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?
We don’t need fewer people, we need more political will and less political won’t. There are more than enough resources to feed and clothe mankind and we now have an extremely effective global delivery system in place, so there is no excuse for not ending global poverty.
This world cannot sustain billions of Humans. We don’t need as many people and we certainly don’t need more people.
The vast majority of crises we face would completely dissappear simply by reducing the birthrates further.
The elderly are the only ones who need to suffer, and very briefly.
OK, so (a) who is going to knock off your elderly relatives - you or someone else; and (b) at what age will you top yourself for the benefit of civilisation?
Nobody is talking about ganking people to reduce the population here, mate.
They’re just going to get suboptimal care and quality of life for a decade or two as they approach the end.
It amounts to the same thing.
One is the result of our actions, the other is the result of their own.
You also avoided my other question: at what point exactly do you accept your care being reduced to “ok die already grandad”?
I’m not surprised though. People like you are all “oh lots of people need to die because this isn’t sustainable” followed quickly by “what me? no I mean other people”.
You’re falling back on assumptions of my stance that I already dismissed, you’re clearly arguing with a person inside your head.