Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”
Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?
Open borders are good because they balance age demographics between countries that skew too old, and poorer countries struggling to support massive birthrates. It gives the immigrants opportunity, their relatives back home wealth, and the “host” country young productivity. It also ties countries together culturally.
I’m not sure where you’re going with that.
And on automation, another big problem is just… enshittification. It’s like we’ve burned all these efficiency gains with horrendous systems, with workers grinding away doing basically nothing useful.
Runaway capitalism 100% did that. It also diverts so much production to be wasted by billionaires.
…But, like, mass communism wave could still have similar problems, minus the billionaires. Lots of other systems would too, depending on where you look.
I think a lot of society just needs to be “simplified” and more a-la-carte instead of ideologically driven. I often cite TSMC as an example, which shifted between straight up despotic, state sponsored socialism, democratic capitalism with a lot of private investment, and stuff in between (mixed with a lot of international cooperation) to get to a kind of “best case” where they are today. Could do better, of course (maybe as a worker/researcher owned coop?)
…I’m going way off topic though.
The nation state paradigm is the problem, open borders would be good for the common people but as long as the nation state collects taxes and pays for any type of welfare restricting movement is the only way for them to maintain power.
It would be fairer to say abolishing borders is good rather than trying to justify simply opening them.
Bullshit jobs and enshitification are a different thing, any sector where automation has increased productivity has absolutely not reduced workloads, it’s not even a question. Time is money after all.