Showing results by author "Paul Morland" in All Categories

A dazzling new history of the modern world, as told through the remarkable story of population change. Every phase since the advent of the industrial revolution - from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump - can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world.

A population calamity is unfolding before our eyes. It started in parts of the developed world and is spreading to the four corners of the globe. There are just too few babies being born for humanity to replace itself. Leading demographer Paul Morland argues that the consequences of this promise to be calamitous. Labour shortages, pensions crises, ballooning debt: what is currently happening in South Korea - which faces population decline of more than 85% within just two generations - threatens to engulf us all, and sooner than we think.

The great forces of population change—the balance of births, deaths and migrations—have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through 10 illuminating indicators, Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in ...