Philip Ball: prediction

Transcript context

…But isn’t that a case of scientists, maybe yourself included, being too cautious? You understand asymptotes. A smaller population would be fine five years from now, but if we just keep on shrinking — it seems virtually every country except Israel and parts of Africa have gone below replacement rates, often considerably below. South Korea is at 0.7. We can’t just have things shrink, shrink, shrink. The ethical and danger implications of that are quite extreme, especially for countries with debt or a lot of retirees. Well, I think, as you say, one of the issues that raises is more about the change in demographics, where you have an increasingly aging population. That’s also because we are living longer in a lot of countries. That certainly needs to be talked about, and we need to think about what the answer to that is. I’m not sure [laughs] the answer to that is simply to have more children. I’m no expert in demographics, but it’s been predicted by demographers for a long time that, actually, we were going to go, and are going to go, through a population hump, that it’s going to peak at maybe something like nine billion or so. Then it’s predicted to decrease to something more like perhaps six billion, which I think would be a fantastic thing because that is one of the big challenges that we have been facing: the growth in population, the demands that creates for food production, for energy, for economic growth generally. I don’t see any reason to believe that a decline from that — if we reach that figure of nine billion — that a decline from that is going to be inherently bad in itself. I certainly don’t think that, at this point, there is any reason for anyone to fear that somehow the population is going to shrink to nothing. I don’t think anyone feels that’s the case. If there are concerns of that sort to be raised, then what we need to be asking is, what is behind this decline in fertility? It’s not fertility in the technical sense, it’s not infertility. There are issues there to some degree, but that doesn’t seem to be causing the decline in birth rate. It seems to be the choices that people are making. So, why are they making those choices? That’s what we really need to understand. It could simply be for a lot of people, kids aren’t that fun, and we’re just on that asymptote forever because that won’t change. Many other things have become more fun, like the internet or playing with AI. Kids have become a bit more fun. Maybe it’s safer to raise them, but the basic joys are more or less constant, so then we’re stuck again.…

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