I almost feel I'm going to have to read this in order to join in this critique, because this is just SO characteristic of how a certain kind of social science-inflected advocacy works, and it doesn't seem to matter how long the trail of havoc and failure is behind that sort of intervention, they just keep coming.
The basic lesson that everybody should have learned from population studies and demography in the second half of the 20th Century is that extrapolating from present trends as if they are themselves purely natural and will continue unabated unless managed through policy--and not through politics--is the worst mode of futurism and at the roots of most failures of forecasting and prediction. That kind of analysis often historically shallow--the connection between doom-casting demographers who were calling for strong interventions into population growth and deeper histories of global and local population increases after 1500 were very weak.
That's problem #1, because a better consideration of the full body of social history that was attentive to changes in population that included but was not limited to family size, age of marriage, ease or difficulty of migration, urbanization, nutrition and diet, epidemiology, administrative systems, legal systems, etc. would have or should have told late 20th C. demographers to cool it with the dimestore Malthusianisms.
Problem #2 is a direct result of that, which is the crude instrumentalism of how they fit policy to desired outcomes. Since they saw population growth as 'natural', they thought of government interventions in unbelievably crude terms--sterilization, legal constraints on family size, mandatory use of birth control, punitive taxation, blanket campaigns of secularization, etc. In reality, it turns out that slowing population growth in a sense took care of itself, or arose from causal roots that most demographers and environmentalists were ill-positioned to notice or evaluate: women's rights, urbanization, consumerism and middle-class cosmopolitanism, easily available but not legally compulsory birth control, etc.
Which all should weigh on anybody worrying about present trends. I wouldn't say so much "hey, relax, it'll all take care of itself", but if we're talking one to three centuries in the future, pretty close to that. As you say, the only thing worth doing are "marginal effects, spread out over a very long period of time". Populations are not something you manage like the hot and cold water faucets on a sink.
I think you have to contend with an even bigger question that always springs to my mind when prenatalism arises: so what if the population shrinks? Our current economic model depends on growth. But that’s a pretty anemic and incurious way to think about this question.
Humans need food, water, and shelter to survive, and they need healthy social structures, art and leisure activities to enjoy, and work that gives their lives meaning. How exactly is the mere fact of depopulation a threat to these goals? Sure, we might have a lot of empty infrastructure, but I don’t see how that meaningfully threatens our future.
Am I missing something? If we leave market economics aside, is there anything that says humans can’t flourish with a global population of five billion or three billion or even one billion?
The whole population decline panic just reeks of unseriousness to me. Paul Ehrlich being wrong about his particular scenario in no way entails that the population of the world can expand indefinitely, because physics, and with that in mind it's been a remarkable stroke of good fortune that the demographic transition seems a durable phenomenon. How great is it that having the world population chill out seemed mostly to involve making people materially comfortable and making sure women had rights, instead of going full Soylent Green? So what if the numbers bob around a little? Imagining that it would just perfectly plateau would be bizarrely precise, and imagining that a world with a little more breathing room wouldn't eventually lead to a few more babies (as it does in *every single living thing*) strikes me as willfully catastrophic- gee, I wonder what political bugbears could be powering that will.
Thinking about any possible hazards of depopulation in that same what-if-we-were-nice-to-people way makes the policy prescriptions pretty clear- and the fact that those aren't at the top of the pronatalist checklists give the game away. Worried about population decline in your particular country messing with your retirement systems? Make it easy to immigrate there. Want to make sure that boost lasts? Make it easy for those immigrants to have families there. If you actually talk to American women about why they don't wanna have kids the list is routinely along the lines of 'I want to make sure my girl babies have reproductive health care and also I'm economically precarious even if I'm presently comfortable'. Perhaps a durable social safety net might let people relax into having a kid.
And yet. It's almost like the social atmospheres that prevailed when the world had a higher birthrate are as much the draw as any actual Big Questions about human destiny.
It’s like they forget that we’re in a polycrisis. For my part, I kept thinking, “Just wait for the next few pandemics. Then we won’t have to worry about having too many old people.”
The next crisis will make these worries irrelevant.
I get the vibe that if the authors pushed all the policies you promote - "universal pre-K! Generous parental leave! Affordable and plentiful housing!" - Elon Musk would cut off the money spigot.
Why do you, Dave, think "that more people are generally better than fewer?" That is the statement that I would like to see unpacked. If we consider the world as one living system, what is the right balance for optimal sustainable living for all of us? I guess philosophers would have to answer what is optimal, and the scientists would have to grapple with sustainable.
A shrinking human population might be exactly what the earth and it inhabitants need right now. This poses serious economic challenges, but how do we assign priorities between tug of existential sustainability and economic hardship? Can AI help with the later? The optimists in the world of Gen AI state that productivity for each person will be 10x. If that is the case, lucky coincidence with the population decline
Our country has not been willing and/or able to create an environment where having children is supported. $1000 tax break for having a child is laughable.
Good points. Our collective inability to adequately address climate change is only one indicator of a civilization that puts short-term "utility maximization" over long-term sustainability. What I find perplexing is the fixation with "population stabilization" at the same point when labor-saving technology is showing signs of ruling obsolete traditional assumptions about the relationship between population size and economic health. Another example of the medium is the rearview mirror?
The US social safety net is not nearly as strong as most western European nations, so it makes sense to me to take a look at what policies we would benefit by emulating. However, it should also be noted that even countries such as Finland have seen their birthrates fall.
Generally speaking, and in the aggregate, ordinary non-elite people living ordinary lives in their context are better at making decisions about reproduction than professors whose research and careers are funded by the Musk 'Foundation.
If we look at the world as containing other things of value, besides human beings (say, whales, birds, plants such as the trees that make up the canopy of the huge rain forests) I'm doubtful whether 8.5 or 10 billion modern humans consuming at 21st century American rates is ideal, or even sustainable for earth. Climate change can be interpreted as the system shifting to counter the excesses. I share your skepticism about polyanna politics. Things are more likely than not to be messy. On the other hand over the past 30,000 years or so, humans have shown themselves able to adapt to changing situations and build new societies when civilizations collapse. (cf. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything)
The first time I ever heard the term pronatalism was in the context of Vance saying childless people should have less rights, so I've always assumed pronatalists are assholes.
$10 million for this research? Sounds pretty generous for buying a few computers and hiring a few grad students. Hardly big science, and it looks like they wasted it.
Ehrlich wasn't wrong. His timing, maybe. There were ~3 billion humans when I read the book. Now there are "only" 8 billion, and the consequences are catching up with us. We have catalytic converters and solar energy, but it's a losing battle.
Ehrlich couldn't predict the "green revolution" that staved off mass starvation. But this hasn't been an unalloyed success, creating big Ag control of agriculture.
Ehrlich lost his bet about prices with Herb Simon. Simon bet on substitutes, and he was right. But again, not with unalloyed success. Plastics substitutetuted for many materials, but they are largely unrecyclable. We also have microplastic pollution, and we have no idea what the consequences will be.
Since Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb", the world population has doubled. This implies a doubling of food production. We know this isn't all due to productivity increases, and in particular, the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed in favor of beef and soybean production. The USA is no longer comfortably food-supply rich, as climate impacts are making crop production more unstable.
It seems to me that reducing the world population would be a boon, rather than a problem. Maybe those AIs and robots are a suitable substitute for humans. Just don't send us to the glue factories, but let our population decline to more sustainable levels. We will not die out unless we do it to ourselves through some technology. A lower global population with a high standard of living supported by robotic production and a circular economy seems like a less dystopian future to me.
There's a lot that Ehrlich didn't predict--not just the green revolution. Most of the people freaking out about population growth didn't actually understand or envision the underlying drivers that have actually slowed population growth in most parts of the world, starting with the importance of political and legal regimes that granted more rights and autonomy to women.
Indeed. And now the US is helping to increase the mortality rate that will bend the growth curve down in Africa and other nations. The rich countries also "helpfully" held back Covid-19 vaccines, reserving them for their use, and preventing countries from manufacturing their own.
Even back in the 1990s, when we knew the climate was heating, renewable energy (solar and wind) was very expensive compared to fossil fuels. Who could have expected both would rapidly fall in cost to make them the cheapest form of energy? Who could have guessed that battery storage would help overcome sunless and windless days that were used as a weapon to ridicule these renewable energy systems? In the 1990s, the GM EV1 was a very short-range EV. Who could have predicted lithium batteries would extend the range to 100s of miles at an acceptable cost? Who would have predicted the domination of the internet in the early 1990s, when most networks were LANs? In biology, not only was the human genome project an expensive, grand idea, but the technology has now reduced full genome sequences by at least 3 orders of magnitude per base pair, making sequencing all the complex life on Earth a feasible project. SpaceX has made reusable ELV first stages (F9), but if the Starship eventually works, the whole system will be reusable. Which of these technologies, in their nascent stages in 1990, would have been predicted to be such successes 1/3 of a century later? I know I didn't until I could see the growth curves ramping up.
And isn't pronatalism just an excuse for anti-immigrant xenophobia? If a country has a declining birth rate and people fear that'll lead to economic problems then there's an obvious and easy answer: let in more people from other countries.
Last I looked, the planet is finite. The loss of biodiversity is part of killing the planet. Humans can get along pretty well without fossil fuels and plastics made by increasing greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere. There are plenty of rigorous economic models of circular economies, sustainable economies, the economics of restoration of soil, species, systems. Why are assholes like Spears and Geruso allowed any publishing oxygen?
I think it's telling that pronatalists freaking out about birth rates rarely mention, or oppose, immigration. Birth rates aren't spread evenly around the globe, and the countries with low birth rates tend to be the ones that people from countries with high birth rates *want* to move to. If their concerns were truly without an agenda, they'd support immigration -- it's a win-win for wealthier countries with falling birth rates and poorer countries with larger birth rates
Nobody’s going to bring children into the world for a bunch of selfish assholes to exploit. Better get used to that declining birth rate unless something is done about this.
Exactly. The world would have to start taking much better care of the people it already has before my partner and I would be willing to give it any more.
I almost feel I'm going to have to read this in order to join in this critique, because this is just SO characteristic of how a certain kind of social science-inflected advocacy works, and it doesn't seem to matter how long the trail of havoc and failure is behind that sort of intervention, they just keep coming.
The basic lesson that everybody should have learned from population studies and demography in the second half of the 20th Century is that extrapolating from present trends as if they are themselves purely natural and will continue unabated unless managed through policy--and not through politics--is the worst mode of futurism and at the roots of most failures of forecasting and prediction. That kind of analysis often historically shallow--the connection between doom-casting demographers who were calling for strong interventions into population growth and deeper histories of global and local population increases after 1500 were very weak.
That's problem #1, because a better consideration of the full body of social history that was attentive to changes in population that included but was not limited to family size, age of marriage, ease or difficulty of migration, urbanization, nutrition and diet, epidemiology, administrative systems, legal systems, etc. would have or should have told late 20th C. demographers to cool it with the dimestore Malthusianisms.
Problem #2 is a direct result of that, which is the crude instrumentalism of how they fit policy to desired outcomes. Since they saw population growth as 'natural', they thought of government interventions in unbelievably crude terms--sterilization, legal constraints on family size, mandatory use of birth control, punitive taxation, blanket campaigns of secularization, etc. In reality, it turns out that slowing population growth in a sense took care of itself, or arose from causal roots that most demographers and environmentalists were ill-positioned to notice or evaluate: women's rights, urbanization, consumerism and middle-class cosmopolitanism, easily available but not legally compulsory birth control, etc.
Which all should weigh on anybody worrying about present trends. I wouldn't say so much "hey, relax, it'll all take care of itself", but if we're talking one to three centuries in the future, pretty close to that. As you say, the only thing worth doing are "marginal effects, spread out over a very long period of time". Populations are not something you manage like the hot and cold water faucets on a sink.
I think you have to contend with an even bigger question that always springs to my mind when prenatalism arises: so what if the population shrinks? Our current economic model depends on growth. But that’s a pretty anemic and incurious way to think about this question.
Humans need food, water, and shelter to survive, and they need healthy social structures, art and leisure activities to enjoy, and work that gives their lives meaning. How exactly is the mere fact of depopulation a threat to these goals? Sure, we might have a lot of empty infrastructure, but I don’t see how that meaningfully threatens our future.
Am I missing something? If we leave market economics aside, is there anything that says humans can’t flourish with a global population of five billion or three billion or even one billion?
Of course not -- we ran this experiment already, and human's did flourish when the global population was 1, 3 and 5 billions, among other numbers :-)
Exactly!
The whole population decline panic just reeks of unseriousness to me. Paul Ehrlich being wrong about his particular scenario in no way entails that the population of the world can expand indefinitely, because physics, and with that in mind it's been a remarkable stroke of good fortune that the demographic transition seems a durable phenomenon. How great is it that having the world population chill out seemed mostly to involve making people materially comfortable and making sure women had rights, instead of going full Soylent Green? So what if the numbers bob around a little? Imagining that it would just perfectly plateau would be bizarrely precise, and imagining that a world with a little more breathing room wouldn't eventually lead to a few more babies (as it does in *every single living thing*) strikes me as willfully catastrophic- gee, I wonder what political bugbears could be powering that will.
Thinking about any possible hazards of depopulation in that same what-if-we-were-nice-to-people way makes the policy prescriptions pretty clear- and the fact that those aren't at the top of the pronatalist checklists give the game away. Worried about population decline in your particular country messing with your retirement systems? Make it easy to immigrate there. Want to make sure that boost lasts? Make it easy for those immigrants to have families there. If you actually talk to American women about why they don't wanna have kids the list is routinely along the lines of 'I want to make sure my girl babies have reproductive health care and also I'm economically precarious even if I'm presently comfortable'. Perhaps a durable social safety net might let people relax into having a kid.
And yet. It's almost like the social atmospheres that prevailed when the world had a higher birthrate are as much the draw as any actual Big Questions about human destiny.
Cute of them to assume Earth will be habitable by 2300.
It’s like they forget that we’re in a polycrisis. For my part, I kept thinking, “Just wait for the next few pandemics. Then we won’t have to worry about having too many old people.”
The next crisis will make these worries irrelevant.
I get the vibe that if the authors pushed all the policies you promote - "universal pre-K! Generous parental leave! Affordable and plentiful housing!" - Elon Musk would cut off the money spigot.
Read this originally as the thread. Thank you for doing the extra work of putting it in essay form.
I could be quoting lines from this all day long.
Musk's $10 donation to UT Austin set up the "Population Wellbeing Initiative" and, in turn, helped Spears get tenure
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-elon-musk-population-collapse-baby-push/
Why do you, Dave, think "that more people are generally better than fewer?" That is the statement that I would like to see unpacked. If we consider the world as one living system, what is the right balance for optimal sustainable living for all of us? I guess philosophers would have to answer what is optimal, and the scientists would have to grapple with sustainable.
A shrinking human population might be exactly what the earth and it inhabitants need right now. This poses serious economic challenges, but how do we assign priorities between tug of existential sustainability and economic hardship? Can AI help with the later? The optimists in the world of Gen AI state that productivity for each person will be 10x. If that is the case, lucky coincidence with the population decline
Our country has not been willing and/or able to create an environment where having children is supported. $1000 tax break for having a child is laughable.
Good points. Our collective inability to adequately address climate change is only one indicator of a civilization that puts short-term "utility maximization" over long-term sustainability. What I find perplexing is the fixation with "population stabilization" at the same point when labor-saving technology is showing signs of ruling obsolete traditional assumptions about the relationship between population size and economic health. Another example of the medium is the rearview mirror?
The US social safety net is not nearly as strong as most western European nations, so it makes sense to me to take a look at what policies we would benefit by emulating. However, it should also be noted that even countries such as Finland have seen their birthrates fall.
To your point about birthrate decline in countries with a social safety net, there was a great article in FT about this: https://on.ft.com/3UtaIRd
Generally speaking, and in the aggregate, ordinary non-elite people living ordinary lives in their context are better at making decisions about reproduction than professors whose research and careers are funded by the Musk 'Foundation.
If we look at the world as containing other things of value, besides human beings (say, whales, birds, plants such as the trees that make up the canopy of the huge rain forests) I'm doubtful whether 8.5 or 10 billion modern humans consuming at 21st century American rates is ideal, or even sustainable for earth. Climate change can be interpreted as the system shifting to counter the excesses. I share your skepticism about polyanna politics. Things are more likely than not to be messy. On the other hand over the past 30,000 years or so, humans have shown themselves able to adapt to changing situations and build new societies when civilizations collapse. (cf. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything)
The first time I ever heard the term pronatalism was in the context of Vance saying childless people should have less rights, so I've always assumed pronatalists are assholes.
$10 million for this research? Sounds pretty generous for buying a few computers and hiring a few grad students. Hardly big science, and it looks like they wasted it.
Ehrlich wasn't wrong. His timing, maybe. There were ~3 billion humans when I read the book. Now there are "only" 8 billion, and the consequences are catching up with us. We have catalytic converters and solar energy, but it's a losing battle.
Prediction is hard, especially of teh future.
Ehrlich couldn't predict the "green revolution" that staved off mass starvation. But this hasn't been an unalloyed success, creating big Ag control of agriculture.
Ehrlich lost his bet about prices with Herb Simon. Simon bet on substitutes, and he was right. But again, not with unalloyed success. Plastics substitutetuted for many materials, but they are largely unrecyclable. We also have microplastic pollution, and we have no idea what the consequences will be.
Since Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb", the world population has doubled. This implies a doubling of food production. We know this isn't all due to productivity increases, and in particular, the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed in favor of beef and soybean production. The USA is no longer comfortably food-supply rich, as climate impacts are making crop production more unstable.
It seems to me that reducing the world population would be a boon, rather than a problem. Maybe those AIs and robots are a suitable substitute for humans. Just don't send us to the glue factories, but let our population decline to more sustainable levels. We will not die out unless we do it to ourselves through some technology. A lower global population with a high standard of living supported by robotic production and a circular economy seems like a less dystopian future to me.
There's a lot that Ehrlich didn't predict--not just the green revolution. Most of the people freaking out about population growth didn't actually understand or envision the underlying drivers that have actually slowed population growth in most parts of the world, starting with the importance of political and legal regimes that granted more rights and autonomy to women.
Indeed. And now the US is helping to increase the mortality rate that will bend the growth curve down in Africa and other nations. The rich countries also "helpfully" held back Covid-19 vaccines, reserving them for their use, and preventing countries from manufacturing their own.
Even back in the 1990s, when we knew the climate was heating, renewable energy (solar and wind) was very expensive compared to fossil fuels. Who could have expected both would rapidly fall in cost to make them the cheapest form of energy? Who could have guessed that battery storage would help overcome sunless and windless days that were used as a weapon to ridicule these renewable energy systems? In the 1990s, the GM EV1 was a very short-range EV. Who could have predicted lithium batteries would extend the range to 100s of miles at an acceptable cost? Who would have predicted the domination of the internet in the early 1990s, when most networks were LANs? In biology, not only was the human genome project an expensive, grand idea, but the technology has now reduced full genome sequences by at least 3 orders of magnitude per base pair, making sequencing all the complex life on Earth a feasible project. SpaceX has made reusable ELV first stages (F9), but if the Starship eventually works, the whole system will be reusable. Which of these technologies, in their nascent stages in 1990, would have been predicted to be such successes 1/3 of a century later? I know I didn't until I could see the growth curves ramping up.
Prediction is hard.
And isn't pronatalism just an excuse for anti-immigrant xenophobia? If a country has a declining birth rate and people fear that'll lead to economic problems then there's an obvious and easy answer: let in more people from other countries.
Last I looked, the planet is finite. The loss of biodiversity is part of killing the planet. Humans can get along pretty well without fossil fuels and plastics made by increasing greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere. There are plenty of rigorous economic models of circular economies, sustainable economies, the economics of restoration of soil, species, systems. Why are assholes like Spears and Geruso allowed any publishing oxygen?
I think it's telling that pronatalists freaking out about birth rates rarely mention, or oppose, immigration. Birth rates aren't spread evenly around the globe, and the countries with low birth rates tend to be the ones that people from countries with high birth rates *want* to move to. If their concerns were truly without an agenda, they'd support immigration -- it's a win-win for wealthier countries with falling birth rates and poorer countries with larger birth rates
Nobody’s going to bring children into the world for a bunch of selfish assholes to exploit. Better get used to that declining birth rate unless something is done about this.
Exactly. The world would have to start taking much better care of the people it already has before my partner and I would be willing to give it any more.