Yves here. We’ve posted from time to time on alarmed media stories about how birthrates are declining around the world and at a faster rate than expected, particularly in advanced economies. The subtext is we need growth in population to have groaf, when growth is a function of both population and productivity increases. And of course, there is the elephant in the room of human consumption levels, particularly as standards of living have been rising, producing unsustainable demand for resources.
Japan in particular has tried to increase baby production, with no success. This post usefully takes on the idea that low birth rates are a problem in and of themselves.
By Emily Klancher Merchant, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, University of California, Davis and Win Brown, Research Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. Originally published at The Conversation
In the face of shrinking populations, many of the world’s major economies are trying to engineer higher birth rates.
Policymakers from South Korea, Japan and Italy, for example, have all adopted so-called “pronatalist” measures in the belief that doing so will defuse a demographic time bomb. These range from tax breaks and housing benefits for couples who have children to subsidies for fertility treatments.
But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. Rather, they are perceived as a cause of or contributor to other problems: With low birth rates come slow economic growth and a top-heavy age structure; high birth rates mean resource depletion and environmental degradation.
Moreover, birth rates are notoriously hard to change, and efforts to do so often become coercive, even if they don’t start out that way.
As demographers and population experts, we also know that such efforts are usually unnecessary. Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic and environmental problems that are almost always better addressed more directly through regulation and redistribution.
A New Pronatalist Movement
According to the most likely scenario, the world’s population will peak around the beginning of 2084 at about 10.3 billion people – approximately 2 billion more than we have today. After that, the global population is projected to stop growing and will likely shrink to just below 10.2 billion by 2100.
Yet many countries are already ahead of this curve, with populations predicted to decline in the next decade. And that has prompted concerns among some nations’ economists over economic growth and old-age support. In some instances, it has also prompted nativist fears about “replacement” through immigration.
As of 2019, 55 countries – mainly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East – had explicit policies aimed at raising birth rates.
The U.S. does have a child tax credit but no policies directly aimed at raising birth rates, according to the U.N., which tracks population policies worldwide.
Even so, in recent years a new pronatalist movement has emerged in the U.S., drawing heavily from a range of ideologies, including racism, nativism, neoliberalism, effective altruism and longtermism.
Among the voices pushing for pronatalist policies are Elon Muskand influencers Malcolm and Simone Collins, who warn that the human population is on the verge of collapse.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has indicated he wants incentives for women to have more babies, and his running mate, JD Vance, has been a rare voice on the floor of Congress warning of a U.S. baby bust.
New Babies to Solve Old Problems
The pronatalist movement is, we believe, inherently misguided. It is premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth, which alone will lift individuals and communities out of poverty.
But absent direct state intervention, this additional wealth generally accrues to those with established higher incomes, often at the expense of workers and consumers.
Seen this way, pronatalism is a Ponzi scheme. It relies on new entrants to produce returns for earlier investors, with the burdens falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the bulk of childbearing and child-rearing, often without adequate medical care or affordable child care.
Government Intervention in Reproduction
For nearly a century, governments have used access to birth control and abortion as levers with which to try to adjust their population growth rates, but usually in the other direction: making birth control and abortion more widely available – and often pushing them on people who wanted more children – when birth rates were deemed too high. Such policies were implemented in numerous countries between the 1960s and 1990s to stimulate economic growth, with China’s one-child policy the most extreme example. Ironically, while high birth rates were once seen as a barrier to economic development, today low birth rates are seen as a drag on economic growth.
Advocates of efforts to reduce birth rates have pointed to the beneficial effects of family planning services. But critics warn that instrumentalizing reproductive health care – offering it as a means to the end of slowing population growth rather than an end in itself – makes it vulnerable to being taken away if population growth is deemed too slow.
Indeed, several of the countries that now restrict access to birth control and abortion, including South Korea and Iran, once promoted them in order to reduce their birth rate.
In 1968, the International Conference on Human Rights declared that couples had the right to decide the number and spacing of their children. At that time, the growth of the world’s population was at its all-time high of just over 2% per year.
But if humans have the inherent right to control their reproductive lives, it follows that governments need to protect that right when birth rates are low as well as when they are high. It is, in our view, incumbent on policymakers to use other interventions to reach economic and social goals.
And these more direct approaches can be effective. For example, in the U.S., we saw child poverty cut in half during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of a higher tax credit, only to return to pre-COVID-19 levels when Congress allowed the supplemental credit to lapse.
Little Effect on Birth Rates
To date, pronatalist policies have largely focused on subsidizing the cost of child-rearing and helping parents remain in the labor force.
While enormously beneficial to parents and children, such policies have had little effect on birth rates. For example, Italy’s 2020 Family Act – a comprehensive program that provides family allowances, increases paternity leave, supplements the salaries of mothers and subsidizes child care – has not stemmed the country’s falling fertility rate.
As fertility rates continue to drop, and as popular anxiety about population collapse heightens, governments are beginning to take more draconian measures. Along with promoting assisted reproductive technologies, South Korea banned abortion in 2005. China’s State Council recently announced the goal of “reducing non-medically necessary abortions,” supposedly to promote “women’s development.”
Around the same time, Iran severely restricted access to abortion, sterilization and contraception for the express purpose of increasing the birth rate.
Borrowing from the Future
Those who deny racist, nativist or religious intentions in promoting pronatalism – especially in the U.S. – usually advocate for it on economic grounds.
Their reasoning is that declining fertility produces a top-heavy age structure. In the U.S. context, this means a large number of elderly people collecting Social Security relative to the number of working people paying into the system.
Experts have been projecting the insolvency of Social Securityfor decades. But the truth is that the U.S. does not need more babies to keep Social Security afloat. Rather, policymakers can increase the size of the working-age population through pro-immigration policies and can increase the amount of money flowing into Social Security by lifting the income cap on contributions.
Governments can provide education, contraception and other health care services, not because doing so will reduce birth rates but because these are vital components of a progressive, fair-minded society. And they can provide parental leave, child tax credits and high-quality child care, not because doing so will increase birth rates but because it will help the children who are born get the best possible start in life.
Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.
Karen Hardee, an independent social demographer, contributed to this article.
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The population will peak way before 2084 and below 10.3 billion. Disease, famine, genocide, suicide, drug abuse, poisoned fertility etc. will see to it. It might be a bit better if we can kill neoliberalism. You want people to reproduce? Give them meaning and hope.
You are right, this article by Tom Murphy criticizes the UN’s demographic estimates. According to the UN, the world’s population will peak in 2084 with more than 10 billion human beings.
Murphy makes his own demographic model and projects six different scenarios. One of these scenarios suggests that the world population will peak as early as 2042 at 8.44 million. Furthermore, in that line of events, in 2100 the world population would be only 4.44 billion people.
Thanks for that link. I have read some of Tom’s work but not that.
And Murphy is just extrapolating current trends, without factoring in all the catastrophes we expect to face before 2100.
Well said! But missing the historical background.
The Sordid History of Forced Population Growth
When the rich begin the process of forcing the population up, we are met with a tidal wave of propaganda about how wonderful this will be. But then, when the population has been massively increased beyond what it would have been if people had only been allowed/encouraged to limit themselves to a reasonable number of children, and the inevitable poverty results, why suddenly the rich did no such thing. All references to past elite population policy vanish, and indeed, it is effectively impossible to even mention population growth in the context of anything negative. What are you, a conspiracy nut?
Why do the rich want ever more people? First and foremost, to drive wages down. Second, to cause asset and rent inflation. And third, to boost the kind of bulk economic growth that only benefits the people at the top.
The “fallacy of broken windows” is that if we break everybody’s windows, the necessity of replacing them will increase the size of the economy. The fallacy is that we would be expending massive effort and resources just to get back to where we were before, which is of no material benefit. Unless you are in the business of selling windows! Then it becomes very profitable indeed – even if it turns out that there are not enough resources to replace all the windows.
For an industrial economy without an open frontier, the production of real goods is set by the amount of developed resources and infrastructure. Production does not automatically scale with the population. Now surely more resources can be developed and new infrastructure built, but this is not instant and not automatic – it requires time, and the diversion of existing resources and infrastructure from other uses – and it might not happen at all, there is no guarantee. In addition, past a certain point, you get diminishing returns and you might need to do more than proportionately increase infrastructure, but also rebuild the entire industrial base to a higher level of efficiency – a truly colossal expense. A rapidly growing population can indeed cause significant economic growth, but the benefits flow to the top, the average person has no stake in this.
Mexico: In 1940 the population of Mexico was about 20 million. The rich pushed for pro-natalist policies “To Make Mexico Bigger and Better,” (see “The Mexicans: a personal portrait of a people”, by Patrick Oster) and now the population has been increased about seven-fold to around 140 million. All that bulk economic growth and low wages has made a lot of money for the elites both inside and outside of Mexico (and the exported surplus population let American employers fire newly enfranchised uppity black workers), but the average Mexican remains mired in poverty. And as usual past “pro-natalist” policies are now forgotten, and even something as obvious as the draining of the water table in Mexico City CANNOT have anything to do with a population that has been increased seven-fold. Of course it’s ‘climate change’ – though I assure you, precipitation on Mexico has not declined seven-fold, it’s roughly stayed constant.
Canada: In 1940 the population of Canada was about 11 million. By 2000 it had increased to about 30 million, a slower rate than Mexico but still fast for an industrialized nation. The point is that with abundant resources and a population that had been allowed to grow at a more moderate rate, that was appropriate for the circumstances as determined by the people themselves, Canada was uniformly prosperous and peaceful. The average Canadian paid no price, was denied no modern luxury or technology, by the moderate size and rate of growth of the population. But recently the elites have decided to use high rates of immigration to massively accelerate the pace of population growth, and – exactly as planned – the average Canadian who works for a living is seeing their future prospects crushed.
Syria: Syria is a small arid plateau with few resources. The Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion, even making the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See “Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba’thist Syria (Demographic Developments and Socioeconomics)”, by Onn Winkler). In 1970 the population was about 5 million. By 2010 it had been approximately quadrupled to about 20 million, the aquifers were completely drained, farming collapsed, and the population stabilized because there just wasn’t enough food for it to grow any more (yet another example of the Malthusian catastrophe, which is not global apocalypse but where population growth tracks the food supply at miserable subsistence).
The rich are breeding us like cattle and we really should start noticing
I could go on with so many other examples of the rich forcing the population up through specific government policies – China under Mao, Japan before WWII, Turkey, Afghanistan, The Ivory Coast, Iran under Ayatollah Khamenei, South Africa, Sweden, England, Iraq, Argentina over a century ago, the old Kingdom of Hawaii, Sudan (gotta love that “reproductive surveillance” rooting out the clandestine use of birth control – and now there is a looming humanitarian disaster – ‘tis a mystery!), it never works out well for the average person.
Even without direct action, the constant propaganda of the rich deprives us of free choice. Perhaps the most toxic and destructive lie in all of history is that first people get rich, then they have fewer children. To paraphrase the late MIT economist Lester Thurow, the Iron Law of Development if that (unless there is an open frontier) you need a long period of slow population growth (and this low population growth cannot be due to limited food supplies), and only then is it possible to slowly develop real per-capita wealth.
In bad science fiction ‘overpopulation’ is to be combated with abusive government fertility controls, or perhaps by releasing a doomsday virus to cull the human herd. Wrong. We don’t need abusive government policies aimed at reducing population growth. We need to stop abusive “pro-natalist” government policies aimed at maximizing population growth.
All true. Historically countries have also wanted more population in order to have more soldiers. That is still a motivation in many places.
The rich were running China under Mao?
most western nations are no longer advanced. a advanced country produces lots of things, little and big. and has enforceable polices to ensure civil rights, labor rights, and environmental rights.
a advanced nation protects its markets, its technology, its civil society and its workforce, this is what builds wealth for all. and gives the workforce the ability to trust the nation, to ensure the workforce is comfortable to invest in a family unit.
so no amount of coercion will work, if people live a life of constant fear.
How to respond.
It does not matter how many or how few people there are, if they are not physically, emotionally healthy. By focusing on population growth, or decline without focusing on population health in the broadest sense we achieve nothing.
A healthy individual is a part of a healthy community, and imbedded in a healthy environment. In other words this is about “ecology” and complex systems. We don’t even have agreement on what healthy communities are, even though we all talk about community all the time.
We talk about child care along with government policies, without acknowledging that for the previous 100 million years children were raised by parents and extended family / village. Government involvement in child care is a recent experiment, with very mixed results. However, for most on the left, it is taken as a matter of religious faith, that it is a good idea.
The same can be said about most of our policies with respect to climate. The endless focus on “Carbon” with no focus on how we could be living & using our resources in ways that more closely mimic natural systems is not helpful. Nature wastes very little. Our whole economy is about waste. Electric cars, will make a few people very rich while devastating the global ecology, and in no way solve the climate problem.
If there is a solution, it is in localizing economies, and that we as humans live off our local environment and find ways to live in balance with that local ecology.
I have always agreed with localism for this very reason. People are right there, they work and live, and clean up their garbage. Local jurisdictions can be like individual Preserves, not just townships. Which leads to the thought, Well, how do we make big interstate and international concerns comply at the local level. They are probably responsible for a vast majority of extraction, pollution and irresponsible socialization of their costs. I’d think there could be a movement to “localize” these guys as well – to regulate them into both environmental and social compliance. It’s a question of setting priorities that coordinate from county, to town, to state, to regional, to national levels. One of the great successes of our federal government has been revenue sharing. We can add responsibility sharing to that same structure.
Project Drawdown researches ways to fight global warming. It reached the conclusion that voluntary birth control combined with comprehensive education of girls and women was not only the best civil rights solution, but also the best population management tool for fighting global warming. As Planned Parenthood puts it, “Every child a wanted child.” Today we live more with Bob Dylan’s diagnosis from long before we worried about global warming, in Masters of War: “You’ve thrown the worst fear/That can ever be hurled/Fear to bring children/Into the world/For threatening my baby/Unborn and unnamed/You ain’t worth the blood/That runs in your veins”
Problem has been solved for us by PFAS/BPA. Good job DuPont, you successfully chemically sterilized the human race. (only half snark honestly…)
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Count-Down/Shanna-H-Swan/9781797114590
Covid is going to cause fertility problems; maybe the vax will, too. Also nearly everyone I know is oddly exhausted. A study I read years and years ago found that a major determinant of how much women enjoy parenthood is how much sleep they need. When I read posts by young women online, my impression is that they are wiped out and they may at least subconsciously realize that they do not have the physical energy to be a parent. If you are feeling energetic and vibrant, you may feel that you can deal with poverty and other problems. If you are exhausted you can’t fool yourself as easily.
Maybe that’s true because I need very little sleep and I LOVED mothering my babies. I was sad when they started sleeping through the night because I enjoyed their company in those special quiet, dark hours when nobody bothers you. But I was also in my twenties when I had my babies, which is when you’re SUPPOSED to have them (if not in your late teens). I wonder how young the exhausted mothers you’re reading online really are…
My aunt had three kids between 24-29 and then another at 42 and she said having one at 42 (even though she had a better husband and a lot more money) was harder than having three in her twenties, and I believe her. Is motherhood really so exhausting or are women just doing it too late? And let’s not leave out the fathers, too. Does a man in his fifties have the energy of a man in his twenties or even thirties? No he doesn’t.
If we are having problems with resource depletion with our current population, won’t all the associated problems we face now only get greater with another 2 billion people? And those additional people will get older too, so the same issues will arise, and we’ll need an even greater population, which will bring in more people who will get older. As pointed out, it is a Ponzi scheme. We are just kicking the can down the road. ( As an aside, China is said to have around 20-25 million young people out of work, yet they are promoting larger families!). Of course, the need for cheap labor is yet another factor in the pro-growth movement.
But all this might never play out, as the so-called elephant in the room, Climate Change, is already wreaking havoc. As has been noted many times, the computer models predicting changes in CO2 , sea level rise, glacial melt, methane release, etc. are usually wrong: the changes are coming faster and more destructively than has been predicted. More people, burning more fossil fuels, and consuming all manner of resources, is hardly the solution to what faces us. Moreover, there are many experts who don’t think we even have enough resources (copper, phosphorous for agriculture, water, and high quality sand (yes, sand) for solar panels, etc., to ever achieve a green economy, given present population levels. Perhaps we need to rethink ‘shop til you drop,’ and try living with what we need, not what we want.
When a culture analyzes having children with a cost-benefit analysis, it is doomed. Other cultures will replace it.
It is true that all cultures are lowering their birthrights, except Subsaharan Africa. But, inside every culture, there are pockets of relatively high birthrates. They will have kids, while liberals have a self-defeating ideology with abortion, casual sex, late marriage, lgbti and other non-reproductive lifestyles.
See “Shall the religious inherit the Earth” by secular scholar Eric Kauffman
Have you ever wondered why all traditional cultures are so damned right-wing? The liberal equivalents of the past in these cultures did not leave offspring, that’s why
lol This statement remind me of Idiocracy movie why there was no smart people anymore.
Increasing population makes sense only with respect to international competition. The bigger the GDP, the more soldiers and the more military hardware a country can make or buy. That military superiority was formerly necessary for acquisition and maintenance of colonies. I think that this, largely as a manifestation of tribal aggressive instincts, is the main reason for the push for higher population growth. Remember, all instinctive behavior is for the ultimate purpose of reproduction.
In the 19th century this reason for growth would have been openly advocated. Lack of discussion of this motivation now is hypocrisy.
I am always baffled when pieces like this talk about “replacement” as a baseless fear or conspiracy theory, only to later advocate for increasing immigration to get people who can fill the void left by falling birthrates.
I agree, the immigration solution is a hail Mary stab to placate the “who will pay for my old age” problem. The excess population will take care of itself. How long do you really expect these old people to live?
As far as population growth being the path to wealth and prosperity, there is an old economic paradigm. We reached the point of diminishing returns some time ago.
Replacement theory posits a nonsensical motive for a nonexistent policy. Actual immigration policies are purely ‘economically’ motivated with complete disregard for ‘cultural’ considerations.
er um… criticizing the “problem with:population thingy, omg really? The last 50 years in the West propagandalizing the virtues of reduced child reproduction and child raising is now , omg, MSM regarded as very bad, must have immigrants to field the deficit body/personsale worker requirements now, right? j.f.c.
Hey TG, lot of good points. Btw if you read all this in books, then could you please share the name of the books ?
Thank you for the kind words! I have included some references in my comments, but right now I don’t think there is a single book including all of this. It’s hard to find these references unless you know where to look, it’s been suppressed. In part by elite power, but at this point I think we are just conditioned to not think about it because of long habit and because it’s been not mentioned for so long. Often I will see a disaster, and look up the historical demographics on wikipedia, then if I search for “pro-natalist” I will get a hit.
For example Sudan is recently in the news. according to wikipedia, in 2000 the population was about 26 million. In 2021, it was about 45 million. There is no reason to expect that food production will AUTOMATICALLY increase over this time by 73 percent, is there? So then I dig and in fact find significant evidence for extremely coercive pro-natalist policies (Social Science and Medicine, J.J. Palmer and K.T. Storeng, 2016). But of course, even mentioning population growth is forbidden except as a brief aside as something somehow carved in stone about which nothing can be done so we can’t think about it.
It can be hard to find references to total annual precipitation over a country by year. Oddly, many so-called ‘climate experts’ that I have contacted not only don’t know how to find this data, but express puzzlement that anyone would want to know. I found a site called “trading economics” suggesting the annual precipitation over Sudan the last two decades has basically trended constant. Constant rainfall, a massively growing population, connect the dots…
I do think that climate change is a real thing and should be taken very seriously indeed. But at least for now, most of what is attributed to climate change is really due to massive population growth, which more often than you might think, is due to government policy…
I recently watched a Youtube video, in which young Koreans were asked if they wanted a children and if not.
There answers came down to 3 things, House prices were too high, jobs were too demanding, and education was too expensive. Parental leave is dissuaded by employers.
The schemes the current and previous government have generally been emphemeral. Only one addresses any of these issues, that you can get an apartment in a publicly subsidized housing complex.
Governments are not being serious about this issue, and young people nowadays know they are not valued by society.
Nothing will change unless the elite comes to its senses, but given current governments, this seems unlikely.
The same can be said of neighboring Japan: housing, employment, education — the perception now is that it’s all too expensive, too complicated.
Government measures have been less than half-hearted and meanwhile the conservative LDP in Japan is pushing “traditional family” models (i.e., women should shut up, have children, and then stay put in the kitchen). Their “vision” is to eliminate or privatize all social welfare, indoctrinate young people with all the values of dotoku (i.e., it is your duty to look after your parents), and rewrite the Constitution to get rid of all that pesky “human rights” language and prioritize family.
As in South Korea, then, it’s hardly surprising that many young people don’t want to have kids.
OTOH, this is probably a good thing in the long run. Agee with @TG’s comments, above.
Further regarding Japan, none other than Miyazaki Hayao has said he thinks the national population of the entire archipelago should be around 40 million, not 125 million.
Thank you for the kind words! Apologies, but I could not resist an extended comment on Japan.
No major society in all of recorded history has industrialized faster than Japan. However, even the best that flesh-and-blood human beings have ever achieved was not enough to keep up with rapid population growth, and by the eve of WWII Japan was on the brink of collapse and chaos. The Japanese militarists were not stupid and had no illusions about their chances of defeating the United States. It’s just that they had no alternative: without invading and colonizing other lands their own exploding population could soon have destroyed their society (Read John Toland’s wonderful book “The Rising Sun”). As you might expect, that exploding population was not the “inevitable” consequence of industrialization, it was the result of a deliberate Japanese government policy to maximize population. (Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, Vol.6, pp158-9, 1996). The primary cause of World War II in the Pacific was the Japanese elites’ policy of maximizing population growth, but this must go unsaid.
Now we are told that the Japanese are not having ‘enough’ children, and they will simply have to produce more or be replaced by immigrants (which is like consenting to being murdered to avoid the hypothetical prospect of someday committing suicide). Perhaps. But caution is warranted, especially as most of those demanding that the Japanese have more kids have such a long history of being vicious lying monsters – er, utterly wrong. Sure, in Japan there are relatively few workers per retiree, but there are also few children per worker: the dependency ratio is not much worse than places like Yemen. The patient accumulation of real per-capita wealth and the effect of high wages on encouraging the productive use of labor means that productivity per worker in Japan is orders of magnitude greater than places like Yemen, and Japan doesn’t need massive capital investments to stay even, and places like Yemen, do. Just look at how the average person in Japan lives, and the average person in Yemen. The idea that countries with young workforces have a ‘demographic dividend’ over those with older workforces is just pure rot. Who are you going to believe, Julian Simon or your own lying eyes?
A gradual decline of the Japanese population from its current level of about 125 million to perhaps 40-60 million could potentially be very good for the average Japanese – though of course, a disaster for wealthy financial interests (the biggest problem Japan currently has is a government accruing massive debts, primarily I think not to ‘stimulate’ the economy but to bail out and subsidize wealthy financial interests). Certainly new resources can always be developed or substituted for, but past a certain point this gets increasingly expensive and difficult. An industrial power with relatively abundant resources has the wind at its back: consider the United States in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, and present-day Russia. Consider also that it would take only a brief period of optimism for the Japanese to completely undo the demographic effects of their recent low fertility rates.
With a smaller population Japan could also greatly reduce its ecological impact while maintaining a high standard of living – but for the elites, ‘saving the planet’ is somehow only a priority if it involves impoverishing the working class. (FYI I’m not against saving the planet it’s just that the rich often use this as a smokescreen for other issues).
Perhaps, if left to their own devices the Japanese will indeed destroy themselves. Or perhaps they will do very well. But, is it too much to ask that the fate of the Japanese nation should be left up to the Japanese people themselves? The Japanese should indeed be concerned about having enough children to maintain a healthy and robust society – but this is not the same as having ‘enough’ children to profit the rich.
The article critiques pronatalist policies but misses a crucial point by not addressing the role of implicit anti-natalist policies in modern societies. As population growth falls below the replacement rate, the prevalent policy environment often becomes inherently anti-natalist, even if not explicitly defined as such. High living costs, expensive childcare, lack of affordable housing, and limited parental leave are examples of how economic and social structures discourage larger families, leading to population decline. The pressures of modern capitalism—where economic success often requires delaying or forgoing family life—discourage higher birth rates. Long working hours, job insecurity, and the need for dual incomes make it challenging for families to have more children. These systemic pressures, driven by modern capitalism, act as de facto anti-natalist policies.
Moreover, modern capitalist societies often prioritize individualism, career advancement, and material success, which further discourages higher birth rates. The cultural shift towards smaller families or childlessness, fueled by consumerism and economic demands, creates a societal framework that implicitly supports anti-natalist outcomes. The article fails to fully recognize how these cultural and economic forces contribute to declining birth rates, making the critique of pronatalist policies less relevant in a context where anti-natalist influences are already pervasive. Additionally, depending on immigration as a substitute for domestic child-rearing is not a sustainable or fair solution, as it places the burden of our population maintenance on outside communities rather than addressing the underlying issues within society itself.
While family formation is increasingly seen as a lifestyle choice within consumer capitalism, it should not be dragged into extremely divisive political discourse or be associated with fascism, eugenics, racism, or other ideologies that have historically distorted the concept of family for harmful ends. The article’s failure to separate discussions about birth rates from these contentious issues risks alienating those who view family life as a personal or cultural choice rather than a political statement. This conflation can undermine constructive dialogue on how to support families in modern societies, making it harder to address the real economic and social challenges that influence family formation.
The article had some fair points but took them in extreme misanthropic directions. While child-rearing can indeed be a burden, so too is the inability to start a family, the prospect of dying alone, or becoming a burden to the children of others, whose parents sacrificed for their upbringing and whose parental investment became a service to you.
I do not buy the dichotomies you pose at the end. Yes, there are couples who are unable to have children and are severely distressed about that. More relevant to the point I think you are making is couples who decide not not to have kids or have fewer kids than they might have because costs. However, recent press coverage of this issue reports (admittedly anecdata but enough to indicate that this cohort is significant) that many women are happy with the choice to stay single and not have kids, as well as quite a few affluent couples.
Second, in a couple, at least one will die alone. Unless you have a joint suicide or fatal accident, one will outlive the other. Many couples get divorced after they have children, some not waiting until the children are on their own. And you are forgetting that dementia can mean one partner is long gone even if physically there.
Third, children meaningfully caring for aging parents is VERY rare. I moved to the South to take care of my mother, but that consisted of making sure her bills got paid, the house was maintained and hiring and managing her aides. Members of the PMC and working children will NOT meaningfully assist feeble parents who need help with “transfers” as in getting in and out of a wheelchair, toileting, or diapers.
The data in the UK show that couples are having children at roughly the sane rate as ever and above replacement rate. The overall decline in the birthrate is because of the rising population of single people, who choose to remain childless.
The article I read was actually more specific, saying the drop was driven by more women remaining single and childless. I don’t trust that observation because either an equal number of men remain single and childless or something weird is going on with a smaller number of women marrying twice, leaving a larger number of fathers and of spinsters.
If policies were neutral on the number of children, we wouldn’t have a situation in the UK where benefits are capped after the first two children. We wouldn’t be building small apartments rather than family houses. We wouldn’t be closing and merging schools like we might never need them again.
The analysis that NC posted by Philip Pilkington if the UK’s options regarding native birthrate vs replacement migration was a really good overview of the issues. It would be worth a detailed post in its own right.
I don’t know about the UK, but in the US, divorced women tend not to remarry. Men do.
Exactly. So I don’t trust the observation that mean fertility is being reduced by more women choosing to be childless. More men must also be childless! But the weaker assertion, that fertility is more or less constant in parents with any children but more people are not becoming parents at all, is interesting. It suggests some sort of threshold effect to childbearing. Could be income, could be housing, could be female opportunity cost.
I will try to.find the reference. Maybe it will be in the Pilkington paper but I think it was on Twitter somewhere.
Found it. Well, something covering the same ground.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-4-projecting-childlessness-among-todays-young-women
The money quote:
“Virtually 100% of the decline in U.S. fertility is driven by the falling TFPR, meaning that rising childlessness is the entire cause of falling U.S. fertility. For people who have kids, they’re having about the same number as they have had for a long time.”
(TFPR total progression rate, from childlessness to first child)
But the article still focuses on women when there must be a man (in)involved. It takes two not to tango! Perhaps this is just an artefact of the way the data are collected.
That is not correct.
The UK does not have an average fertility rate of 2.1. It was 1.56 in 2021 and is gradually falling.
In Scotland it is even lower and fell below 1.3 in 2023.
There are two subpopulations. People A who have children on average have 2.x of them. People B who do not have children have zero. The mean fertility rate has fallen not because members of population A are having fewer children but because population B has grown greatly.
Why it has grown remains to be explained bit at least we know where to look for an answer.
The most obnoxious thing about the pro-natalist programs I’ve read of is that the amount of money they offer people to have kids is so measly. Kids cost a fortune to raise, but I have never seen a program that took that into account at all; the monetary support offered is always about as much as it would cost to provide good care to a hamster. It really must just seem like an insult to people who can do that math.
Seeking to control the population for political or economic purposes is almost always done with vile motives and by people who don’t know what they’re doing. The one-child policy in China was perhaps a partial exception, odious as it was, because it was at least logical; we can’t increase economic growth faster, so let’s slow population growth, and then per capita income will increase. But it turned out that they could increase economic growth faster, so it was completely unnecessary.
More often, however, the motives seem to be extremely shallow. More kids means more workers and more cannon-fodder for the military! That turned out well for Nazi Germany. And as for fewer kids, that, as in my own South Africa, usually means fewer dark-skinned kids, or fewer working-class kids.
C M Kornbluth, in the 1950s, generated a lot of science fiction about how the mouth-breathing ignorant layabouts were outbreeding us decent people – “The Marching Morons” being the most famous. His solution was genocide, of course. I suspect that this is the actual solution which our wise and benevolent rulers will eventually pursue; they have plenty of machines to be their servants, after all, and things will end up much as in Gibson’s The Peripheral.
Ah, China. We are told that the great famine was caused by Mao’s disastrous economic policies, that the following “one family one child” policies were cruel and unnecessary, and that China’s lifting of over a billion people out of subsistence poverty was entirely due to ‘market reforms.’ As usual, we are (mostly) lied to.
Certainly Mao made some very bad economic decisions. But he also enacted a “strength in numbers” policy making it everyone’s patriotic duty to have tons of kids – and when Chairman Mao says have tons of kids, by gosh you better have tons of kids (“Why Did China’s Population Grow So Quickly?” by David Howden and Yang Zhang, MPRA Paper No. 79795, 2017). Honest economists like Ma Yinchu were purged. And it was this pro-natalist policy that was the prime driver of the great famine. When the communists took over in 1950, the population of China was about 550 million at subsistence. It had increased to about 665 million people at the start of the great famine just 9 years later in 1959: and yet, even at the peak of the great famine, total food production was still slightly more than when the communists took over. From 1950 to 1970, total food grain production increased by about 80%, which is not bad. No doubt life under Mao would still have been miserable even with a more moderate rate of population growth – but there would not have been a great famine.
In one sense it is true that the one-family one-child policy was unnecessary: if Mao had only encouraged people to decide for themselves how many children they could provide a decent upbringing for, the necessity of a rapid fall in the fertility rate would have been averted. Now the post-Mao market reforms of China may well have been necessary for lifting the Chinese people out of subsistence poverty, but they were not in themselves sufficient. The idea that the population of China could have doubled in 25 years or so, and then doubled again, and they could have at the same time increased per-capita food grain production to its current level of about three times subsistence, is absurd. All the technology and all the resources of the entire world could not have supported that. Instead, China’s population would have stabilized at likely three to four billion or so and the average person would have remained crushed at subsistence level poverty, just like present day India.
But we can’t let the people in places like India get ideas. Over a billion people with a standard of living inferior to late medieval England, 500 years of western technical and economic progress more than wiped out (see “British Economic Growth 1270-1870”, by S. Broadberry, B. Campbell, A, Klein, M. Overton, and B. van Leeuwen, 2010). Just think of the profit potential should this vast pool of low-cost labor be efficiently harnessed by the global elites! There is no free choice without knowledge of the consequences, hence the lie that limited population growth in China had no impact on lifting the Chinese people out of subsistence level poverty.
There are other revisionist memes on China: that Mao wasn’t really pro-natalist (not true), or that under Mao there was plenty of food it just wasn’t distributed well (also not true: looking at total food production versus total population one finds at the start of the great famine an absolute deficit). But the ruling elites want to deflect us from the obvious lesson: when people are bred like cattle this results not in prosperity but misery for the average person, and that developing prosperity requires some voluntary (not due to chronic malnutrition etc.) moderation in fertility.
But we know how to increase the population. We did that experiment in the middle of the twentieth century. We even have a name for it: the “baby boom”.
I would have thought that if the falling population was a real problem, sociologists would be crawling over the data from that period to tell us where we have gone wrong.
As usual, an excellent discussion. Not much attention paid to psychological well being in the article, more in the comments. Does not the terrifying reality of our timeline play a role? Does this affect the “biological urge”?
My opinion, we’ve already seen peak population. This elevator is going down.
A tiny bit adjacent to this topic, just want to pick at this part of the various ‘demographic crisis’ narratives:
Notice the implicit assumption that Social Security is funded by Income Tax alone – and Income Tax is (of course) sensitive to demographic changes.
That betrays the artificial nature of the various demographic ‘crises’: Most of the narrative is based on an accounting trick, where taxation that is sensitive to demographic changes, is specifically earmarked as the sole source of funding for part of the Welfare State (most often, pensions) – creating an entirely artificial ‘crisis’.
As any MMT’er knows, taxes don’t fund spending – and even if you assume the neoclassical narrative that taxes did fund spending, this ‘crisis’ narrative is still deceptive even in those terms – because ‘funding’ can still come from any other component of Government Revenue/Taxation, which overall is not sensitive to demographics (Government Revenue tends to consistently track upwards in line with GDP/the-economy-overall).
This is the same narrative used all across the West – and you don’t need MMT to defeat it, you can defeat it even within ‘taxes fund spending’ narratives. Simply stating something as simple as “keep the same percentage of GDP funding Social-Security/Pensions”, provides an overkill/excessive amount of money that would permanently satisfy funding needs.
It’s also a funny counter-narrative, as it quickly gets NeoLiberal’s proclaiming “but GDP growth won’t last forever!” (as if it’s going to stop/reverse imminently), which is tantamount to arguing against Capitalism itself – as there are plenty of good arguments demonstrating that Capitalism depends on permanent growth (at which point, the NeoLiberal’s may as well be arguing for the transition to a whole new degrowth-based economic system).
There is a distribution problem with the existing population in which large cities consume nearly all the young and working age citizens away from regional areas.
This is mostly due to cities offering a variety and volume of jobs that regional areas do not. (Which is why many have called the movement from outer regions to city centers “brain drain” or “talent drain”.)
And…. at the same time city life does not favor large families due to its elevated cost of living. So if city folk ever do move back to the outer regions (and many never will because they have grown accustomed to city living) they do so in smaller numbers at a much older age.
With the regional areas being drained of its youth and talent they become economically stagnant and increasingly resentful of the way things are. In the U.S. the regional areas are mostly run by Republicans which is why the pronatalist movement is being pushed by the Republican party far more than the Democratic party which is concentrated in…. you guessed…it cities.
It seems so simple, although this article goes on many tangents. It is not EITHER growth or decline. If the birth rate is less than the death rate, the population as a whole ages. FULL STOP. You don’t need a demographer to tell you that. It is not about social security; that too. All the generation groupings move up. Whereas if the birth rate equals the death rate (not exceeds), each dead person is exchanged for a baby, and the population is invigorated. Who says the babies are going to be only in poor families, and increase poverty?
Immigration is only a short term fix and creates more problems than it solves. If the birth rate is less than the death rate the population declines. All the technology in the world will not be run with less and less people. You will quickly become a 3rd-rate nation.
I believe that each dead person needs to be exchanged for a new born baby. However you do it is up to you. But if you don’t you will loose your nation. If it still exists, it will be an immigrant nation, nothing to do with the original founders.
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But I don’t care if you lose your nation and all of its smoke stacks. The population explosion is proof that humans did not evolve from earlier primates but descended from lemmings.
It is good to joke about that part of our life that is “out of our control”, and your metaphor for pollution, (smokestacks), can make us feel pessimistic and helpless. I don’t say modern lifestyles must be connected to polluting industries, but that is the way that it is now, (and maybe forever?) Modern agriculture and mono-cropping might be even more damaging to planetary sustainability.
I have been studying about the more simple lifestyles of the past. Rural life probably never was a picnic, because as stated in this article, food sources were always appropriated by force, by the elite and by kings. (Elite means he who had the biggest militia.) Could we live a simple rural life now? Maybe one third of the world population or less. First, they wouldn’t know how to do it. And the rest of 2/3rds would die a horrible death of slow starvation and conflict, stealing what food was left from each other.
I wrote a guest post, not on my web site: https://whynotthink.substack.com/p/15-ga-if-you-dont-know-history-you
The full title is “If you don’t know history, you will always remain a child.” This title is a quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 – 43 BC. It will be the start of a series where I investigate our rural heritage, going back 10,000 years, even more, to the invention of language.
Please know that the destruction of habitat by the actions of man has been going on for 10,000 years, and more. The Sahara was not a desert, denuded mountains come from centuries of herding goats. Once fertile fields are covered with white salt crystals after a millennia of irrigation, and now a desert. Forests have been destroyed. Natural climate change plays into it too. With science and technology, all this destruction has accelerated through the roof. Even this article says that if new strains of crops are resistant to disease and pests, they will push out all other plant life. It is the death-knell of bio diversity.
The risk of catastrophic collapse will be immense.
So – – – – Who cares? I only ask my government to keep my current lifestyle going at all costs, and Screw the Future and any other people.
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‘…the truth is that the U.S. does not need more babies to keep Social Security afloat. Rather…”
— Emily Klancher Merchant
There is another way the government can keep Social Security afloat and that is by feeding even more false figures into the CPI B.S. machine.
Keeping CPI figures low assists to keep government monthly payouts to the needy low. Can’t have needy payments greater than 7.25 per hour or folks might begin refusing McJobs in even greater numbers.
This article can be summed up in: “Babies – not even a good ROI.” Talk about missing the point entirely.
Also filled with the usual tropes; 1) about infinite growth, when it is near-infinite shrinking we’re actually facing; 2) about immigration (which is not at all replacement immigration) being a better alternative than having babies – why are other people better than our own people? Where are the immigrants going to come from in a global demographic crunch? Is it fair that the rich vacuum the world for talent? In fact, they also need doctors and nurses in Nigeria and on the Philippines; what about the cultural, religious and ethnic clash such mass immigration carries with it. Humans are not interchangeable widgets. 3) surely having an ambition of “reducing non-medically necessary abortions,” is an admirable and worthy goal regardless of ones opinion on babies, especially if pursued without restrictions.
In honestly, you’d be better served by looking into the international surrogacy industry which has gripped much of the West recently. Which is extremely dubious.
Humans have no purpose on the earth, the way that animals do as part of a balance of nature (or they would if we could stop destroying their habitats). Humans consume resources and pollute the earth – obvious. Not sad human populations are declining and might go away one day. I know that’s not the point of this but humans are very mean and disappointing animals. The pro-natalist thing is another bone headed political idea with no common sense attached to it. Besides the fact it’s creepy and interferes with women’s lives much more than men of course. For starters, where’s the money? Who will help these families? I see young and middle-aged people wheeling around strollers of kids or see them at restaurants, needing to give each kid no matter how tiny, a little screen to view while the adults are eating otherwise they will disrupt the whole restaurant. I am sure these parents are exhausted and badly need a night out and a drink and might wonder why they bought into the fantasy that having babies will be rewarding or at the very least, couldn’t bear the thought of missing the experience. I don’t know how the parents cope with jobs, child care, medical costs, education costs, endless expensive sports and other activities suburban families seem are obligated to get their kids involved in. I think they are constantly busy trying to keep up. Truly it seems like a grueling life. I don’t know why anyone would select it unless they were very wealthy and can hire a lot of help. The US will never subsidize families enough to make a difference – to actually stimulate people to have kids. Some will just do it anyway but it seems totally crazy to me.
The pro-natalist arguments I have seen really aren’t focused on the economics so much as “raison d’état,” religious or civilizational grounds — at best the associated economics are thrown in to bolster state power rationales.
I think neoliberalism and radical atomization are at least as much to blame as any underlying biological factors, though I don’t deny that the latter are increasing as the environment degrades.