Demographic Crisis Framing Is Everywhere

Asocietal crisis is a matter of consensus, of collective subjectivity. Its heralding emerges from a sprawling, chaotic choreography of interacting influencers — formal and informal, great and small — reacting to reality and also competing for attention and clicks. Unfortunately, as with the competition to name the next fake generation, in the chattering classes there is great reward for whoever nails it first, who says “CRISIS!” and gets everyone else to repeat it. And there is no penalty for jumping the gun. So the result is a catastrophizing ratchet, constantly lowering the bar for declaring the current crisis, whatever it may be. And right now, that exponentially growing subjective snowball is gathering around the issue of birth rates and population decline.

When I was on the Overshoot podcast from Population Balance this spring, in an episode titled, “Falling Birth Rates are Not a Crisis,” I argued for resisting both left and right crisis-making. In that cycle, both sides agree that falling birth rates are a crisis in order to argue over solutions. If there is a crisis, after all, there will have to be solutions, and a debate over solutions is an opportunity — neither side wants to let a crisis go to waste. If we don’t accept that there is a crisis, on the other hand, our debate over solutions can be much broader, with birth rates (too high, too low, or irrelevant) as just one element. I was glad to have that discussion, and I welcome the work of Population Balance, but we are not yet winning this argument. The bar-lowering snowball ratchet is my best mixed metaphorical explanation for why not.

Sometimes the etiology of a crisis framing is obvious, as in the the New York Times headline above. The Times has a terrible practice of clickbait headlines these days, which is plumbing new levels of nonseriousness. (My favorite self-own was the recent headline on a column by Nicholas Kristoff about how no one is saying that the United Arab Emirates is behind the genocide in Sudan, which they literally titled, “Let’s Name the Country That’s Financing Mass Murder.”) Above I show the headline for a recent profile of the right-wing Heritage Foundation staffer Emma Waters, by Times writer Anemona Hartocollis, which was titled, “A Conservative Role Model for Ending the Fertility Crisis,” even though the word “crisis” did not appear in the article, and it contains no evidence that such a crisis exists. That implies the crisis framing was initiated at the headline stage — in other words a click-bait marketing decision, not a journalistic assessment. That’s about right.

I feel a better about the Business Explains the World video, “Why America’s Population Crisis Could Be The World’s Worst,” for which I was interviewed by host Hanna Horvath. It is definitely wrong on some key points, starting with the title, and moving to the axiomatic assumption that population growth is good and decline is bad. Plus the usual overstatements, like, “Americans stopped having kids,” which drive me nuts. But Horvath included some good history, explaining how families evolved from needing child labor to the point where, as I said, “If you’re really focused on economic success, having more than one child does not help.”

But the best thing about the episode is its treatment of immigration and Trump. Which also highlights why she called it a “population crisis” instead of a “fertility crisis,” a key difference. She explains that immigration has always been good for the U.S. economy, and almost says that immigration restrictions and deportations today are a much bigger economic threat than falling birth rates. As I say in the video, “the idea of shutting off immigration is shutting off one out of every five future births.” With a mass deportation target of a million people per year — and negative net migration already achieved, for the first time in many decades — we may end up with a population crisis in the U.S., just not one caused by falling birth rates.

Also to Horvath’s credit, at the end she suggests indefinite population growth is not sustainable, and something will have to give. And she concludes: “What we’re facing right now isn’t a country that has chosen sustainable population stability. I believe it’s a country that has very much been sleepwalking [footage of a somnambulistic Trump plodding along] into demographic decline because we stopped doing the one thing that we were historically very good at, which is bringing people into our country.” So, some problems, but a strong conclusion, and a good influence within the “crisis” frame dumpster fire.

Watch that celebrity

The latest crisis hype from the Institute for Family Studies’ Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes, “The Demographic Dead End,” includes the bold claim that, “Comparing family size among admired celebrities to individual aspirations, an admired celebrity having one extra child may increase an individual’s desired family size by as much as 0.15 children.” Although they do not provide sufficient data or methods to understand what they really did, this apparently comes from asking survey respondents to name a celebrity they admire, and then using the number of children that celebrity has to predict the desired family size the respondents expressed during the same interview. The regression results are below — which they creatively call “associational effects” (presumably not realizing this term is used in plant biology, where it does not mean, “I’m trying to use the word effect for something that is definitely not an effect.”)

I love the idea that people somehow choose a celebrity to admire, and then when they find out how many kids that person has, change their mind about how many kids they will have themselves. That’s one possible story!

There is a very deep thread here, though, which Stone and Brookes might be too young to remember. But it’s their legacy, so they should know. Today’s pronatalists are yesterday’s marriage promotion zealots. They brought us “welfare reform” in the 1990s, and useless marriage promotion programs in the 2000s. And they always railed against the influence of the decadent media, especially Hollywood. In fact, it was 30 years ago that the Hoover Institution published a symposium titled, “Can Government Save the Family?” In that collection, Dan Quayle and others — whose only policy suggestions to save the family were slashing welfare and banning abortion — focused on celebrities, too, demanding that the “the media and the entertainment community … join in when it comes to strengthening families.”

The vice president had been especially distressed by the depiction of a fictional happy, White, middle-class single mother named Murphy Brown on TV. In 1992, Quayle famously said: “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

Sixteen years later, in the earlier incarnation of the Institute for Family Studies, the National Marriage Project, a much younger Brad Wilcox had included in his list of demands: “Our nation’s leaders, including the president [then Obama], must engage Hollywood in a conversation about popular culture ideas about marriage and family formation, including constructive critiques and positive ideas for changes in media depictions of marriage and fatherhood.” (If only the Obamas had been positive family role models.)

And now, in 2026, they literally recommend: “Governments interested in boosting fertility should consider enlisting the support of celebrities popular in their jurisdictions, or perhaps even finding a way to obliquely encourage those celebrities to marry and have more children.”

From Dan Quayle in 1992 to Brad Wilcox in 2012 to Lyman Stone in 2026. Rather than learning from this history, they seem to prefer propping up a timeless cultural scapegoat, a distant elite to always hold accountable for the never-ending slide into decadence and decay that is the wellspring of their political movement, which thrives on an aggrieved sense of persecution and victimhood (and tax cuts).

Selective dependency ratios aside

The Business Explains video also contains a common error that helps bolster crisis framing: selective dependency ratio reporting. In the video, the graph below appears on the screen very briefly (for less than one second once the lines are drawn, which probably means people didn’t notice its weird, presumably AI-generated subtitle), while Horvath says that in Japan, “Two workers now bear the burden of supporting one retiree.”

That is a standard dependency ratio: the number of people over age 65 per 100 people ages 15-64. In the case of Japan it really misses the measure of “workers” and “retirees,” however, because no one there starts working at age 15, and a quarter of people over 65 are still working. But anyway, the point is this chart leaves out the decline of children. If you’re interested in dependency rates, that’s essential information. Here is the same trend, from World Bank data, but with the child and total dependency ratios added as well:

As old-age dependency was rising in Japan, child dependency was falling. As a result, only in 2010 did the total dependency ratio surpass what it had been in 1960. That’s half a century of aging population without increasing total dependency, because there were fewer children. This is also — and this is not a coincidence — when Japan became rich and successful. Now, although incomes are not in the very top tier anymore, life expectancy in Japan is still the highest in the world. All that time without increasing dependency, all that opportunity to plan and invest for a future with fewer children and more old people.

The point I keep making: If we are wise, falling birth rates give us what we need to accommodate the effects of falling birth rates. Demographic crisis is a choice.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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