Transcript: We’re Not Having Enough Kids – It’s A Disaster: Stephen J. Shaw on TRIGGERnometry

I mean, it just wasn’t a thing. Us too, it’s now almost daily. So the transition of awareness is the one big change I notice.

And that’s a good thing because one of the reasons for making the documentary was to make people aware of what’s actually happening. But you’re right, over the past two years I’ve been doing more research because I still wasn’t convinced that we really understand this crisis.

Groundbreaking Research on Mothers and Fertility

My first paper, now peer reviewed, I can say that I tend to make documentaries first and then do the peer review after, which is probably the wrong way around to some people. But I think this is so important that people need to be aware of certain things.

And the peer reviewed research really shows that mothers in Japan and the UK are having around the same number of children as 1970 mothers. Let’s just park the category of women because there’s no such thing as a debatable category nowadays. To me it’s like a Schrödinger’s cat. People are not going to like me for this. The idea of a cat that’s half alive and half dead. So park that analogy.

But the idea of an average person, mother or father, is someone with a child and childless at the same time. We measure these average people, demographers do it, and it’s held a lot of people back, I think, in fully understanding exactly what’s happening.

So original research separated people who are having children. We’ve got so much data on women, it’s terrible, really. I’m always talking about women and mothers. I really want to talk about men more and I hope to do that here.

But looking at the data for women, if you become a mother, 1970s Japan, 2025 Japan, you’re going on to have around the same number of children. UK too. In US, mothers are actually having more, from 2.4 to 2.6. So this is not to do about parenthood, this is to do with the transition into parenthood.

The Discovery in Kyoto: A Singular Explanation

But I felt, well from my first research, that’s as far as you could go, that it was obvious parenthood was being delayed. So I had this category delayed parenthood, people doing other things first and running out of time. What I didn’t expect to find one layer deeper was a pattern across 39 nations that explains everything, and I mean everything.

So I’m now on camera on TRIGGERnometry for the first time saying there is a singular reason for falling birth rates. And I’ll either be laughed at for that, or people might look back and think, oh, that’s interesting. I hope it’s the latter.

So if I can take you through for a moment. Last June I was in Kyoto, Japan, and I just finished all the data analysis for the first paper, literally just finished it. And I went out for an evening and a friend I was due to meet was double booked for a birthday party. So I had an evening to myself and I do what I’d like to do on Friday nights. Let’s do some more data analysis.

And I decided to do only one thing, which was, okay, let’s just prep the data for the next paper, which is going to be about the probability of being a parent by age. That was always in my mind. And I threw this into a visualized dashboard data tool and age apparent, it became a curve.

I’ll not go into too much now because you may have more questions first, but I can share with you. The latest research is what I call vitality. And it shows that the age of parenthood can predict birth rates with very high accuracy.

But it’s not your age, it’s everybody else’s age. Well, it’s other people are the problem. You see, it doesn’t matter if that’s helpful. It doesn’t matter if we decide to have a child younger. In the overall average of things, someone having a child will replace someone else. Not having a child all balances out.

What I mean is it’s a societal thing. These curves center around an age where everybody is tending to have children and trying to move that forwards or backwards. Just because a group of people decide, well, we’re going to have kids earlier, great if they do for them. But the whole challenge we have now is to do with the age of becoming a parent. And that’s a big problem.

Understanding the Age of Parenthood

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Just to understand clearly what you’re saying is if you look at societies and you measure the average age at which people become parents, that will tell you what the fertility rate of that society is going to be.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: You can derive it in two or three rather simple steps.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, but I’m a little bit confused about you say that. Why? That’s a single explanation. Because there will be causes of that average age increasing over time. A number of them, I imagine, not just a singular one. Right. So some of them will be economic, some will be cultural, social. I imagine Right.

The Salmon Analogy: Triggers vs. Solutions

STEPHEN J. SHAW: So I try and think of analogies, and some of them are good and some are not. So let’s see. Imagine you’re a fish, let’s say a salmon in a river, a fast flowing river. Let’s say one day some bears come along. Not good. So all the fish move downstream, they find a new home there.

And the fishermen come along and think, what’s happened to all the fish? And then they go and they find the fish, but it’s not as nice where they are now. We want to move back upstream. We know the problem that was caused by bears, so let’s just get rid of the bears. That was the trigger. The bears were the trigger to moving the fish downstream. Right.

Getting the fish back upstream is a whole different challenge. So you’re right. What we see is major social turbulences, crises, recessions, causing delayed parenthood. If you have not had your first child, if you’ve already had your first child, there’s almost no effect. So it delays parenthood. So we’re now moving downstream of when people would have had children before. So the triggers need to be separated from. You know, resolving the triggers now would be like taking the bears away when they’re no longer the problem.

Can We Move Back? The Economic Question

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s a very specifically framed metaphor. Forgive me for interrogating it as much as I am, but it implies that the way this works is you can’t move back. Some people might say, I’m just thinking it through with you, Steven, not trying to argue with you at all, that if you remove the conditions that cause people to delay parenthood.

The reason I’m asking is, for example, right. My wife and I had our first son at 39. I know for a fact we probably would have had him earlier if our material conditions had been different, if we’d bought our flat earlier, if I was making more money earlier, if, etc. Do you see what I’m saying? Right.

So if I go back to that time when I was 35 and I had the income that I had now, or the physical, you know, security of owning a property or whatever it might be, we may well have had a child earlier. So if you remove that economic constraint from Konstantin at age 35, we may well have had kids then. Do you see what I’m saying?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Sure. And to go back to that evening in Kyoto, once I called up this chart, I was up to three in the morning in disbelief for the reason that this curve, which I’ll explain, is symmetrical without bumps. So what I mean, if you look at the age of parenthood, motherhood, and fathers, we now have some father data. My full expectation up to that evening was you’d see a delay in parenthood. Some people having children young, of course, and then maybe mid-20s, you would kind of have a slope going up. And then maybe around 30, there might be another uptick. And then there’ll be another uptick somewhere. It would start to go down, but there’d be another little uptick. Mid 30s, and then IVF. You would definitely see all the progress in terms of technologies.

And you’d also say, well, if you go back to 1970, it would be different, it would be smoother then, because maybe there was closer to an average parent back then. Most people were marrying at the same time, having kids at the same time. So I even doubt myself that this would be a curve that starts smooth and shows all this bumpiness as people, through autonomy, decide whether to have a child at 35 or 39.

But what I saw was a smooth curve in 1,539 data sets. Very slight perturbations, very slight for periods of time. I stared at that screen. I wrote an email to myself that night. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, ever will, because I wanted to remember the moment. So this is a symmetrical curve centered around the age. And today, let’s say it’s around 30, starts around 20, goes up almost perfectly. A perfect bell curve, what we call a Gaussian curve with a formula. There’s a formula for it.

The email to myself said, “We’re all the same.” And what I meant was, it’s a toss of a coin for us all by age, whether we want things or whether we have money. The money you may have had constantly in younger years, you may have spent, take a few more vacations or do other things and then wait. I thought the data was wrong. To me, this was impossible. I went back to the source of data, confirmed that it’s not national databases, verified it against other sources.

Went to the CDC in the U.S. U.S. is interesting, by the way. The U.S., I’ll just state now, U.S. has multiple curves. Asian Americans, perfect curve. African Americans start starting younger. If people were to say, in the U.S., why are so few Asian Americans and African Americans, Black Americans having kids? Well, you can see in the data, Asian Americans are having kids five to 10 years later than African Americans.

The Vitality Curve

So this curve, to try to explain, I call it the vitality curve. The desire to have children, I think is bumpy. I think there are people at those ages when they get through college, two years of career, when they get to 30, when they get to 35, I think there is bumpiness in the desire of kids around certain ages, but there’s a greater force that overrides everything.

So to put it in context, when you model this, again, 39 economies, have to say economies because includes Taiwan. It’s a wide, diverse set of countries in East Asia, North America, almost all of Europe. When you put all this together into a database, all of this data, you get the same smooth curve and you get predictability that around 94% of birth rates are related to that central age, that vitality curve. Only 6% relates to taxes, family policy, the economy, culture, anything else. There’s some exceptions to 6%. You can tweak it a little bit up and a little bit down.

But to me, the takeaway for policymakers is that if you ignore the average age of parenthood and only focus on helping everybody have children, the chances of success are small. And I’ll say one more thing, and this is an irony to me, the more you do to help people have IVF or delay parenthood in any way, the lower the curve goes. So overall, IVF, of course, great for many people, of course, but the more you can encourage later parenthood. This curve started like this and anchored at a young age because people are still having kids and teenagers. So it’s anchored and as it stretches, you take the life out of society.

The Dance Hall Analogy

Can I give you an analogy? Maybe better than the fish one. Imagine times gone by, maybe my parents’ generation, where in a town people would go to a dance hall and that was the only place to meet people, realistically. And the dance hall’s open from 8 until 11 and everyone’s there at 8 o’clock because you don’t want to miss out. And the first hour or so is gossip. And who’s brought their cousin from another town? Has there been a breakup? And the conversations start and then by the middle of the night, the dance floor, everything’s flowing, there’s lots of energy and towards the end people start drifting home and it’s less likely that any new connections will be made. But it’s condensed. Everyone’s on the same page at that same moment in time.

So imagine the dance hall owner thinks, well, this is amazing, I’m going to extend the hours. I’m going to open at 7, I’m going to stay open to midnight. But there’s still only the same number of people to come. There’s not an extra body of people you’re pulling in. So what happens? Some people come at 7, but some of them get bored and go home at 10. Some people have dinner first and come later. There’s never that one central moment. You’ve stretched out the energy and you don’t get that one moment.

And I imagine in that situation, let’s say you’re dancing with someone and you think, okay, this is interesting. And then some new people arrive at 5 to 10 and your head turns and thinks, wait a minute, there’s something new. I need to consider that. At which point your partner notices you looking elsewhere and he or she’s gone somewhere else. When you have a concentrated time span, when everyone’s on the same page, this easier, in technical terms, there’s less entropy, less disorder when people are pair bonding, matching at a younger age.

FRANCIS FOSTER: You know when I was watching the doc and I was reading your data, it reminded me of a book that I read a few months ago called “Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade” by William Goldman. And it’s about the movie industry and he wrote “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” And he said in 1982 the blockbusters were aimed at 16 to 24 year olds. So all the blockbusters in the late 70s, early 80s were aimed at 16 to 24 year olds because he said at the age of 24, people were getting married, they were having kids, they weren’t going to the cinema. So all of those blockbusters would be aimed squarely at that target demographic. Now imagine a blockbuster being released nowadays. It would have been 16 to 24 year olds. If I were to sue a movie producer, I’d be like, well, 16 to 35, maybe 16 to 40.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s why you’ve got a 60 year old Tom Cruise and “Top Gun Maverick.”

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How old he is? Maybe not 60.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, no, Tom, yeah, Tom Cruise is about 60.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So you’ve got all these people identifying with an aged Tom Cruise.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: No offense, Tom. And in that analogy, I think what happens is you’ve actually got more people because there’s more people to watch those movies over a wider age span. The issue with pair bonding is there aren’t any more, aren’t any extra people. We stretched out the hours. So be like stretching the hours of Blockbuster, but the same number of people coming in and not just the energy might be taken out. And sure, the analogy fully holds, but you know, this is my biggest worry now. This is what keeps me awake at night, including last night.

Time moves forwards just like a river. It’s easy to delay parenthood. We all, not this year, I got next year, that’s fine. But if we are to go back, if we are, it kind of means creating this turbulence where you’re trying to, you’re almost trying to tell all the over 30 year olds, look, you go do your own thing, be with each other, figure it out while you’re trying to have some. And I never use the word encouragement. It’s up to people to have kids if they want them. And I’ll say it here now, no one should force anyone to even contemplate children.

But there are many young people who do want family. And given the risk of unplanned childlessness, but having those two things at the same time. I’ve seen it done once in Hungary in a limited way where you have had policies that have created this bubble in 25 year olds and younger having children. Hungary. And that’s probably the most interesting thing happening in demography right now. That. Okay, there’s an example. Hungary’s overall birth rates have gone up and they’ve not settled back down again. But that’s not the most important thing to me. So there’s a bubble that could be interesting for the future of younger people starting a family.

The Real Impacts of Childlessness

FRANCIS FOSTER: And what you do so beautifully in the documentary is you explore the real impacts of childlessness on countries and we’ll talk about South America because with my background I actually found that quite shocking. We’ll talk about that later on in the interview. But the Japanese lady who you met and you took her back to the town that she grew up in. And in the early 70s it had been this vibrant town where there were schools and kids, playgrounds. And then you went back in, I think in 2021, 2022, whenever it was, I mean, talk about that, it was horrific.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: And it was actually a suburb of Tokyo. You know, it’s 40 minutes on the subway line, so it’s technically Tokyo city, which people would think is this 30 million booming place with too many people. So this is my Japanese language teacher and she told me for a long time the suburb where she was brought up. And I knew that she had left that suburb when she was 12 years old. Her family moved elsewhere. So I looked up some data and I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. I think the suburb has completely changed just looking at the residents’ ages.

So I persuaded her. I waited till I had a film crew in town and persuaded her kindly, Emmy Sensei to go with me. And I kind of knew what she was in for, but she didn’t. So she walks into this playground and she’s smiling. There’s where I used to play and I used to climb here. And she’s just filled with joy, you can see it. And then she comes to an alleyway that used to be filled with shops and they’re all closed, every single one shuttered. And she just says “shock.” And you just see what’s happened here because you can’t see inside apartments. Who’s there? Old lonely people mostly.

Well, I know it’s all lonely people because one shop that was open on store is the pharmacy and the pharmacists are 80 years old, husband and wife. And they confirm that everyone, well, as they put it, everyone’s old. And it’s mostly single women living alone because men die younger. And the grocery store, mother and son run it. The mother would be on the till and she liked doing that because many of the elderly people who come by, she’s the only person they get to talk to once a week. And they delay and delay paying their bills and chit chatting. And then one day they don’t come back.

The scene you’re talking about, Francis. Yeah, you know, it was the most chilling moment in the entire documentary. And there were several of it. We found some locals outside this pharmacy, and they were talking amongst themselves. My assistant Mie got to talk to them, and they’re saying, no, no, don’t say this, don’t say this. Don’t mention. But one person told us that the week before, an elderly woman in her 90s, without children had thrown herself off the roof from loneliness. And then we were told that’s not uncommon.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Right.

The Loneliness of Aging and Assisted Suicide

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Right there she fell off because she was lonely. I don’t think we know what loneliness is like in our younger years. What is loneliness? Not being connected with the world. We can’t sit there on that sofa and observe someone sitting there depressed day after day after day.

Yeah, I talk probably my first time talking about this scene in any detail. I don’t know how we do anything about that. Unless people start caring for older people in a way, I don’t think we do anymore.

And these bills are being passed around the world about assisted suicide. I think they’re just terrible. Maybe well intended. Sure, I can empathize with some unfortunate people where that would be a preferred choice.

I remember flying back to Tokyo and sitting beside two young Japanese students, girls in their early twenties. And if you end up sitting beside me in a plane, we’re going to be talking about birth rates, that’s for sure. But the young woman sitting beside me was on her way back home after studying, I think, in the UK, and explained she was on her way back to her house, excited to see her parents.

And I said, oh, you know the brother, sister. Yeah. And then she mentioned her grandparents, and she said, oh, yeah, my grandparents still live with us. Well, that’s good. You’ve got community. And then she kind of welled up in tears and she said, “Why are they still here?” about their own grandparents.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Obviously she was doing chores. Obviously she was studying. Obviously she was imagining all the things she would have to do to take care of her grandparents. But to verbalize those words to me in some way was stuck with me.

Those words may not often be spoken, but they might be thought or they might even be hinted at to a point where elderly people in nations where assisted suicide is possible start feeling guilty. “I’m a burden. Why am I here? I can sense it.”

And then communities build in this expectation, well, you shouldn’t be a burden. And we’ll all think when we get to that age that that’s the done thing now. What does that do to any civilization, any society where you know that that becomes the end?

So this whole area of I call these communities, and it’s not just Japan. I went to one in Germany as well. They’re everywhere. You don’t see them in the center of the city. You know, you go out of cities in many countries and you’ll find. I call them “yester lands,” like lands built for yesterday. And they’re too big now. There’s too many vacant houses. Sure, not in the trendy places. You know, that’s where the house prices go up. But the rural areas or even these suburbs, I worry about that a lot.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I mean, the doc is brilliant and incredibly powerful. And that was one of the moments that really hit home with me. The other one that hit home with me particularly was the amount of schools that were closed.

As somebody who used to teach, and you’ve been surrounded by kids and the energy that kids bring and the liveliness and just seeing you in a deserted playground. And then you said that school closed in 2006, and you showed the photograph of a boy being taught on his own. It made me feel an almost visceral pain.

Schools Closing Across Japan

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, yeah. So we talk a lot about Japan. It’s at the bleeding edge, but the rest of us are not so far behind. Already in the UK, schools are closing in some areas. It’s becoming more and more on the radar. But yeah, I mean, that one photo, to me, you’re right. The last student in this elementary school.

And you know, so Japan, something. On average, every day, two schools close in Japan. And that’s been going on for 15 years. There’s 5,000 to 6,000. Now. Schools aren’t just schools, they’re hubs of the community. Like you say, the energy is not just within the classroom, it’s all around the classroom. And you take a school away from a community, I’ve seen that happen.

So let’s say you have two towns, maybe five, ten miles apart, five, ten kilometers, and there’s only enough children for one school. So decisions made. Okay, we’re going to keep this school. We can just bus these kids. Solution? No.

What happens? Slowly, the families start to buy houses in this town or move there. Suddenly, fewer people want to live here, and you end up with elderly people left here and maybe a few kids still getting that school bus. Meanwhile, this town’s still got a bank and somewhere to repair your car and buy groceries. This one ends up with nothing.

I went to such a town, pretty central Japan last year. There’s one cafe, so one cafe. Maybe a town that would have had two, three hundred people. Not big, but one cafe. The cafe opens once per month. They have a day to all go to the cafe. So these fading societies, you know, it’s terrible.

The Shocking Reality in Latin America

FRANCIS FOSTER: And we talk about fading societies and obviously Japan, because Japan seems to be at the kind of the forefront of this, as does South Korea. The part of the doc I found shocking as someone with a Latin American background is you were talking about South America, you were talking about Brazil. I think what was the stat? Is it 1.64 replacement in Brazil?

I mean, yeah, I found that mind boggling. This is a Catholic country where fertility is celebrated. And you know, when I spent a lot of time, I’m not in Brazil but in Venezuela, it seemed to me that I was surrounded by children and you know, young people and it was a vibrant, energetic society.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, I think that shocks most people. I actually spent three weeks filming in six countries just because I had to see it, because I knew people wouldn’t believe it. And yet if you go back to Italy, forty, fifty years ago, it would have been the same. No one would have believed Italians would stop having big families and birth rates would crash.

Now it’s happening in Latin America and it’s about to happen. It’s already well underway in India, particularly southern India. It just takes us time to notice. You don’t really notice that people aren’t having kids. What changes? Nothing for a ten. A few schools closed, but not a big deal in the initial phases. It takes time for us to know this, which is part of the problem.

But yeah, Latin America, Latin America has a bigger problem than the west, much bigger problem because the west and the Far East got wealthy before they got old. Japan’s got reserves, huge national debt, but it’s got reserves for a while and perhaps they can use those reserves to help re-engineer society.

Brazil doesn’t have reserves. Still today in these countries the pension systems are geared up for very large families compared to the number of retirees. And the experts I interviewed there, including one a doctor who’s now into looking gerontology, is that care of older people and the fear in his eyes and voice talking about the future of elderly people in Brazil.

So what’s happening in Latin America is what happened in Europe and the Far East twenty plus years ago just popping up in the numbers now. The real impact will be twenty plus years time and India is on the exact same path.

The Fatality Curve and Why Solutions Won’t Work

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So this being a worldwide problem, let’s come back to the conversation we started with, which is I guess implied and implicit in what you’re saying to some extent is the idea that the way we got here is not necessarily the way we’ll come out of it in that even if we address some of the reasons that this has happened, that won’t take us to where we want to go. Can you talk about why that is, first of all?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah. So we have this central tendency, this fatality curve. And it’s there 1,539 data sets. So a year in a country put together massive.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which shows that as the average age of parenthood gets older, people have fewer kids. That’s basically what it says overall in a very predictable way.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: So that’s equivalent to tossing a coin 1,539 times and then coming up heads every time. Okay. Don’t bet on the next one being a tail.

So we have to assume, whatever the reason for this curve, I’ve got my theories, I think it’s linked to pair bonding matching up, but it’s there. Now if you take let’s say average age, thirty is common in many nations right now, South Korea, thirty-two, twenty-nine, thirty is common.

If you were to do things like put more money in young parents’ pockets. If you do things that open more daycare, baby bonuses, all sorts of things that people think of gender, men doing more at the home, more paternity leave. Let’s say we solve all those things. We’re now living in a perfect world.

That central age is anchored at that point if you’re to pull it forward. So you’re at that peak point now of thirty. We could have moved the peak earlier, but you’re already thirty. So you need to create some new bubble. A solution can only emerge if a new bubble emerges that allows the people older than thirty to continue doing things as they would have for a time, while something new, a new blossom, if you like, emerges.

Now I don’t know if people actually really will choose to have children younger. If they don’t, we’ve got a real problem. This is a civilization ending. But that curve is so locked in with no examples of really how to move it other than hoping for a second bubble at a younger age.

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The Economic Argument

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is why. Sorry if I’m harping on about the same thing, but this is where I come back to the economic argument because I don’t know if this is true. And you’re right. I think one of the things I definitely observe is that there are the average age of people getting together into a serious committed relationship seems to be increasing.

And I have a lot of friends in America now who are in their twenties, who are all married and about to have kids because that is kind of part of their worldview. But they are kind of the exception, at least globally.

But you know, in the seventies you still had to some extent the one earner household where the man, stereotypically speaking, would go out to work, he could feed the entire family off his income, his wife could afford to be at home with the kids. And now that is just much more difficult to attain for people.

So I would say that probably quite a lot of young people that would be happy to have kids if that vision was available to them, which it isn’t. So wouldn’t solving that problem, not that I know how to solve it, but if we solve that, wouldn’t that turn this all around?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: I’m not saying that these things aren’t important, but I am saying there’s no evidence they’ll affect birth rates.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But we’ve never, we’ve not seen that economic reality be reversed. It’s only getting worse. It’s only getting harder for people to get on the housing ladder. It’s only getting harder for people to survive on a one income.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Right, yes. But if you go back to, you know, seventies, eighties, there was a time when things were getting better and you can look at different recession here. It’s getting. And does it affect birth rates? No more.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: People weren’t having kids in the Reagan Thatcher boom years, so.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Reagan Thatcher boom year. So we’re talking now the 80s, I think really the average family size in the UK was the same. In America it was 2.4. So it’s actually gone up. Childlessness was lower in America at that time. But no, this is something really quite locked in.

But if I could, I understand. I have this conversation. I think my eldest son won’t mind mentioning him. He got married recently and living in central London. He and his wife focused on careers. You know, they tell me similarly that people, if they had more money. But what seems to happen is that when people do have that bit more money, they think, great, let’s go enjoy it for a year or two and let’s have kids later.

And there are many examples, counterpoint. So you’ll take somewhere like southeast of the UK where house prices are going through the roof right now. And that’s the problem. Well, you look at Scotland and Scotland’s got one of the lowest birth rates in the entire UK. Scotland doesn’t have this in the rear.

So there’s imbalances in logic. I’ve got them. We all know Occam’s razor. Is that the saying where I think the most simple reason is probably the right one. I’ve got maybe something to pair with that and subsets here, which is the common grievance raiser, you might call this.

So I go around the world talking about this, lecturing about this, and when I’m in Japan, people are certain if men did more than at home, birth rates would go up.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Really?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Oh, certain. I gave a talk to a technology conference there recently and this lady came up and thanked me and said, but really, you do know if men did more at home, that would solve the problem here. And I come to the UK and it’s house pricing and different places I go, they’ve got local grievances. So if so the razor, really the…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Trend is the same everywhere.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Everywhere but that little razor, if you’re blaming local grievances for things you’re unsure of, they’re probably not the right answer.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, in that case, what do we do?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How do you get, in your analogy…

Reinventing Systems to Support Families

STEPHEN J. SHAW: The fish back upstream? Yeah, thanks for continuing the analogy. Yeah, reinvent things. In fact, reinvent everything. Education. How about taking a year out of high school and focusing on what’s important? How about taking a year out of college? Focusing what’s important?

How about switching to lifelong learning so a 20 year old can realistically expect to be graduating first stage of education and getting out into the workforce, choosing a career earlier, maybe having time to actually readjust that career based on lifelong learning, saying that didn’t work out.

What about long term career sabbaticals? What about joining a company and becoming an employee, but being able to take a 5, 7 year sabbatical but you’re still an employee, you still get a little bit of a salary. Yeah, I’m simplifying the economics here for sure. But imagine you still are attached to that company, still the business card, the email address, you go to the Christmas parties, training sessions, you might even do half a day a week.

The condition would be that after that sabbatical, maybe you’ve had one, two, three kids, maybe not, but you have that sabbatical condition is you have to come back for three years. So just an idea. And then we have some accelerator programs.

You know, parents, particularly mothers, I would say are incredibly efficient, good at timekeeping, conflict resolution, organization. Hire young mothers 27, 30, 33. That’s possible now, but it’s a huge vulnerability for any young person to assume, okay, I’m going to have that family first and then I’m going to cross everything and try and have my career.

So that’s what’s disjointed at the moment. The idea that we have to complete our education, in effect training, whatever it is, start a career, but get onto that ladder at a certain point, that the vulnerability, particularly for women, of stepping back right now, it’s not minimized, but we need to minimize that risk. I think blending everything together is the only possibility.

Hungary’s Policy Approach

The one hope I do see is if I can go back briefly to Hungary. I get asked a lot about Hungary. I go there a lot. I work with the former president Catalan Novak, on a nonprofit, XY Worldwide, and we’re doing all sorts of advisory work and awareness programs around the world on this topic.

So policy there is fascinating. There’s so many policies, but the one I think that may have had the most traction was if you said, as a young person, I want to have a kid, you would get a mortgage deposit depending on the size of house you wanted. Now why didn’t everybody go for big houses? Well, the overall risk is still higher and you don’t need that space.

But if you end up having those number of children, two, three, or four, the deposits basically cancel. You don’t ever pay that back. And if you don’t, you pay a portion of it. And if you don’t have any kids, well, you have to pay it back like you would have had done anyway. I think a lot of young people thought, wow, we can get a house.

Now, does that sound coercive? Oh, my gosh, let’s get married and have kids, have a house. People don’t do that. It means, I think we know. I mean, family policies have failed so much worldwide generally, that people aren’t taking $5,000 and saying, great, let’s go and let’s go to the bar tonight and find someone to kind of, you deposit that check with nine months from now. That doesn’t happen. This is too important.

So I think enabling younger people who want children and become more aware of unplanned childlessness and this curve. Now, one final thing, education itself. People need to be taught. Young people are taught often what’s called comprehensive sex ed. Not just in developed nations, but you go to parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, there are nonprofits there teaching.

But it stops at how not to get pregnant. That’s what it’s all. It’s not comprehensive. It’s that. And that alone. No one’s saying, oh, by the way, here are some risks. And if you really do want four children, the spacing thing about delaying them three, four years might not be for you if you really want. Those conversations need to enter into our education system.

Understanding Unplanned Childlessness

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you use the term that you use often, which is unplanned childlessness. And I think that’s really a big portion of this conversation because I think the overwhelming majority of people, and I include myself on this, just fundamentally do not understand fertility even remotely. So can you talk to us a little bit about some of the facts and myths about that?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, and of course, there’s so many people proposing theories that sperm counts are falling and that that’s a factor, and that women’s biology isn’t quite as, you know, it happens younger than people might think. So, and those all may be true. What I’m saying is that before biology becomes a factor, so biology is a big, big thing. There’s another more important factor that take. It’s like a filter, if you like.

So you know what? I’ll try this. Why is the water in the river, you know, becoming less and less and less and less? Well, it’s something upstream is causing it. So trying to focus on that itself is an issue.

But to summarize, childlessness, we have voluntary childlessness. It’s about 10% of people never have a desire to have children. And my experience will have no regrets and possibly won’t understand those who do have that desire and vice versa. So, and we need to respect that those people have big roles to play in society and are playing big roles. And nonprofits, I think they’re the biggest contingent in some senses. So that’s voluntary.

You then have involuntary childlessness, which is quite tightly defined as either a medical reason, maybe there’s an illness, hysterectomy, something happened to one of a couple, or biological. Basically you’ve tried and tried and tried an IVF and hasn’t worked.

There is no formal category for circumstantial childlessness. Biggest factor, not finding a partner. That’s not involuntary childlessness. Other factors, socioeconomic concerns. So that’s why I coined unplanned childlessness. And it’s not in my published paper. So, and it was brought up, it’s now in an international declaration.

57 nations in Porto. Two weeks ago I worked with an Austrian MP, Guggen Kugler, who included this term unplanned childlessness. And I was there in person to see politicians from the UK Labor, Liberal Democrat, Conservative Times. 57 nations in a plenary session of 300 people unanimously vote to support that resolution which includes these definitions.

So childlessness is not about, I think people, someone once said to me, so this is not my analogy. So I’m going to get a cop out if people don’t like this. It’s not like buying a pet. It’s not like, okay, now is the time for child. I’m going to go down to the pet store. A lot of things have to line up at the right time and finding a partner is the biggest one or not.

Going through a breakup, so many people break up dating for seven years, sure, we’re going to have kids together, 32 breakup or something happens. So unplanned childlessness is the big factor.

Here for the UK I recently updated my analysis. A woman turning 28 in the UK has a 50, 50% chance of ever becoming a mother at 28. Now most countries are below 30, but the US is lower than that. But the US again is Asian Americans are a little bit different to other groups. It’s a little bit more complicated in the US.

But I think simply letting young people know, sure, get as much education as you can. Sure. Establish yourself on your career path. But by the way, you better think about this curve because it’s there and you know, like, they’re not, you know, you can’t cheat the curve. It’s there.

The Fertility Knowledge Gap

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I think, you know, look, men are ignorant about fertility. Absolutely. But I also find it shocking how ignorant women are about their own fertility. They seem to think that you can just, you know, it’s going to be, you’re going to be able to have kids, senior, 38, 39. Now some people may be able to, and obviously that’s great. And some people are able to in their early 40s, but that’s really the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?

STEPHEN J. SHAW: The amount of information on this, to be honest with you, I can see it. It’s been a one way street controlled the message. A one way street controlled by a group of anti natalists going back to the likes of Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s. The book “The Population Bomb,” that way of thinking got into the education system.

Education materials only talk about population explosions. Still, they cut off this year and they point to the year 1800 and like, oh, look at the increase. They don’t then tell you, oh, yeah, by the way, it’s going to flatten out. And then when I do point out that we are going to peak total population, that’s not far away now. Yeah, but year 2100, they will say there’s still going to be around 8, 9 billion people. Yeah, but they’re all old people needing care. It’s not the same as it is now.

So there are people out there trying to block messages and one of the messages that they’re trying to block is educating women about fertility. So they’re very happy to confuse. I’ve seen it. I was invited to Doha debates two years ago. It never aired because unfortunately that series coincided with October 7th and the tone of it. The host was a comedian and once you get comedians involved in things, it was too serious an event, I think, and sadly it was pulled.

But I was debating against a lady who runs a population organization. For me, she’s a population denier because she would not talk about low birth rates even in her own home country of India. But it seems to be that, you know, young people are engaged to this message, particularly young woman. They want to hear, yeah, you can have a career, do it, you’re free to whatever. There’s no downside to this. Don’t listen to Stephen, who represents the patriarchy, you know.

So people like me in the past were blamed as being, you know, anti environmental now, the patriarchy now the next wave of confusion is coming in. I’ve heard some politicians pick up on messages, which is, it’s too late anyway. Let’s not even think about what can we do now. I think that’s another anti natalist message creeping in.

So you’re talking about women awareness and I’m broadening it. There’s an anti natalist message driving many things and I’ve been, you know, I’ve had it in my face more than once.

The Anti-Natalist Narrative

FRANCIS FOSTER: And we’re talking about an anti natalist message. I haven’t seen it so much over here, but I’ve seen it certainly in the States, particularly in places like New York, where bringing children into the world is seen as an act of grotesque selfishness because, number one, the planet is already dying is their narrative. And then you’re just going to bring children in. That’s going to accelerate its demise. And also as well, I hear people going, well, you know, the world is so terrible, why would I bring children into it? That is, you know, that’s awful. They’re going to suffer.

# The Anti-Human Narrative and Its Origins

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, and I get that. I get it in comments, I get it in attacks. I got it in a classroom, university classroom in Tokyo this year, doing a lecture to young Japanese students, when at the end a British lecturer came in and sat at the back and then got up and started heckling me, basically saying the things, “Why are you here talking to these young students? Why are you trying to tell…” The environment’s burning, the oceans are boiling, people shouldn’t… and wouldn’t let me speak.

So these voices are there trying to, I think, poison young people’s minds. I do think it’s a poison, because why can we not at least talk about this topic? Why can’t we debate this? It’s perhaps the most toxic topic. There’s a lot of toxic topics out there, but usually you can get a decent debate about most things.

I feel in this space in the same way when I was cancelled at Cambridge and there’s a fake website that’s been put up trying to discredit the documentary. The UN FPA is now basically saying the message I’ve been sharing is right. The report titled in the past two months was “The Real Fertility Crisis” about people not having the children they want to have. The world is shifting. So I am hopeful within a very few years all those rogue voices will die down because they’ll just be seen as the idiots and people want to talk about this.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it to me, it’s not an anti-child message. To me it’s an anti-human message. It’s putting forward a narrative that human beings are evil and that we are a scourge on the planet.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, so, and where does that come from? Now that’s quite an extreme viewpoint, but it’s there. I’ve interacted online with some people with this view. Some people have made podcasts from that community reviewing the documentary. So I’ve seen it, I can listen to it.

Now, there are some people who literally want humanity to die and are happy to say it. Most of them don’t say this. What I’ve figured out, most of them know if they come out and say “I want humanity to die,” a lot of people are going to switch off to that message. So they find more subtle ways, maybe through writing books called “The Population Bomb.” I don’t know. But those voices, but there are people.

And what’s really interesting, if you go back in history, who funded a lot of the nonprofits in the space? Population Connection used to be called Zero Population Growth going back to Ehrlich in the 60s. All those. Who’s funding them? Not them specifically, but a lot of money went into this. Well, you look at the Ford Foundation, this is on record. Don’t worry, you’re not going to get sued. I mean it’s been written about a lot. The Rockefeller Foundation.

Rockefeller Foundation funded a lot of the India campaigns on low fertility, which directly or indirectly, some say directly led to forced sterilizations of something like 8 million people, literally people taken off trains. So there are voices out there, some quite wealthy, who, to me, their motives at least, have to be questioned as to whether they really care about humanity. But definitely some people don’t.

Women’s Education and Reproductive Choices

FRANCIS FOSTER: And the more I look into this, and this is going to sound like a provocative question, and it really doesn’t mean to. Isn’t this just a natural byproduct of women becoming more educated, having more rights, having control of their reproductive rights that most women, if we’re being honest, and you showed yourself in the documentary, they don’t want five or six kids. They don’t want four kids. They’ll be like, “Two’s enough. Two is just enough. That’s what I can cope with. That’s what I’ll be happy with. I also don’t just want to be a homemaker. I also want my own life.” And you’re looking at these women, you go, I mean, fair enough.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: No, sure.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So…

STEPHEN J. SHAW: I would never want to be associated with anything that would take away any woman’s rights. In fact, I don’t even want to get involved in conversations about abortion. As a man, it’s like, okay, that’s so delicate. And will it affect me personally in a relationship? Yes, but I try to be agnostic on all of those things. I won’t say that first, and I’ll get to your point about women, but let’s talk about men for a second.

So this Gaussian curve, that’s everywhere. We’ve got some data for the US for men at a granular level, it’s very hard to find. And guess what, the same Gaussian curve is there for men too, just a little bit later. And as they stretch, it’s like a coordinated stretch. So men and women are interlinked. So it’s not just about women focusing on education and focusing on other things. Men are too. We’re all in this race together.

And what’s happened with double incomes? Well, property prices got double incomes. So it’s no longer an option or choice for most for only one of us to work. So hence everything’s interlinked. So if we start blaming, women are thinking, well, you know, that’s the solution lies with women, we’re going to miss out again. You can’t move one of these curves without moving the other. So I think it’s a dead end going down. You know, what happened in the past, we can’t change it. For me, I wouldn’t want to change it. And men and women are completely linked to each other.

Economic Realities and Policy Solutions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But isn’t that, forgive me, but that’s kind of where the problem is. Because if the reality is that, as you say, the double incomes have made everything more expensive, it then makes it very difficult for people to survive on one income. And that makes it very difficult for people to have kids in the way that they would want to. And unless we address that in some way, we aren’t going to really get anywhere.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah. And I come back to the Hungarian housing scheme again. I think government has to do something at that level to… I mean, if you’re thinking of this in terms of pure economics, I read this morning the UK is going to be the fastest growing country, population wise, in Europe. And it’s because of immigration, of course.

Well, the issue there is immigrants get old too. So it means if that’s your policy or non-policy, you’re going to have effectively the same number or an increasing number of older people to take care of forever for as long as you can find immigrants. And with birth rates going down in India and South Africa too, that’s a risky strategy, but not to get onto that too much.

The point is here that unless we have new people coming through a system, we won’t be able to support our entire infrastructure for those who do have kids and don’t have kids. So how do we get back to that age? Can we, I don’t know, can we put enough incentives to create such a bubble that enough younger people will have children and maybe even possibly have more children than they would have otherwise to support the entire system.

So it’s a conversation we all need to be having that I’m not sitting here saying I’ve confidently found the solution. I’m not. I’m saying I think this is our best chance by far. And by the way, it means reinventing just about everything.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, Francis wants to end the education of women.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know what’s controversial about that? Why don’t we try that and then if that doesn’t work, we’ll try… No, no, but this is kind of the issue really, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, we all are very happy for women to be educated.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Speak for yourself.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I don’t think anybody would want to hold anyone back from having a career, male or female, if that’s what they’d like to do. I can only speak from my experience. I know quite a lot of women who fill different types of templates there. I know women who love having a career and several kids and they manage it great. And I know some people who feel like, well, actually I had a career and it was on reflection, now that I’ve had kids, a bit of a waste of time actually.

And so there’s that full spectrum and it comes back to what are the societal expectations, what are the cultural norms, what are you seeing around you, what are you being told by your female friends and relatives about parenthood, about children. And I think it’d be difficult to deny that we have lived for some time now in an environment in the west, at least I can’t speak for other places, where children are kind of seen as a burden more than they are seen as a joy and as a thing that you, even when we know from surveys actually most women would really like to have kids.

The Reality of Unplanned Childlessness

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Yeah, yeah, certainly it’s absolutely true that most women want kids. And there’s this conundrum that comes back to vulnerability. Do I do it now or do I wait another year? And a partner may be saying the same thing. There’s some incentive to wait a little bit longer. And that’s where unplanned childlessness kicks in.

It’s the ones that you’re meeting who have had the career and a large family took the plunge at some point when someone else may have delayed a little bit. And then other things happen in life. So for example, in the US right now, for every 10 women 35 and below, one approximately never wants kids, nine do. Of the nine, three will not have kids, six will. Based on current fertility patterns. If you look at fertility last year. So for the nine who do, one third of intending mothers will remain childless.

And it’s lack of awareness or lack of understanding of the complex factors like breakups, like your partner not being ready, that just creep in and then the moment drifts away. And this timing curve, it put me in a bad mood that day in Kyoto and I’m still in a bit of a bad mood because I wanted to think that we had more autonomy to choose the timing ourselves. But you can see it in the data, this is to do with synchronization forces that just get harder and harder and harder.

If you imagine today you’re an 18, 20 year old with your first girlfriend, boyfriend that’s getting a little serious, you’re probably not thinking, “This is the woman I’m going to have kids with when I get to 35,” because that’s too far away. You’re just not even thinking that. So you’re thinking about, well, this is fun. And then maybe there’s a breakup. And then your partner, 23, 24, you’re still not thinking that way.

And I think a lot of people drift through relationships without taking them seriously enough because that might be the best relationship you were ever going to have. It’s just you weren’t on the same page as society, which is telling you, “Wait, wait, wait.” And I think this has caused a lot of other issues. The whole issue with young men, sexless young men. And I know they exist. I’ve certainly met them in Japan.

I think they’re just zoning out and playing in their mother’s basement, playing games, because I think we’re meant to form relationships sooner, and that means something to us biologically and psychologically. And by knowing, well, I’ve got to wait for 15 years before I even can start to think about parenthood. I think it’s part of a broader societal issue.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And one of the things you explore are these people who want kids and then don’t have them.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: And I’ve actually met a lady at…

FRANCIS FOSTER: A party in New York, and she represents one of these organizations. I mean, it was haunting talking to her. There was just a profound sense of sadness there.

The Hidden Grief of Childlessness

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Profound. And again, my heart goes out to even listeners of this because it’s such a difficult topic. And we all might assume that our aunt or our colleague, they must have never wanted kids. They seem quite happy. And it’s a private thing.

I read a poem by one of these people. I’ll not remember it, but it was just heartbreaking about being in the office when a new mother comes in with her baby to show everybody in the office and all the women flock, and she’s locked, trapped in her desk, just frozen, unable to escape because she can’t get past, but just wanting to get out of there.

Not all feel like that. And some people, I’ve been told by this community, I should say that later in life, you know, you can find other purposes. But for many years, decades, or maybe forever, there’s a grief. And that’s what people in that category call it. Men and women. I see men cry as much as women about not having the kids that they intended to have. And it’s just like, what happened, timing and…

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because that’s the thing that I found surprising because I always thought, you know, for blokes, you know, well, you can have kids at any age you like. Mick Jagger seems to be popping them…

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Out at a rate that is just…

FRANCIS FOSTER: Quite frankly staggering, considering he’s in his early 80s. But that’s kind of an illusion, isn’t it?

The Male Fertility Myth

STEPHEN J. SHAW: We’re stupid. We’re stupid. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, biology is a factor, sure. So we got that one in theory. But you got to find a partner. And unless you’re, you know, super famous…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Super rich for the listeners. He’s pointing us for answers.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, exactly.

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Tick, tick, not so rest we forget that we’re actually competing against younger versions of ourself. I learned that divorced at 42 wasn’t exactly planned, but there we are. I thought, well, I might meet someone, plenty of time yet.

And you realize that person over there who’s now X years younger than me, X + five years younger than me, X + 10 years young, who’s able to have a child, that young woman, you know, why would she choose me compared to everyone else?

So biology. We’ve been fooling ourselves. It doesn’t even come into it. And for that one 80 year old who has eight kids, you know, all that’s happening is the woman he’s having kids with, which are probably almost certainly under 40, under 35, they would be having kids with somebody else. There are more children overall. So the overall thing, it’s just really. Yeah, because…

The Crisis of Dishonesty

FRANCIS FOSTER: And, but that ties into the fact that, and it’s actually a lot of what we talk about here at Trigonometry, which is we live in a society where we’re fundamentally dishonest, not only with our children, not only with our peers, not only when we’re at work, but also fundamentally with ourselves. And we are in denial of our…

STEPHEN J. SHAW: Own biology, lying to ourselves or biology generally, trying to believe we’re younger than we actually are. All of it. All of it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think, I think, and this is what it comes down to with this conversation, is a fundamental lack of honesty. Yeah. And what you know, because we think, and look, maybe push back on this if you think this is untrue, but because we think being honest and being direct is unpleasant, it’s rude and it can be seen to be cruel.

But actually, to me, the cruelest thing that you can do is be dishonest, particularly with a woman and say, look, your most fertile years are between X and Y. You can run the risk if you want and try and have it later, but if this is what you really want, then this is what you need to optimize for and prioritize for.

The IVF Illusion

STEPHEN J. SHAW: No, you’re absolutely right. I mean, we all relish, I think, in the idea of longevity, that 30s, the new 20, that 40s, the new 30. But biology hasn’t reset itself at all.

And again, from this curve, there’s no uptick from IVF. So all this idea, while you’ve got IVF, you’ve got egg freezing, it doesn’t actually look particularly good for likelihood. Okay, some will benefit, but overall it causes more people to delay just because you can do that. And many of those fall into unplanned childlessness sort of washes out. So it is a lion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that promise that you can delayed that you… That promise that you can delay parenthood incentivizes people to attempt it. And then many of them are actually then unable to have the children that they wanted to have. Yeah, I see.

That really is what I think Francis is talking about, which is we’re just lying to people, basically. We’re just telling them things are going to be possible, which are, for many of them, not going to be possible. And if they had known that, they would have made this whole set of different choices quite possibly in the run up to it.

Stephen, it’s great to have you back on the show. Before we head on over to Substack and ask you questions from our supporters. What’s the one thing that we’re not talking about that we should be?

The Next Humanitarian Crisis

STEPHEN J. SHAW: The next humanitarian crisis, which will be aging people in countries like Brazil. But more particularly, I’m so worried about old people. We haven’t got our head around the idea that these are nations that are going to age very rapidly without any support systems. I just want people to start to think a bit longer term, particularly when they criticize countries like India for high birth rates, which was a thing of the past. Actually, the real crisis there is being baked in right now. Old people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Stephen, thanks for coming on. Head on over to Substack where we get to ask him your questions. The usual explanations for the fall of the birth rate in the west involve the economic cost of childbearing. So why is the birth rate falling in Cuba and in North Korea, where childbirth and childcare are free and supported by the government?

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