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.
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.
But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?
Well, yes. Families have been getting smaller. This means there’s a smaller pool of people to support the fund and ensure that the money in the fund grows. If the money in the fund does not grow then the people currently in retirement lose value on their contributions, or in other words, get less out of the fund than what they put in. So young people have to pay more into the fund because there aren’t enough of us to support all the boomers at previous rates. Millennials, GenZ, GenA, all fucked.
And I want to be clear: I’m not saying that the CPP is worse than the alternative. Having a ton of seniors homeless due to being unable to work would cost everyone a lot more than the CPP does. All I’m saying is that it’s unfair that my contributions will not fund my retirement because they’re currently funding someone else’s. Especially when I could really use that money right now to, yknow, afford food with actual nutritional value.
And all the more: this is a time bomb waiting to blow. The CPP is only projected to be sustainable for the next 75 years. When GenA is retired, they won’t be able to rely on it. It’s a robbing Pete to pay Paul sort of situation.