Dropping Birth Rates are Good News
News reports and economists exhibit collective angst about declining birth rates and the resulting aging of populations in many nations. They worry about labor shortages, upside-down pension programs, rising health care burdens and stagnating GDP. A research team at The Overpopulation Project wondered if these challenges outweigh the ecological advantage of a population shrinking back to a level that won’t crush the Earth.
In this episode World Population Balance Executive Director Dave Gardner visits with one of the researchers, Philip Cafaro, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University and affiliated faculty member of CSU’s School of Global Environmental Sustainability. Up for discussion: Can a contracting population work economically and socially?
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Dave Gardner 00:00
Slumping fertility rates in developing countries spark labor worries. Canada has a baby deficit. Will paying women to have more kids help? Prime Minister encourages Norwegian women to bear many children. The fertility rate is way down. And yes, that's a huge problem. Aging population, a real risk to Scottish budget. These headlines are real. On an overpopulated planet, they're a bit shocking. Worries about an aging population caused by declining fertility rates go under the microscope on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast. Hi, I'm Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance and host of the Overpopulation Podcast. Fertility rates around the world have been dropping for over fifty years. The global average was five in the mid sixties and it's now just below two and a half. Because we have fewer children entering the population, a natural consequence is a bigger bubble moving through the population. First, a proportionately large percentage of the population is middle-aged and then eventually we have a larger percentage that is elderly. And if you add to that that we're living longer today than in the past, that's also adding to what we're beginning to experience today, which is an elderly bubble. Simultaneously, as we have a smaller and smaller percentage of the population being of childbearing age and average family size decreasing, then eventually, a country's population stops growing and begins to contract. Fair enough to say that. Makes sense? Okay, so most of the world is experiencing that aging bubble today, or at least beginning to and a few, about fourteen I think are already experiencing population contraction. So in today's episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we're going to talk about all this with Dr. Phil Cafaro, an ethics professor at Colorado State University. Welcome to the podcast, Phil.
Phil Cafaro 02:03
Thanks for having me, Dave. It's good to be here.
Dave Gardner 02:05
And I'm going to count on you to fact check me every step of the way.
Phil Cafaro 02:08
I'm on it.
Dave Gardner 02:09
Great. Great. Let's see, Phil, you Frank Götmark and Jane O'Sullivan, under the auspices of the Overpopulation Project recently co-authored a report in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution called Aging Human Populations: Good for Us, Good for the Earth. So first, quickly, what is the Overpopulation Project?
Phil Cafaro 02:32
Well, the Overpopulation Project is a project that I started with Frank Götmark, he's a Swedish ecologist, and we both felt that the connection between population issues, issues in the environment, tended to be neglected by politicians, and by scholars studying environmental issues. So we started this project and got some funding for this project about a year and a half ago, just to look at some of the issues around population in the environment. And, you know, a lot of times when people do look at population issues, they're very sort of careful and tentative about it. We wanted to kind of dive into it and see if we could take a little bolder approach to some of these issues. So we call it the Overpopulation Project, because both of us believe that there's good evidence that the Earth is overpopulated right now.
Dave Gardner 03:25
You suppose? It's pretty obvious.
Phil Cafaro 03:27
Well, yes, you look at climate change, you look at acidifying oceans, you look at the loss of other species. But it's interesting, when people talk about those problems, they might be willing to say, "Well, there's a population connection there," but they don't seem to be willing to say, "That seems to be evidence that we're overpopulated." So we kind of come at it from a different position, we say, "There's good evidence that we're overpopulated right now. Can we clarify a little bit better what that means? And can we talk about ways to address that problem, to sort of give people a sense of a better way forward?"
Dave Gardner 04:05
And the Overpopulation Project does have a website. So we'll include a link to that in the show notes for the podcast so people can follow what you're doing.
Phil Cafaro 04:13
Yeah, we have a regular blog on there. We blog every week. We have all kinds of good resources on there, links to videos, articles, books, etc.
Dave Gardner 04:23
Now, is it fair to call this a study? This thing that you just published about the aging population? What do you call it?
Phil Cafaro 04:29
Yeah, I mean, technically, it's a review article and scientific journals like this. They like it when people are willing to review all the articles that scientists have written about a topic in recent years, and sort of summarize that and present it to their readers.
Dave Gardner 04:46
Uh huh.
Phil Cafaro 04:47
Because, you know, typically, we're all sort of doing our own research, so it's good to step back and get an overview. What we did with this piece is we wanted to look at what the economists what the sociologists what the ecologists were saying about these demographic changes that we're talking about.
Dave Gardner 05:04
What prompted you to want to review that particular subject?
Phil Cafaro 05:08
Well, I should say what really prompted it was we'd been reading a lot of articles in the mainstream press about what a problem it is that societies are ageing. The average age is is increasing for members of in the developed world, certainly. And that's typically presented as a problem. You know, we're worried about getting older, worried about not having enough workers, whatever the worry might be. And from our perspective, as environmentally concerned people, were looking at the same phenomenon and thinking, well, it's, it's a good thing, right?
Dave Gardner 05:42
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 05:42
Because it's tied in with ending population growth. Inevitably, when you end population growth, and if you combine that with success in helping people live longer, healthier lives, you're going to have an aging population. So from our perspective, this was an achievement being described as a huge failure and a problem.
Dave Gardner 06:04
If you're an ecologist, it seems like an achievement, something good.
Phil Cafaro 06:07
That's right. Now, if you're an economist, you might think, and many economists do look at this and say, "Well, here are all the problems with an ageing society." But what was interesting was, when we actually took a look at the scholarly literature on some of the economic problems that people talk about, even the economists are saying, "Well, the problems aren't as bad as we thought," or they're saying it's not really a problem at all. So for instance, one of the main problems that people raise about aging societies is a worry that you're not going to have enough workers, right? As we have fewer young people compared to the number of old people, we're just not going to have enough workers to do the necessary work for society. And partly, that's because people are looking at the so -called dependency ratio, the ratio between adults between sixteen and sixty-five, who we think of as workers, and adults sixty-five and older who we think of as no longer working. So the dependency ratio is going up, the projection is it's going to continue to go up and reflect an aging society, and so you think there aren't going to be enough workers to support the old folks. Well, when you actually look at it, it turns out that it's not as worrisome as you might think, partly because if you have fewer younger people working, that starts to incentivize older people working, and you can put in place policies which will make it easier for old people to work. And so for instance, we found that, or economists studying this have found that if you look at the nations across the developed world, and you compare all of them, there's no real connection between what the average ages and the percentage of people in the population working. So that's not what you'd expect, you'd expect as societies get older, you'd have a smaller percentage of their population working.
Dave Gardner 08:13
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 08:14
Doesn't work that way. Why not? Well, it's because as you have fewer younger people, that incentivizes employers to go out and hire older people.
Dave Gardner 08:25
They're not as likely to kick older people to the curb.
Phil Cafaro 08:28
Yeah. Which which actually is a problem in our society.
Dave Gardner 08:31
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 08:32
So and that's just one example.
Dave Gardner 08:34
Well, and before we move on from that though, isn't it true also that this dependency ratio thing, where we have this threshold of sixty-five and older, it's been around for a long time and today's sixty-five year old is much healthier than a sixty-five year old was fifty years ago.
Phil Cafaro 08:52
That's true. And that's actually very important for thinking about another problem or pseudo-problem that people bring up. The whole question of increased health care expenditures.
Dave Gardner 09:01
Oh, yeah.
Phil Cafaro 09:02
Again, you assume well, the older the population gets, they're old they're decrepit, that's going to cause problems. And look, I mean, there might be something to that. But there are countervailing factors. You mentioned the most important one. It's not as if we're adding on ten and fifteen more years to people's lifespan, and it's ten and fifteen years of ill health.
Dave Gardner 09:26
Right.
Phil Cafaro 09:27
In fact, mostly what we're doing is we're letting people live longer, and we still tend to have a bunch of years of ill health at the end of our lives on average, but we're not really increasing years of ill health to the same extent.
Dave Gardner 09:39
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 09:42
So you can look at other things besides the dependency ratio. You can look at the ratio of healthy to unhealthy adults. You could look at the ratio of able-bodied to disabled adults. You can even get more sophisticated and look at the ratio of the total adult population to the number of people who are within twelve years or fifteen years of the end of their lives. And if you look at all those other measures, which maybe are a little more accurate in terms of the health burden, they look much more manageable. So it doesn't look as if we're doubling and tripling the number of really unhealthy people.
Dave Gardner 10:18
Yeah, in fact, I found that interesting about your review article was that you really kind of took exception to this whole dependency ratio business and advocated for probably a much smarter way of looking at that.
Phil Cafaro 10:31
Yeah, because what we're looking for eventually is a measure of the healthcare burden that an aging society is going to put on a society. And again, we don't want to sweep genuine problems under the rug. If this is going to cause issues and problems, we have to plan for it as a society. And in fact, you know, one of the things we say in this paper is, aging societies are a net positive but to realize that net positive, we're probably going to need to do some planning for aging societies. So here's an example. Another issue that's often brought up is the need to pay for public pensions.
Dave Gardner 11:12
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 11:12
With an aging society. And again, you've got more people who might well be living longer after their their work life is over.
Dave Gardner 11:21
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 11:22
And again, perhaps smaller percentages of workers. So that could cause issues and problems around pensions. Okay, what do we want to do about that? What societies have done so far, and we've seen this in Europe and and some other parts of the world is, they're starting to raise the age when you can start to get a pension.
Dave Gardner 11:43
But let me interject that some economists are saying let's just get busy making babies to solve that problem.
Phil Cafaro 11:49
Right. I mean, and that's another part of this, you know, people are saying, "Well, in order to take care of the old folks, pay their pensions, let's start making babies, let's start bringing a lot more people in as immigrants to boost populations." And-
Dave Gardner 12:01
And maybe I'm jumping the shark by even bringing that up. I know, you'll have some interesting things to say about that. Are you ready to move into that? Or because I interrupted your-
Phil Cafaro 12:10
No, no, that's okay. I mean, I just say first, that it turns out that there are better measures to take besides raising pension ages. And those have to do with things like making it easier for older people to both collect their pensions and still work, let's say. So there are measures you can take to increase the workforce, without cutting back on people's pensions, and making it harder for, you know, people who are, let's say, working physically demanding jobs. It's one thing to say to a professor, "Work an extra three or four years at the end of your working life." it's a little harder for someone who's putting up sheetrock, or working as a janitor to add on those three or four years. That's harder. And it's probably not fair to ask that person to put on those extra years. So in any case, there are measures that you can do, and we talk about that in the paper. But then we also say, "Well, look, if you're saying that in order to pay for the old folks pensions, we have to have continuous population growth, either by higher fertility rates or more immigration, you're basically buying into a Ponzi scheme. You're saying that the only way to ever pay for this need, which is always going to be there - pensions - is to have an endlessly growing population. Well, that's not ecologically feasible. And so you know, we have to reject that." But there's even more you can say about it. Because it turns out, if you run the numbers on those measures to try to increase population to deal with this problem, they don't really deal with the problem. Here's an example. The German government looked at what it would mean to double immigration into Germany as a way to pay for pensions and deal with some of the other issues they're dealing with with an aging population. They basically said, "We could double immigration, year in and year out, and that would lead to dozens of millions of more people down the line, so much bigger ecological footprint, etc. But it wouldn't make much of a difference at all in terms of the average age of our population."
Dave Gardner 14:20
Because it's not like you're only opening the gates to people in a certain age group.
Phil Cafaro 14:27
Right. You might be bringing in some of their parents as well. But even if you did decide to just bring in people of working age, well, you're not shipping them off at the end of that.
Dave Gardner 14:36
That's right, they're gonna get older.
Phil Cafaro 14:37
They get old.
Dave Gardner 14:38
And then you have even more, a bigger population.
Phil Cafaro 14:40
And you have a bigger problem and you have to, on this model, bring in more people. So even as a temporary measure, the Germans and the Australian Government looked at the same question. Again and again, when governments looked at this they found that trying to boost the population to pay for pensions, or pay for old age healthcare, it's really not the answer. There are better answers.
Dave Gardner 15:05
One more comment about dependency ratio, I think it was Bill Ryerson at Population Media Center enlightened me about this. And that is that a lot of the people who are concerned about this elderly bubble, this aging bubble, ignore the fact that people under, really under twenty years old, there's another whole cohort that are not workers for the most part and aren't paying into the pension system and covering healthcare costs and all that stuff, too. And if if that group is shrinking as it is now, then that actually counteracts some of the enlargement of the elderly.
Phil Cafaro 15:41
Exactly. And there are all kinds of savings that are going to come from that. So if you have a smaller youth cohort, that's going to mean you spend less on educating those people.
Dave Gardner 15:51
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 15:52
Down the line, it means you don't need the same amount of housing, you don't need to put as much money into the roads, whatever it might be. So there are savings. But typically, when people run the numbers on this, they don't do that. All they say is, "Well, we're not going to have as much money going into the, in the US the Social Security system for instance. What they should be saying is, "Okay, let's compare the less money going into the Social Security system but combine that with the savings we're going to get from building fewer schools, etc, etc." And that would give you a more accurate picture of how this impacts finances overall.
Dave Gardner 16:29
Yeah. What about just the fact that the population of the country is contracting, then you are, over time, going to have fewer workers and fewer consumers. Oh my God say the economists. Your economy is likely to shrink. That's gotta raise alarm bells for an economist.
Phil Cafaro 16:48
Sure. And, you know, it'll raise alarm bells for anybody who's just thinking about this within the standard paradigm. And again, to be fair, the, you know, there are real issues around this. With the model that we currently have, there are all kinds of problems that you might have with a shrinking economy. On the other hand, there's a different way to look at this, you could say, "Okay, we've built an endless growth economy. And we need that in some sense. On the other hand, we're bumping up against ecological limits. And so there's a problem with endless growth. So are there examples of wealthy developed nations where the economy actually has shrunk and yet they seem to be making it work? Is it possible that this isn't the disaster that people have been talking about?"
Dave Gardner 17:37
Yeah, good question. And you looked at that?
Phil Cafaro 17:39
Well, we looked at that, and especially we took a look at what scholars have written about Japan. Because your listeners have probably read, heard stories about how Japan hasn't been growing, it's a basket case, you know, lost decades for the Japanese economy, etc., etc.
Dave Gardner 17:56
Yeah, their population began to shrink in 2009 I think it was.
Phil Cafaro 18:00
That's right. 2009 was the first year their total population shrank. Just by a small amount. And it's continued to do that year after year. But in addition, for the last several decades, they've, they've had years where they've had negative growth in the size of the economy. And so that's been presented in the business media, the media in general as a disaster.
Dave Gardner 18:22
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 18:23
And then you look at Japan, and you say, "Okay, they've been going through this for a few decades. And yet, it doesn't seem to be a disaster. They have some of the healthiest populations in the world. They are still quite wealthy. They still have a society that functions quite well. A lot of the horrible things that were supposed to happen in a shrinking economy don't seem to be happening." So you could flip this around. And you could say, "Well, is it possible to have shrinking populations and/or shrinking economies get the benefits from that, perhaps, and find ways to deal with the problems, and could you imagine this continuing?" And it turns out that in Japan, there are people who are actually trying to make this happen. They're trying to find the positives in smaller numbers of people and less economic activity. They're trying to recalibrate their economy around sustainable economic activities, and get it away from what it had been built on, which was a lot of sort of building big infrastructure projects that weren't very useful. So Japan, on one view of things, is sort of leading the way in finding a way to degrow and still keep a good quality of life for their citizens.
Dave Gardner 19:41
And I'm guessing the average citizen in Japan isn't having to look hard for the positives of this.
Phil Cafaro 19:46
Yeah, it's a very densely populated country. It's a crowded country. It's a country where in the major population centers people suffer from long commutes and loss of public amenities due to crowding. So there are all kinds of benefits are around that. There are also benefits for those of us who care about preserving wild nature. There are benefits in terms of fewer people in the rural areas, because that opens up possibilities for rewilding agricultural landscapes, rebuilding wetlands, and these sorts of things. And so there are all kinds of positives around that. And actually, what they're finding on places like Sado Island and other parts of Japan is they can take those steps, those rewilding activities, and they can build a sort of new economic paradigm around that, built around bringing an ecotourists, built around teaching people more about the native flora and fauna. There are economic possibilities around that, there are jobs to be found around that.
Dave Gardner 20:47
And isn't it true, Phil, that an economy really just has to be big enough to meet the needs of the population. So if you have a smaller population, shouldn't a smaller economy do the trick?
Phil Cafaro 20:58
That's right. So another thing that we've looked into here has to do with what's the connection between a growing economy and wellbeing? It turns out that people who have a certain basic economic security, that tends to be less important than overall amounts of wealth. It's also the case that you can have an economy that's growing. And you can even gin that up some with population growth, even artificially boosting population growth. But the real question is probably what's happening to per capita wealth?
Dave Gardner 21:36
Yeah. And satisfaction, too.
Phil Cafaro 21:38
So in a country - and satisfaction. So in a country like Japan where the population isn't growing, that takes away one great need for economic growth.
Dave Gardner 21:48
Yeah, all you're left with is greed and I mean, I guess the money system, maybe.
Phil Cafaro 21:53
Yeah, you're left with a system where perhaps if you're running a corporation and you don't show a certain amount of profit, you're gonna get in trouble for that. So I mean, there's still problems with this. But let's face it, there are problems with growth as well.
Dave Gardner 22:10
Bigger problems.
Phil Cafaro 22:11
Bigger problems. I mean, because in the end, the people of Japan have to find a way to live sustainably where they are. And from a wider global perspective, Japan puts tremendous demands on global ecosystem services, tremendous demands on Pacific Ocean fisheries, tremendous demands on Indonesian timber. So, you know, there are all kinds of benefits that we get by having fewer Japanese consumers.
Dave Gardner 22:38
Yeah. And I want to dig into that just for a minute longer, Phil, because I've been sitting here thinking about that, that we know Japan, you know, is tiny, geographically very small, especially compared to its population. So I haven't looked at the numbers lately, but if you went to the data from the Global Footprint Network, I'm sure you would find that their demand far exceeds the biocapacity of their country.
Phil Cafaro 23:01
Sure.
Dave Gardner 23:01
So they're having to import food like crazy, I'm sure.
Phil Cafaro 23:04
Oh, yeah.
Dave Gardner 23:04
Plus timber and other things.
Phil Cafaro 23:06
Food, timber, almost all their fossil fuels.
Dave Gardner 23:09
And meanwhile, we've been filling up the world everywhere else. And so there's going to be people in other parts of the world who might at some point, say, "You know what? I want to keep that agricultural output here and eat it. You can't have it, Japan."
Phil Cafaro 23:25
Right. Or they might want to say that and not be able to. So it could be that people in the developing world might need that agricultural productivity to feed their own people. And yet, agricultural products might be going to the wealthier parts of the world.
Dave Gardner 23:42
Yeah, well, there's a lot of that going on right now.
Phil Cafaro 23:44
There's a lot of that going on right now. And so really, we need to be thinking about ways to ratchet back our demands. One of the best ways, really, the best way to do that is to cut back on population. Because it's not just that it means you eat less food, it's not just that you burn less fossil fuels. It's not just that you take less water out of the rivers, etc. It helps you do all those things.
Dave Gardner 24:11
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 24:11
And so that's why it's such a powerful step to take. And again, to circle back around, that's why we were so anxious to write this paper, because ecologists, and this was published in an ecological journal, Trends in Research in Ecology and Evolution. So we're going after that audience here. And these are people who understand, for the most part, a lot of the benefits, the environmental benefits of fewer people. But they're not advocating policies to try to stabilize or reduce populations. Why not? Well, part of it is because we hypothesize that if they enter into those kinds of debates, people are going to start telling them things like, "Well, you can't have are a smaller population, because it doesn't work economically, it doesn't work socially." So we wanted to look at the, the nuts and bolts of that. And again, what we found was no it, it can work in those ways. There are challenges around it, but it can be made to work. And even just from an economic perspective, there are all kinds of benefits you get from a smaller population. So, you know, think about the countries in Western Europe now, some of whom have stable populations and could have smaller populations if they embraced population degrowth. Didn't try to fight it. A lot of those countries have pretty high youth unemployment rates. A lot of those countries could benefit by, you know, when you when you talk about worker shortages, the flipside of worker shortages is workers are in the driver's seat in terms of negotiating wages. The flipside of worker shortages is employers start to go out and hire groups that they didn't have to hire before - could be young people, could be old people, could be minorities that tend to be looked down on. All of these are groups that, when workers are in short supply, they become more appealing to employers. So that's one benefit-
Dave Gardner 26:17
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 26:17
That shrinking populations can bring. Similarly, another benefit that we talked about in the paper that never gets mentioned in the mainstream media, when you have smaller family size, what that means is that parents concentrate resources more on the children that they do have. When they die, they pass on bequest to a smaller number of kids. And so that tends to again, help to concentrate wealth that way.
Dave Gardner 26:47
So it actually could add equity over time. It could be one of many solutions I'm guessing to this problem we have of the great inequity in the world today.
Phil Cafaro 26:57
Yeah, a country that has a shrinking population is likely a country where young people are going to be in demand as workers, it's likely a country where young people are going to have more resources available to them per person for their education. It's probably a country where companies will have more of an interest in training them.
Dave Gardner 27:18
So wages will be higher?
Phil Cafaro 27:21
Yeah. And there's good evidence for some of these conclusions that I'm talking about. Again, this was a review paper. These are the kinds of things that we're finding economists saying about these kinds of societies. But at the same time, when you go to the mainstream media about these things, all you hear about are the problems.
Dave Gardner 27:42
Yeah. So why do you think that is?
Phil Cafaro 27:45
Well, I think it's because - here's my simple explanation for it, you tell me whether this makes sense. I think the people writing for the business press let's say, or even writing for your local newspaper about these things, they tend to have a general pro-growth outlook on things. They believe we need economic growth. And they know that more people can gin up growth. So from that perspective, when they hear about fewer people, it just raises a red flag. And so they're gonna grab anything they can to sort of explain why this is a problem. The real problem is that it might be the Harbinger towards moving towards a post-growth world. That's their problem. But then they they latch on to all these other pseudo-problems, and play them up instead.
Dave Gardner 28:37
Yeah, you know what I think is that the general populace even is just like these journalists. I mean, we've all been programmed from birth to believe that growth is good. So there's this natural pro-growth bias throughout. And then you add to that, I think that we've got these think tanks that are really representing the interests of the very wealthy capitalists, who are probably the one special interest in all this who really don't want, they don't want to have to pay higher wages. They don't want to-
Phil Cafaro 29:05
Exactly.
Dave Gardner 29:06
They don't want to have fewer customers.
Phil Cafaro 29:07
Exactly. Yeah.
Dave Gardner 29:08
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 29:09
So it fits in very nicely with their interests.
Dave Gardner 29:12
Yeah, yeah.
Phil Cafaro 29:13
Again, I want to emphasize that we didn't come into this with the idea of trying to just to pretend that aging or smaller societies don't cause any sort of problems. We really did want to try to get an honest sense of what the issues are, what the problems are, what are some of the solutions, and also to try to get a good sense of the pros and cons of this and weigh them up together. I just want to emphasize that. And I also want to say that from an environmental perspective, that's the area where it's very clear we just can't keep growing.
Dave Gardner 29:50
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 29:51
We need less economic activity. We need fewer people from an environmental perspective. So if you really get serious about that, then it becomes less a question of, you know, gee, how do we weigh up everything here, and more of a question of, okay there are some societies that are making this transition, we really need to learn what we can from them. What are they doing that's making the transition easier? What are they doing to get the full benefits of smaller populations? And how can we maybe bring that into other societies that are going to be facing the same thing down the line?
Dave Gardner 30:29
Are there more great examples besides Japan today?
Phil Cafaro 30:32
Well, I think Germany is a good example. It's a somewhat different example in that Germany's population - they had a few years about ten or eight years ago where their population overall dipped a little bit, but they're more just on a very stable plane right now. Year to year, their population doesn't change very much. And yet, over the past three or four decades, they've been the strongest economy in Europe.
Dave Gardner 30:58
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 30:59
So that in itself suggests that, look, you don't need to have an ever-growing population in order to have a quite wealthy and economically successful country, even in conventional terms. What would be interesting would be if Germany could sort of embrace that and accept the idea of, okay, going into the future, our population is probably going to decline. It's about eighty million now. We've run population projections for Germany, the Overpopulation Project, which suggests that at current fertility and migration levels, their population might be seventy-two million in another eighty years. So that's a pretty substantial decline. But not, nothing dramatic, nothing drastic.
Dave Gardner 31:47
Yeah.
Phil Cafaro 31:47
Could they embrace that and accept that and show the rest of Europe the way to doing likewise?
Dave Gardner 31:54
Now, you mentioned that there are countries out there who are really resisting population degrowth. I would love it if you give me a yes answer to this. Have you guys catalogued that? And do you have a great list of, not a great list, but a sad list of of countries and what they're doing to try to fight that?
Phil Cafaro 32:10
Well, you know, if you look at Europe, most countries there have it as their stated goal. And actually, the EU itself has it as its stated goal to have a slowly increasing population. They do not accept the population decrease that is likely around the corner. And so there are basically two kinds of policies that many countries are following. One are efforts to boost fertility. And the other is efforts to boost immigration. And there's a wide variety of fertility boosting policies, some of which seem to work, some of which don't seem to work. It turns out that just kind of paying people to have kids, sort of like giving people a kid bonus, doesn't seem to do very well. The countries that are doing the most to keep fertility rates relatively high in Europe are those countries which make it easier for women to both have kids and have a career. So if you think about France or Scandinavia, they have very generous family leave policies. They have guarantees that if a woman leaves her job to have a kid, she gets it back when she comes back in a year or two. And then there's some places have very generous daycare, etc., etc. So many countries around the world, in the Far East where they have very low fertility rates, in Europe, are doing these kinds of things. And then you have countries like let's say, the UK, especially the United States, Canada, we've tended to boost population through high rates of immigration. And there, I think, again, the arguments have been very explicit over and over again here in the United States you hear, "Well, look, we just have to bring in even more people. There are all these jobs that people aren't willing to do. In the future, we will have fewer workers. And so therefore, we have to do this."
Dave Gardner 34:07
Let's put on your ethicist hat for a minute, Phil, and I want to get your perspective about the non-baby bonus policies out there where they make it easier for families to have children. That strikes me as a tough one if you really are trying to weed out population growth-inducing policies. That that's a harder battle because it seems pretty darn humane and compassionate thing to do, those policies.
Phil Cafaro 34:33
Oh, yeah. Especially when you start talking to younger people in those societies and realize, you know, and I've been traveling back and forth to Sweden as part of this project with Frank Götmark.
Dave Gardner 34:44
Tough work.
Phil Cafaro 34:45
Tough work. Yeah. So I've been learning a little bit about Swedish society. And you know, I'm getting a sense firsthand about just how, well how much easier they make it for a young woman or a couple to have kids. How much easier that is then in the United States. They don't have to worry about losing their health insurance if they stop working at a job, they don't have to worry about having a job when they return. If a father wants to take off some time and be with young children, much easier to do that there than in the United States, you can do it and still get paid, etc., etc. So I look at all that and I say, "Well, yeah, it does boost fertility rates a little bit." But on the other hand, do we really want to make it hard? Do we want to punish young people for having children? I mean, at some level, we want that. So you're right. There's a trade off there. But I suppose it's not too much different from the trade off of saying, "Well, we could have smaller populations if we had poor sanitation. And if we randomly gave people the wrong drugs when they had serious illnesses or something." No, we don't want to cut back on population through increased mortality rates, etc. So in the same way, we want to make it possible for people to have one or two kids. Beyond that, though, you know, we might want to say things like, "Okay, for the third kid, you're not going to get some bonus, let's say, or you're not going to get the same tax break you get for the first two kids." Those can be difficult questions, though. It's interesting. I mean, there's sort of two different paradigms for how the international development community talks about these things. The current paradigm is, we just want to give people as much choice as possible. And they will then choose to have smaller families. And this will solve all our problems. So choice, choice choice. And that's going to deal with overpopulation. I'm a little skeptical of that. I think we do want to give people choice, we do want to give people resources, we certainly want to give people contraception, and all these things. At the same time, we should emphasize the responsibility aspect of it. If you have a society where giving people the choice to have as many kids as they want results in them choosing to have four kids per woman, I would argue that's a mistake. That's an irresponsible society. So where do you go with that? I mean, where I'd like to see us go is to say, "We want to further people's choices as much as possible. But we also want to emphasize that we're bumping up against limits. Let's incentivize people to have smaller families. Let's incentivize those vasectomies that some of us got after we had one or two kids. Let's, let's give people bonuses for only having one or two children."
Dave Gardner 37:43
Sounds like a pretty good answer from an ethicist. Thanks for that. Is there anything that you hope to cover that we haven't talked about? Because I'm feeling like we're close to wrap up here.
Phil Cafaro 37:52
I think we've covered it. And I appreciate the opportunity. And you know, I would just say, again, for people who are really interested in these topics, I'd encourage you to go and visit our website for the Overpopulation Project. Just google the Overpopulation Project, it'll pop right up. A lot of good resources there.
Dave Gardner 38:09
Well, thanks for that great work that you're doing, Phil, and thanks for this conversation. I really appreciate you spending time to enlighten us. I'd like to close with a quote from your review article. There is nothing a society can do to decrease its demands on the environment more effectively than decreasing its population. Period. End of sentence right there. So that does it for the Overpopulation Podcast. Be sure to visit worldpopulationbalance.org to learn more about how we can solve world overpopulation. While you're there, you can sign the Sustainable Population Pledge, listen to our podcasts, get on our email list, and even become a supporting member by making a donation to support our vital work. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. I'm Dave Gardner, reminding you we know how to solve overpopulation. We just need to get busy.
Phil Cafaro 39:05
Amen.
