At the dawn of the Covid pandemic, I wrote a newsletter about the approaching virus that highlighted what I saw as the biggest risk: that the question of whether to take Covid seriously would become a partisan political issue. To tackle something this big, I wrote, we’d have to all be on the same page.
As a country, we have vastly more capacity to grapple with difficult challenges and complex tradeoffs when those issues haven’t been subsumed into partisan politics, so I was relieved at the time that Covid hadn’t become a partisan issue. It seemed to me that we could handle it as long as we worked hard to keep things that way.
That didn’t work out that way, of course.
I’ve had this story on my mind because, over the last few years, I’ve watched as the rapidly falling rates of family formation in the US — and much of the rest of the world — go from a niche issue to a mainstream issue to an increasingly partisan issue. And that stands to be a tragedy, just as Covid’s politicization was a tragedy.
Ensuring that our economy and society support people in deciding whether they want children, and the ability to have as many children as they want, is way too important to surrender to the culture wars. And yet that’s where we seem to be headed.
Yes, it’s good when people are able to have lots of children
Just about everywhere you look, birth rates are collapsing.
Many demographers thought that the global population would stabilize around mid-century. But that’s now looking increasingly unlikely. Instead, the world’s population is expected to actually start shrinking worldwide this century, potentially as soon as 2060.
You might wonder: What’s the big deal? Wouldn’t fewer people mean fewer demands on resources, more space and opportunity for everyone else?
But the economics of population don’t work this way. An aging and shrinking population means a massive decrease in expected quality of life in the future. It means a smaller working population will be supporting a larger elderly population. It means there will be fewer people to do all of the things that don’t technically need to be done, but that make life richer and more interesting. And a shrinking population doesn’t represent a one-time adjustment, but a dimming state of affairs that will continue to degrade until something reverses it.
Surely, though, this would still be better for the environment, right? No. Richer societies are better positioned to combat climate change, and while we have been headed in the right direction, with rich countries’ per capita emissions falling rapidly over the last decade, that progress would be likely to reverse in a fiscally overburdened, rapidly shrinking society. In many ways, the most environmentally destructive civilizations in our history were the poorer, early industrial ones, and returning to that state shouldn’t be heralded as a good sign for the environment.
But this looming demographic crisis, one every bit as real and serious as climate change itself, has been met so far with significant ambivalence, if not outright denial.
Part of the reason is that many of us grew up being warned about the opposite scourge of overpopulation. And part of the reason is growing political polarization.
As my colleagues Rachel Cohen and Anna North have written, there’s been a surge of interest in falling birth rates on the right. Elon Musk tweets about it (and reportedly pays an enormous number of women to impregnate them); a Natalist Con in Austin recently featured some good, serious discussion of these issues, but also some fairly awful right-wing provocateurs.
The significant right-wing interest in pronatalism has many liberals convinced it’s a stalking horse for the end of women’s rights, and not worth taking seriously except to rebut.
But this is simply wrong. I will never forgive Elon Musk for the damage he did to PEPFAR, but if he accurately says the sky is blue, that doesn’t suddenly make it red. It makes no sense to refuse to participate in the conversation about one of the biggest issues of the next few decades because most, though not all, of the people currently talking about it have distasteful politics. Rather, that’s all the more reason to talk about it.
Taking family formation seriously doesn’t make you a eugenicist
One of the most important triumphs of the modern era is that, for the first time in history, people have meaningful control over when and whether they have children. That is a social good on which we absolutely shouldn’t compromise. No one who doesn’t want children should have to have them, and any pronatalist who makes anything like that argument should be ignored.
But there are a lot of policies around population that add to freedom, will make people’s lives materially better, and give them more choices that align with other liberal priorities and would likely increase birth rates.
Americans right now have fewer children than they say they want, and figuring out a way to close that gap would all by itself produce a more stable population. No single policy is a silver bullet — not even close — and the whole suite of them would be very expensive. But it arguably wouldn’t be as expensive as the costs of failing to address this, and marginal efforts do produce marginal improvements.
And there are lots of potential progressive wins that could be connected to pronatalism: less expensive housing, universal pre-K, support for new parents, better schools, and more affordable healthcare. If a shared interest in helping more people start families helps build a broader coalition for that very progressive-friendly political work, that’s a good thing.
Beyond any specific policy prescription, though, I think population is a very real problem, and it is corrosive to pretend otherwise. A largely stable population would be okay. A population that shrinks somewhat and then stabilizes would also be fine. A population halving every 50 years is absolutely not going to be fine.
We should all be proactively working to ensure that does not happen, and that means not ceding one of the most important issues we face to the worst people in politics.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
