The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 16, 2025


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Our Demographic Future

Topics
demographics collapse ageing demographic time bomb
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Africans Tony Blair Elon Musk
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1317 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1319

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

146.91

Word count

3,089

Sentence count

254

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the demographics of the future, and why we need to have a lot more kids. The population is on track to hit 10bn by the end of the century, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests it's not going to happen.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics.
00:00:29.440 Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about the future, specifically the future
00:00:34.160 that our demographics are going to gift us.
00:00:38.120 Demographics are one of those things that you can actually predict fairly accurately.
00:00:41.460 You get nice long lead turns on this.
00:00:43.240 So, I mean, if you know what the birth rate is, well, you know what the workforce is going
00:00:47.280 to be, you know, 25, 30, 40 years later, you know what the retiree situation is going to
00:00:55.080 be, you know, 65 years in advance by knowing birth data.
00:00:59.440 So it's one of those things where you can actually make really good long term predictions
00:01:02.780 because, well, you can see the births, simple as that.
00:01:07.780 And also you can see the trends in birth rates and so on.
00:01:11.540 And so you can even project out beyond that with a bit more certainty.
00:01:15.160 So there's a fairly high degree of comfort when it comes to knowing what's going to happen
00:01:19.280 on the demographics to the world over the rest of the century.
00:01:24.560 And it's something that I wanted to look at because I started looking at it when I was
00:01:28.100 aware, of course, that Elon Musk has been going on about the biggest crisis that the world
00:01:33.080 faces is demographic collapse.
00:01:34.740 And, you know, you hear, you know, people counter that by saying, well, actually, no,
00:01:40.000 the population is going to grow.
00:01:41.860 And, you know, by the end of the century, we're going to hit 10 billion people.
00:01:45.820 And you think both of these things are true at once.
00:01:48.940 Because you see that the populations of Europeans and the Anglos, they are collapsing. 1.00
00:01:55.140 North Asians, they are collapsing. 1.00
00:01:56.760 They're going away, as we see in this episode.
00:02:00.580 But the populations of other parts of the world are growing and quite significantly.
00:02:06.660 So, I mean, I don't want to give too many spoilers for the episode ahead.
00:02:09.660 But basically, when you think about the future, if you like Africans and you like Islam, then 1.00
00:02:17.960 you are going to love the future.
00:02:19.020 If your preference falls perhaps a bit more for Europeans and for the Anglos, I'm afraid
00:02:29.160 2,100 is quite a grim place.
00:02:36.340 And you'll see what I mean when I get into the demographics of this stuff.
00:02:39.240 It is actually quite shocking, actually, when I really got into the numbers.
00:02:44.740 And I'm now thinking, why the hell aren't more people talking about this?
00:02:48.140 Because it is a little bit disturbing.
00:02:51.100 You know, we have a government class that thinks, you know, it can solve all economic
00:02:55.060 problems just by printing money.
00:02:57.620 And it can't print people.
00:02:59.520 So it's been doing the next best thing.
00:03:00.980 It's been importing them to make up for these gaps.
00:03:05.560 And I mean, basically, we need to have a lot more kids.
00:03:12.460 A lot more.
00:03:13.100 And this is kind of a message that we need to be permeating down to young people as soon
00:03:20.540 as possible.
00:03:21.180 The key driver for sustainable birth rates is when do women have their first baby? 0.99
00:03:27.780 And if it's in their mid-20s, you're fine.
00:03:31.220 Because what a lot of people thought, the conventional wisdom, was that people are having smaller families.
00:03:40.060 Actually, that's not the case.
00:03:41.300 The proportion of people having, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six kids has actually remained broadly consistent.
00:03:48.380 What's happened is there's just been a huge increase in people who have none.
00:03:50.740 And of the people who are going to have some, if they start in their mid-20s, they'll probably go and have decent family sizes.
00:03:59.220 Because once you've done it once, well, you might as well do another one.
00:04:02.280 I mean, that's true.
00:04:02.900 Speaking as a parent, I mean, 90% of the hassle is with the first one.
00:04:06.500 It's actually not that much more difficult to have a second.
00:04:08.940 So if you're going to have one, you really might as well have three, as long as you're young enough, or four, preferably five.
00:04:15.280 Six is better.
00:04:15.920 Go beyond that if you're an absolute hero.
00:04:20.500 But, yeah, having that first one.
00:04:22.460 But, of course, we created a world where, you know, we take young women and we push them into higher education, university, which, you know, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that in itself.
00:04:32.580 But the expectation that it builds is that, you know, you do your degree and then you immediately go and get a job because, I mean, otherwise, why have you done a degree?
00:04:40.220 And then once you're in a job, you know, they work you hard at the first few bits.
00:04:45.020 And, you know, because you're on the ground level, you're actually doing stuff as opposed to, you know, pontificating that, you know, perhaps somebody my age might do.
00:04:52.780 Sitting around in meetings and, you know, giving things, you know, weighted, serious thought.
00:04:59.020 But, no, you know, you're kind of important because you actually do stuff.
00:05:03.720 So it's very competitive and you get on your career and then before you know it, you're in your, you know, early 30s before you start, I think, having kids.
00:05:13.760 And then once you actually get your act together, you're sort of in your mid-30s rather than your mid-20s, which means even if you do manage to get to the point of having any children at all, it's probably going to be one, maybe two.
00:05:26.020 And, I mean, we get into the demographic split of what the world looks like over the course of the next century.
00:05:32.380 But, you know, this attitude, this model, it's going to result in not quite the extinction of the European people, but something pretty bloody close.
00:05:45.320 It's a little bit depressing, really.
00:05:47.440 By 2100, Africans' share of humanity is going to basically double, while North Asia, the Anglosphere, I can't even say contract. 0.99
00:06:07.600 What I mean is collapse, effectively collapse.
00:06:10.720 We get to peak population in about 2085, 10.2 billion, according to, you know, a whole bunch of sources, to be honest.
00:06:20.900 I found loads of sources for that.
00:06:23.140 And then it does start to decline.
00:06:26.740 But, I mean, just think about what sort of world that's going to be.
00:06:31.560 And, well, I mean, I'll get into some of the detail.
00:06:34.280 I'll get into some of the detail, and then we can think about the implications that come from that.
00:06:41.180 So, I mean, what remarkable about this is this is one of the most quiet collapses in history.
00:06:51.200 We've had population collapses before as a result of war or plagues or, you know, something.
00:06:57.300 But it's none of that.
00:06:58.080 It's just comfort and economic incentives and choice.
00:07:03.800 And we've entered a sort of negative momentum that seems unarrestable.
00:07:11.300 We've reached a stage in the UK now where we've got more deaths than births.
00:07:17.180 And, you know, and that's only because we're counting the immigrant population, their births.
00:07:21.900 If it wasn't for that, we would have significantly more.
00:07:25.360 You know, you can have either, you know, big government or big families, it would seem to me.
00:07:33.780 You can't have both.
00:07:37.460 So, you know, we've got to forget, well, not forget, but probably spend a lot less time talking about, you know, GDP, debt or inflation.
00:07:46.900 I mean, those things are important.
00:07:48.040 We talk about those a lot.
00:07:49.960 But the number that decides if a people is going to survive is fertility. 0.99
00:07:53.680 It's as simple as that.
00:07:55.360 You want a replacement rate of 2.1.
00:07:58.940 So for every woman, you want 2.1 children. 0.97
00:08:03.140 If you have that, you sustain.
00:08:05.380 If you have less than that, you shrink.
00:08:08.120 And if you have more than that, you grow.
00:08:11.360 And it seems a bit arbitrary.
00:08:15.200 I mean, what does it really mean if you've got a birth rate of 1.5 as opposed to 2?
00:08:20.060 I mean, that doesn't sound like a big difference.
00:08:21.800 What if you've got a birth rate of 1 as opposed to 2?
00:08:23.800 What does it mean?
00:08:25.440 Well, think about it this way.
00:08:26.300 If you've got four grandparents and you've got a birth rate of 1, that means those four grandparents are going to have,
00:08:35.060 the next generation is going to be two people.
00:08:38.360 And the generation after that is going to be one person.
00:08:40.520 So that means that in two generations, your population has shrunk to 25% to a quarter of where it was when it started.
00:08:51.680 And basically, that is what is happening to the Anglosphere and to Europeans. 0.99
00:09:04.500 And of course, it cripples your ability to run an economy.
00:09:07.380 In Japan, they've gone from nine workers per retiree to about one to one.
00:09:18.320 Now, evidently, that is unsustainable.
00:09:20.680 You cannot tax your way out of that situation, especially in, you know, countries, Western countries that, you know,
00:09:29.160 have these Ponzi scheme pension arrangements where, you know, you pay in and it is immediately spent on the pensioners of that day.
00:09:40.520 You're not really building up a stock.
00:09:42.960 And then you just tax the workers for the given number of retirees you have at any one point.
00:09:48.940 Well, how is it going to work when we've all got each of us as a retiree to support?
00:09:57.400 And our demographics are just 15 years behind Japan.
00:10:00.120 They're just a little bit ahead of us on this.
00:10:02.720 Native British fertility dropped below replacement levels in 1973, incidentally, around the time that immigration started to become a thing.
00:10:16.100 And so for the last 50 years, effectively, we've been living off these demographic savings.
00:10:21.900 You know, the last full generation, the boomers, they're working their way through the system. 1.00
00:10:27.980 And, you know, we're kind of close to hitting peak retirement rate with those guys.
00:10:35.060 And they're going to be expecting pensions and NHS.
00:10:37.940 And that burden is going to fall on the workers.
00:10:40.480 And there just aren't enough of them, especially not native born. 0.99
00:10:42.720 And the crisis is everywhere.
00:10:46.960 You know, London's got a 1.5% fertility rate. 1.00
00:10:54.740 Rome is 1.2%.
00:10:56.720 South Korea, Seoul, 0.6%.
00:11:00.720 So they won't even have a quarter of their population in two generations.
00:11:04.640 I mean, what does 1.6% take you down to?
00:11:07.040 I mean, it's something like 12%.
00:11:09.540 I mean, they're just disappearing.
00:11:12.380 South Korea is disappearing as a result of this.
00:11:16.040 And I'm not sure that this is necessarily a mystery of biology or anything.
00:11:22.420 Fertility doesn't collapse because people can't afford kids. 1.00
00:11:25.020 Because, of course, I mean, in a sense we can, but we're so heavily taxed and two couples have to work
00:11:34.000 in order to just get a home.
00:11:38.540 And by the time you've done that, you're in your mid-30s and people want to have a home.
00:11:42.540 But people could be having kids in rented accommodation.
00:11:48.500 It would just be very difficult to sort of make any life progress
00:11:51.520 because so much of the tax burden is placed upon the young.
00:11:55.880 And all the subsidies are geared...
00:11:58.100 I mean, the NHS is basically a subsidy to old people, essentially.
00:12:02.820 I mean, it does some young stuff in there.
00:12:05.100 It does a bit of maternity, which all less and less, as is the point of this video.
00:12:11.200 But we built economies based on fertility delay. 0.99
00:12:17.840 That's essentially what they are.
00:12:19.940 Go to university, then get a job, then save for a house.
00:12:23.400 And if you're lucky and you're successful, you know, maybe you get there by the time you're in your 30s.
00:12:31.020 Probably mid-30s.
00:12:32.900 Quite often late 30s.
00:12:34.780 And this model of government is going to need to break because this is an ageing demographic time bomb. 1.00
00:12:49.120 And as we get to the point where there are simply two...
00:12:53.000 And I'm going to get into all the figures in a minute.
00:12:54.520 I'm going to go through a whole bunch of countries and just show you how bad this is.
00:12:57.000 As this collapse continues, governments need to be thinking about new models for how does this work.
00:13:07.680 Because the retirees are going to have to live on less.
00:13:12.040 That's one option.
00:13:13.360 I mean, for a start, move things like pension age from 70 to 75.
00:13:17.940 And then possibly higher as well.
00:13:20.180 And, of course, there's going to be enormous pushback from retirees for that.
00:13:26.060 And they actually vote.
00:13:27.500 And there's lots of them, which is the problem.
00:13:31.400 Retirees work longer. 1.00
00:13:32.760 Or the benefits that they get, the pensions they get are cut significantly.
00:13:38.580 Or you need to find a way to tax young people more. 0.63
00:13:42.040 But if you tax them...
00:13:42.660 And we were already at the stage where a lot of young people are thinking,
00:13:44.860 what's the point of staying in Namex Western country? 0.61
00:13:48.000 I mean, why should they stay?
00:13:51.000 If they're being taxed to the point where they simply cannot have anything for themselves,
00:13:55.860 they're basically just working for that money to go straight out the door to retirees,
00:14:01.120 well, they're not going to stick around.
00:14:04.880 They're just going to leave.
00:14:07.320 And you end up in a completely unviable, inverted pyramid.
00:14:14.560 And it's not going to work.
00:14:15.820 So let me take you through some of the figures, and you'll see what it means.
00:14:23.780 So hopefully on screen you should be seeing my scorecard system
00:14:27.200 that I put together on a whole bunch of different countries.
00:14:31.580 And basically what I wanted to do is I wanted to take three data points.
00:14:35.320 I wanted to take 2000, which of course we have perfect data on because it's in the past,
00:14:41.580 as a starting point.
00:14:42.960 And I wanted to tell the story of this century.
00:14:46.420 And that ranges from the year 2000 to the year 2100.
00:14:51.020 So a hundred year period.
00:14:52.720 So our first data point is 2000.
00:14:54.920 Second data point is 2050.
00:14:56.860 And we could be pretty damn sure of those numbers because, well, I mean, when it comes to retirees
00:15:06.100 and actually most of the workforce, we already see the data from the birth data.
00:15:11.080 So, and we're halfway to 2050.
00:15:12.960 So it'll be fine.
00:15:14.100 And then actually these trends, they don't spike or they don't, they don't, they don't,
00:15:22.360 the curve of fertility and birth rates is pretty consistent.
00:15:26.020 And it holds up over many decades.
00:15:28.260 In fact, it holds up over centuries, these smooth curves of where fertility, you know, waxes and wanes.
00:15:35.540 And so actually you can also project forward to 2100 pretty accurately.
00:15:41.900 So I'm going to give a snapshot of various countries at those three different points.
00:15:47.240 And we'll just take a look and see what is happening.
00:15:49.380 So we start with the UK.
00:15:51.080 So in the year 2000, our starting point, we've got a total population of 59 million.
00:15:57.740 Median age, 37, which is, you know, that's right.
00:16:02.400 That's healthy.
00:16:03.880 Fertility rate, 1.64.
00:16:05.760 Now it's starting to get concerning, even in 2000.
00:16:12.200 But 1.6 is not a disaster if you can put out from it.
00:16:15.780 If you can shift that, you're okay.
00:16:19.560 You know, it's not existential at 1.6.
00:16:23.340 And the proportion of over 65 is 16%.
00:16:27.740 And then I've got the dependency ratio here.
00:16:32.940 Which is, I mean, yes, of the over 65s generally are dependents.
00:16:37.000 They're going to be wanting a pension.
00:16:39.200 But of course, children are dependent as well.
00:16:42.200 So how many dependents per workers?
00:16:44.220 Well, in the year 2000 in the UK, it was 54 for every 100 workers.
00:16:47.980 So essentially, you had two working people to support a dependent, which could be a child.
00:16:54.800 It could be a retiree. 0.60
00:16:57.540 And, you know, it's not super great.
00:17:01.920 It's not like it was in the 80s.
00:17:05.460 But it's pretty solid.
00:17:10.180 Two people working to support somebody who isn't.
00:17:13.380 Yep, that can probably hold up.
00:17:16.740 And the foreign-born share in 2000.
00:17:20.240 Of course, Tony Blair was in power by now, but he hadn't been in power very long.
00:17:23.200 So the foreign-born share of the UK was 8%.
00:17:25.440 And actually, they were largely European or, you know, a splash of commonwealth.
00:17:33.020 Now let's look at UK in 2050.
00:17:37.000 Population is now 73 million.
00:17:39.780 So we've had a quarter increase since 2000.
00:17:43.740 Median age has shot up by a full decade to 44.
00:17:49.180 Fertility rate continues to drop.
00:17:51.100 It's now down at 1.55.
00:17:52.740 This is trending worryingly.
00:17:54.320 The proportion of over 65s is now 26%.
00:17:59.140 So one in four Britons are now retired.
00:18:04.800 And the dependency ratio is now 80 dependents per 100 workers.
00:18:12.820 That's getting a bit more trouble.
00:18:15.200 We're nearly at two workers per retiree.
00:18:21.520 And then you've got to add on the kids.
00:18:24.320 So each worker is supporting 80% of somebody who isn't working.
00:18:30.360 And the foreign-born share has gone up quite significantly.
00:18:36.140 Now, a fifth of the population is foreign-born.
00:18:41.420 And those inflows are, you know, they're not European anymore. 0.72
00:18:45.360 They're less commonwealth.
00:18:46.440 They're South Asia. 0.97
00:18:48.400 They're Africa. 0.99
00:18:48.960 Splash of the Middle East. 1.00
00:18:53.180 What is the UK looking like in 2100?
00:18:58.340 Population has gone up.
00:19:01.460 80 million.
00:19:02.500 So on the face of it, that looks good.
00:19:04.280 That looks good to the government.
00:19:05.480 Anyway, median age is now 49.
00:19:08.940 I mean, that is worrying.
00:19:12.400 I mean, you need some 49-year-olds because you're probably at your peak at 49 when it comes to a set of skills and expertise. 0.88
00:19:23.560 But, I mean, take it from somebody who's 45.
00:19:28.640 When am I, 46 now?
00:19:30.460 Did I turn 46?
00:19:31.540 I'm either 45 or 40.
00:19:32.980 I lose count, honestly, at this age.
00:19:36.180 I start to forget.
00:19:37.780 But anyway, people in their late 40s, you don't want to look to us for running up and down.
00:19:43.220 You know, ladders and moving things around.
00:19:46.100 I mean, we can do it if we have to, but no, I mean, that's not us.
00:19:53.060 We just don't move the way that we used to.
00:19:57.440 So, yes, I mean, some older people when it comes to expertise and stuff, I mean, at 49, you should be training the next generation.
00:20:05.720 That's what you should be doing.
00:20:06.880 That's where all your energy should be going, really, but not the actual doing.
00:20:11.620 Fertility rate dropped to 1.6.
00:20:16.380 This is well below placement rate.
00:20:19.760 This is worrying.
00:20:21.560 Proportion of over 65s, it's 30%.
00:20:25.580 That's a lot of retired people in the population.
00:20:30.900 And 90 dependents per 100 workers.
00:20:37.180 So very nearly one-to-one at this point.
00:20:39.580 Every person who works is having to support somebody who does not.
00:20:44.660 If you enjoyed that content, and of course you did because you are a smart person,
00:20:49.320 then why don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for as little as five pounds a month,
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