So....everyone is grilling RFK Jr, the dumbest health secretary to ever exist, for going on a weird rambling about teenagers' sperm yesterday. And...I thought it might be a good topic to discuss what I think about fertility, childbearing, etc.
To be frank...as a progressive, i DON'T think about it very often. I believe that the choice to have a child is...a choice, and that if we just let people make their own free decisions, the result will be "good enough" where I don't have an issue with it. I don't care if the population grows, i dont care if it shrinks. In general I tend to lean toward shrinking, but as long as remain somewhere around the replacement rate, it's like whatever.
Currently the replacement rate is 2.1, with the typical woman having 1.5 children, so we are below, which requires some immigration. Of course, I'm not opposed to this. I mean, if that's what it takes to keep the population stable, so be it, I really, really, REALLY don't care. I tend to value individual freedom over some weird coercive social conservatism. Of course, the right is the party of...weird coercive social conservatism, so I wanna discuss their perspective.
Discussing the weird obsession with breeding conservatives have
The right wing brain seems....relatively obsessed with this topic, in comparison. Social conservatives, at first, feared people breeding too much. Historically, they've been Malthusian. They're the ones saying we needed to be economically conservative and punitive toward poor people because all they do is screw and have kids, and that if we give them welfare, it encourages bad behavior. All throughout my youth, everything was obsession with teenage pregnancy and weird moralizing about how if you didnt wanna be poor dont have sex before marriage. They'd scream about abortion being this holocaust like evil but then lecture everyone about having sex before marriage and financial stability. They'd go on about how racial minorities don't value the structure of the American family and that's why they deserve to suffer. Really, there was this idea that people will naturally breed out of wedlock like crazy and reproduce at unsustainable rates and that this is bad and we need to be economically austere and impose "personal responsibility" on everyone to offset that. It was a crude and brutish mindset, and out of line with the data. But once you make arguments about how their policies actually seemed to encourage teenage pregnancy, they didn't seem to care, it seemed to be about punishing people for having sex out of the right circumstances. Meanwhile, liberal policies of distributing birth control, allowing abortions, led to more sexual liberalism, yes, but it also led to more stable replacement rates, with women having just short of the replacement rate, generally speaking. And isn't that what we want?
How I see it
As we enter the twenty-first century, yeah, we do have an overpopulation crisis on our hands. Not so much in the first world, where, again, we've kind of stabilized around just short of replacement rate. But the third world? Yikes. Like...all that birth control stuff does lead to a much more stable population. And in an era of climate change, increased resource consumption, infinite growth on a finite planet, I'm fine if the population remains around the same or goes down slowly. If anything, that's a positive change. That's how we ensure long term stability on this planet. We're dangerously close to the maximum populations we can realistically support, and if we really care about sustainability and having a reasonably western living standard, we're already exceeding the population. The whole world can't sustain everything having the existing American living standard as of now. While growth and technological efficiency will allow for us to compensate for this to some degree, which is why the whole economic growth narrative has historically countered the more malthusian narrative, at some point, we're just gonna reach hard limits.
So...as I see it, if we want to avoid more painful choices that come with such a philosophy in the future, we want to AVOID hitting those hard limits. Seriously. Isn't it better if we voluntarily choose to reduce our population somewhat, than for some economic crisis to precipitate a humanitarian one that leads to severe rationing of resources or starvation? Quite frankly, i think the idea that the modern western lifestyle leads to relatively low fertility rates is a feature, not a bug. In the pre industrial days, sure, maybe families needed people to have 10 kids to tend to the family farm and ensure enough kids survive....the horrors of pre-modern childhood (lots and lots of disease and high mortality), in the modern day of humans living longer and more consistently, it makes more sense for us to reproduce at...something close to the replacement rate.
So...honestly? Modern lifestyles leading to relatively lower fertility seems like a good thing. like a potential crisis is sorting itself out naturally in a way that isn't dangerous for us. And that's why liberalism works. When people are allowed to make their own decisions, the choices end up leading to outcomes that are in the ballpark of where we wanna be.
The conservative mentality
The conservative mentality is...very counter to mine. Despite all the malthusian nonsense that seems endemic in their worldview and how we need to be harsh to people who reproduce outside of the proper social contexts, they're actually starting to freak out. They're looking at the modern situation and saying "gee, this ins't good, we're gonna decline in population, people arent reproducing at the rates we WANT them to reproduce at!" And they're framing this as some grand moral crisis.
Now, I admit, maybe we younger people aren't reproducing at the rate that we should. Maybe it could be a little higher. However, as a liberal, I once again have an answer for that. Sure, while childfree adults are on the rise and I'm one of them, I'm not under the impression the main reason we millennials havent been having kids like we "should" is more economic. See, after being told that we need to be financially stable before having kids and that this is the "right" way to do things and that we should expect a life of poverty and misery if we don't follow the proper life script, many of us...havent had kids. Even those who want to. We delayed marriage, childbirth, and building a life because, hey, guess what, the economy has sucked for us, we've been miserable, we've never had the economic stability that our parents had, and then we get yelled at by the same people now complaining we didnt have enough kids that we were eating too much avocado toast or not working hard enough. These people always have SOMETHING to complain about. But I digress.
The point is, now they see this as a huge crisis. Why? because their economic model requires infinite growth. We need women to have more babies because more babies mean more future workers. If we dont operate above replacement rate, then that means the population ages on average. This means that, in theory, our social safety nets like social security become more burdensome. Supposedly they need like 2.5ish workers to fund one retiree, and if we're at a 1.5 replacement rate...well...you do the math.
of course, conservatives hate social security and always advocate for cutting it. And the crisis of social security is completely artificial; people stop contributing taxes above a certain income, like, say, $140k or something. if we taxed the rich more, we could sustain it in perpetuity.
Heck, I'll be honest, in an age of automation and increasing economic efficiency, why do we need so many workers funding things? Modern economics is driven by rank consumerism, not actual necessities. Remember, we've discussed this many times before, but we should be able to, in theory, work a whole lot less and rely on machines a whole lot more. Hell, I advocate for a full on UBI, and reducing the work week. The whole idea that we cant fund a safety net for an aging population has more to do with the structure of said safety net (social insurance....) than on the actual sustainability of actually taking care of much of our population without work. A lot of the calls to raise the retirement age, or cut benefits comes from conservatives who always ignore that hey, we could raise taxes and fund stuff. But they dont want that. They want at most, the safety nets to remain unchanged, if their end goal isnt to shrink them, saying we cant afford them at all and that we need to give the wealthy more money to create jobs. I've seen conservatives argue that we shouldnt even have a concept of retirement and people should just work until they die. It's crazy, but this is how they think.
So yeah, they're totally out of their depth on that, although, if we heavily value infinite economic growth like they do, i can see where they're coming from. At some point, my theory is we're gonna have to stop growing....in part because of the environmental sustainability ceiling mentioned above. We can only fund a certain GDP lifestyle for a certain number of people in the long term, and ultimately, I once again think it's better for us to voluntarily choose to work less and to address the situation that way, than to deal with say, rationing and resource deprivation. And if we wanna avoid those negative outcomes, it's better we address this NOW while we got some runway to start without crashing into those limits, than later when nature FORCES us to cut back on its terms, not ours.
Of course, the right is completely ignorant of the realities of that. They think climate change and the idea of environmental sustainability are leftist plots to destroy capitalism, never mind that I believe in them despite being somewhat capitalist, and just think we can grow forever. So they keep insisting that now we have this crisis of not enough babies being born to fuel the economy of tomorrow, when I look at the situation and think that if anything, the ideas I promote would allow us to stave off a crisis that could otherwise kill a whole lot of us and make us miserable. If not make us go full on extinct from radically altering our environment.
And let's not forget the racism angle...
And let's not forget the racism angle of the far right. They believe in this idea of the "great replacement theory." See, here's a few realities that the "white right" don't like. First, we can address any short term economic sustainability issues by bringing in immigrants. And second, POC tend to reproduce at a faster rate than whites.
This SCARES the white nationalist types. Because they look at a future of America where white people aren't in charge and they are scared. Omg, they dont share our values, blah blah blah. And I'm gonna be honest, what is "white culture" in this case? It often comes off as like the protestant work ethic and christianity. Things that, IMO aren't worth saving. But yeah, that's why they're freaking out under trump. OMG IF WE DONT DO SOMETHING POC WILL OUTNUMBER WHITES AND WE WONT BE IN CHARGE ANY MORE. Again, given the values these guys are defending, is that a bad thing?
Like, really, back in the 2010s we had this idea of the coalition of the ascendant. It was why I was so overconfident of the future of america and believe that conservatism was dying and the future belonged to the left. It's also why the trumpers are going full authoritarian. Realizing that their "way of life" is under threat from demographic change, they're trying to force the demographics to go back their way. Which is causing them to become a lot more authoritarian on reproduction as a result. While abortion has ALWAYS been a long term goal for them to roll back, they've done it. And now they're claiming we have a problem of people having too few kids. But I bet a lot of these people only want WHITES to have kids.
And that actually resolves a core contradiction of their movement. Like, we can talk about say, the evolution of the whole malthusian approach of the past generation. It started in the 1960s with the introduction of welfare and civil rights. The welfare queen narrative was always racially skewed. And conservatives tend to get angry about videos of POC women who have tons of kids going on welfare. It's why they always get so angry over that stuff. A lot of the anti welfare arguments came from racism. And there's always been this idea that POCs are like...culturally inferior to white people. Like...whites will only have kids when responsible on average while POC won't. And, I wanna point out, I dont endorse these narratives, but this is likely how a lot of them are thinking. So now they're upset when whites arent having enough kids...because they fear demograpghic change causing them to lose cultural power in the future.
Me...again, I dont really care. As I see it, if whites have fewer kids, and POC have more, and the end result is close enough to the replacement rate that I dont see it as a major problem, I don't really care. Again, my philosophy is if people are free to make their own decisions, the result should be close enough to where we want that it's not a concern. If that makes america browner in the future, I dont really care. Like really...I DONT CARE. IT'S JUST FRICKING SKIN COLOR. And as far as culture, conservatives aren't really making a convincing case for their culture being so great during the trump era. If anything, it's like they wanna preserve the WORST parts of our culture, like the fetishiziation of hard work, and conservative religion.
In a way it goes full circle, their breeding fixation IS their culture. Like, really, a huge part of conservative culture is this weird religious authoritarianism involving a weird fixation on the family. Their idea of life is just a script. Be born. be a kid. Grow up, go to school, get a job. Get married. Have kids. Rinse and repeat. Everything is just....yep, all of life is just about working and reproducing. It's a really dismal take on life i REALLY dont vibe with. And this is what they defend? Really? This is their culture. A life of hard work, responsibility, and misery.
Meanwhile, my culture? Freedom. DO what you want, enjoy your life, stay out of others' way. If we have to work to live, so be it, but dont live to work. There's more to life than just all being wage slaves and making more wage slaves. We love to act like others are so tyrannical and we're for freedom, but are the conservatives really for freedom? Are they REALLY for freedom? They're just as conservative and authoritarian as the conservative regimes we crap on. Fundamentalist christianity isnt much different than fundamentalist islam when you deal with the extremes. The trump regime's aspirations seem more in line with Putin's Russia than any America I grew up believing in. It's the left, the liberals, who represent the real America. The america that is based on freedom, and doing what you want, as long as you dont harm others. What the right represents these days is closer to fascism. They've become the same people they claim to fear and despise.
The elephant in the room: Gen Z
So...with millennials, I pointed out that while yes, some childfreedom has led to declining birth rates, a lot of it is economic. The economy for millennials has been a crapshow, with a lot of us deferring having kids due to not achieving some level of economic sustainability. This comes after a generation of telling us to keep our legs closed and not to reproduce irresponsibly...while then engaging in the responsibility that our economy allowed. I honestly think millennials would have likely had more kids if the economy didn't suck for them. If we had the economic opportunities our parents did. CONGRATS, GOP, YOU PLAYED YOURSELVES, YOU SHAMED A GENERATION INTO NOT HAVING KIDS AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE KIDS, YOU HAVE MOSTLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME! If we adopted practices like UBI, higher wages, etc, to make life better for the masses, maybe people would have had more kids!
But...then there's gen Z. Gen Z, especially the tail end, I believe the first half of the generation are just like millennials, but the more tail end now in their teens and early 20s, they...have unique problems. And it actually has a lot to do with culture wars. As we know, the men are becoming increasingly conservative, and wanting to go back to an authoritarian approach in which womens' sexuality is more controlled due to their lack of success with dating, and the women...dont wanna be controlled and have gone in the opposite direction of being radfems. Like....those who grew up in the post 2016 environment which has been particularly divisive and toxic has led to a generation of young people who arent having sex, are distrustful of dating, and who seem to hate the other gender due to political polarization.
Idk how these guys are gonna settle down and create the next generation at this rate. it's like all the problems millennials had, and then ON TOP OF THEM, they got their weird utopia 25 situation going on where the culture is so F-ed up that the men and women aren't pairing off like they should. Some of this is the consequence of the internet and its impact on dating. But a lot of it is just...the culture wars between the far right and far left.
Again, I feel like under a liberal model, freedom will prevail where enough people will have kids that we get an outcome that isnt particularly socially undesirable. Like conservatives will complain the birth rate aint high enough, but my answer: FIX THE FRICKING ECONOMY! Which they dont wanna do. But...when radfems hate the men for being conservative, and the men hate the women for being radfems, well....you're dealing with the illiberal extremes just screwing everything up. Anyway these guys are still young, and maybe they'll straighten out as they age, but that COULD be a problem. Either way, this is a problem with EVERYTHING with our politics post 2016. And I've been condemning that from the start as it's not helpful and just dividing us for no fricking reason at all. Of course, the rich wanted us to fight because otherwise we'd demand concessions for them and....wait...
can't we just say ALL OF THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE WEALTHY NOT ALLOWING THE WEALTH TO TRICKLE DOWN AS WE SHOULD AND INSTEAD DISTRACTING US WITH CULTURE WARS?! Arguably yes. Except now their solution to fix this is rank authoritarianism. Because of course it is. *sigh*, we are in hell, and this is why no one is having kids.
Conclusion
So what can we conclude? Well, largely, i think the "fertility crisis" is largely a made up crisis. Generally speaking left to their own devices people make good enough decisions that im happy with the outcome, and we should encourage them to do so. However, conservatives always seem miserable, always seem to be in culture grievance mode, and always ciomplain, and always make up fake crises to get us distracted.
And at the end of the day the crisis is arguably their fault in various ways in the process, if it exists at all, because the contradictions of their own ideology cause all the undesirable outcomes in the first place. Of course they're just gonna blame progressives for existing and insist on taking away our reproductive rights in order to force authoritarianism on us, because of course they would, it's all they really know.
Also, a lot of them are really racist and probably only wanna have the "right" (white) people to have babies, so that's probably what all the complaining is about.
Anyway, i dont think it's a crisis mostly. Insofar as it is, it comes down to conservatives in the first place, and if we just practiced liberalism, the problems would resolve themselves naturally and peacefully to some degree.
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