#219 - Paul Morland - Why The Next Global Financial Crisis Is Mathematically Inevitable

Paul Morland (0:00)

The whole welfare state is a Ponzi scheme. It's built on the idea that each generation is going to be a bit bigger than the last one, so we can bear the burden of looking after older people.

Peter McCormack (0:09)

Essentially, we're going through the Bernie Madoff moment of the welfare system.

Paul Morland (0:13)

Well, we can see that, we can see that.

Peter McCormack (0:15)

What does the world look like for them if they are not producing?

Paul Morland (0:18)

I think we will have a financial crisis of the op, and it will be deeply rooted in demography. Now, we're not going to fix the demography in time, clearly, and we are going to have some very severe cutbacks.

Peter McCormack (0:30)

Is there a technical solution to this? Will AI and robotics, can that plug the economic gap?

Paul Morland (0:36)

I'm not at all convinced that AI is going to mean the end of the demand for labour. But even if it did, what a depressing future for humanity. Are we therefore going to say, let's sit in our high chairs or our wheelchairs and, you know, plug in to something enjoyable and just fade out as a species?

Peter McCormack (0:58)

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I was like, sure, I'll interview you in a sex robot. And both girls were like, oh, that's disgusting.

Paul Morland (1:44)

Icky. Icky.

Peter McCormack (1:45)

Why would a guy do that? And I was quite open. I said, look, women together are quite open about their personal sex lives and what they do when their partner's not around and the things they buy, why should a man not have? Why is it Icky? Just because the technology is better. But then it came to a conversation about, actually, if we make it too easy, because if you think far enough in advance, we will eventually have a technology whereby a sex robot will be indistinguishable from a human.

So if you can choose your perfect partner, but obviously they cannot conceive, will that affect the birth rate?

Paul Morland (2:24)

Well, one of the things I often say in these kind of interviews is that whilst I'm very well-informed on matters of demography, that's what I do. When it comes to the relationships and the sex lives of the young, I went on my first date with my wife in 1985, and I married her in 92, and I've been married for nearly 35 years. So I think there really is a crisis of relationships between men and women, more in some countries than others, often based on or related to different political views. Very often we see women going left and men really not changing over time. There is a crisis of relationships, and that is part of the falling fertility rate. There is a long-standing trend of divorcing sex from conception, of course. I mean, that goes back to some forms of contraception, all the way back to ancient times, but modern reliable contraception probably available. It's really, really difficult to know. But I mean, if I look at my great-grandparents, all my grandparents were born between 1880 and 1914, so a long time ago, and they were ones of three and two. So I think my great-grandparents in late 19th century, early 20th century Germany, which are my family is from, and I'm sure the same here, you look at middle-class families in Britain, they were getting much smaller. So the ability to have sex without conceiving, as a general and fairly reliable thing goes back quite a long way, and certainly by the 60s with the pill, it was ubiquitous.

Of course, with IVF, we're having children without sex. So the two are getting divorced. I can see a future in which they become increasingly differentiated. On the other hand, there's the conception of a child, and then there's the environment into which the child is born and brought up.

I hope the children aren't going to be brought up by a kind of a robot that is both sex worker and nanny, or maybe it's a different robot. I don't know, but it seems a bit bleak to me.