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?
You will receive less retirement money than Millennials (who will get less than Boomers), while the percentage of your income for pensions increases monthly, and the retirement age rises. This change won’t happen suddenly but in waves.
Many liberal governments in Europe are currently pushing to raise the retirement age. For example, in my country, reforms have already ensured that by the time I reach retirement age, it will be set at 74.
And then we’ll find that all the stress that we’ve gone through due to poor planning and policy has taken 10 years off our lives and we’ll all have heart attacks at 70 before we even get to retire. Those that survive will be kept on life support to continue being worker drones for the billionaires. Changing the age of retirement isn’t the solution. And if they do decide to do that, then it makes it all the more important that they enact policy to make life easier right now.