Population Implosion Collapse Chaos, Pronatalist Billionaire Discourse Edition

Population debate seems to be accelerating exponentially. This is partly because billionaires, especially Elon Musk, have inordinate influence on popular discourse (and he is super into impregnating people). I see this in the news, and by the number of reporters calling to ask about fertility and population trends we’re in for another wave. UN population projections are coming out next month, and the Gates Foundation’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation just dropped a new set of modeled global population projections — which predicts sharper fertility declines to come than the UN does.

One of those media calls invited me to be on TRT World (a network associated with the government of Turkey) to discuss the world’s falling birthrates. In what is becoming a familiar pattern, the program included some academic viewpoints (me and Jennifer Sciubba from the Population Reference Bureau), and someone representing pronatalism (in this case that activist guy, Malcolm Collins, who beats his toddlers). Here’s the program:

There are some alarming statistics in the world today, and I take it as my job in these situations to urge the audience to keep their eye on the ball of real world problems — inequality, climate change, reproductive rights, war — and not blow our minds on world population in the year 2300. But then, Collins came on strong with his favorite manipulative statistic: “At their current fertility rate, for every 100 [South] Koreans, there’s only going to be 6 great grandchildren.” (To which he added, “And that is insanely optimistic.”) Could that be true? Not really. The true way of describing the effects of a 0.8 total fertility rate would be this: At their current fertility rate, for every 100 Koreans born today, there would be 6 great-grandchildren born in about 90 years.” That is, the 100 babies (50 of them female) would have 40 children (20 of them female), who would have 16 children (8 of them female), who would have 6 children. He says it like the population will fall 94% in that time, but it’s probably closer to 60% because we’re not starting with 100 babies alone; there are a lot of people already alive — but still! A total fertility rate of 0.8 (and maybe still falling, if you don’t want to be “insanely optimistic”) is enough to drive a serious population decline, much of which is already baked in to Korea’s future. This is the most extreme case in the world by a fair bit — which makes it a dumb place to start a conversation about global population — but it’s real.

Anyway, on the show I tried out a line I was working on:

“Growth as a process has a lot of positive consequences. It stimulates creativity and sort of dynamism, and it has some economic effects that we like. Unfortunately, the larger population that growth produces causes a lot of problems. So we like the dynamic of growth, but the outcome of growth is unmanageable in the long run. The flip side of that is that the dynamic of population decline — and I won’t talk about collapse or depopulation because that’s not what we’re talking about — but if we eventually, which we probably will, get to a declining number of people, that process of decline produces a dynamic that we’re not really equipped to handle at the moment. So it has negative economic consequences, and cultural consequences, that we don’t like. If you look at Korea it’s a good example — the most extreme example on Earth — but a sharply declining population has negative consequences. So we’re going to have to deal with that as a coming reality.”

As I look at that quote, the downside is stated too over-confidently. We really can only speculate about the problems declining population might cause — in the context of the world that will exist at that time.

Consider that in the United States we have very little experience with population decline. We’ve had fertility rates below so-called replacement level since the 2008 recession, but the US population will keep growing for a while even if we don’t allow in more immigrants. How about in the states? In the last 80 years we have never had more than 4 states and DC lose population in a single decade:

Outside of DC (and other majority-Black cities) and West Virginia, we haven’t had a state lose more than 5% of its population over a 10-year period. Still, population decline has a bad record. Look at Detroit, whose decline I described as grueling after it lost two-thirds of its population. (I wrote later, “Nowhere in the world has a city with a population of more than one million people collapsed as much as Detroit’s has since 1950 [at least not in peacetime, and since ancient Rome].”) Granted, this wasn’t some natural decline, it was a racially-motivated White flight and massive, malevolent government neglect. Still, the consequences were bad. Similarly, West Virginia’s many problems are at least partly related to population decline (cause and effect).

Anyway, we don’t know much for sure, but we do have reason to take the issue seriously. That doesn’t mean working to increase birth rates, it means preparing for a world with declining births, which means finding ways to make life better without just assuming growth will do it. (When some American politicians, a few years ago, said a baby allowance might increase birth rates, I said, “Much better, more effective and better for human rights is to create conditions that allow people to control their fertility, and have children if they want to.”)

The dire long run

This is a follow up to my post on the panicky Dean Spears op-ed in the New York Times, which used the word “depopulation” a lot. Since I wrote that we’ve learned more about the Elon Musk money train supporting Sears and his sketchy research operation affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin. This Bloomberg story features excellent reporting exposing the ideological extremism, and racist connections, of at least a set of pronatalists, and important quotes from sociologists Leslie Root and Amanda Stevenson, who focus on the implications of the pronatalist movement for reproductive rights today.

Meanwhile, the paper behind the NYTimes op-ed, by Sears et al., has now been published by PLOS One, and I had another look at it. Bloomberg quotes Root saying the paper is “not good demography,” and, “Why should we assume that people in 200 years will be making the same childbearing decisions we make today?” I agree. Instead of “projections,” I would say, “mathematically conceivable scenarios” is probably a better term. But the figure below from the paper is unintentionally reassuring. What the lowest line on this graph shows (If I follow the story correctly) is a scenario that follows UN projections until 2100 (which means a global total fertility rate falling to around 1.8), and then the whole world suddenly converging towards 1.66, before turning around to start increasing back toward 2.1 in 2175. In that scenario (which includes many other assumptions), global population would stop falling around 6 billion in about 2250. We should be so lucky! This should have a calming effect (although Sears and Musk think it means we need to start impregnating more employees immediately). Six billion was a fine number when last we lived with it in 1998, and I don’t see how sliding back to that level over the next 225 years would be such a catastrophe — at least in comparison with all the other catastrophes we have in the queue.

The other day I said this, more or less, in an interview: I just think the way I think about this long term view and how to handle the question of humanity is, 50 years from now, the world is going to be so different that worrying about the birth rate now is misguided. We’ve got more immediate problems to even get to 50 years from now in reasonable shape to confront the problems. You might say, “Oh, I’m being short-sighted. Elon Musk has got the long view, and that’s the smart view.” But it’s just not practical to think about a thousand years from now when 50 years from now is so up in the air, mostly because of inequality, climate, war, and threats to democracy.

Whose science

Anyway, judging by the popular discourse, by the political attention this issue is getting, by people throwing real money at it, this will be a strong growth area in social science. I hope we’re going to end up devoting more resources to it, so if you’re thinking about a future in social science, consider population. And we shouldn’t leave it to the “philanthropists” who are out front of governments. Consider that Harvard’s endowment is about $50 billion, making it the richest university in the country. If you say to Harvard, “I’ll give you $5 billion if you do whatever I say,” Harvard’s going to have a very hard time saying no to that (which they will deny). There are a few hundred people who could afford to do that today, and they’re not the people we want setting research directions. You might (or might not) like the Gates Foundation because they demonstrate some positive social priorities, like curing disease. But they definitely have way too much power (they gave more money to the World Health Organization than any country except the USA in 2022-23). We don’t want billionaires similarly controlling population science. Musk and the UT-Austin center are an important cautionary tale, one we haven’t heard the last of.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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