JD Vance has repeatedly said that Americans aren’t having enough children.
Other right-wing figures agree with him. Elon Musk, broadening the complaint, has said that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.
When populations decline, the average age of people in the population increases. This has several harmful consequences. Eventually, there are not enough young people to care for older people and to economically support them through contributions to social programs; to fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress; and to fund government services.
These developments disproportionately harm poor people, sick people and other socially vulnerable groups. Japan and South Korea are already experiencing some of these problems, but the trend is widespread. Fertility rates in the United States are below the level necessary for population replacement, and they are declining almost everywhere else. Contrary to the alarmism you sometimes hear about exponential population growth, experts say that the number of humans on Earth will peak before the end of this century and fall afterward.
France has not experienced the severe decline in fertility observed in neighboring countries. One of the main reasons seems to be national policies that provide parents with financial benefits like tax breaks that scale up with the number of children in a family.
That’s an approach that the United States could readily adopt, for example, by restoring and expanding the child tax credit.
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I vehemently disagree. There are already three times more people on this planet than when I was a child. We have polluted every single inch of this planet because there are way too many people. Resources are stretched. Nine billion people trying to have it all. We could use a population decline.
Everyone thinks everything was better when they were children, and everyone is wrong.
Life is better now. Children today are more likely to survive childhood and live to old age than at any time in the past. This is true in the United States, and it is true globally.
If that fact is difficult to square with the argument that "there are way too many people," it's because that argument is wrong.
You would think that an argument that has been made for centuries, and has been wrong for centuries, would be discarded, or at least regarded more skeptically than it is. Instead, it conti… Read more
@ExactingPragmaticGreen2yrs2Y
Exactly! Even if every new person adopted an austere lifestyle equilivant to a monk, the requirements for food and simple clothing/shelter would continue stressing the planet and fuelling climate change.
@WeaverBarrySocialist2yrs2Y
Exactly right. This article mistakenly assumes population growth is essential, and he devotes only a passing thought to environmental impact. Instead, we need to manage what should be a one- to two-generation adjustment that leads to a stable (or even declining ) population, while focusing on environmental preservation and more equitable distribution of the earth's wealth and resources.
@Gr4ssrootJerkyDemocrat2yrs2Y
Population decline is a euphemism for back to the medieval. With current social structures humanity must grow to sustain. We are here because of the population. We have airplanes because there are so many places where people live and they need things and to travel. We have medicine and healthcare because there are so many people and so many places where people-scientists do science. Etc.
The very idea of depopulation is a conservative idea. Progressives must reject it.
@EnergeticLobbyDemocrat2yrs2Y
So the author wants to continue to increase the world population for our own good. For how long? There must be an end point.When will we transition to zero growth? Our earth is finite and our population must be finite as well.Both our world wide population and economy cannot expand for ever. We should figure out how to make this transition now instead of spending our energies encouraging people to have more children. Degrowth now!
For over 300,000 years, the human species was in the thousands to millions. Human populations didn’t hit the 1 billion mark until the early 1800’s.
A massive reduction in human population would be a very good thing for the sustainable future of the planet and for our species. Pronatalist is just another word for oligarch. These are people who lament the demise of cheap, exploitable labor.
India has a population of 1.42 Billion. The average per capita annual income is $2,400. India accounts for 40% of the world’s poverty rate. The argument that increased population increases… Read more
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