Capitalisn’t: The Fertility Crisis—Capitalism’s Next Challenge

Niall Ferguson: The world of shrinking population will be a world with precisely the opposite of the dynamism that characterized the period of rapid human population growth. It’s a rather desolate prospect. 

Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean. 

Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea? 

Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales. 

Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor. 

Bethany: This is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism. 

Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? 

Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t. 

Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process. 

Luigi: Bethany, if an economist, a historian, a general, a politician, an environmentalist, a futurologist, and a journalist enter a bar, what do you think they talk about? 

Bethany: Is this your attempt at a joke? It sounds like a pretty terrible one, if you ask me. 

Luigi: Yeah, it is a dad joke. But they’re talking about fertility. This is one of the rare topics that interests all of them. 

Bethany: There’s been a dramatic shift, one that I think is not fully appreciated by most people, from politicians to regular people. The worry for years has been overpopulation. Now, the worry, at least in some circles, is underpopulation. 

The recent numbers are stunning. The fertility rate is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime. In the United States, the total fertility rate is 1.64. If the fertility rate stays at this level—big if—in three generations, roughly 100 years, there will only be half as many young Americans as today. 

In China, the fertility rate is 1.2. This means that China’s population in 100 years will be about 20 percent of what it is today. In South Korea, it’s 0.7. In three generations, there will only be 4 percent of the Koreans that are around today. 

But Luigi, why do you want to talk about fertility in a podcast about capitalism? 

Luigi: I want to talk about fertility precisely because this is a podcast about capitalism. Economic theory is based on the idea of expansion, and humanity has been expanding, certainly since the 1500s. If that is about to change, then the foundation of our economic theory needs to be rethought. 

Bethany: There’s also an interesting paradox here. Even in the most neoliberal economy, human reproduction is mostly out of the market system. There are cases of uterus-for-hire, but they are limited. The overwhelming majority of human reproduction is dictated by the social realm, not the market realm. 

Nevertheless, it has gigantic effects on the functioning of the market economy. This is the reason why some politicians—hello, JD Vance—averse to intervention in a market system are still happy to intervene and subsidize reproduction. But should we? 

Luigi: Bethany, we have a journalist and we have an economist. We cannot bring all the other fellows here. Who would you pick to talk about this topic? 

Bethany: I think I can bring you one who is able to summarize them all. 

Sir Niall Ferguson, a historian by training, a futurologist by trade, a deep connoisseur of the political world, and someone who has thought a great deal about the reasons why we’re heading toward a global population decline and what that might mean. 

Luigi: But not exactly a tree-hugging environmentalist. Bethany, you will have to play the environmentalist today, besides being a journalist. 

Bethany: I will do my best. 

We wanted to discuss your Bloomberg piece, which is entitled, “Global Population Collapse Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore.” And you wrote this: “Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse, nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. I can’t recall a single pundit predicting how low it would go in some countries.” 

So, a two-part question for you. How did we all get something so big so wrong? And do you think people, broadly speaking, appreciate what this means now? 

Niall Ferguson: The key here is that we didn’t really pay enough attention to the declining fertility rates in, first of all, the Western world, and then just about everywhere. When the total fertility rate, which is, in effect, live births per woman, falls below 2.1, you’re below replacement. That actually started to happen quite a long time ago. This was something that I don’t think people thought much about until they suddenly woke up and realized that human population was likely to peak sooner than we thought. 

Then, the interesting part that most people still have not got their heads around is that population could fall as drastically as it rose in the 20th century. There’s an assumption that I encounter a lot when I discuss this with people that we level off. We just level off at nine billion and just call it a day. 

But that’s not what happens in any biological population. There’s a really steep decline that’s implicit in these low TFRs. It’s very, very hard to project these things accurately, and I may turn out to be entirely wrong. I wouldn’t live to see how wrong I am, but maybe my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will come on your great-grandchildren’s podcast and apologize for Niall’s errors. 

But the reality is that we’re not dealing here with some self-equilibrating system, which is what economists love. They love self-equilibrating systems. That’s the essence of classical economics. But it’s wrong, because it’s a complex system, and it’s not self-equilibrating. In fact, you’re on the edge of chaos. We end because we choose to have fewer children than we need to have to reproduce ourselves. The history that will be written one day, by the last surviving historian, whose name will either be Fukuyama or Harari, will be why human beings chose extinction. 

Luigi: We economists like to think that many systems are stable. In part, they are stable because when you produce less, prices go up, and this creates incentives to produce more, or vice versa. 

But in the fertility decision, once we broke the Malthusian logic that if you produce too many kids, you don’t feed them, so they starve, et cetera . . . Once you broke that, there is nothing that is balancing them off. If, all of a sudden, people decide they don’t want to have kids, it’s not that there are incentives for others to produce more kids. 

I want to start with you analyzing, first at the micro level, and then, maybe at the macro level, the fertility decision. Let’s start from a very simple thing. How many kids do you have, and how did you choose to have kids? 

Niall Ferguson:  Well, I’m an outlier, Luigi. I have five children. I’m an outlier because I love children. Most young men don’t really love children and rather dread becoming fathers. But I’ve found nothing more fulfilling in my life than parenthood. If I weren’t old—I’m now 60—I’d be trying to have more children because children just are the best. So, I’m unusual. 

I’m also a little bit of a hangover from the feckless ’60s. I was born in 1964. My generation, I’m afraid, approached reproductive decisions in a haze of inebriation and lust. We didn’t have dating apps, and we didn’t have spreadsheets, and we really didn’t do the math. We allowed, as they say in some parts of the world, the little head to do the thinking. I’m afraid my path to parenthood was not characterized by great deliberation. 

What I would hypothesize is that you economists have convinced young people that having children is an economic decision, so they sit down, and they calculate how much it’s going to cost to have a child. They see the Harvard fees and the Chicago fees, and they decide the most that they can possibly have is 1.3. That’s just not how my generation, at least my generation of Scots, approached this exciting part of life’s cycle. 

Bethany: But wasn’t part of having children always implicitly an economic decision? A long time ago, people wanted to have children because they needed children to go work. Hasn’t economics always been part of the backdrop of the decision for having children, even if people didn’t explicitly realize that? Maybe the difference in the current generation is more that the economic thinking is explicit, rather than implicit. Or am I not thinking about this the right way? 

Niall Ferguson: In truth, we don’t know terribly much about why people in the past had the families that they had. The key thing for me that we forget is how high infant mortality was. Family size, in the sense of the number of live births, was partly motivated by a sense that half of them wouldn’t make it. If you wanted to have any surviving heirs, you’d better have a good number of children. It’s a very different world from the world that we live in today. 

Now, if we come up to the recent past, it looks as if a lot emanates from the changing situation of women. The more education, the more educational opportunity women have, the more professional opportunities they have, the more likely family size is to be limited. 

It’s not just the pill. There’s a gradual shift in the course of the 20th century towards greater control of fertility, including, of course, abortion. Globally, we’ve moved towards more-liberal abortion rules, even though some countries, including the United States, have tightened their laws. The global trend over the last three decades is for abortion to get easier. 

I think future generations will wonder why human beings developed such an enthusiasm for killing fetuses. I think that will seem like a weird thing in about three or four decades from now. But that is a trend that it’s hard in my mind to feel entirely good about. 

But women have much more control over their own fertility. Once that’s the case, then I think you see everywhere—regardless of culture, regardless of geography, regardless of history—this very steep decline in TFR, in total fertility rate. 

Luigi: I think that, actually, one of the things that, as an economist, I would like to believe leads to having fewer children is the fact that now, we are burdening future generations with enormous amounts of liabilities. 

If you think about the size of the public debt, and the size of the Social Security, Medicare, et cetera, liabilities. Maybe this is too much from an economist’s perspective, but you think about the choice of buying a painting or having a kid. I derive the utility from the kid. But if the kid is heavily taxed, my utility’s taxed as well. I’m more likely to opt for a painting that is not going to be taxed, rather than the kid that is taxed. 

My question is, to what extent is the explosion of debt, the explosion of future liabilities, actually discouraging people from having children? 

Niall Ferguson: Luigi, I’m always sympathetic to Chicago-style arguments, but I don’t think many people are thinking about the federal debt relative to GDP when they’re family planning. There is, I think, an economic—

Luigi: You were not thinking about that? 

Niall Ferguson: I was not. I wasn’t thinking about any economics. I had no idea how I was going to pay for these children of mine. It’s never been my question. 

I think today’s young people do the kind of spreadsheet-type analysis of household finances that my generation didn’t do. We were pretty feckless. I had no clue what the net present value of a child was, how much it was going to cost me to educate these five children. I’m still educating two of them. But I think people do today. There are articles in the newspapers saying, “Well, this is how much it’s going to cost you.” Of course, you see the cost, and the sticker shock is massive. 

For my own children, some of whom are in their late 20s and one of whom is 30, I can see them doing the math in a way that I did not, and I don’t think many people in my generation did. I think there is an economic calculation going on, but it’s not got to do with public finances. 

I think the economics comes in, in that women are making a choice between career and motherhood, and there is a trade-off there that no amount of policy intervention completely gets rid of. This is where Bethany should comment, because it’s really women who are the decision-makers much more than men. People have gotten better at avoiding unintended pregnancy, a lot better. About a third of the decline in fertility in the US since 2007 was just due to the decline in unintended births. 

But there’s also this striking phenomenon of declining sexual activity. There are really large proportions of 18- to 24-year-old men who report having no sexual activity in the past year. It’s a third. 

There are natural reasons for falling fertility. Sperm counts are way down—that’s part of what’s going on here—by some measures, by half over the last 50 years. Then there’s all this distraction that people suggest is the explanation. People are on their phones instead of in the sack. 

I’m particularly interested in the paradox that, as we’ve made mating more efficient through dating apps, we’ve somehow made sex less appealing. I think dating apps may be, in fact, an alien conspiracy to cause the collapse of human population, because they seem to correlate with this steep decline in sexual activity.

That’s part of the story that we’re looking at here. People are making decisions about sex. I don’t think they’re making them because of the debt burdens that they’ve accumulated. If people cared about these debt burdens, Luigi, they wouldn’t exist. People would vote against fiscal recklessness, but they vote for it. People couldn’t care less, certainly in the United States, about the rising burdens of debt, except insofar as it’s personal debt. There, I think you’re onto something. Because I do think student debts and other forms of consumer debt on the household balance sheet do play a part. 

Bethany, I want to ask you because this is a conversation. How do you think about this? 

Bethany: I think I’m more like you, in that I did not think about the math behind having children, and I had my children. But I had my children quite late in life as well, so I also had my career and had lived my life before I had children. I was luckily able to have both. 

But in your piece, you pointed out an article from two economists who point out, “The cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the US has recently become U-shaped, meaning that more highly educated women are actually starting to have more children.” 

I see that anecdotally in people I know. How, then, do you think about this intersection, if you will, of women’s control over their fertility rate with this broader economic structure? More highly educated women have more money and can afford to have children and can afford to hire nannies so they can continue to have their career. Does that point the way toward a possible solution in the form of government intervention? Or would you argue that’s still a bad idea? 

Niall Ferguson: I think the U-shaped story’s interesting because it tracks American income and wealth distribution. At the bottom end of the scale, there’s welfare ways of having a large family, as long as you don’t mind being wretchedly poor. But if you’re in the middle, that’s when it’s really an expensive business. If you’re at the top, you can afford to hire the nannies. This is what it’s all about for professional women. 

The problem is that there are these great, exemplary, egalitarian societies like, I don’t know, Finland, where you don’t have the inequality that you see in the United States, where it ought to be easy for women because there’s really all kinds of ways in which a middle-class family in Finland is supported to have children. It doesn’t work. They still have really low fertility. 

It seems to me very interesting and a problem for economics that the trend towards low fertility, to a TFR below 2.1, is everywhere. It’s come down faster in Italy than in England. It’s come down as fast in Iran as in the United States. I don’t think it’s got much to do with the economic system or the incentives, certainly through the government, that exist to have children. That’s the takeaway I have. 

Luigi: Since you ridiculed my economic interpretation, then I don’t see why there is any problem with the fertility bust. In the past, people were having kids or were forced to have kids, either by mistakes or because they needed them to support themselves in old age. 

Now that we have removed those problems, people have the optimum number of kids. If the population will shrink a lot, that is better for the environment. It’s better for the reduced price of housing. It’s better because the beaches will be less crowded. Why do we worry? 

Niall Ferguson: Here’s the real problem. You know it, Luigi, because you’re just playing devil’s advocate. If you have falling populations, you have economic stagnation, contraction, aging societies. Japan is the leader here, but Japan is telling us what our future will be. Our future will be that schools will have to be converted into elderly care homes. 

An elderly or aged population is a less-creative population than a youthful one. The world of shrinking population will be a world with precisely the opposite of the dynamism that characterized the period of rapid human population growth. It’s a rather desolate prospect. 

I’m waiting for somebody to bring this up, so I might as well do it myself. I’m with Elon on this. If we decide to be a shrinking species, which just confines itself to one planet, and goes back down to two billion and maybe below, that doesn’t look like a good trajectory for us as a species. 

A couple of reasons for that. One, the climate problems culminate before our population starts to decline. The falling population doesn’t really solve the imminent climate problem that we’re creating now. 

Then, the second problem I have with the shrinking human species is, I don’t know, I can’t help feeling that there may be another species waiting to take advantage of that, including the one that we’re building ourselves. Remember, there’s a new species that we’ve decided to make. We call it artificial intelligence, but it should, in fact, be called inhuman or nonhuman intelligence. As we build AI-enabled robots, a new species will be there. They will become very numerous very fast. That doesn’t strike me as at all a good plot line for a movie. 

Bethany: Does this argue, then, on constraints on individual choices, particularly for women, given the dire prospects ahead of population decline? Does it argue for constraints on abortion? Does it argue for constraints on contraception? Does it argue for other constraints on women’s behavior that would create state incentives to have more children? 

Niall Ferguson: I think it’s been tried. Iran would be one place. It doesn’t work. The truth is that no measures seem capable of reversing declines in fertility. If you create the kind of restrictions you’re talking about, people will get around them. It won’t be pleasant, but they will get around them. 

I think one of the key lessons of history is that when governments try to change the total fertility rate in the upward direction . . . They can bring it down. China did, India did. You can use coercion to lower fertility. But it seems to be really hard to coerce people to have more than one-and-a-half children. 

Luigi: Actually, I think that we need to rethink at least some aspects of capitalism, because you are presuming that we need to live with faster and faster growth overall, which at some point in the finite world is not feasible. 

We need to start thinking about a world in which we might continue to increase per-capita income but not necessarily increase the number of people. That allows us choices that are less environmentally damaging. I’m not talking about just CO₂. I’m no expert, but most likely the stuff in sperm comes from some pesticides or some chemical crap that is sent into the environment. It is sent there because people say, “Oh, we cannot survive in a world of 10 billion people without using all the pesticides and all the pollutants on the face of the Earth.” If we actually go down to two billion, we can have a clean world. I understand your idea of, oh, we lose the creativity. 

But OpenAI and all the AI inventions will substitute a lot for people in that dimension. Do we need so many people to be creative when we have systems to be creative? I think we can substitute in many dimensions. We can abandon certain cities as ugly places, and all concentrate in New York because it’s more beautiful, or in San Francisco, whatever. 

I don’t really see the problem, unless you are concerned more from a military point of view. This is where I would like you to talk about the geopolitical aspect of fertility decline. 

Niall Ferguson: If it were so obvious that we should just learn to stop worrying and love population stagnation and decline, then why are so many countries so eager to attract immigrants? One of the odd things about the world today is that countries with very low TFRs determinately boost their population through immigration. 

The United States does it in the most eccentric way possible, by having an open border. Other countries are somewhat more deliberate about whom they attract. But there aren’t many Western countries that just shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh, well. We’ll just be fewer then.” To run Britain’s beloved National Health Service without immigrants . . . because you need a lot of people to run hospitals, particularly to do the menial tasks, but also, actually, to staff the nursing and doctors’ jobs. One thing that goes against your argument is that the societies with TFRs below 2.1 are scrambling to attract immigrants. 

The alternative model, which is much more prevalent in East Asia, is to rely on the robots. I think it’s very interesting that the one area where China is decisively ahead of the United States technologically today is robotics. They will have far more robots. They will definitely get to the kind of robots Elon pretends he has before we do. 

The conflict of the future, when the United States and China finally go to war at some point later this century, could be between an immigrant army and a robot army. That’s a plausible future, in my view. If you look at the war in Ukraine, which is the biggest war we’ve seen in recent years—it’s probably the biggest conventional war since the Iran-Iraq war—the armies are small by the standards of the mid-20th century. The age of the soldiers is amazingly high. The average age of the Ukrainian army is, I think, 44.

But the geopolitics of conflict today is mainly a technology problem rather than a manpower problem. That means that the war of the future, if the US and China do go to war, will be a war of machines much more than it will be a war of men. In that war of machines, the Chinese will have more machines. They’ll have more robots; they’ll have more drones. They will have really considerable capacity, which is why I think a war with China would be quite a bad idea.

Bethany: I’m guessing, based on what you said, that you prefer the idea of an army of immigrants to an army of robots. I might be wrong about that, so correct if I am wrong. The correction might be part of your answer. The question is, then, if a country were to be smart, how would it craft an immigration strategy? 

Niall Ferguson: Well, I’m a bit nervous of robot armies. As I suggested earlier, I don’t see AI as a whole bunch of copilots that will make us really good at what we do. The evidence already shows that the pure AI beats the human with the AI. At least human soldiers have to sleep, whereas robot armies can just continue the slaughter until their batteries run down, I suppose.

The question you asked about the rational immigration policy is answerable in two stages. First of all, it’s clear that if you allow immigration to happen too rapidly so that the foreign-born share of the population shoots up from 10 to 20 or 30 percent, you will have a political backlash. Ask Canadians how that’s going. It’s very interesting to me that Canada has overshot. They had a rational policy in terms of criteria, but the scale was too much. I think the first rule of immigration policy is do not go too fast if you want to maintain the legitimacy of your policy. 

The second rule has to be to select, to have a bias in favor of skill, because unskilled immigrants, as far as I can understand from the various studies that have been done, are not an obvious fiscal positive. In fact, they can be net negative. 

Very few countries are getting this right. But the fact that so many countries are trying in various ways to get immigration right tells me that we aren’t really content with falling populations—at least, not in the Western world. That’s a revealing sign of why we won’t be happy when we find out just how rapidly the population declines. 

Now, remember, I forgot to say this, but it’s really crucial. The population is falling everywhere except pretty much in sub-Saharan Africa. One of the interesting qualifications to be made to the argument is that, as population declines everywhere else, population continues to rise, at least in the next 30 years, in eight countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, plus India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Oh, I forgot Tanzania. In the remainder of the century, if you go out to 2100, nearly all the population growth will be in Africa because the TFRs are coming down there, but they’re still really high. It’s six in Congo right now. 

I think one of the interesting consequences of what we’re discussing is that the countries that have an immigration policy will become, over time, more African. Then, there will be a point reached when we run out of Africans, too. Then, we’ll be in the world of the 2070s, 2080s, when the global population will decline, and there won’t be an immigrant solution. That will be a world that I don’t think Luigi’s grandchildren will actually find very enjoyable. 

Bethany: Luigi, one thing that struck me about this topic and this conversation is how very, very hard to predict it was, how wrong most thinkers got it, and how Niall confessed we might still be getting it wrong. I find that always interesting. I guess there are lots of examples of times where we’ve gotten really important issues wrong. 

What do you think about the big-picture idea that we’ve been so wrong about the question of overpopulation versus underpopulation? And what do you think about the likelihood that Niall’s dire predictions going forward prove correct? 

Luigi: What I was trying to say on the podcast is that human reproduction is a system that is not very well balanced. Like many mechanisms in the market system, when you produce too much, the price goes down, and your incentives to produce are little, and so on and so forth. That’s not true with reproduction. The only limit, historically, has been the ability to feed people. 

I was reading somewhere that if the German chemists during World War I had not understood how to produce fertilizer, the maximum amount of population that we could support today would be two billion, and we are at eight. 

I think that there was a gigantic discovery that expanded our ability to support a larger population, so we have eliminated the boundaries, and the system has been unstable in one direction. 

Now, we have a lot of forces, very understandable, that I think are cutting down on the number of children people want to have. Because it’s an exponential system—I think that everybody has learned with the pandemic how fast an exponential system can go—if you start to decline and you keep this decline constant over time, the population shrinks very fast. 

Now, the big if is, will it maintain? So far, we have seen that the richer you get, on average, the fewer kids you have. Except, as you mentioned in the podcast, in the United States, if you are very, very rich now, you have a few more kids than if you are poorer. But in general, with the increase in wealth, we have seen a decline in the number of kids. Hopefully, we don’t expect people to become poorer, so we shouldn’t expect a dramatic change.

Bethany: I understand that there wasn’t equilibrium on the upside. The human population continued to explode, perhaps beyond what the resources of our planet could provide. There’s my environmentalist comment for you. But isn’t there equilibrium on the downside, at some point? 

I know Niall argued that it’s not. He said economists love self-equilibrating systems, but this one is not. And the human population will tip into really steep decline, and no one knows where that leads. But just as our capacity to fertilize the world and provide for people increased, couldn’t there be something as the population starts to decline that would do the same thing? 

Luigi: I think that the most important innovation would be uterus for rental, the ability to have children outside of a woman’s uterus. That would dramatically reduce the costs of producing children. Maybe we’re not that far away from that. 

Short of that, I don’t see a dramatic change because the problem is mostly the opportunity costs for women to have children, then, secondary, the opportunity costs for parents to take care of them. I think that the big, big change is that women have entered the labor force in a massive quantity. The value of their time has skyrocketed. As a result, the cost of having a child has skyrocketed. 

Bethany: I’m not sure it’s that, but I want to push back on something you said first, or just ask a question about it. Why would a uterus for rent—assuming we wanted to go in that direction, which is a big if—solve the issue, given that the cost isn’t having the child? The cost is raising the child. Why would that solve anything at all? 

Luigi: First of all, I’m not so sure that the cost is only raising the child. I think there is a significant cost of having a child, and a cost that is not equally shared. You can think about a more-equal society where the cost of rearing a child is equally distributed. But so far, the cost of having a child is disproportionately on the woman, with career costs not trivial. A lot of women don’t see this as a priority, or they postpone in their key fertile years. Then, by the time they have the time, it might not be feasible. I’m 100 percent with you, it will not impact the cost of raising a child, but it will impact the cost of bearing a child. 

Now, how big is that effect? You are saying that effect is small and is overwhelmed by something else. It’s possible. Your view is the biggest cost is raising it. 

Bethany: By far. By far, not even close. If you have a child, it’s a nine-month process. You can work during most of that process. Assuming you have a healthy, normal pregnancy, you can work almost until the end of it. The cost becomes having the child. The blip to me of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely nothing compared to the work and the effort and the time spent on raising children. 

But I also am not sure, going back to your original point . . . This would be interesting, if an economist could do this and break it down in a more systematic way. But I’m not sure the issue is as simple as women not wanting to have children because . . . You’re not saying it is. You mentioned other costs and issues . . . but as women who work not wanting to have children and not wanting to trade their career, because what I see with a lot of upper-income women who don’t work outside the house, they don’t necessarily have more children, either. It’s not because they want their career. They don’t have a career outside the house. If that motivation were a major part of the story, then I would expect to see women who choose not to work having a lot more children, and they don’t. 

Luigi: Yes. Look, I want to be very careful because I’m not trying to say we should go back to that period. 

Bethany: No, no, no! I don’t think you are, and I’m very clear on that. 

Luigi: I’m saying the opportunity cost of women’s time has exploded. Think about a woman in the beginning of the 20th century. She couldn’t vote; she couldn’t go around; she couldn’t have a life on her own. Probably she wasn’t even able to go to the movies by herself. 

Now, even if you don’t work, but especially if you’re rich and you don’t work, you have the world at your disposal. You can do so many things. There is an opportunity cost of having a child, and of course, raising the child. The raising is the only thing that you can delegate. Maybe you don’t feel good about delegating, but you can delegate. We do see delegating, since as you said, rich people have a lot of support and then tend to have more children. That does have an impact. 

Bethany: Yeah. You might be right, because wealthier women are having more children. It might actually prove your point, because it might be wealthier women who don’t work outside the house and who are able to have more children without giving up a career, and without any fear of the opportunity cost because in the overall scheme of things, there isn’t one. Maybe that data point does support your argument. 

I guess I was just thinking that you would see—and maybe it’s too soon, also—across the board, more women who’ve chosen to stay home having more children. Maybe that is happening in some places in the country, just not in wealthy, urban areas. 

Luigi: But the thing that shocked me the most, I think, about the conversation is how conservative on this point Niall is. First of all, I think that his sentence about abortion really threw me off, because whether you look at it from a women’s-rights perspective or from the rights-of-the-unborn perspective, either way, I don’t think that abortion and fertility should be in the same sentence. I think that those are two different topics, and they shouldn’t be mixed. 

Bethany: Yeah. I understand your point. I guess I saw him as being purely an economist, even though he’s not, about the issue and basically saying, “Hey, if you don’t have enough widgets, you’re going to regret not keeping all the widgets you could have had.” I saw it in a very data-driven way, rather than a comment on whether women should or shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions. But maybe I’m cutting him too much slack on that. 

Luigi: I’m sorry, maybe I’m too critical. I saw it a little bit in a callous way. Whether you want more children or you don’t want more children, do you really want to have more children simply by forcing women who don’t want to have children to have children? 

Bethany: Obviously not. There was a lot more to say on that point. Is this really what you would want to do? But I thought that would take the conversation in a direction that I wasn’t sure he intended, and that I didn’t think added to the point of the discussion. 

But I agree with you on that point. Obviously, I am pro- a woman’s right to choose. But I didn’t hear him as making a political comment, but maybe it’s impossible not to. 

Luigi: The other thing that surprised me is that, if you put medical issues aside . . . I’m actually very interesting in and scared by the medical issues, now that we’re going to have Robert Kennedy, Jr., in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. Everything is going to be solved, right? 

I’m actually concerned that environmental factors can have a dramatic impact. This is, really, not only unhealthy but worrisome. Environmentalism is not just being concerned about climate change. There are a lot of other things. To support eight billion people, and potentially 10 billion people on Earth, we have to use a massive amount of pesticides, a massive amount of fertilizer, a massive amount of chemical products that we don’t know the long-term impacts of. Maybe this lack of fertility is even driven by many of these pesticides—who knows? It is a tax on Earth that we don’t fully appreciate. 

Bethany: If you had to argue the risks of too many people and a population that continues to explode, versus the risks of too few people, maybe there’s an upper limit and a lower limit. I’m pro-human, but the idea of 20 billion of us on this planet is a pretty horrifying possibility. That said, the idea of us making ourselves extinct is not really a great possibility, either. 

Luigi: But first of all, I do think there will be some rebound on the lower end. When there is plenty of room, and houses will be cheap because people don’t inhabit them anymore, people will have many more children. I don’t see this trend as inevitable on the downside. I think, in the short term, it is good that we’re not continuing to explode. 

The only aspect that I’m concerned about—and, surprisingly, he wasn’t as concerned about—is the fiscal component. We have set up a pension system and a level of debt that is really dependent on some continuous growth in the population—at least, not a rapid decline in the population. As the population is declining, then we may be forced to do massive immigration in order to keep the tabs going and to pay for stuff, creating enormous social problems. 

Bethany: Well, let me come back to this. I think you’re unfairly attributing something to him that he didn’t actually say. First of all, the thought of what governments might do to attempt to force fertility, if this really does become an issue, is a really scary prospect. Actually, in some ways, just as scary as the thought of a global pandemic. That’s a really frightening thing to think about. Margaret Atwood may have been more right than . . . Science fiction has a way of being freakishly right. Who knows? That’s a very dystopian future. 

But I don’t think you’re being quite right. He did not say he was not concerned about the explosion of debt. He said he didn’t think the explosion of debt was what was stopping people from having children. Those are two different issues. 

I do agree with you, I think that’s the most frightening thing, the possibility of civil war between generations as you have fewer and fewer young people to support an aging workforce. That’s something the world has never reckoned with before. None of our systems are built to deal with that.

Luigi: I think you’re right. I gave to him a version that maybe was not the most palatable one. But in my view, when you have a very strong pay-as-you-go system, in countries like Italy, to fund pensions, and you have a very high level of debt, it’s not only that people do the rational calculation the way I described. But also, people, when they enter the workforce, are heavily taxed because in Italy, you have a massive amount of social contribution that goes to pay for elderly people. When a big chunk is taken away from your paycheck, the last thing you want to do is to have a child. 

I do believe strongly that the more you have a pay-as-you-go system in place, the more people will stop having children because they are taxing people exactly at the time when they are fertile. 

Bethany: That’s interesting. If that’s right and he’s wrong, then that would point to a solution for this, at least if governments wanted to. But the problem is, I don’t really see what the solution is. In other words, a solution would be to tax people less at the period when they could be having children to encourage them to have children. But then, how do you support the aging population? I guess, eventually, you’d have a balance if people started having more children. But there would be a gap for a couple of decades that would be really problematic. 

One thing I was struck by in this discussion, and tell me if you were as well, is the ways in which human beings are economic and self-serving, and then, the ways in which, possibly, we’re not. He seemed to make the argument that one reason we weren’t having children, or people aren’t having children, is because they’re so budget-conscious. Per your point about Italy, they’re sitting down, looking at the numbers, and saying, “This just doesn’t work.” 

Then, at the same time, he dismissed the idea that we’re really economic creatures by arguing that we’re not really thinking about the gigantic national debt, and young people are voting for fiscal recklessness other than in their own personal debt.

It just made me start thinking on a different level about the ways in which human beings are rational and economic, and the ways in which we’re not. Of course, if we are actually driving ourselves to extinction, then in the end, we are definitely irrational, right? 

Luigi: It depends. Imagine you were to have a miserable life, but the human species is not extinct. Or you have a very happy life, but there is no survival of the human species. Which one do you choose? 

Bethany: Yeah. Well, I think we’re all short-term in our thinking. I think the majority of people would probably choose the latter. Maybe the point is  not that we’re not economic or not rational, just that we’re very, very self-serving. Our economics and our rationality are directed at our own short-term wellbeing, rather than at the long-term existence of humanity. 

Luigi: I think that Western society is very individualistic and doesn’t really think about the species or the community as an element. If you take the Catholic religion, for example, it’s very much about the community—so much so that you have to sacrifice for others, including having children for the happiness of God. 

Bethany: Yeah. It is fascinating, even though it’s very uncomfortable territory surrounding women and our entrance into the labor force, and our right to work and be fully realized human beings, all of which I am, obviously, incredibly pro. 

But it is interesting that it may come at a cost. Right now, I think I would say the cost is not a cost, because anything that slows down the rapid escalation of the number of people on Earth is probably a good thing. But eventually, it may be a cost. It’s an interesting thing to think about, that something can be very right on one level, and perhaps something that generations from now, if the human race really is dying off, will look back and second-guess.