“Why is Italy's soccer team so bad lately? Well, because there are just so much fewer Italians. So, if you are trying to select the best 22 soccer players when you have 300,000 Italians being born every year, you are going to have a much worse team than when you used to have 1 million Italians being born every year.”
EconTalk · In-Depth Interviews · October 2026
Russ Roberts raised Julian Simon's argument that people are the ultimate resource. Fernandez-Villaverde offers the example he uses with undergraduates: shrinking birth cohorts mean fewer top scientists, artists and athletes in the right tail.
Transcript
…but there is also a political economic scenario where it's actually not that great for the environment. And I have always been a big believer that the best policy to protect the environment is economic growth. Because when people get rich, they care a lot about how pretty your garden is. Yeah.
…innovation and creativity will be less, presumably, in a smaller world, unless we get along better in a smaller world, which would maybe make it easier to sit around and write symphonies. I don't know. We got AI coming. Who knows? But talk a little bit about, if you want to, about that phenomenon.
Yeah. Basically, the idea is: you know, how many Einsteins are you going to have in a population? Well, to some degree, it depends on how many children you have. And when you have a much smaller population, you are going to have a lower chance of having a top person. So, for the undergrads, I use a slightly more mundane example, which is why is Italy's soccer team so bad lately? Well, because there are just so much fewer Italians. So, if you are trying to select the best 22 soccer players when you have 300,000 Italians being born every year, you are going to have a much worse team than when you used to have 1 million Italians being born every year. So, your soccer team is just going to be much worse on average. Well, substitute soccer players for top scientists, top artists, top creative people in any dimension that you want to have. Now, you're absolutely right that we can try to move the needle in other aspects. For instance, I'm a big lover of classical music, and one of the things that surprises me the most is the incredible amount of…
And the last thing we'll close with this is that you talk in the paper about in markets, there are feedback loops that offset changes. And you suggest that there aren't so many obvious ones for population. I think there are. I think the cultural changes of modernity are going to be challenged when…
That may be true. I mean, let me give you a concrete example. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I live, it's already very difficult to win a statewide election if the Amish do not support you. Because the Amish has been growing so much that now they are a pivotal voting block. At the…
My guest today has been Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde Villa Verde. Jesus, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
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