Teaching new dogs old tricks
There seems now an endless stream of force-fitting initiatives to jumpstart baby-making on a planetary scale.
Such as South Korea’s so-called ‘radical’ solution in the video below - mass blind dates - which sounds more desperate than radical …
.. to the growing explicit rhetoric from the billionaire class, most of whom are clearly pro-natalists, and seem desperately invested in increasing population (a.k.a market?) levels.
All the way to autocratic governments drawing legal lines around freedoms of speech related to going child-free.
All of these efforts seem to ignore the real reasons for people not wanting children in the first place. South Korea leads in this and the report below offers some perspective into underlying reasons.
But what are the reasons for this widespread panic, besides the age old obsession with keeping the blood line going? Well, the pressing economic rationale for it seems to be the infamous ‘demographic trap’. It is the idea that as societies get older, the costs associated with maintaining that older population cannot be met by the declining productivity generated by the shrinking working population.
Is that necessarily true though? It would be only if each of the following variables remains constant:
The productivity per capita of the working population remains the same.
The consumption per capita of the entire population remain the same.
Costs for eldercare remain at current levels - the majority of these costs going to healthcare, I assume. But what if old people lived much healthier lives into their last decades because they maintain a healthier lifestyle from the get go and in raised within far healthier cultures than we do have now?
Immigration levels remain the same, i.e. states can let go of their immigration fears and tap into the latent productivity of new incoming immigrants.
Periodic increases in the birth rate.
Advances in technology that will impact any of the above or other as yet unknown parameters.
Instead of fixing any of these cornerstone parameters, it seems to me entirely narrowminded to be fixated on simply increasing the number of babies born per generation and maintaining our current levels of costs and sickness levels on the demand side, and the current levels of productivity on the supply side.
The big problem with the ‘demographic trap’ argument is that it denies the loud and clea demand of women worldwide i.e. ‘I want to have children on my own terms’ and reframes it as ‘You need to have children for the good of the world or the state’. Which to me sounds basically like the precursor for a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ scenario.
Update 29th Dec 2024
Here’s a new informative video that analyses this very issue - the rise of pro-natalism - in good depth - note the very similar cover image as mine for this journal entry!
