My mom is in a memory care home. Every time I’ve been there to visit I’ve never seen a white worker. They’re all black, and not from America. They have strong accents and immigrated from various countries in Africa. Interesting in that Americans don’t seem to want those jobs anymore. 45 years ago my high school friends and I all worked an a nursing home washing dishes, cleaning and being patient aids. Today most high school and college kids don’t really think of getting jobs and their parents provide everything they want. So who is going to take all these jobs as wealthy nations quit having kids? Who is going to be around to pay social security and farm the land and work in grocery stores? The wealthy nations are maybe hoping robots will do all those jobs in 50 years because their populations have basically quit having children. Read on;
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The world’s most famous pronatalist is father-of-11 Elon Musk. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),” he warned in 2022. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes. “Of course I’m going to have a big family,” Altman said the same year. “I think having a lot of kids is great.” The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collinses’ pronatalist foundation in 2022.
The data, pronatalists fear, points to a looming crisis. As societies become more prosperous, people are having fewer children; after 200 years of overwhelming population growth, birthrates are plummeting. An average of 2.1 babies needs to be born per woman for populations to remain stable; in England and Wales the birthrate is currently 1.49, in the US it is 1.6, in China it’s 1.2. Politicians in South Korea have referred to their birthrate as a national emergency: at 0.72 (with 0.55 in the capital, Seoul) it is the lowest in the world. According to a paper published in the Lancet in March, 97% of the planet – 198 out of 204 countries – will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain their population by the end of this century. In the short term, this is creating a pension timebomb, with not enough young people to support an ageing population. If current trends continue, human civilisation itself may be at risk. I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids. The point of the movement is to help those that do
“There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,” Malcolm says simply, as Octavian climbs the bunk bed ladder. “The average Catholic majority country in Europe has a 1.3 fertility rate. You see this in some Latin American countries. That’s basically halving the population every generation. For anyone who’s familiar with compounding numbers, that’s huge.” Malcolm sees South Korea as a vision of our near future: the problem is most acute in countries that are “technophilic, pluralistic, educated, where women have rights”.
The only places where the birthrate is not falling to unsustainable levels are countries where the average citizen earns less than $5,000 (£4,000) a year, he continues. “The only way countries like ours can survive is through immigration from those very poor countries where birthrates continue to be high. You’re outsourcing the labour of childrearing to a separate group,” he says. “And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.”
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