The global baby bust | The Gray Area

[00:00:00]As a woman in her 30s in the United States, I'm super familiar with the stereotypical assumptions about the reasons for falling birth rates. It's the feminists, it's career women who don't want kids or who wait until it's too late, etc. etc. But that's not what the data suggests.

[00:00:19]>> The idea of this being about career women and some people talk about the girl boss and that kind of thing.

[00:00:24]That would make sense if what we were seeing was primarily a decline in births among high-earning and highly educated young women. Whereas what we're primarily looking at here is a decline among those in the bottom half or sort of bottom third [music] of society. So it's young men and women who generally don't have a bachelor's degree, have lower incomes. These are the group [music] who are having fewer children and perhaps more importantly, as we'll come on to, being less likely to get into a couple at all.

[00:01:00]>> [music] [music] >> Welcome to The Gray Area. I'm Christian filling in for Sean Illing. My guest today is John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. He recently published an article entitled Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. The piece really set off a big discussion on both the implications and the causes of why so many people are choosing to have kids. I asked him to come on the show to discuss what's driving this trend. Why birth rates are falling in different societies at the same time and whether we need to do anything about it.

[00:01:46]Welcome to the show, John.

[00:01:48]>> Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:49]>> So I'm going to start with a little bit of table setting here.

[00:01:52]Um noted trillionaire Elon Musk has said that low birth rates are going to end civilization.

[00:02:00]The US's Medicaid and Medicare administrator, Dr. Oz, declared that the US is under baby. By now, I think we've all heard that the US and the rest of the world is going through a demographic decline.

[00:02:15]Many countries are under replacement level for fertility.

[00:02:19]But what does that actually mean? How do you define that?

[00:02:22]>> Yeah, so the replacement rate is the number is about 2.1 children per woman.

[00:02:29]And what that is telling us is that if every woman in every couple had an average of 2.1 children per year, it would mean that if nothing else happened to the population, it would pretty much stay at its current size. So, when that number drops below 2.1 and especially significantly below, it means that again, holding everything else constant, population will gradually start to fall.

[00:02:52]>> That seems not ideal to me, at least.

[00:02:56]But the idea of demographic decline being a problem is actually kind of polarizing, I think. In the US, being too concerned about fertility risks being read as sort of right-wing or pronatalist, um you know, solutions from the left, like increased immigration, are often seen as, well, leftist.

[00:03:17]Is that true elsewhere, this polarizing nature of the debate?

[00:03:21]>> There are certain elements of it. I think, you know, any conversation which has even a hint of women should do X is going to be fairly like conservative coded, right? And I think that's reasonable.

[00:03:32]Um and I think that's why a lot of people in this last couple years, as this topic has become more mainstream, I think there have been quite sensible efforts to ensure that this is actually a much more inclusive conversation about what we as society is and certainly what men as part of this equation should be perhaps doing differently as well, rather than and it just being a series of men talking about um what women do.

[00:03:55]>> I've read a number of pieces on this topic and almost everyone, and actually yours too, singles out South Korea as a key country that's exemplary of this falling birth rates crisis. Why is that?

[00:04:08]I know that they're one of the countries that has actually tried to implement solutions. Is that part of it?

[00:04:14]>> I think it's it's interesting, right?

[00:04:16]So, I think any conversation involving either directly or indirectly involving gender relations, South Korea will come up. So, they are this extreme case where most measures of gender equality and certainly measures of the different roles that on average young men and women perform in South Korea, uh it is a bit of an outlier. Like, there is a very unequal division of household labor and that kind of thing. Certainly, there's been evidence recently of a quite reactionary turn politically among young men in South Korea.

[00:04:50]Um on birth rates, they have been you've you've got this large, reasonably large, and recently high-income country where a lot of other countries around the world can sort of see themselves, as it were, or at least in a few years, and birth rates have gone incredibly low.

[00:05:06]So, we talked about 2.1 being the replacement rate that holds everything stable. In South Korea, they went below 0.8. In the last couple of years, they've actually ticked up a tiny bit, which we might come on to, but it really is this shining example or flashing example, as it were, of how things in a high-income country that has a lot of similarities to places elsewhere in the world, how things can suddenly get that low in terms of birth rates.

[00:05:31]>> You say that this is an example of a high-income country that sort of Western countries can relate to. But, there are tons of different parts of the world that are really different from each other economically, culturally, and yet still also seem to be facing the same trend. What does that say to you?

[00:05:51]>> Yeah, I think that bit for me is what's super interesting here and what really drew me to this idea.

[00:05:57]Um, which is that over the past century or two, we've had these fairly steady and fairly well-understood changes, uh, these demographic shifts, demographic demographic transitions, which have played out at different periods of time in different parts of the world, but all against similar backdrops as it were.

[00:06:17]So, first you have a society first a society develops to the point where infant mortality gets significantly lower. That means, to put it crudely, instead of instead of needing to have a large number of children because some of them won't survive to adulthood, you can start having fewer children. Then we have other shifts like urbanization, like rising female education, general economic development, which again puts downward pressure on the number of kids people feel they need. So, we've seen these things played out before, but they've played out at this at this point in time when a country went through a certain stage of its development. The thing that's, I think, quite striking and relatively new about what we're seeing at the moment is that in the last 15 years, you see significantly declining birth rates in the US, in South Korea, but also in Indonesia, in, um, like >> [snorts] >> Turkey, Iran, Mexico. So, both the timing of the decline and the levels themselves are playing out in ways that is actually, well, it doesn't fit the historical patterns we've seen. You can't explain Mexico falling below the US in terms of female education or income or urbanization or those kinds of things. So, it's it's a new thing when we suddenly see rich countries, middle-income countries, even lower-income countries undergoing a very similar parallel downward shift at roughly the same time.

[00:07:43]>> So, I'm in the US. What do these other parts of the world teach us about what the trend looks like here?

[00:07:51]>> And I should caveat this straight out of the gate by saying that as with any big sweeping social change, there are many theories as what's going on here and it almost certainly won't be a single cause.

[00:08:02]But the one of one of the interesting theories that emerges when you you take this broader, more international, more sort of inter developmental approach. And and I certainly think this this is a theory that I put some weight behind is that one thing that is common to say parts of sub-Saharan Africa in 2020, 2021, uh Indonesia and Mexico in say 2015 and countries like the US, UK, Australia in sort of 2008 is that's when we see the proliferation of smartphones.

[00:08:40]And and I should say at the outset as well that it's not just about the as the theory goes, it's not just about the actual physical device. It's everything that comes along with that. So, the the apps, the time you spend, all of that.

[00:08:50]But that seems to be one of the few things that does line up reasonably well with a downward inflection in birth rates in high-income countries in the late 2000s, in middle-income countries in the sort of mid 2010s and then in poorer countries as we go into the late 2010s.

[00:09:09]>> Okay. I want to return to the phone part in detail uh because I think that theory is fascinating, too, and it's something I've been writing on as well.

[00:09:17]Um but let's back up for a little bit and hit one of the potential explanations that we hear a lot and that you mentioned. You talked about female empowerment and higher levels of education as being perhaps a contributing factor to fertility decline more generally. And as a woman in her 30s in the United States, I'm super familiar with the stereotypical assumptions about the reasons for falling birth rates. It's the feminists, it's career women who don't want kids or who wait until it's too late, etc. etc. But, that's not what the data suggests.

[00:09:55]>> One of the parts that you mentioned there, the idea of this being about career women and some people talk about the girl boss and that kind of thing.

[00:10:02]That would make sense if what we were seeing was primarily a decline in births among high-earning and highly educated young women. Whereas, what we're primarily looking at here is a decline among those in the bottom half or sort of bottom third of society. So, it's young men and women who generally don't have a bachelor's degree, have lower incomes. These are the group who are having fewer children and, perhaps more importantly as we'll come on to, being less likely to get into a couple at all.

[00:10:32]So, generally people who get into stable, secure relationships, settle down, move in together are still having children. It's some of the frictions that lead up to that point which seem to have changed.

[00:10:45]>> Does housing play into this or economic precarity? I feel like those are reasons that are often cited in the US and UK.

[00:10:52]People don't want to have families because they don't have anywhere to put their kids. They don't feel like they can provide for them in this economy at least.

[00:10:58]>> For sure. I I think the way I've been thinking about this is housing is something that if you get secure, stable housing, that allows you to have long-term time horizons. You can then think about things like, we're going to be here, could we have kids here, could we build a family here? When you are perpetually worried about what might happen to your rent in a year's time or perhaps you haven't even been able to move out of your parents' home yet, you're just not going to be thinking about that at all. It doesn't make sense when you don't have the rest of that in place. And there is evidence here that housing, the worsening affordability for homes, um, especially when it comes to home ownership, has had a significant impact on birth rates. So, in countries like the UK and US, perhaps as much as half of the decline in birth rates since the 2000s can be attributed to that. Um, but there are two caveats with that. One is that while they explain why birth rates are a bit lower than they would otherwise be, even in a situation where everyone had managed to afford a home of their own in in line with historical rates, you would still have seen this most recent decline over the last, say, 15 years. So, it's it's shifted the level, but they're not the right not the direction of travel.

[00:12:15]And then in addition, we see very similar declines in birth rates in countries that have not had nearly as bad a housing crisis. So, in countries like Finland in northern Europe, the most rapidly growing type of household is actually young adults living completely on their own. So, that is a place where evidently young people are able to find housing that meets their requirement uh, for the for where they're at in life, and nonetheless, they're still living on their own, they're not coupling up, and not having children.

[00:12:48]>> So, let's talk about how governments have tried to respond to this problem.

[00:12:54]Um, economic precarity is seen as a threat, housing is seen as a threat.

[00:13:00]China is one example of a pretty specific response to the crisis, right?

[00:13:04]They reversed their one-child policy, um, and this year, I think, also instituted a 13% sales tax on contraceptives.

[00:13:15]Has that worked?

[00:13:17]>> Generally, the story on all of these government policy interventions is it's not necessarily a straight story of they don't work at all, but to the extent that they work, they tend to be sort of taking a steeply slope downward sloping line and making it slope slightly less steeply downwards.

[00:13:36]>> [snorts] >> Um, you see this in China, you see this in South Korea, you see this in various places. So, they are perhaps working on some level, but if you think about it, that is a policy that can only really apply when everything else is already there. When you're there, you've got a stable partner, you maybe got your own home, and you're simply thinking now can we make this work financially?

[00:13:58]>> [snorts] >> And so, for some people in that situation, it seems like some of these policies can work. But, when you think A, the decision of whether and when to have kids is a massively multifactorial decision. It's probably the most personal decision anyone will ever make.

[00:14:12]A simple tweaking of the financial calculus is not going to be a complete game-changer for many people. And in addition, if a lot of what we're talking about here is people just not having got to the point where they even feel like they can settle into a stable relationship, those people are just not going to be touched by a policy like that at all.

[00:14:31]>> Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, in the US and also in a number of European countries, I think there's been, you know, conversation about baby bonuses or sort of extra financial payments that would help people have children. But, over time, having a child is an expensive proposition, you know, kind of mentally and emotionally as well as financially. And a $5,000 baby bonus or like an extra 10,000 pounds is probably not going to make the difference I think the governments think they're going to make.

[00:15:05]>> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, some people have argued that these policies would look a lot more effective if it was, you know, a five-figure or even six-figure sum uh, being given. And and there's a, you know, there are solid arguments made for the idea that the baby bonuses should be that large when you think of all of the benefits that society gets from having more people uh more taxpayers that kind of thing. But yeah, for now I would say that the strongest evidence is that they may be slow the decline slightly, but they're competing against these much much more powerful forces.

[00:15:39]>> Let's turn to the much more powerful forces then.

[00:15:42]My big theory actually and one that seems to have born out so far according to your piece is that it's technology and perhaps specifically our phones.

[00:15:56]So, actually let's back up and clarify first. Is it our phones or is it something on them? Is it apps or is it like radio waves affecting sperm counts? This is kind of a conspiracy theory that's been floated that I'm skeptical of.

[00:16:12]>> No, great great to ask cuz I think that is an important part of this. If you just say it's the phones, that could mean one of a hundred different things.

[00:16:19]So yeah, it's as far as I'm aware no evidence that this is an actual uh effect of physically holding a phone or keeping it in your pocket [laughter] for example. There's there's nothing here on what 5G masts are doing or or radiation or heat that kind of thing.

[00:16:35]Um so the theory and that there's a whole bundle of theories on this really but they but they do all center on the phone as an important sort of vehicle.

[00:16:44]So, one is that this is about a straight time use sort of time displacement thing.

[00:16:52]So, famously young people's screen time now is shockingly high. Um it's certainly been true of me at the points over the over the past decade. Uh and the if you simply take a few hours out of your day and spend that with a phone, that is displacing other things. And we know from time use surveys, long-running surveys, that the amount of time people are spending socializing face-to-face has declined steeply over exactly this sort of last 15 years or so. We do have this striking coincidence that over the period where people's screen time has gone up significantly, we've seen a steep decline in the time they spend socializing with other people. So, that I think is the most straightforward theory here is that ultimately relationships and then marriages and children and all of that are downstream of a lot of unstructured social interaction.

[00:17:45]And so, if you take away a lot of unstructured social interaction, that is going to have an impact on relationship formation, kids, all of that. Then there's a whole set of explanations which I'll pause on before going into too much detail on, but basically that it's about what's on the phones. Now, there's a one version of that is it's about social media specifically and the types of content that people consume on social media. Another is that it's things like dating apps, which again make far more sense in the smartphone world than the pre-smartphone in terms of how much people use them.

[00:18:20]Uh then there are then we can we can even talk about the impact of porn. But that yeah, there's that whole bundle of things which are happening through the phone, whereas the first is the straightforward time use one.

[00:18:32]>> Let's start with the time use, I think.

[00:18:34]Um in your article you cite a pretty recent paper by I think Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.

[00:18:43]They're both from the University of Cincinnati and they looked at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks across the US and then the UK. Can you like walk me through that a little bit?

[00:18:56]>> So, the really important part of that analysis is that researchers, when you're conducting an an analysis like this, you're always trying to look for some essentially random thing that happened which de facto split people into different groups. So, you're looking at the impact specifically of this thing in in this instance, the rollout of sort of smartphone suitable uh mobile data.

[00:19:22]Uh instead of just looking at actual smartphone usage. So, what they're doing here is they're saying mobile high-speed mobile technology did roll out kind of randomly, at least in urban areas it was rolled out very quickly, in rural mountainous areas it took longer to get those masts out there. This happened in the US, it happened in the UK, it happened pretty much everywhere.

[00:19:45]And so, what they're doing is they're saying here's a random thing that affected people regardless of their income, socioeconomic status, whatever. It just hit these areas before it hit these other areas. And what they see when they do that is that the areas that had high-speed mobile data rolled out first did see that did see birth rates, especially for the younger groups who had these phones first birth rates fell faster than in the areas that got that connectivity later.

[00:20:15]>> And in the survey, or rather in their paper, they do get into a few of the potential time use issues.

[00:20:22]Like, I think they talk about social media a little bit and potential, I guess substitution effects, which is something that I've written about a little bit.

[00:20:31]Kind of what you said, instead of you know, going on dates and perhaps having sex you're watching porn, which definitely isn't leading to children, whereas a date might. But you talk about dating apps, or you mentioned dating apps before.

[00:20:49]Shouldn't those be at least increasing the pairing up, or the formation of couples that should theoretically then be contributing to fertility?

[00:21:02]>> Yeah, they should, right?

[00:21:03]You'd certainly think so, but anecdotally, and you know, surveys show that everyone well, you know, a a large number of users of these apps seem pretty unimpressed by how that goes. Um, actually it was someone involved in one of these apps once said something really interesting to me, which is that a lot of these apps are essentially screen time apps.

[00:21:25]There's a whole range of app mobile apps that have come out in the last 15 years, which ostensibly are a dating app or this app or that app, but they're fundamentally apps that are trying to get you to keep to stay on your phone for as much time as possible. Um, and of course in the dating app world that means that the incentives are misaligned. They want to keep you on that app. They don't want you to think, "Great, found my soulmate, done, delete the app."

[00:21:48]Um, so just on a on a I think that's just an interesting thing to think about here. But there is other research that looks at things like the concept of choice paralysis. So, this idea that weirdly when you have more options, you get more stuck cuz you're constantly thinking, "Well, this guy or this girl, they seem you know, they look they look hot, they look cool, but I wonder I wonder who else is out there." Like, dating apps in a sense are a constant reminder that maybe there's someone better out there.

[00:22:17]So, you get loads of swiping and people get their nice little boost to their self-esteem when there's a like and then clearly there are dates that happen off this as well.

[00:22:25]But the general culture that they create is one that turns dating into this marketplace rather than somewhere where you're expecting that something might lead to something more long-term.

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[00:25:13]>> And your PC point out that falling birth rates are not just a western or rich country concern, but now actually developing countries have lower birth rates than some of the much wealthier ones.

[00:25:28]How did that happen?

[00:25:31]>> Yeah, and look, again, this is A, this is always going to be multifactorial, and B, the the way I think the way I find it useful to think about this is that recent shifts such as the technological shifts we've been talking about, it's not that they just transform things completely from, say, stable birth rates to falling birth rates. It's that they kind of catalyze or could be kind of catalyzing pre-existing trends. So, in poorer parts of the world, um what we're generally looking at is birth rates are already declining a little bit, and then they just got steeper.

[00:26:08]And there has been proper experimental research done out in the field. So, in one study of sub-Saharan Africa, they found that prevalence or that the share of young people who used Facebook was associated with lower birth rates and more steeply falling birth rates.

[00:26:27]But specifically, and I think this is important, it was where young women were significant users of these platforms as as well as as well as young men.

[00:26:37]And that I think is important because as the authors of that paper suggest, it it suggests that there is a bit of the female empowerment, independence, not settling for mediocrity at best, going on here. And that can't That is something that we can see happening regardless of the state of economic development that a country's in. It could happen regardless of the broad cultural, religious, uh shape of that society. If young women in different parts of the world start seeing that a different future is possible, it follows that that might have an impact on their own choices to the extent that they're empowered to make choices about settling down with a man and everything that follows.

[00:27:25]>> This pushes me to take a little bit of a skeptic's approach, honestly. Like, uh young women are no longer settling for mediocrity.

[00:27:33]That actually doesn't sound so bad.

[00:27:36]And I guess to the broader question, is it really so bad if our birth rates do fall a little bit?

[00:27:44]Overpopulation, climate change, these are all things that we've worried about for some time. And actually, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently wrote a column calling falling birth rates the best bit of global news we've had in some time. Um specifically, they were a relief from the crippling burdens we've placed on nature.

[00:28:04]>> First of all, yeah, I think female empowerment that is clearly as a if we talk simply about female empowerment, more independence, more choice, that is obviously a good thing.

[00:28:14]That's certainly something I would say is a good thing and is not something I would want to say is in any way a sort of dark underbelly.

[00:28:21]Um but I think there are two things I would come back with on that. So, one is that in some parts of the world, based on some of the content we see on social media, it's probably going a little bit further than female empowerment. And from both sexes, we see these negative stereotypes of the opposite sex really proliferate online. And and And almost always a grain of truth to these negative stereotypes. They they're grounded in actual things that have happened.

[00:28:51]But in the rich world at least, we're seeing this decline in coupling at the same time as fathers are doing more domestic work and child care than ever. Now, it's still below 50% and to be clear, you know, we we want that to keep keep moving upwards. But it's almost this disconnect where chances are the potential guy out there is actually going to be a more willing partner in life, in child rearing and all of that than any time in recent history. And yet at the same time, we're seeing this these these very negative stereotypes about what the other sex is like. So, that's just one thing I would say there on sort of where female empowerment can sometimes uh jump a little step further. And similarly, in terms of some of the negative stereotypes young men have around women.

[00:29:43]On the broader debate about whether this is good or not, again, certainly at the individ indi at the individual level, everyone should make the best choice and the right choice for them.

[00:29:54]But at the societal level, this does start having quite clear negative impacts. And just just to give you one that I think is just very straightforward.

[00:30:05]Uh if you look at Japan, Japan if you if people have been to Japan, one of the interesting things is that everything in Japan looks like the coolest wizziest stuff did in the 1990s.

[00:30:17]Like you had Japan was at the top of the roller coaster in the 1990s. It was the place to be. It was in inventing and innovating. Since then, everything's kind of gone into stasis.

[00:30:26]And the interesting thing is that the average Japanese worker is actually just as productive today as they were back then. Japanese productivity output per worker has gone on exactly the same trend as it has in every other rich country since the 1990s.

[00:30:42]The issue is that because there have because Japanese birth rates fell very steeply very early, there are simply a lot fewer workers in Japan today as a share of the population than there used to be. And when you think about it, even if the amount of stuff each worker does hasn't changed, that means when you share it all out across the entire population, there's a lot less.

[00:31:03]So, on a very straight forward level, when your birth rate falls significantly below 2.1 and stays there for a long time, your your average living standards per person are being pushed downwards because you're having to spread more out.

[00:31:16]>> Those seem to be like the implications of falling birth rates in high-income countries, like Japan. I imagine those similar implications are probably true for the US and the UK.

[00:31:27]But, are the implications different in the developing world?

[00:31:32]Can you like describe that difference?

[00:31:34]>> Generally, as countries developed historically, part of that involved a development of the the welfare system, the safety nets, um pensions, these kind of things. Um in fact, to an extent, it was the the development of things like pensions were arguably contributed to people having fewer kids cuz they thought the government's going to take care of me when I'm 70 instead of all of those kids.

[00:31:59]>> Seven kids, yeah.

[00:32:00]>> Exactly. Um whereas the countries that we're now seeing steeply falling and very low birth rates in, many of them don't have those safety nets and structures set up.

[00:32:10]And they haven't got their living standards to an initial level where you can then sort of share the pie and ensure that everyone's okay. So, we're going to see a growing number of countries that start dealing with the challenges, the economic challenges that countries like Japan have been dealing with for 30 years, but they're going to be facing them with far fewer resources to spread across their population. Like one of of one of the responses um that Japan as a as a country as an economy has made to lower birth rates is things like robotics automation actually fighting against the fact that they have fewer workers by innovating technologically and also innovating in terms of how they care for older people.

[00:32:54]A country that undergoes those same shifts at a follower income level is going to face a much much stronger headwinds and have a much harder time.

[00:33:03]>> I'm going to go with like a second skeptic's take.

[00:33:06]We saw something of a decline in birth rates after the mass adoption of the television actually, right? There was a similar time use issue, shall we say?

[00:33:17]But we seem to have come back from that.

[00:33:20]Why can we not come back from this?

[00:33:24]>> Yeah, I mean like I think we can come back from this. I I try not to be a complete doomer on these things and weirdly I for me the fact well, if it is a fact that a lot of what we're seeing has been mediated by smartphones and social media making those tweaks to technology and like the nature of the platforms, usage of the platforms in some ways feels actually easier than solving the much bigger and as you said often quite positive shifts that have driven these changes in the past. Um now, you know, we again we can get on to how easy is it to actually change those digital habits? You know, Australia's been trying it with limited success. The UK at the time we're recording has just announced that it's going to try something similar. Not clear how successful that will be.

[00:34:11]>> You're referencing like the social media bans for younger people, right?

[00:34:15]>> Yeah, so if we think that the amount of time spent scrolling screens and to a lesser extent the content on those screens is having a is is putting downward pressure on birth rates those to me feel more fixable than a a of the broad sweeping historical progress trends uh that would be much harder to reverse.

[00:34:36]So, I sort of think it it feels plausible to me that if if someone told me that in 10 years there've been these big cultural shifts and that I don't know how we get there, but if someone said we've got there and suddenly it is a colleague of mine made the argument that it could be a bit like smoking. Suddenly it becomes seen as very sort of low-class to be sat there scrolling your phone. If someone told me that that has happened in 10 years' time uh I would probably expect that we would have more people in couples and having kids and that would feel a completely believable transition to me.

[00:35:09]>> A Vox writer, actually Eric Levitz built on your thesis recently to predict that actually we aren't going to turn back. That the trend is probably going to become significantly worse with the onset of AI. How does that factor into your thinking?

[00:35:25]>> Yeah, I mean everything at the moment like there's always a an an AI question.

[00:35:30]>> Yeah, there is.

[00:35:31]>> But I think it's more appropriate here than in most places. Like we do we have seen that the data from firms like OpenAI has shown that a a small but significant portion of the conversations that people have with platforms like ChatGPT is in the sort of personal relationship domain. Now, it's interesting that OpenAI among others seem to be making a decision at the moment to move away from that basic chatbot usage and pivot harder to the professional usage because that's where the money is. And if that happens, I think that would be a good thing. If AI does become a sort of workplace tool more than a imaginary friend as it were.

[00:36:14]>> Substitute spouse.

[00:36:16]>> Exactly, exactly. But yeah, we we have seen real-world examples of that kind of usage. And there is a seductiveness, you know, this technology is built to be an entertaining conversation partner on some on some level, right? And I yeah, I would worry that those kind of sort of imaginary conversation partners, yeah, like you said, um substitute spouses, that could be a thing. Now, I I think that would be a very fringe thing, even if that is the road we go down, but certainly yeah, if if AI chatbot companions, as it were, are left to just evolve naturally, I do think there probably would be a small subset of the population for whom that would be a well, that would be the the road they would go down. And yeah, that's that's certainly not going to help people meet up in real life.

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[00:39:26]>> [music] >> As you pointed out, you know, at the top of our conversation, fertility rates have already declined significantly. Um, there are a number of countries that it seems like it may not be possible to pull back from this decline.

[00:39:45]Is there a route to recovery for most countries, or are we already caught in a sort of downward spiral? Like, can they come back up in a meaningful way?

[00:39:56]>> It's interesting, right? Because there are countries, as you said, that have maybe bumped up a bit, and there are other countries where they've not seen nearly as steep a decline over the last 15-20 years. So, what I'm talking about is the general trend, but there are always exceptions. Now, it's it's very tricky to work out what it is about different countries that explains why they've not seen the same shift, or why they have rebounded.

[00:40:19]There's some arguments that a lot of this is is about the people's real sense of um religious or national identity, and their sort of imperative to have children. Now, again, I'm I'm not for for a second saying that therefore that's the road other countries should go down, but that's certainly an argument why for why countries like Israel have particularly high birth rates, or there are other countries in Central Asia, um sort of on the borders of Asia and Europe, where birth rates are significantly higher, and those sort of strong sense of traditional values.

[00:40:56]>> You mentioned that South Korea's birth rates had rebounded slightly. How did that happen?

[00:41:00]>> Yeah, so South Korea is a really interesting one, because of course everyone for the last few years, including myself, has been saying, you know, "Look at this. Look at the steep sustained decline in South Korea's birth rate." Last couple years, it's ticked slightly upwards, and people are making a bit less noise about that.

[00:41:15]Which is often often that negativity bias. So, I think it's great that we do talk about this.

[00:41:20]The jury on what's happening there, I would say, is still out. But one really interesting thing is that the the uptick in the birth rate over the last couple of years has gone on the back of an uptick in the marriage rate.

[00:41:33]So, the two followed each other down, and now they're following each other up.

[00:41:37]So, I would say that that at least is suggestive that again relationship formation, or the formation of strong stable secure relationships, um is key to this. So, South Korea is a country where having children outside of marriage is still very very rare.

[00:41:52]Uh and cohabitation that isn't marriage is still fairly rare. So, when we talk about marriage, then we're really talking about relationship formation.

[00:41:59]Um and again, you know, some argument some say that it's a COVID rebound, and that during the lockdowns and COVID you had fewer marriages.

[00:42:08]Since then some of those people that sort of put off their marriage by a couple of years have got married and had kids. Others say, well, we're talking about 24 2024-25 here. That's not necessarily as clearly about COVID. Maybe it's to do with policy shift. So, it's it's an ongoing discussion, but as I say, I think the most important thing there is that it came immediately after a rebound in coupling up. So, to me, that at least suggests that that is where any policy or cultural shift needs to happen in order for the needle to move.

[00:42:40]>> This moment kind of feels like a historical turning point. Birth rates have been declining and suddenly we are really all aware of this.

[00:42:49]50 years from now, are we going to look back at, you know, 2007 or the introduction of the smartphone or whatever that key inflection point was and wish we had just thrown our phones into the ocean or something at that point? Or are we going to adapt to this, do you think?

[00:43:07]>> The thing is, humans adapt. So, I I'm sure the the most sort of apocalyptic versions of this story will almost certainly not come true. And whether that is because people adapt by more relationships and more kids or whether we adapt by uh changing the way the economy and the interaction between the government uh and the economy and support for the elderly and that kind of thing, whether we change things on that margin, I'm not sure exactly what will happen, but I'm sure adaptations will come in one form or another, which will mean that things might get significantly harder and significantly worse in some way, but not quite as bad as the the current most apocalyptic scenarios look like. But yeah, look, I I do think the number of time series trends where you see a bend between sort of 2008, 9, 10 is [snorts] quite remarkable. And and one thing we've not gone into in detail here is how we see that bend even in countries that didn't that that affected by the global financial crisis.

[00:44:07]Australia being the the obvious example weren't directly affected. So, yeah, I do think there's a chance that in a generation's time people look back and think that was a real turning point. Um and yeah, that maybe we should have done something differently.

[00:44:21]Uh but yeah, I'm optimistic that either, as I say, it's a scenario where in 10 years you scrolling your phone is just no extremely uncool or various other adaptations have happened and and we've managed to get by. Um >> [snorts] >> but I think it's great that we're really wrestling with it now in a way where a couple of years ago it was seen as this sort of fringe view.

[00:44:43]>> What would be your your main recommendation for how we start to either tackle this problem of declining birth rates or adapt to it?

[00:44:52]>> On the tackling the problem, I do think, and again, it's a weird one where I know what my ideal destination looks like. I just don't know what the journey looks like. I think the destination is that people spend a lot less time aimlessly or doom scrolling on their phones.

[00:45:05]It's just how do you get there? It's not clear that a straightforward bans are the way A because they're often circumvented, B because you don't want to throw out all the good positive uses of mobile phones and social media and the internet along with the negative uses.

[00:45:21]Um so, I do almost think maybe some cultural shift that says suddenly you don't want to be seen scrolling your phone, but you're still going to use it to call your grandpa.

[00:45:31]Um maybe that would be a way that we get there. In terms of adaptations, I mean, one thing that I think just think is going to change everywhere is the pension age is going to continue ramping up. So, um I think it will become fairly common in certainly in my lifetime for government pensions to only start paying out when someone reaches 70.

[00:45:53]Um whereas until recently in many countries that was 65 or earlier. So, yeah, that will be a shift. There is one argument that maybe it's a happy coincidence that AI is arriving just at this time when we might start needing more workers and suddenly you have sort of infinite invisible digital workers. But of course, you know, that brings its own questions about unemployment and inequality and all of that.

[00:46:17]Um it may be that we could see different a way of blending those two, both the uh what we do and the adaptation to see more communal parenting again.

[00:46:32]So this would both this idea of allo-parenting. So you could simultaneously provide more support to young adults, young parents today who are struggling to juggle work and child rearing as is more more and more often the case. And in in doing so, you show to everyone else how great little kids can be.

[00:46:52]Um cuz there is one argument that that part of what we're we're what is happening now is we are just in kind of a doom loop where >> Right.

[00:46:59]>> fewer people have kids or people have fewer kids, bit of both.

[00:47:03]That means fewer people are exposed to the idea of kids. Fewer people see their peers having kids and think well maybe I should do that. Um then people start getting annoyed at the existence of kids in certain places like on airplanes or in restaurants and that kind of thing.

[00:47:17]And you create this sort of anti-natal culture. So yeah, I sort of again in my utopian future a decade away, people are not only doing less doom scrolling, they're also helping each other out with parenting. And you just get a sort of more parent and kid-friendly society. Um I admit that is extremely utopian. But maybe there's an element of that as well.

[00:47:40]>> I mean, I think a utopian scenario is a good one to end on. It tells us that there's still hope. John, where can we find more of your work?

[00:47:48]>> At the FT, I'm at ft.com/jbm, my initials. Um or I'm on all the socials um under the name J Burn-Murdoch.

[00:47:58]>> Lovely. We'll send all of our questions about allo parenting there.

[00:48:01]>> Thank you.

[00:48:02]>> Thanks for coming on the show.

[00:48:04]>> Thank you so much.

[00:48:06]>> Thanks for watching. Each week we'll be in your audio and video feeds with great interviews and a philosophy-minded look at tech, culture, politics, and much more. Episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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