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There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn't One of Them.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/there-are-many-threats-to-humanity.-a-low-birth-rate-isnt-one-of-themThere are SO many excellent points in this article. I've pulled out a few, but it is worth clicking the link. Current Affairs is not paywalled.
Commentators across the political spectrum claim that humanity faces imminent collapse due to a “fertility crisis.” Is this mass delusion or cynical propaganda?
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Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.” Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.1 Visiting a school that’s populated by a student body smaller than its intended capacity, Lewis-Kraus describes the scene looking “as if everyone had evaporated overnight.” He laments that in Seoul, “In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand.” It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
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The human population is still growing quite a bit. About 132 million people are born every year. That’s more than a third of the total United States population. It also amounts to around 361,000 births every day. About half of those 132 million people die every year. That means that overall, about 180,000 people—or the equivalent of Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s population—are added to the world’s population every day. (For perspective, that’s a number greater than the populations of more than half of the U.S. state capitals.) The human population has never been higher than it is today in all of history, and it will be higher tomorrow. And this increase has come on rapidly: the world’s human population was just around 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and it's already reached a little over 8.2 billion today. When you plot it out on a graph, like this one from Population Matters, it’s striking:
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To get a sense of the bias in Lewis-Kraus’s New Yorker article, that statistic about Seoul—that only 230,000 people were born in a single year, in one city in the country with the world’s lowest birth rate—is presented as an alarming, even dystopian, figure worthy of urgent attention. For perspective, though, that number is about the same as the total number of chimpanzees alive in the world (a species that has a real fertility crisis and is trending toward extinction). Chimps are Homo sapiens’ next closest relative among other animals, and so they are a good proxy for a natural great ape population density. Of course, the dearth of chimps is not “natural,” as it’s being largely driven by human encroachment, but this disparity should put into perspective how out of balance the human population and birth rate are. For more perspective, consider these statistics on global biomass: livestock mass is 30 times the wild terrestrial mammal biomass and 15 times the marine mammal biomass. Humans’ collective body mass is six times greater than all wild mammals. Human-made material, including plastics and buildings, weighs more than all life combined.
---
Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.” Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.1 Visiting a school that’s populated by a student body smaller than its intended capacity, Lewis-Kraus describes the scene looking “as if everyone had evaporated overnight.” He laments that in Seoul, “In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand.” It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
---
The human population is still growing quite a bit. About 132 million people are born every year. That’s more than a third of the total United States population. It also amounts to around 361,000 births every day. About half of those 132 million people die every year. That means that overall, about 180,000 people—or the equivalent of Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s population—are added to the world’s population every day. (For perspective, that’s a number greater than the populations of more than half of the U.S. state capitals.) The human population has never been higher than it is today in all of history, and it will be higher tomorrow. And this increase has come on rapidly: the world’s human population was just around 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and it's already reached a little over 8.2 billion today. When you plot it out on a graph, like this one from Population Matters, it’s striking:
---
To get a sense of the bias in Lewis-Kraus’s New Yorker article, that statistic about Seoul—that only 230,000 people were born in a single year, in one city in the country with the world’s lowest birth rate—is presented as an alarming, even dystopian, figure worthy of urgent attention. For perspective, though, that number is about the same as the total number of chimpanzees alive in the world (a species that has a real fertility crisis and is trending toward extinction). Chimps are Homo sapiens’ next closest relative among other animals, and so they are a good proxy for a natural great ape population density. Of course, the dearth of chimps is not “natural,” as it’s being largely driven by human encroachment, but this disparity should put into perspective how out of balance the human population and birth rate are. For more perspective, consider these statistics on global biomass: livestock mass is 30 times the wild terrestrial mammal biomass and 15 times the marine mammal biomass. Humans’ collective body mass is six times greater than all wild mammals. Human-made material, including plastics and buildings, weighs more than all life combined.
Note: there is an excellent graphic at this point in the article, depicting the relative biomass of the different categories.
Bruenig’s second recent column about pronatalism, “The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right,” is mistitled. There is no coalition on the right that is “pro-baby.” Bruenig’s claim that “yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd” reveals how out of touch this viewpoint is and how insincere she seems to be. Since when does the ideology that denies the existence of climate change, ignores the true sixth mass extinction event that the earth is currently experiencing, defunds medical research, denies the danger of pandemics, salivates over nuclear war with enemies, and shrugs off hormone-disrupting pollution truly demonstrate a belief that “humanity ought to persist on this Earth”? When authoritarians bemoan falling birth rates, they’re not really concerned about children’s health and well-being or about imminent human extinction. They’re concerned with maintaining a certain system of production that is dependent on cheap, abundant, and disposable labor.
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Much more at the link. I regret that I may only post 4 paragraphs. (At least Current Affairs writes decent length paragraphs.)
6 replies
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... no matter how much they try not to say it out loud (and some of them don't try).
It's not a collapse in population they're worried over, only a collapse in Euro-American dominance.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/bush-political-ad-hes-whiter/2859801
Excuse me -- NORTHERN Euro-American dominance.
