The United States, once an outlier among industrialized countries with respect to its high birth rate, has caught up with the low fertility trend. As birth rates decline even among its large immigrant population, US women are having an average of 1.6 children – a fact that inspires deep unease among economists and others across the political spectrum.
The unease ostensibly concerns a future in which the working-age population is inadequate to support the growing cohort of retirees. These arguments are not new. Commentators have been wringing their hands about a “birth dearth” since Ben Wattenberg, a self-described paleoliberal, coined the term in 1987, in a book that has since been accused of spawning the white nationalist movement.
Since then, the world’s population has grown by 3.2 billion people and is still growing by about 80 million per year. Many of these people are in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to contraceptives and women’s empowerment to use them are not what they are in wealthier countries. This fact is no doubt the source of much of the low birth rate alarm from the right, which is often about not too few people, but too few people of the right race and ethnicity.
From the left, the argument is that if only young people had adequate economic means, reliable medical and social services, and a better work-life balance, they would be more likely to venture into the expensive and all-consuming adventure of parenting. But even in places like Finland, famous for its strong social safety net and elevated happiness index, the birth rate is a mere 1.25 children per woman. The evidence, which shows birth rates falling in nearly every country where women gain reproductive choice, suggests that women are not having kids simply because they don’t want to.
Many of the arguments from the left about how to raise birth rates are unassailable: universal health care and child care, paid family leave, rent control and other progressive policies should be part of a baseline social safety net in the richest economy in the world. But to proffer these programs as means of increasing the birth rate is to buy into the default assumption of a growth-based economic systemand an ever-growing population as the best way to organize societies.
That assumption has resulted in ecological overshoot of which runaway climate change and biodiversity collapse are just two symptoms. Though growth-oriented organizations such as the OECD and the UN talk of “decoupling” carbon emissions from economic growth, such talk is delusional: population and economic growth have canceled out most of the gains made in renewable technology and efficiency in recent decades, with the result that emissions continue to grow and climate change is accelerating. Meanwhile, economic growth is not even succeeding at its most basic job of spreading prosperity: it turns out the vast majority of its benefits flow to the already wealthy.
Yet the urgent push to keep expanding our population continues. Taiwan, South Korea, and China have introduced baby subsidies to spur the contribution of future workers and consumers to keep the engines of growth humming along. The focus of the Trump Administration’s Global Gag Rule is not explicitly on increased birth rates, but on making birth a matter of compulsion rather than choice for millions reliant on US-funded family planning.
Few of these efforts are bearing fruit, as once women have tasted the freedom of choosing the small families they desire, they are unlikely to give it up. Their reluctance is perhaps also a sign that we have surpassed the biophysical limits to our growth, and that the time has come for an economic system that recognizes these limits and prioritizes human and planetary well-being. Within such a framework, progress might be measured not by a Gross Domestic Product that includes oil spill cleanups and military expenditures, but by a Genuine Progress Indicator that measures human and ecological health. And instead of striving for economic growth that drives us ever deeper into overshoot, we might have a goal of shrinking our economy, and maintaining it at a better-fitting steady state.
Contracting our population is key to the realization of that goal – and fortunately, we can use progressive policy to do the work we are now demanding from women. We can embrace and encourage the fertility trends already underway with just $2 billion in funding for family planning, a US contribution that would help meet the unmet need for contraception of women the world over. We can care for our aging society by removing the cap on social security, and forcing the wealthy to pay their fair share. We can uplift the poor not with the mythical promise of economic growth lifting all boats, but with progressive taxation that redistributes the gross wealth concentrated in the hands of a few.
To escape climate change, rein in income inequality, and secure a livable future for the children we do have, the time has come to abandon the outdated pursuit of growth at all costs. A smaller, more sustainable population and economy are the clear path forward to advancing the well-being of all.
The post Why Low Birth Rates are Key to Our Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kirsten Stade.