Pro-natalism (the idea that people, or rather, women, should have more babies than they choose to do at present) has become an established orthodoxy,[1]. The central claim is that, unless something changes soon, human populations both global and national, are going to decline rapidly, with a lot of negative consequences. This is simply not true, on any plausible assumptions about fertility[2]
There’s no need for me to do any calculations here. For many decades he Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has been producing population projections for the world, and individual countries, under a variety of scenarios. One finding is unambiguous. Short of a drastic decline in fertility, far beyond what we are now seeing there will be more people on Earth at the end of this century than there were at the beginning
The range of projections considered plausible is the shaded area. All the projections in that range show population increasing for several decades to come, and remaining higher than at present at the end of the century. The reason is simple. Global fertility is close to the replacement level (one surviving daughter per woman) at present, but past growth means that a large proportion of the population is in, or approaching, child-bearing years. It’s only when this group ages out that the effects of declining fertility, assumed in the lower projections will start to dominate
What about the blue dotted lines? These assume drastic reductions in fertility. On the low side, that involves the entire world becoming like South Korea, where the combination of high employment rates for women and pre-modern male attitudes on gender role has produced reproduction rates below 0.5.
But even in this extreme case, world population in 2100 only falls to 6 billion, the same as in 2000. I was around at the time, and did not feel as if there were too few people about.
One reason these predictions have only a limited range of variation is that most of the growth in population is already baked in. There are 2 billion or so children under 14 at present in the world, and most of them will be around in 2100 as will their soon-to-be-born siblings.
What about the need for workers? One unsatisfactory feature of long-running projections like this is the use of outdated statistical concepts such as the “dependency ratio”, that is, the ratio of people aged 15-64 to everyone else. That made sense 50 years ago, when this range represented the period between leaving school and retiring in most industrial societies. But these days (and it will be even more so in 2100) education continues well past 20 and retirement is often deferred to 70 or more. A look at the age group 25-69 shows that it is going to remain more or less stable in absolute numbers declinging only marginally relative to the growing population
Population projections for individual countries depend largely on what happens to migration. In the absence of stringent restrictions, the flow of migrants from poorer to richer countries will largely offset differences in fertility, meaning that the trajectory for individual countries will look similar to that for the world.
Of course, if you combine low fertility and an already-old population with hostility to immigrants, and you can’t stop your own young people from seeking a better life abroad, you end up with a sharply declining population, as in South Korea and Hungary. But it’s much easier to let more migrants in (there are plenty of young adults, many of them well-educated, knocking at the door) than to persuade people to have more babies.
There is no difficulty in gaining access to these projections, and anyone with a spreadsheet and a bit of time can reproduce them. Yet I’ve read dozens of pro-natalist articles in both traditional and new media and the evidence is never mentioned. Maybe I’m living on the wrong planet.
fn1. Some this is driven by racists worrying specifically about the lack of white babies. But the belief that declining fertility is a crisis is also dominant among centrists, like those pushing the “abundance agenda”, who also support high levels of immigration. Archetypal example is Matt Yglesias who advocates One billion Americans
fn2 There are plenty of ways in which we are risking massively increased mortality (nuclear war, climate catastrophe, pandemics, AI apocalypse etc), but having babies won’t help in those cases.
{ 68 comments }
Martin Holterman 06.19.25 at 8:14 pm
I think you’ve already answered your own question. The concern is not that there won’t be enough people on earth, the concern is that there won’t be enough white people in a particular country.
Dan 06.19.25 at 8:32 pm
“Some this is driven by racists […]. But the belief that declining fertility is a crisis is also dominant among centrists”
Centrists uncritically taking right wing conspiracies at face value? Surely not.
J 06.19.25 at 10:13 pm
That’s it. You found the answer. “Pro-natalists” are just regular ol’ racists. There is no further analysis necessary. Unsurprisingly, pro-natalists are also typically anti-immigration, since the increasing world population pretty much undermines their argument, unless you say the quiet part out loud: that their only interest is in larger number of the correct color of babies.
Alex SL 06.19.25 at 10:15 pm
As can be expected from previous discussions on this site, I agree completely. There seem to be two motivations, as far as I can tell:
First, racism. A good chunk of pro-natalists are not actually worried about too few babies, they are worried about too few white babies (or Japanese or Chinese, presumably, although I am not following their political discourse as closely as that of “The West”). The nominal centrists among them are not as crass in their language, but it is great replacement theory at national and global levels.
Second, and more understandably, worry about the dependency ratio. Many otherwise smart and well-meaning people worry about the sustainability of pensions, of the economy, and of care for the elderly, because they do not appear to grasp that even now, only a small and shrinking part of the population is needed to produce food and work in factories, mines, transport, and retail. I am not an economist, so maybe I am missing something, but even if we were smart enough to voluntarily bring our population down to a sustainable five billion to avoid hunger, war, and disease catastrophically collapsing it to under three billion a few decades later, it seems to me that the dependency ratio would be a non-issue if we were also willing to invest in elderly care to the degree that we are currently investing in stuff like computer games, screen entertainment, and successive tech bubbles. Every single problem we face is a political decision we made and could, if we wanted to, make differently.
Behind both of these lurks the strange misconception that one planet can feed, water, and supply with luxuries like two cars per family, a nice, large garden, and an annual overseas holiday a population of infinity people. Although, in fairness, the first group may well think that that is only a requirement for their own ethnic group, while everybody else should remain in misery, and others may have watched too much science fiction and think we will soon expand to Mars with its bounty of fertile soil and clean water. Or they cynically realise that forever population growth is unsustainable but want to kick the can down the road in the hope that the next generation will be brave enough to face the presumed problem of lower dependency ratio.
engels 06.19.25 at 11:38 pm
I thought it was always supposed to be a national (or European etc) not a global issue. As I see it there are two sets of doommongers. There are people who don’t want ever-increasing immigration (racists, by CT consensus). Then there are people who are worried about the population going down (perhaps for economic reasons), and have noticed there are an awful lot of group 1 and that calling them racists doesn’t make them disappear. Saying “why don’t you just increase immigration.. are you a racist?” may be a good argument against 1 but it misses the point of 2.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t personally give a crap about any of this one way or the other.)
engels 06.19.25 at 11:53 pm
One thing I do have an opinion on is the usual liberal assumption the decline in birth rates is a matter of “choice”. Men and women make their own babies but they do not make them under self-selected circumstances, eg.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/millions-people-delayed-starting-family-31901691
J-D 06.20.25 at 12:39 am
I’ve mentioned here before that any discussion of the effect of changing fertility on the aged dependency ratio which takes no account of the necessary offsetting effect on the youth dependency ratio (and there is plenty of such discussion) is valueless and should be disregarded.
John Q 06.20.25 at 12:56 am
@1-3 I’ve edited to make the point that centrist pro-natalism is mostly associated with support for high levels of immigration (typically focused on skilled immigrants). Racism isn’t a sufficient explanation
@6 Engels, I agree, and plan to write more on this. But I don’t think removal of economic constraints like high housing costs will return us to replacement fertility levels.
@7 J-D Yes, this reflects a Finance Department view of the world.
dilbert dogbert 06.20.25 at 1:31 am
The bottom blue dashed line looks like the shape of the US population curve if all immigration is stopped now. A loss of 100 million by 2100.
Ross Geraldo 06.20.25 at 2:16 am
It’s more or less a given that society has been in a period of decadence for the last twenty or so years — if not more (pretty much all forms of media can handily verify this, with interviews and talk shows being an especially striking example).
Consequently, birth rates are in a period of decrease. It really is, as far as I can tell, a reflection of the societal ethos. This ethos, at current, is characterized by indulgence and economic hardship for most.
Julienz 06.20.25 at 2:30 am
Slightly off topic but I find the dependency ratio a problematic measure. In developed nations a child is almost totally dependant on its parents for physical care and then for food, clothing, shelter, and transport, and on the state for education, for at least the first eighteen years of life and often considerably longer. During this time children make no virtually no economic contribution and they are not born with savings. To consider children as equivalently dependant as the same number of persons over 65, or even over 70, seems to me wrong. Many older people will never need any aged care. They will continue to feed themselves, bathe themselves and otherwise attend to their personal cares until they shuffle off this mortal coil. Many remain in paid employment, do voluntary work ,or provide unpaid care for grandchildren to the age of 70 and beyond. Certainly pension provision is an issue but I don’t buy the assumption that people over 65 demand care from others at anywhere the same extent that children do.
Colin R 06.20.25 at 4:20 am
Yes, the numbers behind pro-natalist arguments never make much sense. It’s strange that racism gets mentioned as a potential factor, while misogyny doesn’t. Resentment against women (which is not unrelated to racism) sure seems to play a big role in who is concerned about birthrates, much more than concerns about the future do.
CHETAN R MURTHY 06.20.25 at 4:54 am
John Q:
Um, I feel compelled to note that Yglesias isn’t the most …. reliable commentator. Maybe there are other centrists who also argue for 1B Americans. but Yggles ….. well, he makes a living by alternating between so-reasonable-that-many-others-are-already-saying-it and scorching-hot-takes-that-would-melt-down-your-car-engine. A number of commenters at LG&M have noted that this is probably tied to his business model as a guy who needs clicks in order to eat.
So …. I think taking him seriously is a mistake. As Dan Davies’ 1-minute MBA advises, “Fibbers forecasts are worthless” (and also, he might add today, “and so are guys’ who live on clicks”).
Substantively, I agree with a number of other commenters: this is about white babies and always has been. Sometimes the “pro-natalists” dress it up in a concern for the rest of the world, but it’s hard to take that seriously when it’s clear they’re white supremacists from the jump.
Alex SL 06.20.25 at 5:58 am
Julienz,
Okay, trying to be devil’s advocate here, despite rejecting myself the conclusion you reject:
As I understand it, the reasoning is about either (a) working age population relative to retirees, purely in form of physical bodies, or (b) what you call pension provision. The first may be more reasonable than it seems to you because in some countries, hardly any elderly people remain in paid employment. In Germany it was at least in the past the case that people had to retire at a certain age even if they wanted to continue working; I remember the case of a prominent biology professor who set up a lab in the USA because his Germany university was not allowed to employ him after he hit 65. May have changed now and would at any rate be 67 or something, but it isn’t that easy. I also don’t know if we want a world where the answer to a changing dependency ratio is, well, you can work at age 80 if you have to…
The real problem with this take on the depency ratio is, again, that it naively assumes that a constant percentage of workers is needed to produce goods and services, when today only a small fraction of the population works in those areas, and increasing numbers of us have jobs that exist effectively only because we want them to: a combination of admin jobs that wouldn’t have existed fifty years ago, new markets created by consumer choices like entertainment and tourism, and government investment in public goods. I am not saying they are all BS; I am saying that they are not a question of survival like having 80% of people be farmers was in past ages. We can decide to have less need for holidays in Bali and more for elderly care, redirect funds accordingly, and that was that. The problem is not that we don’t have enough working age people, it is that few people want to pay taxes for things like elderly care and health care while they are themselves young and healthy.
Regarding pension provision, I recently had a frustrating conversation with my mother, who seems to be under the impression that because of the declining dependency ratio, a defined benefit state pension is unsustainable, but a private superannuation fund gambling on the stock market is future-proof. I tried, seemingly in vain, to explain that both are equally a paper claim against the economic activity available in my society when I hit retirement age, and the only difference is that in the latter case, a private company is taking some of the money out as fees. If the former is unsustainable because insufficient working age people are left to run the economy, then so is the latter, only the mechanism of action will be a collapse of superannuation funds instead of the government running out of money.
Matt 06.20.25 at 6:02 am
I am, I think, very largely in agreement with the claims in the post. But, I think it’s too fast to just say “this is about white babies and always has been.” I say that because, in my “sphere”, this doesn’t seem to capture many of the loudest “pro natalist” voices. One example is the Boston University philosopher, Victor Kumar. He has several posts on his substack on the topic that can be found here: https://0penquestionsblog.substack.com
I don’t find his arguments very compelling, but as one might gather from his name, “white babies” are not a significant concern of his. And, while I don’t think there is much value in engaging with racists on most topics, this is a topic where it seems too quick to me to say that all of the opposition are racists, so we don’t have to engage with any of them.
Chris Armstrong 06.20.25 at 8:44 am
I’m glad you’ve posted on this, John. I also find the view baffling – and scary. One wonders what those who worry about this “problem” think we should do about it. The obvious “solutions” (if this were actually a problem) would be things like better childcare, a boom in state-built housing, better parental leave, and redistribution down from the oligarchs. But somehow I’m not sure this is quite what the tech bros and oddballs who worry about this stuff have in mind.
I also find the take on the environment really odd. I’ve seen smart people say that we need to boost the population so that we can tackle climate change quickly. That seems a weird view to me, but it is very weird indeed to marry that view with a complete lack of concern for the dreadful wider consequences human population growth has had on the environment.
Salem 06.20.25 at 9:13 am
Pro-natalists view more people as a good thing – the “ultimate resource,” to quote Julian Simon. The large increases in world population in recent decades are seen as a large part of why the world has become so much more prosperous. The median projection shows world population peaking before 2100, rather than continuing to grow indefinitely – a disaster, from this perspective.
What’s more, time won’t stop in 2100. The median projection shows population falling by 2100, and – if you had extended the time series – continuing to fall thereafter. Pro-natalism is necessarily a long-term concern. You can’t dismiss long-term concerns by arguing that they won’t happen any time soon – especially if, as with world population, it takes a very long time to turn the ship around.
engels 06.20.25 at 9:35 am
Thanks John I’ll look out for it.
It’s also worth noting that in Britain immiserating large families has been official state policy for some time (whether that is due to racism or something else is an interesting question):
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-children
Thomas P 06.20.25 at 10:41 am
Then there is the issue that the elites can only siphon of a certain percentage of the total economy without causing unrest. More people means a bigger economy and thus more money for the wealthy if not for the regular people.
Jonshine 06.20.25 at 11:41 am
In practical terms (from a UK perspective) there are many anti-natalist policies which would make sense to change and the left/liberals/progressives would like to change: Three child benefit cap; Maternity-paternity leave inequality; Extension of childcare offering below school age; further/higher education tuition fee reform; maternity/birth/neonatal care quality improvement. Even the suggestion to reform inheritance tax on the deceased to a lifetime gift allowance for the recipients points in a pro-natalist direction.
In general terms and taking the long view, immigration from less-prosperous societies cannot be a solution to below-replacement population rates unless we expect those less-prosperous societies to remain relatively poor. I cannot imagine a principled defense of global inequality; therefore, we should hope both that prosperity is widely shared, and that a mechanism is found for prosperous societies to self-perpetuate.
steven t johnson 06.20.25 at 2:20 pm
STJ, I’ve asked you previously not to comment on my threads – JQ
Peter Dorman 06.20.25 at 6:34 pm
I agree completely with this post, and I think it does a service by providing the UN projections, which I often used when I was teaching development econ. Demographic inertia is an important concept to understand. All that said, it’s true that some specific countries, those with substantial welfare states and rapidly aging populations, are feeling some economic stress on this account. Two thoughts here:
(1) It’s worth keeping in mind the comparison between the rate of increase in the dependency ratio or some better metric of net welfare support and the rate of productivity growth. As long as the second exceeds the first, which it usually does, living standards do not need to decline under normal circumstances — this even without increased immigration etc. This point was made strenuously in the U.S. during debates over Social Security and may need to be made again soon.
(2) For many, and I hope most, of us, the world already has too many people. This exacerbates environmental problems, especially habitat loss and extinction, and more space per capita would allow us to have more access to wilderness, uncrowded beaches and all the rest. The problem is getting from here to there. I prefer to think of the economic stress, if any, of transitioning to a much lower global population as a sort of multi-generational investment: people in the present assume a cost for the benefit of future generations. Of course, population decline on a decadal time scale need not require any significant cost at all, so the investment argument applies only in the sense of “less rapid improvement in living standards” rather than absolute decline.
marcel proust 06.20.25 at 8:33 pm
The cynicism that Thomas P expresses is a welcome bit of fresh air.
<a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2025/06/19/are-pro-natalists-living-on-the-same-planet/#comment-845205>Chetan R Murthy: Back in the day, there was a funny TV commercial. Perhaps we could update your phrase, “and so are guys’ who live on clicks” to clicks dig the tall tale.
Kenny Easwaran 06.20.25 at 9:50 pm
I’m disappointed that the Crooked Timber commentariat has become so credulous of attributing any disagreement to right-wing-ness!
I was expecting the two footnotes to give support to the claims that they are on – but I just don’t see any support for the idea that pro-natalism (as in the idea that it would be better for more people to exist than fewer, rather than just a matter of indifference, or actively bad) has become orthodoxy, or for the idea that it is “simply not true … that human populations … are going to decline rapidly, with a lot of negative consequences.”
On the first point, I can see that there are now people who explicitly endorse pro-natalist views, in a way that there weren’t many a decade or two ago, but that’s very different from saying this is orthodoxy. There are still plenty of people who endorse the idea that things like absolute greenhouse gas emissions reduction are more important than per capita greenhouse gas emissions reduction (so that anything like immigration or births that increases the population counts as a net negative), or say that earth is above its population carrying capacity (so that it would be better if there were fewer people), and are not in any danger of being considered “unorthodox”. I definitely don’t think anti-natalism is orthodoxy either, but this is a topic that is clearly in debate right now. (And the fact that at least some people seem to think that it’s plausible that pro-natalism only exists on the political right seems quite counter to the idea that it is orthodoxy, since orthodoxy clearly has to span non-trivial parts of the right, left, center, and possibly other points in the spectrum.)
On the second, I think the displayed graph actually demonstrates the point that population is soon to start decreasing drastically – the only way I can interpret it as not demonstrating the point is by assuming that whatever happens beyond the year 2100 doesn’t matter. It’s true that the graph doesn’t show whether the consequences will be negative or positive. But if you think that individual human lives are typically worth living, and that the typical human improves lives for others more than they harm them, then a decrease in the number of human lives seems like it should be cause for sadness, even ignoring the compounding benefits of artistic innovation and scientific discovery and so on.
Alex SL 06.20.25 at 10:14 pm
Salem,
I can see how one cannot have a complex, industrial society with a world population of one million. I struggle to see how there is any difference between having one billion and having ten billion in that regard (expect in that the ten are using an unsustainable amount of resources), because even among the one billion only a fraction would be needed to maintain complex industry and research. I can only assume that people who argue more humans = more prosperity for any individual human do not understand the concept of diminishing returns, nor resource limits. It reminds me of those who argue that adding more researchers will increase scientific progress in a linear fashion, when in reality at some point researchers merely find out the same things in parallel.
Of course, even if they were right, there would still be the problem of no planet being able to support infinity people.
Finally, the assumption that population degrowth would simply continue forever past the year 2100 until the last few humans turn the lights off after having decided to have no children is bizarre. But perhaps not surprising; it is based on the same simplistic approach to understanding the world that is behind the idea of more humans = more prosperity and behind eternal growth: there is only ever one parameter to every system, that parameter remains constant, and what’s that? Negative feedback loops? Never heard of it.
In reality, this is all idle speculation. At eight billion people, we are apparently already using 1.5x as many resources as the planet can sustainably supply, the economy is growing every year to use more resources, the population hasn’t peaked yet, and there is no indication that we will stop burning fossil fuels until we have heated the planet to a degree that agriculture and freshwater can support many fewer people than they currently do. The most likely scenario is therefore not that people will slowly decrease their numbers, but that the next 200 years will very unpleasantly and more drastically decrease our numbers, after which the surviving, much impoverished humans will be back to having 5-8 children per family so that 2.5 survive. To avoid that, we would have to turn off all coal, oil, and gas burning right now, as good as instantly, across the entire planet, and all accept consumption levels of, say, the 1960s, and for obvious reasons, that isn’t going to happen.
J, not that one 06.20.25 at 10:14 pm
When I read a Western academic writing that “X is an established orthodoxy,” I interpret this as meaning that most not all-that-well educated people in Western countries believe X is obvious but that there’s no support for it and that belief in X is more or less arbitrary. I don’t think this is true for pro-natalism. So my next immediate thought would be to ask why the writer wants people to believe that I (given that I’m a more-or-less average citizen of a Western country without an advanced degree) believe that pro-natalism is obviously correct. These are reflexive reactions and I know that’s not what’s going on here, but I’m not really sure what “established orthodoxy” does indicate in this post.
J, not that one 06.20.25 at 10:53 pm
This is true for nations but not necessarily for communities. If a community is defined by continuity of the people and families living in it, immigration isn’t easier. It’s probably not that hard to persuade people to have more babies if there’s still some memory of a time when having babies was more expected than it is now (which is really not that long ago even in progressive areas in the West).
For those communities in Western states, this is largely about white babies because “conservative” people in less progressive areas are the groups that are more tied to older forms of religious ethics. Conservative people in Western countries who aren’t white often already have immigration as an expectation. (Though they often aren’t about to shift the means of propagating their own communities, for fairly obvious reasons.)
(Still, IMO what’s going by “pro-natalism” is often just a dislike for how girls are socialized and a wish for them to be more traditionally feminine and family-oriented, and less career- and public-oriented, and a feeling that all kinds of uncomfortable things would just go away if girls grew up differently.)
John Q 06.21.25 at 2:37 am
@Kenny E and J: A week or so ago, I got a call from the BBC inviting me to a panel discussion on pro-natalism. I was catching a plane so I couldn’t do it. But if an obscure Australian economist, with a handful of blog posts on the topic, gets this kind of attention, I think it’s safe to say that critics of pro-natalism are thin on the ground. So, I’m comfortable with “orthodoxy”
On Kenny’s second point. At least in my dialect of English, 2100 is not “soon”. Humanity will be lucky to make it through the next 75 years without major disasters (pandemics, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, AI apocalypse). If those are avoided, and our great-grandchildren are worried about declining population, they can easily fix the problem the old-fashioned way.
Scott P. 06.21.25 at 10:11 pm
What’s more, time won’t stop in 2100. The median projection shows population falling by 2100, and – if you had extended the time series – continuing to fall thereafter. Pro-natalism is necessarily a long-term concern. You can’t dismiss long-term concerns by arguing that they won’t happen any time soon – especially if, as with world population, it takes a very long time to turn the ship around.
While true, the farther out you go, the less reliable predictions tend to be. Already, if in 1970 you projected the population in 2100 based on demographics, you’d be way off. The error bars on our 2100 prediction should be around +/- 6 billion, rising as we go further out.
engels 06.21.25 at 10:29 pm
Not sure where this fits in:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/20/tech/durov-100-children-inheritance-scli-intl
Omega Centauri 06.22.25 at 2:18 pm
No one has mentioned religion. Not only is taking Genisis (be fruitful and multiply) as a command from God in play. Also the battle for the demographic dominance of my religion, versus the others can be a potent incentive for many.
Of course Alex is so right in many ways. We also don’t have any good bounds on what size of population is required to maintain a complex economy. Past experience may be a poor quide in the era of extensive AI. What if the singularity people are part correct, even if only partially?
engels 06.22.25 at 2:28 pm
I suppose the other side of the “natalism” debate is euthanasia, a momentous ethical issue which the UK is discussing in a very UK way:
“Even with the savings that might come from assisted dying if people take up the service – and it feels uncomfortable talking about savings in this context, to be honest – setting up this service will also take time and money that is in short supply. There isn’t a budget for this.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/22/wes-streeting-nhs-assisted-dying-service-mps-commons-bill
somebody who actually observes the alliances these dingbats make 06.22.25 at 7:00 pm
Responding to their theories is a waste of time – observing and mentioning their actual alliances is critical to understanding them. There are many pro-natalist policies which could immediately be adopted in America, for example, any time the nation wanted them: free pre-natal care, free post-partum nutrition assistance, greatly expanded parental leave, mandated parental leave, expanded workplace protections for those who take leave to care for or enrich a child, government payments for child care, free government programs for every new parent to get support, teaching and assistance from each other, free mental health care for those negatively affected by post-partum mental health crises, a crash program of fostering and adoption for older children in state care. These are easily within the financial reach of America and certainly would result in many having larger families, and those without families feeling more free to start them. But each and every pro-natalist hates these ideas and is aligned with people who would rather cut their own child’s throat than have .0001 percent of their money go towards assisting poor families. They’re simply liars who loathe women and black people; there’s nothing more to the actual pro-natalist worldview than that. Anyone who pretends otherwise is either a rube or a dimwit.
Edward Gregson 06.23.25 at 8:13 am
Some context about Yglesias’s One Billion Americans proposal is that it was inspired by journalist Doug Saunders’s Maximum Canada idea, a thought experiment/proposal that Canada could increase its population to 100 million by 2100 and that this would be a worthwhile endeavour for Canada. Demographically this is a much more plausible proposal than Yglesias’s and could be carried out to a much greater extent through immigration than the One Billion Americans idea which would likely require a change in birth rate trends either in America or the source countries.
I don’t know to what extent population decline is a real problem or will ever be a real problem, but it seems like some of the concerns raised around it are being dismissed here a little glibly. It’s a big deal if governments are going to start expecting people to work into their 70s, or if unprecedentedly large sections of the labour force are going to be tied up staffing nursing homes. Medical science has gotten good enough that basically everybody is probably going to be a candidate for expensive end-of-life care at some point. And countering these issues with references to hypothetical apocalypses seems like a deflection. Demographic decline is probably both survivable and unavoidable, but I think more than just this one graph is needed to make that case.
More generally and to Jonshine’s (@20) point, it does seem bad for progressives to just implicitly accept that either higher standards of living or progressive cultural values come with below replacement birth rates, because long term that means that to maintain its population, the progressive global society we might aspire to must maintain reservoirs of either poverty or regressive mores to do the reproducing for it.
Tm 06.23.25 at 9:15 am
engels: “Men and women make their own babies but they do not make them under self-selected circumstances”
What else is new?
Tm 06.23.25 at 9:39 am
If you look at the graph featured in https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/04/baby-bust, taken from a recent Lancet study, I think there’s little doubt as to what drives pronatalism. Europe, North America, China and Japan, but also Iran and Turkey, as well as most of South America are already below replacement fertility. India is close. The only parts of the world where high fertility is still experienced are most of Africa and some (the poorest) parts of Asia.
The EU has a birth deficit of 1.2 million per year, Russia about .6 million, China 1.4 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Vital_statistics), Japan almost 1 million, the US birth excess has shrunk to a half million and will soon turn negative.
This is how it is and the trend will likely continue downward and no amount of pro-natalist propaganda will convince women in developed countries to have more babies, while Africa in particular will continue growing in population. And many people are furious about this.
My fear is that when the right-wingers realize their propaganda doesn’t work, they may start resorting to violence. They already have, to be sure, with abortion bans in the US, but these aren’t having the effect, more to the contrary. So the next move will be to take away contraception.
Salem 06.23.25 at 9:46 am
In a world of ten billion, the returns to both innovation and specialisation are ten times greater than in a world of one billion. This means there is more innovation and specialisation, and thereby greater prosperity. There isn’t a fixed number, or a fixed fraction of the population, “needed” for complex activity.
Some things have diminishing returns, other things have increasing returns (and some are on an S-curve). The argument that human population has increasing returns, at least at the current order of magnitude, is far from implausible. As for resources, they are a function of the level of technology. For example, oilfields were not a resource to our ancestors, but the invention of the kerosene lamp and the internal combustion engine made them so, and the development of modern drilling technology vastly raised the limits of the oil we can extract. As technology increases, resources increase. Simon won his wager with Ehrlich for a reason.
Tm 06.23.25 at 10:02 am
I hasten to agree with Colin @ 11, both racism and misogyny are driving this bullshit, and prominent pronatalists are mostly men; in addition to an ideology of growth deeply ingrained in Western culture. The latter is usually more openly expressed, while racism and misogyny are mostly latent and rarely explicit.
I agree with JQ that this thinking is orthodoxy in our political and media discourse and has been for a long time. I remember demographic crisis headlines 20 and more years ago. There are plenty of examples, now even featuring countries like India, which really doesn’t have a lack of people and will continue growing for years. There are zero headlines warning of excessive population growth. In the 60s and perhaps up to the 80s, “overpopulation” was an issue. It has completely disappeared from discourse, in part for understandable reasons, but the new consensus “let’s continue growing and not think of the consequences” is certainly not helpful.
Tm 06.23.25 at 1:29 pm
Salem: “In a world of ten billion, the returns to both innovation and specialisation are ten times greater than in a world of one billion.”
That claim is totally unsupported by empirical evidence but at least it’s also illogic and implausible, pure fantasy in other words.
Zamfir 06.23.25 at 2:06 pm
Edward says: it’s a big deal if governments are going to start expecting people to work into their 70s, or if unprecedentedly large sections of the labour force are going to be tied up staffing nursing homes.
The counterargument here is tha an aging society may have lots of old peoplw needing care, but it has less children to take care of. These do not balance exactly, but it does compensate most of the effect on paper – especially if people van work a few longer, and need care from a somewhat older age, both of which are not unreasonable assumptions given that societies age partially because people stay healthier longer.
But that assumes that society is willing to shift from taking care of children, to taking care of old people. In practice, that often means that women shift from one kind of informal unpaid carework to another, both not captured well in statistics or official plans.
Its also not so obvious that societies with less children actually spend so much less effort on childcare. The time and money spent per child does tend to go up with smaller family sizes. From crude efficiency reasons (watching 3 small kids is not 3 times as time-consuming as watching 1), and because the ‘standard’assumptions about proper care go up when small families are the norm.
Tm 06.23.25 at 8:22 pm
Zamfir: most old people live fairly independent lives at home, only a minority need care in nursing homes. And many old people engage in volunteer work, not to mention care for grandchildren. So the doom-saying really is unnecessary.
It’s still true that immigration is beneficial overall especially for a society with a birth deficit. And many of those anti-immigration voters in Europe already rely on immigrants for their healthcare and will be very upset should those immigrants leave.
Alex SL 06.23.25 at 10:17 pm
Edward Gregson,
No, it isn’t a deflection. The implication of saying that we always need population growth, or the economy will collapse and/or old people will not be cared for – not necessarily what you are saying, but what many public figures are saying to justify pro-natalism – is that the we have to grow population forever. Growing population forever means growing it to infinity people. Now, this is not going to happen. But seriously trying to make it happen would guarantee catastrophe, because the planet cannot feed infinity people.
This is the asymmetry of the discussion. If the population reduces to a quarter, we may be able to stave off catastrophe, and every human of that smaller generation can afford higher consumption levels without collapsing the ecosystem, but the reaction to that idea is fear-mongering. If the population quadruples, nearly everybody will live in poverty, food insecurity, and water insecurity, there will be no nature left, and then once a few bad years hit, humanity descends into mass starvation, desperate cannibalism, disease, and war; but for some reason, those arguing in favour of that outcome are rarely publicly challenged. Their interviewers merely accept the idea of infinity population with the grace of somebody who believes that our speeding car can never hit the wall twenty meters ahead because it has not hit it so far. Indeed, the fact that Ehrlich warned us about the wall when we were still fifty meters away from it, but then we didn’t hit it over the last thirty meters, proves that walls do not even exist.
Now, a counter may be: we don’t mean infinity, we just mean we need to grow this generation; maybe in fifty years they will find a different solution and can stop growing. But that is selfish and craven. Let’s just find that solution now.
Salem,
I see, you do not understand diminishing returns and resource constraints. It is very on the nose that you use oilfields as your example, because exploiting them (and coal) as a resource was the historical error that will cost humanity its current cycle of complex civilisation. You are so very proud of how fast we are driving towards the wall that the speed is the only thing you can see.
But I seem to remember that you may have argued in a previous thread that we should deliberately destroy all natural environments and deliberately drive all of biodiversity to extinction in the name of progress? We do not share the same reality, nor can our two value systems touch each other with fifty feet poles.
John Q 06.24.25 at 2:34 am
Following up TM @41, only a minority of old people ever go into care, and those who do typically survive less than a year. Even they typically less care than a toddler, let alone a baby. This is all invisible because it is done in the home, mostly by women, rather than than by paid workers.
Both nursing homes and childcare centres are relatively recent, going back to the 1950s and 1970s respectively, as far as I can tell.
Tm 06.24.25 at 7:29 am
This is spot on: “Their interviewers merely accept the idea of infinity population with the grace of somebody who believes that our speeding car can never hit the wall twenty meters ahead because it has not hit it so far. Indeed, the fact that Ehrlich warned us about the wall when we were still fifty meters away from it, but then we didn’t hit it over the last thirty meters, proves that walls do not even exist.”
Jonshine 06.24.25 at 10:49 am
Gregson, @34, thank you very much.
As an additional thought, imagine we learned the through some means Jacob Rees Mogg’s (substitute as appropriate) children had inherited his £100-million fortune tax free. Which of the two following scenarios would we find most objectionable? Would the man or woman in the street agree?
First, that some tax chicanery had been used, or-
Second, that he’d had 200 children each inheriting only the lifetime tax-free-gift limit of £500k?
It feels to me that the second is somehow more upsetting – not only did he get to live a luxurious life, but, he’d been able to launch secure middle-class lifestyles for a vast genetic diaspora. More to the point – whilst I’m very happy with the family and life I have, it does rather suggested that under truly unconstrained circumstances I’d have chosen to have substantially more children.
A 06.24.25 at 2:41 pm
Racism, misogyny, lots of other bad things are behind so much of this. But the Yglesias thing seems more myopic.
They Yglesias book was half pro-natalism and half pro-immigration (he trimmed his previous near-open-borders immigration aspirations to “skilled immigration” as a politically feasible compromise, but you can read whatever other motivation you’d like into it). But was it framed as a response to a “crisis?” It seemed much more like a “money is being left on the table” argument. And the pro-natalism aspects seemed to be mostly about him knowing middle-class (really, upper-middle-class) liberal women who kinda wanted one more kid than they had, but didn’t feel financially (and otherwise) supported enough by society to do so.
ragweed 06.26.25 at 5:33 pm
Matt @15 – “One example is the Boston University philosopher, Victor Kumar. He has several posts on his substack on the topic that can be found here: … I don’t find his arguments very compelling, but as one might gather from his name, “white babies” are not a significant concern of his.
Not knowing Kumar’s work or who he is as a person, I would not want to assume either way whether racism is a motivation for his views.
However, I would not assume that someone is not motivated by racism just because they have a common Hindu surname. Plenty of non-white people support overt white-supremacists idea (see Michelle Malkin, , Enrique Tarrio) often because they are making a bid for inclusion in the “white” alliance or holding a privileged position in the hierarchy. And while “white babies” maybe a little simplistic, there are plenty of people who see an in-group of “high IQ” elites that might include the upper echalons of several ethnic groups, but are still motivated by racist ideology. Racism is a slippery beast – Hitler defined Native Americans as a lost tribe of Aryans because he grew up reading Karl Mays romanticized western adventure novels and declared the Japanese as superior to the Chinese because of their racial purity and convenience as an ally.
Matt 06.26.25 at 10:12 pm
Ragweed- you might try to actually look at what I linked to. That way you’d avoid this very sloppy bit of slander. Literally none of what you say has any connection with Kumar. (Again, I’m not convinced by his arguments, and find those in the post more plausible. But, I do think it’s important to be intellectually responsible, and many peole here, including you in this comment, are not being so.)
Ron Raskin 06.27.25 at 12:00 pm
There are definitely some pros and cons to low fertility rates. If you look at things from the planet’s point of view, you could argue there are already more than enough people living on Earth—and we haven’t even figured out how to live beyond it yet.
But the real question isn’t whether the world as a whole needs more people. It’s about which countries do. The need for higher birth rates often comes from economic reasons, but it also stems from political realities.
Just think about this: a hundred years ago, Europe made up 28% of the world’s population. Today, it’s only around 9%. That kind of shift doesn’t just change population charts—it shifts the global balance of power. And yes, that’s one of the reasons the world feels more unstable right now. Just turn on the news.
So when people talk about pro-natalism, it’s not just about wanting more babies for the sake of it. It’s really about making sure that liberal democracies can protect themselves. If everyone had low fertility rates, it wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the case.
Some ask, “Isn’t that a bit racist?” Not at all. It’s not about skin color—it’s about shared values. In today’s world, what really matters is whether people believe in things like freedom, democracy, and human rights.
So right now, one of the best ways to help keep the world stable—and hopefully avoid something like World War III—is to make sure the countries and communities that stand for those values don’t slowly fade away.
Mitchell Porter 06.28.25 at 6:39 am
Noah Smith has just come out saying that lower fertility will change everything. Could someone with more time than me, do a critical comparison of the arguments here and there, and figure out where the truth lies? (I would expect it to overlap with both authors.)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dawn-of-the-posthuman-age
Lameen 06.28.25 at 1:39 pm
“a hundred years ago, Europe made up 28% of the world’s population. Today, it’s only around 9%. That kind of shift doesn’t just change population charts—it shifts the global balance of power. And yes, that’s one of the reasons the world feels more unstable right now.”
A hundred years ago, Europe had just emerged from the biggest war the world had ever known, and were careening heedlessly towards the worst war the world has ever known up to now. If the world felt less unstable to them than it does to us (which I doubt), then they were living in a fool’s paradise.
Somewhere on one of my dad’s bookshelves, I came across a yellowing copy of an early 80s book – The Birth Dearth, it may have been called (can’t be bothered to check) – making the Cold War version of this argument: we must have more babies, or the Commies will win! I don’t think it’s any more convincing now than it should have been then.
Tm 06.30.25 at 7:40 am
Kumar and Smith are be growth fetishists. Foe example, “Nobody knows how to stop humanity from shrinking” (Noah Smith, Novemebr 2024). Actually nobody knows how to continue growing humanity without destroying the planet. It’s curious how both authors at least acknowledge that fewer people will be good for the planet but somehow that doesn’t matter to them.
“Our impact on the planet’s environment will finally be reduced — we will still send out legions of robots to cultivate food and mine minerals, but as our numbers decrease, our desire to cannibalize the planet will hit its limits.” (Smith) Then what is the problem? I atcually couldn’t find a good argument in that piece for why he thinks it is in the article.
“The population crash we’re contemplating is many decades away and won’t arrive soon enough to blunt climate change. Still, though, a smaller environmental footprint would reduce other damage we inflict on the planet. Would that offset the suffering we’d experience from economic and cultural stagnation?” (Kumar)
So somehow the coming population peak is terrible news but it’s also so far in the future that its positive consequences don’t matter, yet its fantasized negative consequences do.
The argument makes no sense in any way. For example China, the world’s second most populous country, is currently the biggest carbon emitter. China’s is already in population decline and that is good news for the planet. To be sure, even a shrinking population can continue to increase its environmental footprint (e. g. by increasing meat consumption per capita) but imagine how bad it would be if China were also growing it’s population, a population that desires the same affluence that Europeans and North Americans enjoy.
Tm 06.30.25 at 7:53 am
If anybody still doubts that demographic doomerism is the orthodoxy in our political and media discourse (Kenny Easwaran?), check this out: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clynq459wxgo
“The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates,” says Dr Natalia Kanem, head of UNFPA. “Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” she says.
“Calling this a crisis, saying it’s real. That’s a shift I think,” says demographer Anna Rotkirch
“This is the first time that [the UN] have really gone all-out on low fertility issues,” says Prof Stuart Gietel-Basten
Still, the UNFPA is urging caution in response to low fertility.
“Right now, what we’re seeing is a lot of rhetoric of catastrophe, either overpopulation or shrinking population, which leads to this kind of exaggerated response, and sometimes a manipulative response,” says Dr Kanem. …”
It’s a bit rich, Dr Kanem, to start using crisis rhetoric and then warning against the “rhetoric of catastrophe”. But here we are. The good news is still that pro-natalist propaganda isn’t going to have any effect.
MisterMr 06.30.25 at 10:09 am
Ideally, there should be an “optimal population amount” and on the basis of that we should be able to say if we are overshooting or undershooting it, but I don’t know how to calculate that “optimal population amount” (though my guess is that we already overshot it).
That said, it is evident that there can’t be continuous population growth forever, so at some point we need to have an economy that doesn’t need a continuous increase in population to work.
From the article linked by TM above:
UNFPA found an even bigger barrier to children than finances was a lack of time. For Namrata in Mumbai that rings true. She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn’t get much sleep.
We should also have an economy where increses in productivity lead to less working hours, but somehow we are going in the opposite direction.
engels 06.30.25 at 10:48 am
Most people here seem to be ignoring the basic pro-natalist argument that if human life has a positive value then more humans = better.
Tm 06.30.25 at 11:56 am
(Sorry for the many typos in 52. I posted a correction btw)
MisterMr: “Ideally, there should be an “optimal population amount””
Why would such amagic number exist? Anyway it’s beside the point because for the growth fetishists, the “optimal” number is always “more”, whatever the current number is. Which proves how unserious the whole discourse is. It really borders on the insane. Everybodywriting long blog posts about the “tragedy” of human population not reaching a hundred trillion understands basic Math and basic Physics but they just declare that they don’t matter.
engels 06.30.25 at 1:10 pm
If you think the population should be lower than it is, which people do you think it would be better if they had never been born?
MisterMr 06.30.25 at 2:13 pm
“Why would such amagic number exist?”
if the amount of people is indifferent, then there is no problem either in extreme growth of in extreme degrowth.
On the other hand, if there is a negative in excessive growth, say ecological collapse, and a negative in population degrowth, e.g. if we assume that more people in itself is better because human lives have an intrinsic value, then there is a tradeoff between the two, and therefore we should be able to say, for a certain technology level, what is the optimal number (the highest before the ecological/malthusian limit starts to bite).
Kim 06.30.25 at 4:02 pm
This article was posted today questioning the UN birth rate numbers: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/birth-rate-population-decline/683333/
I’m not convinced it matters, necessarily, but I thought you or other readers might be interested in it.
John Q 06.30.25 at 6:02 pm
Engels @55 I already rebutted this argument https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/30/against-the-repugnant-conclusion/
Engels@57 This is dopey. I’ll leave you to recollect one of the two certainties of life that ensure the possibility of a lower future population with no requirement that people now living should not have been born.
John Q 06.30.25 at 6:07 pm
Hi Kim
Thanks for that. Interesting, but just nitpicking. Doesn’t even look at the lower projections
I just pitched an article to the Atlantic on this, so I’ll be interested to see what response I get.
engels 06.30.25 at 6:56 pm
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. If you think the population level is too high that entails the counterfactual that things would have been better if some living people had never come into existence. So who are they… let’s ask them if they agree.
Anon 06.30.25 at 11:11 pm
In a reality where an infinite population can be supported, sure. Know where we can find one?
So, setting aside that this is a rather pathetic attempt at creating a false dichotemy which ignores the actual position, sure – let’s ask some people if they agree:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/15/i-wish-my-mother-aborted-me
https://imprintnews.org/youth-voice/i-should-have-been-aborted/66631
https://www.newsweek.com/i-was-adopted-months-after-roe-v-wade-wish-abortion-had-been-option-1719889
Now, would you care to explain on what basis you think they are wrong, and why you are so well placed to make that judgement?
Tm 07.01.25 at 7:12 am
engels 62: JQ has already given a sufficient answer. For my part, I’m not interested in what-if hypotheticals. We live in the world we live in and are now collectively shaping the future. The pro-natalists want to pressure and bully young people into having more children and I’m firmly opposed to that.
Tm 07.01.25 at 7:50 am
MiosterMr 54: “Namrata in Mumbai… spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back… We should also have an economy where increses in productivity lead to less working hours, but somehow we are going in the opposite direction”
Mumbai is a very densely populated megacity. Its population about doubled in the last 30 years (growth has been much faster in the postwar decades but has slowed somewhat after 2000). According to wikipedia, “Over 7 million people, over 42% of the population of Mumbai, live in informal housing or slums, yet they cover only 6–8% of the city’s land area”.
From the information given in the article, Namrata’s family seems more middle class and probably doesn’t live in the slums. They probably couldn’t find affordable and suitable housing close to the workplace, or maybe husband and wife work in distant parts of the city, so they have no choice but to put up with commutes, a situation not uncommon in big cities. Also many suburban people are putting up with long commutes due to the preference to live outside of the city in “green” areas with more and cheaper living space.
Certainly one of the biggest factors that makes affording large families difficult is lack of suitable housing. Pro-natalists want more people but then they are surprised that more people mean more demand for housing, transportation, schools, water, food, energy, resources, which puts upward presure on prices. It’s not just more people, of course, it’s also that consumption standards have gone way up. Houses and apartments have become bigger, the space requirement per person has increased. In consequence, suitable housing for big families is difficult to find and expensive. Increasing demand must be met with more housing construction which comes at the expense of green space. Loss of green space reduces quality of life. Most parents don’t want their children to grow up in concrete deserts.
Pro-natalists believe that resource constraints don’t matter because economic magic, but even fervent believers in economic voodoo cannot deny that the surface of our planet cannot be increased at will and that most areas suitable for habitation are already populated and many of these areas are coming under increasing climate stress. But they still clamor for more people, consequences be damned, and then are surprised that more and more people either can’t afford children or cannot bear the responsibility of putting more children on a stressed planet facing an out of control ecological multicrisis. And many women say no thank you to bringing children into a world poisoned by fascism and toxic masculinity. Pro-natalist propaganda is ineffective because thanks to contraceptives, people are perfectly well capable of making their own decisions and making the requisite tradeoffs involved in family planning. And of course there are and will always be tradeoffs, and having choices always means the potential for regret. I’m afraid in a few decades, many more people will regret having had children at all.
Tm 07.01.25 at 9:24 am
Regarding the Atlantic article (59), it’s really something. The doom and crisis rhetoric is totally unhinged. “The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse”, “First, the bad news: Global fertility is falling fast”, “global fertility trends are much worse than they, and probably you, think”, “the discrepancies become downright alarming” etc. Totally unhinged.
The UN population model assumes low fertility rates to rebound. The article says they are probably wrong. The truth is we have no way of knowing either way but my hunch is that fertility rates will stay low as long as the ecological crisis deepens. If by some miracle decisive and effective political action against the climate crisis is taken, maybe people will become more optimistic again.
I see three, ok four important global trends of our time:
1 the climate crisis
2 declining fertility with a prospect of population peak in the next decades
3 the beginning defossilization of the energy system
4 the rise of fascism and toxic masculinity
Number 4 is making 1 worse (by a lot), slowing down 3 (probably not by much), and reinforcing 2. I conjecture that 2 and 4 reinforce each other: on the one hand, fascists are panicking about low fertility, on the other hand their poisonous politics deters young women from having children, will also likely increase mortality (think of vaccines) and decrease immigration in affluent countries. Kind of paradoxical but here we are.
engels 07.01.25 at 9:28 am
would you care to explain on what basis you think they are wrong
No, I’m going accept self-evaluations as I implied but given the figure 5 billion was mentioned above you’re going to have to dig out a few more Newsweek articles.
I’m not interested in what-if hypotheticals
Then my question wasn’t addressed to you.
Anon 07.01.25 at 12:14 pm
OK, so you would agree that things would have been better if some living people had never come into existence.
I can’t find a mention of 5 billion above – perhaps you’d care to quote the relevant text so we can see what you refer to?
Comments on this entry are closed.