We Need More Babies

We look at demographic trends today and fertility issues in history.  Do we need less people or more?  We make the case for the latter.  

Transcript

We need to Make More Babies

June 2023

Pat Lee Shipman, the author of a very intriguing read called The Invaders about Middle Paleolithic humans, writes in Scientific America about the black death and its aftermath, “By 1351, the pandemic had died down, but whole villages and their fields were empty of inhabitants; cottages and houses sat vacant; many crops had rotted in the field for lack of labor to harvest them; stock animals died, unfed and unwatered, for lack of human care. There were simply not enough serfs and peasants left in England to do the work. We will talk here not about a massive, horrific situation like the Black Death but rather about the slow decline of the human population.  

After nearly a decade and a half, I finally got around to watching the reincarnation of Battlestar Galactica. It was something of a revelation. Intelligent, gripping, and insightful. I am barely old enough to remember the original one from 1978. The goal of that version was to capitalize on the success of Star Wars by bringing a space epic to the small screen. Many mistakes were made, starting with casting Lorne Greene as Commander Adama, the captain of the Galactica, well as all human existence. Before Galactica, Greene played the patriarch on the show Bonanza, one of the most popular shows of all time and which ran for 14 years. The impact of Bonanza was such that historian Amity Schlaes uses it as a subtext for the early 60s American optimism in her book The Great Society. The casting could have been more jarring than making John Wayne play Genghis Kahn, but you get the picture. No one would have cast Wayne as a space captain, but they threw the dice with Greene. 

Contrast this casting with unknown British Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard, commander of the Enterprise in Star Trek’s Next Generation. In fact, the entire cast, with the exception of LeVar Burton, was an unknown allowing each actor, especially Stewart, to define their characters.  

The original Galactica also had a noticeable issue at the core of its mission that even a boy of 10 could discern. After having 12 colonies annihilated by the robot race called Cylons, the Galactica would seek refuge on … Earth. Wait what? A group of interstellar travelers was going to bring a bunch of robots, who make the Terminator Skynet machines look like a bunch of amateurs, to 20th-century Earth? With their ray guns and giant base stars, the Cylons would turn the Earth into a cinder in a few hours, and Adama would be lighting the fuse.  

The new Galactica, however, dismisses the entire Earth concept in a few moments as the new Adama, played by Edward James Olmos, confesses to the new President of the colonies, played by Mary McDonnell, that Earth is a myth. And here we have another wrinkle. McDonnel’s Laura Roslin was Education Secretary in the old administration, but with all of the colonies’ leaders destroyed, she is officially President, and copying our civilian suzerainty over the military, Roslin is Adama’s boss. But the problem is that the Galactica, firmly in Adama’s control, is humanity’s only protection. As secretary of state, General Alexander Haig once declared that he was “in charge” after Ronald Reagan was shot, abrogating the constitutionally spelled out line of Succession. In the fictional Galactica, Roslin even asks whether Adama will conduct a military coup, such as his power. This creates an interesting dynamic between the two intelligent and grudgingly respectful characters.  

And valued listener, I, at last, come to my point. In the first days after the Cylons have destroyed most of humanity, Roslin counts about 49,000 humans left alive in their rag-tag fugitive fleet. Adama, the warrior wants to fight the Cylons; Roslin says nope, they need to run, escape and … have babies! I love that. Adama did not sign up to run from a fight and thirsts for revenge though he knows a direct conflict would be suicide. Readying to go to battle, he notes in the corner of his bridge an attractive young couple flirting and then countermanding his own orders, directs the fleet to run, stating, “We need to make babies.”  

The left dominates much of our intellectual discourse. And within their ideas, an inherent strain of anti-human animus exists. Going back to Thomas Malthus in the 1700s and even today with the celebration of Paul Erlich, there is a potent belief that human equals bad. Despite the fact that Erlich’s 1968, subtley titled The Population Bomb, book has gotten, well, pretty much every prediction wrong, he was still feted on 60 Minutes just this past year. Malthus stated that 1 billion people means doom for the planet and our species. 

Erlich put the number at 3 billion; others have noted it would be six. We are at 7 billion; humanity has never seen less poverty, famine, and disease than today. The fact of this population growth and the near elimination of major famines, once one of the scourges of existence, has not quelled the debate. The Constitution Rights Foundation states, “In 1798, English economist Thomas Robert Malthus wrote an essay predicting that if humans did not check their fast-growing numbers, mass starvation would result. A debate over Malthus’ gloomy outlook ignited during his lifetime and continues today. 

The debate over the limits of human population growth began with Greek and other ancient thinkers. In 210 CE, Tertullian, an early Christian scholar, wrote: Our teeming population is the most substantial evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. . . . In every deed, pestilence, famine, and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance [large numbers] of the human race. This guy would fit in at a Greta Thunberg rally.

Not all agreed with this assessment. As contemporaries of Malthus at the time noted. “At the time of the American and French revolutions in the late 1700s, some English and French writers predicted unending improvement for humankind. William Goodwin, an English philosopher, wrote about a bountiful earth capable of indefinitely supporting the growing human population. A storm of criticism erupted after Malthus first published his essay in 1798. The optimists called his vision of unavoidable mass starvation a “doctrine of despair.” Others condemned his call for abolishing England’s Poor Laws, which provided relief for the starving homeless. The historian Thomas Carlyle dubbed Malthus’ new subject of economics the “dismal science.”  

And yet published this year in the Scientific American, Naomi Oreskes states the primary driver of plant and animal loss is habitat destruction caused primarily by the encroachment of a swelling human population. More people “has meant that ever more natural habitat is being used for agriculture, mining, industrial infrastructure, and urban areas,” says the Royal Society, one of the world’s leading scientific groups. About one million plant and animal species are nearing extinction, and at least 1,000 breeds of mammals used for human food and agriculture are threatened. We ought to have a plan for slowing the destructive surge in human population.”

And Aambar Agarwal, writing last year for Case Western University, On November 15, the United Nations (UN) projects that eight billion humans will live on Earth. In perspective, there were barely two billion humans alive a century ago—not even a quarter of the current population. The UN further predicts that by 2080, the world population could reach up to 10.4 billion.

The dramatic increase in population makes sense; public health, nutrition, hygiene, and medicine have vastly improved in the past few decades. But can the world sustain such a large population? As the population continues to grow, humans will consume Earth’s limited resources more rapidly. Food, water, housing, energy, and healthcare are just some of the basic human necessities. Seeking more land to cultivate food or wood to harness energy will lead to more significant deforestation, such as in the Amazon rainforest. Greater deforestation and food production efforts will drastically affect the climate, releasing more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and accelerating climate change. Climate change will then impact the lives of humans to a far greater extent than it already has. Extreme weather events will become more powerful and common—such as heatwaves and hurricanes—and disease-carrying vectors and waterborne diseases will expand.” Malthus would be proud while Carlyle is turning over in his grave.”

I began this podcast citing the Black Death. In one critical circumstance, it assisted societies (in my opinion) by ending the Feudal system. With so few workers, the serf population grew to power, culminating in movements such as the Peasant’s Revolt. And with the end of the Feudal system, the free labor movement would sow the seeds for capitalism, which has provided the greatest economic flourishing in history. I have made several gigantic leaps here, but both a capitalist, and a Marxist, arguing for the accrual of power to labor, would welcome a population decline. But there needs to be a critical distinction. In the Black Death, everyone died, from the peasants to, as Shipman notes, “The aristocrats also died in droves.” Our situation is very different. If we cannot quickly and efficiently automate care for our elderly, we are economically screwed, and the disruptions to those populations and the young will be profound.  

This is more akin to my thinking; Chelsea Follett of the ever-reliable Cato Institute puts some perspective, some facts, and a much-needed omission of the doom speculation so rife with the overpopulation fanatics. “As economist Julian Simon noted, “Whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster. Since Ehrlich began preaching about overpopulation-induced Armageddon, the number of people on the planet has more than doubled. Yet yearly, famine deaths have declined by millions. Recent famines are caused by war, not the exhaustion of natural resources. As production increased, prices fell, and calorie consumption rose. Hunger is in retreat. Human ingenuity proved to be the “ultimate resource,” as Simon put it.

Then there is the corollary put forth not just by the denizens of think tanks but by Elon Musk believes that we need more people, not less. Better scientific data shows that Earth’s population will peak around 2070, then begin a slow decline. And this brings an issue modern society faces, an issue never before seen in all of human history: gerontocracy.  

In Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns’ Coming Generational Storm, the authors write, “In 1950, there were 16.5 workers per Social Security beneficiary. That ratio fell to 3.4 by 2000. By the time the last baby boomers retire in 2030, there will be only two covered workers per beneficiary. Obviously, workers’ wages will no longer be sufficient to support the payments promised to those retirees. The aging American population is not a temporary phenomenon. The number of folks 65 and older will increase from 35.5 million in 2000 to 69.4 million in 2030, a trend that will continue through 2080. The Social Security Administration suggests that the population of the elderly will rise to 96.5 million by 2090. You could hardly exaggerate the social and economic effects of this aging of America, which is becoming one rapidly expanding retirement community.

Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, states, “All over the world, birth rates have collapsed, and we face the prospect of a shrinking population. Over two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries with birth rates below replacement, including India, China, the U.S., Brazil, and all of Europe. The United Nations projects that the global population will peak near the end of the century, but many demographers now expect that to occur much sooner — perhaps as early as 2050.”

Start with some simple economics, “The federal government continues to spend more than it taxes, causing its debt to spiral upward. A low birth rate means more retirees and fewer workers to support them — more people entitled to Social Security and Medicare, but fewer taxpayers — worsening the debt. Even if we were to rein in the debt, a shrinking, aging population means more non-working people wanting to buy things with their savings, but fewer people to produce them, causing rampant inflation.”

Historically this is not new. Caesar Augustus faced much the same issue. In a piece entitled “The Low Birth Rate in Ancient Rome: A possible contributing factor, AM Devine notes, “There is considerable evidence to show that Roman society in the late Republic and early Empire was afflicted by a low birth rate. Augustus, in 18 BCE, found it necessary to pass the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus to raise the birth rate by penalizing the unmarried childless. In 9 CE, he attempted to supplement this law with the lex papia Poopaea.” This last was a Roman law introduced to encourage and strengthen marriage. It included provisions against adultery and against celibacy after a certain age. Augustus was not the last to attempt to use laws as a cudgel to get couples to, well, get together. In terms of total fertility rates (TFR), governments, as governments will, resort to policies that have been interventionist and abusive. The most notorious natalist policies of the 20th century include those in communist Romania and communist Albania, under Nicolae Ceaușescu and Enver Hoxha, respectively. The policy of Romania (1967–1990) was very aggressive, including outlawing abortion and contraception and imposing routine pregnancy tests for women. But oppressive governments have also gone the other way that might garner the approval of the likes of Erlich and his supporter, though perhaps not openly. Some governments have sought to regulate which groups of society could reproduce through eugenic policies of forced sterilizations of ‘undesirable’ population groups. Such policies were carried out against ethnic minorities in Europe and North America in the first half of the 20th century and, more recently, in Latin America against the Indigenous population in the 1990s. And we see that with the Uighurs in China today, though such practices do not seem to be causing Disney or the National Basketball Association to cut ties with Xi Jingping’s regime.  

From around 10,000 BC to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, fertility rates worldwide were high by today’s standards. However, the onset of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, brought about what has come to be called the Demographic Transition, and TFR began a long-term decline in almost every region of the world, a decline that continues to this day. There is this odd correlation: the more successful a society becomes, the less they want to have babies.  

Even though there has been an increase in individual incomes in the last few decades, researchers have observed a negative correlation between the increased wealth and the number of children people choose to have; according to a report titled World Fertility Patterns 2015, global fertility levels dropped from just above five children in 1950 to around 2.5 children per woman in 2015. 

One theory of how cultural evolution has affected fertility rates is resulting from the trade-off between the number of children and the quality of life that parents desire to give each of them. As both men and women vie for well-paying jobs to attain a higher standard of living and compete for such jobs based on their education, the resources parents invest into each child’s upbringing, including education and inheritance, are crucial. Even the time parents can give to their children becomes an expensive currency.

As the National Institutes of Health states, “The fertility of the population of the United States is below replacement among those native-born, and above replacement among immigrant families and the socially deprived (Singh et al., 2001). However, the fertility rates of immigrants to the US have been found to decrease sharply in the second generation due to improved education and income. 

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal this past May, Janet Adamy notes, “What looked at first like a temporary lull triggered by the 2008 financial crisis has stretched into a prolonged fertility downturn. Provisional monthly figures show that about 3.66 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, a decline of 15% since 2007, even though there are 9% more women in their prime childbearing years. 

Do American women want fewer children? Or are life circumstances impeding them from having the children that they desire?  New evidence points to the latter explanation.” According to several studies, findings conclude that today’s young people feel that their standard of living is below that of their parents, so they focus on that to exclude having children. Adds Adamy, “These findings reflect a growing consensus among demographers that economic and social obstacles have become intractable deterrents to having children for many Americans. Young adults can’t afford to buy a house as nice as the one their parents raised them in or to pay for childcare while they are still repaying student loans. Many men lack the earning power to be providers because blue-collar jobs don’t pay as well, and fewer men are employed. More women can’t find a suitable partner because their own greater education and economic status makes it harder for them to find a man who measures up.”

Some of this is obvious crap. Of course, you do not live in a house as nice as your parents, nor did they when they were young unless there was some trust fund or their parents passed earlier than 65.   

My first residence was an ant-infested studio apartment (though in the heart of Chicago, I did love it). What seems to me more applicable is the suitable husband piece. When young men are raised on Call of Duty and porn at their beck and call and have not developed the necessities to date women, then there will be disparities.    

I think Elizabeth Grace Mathews writing in the Deseret News gets at the heart of the matter. “we no longer offer our young men any universal incentive to embrace the traditional responsibilities of adulthood. In a culture that values tolerance, many Americans fear being judgmental, particularly of the young. Those who hold unemployed young men to account, such as radio host Dave Ramsey, are often dismissed for their lack of empathy and understanding.

Therefore, we can no longer rely on our fellow Americans to maintain that men who work hard, support families, and contribute to their communities are worthy of praise, while those that prefer sloth to industry, porn to relationships, and dependence to self-reliance are worthy of marginalization or censure.

And, of course, the excrement is being taught in the schools. When a child is raised to fear climate and bullying, when they are taught that economic advancement is impossible, you get this. “Some young people say that by not having children, they’re helping to solve other global problems. “To me, it feels borderline unethical even to be having kids with the way the future is looking in terms of climate change and resource shortages and all of that,” said Cara Pattullo, a 31-year-old urban and environmental planner who lives with her boyfriend in Chicago. Instead, she thinks she might adopt or foster children when she gets older or forego childrearing altogether.”

And there is simple science. “One reason the U.S. has fewer children is that the teen birth rate has plunged 78% since its peak in 1991. Greater access to contraception, including long-acting methods such as intrauterine devices, has helped curb unplanned pregnancies that prompt the youngest women to halt their education and become mothers before they’re ready.”

Whaple attempts at optimism, “Sadly, the share of American adults who say that having children is very important to them has plummeted to 30 percent. What would happen if society stopped thinking of new children as a burden? What would happen if you thanked a friend, a co-worker, or even a complete stranger for bringing a new child into the world? You should — because we need children as much as they need us — and not only for economic reasons.” Let me conclude with Sonia Sodha writing for the left (and I mean left) of center Guardian, “It is difficult to overstate the massive economic consequences for aging societies with falling birth rates, as a shrinking workforce has to shoulder the pension health and care costs.”   

What I failed to mention that is one of the best things about the new Galactica is that it was humans who made the Cylons! I know a valued listener. It is hard to imagine a world in which AI could produce a race of creatures in superhuman metal bodies with humanity’s cumulated knowledge and then try to take us over. Except for movies like Blade Runner, Terminator, AI, iRobot, the Matrix, and Ex Machina. But the decline of our Republic will probably not be at the hands of these machines but rather our inability to conceive a culture and even some wiser policies that create more of the most wonderful creation I have seen, a human baby.  

Yet many reject this. One 36-year-old woman noted that she plays with her nephews and nieces, and she is “good.” The feeling of being a parent is not something that you can easily describe, and she cannot know what she is missing. We are growing into an ever more tentative society more concerned with safety and security than opportunity and experiences. But what is the point of all of this?  

I have experienced romantic love and marriage. I have seen sunrises on four continents and tasted the best foods. None of this compares to holding your own child. We need workers to nourish our bodies. We need children to nourish our souls.