Lyman Stone
Demographer and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, writing on fertility decline, birth rates and the cost of raising ch...
“The math is pretty punishing when you get few enough young people. … Productivity growth can rise to offset it in principle, but you do need a lot of productivity growth. You need to be very much kind of a maximum AI optimist to think that South Korea is going to be sustainable.”
Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
Dubner asked whether falling birth rates are really as bad a problem as demographers say. Stone answers that only a huge, AI-driven jump in productivity could make up for so few young people, and uses South Korea as the test case.
Transcript
AI productivity growth might replace all the young workers. Sure, yeah.
There you go. So do you see that demographic problem as we've been reading about for decades as problematic as non-demographers do?
The math is pretty punishing when you get few enough young people. Sure. Productivity growth can rise to offset it in principle, but you do need a lot of productivity growth. You need to be very much kind of a maximum AI optimist to think that South Korea is going to be sustainable.
South Korea being sustainable, what is their fertility rate right now? The
latest official number is like 0.7. Wow. Children per woman. So that means that each generation is like 30 or 40% the size of the one before it. But again, this doesn't keep me up at night. I actually don't worry about that. When I think of the problem of low fertility, I'm not mostly thinking…
Do you really feel that not having your own children will make you miserable and unattached from the next generation?
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