Welcome to Copy Time, a podcast series on Markets and Economies from Devi S Group Research. I'm Tau. We chief economist. Welcoming you to our 133rd episode. Today, we will touch on demographics, a topic that has deep implications for economic growth, financial market outlook and social stability. Our guest is Jennifer Schubach, an expert on the field of political demography. She recently became the President and CEO
of Population Reference Bureau. She also has affiliations with the Wilson Center and he Center for New Frontiers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her latest book, 8 Billion and Counting how sex, death and migration shape our world. Jennifer. A warm welcome to Kovi
Time. Thank you very much for having me
and welcome back to Singapore. Yes,
it is as busy as always. I think that's right.
You were here, I believe about 1415 years ago. And what brings you to Singapore?
I spoke yesterday at the Singapore Council on Women's Organization's first annual summit uh for Action on Gender equality, which is uh I argued that we need to look at our population issues through a gendered lens and we'll ask different questions than we might otherwise ask and get different answers. So I think it sheds a lot of light on what's happening with demographic dynamics, particularly in Asia.
Fantastic. I don't think the intersection on gender and demographics are fully appreciated. So I'm glad you're taking a stab at that. Yeah. And
you think it would be because, you know, biology and yet somehow it is not really on the radar of a policy maker.
That's right. Great. So Jennifer, I want to take advantage of your experience and expertise on demographics as much as I can today. But I want to start with a couple of technical questions. So when I look at UN National Prospects Database, fantastic database. Great website. I use it all the time but it's not just one forecast for population, there are probability bands around population projections, then there are variants, low,
medium high constant fertility, variant, instant replacement fertility. Can you break down these various measures of demographic projections for us? Sure.
So you know, when you're thinking about how to approach the variant, you want to think about how are you going to use them? So there's different uses for different ones. I'm a huge fan of the constant fertility variant. It says if everything stays, stays the way that it is right now, what does the future look like? And this is what I love about demography. I'm sorry that you're an economist because you
don't know what's happening tomorrow. But I do, right? Is it, it's a real privilege to be able to look out into the future, many years in the future and have a sense of what it will be because so many of the people of the future are already born. So the constant fertility variant is useful when we want to say what, you know, if everything stayed the same, how does the future look? So if you want to prepare for that
type of future, then you can do so. And then as you start tweaking those underlying numbers, that's where you get this rainbow of projections. So you know, the UN actually has hundreds of projections just by tweaking those underlying variants. Most people use the medium and it is the one that the UN would say is the most likely to happen. It is made with a mathematical model and it's based on uh the past. So how do we use the past to inform the future?
It's not my favorite though because my background is actually politics and political science and I'm not sure that that not, you know, failing to contextualize an economic, political and social variables is really the way to think about the future.
I think I want to call this podcast, contextualizing demography. And I think you want to revisit this issue over and over again. I think I also am persuaded by the constant fertility matter and I really found resonance in it when I saw your TED talk where you had these projections that, you know, this country's population go down
by 40% by the end of the century. If we go with the constant variant, uh constant fertility variant, and then to your point, you can start preparing or if you don't like that outcome, maybe you can change.
And I think, you know, it's really important if you are someone who actually uses these projections in your work to make a difference as you know, economists might do to understand what, how those assumptions are tweaked for the future. And there have been some things that, that I would
really disagree with. So if we look, for example, at the difference between the medium and the constant fertility for countries like Nigeria or Tanzania just over the next uh what 16 years, just out to 2040 it makes a dramatic difference in the total number of people. I think it's something like um the constant fertility variant versus the medium for Nigeria, I think is a child and a half different. That would be. Now think about Singapore's total fertility rate is less than one child. So
where is, is a huge difference? And so there are these assumptions that you can tweak that say, do you expect fertility rates to go up where they are currently low? And historically, the UN has put that in there? And do you expect them to come down where they're high?
Correct? OK. If I were to travel back in time to your last visit to Singapore. So 2010, 2011 and we opened up un prospect probably it was not as elegant a website then. It, it
was such easier to use though.
And, uh, and, and we looked at the forecast sitting at 2011 and we looked at the forecast for 2024. How spot on with those forecasts would have been?
What I remember the most was how optimistic they were. So they were optimistic in two ways. Um I've always been a Japan watcher and I remember noticing how uh the expectation was that Japan's total fertility rate would rise in the future. Well, that certainly has not happened. In fact, you know, most of these rates have gone lower and I think there was a sense that surely it can't stay this
low for this long. So there, you know, they thought it would go up and then there was also an expectation that it would come down faster, basically in a handful of Sub Saharan African countries where it's still high because it really fell fast in most parts of the world. Um But there have been a handful of countries where it has remained high. Some demographers call it a fertility stall. I mean that in and of itself shows that there's
a bias towards assuming a rapid decline. Um but they were also overly optimistic about how quickly those rates would fall
so the 8 billion mark that is looming would have been at a different point in time.
It wasn't really because actually they kind of canceled each other out. So, you know, we knew it was 12 to 13 years roughly in there, which is, you know, pretty close.
I use a lot of these data for my work here at D BS. And as you can imagine, as a aging society in Singapore, this issue is very close to our heart. Um One question that I sometimes confront is the forecast on India versus Japan, China versus us. Are they all comparable? Are all countries producing decently comparable data?
Well, no, not, not necessarily. Um And there are multiple groups who actually put out population projection. So Population Reference Bureau does one as well. We have our world population data sheet which we put out for about 60 years, comes out um in September most years and uh our demographers do their own sorts of projections. And so there are a lot of sources of data if you were to open up, for example, um the methodology for Afghanistan. So like how does the UN actually know
what's happening in Afghanistan? We know that this is a, you know, there's a lot happening in this country. So how are you supposed to figure out where the population is? You'd have two paragraphs of them fig of pulling together data sources, um USA ID funds a series of demographic and health surveys, the DH S that's a really solid source for um
inputs into these projections. Um But sometimes there's also a little bit of picking up the phone and calling other demographers and, and experts in these countries and these regions to say, here's what the numbers say. What do you think about these? So there's a bit of a human touch in there outside of that medium variant that I really, I think is actually very useful. But just to so, so look the sources will be somewhat different, but they're going through the same filter.
So in my mind, I'm comfortable enough saying that they're comparable and that it's the filter part that matters.
Are there ways of sort of triangulating the data? So you bring me demographic data, I bring you tax collection data and we can see that if a country's projection is huge pickup and the labor force in the country saying there's lots of people working, we should be seeing that in other
and then some of that happens as well and they could pull from all kinds of different record keeping. Um You know, the hardest part is the migration piece because by definition, these people are on the move. So there's a lot of guessing that goes into the migration part as well.
Jennifer, I was in Cambodia recently and they sort of, you know, talk about the killing fields in the seventies and how life expectancy collapsed there. I think to like 23 or 24 there. It's come back amazingly well over the last 40 years. So that kind of reflects the resiliency of society that a demographic shock need not be fatal. And there are ways to rejuvenate. But also it sort of brings me to this question that, you know, what are the shocks
that alter demographic trends? Did the pandemic change demographic in the world?
Not really. So obviously, for the people who died in their families, it was very much a shock. But when we're talking about in these aggregate numbers, it didn't. Um In fact, I think already that's kind of worked its way out of the data in some part. It's because many of the deaths were to people who were already finished with their reproductive years. Um But even for fertility rates, they basically went to
where they were before. And in the U SI, I've always talked about it as it just put the, it pushed on the gas pedal directions we were already headed. So maybe you a little bit of an acceleration, you know, life expectance in the US was already on the decline, which is insane. By the way, it should not
for a wealthy industrial society.
Yeah, even generally like, you know, unless absent a giant war, it is absolutely insane that it would be going down. And so it just pushed on the gas pedal a little bit. Fertility trends already headed down. Maybe you push on the gas pedal a little bit. And most demographers would say that people who were going to have babies, they might have delayed a little bit and then picked right back up.
What about the pandemic bump? People were all staying at home and not working, didn't they have a lot of babies? No,
not this time. Yeah. And like some of the data we've seen about even what power outages in the past and then you can kind of trace up now.
Fascinating. So it seems to me that we have pretty powerful trends in motion and we have seen policy experiments here and there around the world. And so far, the power of the trend seems to be overwhelming to a large extent. Um I'm gonna come back to that uh because I want to talk a little bit about the issue related to Scandinavia and so on, but just drivers of fertility. Uh I know it's a big subject but, and I'm sure you get lots of questions on that.
So let's talk about what drives fertility rates.
It is a lot of things which actually is what frustrates policymakers. And I'm sympathetic to that because as an academic, you know, the the best study is when you can say, which is the mo what are the most powerful explanatory variables here? And then if you're a policymaker, you can take that research and you say, well, let's tweak, let's put a policy in place to address this and voila problem solved, but that's not really how these decisions are made.
And I think anyone who has considered having Children knows exactly what we mean. When we say that it's complicated. It's never just about the money or the ti, you know, timing. It's so many things. But if you think about fertility rates as a big old pot of soup, there are a few different ingredients that go in and that are pretty standard. So modernization matters and modernization can be a whole host of variables like um education rates for women.
So if you're talking about a country where fertility rates are very high, let's say 56 Children per woman. And you bring in um educational system where women especially make it to secondary school. You're gonna see those rates fall also in modernization, incomes are rising. So opportunity cost goes up, uh more opportunities to earn income outside the home. You know, all of that kind of comes in together there more robust health systems, access to family planning. And so that is one driver.
You also have government policy which and it's hard to analytically separate some of these because the government policy will often be let's put in schools or put in health clinics. But I with modernization, I like to think of it as processes that are in motion that that the government may or may not have put in motion itself. Um But government policy can change the trajectory of trends as we know, think about China and many India, many other places.
And then there's the family planning piece and it really is, it's often left out of discussions which I find puzzling but just the technology of being able to decide how many Children to have and when is really powerful.
I bring this up with some degree of trepidation and hesitation because this is a podcast on numbers and, and trends and policy. But let me go there anyway, uh last week, there was an article came from Apple News. I can't remember the source, but it was that there
is also something beyond all these macroeconomic societal factors. There is this question of purpose that there is a generational shift on sense of purpose and people feel that between climate change and geopolitics, they're not hopeful about the future and maybe that plays a role. It's hard to put a finger on it. But what's your thought on that? I think?
Absolutely. Yes. And you know, if I'm trying to keep it simple, I kind of stick it under the modernization umbrella, but it is different. And it's funny because, you know, now that I'm the CEO of PR B, the first time I ever learned about the Population Reference Bureau was to attend, I mean, this is well over 20 years ago, I guess, but it was to attend a seminar that was trying to explain why fertility rates were so low in eastern Europe
and I'll never forget it. Uh because they, they, they talked about all these same kind of variables we mentioned and they said really, there's just no people feel so dismal about the future and we do see echoes of that today. Um especially, you know, anecdotally, you speak to a young person, they talk about that all the time. Um There, that is some of it. But as far as how do we know for sure if that will shape fertility behavior? We don't know yet. And that's because these
young people have not completed their fertility. And so there are some papers that I've seen that say, yeah, they may feel this way. But we all know you, you have a cer certain set of way. You think the world works and you're 20 you're 25 and then you think a lot differently about the world later. So we will not know we have to do this again in 10 years to say, did it actually drive people's fertility behavior lower?
It makes me a little sad because I'd like to think that optimism should be at the younger age spectrum and the midlife crisis and everything should be later. But it's like we're hoping it's almost the opposite. Now, you're starting out kind of jaded about the future. And then hopefully, as you make money, as you get gainful employment, you get more purpose.
Well, and I think we're caught in this, this echo chamber because think about the type of news that comes in our phones. It's all that and it's right there. It's in our faces all day long. And for young people, that's all they're surrounded by. Whereas we didn't grow up with that type of flow of information. And there are, I, I was speaking to a group of young people, um, actually young people in Asia the other night, uh, in the US. And I, I said to them, you know, there are places where you can
read good news. Um, Angus Hervey, who is out of Australia, I think he was at uh TED the same time I was and he has his whole shtick is, here's the good news and it's real news. It's evidence based and it's actually showing what has happened. Um Hannah Ritchie was also at, at TED the same year as I was and she, she talks about environment and she had a book out. Um, what year earlier
this year, I think as well. And she says these are all the things that have gotten better, but that is like a, a grain of sand on a beach.
Come back to the issue of modernization. The theory has been that when you look at a country like Sweden or Norway, once you become very wealthy, then people start behaving a little differently because there are so many safes in place and they then do have babies. I would have thought some of that would play out in Japan. That hasn't happened. So, not quite a convincing argument.
Well, I think we moved the bar on ourselves. Uh, you know, when I feel very fortunate, I think mine, mine was like the last cohort of people who could basically buy houses in our early twenties before things started to get out of control. Um, but even the expectations that younger people have today for what they wanna achieve before they have Children, it has really moved up, up, up. Um And I think, I mean, we could go down a rabbit hole about a technology.
I do keep coming back to, I remember um when my kids were very young was when Instagram was really starting and the only messages you'd get about parenting basically were how hard it was or the perfect mom who is throwing the perfect party that probably costs $500. Well, neither of those things is very attractive when you're thinking about having Children. Uh You're
thinking just really about how incredibly expensive it is. And so a lot of the people I was speaking with actually yesterday at this summit were saying how the competition for like who can, who can just be better, more educated, have a higher income. It's really spiraled up and this puts a downward pressure on fertility itself,
correct? OK. This is a medical science question. I really don't know if there's an answer to this description, but just from a women's health perspective. Are women today asked for a child? I know it's complicated because there's a choice issue there. But just from a biological perspective, well,
there waiting later. So, and that is just very simple stats, you know, people are marrying later and then they're waiting later to have their first child. And when you know, sitting in Asia where mo you know, most marriages, I'm sorry, most Children are born within a marriage. That means that marriage becomes an incredibly important first step before you have Children. So if people are waiting later to get married, then they are starting their families later. And so we do see um a lot more women
of older ages seeking assisted reproductive technology. And those, those, you know, we see that around world, I mean, in the US, for example, the only age group, I think that was seeing an increase in births was 40 to 45. But that's because they were waiting later.
So it's not health but health, technology and choice.
Yes, I think so. Now this is, you know, there are other people who have said that it's infertility. I don't buy it because if you study data just on preferences, you see that preferences
shifted, correct. And that's, that's probably the most powerful one. So let's talk about Japan a little bit. Japan has had a demographic time bomb ticking away for the last several decades. And we see stories of, you know, villages getting depopulated, the country being forced to embrace certain aspects of immigration that Japan was not really open to in the past.
This is the bad stuff. But at the same time, when I look at Japan's economic performance over the last 2030 years, while we say there has been a lost decade, but because they have had basically zero or negative population growth rate, their per capita income has gone up. So the Japanese who are around are significantly more prosperous today than they were. While just looking at the demographic story, it looks like a bad story. So how do we net this out? I think
we had nothing but wild guesses about what aging would look like and its effects on the economy. Now, other people would say they're not wild guesses, they're based in all these economic theories about productivity and labor and all of that. But we didn't know because we've never in human history had this type of demographic shift. So we took our logic from the past, which by the way, this logic was made at a time when population growth seemed like it would
be infinite. So all of our economic theories, all of our cases have to do with that. And when we kind of say, well, it must be different in the future. I think we also have applied what we know about individual aging to populations that you lose your capacity to be innovative. You have cognitive decline you'll be less of a risk taker, you're tired and not productive. And we put all of that on what population aging would look like and what it would do to the economy.
And so now we were surprised that that didn't necessarily happen. I think in Japan's case, they were great there. If anybody was going to go first, I'm glad they went first because they do show what's possible. And I really, if, if I really mean that I'm glad that they went first because imagine a, a country, I'm not gonna name
any other country names here. But imagine a country where technology was not so robust or the population wasn't so educated or even consumption patterns or views on older people, all of these things together made it a great case to say, look what's possible. I think it, I I saw some statistic that something like half of Japanese firms still use um
workers who are over the age of 70. So these are things that I don't think we really thoroughly accounted for when we were making our predictions of the future. We
just assume over 65 retired
productivity. That's why I would never use dependency ratio. I, I mean, I guess when I first started, I used it and I quickly threw it out and said, I will never use this as a measure because you can't compare Gree with Japan in terms of dependency ratio. It's not that there's a magical number, you become a dependent.
Right. There's like 56 years difference in the official retirement age. You got more de facto. Yes.
And I don't, yeah, I don't even use official retirement age either. I think about what's the effective retirement age,
but one bottom line would be that you should be rich before you get old. From a
perspective. I will say we don't know what is the should part. So, so here's how I think about population aging, they're always winners and losers. It, the winners and losers will be different in different settings. Um Let's say, for example, if you are a um a poor country and there's population aging, the losers will be the families and the older people themselves um who really might not have the resources to go around.
Is it going to bankrupt the government budget? Maybe not, maybe they are the winners because they never put in place those systems in the first place versus maybe a European style welfare State where there are all these extensive promises to the population. Well, the winners and losers might look different there. So it's, it's really all about those trade offs.
All right. That's, that's fantastic. And I'm glad you brought that up. Um It's hard to talk about demographic trends without one corollary of demographic trend, which is migration uh for opportunities for uh you know, push factors, you know, people move around. So when you think about demographics in dealing with demographic, uh you know, trans aging, for example, how do you contextualize migration
most of the time when I get questions from, you know, there's always a question from the audience on migration and there's always an assumption that the flows of the future will be huge. I think everywhere I go, it is look what's to come. When several years ago, when people started paying more and more attention to climate change, look how many people will be displaced, the flows will be huge. I don't think that at all doesn't mean people won't need to migrate or won't want
to migrate. But I don't think that they will be able to migrate. I don't see any if I do a temperature check around the world. There's nothing that tells me here they come. Um And in fact, speaking of winners and losers, people who will be displaced and maybe need to move, they will be the losers. In this case, I see nothing but borders and actually, as I think, you know, put
it in conversation with low fertility. So these low fertility, high migration societies, there's a lot of discussion and conflict about the right, the, you know, the right mix of migrants. Um And I know that in, in Asia, there's a lot of discussion particularly in Korea and Japan about what role will migration play in the future in compensating for those labor force losses. And most of the time I hear people talk about Europe and say, I'm not really sure
we actually want to go in that direction. Is there another way to do it? Um I think most people do not realize that 96% of the world's population still lives in the country in which they were born. And I think the reason that it gets so wrong in the popular media is that the elite in the world, they have moved you. We're, we're in Singapore right now. This is a group of people whose bias would be thinking everybody moves. I've given a talk in Silicon Valley.
I always ask this question. I mean, spoiler alert. If I, if I come give a talk for anybody who's listening, I'll say pop quiz, what proportion of the world's population lives out the side of the country in which they're born and in Silicon Valley they're like 50%. And I said, yeah, that's because you all moved, you know, but it's way lower. So it's been, you know, two
or 3% for, for decades. I, I think there will be reasons for people to move but labor does not flow like capital, that's for sure.
Of course. Uh I also think that some of the migration of people might be supplanted by migration of robots going forward. I had this discussion, Jennifer a couple of years ago, I was at us C and we were talking about economic future of the world, but in the context of China we talked about aging and
what that means for China. And there were a couple of Chinese nationals in the audience and they came to talk to me after and they said you do want to talk about China in the context of automation and robot organization because we are very much cognizant of the fact that our labor force is not what it used to be and we will embrace automation as enthusiastically more than anybody else.
Yeah, I believe that to be the case. I mean, I think, I mean, I'd be curious, I'm gonna kind of throw this back to you a little bit when I think about automation and, and aging, I tend to think that if it displaces some high skilled workers, that's probably good actually, since there'll be fewer in the future where I get uncomfortable. If it displaces low skilled workers in low income contexts, then we are in a different space,
right? What I would like to hope for is that a highly automated future actually increases the work potential of the low or the high skilled people that they can harness those robots and do more stuff as opposed to being fully replaced by the robots that a future should be characterized by even more capabilities and more options for us to do things. Not like, you know, just that one thing that was done by a human being would be
done by a robot. Why can we have a multiplicity around that, but that might be techno optimistic.
But I'm the same way too and I mostly am optimistic. And when I look at demographic trends, I, my goodness, look at life expectancy. We've added a whole another life to people and, you know, if it is the case that it gives us a better well being in the future, that's wonderful and kind of marry this with what we know about younger generations today and their feelings about work. They really prioritize well being. Uh so I'm not sure they're
willing to work the same number of hours. So perhaps it a perfect marriage,
correct. So what is your sense of your conversations with policymakers around the world? Like government of Singapore or government of the US or elsewhere? How are governments dealing with these extremely powerful and most overwhelming shifts in demographic trends?
No matter where I am, there's one important thing in common. They just wanna put the genie back in the bottle and that means how do we get more babies now? Even Singapore, which I am a huge admirer of. Uh and I think if you like incredibly innovative again, if anybody has to go through these types of things first, great for Singapore to do it because we can see what will happen. But the general conversation everywhere is tell us what's the secret,
what's the secret to more babies? There is no secret. And if I could have anyone, you know, if we could change anything. It would be, accept this and move towards resilience, the first country that does that and starts planning for a resilient society. Speaking of winners and losers, I mean, that, that put all your eggs in that basket.
That's the place to follow. So I keep looking for signs that someone gets it and they've moved past it and they're just thinking about, you know, retirement work, health and all of those things, Singapore possibly comes the closest to that. There's a lot of discussion about health span, uh health span versus um lifespan about wealth span as well. And, and so I, I see little bits of murmurings there. Uh But we're, I think we're already behind.
I became a citizen of Singapore earlier this year and immediately I was given access to certain facilities like SG health where the idea is that the health span issue that having a single general practitioner attached to you who has your records or refusing to go to a different doctor, the records digitally go to the other doctor and there's a continuous case record and the focus is on preventative care as opposed to spending a lot of money on hospitalization.
So I think that's one sensible approach to dealing with a population that will be increasingly older going forward.
Absolutely. And I really do think that, you know, Singapore is pretty much the one place that is, and it helps it small because you can have lots of experiments here, small, well educated and innovative. So, you know, if you're going to have resilience, that's perfect.
Let's jump outside of Singapore a little bit and go to the rest of Southeast Asia. What's your sense? I mean, the one story that we always talk about in this region is Thailand, which is not a high income economy but displaying advanced economy type demographic dynamic.
Yeah. Well, I know it's really, I'm also curious about Thailand. I, what? So again, my whole career I've heard and it was always spoken about China old before, rich, old, before rich. And so I've always tried to think why, what is, what does that actually matter? Is it about household savings and income security in old age? Well, how could we offset that if there's a really strong, you know, family support there. Is it about the types
of jobs that people will have? So I don't know if I think Thailand, I think the total fertility rate there is like Singapore, one child per woman. I don't know if I buy that. All of these countries that are seeing these demographic trends before they're rich are doomed. What do you think I'm missing?
I think you make a very good point. I think the view is from a very traditional growth model. You need a certain amount of money and a certain amount of people to get a certain amount of growth, assuming productivity is sort of constant around that if you have less number of people, you'll get less growth, less growth is like them because disaster economies can think of and therefore, you know, you are doomed. And so do you need immigration or do you need to have ways to encourage
women to have more babies? That sort of stuff? But I think that given your train of thought, I'm sort of persuaded by the point that you don't necessarily think about pushing back against a very overwhelming dynamic. It's a bit like climate change and we can take a lot of mitigating measures. But we basically have to deal with the world that will be warmer tomorrow than it
is today and today is already warmer than yesterday. Similarly, with aging, I think that again, I think you made a very good point with respect to Japan. We probably were optimistic about Japan's demographic trend 20 years ago than what has turned out to be and might as well then have a very conservative approach instead of being overly optimistic about it. So plan with the view that fertile der don't change and then see what are the opportunities around that?
I think that climate, I use the climate change uh all the time to say, you know, you sure let's try to stop the warming of the world, but you're not just going to sit there on your front porch with the water lapping around your ankles and think, well, how do we stop the world from warming, you're gonna try to put your house up on stilts. And so this adaptation and resilience is exactly um how we need.
And now can I ask you about growth though? I uh so I come at this from an environmental studies perspective actually, um And when I look at the, we've already got 50 shrinking countries, I think. So this, this is already happening. We're already there. And yet I don't see anything changing in the conversation about a bias towards growth, a fetish of growth actually, what would it take or is it impossible for us to move away from thinking that the ultimate marker of
success is positive growth. Even as a country's population is shrinking,
it's hard, it's easy to just stay fixated on national accounts based numbers, you know, which is not a very old construct basically began after the second world war when we had the whole war economy input output and national accounts made sense this much capital, this much labor. This is the amount of value that we are creating. We haven't gotten out of it. We as economists are culpable of not being able to inform the world that there are better ways of looking
at prosperity, social welfare and well being. So for me, for example, Singapore's biggest achievement is not a very high per capita income, but the fact that it has one of the highest life expectancies in the world that its population has some of the highest education attainments in the world. So I would love for us to look at it from a multi dimensional perspective. But I think policymakers find it easier to deal with a dollar amount and that being a proxy for success achievement,
very hard to get out of that. And uh so I'm not going to say that there is some bright new shining field of economics that's going to change the way we look at it. Nobel Laureate, Aaren and Joe Stiglitz a few years ago, maybe about 1012 years ago, wanted to sort of, you know, break forth alternative measures of GDP different ways of looking at it. It was
an interesting thought experiment didn't really go anywhere. I think for the remainder of our mutual professional careers, we'll have to deal with a point that if population shrinks growth goes down and that's the worst of all, the worst of
all. And it's a shame, I really do think, yeah, maybe, maybe in the future, but I do find the same thing when I talk to people in the private sector about what does it look like to scale down and the, the, the, the eyes just bug out and you, you know, you'd be at the airport and what is on the screen behind you, what is consumer spending look like? And it's just all of these markers that we expect.
And I, I do find that it connects actually with our views on the environment because again, if you're measuring everything with spending uh or with growth, then that really conflicts with what we're trying to do environmentally as well.
How do you reduce emission when you want to actually burn more electricity to run the genii models that we want to use now?
Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit easier with the environment actually than with aging because you say, well, there's a huge, uh there's a lot of money to be made. We make these shifts towards greater things.
So that's one thing that again is close to my heart because as a bank, we think about what are the financial opportunities around an increasingly silver population and what kind of financial engineering options you can give them so that whatever money they have, it can go longer than what we have thought was necessary even 1015 years ago.
So that is something that I think banks, insurance companies, pension funds in Singapore in the US in Europe will keep on doing, going forward because going back to my immediate response to you, which is that the growth fetish is not going to go away. So that's, it's what it is. Um I am sure Jennifer that you get asked about China and its doomsday
scenarios are on aging all the time. How do you respond to those people who think that China is destined for really bad things because it's aging so rapidly.
Well, one thing I say is that China is not as surprised as you might think China is. So if you, you can read documents from 40 years ago where those in charge said, all right, if we put in place these policies that encourage or more than encourage lower births in 40 years time, we will be an aging society. So they knew that would happen. I think the surprise part is they thought they could reverse it. Um And you know, so, but they're not alone in that.
What I tend to say is I actually think that democracies will be and this is not, this is like a hard thing to have. Democracies are way worse off when it comes to population aging, it gets back to this winners and losers thing. The thing about demography that I said, I love is that you can see the future it requires though long term planning. Are you in a political system that can long term plan? I do not live in one, I live in one
where the before the election is over. You're already talking about the next election. So how do you long term plan to deal with a shift in basically the center of gravity of your population, you cannot do it. You also have electoral penalties. Think about in France when people took to the streets because they're trying to raise the blue collar work, you know, from like what is it? 55 to 57 or 57
to 59. There are these huge penalties and checks on that if you're in a system that is less responsive to pressures from the population and in a system that can plan longer term, I think you have an advantage there. So I do not see as much of a doomsday scenario as maybe other people do.
I remember in your TED talk, you had this striking observation that in Romania Ceausescu tried very hard to force people to have babies and it led to like rather dire outcomes where people just abandoned the Children, they were all ending up in orphanages and of course, very soon thereafter, again, fertility rate collapse. So don't, don't try to force it now too much because it doesn't really go anywhere.
The other point you made in your TED talk and that will take us to India is that while we think of India as this big tail wind characterized economy with lots of young people, actually, the working age population of India has already peaked, already peaked.
And you know, if you ask back to references, if you look at the data on what are, what's the preferred fertility rate? It's even lower. I think it last I saw was around 1.76 and then the overall fertility rate was at two. So as soon as people can act on those preferences, it's going to keep going lower. Um Yeah, do, of course, I came up in a time where everyone was obsessed with the bricks and thinking about this is the future when we start looking at is India, the
next China, which is a common question. And I'm doing this with a demographic lens. I really notice a difference in the human capital situation, particularly when it comes to women. And so education, you know that and, and I think that's why is a gender lens useful again when you have 1.4 billion people, that's a lot of women. And you know, the be most highly educated women have some of the lowest labor force participation rates. And so I don't see the same um setting and backdrop to
capitalize on. We call the demographic window of opportunity that I know you talk about all the time to reap a demographic dividend. So my expectation would be you won't reap as high of a demographic dividend.
Absolutely. I mean, this issue is something that I have talked about a lot in recent years, which is India has to raise its female participation rate in the labor force. You would not get a demographic dividend. If you a don't educate the young and b don't bring the women into the labor force. And these are two challenges that India still has not fully delivered on uh Jennifer attitude. So we talked about initially, you know,
policymakers and how they're thinking. Uh but societal attitude toward aging, are we becoming more respectful of people with gray hair. Are we, you know, getting ready for a world where there will be lots and lots of people who are 65
you're a bank, how much money is there to be made in? Trying to look like you're not old, substantial, substantial. I don't see it happening anywhere. I mean, you know, when you're really looking for it, we can pluck a few things out. Like look at the grand influencers. Uh you know, there uh some of the modeling campaigns will change and maybe your products change a bit, but I think there's still a huge fear of aging and I'm, I don't see that changing. So
we're aging, but we're still agist. Yeah,
we absolutely are.
Um So just as a bottom line that we have powerful demographic forces, we're not fully ready to embrace the fact that it's heading in that direction, we still think that the policy to occur or middle income provision there takes us there. So then why do you remain somewhat constructive or optimistic about the future?
That is a very good question. I think that being a student of history and being so macro and generalist is what makes me optimistic because when you zoom out and think about where we were just a few decades ago, oh, we're so much better off. So let's just think about health and life expectancy. That's the one everyone knows. Of course, and what we'll see all the time. Oh,
cancer rates are on the rise and all that. Well, some of that's because we're actually living long enough to be able to get cancer. Uh So you're always gonna, you have to die of something. So, the shift to non communicable diseases though is fantastic. That's a marker of success. You don't want people to die prematurely of them. But overall, it's a good thing and I actually think the same about fertility rates as well
with ac at a really important caveat. So worldwide, two out of three people on this planet of 8 billion now live somewhere with below replacement fertility rates. They're able to do so in part because they know that if they have a fewer, fewer number of Children, they're gonna live to reproductive ages. So that is a vote actually of, of confidence in the future in one sense. And, and so, you know, fertility behavior um is, is an
example of that. And here's the caveat though, if you just told me about a society and tell me the name of the country or anything like that. And you said this is a country and the total fertility rate is six. What do you know about it? I would say there are a lot of things that are really broken in that society. They probably have very low female educational attainment, they probably have rampant child marriage, poor health outcomes and probably an unstable government and they're poor.
If you tell me that a country has a fertility rate of around one. I also think that there may be, that may be an indicator of some things about that society that are broken and I think it goes beyond, but it's part of it, what you said about optimism for the future. I think there is pessimism for the future there. And in those societies where it's really low, those gender relations
tend to be really broken themselves. And so, um if you start looking at the household level, you see that it's very unequal uh the amount of time that men and women spend on unpaid labor at home. And then women are often highly educated in these societies and they are spending a lot of time in work. So I would say they're being asked to birth more, work more and care more and increasingly they're saying no, just no. And you know, you can get this from feminists in the region who
will say we're just gonna opt out of the system completely. So, you know, we think about reproduction is reproducing the system you're in. So if you're opting out of that, I think that says something about the society itself might not be serving their interests,
right? That's like ultra modern. You're basically saying no to the biological imperative. It's a bit of a sober note to end on. But I, I really appreciate your insights, Jennifer. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. It was great to have you and thanks very much to our listeners as well. Copy Time was produced by Ken Del Rich Violet Lee and Daisy Sharma provided additional assistance.
All 133 episodes of the podcast are available on youtube as well as on all major platforms including Apple Google and Spotify. This podcast is for information only and does not constitute any investment advice. Have a great day.