Birth Rate Debate: “40% Of Girls Will Never Be Mothers” - #1099

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why should anyone listen to anything that you guys have to say?

**Lyman Stone** (0:04)
I mean, you've brought in an interesting group, right? I mean, whenever people don't want to read something and they just want to watch something to understand falling fertility, inevitably I'm like, well, there's this movie you can watch online about how fertility is falling. Why? What's going on? And I reference your work, and I passed them basically to you. I mean, I'm a demographer. At some point today during this conversation, I'll probably try to draw a graph in the air with my hands.
You can lunge and slot my hand down when I do it. But so, I mean, for me, there's that. And then of course, the Collins' are practically the people who've made this an issue for a lot of people.

**Simone Collins** (0:48)
We're the punchable face of pronatalism.

**Lyman Stone** (0:51)
So, I guess I'm kind of insured we're like multiple people here. And then you're like, It's so true.

**Chris Williamson** (0:58)
It's so true. I don't want to punch you, but it's, yeah. Simone, have you got this just a passing interest, a passion for you? What is this?

**Simone Collins** (1:07)
We are, we're hard effective altruists. We care about the long-term future of humanity. And you can actually see this among many people who are famous pronatalists, like Elon Musk, right? Like, his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity. He's concerned about the environment. He works on Tesla, right? He sees these things. Now he's trying to get humans to space.
So people who are very interested in long-term human flourishing are naturally likely to care about demographic collapse because it is one of those things that is a civilizational level threat. I mean, when Steven mentioned, for example, that this does affect everyone, yeah, boomers who are like, ah, like not my problem. They're still in just a few years going to be receiving only like under 80% of their expected social security payments, which are being paid for by Gen Z, who's not expecting anything. So everyone is affected by this. And yeah, this is something where basically, even if you don't care about the long-term future, you're affected, but because we do care about it, we care about humanity in 100 and 1000 years.
We're at the precipice of a tipping point that could either take things at a very cool direction or a very bad direction. So we care about it from that perspective.

**Chris Williamson** (2:15)
You've been working on this for two decades, flying around the world.

**Stephen J. Shaw** (2:19)
It's just over one decade, it feels like two. I come from a very different perspective. I came out of the commercial world where I ran a data science company doing advanced data modeling for 20 years.
I could have and maybe should have continued in that line. But once I saw in January 2016 that the birthrate issue wasn't just limited as I thought at that time to Japan, to Italy, that effectively it was spreading globally and had been spreading for 50 years. I didn't know about it. For sure, I was bringing up my kids at that time as teenagers as they were for a world where birthrate decline was not going to be a factor for the entirety of their future. I got scared that why do we not know about this? Then going to research to find out what's a common factor because we can't have independent factors alone, explaining why this happened in Italy, and Japan, and Germany, and Spain, and Austria, etc.
at effectively the same time. I find that no one was looking at it from that way, so I really have devoted 10 years into what I would call reproductive dynamics. What are the patterns? Rather than looking at demography from the point of view of, how do we explain changes or rather what levers can change things? Is it linked to salaries? Is it linked to housing appraisers? I come at it from a different point of view. What's the same? What are the underlying structures across societies and over time that are really locked in or mostly locked in? And so it's an interesting, I would describe it really as reproductive dynamics or structural demography.

**Lyman Stone** (4:03)
One thing that I think is worth noting is that for all three of us, your backstory, I know your all backstory, none of us grew up as kids or like, I hope someday that I study low fertility.
And also, none of us are actually coming out of the tradition of academic demography, okay? I started writing on low fertility and then went and got a PhD because it was like a necessity of the job, right? The reality is on the question of low fertility, by and large, academic demography has to a considerable extent been missing in action.