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?
As a friend who was going through the process of getting citizenship once said “I think Canada wants me as a citizen for the tax revenue.”
Yup. That’s the deal… immigration = more tax revenue. It’s actually way better than having more children. Society has to pay for the education and healthcare for children and doesn’t see a dime of tax revenue until the very earliest 18 years, and more likely >20 years. An immigrant that’s already educated immediately starts working and paying taxes.
Immigration is basically the cheat code for demographic problems.
The main problem is that boomers didn’t move out of their houses into nursing homes (or at least small apartments) as early as previous generations so we have some housing problems. But the boomers won’t live forever and when they die off, housing will be freed up.