In England and Wales, the total fertility rate fell to 1.39 children per woman in 2025. More than half of the world’s countries and areas are now below the level at which a population replaces itself without migration. Yet those numbers cannot tell us whether people are freely choosing smaller families, struggling to find a partner, leaving parenthood too late or being priced out of the future they wanted.
In this episode, Margherita Volpato speaks to Camilla Cavendish, Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice. In her new book, Generation Maybe: Why We’re Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All, she investigates why birth rates are falling across very different countries and what those falling rates reveal about the way we live.
By the end, Cavendish explains why the baby bust is not simply a story about babies, but about whether people can imagine and build a different future.
Camilla Cavendish, Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice is an award-winning journalist, Financial Times columnist, and Harvard Kennedy School research fellow.
Margherita Volpato is Senior Producer at Intelligence Squared.
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