Two items today on this topic, first an essay in NY Times, then a letters column today responding to it.
I addressed a similar piece Saturday. Here’s the NYT essay.
NY Times, Victor Kumar, a philosophy professor at Boston University, 5 Aug 2024: Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.
This piece isn’t so much about the global impact of population expansion, as about the odd obsession right-wing folks like JD Vance and Elon Musk have with women having more babies.
JD Vance has repeatedly said that Americans aren’t having enough children. Other right-wing figures agree with him. Elon Musk, broadening the complaint, has said that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.
This doesn’t mean adopting the conservative case wholesale. Progressives need to develop their own version of pronatalism. It should stress the need for government benefits and social services like paid parental leave and subsidized child care while defending the right to abortion and rejecting the traditionalism and nativism that too often characterize the position on the right.
An entirely separate post could be written about how Republicans insist they are pro-family, yet vote against government programs to support families.
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Then the letters. NYT gets letters from all over the country, all over the world. Same graphic.
NY Times, Letters, 24 Aug 2024: Should We Be Worried About Population Decline?, subtitled “Readers discuss a guest essay that argued that we should be.”
The letters express the same reservations I had in Saturday’s post. For example:
I consider myself a progressive Democrat. I would never vote for a candidate who encourages women to have more children because we need young people to pay into Social Security or to care for older people or to “fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress.”
Really? This is ethical? What about considering the kind of world those children will be inheriting?
I agree with Victor Kumar about one thing regarding the environmental threats we face — that our overconsumption needs to be taken into consideration. But that is not justification for growing the population. Climate change is the outcome of overconsumption of fossil fuels. But we are consuming all of our natural resources at an unprecedented rate because there are 8.2 billion of us (with the U.S. the worst offender).
We’re depleting our soils of fertility, our oceans of fish, our rivers of clean water, our land of forests, and our earth of rare earth metals for all of that “technological innovation.” And competition for those resources will fuel more and more conflict around the world.
One more letter:
While the social and economic disruptions that occur within nations when populations age are real, the problem is not low birthrates but outdated economic and immigration policies. The world is not running out of young people — we just have too many young people in some places, without adequate resources and opportunity, and too few young people elsewhere.
This highlights three interconnected issues:
1) An economics based on perpetual growth (of people and consumption) is unsustainable.
2) Global economic inequality is limiting our ability to make the best economic use of the people we already have.
3) If you’re pronatalist, it’s likely because you’re worried about people like you disappearing, not that people in general will disappear. Finally, haven’t you heard that A.I. is going to take all our jobs, anyway? Who needs more people?
