Why are people freaking out about the birth rate?
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Getty Images/Vasiliki
There’s one little statistic that seems to have gained a lot of attention recently: the birth rate. It’s been in decline for a while, and is currently below the level of replacement. With pronatalist ideas showing up in our culture and politics, Brittany wanted to know: why are people freaking out? Who’s trying to solve the population equation, and how? Brittany is joined by Kelsey Piper, senior writer at Vox, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus, staff writer at The New Yorker, to get into how the birth rate touches every part of our culture – and why we might need to rethink our approach to this stat.
Interview highlights
Is birth rate decline a real problem? What issues might it cause?
KELSEY PIPER: A lot of the way the economy is set up, institutions like Social Security, they were built when we had a growing population. And they do have a sort of assumption baked into them that there will be enough people who are working age to support [retired people]. [If] we don’t have as many working people, then that ratio gets very unbalanced.
GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS: One of the problems of a shrinking and aging population is almost certainly going to be even greater political instability. As there are fewer people, the economy shrinks, there’s less to go around. We are actually almost certainly going to see a rise in inequality. In South Korea right now, they don’t have enough bus drivers. And so the first things that are going to disappear are public bus routes that people rely on. And as there are fewer and fewer teachers, there’s going to be shifts into private education. If you’re not careful about the distributional aspects of this, you’re going to end up with an increasingly unequal society.
PIPER: [Also], in cultures where children are very rare, the confidence and feeling that you can have children, that that is an available life path such that people go down, [it] becomes less viable in a bunch of ways – like, are there parks? Are people accepting of children in public? Is it a normal thing to do? That has a huge impact.
It seems there are a few camps trying to solve the population equation: liberal pro-natalists, conservative pro-natalists, and even people who support population decline. How are they all approaching this issue?
LEWIS-KRAUS: So there’s a kind of liberal instinct that says, ‘okay, the fertility decline is not a problem in and of itself, but it’s a symptom of other underlying problems. It’s a symptom of how degraded our social services are, the fact that we have no robust social safety net, and if you had a much better welfare state, these things would naturally go away.’ Now, for a long time, the Scandinavian countries presented a kind of an emergency brake – that if things got bad enough, we could all switch to Nordic affordances for parental leave and child care subsidies. But then [Scandinavian birth rates] fell off a cliff, too.
There are traditional conservative pronatalists, and there are also more tech-oriented pronatalists, but it seems like these groups have a kind of alliance. How are they approaching raising the birth rate, and what’s their alliance built on?
LEWIS-KRAUS: One thing that a technological pronatalist told me – he said, ‘look, I understand the nature of the divisions that my camp has with the more traditional wing of this coalition, but both of us have greater aspirations for like what makes a human life meaningful and significant than just retiring to the villages in Florida.’ [But] it seems like an unstable coalition. Actually, an insistence on a return to patriarchal traditionalism – it doesn’t work. There are plenty of places in the world like Tunisia or Iran, where along various dimensions, these are plenty traditional societies where we have also seen a radical fall [in birth rates]. The other thing is [these camps] do have very different underlying views on reproductive technologies. There are people in that [technological pronatalist] movement who think the solutions are going to be much better and more viable IVF, and then this idea that in 20 or 30 years we’ll have artificial wombs. And those are things it’s very hard to imagine traditionalist pronatalists getting on board with.
What about people who welcome population decline for environmental reasons?
PIPER: So I’m going to mention just briefly, a lot of “kids are bad for the climate” stuff basically assumes that there will be no further progress on green energy, that what we have now is the best it’ll ever get, and that for those kids’ entire lives, they will be emitting carbon at exactly the level of a current American. It’s just a very pessimistic worldview, right? Also, our per capita emissions are declining in the United States. And then the other thing is we did so much environmental damage when there were a billion humans on the world. What effects people have on the environment is partly a product of how many there are, but it’s also a product of our knowledge, our scientific understanding of the world, our state capacity, our ability to follow up on what we do know. We can protect the national parks when we have a wealthy, non bankrupt state that cares about the national parks. We can protect endangered species when we can train lots of biologists who can identify endangered species and figure out what protections they need.
What does all this thinking about the birth rate say about how we’re thinking through the future of humanity?
LEWIS-KRAUS: Maybe the last thing that we want to do is freight children with even greater of a symbolic role in our discourse. The worst possible outcome here is that we allow this to become a full blown culture war thing. Maybe what we want to do is wean ourselves of the habit of talking about children in symbolic terms, as far as what they reflect about our identity, and instead, try to remember that children are actually just little people who maybe could be taken on their own terms.