Shadowing-Übung: Do we need more kids? A research showdown. - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

Fertility rates are falling around the world, and most people think human reproduction will soon slip below the so-called replacement rate,

where the number of babies born can't keep pace with the number of people who are dying.

That means the world's population will level out and then start to fall, which has some people worried.

If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble.

But others argue population decline is exactly what the world needs.

Human beings have overrun the world.

So, do our societies, does our species, need more babies or fewer?

To explore this question, we randomly assigned ourselves sides.

I have a coin here.

Oh good.

If it's heads, I argue that we need more people.

If it's tails, I argue that we need less people.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Alright.

I got tails.

Okay.

Now we gotta go find support for those arguments.

Let's do this.

We spend the next three weeks reading papers and talking to experts to prepare for the fact-check debate you're about to watch.

Today Adam will be arguing for the proposition that there are too many people in the world, and Joss will be arguing that there are not enough.

This sound, That's the timer and this sound

That's for when there's a visual on screen for you if you want to see it

There'll be seven rounds and at the end you can vote for

which side won on patreon And you can also head over there to hear Adam and Joss debrief the debate

Round one Adam you have two minutes to make your first argument Great.

I just want to start by taking a real hard look at some of these numbers

when our parents were born there were about 2.5 billion people on this planet.

All of human history, we'd grown to 2.5 billion.

But to add the next 2.5 billion took just one generation.

By the time you and I were born, there were nearly 5 billion people on Earth.

And that's going to double again.

The UN's median projection says we're going to max out around 10 billion.

And even their lowest fertility projection says we're going to keep growing to 9 billion people.

There's really no denying that this huge population explosion has hurt the ecosystems that we're part of, that we rely on

And Joss is arguing that somehow 9 billion is not enough That we need more human beings on this earth

But I'm going to show over the course of this debate

that a smaller population is actually a good thing It's better for the future of our civilization

It's better for the health of the planet and we can get there without crippling our economies.

But before we dive into that, I just want to say that everyone should be able to have the number of children that they want.

No government should be coercing people to have more babies or fewer babies.

Government should be removing obstacles and empowering their citizens to pursue their choices.

And the reality is that right now, people are choosing to have fewer babies.

Every few years, the CDC interviews thousands of American women

and ask them if they want children and how many children they intend to have.

And a growing share of women say they don't want kids at all.

And if you add up all the intended kids, the average comes out to 1.8 children per woman.

So that's below replacement rate.

That means a declining population.

And if you ask women under 25, that number falls even further.

It's 1.5 children per woman.

I'm arguing that we shouldn't fight that trend.

We shouldn't fight these people's choices.

We should embrace it

because this is an opportunity to restore the population down to what it was when our parents were growing up.

And that can only help us solve some of the world's trickiest problems.

Okay, Joss, you have 90 seconds to respond.

Okay, you really need to look at the total population numbers charted alongside the population growth rates.

And that's where it really becomes clear that our growth rates peaked in the 1960s.

So in this way, demography is kind of like space time where we are looking at the stars

and we're seeing what they looked like hundreds of years ago because of the lag.

The population boom that you just talked about reflects achievements that have happened mostly in the past.

In the past 75 years, what we're really talking about are about 4 billion African and Asian babies who lived instead of died.

This is an incredible achievement that should be celebrated.

And now as our fertility rates decline, that is a result of improvements in education, equal rights and freedom, which we should also celebrate.

But then we have to decide where we want to go from here.

You've already kind of won this debate.

We are on track to see declining population.

That is going to happen.

And the people who are young today will decide how far and how fast we decline.

You're right that the number of children people want has gone down.

But when you ask most people, they would say the ideal number of children is two.

But all around the world, fertility rates are dropping below that.

So it's not obvious that every additional decline in fertility, once we have societies with equal rights and freedom, are a result of free choices rather than new barriers

that societies have put up that are keeping people from living the lives that they want.

Yeah, I mean, we definitely want to remove any barriers to what people want.

But I do.

I'm curious about that, that those surveys that say they ask the question, what do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?

And most people say two or three.

But I think that they're asking the wrong question because those answers are skewed by sort of cultural norms, nostalgia.

Every sitcom has two to three kids in a family.

And so you might just say that as sort of describing what you're observing.

But, you know, in those surveys, I saw one recently that asked,

what do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have? only 2% said

that the ideal size is zero.

But when they ask people if they want kids, nearly 10% say no. So how do you square that number?

A tenth of people say they don't want kids.

Only 2% think that's the ideal number.

I think that's because ideal family size is like this idealized notion.

So those surveys don't really reflect what people really want.

Well, the thing is that what people want is completely shaped by the societies that we build, right?

So we decide whether we have societies that make parenting easy and friendly and desirable.

And so what I hope to show in this debate is

that we should build those kinds of societies and question whether we are.

Okay, Joss, you now have two minutes for your first argument.

Most people are not aware of how much fertility rates have fallen around the world.

So this is a trend that has obviously been happening for decades, but the past 10 years have shown

that we don't go from like six births per woman to two and then just hold there, right?

We're not holding there.

100

And what we really need to talk about here is the statistic of total fertility rate.

101

You hear this a lot in media and conversations about this.

102

It's not the same thing as birth rates.

103

So the total fertility rate is a statistic that imagines a hypothetical woman

104

and how many babies she would have over the course of her life.

105

This is because we can't just wait and see how many kids a 20-year-old today ends up having.

106

We don't have 20 years to find that out, so they use this statistic to try to capture fertility rates at the moment.

107

The replacement rate is around 2.1 to 2.2, and right now two-thirds of humanity lives in countries that are below that level.

108

This is not just a rich country issue anymore.

109

So we're talking about Tunisia, Mexico, Turkey, Iran, Thailand.

110

These are all countries that have lower fertility rates than the United States right now.

111

The Financial Times has a great series of charts showing how demographers keep overestimating what the fertility rates will be.

112

One example is Colombia.

113

The UN thought that there was going to be 700,000 births in 2024.

114

What we actually got there was 450,000.

115

And still, the UN thinks that birth rates are going to stabilize.

116

So those projections that you were saying, they're based on the expectation that birth rates will stabilize for reasons that are a little unclear.

117

It's just as likely that countries will enter what's called a low fertility trap.

118

So if you have a total fertility rate of one, which is like Spain or China right now, that means that each generation is half the size of the one before it,

119

which means half the potential mothers.

120

They can't just return to replacement rate.

121

They need to actually overshoot it for a long period of time to avoid depopulation.

122

So this is going to unfold slowly and, you know, at the scale of our individual lives.

123

It seems slow, takes 20, 30 years for a generation to go by, but it's very hard to change course,

124

especially if we can't get on the same page and recognize that this is happening.

125

Adam, you have 90 seconds for your rebuttal.

126

Well, I'll just start by saying that I think that this declining population is a good thing, right?

127

So I am inherently less worried about that than maybe some people might be.

128

But I also think that it's really hard to predict population decline.

129

It's hard to predict fertility rates.

130

People have been batted in the past, and I'm sure they will struggle with it now. And

131

so drawing a line from a trend we see in the

132

last couple decades to sort of the inevitable end of the human race or a dwindling to some unfortunate size, that doesn't make sense to me.

133

I think that's silly to try and predict that far out.

134

And I'm glad you mentioned that it is It will seem slow

135

because this is a slow process Like I just want to put that in perspective for people You know, we've already been in this period of population decline in many

136

places The U.S birth rate first fell below replacement rate in 1971

137

So we've been living in this world where things are changing in this way But, you know, it's shifted up a little bit,

138

it's shifted down It hasn't been an unstoppable plunge so far We don't know what's going to happen in the future

139

And it seems incredibly unlikely that the population decline will be faster than the population rise.

140

Even the most aggressive low fertility scenarios that I've ever seen are saying that by the end of this century,

141

when the majority of people watching this will be dead, there still will be more people on Earth than when we were born.

142

It's just a slower process than some sort of sudden shock.

143

And I think that gives us a lot of room to adapt and change.

144

I would like to add that with regard to the U.S fertility rate, yes, it went down in the 1970s.

145

It came back up.

146

That bump was because of a change in the composition of the population, not because of a change in behavior.

147

It's entirely a result of the higher fertility of foreign-born women, of immigrants.

148

And that bump is now gone.

149

Their fertility rates have gone down and the countries that they came from have fertility rates that have dropped.

150

So that's one point.

151

But when you say that this happens slowly, that doesn't mean that anything could happen to change it.

152

Right.

153

We we know how many kids are going to enroll in college 20 years from now.

154

Like that's been decided by the people who decided whether to have kids right now or not.

155

And population decline is subject to the same exponential math that population growth is subject to.

156

Right.

157

We can we can see a little ways in the future.

158

But I think every decade you travel into the future, it becomes harder to predict.

159

And if we're worrying about something that the math predicts in 200 years,

160

I think that's plenty of time to upend the assumptions that those equations are making and give us a different result.

161

So I'm just saying that in the short term, yes, but in the long term, no, we can't predict.

162

Okay, we'll move on to round two.

163

Before we get too far into it, let's talk about today's sponsor, which is ZocDoc.

164

So I was reading a really interesting study recently, and it was about what they call continuity of care, which basically means seeing the same doctor over time.

165

It turns out that having that relationship is associated with lower mortality rates.

166

It's really important, but the challenge is often finding that doctor in the first place, and that's where ZocDoc comes in.

167

to remove any of the friction that is keeping us from getting the health care

168

that we need and that we're often already paying for when we buy insurance.

169

Polls have shown that when you put off seeing a doctor, your health often gets worse.

170

So, booking a doctor's appointment should be easier than ordering a burrito in the middle of the night.

171

And with ZocDoc, it actually is.

172

You don't have to call five different doctor's offices just to be told

173

that they aren't taking new patients or that they don't accept your insurance.

174

You don't have to call anyone at all.

175

You can do it all online, get in the same week, sometimes the same day.

176

They have more than 100,000 providers from primary care to dental health, eye care, urgent care and more.

177

So go to ZocDoc.com slash Howtown, book a top rated doctor today.

178

If you use our link, which I'll put in the description, that makes us look good.

179

But again, this is a totally free service.

180

And what really matters is that you stop putting off seeing the doctor and get the care that you need.

181

In this round, Adam and Joss each get to present a stat.

182

Adam, you're up first.

183

You have one minute.

184

Great.

185

My statistic is 1.6 births per woman.

186

I'm quoting from a paper entitled, Is Low Fertility Really a Problem?

187

In this paper, they studied the economic dynamics in 40 wealthy countries

188

and found that fertility below replacement and modest population decline favor higher material standards of living.

189

So a shrinking population was better for standards of living than a growing one.

190

How can that be?

191

Well, what they found is basically that when you have a slowly shrinking population, you can invest more per kid.

192

And that means each kid has more resources, better education.

193

They end up being more productive.

194

An example they use a lot in this paper is Japan, which is the oldest country, the country with the oldest population on earth.

195

They have a total fertility rate of about 1.1, but from 1995 to 2024 has its population declined.

196

its GDP shrank by 27%.

197

When you look at the Human Development Index, a common measure of well-being, Japan's rating rose 6%.

198

So with a lower replacement fertility rate, they actually saw an increase in well-being.

199

Joss, your response?

200

Yeah, I wouldn't say Japan is a hellhole, but I would note that Japan's public debt to GDP ratio is getting a little out of hand, and at some point that may become a problem for them.

201

The paper that you're talking about, it's an interesting thought experiment.

202

They're looking for like what Goldilocks fertility rate maximizes consumption, like balancing the size of the pie and the number of slices.

203

But it's just not the real world.

204

Like this analysis ignores the transition period, right?

205

They run forward several generations till they have a steady age structure, which means that they're kind of abstracting out a lot of the pain that we're going to experience with an aging population.

206

They also assume that an aging population doesn't affect the productivity of the labor force, which is another big assumption.

207

And this paper was published 10 years ago.

208

So I went and looked at the fertility rates of all of the 40 countries in their analysis,

209

and 36 out of 40 of them have fertility rates that have dropped in the decades since this paper was published.

210

We just don't get to choose an optimal fertility rate and hold it there.

211

I would dispute that this is not looking at the real world.

212

I mean, it is modeling possible scenarios, but based on observations of what's happening in the real world.

213

And when you look at Japan, which is very much the real world, you do see that over the past 30 years,

214

they've managed to increase standards of living with one of the most dramatically aged populations in the world.

215

And they've done that by increasing the workforce participation among seniors, among women.

216

They've been very good at incorporating news technologies.

217

They have these very specific immigration visas that they give to help with the workforce.

218

So they're sort of a pilot program for a lot of tools that will make these transitions, which are going to be rough.

219

I'm not denying that.

220

But they'll make them more easy to bear and survivable.

221

Is there like an endpoint to this analysis or can the population shrink down to like very, very small and it's still supposed to apply?

222

Well, in this paper, you could basically continue to have these dividends to well-being if you just stayed at 1.6 indefinitely.

223

You know, but that, again, is like getting so far in the future that other factors will come to play.

224

All right.

225

Why don't we move on?

226

Joss, you now have one minute to present your stat.

227

My stat is that in France, it took around 115 years for their population above the age of 60 to double from 7% to 14%,

228

more than a century.

229

In Vietnam, that same change will take just 15 years.

230

So if you look at charts of population aging, you see these really steep lines in large parts of Asia and Latin America.

231

And the reason why that's really important is

232

that a lot of these countries didn't have the time

233

or the economic growth that Japan had to build robust public pension systems

234

and health care systems for their populations to have a lot of private retirement savings.

235

Vietnam has a social security system, but the majority of seniors do not have access to it because they worked in the informal sector.

236

So this is what economists call getting old before getting rich.

237

And it is a threat to the continued development of low and middle income countries.

238

And at the same time, rich countries will need immigrants to address their own population challenges and labor shortages to care for our aging populations.

239

So already the U.S health care system and long term care system is highly reliant on immigrants.

240

And that's only going to become more the case.

241

And those workers are exactly the same workers that are going to be needed everywhere.

242

Adam, your response?

243

A lot to respond to in both of those stats.

244

I think that when it comes to Vietnam, its population is still growing.

245

It's not declining yet.

246

And its working population, more importantly, is still growing and will continue to grow for a little while.

247

And so that gives you a window of a couple decades, really, where you have time to prepare the economy and to implement systems that will help with that transition.

248

And in terms of the way that immigration can kind of smooth out some of these transitions, it doesn't have to be a completely extractive exchange.

249

There are already sort of pilot programs in a lot of countries where there's an exchange of training and labor.

250

One example is the NHS in the UK, where they offer a residency program for doctors to come from other countries, work in the NHS for a couple of years,

251

and then they can go back home and they bring that training back to their home countries.

252

So there's a way to set this up so that you actually increase the global supply of skilled workers everywhere.

253

When you say that they have this time to set up these systems and prepare their countries, like, yeah, they need time, but really they need economic growth for that to happen.

254

It's just it's always unfortunate when people who live in really rich countries

255

that have benefited benefited from a huge amount of economic growth, like look at these countries and and don't allow them

256

or encourage them to have the same trajectory and experience

257

that led to the lifestyles and the standard of living that we have.

258

Yeah, it's a problem.

259

But I think you also have to ask, will adding more babies be part of the solution?

260

And I think that if there was a baby boom in Vietnam tomorrow, those babies are going to be dependents for the next 15 to 20 years, right?

261

And so you're just adding another, a bolus of dependence on both ends of the population that now you have to invest in.

262

Why don't we move on to round three?

263

Joss, you have two minutes to make your next point.

264

A smaller human population will be less able to solve the big and small problems that we face.

265

That's because people are the source of good ideas.

266

This is obviously the case in areas like science and technology, but it's also the case everywhere.

267

Wherever people are doing things, they're learning from the things that they're doing.

268

They're figuring out ways to do it better.

269

They're sharing that knowledge with everybody else and adding to the cumulative intelligence, which is our most precious natural resource.

270

Right.

271

If you look back through human history, it was the landmass that had the highest population that created the most innovation.

272

Right.

273

Like the landmass of Europe and Africa and Asia, whereas more isolated populations in the Americas,

274

in Australia, they didn't have as many people to accumulate and iterate on ideas.

275

And so that's the supply side, but let's also not forget the demand side.

276

So if you take Howtown, for instance, our channel, we decided to take the risk to launch this thing with the assumption

277

that there were enough people in the world who would want this very specific kind of video

278

that we make to pay back the cost of starting the channel, of the cost of making every single video, which is like pretty big cost up front.

279

And that's the same across the economy.

280

When the chef is deciding whether to open a restaurant that sells Korean, Mexican, vegetarian food, or someone's deciding whether to make a movie

281

or write a book or invest in the technology to create a gadget that's going to make our lives easier,

282

there's this big fixed upfront cost that needs to be justified by a substantial market.

283

There was a study of the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S

284

which showed that a 1% increase in the market size led to 4% to 6% more new medicines, right?

285

And this is really relevant for things like rare diseases, where if there's not enough humans with the condition, the condition is not going to be addressed.

286

So bigger markets encourage problem solving.

287

It just really benefits all of us for there to be large pools of people who want the same things

288

that we want.

289

Okay, Adam, and you now have 90 seconds for your response.

290

I totally agree that population size is one of the drivers of innovation.

291

But I can think of a bunch of other forces that can also drive innovation.

292

One is just investment, public investment.

293

We've just seen the U.S slash a bunch of investment into research.

294

Restoring that or doubling it even would definitely improve the amount of innovation that's happening, the amount of creativity that we can harness.

295

Another factor, you mentioned like communication being an important part and how if you're a more diffuse population, it's harder to have those conversations.

296

But, you know, we can concentrate people into institutions and with increased connectivity throughout the world, that kind of communication can still happen.

297

And then another thing is we can just increase the number

298

of people who are part of those conversations by making sure more people have good education.

299

If you don't ever get to go to high school, it's harder to be part of these conversations.

300

So we can raise the education standard for the whole world

301

and actually increase the population of people who are innovating while the population is decreasing.

302

We can do this kind of innovation with a few billion less people.

303

We went to the moon when the population was 3.6 billion people.

304

Fleetwood Mac recorded rumors when the population was 4.1 billion.

305

So we don't need 10 billion people for great acts of creation.

306

Well, the population going that direction had a larger number of young people than the population will going the other direction.

307

So there is some relevance to that, I think.

308

And you're totally right that increasing investment in research, increasing education, those are all things that are going to increase innovation.

309

But like, where does that, you have to really think about where that money comes from.

310

And the question is whether a bigger

311

or smaller population is likely to provide the tax base to support that kind of investment.

312

And when you have an aging population, we're going to see a bigger and bigger amount of our public budgets going into healthcare.

313

It's very expensive.

314

Older folks spend, you know, maybe several times more on healthcare.

315

And we're going to have to pay for that, which is going to force some tough decisions about where our governments can invest elsewhere.

316

All right, moving on.

317

Adam, you now have two minutes for your next argument.

318

I don't think Joss can deny that human population growth

319

so far has put a huge strain on natural resources and the environment.

320

You can sort of take your pick of whatever metric you want.

321

Groundwater is being depleted.

322

40% of fisheries are being overfished.

323

We're losing a Denmark-sized patch of forest every year.

324

Of course, there's CO2 emissions that is a big focus.

325

The latest IPCC report says the GDP per capita

326

and population growth remain the strongest drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in the last decade, which they put in parentheses, robust evidence, high agreement.

327

So we're really sure about that.

328

So every person we add to the population adds to that strain.

329

But I want to focus on one particular corner of this impact, and that's the loss of other forms of life.

330

It's not that complicated of a picture.

331

Every extra human needs more space to live, and that space includes all the area that's needed to grow and raise the food they eat.

332

And so we've taken over the habitats of other species, taken their resources.

333

This graph here sort of is a snapshot of that.

334

This shows the biomass of mammals in the world, and you can see the familiar uptick of humans, that orange space.

335

But that comes along with it, this huge population of domesticated animals, mostly livestock, that are taking habitat from other animals.

336

And then you can see the wild mammals have declined.

337

If you look at vertebrate populations across the board, their populations have fallen on average by 73% in the last 50 years.

338

Hundreds of thousands of species are facing extinction, and that's the direct result of our actions.

339

Part of it is pollution, part of it is climate change, but the biggest part is just the amount of land that we need.

340

And so what population would allow us to successfully share the world with all these other species?

341

That's really hard to estimate, obviously, because it all depends on how those people live.

342

But every realistic estimate that I've seen says it's less than the number of people we have right now.

343

And they sort of tend to land around the 3-4 billion level,

344

which again is sort of between the population when our parents were born and when we were born.

345

Okay, Joss, you now have 90 seconds for your rebuttal.

346

I want to use my tag team here.

347

It's from Dean Spears, who's an economist and author of a book called After the Spike.

348

When China's particle air pollution was off the charts in 2013, it got international attention and was called the airpocalypse.

349

In the decade after that, the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people, but particle air pollution in China fell by more than half.

350

And it's not just China.

351

The population of the world as a whole grew by 750 million people over that decade and particle air pollution fell.

352

But not everywhere.

353

It didn't fall in India.

354

And that's because leaders in India didn't make the policy decisions that China did to shut down coal plants or regulate industries.

355

When I was a kid in the 80s, the big famous threat was the hole in the ozone layer.

356

But my kids don't add to the hole in the ozone layer

357

because the Montreal Protocol in 1987 banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons.

358

Before that, it was leaded gasoline, but the Clean Air Act addressed that.

359

The thing is, we could list every environmental challenge, and there are many, and they are serious, and they are real, and we must confront them.

360

But whenever we've confronted humans' destructive environmental activity before, it's always been not by reducing the number of humans,

361

but by confronting the destructive activity that humans do.

362

You know, this is the same reason why you don't see environmental organizations advocating for policies

363

that would somehow drastically cut the human population, as if there was any way to do that that wasn't like fully evil.

364

And Spears also has an analysis where they looked at climate specifically, and they showed

365

that population decline that's going to happen is just too slow to be any part of a solution to climate change.

366

We need to decarbonize in the next couple of decades.

367

And when you look at the two population paths, one declining and one stabilizing, you just don't see a difference.

368

What we need are technologies and policies, and you need people to push for both of those.

369

I'd say a couple of things to that.

370

One is that another big difference between China and India is that China's population did fall.

371

Obviously, that was because of policies that we would think of as unethical.

372

But right now, we don't have to resort to those policies to see a population decline,

373

we can just embrace the trend that's already happening and let people make those choices and the population will decline.

374

It's not that it won't have any effect.

375

I think his analysis found that it had a small effect, too small to solve all the problems.

376

But if you look at the analysis of the technology, the decarbonization efforts that we've made, they're also too small.

377

All of these pieces on their own are too small, but together they can have an impact.

378

So why not try all of them at once?

379

And that's actually, I'm going to use my tag team

380

because a bioethicist that I interviewed made that point pretty well, I thought.

381

Let's get some of our ecological improvements from smart technologies.

382

And let's get some of our ecological improvements from getting rid of unnecessary superfluous consumption.

383

And then let's get some from gradually and humanely shrinking our numbers.

384

I think that's the way to go.

385

Put that all together.

386

Let's give ourselves the best chance to come through the next hundred years without disaster.

387

And not just not without disaster, but with a good future where everyone has enough food

388

and we still keep some of the beauty and vibrancy in the natural world too.

389

He seems nice.

390

But I would say if you look at things that need to be done, like there is some cost to cleaning up after ourselves, right?

391

The stock of CO2 emissions is already in the atmosphere.

392

We will have technologies that can remove it.

393

We will have to pay for them because they'll be expensive.

394

And the bigger tax base that you have, the more we can share that cost among ourselves.

395

So it's not obvious that you can just decline the population and you get only a net benefit for the environment there.

396

What I would also say is that if policies matter, and they do, like you mentioned, the cost of livestock, right?

397

Right now, lots of countries actually subsidize the beef and dairy industries.

398

They're lowering the prices.

399

We're not getting the signal of their actual costs.

400

And so that's a policy question.

401

And we need people to push for that change of policies.

402

And the fact is that environmentalists should make more environmentalists.

403

So Donald Trump, our president, he believes climate change is a hoax, famously.

404

If you look at the birth rates of the counties that supported him, they are substantially higher than the birth rates of the counties that voted against him.

405

And you see similar trends in Europe.

406

There is some indication

407

that decline in fertility among people with progressive values has contributed to the rightward turn of politics on that continent.

408

That's just something for, you know, environmentalists to keep in mind that if they want to transmit their values and their priorities to the next generation,

409

they are going to need to produce the next generation.

410

It makes me nervous to think about population engineering as a way to address some of these policy problems.

411

But to your earlier point, I actually think

412

that there obviously needs to be investment to solve these problems it's going to take a lot of work

413

and money and resources to solve them.

414

But there are signs that some aspects of lowering population do cost us nothing and lead to better outcomes.

415

Not so much in the decarbonization space, but in this other problem that's sort of a different one of land use.

416

You've seen countries like Croatia that have had their population decline like 20% in the last 30 years.

417

And they've just pulled back from farmland.

418

And very naturally, that farmland has become wilderness again.

419

And you've seen a rebounding of native populations of wolves and ibex and their native antelopes.

420

And that happened without too much human intervention at all.

421

It was sort of a natural progression where agriculture became wilderness again.

422

But I think you have to also recognize the solutions that can only come out of technology and policy.

423

And the fact is that We've seen a lot of countries, once they get out of poverty, they meet the needs of their citizens,

424

they start to care about paying for protecting the environment.

425

They do make progress.

426

We've brought species back from the brink of extinction.

427

We have decoupled emissions from population in lots of countries.

428

Actually, a lot of countries have decoupled economic growth from carbon emissions because of the shift to clean energy, which is happening faster than people predicted.

429

All right, let's move on to round four.

430

In this round, you each get to ask one another a question.

431

Joss is up first.

432

Okay, so in 1968, Paul and Ann Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted, you know, widespread famine and unrest due to overpopulation.

433

It has gone down as one of, you know, history's most famous bad takes because their predictions were false.

434

They couldn't foresee how innovation would allow us to feed more people with less resources.

435

So my question is, what do environmentalists and what should we learn from the mistakes that they made?

436

And how do we avoid making the same mistakes as we consider population issues going forward?

437

Well, I think the lesson from the Ehrlichs is that it's really hard to predict the future.

438

It's hard to predict what advances technology will do.

439

And you can predict things incorrectly in both directions.

440

You might not anticipate some technology that is going to make population growth okay, but you also might not anticipate some technology like,

441

for example, AI that might make labor shortages okay.

442

New technology could also improve our economies by increasing productivity in the future

443

and making some of these concerns about an aging population and a lowering workforce kind of moot.

444

The lesson is not to try and change people's choices to meet some imagined future that you've constructed with your models,

445

but rather to see what people's choices are in this moment and try to build a world that works with those choices.

446

Right now, people are choosing to have fewer children.

447

And so we should try to build a world that works with that.

448

All right.

449

Adam, you'll address your question.

450

So you're saying we need to reverse population decline.

451

But my question is, how can we do that?

452

Can you name a single policy out there in the world

453

that has raised fertility rates where the population is declining back up to replacement levels?

454

No, we have not seen that any government has figured out how to return societies above replacement rate.

455

But I think that doesn't mean that we can't do anything about it.

456

Actually, if you look at some of the research that's been done that really considers the counterfactual quite closely,

457

you do see sort of marginal improvements when you make childcare more affordable and you expand parental leave.

458

So it's really hard for me to believe that governments are all

459

that pro-natal if the costs of childcare and housing have grown faster than wages.

460

That's kind of the biggest thing

461

that probably affects people's decisions about whether they are going to have families and how big their families will be.

462

And I just don't think that there's any evidence that we've done much at all on those fronts.

463

Well, this segues really well into my pet peeve.

464

In this round, you'll each call out a common talking point that gets on your nerves.

465

Adam, go ahead.

466

I think that a lot of People,

467

especially politicians, think that there's going to be some magic wand they can wave policy-wise that magically makes their populations grow again.

468

And when you look at, like you said, we haven't seen that working yet.

469

Maybe there's things we can do, but they're most likely to cause marginal gains.

470

You look at countries that are what I would call pretty pronatalist in the way that you're describing social democracies in Scandinavia,

471

where they have a lot of support for parents and, you know, they're working on cost of living, all these things.

472

And the population is still declining.

473

There's still a low fertility rate.

474

So I just don't think that there's that many levers

475

that we can push that don't become coercive or creepy to raise the population.

476

And to me, that means that we should be focusing on a whole suite of solutions

477

that include adapting to a lowering population versus just trying to force the population back up.

478

And right now I see a mismatch in where the energy and thought is being focused.

479

So the pet peeve is that people are proposing family-friendly policies?

480

The pet peeve is that a lot of politicians are really focused on increasing fertility rate in a way that is impossible, that we've seen as impossible.

481

Some of those policies, I think, should be implemented anyway.

482

Some of them are less good, I think, for the fabric of society.

483

But I think that by focusing on them and believing that somehow they'll have this effect,

484

they're not having a clear-eyed view of the future and making the other changes they need to make in their societies.

485

Yeah, that seems fair to me.

486

I mean, I think perhaps the area is worth more research and study to try to figure out what might be possible.

487

I'm not convinced we've tried everything.

488

But yeah, some of this may be out of the reach of policy

489

and may be more in the hands of cultural factors.

490

And there's an economist who's doing some really interesting work on this.

491

Her name is Claudia Golden.

492

And she's looked at a subset of wealthy countries, all of which are below replacement rate.

493

And she charts them by their fertility rate on one axis and then how imbalanced the household labor is.

494

So on one side, you have countries like Korea, Japan, and then Southern Europe, like Italy, Greece, Spain,

495

where the men do way less housework and child care than the women

496

and their fertility rates are lower than countries like Sweden,

497

Norway, Canada, France, where the gender relations are more egalitarian and you see that their fertility rates are higher.

498

Again, they're still below replacement, but it's worth interrogating these small differences.

499

You know, why, what is the difference between France's society and Korea's society?

500

We have a lot to look at culturally, just because, you know, giving people cash might not convince them to have a kid.

501

You know, there may be other barriers that are cultural that can explain why those pronatal policies aren't necessarily working.

502

Joss, your pet peeve?

503

Okay, so my pet peeve is that it's really common to hear these days

504

that now is a uniquely bad time to bring children in the world.

505

I think this is pretty wrong.

506

I certainly empathize with anyone who is dissatisfied with the state of the world, who feels a lot of uncertainty about the future.

507

These are confusing times.

508

The challenges are big and real.

509

But the thing is that they always have been.

510

So, you know, you go back a couple hundred years

511

and 30 to 50 percent of babies did not survive the first five years of their lives.

512

Right.

513

They didn't have any defenses against infectious disease.

514

They didn't.

515

They fought in world wars.

516

You know, just in the recent past, big chunks of the U.S population did not have access to equal rights.

517

Are we to believe that all of our ancestors were foolish for bringing us into the world?

518

Like, I'm personally very happy to have been born when I was.

519

And I think the issue here is a lot of media incentives and social algorithms that encourage widespread negativity,

520

nihilism, and that kind of can just have distorting effects.

521

So there was a poll that showed

522

that half of Democrats in the U.S believe that climate change is going to render the earth uninhabitable.

523

It's very hard to find an actual climate scientist who agrees with that.

524

So this really bothers me.

525

There have always been horrors and injustice.

526

And I think the question is whether there are going to be people to fight those problems and fix them.

527

Totally.

528

I totally agree with this, actually.

529

And I think

530

that you see these incentives at play on both sides where you can sell more books

531

if you portray something as a catastrophe.

532

But there are really hard problems ahead.

533

And I think that they'll be made marginally easier in an important way with fewer people.

534

All right, let's move on.

535

In this round, you'll each have to concede a point.

536

Joss, you're up first.

537

Okay, so I will concede that we are not good at predicting the future.

538

It will be many decades before we notice substantial declines in our population.

539

And in that time, you know, a lot could happen.

540

You mentioned AI.

541

The thing that people always fail to anticipate is technological change.

542

So we're going to have to keep an eye on that.

543

It could go either way.

544

You know, if AI plays out in the utopic vision

545

and we all don't need to work anymore and we get a big check from like a limitless source of wealth, great.

546

If AI wipes out jobs and doesn't return anything to the people in return, that's just going to push birth rates lower.

547

I can tell you that.

548

The other thing I'm keeping an eye on is in vitro gametogenesis.

549

So they are figuring out how to make eggs from skin cells, which would remove the age constraint on female fertility.

550

And so this is being done in rodents, but it's totally possible to imagine a future where, you know, women have all the time in the world to establish their lives,

551

to shop around for the right partner, and then start having babies in their 40s and 50s instead of their 20s and 30s.

552

So all of

553

which is to say it's hard to know exactly what the right level of alarm is about falling birth rates.

554

And that is the point that I would concede.

555

All right.

556

And Adam, your point to concede?

557

I would concede that there is reason for some alarm about some of these programs like Social Security in the U.S.

558

An aging population is going to result in some strains on these programs.

559

and the promise that these programs are making to people who are going to retire in 20 years, they're not going to be able to keep those.

560

That's just a mathematical impossibility at this point.

561

There are things that we can do to redesign those programs.

562

There are tweaks that a lot of economists talk about that could basically erase most, if not all, of the shortfalls that these programs are facing.

563

But those changes are pretty politically unpopular, and we don't really have a politician yet who's come along and said,

564

I'm brave enough to really take this on and make those changes.

565

Okay, on to the final round.

566

Joss will be up first.

567

You'll have 90 seconds to make your final point.

568

The truth is, Adam, you already won this issue.

569

Our most likely future is one of smaller aging populations.

570

And the question is, should we do anything to slow or stop that?

571

You make the case that more people are more problems.

572

And while that's true in a lot of ways, it's less than half the story, I think.

573

✨ Empfohlenes Video

75 Sätze

Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

132 Sätze

How young is too young for criminal responsibility? | A Current Affair

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepHigh School Students

145 Sätze

Peter Singer | It Is NOT Immoral To Be A Billionaire (8/8) | Oxford Union

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

116

16 Sätze

Can Earth Run Out of Water?

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

152 Sätze

The Crisis We’re Pretending Isn’t Happening

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

140 Sätze

Zuckerberg and Senator Hawley clash in fiery child safety hearing

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

12 Sätze

Bill Gates - Population - Vaccines

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

211 Sätze

The Biggest Problem No One Is Talking About

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

66 Sätze

Contemporary Topics 3 Unit 11 BIOLOGY The fountain of youth

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

284 Sätze

Why do people smoke?

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

171 Sätze

Would You Use An Artificial Womb? (I Would)

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

60 Sätze

Can You Say Why America is the Greatest Country in the World?

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students

Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion

Dieses Video enthält 621 Sätze und 8341 Wörter zum Nachsprechen. Der gesprochene Teil dauert 48:45. Der Sprecher spricht in natürlichem Tempo, etwa 171 Wörter pro Minute, ähnlich wie im Alltagsgespräch. 86 % der Wörter gehören zu den 3.000 häufigsten im Englischen; den Rest solltest du dir vor dem Üben ansehen.

Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video

15 weniger häufige Wörter aus dem Video, mit Aussprache und Bedeutung:

fertility /fɝˈtɪləti/ (Substantiv) — Fruchtbarkeit. The condition, or the degree, of being fertile.
decline /dɪˈklaɪn/ (Verb) — sinken, fallen. To move downwards, to fall, to drop.
replacement /ɹɪˈpleɪsmənt/ (Substantiv) — Ersatz, Ersatzspieler. A person or thing that takes the place of another; a substitute.
predict /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ (Verb) — prophezeien. To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of…
argue /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ (Verb) — diskutieren, erörtern. To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply.
innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/ (Substantiv) — Innovation. The act of innovating; the introduction of something new, in customs, rites, etc.
ideal /aɪˈdi(ə)l/ (Adjektiv) — ideal, bestmöglich. Pertaining to ideas, or to a given idea.
fewer /ˈfjuː.ɚ/ — weniger. Less; a smaller amount of something non-integral commonly expressed as an integer
solve /sɒlv/ (Verb) — lösen. To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out.
emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/ (Substantiv) — Ausstoß, Emission. Something which is emitted or sent out; issue.
chart /t͡ʃɑɹt/ (Substantiv) — Karte. A map illustrating the geography of a specific phenomenon.
transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/ (Substantiv) — Übergang. The process of change from one form, state, style or place to another.
invest /ɪnˈvɛst/ (Verb) — investieren. To spend money, time, or energy on something, especially for some benefit or purpose; used with in.
pollution /pəˈluʃən/ (Substantiv) — Verunreinigung, Verschmutzung. Physical contamination, now especially the contamination of the environment by harmful substances, or by disruptive levels of noise, light etc.
economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ (Substantiv) — Ökonom, Volkswirt. An expert in economics, especially one who studies economic data and extracts higher-level information or proposes theories.

Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst

look at (Verb) — schauen. To observe or watch.
go down (Verb) — absteigen, hinabsteigen. To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.
clean up (Verb) — putzen. To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy.
figure out (Verb) — herausfinden. To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go back (Verb) — zurückgehen, zurückfahren. To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
rely on (Verb) — sich verlassen auf, zählen auf. To be confident in.
think about /ˈθɪŋk əˌbaʊt/ (Verb) — (jemand) denken an. To ponder.
come along (Verb) — mitgehen. To accompany.

Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest

Der Sprecher verwendet 154 Kurzformen und abgeschwächte Formen, zum Beispiel don't, we're, they're. Sprich sie in der kurzen Form, so wie du sie hörst.

Die „th“-Laute: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, smooth /smuːð/
Die Laute „sh“ und „zh“: innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, pollution /pəˈluʃən/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/
Lange Wörter – auf die Betonung achten: fertility /fɝˈtɪləti/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, anticipate /ænˈtɪs.ɪ.peɪt/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/

So übst du mit diesem Video

Höre dir das ganze Video einmal an, ohne zu sprechen, und notiere die Wörter, die du nicht kennst.
Beginne mit 0,75-facher Geschwindigkeit, sprich Satz für Satz nach und wechsle zur normalen Geschwindigkeit, sobald es leichtfällt.
Nimm dich auf und vergleiche mit dem Original; achte dabei auf Wörter wie fertility, decline, replacement.

Grammatik in diesem Video

Die Strukturen, die der Sprecher am häufigsten verwendet, mit den genauen Worten aus dem Video:

Struktur	Im Video
Present Perfect have/has + Partizip Perfekt – eine vergangene Handlung, die jetzt noch wichtig ist	has hurt · have happened · has gone
Passiv be + Partizip Perfekt – wichtig ist, was geschieht, nicht wer es tut	were born · should be celebrated · are skewed
Relativsätze who / which + Satz – eine Zusatzinformation über eine Person oder Sache	people who are · fall, which has · one, which is

Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?

Shadowing ist eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Sprachlerntechnik, die ursprünglich für die professionelle Dolmetscherausbildung entwickelt und durch den Polyglotten Dr. Alexander Arguelles populär gemacht wurde. Die Methode ist einfach aber wirkungsvoll: Du hörst englisches Audio von Muttersprachlern und wiederholst es sofort laut — wie ein Schatten, der dem Sprecher mit nur 1–2 Sekunden Verzögerung folgt. Anders als passives Hören oder Grammatikübungen zwingt Shadowing dein Gehirn und deine Mundmuskulatur, gleichzeitig echte Sprachmuster zu verarbeiten und zu reproduzieren. Studien zeigen, dass es Aussprachegenauigkeit, Intonation, Rhythmus, verbundene Sprache, Hörverständnis und Sprechflüssigkeit signifikant verbessert — was es zu einer der effektivsten Methoden für die IELTS Speaking-Vorbereitung und reale englische Kommunikation macht.

Shadowing-Technik: die vollständige Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung lesen →

Shadowing-Übung: Do we need more kids? A research showdown. - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

The only good nuclear accident

Why is this one spot not warming?

Dog vision, explained

When Siberia thaws, what emerges?

What the actual science says about "brain rot"

Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained

How young is too young for criminal responsibility? | A Current Affair

Peter Singer | It Is NOT Immoral To Be A Billionaire (8/8) | Oxford Union

Can Earth Run Out of Water?

The Crisis We’re Pretending Isn’t Happening

Zuckerberg and Senator Hawley clash in fiery child safety hearing

Bill Gates - Population - Vaccines

The Biggest Problem No One Is Talking About

Contemporary Topics 3 Unit 11 BIOLOGY The fountain of youth

Why do people smoke?

Would You Use An Artificial Womb? (I Would)

Can You Say Why America is the Greatest Country in the World?

Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion

Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video

Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst

Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest

So übst du mit diesem Video

Grammatik in diesem Video

Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?