跟读练习: Why we might be getting the birth rate panic wrong (again) | BBC Global - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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When I was growing up,
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When I was growing up,
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people worried about there being too many people on Earth.
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But in the last few years,
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that script has flipped for much of the world.
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Some countries do still have populations that are growing,
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but in much of the West,
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birth rates are hitting all-time lows.
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That has a lot of people worried.
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But recently, I sat down with demographer Jennifer Schuber,
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who thinks we're looking at this all wrong,
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and
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that aiming for a correct population size is a lot less important than how we adapt to the population we actually have.
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I think where we get this idea of a correct population number is it's the one
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that allows us to be the laziest.
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Because if you have rapid population growth,
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you are really focusing all your time and attention
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and policies on how do we make sure that there are enough schools being built?
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Do we make sure there are enough jobs?
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And we've been doing that for decades, right?
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So that's comfortable.
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If you're going to upend it,
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how do we make sure we train gerontologists?
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How do we make sure that there's enough long-term care?
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That's really, really hard.
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It's not opaque what needs to be done,
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but it's politically really difficult.
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I'm old enough to remember when overpopulation was the big anxiety.
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And I remember actually, I even have family members who very,
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you know, confidently said, I'm only going to limit myself to having one
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or two children because I don't want to add to this massive overpopulation that we have around the world.
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They turned out to have been wrong.
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So how confident are we that the latest fears we have about this declining population are valid?
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I think part of what we need to do is separate the fears from the data.
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But if we really look at the heyday of rhetoric around overpopulation,
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talking like late 60s into the 1970s,
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it seemed that overall population growth was just exponential.
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I mean, it's more than doubled in my own lifetime.
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But what was happening beneath the surface was that the growth rate of the population was declining already in the 1960s.
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This was happening, but it takes a while for that to show up on the surface.
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We were worried about the headline number.
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We should have been looking at the growth trends.
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Maybe so, but it's hard because that's what we experience, right?
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Like we're not experiencing some underlying tectonic force that no one can see.
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We're experiencing how bad is the traffic?
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What's competition for job really like?
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But now what's happened in our lives is that we've caught up.
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I haven't looked at the data that just got released a few days ago,
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but over 42% of U.S counties were shrinking.
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So for people in those counties,
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they would actually feel what has been happening beneath the surface.
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And certainly we know that there are over 40 countries in the world with shrinking populations.
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So it actually has changed.
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And then the fear around it,
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of course, is a different topic.
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It's really about how societies handle the changes,
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not about the changes themselves.
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That's right.
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And I wish we would talk about that more.
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But how societies handle it is really difficult, right?
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It's hard for a politician to stick their neck out and say,
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I think we're going to need to raise retirement age.
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Well, that person has just put themselves out of a job.
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If we assume that we are on this path for a while where populations are going to decline for a while longer.
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And who knows, maybe in 20 years time,
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we'll be having a very different conversation for whatever reason.
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But let's assume we're on this path for the next 20 years.
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What do countries and governments need to do to adapt in practice?
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What are a few of the things in practice that they need to do to adapt to this?
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Yeah.
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Well, I mean, so we care,
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health infrastructure certainly came up when we talk about gerontologists.
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Care is another one.
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So So there's so much care that we all need at different points in our life and including the end of life.
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And we have really most societies in the world have been set up
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that that women perform most of that care
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and they perform it unpaid many are happy to do
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so of course uh it's not we have to be careful
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when we talk about things like a care burden
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but it is a care situation and it is one where it's not sustainable
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when you have an inverted we would say demographic pyramid where there are
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so many older age dependents and so few people to actually take care of them.
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So we need to think about this at the systemic level and think about how it affects different people differently, right?
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The poorer you are, the harder it might be.
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If you are a woman who has a job outside the home,
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it might be more difficult as well.
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We also need to think about skills and education.
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We have had a really linear view around this, right?
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The many people try to,
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they amass their education and their skills in this first part of life,
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and then they put them to work in the second part.
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Then they retire those skills and hopefully the education stays with them.
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But when we live longer and we know that we need to work longer,
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do we move that to also show up at different parts of life so that we retrain,
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we upskill, we learn different areas,
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and we can make sure that we have income security more so in the long run,
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particularly as the number of people of working ages decline?
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Is it possible, with all of the caveats that you've mentioned,
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to determine whether quality of life is meaningfully different in a growing society versus a shrinking one?
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That's a great question that I'm tempted to overanalyze because I think we actually need to update our definition of this.
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But if I keep it simple in what we know to be true,
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quality of life has actually been much higher in societies that have had declining fertility rates.
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We have much longer life expectancy.
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We have higher education rates.
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And that's because fertility rates tend to come down when you have a rising standard of living.
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And these things, of course,
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interact with one another and feedback on one another.
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What will be interesting for us,
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we are entering into an era of the unknown.
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And we have really been,
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it seems like we moved very quickly off of our celebrations of success that went along with declining fertility,
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like amazing opportunities for women to work outside the home of the fact that we're even here doing this.
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What a celebration.
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Go us.
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And we moved past that really quickly to just talk about the bad parts of things.
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How do we redefine what success
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and wellbeing look like in the context of a population
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that is not infinitely growing and perhaps doesn't have an infinitely growing GDP?
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We need new vocabulary around this.
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Before we go, Jennifer, I'm going to make you prime minister or president or monarch for the day.
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if you were to design a society from scratch,
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where you knew the population was going to decline over time,
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how would you design it?
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I would design it where we have really strong local communities.
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I think so much of where we get off track these days is
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that we have this national level policymaking that is all felt at the local level.
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And there's such a disconnect in that.
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And the way we live our lives really is neighborhood by neighborhood,
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street by street, community by community.
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And by building those really strong communities,
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I think we lay the foundation for resilience that is needed whether
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or not your population is going to grow or is going to shrink.
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And that's actually something that we can do if we increase our knowledge about these trends more and more,
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which we're doing through this.
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I think there's a lot of folks with probably really innovative ideas at the community level and I'd love to see them.
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Yeah, a better community is better care for all of those older people as well.
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Jennifer Schuber, thank you so much for joining me.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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