Latest / Thinking Class / #022 - Dr. Paul Morland - Demography Is Destiny: What Future Have We Chosen?

Transcript

#022 - Dr. Paul Morland - Demography Is Destiny: What Future Have We Chosen? · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello everybody, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Morland.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Paul is an author and broadcaster who writes and speaks about population and the big demographic trends across the world, both contemporary and historic.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Described as the UK's leading demographer and one of the world's preeminent demographers, Paul has written three books: Tomorrow's People, The Human Tide, and Demographic Engineering, and his work has been translated into nine languages.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: He has written for and been interviewed in many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines, including the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Dash Spiegel, and the Jerusalem Post.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: He has broadcast on many outlets, including BBC Radio 4.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Paul and I talk about the reasons behind population decline across the world, why demographic models are so trustworthy when others aren't, whether immigration policies can make a difference in the face of huge movements of people, the nature of diasporas and the potential for integration, the ability of societies to maintain themselves with crashing birth rates, the impact of religion and culture on birth rates, and whether government policy or differing personal priorities are best placed to lead to a demographic renaissance.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: This episode fits a lot in, and it will appeal to everyone because it affects everyone, regardless of whether it's those of you who follow the long-running immigration debate or those of you that are tired of it.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I do hope you enjoy the show with Paul.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's very generous with his time and that we cover a lot of ground.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: But before we dive in, you would be really helping me out if you press subscribe on the device you're listening or watching the show on.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, I came across you when I had learned of your recent book, your most recent book, Tomorrow's People.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I don't know quite how I came across you in the end, whether it was through a conversation I had with Lionel Schriver or through reading some of her articles and she referenced you, but you you popped up into my algorithmic sphere, as it were, as is so often the case with the people that I speak to on the podcast.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and in the book, you outlined the future of um the demographics of the world.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh that there are 10 numbers which you anchor the book on, and some of those include things like fertility rate, um, the rate of urbanization, uh the median age of societies, and and I know you won't want to give your whole book away, um, but you have an idea of where the world's headed.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh maybe we begin there.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Where where is the world headed demographically?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, fortunately, the 10 numbers are not 10 random numbers, they're part of a pattern.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if you get that pattern, you can understand an awful lot about how the world has evolved and how it's evolving.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I won't run you through every number, but essentially we start with um some modicum of modernity, some element of medical care, of public health, more educated people, and they're able to keep their children alive.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Food supplies get better.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: Whether we're talking about Britain in the 19th century, when the prairies were settled in North America, uh, food was pouring in, out of the country came industrial products, and the Malthusian limit to the population uh was lifted.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so people lived longer lives and they were still having large families.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So first thing is down comes infant mortality, and or at least life expectancy grows, and urban population then booms.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: And with that booming population, agriculture is actually becoming more efficient, doesn't need so many hands, people flood into the city.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: So if the population is growing, the cities grow even faster.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Urban populations, however, tend to have uh lower fertility rates, and we see very urbanized societies today like South Korea, where a couple has two-thirds of a child, that means each cohort is one-third of the previous cohort, which has enormous implications for just about everything.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: And with that decline in fertility rates eventually comes an aging population, a rising median age.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: That changes the nature of a society where the median age is 25 versus, say, 45.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: The example I use in the book is comparing the Catalonia of George Orwell, anarchistic and uh uh riven by civil war, with the Catalonia following the controversial referendum a few years ago, and there was a vote to leave Spain, but it wasn't accepted by Madrid, and nobody went up into the mountains with their armorites.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a society median age 25 versus 45.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: So so much flows from this.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's just one example.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually you end up with lots and lots of old people, that's Japan today, uh, with 70 or 80,000 people aged over 100 and growing extremely rapidly.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have this question about a declining population, the population starts to fall.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Do you live with that in the manner of Japan with very low immigration, at least traditionally?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that itself gives rise to all sorts of problems.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Japan has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the world, and the Japanese Prime Minister has talked about civilizational collapse.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: Or do you try and substitute it by bringing in vast numbers of people from other countries, which in turn gives rise to other sorts of problems?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that really, I suppose, leads on.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: I then talk also about um literacy and um uh how literacy and food production have have grown and how that sort of underpinned the system.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: But where we we end up is sort of leading on to my next book, which I uh I hope will come out in July called No One Left, which says really that if you don't want to go the route of uh Japan, which is endless economic and social decline, and if you don't think forever you can buoy your population by migration while the rest of the world's going through the same process.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I talk about polls, for example.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: There were lots and lots of 20-something polls 20 years ago.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: There aren't so many now, and of course, the economic gap has has narrowed.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we can't necessarily rely on immigration forever, and it has its own downside.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: So, really, my next book, No One Left, is a very direct plea to fix the fundamental demographic problem, not only in Britain, but in so much of the world, which is we're just having too few children.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: You touched on, well not just touched, but you you've given a pretty comprehensive explanation as to all the factors that would would lead to this demographic uh decline, I suppose, with regards to to population.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um why is it, for example, that you have um various different reactions?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we know there are different rates of demographic decline based on the West and the East.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So in the West, you'd probably find social commentators uh, on top of the things you talk about with regards to increasing education and affluence and urbanization, talk about things like the social contagion of uh certain ideas, you know, traditional styles of family, uh perhaps.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they would perhaps also bring up um the nature of um birth control.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then over in the east, where you've talked about South Korea having, you know, it's got a birth rate that's probably half of that in Britain, and Britain's is far too low.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And what's the what why is that?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is it because of there's just been an even more rapid urbanization and a loss of traditional lives?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: But what are the various reasons?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: If it's happening everywhere, is it all for the same reason or is it different things?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's a slippery question.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a very good question.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's a slippery question to answer because so many of the things that you think are the key drivers of low fertility, or people argue are the low drivers of fertility, you find a counterexample and their fertility is low as well.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, many people say if only housing were more affordable and childcare were more affordable, and I'm all in favour of measures to make those things uh more affordable for young families.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: And yet if you go to parts of the UK where housing is cheap, if you go to Germany where childcare is cheap, you find actually lower fertility rates than in places like London.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that's not to say I don't think these things are problems, but I don't think fixing them are a solution.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you might say actually it's all about traditional family formations, when those break down, fertility rates go down, but that's not true.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Where you have got very traditional families, actually you tend to have very low fertility rates in the developed world, so countries like Greece.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: If you look, there's actually a correlation, a negative correlation between the fertility rate and birth rate within marriage.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, as in in the more progress so-called progressive societies, that's a very sort of value-laden term, which we could probably unpack.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: But in societies which for a long time have had very high fertility outside marriage, so the majority of births, or something like the majority of births, we're only just there, are outside marriage.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Places like Sweden, they've traditionally, well, I say traditionally, last 20, 30, 40 years had a higher fertility rate, although that's falling as well.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: So it's an all another thing is religion.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you look within countries, the more religious people tend to have larger families.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: One thing I have noticed is that where there is a an Abrahamic tradition, so a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic tradition, it's not that fertility won't fall.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: It certainly does, but it seems to perform more slowly and maybe doesn't get quite as low.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've not seen anywhere in the traditionally Christian West, for example, that has fallen as low as South Korea.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now South Korea has got a large evangelical Protestant movement, but it doesn't have an Abrahamic tradition.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you compare, for example, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, look at those three countries, actually adjust for their level of socioeconomic development, you find that fertility is lower and has fallen much more quickly in Buddhist, predominantly Buddhist Thailand, than in predominantly Muslim Indonesia and predominantly Catholic Philippines, although it's falling in all of them.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: So the norms around family formation, around the cost of housing, around religious traditions all seem to have an effect, but none of them guarantee the general drift as you become more developed towards low fertility.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: And what's really interesting and I think somewhat alarming is that the um level of socioeconomic development at which fertility gets quite low is moving backwards, as it were.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at India today, India's made fantastic progress in the last 20, 30 years economically in terms of healthcare and infant mortality.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: But if you look at India, it's still a very poor country.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: And yet India is about to go below two children per woman.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Countries like Jamaica or Thailand, quite poor, have lower fertility rates than the UK.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: So it used to be a socioeconomic thing.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that socioeconomic thing, modernity had an effect, whatever we mean by modernity, whether we measure it by literacy rates or low rates of education at university or by urbanization or by GDP per capita, uh, these things correlated, related to lower fertility.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, that's broken down for the richest country.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: So once you get to a certain level of wealth, that relationship ceases to exist.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: South Korea, a third of the number of children that Israeli women have.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's not because Israel's more or less urban or educated or um wealthy, it's because uh of cultural norms.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you've moved out of that modern transitional period into a what I call a postmodern demography, where what really matters at high levels of socioeconomic development is culture, tradition, religion, values.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: Not no longer the socioeconomic development.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: But what's also happening is that countries that are really still quite early in uh in the spread of modernity, as I say, whether measured by urbanization, education, or income, are having much lower um fertility rates than would have been expected in the past.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it does seem to be a very global thing.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And only once you move through that process of modernity, of course, much of Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa is not there yet.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Fertility rates are still very high.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: But as you move through that modernization process, it seems almost inevitable that the fertility rate comes down, it's coming down earlier.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Then once you're through it, the question is, and everybody's living to 70 or 80.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, everybody, the life expectancy is 70 to 80, infant mortality is very low, most people are reasonably educated, incomes are reasonable.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: Then what I call getting to demographic Denmark, to use Francis Fukiyama's term, then the question is what are the values?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: What are the traditions?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, what is the culture?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: And when I say slippery, I mean that it's much easier to correlate um levels of literacy or or urbanization with fertility.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Culture is uh a slippery concept, but I think we have to uh deal with it if we're going to understand why some countries have higher fertility rates once they've passed into modernity uh than others.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: So much in the one of the points you made early on about the Abrahamic um religions uh spawning more people, uh I couldn't help but think of the passage in the Old Testament, can't remember it word for word, where um the it is written that uh Abraham and the followers of Abraham's the sons and daughters of Abraham will proliferate through all the earth.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, whilst the the birth rates are still lower than than than needed, um it's quite interesting that despite us living in a world which has um uh become, at least in the West, um avowedly more secular and has tried to throw off those uh Abrahamic um uh roots, as it were, that um potentially self-selecting ourselves out of um our own progeny there.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um the the the immigration point you've made, which is you know, what what what route do you take?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it the Japanese way of you know closing ranks and remaining at ease with your national culture and everything that goes with it and who knows what the future holds, or is it as the West has done, which is you know, mass immigration?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a huge hot topic at the moment, um particularly in Britain and the United States, both of which are seeing record numbers of people unlocking themselves in for large demographic changes.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not very popular to say the least amongst most people out of the thinking classes.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think partly for the cultural reasons which you've alluded to, which is, you know, I had Paul Embray on the show saying there seem to be millions of people in this country who are feeling um culturally unstable.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're unsure about what they are anymore.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: So what what is the alternative to keeping the tap of mass immigration turning on?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is it a cultural movement that shows care for a national culture and history?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is it pro- uh is it pro-natalist policies?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what are the various routes if it's not if it's not Japan?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I wrote in the book uh Tomorrow's People about the trilemma, um, and in fact that that I've now done some work with an economist called Philip Pilkington on quantifying that trilemma.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the trilemma effectively is effectively it it's um Israel, Japan, or Britain, to put it very crudely.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: Japan, you have small families, and you don't want mass immigration, you want ethnic homogeneity, you value that highly, although there is now some immigration in Japan, but that's traditionally been the Japanese start.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And what happens is your dependency ratio gets worse and worse.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: You get more and more old people relative to the population, the population eventually declines.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Just to tell you that in a number, um, when Japan reached 100 million people in the 60s, there were five or six people of working age to every retiree.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then it went up.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: When it goes down to 100 million fairly soon in 20 or 30 years, instead of five or six workers to everyone over 65, they'll be almost one to one.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, how that sort of society works, how you can fund pensions, how you can actually provide health care, it's a financial and it's a labour force problem.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: And as I've said, we already see Japanese debt levels way over double those of the UK.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the the economic implications are I'm not an economist, but that clearly you can't fund that forever.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you simply can't run a society on that basis.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you get um villages that are disappearing, small towns that are depopulating, uh thousands of people every year with no descendants living in their flat.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: There's a whole industry in Japan of defumigating flats where bodies have people have died and bodies have been left for months.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: So all sorts of nasty implications.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And forget the idea of people looking after the elderly.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't have the money, the state won't have the money, and if you don't have the money to employ someone, you know, millions of people will die neglected.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that's and and the country will shrivel.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: And like Japan, Japan's become less and less relevant.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm old enough to remember when it was the land of the rising sun, everyone thought Japan was the future.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody thinks that now.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: How you raise the armed forces, how you, which I think we need more than we thought perhaps 20 years ago, how you staff all sorts of sectors of the economy uh becomes a problem.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the Japanese way.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: The British way is to say, as in Japan, we don't want our very large families.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, again, the fertility rate's been higher in Britain than Japan, but it's been below replacement for 50 years.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: So we're choosing that low fertility, but we don't want that economic rubber.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: We want somehow to supply labor to our different sectors.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's very interesting.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: When I was growing up in the 80s, there was very high unemployment.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's not the case today.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And today we have shortages in almost every sector, whether you're talking about the schools or the army, almost every business I know, um, people they're short of workers just about everywhere.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you can throw money at one sector, but it's whack-a-mole, you're gonna lose uh workers somewhere else.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we again, because our dependency ratio is shifting not yet to Japanese levels, but in a negative direction, and the way that we've solved that is mass immigration.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's a real limit to how far you can go on that.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, there is a uh reaction against it, and there not everybody is comfortable living in an extremely multi-ethnic society.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there are advantages to diversity, but there are also advantages to homogeneity.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the difference being that we can all and are all encouraged to celebrate diversity, but we can barely even discuss the advantages of homogeneity.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, whereas in East Asia, nobody's interested in diversity, it's not even a subject for discussion.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, of course, we want to remain Koreans, or of course we want to remain ethnically Japanese.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's something that should be discussed for sure.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: But in Britain, our solution is to have this mass immigration.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now, traditionally, in Great Britain, we've had huge immigration from Ireland.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: The fertility rate in Ireland has dropped enormously, and of course, Irish economy no longer means people have to leave to get decent jobs and a decent living standard.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: The same's happening in Poland, a huge reduction in the number of 20 somethings in Poland compared to 20, 30 years ago.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: And that will keep falling as the Polish fertility rate is low.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so we have to get our, we will have to get our labour from countries, the remaining countries with high fertility rates, which are poor.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: And those won't necessarily be people with a high value added um ability given their education levels, and they may be people who are more difficult to integrate uh into the nation uh as they're come from further afield and from cultures that are um further removed from ours and probably have very low levels of education.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the root of mass immigration, uh, giving rise to all sorts of issues and questions.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, work done by uh Eric Kaufman, Matt Goodwin has shown quite conclusively that the whole Brexit issue and debate and vote was very much driven by migration, even if uh Brexiteers are now disappointed.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was certainly something that I thought at the time, one of the reasons that I voted to remain in the EU with mixed feelings, was that I thought that EU immigrants, my own parents are from Germany, and I think um immigrants from Europe are easier for a whole range of reasons to integrate.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um so if we were going to have immigration, I'd rather have had it from Europe.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: But I accept, given the demography of Europe, that was not a long term plan.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: There are also other reasons we shouldn't over rely on immigration.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: Take, for example, Ghana.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: We have a huge uh reliance on Ghanaian healthcare workers and social care workers.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: And there it's said, although it's hard to prove it, that there are more Health workers from Ghana working in Britain than in Ghana.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Ghana's a poor country.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Having a child, bringing up that child, educating that child, and getting that child to the level of actually a medical qualification is a huge investment.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And for us to say, uh, well, we're busy and important, we won't have children, you get on with it, Ghana.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And if we want your kids, uh, they've got the right qualifications, we'll skim them off.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I know investors in Sub-Saharan Africa who say this is a real issue.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: There really are problems in manning businesses and um all sorts of sectors of the economy in several African countries when the best and the brightest are skimmed off and taken off to Europe.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that I I have real issues with the Japanese solution, and I have real issues with the British solution.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think either of them are long-term solutions.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you can't say, not every country can say we'll be sub-replacement and we'll bring in immigrants from elsewhere.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: China can't do it.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's not nearly big enough, it's not rich enough.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have the cultural pull.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: People don't speak Chinese in Africa and the high fertility countries.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: But they also um the wages China would offer are lower, and of course, China's so big that it would have to be hoovering up whole populations to make a difference.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not an answer to the world's fertility problem to say somewhere else we'll have the kids and we don't have to worry.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: It may be a stop gap, uh, but until we can start importing people from Mars or somewhere, um, that's not a global solution.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't buy the British solution or the Japanese solution.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the only fix is is the Israeli solution, which is a developed, advanced society with similar levels of um education to ours, a very urban society, uh, and yet a society that has three children per woman.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason why I focus on Israel is because it's the only country that seems to have cracked this issue, that it's become modern and yet uh by modern, by which I specifically mean urban, educated, and wealthy, and yet it manages to produce three children per woman.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that is, I think, the answer.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that doesn't mean I've got uh a recipe or a set of policies that we can just cut and paste and say, right, and then our fertility rate will be three.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: But I think what it does mean is it gives us hope that just because we have reached a certain level of modernity does not inevitably mean that we are going to have to face either mass immigration forever and become airstrip one, just a country where an ever grow, ever-aging population is just supported by more and more people coming from elsewhere.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Those immigrants, of course, get old in turn.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it becomes some massive Ponzi scheme where you just pour people into the country to support the elderly from the previous generation who came.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's not a model for any sort of country.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um the answer has to be, and this is the the subject of my uh my book that's coming out in July, my fourth book, No One Left.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: The the answer has to be somehow to get our fertility rates up.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh when I was born in the mid-six, I'm I'm a very, very late baby boomer by six weeks.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: I was mid-November 64.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was a big boom uh cohort and then it started to fall uh almost immediately afterwards.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think it should be impossible for us to get from a demographic point of view, it seems incredible when countries like Hungary put so much effort in to get their fertility rate from 1.2 to 1.5.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a demographer feels that that's a huge mountain to climb.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: But in a in society generally, if you've said to people, oh, an average of two to three children, it's not only feasible, I think, but it's what most people, men and women in most developed countries say they want.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate, John here.
• 25:50
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• 25:53
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• 26:01
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• 26:19
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• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for sharing your support and enjoy the rest of the show, class mate.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good point, and one that I think Stephen Shaw, who has become known for his work on the documentary The Birth Gap and the various um websites and tracking systems he's he's um he's shared.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I can't I wouldn't be able to regale all of his findings, but uh one of them was it's not that people uh or that there are more women that don't want children, it's just that they come to wait too long in some respects.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they miss the window in which to be able to either have that many children or to have children at all, um, which is which is interesting.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I want to stay on um the the the modeling element or bring on bring in the modeling element of demographics for a moment.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: When I went to school um uh a while ago, I think in middle school, uh we have the three-tier system in Northumberland.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: There um we we played a a game called Foxes and Rabbits, which um showed how the population of uh rabbits would decline if they were overhunted, and then once that the foxes gave up, the rabbits would come back.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying humans are foxes and rabbits in this case, but um I guess my question is is models um are under um scrutiny on lots of things, whether it was the COVID models, whether it was to do with uh various climate science models.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when people talk about demographic models, they say that these basically are pretty much always truth.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, demography is destiny and you can trust them.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so, two questions in there.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we search around for the answers of a demographic um renaissance, as it were.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the first question being is does that just come at some point for reasons perhaps unknown to us because it's just what we do as as living species?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second question is why are demographic models seem to be bulletproof?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, I'll start with your first question.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: What could actually give rise to, I like your term a demographic renaissance.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's very good.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: I should have used it in my book.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we now I mean is it it uh again, I think it's pretty much gone to print now, so it's almost too late.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um it again, it's uh um the sense was um well, in terms of uh inevitabism, so in in the interwar period, by the time the in the 1860s, British women had six children each, and then that fell very rapidly by the time of the first world war, it was down to three.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the interwar period, with all that mum all those things and modernization, the infant mortality rate started to fall, so people felt they didn't need to have so many children, more education, fairly primitive, but still um available uh contraception.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the interwar period, in the 20s and 30s, the fertility rate both in Britain and Germany fell to two, and that gave rise to a lot of alarm.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, Maynard Keynes, the economist, was very concerned about this, and he's one of the few, relatively few economists who took demography quite seriously.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then we had a baby boom.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and the baby boom was different in different places, it was an Anglo-Sphere thing more than a European continental thing, for example.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And in Britain it had two very distinct peaks, um, and actually, quite interestingly demonstrated by the royal family.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: So there was the sort of Charles and Anne peak of the late 40s, early 50s, and then there was the sort of Andrew and Edward peak of the early 60s.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the shape was slightly different in America, but essentially, post-war, there was a baby.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, why did that happen?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: There are all sorts of explanations for this to do with a particular phase of capitalist development, um, to do with the war itself.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever the reasons were, it did happen, and then we moved to a low fertility era.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think that uh it's inevitable we won't get a higher fertility rate at some point.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but there are a number of ways for this to happen.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: One is government policy.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm I in my book, my penultimate chapter is what can government do for us, and my last chapter is what can we do for ourselves.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I am skeptical that government policy alone can resolve these things, and you get very in a very conversation of very passionate people talking about how can I possibly have children, dot, dot, dot, that housing's too expensive and childcare's too expensive, which I, as I said, I've already said, I think that's really important, but it won't solve the fertility problem.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think what's essential is people to have different priorities, so that if you can't afford to lead your lifestyle, leading what living one sort of way with children, you change that in terms of where you live or what you do.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: People say they want two to three children, but it's not that high on the list of priorities.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's a kind of change of heart without wanting to sound too evangelical about it.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: Although today actually is the first anniversary of my becoming a grandparent.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: So my oldest, my older grandchild was born a year ago today.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: So perhaps it's a day to evangelize about the joys of parenthood and grandparenthood.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: But in any case, um, it's all about ultimately whatever government does is relatively small scale compared to the priorities that people have.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And how will you change people's priorities?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I can preach, I can get on my soapbook and write books, but essentially it's about what people want.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's not going to shift by people like me coming along and ranting and raving.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it is down to what people's priorities are and how they organize and order their lives.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that it renates now.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: Can it be done without um a religious revival?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh not something I particularly preach.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm certainly not going around telling people to get religion, um, uh, although I'm sort of moderately religious myself, but I'm I'm not in the business of converting other people.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but um there is a a sort of profound question which um was posed to me by my PhD supervisor Eric Kaufman, who's a good friend, who said who put it very simply: can we raise fertility rates or can fertility rates rise without a greater religiosity?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um Eric wrote a very good book sort of 12, 15 years ago, called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, in which he argued that high fertility, high retention religious groups have this very powerful exponential growth.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that if the rest of us don't have children, they will effectively, whether it's the Amish or the Mormons, less say the Mormons today, or the Haredi Jews, there are groups with very high fertility rates who have low attrition, who retain their young, very small at the moment, but will and could grow exponential could grow exponentially and maybe will.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a sort of, you know, how do we get a uh demographic renaissance?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I would prefer it to be done without some sort of huge ideological shift in society, but maybe that's necessary.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: The second question is why are demographic models uh bulletproof?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they're not entirely bulletproof, but if you think about how a demographic model works, if we want to know today how many 80-year-old Brits there will be in 20 years' time, we know who all the 60-year-old Brits are.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, what could so we could, you know, simple maths.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, not quite, because some of those will die, but we know what the death rates are for people in the 60s and 70s, so that could change dramatically.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: We have a sort of super COVID that wipes out older people.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but broadly we know who the 60-year-olds are today, so we know who the 80s, we could have more mass immigration of older people.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then the question is: well, to what extent are they British?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: To what extent are they, you know, there's there are sort of fuzzy boundaries around identity.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: But broadly, most 60-year-olds today in the UK will be 80-year-olds in the UK in 20 years' time.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, short of a pandemic, um obviously we're mindful of pandemics, although COVID was actually quite small scale compared to some of the past.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: But absent of that, um, mortality rates won't change, life expectancy won't change all that much.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um we know more interestingly, perhaps, how many um um 20-year-olds will be entering the workforce in a decade.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And again, that could be affected by migration or heavenful fend a uh plague, but broadly these things are known.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: What we don't so mortality is is quite um predictable, short of disaster.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: What we don't really know is where fertility is going, and there was a recent Lancet study that tried to model it, but um because it's becoming increasingly cultural, so as countries, as I was saying earlier, move out of that process that a country like China's been in of urbanizing and um um getting wealthier um and getting mass literacy and very large-scale university education.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: Once you're through that, if it's down to culture, it's really hard to map the cultural shifts and how they will in turn map on to fertility rates.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the big unknown.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so in Africa, for example, the big unknown at a global level is how fast African fertility rates will move.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: And Africa's a very it's an enormous continent with very much variety.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: So Ethiopia, Kenya have made great strides in getting their fertility rates down.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: North Africa, South Africa, and its neighbors, it's not that high.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's sort of it's in the sort of three level.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's that great swathe of Central and West Africa, where it's still very, very high, they're still very um very behind in terms of socioeconomic development.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's the big question for global uh demography.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So there are certain things you can say in demography with a degree of certainty, uh, and and that's unusual in the social sciences.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, how big will the British population be in 10 years' time, obviously subject to migration, is much easier to model than how big will the British economy be?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it makes things about demography which are predictable because a lot of the uh facts about demography in the future are already on the ground now.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the really interesting things are the things that are not extremely predictable, like where will fertility rates grow go?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, my sense, although I would like to see the British fertility rate drift up back towards two and above, is that if I look at the culture of Generation Z and their beliefs and their norms, they're not necessarily antenatal, but I don't think they map onto early family formation and a reasonably large number of children.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I suspect that as Generation Z become a larger and larger share of the cohort of childbearing people, the fertility rate in Britain will continue to go down, and it has actually been tumbling over the last few years, and I think it will continue to do so.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, good news ahead, then, in that case.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've we've talked a lot about the big numbers of people um on the move, and particularly we've talked about Sub-Saharan Africa and the big demographic increase going on there.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um there seems to be a perceived wisdom amongst people um in the thinking classes.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: I would say, on broadly what you'd consider the left and the right, you seem to converge on the same ideas, which is look, there's loads of people on the move.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're just gonna have to accept immigration as a part of um our nation, and we're talking about Britain in this respect.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I heard in the space of a week, Polly Toynbee um at an event with Matt Goodwin and Constantine Kissin make that make that argument, uh, which is look, we we're gonna need people for all of those things that you talked about.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it kind of sounded a little bit like a um uh a bit of an imperial um um uh set of ideals, actually, which was ironic considering I'd imagine she's quite anti-imperial.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so anyway, you there was Polly Tornby saying, we need people, there's lots of people on the move, we're just gonna have to accept their coming here.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then I heard Joe Johnson, Boris's brother on Channel 4 News, making the same argument effectively, and he's part of the Conservative Party, of which Polly Toynbee is not a massive fan.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this accepted wisdom.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's loads of people, we're getting it, we're just gonna have to accept it.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in your view, can immigration policies feasibly make a difference um in the face of such widespread movement of peoples?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, again, I'll quote Eric Kaufman on this.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, in private conversation, we've had these discussions, and he's raised my uh awareness of Singapore, a country I know quite well, but I haven't really thought about it that much.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: Here we have a tiny, extremely wealthy island surrounded by a vast mass of um people who are significantly poor.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Indonesia and Malaysia in their different ways are quite successful economically, and they've managed to move their populations forward uh in admirable ways.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: But still, for the vast majority of Indonesians and Malaysians, uh life in Singapore would be an awful lot better.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: And there are an awful lot of them.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm trying to remember how many hundreds of millions there are in Indonesia, and certainly tens of millions in Malaysia, and Singapore's a country, I don't know now, maybe four or five million people.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so um you would say, well, Singapore could never retain its um immigration policies.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's a tiny island, it's surrounded by these vast countries with vast populations, much poorer.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so it will inevitably be flooded, and then it will uh be overcrowded, and it will just become like anywhere else in Malaysia or Indonesia.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: It can't hold out, it can't sustain that kind of um existence.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: But it does, and it controls its migration, has a lot of migration.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've got very good Singaporean friends, and when I was sort of struggling with my three kids and two, my wife and I, our careers, our Singaporean friends, uh, were managing to do the same with a sort of roster of Filipino nannies.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: So um there certainly is immigration in uh Singapore to do all sorts of things, but it's what the Singaporeans want, it's what they decide.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: Now, you may say Singapore's not a very democratic country, but I suspect in this respect that the um government of Singapore more or less represents the views of the Singaporeans.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: There are all sorts of issues in Singapore.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: The super rich Chinese want to go there for all sorts of obvious reasons, and that's kind of distorting the economy in a way.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: So they've got they've got migration issues themselves.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: But here you have a small island surrounded by uh much bigger neighbours, which says we will decide our immigration policy.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: So for the the first thing is I think in the UK, the fact that we are not controlling our immigration policy, that we don't have control of it, is lamentable and deeply embarrassing.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm afraid my view is that we should do what we need to do to control our frontiers in a humane way.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: And if we have treaty obligations that prevent us from doing that, we need to change those treaty obligations.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: So some people say that's a rather hard line.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: But as a UK citizen, I don't think that my human rights and my ability to lead my life uh in the manner I lead it are dependent on international treaties.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're dependent on the way that this this country's traditions and institutions.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: So if we need to change um uh international our international treaty obligations in order to be able to control our borders, controlling our borders is more important.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that would be one point.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um the second point is that we have enormous immigration and we do need some immigration for labor purposes because of our lamentably low fertility rate.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think people should know that.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think people who don't like immigration should recognize that we haven't had enough children of our own.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that sense of responsibility that we should be replacing our own uh or meeting our own needs demographically rather than um you said imperialism.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh some people call it biological imperialism, relying on others to do it, and that the migration we see is to a very large extent a reflection of our own inability as a people to have our own children.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I say as a people, we are a multicultural nation.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody's calling for one group or another to have more children or fewer children, but it's just not good enough, I don't think, that a country with the wealth of the UK and its its institutions, its traditions, and its life uh style cannot replace itself.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um the other then, in terms of migrate immigration policy, um I think we should focus on immigration for purposes of our needs, uh not um a relatively uh a relatively small share of the Of the immigrants coming in are actually going to the labour force.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, there are all these students who come into universities to do degrees that are, I mean, obviously some universities in Britain are very good and are worthy of getting foreign students who then go home.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: But the whole university sector, mass migration of students and their dependents, at least until recently, whether they ever did their degree, whether the degree was worth doing, and if we have labour shortages, is it worth worth um supporting this huge university sector producing low quality education or no education at all to people who are coming ostensibly to attend those universities?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we should focus our um immigration policy on our needs as a country.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds a bit selfish, but I think that's what most countries do.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: Who do we need?
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: We're still wealthy enough, we won't necessarily be forever to attract those people.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um but above all, um to have control of it, and also that it be a democratically driven policy that it actually reflects what the people of this country want.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think Britain's a very tolerant country, and I think people are reasonably comfortable with a certain degree of immigration.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the level and the extent of the ethnic change that we've seen in Britain over the last um 25 years is not something that makes everyone happy.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think those people are perfectly right to, or have a right to express their opinion, to have it heard, and to have it reflected in national politics.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: But I do believe, and I mean this is a point I've made to Matt Goodwin um on many occasions, that without a fix of the fertility rate, there's no it's no good ranting against immigration.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: Not, I'm not suggesting Matt rants, he's very eloquent, but um there's no point in railing against immigration because um the first time uh people find there's no one to look after mum in the old age home, or there's simply no doctor to see you for weeks and weeks, um, they they their anti-immigration sentiment will evaporate.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think we need a sensible settlement that says we bring people in according to our requirements, but we're actually more able to meet our own requirements.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, it takes 20 years.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we need to raise fertility rates now to have an impact in 20 years' time.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: We've never had a government that's even said we have a fertility problem.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: We have some brave backbenchers like Miriam Cates who talk about these issues, Neil O'Brien, um, but Danny Krueger, but not very many.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a very fringe thing, and it shouldn't be a fringe thing.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm often saying that that people associated with Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: But uh Macron, Emmanuel Macron is also talking about fertility issues.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: We seem to have a particular taboo on the subject in this country, which means that it's very hard to change the culture or the politics in a way that means we could at least see a light at the end of the tunnel where we start having enough children, uh, but we don't rely endlessly on immigration.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the the institutional setup in Britain in particular, uh, I think is now under the spotlight for continuing to hamstring the opportunity of um citizens of the country.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I suppose we've got the British Medical Association, which is for all intents and purposes, you know, is a trade union of doctors.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: I know Matt has written about this recently, where it continues to cap the number of uh people that will be trained in Britain, and then that counteracts the argument that we must rely upon um immigrants to be able to fill the National Health Service because ultimately we're limiting the number of university places that budding medical students can actually get onto within the country.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: So there seems to be an institutional setup which isn't exactly great for breeding your own.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and on the other side of that, on the educational point and more broadly, is and I don't know if it was Matt or someone else, but there was um some reports recently that showed the difference um for entrance level, entrance grades, um, but depending on whether you're a British national or a foreign national.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and there was a great list of universities that for British nationals you might need three A's, three B's, whatever.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: But for foreign nationals, in some cases, you might need three D's or three E's to get in.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so not only are we, you know, capping the number of places for British nationals and then bringing in folks on the same course as British nationals who might be high performing, we're charging these poor foreign nationals about three times the amount and then chucking them into a course, which they're probably not going to be able to do.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've got educational institutions reducing um the the, I suppose, the the standards of that course to be able to make sure all of them can pass it because we've got this big consumer model.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I feel like our institutions are all are all um in the spotlight, and probably rightly so, because there's there's things that can be done here.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but in the interests of making the most of you whilst we've got you, Paul, um you've written in the past.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, can I just answer on a couple of things?
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: Can I just say something about those two points very briefly?
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, first of all, in terms of training doctors, if we're short of people, it's a bit whack-a-mole.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: We could have more doctors, we could have more tanker drivers, we could have more teachers, every sector we could throw more people at, but we can't throw more people at all of them.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not that that we don't need more doctors and we shouldn't train more doctors, but if we're not having enough children, some part of the economy is going to be short of them if we uh if we if you know if the overall we don't have enough.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: British universities have a reputation, I think, above their um uh a greater reputation globally than they deserve.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that and and we are the British universities are um effectively selling that brand by exactly what you've said, a slightly different point.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but it does have an impact with immigration.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: So people tend to stay very often, they stay on often.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't I think that whole sector, that huge university sector, which isn't very good, but which is a British university, so it's got some international brand and then sells itself to the highest bidder on the international market, is not a good use of resources.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: The the question I was moving on to is in regard to your uh previous work, uh, and you have written about the nature of um ethnic conflict uh within a society and the different strategies employed by different groups to gain the upper hand.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I can imagine that went down well when you published that.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what what are some of these strategies that are employed?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: It was an academic book, um, and uh it got four reviews in academic journals, so it wasn't that widely read.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the uh the reviews are actually quite good.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, it's a scholarly work, it's it's it's um um um uh it it's about the fact, it's about the way the world works.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's not saying these are wonderful things, it's saying if we look at conflicts, if we look at ethnic groups living cheek by jowl, uh to what extent are they interested in their demography?
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: To what extent are they interested in their numbers versus those of other groups?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I argue that essentially um they have every reason to be, whether they're in non-democratic societies or they're in societies where people go to the ballot box and it means something, numbers count.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: So the the fundamental thing is ethnic groups exist, numbers count, and um therefore it makes sense if you are in some kind of ethnic uh competition or conflict for you to want to increase the number of um your group and to um at least in relative terms to reduce the numbers of those in the other group.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I looked at four specific cases.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: I looked at Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Israel, and the United States.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: The United States, um, the case being that yes, it's not an ethnic conflict as such, but people are very aware of ethnicity and race, and these things matter to people, and they are conscious of numbers.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: And there is strategy.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_02: The way I put it is you can kind of theorize the the ways or generalize the ways in which people in ethnic conflict deploy these strategies, and I call it soft demographic engineering and hard demographic engineering.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: The hard is is the real democracy, it's moving people around, um, it's it's encouraging differential birth rates, so hard group has more and their group has less.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's encouraging uh emigration of the other group, and in the extreme cases, it could include um genocide.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that would be hard demographic engineering.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_02: And the kind of examples I give are the mass so-called repatriation of Tamil, Indian Tamils from Sri Lanka from the 1950s, or the encouragement of um disproportionately Catholic emigration from Northern Ireland in the 50s and 60s, or the higher Catholic birth rate, or the US immigration controls of the 1920s.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think all of these things can be seen through the lens of hard demographic engineering.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: And then soft demographic engineering is fuzzying the borders or changing the boundaries, if you like, of how you think about or number or incorporate groups.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, maybe shortest is a bit obscure, but the way that Sinalese identity was constructed in uh Sri Lanka, out of um uh Candian and low country um uh uh identity against which Tamil identity was fragmented, had a very significant effect on the conflict in Sri Lanka.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Another case would be moving borders.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea of a six-county Ulster uh was very much driven by an ulster that was demographically sustainable for a hundred years from for a Protestant majority.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um so actually that wasn't involving births, deaths, or moving people, but actually drawing a border in a way that made sense uh politically, at least for one group rather than another.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not um in none of these cases am I saying these are good things.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not promoting them.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um any more than someone who you know writes about a war or a genocide is saying, I'm writing about it, so I must be supporting it.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: So people shouldn't misunderstand that.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to explain the world, the way the world works.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not advocating uh any particular policy or strategy with regard to that.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry, I won't use uh a copywriting technique that um paraphrases Paul Walland, I'm a genocidal monster for this episode.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that I'm not picking that up from you, Paul.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: Whilst we've got you, um, so we talked a lot about mass immigration into Britain and elsewhere.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I thought we could talk a little bit about the nature of diasporas um and long-term assimilation and integration.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I recently read Paul Collier's book from about 13 years ago, Exodus, and he wrote about diasporas, saying that the more culturally proximate a group of people are, the closer to the host population they are, the faster the rate of integration.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then those that are more culturally distant, they will tend to remain in a diaspora and they'll experience higher rates of sustained migration as well, because they want more of them around to feel more at home.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so um if we've got a mass immigration policy, which is pretty indiscriminate with regards to whether an immigrant is going to be culturally closer to us or further away, is effectively we are um encouraging the growth of these large diasporas that may never integrate.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess that is my question to you is what in the multi-ethnic Britain that we have and the various different cultures that we have living side by side, some closer to each other than not, um, what what prospects are there for Britain based on what you know about demographic harmony and conflict, and also for retaining a sense of itself based on its its history when you're importing lots of different cultural ideas and attitudes?
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: What does the future of Britain look like on current course?
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think the Collier book's very good, and um there are good reasons for people still to read it and think about it, and it's um the sort of issue that's that's not very easily discussable, uh, that some groups are more assimilable than others.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: But there's an awful lot to do with the nature of the society to in which you're coming.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: So um something I often think about is I I have a friend whose mother came from uh a very old family of Salonican Jews, and uh they had been in Salonica for 500 years, and they were still speaking uh Ladino, a dialect of uh Spanish.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_02: And uh another friend whose grandmother was living in Istanbul, she didn't speak Turkish, she was still speaking Ladino, she's no longer with us, but you know, well into the late 20th century.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm the son of German immigrants, and I do speak some German, but my sister doesn't speak any German at all.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's very interesting that some societies that's not really about distance, it's just interesting how some societies are set up for ethnic groups to remain extremely um isolated or um at least um linguistically and from a marriage point of view cut off from the rest of society for centuries.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: And in others they assimilate very, very quickly.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think immigrate immigrant immigrants do bring a degree of richness and variety to a country, and we don't want them to lose all their um identity, but at the same time, how can you retain some of your identity and fit into the country?
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think that very much depends on the narrative the country has.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: And if the narrat a country has the sort of narrative that Britain has at the moment of self-abnegation, um of stressing all the bad things in its own history, then what you're really telling people is they're coming to a dreadful place and they really mustn't integrate, they must make us more like them if they possibly can.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_02: And there's really nothing to integrate into, there's no culture, there's no history other than things we should be bitterly ashamed of.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's absolutely disastrous.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: As well as being unpleasant and inaccurate as a reading of history, I think it's sociologically disastrous.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think we will create a harmonious society unless we're able to have a narrative of uh national pride and success.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: If you think of America in the early, late 19th century, early 20th century, it assimilated millions and millions of people from Eastern and Southern Europe.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_02: It had traditionally been a place that people from Britain went to and northwest Europe more generally, Scandinavians, very largely Protestants.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: Then it managed to integrate Irish people and then Irish Catholics, having had a lot of Irish Protestants earlier, and then Poles, uh Russians, Jews, Italians, Sicilians particularly.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it managed to create a narrative of the melting pot.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm not saying we need exactly to replicate that.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: We obviously have a very different tradition, but it shows how successfully you can integrate very large numbers of people.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the way to do it is absolutely not saying that we have a history of shame and that that that is the country that people are coming to.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's got a lot to do with where people are coming from and the stories they bring, but it's also very important the story that we tell ourselves and we tell them when they get it.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's think about what our governing classes, our political classes, could could do better than or um or to try and create that more harmonious future in a in a multi-ethnic society.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um based on what we know about demographic implications of things like mass immigration and the the cultural aspects of it, um is it feasible that before all of these economic decisions were being made um that those in the political class ought to have known a little bit better about what was to come with regards to um social cohesion, for example?
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or was it a uh a kind of an experiment um that was run on the basis of economic models and it had obscured um these other factors?
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's only now that it's uh okay, maybe there are ways in which we need to try and deal with this, like the promotion of um diversity, or like you say, self-abnegation, in the in the hope that we might be able to raise people up um to be part of us by negating ourselves.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: What what what is it that our political class um could could be doing and could it have foreseen what has uh taken place?
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think in a way Britain is in a difficult position to have done that because it has been a very homogeneous society.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now, English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh are obviously different ethnic groups in a way, but they've lived in these islands pretty uninterrupted, with very, very little inflow, much outflow, but very little inflow for so many centuries.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think we were not really uh prepared for it.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think our elites had even thought about these things, to be honest.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they've been considered in the way they are in other countries.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: France, for example, has a tradition of integrating minorities.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm not saying that France has done this more successfully than us in terms of more recent immigrants, but at least it's something the French think about.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_02: There is this sense of the citizen, the republic, l'icite, and so on.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's not a model we necessarily want to follow.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the the the sheer absence of any significant immigration into this country, I mean, since the Normans, the Huguenots were really quite a small number, uh, a few hundred thousand Jews at the end of the 19th, 30, 20th century.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_02: Really, we've had tiny, tiny immigration.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, most years since Blair, we've had in a single year more immigrants than we had from the um period of the Anglo-Saxon uh arrival to the uh Second World War.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_02: So we're we're not really very prepared, and it's time we thought about these things.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that I think probably the model has been very much driven by the Treasury and by economists, and not sufficiently by people who think about culture, ethnicity, and society.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, thank you so much for being so generous with your time today.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you've got a book on the way in July, which we talked about, No One Left.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: There are also a book currently out called Tomorrow's People, which we've talked a little bit about.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where can people find you uh online in the ether if they'd like to follow your work?
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if you put my name into um a search engine at Paul Morland M-O-R-L-A-N D, you'll find my website.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_02: I tend to post all my articles.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: I recently had an article in in online for the spectator, for example, about Gaza and all my podcasts.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_02: This one will be there eventually.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's a sort of archive of all the stuff I've done.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: I am on uh Twitter, so uh when I do things I post them on there.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I'm fairly easily able, you've fairly easy to be found.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and my books are uh are available on uh the normal um uh venues and websites for for buying books um online and in bookshops.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, thank you so much.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: Hope to speak to you again in the future and take good care.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining me in Thinking Class today.
• 1:04:19
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• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:04:44
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• 1:04:53
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