Is an economic, political and cultural collapse of societies owing to falling fertility rates imminent and inevitable? Does Elon Musk have a point? The worry that the alarmists put forward is: the absence of an expanding population, let alone a collapsing one, will negatively impact GDP growth.
This is an argument that betrays the class of those making it. GDP growth that is powered by population growth is not actual growth. What we want is rising levels of prosperity for all people. The elite cornering a greater percentage of GDP generated by more number of poor people consuming more stuff is not growth in real terms.
The global Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has been falling for a few generations now. In 2022, the global TFR stood at 2.3. India, which had a higher fertility rate than most nations for the longest time, showed a lower TFR (2) in 2021. The replacement rate is 2.1, which means these rates – for both the world in general and India in particular – are still just above or just below replacement levels. There is, therefore, no actual threat of a population collapse any time soon. Especially given the base is 8.2 billion for the world and 1.4 billion for India. What the world has achieved, thus, is population stabilisation. That, for readers old enough to remember, was a policy goal for much of the 20th century.
Stop burdening the planet
Tamil Nadu and Kerala have had below-replacement-level TFR for a few decades. These societies are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and healthy ones in India. Sure, the median age of a population that has a falling TFR will go up a bit. Which does have a one-time implication on how we financially support the older population. But the more important question to consider in the longer term is this: As a society if we are improving life expectancy and not the quality of life in extended years, are we creating a large segment dependent on the young for resources? That’s an unsustainable, unfair and unproductive demographic Ponzi scheme.
However, we have also been running a worldwide Ponzi scheme in the other direction – driven by an ever-increasing population. This is not sustainable either, given how quickly the planet is reaching its limit (if climate change data is any indicator). The one thing that humans do, which imposes the highest cost in terms of their carbon emission into the atmosphere, is having children. Is funding retirement accounts reason enough to destroy the planet’s delicate balance?
India and many emerging economies have dismal levels of productivity. Their per capita incomes are too low. So, the prospect of economic growth in just moving these large swathes to the levels of productivity and prosperity achieved by countries part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), should be enough to put any qualms about a growth collapse to rest. And subsequently, achieving actual growth of a stabilised population after that – via gains in overall human productivity – should be the goal of any reasonable society. Those seeking greater profits by merely expanding the market to more people without improving their lives are cartoonish versions of the capitalist who cannot be allowed to inform public policy.
Japan, which has famously had below replacement TFR for over half a century, is often cited as an example of such an economic collapse. But it is still a very prosperous society. And if it has run out of young people to do the productive things it wants done, it can easily throw its doors open to immigration. The fact though is, that Japan hasn’t run out of people in that sense – it has tapered over the ‘crisis’ through what all societies will do in the future: increased adoption of technology. And this has increased the country’s rates of productivity even further. Sure, the country has had lower rates of GDP growth. But for an already rich place, that doesn’t look so bad as long as people are doing well. If Japan decided it absolutely needed more people, it could look at the Indians, Nigerians, and Sudanese who are more than willing to take up jobs there. That Japan doesn’t want to do this either means it is doing okay or is racist or both.
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Having children is more than bad physics
The utilitarian arguments for higher TFR in a planet that is burdened under emissions, simply have no basis. There are over eight billion of us; we are in no danger of going extinct. On the contrary, our actions are making other species go extinct. And if one part of the world is facing a shortage of people, which is difficult to fathom, several others can fill that need. Every additional human being we bring to this planet is going to emit more CO2 just to survive. It’s just bad physics and bad ethics to have children at this point.
These utilitarian arguments are often followed by moral and cultural ones that promote natalism. The most common one is that having children gives purpose, meaning and joy to one’s life. When people cite these reasons in polite company, most of us nod and move on. But economist Catherine Pakaluk’s recent book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, which has become a cult classic in some ways, urges educated women to have more children. A lot more. Pakaluk has 14 (eight of them are her own, six of them are her step-children). What she seems to ignore is, it’s education that has the best correlation with lower TFR. Women who stay in school longer tend to have fewer kids, which is true at all levels of education and across the world. The only reasonable conclusion, then, is that women who have greater agency over their bodies choose to have fewer children. Instead, Pakaluk, an author and researcher herself, blames education for making women have fewer children.
South African philosopher and academic David Benatar, in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence gets to the core philosophical issue in answering the question of purpose and meaning: it is the asymmetry between the pleasure of an unborn and the pain of a living person. He even writes “Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure.” An unborn child who forgoes pleasure loses nothing, while anyone who is alive knows the idea of pain too well. And this asymmetry, Benatar argues, makes not being born the better option. He makes the point that human beings give their lives meaning by indulging in several actions, many of which may be wrong. Therefore, assigning meaning to one life isn’t good reason to create another life.
Benatar’s dense work can be understood more easily thus: the lack of consent from the unborn makes giving birth to another life a problematic enterprise. One can, and most people do, still go ahead and become parents. The argument they put forward at that point is: it’s natural. Canadian philosopher Christine Overall in her book Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate dismisses that assumption. Quite correctly, she points to several aspects of what we consider natural that we also find despicable. Something being natural is no reason to do it blindly. Rape, murder and plunder were quite common and ‘natural’ until recently in human history. We don’t condone them in 2024. Why is childbirth held to a different standard then?
Our species, as the most dominant species that this planet has ever seen, is not under any threat of implosion. The question is, how do we transition from the population boom of the 19th and 20th centuries to return to a more normal and stabilised population? If we don’t transition back, and do it well, we run the risk of facing such extreme weather events that living on this planet may not be worth the effort anymore. If that happens, much of the alarmism of economic implosion will be subsumed by the planet’s implosion.
Nilakantan RS is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide. He tweets @puram_politics. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)