Weird Scenes from a Shrinking Planet (Part 2)

Image by Midjourney.

I set out to write an essay on falling fertility and the implications of population decline — but one essay turned into two, and now two have turned into three. Here I’ll wrap up my survey of some of the stranger possibilities of life in an emptying world.

The importance of showing up

Woody Allen is credited with observing that “showing up is 80 percent of life.” In demographics, it’s the whole ball game.

Depopulation won’t last forever. Even as childlessness becomes more common and small families are the norm, there are pockets of people still strongly committed to having lots of kids. If these pockets persist, eventually they will inherit the earth. The surrounding majority will gradually melt away, to the point that these fertile communities become a large enough percentage of the population that their high fertility starts to push the overall birth rate numbers upward. From there, the world repopulates – but with a very different cast of characters.

As I’ve mentioned, the pockets of high fertility we observe in the world today consist of religious minorities that in various ways deliberately set themselves apart from the social and cultural mainstream: ultra-Orthodox Jews, Old Order Amish, Mennonites, and to a declining extent Mormons. My friend Robin Hanson, who has been writing quite a bit about depopulation lately in his uniquely illuminating way, has stressed the importance of insularity in maintaining high-fertility cultures. This makes sense: capitalism is causing global cultural convergence along a host of different dimensions, among them an ongoing deprioritization of raising kids relative to other life goals. To maintain a commitment to high fertility across generations — not just having a big family yourself, but ensuring that your kids and grandkids and great-grandkids have big families, too — you have to somehow immunize your descendants from whatever is in the ambient culture’s water. And the best way to do that is to keep them away from that water as much as possible. In a recent interview, Robin explains how what appear to us as random eccentricities in the Amish’s cultural practices are actually all explicable in terms of maintaining insularity:

I think the key thing to keep your eye on is the insularity. That is, we’re part of this huge world culture and most of us are so integrated into the world culture that even if you and I have, you know, different kids and grandkids, those kids will then mix in with the rest of the culture and they won’t perpetuate a different style of doing things. It’s these very insular cultures that have been able to resist the outside influence and most of their weird choices can be understood in terms of their insularity. So for example, most of them are pacifist, but that’s mainly I would say because they don’t want their young men going off and mixing with other young men in a war that they tend to assimilate the other young men’s culture there and they’re trying to keep them, which means that when they’re big enough to have their own military divisions, they won’t need to be pacifist anymore. It’s because they’re so small that they need to be pacifist.

You know, there are other things, they’re rural, they tend to be rural, even the Amish don’t even like cars. What’s not to like about cars? Well, cars let you mix with people and they very consciously say, now we don’t want to mix with people and that’s why we don’t allow cars, which of course, why they don’t allow internet, phones, etc. They’re happy to use, you know, modern engines and other sorts of things on the farm. And so it’s not like they’re just crazy anti-technology. They are just hypersensitive about their insularity, which makes sense given that it’s so hard to maintain insularity in the face of our very strong world culture.

However much we might take exception to the values that animate such practices, they have this to recommend them: they work. That is to say, they pass the most basic test that all cultures face: they transmit successfully from generation to generation. The Amish now double their population every 20 years or so, and have seen their U.S. numbers rise from a mere 5,000 in 1900 to over 370,000 today. The ultra-Orthodox in Israel are growing by some 4 percent a year, faster than any other group in the country. With a birth rate triple that of secular Jews, their share of the population is rising rapidly: over 13 percent of the population today, they will account for nearly a quarter by 2050.

The values that I live by, the values of liberal cosmopolitan individualism that make all the blessings of modernity possible, have immeasurably greater reach and influence in the world today than those of a few scattered religious minorities. But they can maintain that reach and influence only if people who share them pass them along to the next generation. If, on the other hand, the people predominantly concerned with raising the next generation reject those values, they will not pass the test of time.

New America scholar Phillip Longman raised the question in his book The Empty Cradle nearly 20 years ago:

Does the future belong to fundamentalism? It does if the spread of maternity continues to erode individual incentives to have more children, while leaving a growing share of the population enfeebled by the chronic diseases of affluence and unsustainable social benefits.

The causes for Longman’s concern have only grown more pressing with the passage of two decades.

Reopening the frontier?

In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau famously proclaimed the closing of the American frontier, noting that the rapid pace of Western settlement had effaced any discernible line between settled and unsettled areas. Americans had washed out into the vast expanses west of the Mississippi in wave after wave, bringing land under cultivation and sprouting an archipelago of small towns and farming communities.

Urbanization and the relentless rise in agriculture productivity prompted a partial reversal of these population movements in fairly short order. Population declines in some rural counties of the Great Plains started as early as 1900, and the process greatly accelerated during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today, rural areas almost everywhere are in retreat: 47 percent of U.S. counties lost population during 2022.

Put urbanization together with low fertility and outright national population decline, and the emptying of rural areas goes into overdrive. I’ve already written about akiya, Japan’s abandoned houses that now comprise some one-seventh of the country’s total housing stock. Asian black bears are reportedly making a comeback in the depopulated countryside. Similar trends are visible across Europe as well. Some 3,000 abandoned villages now dot rural Spain. France, Italy, and Romania are reporting big increases in forest land as fields go untended. The Iberian wolf has made a big comeback in rural Spain, and the brown bear, which disappeared from there 150 years ago, has made its first reappearance.

We can expect more of the same — much more — once depopulation goes fully global. Soon there will be more and more places, located not that far from population centers, that offer all the elbow room that anybody who wanted to get away from it all could possibly desire. Meanwhile, as I just discussed, the common denominator in the world’s remaining high-fertility subpopulations is insularity: the most reliable source of big families today is traditional religious communities, enjoined by their faith to be fruitful and multiply, who in a variety of ways — including how they dress, what technology they use, and where they live — deliberately set themselves off from the rest of society. These religious sects don’t rely much on conversion to expand the ranks of the faithful, so to grow they need to combine lots of babies with high retention rates as the kids grow up. Cultural isolation, often buttressed by geographic isolation, serves that end by making it easier for the rising generation to stay on the straight and narrow. Thus we see ultra-Orthodox Jews congregating together in their own urban neighborhoods; the Amish, for their part, continue to live mostly in rural areas even as they gradually gravitate away from farming.

Here we see the outlines of a fascinating possibility: might the stresses and difficulties of depopulation’s downward economic spiral, together with the proliferation of empty land with considerable amounts of usable infrastructure already in place, combine to launch a pioneering movement to reoccupy the “internal” frontier of abandoned areas? If such a thing were to happen, the global fertility collapse could end up with a brilliant silver lining.

I’ve already argued that, to foster both greater technological dynamism and a reknitting of frayed social ties, we are sorely in need of a counterculture that pushes back against consumerism’s enervating distractions. Here’s a snippet:

Call it producerism — the antidote to consumerism, a DIY hacker culture that turns the tide on relentless outsourcing and celebrates the virtues of self-sufficiency and practical, real-world problem-solving.

Imagine if such a counterculture were to develop out of the economic independence movement I’ve been describing. Picture a double-digit percentage of people living in special pioneer communities, all dedicated to greater local self-sufficiency and innovation in the art of living. These communities would be test beds for cutting-edge agriculture and aquaculture, new building styles and materials and techniques, new cooperative institutions for child and elder care, and new local governance mechanisms. Their inhabitants would strive to provide for themselves, but would also employ their skills in a variety of home-based businesses. And producerism would be the guiding ethos: rather than looking for new ways outsource responsibilities to the market, the ongoing quest would be to expand capacities and skills and bring responsibilities back home.

Relatedly, I’ve written of the need to revalorize the frontier as a proving ground for the active virtues. “In reviving the appeal of exploring and settling,” I wrote, “we can recover humanity’s signature move, a major source of our dynamism as a species — namely, breaking off from the crowd with a like-minded group and striking out on your own.”

Maybe the combination of declining economic opportunities in the cities, expanding tracts of abandoned land and infrastructure free for the taking, and the model of insular religious communities who successfully buck the culture of low fertility can trigger the producerist, pioneering revival I’m looking for. But do conservative religious groups with strange beliefs and an oppositional stance toward modernity really offer any kind of promising model? My vision for a renewed pioneer spirit is one that embraces cutting-edge technology and a commitment to tinkering and modifying and innovating — an Amish-style aversion to new technology seems antithetical to what I’m talking about.

Interestingly, though, the Amish attitude toward technology is more discriminating than is generally appreciated. Here’s Eric Kaufmann is his fascinating 2006 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?:

In general, Old Order groups have made their peace with technologies of production while limiting technologies of consumption and, especially, communication. Private radios, stereos, and televisions are banned by all groups, while computers, cameras and phones are outlawed by all but the most liberal.

In other words, their stance toward technology is definitely anti-consumerism, but quite compatible with a pioneering producerism. As for me, I’m far too habituated to the comforts and pleasures of consumerism to find this kind of asceticism appealing — not to mention the fact that my lack of religious belief leads me to reject any life organized around rigid religious dogma. But what suits me and what is capable of generating sustainable, positive change in the world may be two different things, at least in this instance. In a world where the cultural momentum in favor of ever-dwindling human numbers is so powerful, a certain degree of harshness and narrowness may be necessary to resist and push back effectively.

To close this section, let me share an enjoyably provocative take on the Fermi Paradox by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. That paradox, for those of you unfamiliar, turns on the fact that we’ve yet to encounter intelligent alien life. Given the immense age of the Universe, and the immense number of star systems with potentially habitable planets, even if the emergence of intelligence were exceedingly rare, there should still have been time for alien civilizations to emerge and fan out all over the galaxy. So, Fermi asked, where are they?

One line of explanations invokes the existence of a “Great Filter”: wherever intelligence emerges, it eventually confronts some challenge that it cannot overcome, one that prevents or checks its interstellar expansion. Miller suggests that the Great Filter is consumerism, and that family-centric countercultures are our best bet for passing through it. The piece is quite short so I urge you to read the whole thing, but here is the main thrust of Miller’s argument:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness — subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity….

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.

Pigou and parenthood

In thinking through how depopulation might play out around the world, I’ve been assuming that it would follow its own natural course — in other words, it will continue until couples in sufficient numbers spontaneously decide to start having more babies. But of course, faced with such a massive challenge to economic wellbeing and national security, national governments will try to intervene to try to turn things around; many governments are already pursuing pronatalist policies of one type or another. Is it possible that such interventions could work — and that the specter of depopulation goes the same way as that of the population bomb?

There is a strong theoretical case for intervening. It was the English economist Arthur C. Pigou who first developed the concept of an “externality” — costs or benefits from some activity that affect third parties but not the parties actually engaged in the activity. (Pollution is a classic negative externality; scientific research is an activity that generates positive externalities.) Where externalities are present, since the relevant decision makers don’t take into account the costs or benefits affecting third parties, the level of the activity in question will diverge from the socially optimal amount — too much when external costs are present, not enough in the presence of external benefits. Pigou argued that such inefficiencies could be remedied by government subsidies (to encourage activities with external benefits) or taxes (to discourage activities with external costs).

Having children is an activity that produces massive positive externalities. Once upon a time, children were economic assets that benefited their parents, providing extra hands in the field and, later on, support in old age. And while those children also benefited others in society, they were being produced spontaneously as a byproduct of sex and there was limited capacity for birth control. Now, however, children provide few if any economic benefits for Mom and Dad: they are a consumption choice that offers only psychic rewards. Economically then, children are a cost, not an asset, and a cost that’s been ballooning with rising competitive pressures to imbue kids with the human and social capital they need to thrive in the modern economy. And, thanks to the pill and other forms of reliable contraception, they are now an easily controllable cost. Thus, parents are now deciding whether and how many kids to have with no accounting for the huge benefits they offer society as workers, consumers, and taxpayers. It shouldn’t be surprising under these circumstances that we’re making too few of them.

So much for theory: do pronatalist policies work in practice? Thus far, the evidence paints a pessimistic picture. As of 2015, according to U.N. data, some 55 countries had policies in place designed to boost fertility. Such policies generally take the form of cash payments to families with children, often structured to specifically encourage second and third kids. Obviously, what’s been implemented to date has been insufficient to stop the global slide. When we look at the record in specific countries, we see that increasing the generosity of government support for families can boost birth rates, but only modestly. For example, Japan increased its family-support spending by nearly 300 percent between 1990 and 2015. Over this period, the total fertility rate actually fell — from 1.55 to 1.39 — but rallied a bit from its 2004 nadir of 1.31. The bottom line: no country that has experienced any stretch of sub-replacement fertility has succeeded in using government policy to raise fertility back above 2.1.

Robin Hanson, known for his out-of-the-box thinking, argues that we need to think bigger. The social benefits of more kids are so enormous, he contends, that government can effectively pay parents to raise their kids and still come out way ahead. Hanson assumes that the total average cost of raising a child to adulthood is around $500,000 (the average total out-of-pocket expenses incurred by parents for food, shelter, and other basics — but not college — come to $234,000), and then cites economic calculations that put the net present value of a single human life at $16 million. From the perspective of society as a whole, that’s a whopping 32 to 1 return on investment. Further, he notes, the U.S. national debt plus unfunded entitlement program obligations amount to somewhere between $100 trillion and $245 trillion — or a debt per citizen of between $300,000 and $730,000. Accordingly, he concludes, we should be willing to pay up to these huge amounts for every child raised to adulthood. Such sums dwarf the level of support offered by current pronatalist policies in place around the world.

There is a darker possibility: governments could use sticks instead of carrots to incentivize higher birth rates. That’s the path taken by Romania, which launched a highly coercive campaign to raise the country’s fertility in 1966 that lasted until the fall of communism in 1989. Demographer Lyman Stone offers this recap:

When Nicolae Ceaușescu, communist dictator of Romania, imposed his draconian policy of pregnancy surveillance and forced birth (not simply restrictions on contraception and abortion, but literal requirements and mandatory cervical checks), Romanian fertility rocketed upward, and it remained higher than peer countries until the fall of the regime. Governments can boost birth rates. Of course, Romania’s experience was a disaster: this kind of policy disregarded women’s fertility preferences, forced undesired births, and led to blistering increases in child mortality, maternal mortality, and orphancy. Romania is a cautionary tale of what-not-to-do, but it also serves as a proof case that fertility goes where the government tells it to.

The conventional wisdom at present is that pronatalist policies don’t work — that cultural factors swamp financial incentives when it comes to the intimate decisions surrounding procreation, and thus that throwing money at the problem won’t work. That conventional wisdom, though, is based on the ineffectiveness of modest levels of government support to produce dramatic reversals in fertility trends. As Robin Hanson notes, the history of capitalism is replete with examples of big cultural changes caused by influxes of money; influxes of money helped to produce the fertility crisis, and sufficiently large ones could help to unwind it as well. Expect the issue to be revisited as the population squeeze continues — and pray that governments end up preferring carrots to sticks.

A dystopian deus ex machina?

To close out this speculative survey, let me home in on a topic I mentioned in passing in a previous essay: artificial wombs as a possible response to the fertility crisis. Instead of throwing money at parents to induce them to have more kids, governments could throw money at technology that makes parents unnecessary.

Scientists are currently working on research that is bringing that possibility closer. Right now, premature babies born at 24 weeks or later can be kept alive with high survival rates using incubators, but earlier than that babies’ state of lung development makes it very difficult for them to live outside of their mother. Scientists have been experimenting with artificial wombs — plastic bags filled with synthetic amniotic fluid, with tubes that connect the fetus’s umbilical cord to an artificial lung. Researchers in the United States and other countries have succeeded in keeping severely premature fetal lambs alive for weeks, and last September FDA officials met to discuss how to begin doing research with humans.

Now all of this remains far removed from full “ectogenesis” — successful gestation from conception to birth in an artificial environment. Enormous technical obstacles remain to be overcome, not to mention legal barriers and ethical red flags. But the collapse of natural fertility may well encourage more intensive efforts to find a technological fix. And should a breakthrough come, we will indeed have entered a brave new world.

Artificial wombs could have a significant impact on fertility simply by freeing women from the physical risks, bodily changes, pain, and inconvenience of pregnancy and childbirth. Fear of childbirth, or tokophobia, is a relatively common malady and can lead women to avoid having children. Lifting the curse of Genesis could make a big difference for many couples when they are deciding whether or not to have kids.

But the biggest potential impact of artificial wombs comes from their ability to take reproduction out of the hands of the family. It would now be possible for children to be conceived, gestated, and raised not by their biological parents but by professionally managed bureaucratic organizations. Call it the advent of industrial parenting. One can imagine nonprofit or even commercial enterprises that contract with the government for a share of the tax revenues that their little bundles of joy will eventually generate. Or governments could create state-owned enterprises and bring parenting within the public sector.

Put aside for a moment how over-the-top creepy this sounds, and consider first of all whether the idea even makes sense. When I’ve shared this speculation with people in conversation, the main reaction I’ve gotten, beyond the understandable knee-jerk repugnance, is skepticism whether industrial parenting really solves any important problem. Pregnancy and childbirth, after all, are just the beginning of the process, with another 18 years of caring and feeding to follow. Who’s going to do all that work and who’s going to pay for it?

But as I see it, there’s nothing new about the idea of children being raised by third parties in some institutional setting: we’ve had orphanages and boarding schools for a long time. Whether such institutions would be well run, whether they could provide loving and nurturing environments for their young charges, how children born and raised institutionally would turn out as adults — all of these are crucially important questions, but all are beside the point here. I’m not trying to figure out if this is a good idea — I think it’s a terrible idea! — but rather whether governments, animated by different values than my own, might have a reason to go down this road. And I think they might.

As I said, governments already have the capacity to raise parentless children — they’ve been doing it for centuries. What they’ve never had the capacity to do in the past, however, is exercise direct and effective control over the birth rate and thus the size of the population. Artificial womb technology gives them that capacity, and that seems to me like a potential game-changer. In the past, population size was the single greatest determinant of national wealth and might; now holding off population decline looms as a major determinant of national fortunes. And yet, until now, the power over this critically important matter of state has been distributed among millions of couples and exercised in accordance with their intensely personal and emotional considerations. Statesmen can at best seek to influence this power, whether through cajoling and subsidies or threats and coercion — but the power itself is out of their hands and tucked away in millions of humble bedrooms.

Artificial wombs allow governments, for the first time ever, to take the power over fertility into their own hands. Again, I emphatically don’t wish governments to have such power — but the question here isn’t whether the thing should be done, but whether there are reasons to think it might be done. Compare state-owned childrearing enterprises to Robin Hanson’s proposal of huge baby bounties. Robin’s proposal contemplates egalitarian redistribution on an enormous scale: ordinary people are able to convert their power over reproduction into massive fiscal power, as parents receive a kind of super-UBI for doing what all their predecessors did on their own dime. Such aggressive redistribution is going to face stout opposition everywhere, but one imagines that authoritarian governments would be especially averse to power-sharing with ordinary citizens to such a degree. Industrial parenting, by contrast, allows governments to build up huge new power centers within the public sector. And not only will they be able to raise fertility by their own initiative and under their own direction and control, but raising kids on their own is every totalitarian’s dream: the chance to mold their populace’s values and knowledge from the cradle.

I generally agree with Jim Pethokoukis and others who complain that science fiction has taken a dystopian turn and who urge writers to once again give us hopeful, inspiring visions of the future. But dystopian fiction does sometimes can serve a constructive role — that of self-defeating prophecy. Imagining dark possibilities for the future can be a way to alert the public to those risks and start the process of taking steps to avoid them. With that constructive role in mind, let me urge sci-fi authors to start writing near-future stories set against the backdrop of the fertility collapse and an emptying planet. That future contains all kinds of weird and unsettling possibilities that a gifted storyteller could bring to life — and, in the process, help to raise awareness of the cliff we’re sleepwalking toward.