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The food at this restaurant is terrible. Yes, and such small portions. Our two covers this week reminded me of that old joke. Young people are so drawn to dead-end leftist thinking. Yes, and there are so few of them.
In America and Europe, we examine a new brand of me-first leftism, which
we dub Gen-Z socialism.
It exalts price controls and hefty taxes on the rich. Not all of
its leading figures
are young. Some, such as Zack Polanski of Britain’s Green Party and Zohran Mamdani, New York’s newish mayor, are rising stars; others have been around for decades. Some of its appeal is rooted in real grievances, from unaffordable housing to legitimate fears about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. But its core principles—that growth does little to help ordinary people, that spending can be paid for by the richest and that the market needs to be reined in—are destructive. Worse, they are infecting mainstream centre-left thinking.
This new generation of socialists is the subject of today’s episode of The Insider
(watch now),
where Zanny Minton Beddoes, our editor-in-chief, is joined by a panel of editors to unpack their ideas—and ask how centrists should respond.
In Asia and the Middle East, we look at an extraordinary demographic change. You might associate the most populous country on Earth with high fertility rates. In fact, India is
experiencing a baby bust.
The country has a total fertility rate, a measure of children per woman, of 1.9 and falling. That is below the replacement rate, of 2.1 or so, needed for a stable, long-term population. Some states have fertility rates on a par with Scandinavia. Tamil Nadu, an industrialised state in the south, and West Bengal, a populous one in the east, both have the same fertility rate as Finland. Maharashtra, a big western state encompassing Mumbai, matches Norway.
India is
the most striking example
of a global trend. For it is no longer just wealthy places where families have few, or no, kids. Over two-thirds of all countries are now below the replacement rate. Middle-income ones like Brazil, Iran, Thailand and Turkey have been well below it for years. Poorer countries are steadily joining their ranks. The reasons for this profound demographic change are worth celebrating. The consequences are more worrying. | 
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