I think about five year olds in italy, i thinink theye'll be about a third of their peak level before very long. And there are lots of ethnicities and nationalities in the past that, for one reason or other, died out. I mean, we don't talk about the medes any more,. so we shouldn't be surprised if in 500 years time they're not talking about the italians or the koreans. Collectively, if an individual wants descendants, he or she must have children. So if a community, or a ethni or a national group wishes to persist, it must has children.
Does the world have too many people – or not enough? That’s one of the big questions that demographer Paul Morland seeks to answer in his new book, Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers. Demography is the study of groups of people and how they behave, drawing from adjacent fields such as anthropology, sociology, history and economics. For this discussion focusing on political demography, Paul is joined in conversation by our host, Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College in London.
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