The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 16, 2025


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Our Demographic Future


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

146.91101

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 .
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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