John Burn-Murdoch

Exactly.

If numbers got that low and you tried to keep things stable, that essentially is what you'd be talking about.

And one other thing just to mention at this point as well is

Historically, we thought about low birth rates as being a high income thing.

You get them in the West, you get them in rich East Asia countries like Japan.

But now we're seeing steep declines to very low numbers, even in developing countries.

So Mexico now has a lower birth rate than America.

Tunisia has a lower birth rate than America.

Turkey has a lower birth rate than the UK.

So that's a big change as well, that these very low numbers are showing up in countries that are not actually rich in the first place.

Yeah, so this is an interesting one because there are lots of different questions that try to get at this and it's hard to know exactly what we're looking at when we look at these numbers.

So there's a question which asks people, what is the ideal number of children you would end up having?

And generally, again, in most countries, people say on average two.

But when the question is phrased slightly differently, some people respond with lower numbers or say they intend to not have any kids at all.

So I think there's some tension here.

I think this is a really important part of the piece.

There's a tension between what people say would happen in an ideal world.

If everything maps out beautifully, I would end up there with a partner and two kids.

But then people are not living in this ideal world increasingly.

We'll get on to why.