't, you know, shift us from the path to depopulation, the path to stabilization. I was listening to Left, Right and Center the other day, and one of the hosts, Sarah Isger, was saying that, you know, one of the reasons population is going down globally is that when women have more reproductive choice and more options in life, they choose to have fewer kids.

1:00:36kids. And one of the things that I love that you all address directly in your book was that increases in population size would, you know, in the absence of artificial wombs, have to come from women having more babies, which has a health impact, a career impact, etc. So one, my question is, is it true that when women have more choice, they have fewer children and that's the mechanism? It sounds like maybe we don't understand that mechanism as well based on our conversation we've And what do you propose as the method for having more babies and in a way to do it that sort of distributes this responsibility more evenly?

1:01:12I think that we all have a shared interest in there being future generations and so that we all need to be pitching in to making there be future generations and sharing and lifting those burdens off of one another. And I think it's no surprise that in a history where we have long put a lot of that burden on a subset of the population, I mean mothers in particular, that we have people saying no thank you. But because that's been the past, that doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be the future. I mean sometimes we hear people talking about these conversations about low birth rates and they act like there is a choice we have to make.

1:01:54either we can have regressive gender politics that asks more of women, or we can have global depopulation. I think people both on the left and the right start these conversations with the presumption that if we're going to stabilize the population, the extra burden has to fall on to women. And I don't think that's right. I don't think that we should start by asking more from mothers. I think the place to start or a place to start is by asking more from fathers. Males can't get pregnant, that's right, but it takes more than nine months to make a new person. It takes decades to raise a child into a new adult, and that means there's plenty of time and plenty to do for men to even things out.

1:02:34Dads can get up at 3 a.m. to soothe a crying baby. They can cook even though they're tired. They can process the laundry and pack the snacks and figure out about the child care when school is out and drive to swim lessons and, you know, do so much. They can accept the work and the responsibility and being the person who's on call on sick days and summer days. And they can do that for years and years and years and years. And, you know, I think this is, it sounds nice. I mean, it's more than just hopeful rhetoric. I think it's a challenge and we shouldn't consider there to be any sort of guarantee that this is what's going to happen.

1:03:08But, you know, the future of birth rates is going to be chosen. Whether or not we depopulate and whether and where we stabilize is going to come down to the choices that people, and especially women, make for their lives. That seems pretty clear. And so if we're going to expect people to choose parenting, then there's work that we all need to do to make parenting more attractive. And that starts with lifting and sharing the burdens that for so long have only fallen on some of us. I loved reading that part of your book. And is this why you've written a popular book? Instead of like making this argument to policymakers lawmakers and within academia?

1:03:48Are you writing this to the general public to make people aware of this coming issue? Well, there's that and the differential equations. But no, I mean... That's really your goal in the end, right? This is really just a math lesson. This is a topic that more people should be talking about. Not just, you know, more numbers, but a broader set of people. I mean, we're at the very beginning of facing up to this challenge. Most people haven't yet come to the terms of the magnitude of what we're facing. But we wouldn't have written this book calling to avoid depopulation if we didn't think it were possible for humanity to change course.

1:04:25Depopulation is the path that we're on, but it's not the inevitable future. People ask us, so what's your policy recommendation? What legislation would you write? And I think jumping to a policy solution at this point is probably the wrong move. This isn't something that's going to turn around in one presidential term or because of one set of legislated considerations for parents or, you know, a new bill about parental leave. I think we're facing something big. And the first step is many more people sharing a belief that we should want something to change. That's a necessary precursor. If you're already convinced and you're asking what to do next, I don't think it's advocate for a particular piece of legislation.

1:05:07It's invite more people into the conversation and convince your friends and family and classmates and colleagues that people are fundamentally good for one another and that depopulation is not going to get us off the hook for challenges like climate change and our environmental problems that we face. Start a conversation about what could be good about a future in which more people feel like they're able to and supported to choose parenting. That sort of reorientation to thinking that stabilization might be a good future has got to be the first step. And in the meanwhile, there's a lot of social science to do that we should be building out to better understand what might work so that once we're able to build the social and the political support for a stabilized future, we'll know what to do.

1:05:53But there are a lot of minds to change first. Can I end this on an aliens question? Of course, it wouldn't be a DKEU episode without it. So the fact that we see this trend across so many different communities in so many different circumstances makes me wonder naturally if this is something that exists in, I don't know, all intelligent technological civilizations in the galaxy. And do you think maybe what you've done here is stumble on the solution to the Fermi paradox? I'm so glad you asked that. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to stop just for a moment. You've really made Dean's day. He wants to put the Fermi paradox in the book.

1:06:26I don't think we ended up putting the Fermi paradox in the book. Big mistake. We cut it. There's a cutting room floor. But I was interviewed on a podcast from someone at SETI, and I brought this up. And he was just, it was almost like, how could I say something so silly and besmirch the podcast? But yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense that, you know, individuals have to sacrifice to make the next generation. There are shared public benefits of there being a next generation. You're going to learn how to control your birth rates. And so I do think that this sort of dilemma is probably a common one.

1:07:07Now, I am just a humble demographer of Uttar Pradesh, India. I don't, you know, I can't speak to the larger questions, but. Dean is glowing right now, everyone. He's very excited to be talking about this. We love it. All right, Dean and Mike, thank you so much for being on the show. This was fascinating. And anybody who wants to learn more should go grab the book After the Spike. Thanks very much, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:07:59free message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. One last thing before you go. You know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready-to-review work. With your permission, work in ChatGPT can gather context from apps and files, summarize incoming messages, rebuild decks, and help finalize high-quality documents for your team or clients.

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