YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Morland

lines on the record: 48
first: 2022-06-06
most recent: 2022-06-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And again, I hate to be boring, but I'm not actually that interested in making a judgment about that. I am interested in observing it, and I am interested in saying if you care and the current trends continue, here's what will happen.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are people, there are individuals who care very passionately and strongly about their continuity, the continuity of their ethnic group or religious group or nation. And there are people who totally don't. And I think there are patterns of that. And I'm not sure whether one is normal and natural and the other is not. I think it's quite an individual thing.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a question about why a philosophical question, perhaps about why we care about anything after we die. And I was having a discussion with a friend and we were talking about a related subject and he said, well, I will be dead by then and I don't care. Once I die, once I no longer have consciousness, I don't care. I think 500 years is not a helpful time frame because there is so much uncertainty. So we might as well ask, why would we care what it will be like in 100 years' time? And again, what I'm trying to do is lay out the facts. what it will look like, what the trends are, and people can choose to say whether it matters or not. I think it does matter in terms of, you know, will there be Italians or will there be Italians? That will play into the world and it will affect the way the world is, whether that, you know, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, you know, it's another matter. But I think the relative weight of Africa will significantly change the world.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great powers of Europe. So, all other things being equal, a big population is a major help to be an economic and political and military power without a doubt.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say read The Human Tide. That's my last book, which has been out in paper bat for quite a long time. All other things be equal, having a big gang, having a big army, having a large population to man the factories that produce the armaments has helped you. And I think that is the general rule in history. And it's the exceptions. Again, it's a bit like Ukraine and Russia because we are in Europe. We focus on that as a conflict. But I think it's the exceptions like certain victories of Alexander the Great of the Persians. There are times in history where the numbers are Trump, but all other things be equal. If you have more people, you certainly have the potential to have a big and bigger economy, to produce more armaments and to man a larger army in the field. So it's no surprise that, for example, in the 1830s, de Tocqueville in the United States traveling around said there are two countries that are going to be superpowers in use that word in 100 or 150.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One might have said in the 1960s or 70s, there's China with this massive population, very, very poor. They're all going to come to Europe, clearly, aren't they? Well, no, they're not. The poor world can get rich. The rich world can change its fertility. The rich world can get poor. The rich world can choose to have immigration. I think once we get into the world of inevitability and the loss of choice, I think it's quite dangerous. I think it's important to have debates about these things to come to decisions democratically and to implement them and not assume that things are inevitable. And if a country or society said we do want mass immigration, we don't care about ethnic continuity. We do believe in integrating or even not integrating communities and having a very diverse society. I think that is down to societies to make those choices and decisions.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't believe anything's inevitable, actually. I mean, in my lifetime, the two things I've most often heard were inevitable. And people probably, first of all, Irish unification, it's inevitable. And, you know, the vast majority of people, it's still a big majority in Northern Ireland don't want it. And I'm not sure it is inevitable, although it's more likely post-Brexit than it was. And the other thing I remember hearing a lot in the early Blair years was Britain joining the Euro is inevitable. Well, your struggle to find people who believe that now. And I think, Erica, a point you've made to me in the past is a country like Singapore surrounded by very, very poor mass, very, very large population in Indonesia that's quite poor. And the Malaysian population also is nothing like the per capita GDP of Singapore. And there's tiny, tiny Singapore. They don't have illegal immigration. I think they choose what immigration they want. They manage it and they control it. I don't think there's anything inevitable about likewise.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although I admit I use the word egoism to fit neatly in this trilemma, I think that's too judgmental and I try not to be judgmental but simply to point out what the consequence. First of all, what are the facts, what's going on? And secondly, what are the consequences of those facts?”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the book, just to simplify things when I talk about this choice, this trilemma, as I call it, I use the word egoism. So you can be egoistic by having a small family, you can have an economic buoyant economy, and you can have ethnic continuity. So they're the three E's. You can have two, but not all three of those. And that's how I sort of frame that trilemma in the book. I don't really want to say they're selfish. I mean, I think again, I'm trying to point out the consequences rather than to preach at people. And as part of the book, I went out for coffee with a couple of friends of mine. The stereotype is more as women get more educated, they have smaller families. So I went out for a couple of coffee with one friend of mine who's a Cambridge graduate with six children and another one who's an Oxford graduate with seven. And one of them said, actually, maybe I've been selfish because I love having children. And that's what I like to do. So I think although...”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a national group wishes to persist, it must have children. The only other model, of course, is a very effective assimilation. But we know that's a very complex process. It's not very easy to manage. And if Italy in 500 years were inhabited by people who are not descended from today's Italians, who knows how they will identify what language they will speak and what religion they will practice, and therefore in any meaningful case, whether they will be Italian.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there definitely are if you don't believe the Italians are ever going to recover from a well below replacement level fertility rate, then why would there be any Italians, more than a few thousand or tens of thousands? You can do the maths of each cohort halves. And I've got a chart in the book, I think, about five-year-olds in Italy. I think they'll be about a third of their peak level before very long. And there are lots of ethnicities and nationalities in the past that have for one reason or other died out. I mean, we don't talk about the needs anymore or the Goths. So we shouldn't be surprised if in 500 years time they're not talking about the Italians or the Koreans. I mean, it really is down to ethnic groups and to nationalities, to nations, to groups collectively. Just as if an individual wants descendants, he or she must have children. So if a community or a”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asia, for example, and they weren't going to hit this terrible barrier of falling fertility rates and aging populations and declining population. And certainly in Africa, although I admire their pronatalism,”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think if you look at the history of the world over the last few hundred years, what we've seen is a fantastic rise in the population, totally unprecedented. But now we're seeing a really, really rapid slowdown in that rise. So it's gone from 2% a year to 1% a year since the 70s. By the end of the century, it will probably go to about zero. Meanwhile, our technology does mean that the carrying capacity of the world is growing and growing. So all sorts of technologies like wind power and solar power mean that we can actually support more people in the world. Personally, I think, and this won't necessarily make me very popular with the environmentalists, I think the world can support the kind of population it has today and that we'll probably all be best off for the time being with modest population growth, the sort of population growth you get if people are having two or three children. I think it would be far better for the world if that were more evenly spread. So if more people were having children in East”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Age. So I went to a concert and I heard a 90 year old conductor. Do an amazing job at the proms in 2017 or 18. I can't remember which it was. I bumped into a famous artist in a queue in the airport. And I met a retired philosopher and MP that was Brian McGee at the opera. And he was still writing, but really interesting books, actually, well into his 80s until a year or two before he died. And then I give the example of someone who had to work in a Walmart or something in America not particularly happy about. So I don't think there's any one big answer. And the number is 73 or 62. But I think it is true. We've got better health. We've got more years ahead of us. And it is a real cost to society if we just give up and probably a cost to us individually because we know that doing nothing. Isn't very good for you.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I knew at what age I should retire. I'm certainly not in the business of giving advice. So I think, I mean, it's an interesting question because as we get fewer people into the workforce, there is more demand for people. And we've actually had this kind of big exit from the workforce of older people, people in their 50s and 60s. If I took the point of view of a demographer or an economist, I would say, come on, we're healthier, we're younger than people of 50 or 60 of a previous generation. We've had good educations. The workforce need, we're needed in the workforce. We've got more years ahead of us of life. And to retire at the traditional ages really doesn't make sense. I think I talk in the book of some interesting encounters I had with people who were working very to a very, very old age.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanting more people and benefiting economically from those extra people, whereas no part of the world has been more historically overcrowded, full of people than China and other parts of Southeast Asia and infanticide was very common in China in the as late as the 20s, probably, and Japan throughout history is not very well documented, but people have done research. And in these societies, they were living at the edge again, it's debatable, but broadly for much of history. They were living at the edge of Malthusian constraints. They may be East Asia is inherently a, I won't call it antinatal culture, but there may be something that's deeply embedded in the culture in East Asia, in Africa, in opposite ways because of a kind of contrary position relative to the kind of Malthusian model.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, it's very hard to know. I mean, generally they're low because they have the features we associate with low fertility rates. So educated people, urban, high incomes. And there's a correlation in East Asia as elsewhere between high income and low fertility. But there is an interesting question. In some ways it ties into the question that we've discussed recently about Africa and whether sub-Saharan Africa is an exception, why fertility rates in large parts of it are not falling as rapidly as they might have. One theory for why they aren't falling in Africa, which could possibly give some explanatory force to what's happening in East Asia, is the following, that in Africa, with the history of slavery and the sheer size of the continent, there's not a history of land constraint. So people did not live on the Malthusian frontier. And for much of history, they were constantly needing more people.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20 30 years have been in countries like Libya and Syria and Yemen where there have been Six or seven offspring in the last 20 or 30 years, I think the conflict there would have had a lot more flammable material. That doesn't mean it's about to die out. And I know it's been rumbling away in Donbass and Luhansk for quite a long time. But I think the lack of sort of endless supply of angry young men in this conflict will have an impact on it. And I do think you have to look at the round. I mean, being in Europe, we focus on this conflict very much and it's very important. And the loss of life has been very high. But we kind of lose track of conflicts where the loss of life has been much higher, like the democratic republic of Congo or Yemen. And we're just a bit less aware of those young societies where actually there is a lot more war going on. So it is an exception, but it's not such a big exception as our perspective would lead us to believe.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'd broadly agreed with Hasse's argument. And of course, my book came out making this among other arguments just at the time that Putin decided to invade Ukraine. The only redeeming feature, however, is that at least my book turned out to be a nice Ukrainian color. I think it is the exception and I don't think it's the only exception, but it doesn't, one conflict. I don't think Has or anyone else has argued that things like this can't happen. But one conflict doesn't prove or disprove a rule. And there is no doubt, notwithstanding what's happening in Russia and Ukraine, that the really big conflicts in terms of loss of life in the last”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, for the religious to inherit the earth, truly to inherit the earth, what is required, as you know, is first of all a persistence of this very high fertility. We don't really see signs of it coming down yet, I think, among the Hutterites or the Amish or the Haredium, although we have seen it come down a bit among the Mormons who are anywhere a bit different because they are more enthusiastic to bring people in as well. So the first thing is you would need that to continue. And for generations and generations, and we don't really know whether it will continue for another couple of generations. And the other thing is as society changes radically, they will still need to be able to retain their people. And again, we can't imagine in 50 or 100 years' time what the world will be like. But I think what by studying demography, we can at least ask these questions and start looking around and start debating them and realize that on the answers.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secular urban societies as being a bit like big cities used to be in the pre-modern age. So in the pre- by pre-modern, pre-demographically modern age, I mean before the 19th century, somewhere like London sucked in the populations of the rural areas. London has had relatively low fertility rates. London was a high mortality place. It was actually much healthier to be in the countryside in those days. Cities were pretty unhealthy, but it drew people in. And the rest of the country sort of pumped people into London. It was a kind of population sink. And you want possible scenario is that these communities do continue to exist, but that in a way they pump people out and those people man the secular society and do the jobs that a lot of those people don't want to do, don't want to have the education to do. So that's one possible model.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the answer is we don't know because one thing we don't know is how society will change and therefore whether these subgroups will manage to continue to keep their people within the fold. But one analogy I've thought of, and maybe we've discussed in the past,”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it really is about the choices that countries are. So rather than prescribing one thing or another, and I know David Aronovich thinks I did in my book, I'm really trying just to say we should make informed choices based on the information and the data. And, you know, we shouldn't allow, you know, we should, if there are very anti-family, antinatalist people, we should point out what that means for them. But equally, if there are those on the far right that start talking about replacement and so on, we should draw out very clearly that immigration is not some dark conspiracy. It is basically a consequence of 50 years in this country of sub-replacement for do the jobs we need people to do.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That expertise to say when that AI is going to deliver. But if people won't have families of a reasonable size, then societies will be faced with a choice of at least societies that have got the luxury of being able to attract immigrants. Of course, some countries aren't rich enough to attract immigrants. They don't have a culture like, you know, for example, China and Japan may or may not want immigrants. But Chinese and Japanese are not spoken widely in the countries which have a high excess population that could come. So whether they want them or not, it may not be that easy to attract people.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My view is it's a choice that countries have to make. And I keep on having the kind of ethnic balance broadly that they have in the countries at the moment without mass immigration and keep their economies on track. But to do that, they do have to have lots of kids. I mean, at least replacement, at least two or three. If they don't do that, then they have a choice. If they won't have the sorts of sizes of families that will create the workforces, that will drive the tankers and fill the hospitals and provide people for the nursing homes, then they're either going to have to have immigration or they're going to have to find ways of doing without, which in the long term may mean the rise of the robots. But as we know, at the moment, the robots can't do lots and lots of things, even as basic as sort of gathering bins and, you know, garbage collect. So there's an awful, you know, again, they may come to the rescue like the Amish in 100. And again, it's not my area.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That buys you a certain amount. But when we use that up, as it were, if we're still having one or say at that point we're having one child per woman and each cohort's still getting smaller, it's only brought you time. It hasn't effectively solved the problem. But that certainly makes it less alarming. Maybe that will buy us enough time for the Amish and the Haredim to have enough children to kind of compensate for the lack of offspring of the rest of us.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way, it's a bit like the Shimthane argument. So there were other factors at play. But on the other hand, if Shimthane, if the Catholic community had grown and grown and grown and carried on growing, demography would have been dominant. Similarly, we can cope with a certain amount of aging because exactly as you say, older people are getting younger in the developed world, and that will happen in the developing world. They've had better diets, they've had better health care, all sorts of, they've probably led more cognitively stimulating lives. So for a whole set of reasons, there is going to be that upgrade, then there's still a lot of upgrading to happen in terms of education. Our friend David Goodhart talks about kind of peak education. Maybe we've gone as far as we can in the developed world in terms of university educating people, but there's lots of parts of the world where we could still be educating people more and getting a lot more from them. So there's a lot more give, as it were, in that. But nevertheless,”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massive rise in education. I give the example of women in Bangladesh who are about 90% literate today when Bangladesh got its independence back in the 70s. It was perhaps 10 or 15% female literacy. So we're having a huge qualitative upgrade of people, even if we are seeing a big slowdown in the growth of numbers. And that's true whether you look at literacy at one end or tertiary education at the other end. And then finally, I look at the huge growth in food production, which has made this all possible and allowed the Malthus thought we'd always be on the edge of, we'd always breed out the edge of what we could through production of the world. And it turns out he's been turned on his head, not only can we now control after fertility, but we actually have fantastically expanded food production globally.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you get very old populations like in Japan and what sort of economic And eventually you get population decline. I give the example of Bulgaria, where the population were roughly half in the century to 2080. They've got very low fertility. They've had it for a long time. They don't have much immigration. Being a poor country in the EU, they have mass pretty high emigration. So it's a sort of perfect storm for falling population. And then I kind of wrap up with the two things that surround this demographic system. On the one hand,”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, it's not really a problem for Singapore. Singapore can turn on the taps of integration, but other countries can't necessarily or certainly turn on the taps of ethnic immigration that would allow it to continue to be a broadly sort of 70, 80% Chinese and 20, 30 percent Malayan Indian country that it is. And then once you've got low fertility, you then start to get an aging population, fewer young children rising life expectancy. And then I talk about the median age in Catalonia, which in the mid 40s, I argue that that's why we didn't get a civil war in Catalonia when they had a referendum and voted for independence and didn't get it. I sort of compare that to Sri Lanka, similar scenario, violence kicked off. It didn't kick off in Catalonia. They're all too busy sort of sipping their coffees in the sun.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the mortality rate kids are dying within the first year as a percentage is perhaps where Britain was in the 90s. So you've been quite poor countries really leaping ahead. Then that's leading to the second thing, which is population explosion where this happens in places, particularly in Africa. We're going to end up with Africa by the end of the century. There'll be six or seven Africans to every European back in 1950. There were about two to one European Africans. It will be a different world. People ought to understand that. Start thinking about how that will change the world. But then as you get a population explosion, you get a mass urbanization. And I give the example of China, where there are perhaps 10 times as many cities with more than a million people now in China than there were in the whole world on the eve of the First World War. Most of these cities we've never heard of. So massive urbanization with urbanization comes a fall in the fertility rate. And I give the example of Singapore, one child per woman, each cohort half the size of the last.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The human tide looked at this story of the transition, of the demographic transition, which I described earlier, and how it spread across the world. So really it's a history of the last 200 years from a demographic perspective. And when I was writing that, it occurred to me there was a need for a book or a gap in the market for a book, which said, okay, if population change has driven human history, then it must be driving the world today and it will drive the future. Instead of this book being like The Human Tide Wars, a history essentially, it looks at a moment in time which is now, and it says, what are the big trends going on in the world and how are they shaping the present and how are they shaping the future? And I do that in 10 numbers. So broadly, they're all kind of linked. I start off by talking about Peru as an example of massively falling infant mortality rates. fallen very quickly in Peru, but it's Peru is typical of many, many countries.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The kind of societies we live in will change, for example, as Uset wrote in your book Shall the religious inherit the earth? If there is an association of a very patriarchal traditional lifestyles with that high fertility rate, then those communities will presumably become more important and the norms of society will change whether those groups are actually capable without the rest of us in sustaining a modern society. We'll see. Well, we won't see. Maybe our great-grandchildren will. Exactly.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of your second question. So the genetic, I'm not really qualified to talk about it, but the problem with that, I mean, it's a really interesting theory. I don't have the genetic knowledge to know if it's true, and I'm sure it will be debated and geneticists will look at it. I think the problem with that is that you and I know that there are communities with fantastically high fertility rates. Actually, there are two problems. The first problem is they're still quite small. So that gene may be quite small, may not be very wide in the population, and therefore it may take a lot, we may go through the valley of the shadow of not death, but near death before we come out the other side when these populations really stuck. Because if they're sort of doubling every 13 or 15 years, but they're still very small, it might be two or three hundred years before they can really replace the sort of population we have today. The other thing is they don't always have the kind.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With regard to the second point, just on that point, something I often repeat is that when I joined the workforce in 1980, in the 80s, there were two people in their early 20s in Britain for everyone in their early 60s. So people might retire earlier or later or study longer, but broadly, entrants were two to one to leave in the workplace. And that's now evened out. And that's why I think we're feeling this tightness in the labor market. You actually start noticing a shortage of labour all the way through when you can't get someone to work for you in the office or you can't get, I mean, earlier last year we had petrol tanker drivers, lack of them. There's a lack of nurses. There is a general lack of labor. And that's what happens. You get an aging population which has its own many challenges and a shortage of a general shortage of labor. And then in terms of...”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Singapore and Malaysia to the Strait of Gibraltar and walk on countries which only own countries which have fertility rates at or below replacement. And it's all moving in one direction. And even within Africa, we know Southern Africa is well ahead of the rest of the continent and North Africa in bringing its fertility rate down there are some countries like Kenya and Ethiopia where it's definitely falling and other countries it's more slow. So I think even though we accept that Africa's got decades of population growth baked in, much of the world it will be a problem. And I don't think that's deniable. And everywhere I go at the moment, I'm seeing stories about shortages of people. We have an employment and in labor at all ends of the economy.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, starting with the first point, there will be those who say, how can you say we're running out of people? Africa is many countries and sub-Saharan Africa have a very high fertility rate. They've got years and years, decades and decades of high population growth baked in. I think the answer there is that those countries have lots of people. Globally, however, the world's population is beginning to slow down significantly. A large population in Africa won't necessarily sort the problem for Korea or Japan or other parts of the world, including potentially Europe. So it's not, people aren't fungible. You can't just move them around. So I think a lack of people in large parts of the world will be a problem, even if Africa still has booming fertility rates. And I talk in my most recent book about what I call the infertile crescent. So you can walk all the way from the Straits of Johor.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a bit weak, but I say it's destiny, but not all of Destiny. I mean, the way I put it is that you can't understand history all the world today, all the future if you don't get the demographic basics. On the other hand, to think that from the demographic basis, you can read the future. So if somebody said, here's 1920, you know nothing about history after 1920, but I'll tell you everything you need to know about the demography. You can't then write the history of the world or the future on that basis. So of course other things come into play. My argument throughout, though, is that demography is really interesting and it's really important and it's one of many lenses like economics for example or like major political movements political thought but without that lens i think you're really missing something whether it's understanding the past or the present or having some grasp on the future”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Administration, and they quite like it. A lot of people in Scotland vote for the SMP because they like but don't necessarily want unification. And of course, in Canada, you've seen the same, in Tamil Nadu, we've seen the same. Sometimes you get nationalist parties that are quite successful. But actually the spur for their movement, the spur in the case of Ireland, Irish unity has gone, against which if you had had continuing high differential Catholic fertility rates, then I think the writing would be on the war of the universe.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But actually, this election has more to do with the way that the unionist vote changed. And what I would argue, and what I did actually argue in that article, was that because the status quo is unionist, it takes a real Republican majority to move that. And if you've got a growth of these communities who are maybe intermarried or who don't strongly identify, then I think that takes the wind out of the sails of Irish unification, although, of course, Brexit has added into them. And I may have quoted to you a well-known Northern Irish politician who I've got to know a little bit, who said to me, you know, we'd love a few tens of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese because, you know, we need them in the economy. And apart from that, they ain't voting for Irish nationalism. So even if they voted alliance or they didn't vote, or even if they, you know, we end up with a chin.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I wrote an article more or less saying it didn't. And the headline that was chosen not by me was Chin has won the demographic race or something along those lines. Look, for sure, if Catholic fertility hadn't been higher in the 60s and 70s, if we'd remained at a two to one ratio, which was what was sort of initially baked into the partition in 22, we wouldn't have the political situation we have now. However, what I think is interesting in Northern Ireland is the way that both communities are facing a fraying at the edge. There's a growth of people who don't strongly identify as one or the other. Obviously, the rise of the alliance has helped that. Actually, the pro the explicitly pro-Irish unity parties did not do better. I think they got a slightly lower vote at this election than at the last one. The underlying circumstances have helped Sinfei.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the classic cases of the First World War. So, if you look at the period, say, between 1870 and 1914, France, for interesting and not fully understood reasons, had a very So I think the two takeaways from that are first of all that it has led to a kind of paranoia and secondly a related fact that when you look at your neighbor and you think they are perennially more fertile are going to be a demographic threat, it's worth asking the question, is that really the case or is it in fact the case that they're just one step behind you in the demographic transition?”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You start to get a pattern in the demography rather than the random walk. And that, I think, is what makes it interesting, particularly to look at the demographic history of the last 200 years.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expands, and in Britain's case, first mover advantage it allowed Britain to populate the United States, Canada, Australia, and really provide the kind of institutional basis of those countries, even though other populations then followed. And that trend then spread across Europe. You see in the late 19th century millions of Italians, people in Austria-Hungary kind of spreads South and East across Europe and eventually to the whole world. So that's kind of the first thing that changes. And eventually as people get more urban, more educated, more wealthy, and the technology of contraception improves, people's family sizes decline. And eventually you get to the low fertility, low mortality phase, where a larger population kind of evens off. And then the interesting thing, and I'm sure we'll come and talk about, is what next? So the point of the human tide was really to say from that point in 19 around 1800, start the 19th century,”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quadrant, 1800 years. So although it's really interesting to look at individual demographic events like the Black Death and think about what their implications were, the underlying demography doesn't really follow a very set pattern. But then what happens around the time that Malthus was writing ironically, because Malthus kind of said that's the way the world is. We slowly improve our productive frontier. We slowly improve the population. And then around that frontier, we have good and bad years, but nothing's really going to change. And what really happened then is we started the demographic transition. And it started in Britain and in Northwest Europe, and then it spread globally. And that really is the story of the human tide. So in Britain, first of all, you have a heavy fall in mortality, which is a light rise in fertility rates, a heavy fall in mortality rates. And if you've still got big families, but fewer people are dying and people are living longer, the population.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it always mattered. So if you have two societies at war and one suffers a plague, for example, or one for some reason manages to get hold of a new piece of land and grow its population by expanding its agricultural base, that's always mattered. The reason I started my second book, The Human Tide, around the year 1800, though, was until that point I argue you kind of more or less have a random walk in population. So you have good years and bad years, you know, the seven good years of the harvests in Egypt and then the seven bad years. Long term, you get a general rise in population as technology improves and people's ability to create food improves. But broadly, it only quadrupled between, say, the days of Julius Caesar and the days of Queen Victoria, which, I mean, those of you who want to do the math, that's really, really slow to.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I then sort of started to pursue the say what? There are two sides of that question, I suppose three sides. First of all, what's happening? And then there's what lies behind what's happening. And then there's say what question.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are asking me that more these days, so I'm forced to reflect autobiographically a little bit. And I think the two things that really interested me in demography and its consequences were, first of all, the fact that I was born and brought up in Wembley, which probably has seen faster ethno-demographic change the most parts of the country. I was very early in seeing that. So in my childhood, I saw very, very rapid change in the nature of the population in Wembley. The second thing that I guess interested me is when I got married and I and my contemporaries and family members started to have our own families, noting the very different fertility choices of friends, some of whom had no interest in having children, some of whom for various reasons had six or seven. So that kind of piqued my interest. And then I guess.”
2022-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Demography, with Paul Morland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT