This is a new series of articles where I explain what various terms, catch phrases and various other confusing topics and many secret government projects and agencies are and do. If there are any subjects that the reader is interested in learning about please put them in the comment section.

What is the myth of overpopulation?

The myth of overpopulation is an unfounded belief that:

the number of people on Earth will exceed the carrying capacity of the planet in the foreseeable future, leading to economic or social collapse, and that actions ought to be taken to curb population growth.

Population alarmists who buy into the overpopulation myth believe that the world’s growing population will strip the Earth of its useable resources and will outpace innovation and rates of production. This, they believe, will cause diminishing standards of living, more poverty, more hunger, famine and starvation, water shortages, pestilence, war and conflict over diminishing resources, the evisceration of wildlife habitats, and environmental catastrophes (i.e. global climate change).

Where did the overpopulation myth come from?​

In 1798, an Anglican minister by the name of Thomas Malthus published the first edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population where he speculated that, under perfect economic conditions, humans reproduce exponentially while their ability to increase agricultural output increases only linearly at best.

Malthus theorized that there were two kinds of “checks” that kept the population growth rate in check with the food supply.

Malthus falsely believed that population checks were necessary to prevent the proliferation of poverty and to prevent catastrophic war, famine, and epidemics caused by overpopulation—a phenomenon known as ‘Malthusian catastrophe.’

Subsequent editions of Malthus’ Essay were widely read among the upper classes in Europe, many of whom bought into the false belief that high birth rates among the poor would overwhelm Western society and lead to war, famine and poverty.

Malthus’ ideas quickly became the foundation for a movement that began to preach population control and contraception as the keys to socioeconomic development and the betterment of Western society. Although Malthus himself generally opposed on religious grounds the use of birth control and abortion as methods of population control, his followers—the Neo-Malthusians—had no such concerns.

Neo-Malthusianism became the first movement in the Western world to publicly advocate for practicing birth control—a practice at that time still widely condemned by society as obscene and immoral.

What was the affect of Malthus’ theory?

Malthus’ ideas on population selection inspired Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of evolution and were highly influential on Francis Galton and the field of eugenics.

Neo-Malthusian theories on overpopulation and population control endured into the 20th and 21st centuries and were foundational for the population control and radical environmentalist movements of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

U.S. and U.N. foreign aid policies and structures still in place today were largely put into place during the 1960s and 1970s and influenced by Neo-Malthusian theories, placing a heavy emphasis on reducing population growth in the developing world as a principle aim of foreign development assistance.

By the early 20th century, Social Darwinism and eugenics was all the rage and population control was primarily advocated as a way to improve the gene pool and to weed out undesirables, primarily through sterilization. Social Darwinism was frequently mixed with pseudoscience, racism, and hyper nationalism, a toxic concoction which was later extended to its full brutal scale by the Nazi party in Germany during the Holocaust in their attempt to create a master race.

How does the myth of overpopulation affect us globally?​

Malthus’ ideas quickly became the foundation for a movement that began to preach population control and contraception as the keys to socioeconomic development and the betterment of Western society.

Governments today are pushing population control policies in order to control the number of children being born as a protective measure to their national resources. All of these policies have received global recognition of their brutality:

• China’s one-child policy, where women were severely fined, arrested, or forcibly sterilized for exceeding the birth limit.
• India’s sex-selective abortion where approximately 15.8 million girls have been eliminated since 1990 due to a cultural preference for boys. Now the government wants to impose their own two-child policy.
• Latin America’s forced sterilization programs where women where arrested for being pregnant and their babies where aborted in unsanitary conditions.
• The United Nation’s ‘education programs’ that refuse aid to developing countries unless they accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization to prevent the false idea of population over-growth.

Conspiracy chaos: coronavirus, Bill Gates, the UN and population

Over recent years, a growing proportion of Population Matters’ website traffic has been driven by rather odd search terms including “Bill Gates depopulation”, “Agenda 2030 population control”, and “depopulation coronavirus vaccine”. In 2021, our digital manager at the time, Olivia Nater, wrote the blog below to separate the myth from the facts. We are republishing it today, as theories linking this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos with a global depopulation conspiracy are being circulated widely on social media. Again, the record needs to be set straight.

Bill Gates and population

What’s the connection between the tech billionaire and population concern? It appears a surprisingly large number of people believe Gates is on a mission to wipe out the human species through forced injection with fertility-blocking, mind-controlling or otherwise poisonous substances and ‘microchips’ disguised as COVID-19 vaccines. Some even believe the COVID-19 pandemic was deliberately engineered by Gates and other ‘global elites’, including the United Nations (more on that below), to depopulate the world.

This idea is often referred to as ‘The Great Reset’, which was originally just the name of an entirely non-sinister pandemic recovery initiative by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which meets annually in Davos. While theories about a depopulation conspiracy come in many different stripes, one or all of Gates, the UN and Davos usually feature in them.

A 2020 US election poll of 5,500 people found that a fifth of respondents shared this belief. Where did these conspiracy theories come from?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has long supported reproductive health and rights in developing countries, including family planning services. The Foundation has also pledged billions in support of vaccination programmes. Bill Gates has publicly spoken out about the benefits of slowing population growth through improved healthcare several times. For example, in a 2010 TED talk on ways to reduce climate emissions, the wealthy entrepreneur acknowledged the population factor and stated we could reduce this “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services.”

Vaccines are supposed to save lives so you can see how their mention in the context of bringing down population could lead to widespread misinterpretation. In fact, the reality is positive: improving access to vaccines reduces child mortality, which research suggests leads to lower fertility rates (the average number of children per woman). The theory is that when people don’t have to worry so much about losing children to preventable diseases, they have fewer of them, as explained in the 2014 Gates annual letter.

What’s not to like? In addition, the evidence for the opposite relationship is even stronger: when people are empowered to choose smaller families through access to healthcare and contraception, existing children’s health and prospects dramatically improve.

The pandemic-driven conspiracy wave has also swept along some far-right anti-abortionists, who think “reproductive health services” is just a sneaky name for promoting abortions. Actually, improving access to reproductive health services leads to fewer abortions as when women are empowered to use contraception, their risk of unwanted pregnancy is hugely reduced. Those who don’t like abortions should therefore be donating to women’s rights and family planning organisations.

Like many high profile figures, Bill Gates attracts controversy and criticism – but the work done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been immensely positive. Let’s not demonise or be cynical about beneficial investments on such a massive scale – we urgently need more international funding for sexual and reproductive health and rights and other vital health services, especially in light of recent harmful aid cuts.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals and population

Agenda 2030 is an ambitious United Nations initiative launched in 2015 to solve humanity’s biggest crises by 2030, from ending hunger, gender inequality and poverty to halting climate change and biodiversity loss. Its aims are laid out in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). An earlier version, Agenda 2021, launched at the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, has also become a popular search term among conspiracy theorists who believe the agendas are covert plans to reduce the global population. This belief is truly puzzling, however.

Agenda 2021 states “The growth of world population and production combined with unsustainable consumption patterns places increasingly severe stress on the life-supporting capacities of our planet,” but does not propose any population action. Indeed, the SDGs completely omit the need to end population growth – so much so that Population Matters wrote a whole report last year about the links between population and the SDGs and the urgent need to push empowering solutions.

We also published a short animation video explaining how greater investment in the beneficial solutions already embedded within the SDGs, particularly empowering women and girls through improved access to family planning and education, is key to meeting all the other goals. We never expected this to make a big splash but it has already become our second most viewed video. Unfortunately, the comments on YouTube reveal that this popularity is driven by conspiracy theories rather than a sudden healthy interest in sustainable development.

There are, of course, many factors at play in this distortion of the intentions and consequences of the UN’s sustainable development agenda. The United Nations has long attracted hostility for its international perspective, and a false perception that it seeks to be a “world government”. Similarly, suspicion of experts, scientists and “elites” has deep roots, and benefitted from recent nourishment by populist politicians who see advantage in playing on the fears and misunderstandings of some parts of their electorates.

In reality, whatever its limitations and failings, the UN and its health and family planning programmes have overwhelmingly been a force for good in defending and empowering the world’s most vulnerable people, not least women and girls.

Even Prince William was recently dragged into the conspiracy quagmire following a viral Facebook post that accused him of being part of this supposed evil movement, just because he’s expressed concern about rapid population growth in the past.

What is actually being done about population?

The reality is that there just isn’t any concerted global effort to end and ultimately reverse human population growth, although at Population Matters we believe there should be – our already huge and still rapidly increasing numbers pose a serious threat to our future on this planet, as well as that of countless other species. We’re still headed towards 11 billion people by the end of the century, with many of the SDG progress indicators getting worse instead of better. Almost half of women in low- to mid-income countries have no say over their own bodies and lives, and an estimated 270 million women have an unmet need for modern family planning – this number is still increasing due to rapid population growth. Similarly, the number of women subjected to harmful practices like child marriage and female genital mutilation is also growing, while the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition has been increasing since 2014.

Ramping up positive action to empower women and communities to choose smaller families is morally essential, would generate immediate benefits for everyone, and put us on a path towards a happier, healthier future.

Population Decline Will Change the World for the Better

A future with fewer people offers increased opportunity and a healthier environment

China’s population has fallen after decades of sky-high growth. This major shift in the world’s most populous country would be a big deal by itself, but China’s hardly alone in its declining numbers: despite the momentous occasion of the global population surpassing eight billion late last year, the United Nations predicts dozens of countries will have shrinking populations by 2050. This is good news. Considering no other large animal’s population has grown as much, as quickly or as devastatingly for other species as ours, we should all be celebrating population decline.

Declining populations will ease the pressure eight billion people put on the planet. As the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, I’ve seen the devastating effects of our ever-expanding footprint on global ecosystems. But if you listen to economists (and Elon Musk), you might believe falling birthrates mean the sky is falling as fewer babies means fewer workers and consumers driving economic growth.

But there’s more to the story than dollars. Where our current model of endless growth and short-term profits sacrifices vulnerable people and the planet’s future, population decline could help create a future with more opportunity and a healthy, biologically rich world. We’re at a crossroads—and we decide what happens next. We can maintain the economic status quo and continue to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet. Or we can heed the warning signs of a planet pushed to its limits, put the brakes on environmental catastrophe, and choose a different way to define prosperity that’s grounded in equity and a thriving natural world.

Every person on the planet needs food, water, energy and a place to call home. And if we want to increase wealth equity and quality of life—as we should—the demands per person will increase, even with the best-case scenario for sustainable development.

For example, as China grew in population and wealth, so did its demands on the planet. China’s per capita environmental footprint is less than half of the U.S., but the country’s total environmental footprint is twice as large, with the nation responsible for one quarter of imported deforestation and one third of global greenhouse emissions. Reducing consumption in high-income countries is necessary, but insufficient on its own if global population continues to rise.

As the human population has doubled over the past 50 years, wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 69 percent. We’ve already altered at least 70 percent of Earth’s land, with some reports putting that number at 97 percent. Our activities have driven wildlife from their homes and destroyed irreplaceable ecosystems.

The loss of biodiversity is tragic in itself. A world without elephants, hellbender salamanders and the million other species at risk of extinction in the coming decades would be deeply impoverished. Wild plants and animals enrich our lives and hold vital ecosystems together. The fresh water we need to survive, the plants we rely on for food and medicine, and the forests we depend on for clean air and carbon sequestration are all the product of complex interactions between life-forms ranging from microbes and pollinators to carnivores and scavengers. When even a single thread is pulled from that tapestry, the entire system can unravel.

For those more worried about economics than life on Earth, the World Bank estimates that ecosystem collapse could cost $2.7 trillion a year by 2030. Deloitte recently estimated climate chaos could cost the United States alone $14.5 trillion by 2070 as we respond to the increasingly frequent and intense damage caused by extreme weather and wildfires, and the threats to communities, farms and businesses from droughts and unpredictable weather. While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.

In places where these cultural changes have happened, there’s no going back. Even in China, where fertility was initially reduced by the draconian one-child policy, women don’t want to give up their educational and economic freedom now that larger families are allowed.

Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.

If populations decline, some places will have to adapt to societal aging. If we choose a deliberate decline resulting from increased well-being, then we could take the fear out of family planning and make a better future for people and the planet.   

We must choose. We can let the growth-based economy determine our planet’s fate, or we can stop pretending that demography and ecology are two separate issues.

With the first scenario we’ll find that an economy fueled by limitless population growth makes it increasingly difficult to address environmental crises. Communities are already struggling in the face of worsening droughts, extreme weather and other consequences of climate disruption—and population pressure makes adaptation even harder. A growing population will further stress damaged ecosystems, reducing their resilience and increasing the risk of threats like pandemics, soil desertification and biodiversity loss in a downward spiral.

With the second—slow decline and all that comes with it—we can ultimately scale back our pressure on the environment, adapt to climate change, and protect enough places for imperiled wildlife to find refuge and potentially recover.

But despite how inevitable population decline will benefit people and the planet, world leaders have done little to prepare for a world beyond the paradigm of endless growth. They need to prepare for an aging population now while realigning our socioeconomic structures toward degrowth. Meanwhile, immigration can help soften some of the demographic blows by bringing younger people into aging countries.

Governments must invest in health care, support caregivers, help people who want to work longer do so, and redesign communities to meet the housing, transportation and service needs of older people. We need to move our economy toward one where people and nature can thrive. That means managing consumption, prioritizing social and environmental welfare over profits, valuing cooperation and recognizing the need for a range of community-driven solutions. These practices already exist—in mutual-aid programs and worker-owned cooperatives—but they must become the foundation of our economy rather than the exception.

We also need to bring together the reproductive rights and gender equity movements, and the environmental movement. Environmental toxicity, reproductive health and wildlife protection are deeply intertwined. Pollution, climate change and degraded ecosystems harm pregnant people, fetuses and children, and make it difficult to raise safe and healthy families.

Finally, we need what the United Nations’ most recent climate and biodiversity reports drive home, and conservationists, climate scientists and policy makers have demanded for decades: a rapid, just transition to renewable energy and sustainable food systems and a global commitment to halting human-caused extinctions now.

Population stabilization and decline will inevitably be achieved by centering human rights. Policy makers must guarantee bodily autonomy and access to reproductive health care, gender equity, and women and girls’ education.

By addressing the crises in front of us, empowering everyone to decide if and when to have children, and planning for population decline, we can choose a future of sustainable abundance.

Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT supports human extinction primarily because it would prevent environmental degradation. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources caused by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation.

VHEMT was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, an American activist who became involved in the American environmental movement in the 1970s and thereafter concluded that human extinction was the best solution to the problems facing the Earth’s biosphere and humanity. Knight publishes the group’s newsletter and serves as its spokesman. Although the group is promoted by a website and represented at some environmental events, it relies heavily on coverage from outside media to spread its message. Many commentators view its platform as unacceptably extreme, while endorsing the logic of reducing the rate of human reproduction. In response to VHEMT, some journalists and academics have argued that humans can develop sustainable lifestyles or can reduce their population to sustainable levels. Others maintain that whatever the merits of the idea, the human reproductive drive will prevent humankind from ever voluntarily seeking extinction.

History

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement was founded by Les U. Knight, a graduate of Western Oregon University and high school substitute teacher living in Portland, Oregon. After becoming involved in the environmental movement as a college student in the 1970s, Knight attributed most of the dangers faced by the planet to human overpopulation. He joined the Zero Population Growth organization, and chose to be vasectomized at age 25. He later concluded that the extinction of humanity would be the best solution to the Earth’s environmental problems. He believes that this idea has also been held by some people throughout human history.

In 1991, Knight began publishing VHEMT’s newsletter, known as These Exit Times. In the newsletter, he asked readers to further human extinction by not procreating. VHEMT has also published cartoons, including a comic strip titled Bonobo Baby, featuring a woman who forgoes childbearing in favor of adopting a bonobo. In 1996, Knight created a website for VHEMT; it was available in 11 languages by 2010. VHEMT’s logo features the letter “V” (for voluntary) and a picture of the Earth with north at the bottom.

Organization and promotion

VHEMT functions as a loose network rather than a formal organization, and does not compile a list of members. Daniel Metz of Willamette University stated in 1995 that VHEMT’s mailing list had just under 400 subscribers. Six years later, Fox News said the list had only 230 subscribers. Knight says that anyone who agrees with his ideology is a member of the movement; and that this includes “millions of people”.

Knight serves as the spokesman for VHEMT. He attends environmental conferences and events, where he publicizes information about population growth. VHEMT’s views have, however, primarily been spread through coverage by media outlets, rather than events and its newsletter. VHEMT sells buttons and T-shirts, as well as bumper stickers that read “Thank you for not breeding”.

Ideology

Knight argues that the human population is far greater than the Earth can handle, and that the best thing for Earth’s biosphere is for humans to voluntarily cease reproducing. He says that humans are “incompatible with the biosphere” and that human existence is causing environmental damage which will eventually bring about the extinction of humans (as well as other organisms). According to Knight, the vast majority of human societies have not lived sustainable lifestyles, and attempts to live environmentally friendly lifestyles do not change the fact that human existence has ultimately been destructive to the Earth and many of its non-human organisms. Voluntary human extinction is promoted on the grounds that it will prevent human suffering and the extinction of other species; Knight says that many species are threatened by the increasing human population.

James Ormrod, a psychologist who profiled the group in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, notes that the “most fundamental belief” of VHEMT is that “human beings should stop reproducing”, and that some people consider themselves members of the group but do not actually support human extinction. Knight, however, believes that even if humans become more environmentally friendly, they could still return to environmentally destructive lifestyles and hence should eliminate themselves. Residents of First World countries bear the most responsibility to change, according to Knight, as they consume the largest proportion of resources.

Knight believes that Earth’s non-human organisms have a higher overall value than humans and their accomplishments, such as art: “The plays of Shakespeare and the work of Einstein can’t hold a candle to a tiger”. He argues that species higher in the food chain are less important than lower species. His ideology is drawn in part from deep ecology, and he sometimes refers to the Earth as Gaia. He notes that human extinction is unavoidable, and that it is better to become extinct soon to avoid causing the extinction of other animals. The potential for evolution of other organisms is also cited as a benefit.

Knight sees abstinence from reproduction as an altruistic choice – a way to prevent involuntary human suffering – and cites the deaths of children from preventable causes as an example of needless suffering. Knight claims that non-reproduction would eventually allow humans to lead idyllic lifestyles in an environment comparable to the Garden of Eden, and maintains that the last remaining humans would be proud of their accomplishment. Other benefits of ceasing human reproduction that he cites include the end of abortion, war, and starvation. Knight argues that “procreation today is de facto child abuse”. He maintains that the standard of human life will worsen if resources are consumed by a growing population rather than spent solving existing issues. He speculates that if people ceased to reproduce, they would use their energy for other pursuits, and suggests adoption and foster care as outlets for people who desire children.

VHEMT rejects government-mandated human population control programs in favor of voluntary population reduction, supporting only the use of birth control and willpower to prevent pregnancies. Knight states that coercive tactics are unlikely to permanently lower the human population, citing the fact that humanity has survived catastrophic wars, famines, and viruses. Though their newsletter’s name recalls the suicide manual Final Exit, the idea of mass suicide is rejected, and they have adopted the slogan “May we live long and die out”. A 1995 survey of VHEMT members found that a majority of them felt a strong moral obligation to protect the Earth, distrusted the ability of political processes to prevent harm to the environment, and were willing to surrender some of their rights for their cause. VHEMT members who strongly believed that “Civilization is headed for collapse” were most likely to embrace these views. However, VHEMT does not take any overt political stances.

VHEMT promotes a more extreme ideology than Population Action International, which argues for population reduction but not extinction. However, the VHEMT platform is more moderate and serious than the Church of Euthanasia, which advocates population reduction by suicide and cannibalism. The 1995 survey found that 36% considered themselves members of Earth First! or had donated to the group in the last five years.

Reception

Knight states his group’s ideology runs counter to contemporary society’s natalism. He believes this pressure has stopped many people from supporting, or even discussing, population control. He admits that his group is unlikely to succeed, but contends that attempting to reduce the Earth’s population is the only moral option.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Gregory Dicum states that there is an “undeniable logic” to VHEMT’s arguments, but he doubts whether Knight’s ideas can succeed, arguing that many people desire to have children and cannot be dissuaded. Stephen Jarvis echoes this skepticism in The Independent, noting that VHEMT faces great difficulty owing to the basic human reproductive drive. At The Guardian‘s website, Guy Dammann applauds the movement’s aim as “in many ways laudable”, but argues that it is absurd to believe that humans will voluntarily seek extinction. Freelance writer Abby O’Reilly writes that since having children is frequently viewed as a measure of success, VHEMT’s goal is difficult to attain. Knight contends in response to these arguments that though sexual desire is natural, human desire for children is a product of enculturation.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has criticized Knight’s platform, arguing that the existence of humanity is “divinely ordained”. Ormrod writes that Knight “arguably abandons deep ecology in favor of straightforward misanthropy“. He notes that Knight’s claim that the last humans in an extinction scenario would have an abundance of resources promotes his cause based on “benefits accruing to humans”. Ormrod sees this type of argument as counter-intuitive, arguing that it borrows the language of “late-modern consumer societies”. He faults Knight for what he sees as a failure to develop a consistent and unambiguous ideology. The Economist characterizes Knight’s claim that voluntary human extinction is advisable due to limited resources as “Malthusian bosh”. The paper further states that compassion for the planet does not necessarily require the pursuit of human extinction. Sociologist Frank Furedi also deems VHEMT to be a Malthusian group, classifying them as a type of environmental organization that “[thinks] the worst about the human species”. Writing in Spiked, Josie Appleton argues that the group is indifferent to humanity, rather than “anti-human”.

Brian Bethune writes in Maclean’s that Knight’s logic is “as absurd as it’s unassailable”. However, he doubts Knight’s claim that the last survivors of the human race would have pleasant lives and suspects that a “collective loss of the will to live” would prevail. In response to Knight’s platform, journalist Sheldon Richman argues that humans are “active agents” and can change their behavior. He contends that people are capable of solving the problems facing Earth. Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, suggests a limit of one child per family as a preferable alternative to abstinence from reproduction.

Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com recommends that childless people adopt VHEMT’s arguments when facing “probing questions” about their childlessness.

Knight’s organization has been featured in a book titled Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. The Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman said that in a phone conversation Knight seemed “rather sane and self-deprecating”. Weisman echoes this sentiment, characterizing Knight as “thoughtful, soft-spoken, articulate, and quite serious”. Philosophers Steven Best and Douglas Kellner view VHEMT’s stance as extreme, but they note that the movement formed in response to extreme stances found in “modern humanism“.

Depopulation

Sometime on or about October 16, 2006, ninety years almost to the day since Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, the country’s population reached the 300 million mark. As a reporter for the Washington Post remarked, the U. S. is “230 years old . . . and still in a growth spurt.” As this is not an election issue, there was little fanfare over the announcement and only a limited dose of Malthusian angst. Yes urban congestion is a problem, not to mention environmental degradation. And the fact that immigration accounted for roughly forty percent of the population increase caught the attention of a number of border-state politicians. But there appears to be a general acceptance that America will continue to grow at a brisk, predictable pace, and that this growth is good for the economy (more iPods and IHOPs and IOUs), necessary for the care and social security support of aging baby boomers, and a boon to future security needs. (Blaine Harden, “America’s Population Set to Top 300 Million,” Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2006.)

Margaret Sanger spent much of her career working against the grain of American manifest destiny – the country’s inalienable right to fill its vast spaces. Just after she launched her campaign to legalize birth control in 1914 the country counted up to 100 million, and she died a year before the 200 million mark in 1967. Both milestones were met with nationalistic glee. Sanger was always more concerned with the quality of the population than mere numbers, but numbers are measurable while quality, as we have learned the hard way in American history, is not. That is why a panic broke out in the late 1930s when the numbers indicated a downward trend in the population growth rate that had some demographers predicting catastrophic depopulation and placing the blame squarely on Margaret Sanger.

The gradual demographic transition in the U.S. from larger to smaller families, which had for decades been viewed by most social scientists as a healthy trend, raised concerns among those eugenicists who believed the wrong families — middle and upper class — were getting smaller. The rapid population gains produced by immigration meant that America did not suffer from the concerns over anemic growth rates that bedeviled the leaders of Western Europe. But the reduction in the overall population growth rate in the 1930s caused by immigration quota laws and the Depression-era drop in the birth rate led some population experts to warn of prolonged economic stagnation and a weakened future military if the downward trend continued. The issue made national headlines in 1937 when it was reported that the 1936 U. S. birth rate was the lowest on record.

It did not help matters that by 1937 a number of European countries scrambled to reverse population rate declines and join in a belligerent “cradle competition,” to use Sanger’s phrase. A depopulation panic hit England in the mid-1930s following several demographic studies that demonstrated both a sharp drop in the birth rate and an alarming differential fertility trend – the lower classes were far out-reproducing everybody else. Eugenics groups advocated birth promotion programs, including marriage loans, bachelor taxes and baby bonuses to arouse fertile procrastinators. Parliament discussed incentives for couples and even broached the idea of making birth control illegal. Members lamented the population decline and scolded fellow countrymen for selfish considerations when it came to family size. The only problem was that several of the M. P.’s expressing the most concern about the differential birth rate were bachelors. “I learned with amazement and horror,” a Member told the House of Commons shortly after one of the first discussions on population policy, “that even in this House, where the age limit is, I think, fairly high, and which should set an example to the rest of the country, there are nearly 200 bachelors – a situation which honorable Members should take immediate steps to remedy.” (“Bachelor M. P.s Discuss Population Problem in Parliament,” The Birth Control News 15:10 [Mar. 1937]121-122.)

In Germany and Italy, where the birth rates had been on the decline for years, the fascist governments instituted state campaigns in the mid-1930s to raise birth rates among racially “correct” groups using a combination of inducements to young couples such as “nuptial prizes,” financial penalties for bachelors, and tighter restrictions on divorce, contraception and abortion. It didn’t work in either country. Italy’s birth rate continued to fall in the late 1930s even after more than ten years of government inducements, and the German birth rate, though it increased for several years following Hitler’s ascension to power, dropped off again after 1936. Everybody wanted more babies but only the Soviet Union, its population already increasing by more than three million a year, devised a successful campaign that raised the birth rates even higher, mainly by outlawing abortion and paying cash premiums for large families. (New York Times, Aug. 30, 1936, Mar. 28, 1937.)

With conflict looming in Europe, some American social scientists viewed the lower birth rate as a future security issue. A group of demographers predicted sharp population declines by the end of the century that would reduce the U.S. to a second-rate power. Dr. Louis Dublin, a statistician for Metropolitan Life Insurance and a leading expert on American population trends, predicted that the population would reach a peak of about 140 million in 1950, after which deaths would outnumber births, resulting in a population of only 75 million by the year 2000. By then it would be a nation “composed largely of middle-aged and elderly people” and “unduly weighted with elderly women,” hardly a demographic vision to instill fear in one’s enemies. (New York Times, Mar. 28, 1937.)

If the decline in quantity was the catalyst for an unprecedented analysis of population trends and burst of demographic foresight in the 1930s, the perceived decline in quality provoked some extreme proposals and challenged the fundamental aim of birth control. It had been well established in one study after another during the Depression years that unskilled, under-educated and poor Americans had more children than skilled, educated middle- and upperclass Americans. “Unless this decline can be reversed,” eugenics proponent Frederick Osborn told the annual meeting of the American Eugenics Society in May 1938, “the biological stock and cultural inheritance of the American people will suffer.” There was a strong consensus among eugenicists and population experts that the main culprit in the trend toward differential fertility was birth control. (New York Times, May 6, 1938.)

Writing in the Birth Control Review in 1938, Henry Pratt Fairchild, one of the most popular authors on population and immigration issues, determined that “Birth control must accept a large part of the responsibility for the situation in which we now find ourselves . . . It is now . . . both possible and desirable for the birth control movement to divert its attention in the countries of Western civilization from purely quantitative matters, and to concentrate on cooperating with other agencies to promote the eugenic objectives of society.” Louis Dublin was more emphatic, claiming in 1937 that birth control had caused “inestimable damage” to the country and, specifically, that Margaret Sanger’s actions had been governed by “a misguided and short-sighted fervor.” “Mrs. Sanger,” he told a reporter, “was overwrought by the misery she witnessed as a nurse, in families she visited. She did not realize that bad as these conditions were, they actually affected only a small proportion of the country’s population.” In other words, she should not have so freely extended birth control to those of good health and home who were merely seeking to evade “family responsibility.” He said she must balance “her destructive program with constructive advice to those economically able to have children.” (Henry Pratt Fairchild, “Contemporary Population Changes in Relation to Birth Control,” Birth Control Review 22:7 [Apr. 1938], 74-75; New York Times, Mar. 28, 1937.)

Sanger offered an immediate rebuttal, telling the Times that “Dr. Dublin says there has been an evasion of responsibility. Quite the contrary. Statistics and our social workers testify that the parents who have few children are those most responsible toward their children. It is the large family groups that evade family responsibility, and have to plead with agencies and government to keep them going. Dr. Dublin’s is the voice of 100 years ago – not the voice of the future.” She refused to see a downward shift in population as anything but a progressive, civilized trend, noting that “the death rate has also dropped, and that more lives have been saved through birth control, not only of mothers but of children.” (New York Times, Mar. 28, 1937.)

Even as Sanger was celebrating a succession of major victories in the late 1930s, in eugenics circles her name continued to be linked with the prospect of depopulation. Following the publication of an influential 1938 government report on population changes, Sanger briefly caved in to the pressure, issuing a statement of concern over the low birth rate among “healthy and intelligent couples.” Uncharacteristically, she called for subsidies to go to healthy couples who could not afford to raise a family, declaring it was a matter of “promoting the national welfare.” She quickly backed away from this sentiment and scolded the new Birth Control Federation’s national director a year later after the Federation had proposed “to encourage the increase of the birth rate where health, intelligence and favorable circumstances tend to promote desirable population growth.” She told him, “I strongly object to our straddling this issue and trying to satisfy the large population groups . . . Let the Federation begin with its own Board and see how far your efforts, or the most brilliant oratory, will go in getting them to increase their reproductive rates.” (New York Times, Nov. 13, 1938; BCFA, “Objectives,” Feb. 1939 [MSM S62:36]; MS to D. Kenneth Rose, Dec. 27, 1939 [MSM S17:661.)

As aggressions intensified in Europe in the winter of 1939–Sanger blamed the warmongering on the pressures of over-population–she distanced herself still further from the demographers and eugenicists who thought birth control should be better managed: subsidized for the poor and packaged with constructive, race-saving advice and encouragement for the better-born. Speaking at the eighteenth annual meeting of the American Birth Control League in January 1939, Sanger reviewed the dire depopulation predictions that had put the movement on the defensive. “The picture is presented” she told a faithful audience, “that there will be a nation of old men and women over 65 years of age, using spectacles, ear trumpets, crutches, and wheel chairs and these people will dominate our health resorts and increase the call upon the services not of obstetricians but of neurologists. . . To some this may seem a sad prediction, but I agree with Havelock Ellis, who says that perhaps a million more old people may make for more peaceful and happy conditions. That it is the countries dominated by the racketeering young, with their black-jacks, their machine guns, their military drills, uniforms and the adventurous and exciting activities of arrogant youth, that have made for chaos in the world today.” (MS, “Doors to a New World,” Jan. 19, 1939 [MSM S72:47].)

In the summer of 1939 the Census Bureau announced that the birth rate had risen two years in a row. The 1937 predictions of future depopulation looked foolishly premature. War, however, soon united the country on the need to increase the birth rate. Margaret Sanger was one of the few voices who continued to caution the public on the dangers of too many people.

In all of their figuring, the statisticians and demographers and newly minted professors of population studies did not forecast the size and length of the postwar American baby boom that silenced any lingering talk of depopulation in the U. S. As the country sped toward the 200 million mark and populations rose dramatically in many developing nations, Sanger’s arguments again gained currency. Today, depopulation is once more an issue of concern in Europe, but America, the perpetually young superpower, just can’t kick its growth spurt.

The Heresy of Decline

Are we ready to normalize depopulation?

News that the number of living humans had passed eight billion in November 02022 sparked predictable arguments between people inclined to celebrate this milestone and those who worry about the planet’s carrying capacity.

Amid the torrent of commentary, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand posted a characteristically contrarian tweet:

“The ‘drop dramatically’ I still expect. But it won’t be from my predicted 8 billion.”

Brand was referring to a Long Bet he made 14 years ago, in 02009:

“Human population of the world will peak at or below 8 billion in the 02040s and then drop dramatically.”

The bet was based on the fact that fertility rates all over the world have been decreasing steadily for 60 years. Even as the total human population continues to rise, fertility in most countries has dipped below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, and the downward trend is accelerating. Brand overestimated the speed of this transition, but he is sticking with the view held by many demographers that the human tide will start to ebb in the second half of this century.

Although most people are aware of declining birthrates, the idea of outright depopulation remains “fantastically counter-intuitive,” says Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (02004). We can easily conceptualize the temporary population losses caused by war, famine, disasters, or disease, partly because we know that our species has always surged back after these setbacks. But the notion that humanity might voluntarily pause, pivot, and retreat — by having fewer children — seems implausible, if not absurd. When the New York Times publishes a feature on the effects of falling birthrates, for example, readers respond with a mix of skepticism and outrage. Their comments could be summarized as shouting “In an age of rapacious consumption, collapsing ecosystems and massive emigration, do you really expect us to believe that fewer people are a problem?”

The overpopulation story is old, visceral and hard to refute. Each day brings fresh signs of our heavy footprint on a visibly crowded planet. Fretting about the eventual reversal of this phenomenon, WIRED magazine recently declared, “is like someone in the year 1000 worrying about the Y2K bug.”

Is it really too early to contemplate this possibility? Nineteen years ago, the Long Now Foundation invited Longman to give a presentation about his book. At the time, Longman was a fellow at the New America Foundation, a left-of-center think tank in Washington, where he was researching the impact of aging on entitlement programs. When he and his late wife were unable to conceive a child, Longman began to study fertility trends. The Empty Cradle, the result of that study, synthesized decades of research showing that in many rich countries, fertility rates were so low that they threatened to create a self-reinforcing cycle of depopulation that would be extremely difficult to reverse. He cited the work of numerous demographers and economists who warned that such a cycle could be profoundly destabilizing.

In a recent interview, Longman said that the book received a chilly reception from progressive organizations and media outlets, who saw it as a veiled attack on gender equality, reproductive rights, and the sustainability goals of Paul R. Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) and other environmentalists.

Reactions from conservatives were somewhat warmer. Longman was invited to speak by Focus on the Family and other religious organizations, as well as by governments in Russia, Japan and Poland that wanted his advice on increasing birthrates. But when parts of his book began to be selectively cited by people with nationalist and far-right agendas, Longman decided to step away and move on to other research topics.

In the years since The Empty Cradle was published, the discussion around demographic decline has become ever more fraught. Pope Francis laments that “selfish” people prefer dogs and cats to having children, provoking a furious backlash from pet lovers. Elon Musk warns that depopulation threatens civilization, to which WIRED shoots back: “Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse.” Forbes magazine broods over the economic impact of “Death Spiral Demographics,” while broadcaster David Attenborough uses his nature documentaries to argue that biodiversity can only be preserved if humans stop multiplying.

Amid this cacophony, the demographer Lyman Stone recently observed that demographic decline has become “too broad even to discuss: it means too many old people, too many brown people, too many disabled people, or not enough people […] it is all things to all people, a stick with which to beat today’s bogeyman.”

Nevertheless, it should be possible to determine the extent to which depopulation is actually taking place—and to see whether Longman’s warning was prescient or misguided. A close reading of the 02022 report published by the United Nations Population Division, whose forecasts are widely cited by demographers, offers a useful starting point.

An invisible decline

When the United Nations first began issuing periodic population forecasts in 01950, sub-replacement fertility — the necessary prelude to depopulation — was extremely rare. In the 01970s and 01980s, a handful of industrialized countries dropped below that threshold, and soon countries in Asia and Latin America began to join their ranks. Today, the United Nations data show that seven out of ten people live in countries with sub-replacement birth rates. (See graphs, “Which countries are depopulating?”)

Above-replacement fertility is now largely limited to the world’s poorest and least developed countries. Population growth in this group, which totals around 2.2 billion people, is expected to continue for a long time. In fact, the United Nations estimates that nearly all the population growth forecast for the rest of this century will take place in these countries. However, fertility levels in this group are similar to what they were in Latin America and Asia just one or two generations ago, and they could drop just as quickly as they did in those regions.

On the sub-replacement side, countries can be further divided into three categories. The first consists of countries that are still registering what demographers call momentum-driven growth. Some 2.8 billion people live in this group, which includes India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey and Malaysia.

Like a locomotive that suddenly runs out of fuel while steaming uphill, population in these countries will keep climbing for a short time thanks to the “momentum” provided by girls and young women who have yet to enter their reproductive years. But as those women reach middle age, the locomotive will stop, start rolling backwards, and then gain reverse momentum. The United Nations forecasts that Brazil’s population will shrink by 45 million people by the end of the century. Bangladesh could end up with 30 million people fewer than at its peak. Even India, which will keep growing till around 02060 because of its enormous cohorts of young people, is on track to lose at least 200 million people between 02070 and 02100.

The second sub-replacement category is made up of around 800 million people in countries that rely on immigrants to supplement natural growth rates that are already negative (Germany, Spain) or barely above zero (Canada and the United States). Assuming they continue to take in immigrants in large numbers, the United Nations forecasts that these countries will either shrink slightly (France) or grow anemically (the United Kingdom) between now and 02100.

The third category consists of countries that are already depopulating. When Longman published his book, this group was still tiny. Actual depopulation — where deaths consistently outnumber births — was concentrated in Russia and Eastern European countries that together accounted for less than 4 percent of the global population. But in the years since then Japan, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, Greece and Portugal, among others, have joined this category. The government in China recently acknowledged that it began to depopulate in 02022.

This means that in all, more than 2.1 billion people — a quarter of humanity — now live in countries that are smaller each evening than they were in the morning. Because it is diffused throughout millions of people, this phenomenon is essentially invisible to the public, but the numbers are startling in aggregate. Each month, Russia’s population diminishes by around 86,000 people (not including casualties from the war in Ukraine), Japan’s by around 50,000, and Italy’s by at least 20,000. Fertility in these countries has been so low for so long that depopulation is cemented into their future, regardless of any near-term recovery in birthrates. Overall, the UN anticipates that their populations will shrink by between 20 percent and 50 percent by the end of the century. Other studies anticipate much larger and faster declines.

Where’s the floor?

In short, the United Nations data show that Longman’s predictions were entirely correct. Twenty years ago, depopulation or immigration-dependency were demographic oddities; today, they are the norm for virtually all wealthy and technologically advanced nations. Within a single generation (by around 02050), they will be a feature of most of the world’s societies, as unremarkable as universal literacy or high obesity levels are today.

The forces that have brought us to this point — economic development, urbanization, access to education and contraception, changing gender roles — are not likely to be reversed. None of the countries whose fertility has dropped below replacement levels has subsequently returned to sustained growth. As Joseph Chamie, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, recently put it: “Once a nation’s fertility rate falls below the replacement level, it tends to stay there.” The question is no longer whether most countries will depopulate, but at what pace they will do so.

Longman was also right about many of the downsides of this phenomenon. Companies in mature economies are indeed struggling to find employees amid the shrinking number of working-age people. Pension systems are buckling under the weight of longer life expectancies and worsening ratios of contributors to beneficiaries. Xenophobia has risen in many of the wealthy, aging countries that are most dependent on immigration. South Korea has been forced to close nearly 4000 schools for lack of students. Universities in the US, where the number of college students has been falling since 02010, are bracing for an “enrollment cliff” starting in 02025. And in Europe, the “one euro house” phenomenon has become a cliché for the extreme tactics needed to prevent the proliferation of rural ghost towns.

If this sounds like old news — and not quite a catastrophe — it is because expectations and behaviors have been quietly shifting to accommodate the reality of depopulation. Indeed, The Empty Cradle (like Fewer, The Coming Population Crash, Empty Planet, and other books in this category) can all be faulted for underestimating how quickly humanity will adapt to this predicament — just as we have adapted to countless other slow-moving challenges. Japan, which began to depopulate around 02010, is a case in point. After three decades of fruitless efforts to boost birth rates, it has embarked on a more pragmatic policy of “aging gracefully.” Although its economic growth has been lackluster since the 01990s, Japan has continued to improve overall quality of life for its citizens, while achieving unemployment and inequality indicators superior to those of many European countries.

Yet even as these adaptations take place, public discourse around depopulation is firmly anchored in the previous century. On the Right, depopulation is still reflexively described as an aberration, a symptom of moral decay, or a signal of impending economic doom. On the Left, it is too often dismissed as a non-issue or welcomed as a step toward degrowth – one whose environmental benefits will surely outweigh any social costs. Policymakers and academics tend to avoid the topic, wary of its proximity to the agendas of authoritarian regimes and culture war battlegrounds around abortion or immigration.

That is unfortunate, because the era of depopulation poses new dilemmas that require fresh thinking and open debate. Twenty years ago, for example, many demographers still believed that the very low fertility rates then prevalent in Europe were a temporary phenomenon, and that fertility would eventually bounce back and converge close to two children per woman. The assumption was that growing gender equality and rising standards of living would make it easier for women in developed countries to reconcile their career goals with their stated desire to have children. Although a few rich countries subsequently achieved modest fertility gains, most of those increases have evaporated in the last ten years. Fertility is plummeting in places as varied as Jamaica, Uruguay, South Africa, Iran and the United States. And in China and South Korea, it has dropped to levels that were previously considered impossible for large countries.

These trends have given new urgency to the question of just how far fertility can descend before it imposes unmanageable strains on a society. Wolfgang Lutz, an Austrian demographer and founder of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, is one of a small number of academics who have openly grappled with this issue. Lutz acknowledges that “nobody knows” whether fertility rates will recover or continue to fall, because demography lacks a theoretical framework for determining whether a fertility “floor” exists. In the absence of a testable hypothesis, demographers have relied on surveys that ask people to state their ideal family size. For decades, these surveys provided a reassuringly consistent benchmark: across almost all cultures and income levels, large majorities of women reported two or more children as their ideal.

Now, that benchmark has also begun to slide. In some countries, studies show that the number of children that women actually intend to have is lower than their stated ideal family size. In others, social norms appear to be shifting towards a new ideal that is far below two children. Tomas Sobotka, a colleague of Lutz’s at the Wittgenstein Center, says that South Korea offers the most striking example of this trend. “A combination of rapid economic development, very high levels of education among young adults, very competitive labor market, long work hours, unaffordable housing, traditional gender norms and persistent gender inequalities in work and family life have created a perfect storm — conditions that make it very difficult for young people to marry and pursue their fertility plans,” Sobotka said via email. “The question is what happens if young Koreans get accustomed to living single and childfree lives. The research I have been conducting with my colleagues shows that the appeal of marriage and having children has been vanishing among the young adults and many of them are likely to stay unmarried, childfree and without a partner.”

Maria Rita Testa, a professor of demography at Luiss University in Rome, sees a similar pattern in Italian society. In a forthcoming paper, she and two colleagues find that projections of Italy’s future population continue to assume that fertility rates will return to levels substantially higher than they are today. Given that fertility in Italy has stayed between 1.2 and 1.4 children per woman for the last 40 years, “it is anything but obvious that fertility will recover in Italy,” Testa wrote in response to questions about her paper. After such a long period, what were once unusual reproductive behaviors have come to be perceived as normal, and she sees no reason to believe that this will change in the near future.

Escaping the low fertility trap

The consequences of these shifting norms could be enormous, because tiny differences in sub-replacement fertility rates have outsize effects on the pace of depopulation. To illustrate this, Sobotka offers four scenarios for anticipating the number of children that could be born in the future of a hypothetical country where there is no immigration. At a fertility rate of 1.85, the process is so gradual that it can take more than two centuries for the number of newborns to shrink by half. But at lower fertility rates, depopulation accelerates because of reverse momentum. At a fertility rate of 1.6, it takes around 90 years for the number of newborns to drop by half. At 1.3, it takes some 50 years. And at a fertility rate of one child per woman — a level already common in many parts of Asia — it can take less than 30 years: each generation has half as many children as the previous one.

Lutz anticipated this risk in a widely cited 02007 paper where he posited a “Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis.” He challenged fellow researchers to consider whether the combination of demographic, cultural and economic forces that had already driven fertility down in Europe were becoming self-reinforcing and irreversible. In the years since then, social scientists have not offered a plausible alternative to this hypothesis. In fact, the whole question of how depopulating countries can hope to end or at least slow down this process seems oddly under-investigated, given what is at stake. One of the few recent books to directly engage the issue is Decline and Prosper! Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children by Norwegian population economist Vegard Skirbekk. He argues that by adjusting pension systems, health services and infrastructure to suit the needs of aging communities, depopulating countries can continue to thrive. It is a refreshing alternative to the apocalyptic drumbeat surrounding this topic, but it does not offer a way out of the low-fertility trap.

In the political sphere, depopulation remains perennially stuck beyond the pertinent time horizon, because even promising actions (such as a new subsidy for first-time parents) take least a quarter century to pay dividends (the time between the birth of a child and her emergence as a tax-paying worker and potential parent). The rare policymaker who does take up this banner soon learns that evidence on the effectiveness of pronatalist policies is sparse — and sobering. Russia has used lavish “cash-for-babies” programs and housing subsidies to achieve modest upticks in fertility, but these have been ephemeral. South Korea, which has spent $200 billion in the last 16 years on programs to encourage childbirth, now has the world’s lowest fertility rate. Most experts agree that instead of trying to boost birth rates, governments should stick to the fundamental work of improving overall well-being.

Leaders in depopulating countries have also noticed that the general public is not clamoring for action. A casual review of news headlines from South Korea and Italy shows that people there, like their counterparts everywhere, are focused on immediate headaches such as inflation, housing costs or employment. Few things are more tangible than the anguish of an individual who is thwarted in their efforts to become a parent or form a family. But large-scale depopulation remains a sort of creeping abstraction, too vague and too gradual to engage our jittery attention spans. In fact, it may fall into what some ecologists have called the “invisible present,” a space where we fail to detect slow changes in our surroundings and are unable to interpret effects that lag years behind their causes.

If research and policy won’t bridge the strange void surrounding this topic, perhaps artists and comedians will. With his caustic riff on three reasons not to have kids, Ricky Gervais legitimizes the queasy ambivalence felt by many potential parents. In “What Tsunami?”, Hallie Cantor satirizes the arguments that grandmothers-in-waiting use to badger their daughters. And in innumerable ways, contemporary television series remind audiences of the trade-offs and stresses that make parenting so complicated.

But few writers have attempted to fully flesh out the world that depopulation will bequeath us. In an essay entitled “Why Are There So Few SFF Books About the Very Real Issue of Population Decline?,” the critic James Davis Nicoll points out that science fiction writers are traditionally eager to play with wildly speculative ideas:

“Just not this idea. I can easily name more books that delve into the implications of wormholes, which probably do not exist, and faster-than-light travel, which most definitely does not, than I can books dealing with the demographic transition, whose effects are all around us […] One would think that such a process (enormous, world-wide, moving like a glacier, slow but unstoppable) should make for enthralling fiction. For the most part, however, it hasn’t.”

The one notable exception to this rule, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, devotes a single sentence to explaining the demographic origins of its dystopia:

“There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia… [pointing to] a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.”

It is left to us, the readers, to imagine the intricate web of private choices and external forces that could gradually produce the society that Atwood brings memorably to life. And it is also up to us to start telling an alternative story, to fill it with persuasive characters, to imbue them with credible motives, and to plot their journey towards a different ending.

Resources

pop.org, “Population Research Institute.”; populationmatters.org, “Conspiracy chaos: coronavirus, Bill Gates, the UN and population.”; scientificamerican.com, “Population Decline Will Change the World for the Better: A future with fewer people offers increased opportunity and a healthier environment.” By Stephanie Feldstein; en.wikipedia.org, “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.” By Wikipedia Editors; sanger.hosting.nyu.edu, “Newsletter #44 (Winter 2006/2007) Depopulation!”; longnow.org, “The Heresy of Decline: Are we ready to normalize depopulation?” By Paul Constance; hoover.org, ” The De-Population Bomb.: Paul Ehrlich;

Appendices

The De-Population Bomb

In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb, in which he described a disastrous future for humanity: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” 

In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb, in which he described a disastrous future for humanity: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That prediction turned out to be very wrong, and in this interview American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt tells how we are in fact heading toward the opposite problem: not enough people. For decades now, many countries have been unable to sustain a population replacement birth rate, including in Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, and, most ominously, China. The societal and social impacts of this phenomenon are vast. We discuss those with Eberstadt as well as some strategies to avoid them.

Peter Robinson: Throughout almost all our history, the population of the United States of America has grown and grown and grown from 2.5 million people in 1776 to 330 million people today. But what if that growth stops? What if our population shrinks, what then? One man has devoted himself to studying that very question. Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt on Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, a Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Eberstadt, I should say by the way that we’re filming today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt earned both his undergraduate degree and his Doctorate in Political Economy from Harvard. Dr. Eberstadt’s many books and papers include “Poverty in China” and “The End of North Korea.” In recent years, Dr. Eberstadt has been examining population and demography. First he recognized that other countries have a problem publishing “Russia’s Peace Time Demographic Crisis” in 2010. In more recent years, he has been describing this country’s problem publishing, “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis” in 2016. Our topic today, well, let me just read the title of a long essay Dr. Eberstadt published in National Review not long ago. “Can America Cope with Demographic Decline?” Nick, thank you for joining me.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Thank you for inviting me, Peter.

Peter Robinson: It’s a pleasure to see you and it’s a pleasure to have you to myself to read an Eberstadt essay with Nick Eberstadt. Nick Eberstadt I’m quoting you, “Over the past decade and more since the crash of 2008 “and the Great Recession, really, America’s birth trends “have taken a fateful turn “veering well below the replacement level.” What is the replacement level? What does it mean to veer below? What makes us suppose this is ominous?

Nicholas Eberstadt: The replacement level or a net reproduction ratio of one means that there’s one baby girl born for every childbearing woman who’s gonna make it up to childbearing age herself. What this means is that a society is on a long-term trajectory for population stability without compensating immigration or anything like that, to keep things at stability or above. For 30 years before the crash of 2008, almost 30 years, the United States was the lone large rich society that was at replacement or slightly above the replacement level, above this let’s say 2.1 births per woman, per lifetime level roughly speaking. We have slumped steadily since 2008, we’ve been on an escalator going down. And of course the COVID shock didn’t get everybody into the bedrooms, having babies, it actually had the opposite effect. The United States is now maybe on track to be 20% below the replacement level if current trends continue, which is a weasel word we always have to use because demographers are really pretty clueless about forecasting fertility into the future. But if current trends continue, the United States would be on a track without compensating immigration, to shrink 20% for each generation, each succeeding generation.

Peter Robinson: And this is entirely new in our history.

Nicholas Eberstadt: We had a blip in the 1970s, which some of us are old enough to remember, weren’t a super great time in the United States where snapshot calculations of replacement rates had us below replacement for a while. What was really going on in those days was that there’s a big shift in timing of kids, women were deciding to have their ba… they ended up deciding to have about the same number of babies, they just decided to have them later. And if you did the snapshot for a couple of years, it looked like there was a dip below replacement. What’s going on now does not look like a shift in timing, it looks like there may be a shift in the total number of desired children that young people wish to have.

Peter Robinson: So this is tremendously arresting to put it mildly. You get in country growing and growing and growing and now in historical terms, quite suddenly, it looks as though the growth may stop. Absent immigration will come to immigration. The next question of course is, well, what does it matter? The European Union is ahead of us if that’s the way to put it, their fertility level has been down for several decades, they expect their population to begin shrinking what, within a decade or so?

Nicholas Eberstadt: At the end of this interview, I think.

Peter Robinson: At the end of this interview. Russia’s in a worse case, China from the point of view of population is in worse circumstances still. In spite of having eliminated the one-child policy, Chinese just aren’t having children. The birth rate is I think, the number you gave was 1.3.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Yeah, it’s plunged since the end of the coercive one-child policy for some fascinating reason.

Peter Robinson: So, the question would be for those immediately seeking reassurance, well, well, well, this may be happening to us, it seems to happen all over. Let us call broadly construed, the modern world and other countries are in worse shape. We’re still retaining our relative position, we still have relative growth. And then Nick Eberstadt says, well, maybe, but “The formula by which the US ascended “to its current status of wealth and power “was predicated on over two centuries of continuous “and exceptional population growth, “unique among Western countries in tempo and scale.” We don’t know how to be a country without population growth.

Nicholas Eberstadt: The last time that we faced the specter of population decline, which might be a clearer term than demographic decline, which sounds kind of like Spenglerian. The last time we faced the specter of population decline was in the great depression for reasons that we can imagine. Not a time of great optimism about the future, almost no immigration. And the projections from the 1930s had us peaking and declining by 1960s. Those were as wrong as demographic projections so often turn out to be, it didn’t happen that way, but we’re back to a moment where it is very plausible to think our population may peak and decline. The latest information from the Census Bureau reports that US population growth, measured US population growth, never been as tiny as it was last year. And that’s births, deaths and immigration make for the total. We’ve never had a confluence of births, deaths and immigration that ended up with such a fractional increase in US population since we started collecting measurable statistics.

Peter Robinson: And the question would be, why does that matter to our health, our buoyancy, our economic growth? I mean, I’m thinking of crude thoughts. You can count on thoughts that come to my mind to be crude thoughts, Nick. So I’ll offer a crude thought.

Nicholas Eberstadt: I can be pretty crude if you want me to.

Peter Robinson: But I think to myself, all right, real estate. All those overbuilt neighborhoods in Las Vegas, all the building in Florida, those huge tracks being erected in Texas, what happens if nobody is around to live in them? There’s a banking, borrowing, legal system that does property, you get a whole sector of the economy predicated on the existence of growing numbers of human beings. And that just goes away if the population stops growing, is that correct? And there’s some tie between economic growth and population growth, and if population stops growing, economic growth gets harder. It’s more complicated than that, but tease that out for me.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Yeah, so we can look at it two ways. We can look at it as, kind of like the headcount rancher sort of way of looking at population. We look at its components and what we might call the productivity or human capital, the quality of human resources if we want to get into this a little bit more. I was always a skeptic of the population scare back in the ’70s and even into the ’80s, the idea that we were gonna end up denuding the world, like locusts by just having too many people because was looking at the components of population change, the population explosion wasn’t driven because we were breeding like rabbits, it was because we stopped dying like flies. It was because it was a health explosion. Well, if you have to deal with the population problem, I’ll take a health explosion any day of the week, because you can mess it up, but you’ve got a lot of potential there. Also, I would want to caution against people who are alarmist about population decline in a world that is bursting with health and bursting with innovation and technological potentialities. We’ve got an escalator that we can work with that’s moving in the right direction there. We have to be pretty mindful about what you do, but if you surf that wave, a aging and shrinking society can not only maintain its prosperity, but improve it. If we look at what’s happening now in the US, I mean, we can see what’s troubling if we break it down into births, deaths and immigration. People will have a debate about what the right number of births is. And I don’t think that I can tell parents how many children they should have, people know themselves what they think the right number of children is, leave that aside for a moment. Everybody agrees that less deaths is better than more deaths and longer lives and better health is better than the opposite. The United States has been moving in a very troubling direction for the past decade. We’ve basically flatlined in improvements in life expectancy, even before COVID we were creeping along. With COVID of course, we’ve had a severe, almost catastrophic setback in health levels for the United States. And apart from COVID itself, as you know, Peter, we’ve had this problem of deaths of despair in the United States with suicide and drug poisonings and cirrhosis and all of the rest, which looks a little bit too much like Russia for comfort, I’d say. So the increase in deaths that we have seen over the last decade and more, it should be a flashing red warning sign for us. Immigration, the arithmetic of American population growth has been the arithmetic of our exceptional immigration flows, which came in a wave up to World War I, and then resumed again in the ’60s really. During the COVID calamity, despite all of the comedy or tragedy that we see on our Southern border today, it appears that immigration tanked, we don’t have any good immigration statistics, no other open society has good immigration statistics. We find out in the rear view mirror, by looking at the residual, after we look at births, deaths and population change, it appears that our net immigration has tanked as well and we’re already seeing the effects of that in the United States with the spike in unfilled job openings since COVID. So that’s immigration is a hot button political issue. I happen to be of the variety that thinks that on the whole immigrants have made terrific Americans and that we’ve benefited tremendously from the international talent that has come to our country. That if we want to fix the immigrant welfare problem, we fix the welfare state and we have rule of law and control our own borders. So all of that said, immigration has tanked, then we get to the birth question.

Peter Robinson: Can I put a pause on that one because you’re getting into a handful of items that you mentioned in this article, and I’d like to go through each of them at least briefly. In theory, I’m repeating something you said a moment ago. “In theory, it should be perfectly possible “for a modern society not only to maintain prosperity, “but to increase it in the face of pervasive population “aging and the demographic stagnation or depopulation.” So the population gets older, it begins to get a little bit smaller, but as long as they do this and this and this, and this would involve innovation, it would involve being smart about education, developing human cap, you list the things. Then there’s no reason why an older and smaller population shouldn’t continue to be perfectly prosperous. “This path entails advances in research “and knowledge creation with incessant innovation “in the business sector, “labor markets and the policy realm.” Now, let me take you through the Nick Eberstadt checklist of how we’re doing. Dynamism, economic dynamism, quoting you Nick. “Knowledge creation may still be proceeding apace, “it is devilishly difficult to measure “and wealth creation continues at a remarkable pace. “Yet dynamism in our economy and society “is on the wane in some significant “and easily verifiable respects. “America’s vitalizing churn is heading down. “And America’s health progress has gone badly off course.” You’ve discussed health a moment ago, but what do you mean about churn, vitalizing churn?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Well, there are lots of different ways you can look at the kind of dynamism of a society and an economy. One way of looking at it is new business creation, new startups in relation to the existing number of enterprises or businesses. As best we can measure this, it’s been going steadily south since we started to collect these numbers in the late ’70s, early ’80s.

Peter Robinson: Despite of the rise of Silicon Valley.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Despite the rise of Silicon Valley, despite new McDonald’s everywhere, despite everything that we see, if you measure dynamism that way, it’s been less. Another obvious measure of mobility is like whether people get up and move and Americans used to be, get up and move.

Peter Robinson: When jobs were in Florida, you moved to Florida.

Nicholas Eberstadt: So leave aside COVID, ’cause that was a lockdown time and it’s completely unlike any other time, from the mid ’80s until the day before the Wuhan virus came to the United States, America’s proportion of population moving in any given year, even to an apartment next door in the same building was heading south and it’s dropped by about half since the mid ’80s. Now you have to qualify that a little bit by saying, well, there’s a lot of remote work, you can do stuff at home that you never could do before. And that’s all true, but I’m not sure that that gets us over this particular hump that we just described.

Peter Robinson: Education again, I’m quoting you. Between the emphasis, this is a staggering thing. Between the end of the Civil War and the late 1970s, got a little little over a century. “Between the end of the Civil War and the late 1970s, “the United States was almost always the global leader “in education attainment. “But over the past two decades, adult educational attainment “has been advancing at scarcely a third “of that historical pace, “even as other countries surpass us.” What happened?

Nicholas Eberstadt: We still haven’t got a good answer to this because this is one of the big problems in America that somehow is managing to hide in plain sight. Elsewhere on another homework assignment, I talked about the new misery in the United States and things like of deaths of despair, it took our health sciences economy, a decade and a half to realize that the poor whites were killing themselves in these tragic new ways. This problem of slower improvements in educational attainment has been in our face for almost 40 years. And so far as I can tell, not more than a handful of economists and educators have even noticed it. I do not have the answer for why it has happened, I can tell you where it is happening. The epicenters are native born Americans, native born American men, native born American Anglo men. There’s a big overlap with the deaths of despair problem. I can identify it, I can’t explain to you why it’s happening, but its results, its consequences are alarming. There’s a general correspondence, general correspondence between improved educational attainment and improved productivity. If you do back of the envelope and I like to be simplistic, if you do back of the envelope, the slow down in educational attainment improvement looks like it’s costing us at the moment about $4 trillion a year compared to our previous historical trend, it’s a lot of money.

Peter Robinson: Here’s a related item, I think it’s related, you’ll explain. The labor force, again, quoting you Nick. “In an aging society making the most of existing manpower “is of the essence.” “But America is also failing at this task. “The backbone of the US workforce is still the so-called “prime-age male cohort, men from 25 to 54 years of age. “But the current prime-male work rate “is two and a half points lower than it was in 1940.” 1940 sounds like the Second World War, it’s not. Pearl Harbor isn’t bombed until 1941, 1940 is the tail end of the Depression and prime-age male workforce participation is two points below what it was then? This is staggering.

Nicholas Eberstadt: The work rate, this is another part, Peter, of this new misery, the big problems hiding in plain sight in America for some reason. The work rate, the employment to population ratio was as we’d say for men, civilian non-institutional men, 25 to 54 years of age is as we speak, worse than it was in the 1940 census, which was taken as you indicate in March of ’40, when the national unemployment rate was 15%. So we right now have depression level employment rates for prime-age men in the US.

Peter Robinson: All right, government, quoting you once again. “Budget discipline and social policy reform are necessary “for maintaining prosperity in an aging society, “but America appears to have no appetite for either. “Pay-as-you-go arrangements for old-age pensions “and healthcare may be an ingenious contrivance “for a society where working age taxpayers “greatly outnumber elderly beneficiaries, “but the arithmetic becomes unforgiving “if the ratio of funders to recipients plummets.” All right, if I’m not mistaken, you’re talking about social security, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the federal budget. And you’re talking about medical spending, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Obamacare, those four programs account again for another 25% of federal spending. What you are saying is that because we have set this up the way we’ve set it up, one half of federal spending is simply becoming untenable.

Nicholas Eberstadt: We’ve got a kind of a Ponzi scheme problem on our hands. And as you indicated, Peter, as long as you’ve got a growing base to the pyramid in relation to the recipient peak, you can be pretty generous. When things flip around, you got whip sawed really fast. We do not seem to have any appetite in either political party for balancing our budget and controlling our national finances, the way we would with our household budgets. And we have gotten into the very dangerous habit of borrowing to pay for current consumption. It’s one thing to borrow money for a national emergency or for a war. You might even make the argument that it’s okay to take out bonds, to build infrastructure where you can amortize on some sort of ROI scale, but when you are basically using your credit card to go to the Safeway and things are not gonna work out too well because today’s consumption for seniors like myself are being financed by the unborn and that’s not a good business model.

Peter Robinson: Immigration, I’m gonna quote you one more time, Nick. “Only one policy can hope to affect long-term consequences “in population size, and that policy is immigration.” On the whole, this is a straightforward, simple declaratory sentence, but it’s not straightforward. “On the whole, assimilation works well in America.” I’ll have to come back and ask you to explain that. “Yet the Biden administration’s witless posture “on immigration, its maddening insouciance “about our Southern border and stubborn lack of concern “about illegal immigrants, seems almost designed “to provoke anti-immigration outrage.” So assimilation works well, I’ll ask you to explain that in a moment. And your larger point is because assimilation works well, some kind of sensible immigration policy where we control our borders, but let people in according to sensible criteria, and then don’t demonize them ought to command bipartisan support. And in fact, it creates people running around this town, pulling out their hair, gnashing their teeth, as maddening an issue as we have in American politics. But let’s start with assimilation works well in America on the whole assimilation works well.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Take a look at what happens with the children of newcomers in the United States, overwhelmingly they end up as loyal and productive Americans, as great citizens.

Peter Robinson: They learn English, they get jobs.

Nicholas Eberstadt: They learn English, they get education.

Peter Robinson: They get an education.

Nicholas Eberstadt: They work hard and they believe maybe more than native born Americans in the American dream. They’re brought here, they’re attracted by the American dream. And risking all of your human capital in the passage to the United States takes a certain amount of guts in general. Pluck grit, let’s put it that way. Compare us to, for example, Europe, which is a prosperous democratic area full of open societies. Assimilation works well for a lot of newcomers there, but if you do the compare and contrast, I know which country I want to have the assimilation record of, it’s going to be the USA. There is much more problematic record, Europe’s a mixed bag, but on the whole there’s a much more problematic record with becoming citizens, with getting education, with going into employment and with resentment of the country that they’ve chosen as their home or their parents have chosen as a home. Our record of assimilation is very good by international comparison. There are other countries that also look pretty good like Canada, like Australia, like New Zealand, Israel, but for a large country, there’s no country that’s got an assimilation record as good as ours.

Peter Robinson: All right, but you’d stop short, I know you’d stop short. I’m stating this just to give you the chance to address it. There may be a tickle of a worry here. You’ve just said native born American males, especially native born white American males are underperforming.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Yes.

Peter Robinson: Despairs of death are up, workforce participation is down. We have here a sorry group of people, let in the immigrants to do what the jobs these guys should be doing.

Nicholas Eberstadt: So I took economics also, admittedly it was back in the stone age, but I learned at that time that if you have more of a supply of something, you make it less expensive. We have a big supply of lower, skilled labor from abroad in the United States. The economics one I took back shortly after the Civil War would tell me that that would have a depressing impact on wage levels for less skilled Americans. And I think that is true, I think that is true. That being said, the patterns of employment for less skilled American men, bear no correspondence to what we would think of we would be recognizing from that natural experiment. The differences in attachment to the workforce seem to have to do a lot with things like family structure, which is not got to do with wages and with attachment to various social welfare programs with one’s criminal record, which again, isn’t necessarily a jobs wage question. And we’ve just ran a complete per almost perfect natural experiment in the COVID time, we had a drop off of about a million immigrants who would have been in the labor force, and what happened? We had an increase in unfilled jobs by about 4 million during the COVID time. Employers are begging for workers. I don’t know, there was no time in my life, I don’t think when workers had as much bargaining power as they have now. And this isn’t all for coders and hedge funds, they’re not just looking for those, it’s in the service industries, in restauranting, hotels and other things where really the only skills you need are showing up on time every day, drug free. And there may be a longer term impact from this natural experiment, but we’ve had two years of it and it has not been drawing people back off the couch.

Peter Robinson: Population growth is slowing. It looks like a permanent new trend. Soon enough, the population will begin sinking to remain a prosperous, vibrant economy in these circumstances, we need to do this and this and this and this, and we are not doing this and this and this and this, which brings us right back to the first question, why don’t we just get the birth rate right back up? If the federal government is so good, I would almost be willing to argue this is the only thing the federal government is any good at, and that is spending other people’s money. Why don’t we just encourage higher birth rates through various forms of subsidies, tax relief and so forth. And Nick Eberstadt reply is again, to quote you, Nick. “Incentives to boost birth rates are likely to be costly “and to elicit only modest “and perhaps fleeting demographic results.” How come and we have experiments attempting to subsidize, increases in births attempts to subsidize it one way or another, they’re taking place in Singapore, France, Hungary, I think Sweden as well. So we must know something about these experiments, the results.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Well, we’ve seen the results of the experiments. I will give you my reading on them. My reading is not uncontested because baby bonus programs have got a lot of proponents in Europe and some here in the US already. My reading is that it’s very expensive for temporary passing blips in fertility increase, which lead to subsequent slumps. The Swedes have been–

Peter Robinson: You can buy babies forward, so to speak, but you can’t buy more of them.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Yeah, you can change timing. If some parents are on the fence about a second or a third child, let’s say, and all of a sudden there’s a baby bribe that’s offered to them, they may decide to have the child now, instead of having it three years later or four years later. And if you look at that in aggregate, you get what the Swedish demographers call the Swedish roller coaster, which is you put in a new subsidy for kids, the birth rate goes up and then it goes back down further to below where it was when you first put the subsidy in. Because you haven’t changed people’s mentality, you haven’t changed people’s desire about family size. If you really wanted to get into the business of turning women into baby ranchers, you’d have to do something about the opportunity cost of their time. So maybe you’d want a program that involved, let’s say 50% of the GDP. I don’t think anybody’s going to be proposing that anytime soon.

Peter Robinson: All right, this gets us right to the heart of your essay and of the matter. Quoting you yet again. “The single best predictor for national fertility rates “happens to be wanted family size as reported by women.” Now you note, there are polls that ask women how many children they’d like, and you note that this doesn’t correlate perfectly with birth rates, but it’s the best indicator. “In one sense this is a reassuring, even heartening finding; “it highlights the agency “at the very heart of our humanity.” You’re talking about free will there, people choosing their family size. “But if we permit the non-material realm of life “to figure into our inquiry, we may conclude “that proposals to revive the American birth rate “through subsidies vastly underestimate the challenge. “That challenge may ultimately prove “to be civilizational in nature” So I look at, first of all, that hits like a two by four, civilizational in nature. And on the one hand, I think to myself, wait a minute, aren’t we all supposed to be delighted that in this modern world, women are in a position to participate in the workforce, they’re in a position to choose more carefully, more explicitly, more intentionally the number of children they’d like to have. Aren’t we supposed to believe that that’s a wonderful thing and that releasing that many women to the workforce should increase the dynamism and growth of our econ, all that, good, good, good, good, good. On the other hand, I think back to what little I remember about American demographic history and we got low birth rates during the Depression because everybody was poor, and they were discouraged and they didn’t want to bring children into that world. And then we got low birth rates during the Second World War because life was frightening and the men were away risking their lives. And then we get Harry Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower, and my own reading of that history is that it’s complicated. Truman was probably a much better president than he’s generally granted, but set all that aside, what happens is whether you agree with this or that policy, whether you think Ike should have pushed back harder against the new deal, both of those presidents said with regard to domestic policy at least, let’s just leave it alone. Let’s give people a settled set of rules, a settled America, so they can have families, and they did. And you and I are both baby boomers, we are both products. And we think to ourselves, this is an achievement of American history that we struggle through the Depression and we win the Second World War and then we achieve enough stability and prosperity to permit people, to do what they most want to do and that is to have children. And that is good, it is a triumphant moment in American history. So what’s going on here? Why should it be, may I put it one more way? I’ll put it a different way. You have four kids, I’ve got you by one. Don’t those of us who’ve had children feel that having children was the biggest thing that we’d ever done in our lives, the best thing that we’ve ever done in our lives, why aren’t children are luxury good? Why don’t we have more of them as we become a richer society instead of fewer? These are the bundles of questions, Nick, in my head, when I read that we’ve got a civilizational challenge, our civilization no longer likes life, why?

Nicholas Eberstadt: So the demographers have all of these really neat little tools. And if you give them assumptions, they can calculate what trajectories are gonna look like in the future. But demographers cannot tell you what those assumptions should be. They cannot actually put the parameters into the black box. And for that, I think economics is fine so far as it goes, but what you really need instead of a Nobel Laureate in economics is a Nobel Laureate in literature, because you’re talking about Sitegeist, you’re talking about the human heart. You’re talking about all of the things that bring meaning to humanity and fears of humanity in ways that economists aren’t so good at calculating or much less demographers. As parents, we know how wonderful children are and what a blessing it is to be a parent. But one thing that I will say about children is for all of their boundless benefits, they’re not convenient. And we have moved increasingly into a world, and this is just one take on a much more complicated set of questions that you’ve asked, but we’ve moved into a world in which convenience is prized and in which autonomy, personal autonomy is cherished. And in which constraints on personal autonomy are increasingly viewed as onerous. You don’t have to be Leo Tolstoy to see what that means about desire for children. Add to that, the big change in lived experience, in the lived reality for young people today, as compared to those, we can all talk, you give grandpa’s war stories about what life was like back in the 1980s, but people who were thinking about having children today do not live in Reagan’s America, they live in a place that’s got this new misery shaping it so much.

Peter Robinson: “Europe provides a case study in how a sea change “in values can lead to a sea change in demography. “Over the last two decades, the worldview of American youth “and younger adults has become much more European.” That’s what you’re saying.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Sure, and not in a good way.

Peter Robinson: And not in a good way. Again, I go back to this, going back, back and forth, back and forth on the one hand, I struggle against the thesis. It’s not a thesis, it’s a set of observations, very beautifully laid out. I’d rather it weren’t so, let’s put it that way. And then I keep, well, alright, this is civilizational challenges. There’s very little, that little Robinson or great big Eberstadt can do about that. So again, how do we find a way to live with this? And I go one more time to the question. What difference does it make, Europeans lead good lives. Despite the difficulty in assimilating the 1 million immigrants that Angela Merkel permitted to enter Germany, despite the lack of dynamism in their economy, they rely on us in all kinds of ways for technological innovation, for military protection. So still in decline though, that they may in some basic way be, Europe’s a comfortable place to live. So why not? Why not just settle into a comfortable decline? And Nick Eberstadt replies, “Consider the moral and ideological baggage “that sub-replacement fertility “is likely to drag along with it. “Pessimism, hesitance, dependence, “self-indulgence, resentment, division: “do we really think there will be less of these “in a 1.5 child America?” Explain that.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Well, if we were well-behaved robots and each robot mom and dad had an average of 1.5 robot rising generation entrance, we could manage population decline perfectly well for all of the other reasons that I’ve mentioned, improving education, improving health, improving technology, all of the new possibilities that are coming forward. The devilish difficulty, I think, is the swamp of attitudes and values that are associated with sub-replacement fertility in the richest and most productive societies that humanity has ever yet created or seen. And in Europe and in the United States, in affluent societies, we have seen this ideational moral, if you will, revolution over the past several generations that has led to the triumph of solipsism if you will, and the downgrading of the very sorts of obligations that are necessary to nurture a rising generation and to continue a society. We can outsource, we can increase immigration from abroad to take care of the headcount question. What we can’t do without a sort of an ideational call it a moral transformation is get back to a place where people are confident and brave enough to maintain a natural rate of replacement for society.

Peter Robinson: The land of the free and the home of the brave and bravery ought to be construed as the guts to have kids. Roughly, if it’s good for national character.

Nicholas Eberstadt: I mean, we get out a little bit, we get on the bus or a subway or Metro, what strikes me so strongly about young people I meet today, and I realize I may not have a representative sample, is just how afraid they are, they’re afraid of everything. They’re afraid the planet’s doomed. They’re afraid about committing to a job, much less committing to a relationship, much less committing to having kids. It’s a sort of an angst that it’s hard to find a good historical analogy for this angst in our country.

Peter Robinson: “Further,” you write, “would a 1.5 child America “really be willing to make incessant patriotic sacrifices “to defend itself and its allies, “or to preserve the post-war liberal economic “and political order upon which our prosperity “and security so greatly depend?” And those list of items we went through on what we as a society need to do and are failing to do, we were talking about just that, what we as a society need to do. Here is the question of what we need to do in the world. The world is a dangerous place and for all its faults and all our crudeness and stupidities and the way we’ve conducted our foreign policy over the last 75 years, the world is a freer and a safer place because of Americans are willing to sacrifice. Would a 1.5 child America really be willing to make the sacrifices?

Nicholas Eberstadt: There’s no scientific reason that a sub-replacement population shouldn’t be able to step up to patriotism or see the challenges in the world and deal with them. What I was suggesting there is that if we look at the real existing situation that we have, if we look at the tangle of perverse values, attitudes, outlooks, that seems to accompany our particular slump into below replacement fertility, that tangle is also a tangle that has big implications for not just sacrifice within the family, but sacrifice outside the family.

Peter Robinson: You do offer hope or at least an example of one way out of this. “The civilizational undertow now drawing Western societies “into ever deeper sub-replacement is not inevitable.” I cling to those two words right there, not inevitable. “Israel provides proof to the contrary.” Explain that, explain Israeli demographics.

Nicholas Eberstadt: When I started trying to understand population trends, a couple of generations ago, I wrote a study with a dear friend of mine about Israel, and we were more or less, entirely wrong about this. We argued back in the late 1970s that Israel was going to have to release the West Bank and Gaza for demographic reasons, because they were a Western society that was going to head down towards sub-replacement fertility. And the population of Palestinian origin was eight, seven, six babies and you could just draw the lines and see where things went. But a funny thing happened on the way to Palestinian demographic dominance of greater Israel, it didn’t happen. And the reason it didn’t happen is because Israeli Jewry did not agree to go into a sub-replacement. Instead over the last generation, fertility levels in Israel have actually gone up. And now for–

Peter Robinson: And it’s not just the Orthodox.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Not just the Orthodox, even people who describe themselves as not terribly observant, it’s across the board so far as we can see, and for Israeli Jewry as a whole, it’s above three births per woman per lifetime on average, which is, I don’t need to emphasize to you way different from any other affluent open democratic society these days.

Peter Robinson: And the Arab birth rate has declined.

Nicholas Eberstadt: The Arab birth rate has plummeted, and which by the way, is true in all of the rest of the Arabic speaking world.

Peter Robinson: I just wanna repeat this because I had this wrong myself, and so other people may have a mis… We’re told over and over again, that among the Orthodox in Israel, the birth rate is very, very high and that’s true. But your argument is, not the argument, simple observation of the facts, actually, even among secular Jews in Israel, the birth rate is well above replacement.

Nicholas Eberstadt: On the whole, yes, on the whole and it has been going up.

Peter Robinson: And it has been going up. Ours has been going down, that of Europe has been going down, China has been going down and Israel has been going up. And so that says something, well, it says something spectacular in all about all kinds of things, but in particular, the role of women. What do we know about Israeli society at least among secular non-Orthodox Israeli Jewry is that the women participate in the IDF, they fight in the army, they’re fully integrated into the workforce. This is not a choice between a modern society and a high birth rate, this is a modern society with a high birth rate, is that correct?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Absolutely, it’s a serious country with a serious approach to its demographic future. And it’s one that this is not the result of government policy. This is not a particular government policy or a particular baby bonus, this is a mentality.

Peter Robinson: “Perhaps,” you write, “I would be crude and simplistic “to say that Israelis want their country to have a future “and want their descendants to be part of it, “but then again, such a reading “might not be all that far off base.” So it’s what people believe. I found myself in a conversation with a young Israeli woman, this is in France a couple of years ago, and somehow, or other we’d only just met. It was a business conference actually, had nothing to do with think tanks. Somehow or other, this question of demographics came up. And I asked why Israeli demographics were different from those in the rest of the west. And she said, “I think my country, Israel, “I think my country is still a cause.” Is that it?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Until you come up with a better explanation, Peter, that sounds like a pretty good one.

Peter Robinson: Nick, our friend, Roger Hertog, major figure in Wall Street for many, many years, put me up to interviewing you on this. He said, “Nick is doing,” but what he said is “Nick is the only person doing “really serious sustained work on this.” Apart from anything else that Roger said this, because he knows Wall Street in detail, the economic implications haven’t even begun to be taken seriously on Wall Street, where they have incentives for getting these things right. You write something about this and everybody stops action to see what the latest that Nick has written. But we do that because there aren’t a dozen other people studying. Why is this? Is it because it’s so grim, so unrelievedly grim that nobody that there’s even among intellectuals, even in think tanks, there’s a kind of denial, we’d rather not look at that. Why is this not really part of the national conversation?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Well, Peter, remember what I was saying about things, big things that are hiding in plain sight. We’ve got this data revolution, we’ve got this information era. We’ve got these fantastic statistical tools, but they don’t do that much good if you don’t ask the right questions or you don’t see the things hiding in plain sight. And I don’t think there’s any science to that. We’ve got a lot of really well trained demographers, economists, statisticians. But I think that in a lot of the academy, there’s an incentive to kind of play a small ball. There’s an incentive to come up with an elegant little permutation on a formula that’ll get you tenure. You will notice that I’m not in the university, I’m at a think tank, so I don’t have that same set of disincentives to work with. Why people in business are not noticing this, is in a way, a more interesting question I think. I mean, I gather that the richest guy in the world seems to think that demography–

Peter Robinson: Elon Musk, that’s exactly right. Elon Musk does see this and he tweets about it. That the biggest challenge we face now is deep population. All right, so we have Nick Eberstadt and the richest man in the world, that’s not a bad start.

Nicholas Eberstadt: I’ll take that company.

Peter Robinson: That’s not, Nick, let me quote you another time here. Couple of last questions now. “People under 40 do not have much memory of an America “with a vibrant, private-sector driven economy. “They came of age during a strange historical run “of unusually poor political leadership. “From Clinton to Biden, they have arguably known “only substandard presidencies, red and blue alike.” You’re talking about our kids of course. “Theirs is in America where public confidence “in the nation’s basic institutions has undergone “a gruesome and wholesale slide. “Do we wonder that millennials expectations and desires “about family and children might be diverging “from those of their Morning in America’ parents?” Well, that went through me like kind of a knife, because of course you and I like so many of our friends came here and during the ’80s, and during the ’80s, we felt as though the country was going someplace.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Sure.

Peter Robinson: Taxes got cut, we thought that was an achievement, now we understand the importance of low taxes. Federal budget came more or less under control, at least shrank relative to growth in the private sector. We stand up to the Soviets, lo and behold, the Soviets throw it in and we win the Cold War and America seems a pretty glorious place. And my thinking and your thinking is conditioned by that experience. And our kids thinking just isn’t. So what do you say, here’s the question, Nick, because you’re a wise man. Now I’m gonna ask, this is a question to you in your capacity as a wise friend, and not as a demographer. Let’s imagine Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century and there he is in North Africa and he’s receiving bulletins about the sack of Rome and this high civilization that meant everything to him is gone. He watches as across the Mediterranean Rome falls, And yet he leads an impressive and good enough life that he comes down to us as Saint Augustine. If we’re stuck with this America of creeping despair and a continuing loss in its relative importance in the rest of the world, what do you say to your kids about how to lead a good life in different circumstances from the ones in which you yourself grew up?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Sure, well, I mean the future starts here and the future starts in your own little circles and there’s no reason that you can’t be micro optimistic even if you see some pretty pessimistic things going on. And if you believe that you are in charge of your own destiny, that’s a pretty good starting point. There’s a lot that went on that we missed Peter, I’m afraid to say, after we won the Cold War, these trends that I mentioned, the failure to generate wealth for the bottom half of our society decade after decade, the slowdown of education, these are not immutable. None of these trends are immutable. And I still don’t think that we’re at the stage in the game, where it’s smart to bet against the United States of America. There are things which may be going on now that nerds like me won’t be able to recognize for years because we look in the rear view mirror by the nature of our craft. And there are things that government and experts can’t predict that have revolutionized and transformed our society before, including great religious awakenings. And as my much better half Mary Eberstadt has said from time to time, she’d settle for a minor awakening. That wouldn’t be so bad either.

Peter Robinson: So, oh, okay, so this really is the last question. And I’m gonna ask my boomer friend, this is boomer to boomer. 1970s, economic stagnation. By the end of the decade, inflation is in double digits. Arab Oil Embargoes, Soviets advanced throughout the world. They get countries in Africa, Central America, expand their Navy, Blue-water navy, and we have a collapse in national morale, particularly with a defeat in Vietnam and then the agony of Watergate. And then in the 1980s through policy, but still the economy rebounds. And there’s a restoration of national morale, which I’m not making up, all the polls pick it up. And that Reagan reelection slogan of morning again in America rings true enough to the American people to enable him to carry 49 out of 50 states. And at the end of that decade, the Berlin wall comes down. We go from 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis and that national humiliation to the fall of the Berlin wall in one decade. Do we possess the resources, political, spiritual, human capital? Is this country still capable of another act of national self renewal?

Nicholas Eberstadt: Absolutely, of course it is. I mean, we’ve got strangely similar circumstances as you beautifully indicated, not the least of them being an incompetent humiliating, misbegotten White House at the moment, a lot of Carter flashbacks these days for those of us who are old enough to have the pleasure of having lived through that. And of course, we’ve got the resources. There really is no close second in the world. If you look at China in its particulars, which would be the competitor to us, there isn’t a really a close second yet. We do not have the same absolutely unlimited reach that we had at the end of the Cold War, but that’s such an unnatural, historically unusual situation. We’ve got the resources in our country and we’ve got the people in our country who of course can do this again. The one thing that I would caution about is that we have 40 years of poison distributed through our societies through an increasingly maligned university system. And we have seen a Gramscian march through the institutions of severely problematic points of view, in the old days, would’ve been unmockingly called unAmerican, or anti-American. We have that poison to drain from our society before we can, I think really flourish again. But that’s certainly not impossible either. It looks hard right now, but if you recall, 1979, what 1979 looked like, very few people would’ve bet at that moment where we’d end up at on Christmas day in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR.

Peter Robinson: Nicholas Eberstadt, thank you.

Nicholas Eberstadt: Thank you so much, Peter, it’s always a pleasure.

Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, recording today in the Offices of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I’m Peter Robinson, thank you.

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