Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”
Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?
The article is pretty good, but you need to have a bunch of context to understand what it’s pointing out.
I’ve been noticing the Social Darwinism plans for a while. The traditional pronatalist policy is indeed that of “quantity”, specifically, a high quantity of human capital with high turnover - for labor and war. The human capital, you, need to understand that this means:
- women are domestic baby factories (“traditional family”)
- men are (wage?) slaves, worked to death with only enough time to sleep and reproduce
- huge infant mortality rates (this tends to increase fertility as people try to make spare children)
- huge childhood mortality rates
- large maternal mortality rate (guess why the chainsaw was invented)
- an abundance of orphans
- lower and lower life expectancy (retirement = death)
What I still don’t understand is why these pronatalist types want so much human capital when they have so much technology to replace humans, especially now. It’s a weird contradiction in the TESCREAL ideologues. If anyone knows, let me know.
Here’s a good podcast to get a grip on this very broad topic: the overshoot podcast.
This may answer your question. I’ve read that the only way to continue making a profit, aka be better off than the laboring masses, is to use human labor power to produce products/services. Why? Because if a process is automated, the process’s rate of profit will eventually fall to zero. Why? Competition with other businesses that automate will drive the price down as low as it can go (unless of course there’s collusion or a monopoly is allowed to exist).
Put another way, in order to make money, you need to be able to pay your labor less than the value of whatever they’re producing. If the whole process is automated, there’s no one to pay at all, which is amazing for a hot second, but once another business copies and undercuts you, you need to lower your price to match theirs. Then a third person copies and undercuts you both, and before you know it you’re not making any money because everyone is selling a fraction of a cent above cost.
Low birth rate of white people, or whatever group is in control.
I’ve always assumed that it was a dog whistle to nationalism and racism at some level, along with birthrates needed to prop up the system requiring infinite growth, the profits of which are primarily diverted to those already wealthy instead of growth in the social services needed to help an aging population.
The ‘demographic crisis’ is one of economics and states, not the persistence of the human race. The ratio of the old to the young is increasing drastically. Our global economic systems are simply not designed to support this. Our states cannot exist —as they are—without constant growth and those that fall behind are left behind.
The solution to the ‘demographic crisis’ is to move towards economies that are not based on constant growth so that the phenomenon is no longer a problem. Ironically people will probably be more interested in having babies in this scenario as well. Global capitalism is depressing, soulless, and does not make me go “wow I hope my decedents get to experience this.”
You know economics is about resources and there isn’t some magical system that gets around resource distribution, right?
Economics has been termed the dismal science for a reason. A permanent solution to the demographic problems of people living longer will either involve people accepting a lower living standard than they otherwise could have or having people work longer before retiring. Or maybe Logan’s Run? It doesn’t matter if it’s a capitalist society or a socialist society the problems are the same, large population not producing anything but still consuming resources.
But chill, as a great economist once said, in the long run we’re all dead anyway. There’s still a massive pool of people that want to live in our ever-growing populations. We just gotta stop letting people make us think immigration is a bad thing. It’ll be a long time before the entire world is living at the same standard of living we enjoy in the developed world, and with so many people getting suckered into making their countries backwards and authoritarian (thanks, Putin!) it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of immigrants that will be willing to move to an affluent democracy any time in our lifetimes.
If we get to a point where we can no longer depend on attracting immigrants because every country in the world is an affluent democracy… well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?
Some people talking to you don’t seem to be getting it. There’s a Kurzgesagt video about Demographic collapse in South Korea. The issue is: You have a country with a boundary, and the entire country can’t take care of its elderly, and because it is getting poorer, can’t attract people from other nations to take care of its elderly either. This kills the “nation”, which can’t defend itself and doesn’t really have anything to look forward to.
Economic crises drive political crises. The trend towards far-right authoritarianism is a global one. People under stress (of many different sorts) favour authoritarianism for some reason.
The pathogen-stress theory of authoritarianism is fairly well studied and has proven robust. There’s similar support for theories of economic stress and poverty driving support for authoritarianism. Population declines can be a major source of economic stress due to the way older generations need to be financially supported by younger workers.
Low birthrate is a threat to paying folks a low wage.
The only problem with low birthrate is an organizational one, where you don’t have enough young population to support the old population. But to me this just means that the organization isn’t set up correctly.
“Just an organizational problem” is a hell of a problem though.
We’d already be transcendent if it weren’t for that little thing, heh.
Organization aside, it’s also (IMO) a productivity issue without enough automation to take care of elders, or good enough healthcare to keep them “young.” Unless you want to force old people to work.
“Just an organizational problem” is a hell of a problem though.
As in, it’s not a threat to humanity. It’s completely different type and order of magnitude.
We’d already be transcendent if it weren’t for that little thing, heh.
Ah I see you’re not discussing in good faith. So this will be my only reply.
Organization aside, it’s also (IMO) a productivity issue without enough automation to take care of elders, or good enough healthcare to keep them “young.” Unless you want to force old people to work.
Elder care is not really a physical labor problem, it’s a financing problem as it’s organized right now. If a person costs more than they paid into the system (on average, on a large scale, why do I bother I know you’re not discussing in good faith), then the problem is with the system. We should not need everlasting growth so that each generation gets out more than they paid in.
Elder care is not really a physical labor problem
The hell it isn’t! As societies approach 1:1 between working and elderly they quickly run into the problem of having enough people to do elderly care and do regular work. Japan is already experiencing a shortage of caregivers and the worst of it won’t arrive until 2050.
We should not need everlasting growth so that each generation gets out more than they paid in.
Then you are going to have to start killing the elderly because the plain and painful truth is that they are expensive. They require increasingly costly medical care to keep them alive along with increasing physical assistance as they age.
There is no magic wand to be waived where today’s elderly DON’T get out more than they put in…not unless they die when they quit working.