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?
The population demographic projections look quite definitive to me, barring something drastic like a high-mortality pandemic. They’re much shorter term than overpopulation projections, hence probably closer to reality.
The probable reaction is to just burden the working class, as is happening right now with every other problem. This very thread, and pretty much every disaster in the world, is an example of how, well, societies aren’t going to react until its waaay too late.
I agree, that is the probable reaction, but the working class will have more and more leverage the smaller the class gets.
Not if they don’t have any wealth.
And again, by the time they’re even complaining about this specifically, it is waaay too late.
They don’t need wealth if they control the means of production. It’s just a matter of making them understand that they have all of the power; all they need to do is unite.
coincidentally automation is getting significant investment from the wealthy to reduce the requrement of employing the extraordinarily inconsistent working class that expects to live off a wage and be treated like a person.
Surely this is some form of high satire that has gone over my head. Surely.
Peasants that survived the black death didn’t have wealth. Still resulted in a massive increase in their bargaining power.
Bah, you’re assuming they’ll follow existing laws of property ownership. Wealth, aka means of accomplishing goals, will be available to those that need it.