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?
Hard disagree.
This video (from kurzgesagt) completely changed my perspective: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
For this exact reason cited in the OP article.
But the bigger problem with Walsh’s argument is that it only makes sense if you care about the quantity of human life more than the quality of human life.
The video illustrates it better than I can, but basically, underpopulation is societally destabilizing and makes people miserable. It reduces quality of life.
It works if we live in a utopian future where people are living longer working lives, staying young longer, automation is reducing job loads, governments are smart, immigration is free and open, global warming isn’t a looming crisis, AI will solve all sorts of problems…
But we don’t.
In the near term, we need a big mass of young people to take care of retired people, otherwise those young people are utterly miserable because they have to work their butts off to support a huge retired population. Again, you can wave your hands and say “automation! immigration! reduced hours!” but that fantasy is clearly not where the world is headed to. Technology is much closer to addressing overpopulation issues, and then we can worry about plateauing birthrates once we got robot butlers taking care of our elders and making their stuff.
The US hasn’t dealt with this because we are privileged enough to have a massive influx of immigrants (who skew young), but we are royally screwing that up.
I despise how this article tries to write it off as an ideological belief, like you’re a Musk loving fool for thinking this.
…I realize I’m probably posting this in the wrong sub. And I’d love to be wrong, but that article is not selling it for me.
really hit the nail on the head.
this is an issue of the nation state and capitalism.
Automation has increased productivity instead of reducing workloads, and while we keep capitalism around that’s all it will ever do.
Open borders is a good way for a nation state to get robbed.
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we do globalism and if climate change wasn’t enough I doubt anything is.
Open borders are good because they balance age demographics between countries that skew too old, and poorer countries struggling to support massive birthrates. It gives the immigrants opportunity, their relatives back home wealth, and the “host” country young productivity. It also ties countries together culturally.
I’m not sure where you’re going with that.
And on automation, another big problem is just… enshittification. It’s like we’ve burned all these efficiency gains with horrendous systems, with workers grinding away doing basically nothing useful.
Runaway capitalism 100% did that. It also diverts so much production to be wasted by billionaires.
…But, like, mass communism wave could still have similar problems, minus the billionaires. Lots of other systems would too, depending on where you look.
I think a lot of society just needs to be “simplified” and more a-la-carte instead of ideologically driven. I often cite TSMC as an example, which shifted between straight up despotic, state sponsored socialism, democratic capitalism with a lot of private investment, and stuff in between (mixed with a lot of international cooperation) to get to a kind of “best case” where they are today. Could do better, of course (maybe as a worker/researcher owned coop?)
…I’m going way off topic though.
The nation state paradigm is the problem, open borders would be good for the common people but as long as the nation state collects taxes and pays for any type of welfare restricting movement is the only way for them to maintain power.
It would be fairer to say abolishing borders is good rather than trying to justify simply opening them.
Bullshit jobs and enshitification are a different thing, any sector where automation has increased productivity has absolutely not reduced workloads, it’s not even a question. Time is money after all.
Yeah, I’ve done a turnaround on this, as well. The numbers are there and respected researchers that aren’t known for right wing bias/eugenics shit are starting to talk about it more and more.
I can’t remember the name of the guest, but she appeared on Adam Conover 's podcast and made some amazing points about destabilizing societies. It’s hard to agree with the jackasses sounding the alarm, but I definitely don’t agree with their racist great replacement BS. But broken clocks and all
Yeah, there’s an extremely unfortunate intersection with a very bad line of thinking, polluting the argument.
If those eugenics guys really cared, they wouldn’t be trying to firebomb immigration, parent welfare, or wealth redistribution to young people. They just want to purge ‘others’ like a WH40K meme.
That video changed your perspective? It was entirely full of assumptions. Yeah, sure, if things continue as they are now and nothing changes, then economic issues will ensue. HOWEVER, things will change, societies will react and adapt to the evolving situation. So all the doom and gloom predicted in that video is just that, a shit prediction based on shit assumptions.
The population demographic projections look quite definitive to me, barring something drastic like a high-mortality pandemic. They’re much shorter term than overpopulation projections, hence probably closer to reality.
HOWEVER, things will change, societies will react and adapt to the evolving situation.
The probable reaction is to just burden the working class, as is happening right now with every other problem. This very thread, and pretty much every disaster in the world, is an example of how, well, societies aren’t going to react until its waaay too late.
I agree, that is the probable reaction, but the working class will have more and more leverage the smaller the class gets.
There are a lot of problems with that. First of all just looking at the elderly is a problem. There are also children, which do cost a society quite a lot of resources. With a low birth rate that group is becoming smaller and smaller. Right now that dependency ratio is at 41.43%. That is actually incredibly low. The US is at 53.88% and Japan is at 69.94%. That is dependent person per worker.
Then the assumption of not keeping up with certain services. Although that is true, there is another site to it the video completely ignores. The population is shrinking and the country has a lot of high quality infrastructure. That means low housing prices, as they are already built. No need to built new railways, streets, sewage systems and the like.
That also goes for the economy. Constant worker shortages, mean the most competitive companies will pay the highest wages and out compete weaker ones. Therefore the average worker will become more competitive.
One important thing here is that South Korea has an incredibly low fertility rate. 2.1 is replacement level. So 0.7 means each generation is 2/3 smaller then the previous one. However most places in the world are above 1.4, which would just mean 1/3 less people per generation, which makes it a lot more manageable. Also again migration. The world is still above replacement level of 2.1.
There’s 8 billion of us on the planet. Humanity is fine. Losing a few billion won’t hurt anything except maybe capitalist exploitation.
What won’t survive this ramping down is consumerism and the “middle class” lifestyle.
What will make it easier, though, is eating the rich.
You’ll be thinking we need more people when you’re 85, rotting in your bed, and the robot butler you’d been told would be taking over elder care by now doesn’t exist.
To all the people talking about old to young ratios: The old built this world, they should suffer the consequences. We have the technology to end hunger and poverty, but in order to use it we need to have less total people. I don’t care, or rather I cannot care given the circumstances, if the elderly get left behind in the process.
We don’t need fewer people, we need more political will and less political won’t. There are more than enough resources to feed and clothe mankind and we now have an extremely effective global delivery system in place, so there is no excuse for not ending global poverty.
This world cannot sustain billions of Humans. We don’t need as many people and we certainly don’t need more people.
The vast majority of crises we face would completely dissappear simply by reducing the birthrates further.
The elderly are the only ones who need to suffer, and very briefly.
OK, so (a) who is going to knock off your elderly relatives - you or someone else; and (b) at what age will you top yourself for the benefit of civilisation?
I mean, it might not be a threat to humanity but it’s certainly a threat to my ability to retire. Right now the money I put into CPP is funding the boomers’ current retirement and their children’s retirement. Who’s gonna fund mine? But it’s not like my generation could have kids anyway. The same boomers fucked the world so badly that we’re only barely able to scrape by. I’m in my 20s, I shouldn’t even have to worry about this bullshit.
You’re in c/degrowth. Retirement from economic growth “generating” “passive income” isn’t a feature.
Degrowth supports UBI. Isn’t that a form of passive income?
People eventually retire whether they want to or not. Their body breaks down and they can no longer work. These people need some kind of support or they’re going to die in miserable circumstances.
The only way not to die in miserable circumstances is to die suddenly, and retirement homes typically take away people’s ability to choose even that.
I would not wish my grandmother’s “well-earned retirement” on my worst enemies.
I’m well aware of the community I’m in. My support for reorganizing our society doesn’t change the facts of our current reality. And maybe I’m a cynic or a pessimist, but I don’t see developed nations shifting to degrowth until all us peons have been milked for ever last drop of energy we can muster. Even though we need to shift to a model that isn’t dependent on infinite growth, there is little likelihood that will happen in the remainder of my lifetime.
You will receive less retirement money than Millennials (who will get less than Boomers), while the percentage of your income for pensions increases monthly, and the retirement age rises. This change won’t happen suddenly but in waves.
Many liberal governments in Europe are currently pushing to raise the retirement age. For example, in my country, reforms have already ensured that by the time I reach retirement age, it will be set at 74.
And then we’ll find that all the stress that we’ve gone through due to poor planning and policy has taken 10 years off our lives and we’ll all have heart attacks at 70 before we even get to retire. Those that survive will be kept on life support to continue being worker drones for the billionaires. Changing the age of retirement isn’t the solution. And if they do decide to do that, then it makes it all the more important that they enact policy to make life easier right now.
As a friend who was going through the process of getting citizenship once said “I think Canada wants me as a citizen for the tax revenue.”
Yup. That’s the deal… immigration = more tax revenue. It’s actually way better than having more children. Society has to pay for the education and healthcare for children and doesn’t see a dime of tax revenue until the very earliest 18 years, and more likely >20 years. An immigrant that’s already educated immediately starts working and paying taxes.
Immigration is basically the cheat code for demographic problems.
The main problem is that boomers didn’t move out of their houses into nursing homes (or at least small apartments) as early as previous generations so we have some housing problems. But the boomers won’t live forever and when they die off, housing will be freed up.
Does it? The Canadian fertility rate dropped below replacement in 1971, which is also the case for most other Western countries.
Well, yes. Families have been getting smaller. This means there’s a smaller pool of people to support the fund and ensure that the money in the fund grows. If the money in the fund does not grow then the people currently in retirement lose value on their contributions, or in other words, get less out of the fund than what they put in. So young people have to pay more into the fund because there aren’t enough of us to support all the boomers at previous rates. Millennials, GenZ, GenA, all fucked.
And I want to be clear: I’m not saying that the CPP is worse than the alternative. Having a ton of seniors homeless due to being unable to work would cost everyone a lot more than the CPP does. All I’m saying is that it’s unfair that my contributions will not fund my retirement because they’re currently funding someone else’s. Especially when I could really use that money right now to, yknow, afford food with actual nutritional value.
And all the more: this is a time bomb waiting to blow. The CPP is only projected to be sustainable for the next 75 years. When GenA is retired, they won’t be able to rely on it. It’s a robbing Pete to pay Paul sort of situation.
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.