We’re in demographic trouble. According to a report by the Pew Research Center, American fertility is at an all-time low, as roughly 1.6 children are born on average to each woman in the country. This is well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, the fertility rate at which a population stays constant. Simultaneously, 47% of adults under 50 said they’re unlikely to have kids in the future when they were polled in 2024—up from 37% in 2018. In a world being crushed under the weight of human consumption, shouldn’t we welcome a smaller population?
Well, for an extreme example of the consequences of these trends, we can look to South Korea—their fertility rate is currently among the lowest in the world at 0.82. If current trends continue, one half of the South Korean population will be over age 65. In the U.S. today, that proportion is roughly 17%. How can any country remain solvent when half of its people are too old to work? Can any healthcare system support that many people? Who will pay for all the healthcare expenses?
The U.S., in contrast, has almost double the fertility rate. Furthermore, this problem is mitigated by the U.S.’s high immigration rates—part of what makes immigration so good for the US is that it provides us with fit, young workers, whose childhood was paid for on someone else’s dime. But this is an intolerable solution to right-wingers. The once-fringe neo-Nazi conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement,” a scheme in which “they” are intentionally encouraging immigration among non-white people to weaken white power, is now a mainstream Republican talking point.
And this is the main reason why the national conversation about fertility has been so corrupted. In the eyes of racists, the only way to defeat the real demographic problem without falling prey to a made-up one is to encourage birth of all-American babies … by making abortion and contraception illegal, expelling women from the workplace and making AI videos about traditional lifestyles that are more accurate to a vacuum cleaner commercial from the 50’s than real life.
But there are additional problems with an aging population that these morons won’t talk about.
The first is gerontocracy (rule by the old). There’s direct gerontocracy, in which old people have disproportionate levels of power in government. For example, baby boomers make up 39% of the House of Representatives and 60% of the Senate, despite being only 20% of the total population. As we’ve seen with the recent election of New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, it makes a big difference when our politicians are young and care about the same things that young people do.
But, more insidious is the indirect gerontocracy of culture, consumerism and property. The worst example is housing, where over 75% of baby boomers own houses, compared to about 25% of Generation Z. And I’d argue that this is a large cause, not an effect, of the United States housing crisis. What we call NIMBYism is just old people prioritizing their own interests over the interests of their community, like housing affordability, population density, economic activity and public transit access.
The second problem is politics and culture at large. Those AI videos about traditional wives may make your skin crawl, but they’re affecting their intended audience. Fertility in counties that voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 is generally significantly higher than in those that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. I think that most readers will agree that conservatism is an existential threat, not just to democracy, but to the world at large, asking it combines a climate change policy of “drill, baby, drill” with international geopolitical destabilization. We can count on some children raised to be conservative to “see the light,” so to speak, but generally, more babies from conservative parents now will mean more conservative adults in the future.
You’ll also notice that both these problems are a vicious cycle—as young people get more disillusioned with gerontocratic politics and begin to see childbirth as a right-wing affair, both these trends will accelerate. This is why we cannot allow ourselves to concede this debate to Elon Musk—our future depends on it.
But let’s put all that aside, because having a kid is not about politics. It’s about you. So, let’s talk about you. You’re a college student, struggling to get through your classes and find your footing in life. You probably don’t even know what your job will be or where you’ll live, and you’re working hard to secure a spot in the rapidly-shrinking middle class. Having a child is probably the last thing on your mind. You can’t have a kid, you’ve got a career ahead of you!
That’s the fundamental cause of falling fertility. In America, we’ve got a strong culture of trying to get ahead. A few years from now, you can definitely have a child; it would just mean making serious compromises when it comes to your career and free time. This is why South Korea has it worse than anywhere else. Their economic recovery after the Korean War was enabled by a terrifying culture of workaholism, which tightly squeezes fathers expected to be breadwinners, not to mention the mothers who find it impossible to retain their careers after childbirth. And, although our situation is not nearly as bad as Korea’s, it’s quite clear that there are serious problems with our societal model of work and family.
But these problems come from within as well as from without. Many people will say that they simply can’t have kids because they can’t afford it or don’t have enough time. This is almost always false—poor people have been having kids since the beginning of human civilization. The difference now is that child-free life has improved much faster than the life of a parent. It used to be that a child was a critical source of farm labor or rent. But now? People no longer think that the benefits of having children are worth the massive tradeoffs and career compromises. And I’m not denying these tradeoffs—having a child is an unbelievable amount of work and stress. But I don’t think we make a progressive case for having a child nearly often enough, so here’s one now.
As my dad once told me, having a child is an inherently irrational decision. The joy you get from creating a new human and showing it all your favorite things in the world is tiny compared to the agony of trying to get any sleep while raising an infant. You know what else is irrational? Having hope, especially now in times like these. But we can’t live without hope, and we can’t live without children, either. And I don’t just mean that in a demographic sense. Raising a child is an act of hope for the future, but also an act of defiance against those who want people like you to go away. To stay child-free out of fear of the future is letting them win. And to you, who took the time to read and consider a position you disagree with, no matter how hard things will get, no matter how deep the peril the world will enter, the only thing that will improve it is having more people like you.