Released in 1973, the dystopian film Soylent Green portrayed an overpopulated world of 40 billion, with teeming masses enduring food scarcity, poverty, social stratification, resource depletion, urban decay, and environmental collapse.

Oh, all this was supposed to be happening in 2022.

In reality, our global population in 2025 is 8.2 billion, and its growth has slowed and is set to reverse. Moreover, 17-20 percent of our world’s nations (e.g., Japan and Russia) are already experiencing population decreases.

Of course, we don’t expect soothsayer-like prescience from Hollywood, just entertainment. But realize that the ’73 film was influenced by its day’s “scientific” predictions. (See Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and other prognostications that bombed.) Now, though, many observers recognize the reality of population collapse — and the problems inherent therein.

And their prescriptions are still errant, too.

Just consider a comment made by then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in 2023. She claimed that

[i]mmigration is essential to sustaining our labor force as our population ages, ensuring we can support economic growth and meet the needs of an aging society.

Perhaps Yellen missed the memo, but satisfying this need is what temporary work visas are for. It’s just as how, when your pipes are leaking, you have a plumber come in and stay until the job is done.

You don’t adopt the plumber.

But even work visas may soon be passé. Just ponder a comment made this year by Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate and pioneer in artificial intelligence.

“I think for mundane intellectual labor,” he said, “AI is just going to replace everybody.”

Then again, there’s yet another solution to our demographic decline — a much older one. It is, as liberal demographer Phillip Longman once put it, “patriarchy, properly understood.”

Writing about our fertility decline Sunday, commentator Jonathan F. Mack had his own solution: “Time to grin and bear it.” He says this is necessary because no one has proposed any “politically and culturally” palatable remedies.

Many people are talking about the issue, though. For example, Mack mentions that Vice President J.D. Vance and Hillary Clinton weighed in — on opposite sides. Mack writes:

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.

True. What’s more, fertility collapse has been a recurring theme throughout history, occurring, for instance, in ancient Greece and early-A.D. Rome. Why, the latter’s Emperor Augustus even castigated his nobles for their birth dearth. But despite his possession of absolute power, it was to no avail. Procreation is funny that way.

Procreation isn’t funny to feminists, however; in fact, the very term triggers them. As to this, Mack continues:

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.

Of course, import enough migrants from certain Third World cultures and women’s roles will be rolled back to the ’50s.

That is, the 850s — down around Baghdad way.

Mack, though, makes an excellent point about the immigration “cure,” stating that

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.

(Worse still: It’s possible that immigrants may assimilate into the low-fertility standard but not into the Americanism standard.)

In reality, the immigrationist solution is unrealistic because different population groups are not “fungible,” points out Mack. Quite true. In fact, this is the Marxist mistake of treating people, immigrants in this case, as mere economic beings. But as I explained in 2023, there’s a name for those that serve merely a workaday function.

Robots.

In contrast, (im)migrants are real people with many dimensions. They arrive with religions, ideologies, worldviews, values, emotional foundations, and biases. Only a suicidal host nation wouldn’t consider these factors before importing new populations.

In truth, fertility decline’s causes have long been studied and defined. For example, the excellent 2008 documentary Demographic Winter (DW) informs that there are five main reasons for it:

The last factor, the implied threat to feminist norms, is what raised Hillary’s hackles. Mack mentions it, too, writing:

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.

What Mack alludes to is that the best family-size indicator is, research shows, women’s expressed desires in that regard. It’s also why the aforementioned Longman suggested in DW that the facts demand a return to tradition. We must resurrect, he confessed, a system that persuades both men and women to have children and take care of them. And that system, do note, was what he called “patriarchy, properly understood.”

As much as I yearn for tradition, though, it’s not just that “patriarchy,” which in the West is as extant as the T-Rex, is maligned today. It’s not just that it’s hard to imagine it being revived before complete civilizational collapse. It’s also this: Does the old economic formula still apply?

Will we really need millions of warm bodies to fuel our economic engine?

It’s now predicted that AI and robotics will displace up to 800 million workers globally by 2030. This includes up to 50 million in the U.S. If so, we sure won’t need more immigrants or progeny to fill factories, warehouses, and corporate parks.

This said, it would still be nice to have a traditional home — even if it does include a non-biological butler and maid that look like they could answer a sci-fi movie casting call.

Addendum: For those interested, the entire Demographic Winter documentary, well worth watching, is below.