It comes around as surely as summer follows spring. The release of new data showing birth rates on the wane, spawning a litter of hand-wringing articles insisting under-population disaster is on the way. A breeding cycle as beautiful as any Mother Nature can offer.
Tim Stanley in the Telegraph is convinced that “we must have as many babies as possible” to avoid “hurtling towards underpopulation”. The Pope reckons selfish people need to stop having pets instead of children, as though there is a difference. Tyler Cowen thinks it’s “the looming existential threat that no one is talking about”, though he talks about it on the opinion pages of Bloomberg: Tyler is so existentially threatened he can apparently no longer hear even his own voice.
I could add more to this tragic chorus. The general arguments tend to be that a declining population slows economic growth, and leaves a too-small base of young people to support a too-big bunch of useless old people who want healthcare and pensions.
My general feeling is that these arguments come direct from the free-market right-wing. Capitalism thrives best off a massive pool of poor people. Utopia under this philosophy involves every worker being totally replaceable with another – then nobody ever has the clout to demand a right that might impede the perfect motion of the free market. Imagine humans in big battery farms, packed in like hens, squawkers easily cast out, all working their heads off to avoid the chop. Perfection!
Here’s my hunch: depopulation might be one of the most wonderful gifts ever to fall into humanity’s lap. Firstly, a shortage of workers increases wages. That’s clearly disastrous if you’re a billionaire who needs a lot of poor people to man your warehouses, or to clean your holiday homes. But it’s excellent for humanity at large. Our labour will have a higher value.
Better yet, when workers are hard to replace, it incentivises the market to keep people wanting to work. Early retirements hurt firms, so they start to improve working conditions, offer more reasonable hours, free coffee – anything they can to keep employees satisfied. It’s even possible that human wellbeing could someday be valued as much by the market as it is by humanity – though admittedly that’s a distant dream.
A second thing happens when labour gets expensive: humanity starts to innovate. We look for ways to do things that don’t involve expensive humans. This can be good or bad for society, depending on how it’s harnessed. Robot surgeons are helpful for humans: we get readier healthcare, the NHS spends less, and medics can focus on the thorniest cases. Conversely, self-service check-outs have mostly just allowed big businesses to cut jobs and boost their bottom lines. If automation expands, governments will need to raise taxes on businesses to ensure the whole population benefits, rather than just corporate shareholders.
But innovation is fundamentally good for humanity, as you’ll know if you’ve ever used a dishwasher or light switch. People imagine social care will be impossible with an ageing population. But when a care worker costs £25 an hour, there’s a real incentive to invent machines that can do some of the work. That incentive dies if we keep relentlessly pushing out babies.
Established capitalists, of course, view innovation as a problem. The status quo is working fine for them; innovation causes casualties. The newspaper barons are being crushed by the internet; oil giants are still pretty mad about the solar panel. Even the Pope is not getting the buzz on Twitter that he did with his encyclicals in the 1700s. Who wants a new wave of technology to knock further behemoths from their perches? No wonder it’s big-shots like Jack Ma and Elon Musk who are sounding the alarm.
Sensible people shouldn’t heed the dire warnings from the establishment. A declining population will indeed cause huge shifts in society. But they’ll be shifts towards a greater value for the ordinary human, and improved technology that enhances lifestyles. Strains on resources, currently threatening to bubble over into war, will softly ease. A more stable population, rather than exponential growth, will allow our planet to settle, thrive, provide for all. Quantity of life will be sacrificed for quality. As on most issues over the past 2000 years, the Pope is best left ignored.
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Apprentice Joe 