Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the philosophy and policies of groups advocating for global population reduction. This episode explores the arguments, motivations, and potential consequences of “degrowth” movements, including controversial proposals for family planning, technocratic governance, and the future of human flourishing. The hosts critically examine the data, challenge utopian and dystopian visions, and discuss the real-world implications for society, technology, and culture. Whether you’re curious about demographic trends, environmental debates, or the ethics of population control, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and spark new questions. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing the philosophy of the people who are aware that demographic collapse is happening. The, you know, broadly saying, aware of its consequences, but want to facilitate its continued existence and how they think that this is gonna work out. Okay. Because I’ve, I’ve heard of these people, you know, the, the degrowth people, right. The well we can manage, like, we can make things better with an older population in everything like that. Simone Collins: And like, this is good. I’m just picturing the dog in the fire ridden building. Malcolm Collins: Yes. This is fine. Yeah, I kind of blew this off. But we haven’t, well maybe they’re onto Simone Collins: something. What if we’re wrong? If we’re wrong, we wanna be corrected. Right? Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Reach out to us that has these beliefs. Mm-hmm. And they were very nice. And they sent us to their website. And this group is called the O-V-O-L-P-E Foundation. Hmm. Overlap. I, I don’t know how to pronounce it. And they do a lot of work on trying to get girls to have a fewer kids. [00:01:00] I, I will say that normally I wouldn’t care about this work, but guess what country they, they do this work in most. Simone Collins: Ah, Malcolm Collins: Thailand. Do you know what Thailand’s TFR is? It’s round one. This work is genocidal at that rate. That means the population is halfing every generation. That’s one of the lowest, like the the going to their approach. Wouldn’t Simone Collins: they wanna do this in like a really high fertility country? I mean, yeah, they do do it in, Malcolm Collins: One other country. I wanna say tan Tanzania, which is higher fertility, like 4.5. And so that’s, that’s reasonable there. But in Thailand, I’m like, if there’s any country where you don’t wanna be doing this, that’s like doing it in Korea or something. Keep in mind, Thailand’s fertility rate is one, and Korea is like, the lowest on Earth is like 0.75. Yeah. So this is close to the lowest fertility rate on earth. Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean at that point it’s, it’s already happened. You don’t have to worry about it. You Yeah. You don’t have to worry places that are involved. 2.1 at least Malcolm Collins: kicking a dead dog at this point. We should ask them about that. I wanna to go into their own words. Okay. Both [00:02:00] from the chain of emails they sent us and from their website so we can understand how they wanna structure society. And I’ll start with just sort of the wider plan here which we won’t talk about too much, but it’ll give you an idea of where we’re gonna be going with this conversation. Okay. The goal here is on one hand, the wellbeing of children, including the widespread good education, and on the other hand, equal opportunities and prosperity for all citizens of the world. The key message here as follows, fundamental right to one child per couple. This child will be supported through compulsory education, medical care, nutrition, and if necessary, financial assistance from the global community, at least until UNESCO ISCD level two or possibly level three registration with the child protection Authority. The CPA is mandatory. A second child is subject to conditions. Both parents must demonstrate and be able to independently financially support both children up to employability. Approval by the CPA is required for the third child onwards. Additional [00:03:00] requirements applied in addition to the requirement for approval. Progressive child tax policies are levied. So basically the more kids you have, the more you have to pay in taxes rather than the less. And then they go on to say in this section, this is to ensure that school attendance by less privileged children is refinanced by child taxes, by wealthier families. Presumably it would be the wealthier families who are allowed to have far more children. Right? So it’s like wealthy people can have, you could hear these like elements of ness to this, right? A, a dictatorial world government where only the wealthy can have more than two children, or really more than one child. Yeah. It seems Simone Collins: like many sci-fi dystopias where you, you have, you can’t afford to pay the government credits to have an ad
