Why it Matters that the World's Population May be Shrinking

Guest: John Ibbitson, Journalist, Co-Author of “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline” When you were deciding how many kids to have, I bet you thought about things like money and timing and emotional stuff like, “does our family feel complete yet?” Maybe you also thought about whether your house was big enough for another child. On a global scale, experts have been fretting for decades about Earth running out of room. They’ve warned of an impending population crisis that will stress our supply of food, water and land. Cue the apocalyptic soundtrack. But now there’s another group of population experts out there worried that maybe we’ve got the opposite problem –that somewhere around 2050 the Earth’s population is going to start shrinking. Crisis averted, right? Not entirely.