WTH is going on with population decline? Nick Eberstadt on the implications for America of a world with fewer children
Episode #106 | June 09, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Nicholas Eberstadt
Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.
Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, s Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on?
Marc Thiessen: What the hell is going on, Dany, is we're talking about depopulation. So, the New York Times recently had a very, very troubling piece, titled "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications," and it pointed out that demographers believe that in the latter half of the century, possibly earlier, global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. Here in the US, we've seen falling birthrates going back to the 2008 financial crisis. Before that, birthrates in the US averaged 2.1%, which is replacement, but between 2007 and 2019, they fell to 1.7%, which is below replacement. And then came the COVID crisis, where you would think, everybody was locked in their homes with nothing to do, they would be getting jiggy with it, right? But they weren't.
Danielle Pletka: I'm sorry. This is a totally serious topic, but that was possibly one of the worst expressions. Wasn't that a song by Will Smith? Something about getting jiggy? And then, of course, Seinfeld turned it into just... Anyway, look it up.
Marc Thiessen: Anyway, no one's getting jiggy with it, because our birthrate fell in 2020. The fertility rate fell to 1.64%, which is 20% below replacement level. That has all sorts of implications beyond the millennial generation and the young people who are not getting jiggy with it, but it has implications for a country where we're talking about spending $6 trillion in new government spending, and guess what? Young people are not producing the taxpayers.
Danielle Pletka: The workers.
Marc Thiessen: Or the workers who are going to support the new socialism they want to put in place. Socialism requires taxpayers and workers, and if you don't produce the workers or the taxpayers to pay for it, then guess what? When you retire, ain't going to be nothing there for you.
Danielle Pletka: Yeah. No, I know, this is exactly true, and we've seen this happen in China. But I
2 think it's important to put it in context. You'll never hear us quoting so much from a New York Times piece in the future, I swear to you guys who listen to us and trust us not to quote the New York Times.
Marc Thiessen: Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while, right?
Danielle Pletka: Well, right, but what's remarkable is, we're talking now about a global population decline that has the Times very worried. But reckon out that in 2000, the population of the world passed six billion. At the turn of the 20th century, so in 1900, the population of the world was 1.6 billion. So, it truly was, even with World War I and World War II, which were catastrophic events, particularly World War I in terms of the fighters, World War II in terms of the Holocaust, and the intervention of Stalin and his murder of 30 million people, or the Great Leap Forward in China, and the murder of tens of millions by the wonderful Chairman Mao, still, the population grew exponentially.
Danielle Pletka: And what's super interesting is to look at a place like China. If you don't have kids, you end up having these societies that look like upside down pyramids: Super top heavy with old people, and with this tiny point at the bottom of young people, a really small cadre of young people, who don't work, don't generate income, don't pay taxes, and society rests on their shoulders. That's a recipe for collapse.
Marc Thiessen: Well, you mentioned the Great Leap Forward. So, last year, there were only 12 million babies born in China last year. Think about that, in a country of over a billion people.
Danielle Pletka: 1.4 billion people.
Marc Thiessen: 1.4 billion people. That is the lowest official number since 1961, when the Great Leap Forward took place, and they basically starved their population into decline. And the data show, and there are models, that population decline in China is such that China will go from 1.41 billion population now, decline to about 730 million in 2100, at the end of the century. That is a stunning statistic.
Danielle Pletka: Well, but also, again, think about it this way: On the one side, you can say, well, great. And this is a big Lefty thing, right? Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are only having two children because the impact on the environment of having more slap at Prince William, who had three, and the Queen, who had four is the impact on the environment is too great. But of course-
Marc Thiessen: Well, you hear this all the time, like, I can't bring myself to have children because of climate change. Because one, I don't want to burden the world, but two, how can you bring a child into a world that's about to be consumed by droughts and fires?
Danielle Pletka: So, upside.
Marc Thiessen: I refer you back to our previous podcast recently with the Obama science advisor who says, not necessarily a good reason not to have kids.
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3 Danielle Pletka: Right. The only silver lining here is that maybe there will be fewer Greta Thunbergs in the world. But I think the problem is that while people may believe that fewer people will demand fewer resources, in fact, everybody has now been conditioned to expect more resources. Everybody has been conditioned, 50% of the American public is on some kind of government dole, whether it's health insurance, disability insurance, welfare, loans...
Marc Thiessen: Food stamps.
Danielle Pletka: All of that, right.
Marc Thiessen: Rental assistance, you name it, yeah.
Danielle Pletka: Right, or they're living in their house and haven't been evicted because the CDC says you can't evict people.
Marc Thiessen: Our colleague, Michael Strain, recently tweeted, "One-third of people in America aged 18-34 are living with their parents." If that doesn't tell you
Danielle Pletka: That's exactly right. And people have been conditioned. They're not working, they're not producing. Yes, they're not having kids, but their demands are growing, and this is going to be a crisis. I think there are all sorts of implications for this that we really don't understand. It's not just that there are going to be fewer resources. It is that when you have fewer children, your desire to commit to a forward-leaning foreign policy may be smaller. Nobody wants to see their children go off and die in the military. On the other hand, if that child is going to be your sole source of support in 20 years, then you're even more frightened about this. This actually is interesting for China, too, because of course, they've now had about a half a century worth of only one child, and they've had no serious conflicts, so there are questions about whether they would want to, as well.
Marc Thiessen: And then, there's the other problem, which is the coming epidemic of loneliness.
Danielle Pletka: So depressing.
Marc Thiessen: I mean, if you think about, we've had an epidemic of loneliness in the pandemic, and all sorts of mental health problems that have come from the pandemic, but you know what? If you have one child, or if you don't have children, when you get old... We've got this Baby Boom generation which didn't have as many children, and there's stories about this in the papers, about just how there are people living alone, no one calls them. It's a terrible way to grow old, with no one to support you.
Danielle Pletka: give you two perfect examples. One, I see this in Italy, where now or a house in these villages that are dying, because they're just full of old people, and there's no one there. There's no kids. It's terrible. Maternity wards are
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4 closing in hospitals.
Danielle Pletka: But I'll tell you the one that was, for me, the most creepy. I was actually with one of our colleagues, and in fact our guest today, Nick Eberstadt, in China. This was some years back. Now, I don't think Nick or I would dare go to China. But we were walking around, just wandering around Beijing, and we walked past this playground. There is nothing lonelier than a playground without children, except perhaps a playground full of young men, illegal internal immigrants in China, who aren't allowed to leave their rural town without a permit and come to the city, but can't find work in their rural area, and come illegally to Beijing. They then gather in these empty playgrounds, and it is at once just sad, and really, really creepy.
Marc Thiessen: And the big difference between China and us, is in China, it was a result of a government policy, the one-child policy. Here, the one-child policy-
Danielle Pletka: Is voluntary.
Marc Thiessen: Is self-imposed.
Danielle Pletka: Right.
Marc Thiessen: And it will have equally disastrous results over time, maybe slower here than it was in China, because we don't have forced abortions, and we don't have infanticide and all the things, the government running around and enforcing it with the venom that only a totalitarian dictatorship can. But a one-child policy is a path to national doom, and that's what we have right now.
Danielle Pletka: Well, that's all extraordinarily depressing, but unfortunately true. I mean, we see this. Look, you have four kids. I have four kids. But even we see that the patterns of their lives have changed. They spend a lot more time in their rooms, on their phones, on their computers, on TikTok. Maybe China invented TikTok in order to spread the one-child policy to the rest of the world, because that is so distracting from normal life, it really is a terrible thing.
Danielle Pletka: Anyway, guys, so we mentioned that Nick Eberstadt is joining us, and we've had him on before. You know he's a colleague of ours at AEI. He holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy here, and he writes a great deal, not just on demographics, but especially demographics in China, although he's written about Russia and the United States as well. He's also an expert on North Korea. He was actually our honoree last year for our Kristol Lecture, and I commend all of his work to you. You can find it on YouTube or on his page at AEI, but he's the person who knows this stuff the best.
Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.
Marc Thiessen: Well, Nick, welcome back to the podcast.
Nick Eberstadt: Hey, well, thanks for having me back.
Marc Thiessen: It's great to have you. The proximate reason for our reaching out to you is
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5 because there was this New York Times story a few days ago titled "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications." It said demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century, or possibly earlier, the global population will enter into a sustained decline for the first time, the strain of longer lives and low fertility leading to fewer workers, more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized around the notion that surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. You are the world's best demographer, so tell us what we're-
Nick Eberstadt: I am? Thanks.
Marc Thiessen: You are.
Danielle Pletka: You certainly are to us.
Marc Thiessen: Absolutely. So, as the world's greatest demographer, tell us, should we be panicking?
Nick Eberstadt: Well, this is kind of an inversion of the panic of the 1970s about the population explosion, and back then, there was, I think, a lot of unfounded anxiety about the supposedly necessarily bad consequences of growing populations. And I think now, we've kind of seen the pendulum swing, and now we've got a lot of angst, including a lot of unnecessary angst, about the possibility of global population decline. To begin with, nobody knows what's going to happen with world population 50 years from now, 40-50 years from now, because one of the not terribly well-kept secrets of the demography guild is that population science has never come up with a reliable, robust, accurate means of forecasting fertility over the long haul. Once you get to the point in the program when you're guessing about how many children the currently unborn are going to have, you're completely in science fiction. So we don't know what's going to be happening at the point where some say, not all, but some say global numbers may peak and decline.
Marc Thiessen: Can I interrupt you for a second?
Nick Eberstadt: Yeah, yeah.
Marc Thiessen: Because one of the things the Times points out, and again, I will never take the side of the New York Times against Nick Eberstadt, but one of the points they make is that, this is a quote: "The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children. If they have smaller families than their parents, the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff." So, I mean, if you're declining, at some point, there are fewer children to have children, even if they choose to have more children. hard to dig out of the hole?
Nick Eberstadt: Nolo conteste, you know. Absolutely true. What's difficult, or I would argue impossible, to predict is whether the number of children that people are having in rich countries in the future is going to stay below replacement, go down even further, or turn around. Now, with demographics, you're watching a very slow-
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6 motion show. Not much happens from quarter to quarter, or even from year to year. You're looking at things that take place over the course of generations, but over the course of generations, you really can change the world, with exponential increase or exponential decrease.
Nick Eberstadt: At the end of the day, my own impression is that family size is primarily determined not by economic factors, or education, or any of kind of the magic wish list that the boffins come up with. But more simply by the desired number of children that people want, because we're not heedless animals. And if it turns out in the future that people in the rich countries in particular want to have two or slightly more than two kids, things will turn around. Now, that's a big if. Instead of talking to an economist, you'd probably want to talk to a Nobel Laureate in literature to kind of wrap your head around that one.
Nick Eberstadt: So, these are for sure long-term trends, and they take a long time to work themselves out, and we can only see the beginnings of where some of these things are going. The point I was going to make is that, while I have my personal preferences, as a citizen, as a parent, as a member of society, for what I'd like to see things look like in my country, I don't think that there's any kind of scientific way that someone can say one birth level is obviously preferable to another birth level. With death rates, I can always say a lower death rate is better than a higher death rate, for all sorts of reasons, but the birth choices are a little bit more tricky.
Nick Eberstadt: And with a slowing population growth trend, or even with a declining population growth trend, I think that it's still possible for societies to remain prosperous, to increase their prosperity. They obviously have to change. It's a question of how adaptable, how flexible, how competent people, societies, governments are in the face of change. It's like the flip side of the population explosion. If we're dealing with a situation where health and education are on the upswing, we have a lot more options than if we've got a declining population total with a bad human capital background, if you see what I mean.
Danielle Pletka: I do see what you mean. A lot of the work that you've been doing in this area has centered around China. You had just an amazing project a couple of years ago about family and family practices in China. One of the tidbits in this article that we've been quoting from, and as you said, no better way to look stupid than predicting what's going to happen 100 years from now, or 80 years from now. But they say their model shows that China, which has a population right now of about 1.4 billion, will by the end of this century have a population of about 730 million. Now, even if that's off by a pretty substantial factor, that is what Seinfeld might have called substantial shrinkage.
Nick Eberstadt: Yes. Well, we haven't seen the latest numbers from China's 2020 census because they seem to be a little bit embarrassed about them in the Chinese Communist Party, and they're trying to massage them before outsiders get a look at their new, improved numbers.
Nick Eberstadt: I mean, the premier of the People's Republic, he's famous for coming up with the phrase manmade numbers, right? They're good at manmade numbers. And so, they haven't shown us the version of manmade numbers they'd like us best to see, but even without them, we know that there's a lot of momentum right now
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7 for population peaking, and for population decline, and maybe even for population decline for quite a while. And we know that the population is going to age very rapidly, unless there's some catastrophe that kills the seniors. That's the only way that serious population aging can be forestalled.
Nick Eberstadt: But a lot of the problems that China is going to face have to do with... Am I, on this podcast, am I allowed to say they're a totalitarian dictatorship?
Marc Thiessen: You are not only allowed, you're encouraged. And you can use even worse words than that. We've got an explicit rating, Nick.
Nick Eberstadt: Okay. Because of their form of government, they have problems that other countries with similar population shapes or structures would not face. Because they are, for some strange reason, a very low trust society-
Danielle Pletka: So weird.
Nick Eberstadt: Yes, where people must rely desperately on their families for security or for advance, the fate of family structures matters a whole lot more in China than it would in a normal country, maybe we can call it that. And for reasons like this, and for other reasons kind of in the same sort of family grouping, China's population trends may be harder to square with improving individual welfare, and improving prosperity than if you had the same population structure in Sweden or Australia, or some country with rule of law, open society, more responsive governance. So, the context matters a lot, as well.
Danielle Pletka: Nick, just to sort of quickly insert there, it was interesting, Simon Rabinovitch from the Economist actually tweeted out this morning that 2020 was expected to be the year that the median age in China exceeded that in the United States for the first time, but the new census seems to show that China is actually aging even faster. You mentioned that you think that has implications, especially in this communist, totalitarian society. Play it forward. What are the implications that you see?
Nick Eberstadt: Sure. Well, the Chinese government, let's see, not to put too fine a point on it, hasn't been as interested in the wellbeing and the welfare of its citizens as more accountable polities tend to be, and that means among other things that you have this extraordinary gap in living standards, wealth and wellbeing between people in the left-behind rural regions and people in the urban areas, in the cities, the export centers, the economic and political centers. And the population of the countryside in China is already way grayer than the national average, because young folks move out to become effectively illegal aliens in their own country in the big cities, because of their creepy Hukou population control, migration registration, national identity registration program.
Nick Eberstadt: So, there's precious little government attention to, or support for, older people in China, and with the withering away of the family... If you don't live in the big city, and you aren't on the inside political circle of having worked at a state enterprise, or in an urban municipal sort of enterprise or government, you're not going to have much in the way of a national pension guarantee. It's penurious at best. And with the withering away of the family, you're not going to have the
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8 traditional social safety net that China has relied upon over the past, I don't know, 4,000 years: The family.
Nick Eberstadt: So, with the increasingly rapid graying of China, we may be seeing something like a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy unfolding, especially in the rural areas. And I guess we'll have to see if there is enough political accountability or responsiveness in the Chinese system today to have any appreciable attention to this.
Marc Thiessen: Well, you know, of course, they caused this to some extent, for decades, with their one-child policy, which they scrapped a few years ago, and now have turned into a two-child policy, and now the New York Times reports that they've expanded to a three-child policy. I guess, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, "To have children is glorious." But all on Chinese social media, on Weibo, which is one of their social media platforms, the responses have been pretty cool. People are saying, "We can't afford to take care of our aging grandparents, and don't these people know we're just struggling to feed ourselves? How can we feed all these children?" Isn't it hard to reverse these trends once you have a statist or totalitarian social engineering, like the Chinese have engaged in for so many years?
Nick Eberstadt: Well, the one-child policy really is a monstrosity. I mean, it really is an abomination and a crime, and it's been a shame, since 1980, how few China watchers, international figures, experts, American policymakers have called it out. It clearly was intending to use a bayonet to force down the birthrate, back in the very, very late '70s and the early '80s, and since then. And it takes Lenin to its kind of ultimate endpoint. His encapsulation of the concept of totalitarianism was, "We recognize nothing private." Well, Lenin didn't try to bring bayonets into the bedroom. It didn't happen until the so-called reformers in China, after Mao, came into power.
Nick Eberstadt: And I'm not clear exactly how much, quote, "credit" should be given to the police state, coercive birth policy in forcing down the birthrate in China. Certainly some, but by the time the program was ended, as you noted, back in 2015, there was a little blip in reported total births, and after that, for the last five years, it slumped further and further and further down. And I'm not sure that the numbers are correct yet, but if you believe the numbers that we've heard, the total slump has been over 30% in just five years. I mean, that's like what happens in a catastrophic war, or in a famine. I mean, that's not what happens during normal peacetime.
Nick Eberstadt: We should remember, however, that in changing the norm, the Chinese Communist Party still demands the right to set family size in China. I mean, all that they have done is raise the quota that they say the state will permit parents to have. The government still very strictly says the number of births in the country is a matter of state. So, with their apparent panic at the results of the 2020 census, now they're saying, "Okay, we'll make it a three-child norm. As many as three kids will be permitted." I mean, there's probably a huge, big footnote for the Uighurs, and for other non-Han ethnicities in there. We'll see the fine print soon enough, I guess.
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9 Nick Eberstadt: What I'm wondering about is what happens next? This is just changing the quota. I think what happens after that is we start seeing incentives and bribes to try to get parents to have more children by dangling goodies in front of them. I don't suspect that's going to work terribly well. I may be wrong.
Danielle Pletka: They did that in France, right? And did it work in France?
Nick Eberstadt: They say that demographers are like actuaries, except without the personality. Demographers are disposed to have little hissy arguments. There's a little hissy argument among demographers. Some say that pro-natal bribes work, and some say they don't. I tend to be more skeptical of them. There's something called the Swedish Rollercoaster by demographers, which is watching Sweden put in a bribe, or whatever you call it, a pro-natal incentive policy. Some people who are on the fence about having a second or third kid take the money and run, so the birthrate goes up for a year or so and then slumps down to below where it was before. I mean, as you can tell, I'm a little skeptical about the efficacy of the bribes. They'd have to be really big bribes to change people, I think, their behavior.
Nick Eberstadt: But the Chinese government, of course, likes to coerce people. So, it's easy enough to understand how you coerce people to have fewer kids. Forcible abortions and killing newborn babies, and all that sort of stuff, which all happened on a huge scale in China over the past generation-plus. But how do you force people to have more kids than they want?
Nick Eberstadt: We may see this soon enough, because China has got this market totalitarian experiment they're rolling out with the social credit rating system, where you get kind of rewarded or penalized through tiny little nudges. "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Wong, you're not going to be able to rent a car. You have no children." "I'm sorry, Ms. Lee, you're not going to be able to fly on this flight because you're not married." There are all sorts of new totalitarian pressures that the Chinese government may inflict on its population to try to force the birthrate up, and we've never seen anything like that before, so I don't think we know exactly how it may unfold. But we'll see, I think.
Danielle Pletka: Eventually we will, that's for sure. It's funny, just as you were talking about how a totalitarian government figures out how to force people to have more children, it reminded me of that... I'm aging myself now, but it reminded me of that Woody Allen movie, Sleeper. So, everybody go look that up and see what their policies were. I'm not going to explain.
Danielle Pletka: So, we've been talking about bad news, and depressing news, and horrible governments, and awful things. You had a piece in Foreign Affairs that actually was much more cheerful, and the headline of it was, "America Hasn't Lost Its Demographic Advantage." Tell us a little bit about that.
Nick Eberstadt: Well, I didn't write the headline, I just wrote the article.
Danielle Pletka: That's true, but that was the thrust of the piece, was while the news is sort of bad everywhere, it's less bad in America.
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10 Nick Eberstadt: Well, you may recall from back in the day the great demographics expert Waylon Jennings had a song that went something like, "If you think I look bad, you should see the other guy." And that's kind of where we are, I would say, right now with US demographics, in comparison to other countries in the real, existing world that are our competitors in various ways in the international arena. So, we have a remarkable situation for a generation before the end of the Cold War, and lasting beyond the end of the Cold War, where even though we were a rich country, we had birth levels that were about at the replacement rate, where you could sustain a population over time without a requirement of immigration, because we were so close to replacement level. And that was unlike virtually any other affluent country in the world, and unlike a lot of the lower-income countries.
Nick Eberstadt: That's changed since the crash of 2008. Since the Great Recession, US birth patterns have significantly shifted, and they've been sliding down. And 2020 is a bad year to use, because it's like a once in a century shock, it's a worldwide health crisis. Thank you, China.
Marc Thiessen: You would think, Nick, that, I mean...
Nick Eberstadt: Yeah?
Marc Thiessen: All these young people were locked in their homes, without jobs, without anything.
Danielle Pletka: But I think, isn't part of the difference, and Nick will obviously be able to answer this better, that everybody now just wants to be on their phone instead of having sex?
Nick Eberstadt: Yeah.
Marc Thiessen: So, they spent that time scrolling instead of...
Danielle Pletka: Screwing. Alexa is sitting here looking really bemused as we talk about this.
Marc Thiessen: I love it. We are using our explicit rating to the full max on this one. I love it.
Nick Eberstadt: Yeah, yeah. But for more than a decade before, let's say up until 2019, before the crisis, the COVID crisis, childbearing patterns were sliding downward, and other things were changing, as well. My own interpretation, which is only an interpretation, and others will disagree with me, we can disagree all day long. But for what it is worth, my interpretation is that part of what made American childbearing in the rich world exceptional, which it was, was the American outlook, American values. We re a nation with much more religiosity than most of the rich countries. We re much more optimistic outlook, in terms of our population, a more patriotic outlook in part of our population. You can see this in polling data.
Nick Eberstadt: For the rising prospective group of parents, for the millennials, they look very different when you ask them about religion, optimism about the future, patriotism from their immediate predecessors, from people who were having
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11 kids a generation before. And so, maybe in that way, it's not so surprising that you see a more European profile of childbearing in the US.
Nick Eberstadt: What hasn't changed, apparently, is immigration inflows. Net inflows of immigration look like they stayed at about the same annual level in the 2010s as they did in the 2000s, which may be a little bit of a surprise, given all the rhetoric and controversy about immigration over the recent years. But what this means over the longer term, of course, is that the US is on a trajectory towards lower population growth than we would have thought earlier, towards slightly more graying than we would have thought earlier.
Nick Eberstadt: But as compared to what? The EU 27 are a net mortality zone. They've got more deaths than births. Japan has more deaths than births. Russia has more deaths than births. China very soon is going to have more deaths than births. So, even if our era of demographic exceptionalism is over for now, our profile still looks different from all of those regions, all of those big populations.
Marc Thiessen: But I guess, I don't take a lot of comfort in the idea that in a depopulating world, we're the tallest midget, is basically what it comes down to. Those are dying societies. When your death rates are exceeding your birthrates, and you're not producing workers, you're not producing taxpayers... Just because we're dying slower doesn't mean that we're healthy.
Nick Eberstadt: I'm not going to argue with you about that. I mean, to me, myself, the most concerning aspect of low fertility, or lower than ever before fertility in the United States, is the implicit vote of no confidence that parents seem to be lodging about the American future. And I think that's not trivial. That's something that we should pay attention to, and we should wonder about it, and I think we should worry about it. That, to me, is much more something that we should be alert to than the absolute birth levels that we're talking about. Why is it that young Americans feel less confident, less optimistic in the future?
Marc Thiessen: And then, the other factor is, they're having fewer children, but they're also embracing socialism, right? So, if you graph the projected increase in government spending and entitlements, and the projected growth in population, they're not producing the taxpayers or the workers to pay for all the new government programs that they want to take care of their economic insecurity, which is convincing them not to have children. So, isn't it like a death spiral?
Nick Eberstadt: Well, I can make the argument, others might contest it. I can make the argument that there's absolutely no contradiction between having less confidence in the future and militating for more government support in your life, and government involvement in the economy, and political determination of economic outcomes. It seems to me those are all the same piece of cloth, if you see what I mean. And for sure, if you look at the longer-term projections for solvency in old age support programs, you can see just how the modeling of the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and our healthcare guarantees for older people look like. And by the way, the unfunded debt or deficit of the pension program is a tenth, it's a tiny fraction of the debt for our Medicare program guarantees. We talk about Social Security all the time, but we're looking at something that is an order of
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12 magnitude littler and easier to solve. But yes, it's nothing at all that we should be complacent about.
Danielle Pletka: My exit question here for you: Yes, being the tallest midget is not a great thing, as Marc said.
Marc Thiessen: Better than being the smallest.
Danielle Pletka: Well, that's also true. I think that's Japan, although I was shocked to see India among these statistics, as well. But one thing that I saw is that while the total fertility rate has really, really gone down to the lowest level since the government started, that one of the more recent times when we had this very serious dip was in the administration of Jimmy Carter, where everybody was pessimistic about everything. But that there was a recovery, not only with the economic recovery, but also with the optimistic sort of election of Ronald Reagan.
Nick Eberstadt: Yep.
Danielle Pletka: So, can't we hope for some sort of recovery once we get rid of these aged schmucks who have been running the country since...
Nick Eberstadt: Absolutely. This is what I was saying earlier, that demographers are clueless about forecasting fertility changes in the future. I mean, they missed the baby boom. They missed this baby bust. They're good at drawing straight lines. They're good at saying tomorrow will be like today, except 2% different. And in the late 1970s, after the US had lost the war in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter was the one who talked about a national malaise, I mean I think he contributed to it, but there certainly was a national malaise then. But it changed almost on a dime at the end of 1980, and there's absolutely no reason that couldn't happen again. And by the way, we won't know about any uptick in birth trends that may occur until well after it has begun, until we start looking at it in the rear-view mirror, because we just don't predict these things terribly well.
Marc Thiessen: Exit question from me, Nick. We started out by talking about how there was a concern about the population boom in the 1970s, and now we've got the depopulation bust, I guess. Are overpopulation and depopulation equivalent problems? I mean, if you go back, the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition, if you go back to the Book of Genesis, God said, "Go forth and multiply." He didn't say, "Go forth and replace yourself."
Nick Eberstadt: Right.
Marc Thiessen: This has been, for millennia, we were supposed to go forth and populate the earth, and more people were better. The Left seems to see people as burdens to be taken care of, whereas those on the Right see new people as a blessing, more people as a blessing, and more children as a blessing. Are we losing that understanding of population, and is that what's partly driving this?
Nick Eberstadt: Well, part of, I think, what was badly off in the '70s and the era, like a population bomb sort of view of the problem, the growth in human population was being
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13 driven by an explosion of health. The reason that our numbers were increasing was because the death rate was plummeting. Life expectancy was soaring. If you're going to have a population problem, I'll take the health explosion as a population problem. That's one I can work with. There's a lot of good stuff you can do with that. I mean, we've got something very different that's coming across the world right now, which is a change which is being driven by a radical transformation in childbearing patterns. And I think that's more ambiguous.
Nick Eberstadt: It's fascinating when you go back to the Book of Genesis. Why did the Creator command human beings? I mean, that was a command. He didn't say, "Oh, you're just naturally fruitful. You'll just naturally multiply." Why did He have to tell people to be fruitful and multiply? I mean, if you read that, it's kind of like, it's not a total confidence that this game is going to come off. And for an awful long time, human population really did cling on the edge of a knife to survival. For the future, even if we do not have enough human numbers to maintain total world population, as I said, I think we can do perfectly well, and I think we can have prosperity, and improving prosperity over a long period of time, as long as we have improving health, and education, and knowledge, and flexible, open societies. But we can't take any of that for granted, because it gets back to, why do you need that command?
Danielle Pletka: You do need it, actually, and the other thing I think we can conclude that you need is Morning in America, because it's true. Nick, you, as usual, were awesome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Nick Eberstadt: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Marc Thiessen: Take care. Thanks.
Marc Thiessen: All right, Dany. We mentioned Woody Allen's Sleeper. Do we need to bring out the Orgasmatron?
Danielle Pletka: Oh my God. I don't know. I actually don't know the demographics of our audience, but I suspect they're probably people like us who do remember that. But, right, the premise was that a man named Albert Shanker, who is the head of the National Education Association, and widely disliked, had gotten ahold of the bomb, and they needed to repopulate the world and they brought out, that's right, they had this device. Oh my God. Anyway, if you can bring yourself to watch Woody Allen, despite all the awful things that have been written and said about him, and the creepy things he's actually done as well, then Sleeper should be your guide to what the future might look like with all these problems.
Marc Thiessen: We need families. We need stable families. We need bigger... I'll tell you, my father-in-law passed away on Friday.
Danielle Pletka: Oh, I'm sorry.
Marc Thiessen: It was long in coming. He went out to dinner on Monday night with my mother- in-law, and was able to go out to a restaurant, and died a few days later, so he was active until the end. But what was remarkable to me, we spent pretty much
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14 every night this week with my mother-in-law, and she had three children, and between all of us, she has nine grandchildren, plus step-grandchildren, as well, and this whole extended family surrounded her. And I really weep for the images that are going to come decades from now when people are making ill-advised decisions not to have children, not to have lots of children, and they're not going to have that comfort when the time comes with them.
Danielle Pletka: No, listen, I agree with you. Not to proselytize on this question, but I will say... Our oldest is getting married in two weeks, and our youngest is going to be going off to college in one year, and we look at that with trepidation, first of all because we have to be alone together, but second of all... Well, and the dogs. But second of all, because this has defined our lives for almost 30 years, and that is such a joy in life. To think, what are the things that are going to sustain people? You do not get sustained joy out of TikTok. You do not get sustained joy even out of a great career, right? Arthur Brooks, our former boss, talks about this all the time. It's faith, which of course is also declining in America; it's work, which is also declining in America; and it's family. And if you don't have kids, you don't have that.
Marc Thiessen: This is a problem that is foreseeable, but yet not foreseen, right? A lot of people look at children not as the purpose of marriage, not as the center of a family, but the child is like an accessory, right? So, I've got my career, we've got our fabulous vacations, and well, we can manage one child and keep all that going, right? Because they don't want to give anything up, they don't want to sacrifice anything, because it just seems so hard. You're giving up the phase of your life.
Marc Thiessen: You have four kids. I have four kids. What we have found... I don't want to speak for you, but what I have found is that the sacrifice of self for people you... having loving people in your lives brings so much more joy than having one more nice beach vacation, or one more... nicer apartment, or nicer furniture. When I was in my 20s, I wanted all this stuff, and now I don't care about stuff. I care about my family. I care about spending time with my kids.
Danielle Pletka: Okay, I like stuff, too, and my shoes are very important to me, but no, listen. I just, guys, I told Marc when we came into the studio that Stephen, my husband, just flew down to Nashville on Monday morning. Our daughter is moving out of her apartment, finished college, and in tears on Sunday night, "I just can't manage." Of course, we all have been through this who have kids. And flew down to Nashville, and then drove back with her, arrived at 4:30 in the morning. He could have hung around in the house with me. We watched Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe, last night, and that would have been great, I guess? But he did this for Soph, and what a great thing to do.
Marc Thiessen: And I've done the drive from Nashville to Washington. It's about 10 or 11 hours, and those are 10 or 11 hours that are irreplaceable.
Danielle Pletka: That's exactly right. And for all of you out there, just FYI, what they did for at least four hours was listen to our podcast. So, that warmed my heart. So, do the same. Go back, share the podcast with people. Rate us, subscribe, and go and give your families a big hug and a kiss, because they are the best things in the world.
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15 Marc Thiessen: Thanks for listening.
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