In October, NPR examined how the decline in birth rates in industrialized nations is changing the way we live.
It’s not just economically, but also: who’s going to care for an aging population? Will we have enough doctors, nurses, and health care professionals? How will other industries be impacted? What will be the role of AI, robotics, and technology in a world with fewer humans?
Ben Lytle is an entrepreneur best known for the creation of Anthem Health. He is also part of the “potentialist movement,” exploring how individuals can reach their full potential. He is also the author of a three-book series titled “The Potentialist.”
Smaller families today create problems and issues — both in the long term and in the immediate future.
Lytle spoke with WSHU Morning Edition host Ann Karrick, offering his thoughts on the declining birthrate.
ANN KARRICK: Nice to have you here. I know you talk a lot about the inversion, meaning fewer births combined with the aging population, as people live longer. What do you see as the most significant challenges?
BEN LYTLE: Well, first of all, in the macro level, every country in the world's social safety net, including health care, social security or pensions and caring for the lower income people in society or the disabled is all financed by younger people with this huge wealth transfer or money transfer, a subsidy, if you want to think it, and that's going away. That's huge, and nobody's figured out yet how to replace it. The second thing is that economies can't grow in a declining population. That's a risk of recession in particularly in developed countries, but also a worldwide recession or depression. The other thing, and something that we can all relate to immediately, is that we simply cannot care for the people we've got in the United States today, particularly the elderly, as we do it today; we simply don't have enough clinicians and healthcare workers to care for people, and that all developed post-COVID. And I think the last thing bothers me, so those three, the others, that people aren't taking it seriously, even leaders, big leaders, you hardly ever hear business leaders and government leaders and education talk about this, this fundamental change. People just don't seem to be taking it seriously yet.
ANN KARRICK: I did an interview with another person, who said part of the reason he thinks that they are not talking about it is they don't want people to panic, and they're concerned that no one will invest in certain countries or certain industries if they think there will be no people or that that particular country is going to disappear, basically that economy.
BEN LYTLE: I agree with that, but at the same time, investors are smart; they're going to figure it out. Probably the people who are paying the most attention to it today are savvy investors.
ANN KARRICK: And I know you said no one wants a depopulation-driven worldwide economic depression, hard to say, and even worse, if we have to live through it. So how would AI help keep the world economy strong?
BEN LYTLE: We can definitely avoid the economic fallout if we aggressively implement AI, robotics and other technologies that essentially allow us to grow productivity faster than the rate of population decline, and that's absolutely possible with the technologies we've got today. We don't have to wait for any new ones. Many people, and often the press, look at AI, and they look at the negatives of the threats of it. All technologies, throughout history have presented a threat or disadvantages and huge advantages. In this case, AI is the answer to the way we avoid going into our economies declining, and it allows the problem you brought up earlier that some countries worry, well, we've got declining population, nobody will invest in us. As long as they prove they're growing their economy through productivity faster than the rate of population decline, that won't be a problem.
ANN KARRICK: Would you have the same answer regarding AI when it comes to the challenges of health care?
BEN LYTLE: Absolutely, health care is sort of the “canary in the coal mine” for what every industry is going to face. Because what happens is you have people retire faster than you can train new people for the jobs, and that can hit every industry at different levels. But healthcare is the worst. You can't just suddenly say, Let's go create 10,000 new doctors. Let's go create half a million new nurses. So, because of that, the only answer is to make the ones we have more productive and increase training and development of new ones at the same time.
ANN KARRICK: That makes sense. We touched on the demographic inversion and how it's been ignored by government, education, media, and business leaders. You've talked about how it's something that's been around for 50 years, the same as the environment. Why is it being ignored?
BEN LYTLE: It's a bit of a bafflement to me as well. The math is simple. You have to have 2.1 births on average for every female in the population to keep the population flat. There's not a single developed country in the world that has a flat population. Everybody is declining, some quite aggressively. So this is a serious issue. Now, for the first 25 years, this was known; it was mostly known only among the demographers, and they do their own work and they provide their data, but nobody was paying any attention, and it was really the breakthrough that came from a guy named Ben Wattenberg, who used to have a TV show called Think Tank in the Boston area. He was an American enterprise scholar, and he wrote a book called Fewer. It's an easy read. I would recommend people read it, but he was the first one to break it to public figures that, hey, this is a serious issue. Well, he went around the world talking to public figures. He was invited to speak to different legislatures around the world and leaders, and nothing happened.
ANN KARRICK: Perfect, and nothing happened, great.
BEN LYTLE: And so it really shocked me. I think part of it was that we have all been steeped in Malthusianism, that we're going to overpopulate and starve to death. And, you know, we all grew up watching really bad disaster movies about this, and I think we drank the Kool-Aid, but it is an existential threat, and it happens much faster than people think. A lot of people kind of rationalize, well, this is going to take a long time. No, it's not. Look at Japan today. Look at Italy, Spain, and South Korea. It happens in a couple of generations, because very quickly you get down to a level of about 1.3 births per female, which is where these countries are, or worse, and suddenly you can't ever reverse it. You can never get back to the population you once had. There simply aren't enough women in the population having children. So this is a really big deal, and I've been watching it closely because I knew Ben [Wattenberg] and I've been paying attention. I've been speaking on it for 25 years, although I wasn't out campaigning. It is troubling that even today, employers and CEOs don't know it.
ANN KARRICK: Do they not know it? Or do they just not want to hear it? Are people telling them and they're in denial, or they simply have not been told?
BEN LYTLE: Both. I spoke to a group of CEOs – some of them in a certain healthcare sector, largest companies in the world. These are enormous companies. This was a European Union company, and when I started speaking about this, he said, what population decline? What are you talking about? And even his peers looked at him like, What? Where have you been? But that tells you how bad it is. Most of the public still doesn't know about it. Many CEOs don't understand the numbers and how fast it can develop in a generation, or how difficult it is to reverse.
ANN KARRICK: You kind of hinted at it – that it's not something that can be stabilized or reversed quickly. The same 20-50 years it took to get there is going to take at least that long to come back. And that would be if each female were having four or five children, which is not the norm at present.
BEN LYTLE: That's exactly right, Ann – and one of the things that Ben Wattenberg did in his research was exposed that he identified, I think it was 35 or more different causes. And so that's why you can't say, well, let's just give people financial incentives to have children. It's not just money. It is a cultural shift that contains many different elements, such as a woman wanting a professional career, perhaps before she has children. Well, if she waits until age 32, her chances of having more than one child drop to 50% and at 32 it's a geriatric pregnancy. So these things are going to be difficult to reverse, and we have to both pursue productivity gain and try to reverse it at the same time, but we have to start with our government leaders and our business leaders taking this really seriously and realizing, yeah, it's going to damage their business.
ANN KARRICK: And sometimes that's what will speak louder to them, when they realize it's going to damage their business, then they realize, oh, this is serious, and we need to do something about it. But for individual people, is there something they should be doing themselves to put themselves in a better position to be in this new reality?
BEN LYTLE: I do a lot of speaking to young adults and college-age adults, as well as young adults already in their careers. And I'm counting really anybody under 40; they don't know about this. Nobody's producing movies about the problems of a declining generation. So they don't know about it, and most of them who do, don't put it on the same level as the environment. So, for example, when I do ask them questions, I'll say this will be an existential threat to human life – far more and far sooner than the environment, because this one's going to be as hard as the environment to turn – but it's taking place much faster. And, they're usually shocked by that, very few of them, and you would think they would know this, don't realize that, if you wait until after 30 as a female, how difficult it is to have children, and how difficult it is to have more than one.
The other phenomenon is dog replacement. I recently came across a statistic that I haven't verified yet, but it suggests that, at some point, starting around the peak of the baby boomer era, roughly 64-66% of US households had a child. Now that's at 27% -- at that time, about 25% of the households had a dog, now it's 71%. I love dogs, but they're not replacements for children and human beings.
ANN KARRICK: And certainly not to take over the responsibilities of the world.
BEN LYTLE: Right. Exactly. And the joys that you get in later in life, you know, and all the other benefits like, who's going to take care of you, you know, who's going to help you as you get older, and that kind of thing. There are solutions, though, and I'm not a disaster kind of guy. I have a lot more confidence in human resilience. The solutions, usually to things like this, come from technology. Medical technology may be the solution here, whether it's women being able to have children later in life, already we have IVF, there are other things coming. The second thing is technology that would allow a fertilized cell to be extracted and they're saved or later. All that stuff is being researched, but it won't be aggressively pursued until we realize how serious this is as a society.
ANN KARRICK: Until we hit the panic button, and then they'll start to look at those
BEN LYTLE: But cultural norms change, too. You know, you've seen it. We've seen it in our life. You know, in our lifetime, littering was once a huge problem in the United States, not nice, minor, and it was the norm to litter. You know, smoking was the norm. And today you can see some real reversals in drinking as well as alcohol. [Sure] So this norm could change as fast as it's developed, if we take it aggressively. Because, if you remember, within all of those other cases, at least smoking and littering, we put on big public education campaigns to make people aware, and we're going to have to do that, but it's got to get on somebody's agenda, and it's not right now.
ANN KARRICK: What's your call to action to people in general on this topic?
BEN LYTLE: It's the same call to action that is true of my entire Potentialist book, about adapting, for responsible adults – stop being silent. Sit with your family first of all, and educate your family about how fast the world is changing, how we have to adapt, and how you thrive in it, and all too often people feel uncomfortable talking about it. It's not that complicated. I mean, if it were a guy like me, I wouldn't have written the books! So, you know, these are fixable things, but we can't wait for the government. I mean, one of the things about the new reality is that our institutions are struggling. They're all struggling. You can look at the fall in respect for all of our major institutions: education, government, mass media, and healthcare. So individuals in a democratizing society have to take the lead. You can't wait for somebody to say, “Oh, here you need to do this.” So everybody should take this on and say, I want to make sure the people in my family and my social circle, my orbit, my people at work, my team at work, understand how serious these changes in society are, and how we're going to have to step up.
ANN KARRICK: I'm not sure how many steps there are, but I feel like you first have to admit there's a problem, then take action...
BEN LYTLE: With nature, as we have extended lifespan, every stage of life expands. 70 is the new 50, and, you know, 90 is the new 70. It's actually potentially good for this population decline issue, because more people will decide to work longer, because they're going to live a lot longer, and they don't want to retire. They just want to change the kind of work they do.
The other end of the problem is a big problem, and it's something that nobody will deny. I've not had one person in an audience say, “Oh no, that's not true,” which is that children, young people, are growing up slower. Employers will tell you that, parents will tell you that, we can all see it. Happening. And I always kind of use one little humorous point, which is, where did helicopter moms come from? Did they suddenly have a secret convention the rest of us didn't know about and decide our children are still infants? I have to baby them more. I have to hover over them. They did sense that intuitively, and it's true, but that's not the way out of this. We actually have to accelerate the maturity and wisdom of young people, which is absolutely possible if we do it; we just simply change the way we parent,
ANN KARRICK: Well, and if you look back in history, people were kind of adults and on their own, late teens by 20, for sure. They were starting families, having children. And one of the things that's been discussed on this whole topic is that part of the problem is we got rid of teen pregnancy, which most people say, “Well, that's a good thing,” but we didn't replace those babies in any other age group, so they just went away.
BEN LYTLE: I'm old enough, and I actually grew up on a ranch, where my siblings and I, by the time we could walk, had chores. I mean, literally, walk as a little one, you had chores. And then by the time we were pre-teens, 10-12, 12 years old, because back then, child labor was the norm. So I had a paper out, and then I hauled hay, and I worked all through high school to save enough money to go to college. [Right] It's much harder today because we've eliminated child jobs, but we have to find a way to accelerate the wisdom of young people and their maturity. It can be done. This is definitely something we need to address again. Most people will immediately acknowledge it once you make it conscious. [Right] They're not conscious of it today.
ANN KARRICK: A bonus question, for people who still think there are too many humans on Earth, what's your message? Because it's going to be even harder, I would think, for someone in that position to realize that this is a real problem.
BEN LYTLE: Yeah, I think the first thing is, the Malthusian theory has been completely debunked. It was never right in the first place because it ignored technological innovation, and so K calories, 1000s of calories per dollar, has rocketed higher since Malthus formulated that goofball theory. But for people who are convinced of that, imagine you own a herd of sheep, and you’ve got too many sheep, you don't have enough grass, and you decide, okay, I'm going to drive so many of them over the ledge here, and because then thin out my herd, and guess what, they don't stop – that's what we're doing here. Is that, if we're not careful, if anyone who thinks we have too many people, first of all, really revisit the accuracy of that, because according to the UN's figures, it's going to peak at around 10 billion. We're at eight. That's not a huge jump, given the technologies we've got. So that risk is pretty low. The second thing is, let's make that decision once we have decline under control, rather than drive the entire herd of sheep over the cliff.
ANN KARRICK: So level out the population first before we drive sheep off the cliff.
BEN LYTLE: Absolutely, a much-reduced population. When that population is many, many more elderly, and not enough young people, it’s a huge problem. Well, nobody's figured it out yet. How are we going to finance that?
ANN KARRICK: We're already seeing some of that with the baby boomers retiring and their increased need for health care as they age, and there are fewer people to supply those services.
BEN LYTLE: Ann, every week, I get one yesterday, I get two to three texts or emails from people who I maybe don't know, or I know very distantly – and they'll write me and say, Can you help me? I've got a brain tumor, or I've got this severe pain in my back, and I can't see a neurologist for four months. Nobody will see me, or I don't have one. [Right] Or I have type 1 diabetes, and I can't get to an endocrinologist. That's really bad in healthcare. I mean, these are horrible situations. And then right now, without a really aggressive use of AI and robotics, we can't reverse it.
Now, imagine that when you go to get your car repaired, and you've got this lovely new car, got a lot of electronics, and it's got some problems, you call up the dealer, and he says Okay, we'll see you in four months. You go, What!? These technicians take forever to train. Imagine it when insurance companies have to start dropping products because they can't find enough actuaries and underwriters. That's what happens when you start serious population decline. And AI can offset a lot of that, but that's a skill we have to develop as a nation, and we're just moving too slow, and it's not a big business skill. This is something every small business is going to have to do as well, and every professional.
ANN KARRICK: And each person is going to have to start planning ahead as well.
BEN LYTLE: Exactly, exactly.
ANN KARRICK: People who are wealthier will own three cars to make sure they've always got one that's running while they wait for the others to be repaired. And the people who don't have those kinds of finances will be stuck with whatever public transportation is.
BEN LYTLE: Yeah, and Waymo is going to be a good investment. Self-driving cars are going to be a good investment. But I do think, Ann, that this is something that -- and it's why, you know -- I've been so involved in this at this stage of my life, which I didn't plan on doing. It is a call to action. And the opposite is true here: if we really embrace reversing it, stabilizing the population decline, applying technology to offset that, as well as dealing with the increasing complexity of life, we can have the best humanity has ever had. It’s right in front of us, right in front of us. If we'll do that.
ASK: So people shouldn't be panicking. They should just be preparing
BEN LYTLE: And taking it seriously. And not thinking that the government or somebody is going to solve this for you. You have to solve it. Every individual, every family, has to adapt.
Connect with Ben through his website, PotentialistFuture.com.
