Tom Sasse

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129 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 12 Jun

Tom Sasse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

So that's below the replacement rate, which is what's needed to keep the population stable in the long run.

But within that, you see some states that have fallen to levels sort of comparable with rich countries in Europe.

So Tamil.

Nadu, which is a big industrialized state in the south, and West Bengal in the east, have both got a TFR of 1.3.

That's the same as Finland.

And Maharashtra, which is a big Western

state has a a T F R of one point four, which is the same as Norway.

That's right.

So that has been the sort of dominant way that India has thought about this and people have thought about India.

And now what you have is this kind of demographic whiplash where suddenly India is looking at this future that looks quite different.

And that's a future where its population could peak.

in about two decades, and then it could fall almost as sharply as it's risen.

So that future isn't here yet, but the number of births in India have already peaked about 25 years ago.

And that's going to translate into fewer people overall in the future.

And this has happened for a lot of good reasons, but it also creates challenges that India is sort of hurtling through this demographic transition very quickly.

In southern states like Tamil Nadu, you're already seeing that they're starting to close a lot of schools, having to import a lot of workers, and really start to think about how to build systems to care for the elderly.

And that's all happening at a point when India remains relatively.

That's right, but most people hadn't thought of that being a trend that happens quite like this in the poor world.

So in the past it's been thought of something that happens when you reach a certain stage of development.

We've seen that story play out in the West, in East Asia, now increasingly in Latin America.

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