21. The Future of Fertility and the Health of Men

A chat with a Norwegian demographer and the director general of the Norwegian Institute of Public HealthVegard Skirbekk is a social scientist studying how global demographic change is reshaping health, economies, and society. He is co-founder of the Centre for Fertility and Health and is a professor at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Decline and Prosper: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children.Guri Rørtveit is a physician and public health researcher, and director general of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. She is a doctor and professor of family medicine at the University of Bergen.We discuss: Are we in the midst of a demographic emergency or a new phase of history we don’t yet understand? Why do interventions to increase fertility rarely work? Why Japan might do better with its old age dependency ratio compared to a country such as India. Will the Norwegian population disappear around the year 3200? We discuss some of the depopulation doomer anxieties: no more Einsteins to innovate, no more taxpayers to take care of elderly, reliance on immigration to steady population levels, etc.