#17: Paul Morland & Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers

In this episode, I sat down with Paul Morland,  author of the book Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers

We discussed: 
The driving  role education plays in demography and its link to decreased infant mortality and agricultural productivity. 

How technology is making people more productive but still: A Bookkeeper has more to worry about than a Dustbin man if robots ever take over. 

How 25% of Japanese under the age of 40 have never had heterosexual sex and whether this may happen in the UK/US in the near future considering the younger generation spends more time on technology rather than engaging with each other through more traditional social means (face to face!) 

And finally the average age of a population and the link between this and their appetite for war/ revolution.

The Book and Audiobook: Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers is out now.

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Transcript

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ng (00:00.198)
First and foremost, thank you, Paul, for joining the podcast. 

paul_morland (00:17.267)
Thank you for inviting me, I appreciate that.

ng (00:20.082)
 So I listened to the audiobook and it was very comprehensive and well researched actually so I wanted to ask you what was the most difficult part in writing the book for yourself.

paul_morland (00:33.311)
I think the most difficult part is actually being sensitive to the fact that we are on the one hand desperately short of people and short of children in much of the world. But behind that, although it's a social problem, there are lots of really difficult personal stories. And I try to be sensitive to that. In fact I interview in the book a couple of women, one with six children, one with seven. You may remember one's got an Oxford degree, one's got a Cambridge degree. Interesting I think because...

ng (00:45.634)
Hmm.

paul_morland (01:02.227)
They're educated Western women who are having large families and that goes against the trend. So what's going on? And they were both of them very, very sensitive themselves not to be boasting about the size of their family and to be understanding that behind the big social number, there are a lot of decisions which might ideally be different. But there's also a lot of heartache. And I think we have to be aware of that.

ng (01:30.134)
And also, I felt that there was a large emphasis on education that I noticed in the book. And that's in terms of the link between infant mortality with Peru and in the first chapter, as well as the link between education and better agriculture in productivity in one of the later chapters. So I wanted to ask you, what role would you say education plays in demography?

paul_morland (01:56.475)
It's really important and it's sort of behind everything. And I think you've put your finger on quite a few of those points. So first of all, when people get more educated, they are able to look after themselves better, look after their children better. So more educated people tend to have lower infant mortality rates. A literate woman is less likely to lose a child than an illiterate one. A university-educated woman is very unlikely to. So that sort of thing, one. And then as people get more educated, they're more likely to have access to contraception and to wish to use it as they pursue their own goals. So education in a way is the driver behind falling mortality, and then it becomes the driver behind falling fertility. And then, as I say at the end of the book,

Obviously it helps with things like agricultural productivity. If we are going to have fewer people, there may be a quantitative slowdown, but there's still a lot of qualitative gains we can make. And by qualitative gains, I'm not judging the quality of people, I'm simply saying that if we move from a world, say, when three quarters of people are illiterate, to one where three quarters of people can read, or one where only maybe one in ten goes to university, where maybe 40% or 50% do.

That means that apart from the personal value that that has in its own right, it does actually mean that fewer people can do more work and be more productive.

ng (03:27.294)
Okay, and would you say that the link between women deciding to, well, women having, becoming educated and essentially deciding to go down having a career path is linked to them deciding, having children later on in life as well?

paul_morland (03:46.847)
There's definitely that link. I mean, there's no doubt that as women get more educated and they have, first of all, that allows them to have access to contraception to use it, but you're quite right. It also means they're more likely to want to pursue their own goals. So I think that we're in a transition as a world and there are large parts of the world where people aren't at this stage yet. But when people get to this stage, they tend to have smaller families. And I think the big challenge for humanity now...

This is why I'm interested in Israel, is how do you get a modern Western society with equality, with women's rights, with women participating in the birth in the workplace, and a sustainable fertility rate. And I think the only country that's actually got that today is Israel, the only OECD country with a fertility rate above three and all the others are below two. So something interesting is happening there and I think there's probably something we can learn.

ng (04:46.938)
What would you say is well done in order to achieve that, that the West hasn't really, the West of the West hasn't really taken heed of or done yet?

paul_morland (04:54.247)
Well, I don't really know the answer, so I think I'm sort of trying to find the answer and probably pointing better brains than mine at the question. I think Israel is unique in certain ways. You know, some people would say that the shadow of the Holocaust is motivating Jews to have larger families. But actually in America, non-orthodox Jews have very small families. So I don't find that convincing. My first book, Demographic Engineering, looked at how fertility rates vary.

ng (04:58.478)
Hmm.

ng (05:04.16)
Hmm

Yep.

paul_morland (05:23.307)
in conflicts. And I think that there is that existential question that Israel faces. And I think in response to that, people have tended to have larger families. And of course, there is a very large religious element in Israel. But the interesting thing is, despite that, even the non-religious have much bigger families than the equivalent in other Western countries. So I think there are a set of special circumstances in Israel. But I don't think it needs to be unique to Israel. I don't see why others...

ng (05:37.379)
Hmm.

paul_morland (05:50.751)
can't learn from that if other countries wish to.

ng (05:56.702)
Okay, another thing I wanted to ask you actually was, were there any perspectives or beliefs of yours that were challenged in this book? And also after that as well, were there perspectives of others that you think will be challenged in the book if they were to read or listen to it?

paul_morland (06:13.667)
I think my general optimistic perspective that things will turn out all right in the end, that people are wise and that they make the right decisions was challenged. Because I do think that if the whole of the developed world is going to end up with sub-replacement generation after generation, this is going to be a real issue. But I think against that, the question that arises is how good is the technology going to be at replacing people?

ng (06:34.403)
Hmm.

paul_morland (06:41.595)
Now I'm really really skeptical about that at the moment and I always say, you know, I've got a problem with my roof, I need a roofer, I've got a dripping tap, you know, I've got to do some weeding and I haven't got the time, mum needs to go for a doctor's appointment. None of these things are yet being provided to me by the robots. We've been reading about the rise of the robots for a long time and that's lovely, it may happen one day, but if I've got a dripping, a drip through the roof and I need the roof fixed.

There is no technological solution to that. And although there is more and more technology making people more productive, the productivity data suggests that we still need an awful lot of people. And it's gonna be a long, long time before we can actually free up the labor. Which is why we're short of labor today. In almost every endeavor, in almost every market, in almost every field of activity in the UK, we're short of people.

ng (07:35.63)
I think you said that the bookkeeper has more to worry about than a dustbin man in terms of robots taking over. And I think that's a fair point, actually. So would you say that there's a link? Well, there's an issue in, I could think from a UK perspective, I'm not too sure about America or any other places in the West, in terms of

degrees and actual opportunity because there's a lot more people that are becoming educated and going to university but in terms of picking up the work that actually needs to be done, many of them might be studying for jobs which essentially may not need them in 20 or 30 years time.

paul_morland (08:21.971)
So I make this point in the book actually, I've got a good friend called David Goodhart, who's written a book, Head, Hand and Heart, in which he argues that we are not over-educating people but we're over-educating them in a narrow conception of what constitutes an education. I think that may well be true, that we may have too many people doing academic studies where actually they do need to study, they do need to learn, they do need to develop, but not in the sort of classic...

ng (08:29.046)
Hmm.

ng (08:37.784)
Hmm.

paul_morland (08:51.391)
traditional degree sense. But the point I make in the book is that whilst this is a sort of rich country luxury, for a lot of the world, they're nowhere near that. Much of the world, the developing world, and much of the sort of world that's between developing, there's still a lot more education required, that there's a lot of payback on educating people, that they're a long way from the over-education problem.

ng (08:53.859)
Mm-hmm.

ng (09:14.254)
Hmm.

paul_morland (09:17.147)
So we may have an over-education problem in the developed world. I'd rather frame that as getting people the right sort of education. But if you take humanity as a whole, whilst we're fantastically better than we were 50 years ago, there are still lots and lots of countries where people aren't getting enough education. And you know, sub-Saharan Africa is a really good example.

And you know, the good news there is that when all the people in sub-Saharan Africa have the same opportunities of education that people say have in Europe or China, so it's got there in China or America, then just think how incredibly productive and smart humanity is going to be.

ng (09:59.71)
In terms of migration amongst people, you mentioned how vision leads to aspiration, which leads to action. Is the West also experiencing repercussions for constantly imposing its influence on places such as Africa and the legacy of colonialism? Does that bring a case of the chickens coming home to roost when it comes to migration in some aspects?

paul_morland (10:25.595)
I don't really like that term because I think chickens coming home to roost sounds like bad news and I don't think we should see immigrants arriving. I think we should decide how many immigrants we want. We should have a sensible system for immigration. We should enforce it. We should debate it, determine it, enforce it. But I don't want to see it as, oh, you know, we went and colonized these countries. Now we deserve them to come and live here because that's not how I see my fellow citizens wherever they're from.

ng (10:31.478)
Hmm.

ng (10:48.173)
Mm.

paul_morland (10:53.227)
I don't think that that works in that kind of way. It's not an automatic relationship. When we had colonies, in many of them, we sent huge numbers of people out there. So Canada, Australia and so on. And these are not places that people are coming back from. And many countries have large immigrant populations in places they've never had any kind of colonies. I mean, Germany did not colonise Turkey and it has a large Turkish population. Sweden did not colonise Somalia.

So I think we have more creative and constructive ways of thinking about this than just saying, oh you went and colonized these countries and now you deserve those people to come and live in your country. I think that's a really negative way of framing it.

ng (11:36.818)
Mm-hmm and in terms of Africa in general, I think you mentioned that it's projected to have about 4 billion people by 2100 isn't it? But by the end of the century and could you expand on how this can happen now like what factors Contribute to this being the case as well

paul_morland (11:47.107)
Yeah, at the end of the century, roughly.

paul_morland (11:58.771)
Well the thing is, what happens in the demographic transition is when you get... The first thing is you get a drop-off in in mortality rates and infant mortality normally is the big thing. In much of Africa infant mortality is still way too high but it's fallen enormously. Now if people have six, five, six children and instead of four of those six dying before they reach the age of being able to have their own kids, but only one does or maybe...

ng (12:10.742)
Mm.

ng (12:27.394)
Mm-hmm.

paul_morland (12:28.175)
you know, maybe only 20% or 10% or whatever, and that's still very high. You then have many, many more people in the next generation. And now eventually mortality will fall, after mortality falls, fertility will fall. The question is, what's the gap between a drop off in the mortality, and particularly infant mortality, and the drop off in fertility? And that's varied in many, many places. In China, it happened pretty quickly, and there was a very quick drop off.

in fertility between about six or seven children per woman, down to about three just in the 1970s before they introduced the one child policy. And in Iran, similarly, there was a very quick drop off. What's happened in Africa is some basic healthcare has gone in, some basic aid, and that has led to a rapid fall in the mortality rate. But as of yet, the fertility rate in many countries hasn't fallen. So South Africa, it's down a lot.

Northern Africa it's down a lot. Countries like Ethiopia and Kenya are really getting it down too. But there are other countries, particularly in West Africa, Niger, Nigeria and Chad, where despite a relatively fast fall in mortality rates, they're still too high, people are not having smaller families, and so they're in that period when the population will grow very quickly.

ng (13:31.714)
Hmm.

ng (13:49.254)
I think one of the best ways that I actually realized this was in school, obviously we done a lot of education on the Tudors, but it was more to do with Henry D. Ape's marital affairs as opposed to the fact that he didn't have any grandchildren. So when you mentioned that, I was like, wow, that's actually quite true considering you had six wives as well. And you know, you look at a place such as Africa and you know, you look at how child mortality is...

isn't as much of an issue as it was, let's say, about 100 plus years ago. You could understand why there is even 20 years exactly. So it makes perfect sense in that case. I also wanted to ask you, why does it feel like in a place like the UK that the rest of the country still doesn't have the same kind of appeal as London, especially when you consider that China has 121 cities, many of which had grown.

paul_morland (14:18.619)
or even 20 years ago.

ng (14:43.346)
in the most recent future, even though you did mention it's quite difficult to define what a city is.

paul_morland (14:50.363)
Why is London this sort of huge city, several times bigger than anywhere else in the UK? I don't really have the answer for that. I think to an extent there is only a certain amount of space for cities of London scale. But elsewhere in the UK, I think if people live outside London, in smaller cities or indeed in the countryside, they get all the benefits of a modern society. They've got the internet, they've got shops, they've got...

roads, even if they're in the middle of the countryside, they've got fairly fast access to urban life, they've got access to medical facilities. In China, people are leaving a pretty poverty-stricken countryside where they're doing back-breaking agricultural labour, where they have relatively few resources and relatively few services. So for the Chinese...

ng (15:25.14)
Hmm.

paul_morland (15:43.587)
And in relatively poor countries, moving to... And it would be the same, say, in Nigeria, where huge numbers of people are moving to Lagos and other big cities. Moving to the city is a really big change in your life. In the developed country, moving out of a big city, living in the countryside, or living in a small city versus a big city, it doesn't make a huge difference to your life chances or to your... or to the kind of health and other services that you're going to get.

ng (16:10.046)
Wow, okay. And so is it a negative point of view to say that places such as Birmingham, Manchester still doesn't have the same quite appeal as London or can't ever have the same appeal as London does?

paul_morland (16:27.023)
I don't think they would want to be five or six times the size. I mean, it's almost unimaginable a Birmingham or a Manchester of five or six. And not everybody wants to live in a huge city. I think cities of the size of Birmingham or Manchester, in many ways, are very attractive and appealing to people. And Manchester is thriving. So I don't think the model of everybody living in a massive city is... I think what's more interesting in a way is the extent to which the indigenous people of Britain...

ng (16:34.679)
Hmm.

ng (16:48.845)
Hmm.

paul_morland (16:56.295)
have tended to move away from London for a long time, and London had a falling population until about the 90s. White British people continue to move away from London, and what's happened is there's been a massive inflow of people from overseas. So London has got a really international appeal, and without that huge inflow, London would be continuing to decline as a great city.

ng (17:01.485)
Yep.

ng (17:16.13)
Hmm.

ng (17:22.158)
That's a fair point. I'm not too sure how much that has to do with property prices as well or things upon those lines, you know

paul_morland (17:28.423)
Well, it boils up property prices. If people weren't moving from overseas, if people weren't moving to London, property prices would sag. But at the same time, high property prices are one of the factors causing people to leave London.

ng (17:32.95)
Hmm

ng (17:37.986)
Mm-hmm.

ng (17:46.03)
I wanted to also ask you, you mentioned in the book that a quarter of the men in Japan under the age of 40 have never had heterosexual sex. And is there a chance that this can happen in a place such as the UK when you consider how many teenagers are now engaging more so in technology than just general face to face contact?

paul_morland (18:10.415)
I think this is an area I don't really know much about. So I'm 57, my kids are in their 20s, two of them are married, one of them is as good as married. So, you know, what's going on with the latest generation I'm not a real expert on. But it could be that technology sort of displaces relationships. The only thing is, though, on the one hand, you don't really need very much sex to have the next generation, right? I mean...

ng (18:15.703)
Hmm

Uh.

ng (18:21.728)
Hmm

paul_morland (18:37.591)
lots of people conceive fairly rapidly and you know three children is quite a lot of children in today's world. Well you know to have three children it's not as if you... But in order to have children many people want to be in a relationship so it's not so much that they're having no sex, it's really that the technology is perhaps driving them in other directions to relationships. And outside relationships, long-term relationships, they maybe don't feel they want to bring a child into the world.

ng (19:08.79)
Ah, okay. And I suppose, correct me if I'm wrong here, but if a society caters more towards smaller households, for example, if housing is more affordable for houses that are like two bedrooms, as opposed to like four or five bedrooms, or if the estate benefits are cut off up to a certain extent as well, would that essentially have an influence in terms of people's household sizes as well?

paul_morland (19:38.171)
I think what the state does, yeah, what the state does does have an effect. The number of houses that are provided of different sizes by the marketplace should reflect the demand. So I see that more the other way around. I think when people have small families, people are going to build, you know, the housing companies want to make money, so they will build houses for whatever they think they can sell. And if they think they can sell lots of tiny one-bedroom flats, that's what they'll build.

ng (19:39.436)
or choice of whether they want to, yeah. No, go on, Paul.

Yeah.

paul_morland (20:06.759)
And if they think nobody wants to live in a one-bedroom flat because everyone's marrying at 20 and has got three kids by the time they're 30, they'll build family houses. So I think whereas the government can lead on that, the market's going to follow what people want.

ng (20:14.995)
Mm-hmm.

ng (20:24.034)
One last question I wanted to ask you actually Paul was there's another part in the book you mentioned how when it came to the Catalonian referendum, well the Brazilian referendum, sorry not Brazilian, the Barcelona referendum, how obviously Madrid never recognised it, but at the same time the median age of the population was around 40 years old. So that energised revolution didn't really happen considering the age of the population.

paul_morland (20:50.055)
Yeah.

ng (20:53.848)
of the people there was around 18 years old so you could imagine there was a lot more difference in terms of yeah so in terms of how people engaged you know um is would you say that that might have an impact in terms of how Ukraine might be behaving towards Russia like the age of the population or is there other factors at play here?

paul_morland (20:56.243)
Something like that, yes. Yes.

paul_morland (21:11.635)
Well, that's a great question. So I wrote the book saying, you know, we get less and less violence and war between older countries and countries with low fertility rates. And the book came out the same month that Putin went into Ukraine. So it's not to say that these things never happen. I think if Russia and Ukraine had vast young populations like Syria or Yemen, this thing could roll and roll. I think the fact that they don't have such large populations of young men.

ng (21:28.546)
Hmm.

paul_morland (21:40.999)
the fact that so many mothers have only got one child is going to be a constraint on wrapping this thing up at some point, or at least putting it back to where it was before this spring of this year, where it was a fairly low level conflict. I don't think the demography of Russia and Ukraine would allow it to go on like it went on in Syria or what's been going on in Yemen year after year with massive casualties, but perhaps I'll be proven wrong.

ng (22:05.058)
Hmm

ng (22:12.258)
Brilliant, thank you so much Paul.

paul_morland (22:14.195)
Thanks for your time.