2023-11-15
28 分钟People around the world are living longer and, on the whole, having fewer children. What does this mean for future populations? Sarah Harper CBE, Professor in Gerontology at the University of Oxford, tells presenter Jim Al-Khalili how it could affect pensions, why it might mean we work for longer, and discusses the ways modern life is changing global attitudes to when we have children, and whether we have them at all. Fertility and ageing have been Sarah's life's work and she tells her story of giving up a career in the media to carry out in-depth research, and going on to study population change in the UK and China, setting up the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and later becoming a Scientific Advisor to UK Government. Presenter: Jim Al-Khalili Producer: Tom Bonnett
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello, and.
Welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.
I'm Jamal Khalili, and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading scientists and you get to find out what drives them.
So sit back, get comfortable, and enjoy the episode.
Hello.
My guest today began thinking about aging and retirement when she was still in her 20s, not because she was about to stop working, quite the contrary, she was at the beginning of what would become her life's work to understand the in which our increasing life expectancy was changing the world.
Professor Sarah Harper runs the Institute of Population Aging at Oxford University and is a global authority on how health care, housing, infrastructure, migration, almost all aspects of society will need to adapt to us living for longer.
Societal changes also affect how many babies are born.
And we'll be hearing how Sarah leads studies that explore people's attitudes to having children and why in many parts of the world, the number of babies being born is changing, changing dramatically.
Sarah harper, welcome to the Life Scientific.
Hello.
I want to start with a myth that you quote at the beginning of your book, how Population Change Will Transform the World, which claims the world's population is growing exponentially and out of control.
And the reason is that too many women are bearing too many children.
Why did you begin with that?
I began with that because that was the belief that was around for a lot of the second half of the 20th century.
And yet at the same time, we were having population aging, which was being driven by reductions in childbearing.
So what we call the total fertility rate, which is the number of children that are born per woman of reproductive age, was consistently going down, first of all in Europe and North America, and then it was spreading out into Asia and Latin America so that only sub Saharan Africa still has very high rates of childbearing.
And because of that, world population isn't going to reach 24 billion, which is what we once feared.
The UN believed that by about 2050 we will hit probably 9, 10 billion, and then we will probably flatten, maybe go up a little by the end of the century.
But basically we are looking for at a far smaller population than we once thought.