Aging Population: Nothing to Fear
Are nations with low birth rates going to collapse due to a temporary bulge in the ranks of the elderly? On an overpopulated planet, this is an important question. Depopulation alarmists in numerous countries are pushing for baby bonuses or high immigration quotas in order to avoid getting into recovery from growth addiction. It’s all for the sake of maintaining perpetually increasing numbers of taxpayers, consumers and workers. This approach to demography is unsustainable and dangerous.
Dave Gardner and guest co-host Nandita Bajaj are joined by Jane O’Sullivan, lead author of the paper, Silver Tsunami or Silver Lining? Why we should not fear an ageing population. Jane explains why the fears propagated by alarmists are vastly exaggerated or ill-founded.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
"Will Global Population Peak Below 10 Billion?" by Jane O'Sullivan
"Five Myths About Population, Aging and Environmental Sustainability" by Jane O'Sullivan
"World Population Prospects, 2019 – Good News or Bad" by Jane O'Sullivan
"WWF Living Planet Report 2018 – 'aiming higher', but not on target" by Jane O'Sullivan
"Aging Human Populations: Good for Us, Good for the Earth" by Jane O'Sullivan
-
TV News Segment 00:00
There will be one million fewer Australians by the end of 2022. That's based on forward predictions. One million fewer consumers, many, many fewer taxpayers. This will mean lower living standards for all Australians, won't it?
Dave Gardner 00:13
What the? Do more consumers or taxpayers improve your life? Or do they further destroy an overpopulated planet? Next, on the Overpopulation Podcast. The soundbyte that started this episode was not a politician assuming fewer consumers is bad news. I'd expect that from a politician. Sadly. It was ABC Australia current affairs and political correspondent Fran Kelly on the RN Breakfast Program. We'll dig into some of the growth-addicted, Ponzi demography thinking of politicians and journalists on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast. The podcast that dares to stand up for the right of future generations to live in a world worth inheriting. I'm your co-host, Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance. Learn more about us at worldpopulationbalance.org. Erika isn't available for this episode. So we've invited guest co-host Nandita Bajaj back for another episode. Nandita, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Nandita Bajaj 01:22
Sure. My name is Nandita Bajaj. I live in Toronto, Canada, with my husband, Mike and my dog, Sophie. I currently work as a high school educator, but I'm on sabbatical pursuing my grad degree in humane education. And my area of interest is the overpopulation crisis. And that's what I'm working on for my thesis.
Dave Gardner 01:44
Anyone who calls it a crisis must have a pretty good understanding of the issue. So thanks for joining us. Well, I'm pretty excited today about our special guest. Setting it up in October of 2020, Sustainable Population Australia published a discussion paper called Silver Tsunami or Silver Lining: Why We Should Not Fear an Aging Population. And that really caught my interest because we're seeing a rise in the wringing of hands by policymakers and economists over an aging population. Of course, they don't describe it this way, but it's just a temporary bulge in the ranks of the elderly as all the baby boomers work their way through old age. Because younger people are choosing to have smaller families, their ranks aren't as big. And that's raising alarms over funding of pensions and other social programs for the elderly, maintaining recent rates of economic growth, balancing government budgets, filling jobs, etc., etc. That's a dangerous fear, because it is driving some efforts of pronatalism and, you know, efforts to grow the population of various countries, cities, territories, regions, you know, in order to solve a problem that I suspect isn't really as big a problem as they think. So we're gonna find out a little bit more about that, about whether it is a big problem or imagined. We're gonna find out from Jane O'Sullivan. Jane, thanks for joining us today.
Jane O'Sullivan 03:03
You're very welcome, Dave. Lovely to speak to you.
Dave Gardner 03:06
It's great to have you. Jane is the lead author of that paper that I spoke about. She's been a researcher at the University of Queensland for quite some time. Since 2009, you've been focusing a lot of attention on demographic pressures, on food security, economic development, and environmental sustainability. You're an honorary research fellow at the University. And you are also on the National Executive Committee of Sustainable Population Australia.
Jane O'Sullivan 03:32
That's correct.
Dave Gardner 03:33
And I could go on and on. But I will also mention that you're a member of the International Union For the Scientific Study of Population. You've authored an impressive list of papers on this and related subjects, we're gonna put several links in the show notes. So again, I'm counting on you to help us steer our listeners to find and explore more of your work.
Jane O'Sullivan 03:52
Great. Thanks, Dave.
Dave Gardner 03:53
So first up, we want to know, why did you write this paper? How did this come about?
Jane O'Sullivan 03:57
It came about because aging has become the big bogey monster of our time. Governments around the world are more worried about an aging population than they are about climate change, if you judge by what they're willing to do in response to it. Which is really bizarre. And it's developed as an excuse for promoting population growth.
Dave Gardner 04:19
Do you think it's an excuse more than a rationale?
Jane O'Sullivan 04:22
I do, because debunking this myth about the problem of aging is not very difficult. And the reason it's not cutting through is because people want to believe that aging is a problem because it means they can keep promoting population growth.
Dave Gardner 04:39
I had that question on my list, but it was way down, but you make me want to jump right to it. Who wants to promote population growth and why?
Jane O'Sullivan 04:45
Well, there's a range of big businesses basically that benefit from having more people. They're usually the ones who don't really suffer from competition for more people. They've got a bit of a monopoly about what they produce and what they sell, and it's an advantage for them to have more customers, or more workers competing each other down on wages in particular. So for them, they want the population to grow without a thought for where that's heading. There's no concept of the end game. It's all about the incremental change this year that will add to their bottom line. Unfortunately, they also control a lot of our political discourse, because they have the ear of government because they can afford to get the ear of government. So they convince a whole lot of people that what's in their interests is in everybody's interest. And that's not just in relation to aging, that's across the spectrum of neoliberal economics, I guess. But if we are to avoid disaster of following that course, we have to be able to call them out and say, "Actually, what you're saying here, doesn't stack up in any evidential way."
Dave Gardner 05:58
I should interject here that you're describing something happening in Australia, but it's not, that's not the only place. The rest of us around the world can learn something from the pretty candid conversations that are happening in Australia and from this conversation, we've got the same issues happening in places like the United States and Canada and Western Europe, too.
Jane O'Sullivan 06:17
That's right. I'm hearing it all around the world. And I'm hearing it very worryingly from the leaders of developing countries that have very high population growth rates and very small proportions of old people. The president of Tanzania last year was saying that the women who don't want large families are lazy, and we need more babies, because we don't want to end up like Europe. And he's been to Europe and saw how aging was causing them problems. Of course, aging is not causing them problems, and it's certainly not going to be causing problems in Tanzania. But because of that fear, countries like Tanzania are making it harder for women to get family planning access. Countries like Turkey are withdrawing access to abortion, Iran has backflipped spectacularly on what used to be probably the best family planning regime in the world, to make it very hard for women to access family planning and, you know, telling people that they need to have more children as a national duty. And this is all because of aging. We cannot stabilize the world population if the leaders of the world's countries put avoiding population peak and decline as their number one economic priority, which is all built into this aging problem.
Dave Gardner 07:33
So Sustainable Population Australia was alarmed at this just like I have been about the cry, about the problem of aging population and the need to do something about it. And you said, "Why don't I do a paper?" Is that what happened?
Jane O'Sullivan 07:47
Pretty much. We decided to do this series of discussion papers in order to go into a bit more depth and unpack the various issues around the population discourse. And this was very high on our priorities to address because it is so layered in myths and misunderstandings.
Dave Gardner 08:06
So one thing I noticed that this paper got a fair amount of news coverage, which I thought was pretty impressive. I think if I wrote a paper here in the United States as an advocate for sustainable population, I think I would be roundly ignored. Much more so than you were. Tell us a little bit about the reception that paper got.
Jane O'Sullivan 08:23
Well, actually, it hasn't had very much reception from the media. In particular, our national broadcaster, the ABC, has avoided us like the plague. They seem to hold the view that anybody who wants to reduce population growth is anti-migrants and a xenophobe. So they haven't been speaking to us at all. We've had a bit of media coverage in publications targeting retired people. So the older citizens, obviously feel that this aging discourse has some bearing on their standing in society, and then they're interested in this story. So I guess that's where the interest has lain. But really, the nitty gritties of the arguments have not been picked up in the political discourse at all at this stage, but at least it's there so that we have it to refer to to substantiate our arguments when we raise them in relation to tactical issues that come up in the media.
Dave Gardner 09:23
But are you telling me that you're gonna have to kidnap elected officials and tie him to their seats and put toothpicks under their eyelids and make them read this?
Jane O'Sullivan 09:32
It's getting a bit like that. Yes. We've actually posted them a hard copy of the report, every federal parliamentarian, and we're trying to make bookings to visit them, some of them, and they're not answering. You know, there's all sorts of reasons why that you can't book a meeting with your MP, but they're not exactly beating our door down to explore this issue.
Dave Gardner 09:55
Crud. Bummed to hear that.
Jane O'Sullivan 09:56
And when you take the issue on its own, people really don't see that it's so topical. But in fact, it's the impetus behind a whole lot of other political discourse, particularly around population policy and around the federal budget. And, you know, it's a huge concern for the Australian government at the moment that COVID-19 has caused us to close our borders, which means a massive reduction in immigration, because we had a massive amount of immigration before the pandemic. So it makes a very big difference to the dynamics of the Australian population. Now on the way that they're projecting the government revenue, they think that will be a big hit. It's not going to be a big hit, because the jobs aren't there for the migrants to take. So the revenue was not going to follow their model anyway. But these are the sorts of discussions that are happening in our media, and where we would like to get a bit of sanity around what aging really means. And it's around that workforce impact that the biggest myths lie.
Dave Gardner 11:07
Before we jump into that, I want to play something for us, for our listeners. You mentioned that the ABC in Australia is ignoring you, the author of the paper and Sustainable Population Australia, but they're certainly talking to the politicians. And there was an interesting conversation on the ABC's Fran Kelly, RN Breakfast with Fran Kelly, just back in October of this year, with Alan Tudge, the Minister for Population, Cities and Urban Infrastructure, and I want to just play a minute from that to give people kind of a sense of the belief that you just described.
TV News Segment 11:40
There will be one million fewer Australians by the end of 2022. That's based on forward predictions. One million fewer consumers, many, many fewer taxpayers. This will mean lower living standards for all Australians, won't it?
TV News Segment 11:54
Well, it certainly has a very big impact on our economy. And on our GDP growth. Population's been a very significant part of our economic growth story for more than a century. And we've now going to have the lowest population growth this financial year since World War I, as you said, it'll be point two percent this year, whereas normally tracks at about 1.6%. So yes, it will have an impact on the economy. And that-
TV News Segment 12:21
Can you put in dollar terms or at least GDP terms? What's the hit to GDP from a million fewer people here over two years?
TV News Segment 12:28
Well, if you go from 1.6% population growth to 0.2% population growth, the rule of thumb is that that's about a 1.4% hit to GDP. But that means we have to make up for that growth in other ways.
Jane O'Sullivan 12:42
Well, immediately from his maths, you can see that it makes zero impact on GDP per person. Which really makes you wonder what the government thinks they're about. And it seems that they're about growing our economy just by feeding in more people without concern for whether it's actually making life better for anybody.
Dave Gardner 13:07
So just bigger numbers?
Jane O'Sullivan 13:09
Just bigger numbers. So what they admit from all of their analysis is what they have to pay out to support those extra people. And I guess a core part of my work has been to point out that that's not just proportional to the extra people, it's disproportionately greater than the number of extra people because you actually have to build new stuff for them, not just provide the services per capita that the existing people have.
Dave Gardner 13:35
So are you suggesting that there's not a return on investment? That it's not profitable?
Jane O'Sullivan 13:36
There's certainly not a return on investment. I mean, you can't say that we don't have enough people to function in the way that we want to as a sophisticated modern society. We've got plenty of people to do that. And globalization really means that you need fewer and fewer people in that regard, because you can access the services of people anywhere on the planet for a whole range of things. So it's not a matter of not having a critical mass of people. Anyone you add after that is drawing resources to the job of expanding your infrastructure and away from the job of providing better for the people who are already there.
Dave Gardner 14:16
Now I haven't let Nandita get a word in edgewise yet and I'm going to, so I'm just going to put a button on this by saying, highlighting something we heard. We heard that Australia's been growing it's population at 1.6% annually prior to the COVID lockdown, the world is adding just under 1% a year. So Australia has been beating the world population growth by a substantial amount, interestingly. Just because somebody's getting rich from it.
Nandita Bajaj 14:41
Yeah. So it's interesting that you're talking about the fears that a lot of the politicians are acting from, especially the fears of aging. Is there really a danger of running short of workers or taxpayers? I think you've partially answered that already. And you've spoken of about infrastructure costs once we get past a certain number. Can you speak to that, the law of diminishing returns?
Jane O'Sullivan 15:08
Okay, so it's not really about a law of diminishing returns. It's about the myth that the number of workers we have in the economy determines the scale of the economy for a start, but also that the number of workers is determined by the proportion of people of working age, and I'm doing air quotes here, working age, demographers generally talk about as being aged between fifteen and sixty-four. So it's purely modeling that number of people as being responsible for all of the economic activity and projecting whatever production they have now into a future where there's more or less of them as a proportion of the total population. The myth is that the proportion of them that work now will be the same proportion of them that work in the future, where what we see when countries age, and we've already got this natural experiment around the world where some countries have already progressed much further through the aging process than others. So Japan is the most advanced, they've got more than 20% of the population is over sixty-five now, I think Germany is in that category. And to give some context, this is a transition that will get to an endpoint, and the endpoint, depending on how much we can extend human lives, but supposing that plateaus out at about ninty as an average life expectancy, the endpoint will be around 30% of people will be aged over sixty-five. That of itself shouldn't be a problem, okay? But it means that we won't ever get less than half the population in the fifteen to sixty-four age group, almost every country has less than half the population actually in paid employment. So there's plenty of people to do those jobs. Not everyone between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five can be in paid employment. But a lot of them want to be or would want to be if the terms of employment were better, so that it fitted more around their other responsibilities. You know, they're choosing not to be in employment, because they can't hold down full-time or regular hours job on top of their caring responsibilities or something. But there's a huge buffer of people who would take up employment if the terms were just slightly better for them. And that is exactly what we see in the countries that have aged. There has been no shrinkage of workforce at all. There has just been an increase in the proportion of people who hold a job. So all those hits on the economy in terms of revenue are complete nonsense. It just isn't happening. And there's no reason to think that it will happen in the future. Even if it did, you know, people worry that, "Oh, well, old people don't spend as much. So that's going to be bad for the economy." Well, bad for who? You know, if they're spending enough to employ all these people who want jobs, and there are fewer people wanting jobs, why is that a problem? You know, we've got to get away from these simplistic economic metrics that no longer represent the ideals that we're seeking to achieve in an economy. So there's not going to be a shortage of workers and aging is really going to make it better for job seekers to get good, secure work on their own terms. That doesn't mean a great hike in wages that's going to be problematic for business profitability. That's all nonsense. This is very incremental stuff. But the bigger problem that we have in the world is far too many job seekers chasing too few jobs. So in that sense, aging is a really good thing for the economy.
Dave Gardner 18:52
Yeah, it's gonna solve the whole issue of fewer jobs due to artificial intelligence and automation, right?
Jane O'Sullivan 18:57
Well, yes. But I mean, we've had automation for a couple of centuries now eliminating jobs. You know, they've eliminated a massive amount of work. And we keep inventing more jobs. Because the other thing about the labor market is that it's not mostly about recruiting people to produce the stuff we need. It's mostly about distributing incomes to everybody who needs an income. So we have to invent jobs for people to do so that they can get a share of the overall economy, you know, and get some income. So we actually don't need anything like as much work as is actually happening because a lot of it is just jobs that we somehow managed to invent and find a niche for in order for people to get income.
Dave Gardner 19:39
Wow, that's mind blowing.
Jane O'Sullivan 19:41
You just have to think about the economy from a few different perspectives and see that this whole panic is complete nonsense.
Dave Gardner 19:49
Isn't it also kind of bogus to write off anybody sixty-five and older. I mean, what's with this fifteen to sixty-four? That seems like an age range from the past. Needs some updating.
Jane O'Sullivan 20:00
It is pretty anachronistic, certainly the fifteen, you know, most people continue their education into their twenties these days, and they might be doing some work in the meantime. But they're not sort of full-time in the workforce until, you know, around twenty or their early twenties.
Dave Gardner 20:17
So well enough, they're men, they're just sitting at home playing video games until age thirty or forty these days, aren't they?
Jane O'Sullivan 20:24
Well, the thing is, they're probably doing a service to all of the other people out there trying to find jobs by not being in the job market. So yeah, it is anachronistic. The United Nations actually produces tables of the twenty to seventy age group as well as the fifteen to sixty-four so that you can have a choice of how you want to analyze data on the ratios thinking that maybe twenty to seventy is a more realistic span of people's working lives now and into the future.
Dave Gardner 20:55
But if you're a growth booster trying to convince everybody to start making more babies, or importing more workers and consumers, then that's to your benefit to use that fifteen to sixty-four range?
Jane O'Sullivan 21:05
A lot of them take a cut off at sixty and say that the dependency ratio, being the proportion of people aged sixty and above, compared with the, you know, the fifteen to sixties. And that just makes the ratio look bigger. And they can panic about when that is going to tip over to have more people over sixty, you know, they're not under sixty. And that's not going to happen. But it's all terribly arbitrary. The thing is that older people are not financially dependent on the working age population. And certainly in Australia, there are more working-age people who are not in employment than there are people aged over sixty-five. So that's a bit of a simplistic argument in that the over sixty-fives tend to cost the government more in terms of their health needs and their likelihood of being on a pension and the pension certainly pays better than the Dole in Australia. Nevertheless, it would mean in the future that at least part of that pension burden is eased by reducing the number of people who are on welfare who are of working age, because they're actually able to get into the workforce.
Nandita Bajaj 22:09
Just to that point, that the age-related health care, that's another point that you've deconstructed in the paper is there's this ill founded concern that the expenditure is going to be skyrocketing on health care, especially for the frail elderly. But you found that the data doesn't quite match all of these exaggerated concerns.
Jane O'Sullivan 22:33
Well, that's right. There's been quite a lot of literature in the demographic and health sphere about this. And what they are emphasizing is that as lifespans are increasing, we're not seeing people in older years spending more time needing high levels of health care. We're seeing a compression of their disability into the last couple of years of life, but a longer period of life spent in good health. So if the life expectancy has moved up from sixty-five to eighty, it doesn't mean that you've got an extra fifteen years of supporting people with high health needs. The onset of old age-related disability might have moved up from sixty-three to eighty-seven.
Dave Gardner 23:23
We hope so, don't we?
Jane O'Sullivan 23:24
So it means that because of the demographic transition, and that's because birth rates have fallen, the death rates have fallen, and we're going to a pattern of the society where we have more even numbers of people of every age, which means that we inevitably get higher proportions in old age than the old pyramids where, due to mortality, we had lots of young people and fewer and fewer people as you go up the stack, which means you get a fairly small proportion in old age. But obviously, that means we get more people with old age-related health issues. In the middle of the transition, when the death rates have gone down, but that pattern of the age distribution hasn't yet worked its way through, because that takes a whole lifespan to get those people into old age after them not dying in childhood. So in the middle of that transition, you get this period where the death rate is very low. And that's where we've been for the last several decades, and in several decades, you get to think that that's normal. In fact, as aging progresses, the death rates gonna go up again, just because there are more old people, so more of the people are reaching the end of their life. There is a health cost around death, like most of the health costs in a person's life, are concentrated in the last couple of years of their life. So the proportion of GDP we spend on health is going to go up because the death rate is going up, but it's not going to be astronomically higher, and it's not going to be unaffordable. You know, if we have a baby boom, everyone says, "Isn't this great for the economy, we can sell more nappies and cots and all these things that babies need that we have to spend money on. And that's great for the economy." But when you get more old people, you know, why don't we say, "Isn't this great for the economy? We can have more nurses and more healthcare people. And that would be great for the economy." You know, it's just the same, it's actually good for the economy. It's just about how we choose to spend the money.
Dave Gardner 25:29
Yeah, I think you write in the paper about how, you know, if you have a smaller and smaller cohort of young people, the social programs for them, the expenses to support them can be shifted to temporarily take care of the additional expenses for that temporary bulge of the elderly.
Jane O'Sullivan 25:46
That's right. But governments then complain that well, you know, we have to foot the bill for the elderly, whereas you parents foot the bill for the young. Fair enough. But governments can choose how that income's distributed. You know? They're the ones who collect the taxes and distribute it. So if you're just taking the health of the whole economy and the whole population, there's a whole lot of flexibility for redistributing resources to better support older people, and increasingly older people are doing that themselves with their own market power. So it's not something that's going to create a huge rift in the way that economies run, it's just going to change the profile of our economy a bit. Not anything like as disruptively as the information technology revolution, for instance. It's going to be a very gentle transition.
Dave Gardner 26:38
We want to ask you a little bit about the possible solutions that the GrowthBoosters are proposing, but before we jump into that, what else from the paper have we not given you a chance to explain? You know, I want to make sure we give you a chance to thoroughly debunk all of these aging population fears. What have we not talked about?
Jane O'Sullivan 26:55
Well, just to give a little bit more explanation about the infrastructure cost argument. I think a lot of people kind of have trouble conceptualizing this, but once they get it, you get it and you'll see it everywhere. It's not, you know, after a certain level of that we reach diminishing returns. It is purely on the rate of population growth. So it doesn't matter if we're underpopulated, overpopulated, whatever your opinion is, of where the ideal population is. If we're adding one percent more people every year to a country, that country has to spend about 7% of its GDP to put in place the stuff that those extra people need. Now, that's not all government funding, that's including private expenses on building new houses, buying cars, equipment, new workplaces, everything that has durability that was already in place for the people there last year, that has to be expanded for the people this year. Now, you can say, "Well, that's good economic stimulus, too." But it's taking the spending power that exists, which is the spending power of the existing people, that has to be stretched to accommodate these people who are about to arrive at a rate of 1% per year. So that's 7% of your GDP that's soaked up doing that. If you're a developed country, and your urban centers are growing at five or 6% per annum, that's a prohibitively large proportion of your economic activity that's required to build the infrastructure for those people to exist, which is why they're failing.
Dave Gardner 28:28
Can you tick off, you know, some of the more common government-funded public infrastructure that you're talking about? What would that be?
Jane O'Sullivan 28:34
Well, for government infrastructure, you've got, you know, roads, power station, waste disposal, and sewage, and water supply, and police stations, and prisons, and ports, and airports, and public amenities, schools, hospitals, you know, just hospitals. If you add one person to the population, and for Australia, we've got a fairly low ratio of hospital beds per head of population, it's about three per thousand. In Europe, it's tending to be more like six per thousand. So even at that low rate, to create three beds per thousand extra people, it costs about $12,000 per person. Because a hospital bed is costing somewhere around four, four and a half million dollars per bed for an entire, fully functioning hospital.
Dave Gardner 29:20
Well, look at those hospital beds. They look like Lamborghinis.
Jane O'Sullivan 29:23
It's not just the bed, it's you know, the radiation clinic, the, you know, the diagnostic centers, surgeries, everything. But if we break it down for the cost of a hospital divided by the number of beds, and that's the way the OECD, you know, reflects your hospital capacity - is beds per thousand population - that's what you're spending. About twelve grand per extra person coming into the country just for hospital beds.
Dave Gardner 29:48
Well, that's really surprising, because the bed itself probably cost two thousand dollars, right? But I am just joking about all that. So is it a rational response to the aging population then to try to add more population to the country, does it work?
Jane O'Sullivan 30:02
No, it doesn't work. It can slow the shift in the age distribution a little bit, but it doesn't stop it. And ultimately, you get all of the costs of population growth heaped on top of the costs of aging in terms of extra healthcare and aged care facilities. So it turns out that the cost of the population growth is greater than the extent to which it could reduce the aging-related costs, or at least dilute them in terms of their proportion of GDP. So it doesn't work in an economic sense. It doesn't stop that demographic transition from getting to a point where we have more old people in the community, whether we keep growing, you know, at around 1% per annum, we're still going to get proportion of people over sixty-five, well over 25%. And if we don't grow the population, that proportion is going to stabilize about 30%. You know, it's not a big difference. So population growth really doesn't fix it. And it's only popular because it's the lever that governments can be seen to be doing something about most directly. They'd like to be able to increase the productivity of labor, but they're not very successful at doing that. And they don't have things that they can do that make them be seen to be doing it very efficiently. So they're really resorting to this as a way of looking like they're doing something about aging. But in fact, what they're doing is doing something for all of their mates in big business who want to have more customers and cheaper workers.
Nandita Bajaj 31:36
It's interesting you say that the aging population, or the population of people over sixty-five, will naturally stabilize around 30%. So when you look at some of the claims that are being made in politics, for example, you've quoted in the article, by 2050, roughly half of us would be over the age of sixty-five and we'd essentially be one gigantic floating nursing home somewhere in the Pacific. The math doesn't really add up does it?
Jane O'Sullivan 32:05
The math doesn't add up. And that sort of image is given over and over again, you know, in political cartoons and things about us just running out of young people and all being old and frail with nobody left to look after us. That is not what's happening at all. It's just a shift because we're all living longer, obviously, there's going to be more old people around. And most of them are going to be healthy and active. And that's the other thing that we're very bad at measuring and therefore celebrating is all of the things that retired people do for our communities, in terms of their volunteer work, and their environmental work, and their community cohesion work. It really adds a great amount of richness to society to have that pool of people who are happily not in employment anymore and still active in our communities.
Dave Gardner 32:56
Being sixty-five myself, I'm pretty glad to hear that.
Jane O'Sullivan 33:00
A shining example, Dave, of somebody who's doing great things for the benefit of society.
Dave Gardner 33:06
They might want to get rid of me. I'm just stirring up trouble I think.
Nandita Bajaj 33:09
You're a frail, elderly person incurring a huge cost on everyone, Dave.
Dave Gardner 33:15
Yeah, if I wasn't so busy trying to skinny up my life. So we know it's really foolish to try to, on an overpopulated planet, in a country that doesn't have an endless supply of resources to meet the needs of an ever-growing population, it's pretty foolish to try to increase population growth rather than to embrace what we're all naturally starting to do, which is choosing smaller families. And the twenty-first century is going to be the post-growth century. Everybody needs to get used to the idea of a slowly contracting population. But let's assume that elected officials in Australia just can't quite shake off the handcuffs that are put on them by the by the growth-boosters, and they're bound and determined to reverse what would otherwise be population contraction. There's only two ways to do that. One is to get women to have more babies than they're choosing to do. And the other is to import more people. Do you have some comments about those?
Jane O'Sullivan 34:11
Well yes. There's any number of reasons that governments make to justify trying to do those things. And Australia yesterday announced the total fertility rate for 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published that the figure had gone down to 1.66, which is way lower than it has been. It was up to over 1.9 just a decade ago because we had had government intervention - we had had a baby bonus of paying people a lump sum of money when they have a baby, as well as all of the propaganda that comes with that campaign that makes people think that they are doing the nation a service by having their fourth or fifth child. And I've certainly met lots of mums that are in school who think that, you know? That they really think that they're making a sacrifice for the country.
Dave Gardner 34:11
What was the slogan? Remember the slogan?
Jane O'Sullivan 34:29
One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country. So what people don't understand is that the amount of immigration that we would need just to top up the generations and stop our population declining, if we really didn't want it to decline, I mean, I'd prefer that it did, but if you're afraid of population decline, it's not as if there aren't enough migrants around to do that. We would only need around 0.3 percent of the population per annum in migration to balance the population if fertility was sitting around 1.5 children per woman. And currently, Australia's been going around 0.9 to 1% of the population per annum in immigration.
Dave Gardner 35:43
But then the builders wouldn't need to be building more and more houses. If that was all that happened, though.
Jane O'Sullivan 35:49
Well yeah. So what is the building industry in Germany look like? It's not exactly moribund, it's busy making places better for people. We could do a whole lot of that if we didn't have to build cheap and tacky because we've got to turn about quite so fast. Every industry has its changes over time and just because we go from building an extra 200,000 housing units a year down to just doing extensions and improvements and replacing places that burned down in increasingly frequent bushfires. And that's a transition that businesses can easily make over time. The thing about the building industry is that it's got a very high turnover of workforce, they're very ephemeral jobs, and often not particularly attractive jobs. Whereas the health industry, which will be growing a little bit, as we age, generally produces good, secure careers for people that are much more family friendly. So I can't see much of a problem in the economy changing in that direction.
Nandita Bajaj 36:58
Yeah, when you were just talking about the baby bonuses, it made me wonder how whenever we talk about population policy, or population stabilization or control, we think of the word coercion. But we never think of the word coercion when the governments are paying people to have more babies than they might want to, or to put some kind of a moral pressure on them to have babies for their country as their moral duty.
Jane O'Sullivan 37:27
That's absolutely right. We really should be calling that out as coercion, you know, every time you say, "Oh, we we need to slow the population." Everyone says, "Well, you don't want the government in your bedroom." Well, they willingly marching into the bedroom with baby bonuses, and, you know, all sorts of incentives to have more kids. The other thing is that, who are these extra kids that you're trying to induce people to have? You know, if you're doing it by making it harder for people to access family planning and abortions, and actually in Australia, a rich country, it's really hard for low income people to access effective long acting contraception. And it's not always easy for them to maintain the pill, you know, even the pills, very expensive over the course of a year, but it's not as big a lump sum. So it cost them over a thousand bucks to get an IUD for instance. For a person in that position who can't afford to get an IUD, how can they afford to raise a child well? We know that when it's difficult for people to control their fertility, the extra children are turning up in poor families, in unstable families, in contexts where they're getting a very poor start on life. And to me, it's a terrible shame in our society that governments pay so little attention to things like teenage pregnancy and access to contraception as a right, because they actually want to coerce people into having children that they don't want for the sake of boosting the economy. So that, you know, they're saying they've against child poverty, but they engineering child poverty into this policy position.
Dave Gardner 39:11
Wow. So you said they gave up the baby bonus, does that mean they're giving up on the childbirth solution and just putting all their eggs in the immigration basket?
Jane O'Sullivan 39:20
They might revisit it, they sort of rolled the baby bonus into government funded maternity payment. So instead of getting a lump sum payment, you get a fortnightly pay out for a certain number of weeks. So there is still that incentive, but it's not, psychologically it doesn't have the same impact. You know, you hear all these stories from midwives about the boyfriend turning up to collect the birth certificate so that he could run off and collect the five thousand bucks and spend on whatever whim he had at the time. That sort of terrible response is not happening anymore, and it's probably a good thing that there's universal assistance for maternity, but they could be designed in a way to be less incentivizing for people to have extra babies.
Nandita Bajaj 40:08
The other thing that Dave just brought up about bringing in more migrants also is presented as a very binary choice. And you mentioned in the paper that similarly as we talk about population policy with having or not having kids, immigration is very polarized. Pro-immigration stance is seen as the moral high ground, as you said, and anti-immigration is seen as locking the doors in xenophobic paranoia. This is definitely something I find in a lot of conversations. Pro-immigration is always seen as a very progressive stance, even among environmentalists. And I would love to hear what your thoughts are on how to get past such polarization and actually have a meaningful discussion.
Jane O'Sullivan 40:57
Yeah, I wish I was better at it. It's really quite hard to cut through. But I like to emphasize that low immigration is pro-immigrant. Immigrants have a much better experience of integrating into a new society if they are not in such large numbers that they are forced to aggregate together, you know, and that they are forced to compete for scarce work, and that they intend to be relegated to certain sectors of the workforce, which the dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs that the locals supposedly won't do, just won't do for the prices that people get away with paying immigrants. We've actually had a bit of a fiasco in Australia lately, where the Prime Minister has been encouraging all of the young unemployed to go and get jobs on farms because the farmers are saying, "We need more access to immigrants because our crops are rotting in the fields," you know? And a whole series of reports are coming out about how farmers won't take locals. The locals are applying for these jobs by the thousands. And farmers are not taking them because they rather use the labor hire companies, which are exploiting immigrant workers and not paying them correctly. So it's a much better environment for migrants, if migrants are in reasonably small numbers where they're not causing the labor market to skew in any particular way to accommodate them, because if it's skewing to accommodate them, it's going to be exploiting them.
Nandita Bajaj 42:27
Right.
Jane O'Sullivan 42:27
The other thing is that if you choose to argue that we should have open borders because everyone in the world has a right to pursue their best chance in life, wherever they can find it, sure, make that argument. But don't claim that having a big influx of people from somewhere else is good for our economy. And if you don't believe that, you're a xenophobe. You know, they're two different arguments. Whether or not it's good for our economy is a separate thing from whether or not you think that people should have a right to come. It's not entirely separate thing, because obviously, you need to weigh up the costs and benefits of those positions. The other thing is that there is no country willingly with an open border. We all have limits to immigration. So if you think you're pro-immigrant, and you want for instance, Australia's immigration rate to stay at about 230,000 per year, which by the way, is about the number of school leavers that we have. So for every school leaver entering the job market looking for a job, there's an immigrant also entering the job market looking for a job. It's a huge imbalance at the moment. So if you think that's about the right level to have, and that makes you pro-immigrant, and you know, a globalist who is welcoming to all the people in the world, that is a tiny, tiny proportion of the people who want to migrate. So Gallup Poll actually does surveys around the world of people's intentions to migrate. And they find that in the last survey, around seven hundred and fifty million people would like to migrate and are making efforts towards migrating. That includes more than 30% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance. You know, very high proportions of people in South America. Only a tiny proportion of those people will get the privilege of moving from a developing country to a developed country. About half of migrants move from one country to a neighboring country of fairly similar levels of development, but only about 1% of the people in the world are people who've moved from a less developed country to a more developed country, but 1%. So there are no feasible immigration settings where we could actually realize that image of letting everybody come to a developed country if that's what they choose. So I think you need to be honest about the moral position and not confound it with finger pointing and saying, you know, it's good for us and just let them come. Because it's a lie. It's really just basing a policy position on fabricated nonsense that is designed to point the finger at your opponents and say you're morally bad people.
Nandita Bajaj 45:22
That's a really helpful analysis.
Jane O'Sullivan 45:25
Yeah, so where we ended the paper is really with an upbeat look at what an older and declining population would be like. And this is what we call the depopulation dividends - the benefits of having improving environmental conditions for a start, increasing levels of immunity for people, being able to support our young people into careers and grow their human capital and their potential, and give them lots more opportunities in life than the highly competitive world that we live in at the moment. Having a more aging-friendly society where older people have more respect, more opportunities, and more freedom to do what they want to do. All of these things, you know, more inheritance per person. The other thing is, if you've got a shrinking population, then more people are being well provided for in what they're inheriting from their parents. All of these things add up to a much richer, more vibrant, if you like, society. That word vibrance often used in terms of a growing population. And I think that it's the vibrancy of, you know, a third world market where there are a whole lot more sellers than buyers, nobody's got time to take holidays, because they're trying to make it back.
Dave Gardner 46:42
Thank you for that. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has a problem with that word.
Jane O'Sullivan 46:49
To me, a vibrant future, would be one where the wild biosphere is making a comeback and able to enrich our lives. And we are able to live somewhat more freely from all the moral constraints that are always on us at the moment about consuming less and living in smaller spaces. And all of that is imposed on us because of our population density. So to me, a declining population is starting to free people up towards a more happy balance with nature and being able to support our next generation in really generous and empowering ways.
Dave Gardner 47:27
That's a great finish. Well done. Thank you. Will you come back for future conversations?
Jane O'Sullivan 47:32
I'd be happy to Dave, thank you.
Dave Gardner 47:34
Well, that's great. Well, we've been talking to Jane O'Sullivan from Australia. She's on the National Executive Committee of Sustainable Population Australia and a prolific researcher. We'll put links in the show notes to the paper that we've been talking about that debunks the fear of an aging population and a number of other good pieces from her work as well. Nandita Bajaj, thank you so much for helping me keep this interview on track. It's really great to have you as our guest co-host today.
Nandita Bajaj 48:02
Great to be on, Dave. Thank you so much, and lovely to meet you, Jane.
Jane O'Sullivan 48:06
Lovely to meet you too, Nandita.
Dave Gardner 48:07
I hope you'll both come back.
Nandita Bajaj 48:09
You bet.