Jim’s Mowing founder Jim Penman is turning his attention from mowing to growing.
While most Aussies think of the franchise mogul as the ubiquitous bearded guy with the floppy hat, the millionaire lawnmowing entrepreneur has a lesser-known passion project — saving the human race.
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In a new book with best-selling author Andrea Pearson, Mr Penman is tackling the birthrate crisis head-on.
Mr Penman has been interested in collapsing birthrates since his time studying history at university.
“I was a big fan of the story of Rome and why the Roman civilisation collapsed — I could see parallels even at that time in what was happening in the world,” he told news.com.au.
It’s a seemingly intractable problem that has stymied governments and experts for generations. Billionaire Elon Musk fears the human race will go extinct and has described Aussies as an “endangered species”.
How do you convince people to have more babies?
Hungary, one of the most pro-family nations on earth, has been unable to lift its birthrate despite pouring billions into subsidies every year.
Countries across East Asia have also failed to reverse fertility decline despite years of aggressive pro-natalist policies, tax incentives, baby bonuses and family support programs.
“Policies that really explicitly target reversing fertility decline have not been successful,” Philip O’Keefe, professor of practice at the UNSW School of Business and expert in global demographic transitions, previously told news.com.au.
“Any expectation that you can significantly reverse that decline is probably not borne out by the experience.”
Australia has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman for almost 50 years, but that number hit a record low of 1.48 in 2024, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Treasury’s latest Intergenerational Report, released last month, forecasts deaths will outnumber births in Australia for the first time by the 2060s. Japan, which has the near-lowest fertility rate in the world, reached that grim milestone nearly a decade ago.
Many factors have contributed to the collapse in birthrates across the developed world. Women are having children later on average and having fewer children overall, partly as a result of delayed motherhood and family formation.
Contraception, increasing female education and workforce participation, financial pressures and declining religiosity have all played a role.
But Mr Penman argues it all comes back to biology.
“They’re all part of the same trend,” Mr Penman said.
“You see the same thing in the late Roman Republic, Han China, Ptolemaic Egypt … Augustus gave a big talk to his equestrian aristocracy; he told them, ‘You’ve got to stop being so selfish, have more children.’ But he didn’t know what to do.”
Mr Penman said the big difference now is “we have the potential to do something about it”.
“In the modern world, through our understanding of neuroscience, we can understand what’s gone wrong, and we can potentially reverse it,” he said. “That’s the big lesson of this book.”
During his university studies, Mr Penman grew convinced that birthrate collapses throughout history were a “biological pattern based on changes in human character”.
“There’s a character change happening in the Australian population and across the world which is a response to affluence,” he said.
“It floods the brain with dopamine, that makes the brain less sensitive to dopamine … similar to what happens when you take cocaine or other drugs.”
The modern dopamine-fried world, flooded with gambling, drugs, social media and pornography, means once-normal human routines like children and family “become less stimulating”.
“People think it’s all about money [through family subsidies],” Mr Penman said.
“That’s not the case. Preferences have changed, priorities have changed. There’s no government policy that can change this because it’s a change in the environment, but it can be changed — to some extent by your behaviour and more fundamentally there are potential treatments.”
When his PhD thesis was rejected in 1982, Mr Penman’s hopes of an academic career were dashed. That set him on the path to found Jim’s Mowing in 1989, the now 5000-franchise, $1-billion-a-year empire, and “the rest is history”.
But his interest in science never waned.
Today, Mr Penman funnels millions of dollars into his “philanthropic” private research organisation, Epigenes, which is seeking to identify potential drugs to cure mental illnesses brought on by the modern environment.
Epigenes, in partnership with La Trobe University, is working on a number of research projects into how environmental factors including calorie restriction, social interaction and stress can drive biological change across species.
“We’ve been studying food addiction for a while,” Mr Penman said.
He describes his Holy Grail drug as “like an anti-cocaine”. It could be similar to GLP-1 weight loss medication, which can suppress appetite and potentially other addictive behaviours like drinking alcohol.
“On an individual level we need to get rid of these dopamine surges causing the problems — sex, porn, social media, gambling,” he said, conceding that was unlikely.
“A more realistic solution is to develop treatments that can [counteract those effects] so things like family and children become more attractive. If you could develop such a treatment, it would have dramatic consequences for anxiety, depression, alcoholism.”
He added, “To do the original research does require a bit more money. I’m doing my best.”
Mr Penman currently funds Epigenes to the tune of around $3 million a year from his own pocket.
“It wouldn’t have to be a huge investment — a few hundred million dollars to discover suitable treatments,” he said. “At that stage the drug industry would take it up. This thing would have incredible potential.”
In the book, Birth-Rate Crisis: Reclaiming Family and Purpose in a Dopamine-Driven World, which releases on October 13, Mr Penman also makes the case for behavioural changes to boost the birthrate.
“[It’s about] how to lead a better life and how to bring your children up better,” he said.
“There are groups that do this very successfully, that resist this trend, like Orthodox Jews and the Amish. They have very strict codes of behaviour that govern their ordinary life, standing out against selfish individualism. These groups do have very large families, but they have to be separate from the wider society because the wider society is so corrosive.”
Unlike many others, Mr Penman is optimistic that the problem can be turned around.
“It’s a gradual process; you can already see the problems that are happening now,” he said.
“Growing disillusionment with politics, productivity is declining even though technology is advancing, per capita incomes of Australians are going backwards. The Roman Empire fell apart, the economy declined — it’s part of the same process.”
But “we’ve got time to do something about it”. “If a solution could be found, it could happen fairly quickly,” he said.
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