Why Are People Having Fewer Children Than They Want? With Camilla Cavendish

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Margherita Volpato (0:56)

Hi there. I'm Margherita Volpato and welcome to Intelligence Squared, the podcast about ideas that matter. In each episode, we speak to some of the world's most interesting thinkers. Not simply about what they've written or created, but about the ideas that drive their work and why they matter now. In England and Wales, the total fertility rate fell to 1.39 children per woman in 2025 More than half of the world's countries and areas are now below the level at which the population replaces itself without migration. Yet those numbers cannot tell us whether people are freely choosing smaller families, struggling to find a partner, leaving parenthood too late, or being priced out of the future they wanted. In this episode, I'm speaking to Camilla Cavendish, Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, the award-winning journalist, Financial Times columnist, and Harvard Kennedy School research fellow. In her new book, Generation Maybe, Why We're Having Fewer Children and What It Means For Us All, she investigates why birth rates are falling across very different countries and what those falling rates reveal about the way we live. We're going to explore the gap between reproductive freedom and frustrated hopes, the way modern dating and social imitation may shape family formation, and the bargain between work, housing, care, and old age that governments may need to rethink. By the end, we should understand why the baby bust is not simply a story about babies, but about whether people can imagine and build a different future.

Camilla, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

Hello.

Camilla Cavendish (2:25)

Thank you for having me.

Margherita Volpato (2:26)

I'd love to start out with what sparked this project and this book. Is it true that it was a conversation you had with a young woman in Tokyo?

Camilla Cavendish (2:34)

Yes, it was in part. So I was in Tokyo to write a different book, which I published, which was about the aging of the world. Japan is one of the places that has more people over 100 than anywhere else in the world. And it has a substantial proportion of its population who are pensioners being supported by a dwindling number of young people. And I started talking to younger women for all sorts of reasons while I was there, because they were the ones who were having to take care of their parents. They're actually very empowered, they're having great careers. And one of them said to me, you know, we're not having children anymore because we really are in a different era.

And I started talking to many of them about this. And one of them, I quote in the book, she said, I wouldn't really mind a child, it's a husband I couldn't put up with. And I thought that was interesting from a human level. But I also realized that, of course, when you look at the numbers, you can't really look away because the falling birth rates in the world are accelerating the aging of the planet. And we are actually sleepwalking into a very, very brutal transition in most parts of the world with failing welfare states and growing numbers of old people and not too many young people. I then went back to the states to Harvard, as you mentioned, where I have some students who are brilliantly helping with all this kind of research. And one of them started talking to me about how she frozen her eggs, which I have never heard of before.

Then it turned out that a whole bunch of graduate women in their mid to late 20s have frozen their eggs. And from there, for me, it just became a combination of the numbers, but also the human story, what on earth was driving this?