After the wide-scale apoplexy induced by reports of overpopulation, an ice age, global warming, and then climate change, the apocalypse of the season may be shifting to low birth rates and population loss. In recent months, authorities no less diverse and august than Pantsuited Demographer Hillary Clinton and Hillbilly Procreationist J.D. Vance have weighed in with their preferred remedies. I regret to report that no one has suggested any politically and culturally acceptable solutions, so it is time to grin and bear it.
Mr. Vance, a seemingly dedicated Europhobe, proposes an oddly Continental menu of transfer payments to parents to promote fertility rates. Unfortunately, most of what the Vance school has suggested — generous tax benefits and other subsidies for families – already exists in European countries that have fertility rates even lower than those in the United States. Bribing people to have babies is not likely to be more successful than were past attempts at bribing them not to have babies. Procreation is funny that way.
While Wikipedia reports that the Shakers, once 6,000 strong, are down to their last three members, Hillary Clinton’s new anti-natalist fervor may increase their rolls to four. She recently reacted to Mr. Vance by lambasting any suggestion of encouraging our existing native population to have more children because it would purportedly reduce women to the roles that bound them in the 1950s. Her answer: mass immigration from third-world cultures with high fertility rates. She apparently wants to delegate manual labor to immigrant men and the labor of labor to immigrant women.
There is nothing new to the proposal of large-scale immigration to offset low fertility, but there is an inherent fallacy that undermines this solution. Specifically, if third-world immigrants successfully assimilate, they will rapidly adopt the low fertility habits of natives, and if they do not assimilate, they will create a host of problems that outweigh any benefits that they might bring. Fertility rates in recent immigrant groups have, in fact, fallen fairly rapidly after their arrival.
The Clinton high immigration solution also simplistically and unrealistically treats people from different population groups as fungible. You cannot replace low-fertility highly skilled high tax–paying classes of people with low-skilled largely untaxed classes and expect that the result will be the same as if the former group started producing children again.
Some suggest that immigrants are essential to pay for the benefits necessary to support an aging native population. Recent unskilled immigrants, however, cannot contribute enough tax revenue to pay for the education, medical, infrastructure, social welfare and judicial-penal system costs they impose with something left over to devote to old age benefits for the native population. There would have be some very high-paying jobs for recent immigrants.
Everyone accepts that the emancipation of women from culturally imposed norms that emphasized marriage and childbearing inevitably caused a substantial reduction in fertility rates. The unfortunate truth, which borders on unmentionable, is that there is no apparent solution to low fertility in a culture that has given women opportunities that make marriage and childbearing optional. There — I didn’t want to, but I said it.
That is where the “grin and bear it” comes in. If we cannot reliably increase fertility rates without imposing unacceptable conditions, can we live with lower fertility rates, just as we have learned to live with the parade of horribles that started with the population bomb in the late 1960s and has continued through a succession of incipient dystopias, of which climate change was the most recent?
Advanced low-immigration, low-fertility cultures like Japan may not be as robust as their leaders might wish, but they are not doomed, either. The fertility problem is triggering accelerated automation in Japan. Before we allow mass immigration, we might want to ask what we are going to do with the real Juan and Maria after we name our Roombas “Juan” and “Maria.”
What if we stayed at a population of “only” 330 million, double what it was a short time ago? What if requisitioning the resources necessary to support an aging population slightly reduces the standard of living of younger folks who still live in larger homes, have better cars, eat out more, and enjoy more air travel than their predecessors did?
We can live with that, which is a good thing, because we are going to have to live with that.
Image via PickPik.