“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?
Yes, the fertility collapse started in rich countries but it's spread almost everywhere now -- you just need urbanization and consumerism. And regarding your remark that "the problem isn't capitalism per se but consumerism," it's true that one could theoretically have one without the other, but actually existing capitalism today is everywhere powered by consumerism. Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
Nice comment! Yes I don’t think it’s money. For example, I live in a wealthy town. Almost nobody has more than two little kids like me. Yet I go to the one Catholic Church in that town, and there are lots of 3 and 4 kid families in the family mass - all from that same town.
Perhaps religious people - or the culture of Catholicism- is stronger than the cultural incentives to have one or two kids. Hmmmmmm.....
Yep. The real issue isn't going to be in the US. America can always find more immigrants to import. The real problem will be in countries like Brazil-- middle to low income, low fertility, not an attractive destination for immigrants. In fact, these will be the countries that the immigrants will be leaving, not coming to. India, Vietnam, lots of Latin America will all be in this unfortunate middle. Not poor enough to have high birth rates like Mali, just rich enough to have low birthrates but not rich enough to ofset them with immigration.
It sounds like Vietnam hasn't yet followed the path of the U.S. and other large SE Asian nations, not to mention China. That gives it the opportunity to learn from the rest of us what not to do as it develops.
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.
“Becoming more [costly in parental effort] over time” is kind of an odd phrasing. People are deciding to put in more effort. It’s not some external factor.
I am still pretty sanguine about the population trend. The same way we over-relied on our projections of runaway population growth, at this point I think we’re engaging in excessive hand wringing about population decline. We’re extremely bad at projecting things 80 years in the future, and often the trends have reversed before that time even arrives.
Having said that, maybe we have come across a bug or two in human nature. It’s not the first time. We’ll have time to figure them out and find solutions. It’s funny that we still have a tendency to be so fatalistic despite humanity having come so much further than anyone expected.
You're totally right that there's no reason to feel confidence in long-term population projections. tBut it's the fact that fertility has fallen so fast, and has fallen so low in some places (e.g., South Korea, China), that really grabs the attention. Because the number of potential future parents is shrinking so rapidly, even a turnaround in attitudes won't be enough to stave off a protracted period of decline. And the decline in global fertility is still accelerating, not tapering off, so there's just no sign at present that the trend is about to turn around.
"People are deciding to put in more effort. It’s not some external factor. "
People are deciding to put in more effort, because not doing so will be really bad for the kids. When i was growing up, parents could keep their kids fed and clothed until age 14, without worrying too much about school. Then the kids could get an apprenticeship for a few years, leave home and be married by 20, with a safe job, well paid by the standards of the time. Nothing like that is possible today.
More seriously, I think the standard of comparison should be 30-40 years ago, and most of the added activities and whatnot that parents have piled on since then are optional.
Also, there are still apprenticeships, free community college, etc. Trade jobs still seem to pay quite well.
Agree with this about the cost. But I don't like the idea of children being raised in unstable parent relationships and subsidizing that.
But the cost for the two parents who want to have more than 2 or 3 is not the only factor. It's only the woman who bears the child, and women don't want a lot of children for a number of reasons. Until the the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1960, they didn't have a choice. "The total fertility rate declined by nearly 50 percent between 1960 and 1973, from 3.6 to 1.9 births per woman . . . It would appear that growing use of the pill, the IUD and sterilization--but principally the pill--is the prime factor in the dramatic decline in unwanted and mistimed births among married couples" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3068068/).
I can't believe BRINK LINDSEY ignored this factor.
I didn't mention it, but of course the pill in particular was a complete game changer. Yet it's far from the only driver: fertility started declining before reliable contraception was widely available.
My own worldview is intensely individualistic, and I'm quite latitudinarian on what constitutes a well-lived life, so coming around to my current position on this topic has not been a comfortable ride. As you've framed the matter above, the choice to have kids is just one consumption preference among many, and it's not our place to question consumer preferences (not everyone wants children, expressing concern about low fertility amounts to criticizing non-parents as lazy). That's the key move -- once the consumerist outlook governs decisions about reproduction, low fertility is all but guaranteed. I know you recognize the claims of the unborn against us when it comes to climate change, but how do they have claims to a livable planet if they don't even have a claim to exist?
I don't see this as merely consumer preference. I assume that parents want the best life for themselves and for the kids that they actually have, and (given the chance) will decide on family size accordingly.
I don't think that we should place any weight on the interests of the uncountable trillions of potential kids who will never be born as a result of our choices - that points you in the direction of the crazy version of longtermism given by Parfit's Repugnant conclusion
I reject the repugnant conclusion because when it comes to human flourishing, I think the total amount of flourishing, the average amount of flourishing, and the peak level of flourishing all matter. So, to a point but not all the way, I do believe in "the more, the merrier" -- and that we humans collectively have an unchosen moral obligation to value future human lives. I don't have a clear sense of the extent of that obligation, but I think that protracted periods of sub-replacement fertility fails to live up to it.
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!
I would feel very differently if global fertility were converging on 2.1 and the great 20th century baby boom was coming to an end with a new era of population stability. But that's not what's happening; instead, we're facing the prospect of rapid population decline, which is unprecedented in modernity and will be incredibly destabilizing along numerous dimensions.
Yes, a lot depends on the rate. It's good to know that fertility rates *can* respond downward rather than remaining stubbornly high regardless of economic or ecological factors. But a *collapse* in population would not be good news. Population needs to stabilize or shrink *gradually*. My guess is that fertility rates will not remain far below replacement for long, if only because no country wants to be shrinking while competitors are growing.
It's a plausible guess, but look at South Korea -- a hostile neighbor on their border bent on their destruction, but the lowest fertility on the planet.
Thanks for these phrases, which I'll add to my working vocabulary because I'm thinking along similar lines: "social organism" and "carrying capacity of the planet".
Agree with you. We should not populate beyond what the planet can provide to all of humanity. We are already exceeding its carrying capacity. We need to learn to live and prosper within those limits. To not do so destroys our human habitat. See geographer Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". Two of the five factors he identifies in societal collapse are environmental damage and climate change.
THAT's the bug in human nature as Greg G put it above: We can't live within limits, and we use violence against our competitors to reduce the demands on resources. I think humanity CAN learn to live within limits, but, like the Wars of Religion in Europe, that finally settled the religious differences and tensions between Protestants and Catholics, it's gonna be a long, bloody battle.
It's either that or a slow, ecological collapse where the poor die out first and the wealthy eventually take off for space colonies compliments of SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
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.
Agree, agree, agree!! Thank you for noting that the population growth of the past was on the backs of women. They don't have to carry it anymore and they won't give up that freedom. We're going to have to figure out how to live within ecological limits.
We didn't have much population growth in the past: prior to 1700, the average annual growth rate was 0.04 percent. Women bore lots of children because there was no effective birth control and because half of them were going to die young. A stable-population world doesn't require the surrender of female freedoms, but it does require a culture that prioritizes family formation.
I think in 20 years we’re going to look at many of our current environmental challenges the way we look at burning rivers from the mid-20th century. Clean energy in particular is going to solve a lot of them. We’ve also become much more careful about environmental issues as we’ve gotten richer as a society, and I think that will continue. Figuring ourselves out will likely be more challenging than the environment.
Yes. But we had to pass legislation to clean up those rivers. And we did. Our federal government is broken now. And I see no significant efforts to deal with other problems.
We just passed the biggest climate change legislation we've ever had in the US.
Also, at this point renewable energy is cost competitive or advantaged, depending how you look at it, and costs are continuing to go down. Economics and self interest can mostly take over from government regulation on that front, with the major exception of deregulating grid improvements.
Also worth noting that a lot of this stuff happens at the state level. Texas is a leader in renewable energy now, and it's not because of regulation or left-leaning sentiments. It's because it makes economic sense.
Which problems do you feel are not being addressed?
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.
Agree Capitalism/Democracy is the best option, but you didn't mention the other cost in the benefit of increased per capita income that capitalism has given us: The cost to our human habitat, AKA fouling our own nest.
And another factor in declining fertility. Educating women also reduces the number of births she gives.
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...?)
I reject both climate doomerism and denialism. With respect to fertility, what is causing declining marriage rates? The decline began in the US in the 1970s. The availability of oral contraceptives from the 1960s on must have something to do with it.
Also, speaking of oral contraceptives, I don't see a fix for the burden of pregnancy and childbirth they gave women the choice to avoid.
Artificial wombs may be here before too long, and they offer the possibility of kids without the pain of pregnancy and childbirth. More on that in my essay next week.
Hmmm. I look forward to it. My first thought is that such a device might eliminate the pain for the mother, but what does it do to the the mother and child relationship, much of which depends on biology.
I'm a regular Lyman Stone reader! Thanks for your thoughtful comments. And I strongly share your rejection of the false alternatives of denialism and doomerism.
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.
Thanks for your comments! One point: in the sense I have used the term capitalism throughout this series of essays, China is a capitalist country. An authoritarian capitalist country with a large state sector, but capitalist all the same: wide reliance on private entrepreneurship and investment, wage labor, corporate organization, freely floating prices, and profit-and-loss, all motivated by a culturally domimant consumerism.
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.
It hit many things on the head for me. Then I proceeded to this 2017 article from Eberstadt, which clarified our current societal issues even more. https://bit.ly/3G1flsA
Paraphrasing, 1/5th of the population out of the work, stoned, watching videos. Most of the daily communication I receive from people is them sharing a video. I don't know where anyone finds the desire or time to consume so much video. But if they don't have a job and they're high, the time and "desire" becomes available.
Thanks for linking the Bret Stephens op-ed, I think it gets a lot right about Trump's appeal. As I see it, the transition to a globalized economy starting in the 90s resulted in a big decoupling between what's good for American businesses (which are extremely successful) and American society overall. Henry Ford famously saw a tight coupling between the two, but these days are now long gone. As an American now, you're either in a position to benefit from US business success (either through employment, or invested assets), or you're on the outside looking in. Trump has been very effective at recognizing the latter group.
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.
Lots to chew on in this meaty comment! I'm glad you liked Jennifer Pahlka's new book; I'm delighted that she is now a colleague, having recently joined the Niskanen Center as a senior fellow.
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 think the anxiety also manifests itself in cocooning with one's giant screens and video games. Social media seems to be propagating the idea that they're all victims and the only satisfying life attitude is to blame others (both the rich and the abjectly poor in the tents.) It's kind of the modern version of "Tune in, turn on and drop out" - hopefully they'll outgrow it. The current better jobs outlook might help.
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.
My impression of South Korea is that they haven't had their major feminist revolution yet (way too much plastic surgery), but at least it's kind of happening in the refusal to propagate.
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.
While I agree blaming capitalism and leaving it at that leads nowhere, I nonetheless think that the fertility collapse does illustrate that capitalism has wandered off course -- specifically, it is fostering cultural attributes that are inconsistent with capitalism's long-term survival and flourishing. All my speculations about "economic independence" represent my best efforts to figure out how to get things back on course.
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.
I agree. Seems to be substituting the word "capitalism" for "growing prosperity."
I agree with the analysis that shows the greatest single factor is declining marriage rates, with later marriages, 50% divorce rates, rising rates of gay marriage (not the best for procreation) and so forth. Add to that the pill, abortion, and other birth control. Then we have women with the freedom to pursue a career which takes them away from child care.
Lower birth rates are a side effect or "wake" of modern prosperity (having nothing to do with the means of production). For places like Korea to address this they need to think big. Assign votes based on numbers of children. Old age pensions proportionate to the number of kids. Tax rates inversely proportionate to numbers in the household. Direct Subsidies for full time moms with more than three kids. Elite schools giving preference to large families. Politicians and public figures walking the walk and showing off their large families. Immigration preference for larger families.
Just spitballing here, but we need to get out of our box before it is too late.
I'm being deliberately provocative by laying the fertility collapse at capitalism's doorstep. Capitalism produces modern economic growth, growth features urbanization and rising education and expanded opportunities for women and access to reliable contraception, and all of those lead to a low-fertility culture. So, in other words, a bunch of good things are producing a very bad side-effect. Yes, we can mount responses to low fertility (e.g., massive subsidies for parents) that do not change the structures of production, but one reason for implicating capitalism is that it leads us to think about how we might change some of those structures. My ideas about "economic independence" and fostering greater local self-sufficiency and strong personal bonds offer structural reforms that could help to promote a more family-centric culture.
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.
Yes, the much greater ratio of old to young is the problem the fertility decline gives us, especially as it has been coupled with increasing life expectancy. Japan's situation is the worst because they won't let migrants from other countries and other races enter their society. As Lindsey noted, immigrants in the US will offset the declining fertility of Americans born here.
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?
Yes, the fertility collapse started in rich countries but it's spread almost everywhere now -- you just need urbanization and consumerism. And regarding your remark that "the problem isn't capitalism per se but consumerism," it's true that one could theoretically have one without the other, but actually existing capitalism today is everywhere powered by consumerism. Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
Great comment. I think this nails it.
Nice comment! Yes I don’t think it’s money. For example, I live in a wealthy town. Almost nobody has more than two little kids like me. Yet I go to the one Catholic Church in that town, and there are lots of 3 and 4 kid families in the family mass - all from that same town.
Perhaps religious people - or the culture of Catholicism- is stronger than the cultural incentives to have one or two kids. Hmmmmmm.....
Yep. The real issue isn't going to be in the US. America can always find more immigrants to import. The real problem will be in countries like Brazil-- middle to low income, low fertility, not an attractive destination for immigrants. In fact, these will be the countries that the immigrants will be leaving, not coming to. India, Vietnam, lots of Latin America will all be in this unfortunate middle. Not poor enough to have high birth rates like Mali, just rich enough to have low birthrates but not rich enough to ofset them with immigration.
It sounds like Vietnam hasn't yet followed the path of the U.S. and other large SE Asian nations, not to mention China. That gives it the opportunity to learn from the rest of us what not to do as it develops.
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.
“Becoming more [costly in parental effort] over time” is kind of an odd phrasing. People are deciding to put in more effort. It’s not some external factor.
I am still pretty sanguine about the population trend. The same way we over-relied on our projections of runaway population growth, at this point I think we’re engaging in excessive hand wringing about population decline. We’re extremely bad at projecting things 80 years in the future, and often the trends have reversed before that time even arrives.
Having said that, maybe we have come across a bug or two in human nature. It’s not the first time. We’ll have time to figure them out and find solutions. It’s funny that we still have a tendency to be so fatalistic despite humanity having come so much further than anyone expected.
You're totally right that there's no reason to feel confidence in long-term population projections. tBut it's the fact that fertility has fallen so fast, and has fallen so low in some places (e.g., South Korea, China), that really grabs the attention. Because the number of potential future parents is shrinking so rapidly, even a turnaround in attitudes won't be enough to stave off a protracted period of decline. And the decline in global fertility is still accelerating, not tapering off, so there's just no sign at present that the trend is about to turn around.
"People are deciding to put in more effort. It’s not some external factor. "
People are deciding to put in more effort, because not doing so will be really bad for the kids. When i was growing up, parents could keep their kids fed and clothed until age 14, without worrying too much about school. Then the kids could get an apprenticeship for a few years, leave home and be married by 20, with a safe job, well paid by the standards of the time. Nothing like that is possible today.
You grew up in the 1930's?
More seriously, I think the standard of comparison should be 30-40 years ago, and most of the added activities and whatnot that parents have piled on since then are optional.
Also, there are still apprenticeships, free community college, etc. Trade jobs still seem to pay quite well.
"A bug or two in human nature"? What exactly is the bug in this case?
Agree with this about the cost. But I don't like the idea of children being raised in unstable parent relationships and subsidizing that.
But the cost for the two parents who want to have more than 2 or 3 is not the only factor. It's only the woman who bears the child, and women don't want a lot of children for a number of reasons. Until the the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1960, they didn't have a choice. "The total fertility rate declined by nearly 50 percent between 1960 and 1973, from 3.6 to 1.9 births per woman . . . It would appear that growing use of the pill, the IUD and sterilization--but principally the pill--is the prime factor in the dramatic decline in unwanted and mistimed births among married couples" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3068068/).
I can't believe BRINK LINDSEY ignored this factor.
I didn't mention it, but of course the pill in particular was a complete game changer. Yet it's far from the only driver: fertility started declining before reliable contraception was widely available.
My own worldview is intensely individualistic, and I'm quite latitudinarian on what constitutes a well-lived life, so coming around to my current position on this topic has not been a comfortable ride. As you've framed the matter above, the choice to have kids is just one consumption preference among many, and it's not our place to question consumer preferences (not everyone wants children, expressing concern about low fertility amounts to criticizing non-parents as lazy). That's the key move -- once the consumerist outlook governs decisions about reproduction, low fertility is all but guaranteed. I know you recognize the claims of the unborn against us when it comes to climate change, but how do they have claims to a livable planet if they don't even have a claim to exist?
I don't see this as merely consumer preference. I assume that parents want the best life for themselves and for the kids that they actually have, and (given the chance) will decide on family size accordingly.
I don't think that we should place any weight on the interests of the uncountable trillions of potential kids who will never be born as a result of our choices - that points you in the direction of the crazy version of longtermism given by Parfit's Repugnant conclusion
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/30/against-the-repugnant-conclusion/
I reject the repugnant conclusion because when it comes to human flourishing, I think the total amount of flourishing, the average amount of flourishing, and the peak level of flourishing all matter. So, to a point but not all the way, I do believe in "the more, the merrier" -- and that we humans collectively have an unchosen moral obligation to value future human lives. I don't have a clear sense of the extent of that obligation, but I think that protracted periods of sub-replacement fertility fails to live up to it.
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!
I would feel very differently if global fertility were converging on 2.1 and the great 20th century baby boom was coming to an end with a new era of population stability. But that's not what's happening; instead, we're facing the prospect of rapid population decline, which is unprecedented in modernity and will be incredibly destabilizing along numerous dimensions.
Yes, a lot depends on the rate. It's good to know that fertility rates *can* respond downward rather than remaining stubbornly high regardless of economic or ecological factors. But a *collapse* in population would not be good news. Population needs to stabilize or shrink *gradually*. My guess is that fertility rates will not remain far below replacement for long, if only because no country wants to be shrinking while competitors are growing.
It's a plausible guess, but look at South Korea -- a hostile neighbor on their border bent on their destruction, but the lowest fertility on the planet.
Thanks for these phrases, which I'll add to my working vocabulary because I'm thinking along similar lines: "social organism" and "carrying capacity of the planet".
Agree with you. We should not populate beyond what the planet can provide to all of humanity. We are already exceeding its carrying capacity. We need to learn to live and prosper within those limits. To not do so destroys our human habitat. See geographer Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". Two of the five factors he identifies in societal collapse are environmental damage and climate change.
THAT's the bug in human nature as Greg G put it above: We can't live within limits, and we use violence against our competitors to reduce the demands on resources. I think humanity CAN learn to live within limits, but, like the Wars of Religion in Europe, that finally settled the religious differences and tensions between Protestants and Catholics, it's gonna be a long, bloody battle.
It's either that or a slow, ecological collapse where the poor die out first and the wealthy eventually take off for space colonies compliments of SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
I like the analogy to the Wars of Religion. It takes a long time for culture to adapt to fundamental changes in circumstances.
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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.
Agree, agree, agree!! Thank you for noting that the population growth of the past was on the backs of women. They don't have to carry it anymore and they won't give up that freedom. We're going to have to figure out how to live within ecological limits.
We didn't have much population growth in the past: prior to 1700, the average annual growth rate was 0.04 percent. Women bore lots of children because there was no effective birth control and because half of them were going to die young. A stable-population world doesn't require the surrender of female freedoms, but it does require a culture that prioritizes family formation.
I think in 20 years we’re going to look at many of our current environmental challenges the way we look at burning rivers from the mid-20th century. Clean energy in particular is going to solve a lot of them. We’ve also become much more careful about environmental issues as we’ve gotten richer as a society, and I think that will continue. Figuring ourselves out will likely be more challenging than the environment.
Yes. But we had to pass legislation to clean up those rivers. And we did. Our federal government is broken now. And I see no significant efforts to deal with other problems.
We just passed the biggest climate change legislation we've ever had in the US.
Also, at this point renewable energy is cost competitive or advantaged, depending how you look at it, and costs are continuing to go down. Economics and self interest can mostly take over from government regulation on that front, with the major exception of deregulating grid improvements.
Also worth noting that a lot of this stuff happens at the state level. Texas is a leader in renewable energy now, and it's not because of regulation or left-leaning sentiments. It's because it makes economic sense.
Which problems do you feel are not being addressed?
Here's one thing: Biodiversity destruction (https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/biodiversity-loss#:~:text=Biodiversity%20loss%20refers%20to%20the,natural%20patterns%20present%20in%20ecosystems.)
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.
Agree Capitalism/Democracy is the best option, but you didn't mention the other cost in the benefit of increased per capita income that capitalism has given us: The cost to our human habitat, AKA fouling our own nest.
And another factor in declining fertility. Educating women also reduces the number of births she gives.
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...?)
I reject both climate doomerism and denialism. With respect to fertility, what is causing declining marriage rates? The decline began in the US in the 1970s. The availability of oral contraceptives from the 1960s on must have something to do with it.
Also, speaking of oral contraceptives, I don't see a fix for the burden of pregnancy and childbirth they gave women the choice to avoid.
Artificial wombs may be here before too long, and they offer the possibility of kids without the pain of pregnancy and childbirth. More on that in my essay next week.
Hmmm. I look forward to it. My first thought is that such a device might eliminate the pain for the mother, but what does it do to the the mother and child relationship, much of which depends on biology.
I'm a regular Lyman Stone reader! Thanks for your thoughtful comments. And I strongly share your rejection of the false alternatives of denialism and doomerism.
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.
Thanks for your comments! One point: in the sense I have used the term capitalism throughout this series of essays, China is a capitalist country. An authoritarian capitalist country with a large state sector, but capitalist all the same: wide reliance on private entrepreneurship and investment, wage labor, corporate organization, freely floating prices, and profit-and-loss, all motivated by a culturally domimant consumerism.
All good points. #6 gave me a big laugh!
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.
This morning I read Bret Stephens op/ed about why Trump has support - - the link should be gifted and without paywall, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/opinion/columnists/donald-trump-election.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NE0.cf2q.DPWby2R-_1ch&smid=url-share
It hit many things on the head for me. Then I proceeded to this 2017 article from Eberstadt, which clarified our current societal issues even more. https://bit.ly/3G1flsA
Paraphrasing, 1/5th of the population out of the work, stoned, watching videos. Most of the daily communication I receive from people is them sharing a video. I don't know where anyone finds the desire or time to consume so much video. But if they don't have a job and they're high, the time and "desire" becomes available.
Thanks for linking the Bret Stephens op-ed, I think it gets a lot right about Trump's appeal. As I see it, the transition to a globalized economy starting in the 90s resulted in a big decoupling between what's good for American businesses (which are extremely successful) and American society overall. Henry Ford famously saw a tight coupling between the two, but these days are now long gone. As an American now, you're either in a position to benefit from US business success (either through employment, or invested assets), or you're on the outside looking in. Trump has been very effective at recognizing the latter group.
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.
Lots to chew on in this meaty comment! I'm glad you liked Jennifer Pahlka's new book; I'm delighted that she is now a colleague, having recently joined the Niskanen Center as a senior fellow.
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 think the anxiety also manifests itself in cocooning with one's giant screens and video games. Social media seems to be propagating the idea that they're all victims and the only satisfying life attitude is to blame others (both the rich and the abjectly poor in the tents.) It's kind of the modern version of "Tune in, turn on and drop out" - hopefully they'll outgrow it. The current better jobs outlook might help.
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.
My impression of South Korea is that they haven't had their major feminist revolution yet (way too much plastic surgery), but at least it's kind of happening in the refusal to propagate.
Here's a good Atlantic article from last year on the battle of the sexes in South Korea. Your impression is spot-on: female expectations have changed dramatically, while men's are lagging badly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/south-korea-fertility-rate-misogyny-feminism/673435/
And the access to birth control that makes that refusal possible.
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.
While I agree blaming capitalism and leaving it at that leads nowhere, I nonetheless think that the fertility collapse does illustrate that capitalism has wandered off course -- specifically, it is fostering cultural attributes that are inconsistent with capitalism's long-term survival and flourishing. All my speculations about "economic independence" represent my best efforts to figure out how to get things back on course.
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.
I agree. Seems to be substituting the word "capitalism" for "growing prosperity."
I agree with the analysis that shows the greatest single factor is declining marriage rates, with later marriages, 50% divorce rates, rising rates of gay marriage (not the best for procreation) and so forth. Add to that the pill, abortion, and other birth control. Then we have women with the freedom to pursue a career which takes them away from child care.
Lower birth rates are a side effect or "wake" of modern prosperity (having nothing to do with the means of production). For places like Korea to address this they need to think big. Assign votes based on numbers of children. Old age pensions proportionate to the number of kids. Tax rates inversely proportionate to numbers in the household. Direct Subsidies for full time moms with more than three kids. Elite schools giving preference to large families. Politicians and public figures walking the walk and showing off their large families. Immigration preference for larger families.
Just spitballing here, but we need to get out of our box before it is too late.
I'm being deliberately provocative by laying the fertility collapse at capitalism's doorstep. Capitalism produces modern economic growth, growth features urbanization and rising education and expanded opportunities for women and access to reliable contraception, and all of those lead to a low-fertility culture. So, in other words, a bunch of good things are producing a very bad side-effect. Yes, we can mount responses to low fertility (e.g., massive subsidies for parents) that do not change the structures of production, but one reason for implicating capitalism is that it leads us to think about how we might change some of those structures. My ideas about "economic independence" and fostering greater local self-sufficiency and strong personal bonds offer structural reforms that could help to promote a more family-centric culture.
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.
Yes, the much greater ratio of old to young is the problem the fertility decline gives us, especially as it has been coupled with increasing life expectancy. Japan's situation is the worst because they won't let migrants from other countries and other races enter their society. As Lindsey noted, immigrants in the US will offset the declining fertility of Americans born here.
Check out my upcoming pair of essays on the possible consequences of depopulation.