Where Do The Children Play?
The population bomb, birthrates and the future of humanity
When a writer says that he believes that Western civilization is falling he is called a pessimist. Perhaps he is really an optimist. Was it not well for the world that the vile old civilisation of Rome, built upon a tenement-housed population of slaves, passed away? How otherwise could the virile young nations of Christendom have arisen? When we survey the urban civilisations of our own time, with their shoddy cinematograph amusements to stupefy a mass of wage-slaves, just as the circuses of old stupefied the mobs of Rome – with their worship of wealth, their ugliness and joylessness and disease – are we pessimists if we think that Providence soon will make a clear sweep of the mess, and will makes a way for the unspoilt peoples?
— Aodh De Blácam, Heroic Ireland
The Economist Philip Pilkington wrote an essay on what he called “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction”. He identified this contradiction as the “tendency of the rate of people to fall.”
Pilkington was here borrowing from Marx, whose prediction of a necessary collapse of capitalism and transition to communism was premised on a fundamental contradiction he believed he had identified in the logic of capitalism: since labour was the source of all value, as capitalists invested in technology the amount of surplus value they could squeeze out of the production process would necessarily fall, leading eventually to a collapse.
Marx’s predictions proved incorrect, but as Pilkington argues, when it comes to population, there does seem to be a contradiction which limits the necessary continuous expansion of a capitalist economy. As per capita GDP increases, the total fertility rate declines, the share of retirees and people reliant on welfare thus increases, in turn lowering economic growth. And so, Pilkington concludes:
Left to its own devices, capitalism’s categorical imperative of work and consumption is, in the end, at odds with its structural needs, as it discourages family formation and thus stymies the capitalist economy’s ability to grow. This is the core contradiction of capitalism—much more profound than anything Marx imagined.
Though nationalists and conservatives are reluctant to attack capitalism as a source of their woes, the tendency Pilkington describes is responsible for the greatest “supply pressure” on immigration, as employers demand an expanding workforce and consumer base, and unimaginative economists and politicians turn to immigration as the only solution to society’s problem of a growing proportion of old age dependents.
Japan stands out as a country that has resisted this, though they have done so by keeping wages and economic productivity extremely stagnant, and now, they too are resorting to a large influx of economic immigrants.
This is not just a problem for advocates of immigration restriction. A few decades ago, if someone spoke of “the population crisis”, you would assume they were talking about the Malthusian catastrophe of the world’s population expanding beyond carrying capacity. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, started a trend of catastrophizing predictions about the earth expanding beyond its carrying capacity.
Now, if one hears discussion of an incoming population crisis, it’s safe to assume they are talking about the predicted rapid decline in global population after its projected peak this century. It’s all the rage now for neoliberal intellectuals to opine on the causes of and solutions to the universal trend of economic development cratering birthrates. Anyone familiar with Elon Musk’s X feed will know that he and other Silicon Valley libertarians believe population decline is the issue of our time.
Long term projections show that the population collapse will be hugely transformative. Take South Korea, a first world country with the lowest fertility rate in the world. Under current trends, its population of 52 million is projected to drop below 30 million by 2076, and to just 16.5 million by the end of the century.
East Asian countries are especially plagued by population decline. Japan’s population peaked in 2008, at 128 million. The number of births reached another new low in 2023, and the Japanese government projects that by 2070 the population will have fallen by 30%. By 2100, Japan’s population will have shrunk by half, to 63 million.
Things are not much better outside Asia. Iran, an Islamic theocracy, has had a dramatic drop in its fertility rate in recent years, to as low as 1.61 in 2021. Across Europe birthrates are shrinking, even in Scandinavian countries which had seemed to have a lot more resilience to this trend than the rest of Europe. And south of the continent the picture is especially bleak, with Spain and Italy continuing to slump to record lows.
But falling birthrates are just the most obvious and immediately consequential effect of capitalist economic development. Here are some other alarming trends that mass affluence under consumer capitalism has brought us:
There is a mental health crisis in Western societies that is getting worse. About one in five adults in America has a mental illness. One in four young women in the UK has a mental health disorder. The suicide rate rose 655% in Ireland since the 1960s.
We have a loneliness crisis. 61% of young Americans report “serious loneliness”. In the UK, the number of young adults who report having only one or no close friends jumped from 7% to nearly 20% between 2012 and 2021. 22% of millennials in the US report having no close friends.
IQ is declining. The so-called “Flynn effect” of generally increasing IQ’s has ceased, and research across the world has shown intelligence scores declining. The trends of affluent society where having kids is not a necessity has been for lower IQ people to reproduce at higher rates, suggesting this will get worse.
We have a fat crisis. Over half of European adults, and over two thirds of Americans, are overweight.
We have an addiction crisis. Almost 17% of Americans reported a substance abuse problem in the past year. Half of British teens feel addicted to social media.
In short, the affluence and individual liberation delivered by capitalism and mass democracy is not only leading to us no longer replacing ourselves, but there is a startling decline in mental, physical and genetic health which is making populations who experience this cycle incapable of reproducing themselves. Mass society is not dying due to ecological collapse or a proletarian revolution, but through alienation, nihilism and despair. The alienated, secular, modern worldview, unmoored from traditional beliefs which sacralized the mundane, simply lacks the capacity to vitalize populations.
Marx thought his historical materialism could predict the society that would follow of necessity after capitalism. History would culminate in a post-scarcity communist society, where man related freely to his fellow man, and where the distinction between ‘private and common interest’ evaporated. If capitalism is going to reach a crisis due to social collapse and stagnation caused by a population crisis, what can we forecast as the next social formation?