Alice Evans
speaker
145 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Alice Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But as the entire economy ages, then it becomes more sluggish. And those younger people, either through savings or taxes, need to pay for elderly health care or pension costs or provisions. And that then creates a massive fiscal squeeze because governments or individuals need to spend a higher amount of their money given those rising dependency rates.
And if we're concerned with things like climate change mitigation, the governments just won't have enough money to spend on extra costs if you're spending more on old people. And on top of this, if younger people are saving more, as they are in China, then they're going to be spending less. So that has a knock-on effect on the entire economy.
So I think fertility and women's choices and men's choices about how many children they want, that's always come up in my interviews because I'm always interested, you know, what do you want to do for your life? So I've got so much data on this going back for the past 15 years. You know, when I was in Zambia, women would always encourage me to have another baby. Oh, you must have a baby.
You must have a baby. That was so imperative for them.
So I was constantly pestered. And then I think in East Asia, in South Korea, where I was looking at the data so intensely and I was having so many of my interviews and I just realized it was so omnipresent. And then I looked at the data more broadly. So I think going to South Korea is really what fertility pilled me, so to speak.
And you see it in Italy, too. For example, when you get off the train in Rome, you see the pet store rather than the kids store.
Yeah, I mean, I would say one more thing. I suppose one aspect of me as a sort of social scientist is I teach on international development. So I'm very interested in economic outcomes and how we can all become richer, the sort of abundance idea. But I also study culture. So it's the interconnection between all these economic consequences of our cultural choices.
So let me add on the Scandinavia point, you know, left-wing progressives may say, oh, Scandinavia is so family friendly. You know, there's universal childcare. It's easier to be a working mother. But actually, the U.S. has higher fertility, right? So that signals to us that that theory isn't working.
And as for the theory that it's all about women's choices and liberalism, how can that explain why fertility is crashing in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey, and in Tamil Nadu, which remain very conservative? So something is happening very recently, maybe in the past 15 years, everywhere all at once, across vastly different economies, across vastly different governance and welfare systems,
and across vastly different levels of liberalism versus religiosity. So those theories that you mentioned seem to do a poor job of the sort of comparative analysis in the very recent global plummet. And going back to Sweden, for example, what there has been in the very recent years is a massive, massive rise in singles, hugely.
There are more and more people living in single-occupier households, and this reflects a global trend.
Absolutely. So if we look empirically at the data for a range of countries, we find that increasing number of people are staying single. That is, they are neither married nor cohabiting. So in the US, over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married. So they're single. That's the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, in China, in South Korea.
I chat to all my Chinese students. Many are single, no expectations, no plans, no desires to be married. So that's a massive, massive global friction. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated. If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or couple is almost one to one with the decline in children. It matches so closely in both the US and China, everywhere.
This is the strongest correlation. It's more closely correlated than anywhere else and across multiple countries. The data is so strong.
Yes, that's what I think, certainly. So I think we can say, you know, there could be locally specific factors that go on in each place. Each place has its own cultural idiosyncrasies, and I don't want to ignore that. But yes, absolutely. The big shock that's occurred everywhere all at once is we've seen vast improvements in personal online entertainment. So we know, for example, in the U.S.
So people are spending more. No, but I think that's the thing. I mean, no offense, Ross, but I do blame charismatic people like you. You know, if people want to socialize, to listen.
Okay, okay. You're totally innocent. Okay. But we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it's, you know, watching shows on Netflix, sports bets, you know, online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can, you know, go on Pornhub.
online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft. So we're all becoming, it's not just being single, we're all retreating into this digital solitude. And I think that's partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. You can work from home.
And some of these apps are so hyper engaging that you sort of get distracted by the constant stream of Dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked. And effectively, the tech is out-competing personal interactions. That's my fear.
And there's the big difference that sub-Saharan Africa has much, much lower rates of smartphone penetration.
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