Empty Planet: Preparing for the Global Population Decline

[Music] okay good evening everyone and welcome to the Center for international governance innovation or as we call it CG and my name is Bob Fay I'm the director of the global economy program here and I'd like to thank you for coming tonight and I think you're gonna find it to be a very interesting and engaging evening so before we begin I'd like to see if you would like to acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional territory of the neutral Anisha Anisha nabhi and who Dennis own 8 peeples cg is situated on the Holloman tract the land promised to the Six Nations that includes 10 kilometers on each side of the Grand River and you can see that up there so tonight we're here to listen to Darryl Bricker and John Ibbetson who will discuss their new book empty planet the shock of the global population decline so the book starts off rather bleak and in fact it makes the point that we're all actually pretty lucky to be here given some of the things that the human race has confronted over the years but now we're you know we're up to 7 billion people in counting and the book goes on to discuss how perhaps the the notion that the you that the population can double is probably optimistic but what the buck does extremely well is it goes into all the socio-economic factors that lie behind population growth and I'm an economist so when I was reading this book I thought to myself I could have written it you know I'm an economist they're discussing socio economic factors and how it affects population growth and this is something I've actually done work on but I think it's fair to say there'd be no one in the room today to listen to to the book because it would have been boring but but this book isn't boring because it's actually written in an incredibly engaging style and supplemented with very very interesting stories from a wide range of countries that are used to highlight the importance of these socio economic factors and how they differ across countries so Darren we'll discuss her book for about 40 minutes and then bet from Amonte who is a senior fellow here at cg will come up and also a professor at the Boston school and will moderate the discussion between them and then we're gonna open up a Q&A session with all of you so Daryl Bricker is the chief executive officer of Epps's public affairs which is the world's leading social and economic research firm he's also senior fellow at cg so ipsus you may not know also runs a very important survey for cg which we call the global survey on internet security and Trust and I would encourage you to go on our website and take a look at that because it's full of interesting facts the other co-author John ebbesson is a well-known columnist for The Globe Mail he's also written several several award-winning books and he's also a former senior fellow at cg so before I turn over the floor to them the other thing that was coming to my mind when I was reading this book is a story about when I was going to London England a few years ago and I don't know if it's just me but when I go through immigration in London I always have very very strange things happen and so I was going through and I get to immigration and the the person at the agent goes so mr. fait why are you here and I said well I'm actually going to the Bank of England for meetings and the guy goes house you're an economist and I go yes I am so he goes well what are you gonna be doing there and I said well I'm just gonna go talk to people about you know various things and he goes okay listen obviously didn't think that was it didn't prove that I was an economist he goes since you're an economist tell me which country has better growth prospects China or India and I don't know if you know it's an early morning flight you land at 6:00 in the morning I'm sitting there shaking my head and I'm going is this guy serious and then I realize of course it doesn't matter whether they're serious or not you always answer the question so I said off the top of my head China in the short run in India in the long run and the guy said why and I said demographics well what the book points out is that China's population will peak at 1.4 billion around 2030 and India around 1.7 billion in 2060 so five years later I'm right so so now I'd like to invite the authors to come up to the stage and and and talk about their their book thank you oh it's a long walk over here good evening everyone how are you it's great to be back here at its CG I'm also a fellow here at CG and quite honored to be so but what's especially good for me tonight and anybody here who knows me knows I'm from the kW area I'm actually from Cambridge Ontario my mom and dad are here tonight so thanks mom and dad for coming out and so it's a bit of a homecoming to talk about a global book and what this book is about is what John and I like to call vertical knowledge it's that thing that everybody knows we just all repeat it and it may not be correct and the vertical knowledge in this instance is that the world's population according to the UN is going to get to 11 point 2 billion people by the year 2100 I think John and I make a pretty convincing argument in the in the book that this is never going to happen we will probably get somewhere between 8 and 9 billion people you might argue that that's already too many people but it's certainly not 11 billion people probably around mid-century and then the human population is going to start to decline and it's not going to stop and the reason is because we've stopped having kids we'll get into a cup in a couple of minutes why that is that we stopped having kids but to have a replacing population you need to have at least 2.1 children born for each woman in a country so that means that you need a little for yourself someone to replace you someone to replace your partner and a little bit extra for those who won't or can't have kids Canada right now has a birth rate of about 1.6 China has a birth rate of 1.5 and India has a birth rate of 2.1 they're now at replacement level by the way 36 percent of the world's population lives in two countries China in India and if they're not having kids there aren't any other places that are going to have enough kids to replace them so this is going to put us in a position by the time we get to mid-century in which the population as I said is going to peak somewhere between 8 and 9 billion and then start to decline and how far the decline will go will only can depend on the number of children that we decide to have in fact most of the population growth that's taking place in the world today is coming as a result not of people being born and arriving in our population but people living longer and not leaving and the problem and the problem of course when you have a lot of people hanging around for a long time is that they're not in the particularly fertile production years of their lives in the sense that they're not having kids so we're reaching this point in human history in which the first time in any time that human beings have existed on the face of the earth and at a global level that we're actually deciding deciding to have a smaller population John and we're gonna talk a little bit later about the implications for this in terms of the environment in terms of national economies in terms of geopolitics but I think an important thing to emphasize right off the top is that and its core population is not rising for terrific reasons the reasons are all good reasons there's one one reason why population birth rates are going down well there are already about two dozen countries where who are losing population every year places in the world that you think are having lots of kids are not having lots of kids for example the birth rate for Latin America and the Caribbean all of us are everything except for the United States in Canada is 2.1 that entire region is that replacement countries like Brazil the 5th largest country in the world as is it 1.8 parts of Southeast Asia are well below replacement rate in some parts of Asia like Korea Japan Singapore Taiwan are down to one they are one full baby short of what they need to do to keep their populations going so why is this happening and why do we believe the UN is wrong in its projections and then and the single simple word for it is urbanization the United Nations believes that the pattern of birth rate decline going forward in this century will match the pattern of birth rate decline in the last you know 75 80 years it was so what happened after the Second World War up until now is going to just keep going we think that's wrong and the reason we think that's wrong and and we are channeling many demographers who think this is wrong is that urbanization is accelerating in the developing world we're already fully urban throughout the entire developed world but the developing world is urbanizing at a tremendous clip four things happen when the country becomes more urban than rural the first thing is children stop being an asset and start being a liability on the farm the kid is another you know pair of hands to work in the fields in the city the kid is just a most defeat I'm any of you who live in cities no the kid is just another mouth to feed speaking in terms of pure economics they have other advantages but just in terms of economics a second thing happens when a society goes from being mostly world to being mostly urban women acquire autonomy this happened through the course of the the developed world and it is happening at an incredible pace in the developing world women in the city have access to education systems that they don't have in the village they have access to state schools they have access to mass media in the city in a way they don't in the village they have access to other women who educate each other when they're in the city in a way that they don't when they're isolated in the village women once they have more education demand control over their lives in their bodies this happens everywhere in the world without exception there is no exception to this anywhere in the world once women to get a certain amount of education they begin to make demands one of the demands they make is they get to decide how many children they're going to have and invariably they decide to have fewer children than their mothers had the third thing that happens the power of organized religion declines every religion in the world and it's really quite remarkable there isn't one exception that I we've been able to come across every religion in the world believes that women should be subordinate to men and that women should you know have lots of children and stay at home and look after the family it's remarkable how many religions believe this would be accepted all major religions are dominated by men but one and and in the rural environment religion is powerful but once you move into the city the power of religion begins to decline we were looking at the Philippines where the Catholic Church is alarmed at the precipitous decline in Mass attendance well the Philippines is urbanizing and by the way it's fertility rate is crashing at the same time fourth and finally Klan ceases to be important when you're living in the village environment that big extended family places a tremendous pressure on you to get married to settle down to have kids to do all those things when you move to the city the power of the clan is replaced by coworkers they're the ones you spend most of your time with when was the last time one of your co-workers urged you to have a baby so urbanization produces an economic disincentive to have children it gives women power to make decisions about their bodies it weakens the power of religion and it weakens the power of the clan and all of this leads to what we are seeing and what we described in the book which is rapidly falling fertility rates throughout those parts of the world where we would think in the UN still thinks you were going to continue to see - till Atia rates and so let's talk a bit about the consequences for Daryl well actually before I get on to the consequences I just wanted to say Bob mentioned that you know if he wrote this book it would probably be pretty boring because it would be a lot of economic statistics and we've been going through a lot of numbers we do that very briefly in the book but there's no charts or graphs in the book we're very proud of that yeah we're very proud of that in fact we made that decision right at the start no charts or graphs so what does the book focus on well it focuses on these arguments but what it also is is a travelogue so John and I traveled around the world and went to various places to see what was actually happening on the ground so we went to Africa I went to Kenya went to Brazil and visited a favela went to India and went to a slum in in urban Delhi we went to a dinner party in in Brussels I was my nephew part man what'd you say John who's my nephew it was his nephew John got to call all the nice places I went to the favelas and the slums of example but it was m'as really interesting was that everything that John just said about what goes on in these communities and what's going through the minds of people when they're making decisions about their families regardless of the circumstances that we found ourselves and whether it was a dinner party in downtown nairobi which i went to or in in Korea and Seoul where John was talking to university students women university students about the future of their lives regardless of the circumstances that these folks lived in the conclusions that they were coming to were the same while there were cultural nuances that were different in different places the conclusion that people were coming to about their future was consistent and that was that in order to have a different life particularly among the women actually exclusively among the women in order to have a life that's different from the life that my mother led and the life that my grand mother led I need to have fewer kids I need to be empowered I need to be in control of what's happening in my life I need an education I need a career and I need to control those decisions about what my fam my family is going to be I recognize that I do have cultural and familial responsibilities but I'm going to interpret them in my own terms rather than the terms as John quite correctly pointed out of some form of religious beliefs or in terms of what my clan or my family tells me I have to do I'm going to empower myself and so you know when I was in a slum in Delhi sitting with did we did two focus groups in this slum listen to women talk about this and very sophisticated terms the same that I've heard in other places and were in like a place of abject poverty and listening to these women talk about their lives and how they wanted things to change and I'd see a glow under their sari I'm saying what is that what is glowing and then all of a sudden one of them reached in and pulled a smartphone out and it was in John and I talked about this afterwards it was she has the knowledge of humanity in her hands the knowledge of human history all of science everything that you could think about she has a data plan as poor she is that she's able to access this information and she can read it she can also communicate with her friends and her relatives and everybody else the way that we do but this is a person who is a fully formed you know modern person regardless of the circumstances that they're there sitting and why wouldn't she making be making decisions that are similar to the decisions that other women are making in the world and regardless of where we went we kept hearing this message over and over and over again that the story was about bringing people together in a city urbanizing and then the lives of women's changing the lives of women changing and that affecting what the future of humanity is going to be and it's that simple it's not a global decision that some you know government body is making or some you know higher authority it's these little individual decisions that are being made consistently all over the world mostly by women about the size of the families that they they want to John so let's talk a bit about the consequence of this but before we do that I've one more anecdote oh we're in Waterloo there's a fair number of people in this room who involved in public policy and one of the great examples of the law of unattended consequences in public policy was what we found in Sao Paulo so we were really curious about Brazil it's a big country and it's poor right it's quite poor the machismo culture is still very powerful men in in developing countries still want sons and they want as many children as it takes to get sons and they've possible they want more than one son for insurance so we we heard this over and over and over again women saying I want this I've seen my mother's life I don't want that life but them you know my husband the men this too is a universal constant from Seoul National University to the slums of Delhi young women don't think much of young men but that's a different book so in Sao Paulo the question is how could this big poor country with with this very male dominant culture have a fertility rate of 1.8 well below replacement rate how could that be well guess what it's been studied and there are there were two things that that I found most amazing one is soap operas electricity has been brought to the favelas so there's not going to be a TV in your sort every Shack but there's there are TVs around and women gather around the television sets in the afternoon the way my grandmother used to you know turn on as the world turns you know 50 years ago and they watch the the soaps the romanticists are called where they see independent powerful women taking control of their lives and making very strange choices about what to do with in their in their personal lives they they take that as an example and then the second one is this law of unintended consequences Brazil has universal public health care it's really bad you never spoke care and women have children young there have their first child child around 19 or 20 so there should be lots and lots of kids but the women don't want the kids the husband can come home drunk however on a Saturday night from the bar and nine months later there's a kid so what happens is and this has been very well documented the women will say to the doctor I want this to be my last pregnancy and the doctor will say well you know we can declare that this is an at-risk birth and that risk pregnancy in which case we're going to do a cesarean section and I want to do a cesarean section because I get paid a lot more for doing a cesarean section than just a natural birth and if you want while I'm there I'll do a tubal ligation it's called shutting down the factory and it is the most common form of birth control now practice in Brazil that I find just an astonishing of a public policy point of view so let's look a little bit at at the consequences on the question of the environment this is all good do not think for a minute that there's any sort of global global warming denialist element to this book at all we take this very very seriously but we are encouraged that we might be able to reshape the models to predict a nine billion max rather than an 11 billion max and that's going to be helpful down the road not now that doesn't change decisions we're making now but it could be helpful down the road also urbanization apart from all the other things that a lower population would do in terms of resource depletion and pollution of oceans and the like urbanization has the great benefit of converting marginal farmland back to bush and we've seen this in in developed countries it's really only the great a farmland now that's used where I grew up used to be farmed and it's now completely back to bush so that acts as a carbon sink and also increases biodiversity so all good news on the environmental side nothing but bad news on the economic side and the simple fact is this if you have fewer young people this year than you had last year if you have moved into a society like the two dozen already where every year there are fewer people being born that means there are fewer seven year olds and there are eight year olds there are fewer 39 year olds and there are 40 year olds you have fewer people available to pay taxes to support health care and pensions for all those old people and be you have fewer people consuming and consumption remains you know whether for good or ill the most important economic force driving a society it is young people leaving school getting a job buying the first house buying the first car getting the baby stroller the smart black dress for the office party all those things that people buy drive consumption if you have fewer people you have less consumption you have less economic growth Japan lost 450,000 people last year Japan's in about three decades now of economic stagnation caused in large measure by population decline and an aging society and then in terms of geopolitics it's a mixed bag and why don't I throw what the ovary the mixed bag over you well the the good part of it is that what do old people not don't do they don't they don't have worse you know worse or a young person's game so with the ageing of the world's population the likelihood that we're going to be resorting to the old form of methods of conflict to solve world problems is probably going to be reduced but the part that's probably going to be really interesting in terms of geopolitics is how incredibly wrong everybody who's analyzing China these days is getting it I mean I can't pick up a magazine or a book these days without reading something about the ascent of China maybe there's a moment where they spend time talking about the demographic challenge that's presented by China but rarely does anybody focus on it and the truth is with China China is in a very difficult situation when it's come got in its pop when it comes to their population the economists had the best line about it and I think we quoted in the book where we say China is going to get old before it's rich enough to be old so the Chinese population the birthrate today the UN says is about 1.5 it says it's going to increase through the course of the 20th 21st century up to about one eight by the way there's no country in the world in which that's happening so I don't know why the UN would make that prediction makes no sense so let's assume it's 1.5 as a reasonable number big study came out in The Lancet magazine in November in which they had a whole series of it's like five pages of mice type of the demographers that worked on on this analysis of global population trends they have it at 1.4 and with a number like that the expectation is that by 2030 the Chinese population is going to start to decline remember the average of the median age of a person in China today is 37 back in 1950 the average Chinese person lived to the age of 42 by the 20 by 2030 they're going to live to the age of 80 we've increased human life in China by you know almost a while actually a hundred percent we've increased it by that much over the space of less than a century it's going to be a very old population and it's going to be a shrinking population the UN's estimates right now is there are that it's going to shrink by 300 million people I've seen estimates in other places by very credible demographers that have it closer to about half a billion or 600 million people by the end of the century the possibility that the Chinese population is going to be the same size as the American population is very real but who is going to be the emerging demographic superpower when John mentioned geopolitics in all of this two countries number one is India India has a very young population that is going to continue to grow for the foreseeable future but even in India the population fertility rate replaced is a replacement level now so the young population will continue to increase the the Indian population but also increasing longevity in India will increase the Indian population so if India hasn't already passed China in terms of population size today it will in the next couple of years and through the course of the 21st century India is going to become the dominant as bob was talking about Bobby the dominant population power but as India is growing so is America America's birth rate is below two it's about one point depend the estimates you look at 1.7 to 1.9 but the thing that America has going for it that neither India or China have going for them is immigration so the United States takes in about a million immigrants per year that's legal immigrants per year the demographic suicide for the United States would be to stop that they unfortunately have a president these days who seems to think that that's a very good idea there is a very wrong idea the chance for this to be America's century due strictly to demographics and an ability to maintain a youthful and growing population in comparison to major superpowers like Russia which is in the same position as China and India which is going to obviously eclipse China but is also going to start to come back is very much present so getting the immigration question right in the United States is not just a temporary political situation it's also their future if they can get it right the geopolitics works very much to America's advantage if they get it wrong they could find themselves in the same position as the other superpowers John by the way this is the point at which the organizers of this event receive a rude shock we had promised we would speak for 40 minutes we're not going to speak for 40 minutes I can't even stand us for 20 I mean it's a and and the the reason is that we have done this together and separately before invariably we find that there is a long line of people that microphones who really want to express their strong opinions about some of the conclusions in this book and and ask questions so in order to maximize Q&A time which is is usually the most fun part I think we'll try to bring it in at half an hour which means there just a couple of things left to wrap up what if you if you want to keep your population stable right you're not trying to become you know it was a sub-saharan Africa which is sort of the one place left on earth where there is still very high fertility rates though those fertility rates too are going down those societies are urbanizing one quick stat we went to Kenya as Darryl said in Kenya they have about ten years in now to a program that mandates elementary education for females so the girls must go up to grade eight and last year it was actually the book it was already under presses when the story came out last year was the first year in which as many girls as boys sat the grade eight graduation exams and by the way the girls did better than the boys though that's no surprise and guess what the fertility rate in Kenya is coming down fast so if you want to keep your society stable let us say you don't want the economic consequences of population decline you don't want to grow crazy either but you'd like to get up somewhere around to there are two ways to do it Darryl's described one which is immigration doesn't change your fertility rate but people come into a place the babies that aren't born every year Canada by the way which we think is the most successful country in the world in terms of we're a little biased in terms of immigration we're going we're on our way to 50 million by the middle of the century we'll have passed Italy and Spain and be closing in on Germany by the middle of the century so immigration if you can make it work some countries handled it better than others is a natural way to replace babies that are missing cuz of a low fertility rate the immigrants themselves by the way do not have higher fertility rates immigrants who come to our country I'm adopted the fertility rate of the country they've entered not of the country that they left so you can do it that way there is a theory that you can do it through neethu lists policies that is you pay couples to have children you increase benefits for for paternity leave you you do all all the sorts of things that you can in order to encourage a couple to have that third child this doesn't work you can do it bit the sort of the program's themselves aren't beneficial I'm you know I think the paternity or family leave is great we've moved in the book that it should be mandatory fifty fifty men and women we you know child supports are great supports for child care are great daycare in the office all those things are great so that if you want to have another child the supports are there for you to have another child but the state cannot compel you to have a child they cannot bribe you to have a child for a reason that's called the low fertility trap which is simply that when you get into a society where one or two kids is the norm you get into a society where one or two kids is the norm you it's just what everybody expects and and society adapts the school system and the hospital health care system everything adapts to the idea that parents will have one or two children you don't often just think about if one of if one of your friends said we're getting married and we want to have five or six kids that would be interesting right here is it what really five or six why is that well I'm from five my partners from eight so you know these expectations change the low fertility trap is also the result of why you have a child changing your not having a child because the state says it's your duty to have a child the army needs you know men to fight you're not having a child because God says you must be fruitful and multiply you're not having a child because your family is pushing you to have a child you're having a child because you want a child you're having a child and this is raise my eyebrows but in the sense you're having a child as a lifestyle choice you and your partner decide that your lives would be more rich more rewarding more fulfilling if the two of you brought a child into the world and raised that child it's infinitely more important than you know whether you go to Ecuador this year or what kind of furniture you want for the living room but it is a choice about what will fulfill you in your life and again most people find that they are very quickly fulfilled one or two is usually enough so the consequences of this I think down the road are going to be fascinating we worry a bit about the loss of creativity that having fewer young people every year will have because you know trust me I know I younger people are more creative than older people the the innovation the entrepreneurship that is so powerful among the young there may be less of it that said in the great scheme of things were not that worried about what will happen to economies over the course of the century I talked from an economist once and I gave him the whole thing the whole this is gonna be terrible decide that I have this awful it's decades of decline and he said probably not and I said why yeah these things have a way of working themselves out and that is a very powerful economic argument these things have a way of working themselves out and anyway there will still be a tremendous amount we suspect of creativity of excitement in places like Mumbai and Lagos where there will still be large young populations and we may find that these are the new centers of art and music and innovation and science in the middle and later decades of the century we also think that migration itself is soon will in the midterm be coming to an end Canada used to bring a lot of people from China now not so much China is reaching developed world status it has an aging population there's tremendous the Chinese don't feel a tremendous need to come to Canada India is now a replacement rate we may find over time that there'll be less desire on the part of Indians to leave India to come to Canada Philippines as I said is urbanizing its fertility rate is falling so you mean you may we may find you know in a couple of decades where you actually actually have to go and beat the bushes to get people to come to your country and we think this geriatric piece is as it's called is going to ultimately be a great thing if migrations well as will decline and and and we will be a more peaceful place whatever else we are we wonder though about how it will feel humanity has never decreased its population it might have happened during the Black Death or during the you know the the horrible wave of deaths that took place when the old world met the new world there might have been a temporary decline in the global population then we don't we don't know but we have never decided to decline we have never decided that we will deliberately because of the choices we made become a species of whom there are fewer every year what will that feel like what will it be like to live in a world in the end you know someone born today will reach their 30s in a world we think where the UN is reporting there were fewer people here this year than there were last year and there will be fewer people next year and that will never ever stop we think again it will be a world it would be a world at peace we hope that it will be a world that continues to be prosperous it will be a world that is healthier in terms of the air and the water and the land but we also suspect that it might be a world in which a poet first notices that for the first time in the history of our race humanity feels old and I think we should stop it there and and get the conversation drop the mic John thank you folks thank you [Applause] so thank you that was entertaining and informative and you left us on a good note so that's good because the word empty planet is a scary title in some way but it's something we're not used to right and I think this is what you've painted out it's not just the UN think of our pop culture we think of zombies we think of you know overpopulation they're gonna come and after us I'm gonna have to find some way to send out the herd right the Avengers that else is wrong we didn't need to wipe out half the gallon good to know but you guys are going against the grain here there's a lot of people out there who are going to basically challenge your numbers and challenge your assumptions and what I'd love to know is what would you tell those you know mythical economists and demographers out there that got it all wrong I mean why should we believe you as opposed to them well I think it's a pretty easy answer look at the data I mean that's what we did we looked at the data not just us but many many many many other demographers looked at the data and said this is not settled science that there's still a debate that we can have about the numbers and if anybody wants to go through the modeling I'd be happy to do it with you I didn't bring my my abacus with me tonight but we can certainly talk about how the u.s. numbers with Darrel he always wins except at the poker table it's and anyway John's very good actually but we have data we've been through the numbers we know what it looks like but not just us many many many credible demographers have been through it and are asking the same questions and I would suspect that sometime during the course of this year if not next the UN will be gradually starting to reduce their estimates of what the future population is going to look like John but John and I weren't content with that we actually traveled around and looked and actually we're happy to report that there the book is riddled with mistakes especially in terms of fertility rates so though we were already on the presses when Darryl alluded to it The Lancet produced a massive port with hundreds of democracy in in in I think more than hundred fifty countries around the world and it was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and in essence what they were saying is we we want to look at the number as I selves we don't want to just rely on the United Nations Population divisions we want to go look at the numbers ourselves and almost everywhere they produce numbers that were not only lower than the numbers that the UN was using their numbers are lower than our numbers so for example the UN I think when we went to press the UN had India at 12.4 for till you rate of two point four it's the don't own the Gates Foundation research that said no it's already two point one have you any idea how that what that does to global population projections when India's fertility rate is adjusted from two point four to two point one the global the UN has the global fertility rate at two point four right and Lancet has a two point three I'm sure that's the only 1/10 of a baby but that's the entire population of the earth so you know I have admit when The Lancet article came out I was reading frantically at the beginning and I just kept going no our numbers higher than theirs our numbers higher than theirs if we actually went in to do a second edition we would be adjusting all of our numbers down rather than out so yeah I'm there's already lots of rumors if you live in the very small confined world of statistical demography or population DeMars of my world that the UN the UN updates its numbers every two years I believe there's going to be a nineteen update and that this will be the first one in which the UN begins to to reduce its expectations they're not going to go from eleven point two billion to nine billion overnight but they're going to start saying our median variant is it's going to be is now how it justed downwards and I suspect I won't be around to see it but somewhere on 2050 we will all meet at and and yeah so so the UN the way they do this they're eleven point two billion models based on the idea that gradually we're going to get to a replacement rate in terms of population but they say if we're half a child higher than that half a child like 0.5 of a child and they'll have children are born but half a kid higher than that the global population will be almost 16 billion people if we're half a child lower than that it will be about what it is today by the end of the century ok so just going based on what The Lancet did for and just not looking at the global average but looking at the biggest countries that's where they see the biggest discrepancies so we're already based on that eleven point two billion variant their median variant for the UN what The Lancet has would already move that down well and that's based on today's data not based on all the cultural factors that John and I found when we were doing research for this book and all the other things that we were told by other demographers as we as we travel around the world and we interviewed them so I'm quite confident that we're on track to where we're what we're suggesting in the book and by the way it's not that the UN completely disagrees with what we have they just have the peak getting a little higher a little later and declining less they also see in the future that the population is going to decline so as an academic I have to ask this is this a part of a story of the fact that you have people sort of an HQ the UN doing this tabulations but just aren't going to the ground and talking to people that's what The Lancet said right Melinda and Bill Gates Fund which of course spends a lot of effort and money to actually have that local knowledge it actually goes into the field and supports the kind of research to find these kinds of things and this is really a sad I think state of where you know we cannot predict the world from our offices as academics good academics journalists we need to go to the field and talk to people because it's a totally different story when you get into their homes and into their into their favelas as you pointed out and we by the way we interviewed John Wilmot who's the director of the UN PD I mean here in this position is fully represented in the book so if you can read his take on it and decide that we're wrong and he's right but but and and and there are all sorts of people of different explain different motives for why the UN is doing this we like to stay in our lane one of the questions we keep getting asked is seven billion already way too much you know are we not already doing tremendous damage to the planet are we already not at risk a huge you know damage economic environmental damage due to climate change but that's not something we dispute for a moment we're only trying to get out this one idea which we think is a very big one you think you're gonna go from seven to eleven you're not you're gonna go from seven to at most nine you think the population is gonna grow for the whole century no it's not it's gonna peak around mid century and then start to go down just offering what we hope is a convincing argument for those two ideas is the whole purpose of the book we hope that we many other books that then spin out the various implications for this but we we as Darryl likes to put it we like to stay in our lane we just wanted to argue this one thing on the ground in the in the places where it's happening so I want to tease that out because reason why you want to stay in your lane is that's very political right to suggest that the population is not going to be as high as it is because part of the challenge of course is that we have a lot of we do have climate change deniers we do have people who say that this is not happening and in fact a lot of the you know Pro environmentalist and the environmental lobby is very much worried about the state of the world if we get to these enormous numbers I mean the carrying capacity back to a sort of Malthusian type of argument is one that suggests that it's going to be a very scary world if we're one where we're all fighting for natural resources for food for the rest of it it's that kind of doomsday scenario that many people are afraid of and of course you were at the outset of being very clear that you're not trying to support a climate change denier because I think that's a really important subtext to us all okay so so what our point of view on this is yes you can have all of these discussions but on climate change if your principal argument is that it is created by the activities of human beings which we both believe and I think the science is settled on that if you change the denominator in the equation the number of human beings what does that have on your estimate now I think that anybody who's a reasonable scientist can have that conversation leaving aside all the politics so how do you adjust your estimates based on adjusting the denominator in the equation it's simple division we all learned how to do it when we were in school that's all we've done the fact that what's happening in the environment is happening we're not questioning whatsoever and if people believe that simply questioning that one point is giving solace to people who are climate change deniers you can come to John and I will absolutely tell you that is not what we're saying what we're saying is get the right facts make come to the right conclusions and let's have a reasonable rational argument about this it the implications are ultimately political I agree with that but you know you're entitled to your opinions and your political beliefs which are not entitled to your own facts I mean the I we all know the IPCC numbers but well we're we have to be a 2030 and we're we have to be a 25th at 2050 especially on the 2030 number arguments have no impact on that at all right what's happening between now and 2030 everyone agrees - we're talking about what there will be looking like 20 years after that and it'll be a different world but this is not an excuse at all for stepping back in in efforts to to mitigate global warming and to combat climate change well and also I think another perhaps maybe not just political message that policy master that comes out of your book is that immigration is good immigration is necessary particularly for some Western countries indeed as you said there may be in fact one day we get to a point where there is a fight for for immigrants to come so what do you say to the to the naysayers out there because there's a lot of naysayers you alluded to Donald Trump in the White House and certainly there's a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric coming out of the White House at the moment the picture that you painted of this this declining population is very reminiscent me of sort of Germany today and of course Angela Merkel a few years ago took a big gamble and and you know allowed more than a million refugees to come into the country and today there is the alternative for Deutschland inside the Parliament so you know there are a lot of naysayers so there is a rise of global populism today so how does how does I mean how do you square that or if I'm a what's the you know what would you say to the naysayers out there that say you know what immigrations not working well I think the most important point and again it's no coincidence as we say the two Canadians wrote this book Canada gets the immigration right all right it kind of gets immigration better than than any other country for one reason and we don't need to get into the history of it multiculturalism works more easily for us than it does for some other countries China just does not want immigrants Hungary just does not want immigrants and that's a cultural decision that the Chinese have made the Hungarians have made and they will live with the consequences of that but we are a nation that has always accepted immigrants and indeed we are a nation that has always gone out and sought out immigrants you know Clifford Sifton who we mentioned in the book you know in the 1890s population decline was a big issue in Canada people were leaving Canada in moving the United States and it was siftin who said we're gonna go into Eastern Europe and we are going to recruit immigrants to come to Canada and we're going to convince them to do this and a lot of people said no no no they'll never integrate their Eastern Europeans they don't speak our language they're all Catholics we don't want these people but Canada needed them and we filled the prairies with immigrants from from Eastern Europe as one of my students said I taught a course on this that Otto I said no Clifford Sifton no wayne gretzky and so that's that's our ethos and the important thing is always remember that ethos countries that bring in large numbers of people for purely humanitarian reasons get into trouble because after a certain point you start to get that kickback right you bring any minute now I'm not in any way criticizing Angela Merkel for bringing in a million refugees that was a terrible global crisis Canada did its part too but you bring in too many refugees you get alternative for Germany they always the point is to push home the idea that we are bringing in because they have the education and the skills and the use to power our economy it's not some global concept look at your workplace look at your street look at your community what impact are immigrants having on it well they're they're owning the businesses they are they are diversifying their workplaces they are producing new ideas they are growing our economy and if you keep immigration always focused on that yes we bring in about ten percent of our intake every year is humanitarian and that's important but if you always always focus on the fact that this is our own naked self-interest to bring these people in then you will have a greater consensus in support of immigration that if you just appeal to the better angels of people's nature so I would just add I mean this is one of the issues that the government's having right now so when we go out and do our polling yes I'm in the polling business and we ask people what are the most important issues facing the country today number four on the list of you know 30 things that we look at is immigration and that's not not because people are happy with what's going on and the problem that we have with immigration right now is a lot of people's perceptions are being driven by what's happening at the Quebec border now the government can say what it likes about being our need to be compassionate but people do not feel that this is working the pictures are horrible it doesn't look like a system that's under control and when you get the provincial government here in Ontario and you get the city government saying that many many of the places for homeless people in shelters are being taken up by people who are refugees alleged refugees coming over the border and that you know we have no way of controlling this that's a big problem for our immigration system because people have to have the view that it is well controlled that we're being selective about who's coming into the country and there are people who are actually going to make a positive contribution that's not to say that the people coming over from Quebec or over the Quebec border right now will not make a positive contribution but that's not the type of immigration that Canadians have basically been raised to support so this is when it becomes a problem and when then the government turns it into an issue of your compassion or whether you're you know political movement is racist or whatever that's when we get into some very dangerous political territory in this country as long as we state going down the lane that John was talking about before previously that's when we're successful when we go down that other lane that starts looking like Italy Spain France the UK you want to know why we had brexit brexit was driven basically by people's attitudes towards immigration and cultural change absolutely you can argue the economics all you want but I was there I was doing the polling I can tell you what it is and it would be the same if we held the referendum again thank you so one other big theme that you know comes out of your book so for me the environmental message was was there was very strong clearly the the challenge that this would face on our policy on immigration is obvious but one thing that I'd love for you to tease out for me as well is why is it so bad if we consume less I mean could we think about this you know economic you know we talked about this empty planet and you certainly provided not quite a doomsday but sort of the the negative effects of this on our economy but tell us why is that bad I mean what's so bad about having less black dresses being bought to that cocktail party that you mentioned there John I mean you know could the planet not afford to have us buying less anyways could we think about maybe this is time for us to rethink of the way that an economy a healthy economy is actually even measured and thought of you see this Lane you see a staying right in this Lane I mean these are important important questions is liberal democracy inextricably tied to capitalism must capitalism be inextricably tied to constant growth are there alternative economic models what would those economic models look like those are fascinating questions I can't wait to read the books by those who choose to write those books we are not questioning the the you know whether we need to go to a neo Marxist or economic model we don't have opinions about that always say what we do but we're not we're not we talked about it all the time but not in the book all we're saying is in the current globalized economic system which is capitalist and which is based on consumption based growth the economic consequences of having fewer young people are as follows that's all we want to do and the other argument you know whether the alternatives like that's that's that's for another book but I did have a specific point I wanted to make on this question and it's something that I deal with in my day job which is people who are marketers who are obsessed with youth this idea that all of consumption all of all tastes everything that has to be made is made for young people that's because we never really actually think of older people as a consumer market and I think that one of the things that will come out of this process of adjusting to a newer population is we're gonna have to start thinking about what a consumer market looks like so one of my favorite things one of my favorite groups that I present in front of and I've talked about these data with our restaurant tours Restaurant Association here in Canada and I you know there's endless numbers of consultants and restaurant experts that get up and talk about what you have to do in your restaurant to attract young people well let me help you out with something there's not as many as you think there are secondly they have no money why do they have no money because all of the older people who are here in this audience still live in Waterloo didn't sell your house and are moving and same thing in Toronto same thing in Vancouver same thing in any place that as a desirable real estate market people are living to an older age now they're living well they're living in a wealthy way they actually are sitting on the wealth of the country the older population it's not the younger population so to restaurant tours you know when I say to them turn down the music so somebody can have a conversation [Laughter] turn up the lights so I can see my menu maybe make the font a little bit bigger so I can read what's on it make it possible for me to put my Walker my scooter my whatever it is somewhere open up those Bank cats and chairs so they're not so slippery and they're easier to get in and out of and put some things on the menu that I actually might like to eat and maybe I'll come to your rescue Darryl was like that when he was 32 my mom and dad will tell you that I was like that when I was 20 okay but you pointed out something very interesting of course but Darryl so I mean Japan Japan is the quintessential older population at the moment and so let me ask you what is the downside I mean there is some socio not socio cultural challenges here now I mean I was once to talk about demography I think the most interesting statistic I once read was that you know most Italians will not know the concept of a cousin soon and you know for us are this quintessential you know Italian families about you know uncles and aunts and tons of cousins this big long table our tables are shrinking right I mean we think about the family unit it's becoming smaller and smaller think I'll write a book about it it's this one no it's not up there that's my face so Japan right Japan is a great example of where we are also now in another crisis which is also a lot of elderly people who don't have people to care for them and this is this is the you know obviously once the the the we decrease it our population we have less and less dependents who take care of us in our old age and this is becoming a challenge of course for elder care as well so this is something else that we have to think about is how are we going to you know design our society design our place I mean you know you mentioned the restaurant I don't think that's not that's a true thing this is the reality of where we're going we have to start thinking about that so what what is this what would you say to policy makers and you know everything from urban planners to to to politicians about what they need to do to prepare for that because that is coming I think the number one issue that we're going to be facing in this country going forward when it comes to urban planning any sort of design issues as mobility and the reason is because older people are populating our cities and our suburbs they're not moving and they're less likely to drive cars and we're not building transit to accommodate them we're not building infrastructure to accommodate them instead what we're doing is building bike lanes for nobody to use oh dear well let me just give you a couple of statistics so you understand the median age of a Canadian today is 41 years of age eighty percent of the Canadian population growth in the last twenty years has been in a car commuting community that's the truth so what are we doing for people who live in Agincourt what are we doing for people who live in kitchener-waterloo who have to get into Toronto what are we doing for anybody who has to drive into the City of Toronto because we built no infrastructure for them I have nothing against bike lanes they're fine but that's not that's not a mobility plan we need a mobility plan in this province in the City of Toronto in this country and every major city in the world is going to be dealing with it and simply painting lines on a road for people who are going to ride bicycles in a country in which six months of the year you can't do it anyway doesn't sound to me like an adequate transportation policy so you know don't worry about the issue of bicycles start worrying about the issue of how you get people from Newmarket into Toronto every day because that's the problem that we're really facing in this country that's the mobility problem and when you start thinking about bike lanes maybe we should have them available for people who take scooters how are people going to get around to their doctor's appointments how are they going to get around to various but they're not taking bicycles why are you making it harder for them to park they don't have a lot of choices we're not building transit for these people that's the new population that's the population of our country it's older the average Canadian is 41 years of age now as I said so let's not let's get real there's not a lot of dis in the book actually but there should have been I got a whole chapter unfortunately my next book actually I talked about unfortunately the co-author is partner owns talltrees cycles yeah is a bicycle shop and wants to stay married so but I think you know I do agree with the economists who said these things have a way of working themselves out I mean uber and lyft are taking up part of that challenge but there's still cars and car and ride-sharing once we move to fully autonomous cars may take care of these things you'll do trade themselves out I think one thing that is permanent though and that will not change is the bay emptying out of rural environments I mean you can't go a month now without a story about a village for sale somewhere in Europe by the way you could spend the latest yeah there's one there was a forty four forty five thousand bucks gets you six houses the entire village in a de Pape you later part of Spain there's also a village in Sicily for sale so and we're seeing this in Canada too obviously urbanization only goes in one direction and there's no way to stop that because I think at a fundamental level people want to live in places where services are available where jobs are available you can boutique it right you could make your a small town desirable because I'm from Gravenhurst it's on a lake so we're gonna be fine the lake is gonna take care of Gravenhurst other places set themselves retirement communities and and and that makes some sense as to there are communities that are attractive to entrepreneurs who don't want to live in a city but who are artists who would rather live in a rural environment but in the long run this only goes in one direction these megacities are going to get mega and these suburbs are going to get even bigger because the number of people who are coming to us from parts of the world where they lived in cities and one in cities and the numbers of us who are living in rural environments although they're precious few of those left but can't find jobs in those rural environments and move to the cities will continue so EMA in Japan they are putting mannequins up in some villages just to create the illusion that people are actually sitting on those tables yeah it's not a joke is it's actually so what does this mean for our food supply I mean is this also going to be and you mentioned earlier that some arable land is now switching back to bush yes that's good for the overall obviously situation with our climate but it also has a negative effect on the food supply does it not well what's happened in the agriculture industry but you can just look at Canada as an example we're much much more efficient in producing food today than we've ever been every year we get more efficient at doing it most of the farming that the thing that's really changed in farming is a switch from basically farming businesses away from family farms and we can say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but farming businesses are more efficient for producing food than family farms and that balance keeps getting greater and greater difference keeps getting greater and greater every year so actually what's happening as the land that we actually are required we require to produce the food products that our population is going to need is actually getting smaller even if our population is growing a bit and this is true globally again we don't want to get into a debate about you know genetically modified foods or corporatization of agricultural sector but I want but one thing we point out is because we there's a whole chapter on the nemeth uzi ins right so all the way back to Thomas Malthus who said that you know there would have to be endless oscillations of the population with population crashes and poverty and and and death and starvation and we remember Paul Ehrlich to the 1960s for this Population Bomb by the 1980s we would be in a post-industrial wasteland the Club of Rome in the 1970s there are books out right now that talk about massive population growth and the you know the terrible impact that they're going to have and again you know we we don't all we want to say is in terms of our ability to feed ourselves and sustain a higher population that's not an issue right we sustained a 1 billion we sustained 2 billion we are sustaining 7 billion there are environmental consequences to that absolutely but there has not been a famine anywhere in the world since the 1990s that was not induced by its own government or by other governments waging war all famine is the result of geopolitical action now not the result of desertification or drought or anything else we can feed 7.2 billion fine I suspect if we are completely wrong and we get to 11 billion just in terms of agricultural capacity we'll be fine at 11 billion - we have always found ways to improve agricultural productivity much quicker than population growth not and not talking about the environmental consequences of that just our agricultural couple the caveat there is a that assumes that we're gonna stick to more of a plant-based diet certainly if we all move towards meat eating diet as many are saying now increasingly is happening in particularly in China as middle class goes up then we're in a problem because of course the amount of arable land that an animal takes is far more than a plant-based diet unless we're making meat in a lab my partner's my partner's vegetarian I heard it's great it's great it's great first time he tasted beef in 30 years that's right that's right okay final theme gender because you have a really interesting female middle-aged guys are gonna ask us well I find you as feminist I have to point a liberal feminist in this book you know very traditional Western liberal feminists because there's a lot of gender conversation in this book and I think it's really interesting and again as I we talked a sort of offline earlier you know I see a lot of the you know the challenges that many of the women that you had a chance to meet with talk about which is you know it's increasingly more difficult to have children to have lots of them they you want to give them a better quality of life certainly urbanization doesn't make it easy there is a great theme in your book about female empowerment that I must say really you know spoke to my heart and I'd love for you to just comment a little bit about some of these vignettes and stories of the great women that you met across the world because there's many of them in this book but if I could give you an opportunity to just give us a few that stands out that really made you think AHA that's that's really talked about India and we talked about Brazil the other one I think that when we were writing it at the time both of us it really gave us a bit of a start was Kenya and Kenya is still a very traditional country when it comes to the issue of courtship so the way things happen in Kenya is you really don't go out and find your loved match it's still very much arranged marriages dowry czar paid by the the husband's family to the wife's family but when you get into the culture of how dowry is work and how mating works in in Kenya you soon discover that even in the most traditional cultures the effect is to push marriage later in a person's life and a push child production later into a person's life and the reason is because the state in Kenya is basically seen as a place where corruption takes place it's not a place where you go like in our country if you needed to get welfare support or healthcare support or educational support it's it's it's a place where corruption takes place so your social safety net your the thing that you rely on to make your life possible is family families clans tribes then they divide it up in those kinds of ways and what really is the essential mission of every young person in the in that type of a family environment is to strengthen that social safety net on behalf of the family which means that if you're a woman getting paid considerable as much money as you can get or whatever the the payment is is usually by the way in livestock for your marriage to somebody and for a man being able to demonstrate that you can support somebody at the level that they deserve to be supported at and add to the family network well for an urbanizing country that's increasingly moving towards capitalism and Western business that means moving from the countryside moving to the city getting an education getting a job demonstrating that you can put together the wealth to pay for a dowry which means now you're now moving into your late 20s in the early 30s and for women because you want to make a contribution beyond just having children but you want to make a contribution of the social safety net you have to get an education and and get married in a later age so when we'd interview women in Kenya they would be talking to us in very similar ways to somebody if I had interviewed them in Canada except they feel this tremendous obligation to support their family and to make sure they're worth whatever it is that they need to either pay or be paid as a result of this whole cultural practice of people getting together and that was fascinating to me I'd never encountered that the interesting thing was when we went to India it was the exact opposite so the bride price for the dowry was paid actually from the bride's family to the husband's family but a very similar kind of process went on because he couldn't rely on the state infrastructure you had to had to strengthen their family then what what I wasn't prepared for and I don't think John was either was how that had the same effect as getting and pushing terms of pushing back marriage and having kids in a person's life the same way that it was doing it in in a western country like Canada I would add to two very quick points and then we can open it up though first was what an optimistic story this is it is fundamentally an optimistic story a woman in the United States in 1800 will have on average seven children a woman in the United States in 1900 would have on average four so the fertility rate almost halved in the 1800s that's when women began to have property rights women first began to get an education the fertility rate in the United States in the 1950s was just over 3 during the baby boom by the 1970s it was down to 2 this was where the sort of the first wave of emancipation the arrival of the of the of the pill of the great increased participation by women in the workforce by the 1990s it had dropped below the replacement rate and in the United States and and the most the rest of the world so this was a hundred and seventy year prior not all two centuries of steady but slow progress in which women went from having no rights of any kind whatsoever to having something you'd formerly at least something approaching full equality the developing world is doing it in a single generation they are moving with incredible speed and that can only mean that the rights of women in those developing countries are also going to increase at a much faster rate than they increased in the past again you know as many Kenyan girls are getting grade eight as Kenyan boys the other thing I noticed and this is purely anecdotal so I you know I wouldn't stress it but if you talked to university students in Seoul and only women university students in Seoul how many kids do you want to have one or none I'm not getting married well why not because and this data to prove this Kenyan men do less housework Korean men do less housework than any other men anywhere in the world with the possible exception of Japanese men at least in the developed world than Japanese men and I said but you know come on your your graduate students at Seoul National University the guys that you meet are going to be much more enlightened they're going to be much more millennial guys and then they said well not so much they claim they are but not so much and anyway you don't just marry a guy in fear you marry the guy's mother and you know the mother-in-law's would freak out if we asked our husbands to you know change the diapers and take time off work so they were saying you know rather than go through all of that they'd rather just not get married or get or get married very late and have you're just one child and how close was that to the women in the slum in New Delhi our husbands are useless they come they they only work when they want to they spend all the money on drink and gambling and then they come home and they want sex this is not the life we want well the life we want is one where there are you know at most two children like after us when we get old and and we have freedom an opportunity to live our own lives rather than just be you know caregivers I need my own money so I can have some rights and I thought you know what it doesn't matter where you are in the world if you get women away from men and get them talking off the record they all say the same thing I we didn't do it in Canada so I couldn't possibly say sounds like you guys did some counselling at the same time as a book okay we're gonna open it up for questions but one last just final thought are we gonna be a lonely place though I mean as our population is shrinking and that you know metaphoric table is shrinking and we have less and less people on it now we're getting ready for literally not quite an empty planet but at least an empty solitude life well John and I are talking about our next project and that's one of the things that we want to take a look at so what are the implications of some of the things that we're talking about an empty planet and not so much just about economics or whatever I mean anybody can do that what we're really interested in is how people are doing what culture is gonna be like how people are going to live together how families are gonna operate what's what what's what's you know love romance going to look like in a world like that now we're not going to be so lonely in the sense that we're all going to be living in cities but the fastest-growing household type in the world today is people living on their own yeah at the beginning of life and at the end of life so it's going to be a very very different society based on the kinds of people that are going to exist on the face of the earth in the way that they are choosing to live together you can have a really dystopic view of that in fact we there's a tremendous amount of information out there that's pretty dystopic about that I think John and I our view is you know what there's some green shoots of opportunity out there that we see what the potential positive way forward is going to be and and we talk about it a bit in this book but I do not see it as doom and gloom I actually see it as just a humanity in transition and there will be as John said previously we will find a way okay so let's open up for questions thinking come on down to a couple of mics on either side my craft and up in yellow because this is they have really good acoustics here oh it's all yes sir yeah the blue shirt yeah go ahead yes it's a there's a quick and easy way to answer that there are there are Muslim countries that have high fertility rates but they tend to be impoverished and strife-torn so Iran for example is a 1.7 Iran is well below replacement rate today SIA is that replacement rate Egypt is coming down Malaysia is that replacement rate Indonesia is above replacement rate but not much I think it's it's about 2.3 or 2.4 so you see fertility rates coming down in Muslim countries where there is a developing economy a growing middle class increased opportunity for women to have education where you have still the really dysfunctional numbers are where you have really dysfunctional countries Iraq Syria Tunisia Libya places like that but there's there is no real difference between let's say Indonesia and the Philippines both are ARCA pelagic countries with that are with developing economies high level of poverty but increasing urbanization and as a result quickly declining fertility rates and there is no evidence that I have ever seen that Muslim fertility rates are any higher in Western countries in fact I know they are then they are in than any other group in other words it doesn't matter where you come from when you come to Canada or Belgium or Sweden you will adopt the fertility rate of that country at least within one generation do that in fact there's even strange and bizarre evidence that and this was done in Belgium so there's a large Moroccan population in Belgium the Moroccan birth rate in Belgium is the same the Moroccan Belgium birth rate in Belgium is the same as the European origin Belgium yeah birth rate but it's also appears to be going down in Morocco and there's some anecdotal evidence that Moroccans living in Morocco seeing that their cousins are living good lives in Belgium with you know with 1.5 are having fewer kids back in Morocco that I that that is more like dollar than real but in terms of hard evidence no as long as the country is reasonably stable and educates its women that country is a birth rate goes down it doesn't matter what the cultural religion is excellent presentation I had a couple of points I just wanted to ask you about number one it was comforting to hear you mention that as the population gets older that Wars may possibly in decline I think I understood you correctly when you said that but what I'm wondering is who decides who starts wars does that have anything to do with the age of the people in a country or is it controlled much more by leaders who for various reasons put in place and make their own decisions and secondly even if people lose their ability to fight wars physically we've moved toward or moving toward unfortunately a kind of fighting of wars which is going to be carried on through drones already is for that matter but where artificial intelligence will play a much bigger role so I'm just wondering quite honestly whether you're simply perhaps a little too optimistic about that scenario my question my second question was concerning migration and I think you mentioned too that we would perhaps see a tapering off or an ending of migration but I wonder if you'd comment a little bit on climate driven migration with the warming of the world's climate and what effects that's going to have the third point I think best man you mentioned it food I believe I've read recently that we waste about 40% of the food that we produce in Canada for example so indeed we seem to have a great opportunity by better use of our food resources to deal indeed with a much bigger population or a population even if population to clients I mean we have ways offsetting that thank you okay so I'll deal with the first two and if you want to deal with the third one I can deal with all you deal with all fee okay so on the first one first one bring up my phone go ahead first one geriatric piece the John's gonna tweet I guess geriatric piece I mean that's not even our idea I mean that's something that a lot of people have been talking about there's a really good book that just came out by Paul Moreland who actually reviewed our book in the global mail on the impact of demographics on politics and this is one of his big arguments which is that if you go and you look at the median age of places that have conflicts they always have younger ages so as older ages you know as populations get older the ability to wage war but also the desire to wage worse tends to decline I'm not arguing that generals happen to be older than soldiers but if you don't have soldiers it kind of makes it hard to occupy the other country otherwise you kind of lose so no I think that as the population ages the way that that way of solving problems is going to become less in terms of migration the question was of climate change climate change yeah I looked at and so I'm this is something I spent a fair amount of time on looking at refugee populations in the world today there are none that the UN is actually declaimed as claimed as climate change refugees there are none in the world right now that doesn't mean that there won't be but it's not a large source of refugee populations the biggest source of refugee populations in the world today are basically those that are created by political instability in war almost all of the refugees if you just shut down a few difficulties in a few places in the skin in this world we'd have almost none and that's obviously in places like South Sudan and other conflict states in Africa and also what's going on on Syria and Afghanistan that's where almost all of the world's refugees come from and that's not being driven by climate change now the Sahel is obviously an area of Africa where this could become a problem there's places in the Middle East where this could become a problem there's places in Asia that you know could be underwater where it's becoming a problem but today they're not really sources of refugees or at least not declare it as or defined as refugees the last one on the waste of food just shows you that there's another potential way that we could by working a little bit smarter helped to deal with this population increase that's going to go up by another billion people if we've you know 40 percent of our food supplies wasted should be able to take care of that relatively easy so I hope that answered your questions thank you your point is far more optimistic than mines is I'm far more of a pessimist but um well you can leave them I I do I do agree with the idea that the population would decrease but do you believe that it could even decrease at a faster rate due to as I already mentioned the excesses of climate change or political instability the conflicts and the violence will further decline the already declining population or birthrate so population matters has taken out in the book they're an NGO that looks the population issues they accept the UN numbers they do not accept our numbers and I would say they would agree with you in two different ways first of all they would just say we're wrong and the UN by the way they said that without reading the book which was a perspective but that they were also argue that even if we are right it doesn't matter we are desperately over burdening the earth at 7 million people and whether we stay at 7 or whether we moved to 9 doesn't really matter we should be far below the level of 7 they're out right now again we say on the first issue well you know read the book we think our arguments are fairly compelling on the second issue that's that that that may be true it may be that at seven billion we are already straining the resources of the planet beyond their current capacity all we can say is that up until now the great the narrative arc is we are able to handle it right so again when it was around three billion and Paul Ehrlich was writing when it was four billion in the Club of Rome was writing you know when it was it six and seven billion and the current guys are writing they're all saying now we're at the point where it's tipping and let's put let's put it this way here's why I'm an optimist I was raised a Baptist and in in my church we were always at the end times and you you could you could you could see for sure that the the the revelation foretold the creation of the European Common Market and that Israel that meant that the temples veil was gonna get rent and and all of these things were proof positive that the Antichrist was among us in the end times were near and I remembered about the age of 12 being going as long as archives and there was the Gravenhurst banner from sort of 1895 and evangelists saying n times are near we put the British Empire as proof that the Antichrist is coming and so on and that's sudden you realize oh wait a minute these guys just want doom if all we're saying in the book is that we handled it at 1 billion we handled it at at 5 billion we are handling it at 7 billion these in terms of our ability to sustain ourselves Minar lifestyles will the pace of climate change outweigh the speed of innovation that is going to be ultimately be the way in which climate change is combated so batteries that will sustain a large amounts of energy vehicles that will be fully automated and the like I don't know all I know is it up until now the narrative has been we work it out and so I'm an optimist despite have being raised a Baptist because I think evidence shows that we work it out yeah and I'll just add one more thing to that if we're wrong we're we're not wrong is probably on the question of fertility we're we're probably wrong is on the question of longevity so for example if we find a cure for cancer or we find a cure for heart disease all our estimates about the size of the population are going to change because that would affect the number of people who are going to stay on the in the on the face of the planet but the the truth is the the other part of it the addition of more people as a result of births I think we're pretty right on that one a long day for some people in this room and I think it's time to say thank you before we wrap up just a few points so first as someone who did economic forecasting at the Bank of Canada I realized at one point what you do is you build a really good you you decide your numbers and you build a really good story around them and you might be completely wrong but you've got a great story and you and and you just see where things go and I think that's exactly what we heard tonight they've they've got a they got some story they got some numbers they've got a great story and and I urge you to read the book and and read the story the books for sale outside and it's also available on Word worst books and and it's it is it's it is really fascinating to read two things that are coming up here at CG next Monday we'll be hosting a panel of experts in international law and they'll look at the implication of technological changes facing the international legal order and the impact it will be have on trade peace security human rights the environment everything it's it's a real mouthful but I can assure you it's gonna be really interesting it'll start at 5:30 and it'll be followed by a reception on April 30th there'll be a film in the cinema series that'll be that's called medicines and it delves into lives three women whose lives have been transformed via online harassment and following the event they'll be a panel of local experts discussing the issues raised in the film and the intersections of safety and technology gender consent and law so on behalf of cg I'd like to thank our John and and Darrell alike as I say the book is well worth reading and could not have been written by an economist it's just got too many interesting story stories in it too to bolster our argument so thank you very much ESMA thank you and good night [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Centre for International Governance Innovation

Views: 713,441

Rating: 3.9383752 out of 5

Keywords: Empty Planet, Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson, CIGI, Population

Id: bSAgHvETNSg

Length: 92min 6sec (5526 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Maybe this will get housing costs finally under control?