 All right, we have the top of the hour now. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host. I'm your cat herder for the hour. And I'm the organizer of the forum. And I'll be your guide to the next hour of conversation. Now I'm very, very glad to see all of you here today because we have a fantastic topic, a really powerful look into the future with a great guest and you'll have a lot of questions, I'm sure. Now, I'm absolutely delighted to introduce this week's guest. This is John Ibbotson. He's coming to us from Ottawa, Canada. He's a writer at large, the Globe and Mail, and a lifelong journalist who has written many, many articles, really good books. And he's coming to us today because he's speaking about a new book that he co-authored called Empty Planet. And I cannot, cannot recommend this book highly enough. Empty Planet offers an unusual take on demographics and some of you know demographics have a huge, huge role in changing education and reshaping everything from K through 12 to universities. So I'm absolutely delighted to have you here, John. Welcome, welcome to the forum. My pleasure to be here. Oh, great. Well, I have to ask, it's July, you're in the North country. Just how sweet is summer there right now? Well, we are, Ottawa has your typical continental climate. So it's about 33 degrees right now. Oh, sorry, it's about 91 degrees, 90 degrees right now. Fahrenheit, we have hot human summers. And then in the winter, it gets down to, in Fahrenheit, it'll be about minus 30 on a really bad day. We are the second coldest national capital in the world. So bad day in winter, people in Ottawa tend to say to each other, it could be worse, we could be along the tour. There's always that Mongolian comparison. That's right. Very good. I haven't been to Ottawa since I was a kid, actually. I've been to just about every other major Canadian city since, but I have to owe you a visit. John, I'm so glad you're here in that ridiculously warm climate. And I can see it's reflected in the warmth of your face and of course the warmth of your shirt. Let me just, as a way of introduction, let me just ask, looking ahead for the rest of 2020, what are you gonna be working on? What projects, what writing and what topics are uppermost in your mind? Well, I think COVID and then COVID and probably COVID. More than COVID. Yeah, sort of back, I'm in the Ottawa Bureau. Our bureau chief is Robert Fife. And Bob has an amazing ability to look ahead and see what's going on. It's why he is respected journalist in Canada. And we came in for the morning meeting early in the second week of March. And Bob said, this bureau is writing on nothing but this new coronavirus from here on in. And about two days later, the NBA canceled its season. So we've written pretty much on nothing but coronavirus here on in. I write a column and features analysis pieces. So for me, it's obviously how Canada is handling it. But also a lot of geopolitics of it. My second last column was on the fact that the European Union is allowing Canada of Canadian visitors as of tomorrow, as of today to travel, but not allowing Americans to travel. And Canada is not allowing Americans across the border either. So you folks are sadly quarantined by both Europe and Canada. And I'm afraid that my columns too often have a tone of, I never thought I'd live to see the day when. And that's one of them. So I'll be working on border issues, on Canadian economic response, social political response as well, how the country is handling it. We're a big country with a lot of different regions. So different parts of the country are treating it in different ways, just as is the case in the United States. Although there's more uniformity overall than in the United States. And what it means going forward, especially in economic terms as well as political terms, you know better than anyone else that we face probably the worst recession of my lifetime. And certainly the worst recession of my lifetime and how we're gonna get through that. So also the conservative party is having a leadership race, but who cares? That's a great coda at the very end. Well, good luck to all of this research and we thank you for doing all that. We look forward to reading more of it. I'd like to ask about the empty planet now and we'll circle back to the pandemic and its impact on us. But if I read this correctly, your thesis is a really extraordinary one. Back in the 60s through the 80s, a lot of the world were concerned that we were rushing towards overpopulation, that we would be filling up the world with babies, that what this would lead to all kinds of terrible problems over crowding, public health, starvation, geopolitical chaos and so on. And some nations reacted most strongly, India and especially China. But what you're worried about is that in fact the opposite seems to be what we're on track for. That we're heading towards all populations total right now are rising. Many, many nations are seeing their population grow at stop or actually go back and shrink. And that we're headed towards a global human population plateau after which we will decline towards your titular empty planet. I've got to ask first of all, what kind of reactions have you gotten from this book? I mean, a shock this May? Surprisingly positive. Daryl Bricker is my co-author and I should introduce him although he's not able to make it today. Daryl is the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs which is a global polling firm very much present in the United States and as well as Britain and Canada. It happens that Ipsos is headquartered in Toronto and Daryl is the CEO. So he's a pollster and a friend. I am a journalist and we had long been interested in the more or less academic arguments that were being put forward that the United Nations Population Division was wrong in its projections that the plan is not going to get to a population of over 11 beginning by the end of the century before it started plateau. That in fact, it would plateau much sooner and that the population of the planet would be going down sooner rather than later. Well, actually it is later, later in the century. But these were mostly academic arguments. We, he's a pollster, I'm a journalist. We wanted to see whether this argument could be demonstrated in the field. So we traveled to six continents and we talked to an awful lot of people. Everything from students at Seoul National University in South Korea to women in the favelas and slums in South America and in India. Talked to people in Africa as well. A lot of demographers, a lot of statisticians, a lot of academics, but also just a lot of young people asking them about their plans. And we came to the conclusion that yes, the dissident demographers, as they are called, are right. The school of demography that says the United Nations is wrong and that the planet's population is going to in fact top out around nine billion at the middle of the century and then start to go down. They are closer to the mark than the United Nations demographers are. And somebody ought to tell the planet about this. Because as we always say, it exists in monographs and journals, it doesn't exist on the street. And the purpose of our book was to get this message onto the street. Well, it does so very, very effectively. Friends, I've been telling you in multiple places what a great book this is. Among other things, it's incredibly clear, incredibly accessible, and I found it impossible to stop reading. So I have a few more questions that I'd like to tease out some of the implications and pieces of the argument, but we would love to hear from you. So again, just click either that raised hand button if you wanna join us on stage or if you can't do that, just click the question mark and type in your thoughts and your questions. And again, if you have basic questions like how can this be, what's wrong with the UN or more complicated questions? So what are some of the drivers of this change? Please, we're open for all of these right now. So one of the questions I'd like to start with is if we look ahead, what are some of the big cultural changes that occurred if we actually have this change in our population? I was reading one account where they said that one possible outcome will be a decline in wars, both interstate and guerrilla wars that would be heading towards a wonderful phrase, a geriatric peace, which I find delightful. What are some of the cultural changes you anticipate for us? Well, first of all, we spent a lot of time in the book just trying to make the argument. So we feel that the real purpose of anti-planet is to make the argument that the planet's population is aging and is about to start declining. So we spent a lot of time on that. And we hope that once this argument is out there, people will engage with it. I'm sorry, you asked at the very beginning what the response was and I failed to answer and shame on me as a journalist. We were surprised at how much positive response there was, how many times we were given really positive reviews in the American and British and European press. There was very little negative. Population matters took us on, obviously. We were surprised by the degree of acceptance of the argument that we received. So we talked about the book, the process itself, but yes, at towards the end, we said, well, what does it mean? And it means basically three things, one environmental, one economic and one geopolitical. And I guess if you put them all together, that means culture. Environmentally, it's nothing but good news for pretty obvious reasons. Fewer people on the planet means fewer people pressuring the environment, this is gonna be great news in the fight for global warming. Economically, nothing but bad news, nothing good to say about it at all because you were going to have every year fewer young people available to work and pay taxes and consume and support the economy to prop up all the relatively ever larger cohort of old people like me who will be consuming pensions and healthcare resources. So it's a real challenge economically in Japan, more than any other country in the world is the textbook case for that. Geopolitically, it's a mixed bag. You're right, we talk about the possibility of an aging society will be a less violent one. We talk about the hope that migrations, at least forced migrations will decline over time. We see a world in which China is set, China's population is going to start to decline within the next few years. In fact, we have it in the late 2020s in our book, there is new data to suggest China's population will start to decline in two or three years from now. And that's going to have a great impact on China. We don't, and it's not a positive one. At the very best, they will lose 300 million people this year. They could very easily, if their current population trends continue, they could lose 600 million people, not this year, this century, that's gonna have a major impact. Russia is also set to decline. The geopolitical winner in all of this is, guess what? The United States, if it doesn't self-immolate by closing its doors to immigration, but on that don't get me started. Yeah, we talk about a world in which, that very much could be a 21st American century if the Americans do things right. I'll put a little plug in for Canada, which has the world's most aggressive immigration policy. We're gonna get to about 50 million people by the middle of the century. We'll have past Spain and Italy be closing in on Germany. So we're looking at being a great power pretty soon. But also, the real centers of innovation could be in places like Mumbai and Lagos, where the population is still relatively young, I say relatively, because India is now at replacement rate. Again, in the book, we said India was almost at replacement rate, but the new data has come out. India is at 2.1, India is at replacement rate. But still, these are gonna be the younger places on earth, the more interesting places on earth, the place where all the good music and films come out of. And I, but beyond that, you're a fool to predict, but of course, we're in the business predicting this book, so what does that make us? That makes you ambitious and a great source for our discussions. Well, if I've jumped the gun, because that is my want to look ahead, let's think about these mechanisms. What's producing this change? And one key part is education, where the more education women get, the fewer kids they have, second is, although it sounds kind of ridiculous to say this now, improvements in healthcare and public health, and a third is increasing women's role in the workplace. And a fourth is greater women's access to all kinds of reproductive health. How am I doing so far? Not bad. You're actually outlining one of four characteristics that produces a population decline. So yeah, what drives a population to plateau and start to decline? Well, obviously it's a declining fertility rate. If your fertility rate is above 2.1, your population is growing. If it's below 2.1, your population will eventually decline. All developed countries, including the United States and Canada, pretty much all have fertility rates well below 2.1. If not for immigration, their populations would either be going down now, but more than two dozen countries in the world are losing population right now every year, or would start to happen very soon. So what causes a fertility rate to go down to 2.1 and then below that? Well, essentially it's four things. Well, actually, I'll contradict myself. It's actually only just one thing. It's just one thing, a single thing, and that's urbanization. The society urbanizes its fertility rate goes down. And of course we are becoming a more and more urban planet. In fact, we are for the first time in human history now more urban than rural. So the real question we should be asking is why does urbanization lead to fertility decline? And that's eventually me getting around to your answer. So urbanization needs to fertility decline for four reasons. The first is economic. If you're living in the countryside, children are an asset, another pair of hands to work the field, another source of labor. A child when you moved to a city goes from being an asset to a liability, just another mouth to feed. Children are wonderful and I'm sure they are great things and people love to have them. In the United States they love to have about 1.7 of them. And one of the reasons they only want 1.7 of them is that children are an economic liability if you're in an urban environment. The second one, which you alluded to, is urbanization needs to the empowerment of women. This is hugely important. When a woman moves from the countryside or the village into the city, she becomes educated, better educated at least. She has access to formal education systems that she didn't have in the countryside or village. She has access to informal education systems like media, especially other women, women teaching women access maybe to the internet that she didn't have. So when a woman finds herself in an urban environment, she finds herself acquiring knowledge and as she acquires knowledge, she becomes empowered. And when women become empowered, one of the most important decisions they make is I'm not having as many children as my mother had. And that is a universal phenomenon that we found around the entire world without exception, developed society, developed big society, north, south, it didn't matter what continent you were on, whatever it was. If women have the ability and the power to decide for themselves, they have fewer children. And urbanization helps to give women that ability. 3 and 4, these are much less important. Organized religion is more powerful in an urban environment than it is in an urban environment. And no matter what that religion is, traditional religion likes women's subservient and children plentiful, but that power wanes when the family moves to an urban environment. Same with clans. In a rural environment, your clan or your aunties are telling you there's time to get married and settle down. When you move to the city, your aunties are replaced by your co-workers. And when was the last time any of your co-workers urged you to have a baby? So the economics of urbanization, the empowerment of women through urbanization, the decline of the power of religion through urbanization, the decline of the power of the clan through urbanization all lead to the rapid decline in fertility in any society where urbanization takes place. And as the book alleges, we are urbanizing at a far faster clip than many expected or that the United Nations Population Division is willing to admit. That's a fantastic answer. That's a very, very detailed answer. Since this is a program about the future of education, it's, I just want to note that education plays a key role in this, that education is changing demographics in its own way. We had questions that came up ahead of time from people who couldn't make it. And I wanted to share a couple of those before we get started. One of them is from the indefatigable Don Charlis who asks, what happens when the US higher education business can only think from week to week but has to confront the kind of century long curve you're talking about. I guess this would apply to the rest of higher, the rest of American society and indeed many, many other enterprises worldwide. If you have the kind of short-term look, maybe looking at a quarter economically, how can you cope with this kind of slow but vast and deep change? It's an interesting question to which I have no quick and easy answer. It's certainly something that we observed. Societies are thinking about it a lot, especially in East Asia. So for example, I interviewed a demographer at Seoul National University. He has two daughters. Everybody knows that in Korea's and Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, the middle class sends its kids to cram school on top of the regular whatever school they were attending during the day because the competition again at the university is so fierce. His children are not in cram school. And I said, why are you not, of all the things, you a professor, a university professor, you don't have your children in cram school because I'm a demographer. And I know that by the time my children get to university, there will be vast swath of empty spaces available for them. They'll get to pick what university they go to. They don't need cram school now. So to the extent that, again, a good place to go when you're having this discussion is Japan, is South Korea, is Taiwan, is Singapore. These are huge issues there and they are thinking about it hard. And they realize that it is going to lead to the emptying out of schools. In some ways, it's good news because as long-term care needs increase. In Canada, our long-term care budgets are going to triple in Canada over the next 50 years and so are yours. One source of revenue is through schools not built, classes not filled and teachers not hired. Maybe not the most encouraging message in an educational forum, but it is inevitable that even if you have a very robust immigration program, Canada imports per capita three times as many people as the United States does, we are expecting to see over time a decline in demand for childcare and education spaces. How do you plan for it? Oh, come on. Anybody who's covered a municipal or provincial government or state governments in your case knows you don't plan for it, it just happens. And once it happens, you deal with it. We're no better at that sort of thing than you are. In fact, I don't know any place where governments do a particularly good job of casting forward, but they'll have to react to it. They'll react to it once they see that there just aren't any more children in the schools. The one country I would think of famously about this is China, which famously plans, at least at the national level, with a long-term view. Yeah, and plans horribly badly though. Their one child policy led to an official fertility rate of 1.6, but there are a lot of people who believe that like many other things in China, that number is fake. South Korea, this happened after an empty planet went to a press. Korea announced that its fertility rate is 1. It's the first country in the world with a fertility rate of 1. They are one full baby short of what they need to keep their population stable. Hong Kong apparently is also now at 1. I will bet you the next time that census data comes in, you'll find that Taiwan and Singapore are at a very close to 1 as well and Japan very close to 1. If all of the societies around China are at or near one, why is China at 1.5 or 1.6? Why is China not more like the countries that surround it? Well, there are a lot of people who suspect it is. There are a lot of people who suspect that the Chinese are torquing their numbers. The one child policy catastrophically forced fertility down at a clip that was not only tragic for those who wanted more children, but ultimately highly damaging to the demography of the country. And as others have famously said, China's a society that's about to get old without first having become rich. Yeah. So if we're gonna remake the excellent film, Parasite, we're gonna have to deal with one kid for the family rather than two. I'm afraid so. We have, well, thank you for that great answer. We have questions coming in. And thank you, by the way, Don, who can't make it, he'll see us in the recording. Thank you for the very good, if daunting question. We have another one, a question that comes up from Donald Clark. And so we may just bring, flash this one on stage. And once again, makes this our continued international conversation, because this is coming to us from Britain. And Donald asks, like Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death, we may be educating ourselves to extinction. Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, asks his students whether college makes them biologically fitter. They say yes, he says no. Here, let me put that back up on stage again. It's not such a beautiful question or comment, rather. So how would you respond to that? Now, I'll bring it back up again, if I... Yeah, it's a fascinating comment. There is no question that education leads to the decision, as I have already said, of women to have fewer children. They have children not because they need the kid to work the fields. They don't have them because the man and the family demands that they have children, as men so often have in the past. They're not having children because God tells them to, the state tells them to, their family tells them to. Couples are having children because they decide to. Childbirth becomes a lifestyle choice. As we say in the book, infinitely more important than the decision to shift to a post-modern look for your living room. But on the same scale, children are a way in which a couple or a woman fulfills themselves, makes their life more complete. And people find that their life is pretty complete after one or two kids. So it is an inevitable result that because of the empowerment and the education of women, you put a creative situation in which you are going to lower your fertility rate. The only alternative to that, however, does not bear contemplation. It would be the regression of empowerment of women, the return to a pre-industrial, really, pre-urban attitude to society. And as much as I admire Margaret Atwood, who's a Canadian, not novelist, no one wants to go there, at least no one that I know. And you point out several times in the book cases where governments tried very energetically to encourage their populations to reproduce more. You point out to Singapore, you point out Denmark, where it's a absolutely hilarious propaganda for a childbirth, and that this basically doesn't work. That it's, you barely move the needle at all. Yeah, it happened here in Quebec, which was has the lowest fertility rate in Canada, tried it with the basically $5 a day care. The post to child is Sweden. Much of the Swedish social safety net was created during the depression, and then advanced and enhanced in the decade since to overcome very low fertility rates in Sweden. And it has some effect. You can bump your fertility rate up a bit, a bit, if you have sufficiently lavish programs, but they are very, very expensive. And no one has ever managed to get it back up to 2.1. And even the Swedes find that whenever a bad recession hits, they have a tendency to cut back on those programs. Interestingly, Hungary has become a new experiment. Hungary, which has a very xenophobic government, does not want immigrants of any kind whatsoever. It wants Hungary for Hungarians. And so it is offering now lavish bonuses to have kids. Basically, I forgot what the actual number is. I think it's around four kids. You pretty much get a house and a car and a tax-free life just for giving Hungary that many babies. So it'll be interesting to see whether, because of course, Daryl and I argue strongly for the virtue of child care and the virtue of support so that women can work fully and equally with men in the workforce. The idea of just bribing women to have babies, one more and you get a car is an interesting experiment. We'll see how the Hungarians fare. It is. Donald wanted to come up and join us on stage to further this. So thank you for that answer. Donald, thank you and welcome. Welcome to the forum. What would you have to add to our guests' detailed answer? Well, if you take John's premise, which I agree with, which is that education is the cause of the depopulation, then I have two comments to make, which is how do we reverse this? Because that's an existential threat. And I think there are two possibilities, your reverse education. And I don't think that's quite as far-fetched as you might imagine because if, like me, you agree with Brian Kaplan, that 80% of higher education is actually signalling, putting a sticker on your forehead for employers. And it's not actually worth the huge investment that many imagine it is. Then maybe we can haul back on that. That's one possible cause in the future. The second one, which I think is more plausible and possible, is that technology may free us up to a degree at some point in the future, where we have more leisure time in a sense, and we have more time in the sense and more reflection to procreate, if you want to put it that way. So I think there are two possible causes of reversal if you agree with your premise, which I do. I don't know if you've got... I haven't read the book. I don't know what mechanisms you've got, but I would say less education, more technology. Well, we would disagree to the extent that education removes the ability of women to make choices for themselves. That would be a very dystopian society and we want no part of it. So for us, there is no reversal. This process is in the medium term, and for us, medium term is out to the mid-century, irreversible and can't be changed and won't be changed. It will just happen. We speculate on literally the last page of the book, I think, that the time may come, decades down the road, when people are tired of being an only child and living in a society where there are, you know, couples have either no children or just one children, and it's very strange if you have three children. So already starting to become strange if you have three children. And people might just say, you know what? Why don't you and I have like six kids? Maybe, you know, the evolution of the nature of work makes that possible and economically feasible. I grew up in a family with five children and we loved it. You know, Christmas morning is a whole lot of fun when there are five kids running around the house, screaming in delight. So that may be the case, but if it's a case, it will happen naturally. Again, Daryl and I are extremely suspicious of anybody who comes along with a program or a policy to reverse population decline, because that's a programmer policy to rob women of choice, and we don't want nothing to do with that. I think that answer quite odd because what you're saying is, well, if we agree that education can't be touched, is always an intrinsic good, we're doomed to die. No, I'm saying what cannot be touched is the empowerment of women, which is, by the way, still far from complete. Women in any society in this world still remain the caregivers. By God, if COVID has taught us one thing, it's taught us how ill-equipped men are to handle domestic responsibilities when they're compelled to stay at home. So it's not a question of education. We would simply say anything that you do that might lead to women losing the gains that they have made in their autonomy, in their control over their own lives, in their ability to decide for themselves when they will marry and how many children they will have and how they will adapt that to their professional requirements, their job requirements. Anything that diminishes that control and that autonomy is something that we would oppose. Yeah, my point wasn't really about education. My point was originally higher education, in other words, we should be cutting back on that so that people aren't parking themselves in the system from the age of 18 to increasingly with a master's and PhD and so on and so forth. In other words, you can cut out the higher education portion and still have the vast global educational women because cutting out that excess, the 80% Kaplan promise, would haul the whole system back but still maintain the education for women globally, which is not higher education. Just so long as you don't suddenly seeing that women are dropping out of college and men are staying. Yeah, exactly. I agree with that. That's not happening. Well, thank you, Donald. Really appreciate the question. Good to see you and I just tweeted out at you so you can see a response there. But thank you for taking this future demographics forecast very seriously. Friends, if you're new to the forum, you can see this is how easily we bring in people to join us on video. We also have more questions that have come up and so I'd like to bring in one from a previous guest and a fantastic researcher on self and naturally another Canadian. Let's bring in Stephen Downs, who asks, so why can increased productivity via technology offset the need for young people? Why can the beneficiaries of productivity offset the costs via more equitable taxation? Good point. And the answer is that that may well be the case. The nonetheless, we find the economic consequences of population decline to be negative because sure, you can replace the missing worker with a robot, but the robot doesn't buy a smart black dress for the office party. In other words, our economies are driven largely by consumption and if you have fewer people being born, then eventually you have fewer people in their 20s, buying the first car, buying the first house, having that baby and buying the pram and all of the things that you do in your 20s and then in your 30s getting a different house, maybe having a second baby. Our economies, both Canada's and the United States, all the economies of the West are driven by domestic consumption. Fewer people means less consumption. Less consumption means less growth and that means economic decline. The Japanese, again, with the Canadians in the coal mine for this, their population, their birth rates dropped precipitously. They are now in their third decade essentially of recession with no idea how to get out of it, frankly. And with the population decline reaching such a point that in some villages around the country, they are literally putting puppets onto benches on the street in an effort to create the illusion that there are actually people in that village. Again, your title has a fantastic way of getting the attention and focusing it marvelously. Empty planet, empty classrooms, empty villages, empty spaces. Thank you, Stephen, if you'd like to say more, we can bring you up. We have another question coming to us from Pennsylvania and this is one I have to read. I can't show it very well. This is from the wonderful political scientist, Ed Webb, who asks a political question. In projecting geopolitical winners and losers, what is the relative importance of governance, culture and natural resources? He gives a couple of examples. He says, for example, is Nigeria a potential winner because of vibrant creative culture? What about strong digital and other infrastructure like the UAE? Yeah, I think in the short to medium term, there are going to be advantages. The only important resource that matters is human resource. I say this from a country that's economy is, for my money, too dependent at times, quite a lot of resources, but human resources are vastly more important than natural resources. And the younger population is going to confer a competitive advantage for a while. So we talk in the book about India is in a Goldilocks position. They have reached two points. They have the great dangers of a population explosion in India have removed themselves, but they have one more generation of a mostly young population before they too are going to start to face the challenges of an aging society. So they have a one generation advantage on China, which is already moving into decline. Nigeria maybe has too much of a good thing. I mean, sub-Saharan Africa is the one place in the world where there is still, there are still very high fertility rates, although even there, then we went to Kenya to look at this, even there, fertility rates are falling rapidly and more rapidly than the UNPD, United Nations Population Division, wants to take into account. For example, and again, this happened, we noted in the book that Kenya is making real progress in the education of girls, that Kenya has the instrument of requirements, mandatory requirements, requirements for mandatory education for girls. What happened, what we also noted was, well, you can require anything, but what actually happens is a different thing. Again, after the book came out, this is such a rapidly evolving topic. Kenya announced that for the first time, as many girls sat the grade eight exam as boys, of course they earned overall a higher score, but what matters most is that the girls are now in Kenya educated as well as boys at least up until grade eight. What does that mean for the Kenyan birth rate? Well, already the Kenyan Department of Statistics is saying that they're seeing surprising signs of fertility decline in Kenya. Nigeria is a different case because it is in many ways a very troubled and divided society, but so at the moment I would say that the very high fertility rate of Nigeria is a liability, not an asset, but given Nigeria a breakthrough and in a generation or two, it could be a global leader. A generation or two. So thank you for that glimpse ahead and Ed, thank you for the fantastic combination of geopolitics and demographics. Thank you both. We have more people who have questions and so again, friends, if you're new to the forum, you can see just by either clicking the raised hand, you can join us on stage or type in the question mark triggered button and you can type in questions. We have another questioner coming to us from not too far from me from Virginia, Washington Lee University for now, Professor Mark Rush. Mark, greetings. Greetings, how's things? Good to see you. You too, all. I really enjoy this conversation as something that covers a topic I've always been fascinated by. Going back, remember there was a great piece long ago by Pete Peterson when it was CEO of the Blackstone Group called Grey Dawn and scared me to death about just the grain of society. It's just such important stuff. One thing I'm curious about though, it looks like the world could be more peaceful. Sure, fewer people, therefore, less relative scarcity of resources, less fewer reasons to go to war and so forth. I saw a fascinating discussion of kind of the reverse which is, and Ross Dalthitt's covering for Decadent Society where he suggests that one of the reasons for what he declares a stagnation is precisely population decline. Once you're able to control population decline, you lose whatever benefits there comes from, from accidentally giving birth to the next mode cycle for Madame Curie. And so I'm just wondering, do you address this at all in the book because it is ironic a stable or declining platform does sort of remove that random windfall benefit of the genius paying board? Yeah, it concerns us as well. By the way, and there are a couple of other things for that geriatric piece. One is just there will be fewer young men in the world. When there are fewer young men, there's less violence in any society. Also, societies will have to spend more and more of their GDP looking after their aging population. So they'll have less money available to spend on guns. We'll have to spend more on butter. But yes, we worry too that fewer young people could lead to a decline in innovation in creativity. Although we know, there isn't really, is there really that much correlation between the size of a population and the creativity of its product? There weren't a lot of people in Athenian Athens by centuries before the birth of Christ. And London wasn't a very big city when Shakespeare arrived. So you can have a pretty creative, you can have an awful lot of creativity in a small population. I'm a bit of a music, classical music geek and it astonishes me that what is coming out of Iceland in music these days. And Iceland doesn't have an awful lot of people. Nonetheless, it's kind of a knee jerk. This follows from that feeling that if you have an older society, you'll have a less innovative society. But this is really going to be one of the issues, I think where we're gonna look back in 30 years and said, why didn't they realize that dot, dot, dot? Only we have no idea what comes after that. If I can follow, I think you're pointing by Iceland. Fantastic, but on the other hand, the state Iceland exists, or it's a small state right now, but it's in a world with incredible communication. So Iceland's tiny and that's really is part of a currently growing world. Follow the question, the one thing, and I don't know what you may touch upon this in the book, I haven't, I'm gonna get it, but I haven't got it yet. Will the population decline be random and balanced? Or there's another I found tremendously pointing an analysis by Valerie Hudson and some of her colleagues. It's called Bear Branches, where she talks about the rise of violence in Indian China precisely because the selective abortions devastate the population of women. Everybody wants young men to take care of them as they get old. And so as a result, she says, you can draw a line from that to rising violence, rising crime rates. I mean, it's crude, but basically you have too many overly hormonal young men unable to find women to marry or whatever, spend time, so this is not quite that crude, but that's basically it. So they get bored, they turn violent and they become gangs. Do you have any sense of how this population decline might take place or could it be at the expense of women, even though, as you were saying, we've got to have a balanced population? Yeah, it's a great question. And it is a genuine concern. So in fact, just about, I think two days ago, three days ago, United Nations population fund put out some new data that said there are 140 million missing women around the world. That sex-rective abortion is having that profound in effect. And that is very worrying. And it is worrying again for the question of how do we continue the empowerment of women when societies are deliberately aborting female or would it be female children? So that is a genuine concern. And again, we kind of started out at the beginning thinking that this was going to be a book about an aging, declining, developed world and a burgeoning, developing world and the conflicts that would happen when you had, you know, essentially a vacuum emerging in Europe and North America and these great, huge populations pressing up against our borders. But that in fact, that's not in fact the case. For example, in the Western Hemisphere, if you take Canada and the United States out, so all the countries in the Western Hemisphere essentially Central and South America and the Caribbean, they're at a placement rate. The Latin America and the Caribbean are at a placement rate collectively. So there's not going to be any great press population. Those caravans coming up against the United States border that bothered Donald Trump, they're going to go away because the countries that are producing those caravans are now at or below a placement rate or very close to it, to a placement rate. So again, the only place left on earth where there is a region with very high fertility is sub-Saharan Africa and even that is going down. So I guess I would say, yes, we worry about a world in which women are still not afforded, the rights and freedom and equality that you, that would be, that would accompany as many girls being born as boys within a society. And again, we worry at any time when you have an overabundance of young men because they're nothing but trouble. I know I was. And balanced against that declining fertility rates in places where we didn't expect to see them and at speeds we didn't expect to see them. I'll finish off with just one last stat, Philippines. Canada's three largest intake countries are India, China and the Philippines. And a couple of you know the Philippines moved up to number one. So we bring in 340,000 people a year. That would be the equivalent of you bringing in 3.4 million people a year. And the Philippines is the largest single intake source for our country. But the Philippines fertility rate is guess what, cratering. The Catholic Church is producing studies saying whatever happened, no one's going to mass anymore. The Philippine government is grappling with the issues of the whole society moving into Manila and a couple of other cities. And the fertility rate of the Philippines is going down. So Canada may not have easy access to surplus populations from Philippines, India is already becoming difficult to recruit from China, the way we did in the past. Surely that would mean over time if the Philippines population stabilizes and starts to decline that it would become a more peaceful place, not a more violent place, not withstanding even if there were more young men than the young women in that society. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for great, great questions. Thank you so much. And again, John, that's a fantastic answer. That's quite a vision. Again, one of the pleasures of your book is that it's, your co-authored book is that it's so global, so easily planetary in scope. Let's, I promise that we would circle back to two points. I'd like to do that before we close. And again, everyone, we have time for more of your questions and your comments. One of them is to come back to COVID-19. There's all kinds of things to say about it, obviously, but one of the things is that we're looking at a death toll right now of about half a million people. The deaths are almost entirely on the elderly population so far, although this may change. I'm wondering what you see is the impact of COVID-19 on your demographic model. I mean, do you think people who are trapped together in the same apartment under quarantine are gonna start reproducing like bunnies or do you think we'll see the average age drop a bit if we keep losing more and more seniors? No, I expect to see the opposite. So first of all, look, in the grand scheme of things, COVID is a horrible, horrible thing and we are all living diminished lives at home as a result of it. But even the first and second world war and the Spanish flu pandemic didn't have any real impact on populations. There was no real, you would have thought that the second world war would have appreciably moved the overall global population down, didn't affect it really at all. So neither will COVID-19. As for the myth of people getting together and making babies as they did in New York during the blackout, well, they didn't. But there was no increase in babies nine months after the New York blackout. That's an urban myth. Every study that's looked at it says there is no evidence anywhere on earth that a period of enforced seclusion produces more babies and just think about it. You weren't going to have a kid, but you're so bored that you end up having one anyway. That's not really a decision that people are going to make. However, there is a correlation between times of economic distress and fertility. And guess what? Of course, fertility goes down. We saw it in the Great Recession of 2008, 2009. The millennial fertility rate went down to one in the United States during that and it hasn't really bounced back. That's why we wonder in the book and we're wondering even more since the latest American statistics came up whether the American fertility rate of 1.7 is wrong. Whether if you looked only at the millennials and Gen Z, you would find that the fertility rate is much lower and we'll see that happening very soon. But absolutely, and again, it's just common sense. If you're a young couple starting out and you get hit with something like COVID-19, your plans to buy a house, your plans maybe to take that riskier job but one with more potential, your plans to have a kid next year, they all get put on the shelf because you can't afford the economic consequences of having a child when you don't know what's going to happen. And there is again, lots of data to show that if some kind of traumatic event, war, disease in our case causes a cohort to delay having babies, those babies never get born. They don't decide in, now the times are better, let's go to it. They just decide, well, we were going to have two children but you know what, all after everything that we've been through, let's just stick with one. So COVID-19 should in fact suppress fertility rates in the United States and Canada and elsewhere around the world, not increase them. Well, that's a huge takeaway. That's a really, really important takeaway, thank you. Then I have to bring us back to another earlier point which is the impact on education. And let's just focus on higher education right now, post-secondary, the college and the universities in Canada and worldwide. My sense is that the declining child birth rate will have a few different results. One is that it will increase competition. Already Canada is per capita, for example, the world's leading attractor for international students or Bravo for you all, but you will compete that much harder to get more and more students from Malaysia wherever you can, especially Nigeria. Second is that we may see a boom in producing more education targeted at elders and senior citizens and everything from perhaps on campus housing that may not just be educational to more programs and more support. And the third is that we may see a shift in our research and curriculum that we may see, for example, fewer slots, fewer resources allocated to K through 12, primary, secondary school preparation and more towards gerontology and to any other field around seniors. What do you think? Am I on the right page here? Yeah, you're absolutely. And it's another reason why the United States is shooting itself in the foot right now. So I'll just put all the stuff about gerontology and education for older people and we can't afford to retire anymore at 65 and we may have to cut back on pending reports and intergenerational warfare that could result from the fight over taxes. Let's put that all into a, yeah, sure. Because, and leave it at that for the moment. Let's focus on something else though that you mentioned, if I may, which is education as an immigration strategy. This is something Canada discovered. We, again, we have labor shortages among skilled workers. We have quadrupled the number of people that we bring into the country to attend schools and colleges and universities over the space of the last 15 years. In fact, students graduating, international students are now the single largest source of permanent residents as we call them. You would call them green card holders, I think, in Canada. And it's very deliberate. It's premised on the assumption that we're going to have to compete for immigrants and some countries are gonna be more successful at it than others. So even before Donald Trump became president, you guys were tightening up your requirements, you're issuing your H-1Bs. The Great Britain was doing exactly the same thing. Canada is doing the opposite. As I say, we have quadrupled the number of people we bring in. If you come as an international student to Canada, you are automatically guaranteed a three-year work visa upon graduation and you were put at the very front of the list should you decide to apply for citizenship at the end of your work visa. We're actively recruiting. Nonetheless, we will always place number two to the United States because, no matter what else you wanna say, it remains an enormously attractive society. Canada competes with the United States for immigrants and we're always number two in that competition. I was in Busan, Korea a couple of years ago talking to, not for this book, just talking at a conference and talk to a group of students at the University of Busan and they said, you have to let in more Korean immigrants, Korean students. And I said, well, we already do bring in a fair number of Korean students. Well, you have to bring in more. And I said, well, what about Australia? Australia is a country that also has a very aggressive program. We don't wanna go to Australia. And I said, why don't you wanna go to Australia? And they said, because we ended up with Australian accents. And who wants Australian accents? We don't wanna go to Britain either. We don't want a British accent. We don't want a Hollywood accent. What they want is a standard North American accent when they finish their English training. And there are only two countries in the world that can give them that. One is the United States and the other is Canada. So let me remind you of the occasional project or a boot, you'll be okay. Yeah, or A every now and then. But let's not do the list of all the famous Hollywood actors who are actually Canadian. Let us both our countries continue to keep our doors wide open and continue to compete with each other to bring the brightest and the best to our shores because for both of our countries, in the end it can only be a good thing. That's a fantastic, fantastic point to close on. Thank you so much for that great answer to my question. And thank you for being a fantastic guest. You've been a fountain of information about how the demographic transition will impact so much, so much of life. One last quick question. How do we keep up with you? What's the best way to track your output? Do you have an RSS feed on the global mail page or newsletter or what? Well, we have, I'm on Twitter and Facebook. So my Twitter is John Ibbitson, J-O-H-N-I-B-B-I-T-S-O-N. That's right. The same is true of Facebook. If you really want to spend a lot of time listening sometimes in demographics and candidate US relations, but an awful lot on equalization components in the transfer programs between Ottawa and the province of Saskatchewan, come right in. I'm the place to be. Yes, I would actually be interested in that. And I'm a big fan of Alex Usher, who does a lot of work on this. And also, of course, Stephen Downs here. We are past the end of the hour. So I have to, with a great deal of regret, thank you and let you go. We'll have to bring you back next year to think about where demographics are going. In the meantime, everyone, you should, on the bottom left corner of your screen, have a link to the publisher's page for Empty Planet. So you can grab a copy. It's a great, great book and you've been a great guest. Thank you, John. Thank you so much. This was a delightful hour. I'm glad to hear it. But don't go, everybody, because I've got to tell you about what's coming up for the next few weeks. So remember, I was talking to you about how we have a special, special session coming up on Wednesday. One PM Eastern time. You'll all get email about this. We're gonna focus on the impact of Black Lives Matter on higher education. And then for the next weeks after that, again, all these great topics, how to improve teaching online, what's happening in public universities, the changes in fall 2020 planning and how to do video conversations like this well. So please stay tuned for that. And here's a hint about our guest next week, the awesome Terry Gibbons, who is a brilliant, brilliant analyst, a great entrepreneur and a really huge activist in trying to improve higher education, especially the role of interrepresented people. So we're really looking forward to seeing Terry. If you wanna keep talking about all these issues, what international competition means in higher education, the impact of demographics on economics, we have all these conversations going through various social media channels. Twitter is our most popular. So just use the hashtag FTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander, or join our groups on LinkedIn or Facebook or Slack. If you'd like to dive into the past, one of our participants mentioned the awesome Brian Kaplan. We had a great interview with him, great discussion with him. And we've been talking about demographics with a few other guests, including the awesome Nathan Graw. Please just go to tinyorl.com slash FTF archive. And you can see a whole series of recordings. And in the meantime, thank you to Shindig for making all of this available. Thank you to you all for your great questions and comments. Stay safe, keep thinking about these issues and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.