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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Low birthrate is a threat to paying folks a low wage.