- We are not far away from global population peaking.

There's still this sense that we are at unending growth and we're all gonna perish from overpopulation, but that's really not the case.

(gentle music) - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, how do we plan for our global future?

Decades away, what will our world look like?

Most, we can't predict.

I, for one, still waiting for my flying car, but at least one thing is certain: we are at the beginning of a fundamental shift in modern human history.

The global population is still increasing, but the growth rate slowing a lot.

By the end of the century, we'll start to see depopulation and the people on earth on average will be a lot older.

So, what do we do about it?

Is a slow-moving crisis inevitable or can we adapt?

My guest today, Jennifer Sciubba, President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, says our demography is our destiny, but how we prepare for it is up to us.

What does all this mean for immigration, women's rights, and the future of global power?

We'll get into all of it.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

- Well, it's great to be back, Vladimir, truly, and you know I do love podcasts.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Narrator 1] And by.

Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

(bright music) (dramatic music) - The world is quietly being reshaped by a ticking demographic time bomb.

- Japan's fertility rate has hit an historic low.

- The US population is older than it's ever been.

- Italy's national birth rate has fallen to its lowest level on record.

- Experts are warning that global fertility rates will drop below the point needed to sustain the world's population.

- 2/3 of the world's population lives in countries with fertility rates below replacement levels of 2.1 children per woman.

By 2050, one in six people on the planet will be 65 years or older.

While the global population is still increasing, driven by growth in developing countries like Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia, experts predict the global population will peak within 60 years.

Economic and social implications of that are huge.

Smaller populations means fewer workers, more retirees, declining tax revenues, and slowing economies.

So governments all over the world are doing what they can to try to boost birth rates, especially in East Asia where the population crisis is severe.

In Japan, the demographic decline is so bad the Imperial family is literally running out of heirs.

Japan has the oldest population in the world, so the government has expanded parental leave, they've subsidized daycare, and they've introduced cash allowances to get people to have babies.

For decades, China limited births to one child per family.

Now, Communist officials knock on doors to ask women about plans to have more kids.

President Xi Jinping has called childbirth a national priority and a patriotic duty.

In South Korea, sales of dog strollers have outpaced actual baby carriages.

The country has the world's lowest birth rate, which the government has declared a national crisis.

(Yun speaking foreign language) - Korea has tried it all.

Cash incentives, tax breaks for new parents, housing benefits, even matchmaking services.

Nothing is working.

The problem runs deeper than economics or policy.

Modern society is changing.

People are delaying marriage, they're prioritizing their careers.

And for women, more education and opportunity most often means fewer children.

Immigration could help.

1.2 billion people will age into the labor force in developing countries over the next decade, and there aren't enough jobs in their home countries to support them.

But in many places, accepting large numbers of immigrants is politically toxic, and even countries with growing populations are gonna peak within the next few decades.

So, maybe it's time to embrace reality.

We can't turn the demographic clock back to the 1950s.

Instead of pushing for more births, governments could also rethink old age.

Invest in lifelong learning and new technologies to keep people productive for longer, extend their working lives.

Redesign retirement and Social Security to support older engaged populations.

The aging crisis could be an opportunity to create a blueprint for how societies thrive with the populations they actually have.

The future won't look like the past, and that's not such a bad thing.

Here to help us unpack population trends, how governments are responding, and what the future might look like, is one of the world's leading experts on demographic trends.

Dr. Jennifer Sciubba, President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau.

And here's our conversation.

Jennifer Sciubba, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me, Ian.

- And we have not had a big conversation about demographics on the show, and it's about time, right?

- It's certainly time.

- It's something we can actually project.

- We can, yeah.

- We can talk about the future with a reasonable degree of certainty.

What's the single thing that you are most confident of that you suspect our audience doesn't know?

- I don't think most people realize that we are not far away from global population peaking, and that most of the world is far down that path already.

I think there's still this sense that we are at unending growth and that the globe is just filling with people with no end in sight and we're all gonna perish from overpopulation, but that's really not the case.

- Now, I've noticed that, I mean, there's this massive trend that, you know, women, you know, the 20s, 30s, 40s, the most sharp increase is zero children.

And we're seeing that all over the world, really, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

- What's driving it?

- Well, we have to break it down into two different buckets here.

So if we think about places in the world that go from very high numbers of children per woman to lower, and we'll just throw out a number for us of replacement levels about two, obviously, replacing both parents.

So that's a number to keep in mind.

When we say from this high, high level to that replacement level or just under it, typically speaking, ending child marriages so people get married later, obviously that shrinks the number of years in which you might be having children.

Increasing education, including secondary level education and having rights-based access to family planning and health services.

That brings it down.

Work in there how all these feed in together with opportunities for work outside the home.

So there's a greater opportunity cost for having those extra numbers of children.

- And that's what's now happening in India, happening in Africa, we see that.

- And has been happening for a long time, and so I think people have a general sense of that.

The puzzle that we've been sitting with today, though, is, there's not a bottom.

Like, where is the bottom for the average number of children per woman?

And so the question that I think most people are wanting to know is, why does it keep going lower?

And for that, it's a much more complicated answer, 'cause you can't just say, "Well, we are continuing to educate women "so they are not having children."

In fact, we're starting to see data that the more educated women, so now when we say educated, we're not talking about women who get out of high school.

We're talking about women with advanced graduate degrees.

They're actually seeing rises in the number of births.

So we can't just say, "Oh, the relationship between education "and fertility rates is straightforward."

It's better for us to break it down.

- What is it that worries you the most?

Because I hear when you're talking about population contraction, I hear a level of concern in your voice, and I'm wondering what drives it.

- There are two things that concern me.

One is when we paint population as the problem, we look for population-based solutions.

And we see murmurings around the world, I would say particularly in the United States, if we want more babies, then we might have to make that happen.

So when you see population as the problem and population as the solution, I really worry that women's rights, access to contraception, for example, are on the chopping block.

The second thing that worries me is that we've kept the focus just on the population numbers.

So, how many babies will there be?

Why are there so few babies?

And we've taken no responsibility for adjusting to this.

So I think we are decades behind in preparing for the world that is surely to come.

And instead, we keep trying to think only in terms of this as a population issue.

- But I wanted to get a little past that and say, you know, let's imagine, I mean, we had this massive, you know, run-up from just a couple billion to what's gonna be 10 over just a few generations.

Why is it necessarily so horrible if we go, if we have a gradual slide from 10 to eight to seven to five?

Why is that necessarily a problem?

- For me, it's not necessarily a problem.

For governments, for families, it could be a problem.

So the governments that do not adjust their systems, they will have a problem.

And, in fact, if we're thinking geopolitically, who's likely to come out on top, it'll be the ones who realize the fastest that they're not going to reverse these population trends and they instead build to deal with it.

That means you're thinking about things like the workforce, your use of AI, for example, education, housing, Social Security systems.

And I think that it's also an issue at the family level, though, because we have very poor care infrastructure around the world.

And so, you know, if the government is not the one who is taking the responsibility for caring for the people, and it's not the case everywhere in the world.

We tend to think about European style social welfare systems and aging, but not every country in the world has that system.

For example, look at Singapore.

So, who holds the bag then?

It's the family.

And when we say the family, that's really code for women.

So failure to prepare and put in place systems that deal with what you actually have, which is an aging, smaller population in the future, well, that's what's really dangerous.

- What happens to a Japan, a South Korea in a generation, if they don't actually pivot to a changing population?

- Japan's probably adjusting better than many other countries.

I think about France, for example.

Let's just contrast Japan and France.

We can see that Japan average age of exit from the workforce is at older ages.

So people tend to work longer, the population is healthier.

That right there gets you huge bonus points when it comes to adjusting to aging.

In France, they've got a healthy population, but there are still all these pressures for early retirement.

Well, when you're living decades beyond retirement, you really constrain those social welfare systems.

So, you know, that's what I look for.

If you are a country that the government has made extreme promises to take care of you and there are fewer people in the workforce, then there's not as much money flowing into that pie and those pies being divided in many other ways.

So I think the strains in government budget is where we'll really see the biggest issue.

So there are trade-offs.

I mean, you know, what will go while you pay for an older population?

Will it be defense?

Will it be something else?

Will it be education?

- Especially an older population that has a significant amount of power over political decision-making.

- That's where I think the democracy part is very interesting.

Love democracy, fantastic, but I think it's very difficult to do long-term planning in a democracy.

And demography is the ultimate long-term planning.

It is looking out and saying, "In 30 years we know what the strains will be.

"How do we put in place structures now that support that?"

But instead, voters and politicians, they have such a shorter term view.

So I really worry about the ability of democracies to kind of pivot and prepare for the future that's just 20 to 30 years ahead.

- Now, the other side of the policy equation is, if you don't like what's happening with your population, can you change it, right?

I mean, China's gone from a one-child policy to a two-child policy to a three-child policy.

Isn't changing the demographics at all.

- No.

- What have we seen in place that has made a significant difference in changing population trends?

- Well, if we think about population trends as three pieces: there's the births, and there's the deaths, and there's the migration.

The migration piece, countries can do a pretty good job of changing.

In fact, you know, we talk about porous borders, but really, at the end of the day, they're not that porous, especially if you define borders as your asylum systems, all the adjudication.

States have pretty good control over their migration part of things.

The death part, countries also have, mm, some control over, a little asterisks here, we're talking about the United States.

Because there's a lot that countries can do to invest in health and longevity.

And so our aging problem, so to speak, is partly because we're living longer, and that's a great thing.

The United States compared to its peers, however, what we think of as our peers is not in the same boat.

So the US peers in terms of healthy life expectancy or health span are Russia, China, and Mexico, it's not Southern Europe.

And so we are at a significant disadvantage there.

- Which is astonishing, right?

Because, I mean, the United States is a peer of Singapore and Western Europe at the 1% of the population wealth and education, but the average American, not even close.

- One of these things is not like the other one when it comes to us and what we think of as our peers.

And so of course it's not an easy fix.

I mean, it's not just about the amount of money that we're spending on things.

There's some larger cultural issues here behind why we have such poor health, and that affects our ability to adjust to population aging because we are going to have to have more and more people working longer.

- So we've talked about death, we've talked about migration.

We haven't talked about-- - The big one.

- The big one.

- Yeah.

- Having kids.

- Having kids.

- And that's the one that I suspect you're gonna tell me you can't move very much with policy.

- You can't move very much, which of course China is finding out because, you know, they can say, "Please have babies, please get married."

There's so many countries out there that are actually in the business of trying to do matchmaking.

Korea's also one of these countries, and it's very difficult to get people to get married and have children because the government wants them to here in this modern world.

The approach that most governments are taking, particularly in Asia to the low fertility issue, they are really focusing on gender but in the wrong ways, because this actually is an issue about gender.

It's an issue about women's opportunities, women's rights.

We just don't tend to frame it that way when we're talking about it at this geopolitical level.

But at the end of the day, reproductive decisions, they're made either between couples or perhaps even individually for women.

And so when we have these national level policies, they really often do not resonate at the individual or household level.

And so most of these countries are trying to lean into, how do we convince women to have more kids, or how do we create a system to get them to have more kids?

And these opportunities look all over the place.

So China's actually doubling down on traditional roles.

They're calling for women to exit the workforce and get back into the home and have babies.

Women who've been exposed to the idea that there's a bigger world out there, they're educated, they've perhaps, you know, moved to the cities already, they have jobs, that does not resonate with them, and so they are really pushing back against that.

In South Korea, they've had a lot of the same kind of rhetoric and policies over the years, so there's a huge feminist movement in South Korea that it's actually having women opt out altogether of even dating.

- What are the governments right now that are doing the most to try, however ineffectually, to change their birth rates?

- Korea is one of the countries that is doing the most.

They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to raise fertility, and they're doubling down.

I was there not that long ago, and they have set up a new population ministry to really lean into this more.

And there's a sense I get that some of these messages around gender are resonating.

For example, it's not just putting in place a paternity policy saying, "Okay, we want there to be paternity leave "and that'll solve everything."

They have that in South Korea, but fewer than 10% of dads take it.

So then that points to another question.

Well, it's not just the government policy.

Okay, so now then, is this really a population issue, or is an issue with workplace culture generally?

So same kind of thing in Korea, in terms of education.

Researchers have pointed out over the years that Korean education system is so expensive and it's so onerous, particularly on mothers.

They know that that's a problem for everyone, not just around the fertility rate.

So then this new population policy set, they're working to try to adjust that as best they can, these, you know, famous cram schools and such.

So what we learned here is when we're talking about fertility rates or births and, you know, who's having children, it's a whole suite of policies that say, "What's your life like?

"Is your life a rich life "where you're optimistic about the future "and you're forming relationships "and you have strong communities?"

If the answer is yes, you're more likely to have higher fertility rates.

If the answer is no, it's more likely to be lower.

- Now, one of the things that interests me a lot about demographics is we have such a wide variety of countries out there on the basis of what their populations look like.

I mean, you have African countries out there where the average age is 18, right?

And on the other hand, in Japan and South Korea, it's, like, over 50 now?

What have we learned?

What do we know about how countries are different on the basis of their demographic profiles?

- When we think about the base population, that determines, of course, what the priorities are at the country level.

So when your base is so radically different, it gives you completely different priorities at the country level.

So if you are in a very young country, you are extremely worried about how you're going to educate your population.

Maybe 40% of your population is younger than age 15.

That's your set of issues.

You're worried about creating jobs for people so that they will have opportunities as they get into those working ages.

If you are on the other end of the spectrum, you're thinking more about, do you have enough workers to especially support those entitlement systems that you very likely have put into place?

So really different sets.

We're worried about empty cities in Japan, and you're worried about building enough housing in Lagos.

So just, it's wildly different, and it makes me worry about what we do at the global level when we have all these transnational issues we need to come together on.

And we've got, you know, over 30 shrinking countries, and we've got a set of countries whose populations will double over the next 30 years.

- Yeah, you have people starving all over the world, and then you have massive amounts of waste of food, and, yeah, you have ghost cities in Japan and in China, too.

And yet you've got huge housing crises in other places.

So much of this feels like a distribution challenge.

- A lot of people will just say, "Well, why don't we send those people "from those young countries who need jobs "to the places that are old countries "where they need workers?"

But that's where I always say immigration is much more of a political issue than a demographic issue.

So when we wanna talk about it within demography, we tend to talk about it like an economist would, like they're not real people.

No offense to my economist friends, but, you know, they just think about, "Oh, we could just, "let's send people where it looks like they should go."

But politically, of course, that's not how it works.

And we also know that immigration brings with it its own host of challenges and changes, and not all countries we should expect will go down that path.

- So when we see populations that are much younger, populations that are much older, are there any connections with type of governance?

I mean, we know what the priorities have to be and they're very different.

What about democracies and authoritarian regimes?

- Well, at the very young level, yes, we know a lot.

I mean, young countries, meaning countries that the average person is very young and they tend to have higher fertility rates, they are much more likely to be incredibly unstable, experience coups, and not to be democratic.

And so where we're trying to figure out from a research perspective is if there's any causality there.

Meaning, we used to think, I would say Arab Spring time, around the Arab Spring time we had a lot of questions about whether or not an older age structure would lead a country to become more democratic.

I don't really think there's a lot of support for that now.

I think, instead, we understand what we've known to be true for a long time, which is a demographically youthful country, it's not transitioning to democracy.

If it does transition, it's not gonna stay that way.

And so of course, when we're thinking about the world of the future, the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there's a set of countries, including Nigeria, that is not likely to see movements in that regard.

- And these are going to be, Nigeria, one, Indonesia, another Pakistan.

These are some countries that are going to be some of the world's largest.

- That's right.

- But we don't spend a lot of time thinking about right now.

- Yeah, we don't.

And, you know, the question I guess would be, to what degree do our global power structures, the global influence, does that line up with population size?

We were doing this conversation 100, 150 years ago, we would be so certain that those two things would align.

Now, of course, that's not the case.

And so, how fragile are our global systems that they could break down those structures of post-World War II?

I tend to think they're pretty well entrenched.

And so we'll actually see power being concentrated in the hands of smaller and smaller countries, even as the rest of the world grows.

- Jennifer Sciubba, thanks so much for joining.

- Thanks so much, Ian.

(soft music) - Now let's check in on the one population that never ages, just pills a bit, because felt is forever.

It's time for "Puppet Regime."

- Welcome to new episode of me and Xi's podcast, "This Authoritarian Life."

Today we're featuring very special guest, old friend, back in club of power, Donald Trump.

Welcome.

- Well, it's great to be back, Vladimir, truly, and you know I do love podcasts.

They helped me to win the election because a lot of young people listen to them.

- Yes, well, that is problem we are going to discuss today.

- Which problem?

- That there aren't enough young people in our countries.

People just aren't having kids.

- Dude, it's crazy.

In Russia these days, almost no one wants to raise cannon fodder anymore.

- But in America, they complain it's too expensive and time-consuming.

- But we invented TikTok so American parents wouldn't have to spend time with their kids at all.

- Yeah, thanks for that.

What are you guys doing about it in China?

- Well, we just have people from the government going around telling people to have sex.

- We have that too.

It's called the Department of Education, is what they tell me.

But we're gonna close that.

- I try to pay people to have kids.

Now I just annex neighboring countries and count people there as Russians.

- Very smart, Vladimir.

Xi, you could try a little number like that with Taiwan.

- Oh!

- Just kidding, don't even try it.

- Well, you could do it too, Donald.

Just take little bite of, say, Canada.

- Please, there's, like, five people there, and aren't they all Communists, like Justin?

- Okay, well, how about Mexico?

- Too many Mexicans, Vladimir.

You know I can't sell that.

- Maybe we just have to accept fate.

We shall grow old, and no one younger will come along to replace us.

- I'm not really mad at that.

I kind of love the idea of not ever being replaced.

- You already know my view on that.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or you don't remember 'cause you're getting old, why don't you check us out a couple times, at gzeromedia.com?

(bouncy music continues) (bouncy music continues) (bouncy music continues) (gentle music) - [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by.

Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

(bright music) (cheery music)