No, Falling Birthrates Are Not a "Serious Threat to Humanity"

 The online magazine Aeon publishes many poorly reasoned essays. Aeon's latest example is an article by an associate professor of philosophy, one entitled "The Vanishing of Youth."  The essay by Victor Kumar attempts to convince us that falling birth rates are a "serious threat to humanity." We get some bad armchair reasoning. The silly title gives us a hint of how far astray the author has gone. Declining birth rates will not produce any such thing as a "vanishing of youth." 

After pointing out that many say that declining birth rates will very much help reduce the problem of global warming, Kumar says, "These hopes are misplaced." He then says this:

"The path forward on climate change is clear: rapid decarbonisation. We must transition as fast as possible from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. If we fail, the future will be disastrous, and population size becomes irrelevant. If we succeed, additional humans won’t impact carbon emissions."

Decarbonization means the replacement of carbon-based energy sources such as coal and oil with alternative energy sources such as solar power, geothermal power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and so forth.  Such a thing requires many types of extremely difficult work across the globe, occurring over many decades. Any claim that it can be achieved rapidly is erroneous. The idea that you can make population size irrelevant to global warming by "rapid decarbonisation" is fallacious "silver bullet" reasoning.  The likelihood of successfully replacing oil and coal as energy sources is very much related to population size. The smaller the global population, the greater the chance of success such a decarbonization project has. It is fallacious to claim that in some disastrous future "population size becomes irrelevant."  Population size is always extremely relevant. 

Kumar then gives us this fallacious reasoning:

"Moreover, the timelines don’t match. Climate change demands solutions within the next few decades; population decline won’t materialise until the next century. Having fewer humans arriving then won’t retroactively cool the planet." 

The insinuation here that under a low-birthrate scenario "population decline won't materialise until the next century" is not correct.  Below is a year 2025 global population projection appearing in a scientific paper authored by Harvard scientists (a paper published in The Lancet):

In three or four of the five scenarios, global population peaks around the year 2060, and begins declining after then. So it is not correct that under a low-birthrate scenario, population decline will only occur in the twenty-first century. Under reasonable versions of such a scenario, population decline may begin around the year 2060,  forty years earlier than Kumar claims. If that occurs, such a decline will be a very big help indeed in reaching some goal of global decarbonization. The smaller the population, the easier that goal is to achieve. 

Kumar's next paragraph is this very fallacious bit of armchair reasoning, which seems to be based on the premise that a smaller global population would mean fewer young people. 

"Imagine, however, that population decline accelerates. That would worsen rather than salvage our climate prospects. Young people are more likely to support bold environmental policies, become climate activists, and invent green technologies. A shrinking, ageing population means fewer contributors to these efforts."

This kind of reasoning is fallacious. Whatever global warming reduction/slowing effect might occur by having a larger population and more activist young people, it would not be as nearly as great as the global warming reduction/slowing effect that would occur if the population was smaller and there were fewer people around, resulting in a much smaller carbon footprint for most nations. Kumar's reasoning above is like saying it would be a shame if the death-by-drunk-driving rate fell too low, because in that case there would be fewer activists trying to reduce deaths by drunk driving. 

Kumar illogically depicts the following events in the US:

• "Hospitals will burst at the seams while playgrounds empty." No, playgrounds will not empty, because many young people will still be born. And given an overall decline in population or a flattening of population growth, there is no reason to believe that "hospitals will burst at the seam," something that would be more likely to occur if populations keep rising. 
• Kumar predicts that the Social Security system will crumble if the population declines or population growth flattens.  This is fallacious. The current financial difficulties of the Social Security system are easy to permanently fix by simple measures such as eliminating the current "cap" under which income above $200,000 is not subject to the Social Security tax, or by increasing the retirement age after there occurs a corresponding increase in life span (projected to occur because of medical advances). 
• Kumar says there won't be enough tax revenue if the population decreases or population growth flattens. This is a fallacious argument. Tax revenue problems in the US can easily be fixed by increasing tax rates on the wealthiest or creating a wealth tax applying only to the richest. If the population was slightly declining, there would be less need for tax revenue, because tax revenue needs are proportional to population size. 

We then have from Kumar this paean to youth:

"To thrive, societies need young people. New generations drive economic growth, pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change. They’re more likely to take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures. When we talk about population decline, what we’re really talking about is the gradual dissipation of this vital social force."

There will still be plenty of young people if the population declines or if population growth flattens, so this is not a good argument for keeping the population growing. Kumar's statements here are an example of ageism. People who are between 35 and 60 have done very much to  "pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change," and they also often "take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures." In fact, a person over 60 may be more likely to embrace new ideas than someone who is 25. 

Let us consider a young person who studies to get a PhD at a university. Can we expect that this person will be particularly likely to take risks and embrace new ideas?  Often the exact opposite is true.  In many fields such as neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and cosmology, we have belief communities that are dominated by old dogmas and old taboos that have been hanging around for decades or centuries. The career path of someone in such fields is a path of conformity. In such fields a person's chance of progression from PhD candidate to PhD to  "post doc" to assistant professor to full professor will be totally dependent upon how much that person parrots the "party line" of some academia belief community. This is the opposite of a situation where the most thought innovation comes from the youngest. 

Imagine someone is part of such an academia belief community for decades.  If he is a neuroscientist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect a neuroscientist to write.  If he is an evolutionary biologist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect an evolutionary biologist to write. It's a "publish or perish" situation in which the person is expected to meet some quota of papers written. And to get papers published, conformity is required, because peer reviewers tend to reject papers advancing contrarian ideas or heretical claims

But then let's imagine such a person retires from academia. Now he might feel a greater freedom to speak his mind. So the 60-year-old or the 65-year-old might actually be more likely to "embrace new ideas" and "take risks." He might now think that for the first time in his life he can stick his neck out, without suffering dire consequences. My point here is that there is a large reason for doubting the  generalization that young people think in daring, innovative ways, and older people stick to the old way of thinking. Often the main people to realize the stupidity of bad old dogmas are those who have had decades to ponder the failures of such dogmas and how they fail as explanations for very deep complexities of reality that take many years of study to appreciate. 

Kumar makes some fallacious claims about economic growth:

" More importantly, degrowth would devastate developing nations. Economic growth dramatically reduced global poverty. Reverse that growth, and poverty will resurge."

No, poverty will not increase if global population growth reverses or flattens. Degrowth in population is not the same as a shrinking economy.   Statistics about economic growth can be very misleading. An economy can be counted as growing when there occurs many different things that people do not need, such as the building of too-large houses and the building of weapon systems and the manufacture of unnecessary cars. 

An economist says this:

"It’s a false assumption to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world because we measure growth as growth in G.D.P.  If it goes up, does that mean we’re increasing standard of living? We’ve said that it does, but we’ve left out all the costs of increasing G.D.P. We really don’t know that the standard is going up. If you subtract for the deaths and injuries caused by automobile accidents, chemical pollution, wildfires and many other costs induced by excessive growth, it’s not clear at all."

Birthrates below replacement levels are not even happening in developing countries, making Kumar's point here particularly weak. Here is some data from this page:

The "developing nations" do not even have birthrates below replacement levels, and it is a fallacy to assume that if the global population begins to decline, that this will mean there will be birthrates below replacement levels in developing nations. Such developing nations will still be able to grow economically, and their population will still grow. The dip in population growth will come mainly from dips in birthrates of developed countries. 

Kumar states this:

"A smaller population will thus shrink what the evolutionary theorist Joseph Henrich in The Secret of Our Success (2015) calls our ‘collective brain’. We’ll forgo not just particular innovations but entire fields of enquiry, impacting everything from basic research to practical applications in engineering and medicine."

No, there will not occur the disappearing of "entire fields of enquiry" if population growth flattens or if the world's population size slightly declines.  A global population of seven billion working smarter can do just as much intellectually as a global population of ten billion not working so smartly. 

Kumar is speaking erroneously when he says this:

"Young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film. As their numbers diminish, the future will become a cultural wasteland. Imagine the 1960s without rock-and-roll, the 1970s without Hollywood auteurs, the 1980s without street art, or the 1990s without hip-hop." 

Nonsense. There will still be billions of young people in a world of seven billion people with a slowly declining (or not increasing) number of total humans.  And it is not true that "young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film." Middle-aged people have contributed just as much to such areas as young people. 

Kumar seems to have his face twisted into agony over some prospect that he should not be worried about at all: the prospect that the global population may stop rising and slightly decline. Kumar suggests desperate measures we can do to increase the birth rate, and make it more affordable to have children. Kumar suggests the nonsensical solution of "artificial wombs," stating this: "Perhaps the most effective solutions, ultimately, will relieve the costs of childrearing through artificial wombs or AI nannies." This would not actually do anything to reduce the expense of having children. Pregnancy is not expensive, but having your child be grown by an artificial womb would be gigantically expensive.  And the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full-sized human baby is a miracle of organization that could never be reproduced by some artificial womb. 

Part of the reason why someone at a university might be suggesting artificial wombs is that places like Boston University (where Kumar works) do a really bad job at educating people about the vast levels of hierarchical organization and fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence and purposeful molecular machinery choreography everywhere in human bodies, because the proper teaching of such realities conflicts with the preservation of accidental origins dogma that is prioritized at such churches of materialism.