 Thank you very much. Thank you for including me on this panel. It's very exciting to be part of it with this with this great group and but an amazing correction of people and just to be part of them. PAA again is really exciting and great fun. So, thank you very much. I have a, like it's just a different tone or approach, which I think it's going to hopefully make the panel interesting. I start to sort of with this anecdote where Disney tweeted this very positive progressive message about pride month with the Mickey Mouse Funhouse people marching in the room for everybody in the, the, the, the, the really just terrible on response from the, from this random just sort of, you know, with where anybody anything associated with sexual orientation is about pedophilia. But so that's disgusting but what was interesting is that they put it in that I like this phrase the grand march of progress. The idea that on the liberal agenda of the gay is is is is the progress agenda so like we are on this, we're on this path forward and that's kind of what I'm interested in. And this is influenced by this, the seminar I teach every other year or so on families and modernity theories, where, where demography is very hooked up with or hitched it's hitched to or, or, or majority is hitched to demography on questions about sort of this about developmentalist things industrialism capitalism democracy individualism rationality scientific method. So the transition is, is the demographic transition is very much related to all of these things and some complicated on unsatable or tricky ways but definitely part of that whole story. In retrospect, maybe the second demographic transition seems a little desperate like we want to get our mojo back and be part of, like world history happening in a, in an incontrovertible or inevitable direction. But it seems almost quaint now I'm although not, you know, it's been. I love this academic demographic transition. But it's this idea that marriage and less less marriage and later marriage and more cohabitation of fewer children and more divorce and more single parents and flexibility and gender symmetry quality. And with the shift in values this mass low and shift from survival to individual self realization and democracy expressive work and anyway, I'm less doggy wrote this piece in 2014 sort of defending the idea against critics who said, you know, this is just a very western idea at the end of history remember when after the Cold War ended and everybody said that's it we've arrived this is the final state. Western democracy liberal democracy is the is the pinnacle of human achievement and now we just now it's just mopping up. Now we just need marriage equality you know and then we'll be will have really finally arrived. And I noticed he had this little caveat in there like oh sure it's going to extend to non Western societies, just as long as they have a greater accentuation of mess low and higher order needs and a solid democratic institutions protecting respect for diversity. As long as we have that, you know, then this, then the second demographic transition is assured, which does that really describe, you know, our society or the world we live in. So the spectacles now of guided missiles hitting apartment buildings in modern industrial European cities which, despite the kind of racist overtone of being shocked that that it's happening in Europe is happening in a in a developed a more developed society and that is messing with our narrative. You don't have to be racist to be to to see that there's a clash there. There are millions of refugees created in just a matter of weeks. Not to mention, literal war in the streets against the very concept of democracy in our country, and the existential threat of climate change that we're really basically not doing hardly anything about. So, the, what I want to kind of say in this talk is, we can't have this, we can't really have this idea that there's normal society with its normal progression. So the other thing is kind of getting in the way, and we're just trying to like study the core of what's really happening there's like normal, it's modernity it's on some kind of track, which, which we're trying to get a handle on, while we work around all these things like this giant pandemic and climate change, and this diverging growing inequality which makes it increasingly hard to characterize society in any one way. I'm going to send for Fugl or for Frickle, Andrew's going to explain this, the tendency of identities to be fragmenting. And then of this policy and coherence I mean the idea of modernity and demography is partly that we're going to use our scientific rationality to explain the way things should be. And then like the policy that emerges will be the result of the knowledge produced in some way there's some relationship between all the learning and studying and science we're doing and the policy that comes out of it and there's a lot of assumptions that, that the behavior of the society reflects the knowledge generated and there's anyway so I'll give some examples of how this is not really true. I forgot to start my time. Oh, no I didn't. I think I have seven minutes I think right. Okay, so I'll go for six. What are like New Orleans what's the population of New Orleans well, you know, up to 1960 New Orleans it was industrializing the cities were growing it was it was like modern modern society and urbanization. Well, so then the population start to fall well we had this kind of unique set of circumstances in America with the industrialization, especially in our industry and you know obviously in our industrial cities. We had about 20% of 1520% of the population, then we had a giant climate climate change driven event which knocked out half the population, and kind of a little bit of a resurgence gave back about half of that and now lost a bunch more, possibly as a result of the pandemic and so what is like the story of New Orleans, besides the series of catastrophic anomalies. Okay, that's kind of the point I'm trying to make. So in the case of divergence you know we have this. Yeah, this the old the old modernity idea like especially in the second demographic transition as part of this is like, we won't need marriage as much anymore especially women. And yet we have this, this basic that that lines to show that women with college degrees are now much more likely to be married than women without college degrees and that's widening and, and not only does that make it hard to characterize like what direction are we going, but there's a big a well being inequality gap. It might be hard to see, but the dotted line show the ratio of single to married mortality for men and women. And in 2017 versus 2007 so the gap in well being in survival between married and single people widen just in that 10 years. So the origins. Our ability to sort of tell a story about one story, that's really undermined in the case of fragmenting identities. I love fragmenting identities I don't mean undermine in the sense of anything bad, but the idea that what we need to do and I, you know Gary Gates was right and Wendy is right we need to study these things, but the idea that we're going to like nail it and finally get it. I think it's just a misnomer I mean this process has its own momentum at this point, and we're just going to generate more and more and more identities all kinds not just about sex and gender. But that's just that's just the way we're going experiences if people have become identities. Now, and like you notice each of these has a flag it's not just that you've experienced something is that you now carry this flag. I just think we're going to stop. So it has its own. Okay, so you can't tell one story. In the case of of a policy and coherence I think this really undermines us in ways that we really have not that it's hard to grapple with and we might not be able to grapple with it. Consider abortion I mean when the Supreme Court overturns Roe versus Wade if they do this year or you're soon whenever that is, we're going to have some states that are constitutionally protecting abortion and some states that are immediately criminalizing it's going to be a felony in Oklahoma or Kansas or wherever just passed that new law. And there's no, there's no rationality to to either to that to that disparity or look at the child tax credit. So it's not a political evidence based scientifically designed intervention that lifted millions of children out of poverty, and we threw it we threw it away because it was inconvenient for Republicans. So it's just that there's not even a policy case made for eliminating it they just don't like it so they got rid of it. Let's go brand. So like what is the what so so we're going to sit here and be like all rational with our science. And it seems to be having one. That's what we expected to do. So how should we interpret change. I guess, well I don't know. There's there's kind of a fetishization of normality that's all I'm going to say and I don't want to pick on the Census Bureau for their projections I don't know how to make projections, but their projections total fertility rate is 1.84 for the next 40 years. And their projections life expectancy continues to just kind of increase. It hasn't increased in, you know, 10 years it's fell a lot. Two years ago it's probably not going to be increasing a lot anytime soon, except maybe to get back a little bit of what we lost in the pandemic. But this kind of assumption we all learned it in demography it's like how fast is life expectancy going to increase. That was the big question I taught methods courses where we asked that question. What if it's just not going to increase anymore. So, how should you look at it well, you know we have a giant change this was a very big change in marriage in the last year. I'm just from the this is just from the vital records data. And you could say okay well at this rate the last wedding will take place in 2025. Or you can have the more moderate view like we're in an era of change here it's going it's in the direction of downward ignore the pandemic year just focus on 2019 in which case we've got until about 2075 to the last marriage. I'm being tongue in cheek, or you could just sort of take like we're in an era we're in the, we're in the period of about seven marriages per thousand. And of course there's fluctuations, right none of those are really ideal ways to do it and I think the problem we have in general about the future is that you can't see the future, the president gets in the way of seeing the future. I love this, just like penumbra is the penumbra is the part the shimmery part of the eclipse. There's the light of the future coming out but it's just the edges of it so we just get glimpses of it, and we're stuck back there. And I think there's a there's, I guess what I've become skeptical about it, about attempts to put us on a track to say that we're on a track from here to there there being someplace in particular. I love the future I want us to be able to see the future but it's really hard to do that. So my advice is not to not to not to stop asking big questions at all. But just to avoid treating the actual events of the day as anomalies are things that are in the way of our historical building they are what's happening they are our society. And to watch out for progressives narratives that assume that they know where we're going. We have momentum, you know, demographers we understand there's such a thing as momentum, but, but we can't assume that there's a normality which is coming which will be back at some point. You know it reminds me of the when the FBI decided not to count the deaths on 911 as homicides, just just messed up the statistics basically but they were murders they took place. It was just an awful lot of murders that year, but they still don't count them as homicides in that year. Anyway, that kind of thing drives me not so do family demography in light of disasters inequalities identities and policies as messy and coherent unpredictable features of society not as bugs in the ointment of modern progress. My concluding sense. Thank you.