Shadowing Practice: Do we need more kids? A research showdown. - Learn English Speaking with 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.

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

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

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It's not the same thing as birth rates.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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This is not just a rich country issue anymore.

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

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

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

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One example is Colombia.

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

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What we actually got there was 450,000.

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

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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.

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

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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,

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which means half the potential mothers.

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They can't just return to replacement rate.

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

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

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

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

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Adam, you have 90 seconds for your rebuttal.

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

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

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

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It's hard to predict fertility rates.

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

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so drawing a line from a trend we see in the

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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.

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

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

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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

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

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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,

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It came back up.

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

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

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And that bump is now gone.

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

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So that's one point.

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

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Right.

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

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

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

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Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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Okay, we'll move on to round two.

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

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Adam, you're up first.

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You have one minute.

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Great.

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My statistic is 1.6 births per woman.

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

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

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

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

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How can that be?

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

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

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They end up being more productive.

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

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

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its GDP shrank by 27%.

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

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

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Joss, your response?

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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.

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

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

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But it's just not the real world.

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Like this analysis ignores the transition period, right?

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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.

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

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And this paper was published 10 years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They've been very good at incorporating news technologies.

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

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

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I'm not denying that.

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

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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?

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

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

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All right.

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Why don't we move on?

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

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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%,

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more than a century.

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

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

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And the reason why that's really important is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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Adam, your response?

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A lot to respond to in both of those stats.

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

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It's not declining yet.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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,

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

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

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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.

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

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

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or encourage them to have the same trajectory and experience

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

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Yeah, it's a problem.

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

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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?

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

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Why don't we move on to round three?

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

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

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

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

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

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They're figuring out ways to do it better.

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

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Right.

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

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Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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And that's the same across the economy.

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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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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So bigger markets encourage problem solving.

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

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that we want.

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

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

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

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One is just investment, public investment.

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

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

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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.

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

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And then another thing is we can just increase the number

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

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

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So we can raise the education standard for the whole world

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

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

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

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Fleetwood Mac recorded rumors when the population was 4.1 billion.

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

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

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So there is some relevance to that, I think.

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

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

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And the question is whether a bigger

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

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

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It's very expensive.

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

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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.

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All right, moving on.

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

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

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

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

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Groundwater is being depleted.

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40% of fisheries are being overfished.

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

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

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The latest IPCC report says the GDP per capita

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

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So we're really sure about that.

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

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

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It's not that complicated of a picture.

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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.

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

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This graph here sort of is a snapshot of that.

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

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

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And then you can see the wild mammals have declined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I want to use my tag team here.

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

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

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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.

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And it's not just China.

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

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But not everywhere.

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It didn't fall in India.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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but by confronting the destructive activity that humans do.

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

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

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

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

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We need to decarbonize in the next couple of decades.

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

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

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I'd say a couple of things to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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So why not try all of them at once?

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

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

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

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

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

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I think that's the way to go.

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Put that all together.

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

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

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

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He seems nice.

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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?

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The stock of CO2 emissions is already in the atmosphere.

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We will have technologies that can remove it.

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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

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 621 sentences and 8341 words to shadow. The speech runs for 48:45. The speaker talks at a natural 171 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

fertility /fɝˈtɪləti/ (noun) — The condition, or the degree, of being fertile.
decline /dɪˈklaɪn/ (verb) — To move downwards, to fall, to drop.
replacement /ɹɪˈpleɪsmənt/ (noun) — A person or thing that takes the place of another; a substitute.
predict /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ (verb) — 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) — To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply.
innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — The act of innovating; the introduction of something new, in customs, rites, etc.
ideal /aɪˈdi(ə)l/ (adjective) — Pertaining to ideas, or to a given idea.
fewer /ˈfjuː.ɚ/ — Less; a smaller amount of something non-integral commonly expressed as an integer
solve /sɒlv/ (verb) — To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out.
emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/ (noun) — Something which is emitted or sent out; issue.
chart /t͡ʃɑɹt/ (noun) — A map illustrating the geography of a specific phenomenon.
transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/ (noun) — The process of change from one form, state, style or place to another.
invest /ɪnˈvɛst/ (verb) — To spend money, time, or energy on something, especially for some benefit or purpose; used with in.
pollution /pəˈluʃən/ (noun) — Physical contamination, now especially the contamination of the environment by harmful substances, or by disruptive levels of noise, light etc.
economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ (noun) — An expert in economics, especially one who studies economic data and extracts higher-level information or proposes theories.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

look at (verb) — To observe or watch.
talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
go down (verb) — To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.
clean up (verb) — To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy.
come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
figure out (verb) — To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go back (verb) — To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
move on (verb) — To continue; to proceed; to go on.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 154 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, we're, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, smooth /smuːð/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, pollution /pəˈluʃən/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: fertility /fɝˈtɪləti/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, anticipate /ænˈtɪs.ɪ.peɪt/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like fertility, decline, replacement.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has hurt · have happened · has gone
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	were born · should be celebrated · are skewed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who are · fall, which has · one, which is

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?