Tom Sasse

speaker

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

And the third factor is a bit harder to measure, but it's basically culture.

So as it becomes aspirational to have one or two children, that then starts to spread within a country.

And this is where people are starting to look at the role of smartphones.

So smartphones could be really quite a powerful tool for diffusing these new types of cultural norms.

So if you're a poor woman in a village,

you become more exposed to the lifestyles of richer peers in cities.

Now we don't have really good studies yet that prove this, but it's a very interesting hypothesis for why these kind of effects might be happening more quickly in the poor world than we expected.

At the biggest scale, it means that peak human is probably sooner than we think, and we should be skeptical about claims that Africa is going to grow quite as large as some people have suggested in the past.

I think it also means that potentially it will be harder for all countries to bank on importing the kind of migrant labor that they might have thought they were going to to help them tackle worker.

Shortages.

If poor countries reach low fertility earlier, it probably adds another layer of difficulty to the task of development and getting richer.

Not the only one.

So that will be alongside old problems like building institutions, tackling corruption.

And it's not to say that you can't get rich if you've gone through this demographic transition.

So China and Vietnam are both examples of countries that actually

actually went through this transition at an even lower level of wealth than India.

But it does make it harder because it means that you don't have the wind at your back.

And it means that poorer countries maybe have a narrower window when they're going to be in this demographic sweet spot.

Well, I think what most countries are finding is that there isn't a great deal that you can easily do to move the needle.

So these fertility trends are driven by pretty deep economic and cultural forces.

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