Yves here. The hand-wringing about falling fertility is dishonest on many levels. No one wants to admit that turning babies into human beings (a project that does not always take) entails a lot of drudgery and dealing with bodily fluids. Women with the ability to foist the work onto others regularly do, as the pervasive use of wet nurses, nannies, and governesses among English and European aristocrats attests. Modern women, who seldom have spouse who will help all that much with what historically have been maternal duties, reduce their child-rearing labor by having few children by historical standard or none at all.
Those who visit societies organized along traditional lines, like Bali, use a different approach, of extended families living in compounds, and children being substantially cared for by older adults and siblings of the parents. Aside from greatly reducing paternal stress levels compared to the nuclear family structure, IMHO a big advantage is exposing the growing child to many more adults, which helps them develop better interpersonal skills.
And that is before getting to the fact that the world very much needs to reduce population levels, above all in high income, high resource consuming countries. Demanding women breed more babies is the laziest and most destructive way to approach this issue. Japan has show that it is possible to preserve high living standards with a shrinking and aging population. But Japan also has very low inequality and high social cohesion.
Of course, if the Strait of Hormuz standoff continues, we’ll get big and often disorderly falls in population regardless.
By Julie Hollar, FAIR’s senior analyst and managing editor. Originally published at Common Dreams
If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.
“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced The Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR’s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”
It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.
Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”
The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as The Atlantic piece put it—“higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”
But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals, and economic inequality driving the narrative.
Hidden Xenophobia
The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.
In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.
But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023-24 than it did in 2003-04.
Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:
A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.
It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost, and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.
On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:
We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.
They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.
When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”
‘To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism’
And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”
A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family, and children while also valuing independence, career, and financial stability”:
“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.
That’s a very sad development.
Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”
Joecks further opined:
Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.
‘National Motherhood Medal’
Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.
The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.
It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medalsto (Aryan) women who bore many children.
While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”
‘Collapse of Our Civilization’
The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s
warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.
By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.
Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”
That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.
It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.
Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.
‘The Problem Is Teens’
Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that
30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.
It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News’ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:
The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.
In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:
If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.
Vanishing Productivity
The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’ “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.
While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes’ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).
The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that United Nations population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:
If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.
Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling, and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”
But it is clear what readers are being primed for: Governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As The Atlantic piece concludes:
If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.
Productivity Swamps Demographics
That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that
many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.
What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.
It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:
Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.
Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.
Not Enough Babies? Too Many billionaires
The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasinglydo.
Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”
An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)
But none other than the Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.
Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminatethree-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.
Economic Value Judgments
And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of The Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014-18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).
So when The New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.
There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.
But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.
39 comments
Comments are closed.
> “a big advantage is exposing the growing child to many more adults”
While in certain MSM backlash against 68ers is common now above practice was applied among European progressive life styles – often by below the visibiliy line sort of normal people who did not turn their lives into some public case of making this or that ideological point.
To use personal anecdote: My mother who has been working as teacher and in child education for many decades and still does as a retiree has suggested that ultimately only one thing matters:
That the child has particular people it can address and talk to on a constant basis. It eventually does not matter who those people are, whether initially family, relatives, just friends or strangers. It´s structures not persons that matter. And duration instead of event-like, emergency-style popping up.
The new consecration of “motherhood” is quite appalling in its dishonesty. As suggested in Yves´s intro, unsurprisingly these new tropes are favoured by those who are least hit by the real work it all entails.
Not only children, taking care of seniors is also a significant task. Modern nuclear families have been forced to abandon both responsibilities in favor of serving the corporate masters.
There have been huge increases in living standards of workers since 1950? I find this statement contestable; it is the opposite of the standard narrative, at last as concerns the post-1970s.
I find this argument mathematically incoherent. two points should be obvious. first, immigration must, definitionally, net to zero. every person who leaves one country for another reduces the population in the country of origin. since migration ever and always has an economic aspect, this means that wealthy countries are exploiting the global south to solve their population problem. second, a birth rate below replacement level must ultimately result in zero population. at some point, the birth rate must rise or homo sap will darwin itself out of existence. the author of this piece may regard this as a feature rather than as a bug. personally, i do not.
I’m not sure who is making the argument that, globally, immigration doesn’t net out to zero. When people talk about immigration, for or against, they usually use a country (or, most broadly, “the West,” “the Global North,” etc.), as their level of analysis, and I didn’t see anything to the contrary above, though I may have missed it.
But if you want to use the whole world, its human population is still growing, so I think we’re good.*
*In relation to that particular problem.
True mathematically speaking, but I think the model would break down long before that became a factor. The birth rate depends a great deal on cultural, societal and economic factors that would not remain static in the event of a large population decline. Knowing the average birth rate and trends today tells us next to nothing about what those figures might be in a hypothetical future world of substantial depopulation due to declining birth rates.
Billionaires like Musk who advance this argument are usually just rationalising policies that coerce women back into child-rearing, typically by cutting off other options. Try telling them that based on current inequality trends, billionaires will soon own all the money in the world, and it needs to be redistributed before it’s too late, and see if they’re as eager to apply the over-extrapolation fallacy to that scenario.
Great point! “Overextrapolation for thee but not for me”
Daycare in the first few years of life is at 1500/month, and growing faster than inflation. It’s intrinsically expensive as it’s labor intensive.
Summer camp? $200/week and rising.
Parents also have an issue with sick time. A family friend tried going back to her work when her youngest was five, she was fired because her daughter was sick three times in a few months, she called off on those days.
Heck, just the vaccine schedule requires taking a lot of days off. Pediatricians work 900 to 500.
Schools also take a lot of days off and half days. I’m not sure why.
I first misread this as “fertilizer” rather than “fertility” and clicked here expecting something novel and outlandish.
One of the loudest (and definitely richest) voices calling for reproduction is the same person who claims to want to ship people to Mars and also wants to replace workers with AI. More broadly it strikes me as incoherent that an elite that is allergic to any notions of public good or (shudder) socialism calls on people to raise children for the good of society.
How many times should it be said that, under a prevalent neoliberal regime that is fundamentally inimical to human needs and aspirations, people will not only be hindered to procreate because of economic reasons (unaffordability of support services for parents), or because of social reasons (unavailability of support services for parents), but will also lose any desire to have children because of the sheer utilitarian motives that are constantly put forward: “fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce […] poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward [and] a threat in terms of the sustainability of Social Security”.
Old Kantian argument: people should be considered as an end in themselves, not as means (to achieve GDP growth, fill Social Security coffers, man legions despatched to fight the current enemy).
vao,
As always a very sane and obvious comment. Thank you.
This stupid and evil system we live in is eating itself.
People cannot reproduce because it is too expensive. The envelope is bursting at the seams.
That may be good for the planet (which doesn’t notice) but for our kids it sucks.
Neoliberalism is running out of people to keep the Ponzi scheme running except for mass immigration, which brings its own problems.
Shit, you’d think someone could figure this out?
If the Iranians charge a toll of $1 million per VLBC (very large baby carrier), that’s only like a dollar per baby.
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche … it’s an old song, but even more plodding and off-key.
Why do we never consider that hope for the future is a reason people have children and despair a reason we don’t. If we want to increase birth rates then give the world something to look forward to.
Right now there isn’t much.
Right on Brother, or Sister.
I’ve always hated the argument that we need more babies, or more immigrants, or more people in general to care for an aging population. I find the arguments about immigrants to be particularly racist, as if people of color are required to do the demeaning and demanding job of caring for the elderly who are not in any way related to them, or even part of the same culture. There used to be a word for importing people of color from across the seas to do the crap work for minimal compensation that nobody else wanted to do. Now that want of the ruling class is couched in different language, but the result is the same – exploitation.
And it is often religious fundamentalists who push this narrative, although some are more enlightened than others. We had a Mormon family in our town when I was growing up, and there were two brothers who each had over a dozen kids. According to my own father, the patriarch of the Mormon family at one point told his two sons “I know the good lord said to be fruitful and multiply, but he didn’t mean the two of you had to do it all by yourselves.”
I think the author made a pertinent point. Want more babies? Then have fewer billionaires. That’s the population I’d like to see go to zero.
As a confirmed non-breeder who decided in the 1970s that I never wanted kids (reading “The Limits to Growth” when it came out was the clincher for me), the only empirical data that ever gave me pause – briefly – to reconsider this were the large family sizes reported for various RWNJ and fundamentalist factions.
It’s outrageous that the idea of women having more children for the good of the nation is still accepted. If this mindset continues, someone might eventually propose taxing or fining single people or childless women.
My father had children to advance his career. My mother was explicit about that (their lack of interest in children was evident and confirmed by their indifference to their grandchildren(.
Humans continue to destroy the planet each day. We are the only animals with no purpose other than to please ourselves and in the process are killing the environment and each other for stupid reasons. Please no more babies and I hope the species becomes extinct. Of course I am glad I am here but I’m over halfway done and never produced any kids. I rescue cats and have done and support TNR to lower those populations. Idiotically people don’t want to stop cats from having kittens but then get pissed off if the feral cats are running through their property. Same thing with babies – have a bunch, they are so cute but no we won’t take care of them, as a country. You are on your own – no universal healthcare of course is the most obvious cruel omission.
> You are on your own – no universal healthcare of course is the most obvious cruel omission.
The messaging does seem to be really mixed.
Too few workers!
Women should leave the work force to raise children!
Immigration should be reduced!
And the concern about care for the elderly is not matched (in context of “business-friendly” neoliberal approaches to regulation) by concern for safe workplaces, healthy food, unpolluted environment, preventive and curative healthcare that is sufficiently low-cost that people can afford to make use of it, etc., etc. All of these things could reduce debility in future elderly and extend useful working lifespan (not to mention improving people’s lived experience).
Is the panic real, or just performative, the current thing that one needs to appear to be concerned about?
“Please no more babies and I hope the species becomes extinct.”
When you consider how we are wiping out large swaths of life on the Earth, that view is understandable, but is it the case that humans are some sort of evolutionary “mistake” that is totally configured to destroy? It’s true that human skill at killing is nothing new. Hunter-gathererers’ hunting skill was one factor in the extinction of megafauna post-Ice Age, even though the rapid warming’s effect on megafauna habitat was a bigger reason according to the current scientific consensus.
Nate Hagens has an interesting theory. He argues in “Humanity as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” that certain evolved traits that worked well when we were in hunter-gatherer bands became destructive when we were in larger groups. That’s different from the obvious point that humans can do more damage when organized into large groups. Hagens is saying that we are different as individuals and as a social group when we gather in larger numbers. (On point spot cut)
I’ll grant that there is something about us humans. Other animals are intelligent. Other animals are tool users. Other animals communicate with each other. Other animals are social. But other animals do not build pyramids or H-bombs. Homo faber’s seeming obsession with higher, bigger, faster is bound to prove an issue. The question that occurs to me is how is it that the biosphere has allowed humans to stick around so long when we are so dangerous?
I took this to be an argument for the elimination of the human race, since that’s what lower and lower replacement rates will eventually lead to. It could have been better argued though.
The most powerful argument against the “we need young people and especially immigrants” theory is the lack of any evident overall shortage of labour in modern western states.(I don’t mean people prepared to work for starvation wages.) In France, the most characteristic feature of immigrant populations with large numbers of young people is … very high levels of unemployment.
Only if it actually made any sense to just extrapolate a current secular trend as continuing indefinitely. Which it doesn’t.
I became a father at the age of 46, when my then spouse was still expecting I was assured by a woman of our acquaintance that “Small children aren’t much more work than a cat”.
That was not the case, but being a Dad was a lot more fun than I expected.
A friend of mine that had children before me used to say “there are two types of people in the world, those with children and those without”.
I didn’t really understand that until we’d had our first child.
and in the whole “early to mid 30s status comparison type conversations” people would ask what my wife “did”. I used to say she works very hard but doesn’t get paid for it. which was true. doubly so with our extended family being many hours travel away.
it’s not glamorous, it’s not fancy. its very biological and really one of the whole purposes of being.
and as for “dealing with bodily fluids.” – I can offer a low point of standing in front of the bathroom mirror, stark naked (how I used to sleep), at 2 am, holding a six month old baby, looking at my chest covered with regurgitated milk and sultanas -now swollen back to full size grapes -I’m thinking “how did I get here” and “wtf” and variations.. !
The immersion in bodily fluids, to be followed in later years by withering adolescent critique, is a humbling experience everyone would benefit from.
???
fallacious use of reductio ad absurdum. all comments soon will be false and that will be the end of NC.
If continued indefinitely, sure. But there’s no reason to assume that continuation.
Most of the planet is dealing with this issue. The world’s lowest birth rates are in South Korea and China. It is not a preoccupation of supposedly racist white people. As a matter of fact, this habit of making everything about them and their psychodrama over race is the most annoying thing about white people. :) Who cares if you are racist or not, you are not that important.
The primary issue here, which everybody below a certain age should be worried about, is that in a few decades there is going to be a population of elderly people, who cannot work and need to be supported, which will be much larger than the population of people who will be working to support them. Meaning that, depending on how political power is structured, either the young people are going to be absolutely squeezed or the old people are going to wind up in GULAG rest homes.
I see no realistic prospect that elderly people will be “supported” in the future at anything like current spending levels, at least in the western countries I am familiar with.
Plan accordingly.
Agreed.
The plan is “assisted suicide”, that much is obvious.
The spending levels might be the same, but the value of the payments will be radically shrunk by inflation.
From an altitude of 39,000 feet, how is it that advancements in technology are correlated with the State’s shrinking ability to take care of the young (by far the most important) and the old? Remember Keynes and the 15-hour week?
The linked article about Keynes’s prediction points to increased average consumption as one reason, and there’s no question that’s true. Just drive through a early suburban neighborhood built in the 50s with its modest homes of 1,000 s.f. or less. Then tour a development of 60s split levels averaging over 1,500 s.f. Then check out 90s McMansions at 2,000+ s.f. The same pattern holds for pickup trucks and vacation destinations.
The billionaires hoovering up all the income and assets is obviously another big contributor.
Increasingly, it will be the angry Earth that makes it hard to do what we used to do with ease.
Actually, I think this in the same vein and the right wingers and the medals for mothers crowd. It shares the perspective is that national birth rates are a product of individual choices, particularly of women, and not the result of public government policies.
You can say each individual birth is an individual choice. But why are those choices being made by millions of people? It’s about government policies, on the economy and a lot else. Medals and bursaries can’t mask emiserating life prospects, a poor economy, rotten housing, precarious employment and increasing corruption. When it comes to thing like home ownership, education, car usage, the employment rate, the role of public policy is clear. Constantly throwing it back on women alone is a tactic governments, companies, and institutions use to duck out of their role in demographics.
The wages of neoliberalism are death.
Great piece and comments, but would like to point out that Social Security need never be threatened nor impaired but demographics. The federal government just needs to help fund a pension for all workers the way it funds a pension for its workers–civilian and military. It borrows to make those commitments, it can borrow to make up the SS gap, which is not that large in the scope of the federal deficit. Refusing to pay my promised pension is a policy choice, not financial necessity.
All of these discussions are predicated on the assumption that the near-term future will strongly resemble the present, which seems more and more unlikely. The whole concept that reproduction is a choice is quite recent and is a result of effective and readily available contraception. Those products rely on modern industry for pharmaceuticals and for plastics for barrier methods, as well as for high-volume tight-tolerance manufacturing. (Yes, I know about lamb membrane condoms. Not amenable to mass production and prone to tears and pinholes.)
If we see a collapse, women’s only alternative to many pregnancies will be to never ever have sex. And never ever get raped, because no, women’s bodies don’t have a way “to shut all that down”.
Of course, a collapse will also lead to megadeaths from famine, pestilence, and war, so funding social security won’t really be a consideration.