Dr Stephen J Shaw

Demographer, data scientist, filmmaker.

Dr Stephen J Shaw is a world-renowned demographer, data scientist, and, more recently, documentarian. For several years, he has been sounding the alarm on ‘depopulation’ - a rapid and global decline in population that he predicts humanity will face in the coming decades. His 2022 documentary, and first foray into film, Birthgap: Childless World explored the magnitude of these trends and the prospect of a world in which they go uncorrected.

Why did we invite him on?

We’ve hosted Stephen before, back in 2023 when he was promoting the release of his documentary debut. It was one of the most enlightening interviews we released that year; it seems many of our viewers, like us, were unaware of the scale of the problem.

Two years later, the projections have not improved. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. Stephen has continued to chart the data and, in his words, it “keeps him up at night.”

We wanted to hear more, and share what we learned with you.

What did we talk about?

“Last time I was here, adult nappies were outselling baby nappies in Japan. Now, the same is true for strollers - ones for pets are outstripping ones for babies. Things are not getting better.”

Stephen was quick to work out that this phenomenon isn’t about parenthood itself, but the transition into it. Mothers in Japan and America have as many children now, perhaps more, as they did in 1970; there’s just far, far fewer of them. That, he believed, was as far as the data could go.

What he didn’t expect, however, was a “pattern beneath the surface, [present] in 39 nations, that explains everything. And I mean everything. There is a singular reason for falling birthrates.”

Stephen walks us through how he arrived at this revelation. Analysing his data in Kyoto, he was charting 1500 data sets that captured the age at which men and women become fathers and mothers. With years of study under his belt, Stephen felt he could predict the outcome: a bell curve with peaks and trouphs clustered at several key age brackets - mid 20s, early 30s, perhaps again in the late 30s, etc.

That isn’t what emerged. That night, he sent himself an email: “We are all the same.”