Why Global Birthrates Are Collapsing - Stephen J. Shaw

Women turning 30 without a child. If you're childless at 30, at most, you've got a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother, and that's maximum. It's actually lower than that in most countries. I could not find anywhere any example, so it's a toss of a coin, turning 30 without a child.

How long have you been working on this project?

Seven years this month. So, seven years ago, I read a newspaper article about falling birth rates, uh, falling populations in Europe, uh, that scared me. And, uh, to be honest with you, I, I read an article that the UK, we're actually both from. I, I've lost my accent, and you've kept yours. But I read that the UK is gonna become the most populous nation in Europe, and to me, I didn't believe this because Germany has at least 15, 20 million more people right now. You know, how is Germany going to lose so many people or how's UK going to possibly add so many people? And I dismissed it. And two, three weeks later I thought, "Huh, if Germany has had this really low birth rate for like 40, 50 years, and because people are living longer, we haven't really noticed the fall off yet, that could explain it." And I looked at data and it was frightening, because that's exactly what was happening. Not just in Germany, but in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, so many nations across Europe. And the biggest confusion to me was why don't I know this? You know, I, I feel I'm someone who is aware of world issues, aware... I was aware of, um, population decline in Japan, um, and a little bit Spain and Italy 20 years ago when youth unemployment was being blamed for low birth rates there. But when I saw how consistent it's been for such a long period of time, I wanted to dive in and find a book. I wanted to find some explanation. There's books about it, but they all focus on local issues. Here's what's happening in Japan, here's the problem in Italy, here's the problem in Germany. And that just did not make sense to me. For me, there had to be some kind of global trend happening, and I needed to find out for my own sanity as much as anything else why this was going on.

I get the sense that this is the most dangerous of the existential risks, and the reason that I think population collapse is the most dangerous is it doesn't galvanize anybody into action. There's no smoke in the sky. There's no incoming asteroids. There's no movies about Arnold Schwarzenegger coming down naked from the, the ceiling and, and crashing through your house. This is the kind of existential risk that creeps up on you year by year, generation by generation. Nobody sees it coming, and when they do, it is too late. And we still have people and news articles and replies and comments where I and Jordan Peterson warn the entire world that this is something which is a concern from people saying, "Good. There are too many people on this planet in any case."