An Empty Planet: How Population Decline Will Reshape Society with Darrell Bricker

“The problem for the future isn’t production. It’s consumption.” - Darrell Bricker

Global population decline is accelerating faster than anyone expected—and it will reshape economies, politics, and society. In this episode of It’s an Inside Job, I speak with population expert Darrell Bricker about fertility collapse, aging societies, and what leaders must understand to prepare for an “empty planet.”

What happens to economies, innovation, and social stability when the world stops having children?

Key Takeaway Insights and Tools 

• Global population decline is driven by fertility collapse, not mortality.
  Declining birth rates—across both developed and developing nations—are the single most important factor shaping future population size.
  00:04:00–00:05:24
• Urbanization fundamentally changes family formation.
  As women gain access to education, careers, and income, partnership and childbearing are delayed—and family size shrinks permanently.
  00:06:01–00:07:34
• Below-replacement fertility is now the global norm.
  China, India, Europe, and the Nordics have all fallen below replacement rate, making long-term population decline mathematically unavoidable.
  00:10:16–00:12:16
• Economic growth is threatened more by lack of consumption than production.
  Aging populations consume less, innovate less, and hold most of the wealth—while younger generations shrink in number and purchasing power.
  00:17:02–00:22:24
• Policy incentives alone do not reverse fertility decline.
  Even generous childcare, parental leave, and financial support (e.g., Norway, Canada) have failed to meaningfully increase birth rates.
  00:36:44–00:39:17

Bio

Darrell Bricker is the Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, one of the world’s largest public opinion research organisations. Based in Toronto, he is the co-author of Empty Planet, a bestselling and widely debated book that challenges the long-held belief that overpopulation is humanity’s greatest threat.

Call to Action

If this conversation challenged your assumptions, share the episode with someone who should be thinking about the future of society, leadership, or economics.

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to the Podcast
• 1:42 Practical Tips for Everyday Challenges

Transcript

0:04

This is It's an Inside Job, and I'm your host, Jason Lim. This is the show where we explore the stories, strategies, and science behind growing resilience, nurturing well-being, and leading with intent. Because when it comes down to it, it's all an inside job. Well welcome back to it's an inside job i'm your host jason limb in this week's episode i am thrilled to have a distinguished guest with us he is an expert whose insights challenge conventional wisdom joining us today is daryl bricker he's the co-author of the groundbreaking book empty planet the shock of global population decline daryl's work challenges the prevailing narrative of a world hurtling towards overpopulation, presenting a compelling argument that the reality might be quite the opposite. In our conversation, we will delve deep into the contrarian perspective that global population growth is not the impending crisis we have been led to believe. Instead, we will explore the compelling evidence and the societal shifts that suggest the world's population is on a downward trajectory. We will unpack the implications of declining birth rates, shifting demographics, and the potential ramifications for economies, societies, and global affairs. What does it mean for our labor force, our economies, and our social structure if our population is not burgeoning, but declining? Moreover, we will discuss the profound impact this could have on environmental sustainability, resource allocation, and the very fabric of our societies. I mean, are we prepared for a world where fewer people drive profound societal and economic changes? So join me now on this fascinating conversation as we challenge assumptions and explore the implications of an empty planet. Introduce who you are and what you do currently. My name is Daryl Bricker. My daytime job is I'm the global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, which is the largest public opinion, public research company in the world. We're based in Paris, but I happen to live in Toronto and I'm Canadian. And my side hustle is I write books on topics that I'm interested in. So I've written seven books many of them have uh i doubt your audience has necessarily read them that if uh unless they're canadian but uh um i have written one book called empty planet that is about global population change and focuses on the question of fertility and i uh the collapse of global fertility and it's probably the topic i speak more about to international audiences these days than just about anything else you know as we said just before we started recording this i think it's such a relevant topic i know the book was written 2019 but i think the premise and what it's about still affects today i mean there might be slight changes perhaps but well that's what i'd like to explore with you in the coming hour i was wondering perhaps just to bring our listeners up to speed i was wondering if you could summarize the central argument around your book empty planet and how it differs from the prevailing view of global population trends. So, John Ebbetson, who is the writer at large of the Globe and Mail, which is the largest newspaper here in Canada, and I wrote the book together. And really, the reason that we wrote the book was to make one simple argument. And that's that everything that people know about the future of the human population, particularly as communicated by demographers at that time when we were doing work on the book, was incorrect. Particularly what the UN was saying about where the global population was going to get to by the end of the century was definitely incorrect. And what we wanted to do was talk about why the modeling was not accurate and to suggest maybe what a different future was going to look like based on one simple point. And that was that estimates about global fertility were way off. That, in fact, global fertility was going to have the single biggest effect on the size of the global population over the space of the next century. And that the projections at the time that said we were going to be 11.2 billion people by the year 2100 were wildly inaccurate. And so what we did was we made the argument in the book by traveling around the world and taking a look at what was happening in people's daily lives and how they regarded the question of having children and forming families, just to make that point. So it's not a book that's full of all sorts of charts and graphs and data. It's basically a long story about what's happening in the world and what's happening in various countries to add up to our conclusion, which was that if you think that the global population is going to be 11.2 billion people by the end of the century, think again. And that the primary reason that we were never going to reach that number or get even close to it was because we've stopped having kids. Yeah, it's definitely a contrarian view, and I guess it was definitely a contrarian view back in 2019, but I guess more of this data is open to the world, more people are cognizant of it. I just find it surprising that there hasn't been that much in-depth look, and I think having a contrarian point of view really educates us to understand how that works. And so what do you think are some of the key reasons why you believe global population would decline? I understand it's fertility rates, but I was wondering maybe if you could expand on that picture to the extent you wish. Yeah, it really is. It really is the changing number of children that we're having in our lifetimes. And basically, what all of this is a result of is cultural change around the world, which is becoming a consistent global change. And that is, as the world's population increasingly urbanizes, it changes the lives of women. And when women move into urban centers, they have different lives than their mothers and their grandmothers had. and they're exposed to different role models and different possibilities for their lives. So one of the things that they do is they probably try to extend their education. And then the second thing that they try to do after that is to participate in generating their own income by being employed for pay in a job outside of the home. And when you make those kinds of decisions, what it does is it pushes back all the other decisions, particularly about family formation. So it pushes back if you're going to be in a partnership the year at which you become permanently partnered. And after that, it pushes back the time at which you decide to start your family. So Canada is a great example of this. I mean, the average Canadian woman back in 1960 got married around the age of 21 or 22, had her first kid when she was in her early 20s and probably had four in her lifetime. That was the average. Today, the average Canadian woman gets married around the age of 30, if she gets married at all, has her first kid shortly after and probably only has one or at the outside two. And as a result, fertility has declined from four kids on average per Canadian woman down to 1.3 today, which is the lowest in Canadian history. I guess I've been reading some articles as part of a little more in-depth conversation with you. I also understand that it's just the cost of living. I was looking at China and Taiwan. A lot of young professional women there because of the cost of just having kids or sending them to daycare or floating a mortgage. Or all of these variables, I guess, add to this equation that leads to the fertility window. And I guess that shrinks, right? Because there's only a viable time to have, I guess, a healthy offspring at some point. Or have I kind of missed the target a little? No, you're right about pushing every decision back. But, you know, when your parents had you, they didn't have all of those things in place either. In previous generations, we didn't have all of those things in place. Yes, housing was cheaper. You didn't need as much education to succeed in the economy. All those things are true. But if you actually go out and you ask people why they don't have kids, the two prevailing reasons are, number one, I just don't want them. I just don't want them. Number two is I can't have them. And then you start getting into the financial conditions. So the issue is really from a cultural perspective, the idea that one of the things that you want to achieve in life is to be a parent is less appealing than it's been at any time in human history. And to the degree that people want to be parents, they want to be parents in a limited way. And the reason is because you're not having kids to satisfy the patriarchy. You're not having kids to satisfy your religion or satisfy the state. You're having them for the purposes of living a full life experience. And most people are telling us that they've lived a pretty full experience with one or two. And the population only grows if you want to have three. Because if you just have two, it's replacing yourself and your partner. And in many of Western countries these days, the prevailing number, the modal number, the most common number of kids that a family has is just one. So this is this is what's happening now that's not particularly surprising i mean, sometimes it's a little difficult to break people out of the statistical arguments and then break it out into reality which is you don't have to listen to me go take a look at your own family, Take a look at your grandparents, take a look at your parents, take a look at your number of siblings you have, and take a look at the number of kids that you have in your family. Now, there will be some exceptions, but overall, what you'll find, mostly the trend is it's like a funnel that gets wide at the top. When you get to your grandparents, it gets smaller and smaller as you get to the bottom in terms of family size. The surprising part of that is it's not only happening in developed countries, it's also happening in developing countries. China being a good example, where their fertility rate has dropped from somewhere around four to now, some people argue, just over one or just under one. And the result of that is that the Chinese population is going to decline by half or more over the course of this century. And that's even, by the way, using the UN's estimates, which are wildly exaggerated in terms of what the actual population is going to be, the population trajectories are going to be through the course of the century. So, I mean, how will this declining population, how will it impact different regions of the world? You know, what are some of the specific implications, I guess, for developed and developing countries? It's already happening. So there's over 30 countries now that actually have declining populations. Japan loses about 800,000 people, 800,000 people from its population every year. Greece, there's more people who died two to one over births every year. In Italy, they're losing over 50,000 people. In Spain, they're losing over 50,000 people. So it's already happening in 30 plus countries. All through Europe. I mean, the European Union is supposed to start declining in the mid-2020s. It's probably very close to already tipping over right now. The Chinese population last year actually tipped into decline. First time in Chinese history. Well, there have been periods, I should correct that, in which the Chinese population, if they were measuring it accurately during the Cultural Revolution and other times when they probably were experiencing some absolute decline. But this is the first time outside of a major event like that in which the population has started to decline. And even countries like India, over the last couple of years, started recording below replacement rate fertility. And so when you start thinking about that, it's like, okay, well, 36% of the global population is just two countries, and that's China and India, and both of them have below-replacement rate populations. How does that add up to 11.2 billion? By the way, the UN has adjusted its estimate over the space of the last three or four years from 11.2 billion to 10.4 billion. So they've taken 800 million people out of their estimates in the space of just four or five years. So you're just going to see this happen every couple of years as they change their projections. And when John and I were writing this back in 2019, to say what I'm saying right now would be seen as kind of outrageously controversial. It's now for people who follow this issue a little more closely, I would say more of the conventional wisdom. It's more of the conventional wisdom. But I mean, understanding that, you know, the people at the UN are putting these stats together. I would assume that they're highly intelligent people, knowledgeable, and they can draw from the same science, the same stats that you guys have done in 2019. But what is the reason you think they still are estimating 10 plus billion people? Well, I mean, there are people who get into political motivations, but I'm not going to do that because I have no evidence of that. And that's for others to discuss. I think, as a statistician, I think it's just a really conservative approach to how you estimate population. So their model is really simple. It's take a look at fertility, take a look at deaths, and take a look at social people moving between and among countries. And you can get a pretty good estimate of what's happening in terms of population growth. The problem is it's all retrospective. It's based on how populations behaved in the past mostly in terms of how the patterns will evolve in the future. And the problem is the population is not behaving as it behaved in the past. Assumptions you can make about, for example, and I hear this all the time, we call it population momentum. A lot of young people coming into the population and that's automatically going to lead to boosts in population in certain countries. And the answer is, yeah, except if they don't behave like previous generations behave. And why are you making those assumptions about their levels of fertility? Because everything that we're seeing is that they're not behaving like previous generations. So it's not, I wouldn't say, like I said, there are people who apply political motivations to this. I would say just from a statistical point of view, the model is not up to the task. They need to correct it or they'll just keep doing what they do. And it's kind of a safe place to be because they adjust their estimates every two years. So by, you know, 2000, you know, in 98, you know, they'll probably be close to what it's going to be in 2100. But but looking at it from where it is today, there's just there's just it's very, very difficult to see. Unless we start producing children in a way that doesn't involve the biological processes that we that we normally produce children with or actually almost uniquely produce children with. If they've come up with some other way of doing that, it's very unlikely that we're going to see anything close to what the UN is estimating. And by the way, Jason, most of the global population growth that's taking place these days is not because children are coming into the world. It's because people aren't dying as fast as they used to. So the biggest chunk of population growth is not tracking new people coming into the population. It's being produced and actually tracking the number of people whose lives are actually longer. So in Canada, back in the 1920s, the average Canadian lived to 57. That number is now up to 82 or 83. So that's why the population is growing. It's not because there's tons and tons and tons of kids coming into the population. People are hanging on. Yeah, and when John and I said this back in 2019, it was like, you don't know what you're talking about. But the data just keeps rolling in, basically confirming the direction and trends that we talked about. In fact, the only thing that's happened is it's happened faster than we said. One of the things John Ebbinson likes to say about the book is we were wrong. And the reason that we were wrong is not because we didn't get the trends right. We just didn't get the trends fast enough. It's actually accelerating, particularly as a result of COVID, faster than we predicted. I mean, China was supposed to be tipping into decline sometime in the 2030s. I just told you that in 2022, 2023, the Chinese government admitted that China's population has tipped into decline. So it's happened a decade or a bit faster than was initially being predicted. It's a profound way of how we need to shift our thinking. Because what obviously when declining populations, obviously, this is going to have economic implications. So at least that's the red thread I pull out of this. So how do you foresee these declining populations impacting global economies? And so I guess it's not just the negative, but I mean, obviously, there will be potential challenges and opportunities with a declining population. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. Yeah, so since the Industrial Revolution, global economies have been driven by a combination of consumption and trade. That's where economic growth comes from. So if you increase the number of people. On the face of the earth, you automatically increase the amount of demand for the goods and services that the economy produces. That's how capitalism works. But not just capitalism, any economic system works. When you produce a population that, first of all, is not in the consumptive phase, or the weight of the population is not in the consumptive phase of life, which is the younger phase of life, the younger generations, when those start to decline and the larger part of the population becomes the older, less consumptive part, particularly one that's sitting on all the wealth because young people don't have it. And one of the things you pointed to is mortgages and houses and rents. And one of the reasons is because all the wealth sits with the older generations. All of a sudden, you've got a big problem in terms of consumption. Which is that unless we can turn older people back into consumers, economic growth going forward is going to be really threatened. The other thing that happens is that innovation, which tends to be a younger person's game, gets reduced. So some of the issues that we might be able to resolve as a result of innovating won't be solved possibly as quickly or as, I would say, as cleverly as they would if we had more younger people who are part of the innovation process. And, you know, these ideas aren't uniquely mine. There was an economist named Charles Jones at Stanford University who read Empty Planet and came up with something he called the Empty Planet Result, in which he did basically all the mathematics around the question of what happens to the global economy going forward. And his two big points were fewer people, older people, less economic growth. That's the problem. And then secondly, what it does is it reduces the population that would be focused on innovation. So, yeah, I think that's what we're going to be confronting. So, as you said, traditionally, it's been young people coming up through the game. They have the innovative minds. They are seeing new things. So that would beg the question with AI and the rise of artificial intelligence and how far is that? I mean, could, again, I know we have to speculate here, but do you see AI helping to contribute to this sort of innovative process, finding new ways of doing things, novel ways of doing things? Every time I hear about AI, and by the way, I'm really fascinated by it and a big user of generative AI. We're only scraping the surface of what it can do to transform things. But every time I hear about what it's going to do for the future, all I can think about is jet cars. You know, that or what people, you know, when the Internet first came up, which was, you know, it was originally developed by academic researchers and people in the defense industry to be able to communicate in a secure way. Nobody saw Netflix. Nobody saw that the explosion of usage would be for things like porn. I mean, never and these innovations never, never find their way into the population the way that people are anticipating. So I tend to think a little bit of jet cars and what has happened with the Internet when I think about AI and our future. So we'll see, but probably not in the way that the well-motivated people are intending. It will be the way that it's adopted and what its effect will be. But the second thing is that AI doesn't consume anything. The problem that we have, I mean, where everybody automatically goes into this conversation, I didn't and I didn't go there on purpose, was in the area of production. Production of all the problems that we have to face due to a shrinking and aging population is probably the one that we're most engaged with and have the most sense of how to confront it. And the reason for that is there are countries that are already dealing with it. So, for example, like Japan and its robotization and everything from how it manufactures things through to even providing service robots to work in seniors' facilities and that kind of thing. So, production, I think that that's the easier problem to deal with. The really big problem for the future of our economy to deal with is consumption. And that's because robots don't buy anything. AI doesn't buy anything. The people who are going to be the largest segment of our population, they don't tend to participate in the economy. Nobody makes anything for them. I mean, people who produce consumer goods basically have a complete blind spot when it comes to older people. They still think that they're catering to the post-Second World War baby boom in its infancy. But that consumption part of what's going to happen in the global economy is the part that I think is going to be the most vexing that we're going to have to deal with. Because if there's no consumption, then the idea that we're going to have stagnant growth going forward has to become part of how we prepare. It has to become the assumption of what the future is going to look like. Because there's no obvious way that consumption goes up given those demographics. Yeah, production, consumption. So do you think at a fundamental level we have to rewrite the narrative of what economic prosperity is? And I know that is not a simple thing to do. I mean, do we need to redefine how we see progress, how we see growth, how we see economic flowering? Well, there are some people trying to do that. The degrowth movement is out there, but honestly, that's kind of Marxists living their best life again, right? Yeah, yeah. It's just not really realistic. But I think that what's going to happen is the facts are going to start producing more of a conversation about these things. You know, Auguste Compe, a French Enlightenment thinker, came up with the term demography is destiny, and people have criticized him every moment since. But I think he was a lot more accurate than what we think. I think our future is really going to be defined by what happens to the human species. And I have to keep coming back to that term human species because we tend to think that we're not. But we are. We're a biological species with a lifespan of about 100 years. And if this generation doesn't produce the next generation, who will? And if everybody decides to stop having kids. And by the way, every time I get up and give these a presentation on empty planet and a public audience, somebody always stands up and says, I'm not going to have kids because I'm worried about the climate. I'm worried about this. There's interest groups out there saying, including the UN saying, you know, smaller families is what we need and all the rest of it. It's like, yeah, yeah. But, you know, if everybody decides to make the virtuous decision, we don't exist in just over 100 years. By the time, you know, we're 50 years in the future, we've lost so much reproductive capacity that we probably were doomed at that point. So, and I don't mean to be a millenarian about this, I'm not a doomsayer, but, you know, the math here is brutal. And by the way, it's not even mathematics, it's arithmetic, just addition and subtraction. You said there were two things where people say i don't want to have kids and i can't have kids i can't have kids that's that's a fertility problem at another level but those who choose would you say it is a trend and meaning that it's kind of the the flavor of the decade or the flavor of the next score of years and do you think that there may be a change at one generation or another world they say you know what i want to have kids or as you said the mathematics are already playing where there's a a point where there's no coming back we've crossed some line i think in some countries we've already crossed that line i think i don't know how japan does it i mean. I don't know how italy does it um you know there's just the median age of the population is 48 in both italy and japan they're already old and unless we figure out another way to produce human beings their reproductive capacity has evaporated. So their only possibility is through some form of immigration. And, you know, Japan doesn't like immigrants and Italy has a real problem with them too. So the Italian population is in decline and that decline will continue to accelerate. But could there be a change in how people view raising families? Yeah, there could very well be a change, but it isn't really happening anywhere. The only places that you can see it are in more religious communities. And the only country that we've seen in the modern era that's actually moved from below replacement rate to above replacement rate in a significant way is Israel, and for obvious reasons. But. This is just the prevailing trend. All of a sudden, are women going to wake up tomorrow and say, you know what? I want a family of four like they did back in 1960. Well, maybe they will. But I think based on all the evidence out there, the likelihood is not. So if we can get down a little nuts and bolts, why do people choose not to have kids? Or why is that a growing trend? Maybe even a majority of people saying, you know what? I have a good life. I've experienced a lot. I have the financial field to do what I want, when I want, and kids are just going to belabor this process. What are some of the reasons that you've heard that why women or just young couples don't want to have kids, if we can just call it that? Because mostly it's because of lifestyle. I mean, that's the main thing. So the thought experiment I do with people is when somebody says to me, you know, I don't want to have kids. And they give me the reason. So, you know, sometimes it's climate change. So, well, you know, if we limited climate change as a problem tomorrow, how big a family would you have? And it's like, uh, they never thought about it. Or I would say to somebody, okay, so the cost of children, okay, if we made it free, how many would you have? Because there are countries in which we've done that. Where you're living, it's basically almost free, given all of the child care assistance that you get. I mean, the Nordic countries are the model. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was just going to say, yeah. But they're the model. I mean, if you don't think it's good in Norway, you're not going to find a better example of being progressive in terms of childcare and helping people to raise families anywhere else in the world. So you guys are at the high end of how most countries would aspire if they want to deal with this. And you know as well as I do that fertility rate is declining in Norway, maybe not as fast as it is in the rest of Europe. But the fertility rate in Norway is below replacement rate, and there's no sign that it will any time in the near future go above. So if Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark are all below replacement fertility and declining, what hope is there for anybody else? But places like Canada and the States where they have policies of immigration, and a lot of the times they have the luxury of bringing in the best people to bolster the numbers even if the native population is not growing. I mean, how are trends like maybe, I don't know about Australia, but Canada and the States where they have immigration policies and they're much more open to that than let's say some European countries. Does that give North America an advantage or am I seeing it too black and white of terms? I think you're absolutely right. It gives Canada and the United States and Australia a huge advantage. Now, the problem is massive immigration is very culturally disruptive. And you're already seeing a candidate in the United States who wanted to build a wall now talking about the blood of the nation being polluted by immigration in the United States with Donald Trump. I mean, there is reaction to these things. And I mean, even in where you are today, Norway, what the reaction has been to immigration in the country, certainly in Sweden and there are, you know, obviously in Finland, there are in democratic systems, there are reactions to that level of cultural change that's been brought in by immigration. So it only works in certain places. Yeah. And the places where immigrants are coming from are also going through the process of immigration. Declining fertility, declining populations as well. I mean, the biggest diaspora in the world today is India. And they're now below replacement rate fertility. I mean, China, there's a lot of, still, you know, for a while, it was the number one source of immigrants to Canada, no longer. And one of the reasons is because there aren't as many Chinese to send. Immigration is a young person's game, and the median age in China today is 39. Wow, that I did not know. 39. That's why I'm here, Jason. I'll tell you all this stuff. In fact, the Chinese population is actually, on average, older than the American population. The median age in the United States today is 38. What would you say? Okay, so the trends are the arithmetic, the mathematics, the stats are showing unquestionably that there is a declining population growth both in developing countries. So what do you believe the technological and environmental impact of these shrinking numbers means for the planet? Well, I think anybody who's concerned about climate or the health of the environment would have to see this as good. Fewer people on the face of the earth, if you believe that human beings, and I think most reasonable people believe this, are the source of destructive pollution in the world, and particularly the size of our carbon footprint, you probably are happy about this. I mean, if you're at the World Economic Forum or you're at the UN or whatever, where they celebrate or really focus on climate change, this is probably going to be one of the things that has the biggest effect. All good for the climate and the environment, but really, really bad for societies and really, really bad for economies. So you could actually see some societies sort of holding their own, such as maybe North America, if we take into consideration the clash of cultures. But where and then other nations could actually literally implode and collapse. I'm not an apocalyptic person by nature, but the first stage of this is to recognize what's going on. And that's why John and I wrote Empty Planet, because the conversation, by the way, Jason, that you and I are having right now, four years ago when Empty Planet came out, would have been a very different conversation. I mean, we didn't start into this conversation with, how can you possibly be right and the UN is wrong? Because there's been such an accumulation of evidence. Anybody who's done their homework to talk about this topic would know. That this trend is going in one direction. But still, at the World Economic Forum last year in Davos, there was not one single session on population. Not one. So we have this, I think, prejudice, this blind spot when it comes to what's really going on with the global population that is going to be, I would describe it as the single biggest issue that is going to affect the future of humanity over the course of the next 80 years or 70 years, it's time to wake up and start having this conversation in a serious way. Um, and, uh, and, and that's not what that's still, I mean, as I said, the narrative starting to turn, the people who are more informed about this are now starting to talk about what you're talking about, which is, so what do we do about this? What are the effects going to be rather than saying it can't possibly be happening, which was, which is what it was back in 2019 when the book first came out. We've laid out the challenge. We've laid out that this is a trend and it's only a growing, it's like a snowball down a hill. It's just picking up speed and picking up mass. So how can we prepare and mitigate for some potential disruptions in this? I mean, are there recommendations you would have? Some things you've seen? Well, you know, that's where John and I have kind of turned our attention to these days and looking at recommendations. And, you know, there's really kind of three different points of view on this. There's two that are progressive and one that is conservative. Because you're going to hear me writing and saying this a lot over the space in the next while. Demography is not just destiny, it's politics. So I think that what's happening is that this is now moving to more of a political conversation. And, There's three groups. Two are progressive. One is conservative. One progressive group is the hallelujah, it's about time. We should get our global population down to 2 billion. That's what the globe can sustain. Not recognizing, of course, that today we're 8 billion and the globe is sustaining pretty reasonably, but we should get down to 2 billion. And all of what I'm talking to you about right now should be completely celebrated. These are the degrowth people. These are the people who are part of the population zero type movement. They see nothing but good in any of this. The economic consequences, they don't care because we're focused too much on economic growth. And fewer people on the place of the planet is just going to be good. What they seem to fail to realize is that 2 billion, as the population was around the Second World War, 2 or 3 billion is not the same 2 or 3 billion today. The pyramid's completely flipped. The population period's completely flipped, and there's almost no kids. The population can't reproduce itself, and it's completely dominated by old people. So it's kind of an interesting fantasy, but beyond the reduction of the numbers, they really haven't given it a lot of thought. In the environment, they haven't given it a lot of thought. And then there's a second group, If that's the radical position, the reasonable liberal progressive position is, oh, well, the reason that this is happening, and we even had a bit of that conversation today, was essentially market failure. And market failure as a result of sexism and inequality. So if we just made it easier for women, if we put the right incentives in place so women would not suffer a career penalty. For having kids. And they were able to afford having kids, you know, by either dealing with the houses that they would raise them in, sort of real estate prices, or the cost of childcare, or whatever it is, this would simply fix itself. And we would get to that neutral, you know, kind of 2.1 level in which the global population just replaces itself. Except every place that it's been tried, it hasn't really worked. And you're sitting in one of them. Like, what else can the government of Norway do? It's very difficult to see what the next incentive system is that you can put in place to make the market work, because it's a problem of market failure. So the problem with those guys is that's where everybody wants to be. That's where the conversation is right now. And the problem is it's not really having an effect. And then there's the third point, which is the one that is the most distressing, I would say. So if the first one is not, you know, they've got their eyes closed to this, okay, well, you know, their eyes are going to be opened by the facts at some point. The second group, market failure isn't the problem. Well, they're going to wake up a little bit going forward, and maybe they'll come up with some different ideas. And then there's the third group, which is the conservative group that John and I call neonatalists. And basically, their point of view is all we have to do is go back to the baby boom we know what works so that means women out of the workplace um greater focus on religion greater incentives to families to have large families greater incentives for women to abandon the educational system and and uh and uh start producing kids like their grandmothers did and if we just went back to that then we would have another baby boom uh good luck. Yeah, well, it's like, okay, well, that's the behavior you want, maybe not the educational part, but the having more kids is what you want. But who, which women are going to go back to that? I mean, so it's, it's, you got these, this dialogue of the deaf that's happening on all of these things in which none of them are really talking about anything that would be particularly appealing to the public, or if they are talking about something that's appealing, it doesn't work to the level that the people who are the advocates think they would like the people who are in that second group. Let's make child care for free. How many more kids are you going to have? Well, we just reduced child care costs. The government of Canada tells us down to half of what it was three years ago or whatever it was when they brought in the program for child care that the Trudeau government put in place. In the period of time that it's happened, fertility rates gone from 1.5 to 1.3. So it's a great program for making it easier for women to work, but making it easier for women to work doesn't mean that you give them a great incentive to be a mother, right? So some will, but you can just look at the numbers. I mean, there's cause and effect. So this is why it's going to move into the world of political conversation. It's because the issue is going to become more urgent as the facts build up, as you're learning probably through your research to have this interview, as the facts build up. And there's going to be a really very complicated, difficult political conversation in which the various sides are just starting to form that's going to take place. And this is going to work itself out, I think, through the political process because demography is politics. And so do you see maybe not in all countries, but in certain regions, there is social unrest, however that shows up? Well i think we're seeing it in some countries like for example italy right now where we've just seen a government with a pro-natalist policy elected we've seen other governments in argentina a government with a pro-natalist policy elected so the populist parties of the right this these days is becoming part of what they talk about it's a big part of what victor orban talks about they don't want immigrants in hungary they've nationalized in vitro fertilization and made it a state asset. If you've had four kids, you no longer pay taxes. Why? Because Hungary, if it can't reverse its fertility decline, is going to disappear. Serbia, Croatia, all of the former Yugoslavia, all of them are in danger of disappearing because their populations have evaporated through a combination of almost no fertility, really old populations in terms of median age, but also a diaspora that's left or the younger population that's left. And they're working in other places in the EU, for example. So there's, yeah, it's population is going to become a very, very political conversation over the space of the next 20, 30 years. I think you made a i'm i'm so fascinated by you know the shifting populations of immigration you know over the last you know news cycle the last three months you know there's been a focus on poland where they say we don't want any of these type of immigrants but we've taken a million ukrainians and they don't have such a huge cultural clash and and then that obviously it helps the the economy in whatever ways but do you do you see because as you said part of it is is the cultural clash when you have one type of uh society that have whole different values or share different that have different values and it just clashes and over trickle it it allows uh the majority of the population to absorb and to understand but when there's like these waves coming over you can understand how it can bring out the right-wing nut jobs out of the woodwork and they create this sort of uh fermentation between uh between these two populations creating. Just riling people up. Is there something there that needs to be addressed? I mean, is this a conversation we need to have or is it just too politically sensitive? Well, you know, one person's nut job is another person's patriot. Yeah, exactly. So I try not to put any value judgments on this. But as a political scientist, I'm observing it and I can see it coming. Just like when 2019 and John and I came out with this book and said, this is where we're headed. The next thing is we can see where this conversation is headed, which is it's going to become a very political conversation. And you can see the sides being drawn. And you've got, as I said before, one group that just celebrates everything about this, the decline of population. You've got another group that sees it as market failure, and they're wrong about that. And then you've got this third group, which is basically nostalgic, and potentially nostalgic in a very destructive way, that wants to move society back and challenge some of the things that have been hard for our rights. You know, everything for abortion is a great question, issue for this. So, you know, the current debate over abortion is really over two things. It's over the right of a woman to choose and the right of the unborn. That's been the defining conversation. But what happens when you bring in the decline of the population? Has another element to that. That's something we haven't really dealt with. Interesting. It's going to bring a whole new character to this conversation. And there can be an animating element here that isn't about the rights of women, ultimately is about the rights of women and the rights of the unborn. But there's a national interest associated now with a certain type of outcome. That doesn't exist right now, but you can see it coming. Maybe we've already address this, but I'd like just to rewind. You spoke about certain regions or regions of the world or countries that might buck the trend of declining populations. Maybe, maybe there are some initiatives and efforts and policies put into place to try to maybe slow things down. And you mentioned the Nordics or the Scandinavian countries. From your experience, are there other conversations or other things that we might have to think that go beyond the three clusters of you're talking about the neonatalist, the degrowth people, and the third group, is there something else that can maybe bolster certain initiatives that are not 100% promising, but can help bolster the encouragement of population growth, maybe in certain regions? Well, the most immediate thing that we're going to have to deal with is the elderly population. So the most obvious and immediate effect we're going to be dealing with is that. So by 2030, the entire global baby boom, as is defined by, I guess, the North American version of what the baby boom is, that is kids born after 1945 up to the early 1960s, the entire global baby boom is going to be 65 years of age or older by 2030. By 2045, they're all going to be in their 80s. That life tends to peak just after 80 in terms of longevity and then likelihood you're going to live longer starts to decline so we're going to go through a massive population change just because of those two things what are we doing to get ready for that pardon me because that's the first conversation i think solving the fertility issue is going to be very complicated solving the aging issue is the one that's going to hit us hardest first so the priority would be how do we solve the aging issue pardon me so part of it would it be sort of um again forgive the ignorance of this question but would we have to talk about wealth distribution throughout the generations and sort of counterbalancing that so it's not all sitting at the top with the aging population again i know that's very controversial but i guess we just talked theoretically now demography is politics Jason. This is what I mean. It's going to be a huge, yeah, are we going to have to redistribute income based on generations? Because the people who are now fueling the rise of this right-wing agenda in many places in the world are not the old people. They're actually the young people who are not only feeling the pressure of everything that you were talking about before, but are in a situation in which the type of life that they feel, particularly middle-class drivers who feel that they've earned, are not getting access to. And so they're looking for solutions to that problem, and the solutions of the left aren't necessarily that appealing. But the solutions of the right, which are more nostalgic, saying that you're entitled to the type of life that you think that you're entitled to because your parents had that kind of life and your grandparents had that kind of life, that has a certain amount of appeal. And there's an energy in those movements right now. So I think over the space of the next 10 years, and who can even say beyond tomorrow, but over the next 10 years, that would be the thing I'm looking at. And a lot of it is going to be directed towards how you deal with this fact that there's young people feeling like they're left behind. And then you've got an older population that's basically sitting on all the wealth in most countries. Yes, yes. You know, you can see sort of shifting trends here in the Scandinavian countries where there is more of that policy. And I think that, you know, the idea of social democracy, to the extent that the Scandinavians do it, you may see a quicker trend as distribution, where they think more so of, I guess, they think about everyone. It's not so individually driven. But don't get me wrong, it is far from perfect here. To give you the fertility rate for Norway, which is 1.48. 1.48. Replacement rate for your listeners is 2.1. So it's every woman in a country having at least 2.1 kids. You can't have 0.1, obviously, but that's a rounding factor for kids that don't make it to adulthood. By the way, in developing countries, because infant mortality is high, the replacement rate is actually higher. So a place like India is probably more like 2.3, 2.4, and Indian fertility now is 2. But yeah, that's Norway. So whatever the Norway government is doing is probably better than what the Italian government is doing, but not a whole lot better and is really expensive. That it is. But it's a small population with no national debts. And they've just, you know, they're sitting pretty with, you know, oil and such. But that's another episode. We are coming close to the top of the hour, and I appreciate all of your input and such, because I think this is a wake-up call. But if theoretically you were to write up a follow-up book to Empty Planet, and I think we've talked about certain policies and strategies you think need to be put into place, such as dealing with the elderly population, a distribution of wealth and such. What else do you think we could do? What are the conversations we need to have in the next, I don't know, 24 to 36 months at what levels of society? Well, I'm not a policy person, so I don't really have a lot of prescription. And what I have seen, and by the way, I get asked this question a lot, and the answer is I just don't know. I mean, if there was a magical solution, I'd certainly be here advocating for it. I think it's going to be incredibly difficult. I mean, I actually read a recent book that was a really good one by a professor in Oslo on this, in which his analysis was, well, you know, we know enough about it that we can start getting ready for it. What we have to do is we have to maybe transfer wealth from certain parts of the economy to other parts of the economy or from population to one or the other. But we know it's coming so we can get ready for it. And my view of that was that in the best of all worlds, that would be true. So the idea that you wake up to it and you understand that that's what's happening and you have to get ready for it is reasonable. But my view also is that just as what happened between the baby boom to the end of the baby boom was pretty much unpredictable. It had never happened in human history before. The idea that young people became consumers, I mean, there was no such thing as youth music before. There was only music. There was no such thing as things for kids. There was only clothes for kids. It was just clothes, right? Youth culture developed. And just as it was unpredictable on the way going up, the way going down is like falling down a mountain in the dark. It's going to be really complicated, and we just don't know. So I'm not as sanguine about what the progress is going to be on this. So I think that rather than suggesting a whole bunch of policy options that I've thought of, I prefer just to wake people up to the fact that it's going on, and whoever is very creative on policy should be starting to think about it. And a place that I would be starting would be anything that has to do with the elderly. Not just as dependents but as consumers the better way to get people to unlock their wealth is to make things for them so they can participate in the economy again which will help to spur economic growth but if you look at advertising i'm sure in norway today and take a look and see how many ads actually feature old people as mainstream consumers i think that probably be a very small number. I think that there's a lot of things that have to change in terms of the way that the private sector in particular looks at the population. I talk to clients about this at Ipsos all the time. Open up your mind to what's actually happening in the population. It's not what your marketing agency is telling you about kids. I'll give you an example of this. Restaurants. Um, you know, everybody wants to create the new restaurant for kids, right? If you know, the, the place where young people are going to go gather and have a great time and they're not friendly places for older people. So my advice to anybody with a restaurant is turn down the music, turn up the lights, open up the front door so I can get my mobility device in, make sure that I can actually sit at a table rather than having to scrunch into some banquette that it's not set up for me to sit in and, uh, put some things on the menu that I actually understand. And maybe I'll come to your, maybe I'll come to your restaurant or I sat through a, uh, a presentation, uh, a few weeks ago in which it was about sports marketing in which they were talking about the fact that young people don't watch soccer or ice hockey or, or, uh, any type of professional sports, the way that the previous generations did. So what we have to do is we have to change everything about the broadcast in order to attract them. So we have to increase the snackability of the items in it. We have to increase gambling opportunities. We have to do all this kind of stuff. And I'm thinking, yeah, I can sort of get that. But there isn't as many young people as you think, and they don't have as much money as you think. What are you doing for the old people who already have the habit of watching sports? Are you going to wreck the broadcast for them? Because there's a danger you're going to do that. So the minute that you start laying out the population realities to people who are in this business, they realize that the technology may be 2023-2024, but the population of 2023-2024 is not the population of 1964. But they haven't woken up to that. That is a very salient point, a very salient point. Well, Daryl, thank you very much for your time today. I really appreciate an hour, you know, a busy man such as yourself to have such a, for me, an insightful and eye-opening question. And I think this speaks to a lot of what this podcast tries to, you know, talk about is resilience. And I think with declining population and everything that means, I think, as you said, it starts with conversations. It starts with policies. It's hard about prioritizing and having these things. And it could be at such a pragmatic level as, okay, what do we do in a restaurant to attract more people, attract the people who have money, who can spend so we can thrive? So I thank you very much for your time today. No, you've got a talent for this. I thought that was really, really good. Thank you, Daryl. Thanks for your time. Have a great weekend. See you from Canada. Bye-bye. That was Daryl Bricker, author of the compelling book, Empty Planet, and we've thoroughly challenged the long-held narrative of overpopulation today. If one key takeaway remains is that the world population is poised for decline. It's driven by factors like declining birth rate, urbanization, and prioritization of careers and financial stability. I think the world is facing a number of challenges simultaneously. You know, climate crisis, deglobalization, the us versus them mentality that seems to be flourishing. But when it comes to depopulation, Daryl encourages us to move beyond fear and to start thinking more creatively about the future. I think one of Daryl's main messages for me is that we must urgently address how we adapt our societies to thrive with fewer people and to recognize both the challenges and the unexpected opportunities that come with this decline. And a personal thank you to you, Daryl, for an eye-opening and sobering conversation. Folks, if any of you are interested in reading Empty Planet, which I highly, highly, highly recommend, I will leave the link in the show notes. And thank you for showing up for another episode. I really appreciate it. If you know someone who might find this a compelling conversation, please share it with them. It helps go a long way to spread the word of this podcast. And until the next time we meet, keep well, keep strong, and we'll speak soon.