Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

As the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt once put it, “a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively, almost completely unprepared to encounter, because all of our experience, in ways that we don't even think about, has been framed by a growing world population.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the discipline of economics. The great well of economic theory that we are familiar with was all written during times of population growth. We are about to enter uncharted territory, and my guest today argues that demography is now the most fundamental force shaping our economic future.

The demographer Paul Morland is a former Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Senior Member at St Antony's College, Oxford. His previous books include 'The Human Tide' and 'No One Left.' He is the co-author, with Philip Pilkington, of a new book titled 'Bust: The Economics of Population Decline', which argues that depopulation triggered by low birth rates is already transforming our economies, not only in the developed world, but everywhere.
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This interview was actually recorded before Suella Braverman's most recent Question Time appearance, which sparked a public row over the question of English identity and ethnicity. As it happens, that was one of the topics we covered in our conversation, which is themed around Suella's new memoir, an account of her family's experiences of the British Empire, and her vision for modern Britain.

Suella Braverman is a politician, barrister, and former Attorney General and Home Secretary. Earlier this year, she defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK, and now serves as their spokesperson for education, skills, and equality. Suella's new book is titled 'Patriot: Empire, Betrayal, and Hope.'
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In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, Rob Henderson and I discussed the new matchmaking scheme from the Singaporean government, which seems to be intended to boost the country's birth rate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2019, Rusty Reno – editor of First Things magazine – published ‘Return of the Strong Gods’, a book that argued that the postwar ideological order of tolerance and openness had overreached, and that we were set to see the reemergence of “strong gods” in politics—that is, the powerful loyalties that bind people to their homelands and to one another.

Today, Rusty and I return to this thesis seven years on. Populism is certainly ascendent, and not only in the United States. Should we be worried about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction? Or should the “strong gods” be welcomed?
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For this bonus episode Meghan Murphy and I discussed the recent Women’s Convention in Rochester, NY, which we both spoke at. This was a gathering of sex realist feminists, with a lot of mothers and Christian women in attendance. Meghan and I spoke about the historic relationship between Leftism and feminism, and wondered whether we're seeing a decoupling of women's advocacy from the Left-Right binary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.