Interview with Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

Zachary Karabell (0:06)

What could go right? Talk to your friends, talk to someone on the street, and most will say that one of the pressing challenges of the 21st century is global population expansion. We're at seven and a half billion people now. Soon we will be at eight. And if you listen to the UN, and if most of us think about what our assumptions are going forward, it's going to be 10 billion, 11 billion. And will the environment, will societies be able to sustain this massive increase of human beings on the planet with resources and water and all these other issues already showing signs of stress? That at least is what we tend to assume. But as Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, who are my guests today, point out in this incredibly important new book, Empty planet, The Shock of Global Population Decline, those assumptions are almost certainly wrong. They may have been right. The models may have been correct 20 years ago, 30 years ago. But with massive urbanization globally and the increase of global middle class affluence, that doesn't mean there isn't huge inequality and challenges. With those changes, the arc of population increase has leveled off sharply. It already has in Japan, it already has in Western Europe, it already has in Latin America, and it has in significant portions of the United States and North America. That is changing the demographic future, and it is changing it far more rapidly and much more dramatically than most of us assume, and that the models currently dictate. What's the problem of this? If it's not going to be an issue for 30 years, the problem is, of course, that if we are all driving our societies, driving our businesses, making strategic assumptions for how we spend, and what we spend, and what we invest in, and countries and governments doing the same, based on a wrong assumption, based on the wrong script, then we are steering these massive societies and ships of state and businesses and individual decisions about the future, we're steering them in the wrong direction. So being more attuned to what the actual population arc is versus the population arc that we assume is crucial to understanding the future. And one of the things that emerges most positively from Darrell and John's book, Empty planet, is that many of the most crucial and pressing resource strains on the planet, which are based on more people needing more stuff, will by virtue of demography become less pressing over the next decades. That doesn't change the urgency of environmental change. Currently, it just means that while it may be getting worse now, it may actually ease in the future. Anyway, they are both compelling individuals. Darrell Bricker is Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos Public Affairs, which is the world's leading social and opinion research firm, and John Ibbitson is a writer at large for The Globe and Mail, Canada's leading national newspaper. So with that, let's speak with Darrell and John.

So, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, thanks for joining me today to have this discussion. I was deeply pleased to see the publication of this book as it's an issue that I've been talking about with people for some time, and I'm struck by the degree to which the concept of population not expanding exponentially and then creating the panoply of social, environmental, and political challenges that that would entail. That idea that we may not continue to grow, grow, grow infinitely is not a familiar one to most people. In fact, I think really cuts against what most people believe in a way that is unsettling. So, what's been your experience of this when you have told people that you're writing this book? I mean, do you get raised eyebrows and skepticism, or have people been receptive to the concept that really upends what most people perceive?

Darrell Bricker (4:20)

It's actually been quite the opposite. It's been a lot of people, particularly demographers, saying what you just said, which is, yeah, you know what? We've been saying the same thing, so I'm glad somebody's talking about this finally. So, there is kind of what we might call the received wisdom or vertical knowledge about this being an absolute fact that is unquestionable. But when you go out and you talk to a lot of scientists who are dealing with this day to day, and particularly when you go into the countries and talk to the scientists who are living there, as opposed to, say, for example, living in New York or in Washington and just interpreting data that comes their way, this is not a shock to them or a surprise to them. This is what their daily experience is. So, the reaction I've basically got when I was out in the field, and I know John had a similar type of reaction when he was out in the field, was people saying, yeah, it's about time. Somebody wrote this.