MAY 1st, 2023 | Grant Johnson

Why Plunging Fertility RATES Might Not Be So Bad

There are advantages that come with having fewer people.

I remember seminal books like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West ringing the alarm about falling birthrates and the wider implications of this phenomenon back in the early 2000s, but nobody cared. Since it was a problem that mostly effected majority white countries, the assumption by the progressive hegemony was that if you cared, you were racist. Never mind the fact that Japan and China were two of the earliest examples of below-replacement-fertility. The smear was that White countries were afraid of a Black/Brown planet.

Today, however, the global fertility crash is being fully realized in nearly all countries around the world. The world average fertility rate is currently 2.3 children per woman and falling. A fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman leads to population stability in which two kids replace their father and mother generationally. The 0.1 factor accounts for children who don’t live past the age of eighteen.

It is now likely that the global fertility rate will fall below the replacement rate by 2030. This means the overpopulation problem has effectively ended and as time moves forward, the global population will begin to decline, slowly at first… then rapidly.

The problems with this situation are now starting to go mainstream. The newest iteration of this development is spearheaded by Stephen J. Shaw with his new film Birthgap. The economic malaise that comes with shrinking markets and older ages is contrary to the explosive growth and youthful vitality that 20th century analysts took for granted. Our Ponzi-styled, social systems of welfare, healthcare and old-age pensions are now looking completely unstable. Our fiat currency systems and the debt that they’ve built are now looking catastrophic. Our general way of life is coming to an end… and people are beginning to finally realize this.

The solutions in the past have led to championing immigration as a band-aid solution for the West, but this fertility crash is happening everywhere and both the receiving and sending countries are beginning to feel the impact.

The other solution is to just have more kids, but despite some governments incentivizing breeding with generous pro-natal policies, people aren’t responding in numbers large enough to stave off population decline. The longer it continues the harder it will be for a smaller generational cohort to arrest the decline.

The general assumption is that things need to stay the way they’ve been, and we need to figure out how to make that happen; but what if things don’t need to stay the way they’ve been? What if there are enormous opportunities for the future, based on positive aspects of us not having explosive breeding habits? What if this baby boycott sets up a future that conservatives can believe in and helps us avoid the globalist plans for a woke progressive clown world future?

Better parents and better kids

One issue that’s never discussed is the cultural change of having children. For thousands of years, children were the natural result of living life on planet Earth. People were driven to have sex and they did. Children were the by-product.

In the 1960s, all the nascent technology that had been around for a while had either gotten better (condoms) or mainstreamed (birth control pills, IUD) or legalized (abortion). Sex without pregnancy is a timeless tale, but these technologies were embraced and celebrated because they worked like never before.

Regardless of the sexual ethics of the situation, the end result was that the birthrate plummeted. The children who were born, were (more often than not) wanted and planned for and limited and cherished. This led overall to better outcomes for children.

Since mass contraception and abortion: Child abuse has declined. Sexual abuse has declined. Child poverty has declined. Crime rates have declined. Highschool completion rates are way up. Teen pregnancies are way down. Despite problems that we constantly hear about (bullying, social media, obesity…nothing’s ever going to be perfect) the metrics for children have improved since 1970.

Metrics aside, it just stands to reason that if people can control the consequences of sex then they will do so and when the time comes to willingly make a choice to have a child (or not), they’ll be better prepared and more open to doing so. The prospective parents will be better equipped, better motivated and more intentional about their role than at anytime throughout history.

The kids themselves will have more attention, more opportunities and more resources thrown at them both by parents that welcome and encourage them and by society at large, which adapts to children being high value humans rather than problems to solve. If anything, new problems of entitlement and sensitivity have arrived because of this avalanche of attention and indulgence.

Life isn’t perfect and many kids still have a rough life, but in the aggregate, kids are better off than ever before. The abortion promise of making “every child a wanted child” has proven mostly true. Being born to a woman who (if given the opportunity) would rather terminate you out of her life than raise you to the age of 18, is not likely to make for a very good living situation growing up. As birthrates continue to plummet, the scarcity of children will increase their value and multiply their opportunities. The circumstances for children are just going to get better and better.

Conservation

When it comes to handwringing about the environment, nobody is a bigger skeptic than me. I was reading Julian Simon long before his ideas were taken into the 21st century mainstream. The doomsday cult of climate change is a threat to our civilization far more than warmer weather could ever hope to be and human ingenuity will likely solve everything in the long run.

Nevertheless, the Malthusians do have some points about carrying capacity and environmental footprints that are legitimate although overbearing. “If everyone on Earth lived like an average American then we’d need four Earth’s worth of resources to make that happen!” This sort of rhetoric requires a lot of deconstruction as there are many factors that can be debated about the issue, but do we really think we can or should keep growing and prospering at 20th century rates of economic and population growth…forever?

Using oil as a proxy for prosperity…if everyone in the world consumed like the average American today, we’d need to quadruple the oil production we currently have. Even if that were possible, or if we could provide alternatives as substitutes, the requirements for that growth would undoubtedly strain the fabric of the planet. All the resources that go into the average Western standard of living, the metals in your phone, the heat in your home, the beef in your burger, the buttons on the shirt you’re wearing and the shipping costs to bring that shirt to North America from Bangladesh and make and pack it into the cardboard box you drove it home in… the footprint is undeniably very large.

Now imagine if the global population doubling time was still 35 years like it was in the 1960s. Could we really handle 16 billion people living like Westerners in 2058? Or 32 billion people by 2093? Would we want to risk having to handle that?

I believe in human ingenuity, innovation and long-term prosperity, but what if those ideals aren’t enough to overcome the concrete limitations of the environment? We’ve been able to problem solve up to this point, but constantly trying to stay ahead of human demands is fraught with deadly potential and setbacks. The unwelcome consequence of wringing out every drop of resource-laden prosperity could lead us to horrific outcomes that we can’t easily undo.

Moreover, choosing to have fewer children is a benign solution compared to the violent alternatives that could have been on offer from a global elite aiming for that final result anyway, only faster. Smaller families and fewer children leading to less environmental stress overall is much better than wars for resources or genocides for living space.

The fact is, birthrates are falling and a silver lining is less stress for Earth keeping up with humanity’s insatiable demands. Conservation is a conservative principle after all.

Better economics

The modern social-welfare state is a ponzi-scheme. The big safety nets put into place 100 years ago assumed a bunch of statistics that are no longer applicable. The population pyramid that existed in the 1920s has become a population beer glass in the 2020s. Life expectancy is much, much longer and healthcare needs are much, much greater. How do we foot the bill for our BIG GOVERNMENT luxuries without a constantly expanding population?

The solution for most governments around the world has been, massive amounts of debt. This has been made possible (or at least easier) by our intangible fiat currency systems. Governments can just print money and inflation shows up later. Using a variety clever tactics and strategies these governments have been capable of kicking the “bills past due” notices down the road indefinitely.

Indefinitely has now arrived.

Conservatives and libertarians should rejoice that BIG GOVERNMENT is going to struggle in the future economic environment. The corruption and destruction that comes with socialism is well documented, and the “low calorie” version of socialism that has slowly infested Western Civilization under the guise of a social safety net is going to slowly be repealed. This will create a more resilient and independent culture in which people get less dependent on government and more resourceful amongst themselves.

In the long run we will likely see more and more debt and more and more inflation. The death of fiat currency is a timeless tale. Declining birthrates in conjunction with (or perhaps precipitating) this development, however, is a bit of a wildcard. Will deflation due to population decline overwhelm inflation due to increased money printing to maintain the status quo? Japan shows us the near future, but it will be interesting to see how things unfold not in terms of years, but decades.

For now, conservatives should look forward with a sense of opportunity and advantage. Socialism is going to be unaffordable. Family ties will become more important than ever. Debt-fuelled consumerism will be a thing of the past. Housing costs will (eventually) fall. Wages will rise. Hard money may return. The economics of the future could be very bright indeed.

No more war

When Hitler invaded Russia in World War 2, Russia could afford to throw millions of men into the muzzle fire of advancing Germans because they had millions of men to throw. Today, Russia is a dying country with a fertility rate of 1.5 and they are facing off against Ukraine with a 1.2 fertility rate.

The last time either of these countries had replacement level fertility was 1988/89. That’s 34 years of substandard breeding. Lots of families are getting notices that their only son has died fighting a useless war and the family line is now finished. No brother to carry the family name and no sister to replenish the family line. There will be no grandchildren. There will be no heritage to pass on because there will be no family to receive it.

The use of mercenaries in this conflict is very telling. East Ukraine is a magnet for dirtbags worldwide to fight on both sides of the war and they are doing so with gusto. The larger picture, however, is that a deficit of men in the first place has led to this requirement. Without soldiers, there would not be fighters to fight. Without yesterday’s babies, today’s soldiers did not arrive.

The conflicts we see in the 21st century are nothing like the full-scale global annihilation we saw in the 20th century. There just isn’t the manpower or appetite for loss in a world with below replacement fertility. Every life is too precious to lose. Every death costs too high a price.

Low fertility and declining populations could very well see the arrival of a de facto world peace within our lifetimes. Not because of policy or principle, but because life won’t be viewed so cheaply, and land won’t be viewed so lustfully. Any elite plans for war will simply extinguish because the tools for war (surplus young men) won’t be there.

"You know what the great thing about babies is? They are like little bundles of hope. Like the future in a basket." —Lish McBride

The world of the future is going to be radically different from today in ways that we can’t imagine, let alone predict, but as demographers are quick to point out, looking at births today tells you a lot about what a country will be like in 50 years.

India for example has 1.4 billion people and will surpass China as the world’s most populous country within the next ten years. Just recently, India’s fertility rate fell below the magic 2.1 rate which means India is now producing a deficit of births needed to maintain the population they have currently. It also means that with more people having fewer (or no) children, the parents (and the children they do have) will be wealthier than otherwise would have been the case. More money disbursed amongst fewer people raises the standard of living…and from what I’ve heard from every single person I’ve ever met who’s been to India…raising the standard of living needs to be priority number one.

One hundred years from now there will be fewer people on Earth than there is today. The quality of people then will likely be far higher than what we have today and the world in which they live will be richer and more bountiful than our average standards are now.

The worries and laments of boomer conservatives and those of their ilk need to simmer down. Humanity is not dying out; it’s just being naturally selected for changing conditions and the winners of the future won’t give us or our concerns a second thought. The future belongs to those willing to build it, and those willing to build it are getting better all the time.