Let's talk about... babies! | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

We’re currently hard at work on the next video.

Which is going to be about… babies.

Over the past six months or so, there’s been a growing amount of discussion about declining birth rates across the world.

Half of all countries in the world (accounting for 2/3 of the global population) have total fertility rates below that needed to sustain their current populations.

Where society used to worry about a “population bomb” leading to mass starvation, the UN now predicts that the world’s population will begin to decline as soon as the mid-2080s.

This topic has been picked up particularly enthusiastically by commentators on the political right.

Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, and several others in the podcast sphere have sought to frame this as the biggest existential threat facing humanity: a greater threat than the climate emergency, a greater threat than inequality, a greater threat than zoonotic disease.

But, is that the case? Is this a potential “crisis”? And, if so, what can we do about it?

I wanted to dive into the topic and explore it from two angles:

Firstly, I wanted to try and understand what’s going on here. What do the data tell us about population shrink and demographic aging? What are the consequences and the concerns here? And why are we exactly are people choosing to have less kids these days?

Secondly, I’ve been fascinated by the rapidity with which right wingers have become so enamoured with the issue. In a world of many intersecting crises, I wanted to explore what it is about this one that they appear so drawn to?

Finally, my plan is to dig into how we should respond to this phenomenon and ask whether the actual solutions to declining fertility rates are likely to be ones folks like Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson would like, or whether they might challenge some very basic conservative beliefs.

Despite the fact we’ve already started production on this one, my thoughts are still pretty messy! So it’s going to be a slightly different process this time around.

But I hope it’s going to be an interesting look at a topic I think we’re likely to all be hearing a lot more about over the coming years!

I’ll share more about it in future editions of the Friday Update!

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!