“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” I’ve always loved that line from Oliver Cromwell, even if I haven’t always taken its counsel. It’s been lurking in my mental background, though, throughout this essay series. I’ve been banging the drum here in support of some bold claims — capitalism is in crisis, its effectiveness as an engine of social progress is in decline, and a shift toward greater local self-sufficiency is needed to remedy things — that younger me would have strenuously rejected, and that many people today whose opinion I respect do not find persuasive. As I’ve written about
I live in Vietnam and I feel the American-centric view of this post (and Douthat's comments) misdiagnose the issue somewhat.
Douthat talks about "rich countries" but as another comment points out that's not correct. Vietnam has a GDP per capita of $4,000 but a fertility rate of 2.013, under the replacement rate. Being rich apparently has nothing to do with it.
Other arguments about NIMBYism also seem to miss the mark. There is no NIMBYism in Vietnam and the economy is growing at 8% but still the fertility rate shrinks. There is dynamism and hunger here that is lacking in America. But it doesn't translate to wanting children. People are future thinking because the current society is poor and who is going to complacent about that?
Talk of cost of childcare also seems to be wrong. There are many countries with free or heavily subsidised childcare and it seems to make almost no difference.
People talk about the "lack of a village" but I'm not sure that's it, either. Most of my neighbours live in multi-generational households but the 1- or perhaps 2-child family has become dominant.
My next door neighbours are a prime example. The grandparents own the house outright. There's not even property tax in Vietnam yet, so the costs as bare bones. The husband and wife live with them. No housing payments. Ample childcare available. Yet they are a one-and-done family. They are adamant about not having more children.
I don't want to pretend I have the answer. I think it likely that, like all problems in the modern world, it is a complicated multi-factor issue. A death of thousand papercuts kind of thing. Car seat laws, restaurants that primarily have 4-seat tables, the pain of getting hotel accommodations when you've got more than 2 kids, the mere logistics of transporting multiple kids to after school stuff in the 99% of cities around the world that aren't a cycling/transit paradise. Even the things I dismissed above are likely contributing factors, even if they aren't smoking guns.
My personal hypothesis is that the problem isn't capitalism per se but consumerism. That human ingenuity has, after several hundred years of exponential innovation, finally created a bevy of choices that surpass what evolution's more plodding pace can provide.
When I travel from Vietnam to America on holiday, the thing that strikes me the most is just how rarely most Americans leave their homes. And who can blame them? Thousand of square feet of perfectly climate controlled privacy, devoid of even the slightest inconvenience. No neighbours who are slightly annoying. No coffee that isn't made exactly how you like it. 500 channels, a dozen game systems, on demand movies from 100 years to choose from.
But it's not just mere consumption. There are 10,000 niche hobbies easily accessible to find what resonates with your soul.
There are so many options to entertain and self-actualise...is it any wonder that our genetic impulse to procreate has been outcompeted?
Raising children is incredibly costly in parental effort, as well as money, and is becoming more so over time. Wishing that people would have more children for the benefit of "the economy" is another version of saying that we would all be richer if people weren't so lazy. Not everyone wants children, and most who do want children are happy with two. The most a pro-natalist policy can and should do is remove some barriers faced by people who want children, but aren't in the kind of stable relationship where this would make sense.
As regards the big picture of humanity, even with an average of one child per woman from now on, the world population would still be in the billions well into next century.
That line from Cromwell is a favorite of mine too.
I think about slowing population growth differently. It is the social organism reacting to individual prosperity and binding global limits on the carrying capacity of the planet. It is WONDERFUL that this is happening, because it means we have a CHANCE of survival longer term.
I do share the foreboding however, because a more stable population involves a serious transition toward NOT relying on growth as a magic elixir for all our social problems. It isn't really a very good kind of magic to begin with, since it leaves so many behind. But it does provide a convenient social lubricant which sustains political coalitions of what used to be called "the bourgeoisie".
So we agree that population is an important dimension of "the permanent problem", but for different reasons. You argue that we've GOT to resume faster population growth; I argue that we should not, and that this is WHY the permanent problem is bearing down on us.
Thanks for your work on this topic. It's challenging, and there is very little space for it among our political class. Keep it up!
Second, that’s a really great header image for this piece.
Third, well…. yes, demographics are destiny, as the saying goes. I remember a Medieval Historian I had for a few classes once said, “My students don’t like hearing this, but the biggest driver of what happened during this period wasn’t things like Thomas Aquinas, the Magna Carta, or the printing press. It was that the population of Europe doubled during this time.” I didn’t like that, either! Alas...
So population numbers are powerful, at least from what we know from 5,000 years of agrarian Empires, and the agrarian/industrial empires that we have now. For what you are saying to be false (that population decline is going to be very bad) we need to shake loose at least one of the assumptions under what we have learned from the past. Perhaps there are new dynamics in a technology-driven world that are not obvious.
Other thoughts… A lot of population decline is due to the increased status and self-actualization of women. I am very glad to see this. However, this has - so far - led to a decline in birth rates all over the developed world. So what is the future of women in our world? Are we really going to hope women go back to lots of unplanned pregnancies and years away from education and careers? I hope not. So I am OK with population decline if that’s how women get equality.
Also, as someone who considers himself as an environmentalist, I think population decline is great news. We are liquidating the Earth’s resources. Too many species are dying, habitat is disappearing, and we have water problems all over the globe from over use. (The American West could go dry starting in 20 years. They have severe shortages now and the Biden administration has had to step in to referee.)
I don’t see a sustainable future with more population growth. I see crises all over the world around water and food. (Food might not just be a yield problem. If we keep killing pollinators, our food won’t grow anyway)
So I am thinking about a sustainable future with a healthier world and women’s equality. It’s not impossible - I have four kids and my wife and I are equals and she has a great career and we do a lot to limit our personal impact on the world like growing a lot of our own food.
These days I hear a constant beat of anguish over population rate decline. You, Elon Musk,Russ Douthat, and others are bemoaning a population decline that has not even begun, and won't for another 50 years at best. Having been born in 1950, I have been amazed at the amount of change that can and does occur in 50 years. Population began increasing in the 1700s, and has been on a steady state exponential increase until about 1930 when the rate of increase began to decline. As each country passed a certain economic/education level the internal rate of increase began to decline. This happened almost in direct ratio with how much capitalism was developed by each country and in inverse proportion to the inequality. As the inequality increased the birth rate dropped.
Capitalism has allowed the per capita income to increase to unprecedented levels and thereby defeat the Malthusian devil that prevented both population increase and general flourishing. Unfortunately it also brought with it a significant increase in the opportunity costs for gaining the level of flourishing people desire. That increase in opportunity costs is reflected in the decreasing birth rates. People haven't stopped having baby's they have simply limited the number of children to represent the increase in opportunity costs. It is no longer a necessity in most parts of the world for a woman to have 5 children to insure that at least one will survive to support her in her old age. She has a better chance that her husband will survive and one or two children will suffice. However in a capitalist society, the opportunity costs are too high to have much more than one or two. Until we find a way to reduce the opportunity costs, both economically and socially we will see declining birth rates.
The good news is that I and others believe that we are heading in the right direction. Increasing affluence around the world and increasing equality are going in the right direction. But this is an effort that requires an active choice, you (the population) must make the active choice to decrease inequality and increase our social supports for some version of capitalism it succeed. Capitalism/Democracy is the best option we have come up with in the last 10,000 or so years. We are still tweaking it trying to make it succeed. This is not to say that there are not forces trying to take it in another direction. As I have often said “Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean there are not people out to harm me”. But so far we are (just barely sometimes) succeeding. I believe when we solve the Capitalism/Democracy problem, we will solve the population issue. Working on the one solves them both.
First, you probably know this already, but Lyman Stone is the internet's leading authority on all things fertility data related. I don't share his moral convictions at all, but I respect his scholarly honesty and thoroughness. If you're going to think productively about the issue you ought to engage deeply with the data he presents and analyzes. One of his latest tweets on the topic, IIRC, noted that most of the fertility decline is about declining marriage rates-- that e.g. even in Japan and South Korea, married couples still have TFR close to replacement. If that's true, then the disconnection and loneliness you've talked about before as symptoms of the present sociological crisis may be central to fertility decline.
Second, it seems to me that there is a pattern of "wicked problems of modernity" and that both the fertility decline and climate change fit the pattern. They are complicated, multicausal, but definitely strongly tied to the rise of capitalism and the Great Enrichment. They are tough to fix and even to properly understand because of that complexity and also because they are collective action problems with multi-decade lags between behavioral change and practical effect. And the discourse around them tends to be dominated by denialists (this isn't really a bad thing, look at the short-term upsides; we can easily deal with it later if it ever becomes a real problem; and the people raising the alarm now must be motivated by a terrible extremist ideological agenda) and doomers (this is baked into the structure of modern life; it proves that that structure is hopelessly corrupt and evil; the future belongs to the Amish).
So if you believe that climate change is real and important but also solvable, if you reject both doomerism and denialism there, you should look to the reasons why and see if we can apply those reasons to fertility. Possible lessons include:
-- the importance of just doing the messy, hard work of breaking down the problem into little bits and seeing where the lowest-hanging fruit is (what would a Project Drawdown look like for fertility?)
-- the importance of technological solutions in enabling a more sustainable future without sacrificing the comforts and pleasures of modernity (how might we make parenting easier and cheaper through suitable technological development? does that mean artificial wombs, or robot diaper-changers, or medical treatments that delay menopause while extending healthspan...?)
Behold! This is an important topic and your contributions are appreciated.
Some commentary:
1. This is clearly not just a "capitalism" problem, given the birth rate in China
2. Much of the blame for this can be placed squarely on the wide availability of cheap and effective birth control
3. We assert that humanity has not recently started "privileging the present". The vast majority of humans have always "privileged the present", it was simply that in many cases, children were an inescapable side effect. And for many of those who "wanted" children, it was in the desire for additional labor to perform toil.
4. We also propose that "privileging the future" is a genetically inheritable trait. If this proposition is correct, the problem of "too many people who privilege the present" is self-correcting over time.
5. It is interesting how the recent advancements in AI and robotics hold a certain amount of promise in resolving some of the physical care challenges posed by an aging population. TBD.
6. Should Taylor Swift become a mother, it is reasonable to assume that there will be a measurable cultural shift towards parenting, at least for a certain cohort.
An interesting thesis. But where I part company with you is that it seems predicated on the presumption that humanity's future direction of travel is something that can be collectively directed. Whereas I am one who thinks we can but watch it unfold.
Agreed. My brief, shallow reflection on your well-written words: capitalist workers are tired. Many jobs are performative. People have to work to obtain the money to live. Being tired takes energy away from physically present interpersonal relationship. Obtaining social "likes/credits" is easier and more fun than working a traditional 9-5 job or religious participation, but it doesn't provide the interpersonal rewards of physical relationships. Also, people don't let themselves get bored any more. There's always another click to avoid boredom....which contributes to being tired, unable to recharge.
We appear to have different definitions of capitalist, though I find the term is used loosely. No need to debate. We see things differently, which is fine.
(Ah, the privilege of responding & expounding in a couple of hours vs. actually coming up with a set of original essays.) When Brink mentions dynamism I have to go back to previous posts to review what he means. Perhaps I could paraphrase "dynamism" as the continuing breakthroughs and progress in society that have led to better lifestyles, including technological/engineering, scientific (agricultural, medical, etc.) and even sociological (use of the internet and social media, psychology, etc.)
Along with "dynamism" and "capitalism," another overarching, wildly abstract concept that might be considered here is "complexity." The more complex a system is, the more opaque and uncontrollable it becomes. At this point we're even talking about interlocked systems: political/governmental, financial/economic, social, global supply chains etc. We can see the negative impacts on our lives, such as climate change and workaholism from capitalism, along with government's increasing inability to maintain the well-being and support the flourishing of its citizens. The question is how to move beyond that gloomy recognition.
Our current woes could be seen as the natural result of the biological success of an intelligent species with opposable thumbs. I get a fatalistic but serenity-prayer-like comfort from looking at humanity from the biological/ecological standpoint: We are a species that has outgrown its resources. In this case the "resources" are the ability to understand and control our own intelligent progress. (Can AI play a role here if it's very, very cautiously used? Or would it just make things worse by black-boxing our Russian-doll black boxes?)
With some systems I wish we could just decide to stop where we are and try to fix what we have (impossible of course.) "Fixing" systems is a matter of finding the internal levers in systems and nudging them: it's painstaking, boring, and usually leads to unintended consequences. It would be a new kind of dynamism, not so much the "move fast and break things" type, but a quieter, unheralded local type.
Brink often mentions the benefits of local communities. Acting locally in terms of our systems could also a clue to nudging things. There's no better way to start understanding the complexities of governmental systems than to immerse into one tiny, local function of a city government. (The same may be true of private industry.)
I recently read Jennifer Pahlke's new book "Recoding America," which I snapped up in hopes that there would be specific, detailed insight on one particular system, along with some examples of successful nudges. The book delivers and as such might be a model for looking at other systems. Overall her diagnosis is that government has too much faith in processes that have been laid down over the decades, to the detriment of results. One of her suggestions is that the Federal Government hire more in-house IT experts. Another is that employees at the bottom of the Congress-law-policy-process-implementation "waterfall" be allowed more power and leeway in producing technical products (such as webpages) that will actually work for their users.
This guidance for government IT might be seen as a vertical form of "localism." Focusing more on results means that end-users and hands-on techies have to be involved from the beginning. (As for managers, there would have to be radical changes in a bureaucratic culture "in which fidelity to flawed rules and practices is valued more than solving problem" as Pahlke puts it. "Local" in this sense would civil service employees in a department way down on the org chart interacting directly with users, even if those users are scattered across the nation.
As a side note: I can't help but see parallels between Pahlke's advice for government and the current crisis at Boeing (where are the engineers? where are the long-term, in-house employees?) Perhaps the "nudge" from the doorplug ejection will lead to some corporations giving more weight to "results" and less to stock prices.
Brink, this is something I too have been thinking on and I want to offer a sort of broader adjustment to your thesis. A little over half a year ago, I thought the great decline in fertility was a result of unrestrained liberalism, a sort of post-liberal argument. Increasingly though as I've surveyed more societies with less liberal tendencies, I don't think this idea holds up to scrutiny.
Instead, I believe the wave of anxiety brought on by modernity is key to understanding the present decline in fertility. We can see this anxiety in our fears about democracy, despite democracy remaining at one of its all time highs. We can see this in our climate anxiety despite the great amount of progress made in solving the issues associated with it, more progress than was even thought possible just 20 years ago. We can see this in our constant fears about having enough wealth and money despite the fact humanity is wealthier and richer than at any point EVER.
This anxiety wave inevitably affects potential parents who grow up with the triple terrors of a polluted planet, autocratic rule, and impoverished lives. These fears induce the rightly criticized safetyism which so blights our lives and prevents parents from seeing the great future their children might have if only they take the time to bring them into the world. Instead, they only see an abject misery of frightful fear brought on by modern life and pumped directly into their brains via social media.
What we need is an anti-anxiety medicine for modernity, something to move us out of the current doomscroll into a new era of dreamy, promethean-esque hopefulness. I do not know how to create the conditions for such an era to emerge but I believe beginning with setting out the task ahead, diagnosed correctly, will lead us to the proper treatment regime.
I agree that something is wrong, and I would love to see a good study of what is going on in South Korea, epicenter of the trend, and one of the most work-oriented and capitalist of countries. But, long term, I expect trends will change. Societies, and the world at large, are not homogeneous. It takes only one significant sub-group with positive growth to eventually overwhelm all sub-groups with negative growth, and to bring the overall population growth back to positive. The long term question is, what will be the characteristics of the growing sub-group? Right now, I'd say religion. I'm an unbeliever. But I love my Mormon friends, and I think they (and other groups I'm less enamored of) are the future.
Thanks a lot for this essay, Brink. More and more thinkers are realizing that we have a serious problem, but I have yet to see plausible solutions. I would also challenge the assessment that "capitalism" is to blame, if only that "capitalism" has become such an imprecise term as to fail to clarify the matter.
Brink, agree falling fertility rates are a real problem. The argument that this is a failure of capitalism is unclear. That capitalism has problems of its own is also clear - that there is a causal relationship with depopulation maybe conflating correlation with causation. Maybe you'll address this next week.
Seems to me that the world will be more sustainable with a population of about half what we have now. We clearly need to stabilize population at some level; it can’t grow endlessly. Still, catastrophizing about the end of humanity misses the real problem, which is how societies will deal with a much greater ratio of old to young people. Who will care for the aged? How will we find enough workers for any industry? More robots? Even less personal interaction? I won’t speculate, but would like to see a discussion that explores the consequences of a stable or declining population.
I live in Vietnam and I feel the American-centric view of this post (and Douthat's comments) misdiagnose the issue somewhat.
Douthat talks about "rich countries" but as another comment points out that's not correct. Vietnam has a GDP per capita of $4,000 but a fertility rate of 2.013, under the replacement rate. Being rich apparently has nothing to do with it.
Other arguments about NIMBYism also seem to miss the mark. There is no NIMBYism in Vietnam and the economy is growing at 8% but still the fertility rate shrinks. There is dynamism and hunger here that is lacking in America. But it doesn't translate to wanting children. People are future thinking because the current society is poor and who is going to complacent about that?
Talk of cost of childcare also seems to be wrong. There are many countries with free or heavily subsidised childcare and it seems to make almost no difference.
People talk about the "lack of a village" but I'm not sure that's it, either. Most of my neighbours live in multi-generational households but the 1- or perhaps 2-child family has become dominant.
My next door neighbours are a prime example. The grandparents own the house outright. There's not even property tax in Vietnam yet, so the costs as bare bones. The husband and wife live with them. No housing payments. Ample childcare available. Yet they are a one-and-done family. They are adamant about not having more children.
I don't want to pretend I have the answer. I think it likely that, like all problems in the modern world, it is a complicated multi-factor issue. A death of thousand papercuts kind of thing. Car seat laws, restaurants that primarily have 4-seat tables, the pain of getting hotel accommodations when you've got more than 2 kids, the mere logistics of transporting multiple kids to after school stuff in the 99% of cities around the world that aren't a cycling/transit paradise. Even the things I dismissed above are likely contributing factors, even if they aren't smoking guns.
My personal hypothesis is that the problem isn't capitalism per se but consumerism. That human ingenuity has, after several hundred years of exponential innovation, finally created a bevy of choices that surpass what evolution's more plodding pace can provide.
When I travel from Vietnam to America on holiday, the thing that strikes me the most is just how rarely most Americans leave their homes. And who can blame them? Thousand of square feet of perfectly climate controlled privacy, devoid of even the slightest inconvenience. No neighbours who are slightly annoying. No coffee that isn't made exactly how you like it. 500 channels, a dozen game systems, on demand movies from 100 years to choose from.
But it's not just mere consumption. There are 10,000 niche hobbies easily accessible to find what resonates with your soul.
There are so many options to entertain and self-actualise...is it any wonder that our genetic impulse to procreate has been outcompeted?
Raising children is incredibly costly in parental effort, as well as money, and is becoming more so over time. Wishing that people would have more children for the benefit of "the economy" is another version of saying that we would all be richer if people weren't so lazy. Not everyone wants children, and most who do want children are happy with two. The most a pro-natalist policy can and should do is remove some barriers faced by people who want children, but aren't in the kind of stable relationship where this would make sense.
As regards the big picture of humanity, even with an average of one child per woman from now on, the world population would still be in the billions well into next century.
That line from Cromwell is a favorite of mine too.
I think about slowing population growth differently. It is the social organism reacting to individual prosperity and binding global limits on the carrying capacity of the planet. It is WONDERFUL that this is happening, because it means we have a CHANCE of survival longer term.
I do share the foreboding however, because a more stable population involves a serious transition toward NOT relying on growth as a magic elixir for all our social problems. It isn't really a very good kind of magic to begin with, since it leaves so many behind. But it does provide a convenient social lubricant which sustains political coalitions of what used to be called "the bourgeoisie".
So we agree that population is an important dimension of "the permanent problem", but for different reasons. You argue that we've GOT to resume faster population growth; I argue that we should not, and that this is WHY the permanent problem is bearing down on us.
Thanks for your work on this topic. It's challenging, and there is very little space for it among our political class. Keep it up!
Comment
Hmmmmmmmmm….
So first, Happy New Year!
Second, that’s a really great header image for this piece.
Third, well…. yes, demographics are destiny, as the saying goes. I remember a Medieval Historian I had for a few classes once said, “My students don’t like hearing this, but the biggest driver of what happened during this period wasn’t things like Thomas Aquinas, the Magna Carta, or the printing press. It was that the population of Europe doubled during this time.” I didn’t like that, either! Alas...
So population numbers are powerful, at least from what we know from 5,000 years of agrarian Empires, and the agrarian/industrial empires that we have now. For what you are saying to be false (that population decline is going to be very bad) we need to shake loose at least one of the assumptions under what we have learned from the past. Perhaps there are new dynamics in a technology-driven world that are not obvious.
Other thoughts… A lot of population decline is due to the increased status and self-actualization of women. I am very glad to see this. However, this has - so far - led to a decline in birth rates all over the developed world. So what is the future of women in our world? Are we really going to hope women go back to lots of unplanned pregnancies and years away from education and careers? I hope not. So I am OK with population decline if that’s how women get equality.
Also, as someone who considers himself as an environmentalist, I think population decline is great news. We are liquidating the Earth’s resources. Too many species are dying, habitat is disappearing, and we have water problems all over the globe from over use. (The American West could go dry starting in 20 years. They have severe shortages now and the Biden administration has had to step in to referee.)
I don’t see a sustainable future with more population growth. I see crises all over the world around water and food. (Food might not just be a yield problem. If we keep killing pollinators, our food won’t grow anyway)
So I am thinking about a sustainable future with a healthier world and women’s equality. It’s not impossible - I have four kids and my wife and I are equals and she has a great career and we do a lot to limit our personal impact on the world like growing a lot of our own food.
These days I hear a constant beat of anguish over population rate decline. You, Elon Musk,Russ Douthat, and others are bemoaning a population decline that has not even begun, and won't for another 50 years at best. Having been born in 1950, I have been amazed at the amount of change that can and does occur in 50 years. Population began increasing in the 1700s, and has been on a steady state exponential increase until about 1930 when the rate of increase began to decline. As each country passed a certain economic/education level the internal rate of increase began to decline. This happened almost in direct ratio with how much capitalism was developed by each country and in inverse proportion to the inequality. As the inequality increased the birth rate dropped.
Capitalism has allowed the per capita income to increase to unprecedented levels and thereby defeat the Malthusian devil that prevented both population increase and general flourishing. Unfortunately it also brought with it a significant increase in the opportunity costs for gaining the level of flourishing people desire. That increase in opportunity costs is reflected in the decreasing birth rates. People haven't stopped having baby's they have simply limited the number of children to represent the increase in opportunity costs. It is no longer a necessity in most parts of the world for a woman to have 5 children to insure that at least one will survive to support her in her old age. She has a better chance that her husband will survive and one or two children will suffice. However in a capitalist society, the opportunity costs are too high to have much more than one or two. Until we find a way to reduce the opportunity costs, both economically and socially we will see declining birth rates.
The good news is that I and others believe that we are heading in the right direction. Increasing affluence around the world and increasing equality are going in the right direction. But this is an effort that requires an active choice, you (the population) must make the active choice to decrease inequality and increase our social supports for some version of capitalism it succeed. Capitalism/Democracy is the best option we have come up with in the last 10,000 or so years. We are still tweaking it trying to make it succeed. This is not to say that there are not forces trying to take it in another direction. As I have often said “Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean there are not people out to harm me”. But so far we are (just barely sometimes) succeeding. I believe when we solve the Capitalism/Democracy problem, we will solve the population issue. Working on the one solves them both.
First, you probably know this already, but Lyman Stone is the internet's leading authority on all things fertility data related. I don't share his moral convictions at all, but I respect his scholarly honesty and thoroughness. If you're going to think productively about the issue you ought to engage deeply with the data he presents and analyzes. One of his latest tweets on the topic, IIRC, noted that most of the fertility decline is about declining marriage rates-- that e.g. even in Japan and South Korea, married couples still have TFR close to replacement. If that's true, then the disconnection and loneliness you've talked about before as symptoms of the present sociological crisis may be central to fertility decline.
Second, it seems to me that there is a pattern of "wicked problems of modernity" and that both the fertility decline and climate change fit the pattern. They are complicated, multicausal, but definitely strongly tied to the rise of capitalism and the Great Enrichment. They are tough to fix and even to properly understand because of that complexity and also because they are collective action problems with multi-decade lags between behavioral change and practical effect. And the discourse around them tends to be dominated by denialists (this isn't really a bad thing, look at the short-term upsides; we can easily deal with it later if it ever becomes a real problem; and the people raising the alarm now must be motivated by a terrible extremist ideological agenda) and doomers (this is baked into the structure of modern life; it proves that that structure is hopelessly corrupt and evil; the future belongs to the Amish).
So if you believe that climate change is real and important but also solvable, if you reject both doomerism and denialism there, you should look to the reasons why and see if we can apply those reasons to fertility. Possible lessons include:
-- the importance of just doing the messy, hard work of breaking down the problem into little bits and seeing where the lowest-hanging fruit is (what would a Project Drawdown look like for fertility?)
-- the importance of technological solutions in enabling a more sustainable future without sacrificing the comforts and pleasures of modernity (how might we make parenting easier and cheaper through suitable technological development? does that mean artificial wombs, or robot diaper-changers, or medical treatments that delay menopause while extending healthspan...?)
Behold! This is an important topic and your contributions are appreciated.
Some commentary:
1. This is clearly not just a "capitalism" problem, given the birth rate in China
2. Much of the blame for this can be placed squarely on the wide availability of cheap and effective birth control
3. We assert that humanity has not recently started "privileging the present". The vast majority of humans have always "privileged the present", it was simply that in many cases, children were an inescapable side effect. And for many of those who "wanted" children, it was in the desire for additional labor to perform toil.
4. We also propose that "privileging the future" is a genetically inheritable trait. If this proposition is correct, the problem of "too many people who privilege the present" is self-correcting over time.
5. It is interesting how the recent advancements in AI and robotics hold a certain amount of promise in resolving some of the physical care challenges posed by an aging population. TBD.
6. Should Taylor Swift become a mother, it is reasonable to assume that there will be a measurable cultural shift towards parenting, at least for a certain cohort.
An interesting thesis. But where I part company with you is that it seems predicated on the presumption that humanity's future direction of travel is something that can be collectively directed. Whereas I am one who thinks we can but watch it unfold.
Agreed. My brief, shallow reflection on your well-written words: capitalist workers are tired. Many jobs are performative. People have to work to obtain the money to live. Being tired takes energy away from physically present interpersonal relationship. Obtaining social "likes/credits" is easier and more fun than working a traditional 9-5 job or religious participation, but it doesn't provide the interpersonal rewards of physical relationships. Also, people don't let themselves get bored any more. There's always another click to avoid boredom....which contributes to being tired, unable to recharge.
We appear to have different definitions of capitalist, though I find the term is used loosely. No need to debate. We see things differently, which is fine.
(Ah, the privilege of responding & expounding in a couple of hours vs. actually coming up with a set of original essays.) When Brink mentions dynamism I have to go back to previous posts to review what he means. Perhaps I could paraphrase "dynamism" as the continuing breakthroughs and progress in society that have led to better lifestyles, including technological/engineering, scientific (agricultural, medical, etc.) and even sociological (use of the internet and social media, psychology, etc.)
Along with "dynamism" and "capitalism," another overarching, wildly abstract concept that might be considered here is "complexity." The more complex a system is, the more opaque and uncontrollable it becomes. At this point we're even talking about interlocked systems: political/governmental, financial/economic, social, global supply chains etc. We can see the negative impacts on our lives, such as climate change and workaholism from capitalism, along with government's increasing inability to maintain the well-being and support the flourishing of its citizens. The question is how to move beyond that gloomy recognition.
Our current woes could be seen as the natural result of the biological success of an intelligent species with opposable thumbs. I get a fatalistic but serenity-prayer-like comfort from looking at humanity from the biological/ecological standpoint: We are a species that has outgrown its resources. In this case the "resources" are the ability to understand and control our own intelligent progress. (Can AI play a role here if it's very, very cautiously used? Or would it just make things worse by black-boxing our Russian-doll black boxes?)
With some systems I wish we could just decide to stop where we are and try to fix what we have (impossible of course.) "Fixing" systems is a matter of finding the internal levers in systems and nudging them: it's painstaking, boring, and usually leads to unintended consequences. It would be a new kind of dynamism, not so much the "move fast and break things" type, but a quieter, unheralded local type.
Brink often mentions the benefits of local communities. Acting locally in terms of our systems could also a clue to nudging things. There's no better way to start understanding the complexities of governmental systems than to immerse into one tiny, local function of a city government. (The same may be true of private industry.)
I recently read Jennifer Pahlke's new book "Recoding America," which I snapped up in hopes that there would be specific, detailed insight on one particular system, along with some examples of successful nudges. The book delivers and as such might be a model for looking at other systems. Overall her diagnosis is that government has too much faith in processes that have been laid down over the decades, to the detriment of results. One of her suggestions is that the Federal Government hire more in-house IT experts. Another is that employees at the bottom of the Congress-law-policy-process-implementation "waterfall" be allowed more power and leeway in producing technical products (such as webpages) that will actually work for their users.
This guidance for government IT might be seen as a vertical form of "localism." Focusing more on results means that end-users and hands-on techies have to be involved from the beginning. (As for managers, there would have to be radical changes in a bureaucratic culture "in which fidelity to flawed rules and practices is valued more than solving problem" as Pahlke puts it. "Local" in this sense would civil service employees in a department way down on the org chart interacting directly with users, even if those users are scattered across the nation.
As a side note: I can't help but see parallels between Pahlke's advice for government and the current crisis at Boeing (where are the engineers? where are the long-term, in-house employees?) Perhaps the "nudge" from the doorplug ejection will lead to some corporations giving more weight to "results" and less to stock prices.
Brink, this is something I too have been thinking on and I want to offer a sort of broader adjustment to your thesis. A little over half a year ago, I thought the great decline in fertility was a result of unrestrained liberalism, a sort of post-liberal argument. Increasingly though as I've surveyed more societies with less liberal tendencies, I don't think this idea holds up to scrutiny.
Instead, I believe the wave of anxiety brought on by modernity is key to understanding the present decline in fertility. We can see this anxiety in our fears about democracy, despite democracy remaining at one of its all time highs. We can see this in our climate anxiety despite the great amount of progress made in solving the issues associated with it, more progress than was even thought possible just 20 years ago. We can see this in our constant fears about having enough wealth and money despite the fact humanity is wealthier and richer than at any point EVER.
This anxiety wave inevitably affects potential parents who grow up with the triple terrors of a polluted planet, autocratic rule, and impoverished lives. These fears induce the rightly criticized safetyism which so blights our lives and prevents parents from seeing the great future their children might have if only they take the time to bring them into the world. Instead, they only see an abject misery of frightful fear brought on by modern life and pumped directly into their brains via social media.
What we need is an anti-anxiety medicine for modernity, something to move us out of the current doomscroll into a new era of dreamy, promethean-esque hopefulness. I do not know how to create the conditions for such an era to emerge but I believe beginning with setting out the task ahead, diagnosed correctly, will lead us to the proper treatment regime.
I agree that something is wrong, and I would love to see a good study of what is going on in South Korea, epicenter of the trend, and one of the most work-oriented and capitalist of countries. But, long term, I expect trends will change. Societies, and the world at large, are not homogeneous. It takes only one significant sub-group with positive growth to eventually overwhelm all sub-groups with negative growth, and to bring the overall population growth back to positive. The long term question is, what will be the characteristics of the growing sub-group? Right now, I'd say religion. I'm an unbeliever. But I love my Mormon friends, and I think they (and other groups I'm less enamored of) are the future.
Thanks a lot for this essay, Brink. More and more thinkers are realizing that we have a serious problem, but I have yet to see plausible solutions. I would also challenge the assessment that "capitalism" is to blame, if only that "capitalism" has become such an imprecise term as to fail to clarify the matter.
Brink, agree falling fertility rates are a real problem. The argument that this is a failure of capitalism is unclear. That capitalism has problems of its own is also clear - that there is a causal relationship with depopulation maybe conflating correlation with causation. Maybe you'll address this next week.
Seems to me that the world will be more sustainable with a population of about half what we have now. We clearly need to stabilize population at some level; it can’t grow endlessly. Still, catastrophizing about the end of humanity misses the real problem, which is how societies will deal with a much greater ratio of old to young people. Who will care for the aged? How will we find enough workers for any industry? More robots? Even less personal interaction? I won’t speculate, but would like to see a discussion that explores the consequences of a stable or declining population.