Darrell Bricker is the coauthor of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, a book exploring how a shrinking population might reshape the social, political, environmental and economic landscape. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change, Darrell joins Alexsandra and Ross to discuss how his understanding of population trends differs from conventional wisdom and explain why the UN numbers around global fertility rates are wrong.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra and I’m here with my lovely co-host Ross Kenyon.
Ross Kenyon: I am lovely. Thank you. That’s nice.
Alexsandra Guerra: So lovely.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’re excited to be here. We both read a book recently called Empty Planet, The Shock of Global Population Decline. Daryl Brooker is here with us. He’s one of the co-authors. Daryl, thank you so much for being here.
Darrell Bricker: Well, thanks for having me on.
Ross Kenyon: This is the first episode we’ve done on demography and human population. There’s a long-running internal nori debate about whether to have children or not with people taking various sides. Some people have already had children and seek to expose justify all their decisions and then some of us looking forward who haven’t had children. And so we’ve been thinking about this a lot. And so when I found this book, I forget how, I think I was just looking maybe on Goodreads or maybe on Amazon. I can’t remember how I came across it, but I said, oh, this looks interesting.
And also it runs a bit contrary to what people typically think about population trends because the estimates seem a bit different. So, Darrell, why don’t you just give us a broad overview of what is going to happen with the human population in your opinion and your research? And how does that differ from the conventional understanding of such?
Darrell Bricker: Well, John Ibbotson and I, who wrote this book together, we are always intrigued by something that we call vertical knowledge, which is that thing that everybody knows. All the politicians know it. All the academics know it. All the media people know it. All the commentators know it. That happens to be wrong. And what happens to be wrong in this instance is the view that the global population is out of control. And the reason that they believe that is that the estimates they’re provided with by organizations like the UN suggest that by the end of the century that we’re going to have 11.
2 billion people on the face of the earth. And if you look at the fact that we’re about 7. 5 billion people right now, that really raises questions about whether or not the earth is going to be sustainable. But when you really start to dig into this and you start to look at how the modeling is done by the UN and by others, and you really start to look around the world and travel around the world and talk to people, what you start to find out is actually things are already happening that make that 11%.
And probably where we’re going to end up by mid-century is somewhere in the range of about 8. 5 billion people. And then by 2040, 2050, it’s going to start to decline. And the population is going to be about the size it is today or maybe even smaller. So that’s a very compelling idea and very contrary to a lot of what the vertical knowledge says about this topic.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So I’ve been personally very excited for this conversation because we’ve been talking about having a podcast on the Reversing Climate Change podcast about this very topic. And what you’re saying here is that the estimates from the UN, the models are wrong. And I love in your book, it made me laugh out loud for a good while I had to pause, which was we think common sense is wrong. And can you tell us why? Like, what are some of the underlying assumptions that make that 1. 2 billion estimate wrong?
Darrell Bricker: Well, the big assumption is really the number of children that women are deciding to have. And what’s happening in the world today is that number is declining and more rapidly than the models are estimating. So if you look at what the UN suggests, the UN suggests that we have a natural state of about 2. 1. And that’s enough to replace every woman in the world, enough to replace every man in the world, and a little bit extra for those people who can’t or won’t have kids. But The truth is that in many, many countries around the world today, the number is below that.
And the countries that are above that are actually falling faster than the UN is estimating in terms of the fertility rates. And the countries that are below that are not coming up to that natural level of 2. 1s. In fact, they’re continuing to drop. So the biggest impact that we’re seeing right now is the lack of fertility in the world. People making for the first time in human history the decision to have smaller families.
Alexsandra Guerra: So there’s so much here that I’m trying to dig into, but you’re saying that we actually are overestimating the fertility rate, that it’s rapidly declining because people are deciding to have fewer children. Correct. What’s driving that decision?
Darrell Bricker: Well, the thing that’s had the biggest impact on the world and fertility is urbanization. So back in 1960, about a third of the world’s population lived in a city. Today, it’s about 54%, 55%. So there’s rapid, rapid change in basically the countryside clearing out and people moving to larger population areas. And by the mid part of the century, we’re going to be two thirds of the population living in cities. Now, when you move from the city or from the country to the city, In the country, lots of kids, that’s lots of free labor on the farm.
When you move to the city, there are just lots of mouths to feed. So people make an economically rational decision and they have fewer kids. But add into that, what it really does is it changes the lives of women. And this story is really about the changing lives of women. And that is that all of a sudden they become exposed to other women. They become exposed to other role models. They become exposed to other choices. And they start making decisions that are different from the decisions that their grandmothers arrived. Even their mothers made.
And one of the big parts of those decisions, one of the big decisions they make is they’re going to have fewer kids. And the reason that they do that is because they want to be able to work. They want to be able to have an education. They want other types of choices that are different from the historical role of women in those societies. And this is all over the world. So as those trends start to accelerate as a result of urbanization, you see fertility rates being crushed all over the world.
Ross Kenyon: This is an interesting book to read primarily because we work in an industry and in a field in climate change and environmental companies. This sector tends to celebrate declining birth rates and think it’s a very good thing. Almost unambiguously so. So what exactly are they missing? I feel like the conversation always ends up talking about the carrying capacity of Earth, how many humans Earth can support, and that people think that we’re above that and going to keep increasing the demand. What are some of the things that are bad about this?
Or what are some of the things that, if not bad or good, are just changing circumstances that we need to account for?
Darrell Bricker: Well, yeah. And in fact, John and I are quite clear in the book that we don’t put a value judgment on it. We basically say, look, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing, but it’s a huge thing. I mean, it’s going to be the single biggest trend that has an impact on humanity through the course of this century. So we need to understand it. The good side is all the things that you would know, whether you want to see healthier oceans, whether if you accept the idea, and I think any thinking person does accept the idea, that climate change is being driven by human activity.
If you believe that human activity, the denominator in the equation is the size of humanity, if you reduce the size of the denominator, obviously that’s going to be good for the ocean, it’s going to be good for the climate, it’s going to be good for our forests, it’s going to be good for all of the things that relate to resource depletion in the world. But on the other side of this, I mean, we’ve always, since the Industrial Revolution, basically, relied on consumerism to drive economic growth. And if you reduce the number of consumers, and not only that, you increase the age of those consumers, because particularly younger consumers are the ones who tend to drive the marketplace, all of a sudden you have a very different and a more challenging economic model.
So I think that there’s good parts to this and there’s potentially bad parts to this. But as I said before, it’s going to be an incredibly important trend as we go through the centuries.
Alexsandra Guerra: And so going back to something you were saying earlier with regard to and you do this well in the book. So thank you again for writing it. It’s really a story about women. And you say somewhere in the book, and I might be wondering, Totally butchering the way that you say this, but that really it’s the education of women that’s going to lead to a decline in population, if I may make that leap, because the more that women are educated, the more control they take over their bodies on the decision of whether or not they will have children.
And then they’re increasingly deciding not to or to have them later.
Darrell Bricker: Right. So this is an argument that was first advanced by a professor at the University of Vienna named Wolfgang Lutz. And basically what he did was he took the UN’s estimations of future population growth and just simply factored in an acceleration in terms of the level of population growth. And where’s the one? Israel.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, OK. Well, one thing that you said in the book, too, that really resonated with me a little bit was that women are now kind of gaining more power over themselves. And that like if we had I’m really just ruining this right now, but I’m like I’m trying to walk this very delicate line.
Unknown speaker: I can tell.
Ross Kenyon: So circumspect. Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: The history that has unfolded is because of the complete control and power over women’s bodies and choices by men and that men are now experiencing a struggle and a tension that naturally is occurring as women start to break free of these of this power and take more control over what they decide to do with their bodies and when to have children. And yet men are still making decisions on whether or not women have the right to contraceptions or abortions. This is very sticky topic.
Ross Kenyon: And I can see why you were you were careful.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I was talking very strangely. And so I see two wonderful things here, which is like, yeah, OK, women are being more empowered and yet we might cause the decline of the populations, which could be good. But then, like you said, decrease. Increased population leads to decreased consumerism and then maybe changes the state of our economies. And so maybe it’s up to us to redefine what those economies look like instead of being linear, being more circular so that we don’t have to base our economic strength based off of a linear consumption path.
I’m just really on my soapbox now. I didn’t really ask you anything there.
Darrell Bricker: No, no, but I think that these are all really interesting questions. And just as you’re struggling with it, we’re hoping that the people who read the book, and at least from this one particular angle, because we only talk about one independent variable in terms of what our future is going to be, but we think it’s a very, very large independent variable. And that’s the size of the population. But what we’re hoping to cause is a serious conversation about it. And to cause people to have the type of brain cramp that you’re having over what the future is going to look like.
Because everything that we’ve been told, all this vertical knowledge is probably not going to come to pass. So we need smart people thinking about this. The way that you do that is you expose them to the truth about what’s happening in the data. And that’s basically what the book is. It’s not a personal argument that John and I make. It’s an argument based on data.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, one of the really good stories that I love that you put in there, you look at the numbers of fertility in Latin America and the Caribbean, and you state a study that was done in Brazil were in the, what is it, the fastest? The... Favelas, there we go, where the governments were giving more access to electricity and consumer goods like TVs. And the more that young women were exposed to soap operas where like sex was more commoditized. You had these female characters portrayed with strength and freedom. The decrease in births occurred and that women, while they might have been having them at 16 years old or maybe 22 years old, they decided to stop having children much sooner.
So just by giving access to telenovelas, you have a decrease in the fertility rate in Brazil.
Darrell Bricker: Right. And it’s not a particularly controversial idea in Brazil that this was the outcome. The idea that large populations, very fertile populations, in the instance of Brazil, I think they’re the sixth largest country in the world, in terms of population size, they’ve gone from a birth rate of 6 down to 1. 8. And they’ve done it since 1960. So less than 100 years. But nobody knows, Brazilians know about this, but unless you’re a population expert, It never comes up in a conversation about the future of Brazil, the future of Latin America, which is a heavily, heavily urbanized population now and has gone through massive transition as a result of that.
And even in places like favelas, people are having fewer kids. So the interesting thing for me was not just to read about this, but was to go to Sao Paulo and to meet with people in favelas and to meet with people in the university. There’s a great story in the book about meeting with PhD student women, a whole class of them, and talking to them about the future. What the reaction was on this question of whether or not they wanted to have kids. You can see that Brazil, when you’re there, is going through this huge transformation.
But when I come back from Brazil and I start talking to people about it, it’s like I’ve come back from the moon. They have no idea that any of this is going on. But not just happening in Brazil, happening all over the world.
Alexsandra Guerra: So, I mean, it can’t just be that they’re giving more access to lower income families to watch telenovelas. There are other things that you mentioned. Can you explain a little bit more? Paint us a picture and use Brazil as the case study for our listeners to understand what are the things that are happening that are causing such a rapid decrease from fertility rate of 6 to, what was it, 1. 8?
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, it’s 1. 8. The first part of that is massive urbanization. So the Brazilian countryside is basically cleaned out. Everybody’s moved to the major cities. So I think the urbanization rate in Brazil today is like 82%. And it’s gone up, I think it’s doubled or more over the space of the last 70 or 80 years. Actually, 1960, 50 years, 58 years. But it’s gone through this massive urbanization. And the effects that you see in every other country that have gone through massive urbanization are happening in Brazil, which is people making a choice to So women in Brazil, they have this wonderful phrase, and we talk about it in the book, shutting down the factory.
So interestingly enough, Brazilian women still get married fairly early. They still have their first kid fairly early, but they get sterilized very early in their lives, like in the mid-20s or even up to the age of 30. They get sterilized after having two children.
Ross Kenyon: We should clarify, they’re choosing to sterilize themselves.
Darrell Bricker: It has one of the highest rates of sterilization in the world. It also has one of the highest rates of cesarean sections. And the reason for that is because the healthcare system has this kind of perverse situation in which the public healthcare system, if a doctor goes in and performs a cesarean section, they can also do a little work as they’re doing it, which is the sterilization procedure, and they can kind of double up on their feet. So they do. And it’s just a twist in the healthcare delivery system, but that’s what the end effect is, that it creates the situation in which you bring this aspect of the healthcare system together with the desire of women to have smaller families, and you create the situation that we have in Brazil.
Ross Kenyon: How often when you’re discussing trends like this, Daryl, does the ghost of eugenics come and haunt the discussion? Because I feel like even mentioning something like this is already grounds to open that up. And I wonder if that’s just demography in general is talking about population numbers just have to always deal with that skeleton in the closet, which is really hasn’t even been in the closet that long.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, it never really came up when we had this conversation, but just like anything that involves science, there’s always somebody who’s prepared to kind of pervert the message. Actually, where the perversion takes place in this instance is one of the conclusions that John Edmondson, my co-author, and I came to in the book was that the Canadian example, and we’re both Canadians relative to immigration. So the idea that you would open up your borders to allow people from different countries to come in and settle and offset the lack of fertility in your country is a good idea.
Well, let me tell you. Well, they don’t talk about eugenics, but anything on immigration, if you want to attract everybody who’s got a very strong point of view, just talk about that. And we certainly have. And one of the main criticisms of the book that we get is that we’re trying to be advocates of a particular political philosophy that has to deal with immigration. For us, it’s really not that at all. It’s just if you’re looking at ways to deal with this, it’s one of the ways to deal with it.
Countries like Canada and Australia, even though it’s caused a lot of social controversy in both places, it’s one of the ways that you can offset the lack of fertility.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And this is a nice way to circle back to the discussion of what politics might look like in a future where population were in decline globally. I’ve heard a story about this for a long time, and it’s about the number of workers who pay into Social Security now. But that’s going to happen on a global scale where you have a population that either the retirement age has been Ratcheted up over time, or just young people are taxed a lot to pay for the expenses of keeping an elderly population in house and home.
What exactly is going to happen? Are there going to be intergenerational conflicts over how to supply this wealth and provide for people? Are governments going to pursue policies that are trying to increase the birth rate so that there’s more workers paying into the system? What exactly happened? What are the conflicts and the fault lines of tomorrow?
Darrell Bricker: Well, the conflicts are really generational. I mean, so everything that you just described, the potential for that to happen is there. We have this characterization of, you know, millennials, for example, as this happy-go-lucky, you know, coding during the day and rock climbing at night types of people. The world is the oyster and all the rest of it. No, they’re an incredibly tense group of people. And the reason that they’re tense is because the older population occupies all the stuff that they want. So you want to know why you have a housing crisis for younger people in many of the most desirable cities in the world is because the older people aren’t leaving.
They very much like to live in downtown Manhattan, thank you very much. And they’re not going to give up the rent control department for you.
Alexsandra Guerra: And they’re not dying.
Darrell Bricker: And they’re not dying as fast as they did. So we’re in a situation in which we’re going to have to challenge a whole bunch of assumptions about what somebody’s life path is going to be. So for example, when are you going to retire? In fact, most developed markets these days, we don’t have mandatory retirement. You can look at a place like Canada, you can’t ask a person to leave their job because of their age. And many Western European countries are the same way. And we’re also at the same time faced with a series of pension bills that are going to be overwhelming.
So we’re going to have to rethink what we mean by the concept of retirement. We’re going to have to rethink what we mean by work. So do you need to work a full-time job or maybe can you work a part-time job when you’re older and still stay participating in the marketplace and sharing your knowledge of information and help to the workplace but also open up some space for some younger people to get out. But as we do that, what we continue to do is move to these open office concept types of situations in which older people who have issues with ambient noise can’t work.
So, I mean, we’re going to have to rethink all of these kinds of things based on the population we really have, as opposed to the theoretical population that people are telling us is going to exist on the face of the earth, because it’s simply not going to happen.
Ross Kenyon: If we survive the climate and environmental implications, then we have demographic challenges that are just right around the next corner.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, but they aren’t the ones of, you know, Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb. You know, they’re not, the world is so incredibly overpopulated that we’re not going to be able to feed anybody. I mean, we have 7. 7 billion people on the face of the earth today, and we’re not really having a problem feeding them.
Ross Kenyon: It’s more that the social services people have come to expect will no longer be there in the same way.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, and the way that we develop wealth, the way we distribute wealth, the way that we look at how various parts of the population are going to interact with each other, what our functional cities are going to look like in the future because, you know, everybody’s moving to the city. And what this is going to do to rural and small town communities, which is incredibly destructive. I mean, in your country, in the United States, take a look at what’s happening in small town and farming communities all over the country. You know, the smart kids leave.
And all that’s left are the old people and people who can’t find a way. It’s an incredibly disruptive series of demographic changes that are happening. And we’re living right in the midst of it right now.
Alexsandra Guerra: So can you paint us another picture of what does the future look like with population decline and what those consequences might be?
Darrell Bricker: Well, I think the air is going to be cleaner. I think the oceans are going to be healthier. I think our natural environment is going to go through a fairly positive improvement. Now, obviously, we’re going to have to deal with some issues, for example, like dealing with energy poverty in certain areas. And what happens when middle class status starts to find its way into people, into developing markets and what that’s going to do to the consumption of resources in the world. So there’s going to be an interesting debate about that going forward.
But the other thing that’s going to happen is we are going to have to rethink what capitalism is all about. And the reason we’re going to have to rethink what capitalism is all about is because a system that was basically driven by youth consumption is going to change. So given that we’re not going to have the level of number of use in the global population, at least the proportion of use in the global population, what are we going to do to keep the economy bubbling along? Are we going to have a different version, as you were saying before, maybe a circular version of?
What our expectations are about how our future economic growth is going to take place or not take place. We’re going to have an interesting debate about that. Another interesting debate that we’re going to have is about global security. The truth is that youthful populations have wars, not older populations. So what’s going to happen when the average person in the world, say for example in Japan, the median age of a Japanese person today is 48. And China’s rapidly closing in on that. By the way, the median age in the United States is 38 and China today is 38.
So the U. S. population is younger than the Chinese population. Rapid aging... They don’t fight wars with old people. You fight them with younger people. So there’s potential for a geriatric piece, which could be a good thing because we may have to start deploying all of these military resources we have around the world to taking care of these aging populations in places where they haven’t been able to get rich enough, fast enough to be able to take care of them. So there’s going to be some really, really interesting fundamental debates that are going to take place all because we just made the decision to stop having kids.
Ross Kenyon: Has anyone ever called it Pax Geriatica? Or is that mine? Did I just...
Darrell Bricker: No, you can steal it. That’s a beauty. Get a t-shirt made up with that one. That’s good. I like it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. If you like what we’re talking about here, the book is full of interesting thought experiments and predictions that relate to this. But go ahead, Alexsandra.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I highly recommend this book. We’re not over yet in the conversation yet. So this is great because what you’re describing are a whole new slew of problems. And I think this is the nature of life and especially humanity that we solve one problem only to create another one. That’s the whole fun. Yeah, it’s all a game. We’re just here to play this play. Anyways, bringing it back in, in my mind, and I think a lot of people, we have the vertical knowledge or the common sense or just the idea that the future looks pretty bleak for different reasons, being that we have an exploding global population, we’re all fighting for resources, there’s no room to house anybody, the list goes on and on and on.
And so how that has played out for For me, especially working in the climate change space, working at Nori, really feeling very, very compelled. I’m from Miami, Florida originally, so ground zero for sea level rise freaks me out. But I’ve got an awesome nephew who lives there. My whole family still lives there. And I think, yeah, I would love to have kids one day. Or will I? Because if I have a kid, I drastically increase the total amount of consumption and the carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases, and therefore only contributing to the problem.
And so it’s been this constant...
Ross Kenyon: I push back about this too. We go back and forth.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we’ve had some healthy debates, and that’s why we’re doing this episode. Thanks for putting this together, Ross. And so, yeah, that’s just the complete, and it’s very overwhelming, the emotions that I have, because I definitely want to become a mother one day, and I find that, I mean, years and years down the line. Yeah. To be faced with the challenge of saying, OK, if I really care about the environment, then I won’t have any children at all, really upsets me. And I’m like, this is my one life, dammit. I want to have a kid if I want to have a kid.
And I’m going to do everything I can to reverse climate change. But it sounds like maybe that’s not even helpful at all to be talking about, which is, yeah, regardless of whether or not I choose to have a kid, I’m a climate conscious citizen. Women across the world are deciding not to because we’re not having six or 11. We’re having maybe 1. 5 children. I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Should we stop this conversation altogether?
Darrell Bricker: I think that it’s an incredibly personal conversation for many women in the world as to what the size of the family that they want to have. But if the reason that they decide that they don’t want to have kids or they want to have only one, say, for example, Is because they are worried that the world is going to be overpopulated as a result of their decision? Don’t. If you want to have children, have children. The truth is that the millennial birth rate in the United States today is 1%. So your one kid is not going to make much of a difference to what is happening in terms of the population patterns in the United States.
So many people have decided not to have three kids, which is the only way that the population grows, that the idea that you wouldn’t Decide to have the pleasure of having a family of your own because you want to save the climate. It’s a fairly, in some ways, kind of a fanciful sort of idea about the level of power that you wield over the climate. You might as well just focus on your family and having the size of family that you want to have. The truth is that even in countries like China, the birth rate may be as low as one today.
36% of the world’s population lives in just two countries, China and India. In China, they’re well below replacement rate, and India is just at replacement rate and falling. So what you decide to do in your family is not going to really have much of an impact on that.
Alexsandra Guerra: But what if I decide, first of all, you called me fanciful. That’s funny. But what if I decide to have four or five kids?
Darrell Bricker: Well, if you have decided to have four or five kids, it’ll be a lovely, wonderful family. I’m sure it would make for wonderful Christmas mornings and it’d be great for all these siblings to have each other in the world. But its effect on the overall climate because of what you decide to do is very minimal, virtually nothing. And the reason, I mean, if you really wanted to affect the climate, stop people from aging. The biggest source of growth of the population today is not because we’re making new people. It’s because we’re getting really good at keeping older people alive, right?
So if you look at the average person in China back in 1950, they lived to the age of 40. Today, they live to the age of 80. That’s why the population continues to grow. It’s not because there’s so many kids being born into the world.
Ross Kenyon: Daryl, this comes up and the fight over this, the lines of the battlefield are very well drawn at this point. Not to go full the good place on you, but it’s very much on like the Kantian categorical imperative. You should act in a way in which if everyone else didn’t. I’ve always leaned more towards your position too, which is the game theory of this doesn’t line up. It’s like... It’s not going to make a difference one way or the other or move a needle in any way. So if you can raise a family of healthy, well-adjusted children, that’s a net positive for the planet.
That’s more problem solvers. That’s more kind, empathetic, smart people to have around. But I go back and forth on it, too. But I tend to agree with you there, too. Alexsandra is eyeing me like a fox in the bushes at the hen house. What are you trying to say?
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m not. I’m looking at you and I’m running math in my head. So I’ve got these different variables, which is like the replacement rate. And Daryl, you guys talk about this in the book a lot, that there’s the Goldilocks growth where your fertility rate equals the replacement rate.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, it’s for India today.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And so, so long as the fertility rate, so Goldilocks rates, fine. However, what you said is like, oh, we need to prevent aging because what’s really causing the growth in population is that we have so many people who are just living longer, but then there’s compound growth. So like if people start having more kids above the replacement rate, Or even at that Goldilocks rate. And we’re still going to be continuing to increase because we have a stock of older people who just have not died yet. Which is great because my grandparents are 85 and I love them and I’m freaking out about them dying.
So like live as long as possible. So I agree with you, but I’m also saying like, yeah, you have to pick like one of them, which is like decrease the number of children you’re having and then let them live longer lives. But you can’t have both.
Darrell Bricker: Well, or also recognize that you’re winning the argument. You’re already winning the argument because what’s going to happen is the global population is going to decline to about what it is today and then start sliding and we don’t know how far it’s going to go because people are already way ahead of this thinking. Just by making personal decisions without any regard what they want to have in the climate, what the effect is going to be on the climate, simply because they’ve decided to live the lives that they want to live and they feel entitled to live.
And those lives are ones in which they have smaller families. And you can get all wrapped up in all of these other externalities that relate to these decisions. But the truth is that people are already way ahead of you. The millennial birth rate in the United States is one and declining.
Alexsandra Guerra: All right. Well, first of all, I want to clarify, I wasn’t, sometimes my passion and enthusiasm comes off as trying to argue, not the intention. I was just like sharing with you all these things that are going on in my mind.
Darrell Bricker: And I’m saying to you, if you decide you want to have kids, you should do it with a clear heart and an open conscience.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, Daryl, she doesn’t want to be absolved, man.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, I do.
Ross Kenyon: Confirmed of her suspicions.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, it’s like it allows someone the response time, right? To like think through something completely. It’s not like, oh, you give me new updated information. Okay, I am logical, rational calculator human being. I shall update the software in my mind and now switch my behaviors. It’s like, okay, let me internalize. Let’s think through these things, critically think and assess. And I’m leaning towards what you’re saying. I’m so grateful really for you... Doing the research, writing the book and being on this podcast so we can share this with our listeners.
Darrell Bricker: And as I would say to anybody who asked me that question, I’ve been asked that question many times. It’s, you know, what’s in your heart? I mean, just do what you think the right thing is. But if you think that you’re saving the planet by denying yourself pleasure of being a parent, you’re probably mistaken about that.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m happy to be mistaken about it.
Darrell Bricker: And you know, the other thing though, is that the way that women are living their lives today or choosing to live their lives today, the truth is that the number of women who are in the position where they’re actually capable of producing multiple children, particularly For example, like the United States, particularly among people who are the younger generation today. I mean, they’re pursuing educations, they’re pursuing careers. By the time they turn around and start thinking about having families, the one thing that still is an imperative that nobody can fight is biology.
At a certain point in every woman’s life, the possibility or probability of her being able to have children declines. And normally, back in the day, when people started having children younger, so if you look at the lives of people of, you know, so the boomer generation, for example, I mean, they had their first kid, probably got married when they were around 20, 21. They had their first kid when they were 22, 23, and they had four. The average American woman today gets married by the age of 30 if she’s 30 at all or she gets married at all by the time she’s 30 and has her first kid by the time she’s 32 or 33 and then probably is going to go through that inevitability by the age of 40 and just past that where it just gets harder and harder.
So that’s one of the other reasons why people are only having one or two kids. They haven’t left time to have any more. There’s always this view that there’s these tonnes of people out there having lots and lots and lots of kids. Yes, there are. They live in the Sahal in Africa. They don’t live where you guys live. They don’t. I mean, how many friends do you have? And I’m thinking of your older friends that have three kids.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. Like end sample size of maybe two. So my cousin, my nephew Noah is lovely, but she’s like, yeah, my cousin says I’m not going to have any more kids. So she’s a millennial. She has one child and that will stay one for her.
Darrell Bricker: How many kids does your grandparents have?
Alexsandra Guerra: Ooh, they had five. Yeah, total. One died in the first year, and then I had, so they had four kids.
Darrell Bricker: So what I normally do when I have this conversation with people, because I get asked this a lot, I say, leave the stats alone. Leave the, you know, everything that you’ve read alone and just go home. And take a look at your family albums. And take a look at your grandparents and their brothers and sisters and how many kids they had. And then take a look at your parents and their brothers and sisters and how many kids they had. Take a look at your brothers and sisters and how many kids you’ve had.
And if you’re old enough to have kids, take a look at your kids. I bet you it looks like a funnel. It’s a triangle going down with the triangle at the top of the triangle at the bottom of the funnel all the time. There are exceptions, but that’s generally what’s happened.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. And then just to comment also on like the end sample size of two. So one yes agreeing with the one kid for the millennials out there and then myself. So, you know, I was on Instagram this morning and of course what comes up is an ad for I think it’s called Modern Family. And it’s like you do a pinprick of your blood and then you send it a sample. And they look at your hormones and they assess like, you know, when might you want to consider having kids? And so you were saying, you know, that the window is This is shrinking for people who decide to have children later on in life, which I might be.
So I’m 30 and I don’t plan on having children maybe until like 35, 36, like maybe thinking about it then. And I looked at the timeline just like based off of an assessment, like a, you know, 10 question quiz. And I’m like, man, I can maybe only have one kid. So this is exactly just affirming what you’re saying here.
Darrell Bricker: And so I’m not making this stuff up.
Alexsandra Guerra: No.
Unknown speaker: No one accused you of doing that, Daryl.
Darrell Bricker: No, but it’s really interesting to me because you’re going through that type of awakening about all of these things that people who assume that a whole other situation existed in the world when they discover that it really doesn’t. And then they start looking at it in their own lives and they act like a normal human being. And that’s what we’re talking about here after all are individual human beings and the decisions they make. And you see the dilemmas that you have in your life. Well, everybody else is having the same dilemmas.
And you could live where you live or you could live in London or you could live in Paris or you could live in Seoul, Korea. I mean, we go to Seoul and talk to young women there about what they think their future life is going to be. They’re all struggling with the same question.
Ross Kenyon: Darrell, one of the responses to this crisis that I’ve seen is alternatively called natalism or pronatalism. That is, the government should promote childbirth and rearing. But you detail in your book that in the places where these policies have been tried, they haven’t been so successful. Is there anything that can be done to reverse this trend? I guess you say that immigration and allowing sort of people from high birth cultures in is a good way to reach replacement rate in countries with declining birth rates. Is there anything you can do besides immigration to stem this tide?
Darrell Bricker: Not really.
Ross Kenyon: That’s it?
Darrell Bricker: Make sure that, for example, it’s easier for women to take time off of work to do this, that it’s easier when they do decide to work because they are deciding to work. It’s easier to manage their more complicated lives when they decide to become mothers. From a financial perspective, to make it more amenable for people to reduce the financial penalty of having children, we should probably consider. But the truth is that almost nowhere has it worked. I mean, it might have a marginal impact, but what we’re really dealing with here is cultural change.
And the cultural change is the desire to have smaller families and to have different lives for women. And the government policy can make it easier for those women who decide to have smaller families to have maybe one more, but nowhere in the world does that really happen. So if you look at the Nordic countries, for example, which have probably the most generous plans when it comes to everything from maternity to paternity leave to even in Sweden, they give you free passes for public transit if you have a stroller, all sorts of things, everything that you can do.
And all of those countries are below replacement rate in terms of fertility. So you can do a little bit of work around the margins, but it doesn’t look like anything really, really makes that much of a difference.
Ross Kenyon: I guess you could just do direct payments, but then it seems, so I’m not that susceptible to worries that putting a price on things commoditizes them in a semiotically inappropriate kind of way, but this is a case where I do feel weirded out by it where it was like, we’ll give you $10,000 a year for every kid you have. You’d be like, this is not the correct reason to become a parent is that you’re getting paid for it. And I would react against that. But there probably is a price at which that would move people on the margin into having many more kids potentially, or maybe not.
Maybe this has been tried and it’s not.
Darrell Bricker: Well, they are trying it right now, for example, in Hungary, in which by the time you have your third kid, you pay zero income tax. I mean, there are countries that are going to try to reverse this trend, but none of them so far have figured out a way to do it. I mean, there are countries that have been able to slow down the decline, maybe even for a short period of time, be able to pick it up, but not to be able to pick it up above replacement rate in a consistent way.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I just, I would take the $10,000 because, you know.
Ross Kenyon: It wouldn’t corrupt your reasons?
Alexsandra Guerra: No, no, no. Actually, something that I think about a lot is like, will I, am I willing to have a child alone? And I’m like, well, only if I can afford to have that child alone. I don’t think it would be like the funnest thing to be a single mother, but I’d rather do that than like maybe settle down for a relationship with someone that I don’t want in my life all the time or that I don’t trust to have a child with and quite busy.
Ross Kenyon: The former seems better than the latter.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. But then you had then were, you know, there was a really nice story that you included in the book, Daryl, about the Brazilian women that you were talking to. And like, you know, they were a graduate program and one of them started to cry and the other one had to comfort them because they’re like, yeah, we were trying to get our PhDs. We’re trying to emancipate ourselves from like The subjugation of women by men. And then, yeah, but how do you date? Finding the right person, deciding to have kids together seems like also a limiting, a factor that causes the decrease in total amount of Children that women decide to have because like, okay, yeah, if that’s a precursor, I don’t want to settle for just whatever schmuck comes around my way.
And sometimes we just don’t have that time to find the right person. And I can have a kid and then find the right person later. I’m open to that. But finances, big problem.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, but see, the conversation that we’re having right now is going to be the conversation. It is the conversation. In developed countries, women all over the world are going through the same dilemmas. And a lot of them are making the decision, maybe I’ll just fly solo. Maybe I’ll have a kid on my own, maybe I won’t. But these are choices that your grandmother, because you’re young enough that maybe your mother was part of this trend as well, but your grandmother never would have thought of.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, no way. Abuela would not.
Darrell Bricker: Yeah, and that’s how dramatically the world has changed. And all of these things, all of what we’re talking about here reduces the likelihood that people are going to have kids because women are making different decisions about their lives and they’re incredibly complicated decisions. I mean, the Rubik’s Cube of trying to figure this out is really a tough one, but The impact of it is the same everywhere, which is that it reduces the likelihood that you’re going to have three kids, which is what you need to have in order for the population to grow.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Daryl, that’s a very good place to end it. Thank you so much for being on the show. We really enjoyed your book.
Darrell Bricker: My pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, absolutely. If you want to read it for yourself, which you absolutely should, there’s also an audiobook version of it. It’s called Empty Planet, The Shock of Global Population Decline by Daryl Bricker and John Ibbotson. Wish John could have been here too. We’ll have to have you guys back. I’m sure you’re cooking up something new over there. There’s probably some other book that we’re going to want to read, right?
Darrell Bricker: Well, we’ve got some things on the We’ll keep our eyes peeled there.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I’d love to read them. Thanks again so much for writing this book and alleviating me and absolving me of the guilt and the stress. And I really appreciate it because it was based off of a lot of hard work, study and facts. And so I can feel good in the decision to be like, yeah, I’m gonna have a kid. Let’s do it. Decided right here, right now.
Ross Kenyon: Is it really wonderful? We don’t have to argue about it anymore?
Alexsandra Guerra: No, we’re not. We’re done. I’m gonna have a kid in five to eight years when I decide that’s the right time.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, thank you. And if you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Thanks so much for listening. Tell a friend if you’ve been having this debate like seemingly everyone is these days. Send it to them. I’m sure we’ll probably get some interesting feedback on this one too. And we’ll probably have to have an episode where someone says, actually, you should never have killed children. And Daryl Bricker is a very bad person. Daryl, we’ll try to defend your arm.
Darrell Bricker: I’m sure that’s in the mail.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful day.
