Joseph Henrich

Lots of the world is just getting hit after 1970.

And we also have things like rising female labor force participation, which is going to stifle it, rising female education.

And so once that stuff, you know,

maxes out, then we'll, you know, you'll see variation among different groups in terms of the number of babies they produce, right?

So, and this thing unfolds in demographic timescale, so we're not going to see it for a few generations, but there'll be some group somewhere that will be producing more babies than everybody else.

Yeah.

The reason why I think religion is the likely one is because, you know, people might people do things because they think God wants to do it.

And if people come to think that God wants them to have more babies because it's a way of worshiping him or getting to heaven or whatever the religious configuration is, then that'll be a group that produces more babies.

I mean, Catholics were defying the demographic transition for a while.

They just seem to have stopped.

Right.

Yeah.

So I think the answer to that is yes.

The one way that countries or whatever the political institution is could address that would be doing this thing that I've previously called like domesticating the competition.

So sports teams constantly renew themselves by competing.

Firms live and die and renew themselves over time.

Like you said, companies will start off being super great and then they get too big and then they get kind of inefficient and then eventually they disappear.

Yeah.

None of them last forever.

And that seems to be true of political units.