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?
Low birthrate is a threat to paying folks a low wage.
This person has class consciousness!
Workers need to learn about what a birth strike is.
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.
They want a cheap work force to steal wealth. That can be done by having a lot of supply in other words natalism or it can be done by lowering demand using technology. They obviously go for both.
Organic material for various singularity projects, replacement parts for human and hybrid beings.
Organ farming is certainly a real possibility, but I think that it requires a quality of human capital welfare to ensure a high quality animal product. It doesn’t work with poor nutrition, pollution, various diseases damaging the merchandise. There was an nice SciFi movie about this: The Island (2005).
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.
Ha. Jokes on you. I’m 61 and rotting in bed with no robot butler now. lol
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.”
Yes, sustainability has to be part of any solution.
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.
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.
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.
Thats not a problem that can’t easily be solved. All the resources needed for you to retire exist in abundance.
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.
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?
Nobody is talking about ganking people to reduce the population here, mate.
They’re just going to get suboptimal care and quality of life for a decade or two as they approach the end.
It amounts to the same thing.
One is the result of our actions, the other is the result of their own.
You also avoided my other question: at what point exactly do you accept your care being reduced to “ok die already grandad”?
I’m not surprised though. People like you are all “oh lots of people need to die because this isn’t sustainable” followed quickly by “what me? no I mean other people”.
Your comment reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Euthanasia
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.
from kurzgesagt
red flag
Just a reminder, kurzgesagt is billionaire propaganda and not to be blindly trusted or posted.
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.
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.
the working class will have more and more leverage the smaller the class gets.
Not if they don’t have any wealth.
And again, by the time they’re even complaining about this specifically, it is waaay too late.
Peasants that survived the black death didn’t have wealth. Still resulted in a massive increase in their bargaining power.
Not if they don’t have any wealth.
They don’t need wealth if they control the means of production. It’s just a matter of making them understand that they have all of the power; all they need to do is unite.
Bah, you’re assuming they’ll follow existing laws of property ownership. Wealth, aka means of accomplishing goals, will be available to those that need it.
Can’t even say “eat the rich” anymore because most of them are old and stringy.
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.
