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Stop Arguing About the Birthrate
The battle of the Birthrates is pointless
Elon Musk would like you to have a lot of children. He has gone on record many times to say that having kids isn’t just a fulfilling life choice but a civilizational imperative: “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
And the centibillionaire isn’t all talk in this regard. He has at least 12 kids with several different women. He has emerged as one of the most prominent representatives of a growing “pronatalist” movement. The pronatalists, who also count Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance as a member of their camp, believe that declining birthrates in wealthy countries like the United States are a) a big problem and b) one that can be overcome with a combination of government policy and changing social norms.
Some of the pronatalists are motivated by economic worries — they fear that it will be impossible for a shrinking population of working-age adults to support a growing cohort of retired people. Countries with declining populations will not be as productive; their economies may cease to grow, at least on an aggregate basis. Some are motivated by religion, believing that God commands us to have children; others are animated by effective altruist ideas that the future of humanity requires a lot of kids. Some have a more nationalist, even racist reason for promoting procreation — they’re trying to prevent the so-called “Great Replacement” of white people by immigrants. A lot of the time, these concerns overlap.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who want to shrink the number of humans on the planet. We can call them the Malthusians, after the first guy to have a famous freakout about rising populations.
Malthusians believe that the human population, which has increased eightfold over the last two centuries, has grown at an unsustainable rate. They see the environmental damage all around us — the plastic, the extinctions, the deforestation, climate change — and link it to the number of people on Earth. People in this camp conclude that if there are fewer people eating food, driving, flying, and throwing our their trash, there will be fewer environmental problems. They argue that a human population of a billion or two might be able to live…
