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?
This may answer your question. I’ve read that the only way to continue making a profit, aka be better off than the laboring masses, is to use human labor power to produce products/services. Why? Because if a process is automated, the process’s rate of profit will eventually fall to zero. Why? Competition with other businesses that automate will drive the price down as low as it can go (unless of course there’s collusion or a monopoly is allowed to exist).
Put another way, in order to make money, you need to be able to pay your labor less than the value of whatever they’re producing. If the whole process is automated, there’s no one to pay at all, which is amazing for a hot second, but once another business copies and undercuts you, you need to lower your price to match theirs. Then a third person copies and undercuts you both, and before you know it you’re not making any money because everyone is selling a fraction of a cent above cost.