The latest edition of the Lawfare Institute’s Rational Security podcast, “The ‘Active Listening Noises’ Edition,” began with an amusing dissection of The Daily podcast host Michael Barbaro’s weird habit of making loud noises into the microphone in reaction to guest comments, followed by a characteristically thoughtful discussion of the Biden administration memo concluding the high likelihood that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza but yet had not met the threshold for cutting off arms support.
This was followed, alas, by a maddeningly unhelpful discussion of a recent WSJ report “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed.” (ungated here) Natalie Orpett treated the whole discussion as a right-wing plot to take away women’s rights and advance a white nationalist agenda while Quinta Jurecic argued that the notion that we needed more babies was without any empirical basis and likely rooted in Industrial Age notions. Scott Anderson and Alan Rozenshtein were a bit more grounded in the debate but seemed embarrassed to be discussing the issue at all.
The author of the WSJ essay, chief economics commenter Greg Ip, lays out the stakes pretty well in the intro:
The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
Some demographers think the world’s population could start within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
Donald Trump, this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called collapsing fertility a bigger threat to Western civilization than Russia. A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has prioritized raising the country’s “demographic GDP.”
Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
That Trump and Meloni support the agenda is certainly unhelpful in persuading progressives of the urgency of the problem. Ditto, as noted later on, that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban is taking draconian steps to solve it.
Still, Ip does a pretty good job in the piece addressing Jurecic’s question. Societies with below-replacement-level births face a demographic inversion, with more old people relying on social welfare systems and fewer young people paying into them. Economies stagnate as fewer workers are available. Schools and colleges close as there are fewer students. The progressive project simply isn’t sustainable without a vibrant workforce.
As noted in the piece, several countries, most notably Japan and South Korea, have tried without much success to reverse the trend by offering various incentives to ameliorate the burdens of childcare. But this isn’t enough to offset the plain fact that, for many women, the burdens of child-bearing and -rearing, most notably the long-term impact on their careers, are too high to offset. And there’s something of a social contagion effect, wherein those in a cohort having fewer children create subtle pressures on others to do the same.
The most obvious solution to low birth rates is immigration. It’s how the United States has coped so well with it over the years. But, as Ip rightly notes, this is a “zero-sum game,” where one country’s gain is another’s loss.
Additionally, as Ip observes, “High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance, often over concerns about cultural and demographic change. A shrinking native-born population is likely to intensify such concerns. Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigration.” Orpett is certainly right that this is at least intertwined with white nationalism if not outright racism. But there’s also a near-universal desire among peoples to preserve their native culture and social mores. For smaller countries, in particular, it would be easy for rapid migration to radically reshape societies.
This may simply be a case wherein, as Shimon Peres put it long ago, “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact – not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.” Low birth rates may well be a natural outcome of modernity.
One of the male panelists (I can’t recall whether it was Anderson or Rozenshtein) emphasized that there are indeed many women who want to have more children but, for whatever reason, can’t. Policy changes like making access to IVF and other fertility treatments cheaper and more readily available and increased funding for family leave, daycare, and the like would certainly be helpful in those cases. How much this would offset the overall deficit, though, I haven’t the foggiest.
