2025-08-14
35 分钟This week, we're pleased to bring you some of the best conversations from our archives.
Last year,
we spoke with the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash infertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation.
That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year.
The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birth rate in 2024.
I hope you enjoy our conversation with Nicholas Eberstadt.
We'll be back next week with a new episode.
I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
It seems to me there are a lot that human beings and their governments and civil institutions can do to adjust to shrinking and aging populations just the way we adjusted to a growing world when we have a population explosion.
Over the past century, the world's population has exploded,
surging from around 1.6 billion people in 1900 to roughly 8 billion today.
But according to the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over,
and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun.
In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs,
Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order,
one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics.
Senior editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Eberstadt,
about what is driving today's population decline,
why policy cannot reverse it, and how governments can reckon with the shrinking world.
You wrote in our recent issue what is nothing short of a monumental piece titled The Age of Depopulation Surviving a World Gone Gray.