Stephen Shaw

Every nation talks about its own issues.

It's the price of real estate.

Work-life balance, it's, you know, Southern Europe, it's youth unemployment, it's gender issues in Korea.

But no, you look at the data and it cuts through all of this.

The reality is, without exception, every nation has a straight line in terms of the age of motherhood.

It goes up every year, up and up and up.

And with it, birth rates come down.

And we're noticing this right now, Glenn.

You know, it's in the news almost daily in some cases.

The reality is this started in the 70s, but we didn't really know this because people who delayed parenthood in the early 70s mostly had a chance to catch up and have a child mid-20s, late 20s.

We're now at a point where people are starting so late, it gets more and more challenging for different reasons.

To really have your first child, you know, 33, 35, 37, of course it can happen.

But for more and more people, it simply doesn't.

South Korea.

South Korea?

Yes.

So the average woman in South Korea is having 0.7 children.

The U.S.

is 1.6.

That's not good because we need around 2.1 children per family, basically everyone having two kids on average, for a population to remain stable.