Are we not looking at a future for the planet that is essentially religious? I think the answers we don't know. One analogy i've thought of than maybe we've discussed in the past, is secular urban societies as being like big cities used to be in the pre modern age. It was a kind of population sink. And one possible sonario is that these communities do continue to exist, but that they pump people out em and those people man the secular society. So that's one possible model. But by studying demography, we can at least ask these questions and start looking around and start debating them.
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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