The population clock

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[00:00:35] Wir schauen uns an diesen Stahl, der sich schien, aber in actualität hat es bereits explodiert. Und das ist, weil es eine Unterschiede zwischen dem, was auf der Grundlage passiert ist, das ist der totalen Verwalt, und den tectonischen Forsten hinterher. Seit der 1960s, die Welt populationen hat mehr als doubled, aber die growth rate hat fallen. Wir sind die größte, die wichtigste Phase in modern humanität.

[00:01:02] Die shift towards pervasive und permanent low-fertility, population-ageing und eventual depopulation. Fertilität ist überall, nur an verschiedenen Raten in verschiedenen Bereichen. Das ist die Debunking Economics Podcast mit Steve Keen und Phil Dobbe. Well, das ist Jennifer Skjuba, die eine demografie, giving eine TED-Talk über die Fertilität rundherum der Welt. Die Welt ist decreasing.

[00:01:30] Are wir bereit für das in einer economy, die auf die Wirtschaften und die Wirtschaften betrachten? Und wenn das ist, warum sind die UN und andere noch immer noch immer wieder auf die Welt? Wie geht es, wenn die Welt um die Zukunft zu bekommen? Well, die rate might be slow, aber die absolute number keeps going up still. Und kann die Welt sustain that? So, was gibt's? Das ist es, das Wichtigte auf dem Debunking Economics Podcast.

[00:01:59] Da sind es, es ist 8.2 billion people auf planet Earth. Die UN projects die Welt's population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 und 11.2 billion by 2100. Wie kommt? Well, in many countries, people are having more babies. There are more people of childbearing age and they're getting better at it. People are living longer. And thanks to modern medicine, we've got lower mortality rates earlier in life as well.

[00:02:29] So, Steve, an extra 3 billion people. That's more than one third again by the end of the century. Now, even if we ignore climate change, I mean, is that sustainable, a number like that? Well, if you ignore climate change, it may be. One of the big issues people are just not conscious enough of is the dependence we have as a life form, not just as a civilisation, but as a life form on phosphate. So, you know, you've heard of superphosphate, obviously.

[00:02:57] And if it wasn't for the invention of superphosphate by the same person who invented nerve gas and applied nerve gas to Allied troops in the First World War, I think you've got the Haber-Bosch process. If that process hadn't been invented, then I'm seeing estimates from agronomists and scientists in that area that the maximum carrying population of the planet would be 2 billion people. Right. But because we've got, in effect, got fertiliser.

[00:03:23] A factor of 4 more, yeah, and therefore a factor of 5, and actually you're talking, you know, 13 billion, a factor of 6 more than the population to support were it not for superphosphate. Right. So, which is fertiliser in effect, isn't it? It helps provide the nutrients through plants. Well, no, it's, yeah, it's fertiliser, but it's actually petrol, okay?

[00:03:43] Yeah, because what you're doing is using a chemical approach to convert, to combine nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, you know, fuel stock, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know the process. I'm not a chemist, okay, so I've got to admit ignorance on that front. But it fundamentally requires you using fuel to do it. So, we talk about it being a green revolution, but in a fundamental sense, it's a brown revolution. You're pouring oil, a derivative of oil on your soil, and the plants are then absorbing the phosphate from that.

[00:04:12] And this is just one little weird point. I've seen some people in science magazines discussing this recently. Phosphate is a very rare metal compound. I think it's a metal. I'm not sure. There's very rare compounds. Phosphate takes up a tiny fraction of the Earth's crust. If we were using silicon, for example, we'd have about 40% of the crust to be able to use. We're using a tiny fraction.

[00:04:36] And every living being uses phosphate because it's the chemical that carries electric signals effectively through the body and enables the sort of electron and proton exchanges that fuel our muscles and brain and so on. So, I remember this from my school chemist classes. So, any chemists, please forgive me for stuffing up here.

[00:05:00] But we have a chemical called adenosine triphosphate, so three phosphate atoms, which is used to power our muscles. So, you have adenosine triphosphate reacts with oxygen in the context of the human body, oxygen in the water, to produce adenosine diphosphate, so two rather than three, and waste products, including carbon dioxide, which we breathe out. And then, so you have to have, if you have your muscle function, you must have phosphate.

[00:05:28] And every living being on the planet needs it. And guess, because humans don't get directly from, well, they get them from plants where we spray it on plants in the first place using superphosphate. Guess where the superphosphate comes from? Which country? There's one dominant country. I don't know. Everything, a big one, Russia, China. Morocco. Oh, right. Okay. Not such a big one. And apparently, not such a big one.

[00:05:53] And I think apparently, I think it's something like 86% of the world's superphosphate, phosphate is, that's great superphosphate, is sourced from one region and largely in one mine in Morocco. Right. So, if the only reason we're sustaining this, the population at the level we've had, it's because of phosphate. We've got to have phosphate. Yeah. Why would Morocco not be by far the wealthiest country on the planet then? I am buggered to answer that question myself. It is, when I first said this factoid, I thought, you're joking.

[00:06:20] This is the Conway's book, The Material World, which I do recommend to people as a read to see, you know, the incredibly minor dependency. We have massive dependence we have on minor parts of the planet. So, phosphate, 86% from one country. Crazily, when that's, what's the name of the storm? Milton. Of course, my favorite name, Cycline.

[00:06:43] When Milton took out North Carolina, it also took out a silicon mine, which has the world's purest silicon. And that's actually an essential part of the process of drawing silicon wafers out of process silicon. Again, it's an incredibly intricate process, but only one part of the world, and it happens to be a tiny part of North Carolina, is this.

[00:07:06] We could probably, given three or four years, we could work how to refine, you know, not quite pure grades of silicon to the grade that they get out of these mines. But it means we don't have to do that at the moment, just to drag it out of the ground. And so, that's one region of North Carolina is critical for the existence of silicon wafers. So, on the size of the sustainable population then, again, let's, you know, we'll bring climate change into it in a second.

[00:07:33] But the Club of Rome had a number which was nowhere near eight or nine or 11 because they said we just wouldn't be able to sustain the food that was required. That's the limit. That's the limit to growth. So, were they assuming that the impact of phosphates would not be so great? Because that's the argument that's always given, isn't it, against the Club of Rome. Say, hey, look at the number they came up with, whatever it is, you might have it on the tip of your tongue.

[00:08:00] And we've surpassed that now because we have been, because of innovation and our ability to find a solution to save mankind. I complain enough about being misrepresented by neoclassical economists when my criticism of them. But their misrepresentation of the limits of growth is, you deserve the Nobel Prize in misrepresentation. We actually, we should get Nobel to create a fifth category, you know, the Nobel Prize for misinformation. Economists would win it nine years out of ten.

[00:08:26] And when you look at the report, the table of the people say, look, they had these numbers and we're far exceeding them. It was a table they had lifted with permission from the American Department of Mines saying what current reserves are, what the rate of a dip of policing is, and how long they'd last if that was the, you know, no further discoveries. That wasn't in their model. It was a table they had to illustrate. So, it's more to do with mineral extraction rather than… Yeah, mineral extraction, yeah. So, the limits to growth did what they…

[00:08:54] They created a model with a number of what they call system states. So, you had five main system states. You had the level of resources and resources they assumed would be depleted over time. You had the level of food output per capita, which would rise as technology improved. Level of industrial output per capita, which would also rise as productivity improved. The level of population and level of pollution. And they then had feedback between those five factors.

[00:09:23] And, of course, if you are going to have industry, then you are going to deplete the resources. So, the resources would decline over time. But when you use those resources to make food, you could support a higher population. But if you had more industry, then you had to devote some of that land of creating industrial output rather than food. And the pollution occurred that reduced capacity to produce food. It also affected population and health and so on. So, these factors all feed in with each other.

[00:09:51] And when they did what they call the standard run… I want to get this because people have got such a shitty idea of how this process actually worked. They consulted for a number of years with a number of domain experts in each of those areas. And there's a book, I think about… I haven't got it with me while I'm traveling… But about 450 or 500 pages thick of all the background research they did to say, how can we produce an index for the level of resources?

[00:10:19] How do we produce an index for the amount of food production, industrial production, et cetera, et cetera? They produced those indices and they then built their model and ran the model from 1900 to 1970 until such time as the model itself generated a close approximation of the data that they made up by working with these experts, the field experts. So, they said, yes, your model is reproducing my information on resources, that woman's information on food,

[00:10:49] this guy's information on industrial output per capita. They got the five right. So, 1900 and 1970 was actually fitting the data and they simply ran it forward from 1970 to 2100. And then what they did, when they did that, what they call the standard run, they found that world population peaked… Another thing they did, they deliberately did not include dates on the horizontal axis. They began at 1900. They finished at 2100.

[00:11:16] There were no intervening dates because they did not want to be tied down to a specific prediction. They were talking about trends here, not point prediction. But if you eyeball the figure, their population peaked in, I think about 2050, roughly, let's say. And then what you then had is a decline in population caused by both pollution, by running out of resources, by running out of food per capita, by running out of industrial output.

[00:11:46] And they saw those peaking sometime between, say, 2000 and 2030. So, the scary thing is… I've had colleagues… I can't remember Graham's last name now, but an old mate of mine, Graham, I worked with at CSIRO, he did a very detailed study of existing trends as of 2010 and found that what they call the standard run, which I've just verbally described, fitted the data very well. And then Gail…

[00:12:16] It's not Henderson, it's Gail Harrington, I think, did another very detailed study in 2019 or thereabouts, also showing that the limits to growth standard run is actually fairly closely fitting where we are right now. And that is a scary story because it says we're going to have a population decline, of course, not by choice, but by a breakdown in food supply and a breakdown in industrial output and pollution. And what that means to how we get on with our fellow man.

[00:12:41] So, you're saying about 2050s, which by the UN's projections, although they say it goes on from 2050, they take it up to 11.2, but their 2050 figure is 9.7. So, let's say they're right on that and then it starts to decline from that point onwards. But we'll look at the consequences of that in the second part. Just quickly before we go for a break, though, I mean, this argument about, you know, it's been leveled many times that things like the Club of Rome…

[00:13:09] …you know, there's always going to be an answer. So, the University of Chicago and NASA did a study a while back and they said our ability to support our current population is somewhat limited because of the way, you know, right now. That if we carried on the way we are, how we use our land, how we use fresh water and reduce the availability of it, the flows of nitrogen… …if we just carried on, that would take our population down to 3.4 billion.

[00:13:38] But the good news, they reckon, is if we improved our cropland with irrigation and fertiliser… …if we managed land better, if we managed water and nutrients better… …if we reduced food loss and we changed our diet… …then we could get up to at least 10 billion. Now, that's a lot of ifs in that, isn't it? But, I mean, there would be some way of saying, well, okay, we are not very efficient at how we use our land and how we feed ourselves. If we got better at it, we could support a bigger population.

[00:14:07] But it's…but how, you know, is it realistic to actually say that? Because that's…that becomes geopolitics, doesn't it, at play? And we know that you can never win against geopolitics. Yeah. I mean, it's…I mean, it's…some parts of it sound similar to the limits to growth. But one thing which is different there is the limits to growth… All the studies they did, they had numerous runs on very old computers. So, it took a long time to run those…run and see the results.

[00:14:31] But they…none of the situations they saw as alternatives to our current, you know, business as usual course as they cause it, none of them led to a stabilized system unless we had population control as well. And, like, I'll go through the seven points that they saw as being necessary to be able to have a stabilized system.

[00:14:53] The first was population stabilizes the 1975 levels, which mean rather than 8.2 billion, we have about 3.5 billion people. Resource consumption is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value. Now, that's…I think that's an absurd requirement. But they're saying literally you produce four times as much out of the same inputs of resources.

[00:15:17] But to get the…to avoid a shortage of non-renewable resources, they had to have a fourfold increase of how we…the productivity or the extent to which we get… make resources. So, cars would have become lighter, for example, okay? You're using less steel for the car and things of that nature. But a four…one… No matter what, polystyrene, Steve. The polystyrene is looking pretty good to know about it, okay?

[00:15:44] Preferences are shifted towards services such as education and health and less towards factory-produced goods, so more services, less manufacturing. That was those three. Stabilize population, increase resource efficiency by a factor of four, shift towards services rather than physical goods, reduce pollution by fourfold, so a fourfold fall on the rate of pollution in output as well. You focus upon food production, even though it would be uneconomic because you're selling to poor people.

[00:16:14] You have to put that high value on producing sufficient food. So, subsidizing food, in other words. Yeah, yeah. Use of agricultural capital makes soil enrichment and preservation a high priority. So, rather than…a lot of our pesticide use is… This kills most of the biological substances and it's even more industrial process than we think it is. An average life design of capital has to be increased so you have no more built-in obsolescence. Those seven things were necessary to stabilize.

[00:16:44] And then they say we could go on indefinitely. But it would be a population level about one-third of what we have right now. Yeah. Wow. And that subsidizing food is an interesting one, isn't it? Because if you… I mean, obviously, they were wrong on some of that, weren't they? I mean, you know, it didn't happen the way that they panned out. No, no. We're living out their course right now. If you go back and look at what they call the standard run… Are we four times more effective? No, no, we're not. At producing food? No, that's why we didn't…

[00:17:10] They would need to do that from 1975 to avoid a crisis. They were saying if we don't do it in 1975, we try to say in 2000 instead, it's too late. Right. So, we have to stabilize… That's what you're saying. Yeah. Okay. So, the idea about subsidizing food is an interesting one. It sort of relates to what I want to talk about next after the break because the real issue is where the food is as well, isn't it? Because it's… Yeah. It's not always… Geo-bologics, yeah. Yeah. Where the people are.

[00:17:38] And, you know, in a lot of these studies, I'm thinking, well, yeah, but what about transport costs for all of this? You know, I have lots of food, but it's in the wrong place and too timely or too costly to transmit or transport. But also, if you've got a shortage of food in certain areas and you don't subsidize food, then obviously you get to a stage where only the rich can afford to eat. And then you get to the stage where they're going, well, okay, we could subsidize so that, you know, more people buy food products. Yes. But…

[00:18:07] And that might be good for the food producers if the government's there subsidizing so they can produce more, so they find more innovative ways. But that's only going to work to a point, isn't it, where the cost of producing the food to feed everybody in the economic system that we've got just doesn't stack up. So you ultimately get to a stage where the rich survive, the poor die. Yeah. You've got to have the poor, in other words, being subsidized. Otherwise, it won't work. Yeah. And you've got to have the rich agreeing. Yeah. In an environment where they're saying there's too many people. And you have countries that are being pleasant and transporting food to each other.

[00:18:37] Yeah. Okay. Meanwhile, I've got to duck. We've got to get out of the whole squadron of pigs flying over my head right now, so I better duck. So how much will economics solve this problem? That's what I want to look at when we come back because I wonder whether, you know, some of this decline won't be people dying of starvation. It might be people who just weren't born in the first place. So let's look at that when we come back on the Debugger Economics Podcast.

[00:18:58] We'll see you next time.

[00:19:33] This is the Debugging Economics Podcast with Steve Keen and Phil Dobby. So, Steve, there's an article I read in CNBC this last month, which leads with a photo of the St. George Cafe in Lasta, which is a village in the Peloponese region of Greece. And if you want to go in there and get a drink, you have to help yourself and leave a donation

[00:20:02] because there is nobody left in the village left to man this store. In fact, it's just a ghost town because people in Greece are not having kids as much these days. The population is ageing and the younger voters are leaving to get jobs elsewhere. It's a country in terminal decline. And this village of Lasta is one of many villages in Greece where people just don't live anymore because economics has forced them out.

[00:20:30] So as well as the overall top-line population for the planet, we're seeing massive population movement, aren't we? And yet there's nothing wrong with Greece as a country being able to sustain itself. But economics, particularly the EU in this case, has forced people out. Yeah, and I saw that when I was in Croatia, at least close to 10 years ago, I've been driven from one city to another.

[00:20:59] And my host would say, well, this city's got no people left. The answer is because there are no jobs. All the jobs have moved to EU countries or did the capital. So they've been depopulated in the countryside. So we are getting – we're still having population growth overall. People, even in the country which we're growing, are suffering this phenomenon that the population is being redistributed around economic, current industrial and economic centres and depopulated elsewhere. Meanwhile, I wanted to pick up my wife from Guildford Railway Station the other day,

[00:21:28] and it took me almost an hour to get around a roundabout because the traffic was so bad. So, I mean, it's – clearly, the – Because English sure should have been in Greece. Well, yeah. I mean, it's the way we have spread the population across the planet and the way it is concentrating in particular areas. And the only reason it's concentrating in those areas is because people think they can make money there.

[00:21:52] I mean, that is a – so even before we hit the problem of there being too many people on the planet as a whole, we are going to hit the problem where there's just so many countries that are going to be severely overpopulated without the infrastructure – never mind the planetary resources, just the infrastructure that's needed to satisfy those people. That's – I mean – and that, I suspect, is going to happen quicker. Like in the next – it's happening already. But, you know, in 10 years, you can imagine it will be intolerable. Yep.

[00:22:19] And this is actually like the geographic element of economics which is left out of the thinking in mainstream economists. There's a wonderful paper by a guy called Hotelling about if you have a beach with people uniformly distributed along the beach and then an ice cream stall, where's the position for everybody for the ice cream stall? It's right in the middle of the beach. If you then have a competitor coming along, where's the best position for the competitor, for the people on the beach now?

[00:22:46] It would be best if the first one relocates to one-third of the way along the beach and the other two-thirds of the way along the beach. But they're each going to face the competitive pressure that if they encroach on the other's territory, they will get – take half of that market. If people just worry about how far it is to walk to their ice cream stall rather than quality differences. So if one person does locate at the one-third position, their competitor will locate at the two-thirds position and the competitor will get more than two-thirds of the trade on the island.

[00:23:14] So what actually competitively happens is the two ice cream stalls sit right next to each other at 50% point. So what you've got is – And all the sunbathers are gathered in the middle of the beach because they want an ice cream. They're not going to be spread out a long way. So you get that – Yeah, so you get concentration, which is not beneficial. And so you therefore have to have regulations help and say you can only be within – you have to divide the beach up between you if you have a new competitor. You've got to relocate, yada, yada, yada.

[00:23:42] So that way you'd be – you know, you'd force to get a distribution. The regulations would actually help improve social utility. And that's not the sort of thing economists like teaching their students. So many of them don't learn about hoteling those days. And that's why, you know, the EU, if it was smart, would say, well, okay, we've got a region. We've got a large population. Let's look at the resources we've got. Let's look at the people needed to run businesses using those resources. And let's develop a population strategy that is going to ensure that people are living in the right place.

[00:24:12] And, you know, we're – Yeah, but it doesn't happen. Because it's too – because of competition, because of economic competition, because of each country is racing for its own GDP. And it's also because, you know, industrial concentrations work. And this is where – I like the work of Michael Porter on this front. He called the competitive advantage of nations as opposed to the comparative advantage.

[00:24:32] And he said what you get is industrial agglomerates occur because there will be often regional competition between leading families in a region for a particular slice of the upper class incomes. And that then causes a growth in industry sector. And the example, the best example is in northern Italy and high-performance cars.

[00:24:54] And Lamborghini and Ferrari and all these cars, Maserati, began as competing families that used to actually produce tractors during the second – until after the Second World War. And they started producing high-performance cars, sort of a competition between each other. And then what you got was this concentration of people who can make high-performance cars in one small region of Italy. So the country becomes identified with a product, but it's actually the region that generates that. So you need – the regional agglomeration makes sense. They do work.

[00:25:24] But you've got to then avoid the situation where you have – you know, you denude your population because there are no opportunities around. So that's an argument for state distribution of resources. Yeah, exactly. And you feel like that's got to happen. But, I mean, also the places where they are making stuff. I mean, they come home after, you know, after a hard day making stuff in the office. And they want to make babies as well. You know, they just have fantastic sex. So in Germany, it's hard to imagine. But 1.46 live births per woman in Germany.

[00:25:54] 1.79 in France. Germany, obviously, because, you know, until lately they've been able to afford to have more children. France, they just like, you know, having sex. But in Greece, 1.32. So, you know, 1.79 in France, 1.32 in Greece. And then you look at Spain, it's only 1.16. Italy, it's 1.24. So these southern European countries are facing the issue of declining birth rates as well as slowing economies.

[00:26:23] Although Spain's perhaps doing better than most actually at the moment coming out of the pandemic. But the, yes, I mean, that sort of like feeds in that argument that, okay, as economies slow, the population will sort of slow automatically because there's less children being born because people won't have families if they think they can't afford it. Yeah. Well, and in fact, we actually need that dynamic. But it's not happening fast enough.

[00:26:48] So because we are, I mean, the amount of – we worry about the population of humans that ignore the population of all other species on the planet. The trouble is we can't do that indefinitely. And this is one of the dangers. We have to think about life itself rather than the life of humans as the overall metric for survivability on the biosphere.

[00:27:05] And that's one reason that I'm so angry at the economics profession for destroying the credibility of the limits to growth study on completely spurious grounds and then replacing their fairly well-worked-out engineering-based analysis with the nonsense of people like Nordhaus and Toll and Mendelssohn and, you know, all the followers they've got in mainstream economics.

[00:27:27] And we've now gone from a wise analysis of what the constraints of living on a finite planet to a bunch of morons who actually believe – and this is quoting a recent book – they believe it is possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Now, that is not a – that is a quote from a book by a guy called Daniel Suskind called Growth a Reckoning, neoclassical economist. They literally believe that. And they're completely wrong about the physical world and we're going to pay the consequences.

[00:27:54] And his argument is that one that I leveled earlier, that we all just find more ways of creating more food, more resources. We'll just get more efficient at using the resources we've got. And we'll keep on doing that indefinitely. And it's a fantasy. Yeah. I wonder what proportion of the population actually believe them, if you would believe that, if you stop them in the street. Too much. Too much. Too much. Yeah. People and influence.

[00:28:17] I mean, this is one reason we haven't taken climate change seriously is because people fall for this argument coming out of mainstream economics that it's possible to continuously make up new inventions that mean you get more productivity out of set resources. And that's one reason I come back to focusing on things like superphosphate. Because economists think everything is substitutable. Paul Davidson used to say that the axiom of gross substitutability is a major fallacy in neoclassical economics. And he's dead right.

[00:28:46] And the thing is, we see there are some things there's no substitute for. There's no substitute for energy and there's no substitute for phosphate. So, if you don't have – and it answers the question of how you use energy, of course, that's part of how you generate pollution on the planet. But you cannot have more people than there's phosphate available to keep them having their muscles functioning. So, there's – and you can't substitute any deals for phosphate.

[00:29:12] Life nowhere on the planet has generated any organism which doesn't use phosphate as the central part of its energy transmission systems. So, phosphate is a critical resource and is one of many in that sense. There's some things you – you know, you can have aluminium rather than steel in a car. There's a substitute like that. But you cannot have magnesium rather than phosphate. You'll die. Period. There is no substitute.

[00:29:38] So, that blindness to the existence of absolutely critical limits – That's the ceiling. – is a huge part of why they've led us astray. Right. Okay. And the short – in the short term, because this is a real short-term issue, we're more concerned about this than we are about climate change. And that's the movement of people. So, I mean, it's a political hot potato. So, 5.1 million people arrived in the EU from outside the EU in 2023, which is the highest it's ever been. The next closest was 4.3 million in 2015.

[00:30:08] And that number for 2023 was about double what it was the year before. Do we – and yet, you know, we've got – so, you know, it's abhorrent, we're told, that these people are arriving. By the way, 6.9 million people displaced from Syria in 2022 were saying our fans. So, maybe some of them will go back now. Who knows? But, you know, wars are creating the mass movement of people. We are going to see more of those wars because you get down to the roots of it. It's religion.

[00:30:37] But then if you go down even deeper, it's almost always boundaries. It's geography, isn't it? It's resources. It's often resources. And like a lot of the instability in Syria, people have attributed that to climate change, damaging the agricultural productivity of the country and forcing movements in that way. And then the political consequences followed from that. So, what do you do in a situation like that where you've got millions of people moving into the EU and then trying to – you know, some of them trying to make it across the channel into the UK?

[00:31:05] These countries where there is, you know, a high density of population, which you say might be an economic benefit. And people very often argue that, you know, if we get more people in, then we'll – you know, that'll help the economy to grow. But it is concentrating the population. It is obviously creating an awful lot of angst because people don't like seeing the population growing quite so much. And it is, you know, the hoteling argument. Everyone's moving to the centre of the beach. What do you do about it? Well, you've got to have policy that addresses it.

[00:31:35] And like a lot of the policy in terms of people displacing is you've got to stop making the places they move from unpleasant because what – I still find it remarkable that people criticise people for moving from areas which are being denuded of resources and affected by wars that the West itself has caused frequently. So, you know, you don't make those places less pleasant by having yet another war on the location. You improve them.

[00:32:01] You make – you know, you address the income distribution, the agricultural productivity issues that are driving people away in the first place. You realise the private sector is likely to concentrate resources so you need to have the state going in the opposite direction and distributing resources.

[00:32:18] So, all these issues about having an intelligent approach, we do the exact opposite, a knee-jerk reaction to be anti-migrant and try to put up barriers which, you know, will work until such time as maybe the depopulation flow reverses. And this is one reason that I – you know, I think that the West – people in the West all think that climate change as well is only going to affect people in poor, hot countries. So, don't worry about Northern Europe.

[00:32:45] Northern Europe is probably more exposed than anywhere else on the planet to serious effects of climate change. And it could actually mean global freezing. And the global freezing means local freezing of Europe and increasing in temperature elsewhere. And there may be refugees from Europe. It's going to be fun to see how African countries react to that. Yeah. So, in the short term, though, I mean, the numbers coming into Europe and into the UK. So, 906,000 we saw in 2023.

[00:33:13] The UK's Migration Advisory Committee says that they reckon net migration should settle down to 300,000 over the next few years. But, you know, the government is trying to put hard limits on the number of people who come in. And one of the things they've done, for example, is reducing the number of people arriving as dependents on people studying visas, which is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot, really. If you're married and you want to study here, you can't bring your partner with you. So, you go somewhere else to study.

[00:33:42] Therefore, the UK doesn't get that foreign earnings from education. It sounds also part of the reason why I say universities around the world are suffering now because they've pushed on to being fee-generating institutions rather than educational distributing. They had to get extra bums on seats. The easy way to do it was to get more overseas students to come in. So, all these universities have been selling themselves as location for overseas students.

[00:34:05] And now that that is really leading to immigration backlash in most of those countries, universities are now suffering across the West being forced to close because of a lack of students. So, you know, I'm glad I'm out of the university sector because I could see this nonsense coming from some years ago. But your education system is in crisis because you forced them onto relying upon foreign students and now you don't allow them to have foreign students anymore. Yeah. So, all of this short-term thinking.

[00:34:34] So, is the answer to – if it is about, you know, trying to stop this global movement in the short term again, this global movement, which is just growing year on year from countries where there is war or there's not resources or there's just not the – you know, what have been called economic migrants. As though that's an awful thing. Like, you know, why should they be allowed to pursue their self-interest in earning more money? You know, that should just be for us in the West.

[00:35:00] But if there was some sort of mechanism, a global mechanism where money is fed into countries so that they can support higher populations and establish the infrastructure in those countries so they can look after themselves and make the most of the resources that they've got available in a way that's obviously going to be better for the planet in the long term, that sounds like a sensible approach.

[00:35:25] The downside is, though, these people, because they've got more money and more wealth and more comfort, you know what they're going to be doing Friday and Saturday night. They're going to be making babies. They're going to add to the population. No. Let's get that fallacy out of the way. Population growth – It's a Thursday night, is it? Well, no. It's Friday where you wear a condom because you can manufacture them locally. What you see out of increased income per capita is a fall in the population growth level.

[00:35:55] And that was included in the limits to growth as well, by the way, for a set of complex mechanisms. The increasing prosperity causes a decline in population growth. So, what he was describing, you know, rich countries giving poor countries the capacity to invest and industrialise and therefore reduce the immigration pressure. That was part of Keynes' Bretton Woods plan because the idea was that countries would trade in what he called Bancor and a country running up in excess of Bancor would be taxed.

[00:36:24] For that excess of Bancor on the tax would then be distributed to poor countries. So, you'd have a way that countries which were trying to get too high a trade surplus – and that was what Keynes was trying to prevent. So, rather than getting as huge surplus as we get from China and Japan and Germany over the years of their massive industrial growth, those surplus would be then used to tax those countries for running too high surplus, trade surplus, and the money would be distributed to the Bancor if you go to third world countries,

[00:36:53] which you then pay to import capital goods and start building up their own industrial structure and so on. So, Keynes had that idea and that would have also led to potentially stabilising populations because when you talk to people in the third world about why they have, you know, so many babies, the answer is it's social security. The children will keep you alive and keep you well in your old age. So, there's a motivation to have children that way.

[00:37:19] But if you don't have the need for kids to – if there is some social security in the system, there's less pressure to have children. So, that distribution system that Keynes was arguing for, which of course we lost courtesy of the Americans and Harry Dexter White, that would have reduced population growth and reduced migration pressure as well. So, I mean, it wouldn't have been the answer to everything, but it might have got us to that levelling out of the population that much faster. And I wonder – yeah.

[00:37:49] There's no appetite for that at all, is there? Because actually there's not really much discussion other than how do we fix the short-term problem, which is to stop the boats. We can cope with three words, thanks to Nigel Farage. Yeah, yeah. Three words. Two TLA's, three real-letter acronyms. I mean, even China gave up on its one-family policy because it caused enormous social tensions. Right. And then the population growth has actually declined since then. That's the interesting thing. Yeah. So, they got rid of the one-child policy and the birth rate went down afterwards.

[00:38:19] I think they're having a lot of incels in China. But yeah, it's a – I mean, our structures are – society is structured in such a way that, you know, we used to say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, you're now doing an atomic family to raise that child and the village no longer exists in the same integrated sense we used to have in pre-industrial periods.

[00:38:44] And we need to recreate something like that to enable us to have, you know, lower population growth while still getting the pleasure of interaction with children in a safe environment. That is something which our societies are not structured for. So, should we have a one-child policy? Should more Western countries say, well, okay, let's do our bit? Or is that – I mean, it's happening by default, isn't it?

[00:39:09] It's happening by default, but I think we're going to find it being compulsory as well at some point because, I mean, again, back to the starting point of this conversation. Eight billion people is about two and a half times the limit – that the limits to growth that he said was sustainable with current practices. And, you know, we're trebling it. We're talking about going to four times that level. I think we're just putting an enormous amount of pressure on the – already on the planet's reproductive capability.

[00:39:37] And we're producing far too many humans and not many other species. So, you know, I think we have to have – at some point we'll be forced into it. It's a question of whether we do it by collapse in civilization and therefore collapse in food and starvation or we try to do it in a planned sense. Unfortunately, my money is on the former. Yeah. Well, I mean, and the problem with the planned sense, if you say that you can only have one child, that means we go through a whole generation of people who are just only childs. And, you know, we know how intolerable some of those people can be.

[00:40:07] I imagine everyone is like that. All right. But geography seems like the short-term issue, doesn't it? And all of this gets down to the rich looking after the poor countries and helping pull them up by the bootstraps so that they do procreate less, use resources better. And maybe that is what would limit the population. And as you're saying, Keynes had an answer for that. Maybe we just need to dust that idea off.

[00:40:35] But we've got to convince the Americans, as always, the problem, the blocker. Yeah. Yeah. Sticking Andy Kalendo, he doesn't come to humanity all the day. All right. Very good. Catch you again next week. I think we might go back to Cointopia next week. I'm liking that place. So we'll… Fun country. We'll go back there next time. Thanks, Steve. Looking at it. Bye-bye. The Debunking Economics Podcast.

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