“Suddenly there aren’t enough babies. The whole world is alarmed.” This is the telling title of last week’s grim WSJ article by Greg Ip and Janet Adamy. It’s not just the privileged West whose birthrates are falling below replacement levels, the authors explain. Shockingly, the decline is happening everywhere, including the third-world countries that Paul Ehrlich called out for (as he saw it) overbreeding in 1968 in his Population Bomb.
Ehrlich believed that there were simply too many babies in the world. The effects of this overpopulation, this fungus or plague (as he saw it) upon the planet would be catastrophic, if left unchecked. Well, they’re checked now. The results aren’t good. To name just one obvious problem of many, when the numbers of retirees threaten to overwhelm those in the workforce, the economy is going to be in dire straits.
So why is this happening and how might we reverse the problem? First, a lot of the arguments that Ehrlich brought up about people being a strain on the plant are still taken by some as gospel truth. In an interview about her new book on animal rights, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in fact, said that no one should be having kids right now–so the fertility crash is actually a good thing. You can see the relevant excerpt from her conversation with Shadi Hamid here.
Hamid pushes back to Nussbaum’s argument, noting especially that India is under population replacement rate for the first time in its history. Nussbaum’s response? Great, India still has way too many people. It was clear that no economic argument Hamid brought up was going to dissuade Nussbaum.
I’ve found it fascinating that so many individuals who actively promote animal rights do not seem to like people very much (Peter Singer is another one who comes to mind). It seems appropriate, by contrast, that three excellent books that have come out this spring that do propose solutions to the crisis WSJ identifies, all start from the perspective of treasuring people and institutions that promote human flourishing—beginning with marriage and family.
Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly (see reviews here at Current from Dixie Dillon Lane and Ivana Greco). I particularly appreciated Carney’s theological discussion of the “civilizational sadness” he sees among those who don’t wish for children today: a belief that it’s not just that kids are bad (for us, for the planet), but that we ourselves are irredeemably bad. Of course, Christians know this is a lie—and a lie born of bad theology. But it’s a lie that has been selling well since, well, at least the days of Ehrlich.
Brad Wilcox, Get Married (see my review at Providence Magazine; Ashley Fitzgerald’s review here at Current is coming this summer!). Wilcox brings together over a decade of research to show that married people are overall much happier than those who aren’t. What I found particularly fascinating is Wilcox’s finding that many left-leaning college-educated people “talk left, walk right,” when it comes to marriage. In other words, they verbally affirm the modern “anything goes” standards but are remarkably conservative in their own personal lives. Presumably for the same reason that Silicon Valley tech moguls “raise their kids tech-free.”
But most important of all, perhaps, is Catherine Pakaluk’s recent book Hannah’s Children (which Agnes Howard reviewed for Current), which shows the value of qualitative research over quantitative. It is one thing for WSJ and other quantitative scientists to look at the sheer numbers and say, “oh, dear!” It’s another to do what Pakaluk did so well—examine the 5% of the population who joyfully choose to have 5+ kids. Why do it? Because they really love children more than other “goods” they could have chosen. And they enjoy life together with other people.
Sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer. I think about this with the hand-wringing over the “fertility crash.” The only solutions that are likely to work are not ones that focus just on incentivizing people to have more babies—which, by the way, doesn’t work. Just ask the Roman emperor Augustus. Or Hungary’s Victor Orbán. History repeatedly shows that you can’t just bribe people into having more kids, if this is against their values. Rather, to go back to Carney’s point about “civilizational sadness,” our society doesn’t seem to value people in general. AI and animal rights, on the other hand, are flourishing just fine—and that’s part of the problem.
So, the only solution likely to result in more babies is creating a culture that clearly values all people and encourages people to delight in each other’s humanity. Single and married, young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor. People. God’s image bearers.