This was published a couple of weeks ago, but not yet posted in this community.
It’s a much-needed skewering of the idea that low birth rates are an existential crisis and that somehow what we need is more human beings on our stressed planet. This crazymaking meme is quickly becoming received wisdom. As the article describes, it’s being propagated by a bunch of disparate thought leaders:
- millenarianist billionnaires who are completely unexposed to our planet’s ecological limits (Elon Musk, obviously)
- pronatalist religious types, both conservative (Ross Douthat) and progressive (Elizabeth Bruenig)
- liberals (Ezra Klein) and eccentric libertarians (Tyler Cowen) who apparently believe “abundance” is the only way to save democracy
Their talking points are pretty well recapitulated here. There’s a legitimate argument to be had about the speed of any population decline (because of the stress on welfare systems). But the pronatalists are not talking about that, they’re genuinely worried about human underpopulation. This article is full of stats and demonstrations that show that this concern is completely delusional and is helping to make our planet less liveable. We need to fight back by stating this fact more loudly.
[I]f 95 percent of today’s human beings were to evaporate overnight, we would still have a global population higher than 400 million. That’s more people than existed during Rome’s greatest territorial extent, a time after Homer, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Alexander, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Jesus, and many other important figures had all made their contributions to the Western world. This population level, which amounts to five percent or one-twentieth that of today (at most), was hardly a threat to civilization, and much less to the human species.
That was a good read. Thanks for posting.
Many of these natalists aren’t talking about humanity in general when they talk about low birth rates.
They mean the wrong kinds of people are having too many babies and the (rhymes with right) kind of people aren’t having enough babies.
That’s a common refrain but it’s pretty hard to falsify. Personally, racism is not what I hear when I listen to most of these people. Perhaps it’s true of some of the billionaire oligarchs, but the leftists and liberals and Catholics are not closet racists.
PS: sure, downvote away, but you have no more evidence of what goes on in the minds of others than I do. It’s speculation, it’s a distraction, it’s too easy.
its a threat toward wealth disparity. they need necks for the collars.
Exactly what I’m thinking.
The problem is selective depopulation. Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are way below the 2.1 replacement rate. But most of Africa is above: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Root cause appears to be economic and cultural. Young people not able to afford making and raising children, and there’s a growing lack of partner options in rural areas because of wholesale migration to urban areas for better job and education opportunities.
The acknowledged solution is to promote managed immigration to level things out. However, xenophobia is a real thing.
More on the topic:
- https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-point-could-arrive-2030
- https://hir.harvard.edu/improved-immigration-japan/
- https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/south-korea-population-decline-aging-crisis
The U.S. isn’t immune: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/health/us-birth-rate-decline-2023-cdc/index.html
The point isn’t to force making more babies (Japan and South Korea have tried pretty much everything). But to balance things out so we don’t run out of natural resources, since developed nations consume way more resources per-capita than developing nations.
In a few years, there may not be much choice but to encourage immigration INTO these countries, just to keep populations and resource usage balanced. Hard numbers don’t lie.
Is this “acknowledged solution” not simply a neoliberal solution that has been accepted as common wisdom? Of course orthodox economists see population movement is normal and desirable. After all, the utopia of free markets is free movement. Of goods, services, capital - and people.
Personally I don’t buy it. We also have the right to live in cohesive societies. Indeed, cohesive societies will by definition be more resilient in the face of the coming challenges. A world of mass migration “to level things out” is a world of fractured angry societies which vote for dictators - after all, mass immigration will never be freely chosen in democracy. Hard polling numbers don’t lie, either. A world of mass population movement is a world of weak states with little legitimacy. It’s the reign of oligarchs and big money. The neoliberal dream, in other words.
You’ll probably reply that people (including me, presumably) have been manipulated by those oligarchs into rejecting migration as an economic fix precisely in order to precipitate authoritarianism, or something. Needless to say, that is all unfalsifiable. What seems clear to me from history is that human societies have a threshold of tolerance for immigration, and we push that limit at our peril.
Nothing I linked to or said cast a political angle to any of this. It’s just demographics and maths.
One solution is for a society to 100% defray the cost of raising children and take away the economic sting. South Korea and Japan are getting close, but it’s not clear even that would work. Young people are waiting longer to get married, to start families, or to have more than two children (replacement ratio is 2.1).
Better healthcare in developed societies is also letting the elderly live longer. The flip side is that it also puts strains on national resources because it requires higher draws on pensions, use of socialized medicine, and limits real-estate turnover.
If you can’t raise local birth rates, we’re on a slow moving train crash to societal collapse. It’s just a question of velocity. Once societies try all the soft incentives, they’re left with hard choices:
- Forced childbirth
- Senecide (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide)
- Warfare (worsens problem–kills off predominantly young soldiers)
- Cloning
- Immigration
They all have their issues. Time will tell which will work out.
To say political and social choices are “just demographics and maths” is exactly how the neoliberals presented their own unsustainable recipes in the 1970s and 80s: “There Is No Alternative.” As for “societal collapse”, that is silly histrionics. Today’s supposedly collapsing societies (Japan, Italy and so on) are, in material terms, some of the richest the world has ever known - far richer than they were themselves a few generations ago when orthodox economists were cheerleading for them. No, clearly they are not going to be pacemaking world GDP growth and consumption going forward - but do we not have the right to choose to move to other values? Most obviously: to work a few more years (not necessarily more hours) in line with longevity, to better distribute the existing abundance and above all to consume a bit less? I’m not a fan of the mental prison that underlies the choices you’re presenting as inevitable.
my old state uni near me, had some of the staff blame birth rate as the cause of thier low enrollment, no its the job prospects of many stem majors, heavily gatekeeped at the scientist level to prevent most entry level from entering the field. also HCOL IS THE OTHER major issues, no countries wants to address at all as with global warming, sabin made a video how GW was pratically abandoned.