Transcript: The Age of Depopulation With Nicholas Eberstadt – Uncommon Knowledge

This time it’s different. Global health is higher than it’s ever been before. It’s continuing to increase with a few very small footnotes that are exceptions around the world, but not enough to affect the overall totals or trends.

What’s happening now is that we are marching towards below replacement fertility, towards a global pattern of childbearing which will be insufficient to sustain global population. And that is entirely new.

PETER ROBINSON: All right, I just have to… You just said it. You just said it very well. But it is so striking, possibly because I’m a boomer and grew up with the notion that we were suffering overpopulation. I’ve called this segment the Depopulation Bomb, after Paul Ehrlich’s famous book of the late 60s. I think it was a 1968 book called “The Population Bomb” that predicted such population growth that by the mid-70s—he was wrong, of course—but by the mid-70s, there would be mass starvations.

Now, what he was wrong about, I always thought, conservatives always thought, was that he missed human intelligence. He missed our capacity to grow. Not that he was wrong about the population. The population would grow, but resources would grow even faster. Okay, but this is not that argument. This argument is that he was wrong about the numbers. Population is going to shrink as we boomers depart from this world, not continue to grow. I’m just asking you to repeat it so I’m sure I’ve got it.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: We are on a long-term march, seemingly unstoppable, to planetary below replacement fertility. It is possible we already have reached that threshold. It’ll take us a couple of years because we have to look in the rearview mirror until the statistics catch up with us.

Asia: The Dramatic Decline

PETER ROBINSON: All right, Asia. We’ll go continent by continent. Very briefly, Nick Eberstadt again. This is from Foreign Affairs. “In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, by 2022, every population was shrinking.” Again, to a boomer like me, the idea that China—we were raised with a notion that China was going to grow—all of these countries are actually shrinking and have been for three years at least.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Yeah, it’s really hard to wrap one’s head around this, but the childbearing patterns in East Asia are about 50% below the level that would be needed for long-term population stability. We are flirting with a regional average of about one birth per woman per lifetime in East Asia. And in some places like Taiwan, like South Korea, like large portions of enormous China, we’re already well below one birth per woman per lifetime.

PETER ROBINSON: So help me with the math here. I’m tempted to say the math is as simple as this: Father, mother, one child. That means the overall population halves in each generation. Can that possibly be true?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: That’s about correct for the region as a whole. Unless something radical changes, we can expect that rising cohort of babies, of newborns, to be half as large as the parental cohort.

# China’s Unexpected Response

PETER ROBINSON: And now China. I’m staying with Asia for just a moment. China had famously imposed a one-child policy in 1979, but replaced it in 2016 with a two-child policy. And all my Chinese friends in California tell me it’s very easy to buy your way out of the two-child policy. If you want three or four, there are fees you pay and bribes. You can have a big family, big-ish family in China if you want, but nobody does.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: No, no. I mean, what’s happened in China is really fascinating. After that catastrophic and cruel one-child policy was not even suspended, but after the quota was adjusted, the overlords in Beijing thought that they were going to be able to tweak the size of the herd kind of the way that a rancher would with a flock. But the pigs in Animal Farm, or whatever the analogy is, didn’t go along with that. Exactly the opposite happened. The total number of births dropped by about half. And what I think we see in that particular case is a massive vote of no confidence in the Xi Jinping dictatorship.

# India’s Surprising Transformation

PETER ROBINSON: All right, India. Once again, Nick Eberstadt. “Sub-replacement fertility prevails in India. In India, where urban fertility rates have dropped markedly, in the vast metropolis of Kolkata, officials reported that in 2021 the fertility rate was down to an amazing one birth per woman—lower than in any major city in Germany or Italy.” Even India.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: It’s very hard to wrap our heads around this one, Peter. I mean, I first visited Kolkata when it was called Calcutta in 1975. It was teeming with children. It was teeming with children. I mean, the fertility level was probably around five births per woman. Now, one birth per woman. This has happened in your lifetime, in one guy’s lifetime that’s happened.

PETER ROBINSON: And you’re not that old, Nick.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, thank you for saying that, but it’s happened really fast in any sort of historical measure of time.

Europe: The Demographic Collapse

PETER ROBINSON: Europe. Nick Eberstadt: “For half a century, Europe’s overall fertility rates have been continuously sub-replacement. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has witnessed 17 million more deaths than births. The 27 countries of the European Union reported just under 3.7 million births in 2023, down from 6.8 million in 1964. Last year, France tallied fewer births than it did in 1806, the year Napoleon won the Battle of Jena.” We think of Europe as the center of Western civilization. We boomers still think of it that way. What’s going on?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, we now have East Asia and all of Europe, including Russia, as net mortality zones in our global population—more deaths than births now, and that gap looks only to be increasing as far as the demographer’s eye can see.

Latin America and Beyond

PETER ROBINSON: Latin America. You write that birth rates are down throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and indeed in North Africa and the Middle East. To quote you once again, “Iran has been a sub-replacement society for about a quarter century. And in Turkey, Istanbul’s 2023 birth rate was just 1.2 babies per woman—lower than Berlin’s now.”

So if I understand you correctly, across the entire globe, there are only two exceptions to this trend of shrinking: one major exception and one minor exception. And we’ll save the minor exception because it’s the United States. The major exception is sub-Saharan Africa. Explain the degree to which it is an exception and then, if you can, why.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Every continent on Earth except for Africa is now already below replacement.

PETER ROBINSON: Replacement is 2.1, or roughly 2.1.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Every continent but Africa is exhibiting childbearing patterns that are inadequate to provide for long-term population stability. They’re going to increase for a little while on population momentum, but that can’t fly. I mean, they’re all on course for depopulation absent compensating immigration.

With the exception for now of sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is still about 100% above replacement. Africa as a whole, if we add in North Africa, maybe 75% above replacement. But birth rates are declining basically everywhere in the world with tiny exceptions. And the level of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa is about 35% lower than it was in the 70s or 80s.

There are already places in sub-Sahara which are at replacement, about to go below replacement, like South Africa. Off the coast of sub-Saharan Africa, places like Mauritius are well below replacement already. I mean, stick around.

PETER ROBINSON: So my impression—again, you know this, I’m just asking questions—I seem to remember reading somewhere that the two, in some ways most economically hopeful countries in sub-Saharan Africa are Nigeria and Kenya. They seem to have their economies sorted out enough to be growing. How are the birth rates in both of those places?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Nigeria is a bit of a mystery because its population numbers have been shambolic for a couple of generations. They fought a civil war over cheating on their 1963 census in the Biafran War. Kenya’s a lot clearer. And Kenya’s birth levels are coming down very rapidly. They’re not at replacement yet, but they’re coming down very rapidly.

The United States: The Minor Exception

PETER ROBINSON: All right, so this brings us to the minor exception, the United States of America. Quote Nick Eberstadt: “The United States remains the main outlier among developed countries.” I must say that brings a little warmth to my patriotic heart. I like being an outlier among developed countries, resisting the trend of depopulation. “But even in the United States, depopulation is no longer unthinkable.” Explain.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: What makes the United States demographically exceptional for an affluent democracy is its unusually high birth levels and its embrace of immigration. Those two things. For the last 15 years, the United States has dropped below replacement childbearing. We’re now actually 20-plus percent below.

PETER ROBINSON: The replacement level for the first time in our history.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, I mean, we had this happen briefly in the 70s. There was a dip in the…

PETER ROBINSON: Not even in the 30s during the Depression?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: No, we were still, for the 30s, we were still barely above, barely above replacement. There were a couple of years that you could find charting down. But this is a long period. This past decade and a half, we kind of have a new pattern. Our birth levels are higher than for Europe or, needless to say, for East Asia or other places, but not enough to maintain long-term population stability.

On our current trajectory, we will get to be a net mortality country within a decade. This is where the immigration comes in. Immigration has added to our ranks since the very founding of our republic, of course, and it is set to continue to do so, although nobody can guess exactly what flows of immigration are going to look like. But at this stage, the Census Bureau is now guessing that the US population, immigration included, is going to peak within the next generation and a half.

Why Are We Having Fewer Children?

PETER ROBINSON: All right, why? What’s happening? Nick Eberstadt again: “It is generally believed that economic growth and material progress account for the world’s slide into population decline.” Stop there. Why are children not viewed as luxury goods? Why don’t we have more children the richer we are?

You and I love kids. You and I both had a slew of them. I think we would agree that that is the most satisfying part of our lives and we would therefore suspect that anybody would find it satisfying. The idea that the richer you get, the fewer children you have strikes me as counterintuitive or at least worth explaining right there from the get-go.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, Hoover’s late, great Nobel economics laureate Gary Becker kind of nailed it back in the early 1960s. He said all other things being equal, the more money you have, the more of everything you want, including kids. But at higher levels of income and higher levels of education, your tastes may change. You may have preferences for other things. You may assume that kids means college and graduate school and all sorts of expenses that you wouldn’t assume were yours at a more modest income level or modest educational level.

So what we see is a huge change in mentality for more affluent people. And that change in mentality, I think, is the real explanation for why richer people don’t always have more kids.

The Most Powerful Fertility Predictor

PETER ROBINSON: You write again, I’m quoting you. All I’m going to do is quote you to yourself here, Nick. “The most powerful fertility predictor ever detected. Not how rich an economy is, but what women want. There is an almost one to one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have.”

I presume that there are surveys of this kind conducted all over the place, all the time. Okay, so here’s what, here’s the next question. Does this suggest that women have always wanted fewer children? That throughout all of history they found children just trouble? And that suddenly the availability of the pill and other forms of birth control permit them to limit their families as they have always wished they could do? Or have women changed their minds about children? All this strikes me as a deep, deep puzzle. Am I wrong? Am I missing something?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: You’re totally right. It’s an almost unfathomably deep puzzle. And I think in this same piece I made an observation that the person who explains it deserves a Nobel. But they don’t deserve a Nobel in Economics. They deserve a Nobel in Literature. Because you have to understand the intimate complexities of the human heart. The profound changes in zeitgeist, the differences in morays that have unfolded over time, those variations.

We have to remember that we are the world’s singular and most adaptable animal. I mean, that’s why Paul Ehrlich got it so badly wrong. If we were all insects. He was a professor of population biology, studied insects.

PETER ROBINSON: Right.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: And if we were insects, we would have had a very bad time after the 1960s. But we not only adapted our circumstances, we not only came up with adaptations that would allow us to prosper with greater numbers, we also changed our life expectancies, we changed our family formations, we changed our desire for children.

Mimetic Theory and Social Learning

PETER ROBINSON: Nick Eberstadt. What is happening might be best explained by the field of mimetic theory. And now you’re in trouble because you are required to explain what mimetic theory is and how it might explain what’s taking place.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, back slightly after the Stone Age, when I was in college, what was really in vogue was this concept of sociobiology. E. O. Wilson.

PETER ROBINSON: Yes, yes. Also an insect man.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Also an insect man. And very plausible argument. Seemingly incontrovertible was that we, as creatures bound by our DNA, had built in habits and built in approaches to living arrangements, social arrangements and other things. But now that we see poor countries in the world, very poor countries in the world, places like Myanmar, like Burma, where women seem to be voluntarily choosing to have fewer children that would be required to replace their cohorts. It doesn’t look as if we have a built in mechanism, a built in thermostat.

PETER ROBINSON: Not hardwired.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Yeah, we’re not hardwired to replace ourselves. It doesn’t look like that. It looks much more as if mimetic theory, whose great proponent was Stanford’s…

PETER ROBINSON: Rene Girard, my across the street neighbor.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Wow, how cool is that? May be able to explain a lot more of what we’re doing. To oversimplify mimetic theory, it’s social imitation that people are affected by what they see and what they want is affected by what they see, and that there’s an enormous amount of social learning, complex social learning in the arrangements that we live in.

My favorite expert, the great Mary Eberstadt, uses mimetic theory in this way. She describes what she calls a “cat stuck in a tree problem.” And her point is that anytime that the fire department comes out to help the little kitty get down, that is a cat that was not raised around other cats, that was a house pet because it never learned from other cats.

PETER ROBINSON: How to do that, how to get down.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: And just in the same way that kitty didn’t learn how to get out of the tree, people who are not exposed to the social imitation and learning that would come with large families find it very hard to regain that. So I’m trained to think as an economist that people’s desires change. They’re kind of exogenous. Desire for kids goes up, goes down. People will adjust accordingly. But it may be that it’s very much harder to return to replacement fertility once you go far below that than we might expect.

PETER ROBINSON: So on my favorite as well. But you have a special reason for considering her your favorite, because she is, of course, Mrs. Eberstadt. But Mary’s… So on this notion that mimetic theory may explain it, it could be that having lots of kids is like the Latin language. Once its use is lost, once it no longer becomes current, it very quickly just disappears. So it’s a kind of lost art, lost knowledge. Is there something to that?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I think there’s something to that. I mean, even if we look around the world today without getting very fancy and scholarly, we can see that in a place like Israel, which is still, I think, the most fascinating exception to modernity with regard to fertility, secular Jews in Israel report notably above replacement fertility. Whereas, for example, secular Jews in the United States…

PETER ROBINSON: Way below, way below.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: And so part of it is the context, part of it is the neighborhood where you live. Part of it is…

PETER ROBINSON: You’re explaining something to me that puzzled me for a long time. I have an Israeli friend who told me that in his neighborhood, he has five children. The next street over, the next house is six, the next house is seven. And then there’s… and he said, the women, the ladies say to each other, “four is the new two.” In other words, it’s a kind of shared… that country is in some ways a neighborhood, and it’s a kind of neighborhood expectation. That’s the mimetic.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: That would be mimetic. I think that would be mimetic. And it cuts both ways.

Can We Buy Our Way Out?

PETER ROBINSON: Yes. Yes, it cuts both ways. So can we buy our way out of this? The New York Times this past spring: “The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children. One idea would give a $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery.”

Hungary is famous for giving tax cuts to families with more than a certain number of children. You’ve written about Mongolia, which gives an award to mothers, the Mongolian star. Can we buy babies?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: We can try, but I think we’ve got a century and more of experience with pronatal policy, and the results are very disappointing. For people who think that we can buy our way out of below replacement fertility, the record is that baby bribes or baby bonuses are very expensive. And in terms of moving the demographic needle, they do very little.

Well, what they can do sometimes is that they can create a little blip among people who kind of take the money and run, who are planning to have a second or a third child, more or less anyhow. That’s why some Swedish demographers talk about what they call the “Swedish roller coaster.” When a new pronatal program comes into effect, the birth level goes up a little bit, but then it goes back down after that below where it was before the program started.

PETER ROBINSON: I see. They’re buying babies forward, so to speak.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Right.

The New Geopolitics: Europe and Africa

PETER ROBINSON: Well, the new geopolitics of this world that we are entering. From your article in Foreign Affairs: “Humanity’s shrinking ranks will inexorably alter the current global balance of power and strain the existing world order.”

Okay, let’s talk through a couple of these coming strains. Europe and Africa. As you’ve noted, Europe is already hollowing out. By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa, to quote you, “tomorrow’s world will be much more African.” But “the outlook for human capital in sub-Saharan Africa remains disappointing.”

Just at the crudest level. Over the next 25 years, aren’t there going to be a lot of empty villages in Italy and Spain and France that look wonderfully appealing to people from Nigeria and Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa? That is to say, migration. Europe feels beset by migration to begin with. It hasn’t seen anything yet.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: There may be a lot more pressure for migration than we’ve seen so far and there are a lot of situations in which migration is a win-win. There are other situations in which migration is not a win-win. One of the reasons it’s going to be more difficult to attract Africans to an emptying Europe is because the level of skills and knowledge for so much of the sub-Saharan population is limited.

One of your Hoover scholars, Eric Hanushek, has done fantastic work on trying to come up with global measures of skills. And stunning and uncomfortable as it is, his numbers suggest that over 90% of the rising generation in the sub-Sahara doesn’t have even the basic rudimentary level of skills that’s measured in these tests. The basic level one. What would that be? Of looking at a clock that’s not a digital clock and telling you what the time is, being able to read a simple sentence and tell you what it means, that sort of stuff. You’ve got to have skills to be able to fit in and…

PETER ROBINSON: Totally suited to modern society, modern economy.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: That’s one of the reasons that I think that doubling and tripling down on education in sub-Saharan Africa is that absolute imperative for success of our future.

Cold War Two and Demographic Tides

PETER ROBINSON: All right, more geopolitics. Historian Niall Ferguson, another Hoover fellow of mine, has already begun referring to our conflict with China as Cold War Two. And China has only too many allies. Putin’s Russia, the Iran of the Ayatollahs, to which Nick Eberstadt replies: “The coalescing partnership among China, Iran, North Korea and Russia is intent on challenging the U.S.-led Western order. But the demographic tides are against them. China’s birth crash. The next generation is on track to be only half as large as the preceding one will unavoidably slash the workforce and turbocharge population aging.”

So this new world may bring all kinds of problems, but at least we can relax about the challenge from China. Or am I over reading this?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Let’s put it this way. I have a sick fascination with the country of North Korea. And as far as I can tell, North Korea’s GDP is approximately zero. It causes an awful lot of trouble, internationally outsized trouble. Because if you have a revisionist radical government in a world order that’s predicated upon cooperation and complex economic arrangements, you can cause a lot of damage really easily.

PETER ROBINSON: Nuts with nukes are going to be a problem whether their population is growing or not.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: And if you have the second largest economy in the world possessed by the CCP, by a revisionist dictatorship, you can cause a lot of trouble, even if the balance of power is tilting against you.

Military Demographics and Only Children

PETER ROBINSON: All right, military question. China presents a question mark when it comes to depopulation and a willingness to fight. I haven’t seen this anywhere else, actually. I haven’t seen much of almost anything that you write about anywhere else. That’s one of the things that makes you so singular as a scholar.

China’s military will be manned in large part by young people who are raised without children. Would China risk a force of only children in, say, an invasion of Taiwan? Question. Is anybody studying this? Question. Do we have anybody at the Pentagon who’s asking how demography affects the willingness to use such military as you may have?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I think there’s a certain amount of speculation. I think at this point, we’re at the musing and speculating and anecdotal analogy portion of the show. It’s an open question of whether casualty tolerance is going to be affected in China or in other parts of the world by the proliferation or the rise of the only child or of armies composed of only children.

America’s Immigration Challenge

PETER ROBINSON: All right, back to the United States once again, Nick Eberstadt. “The United States remains the most important geopolitical exception to the coming depopulation. US demographics look great today and may look even better tomorrow. Pending, it must be underscored, continued public support for immigration.”

Well, now immigration is one of the most vexed issues in all of American politics. According to a Gallup poll last summer, this is actually before the presidential election, 55% of Americans wanted to see immigration curtailed, and they went on to elect a president who has done just that. All right, so little Robinson thinks this through and says uncontrolled immigration…

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Or at…

PETER ROBINSON: At least largely uncontrolled immigration. I think it’s fair to say we just lost control of the borders, built political opposition to immigration. Could it be that the reverse will… Donald Trump has said again and again, and I believe him, that he’s not opposed to immigration, he’s opposed to illegal immigration. So could it be that Donald Trump, in closing the borders for now, will permit the country to relax about the issue and permit us to achieve a kind of sanity over the longer term in immigration policy? Do you think that, or do you hope it?

The Immigration Debate and America’s Future

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I certainly hope so. I mean, you could not have done, I don’t think you could really have done anything more brilliant to subvert and poison American support for immigration than the Biden administration did by its willful sacrifice of border security with Mexico. For half a dozen different reasons, it’s not crazy for American voters to be horrified by that ongoing situation.

PETER ROBINSON: Nobody voted for that.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: No. And with border controls, with national sovereignty, with an approach where we get to choose whom we invite into our country, and with our fantastic special secret sauce for assimilating newcomers into loyal and productive Americans, I think there’s a very, very positive future ahead of us.

America’s Education Crisis

PETER ROBINSON: All right, the basic formula. I’m quoting from a different article in Foreign Affairs, but I’m quoting you still. This article is called “America’s Education Crisis Is a National Security Crisis.” “The basic formula for material advance, reaping the rewards of augmented human resources and technological innovation will be the same. But today we’ve lost ground. Today the US is only neck and neck with China in total highly trained workers,” close quote.

So even if demographic trends favor us, I believe you argue and argue insistently, vehemently that we have to do a better job at educating our own population. Correct?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Absolutely. I mean, our advantages come from our human resources and our, dare I say, unique political and cultural framework which allow us to unlock the value in human beings in a way that you don’t see anyplace else in the world, really. And look at what our system does to attract talent from all over the world. I mean, look, the unlocking talent from abroad has also been one of the great game changers for the United States, both domestically and geopolitically.

The Promise of School Choice

PETER ROBINSON: So let me ask you a question that we’ve seen out in the states. We depart for a moment from Washington, always a mentally refreshing exercise. Out in the states, we’ve seen this expanding school choice. Milton Friedman recommended school choice six decades ago, but we’re finally seeing it.

Possibly because the teachers union so embarrassed themselves during the COVID lockdown. Perhaps that plays part of it. But one way or the other, we now have 29 states, plus the District of Columbia have school choice programs. I believe I should make that 30 states, because I believe the governor of Texas has now just signed a new school choice program. Are you optimistic? Now, this is K-12 we’re talking about. Are you optimistic?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: That has to be positive. That has to be positive. I mean, the thing that we see, as you know very well Peter, is the worrisome unevenness of results within the United States. We’ve got a lot of fantastic public schools. We also have a lot of mediocre ones, and we’ve got some horrendously bad ones. Being able to fire a teacher and reward a good teacher is one of the few levers that we have that really seems to increase educational quality outcomes.

The Crisis in Higher Education

PETER ROBINSON: Okay. And then I haven’t thought this through, but you being you, I suspect you will have thought it through at least tentatively. What about higher education? We have, I mean, it seems to me you could argue, one could argue. I don’t know what argument you’d make, but that’s the point. I’m setting up a question for you here.

That our institutions of higher learning, and particularly our most prestigious institutions of higher learning with which you are intimately acquainted, really have become much too complacent, much too self perpetuating. And that this reaction against them, which takes all kinds of forms, reaction against DEI. We have the Trump administration saying, I think we could, I think you and I would both feel that the Trump administration says to Harvard, “knock off this and this and this and this or we’re going to take away some of your funding.” It says to Columbia, “knock off this and this and this and this, or we’ll take away some of your funding.”

My own view is that the “this and this and this” represents an undue intrusion on the self government of a private institution, but that it sure is getting at something. And that to the extent that this administration shakes up and makes in some degree or other more responsive to the wider public, to the national interest, these elite institutions, it will have improved them.

Now, of course, there is the other argument. How dare you say such a thing? It’s taking a sledgehammer to these jewels. I don’t know. What do you, do you have thoughts on this?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Yeah, I mean, we’ve got a really confusing set of developments in higher education. And this isn’t new. I mean, this has been unfolding really since the 60s. On the one hand, we really do have the leading research and development centers in the world in our research universities in the United States.

PETER ROBINSON: They really are jewels.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: That part hasn’t changed. What’s troubling, obnoxious, and I think should be totally unacceptable is the sort of the long march through the institution by enemies of the open society. And that has no place in institutions of free and open inquiry. And yet it is so obvious in so many universities, in so many departments, in whole schools, within universities.

One of the things which is most troubling to me about political and public life in the US these days is the sort of slow death of truth that we’re seeing in the public square. And it’s not just statements that are being made in the White House. It’s the contempt for truth that we see in the media. And it’s the disregard or sometimes the hostility towards truth in universities.

Dealing with this problem is not easy. We don’t have a magic wand for it. This problem developed over the course of a couple of generations. It’s a historical problem at this point, and I don’t know that it’ll be resolved in less than a historical period of time. But sometimes it looks a little bit, if you’re in a university, it looks a little bit like the Battle of Stalingrad. And it looks like you had house to house to house combat to get safe spaces back. Safe spaces for intellectual inquiry.

The International Order Under Threat

PETER ROBINSON: Yes, a few last questions. Nick here. I’m going to quote you from another article, but again, I’m quoting you. This is published by AEI itself, the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s Suicide Attempt, the Sequel.” This is you. “With the 2024 election, we saw a broad political rejection of open borders, reverse racism via DEI and state abetted censorship. But instead of correcting course, the US Government now seems to be lurching into an alternate mode of self harm, embarking on a project of dismantling the international order, an order, ironically, that the United States itself painstakingly helped to build.”

First of all, you may want to amend that since you published it. I don’t know. But the question would be, with demographic trends working in our favor, the Trump administration shouldn’t be attempting to dismantle the international order. It should be trying to shore it up. Is that the argument?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: My argument would be that Americans are going to be almost certainly worse off, less affluent and less secure if we sacrifice the, let’s call it the Pax Americana that we have helped to build over the last three generations since the end of World War II. There are many, many flaws in the existing world order and many, many flaws in our system of alliances around the world. There are problems with the trading system, with the finance system. But again, it’s a question of compared to what? And if we’re going to tinker with this or radically adjust it, we better think first about what the unintended consequences of any big changes might be.

PETER ROBINSON: If we end the Pax Americana, the American peace, there is no other pax that will follow it.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, maybe a pox upon our house.

Why Few See the Demographic Revolution Coming

PETER ROBINSON: The very first sentence of your essay, “The Age of Depopulation.” I’m going back to our master text for the day today in Foreign Affairs. “Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history.” What interests me is that beginning dependent clause. “Although few yet see it coming.” Why is that? Why do so? Why aren’t there cover stories on magazine after magazine after magazine? Why is it still Nick to whom we must turn to get the latest on this gigantic issue?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: One reason might be that we’re kind of accustomed to thinking that tomorrow is going to be like today, plus or minus 2%. It’s an easy way to organize one’s thinking and one’s behavior. It doesn’t help us much when there are big radical disruptions ahead.

Another is that the ideology, call it the myth of overpopulation, this kind of zombie idea still circulates much too far in the intelligentsia and even in policy circles. The final thing is that world’s a big complicated place, and the realm of the real and the possible is much wider and deeper than our own imaginations. And so our imaginations are probably going to be slapped by reality. We’re going to have to rethink everything that we assume about these arrangements.

Eberstadt vs. Musk: The Future of Humanity

PETER ROBINSON: You make an argument. I say we’re on last questions. But this is a basic question. You make the argument that depopulation needn’t be bad. To put it crudely. A quotation and then a brief video clip. The quotation is you. “Even in a graying and depopulating world, steadily improving living standards and material and technological advances will still be possible.” And here is the video clip.

ELON MUSK: You know, the birth rate is very low in almost every country. And unless that changes, civilization will disappear. America had the lowest birth rate, I believe, ever. That was last year. Places like Korea, the birth rate is one-third replacement rate. So that means in three generations, Korea will be 3 or 4% of its current state size. And nothing seems to be turning that around. Humanity is dying.

PETER ROBINSON: And Nick Eberstadt answers Elon Musk, how?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: We have an extraordinary new, completely unfamiliar challenge in front of us that’s posed by disinterest in having large families, by a change in our own desire for our own progeny, for continuing our own family lineages. Have to remember that we’re the most adaptable species. I think we’ll be able to adapt to this materially. As I say, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to maintain prosperity.

My imagination isn’t big enough to really understand how family life is going to work in a universe where there are so few siblings and so few relatives. We’ll adapt somehow. Something will fill that social capital vacuum.

PETER ROBINSON: You know, there are people saying AI will do it. We’ll have robots, we’ll have computers that know so much they can keep us company.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Well, we get into the post human world and stuff, but the threat to the family is the part of this that I can’t really wrap my head around.

PETER ROBINSON: I mean, I thought you were going to be more cheerful. I thought you were going to say, “oh, calm down, Elon. We may be half as many, but we’ll still be well off and enjoying ourselves.”

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: We can shrink as a species for a long time and still have billions and billions and billions of people on earth. And during that period of adaptation, we may also find that there are intellectual and spiritual and ideological changes that make for desire for children in consequential portions of the planet.

The Spiritual Crisis Behind Depopulation

PETER ROBINSON: Okay, so here’s the last question again. I’m quoting you. “People increasingly prize autonomy, self actualization and convenience, and children, for their many joys, are quintessentially inconvenient,” close quote.

Well, now hold on, let me repeat that. Autonomy, self actualization and convenience. And I put it to you both as an academic and as a friend, because I’m attacking you here slightly because I know you well enough, Nick. I put it to you that autonomy, self actualization and convenience represent a recipe for an empty life. And there is something that you haven’t quite said, but that I suspect you feel very sad about all of this.

I put it to you earlier in the show, but I put it to you again now. Somehow or other, there is something spiritually amiss here. That Israel. I once asked a young Israeli woman, “why is Israel still above replacement level?” And her reply struck me as very profound. At least it has always stayed with me. She said, “my country, Israel, my country is still a cause.” Ah, people have something to live for for which they want to bring children into existence.

So here’s my last question. In this depopulating world, what would Nick Eberstadt, a good and holy man who is also a brilliant demographer, advise Pope Leo XIV?

The Quest for Meaning in an Age of Abundance

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I don’t think that the Prince of Rome needs any guidance from an economist or a demographer about what makes for meaning and spiritual completeness in life. What I suppose we need outside of clerical circles is a little bit more introspection.

There have never been so many people on earth as there are now. And there’s so much loneliness. I mean, we’ve cracked the formula for abundance and that may be necessary for the sort of a fulfilling flourishing of our species, but it’s inadequate. That’s not game over.

What we’re seeing all around the world with this birth crash is a change in values and I think in an awful lot of cases a substitution of older values for much less fulfilling ones. You look at the iPhone and you see so many people gazing into that anywhere you go, even in low income countries. It’s like a modern day Narcissus mirror and it is irresistible. But it’s also so inferior to the real full life, to the technicolor life that people can live here.

So the quest for meaning is not going to end once we head into depopulation as I believe we will sooner than most presume. We’re going to adapt and adjust to it and there’s going to be I think a great spiritual ferment and churning as world population contracts. Give it a couple of generations, give it a little time. We’re a very adaptable animal.

PETER ROBINSON: Nick Eberstadt, thank you.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Thank you Peter.

PETER ROBINSON: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson.

Related Posts

• The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics – Joshua Citarella on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)
• Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Distorted Version of the Monroe Doctrine (Transcript)
• Robin Day Speaks With Svetlana Alliluyeva – 1969 BBC Interview (Transcript)
• Grade Inflation: Why an “A” Today Means Less Than It Did 20 Years Ago
• Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive? – Jeffrey Edmunds (Transcript)