Episode Details

Back in 2011, a landmark study by the United Nations Population Fund warned that the global population would reach 15 billion by the end of the century, “putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates.”

Cue lots of subsidies, initiatives, hand-wringing, wasted money, damaging narratives, damaging policy, and articles in the Guardian.

Here we are today, and suddenly the issue is population decline. By 2100, 97% of the world’s countries will have a shrinking population, according to a study published in The Lancet, leading to “staggering social change”. The Telegraph followed with a ludicrously sensationalist headline: "World population to fall for the first time since the Black Death."

Cue, no doubt, lots more subsidies, initiatives, hand-wringing, wasted money, damaging narratives, damaging policy, though, perhaps not so many articles in the Guardian. The last thing that publication wants is westerners reproducing. Not white ones, anyway.

The problem is economic modelling. It is wrong as often as it is right. Tossing a coin or consulting a psychic is just as reliable. Economic models commonly rely on extrapolating trends, which can work for a bit - trend-following is a highly effective investment strategy, after all - but they are largely based on the assumption that current conditions will persist, when they usually don’t, particularly when projecting decades out. Something unforeseen happens, such as lots of people making decisions an economist didn’t expect, and this changes everything.

Yet such flawed models, even though nothing more than projections that only carry more weight than Mystic Meg because they were delivered on a spreadsheet by a bloke with a PhD, become the basis for huge and expensive decisions by policymakers. We have seen it with climate change, with Covid, with economic policy, and with anything the OBR touches. The consequences are sometimes really harmful to people: lockdown policy being the most obvious recent example. It was based on flawed data and it was deeply destructive. Net Zero is the next one. Everyone can see it, yet still policy-makers persist.

I was, broadly speaking, persuaded in the early 00s by the arguments that population growth was inevitable. I am less persuaded by the idea that we will now see population decline, though perhaps I shouldn’t be. Fertility rates are coming down: globally, between 1950 and 2021, they fell by more than half: from 4.8 children to 2.2 - and there is not a nation where they haven’t fallen. Annual global births peaked at 142 million in 2016, falling to 129 million by 2021.

But whatever. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. There could be a nuclear war and the population might sink below a billion. Global planning laws could be eased, just as the world abandons fiat money for gold and bitcoin, with the result that house prices come down, just as people realize that seed oils, processed food, and tap water have all been making them infertile, and, as a result, we suddenly get a population boom.

So much of this is economic. In Developing Countries, people tend to have fewer children as they get richer and live longer. Irony of ironies, in the richer, Developed World, the main reason people have fewer children is that they can’t afford them.

Italians, being Catholic, are associated with large families and lots of brothers, sisters and cousins. But when Elon Musk, himsel