I’ve been seeing more and more alarmism about the idea that, on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two. That distant prospect is producing lots of advocacy for policies to increase birth rates right now.
One of the big claims is that a smaller population will reduce the rate of scientific progress I’ve criticised this in the past, pointing out that billions of young people today, particularly girls, don’t get the education they need to have any serious chance of realising their potential. But it seems as if I need to repeat myself, so I will do so, trying a slightly different tack
It’s surprisingly difficult to get an estimate of the number of researchers in the world, but Google scholar gives us a rough idea. Google Scholar indexes research across all academic disciplines, including social sciences and humanities. No exact count is available, but I’ve seen an estimate that 1.5 million people have Google scholar profiles. I’d guess that this would account for at least half of all active researchers, for a total of 3 million.
Another way of getting an estimate is to look at the total number of documents indexed, which is said to be about 150 million. Assuming a mean value of 50 per active researcher (a highly skewed distribution where the really active people are producing a lot more) that’s consistent with the earlier estimate.
That is, to maintain the existing number of researchers, around 0.3 per cent of a population of 1 billion would need to be in this active class. Taking account of lab and research assistants, technicians and so on, the proportion might rise to 1 per cent. If all countries in the world achieved the 40 per cent rate of attendance common in rich countries, that would require 2.5 per cent of undergraduates to do science degrees with a third of those going on to graduate study.
It would actually be easier than this if, as seems reasonable, a sustainable world with a gradually declining population could manage without an overgrown finance sector, buying up many of the best and brightest. The “rocket scientists” now working on ways to make stock trading nanoseconds faster could go back to rocket science, or whatever kind of science is most needed in the future.
In summary is no reason to think a billion people would be too few to sustain a technological economy.
But would a world of a billion people look like? I’ve addressed this before, but I will reprint what I wrote then.
It’s foolish to try to say much in detail about life many generations from now. What could a contemporary of Shakespeare have to say about the London of today? But London and other cities existed long before Shakespeare and seem likely to continue far into the future (if we can get there). And many of the services cities have always provided will be needed as long as people are people. So, it might be worth imagining how a world population of one billion might be distributed across cities, towns and rural areas.
A billion person world could not support mega-cities with the current populations of Tokyo and Delhi. But it could easily include a city the size of London, New York, Rio, or Osaka (around 10 million each [1]) on every continent, and dozens the size of Sydney, Barcelona, Montreal, Nairobi, Santiago or Singapore (around 5 million each). Such a collection of cities would meet the needs of even the most avid lovers of urban life in its various forms.Meanwhile, there would be plenty of space for those who prefer the county
With only a billion people we wouldn’t need all the space in the world. The project of rewilding half the world, now a utopian dream, could be fulfilled, while leaving more than enough room for farming and forestry, as well as whatever rural arcadias followers of the simple life could imagine and implement.
- Betteridge’s Law of Headlines Applies
fn1. It’s not always clear where to draw boundaries here. I’ve gone for examples where the estimated urban area is similar to the officially defined city, with the exception of NYC, where there is (to me at least) a sharp distinction between the five boroughs of the city, and the larger conurbation.
{ 39 comments }
engels 11.30.25 at 10:50 pm
I’d like to see a Venn diagram of the “breed for string theory” people and the “AI will do our thinking for us now” people.
Alex SL 11.30.25 at 11:24 pm
This calculation is great but already giving the natalists too much credit. They would have to be either too stupid to understand your argument, more likely, not arguing in good faith in the first place. Why? Because even without your estimates, it should be trivial for any natalist to consider what currently, right now in 2025, constrains the number of scientists and the speed of research progress, and to conclude within the second that it is funding. Be it here, be it in the country where I grew up, be it in Argentina, or be it in the recently DOGE’d USA, science is being variously cut and starved of funding. Adding, say, another three billion humans into a resource-constrained world won’t improve that situation.
An influential natalist who convinced their government to raise the top marginal tax rate by 1% and then use that money to instantly double their country’s science funding would have achieved infinitely more than hypothetically convincing people to have more children who could hypothetically be scientists three decades later. Again, they are unlikely to be so stupid as to not be able to see that. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that they aren’t using science as an argument in good faith. They have started from the premise that they want more (white) children, and they merely throw around various rationalisations that they think might appeal to this or that audience if nobody thinks about them for even one second.
marcel proust 11.30.25 at 11:26 pm
Actual figures for China over the last half century or so strengthen your argument.
I asked Dr. Google 2 questions:
What has the population of China been over the last century?
What has the number of Chinese scientists been over the last century?
The AI answers at the top of each response give rise to the following table
Year Population # scientists & engineers
1982 1 billion 1.2 million
1990 1.1 billion
2000 1.27 billion
2010 1.34 billion 3.2 million
2020 1.4 billion
2022 6.4 million (# FT equivant R&D personnel)
The numbers for the second column may not be precisely what we are looking for, but they are very suggestive. The relationship does not appear to be linear, something other than population growth must be driving the growth in scientific/research personnel.
Suggestions? Yes, the hand in the back… more people attending college and graduate school. That strikes me as most likely too.
Thomas Jørgensen 12.01.25 at 12:38 am
I actually disagree quite a lot about the megacities. “URBANIZE HARDER!” has been an incredibly consistent trend. I see no reason for falling total numbers to stop that. Cause people to completely abandon less successful cities? Sure.
But a 1-billion-people world is pretty likely to be a world where nearly everyone has gathered into a very small number of mega cities. Potentially just one city with over 900 million people and the rest of the world very thinly populated with just enough people to manage robots that manage the land.
Chetan Murthy 12.01.25 at 2:30 am
[Right with you, JohnQ]
I’m old enough that I remember a time when Indian scientists and engineers weren’t somehow ubiquitous. Yes, there were Indian doctors starting to appear in the West, but only just starting. And yet somehow, here we are, with many many thousands of Indian doctors, engineers, and scientists, all over the West. Surely this is evidence that training matters far more than raw numbers of suitable candidates: that there are almost-certainly many, many suitable candidates in poor demographics all around the world, just waiting to be discovered and cultivated.
Oh I’m sorry, but they’ll be nonwhite, and that’s all wrong. Just all, all wrong. I stand corrected, truly I do.
JPL 12.01.25 at 2:50 am
“Betteridge’s Law of Headlines Applies”
How often is it the case that a capable young person with a serious interest in pure scientific inquiry is forced to choose a different career path mainly because the other career path promises more, or even excessive, money? (And if there is external pressure, where does it come from?) You can’t solve the question- problem simply by omitting the question mark; it’s subject-AUX inversion that indicates that the sentence is a question. The problem with the OP question is with what you might call answerability. There are societies today that seem, in terms of conventional thinking and government policy, to completely lack the desire to encourage the life of the mind and only emphasize making a lot of money and living a life of luxury and hedonistic decadence in an accepted preexisting social structure of dominance by wealth, but which still manage to produce courageous pursuers of truth, and I do want to include the arts. It’s disappointing when a capable young person proclaims, “I wanna get filthy rich!” I don’t think that’s admirable. It could be an overreaction. Overbearing fathers and conventional cynicism maybe.
John Q 12.01.25 at 4:03 am
Thomas J @4 I don’t think this is correct in general. The first megacities, London and New York aren’t that much bigger in population than they were 100 years ago (that’s true even taking account of Greater London). Cities in the rich world, with the exception of Tokyo, don’t seem to be getting a lot bigger, and it’s not clear why they need to. I now live in the Sunshine Coast. It’s part of the Greater Brisbane conurbation, but has most of things I would associate with being in a city – a university with a teaching hospital, an airport with flights to international destinattons, the standard array of department stores etc. No opera or ballet, but I have to admit that I wouldn;t go anyway. That;s with a population of maybe 0.5 million.
When you see people crowding into Delhi and Jakarta, my question (as with London in C18) is – what are they leaving behind?
somebody who travels a lot - 12.01.25 at 8:17 am
Will Fewer Kids mean Fewer Tourists*?
Hopefully – as the Mass Migration of Tourists needs a lot more Scientists researching it’s ‘sinking’ (as Elon would let it ‘sink in’)
Tm 12.01.25 at 8:21 am
“on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two”
You know this of course but it still should be clarified that on current trends, population is not remotely on track to shrink to 1 billion in 100 years; it is still growing, will continue growing for decades, and will probably not fall below the current level of 8 billion before 2100. Serious projections don’t go beyond that time horizon. A rough calculation shows that to go from 8 to 1 billion takes three half times. In the last 100 years, population doubled twice.
Tm 12.01.25 at 8:45 am
Regarding megacities, 4 and 7: megacities have grown in countries where rapid population growth, industrialization and rural depopulation concentrated large numbers of people into a small number of existing population centers. It wasn’t that they had much choices and opted for bigger cities because they are so much fun. In higher developed countries, urbanization was slower and more distributed. Cities in US and Europe have depopulated in the post war period and have only started modestly growing recently.
“Potentially just one city with over 900 million people and the rest of the world very thinly populated” Why would people want to leave cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Marseille, Milano, Brussels, and move to a continental megacity, let’s say Paris or London – or even leave the continent and move to Delhi or Jakarta? What would be the point?
Tm 12.01.25 at 8:50 am
(cont.) And why should a smaller population want to build housing and infrastructure in megacities instead of using the ample space in already existing cities? Under a scenario of slow population decline, there will be almost no need to build anything any more, people can concentrate on maintaining the existing infrastructure, which will greatly reduce the environmental footprint and also reduce the demand for labor, and of course reduce the economic cost of housing and infrastructure. It would be really dumb to give that up.
John Q 12.01.25 at 10:21 am
TN @9 You’re right and I’ve made this point before. But I was planning to pitch this at The Economist, and they had someone assuming an immediate drop to 0.5 NRR. which gets you to 1 billion pretty quickly, especially if you ignore the young-skewed structure of the existing population. Seemed easier to grant them that point.
MisterMr 12.01.25 at 10:21 am
John Q @7
“Cities in the rich world, with the exception of Tokyo, don’t seem to be getting a lot bigger”
IMHO, there is a situation where in certain places, the big jump to urbanisation happened, say, in 1890 with 1890 technology, so the city became as big as it could for a 1890 city and now it is difficult for it to grow anymore; OTOH there are cities who got their big urbanisation jump in 1990 and therefore will reach a much bigger size due to the higer level of technology.
In some sense, the “developed” world might be less modern than the currently developing one, because there is less reason to throw away the old technologies (that still work quite well) whereas in the developing world when they jump forward they jump to the state-of-the-art model. This is IMHO the reason China is leading on electric cars with the USA and the EU lagging behind.
Alex Sl @2 (and partially also an answer to Chetan Murthy @5)
“They have started from the premise that they want more (white) children, and they merely throw around various rationalisations that they think might appeal to this or that audience if nobody thinks about them for even one second.”
It is certainly true that these are just poor rationalisation for an underlying pro-natalist intuition, however I don’t think that racism in the strict sense is the main driver (though it might be correlated).
In some sense, it is natural to think that the “normal” process of life is that people mature, make long term relationships and pop out kids, who will also mature and pop out kids and so on. So when society apparently doesn’t work like this anymore many people will have a strong intuition that something is going wrong, though the morality of natalism is IMHO very confusing (because we have generally an individualist concept on morality based on preference, freedom and hurting others, that is difficult to appli to those who are not yet born).
This is correlated to racism for two reasons IMHO: the first is that it correlates with traditional family values (or roles), that are stronger among conservatives; the second is that there is a natural tendency to think in a familist way (e.g. I might be pissed by the idea that the italian population decreases because it feels like if my bloodline is decreasing, and the fact that somewhere else Kenyans are instead increasing doesn’t solve my problem) and this “familist” view is also largely what creates racism (and also strongly linked to right leaning tought).
However to some degree this familist form of thinking is natural, the idea that people are super-rational and only care for their own self interest or in purely abstract “whole mankind” logic cannot work in reality, so just blaming everything on racism is going to be unproductive (in the same sense that when people on the righ call even the smallest government intervention “socialism” they end up making socialism look good).
TL-DR: it is true that some pro-natalist ideas are silly and that often pro-natalism correlates with racism, but a minimum degree of “pro-natalist” intuition is natural so blaming all of it on irrationality and racism is also counterproductive.
So I say from my great wisdom.
engels 12.01.25 at 1:22 pm
Why would people want to leave cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Marseille, Milano, Brussels, and move to a continental megacity, let’s say Paris or London – or even leave the continent and move to Delhi or Jakarta? What would be the point?
Because that’s where the billionaires live and the only paid work there is is serving billionaires in one way or another.
Laban 12.01.25 at 4:21 pm
JPL @6
“how often is it the case that a capable young person with a serious interest in pure scientific inquiry is forced to choose a different career path mainly because the other career path promises more, or even excessive, money? ”
Steve Hsu used to note that most of his brightest physics students ended up as “quants” in finance. But it’s hardly “forced”, surely, if a student goes for the money?
Michael Cain 12.01.25 at 8:25 pm
I’m going to make the assumption that progress as used here means making a difference in products (rather than, say, a more exhaustive list of the billions of galaxies that better telescopes can find). By that measure, a lack of engineers will have a bigger impact than a lack of scientists. For example, the other day I read about a new form of strained germanium that can be grown directly on silicon. The germanium layer has much faster hole transport than the materials currently used in integrated circuits. There’s potential for faster electronics that use less power.
But there’s a huge amount of engineering that needs to be done before that potential could be realized. Does the process scale to full-sized wafers? Can the extremely high-purity germanium required be produced at scale at a useful price? Is it compatible with all the things besides silicon that go into integrated circuits (eg, resists and solvents needed to etch nanometer scale patterns)? Those are engineering questions.
Alex SL 12.01.25 at 9:13 pm
All of the world ending up in a single city or birth rates falling imminently to 0.5 per family and then staying there for a century are interesting cyberpunk or science fiction premises but not part of any serious discourse. Depending on how things pan out, the next one hundred years might bring a 1% employment rate as nearly all jobs get replaced with robots controlled by superhuman AI or societal collapse as climate change worsens and hundreds of millions of internal and external refugees overwhelm countries already stretched by running out of freshwater and successive failed harvests. My money would be on the second scenario, but regardless, the idea that number of children per family would remain constant over decades under either scenario is quite silly.
Unless the variety of hormones, microplastics, and forever chemicals we are happily saturating the planet and ourselves with begins to affect male fertility to the degree that anybody without access to expensive fertility treatments struggles to procreate. But that again is currently speculation. More likely that this kind of pollution at least also affects us in other ways that contribute to societal dysfunction, like leaded petrol did until it was phased out, only in this case, it seems inconceivable that the world would collectively decide to phase out plastic.
MisterMr,
I agree: natalism doesn’t necessarily have to be based on racism. It just happens to be the case that usually natalists turn out to be racists (although not only white ones, of course). The few that I have seen that aren’t racist tend to not have any coherent worldview or ideology. Have yet to see somebody who could seriously be described as being progressive or on the left who cares intensely about other people making more babies. Instead, they tend to care about not having ten billion people in a world that can feed maybe at most six billion sustainably and address that by having only one child themselves. So, there is a strong correlation of natalism with certain other political views, as you wrote.
JPL 12.01.25 at 11:51 pm
Laban @15:
That’s right; those ones are not forced. Those are the cases I said are sad and not admirable, the ones who are capable, but say, “I wanna get filthy rich”. The sentence you quoted aims to refer rather to those who are capable and have a serious intertest in, I perhaps should have said, pursuing pure scientific inquiry, not driven by money, but by intellectual passions, where such a career will provide enough money, and allow a focus on helping people, rather than getting oneself to the top of the wealth-dominance pyramid. The question would be, what policies, values, etc. tend to enable serious young people to follow what they would love to do and have a meaningful life, and maybe a related question would be “what kind of a society tends to encourage more people to not say, “I wanna get filthy rich?”. Then at least we have an answerable question of causal analysis.
hans 12.02.25 at 1:20 am
My attention is caught by the assumption that scientific progress has primacy over other societal goals, like greatest good for the greatest number (hopefully not just counting humans, for my preference). Or creative endeavors more broadly, like the arts. There is a trend toward greater technology, greater power for good or ill, with nukes and AI two trail markers.
I’m fine with a long term contraction of population, myself, just wondering about your assumptions. If we could, say, devote resources toward progress in ethics, theory and practice, that would be real useful.
Tm 12.02.25 at 7:32 am
engels 14: If you’re serious: Why would the billionaires prefer to live in megacities? There are plenty of rich people in Frankfurt and Milano, not to mention the much smaller Zürich let alone Gstaad.
Tm 12.02.25 at 7:49 am
MisterMr et al: Apart from racism, we shouldn’t overlook the role of sexism in the pronatalist discourse. What you call the “pro-natalist intuition” is often disapproval of women refusing their proper traditional role. Hence the culture war front against “childless cat ladies”.
Tm 12.02.25 at 7:55 am
To be sure, there are liberal pro-natalists and they are careful not to say these things (I suppose they are motivated mostly by the habitual belief in growth, growth, growth). But for the dominant right wing natalists, it goes without saying that feminism is to blame for the demographic doom.
engels 12.02.25 at 12:44 pm
it’s hardly “forced”, surely, if a student goes for the money?
It is if they literally can’t get money to do research. But yes a lot of them are just sell-outs (to choose the politest epithet).
Chetan Murthy 12.02.25 at 5:15 pm
JPL@, Laban@15: Oh, this is a big one! Indeed, it has been observed that in the US (maybe in other countries) entire swathes of technical talent get scooped-up by the finance business, and more recently, by ad-tech. All of that is deadweight loss. Deadweight loss.
Laban, to answer your question (with, admittedly, an anecdote): I flamed out of academic research, and went into “industrial research” which ….. was barely that in name. Really, it was just industrial work. B/c y’know, when you flame out of academia, you’re not going to be able to do research, b/c that requires money, and if you’re not getting paid, don’t have an office, a lab, etc, then you’re -done- with research. And that’s -before- the question of whether you’re gonna get to do “research” in industry. And haha, in industry, there is an entire mechanism to convert young recruits who think they’re being hired to do research, into good little industrial drones who work on what the boss tells ’em to do.
Wanna change that? A way to start would be to increase taxes on high incomes, so that the -incentives- (to go work in finance, or adtech) disappear. And at the same time, you could increase the pay of (inter alia) schoolteachers, so a PhD in physics could lead to teaching in high school without also taking a vow of poverty. etc.
Also, I remember reading that the entire output of many Ivy League universities (so, not just STEM grads, but everybody) was scooped-up by finance and consulting companies. Again, that’s all terrible. And the same is probably true of the top MBA schools. Imagine if, instead of going to work in the “rapine, looting, and layoffs” business, MBA grads went to work in operations at medium-sized businesses all over the country, to run them better.
Last: I remember in the early 90s there was all this talk about a shortage of PhD STEM grads. And then the Bush recession hit, and haha, one postdoc position in computer science in the US received 300 (THREE HUNDRED) applications.
These (must be reiterated: racist) pronatalists are all also true believers in Laissez-Faire Capitalism Uber Alles. They have no interest in actually producing more scientists, or ensuring that scientists have careers worth a damn: all the case about is cooking up justifications for their prior beliefs.
John Q 12.02.25 at 11:41 pm
Michael Cain @16 You’re right and I started by looking at engineers also. But the great majority of engineers aren’t doing R&D work. They are doing things like building roads and bridges, managing operations in factories and so on. The demand for these kinds of things will either be proportional to the population (for things like manufacturing) or lower (for long-lived infrastructure that can be allowed to run down as population declines)>
John Q 12.02.25 at 11:46 pm
There is a positive version of pronatalism which starts from the fact that many people have fewer kids than they would like or consider ideal. To the extent that barriers to forming a family can be removed, that’s a good thing. And if more general pro-natalist intuitions can be channeled into supporting people in their life goals (including becoming parents) that can also be good.
engels 12.03.25 at 12:52 am
TM, I grew up in an area of Britain that has lots of beautiful historic buildings and wonderful natural environment and yet no PMC under 30 (maybe 50) live there any more. And for the record there are “rich” people there too, just not “fuck you rich” like in London.
Matt 12.03.25 at 3:14 am
“Have yet to see somebody who could seriously be described as being progressive or on the left who cares intensely about other people making more babies. Instead, they tend to care about not having ten billion people in a world that can feed maybe at most six billion sustainably and address that by having only one child themselves. ”
I know at least three left to left-ish political philosophers () who strongly support pro-natalist policies on grounds that are similar to those that John Q notes in his comment at 26. These are all people who like kids, have several, think having kids is good for people, and think many people would have more kids except that current policies make it too difficult/expensive. (Two of these are women, and one is man whose wife is also a philosopher, though not a political philosopher.) There is even a straight-forward sense in which I am sympathetic to them – again in the way that John Q notes at the end of 26 – “supporting people in their life goals (including becoming parents).” I, myself, think that, if we do it right, a declining population is probably a good thing. So, I can’t say I support policies designed to increase population. But, policies that help people do what they want are prima facie good, too.
() I also know a few utilitarians who I would not classify as even being “left-ish”, but as being, at most, centerists, who support explicitly pro-natalist views in the sense of wanting to grow the population, but their views are distinct of the people I focus on here.
Zamfir 12.03.25 at 8:31 am
John says that demand for bridge builders would be lower in a smaller population. Isnt that the rather the same for science (or scholarship or research or R&D ). The demand for those is, somewhat simplified, eiher from curiosity (people want to know how many of those distant galaxies exist), or some applied downstream benefit (the strained germanoum allows some improved device)
Those demand sources also vary with population. A smaller population means (CP) less people interested in a particular scholarly topic, and less users who would benefit from those geranium devices.
Many of such activities have a threshold. Spend 1/10th on a bridge and you dont get a smaller bridge, you won’t reach the other side at all (that’s why there is no small bridge to Sicily). Fairly similar for study into a particular aspect of galaxies or germanium – if you cannot dedicate some minimum amount of effort you wont get useful results at all.
MisterMr 12.03.25 at 12:24 pm
TM @21
There is certainly a connection between pro-natalism and traditional gender role expectations, however it is not automatical, plenty of women have two or more kids and a career (this is helped if the father is more present, or if her career gives enough income to pay for house help).
However, though straightforward anti-feminism can push towards anti-natalism, there is also the opposite effect of people who are reflexively anti-natalism because it smells anti-feminist, more or less for the same reasons.
Chetan Murthy 12.03.25 at 5:06 pm
Zamfir @ 29: “John says that demand for bridge builders would be lower in a smaller population. Isnt that the rather the same for science (or scholarship or research or R&D ). ”
Worth remembering that demand for all sorts of things with long lead-times, that require significant and long-term up-front investment, with high uncertainty, is driven by the government. Much of modern America’s technology was created via research funded by the government. Once the government had funded ARPAnet, had funded the development of MOSIS (anybody remember that? the first semiconductor fab you could email your designs to), and a bunch of other technologies, sure, industry was able to industrialize ’em and make a mint. But the government had to fund the actual basic research and further engineerin to reach something approximating feasibility.
And in a related vein, India is well-known to produce a ton of engineers and (before that) doctors. That didn’t happen because somehow there’s an indigenous demand, and doctors get paid well in India; it is also well-known that Indian doctors go abroad (like my father did in 1968), and until recently the same was true of engineers. Again, a government that invests in certain capabilities, even though the domestic market doesn’t actually benefit, and doesn’t even absorb the product.
Barry 12.03.25 at 8:27 pm
Mr. Mr.:
“It is certainly true that these are just poor rationalisation for an underlying pro-natalist intuition, however I don’t think that racism in the strict sense is the main driver (though it might be correlated).”
At this point the null hypothesis for so many things is that racism is the #1st or #2nd driver. Note that the multi-billionaires of the Tech Oligarchy is more and more pleading racist arguments.
Alex SL 12.03.25 at 9:08 pm
John Q,
Whether that positive natalism counts as “good” would probably depend whether even at current population levels consuming 1.5x as much as is sustainable is good.
There are four arguments from the left or progressive side for why the number of humans on the planet doesn’t matter and everybody can have as many children as they want, three of them closely related.
First, if you are against that you are a racist. Yes, even if you personally have only one child and want your own ethnicity’s population to shrink, still a racist, because. Because worrying about overpopulation is racist, end of. Stop asking.
Second, our resource use and ecological footprint is all because of twenty large companies. That seems very odd because of how the economy works; whatever those companies are, they use resources unsustainably because they are selling products and services to an unsustainably large number of customers. They aren’t running a pointless pollution generator while twirling their mustaches and laughing maniacally for the evulz.
Third, our resource use and ecological footprint is all because of twenty billionaires. (I have never been able to figure out where the number comes from, but twenty seems to come up again and again in this context.) I completely agree that using a personal jet to travel everywhere is ridiculously wasteful and should be illegal, but sorry, no billionaire is consuming ten million humans’ worth of food, freshwater, electricity, or plastic. Even if, in my ideal world, billionaires would not exist at all, the sustainability problem would still be in the same ballpark.
Fourth, our resource use and ecological footprint is all because of the middle class in developed countries consuming so much more than the poor in the Global South, despite the latter being much more affected by the consequences of e.g. global heating. This claim has the advantage of being accurate. However, the unspoken implication is that the voters the leftist or progressive would like to convince will have to be massively impoverished, and the poor of the Global South will have to accept that they can never aspire to wealth. And I am okay with that! That is what needs to happen to ensure a livable future for humanity! But unsurprisingly, the modal leftist or progressive finds it tactically smarter to make claims one, two, and three instead.
Unfortunately, this is then my experience of positive natalism online: dishonesty about the environmental implications, not much better than the argument from number of scientists.
PatinIowa 12.04.25 at 5:14 pm
A quibble:
“It would actually be easier than this if, as seems reasonable, a sustainable world with a gradually declining population could manage without an overgrown finance sector, buying up many of the best and brightest.”
They went into finance. They’re unlikely to be the brightest. In my mind, they’re hardly the best.
Full disclosure: my partner is a medical researcher. She could make a lot more money doing something else. She’s the best.
Chetan Murthy 12.08.25 at 5:09 pm
AlexSL @ 33: yes, “positive natalism” seems to be rife with bad faith arguments. It reminds me of those blockchain enthusiasts who argue that cryptocurrency will liberate “the unbanked” in Africa. As if. As if.
And in the end, it all founders on the -simple fact- that when women and girls are given -choices- about their lives and the lives of their children, they invariably choose to have fewer children, later in life, and to invest more in those children’s lives. It’s a constant across all human societies where it’s been tried.
In that sense, “pro-natalism” is both racist, and -misogynist-, as it critically depends on denying women those choices. If pro-natalists were actually serious about their beliefs, they’d be confiscatorily taxing billionaires and using those funds to provide extremely cushy benefits for expectant mothers and families. -extremely cushy- benefits. So cushy that women would make the -market decision- to have children. Necessarily this would mean that -all- education would be free, b/c again, when women have options/choice, they invest in their children’s education in order to give them the best chance in life.
That “pro-natalists” don’t think about this at all, is pretty much proof that what they are is misogynists in sheep’s clothing: their position is the -male- position: “pump out as many babies as possible, and sure some will die, some will falter, but some will do great! We don’t need to concern ourselves with the ones who falter.” What experience teaches is, us that -mothers- do not have that belief about their children (and hundreds of thousands of years of “bear a child, lose a tooth” can imprint that on the genes, I suspect) where -fathers- do.
John Q 12.09.25 at 9:17 pm
It’s important not to overstate the environmental impact of more or fewer babies in the medium term, at least. Between now and 2050, feasible changes in fertility can have only a modest impact, since most of the 2050 population, and nearly all of the 2050 adult population, has already been born. But we need to completely decarbonize the economy by then, getting rid of coal-fired and gas-fired electricity, internal combustion vehicles etc.
Tm 12.10.25 at 11:37 am
“It’s important not to overstate the environmental impact of more or fewer babies in the medium term, at least. Between now and 2050, feasible changes in fertility can have only a modest impact, since most of the 2050 population, and nearly all of the 2050 adult population, has already been born.”
Yes, except that all the children born or not born in the next 20 years will make a difference. We had a max of >140 million births per year just a few years ago, which has now declined to (it’s difficult to reliably estimate) maybe 125-130 million? It will decline further. So over 20 years we are talking of several hundred million people who will or won’t be born, and who will or won’t have children themselves. I think everybody should at least try to understand what these numbers mean, 120, 130, 140 million new humans every year.
The number of deaths is about 60 million per year and will increase (hopefully slowly but I wouldn’t bet on it given the consequences of the climate crisis and increasingly overtaxed healthcare systems) but that is the less important variable. Every person born will eventually die. The real question for our demographic future is how many are born (in that respect I kind of agree with the pronatalists).
MisterMr 12.11.25 at 5:14 pm
There is also the problem that, if at some point population has to stabilize, the number of childs per woman cannot vary that much from an average of 2.2 or so: 1.5 and we are already in very fast population shrinkage, 2.9 and we are already in very fast population increase.
So I’m not sure the government or whomever can make choices that lead to the “optimal” number of babies-per-woman without being extremely restrictive on personal freedom, because blunt incentive are too likely to overshoot or undershoot. It is a very complex problem, though as I said before, not a problem for this generation so probably someone will solve it when I’m already dead.
@John Q 26
This is also my opinion (I know various couple who had less kids than they wanted, or zero), but the problem is that the main limit is time and/or career for the mother, and secondarily money; the money part is not going away with higer income because kids will just become more expensive because of competitive education.
Unless a lot more of the kid upbringing is left to the government (more schools and kindergartens, cheaper and of uniform level not the good ones just for the rich).
But these are problems that existed even before pronatalism.
Chetan Murthy 12.13.25 at 3:34 am
MisterMr @ 38: The more I think about this problem (that will only be relevant in the far, far, far future, but hey, let’s game it out) the more I think the solution is really simple. If birth rates are too low, just offer massive subsidies for women to have children. And I don’t mean a few thousands. I mean the kind of salary that only stockbrokers get. You’ll get lots of takers, I suspect.
I mean, we believe in markets, right? We believe that the way to get people to do jobs that are understaffed, is to raise wages, right? So raise the wage for being a mother. Raise it a ton. But but but where will we get the -money- [Lebowski] ? Easy-peasy: taxation of the rich. Tax ’em and use that money for socially-useful ends.
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