00:00you mentioned fertility what yes and this actually comes comes back to this one of the other things
00:06I'm obsessed with at the moment is peaking global population and the fact that we very probably live
00:11in a period of peak humanity so the global population will start falling over the next
00:15couple of decades and the UN forecasts on this are always wrong every time wrong so you know
00:20they think we'll peak in in 40 years 50 years but it's very likely we'll peak quite soon and if
00:24you
00:24look at the fertility rates around the world you can see that in real time you know Korea down to
00:290.7 something and the new Japanese numbers out yesterday 1.15 and here in the UK were 1.44
00:36but there is a very interesting anomaly connected to this that is it comes back to this idea of the
00:42poor old UK there is a very strong correlation between falling fertility rates and the number
00:48of robots in a country right so as your fit makes sense right as your fertility rates begin to fall
00:53and you recognize that there's going to be a fall off in your working population you start to invest
00:57more and more in robots so Korea South Korea has the largest number of robots per 10,000 workers in
01:04the world coming in it's just over a thousand and then you have countries such as Singapore etc that
01:08are in the 900s you come down to the big European economies Germany etc 500 is Japan around the same
01:15level and then you get the global average 126 robots per 10,000 people and then you get the UK
01:23just over a hundred despite the fact that we have a relatively low fertility rate 1.44 so our
01:29fertility rate is low and if you look at the charts you would therefore expect us to have a pretty
01:34high
01:34number of robots per 10,000 workers and in fact we're well below the global average and it's that
01:40kind of statistic and you look at and you think well our favorite Adam Smith quote or my favorite Adam
01:44Smith quote is there is a lot of ruin in the nation in a nation a nation can go through
01:49an awful lot
01:51before it gets anywhere near the end of its glory days but look at numbers like that and we're really
01:56beginning to push that idea to destruction I bet we got more fax machines than they were I think we
02:02have a lot more fax machines you're right but that kind of tells us next
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