Is There Even a Way to Reverse the Birth Rate Collapse?

There was a time when people feared that the human population would continue growing until we ran out of resources. These ideas were popularized by Thomas Malthus and later by Paul Ehrlich.

The idea was that like say deer, who have no natural predators in an area, the human population would swell and grow until it got out of hand. Of course, now we can definitively see that the OPPOSITE is happening. The birth rate across most of the civilized world is collapsing:

On average, women in 1963 were having 5.3 children in their lifetime, and by 2023, that had more than halved to 2.2. During the same period, the global population rose by around 150 percent from 3.2 billion to 8.1 billion.

The fact that populations kept (and keep) growing despite falling global fertility is tied to longer life expectancy and lower childhood mortality. The UN expects global fertility to reach the minimum replacement level of 2.1 by the middle of the century while the global population is expected to start falling towards the end of it.

Now, why is this happening?

Well, there is no definitive answer to that question and there are lots of competing theories. In all likelihood though? There are probably a number of overlapping factors, great and small. Let’s run through some of those briefly, focusing on the conditions in the United States.

* Our population is getting married much later and in considerably smaller numbers than they did in previous generations.

* Children have gone from a must-have, financial asset that was essentially cheap labor and a retirement plan and have rolled into enormous financial liabilities.

* Birth control and abortion have dramatically reduced unplanned births.

* Christianity is in a long, slow, decline in the United States, and believers (“Be fruitful and multiply”) are more likely than non-believers to have kids.

* Entertainment options have improved so much that many people would rather stay home and play video games, watch movies, and enjoy their homes than go out and chase the opposite sex.

* Social media and overprotective parenting have dramatically weakened the social skills needed for people to couple up.

* The abundance of pornography has both made many men less interested in having sex with a real woman and has made it more difficult to perform with a woman if they do.

* The promotion of homosexuality in schools has significantly increased the gay population, taking those people out of the breeding pool.

* Our heavily visually oriented online dating sites have created a situation where the highest value men end up sleeping with large numbers of women while making it simultaneously difficult for many men to date at all.

* The population has gotten significantly more obese and thus, less attractive to the opposite sex overall.

* Welfare, child support, better jobs for women, and less stigma around divorce as well as sleeping around have made many women feel like long-term relationships are optional.

Now, we could debate which of these are the most and least important factors. You might even have some other ones you’d like to slide into the list. However, in a sense, what it all comes down to is something very basic: Men and women don’t NEED each other the same way that they used to in past generations.

Note that I didn’t say that they don’t “want” each other. Love is great and a happy relationship makes life better all the way around. It’s also CLEARLY, UNAMBIGUOUSLY, STATISTICALLY the best way to raise kids.

However, for large parts of human history, relationships went far beyond that. Sex outside of marriage and even worse, PREGNANCY OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE, had a lot of stigma around them. So did divorce.

There was no opportunity to hop on Tinder and at least POTENTIALLY get laid. Moreover, there was no welfare. If you were a woman and you had a kid outside of marriage, chances are you were headed toward poverty and being looked down on by the community. On the other hand, if you were a man and you wanted to have sex, it wasn’t easy in many places without a wife because pre-marital sex was heavily frowned upon and viewed as extremely risky.

Additionally, this may sound crazy to people who’ve never read up on what things used to be like, but housework used to be several orders of magnitude more difficult. There were people bringing water into the house from a well, cleaning their clothes in a stream, and cooking for hours over a fire because microwaves didn’t exist. A man very much NEEDED someone at home, running the household and taking care of his kids to be able to go out and work to grow the food or make the money they all needed to survive. In a very real sense, it was a team effort, and guess what? People without kids didn’t get to make smarmy TikTok videos about how not making children means they had more money to go to bars and travel; instead they starved to death when they got too old to do backbreaking labor in the fields.

That may not be the impression you get from bullsh*t memes designed to convince you everyone lived an idyllic life in the olden days:

…However, in reality, almost everyone was working as much as people do today, or more, in much worse conditions, and still living in grinding poverty.

Again, men and women didn’t just WANT each other, they NEEDED each other.

Could that happen again?

Yes.

Although, we probably wouldn’t like it very much if it did.

Why?

Because what would have to happen to create that situation? A complete breakdown of societal order? Men needing to go out and fight other nearby tribes? A situation where the Internet crashed out, office jobs disappeared, and we had to go back to sustenance farming and hunting to live? Living in a world where the only law is your gun makes for a great fantasy novel or video game, but it would sure be a lot of steps backward from where we are as a society today.

Granted, there might be other possibilities.

For example, some kind of ludicrously, almost too good-to-be-true boon handed out from the government – but how likely is that? For example, what if the government said, “Any married couple that has kids doesn’t have to pay taxes!” Would that get people together? Almost certainly, yes. But would that even be financially viable at all for the country? Would single people be willing to pay a much higher tax burden? How could you ensure that it would be productive, responsible, citizens having kids as opposed to the worst people in your society?

It’s also possible that somehow, some way, we could create a societal stigma around waiting to get married or not having kids. The thing is, are we going in that direction now? No. How would we even get there? Unknown.

The other obvious, perhaps darker possibility that comes to mind would be a technological solution. We’re talking about growing babies in tanks, like The Matrix. How would that work? Who’d raise them? Would this turn into some kind of sci-fi horror show? Very hard to say:

The United States, being the most desirable place on the planet, has one other obvious option that nowhere else on the planet can do as well. We can supplement our birth rate by allowing some of the best people from around the world to emigrate to our country. Unfortunately, we’re squandering that opportunity with our extraordinarily foolish, non-merit-based immigration policies that bring in some good people and lots of others we’d be better off without. It’s a very fixable problem, but there seems to be very little talk of actually fixing it.

Long term, a country with as much room and possibility as the United States would be better off with a growing, productive population, but like the rest of the Western world, it doesn’t look like that’s the direction we’re headed in. Instead, it looks like the planet is headed toward a drop in population which will reduce lifestyles, weaken nations, and perhaps spiral into a population collapse.

Fixing it?

There don’t seem to be any easy ways to do that.

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