Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2024

Front Burner Transcript for October 10, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

JP: It's no secret that people are having fewer kids than they used to; having them later in life or choosing not to have them at all. That's been the case for a while now. But maybe you've been hearing more about the birth rate lately because of people like Elon Musk and Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. The truth is, it's not just Silicon Valley types and conservative politicians that care about this issue. Declining birth rates and aging populations are a global problem that governments around the world have been trying to solve for some time now. Including here in Canada, where we hit a new record low fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman this year. That puts us among the lowest in the world. So today I am talking to Jennifer Sciubba, a demographer, political scientist, and the president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. She's one of the leading experts on this, and she's going to talk to me about why birth rates have plummeted, what's at stake, and how this issue has become so politicized.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Jennifer, hi. Welcome to Front Burner.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Thank you, Jayme. Great to be here.

JP: I am really, really looking forward to this discussion. So I wonder if we could start here. If you could put this moment into context for me, because for a long time there was more concern over overpopulation globally, right? For example, China had its one child policy to curb population growth in that country. When and how drastically did that change?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: It's been changing for a long time, but no one noticed. And that's what is new about this moment, is that these forces that were beneath the surface -- a slowed population growth rate -- these have been going on since the 1960s. But because of the way population growth works -- because of mass -- people on top of the planet, what we could see around us and in front of us, was that population was really growing. And so what's happened now is that we're at this moment where what's happening on the surface is now caught up to what was always happening beneath the surface. And we really noticed it when we hit 8 billion people in November 2022. And I was doing media interviews and there was a lot of coverage of this.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER 1: It's a momentous time in the history of the world. The world's population just ticked over 8 billion.

REPORTER 1: Eight billion people now inhabit our ball in space.

NEWS PRESENTER 2: If you're noticing more people everywhere, that's because there literally are. The United Nations says 8 billion people now populate the planet.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: That's when I think people really started picking up across the world that there was something different about that 8 billion milestone than there was 7 billion milestone, you know, last decade. And when China was surpassed by India as the world's largest country because of different population trends, I think that was another really important moment to have people notice what was happening.

JP: Mm-hmm. And just elaborate for me a little bit more on what exactly it was that they were noticing. What problem were they seeing?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, they were noticing that there were far fewer children compared to those of working ages. And at first, that seems like a great thing. We had several countries that reaped what was called a demographic dividend, which was just an economic boost from having lots of people in this working age population that were invested in with the right kinds of policies. So they really saw this, this bonus there. But what happens is that, of course, over time, those people in the working age population start to age. So what everyone notices then is that there's a flip in the age structure from being a very young one where the average person would be younger, to one where the average person would be older. And they also noticed that it wasn't just a handful of countries anymore. I mean, I started studying this, you know, 20 years ago. I guess more than 20 years ago at this point. And we were talking mostly about Japan.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER 3: Japan is home to the world's oldest population. About a third of its residents are aged over 65 years, and 1 in 10 people there are aged 80 or older.

COMMENTATOR: It's no surprise that Japan, which has had this very, very long, very low fertility rate and the oldest population in the world, has got the worst government finances in the developed world, because the government is indeed spending more and more on health care and pensions and has fewer and fewer tax payers.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Some about Germany and Italy, because they had had low fertility rates for a long time in these rapidly aging populations.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 2: Take, for example, the town of Acquaviva Platani in Sicily. Founded four centuries ago, the town's narrow streets and position high atop a hill once made it difficult for invaders to pillage. Today, young people find it difficult to live and work here...

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: But when we look now, I think the UN just reported that there's something like 50 shrinking countries. I had done some calculations a few years ago where there were already over 30. And so populations really began to age, and then, to depopulate.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: The Economist argues that for countries with low birth rates, "the implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises."

[music]

JP: I'm so curious about this. What are some of the reasons for the declines that we're seeing, you know, especially in developed countries? I imagine that this is quite a complex answer, hey?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: It is a very complex answer. And that can be really frustrating for political scientists like myself who love to have one or two explanatory variables. Or demographers, or for policymakers who perhaps want to change those trends. But yeah, it's a lot of things. What's really interesting is that globally, though, there are a lot of things in common, and one of them is cost. Everybody -- and that's something that people can just intuitively say, Yeah, we know, everything's expensive now. Housing -- very expensive. There's a, there's a housing shortage I think about in the United States.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 4: Builders completed over 1.5 million new housing units in the 12-month period that ended in July 2024. That still wasn't enough to end a housing shortage that's a decade in the making.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We built fewer homes this last decade than any decade going back to the 1960s. So going into the pandemic, we were already facing a housing shortage.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I've just come back from Singapore and South Korea. [JP: Mm-hmm.] Young people are talking about how the only housing available to them is really small.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 5: Roughly 63% of total homes in Korea are apartments. Unlike Australia, which has too little housing, the problem in Korea is there are too many apartments.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: And obviously, you're not going to have a large family in these really small homes. Or if you still live with your parents and you are an adult, it's hard to form those independent relationships and kind of move towards your own family formation. So cost is one.

JP: That's definitely an issue here in Canada as well. I'll just say.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Oh gosh, yeah. Housing in Canada, I mean, this is really something to watch, right?

JP: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: For sure. Cost of education can be really high in different places, um, that could discourage you from, from wanting to have larger families. People are also waiting later to get married and later to start having children because they'd like to hit these certain milestones in terms of income or promotions at work. Or like to have a job at all in the first place. And of course, the later you wait, there is a biological limit in terms of reproduction for women. And so the chances of you having a large family decrease over time the longer that you wait.

JP: You mentioned education. There's career advancement for women. But what about the role that access to contraceptives has played here? And, you know, in some ways, isn't that a sign of progress?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Absolutely. In fact, in the United States, it's always a really interesting Q&A when I'm giving a talk on this, because people... you know, you have some audiences who are talking about how awful this is. And I'll point out that a large reason for the U.S. fertility rate going down is that the teen pregnancy rate went down. And that was something that policymakers and communities had really worked for for a long time. So, yeah, absolutely. Having more control over your own reproduction -- when do you want to have kids? How many do you want to have? How far apart do you want to space them? That's all gotten easier as contraceptive access has gotten more prevalent. And that's actually a worry for me. Because that is such a great thing -- let's keep that. As we talk about low fertility rates -- and I'm someone who talks about them all the time -- I worry about the degree to which we cause alarm over them or problematize them. Because I have a fear that it might put those rights under fire, and we absolutely do not want to do that.

JP: And just, just one thing I wanted to be clear about. I said before, you know, why we're seeing this in developed countries specifically. But it is not just developed countries, right? This is, [JENNIFER: Absolutely.] this is an issue that we're seeing the world over.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, it's not just cost, of course, that changes people's patterns of family formation. There are other things going on as well. And I think one of them to pay attention to is a shift in values. So, you know, and this is funny because I'm a mother of two children and I'm very glad that I have them. And they're, they're really wonderful, and I'm glad I had when I did and had all those choices. Fantastic. But of course, with that comes an opportunity cost. And for me, the opportunity cost was still in favour of having children. I knew what I would, quote-unquote, "lose" in terms of maybe sleep or career or any of these other things. But it was worth it to me. When you talk to younger people today who are thinking about having families, they don't find the opportunity cost worth it. They would rather choose those other things than having children when they're able to have those choices. And that can be really hard for us to measure. It can be really hard for us to address if you would choose to do so from a policy standpoint. But we even see it, I mean, we certainly see it in wealthier countries, but we also see it in countries that are maybe not as wealthy. So, what's remarkable about this moment is that this trend towards low fertility is really global, with only a few exceptions. Two out of every three people on our planet live somewhere with below replacement fertility levels. So think about that as below two, one to replace each parent. [JP: Mm-hmm.] That means a country like Thailand, actually, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world: around one child per woman on average.

[music]

JP: In Canada, I know, you know, our immigration levels have risen a lot in recent years, in part because of this. Um, now the majority of our population growth actually comes from immigration. And so what role does that play?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Immigration, depending on the form of immigration, can really supplement workforce shortages. So there may be particular skills in a society where, um, that are really necessary. They may be in health care, for example. Think about Japan that's really... has a lot of older people, but has had a lot of shortages in terms of nursing, and can bring in foreign workers to fill those specific areas of the labour force. That's a big part of it. But immigration looks so different in different places. I always want us to add lots of nuance to this conversation, because, you know, sometimes a country could have an immigration scheme like Canada, where it really uses immigration to fill the workforce. Other countries may just want total numbers of people. And so they may say, well, you can come and-- but your spouse can't work. And we're fine with that because we're just looking for extra consumers, for example. That's something that we're going to hear much more about in the coming decades as countries debate whether or not they want to use immigration to compensate for population aging and shrinking, and in what form and what ways they want to use immigration for that.

JP: And if I were a country who wanted to try and turn this around with policy, who wanted to try and increase the birth rate, what tools might I have available to me? What have we seen from other countries and how has it worked?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: You basically have nothing. And I would say don't [Jayme laughs] [indistinct], stop right now. [laughs] Because not only do I think-- not only do we not have evidence that, that there's going to be a long-term turnaround from doing a policy like a cash bonus, for example, to mothers or to families, I think now they're starting to do more harm than good. And that's something [JP: Hmm.] that's different as well. And I really see this in East Asia, where I would say that population politics is really gender politics. And as some of the politicians in East Asia have started talking about low fertility and what a problem it is and that it's an existential crisis, they've made population the problem. And of course, who has the children, of course it's women. And it's become this very instrumentalized conversation, where women and births are a means to an end rather than thinking about what these experiences of women might be. And there is a backlash. It's really, you know, causing some young women to opt out of the system altogether. We don't want to be part of this. We don't want to feel like we're being used for our reproduction like it's part of this, you know... You could go, like, oh, it's part of the capitalist framework and, you know, we're--

JP: Yeah, yeah.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: --you know, this is the labour that we are providing in this. I think it is causing those... You know, East Asia has the lowest fertility rates in the world. South Korea has a fertility rate of .7, officially. I hear unofficially it's even lower than that. Singapore has now gone below one child per woman. So, I don't think there are advantages to governments talking about women's reproduction -- lack of it -- as a problem and seeing solutions only as those things that might incentivize more births. I do think there's something different they can do though. If we focus more on well-being, the side effect may be lower fertility. Just like the side effect of education and opportunities to work outside the home, was lower fertility rates.

JP: And so when you, yeah, when you say well-being, what do you mean?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yeah. So, if we're talking about cost as being one issue, lack of childcare as being one issue, what are the experiences of that if you're a parent? They're, they're really-- they can really damage your, your well-being. So, it's more-- it's less about saying, We're going to give you child care so you'll have another baby, and saying instead, Let's help you with child care so that you have a better experience at home and a better experience as a parent. [JP: Mm-hmm.] It may seem like a subtle difference, but I think it's incredibly important.

[music]

JP: You talked about how we're hearing that this is an existential threat. So, I mean, some of the people that we've been hearing that from are people like Elon Musk.

SOUNDCLIP

ELON MUSK: Please look at the numbers. If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.

JP: I'm just really interested in what you think of that. You know, when you hear people say that this is an existential threat, this low birth rate. Um. Like, is it?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I get very worried when people use language about existential threat. Because if this is framed as a population problem, then the solution becomes a population solution. And that's where I really worry. If something's an existential threat, kind of like you might have a national emergency, for example. Well, what happens in a national emergency? Often the head of state will suspend rights, suspend rules, in order to get out of that emergency. Basically, they'll do what's necessary. Well, what could be necessary if we have this existential threat to a country because of low reproduction? Perhaps there could be the kinds of policies that were put in place when there were-- it was framed that having too many people was a threat to the nation. And so that means, of course, suspending rights and kind of forcing reproduction and... So I don't like that language. It's also inaccurate. Because let's be honest, trends do change over time. Right now, values about having larger families -- those are not in vogue. But does it mean that 30 years from now they won't be in vogue? Of course not. I mean, we could never have predicted the way that social media and technology would have taken over our lives and changed the way we interacted with one another, in the same way that we can't predict in 30 years what that will be like.

JP: We had a-- we did a show a while back on the Collinses. [JENNIFER: Oh, yeah?] They're this couple which-- who I'm sure you've heard about. They're from Pennsylvania. They're a part of that pronatalist movement. They say that a lot of their peers are tech types and venture capitalists. And just, what do you think of that, that movement, the pronatalist movement, which is really trying to encourage people to have more children?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, we see a lot of variety in a pronatalist movement. Perhaps some of my comments could be construed as pronatalist if I say, oh, let's make sure we're supporting families. So that's the-- you know, that's on one end of the spectrum. But there is a lot of other flavours to that. Um, you can also see there's... there's some less savoury parts of a pronatalist movement that really have a lot of tinges of eugenicism. And I'm a student of population history in different countries around the world -- it's one of my favourite things to research and write about. And you really see over time that governments or different kinds of elites -- like maybe a tech billionaire, for example -- who want to have more births, they never just want to have anybody giving birth. They tend to want to have certain sets of people have births. That could [JP: Mm-hmm.] be by race, it could be by socioeconomic status, it could be by education. And education actually does come up a lot in this. And then, of course, in pronatalism, there's a religious element as well. And that is absolutely not unique to the United States or Canada. You know, around the world, there are different religions that would have as part of their tenets to have more children. And so some believers would follow that and then have more children. So there's a lot of variety in what is termed the pronatalist movement.

[music]

JP: You mentioned that pronatalists come from lots of different stripes, but this has also been an issue that has been kind of front and centre in the U.S. election campaign. J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential candidate for Donald Trump, is one of the people leading the conversation right now.

SOUNDCLIP

J.D. VANCE: I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.

J.D. VANCE: Because if you don't have children, if you don't have families -- those are the bedrock of our entire civilization -- we don't have a real country anymore.

J.D. VANCE: We're effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies.

JP: I'm just so curious, before we go today, what you make of the way that the issues have become politicized in recent years, and particularly in the lead-up to this election as, as a right versus left thing.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I'm so sad that that is the way that this has gone. Because this is just another example, which we've seen too many times in history, of women being pitted against one another, and of seeing women's choices about family or work as political statements. When, of course, if we think about ourselves, I didn't-- I don't have the job I have to make a political statement. I don't have two kids because I was looking to make a political statement. My best friend who stays at home with her children, does-- isn't doing that to make a political statement. But that's the way that everyone's choices are being interpreted now. And one other part of this, of course, is I happen to have those choices. My friend has those choices. But it's not as if probably the majority of women are doing what they're doing because of perfect choice. Whether that is, maybe they carried a child that they had never intended to have, or they're desperately trying to have one and they're unable to do so. Or moms who wish they could get child care but can't so they're staying at home and they can't work. Or who are forced to work and can't stay at home even though they'd rather be at home. So, all of these ideas of choice and political statements and putting women against one another, that's really where this is leading. And that's such a shame because it's just not the reality for most women.

JP: Okay. Jennifer, this was so interesting. I feel like I could talk to you all day about it. But um, I really appreciate you taking the time and thank you so much for coming by.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Thank you. So glad to be here.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right. That is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

Birth rates are declining. Should we be worried? - Transcript

Social Sharing