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let me show you a video the goal of our organization is not to convince people who have no kids to have two kids or one kid is to convince people who have four kids and to make it easier for people who have four kids to have nine kids if they want this is Malcolm Collins Malcolm and his wife Simone are authors private Equity investors and Venture capitalists based in Pennsylvania earlier this year they welcomed their amazingly named fourth child industry Americas into the world but if a family of six sounds like a pretty full house already they don't plan to stop there we're going to have more than seven if we can basically until my uterus is forcibly removed in a botched surgery I'm going to keep going if you keep even vaguely up to date on the news you've likely seen the collinses about before they've been interviewed a lot over the past few years in newspapers on podcasts on TV and that's because the Collins aren't just planning to have lots of kids simply because they're fond of children no they're the leading lights of a niche yet vociferous movement which they call pronatalism so the pronatalist foundation which we run says no matter what we are going to have demographic collapse in the developed world and it will wreak havoc on the economy our goal as an organization is to preserve as much of our existing human diversity as possible into the future their core belief is that the greatest threat currently facing humanity is not climate change inequality zuntic disease or any of the usual concerns you might hear raised about our crisis stricken world but instead declining birth rates it's so much worse than people think so if you look at the United States if you project forwards the decline in fertility rate we have had in the past 10 years and you assume one generation every 30 years for every hundred Americans there's only going to be around 4.3 great-grandchildren the Collins is aren't alone in harboring this fear that Humanity might be on the brink of dying out pronatalism has become a highly fashionable thought Trend in Silicon Valley Elon Musk has repeatedly stated that what he Call's population collapse represents an existential threat to humanity a position which appears to have factored into his own decision to have fathered 12 children at time of recording from there the belief that we urgently need to boost birth rates has become a recurring theme both in the contrarian podcast sphere and in formal conservative politics at the very high levels we don't have enough families and children to continue as a nation there is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies we want to produce babies in this country right we want to produce babies when I first started making this video I was pretty skeptical of this whole population collapse thesis given the Rogues gallery of populists and reactionaries that become the leading Lights of the pronatalism movement it's easy to push it aside died as just another conspiracy theory the latest installment in the franchise which brought us vaccine passports 15minute cities and they're eating the dogs they're eating the dogs the more time I spent digging around this topic however the clearer it seems that declining birth rates really are about to lead to some pretty significant social and economic challenges for many countries probably the country that you're watching this from right now there are a few questions that I want to try and answer over the next however many minutes then firstly how bad really is the decline in birth rates which the pron natalists are so incensed by secondly why are they so interested in this crisis over the many other challenges the world is presently facing and thirdly does the pronatalism movement actually have any useful answers to the world's baby drought or the real solutions ones which the collinses musk Trump and their allies would be unlikely to find so appealing [Music] any discussion of modern day concerns about birth rates has to start with this book this is the population Bomb by Paul Erick published in 1968 erick's book makes exactly the opposite argument to that of today's pro natalists rather than population collapse it warns of a rapidly approaching future in which an exponential rise in the number of babies being born means there are more human beings alive on planet Earth than planet Earth can adequately sustain the main premise is that there's 3.6 billion people in the world today and we're adding about 70 million a year and that's too many it's too many because we are getting desperately short of food that we're very much short of other resources and that above all the very delicate life support systems of the planet the things that Supply us with all of our food ultimately with all of our oxygen with all of our waste disposal are now severely threatened what the population bomb does share with today's PR natalists is an Unapologetic alarmism at itar is the observation that what ear calls the doubling time of the human population has been exponentially decreasing throughout history prior to 1650 he estimates the global population doubled around once every thousand years then in the 200 years between 1650 and 1850 it doubled again then again in the 80 years following that by the time the population bomb was published that doubling time had dropped to just 35 years the challenges which might come with such a rapid rise in population are fairly obvious it might be relatively easy to double the global population in 35 years but it's much harder to increase the size of the global food industry at the rate required to feed all those extra people can you build enough houses for them enough transport educate them all can can the environment take the extra stress they'll place on the planet erick's answer is an emphatic no he went on to argue strongly for governments to introduce measures to discourage people from having as many children the only hope that there is is that we will be able at least in the United States through the political process to get a government that's courageous enough to say look we're overpopulated and we have to have population control and start moving in that direction this concern that the size of the global population might one day overwhelm the resources available to feed everyone wasn't entirely new the population bomb is effectively a modernizing adaptation of an 1803 pamphlet by Thomas Maus which simly predicted that overpopulation Would One Day lead to famine and War nevertheless erick's book was a sensation it sold more than 2 million copies led to its author becoming a regular guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and firmly lodged this concern about population growth in the popular imagination until very very recently if someone was going to strike up a conversation with you about the global population they were almost certainly going to argue that there was simply too many of us erick's wish for population control even came true in at least one case in the form of China's Infamous one child policy which punished families who had more than one baby there was just one problem with ear thesis even by the time the population bomb was published Global birth rates had actually started to Decline and over the next 50 years they would steadily reach a point where the world's population was not about to catastrophically explode but in many countries was actually starting to [Applause] decline in short then the basic phenomenon that the Collins is Elon Musk JD Vance and their fellow Pro natalists are so concerned by is a very real one across much of the world people are having fewer children than ever before there are a few key metrics which help us understand how population size changes over time the first is the total fertility rate this is the total number of children the average woman in a given country or region will have over the course of her life at present for example the total fertility rate in Egypt is 2.8 which means that as things stand the average Egyptian woman either has or is on her way to having 2.8 kids but if we're interested in whether the population of Egypt or any other country is going to rise or fall over time then we need to compare that figure to another metric called replacement level fertility this refers to the number of babies that each woman in a given country or region would need to have for the size of that population to remain stable once that woman and everyone else in her generation passes away in most countries today that figure is around 2.1 the complete two children here effectively serve to replace the two parents who produce them when those parents die whilst the point one of a child accounts for the fact that sadly not all children will survive into adulthood to produce more children of their own broadly speaking if a population has a total fertility rate of more than 2.1 it will grow each cohort of parents will produce more children to add to the total population tally then they will reduce it by when they die if that population's total fertility rate drops below 2.1 then it will decline each cohort of parents fails to have enough children to replace themselves when they pass away okay where does this one actually go it was here of course within a certain country this rise or fall can be either exacerbated or alleviated by migration as people either flock to or flee from a certain place nevertheless if we look at this chart recording shifts in the global total fertility rate from 1950 to 2023 we see that from a peak of 5.3 in 1963 that figure has been trending steadily downwards as things stand we're having just 2.3 children per woman and that downward Trend only needs to continue a very very tiny amount more before the global population begins to shrink at present this is exactly what demographers expect is going to happen the United Nations currently predicts that the global population will Peak sometime in the mid 2080s at which point declining fertility rates will launch us into a new era of increasingly rapid population Decline and while PA erck might be popping open the champagne the pro naturists are concerned that a situation of what they call population collapse might simply present us with a whole new set of challenges let me show you another video why is in Japan many people have no children what why the population going down why women having so few children are you worried about there being so few children in Japan now this is a clip from birth Gap a film by campaigner Steven J Shaw who like the Collins is has made raising the alarm about falling fertility rates his personal mission he's seen here doing some spontaneous Street interviews in Japan which has long been viewed by PR natalists as one of the canaries in the population CL collaps coal mine like many wealthy countries Japan experienced a significant Baby Boom in the wake of the second world war but where the baby booms in the US the UK Canada and much of Europe lasted for around two decades Japan subsided after just 2 or 3 years after which the country's total fertility rate began to fall precipitously as we can see from this chart in 1947 Japanese women were having on average 4.5 children each over the course of their lives but by the mid 1950s that figure was already tickling the replacement rate of 2.1 in the early' 70s Japan's fertility rate finally plunged into the sub 2 Zone and ever since the 1990s has fluctuated between 1 and 1.5 children per women improvements in public health and the associated increase in life expectancy mean it took a little bit longer for the country's Total Living population to begin to decline it kept climbing if more slowly until 2010 then it began and to happen every year for the past decade and a half Japan has had fewer people living in it each December than it had the previous January it's very difficult issue and there is no easy fixs for this issue countries like Japan and South Korea often take the headlines when it comes to discussions of falling populations we hear stories about young people refraining from sex extreme work cultures which leave no time for family life and closing schools as that decline in global fertility figure show however a similar trend has taken hold across much of the world the University of Oxford's our world and data site recently compiled this map which distinguishes between countries which are currently above replacement fertility levels and those which are currently below as you can see it's a pretty even split ing to the international monetary fund around 2/3 of the world's population now live in countries which are presently on track to begin shrinking it's very likely that the country that you are currently sat in whilst watching this video video has already fallen below that crucial 2.1 figure as of 2023 the US the UK Australia France Ireland Brazil and Colombia all had fertility rates of just 1.6 the Netherlands Sweden Norway Germany and Belgium are at 1.4 Canada at 1.3 South Korea might be leading the way at a measly .8 but other countries are not far behind you look at Korea right now and 60% of uh of Kore citizens are over the age of 40 so it's it's likely already too late for them to turn this this problem around so we need to turn this around before we hit that level but the truth is we probably won't the difference between a total fertility rate of 2.1 and 1.4 or 1.5 might not seem all that much but over the course of just two generations that's the difference between a population maintaining its current size and shrinking by 35 or 45% even with the butress of increasing life expectancy and inward migration Japan's population is on track to decline by nearly a quarter over the next 40 years where wealthier countries such as the United States are set to avoid absolute reductions in population for a wild longer it will largely be a result of immigration making up for that deficit in births but why does any of this matter if population increase was such a concern until just a few years ago then surely a declining population is a good thing are the pronatalist simply trying to fear Monger about nothing well not [Music] [Music] exactly the challenges associated with Paul erick's population bomb scenario were fairly easy to get our head around we all know that we live on a finite planet with finite resources and while we could certainly distribute those resources much more equitably it's clear that there would eventually come a point where there simply wouldn't be enough food or water or energy to go around the challenges associated with a declining population are little bit more nuanced for some PR natalists the fear is one rooted in outright racism they look at this map of countries with above and below replacement level fertility and worry that to put it bluntly African countries are quote unquote outbreeding European and North American ones hungary's far-right prime minister Victor Orban has openly built his policy agenda around fighting such a scenario we're living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe people in the west are responding to this with immigration they say that the shortfall should be made up by immigrants what we need is not figures but Hungarian children in our mind immigration means surrender others on the right fear that regardless of what happened within their borders shrinking National populations will lead to decreased military economic and cultural strength on the world stage but even if we bracket off some of this more extreme stuff for a moment and even if you believe quite plausibly that the declining impact on the environment which will come with a smaller global population would be a good thing then there's still some very real practical challenges which come with a country or the whole world's population declining too rapidly at the heart of this issue is the simple fact that a population which is shrinking due to low fertility rates doesn't shrink proportionally to its current makeup instead as people have fewer and fewer children there's an increasing proportion of older people to younger ones we can see this fairly plainly in this chart which tracks the median age of people in Europe and North America from 1950 to the present day since the end of the post-war Baby Boom the median age of both regions has increased by about 12 years The crucial figure to keep our eye on however is What's called the old AG dependency ratio this tracks the the percentage of a given population a given time which is over the age of 65 and it's referred to as the dependency ratio because as they retire or become unable to work old people become increasingly dependent on younger people to keep things ticking over this is sometimes true in a very direct sense they might need carers or healthcare workers to look after them even if they're healthy they need shop workers and delivery drivers and Warehouse staff to furnish them with goods and services older people continue to use electricity water and Roads which need maintenance and Improvement and on a broader level for older people to receive either state or private pensions they need younger people to be paying taxes and keeping the stock market buoyant enough that there's something to pay them in a country which is either at or above replacement level fertility this isn't too much of an issue every time a bunch of older people retire either the same or a greater number of younger people join the workforce to replace them they can provide all that direct support whilst also ensuring the economy continues to grow furthermore in a growing population the ratio of older people to younger people actually decreases over time during the baby boom years of the 1960s and 1970s for example over 65s accounted for less than 15% of the population of both Europe and North America as fertility rates have dropped however that figure has more than doubled Europe is likely to hit an old age dependency ratio of a third in just the next few years and North America isn't far behind as we'll see shortly a lot of the most enthusiastic torchbearers of the pronatalism movement are driven by some pretty ugly motives racism classism and a desire to bemoan The increased agency that contemporary Society affords to women we've seen an increasing stratification among men where some men at the top uh get an increasing amount of mating opportunities and then while men at the bottom are being uh are excluded from meeting but before we dig into any of that it's important to again stress that there are real challenges here State Pension systems across the world already facing crisis as old age dependency ratios shift higher and higher healthc Care Systems are being stretched and older and older voters are electing older and older politicians and yet just because the core problem is real doesn't mean that some of the explanations for why we're having less kids which have been adopted by the pro fatalists are entirely legit in fact some are pretty suspect indeed so I guess it's about time we talked about this thing if you look at this chart tracking the changing total fertility rate in the United States and United Kingdom from 1950 to today you'll see that things really began to take a turn during the 1960s which makes makes a lot of sense in 1960 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive pill just four years later a quarter of All American couples were using it its rapid popularity saw the various legal restrictions on who it could be prescribed to gradually overturned and its efficacy and ease of use ensured it was quickly embraced by women and couples wanting to gain greater control over if and when they conceived all of this makes it kind of easy to infer that the decline in fertility rate is a direct result of contraception simply getting much better and more widely available in fact some pronatal lists have flirted with trying to shed doubt on the efficacy and safety of the pill I'm not saying that people shouldn't use birth control I think we should just be we shouldn't use I think hormonal birth control is is is making is making a lot of women sad and depressed yes and they don't realize it and they don't realize that's the cause nevertheless this is a niche View even those commentators most willing to bemoan expansions in women's agency will accept that safer and more reliable contraception has been a means through which people have changed the number of children they had rather than the reason that they've done so it seems obvious that I mean one of the causes the distal causes I would say clearly is the promotion of the birth control pill but even that is a somewhat shallow answer because there's a very specific set of Social and economic realities Zeitgeist that even made the invention and distribution and acceptance of the birth control possible for one many countries previously saw a drop in peacetime fertility rates during the Great Depression when the pill hadn't even been invented yet further as Steven J Shaw highlights in responding to Jordan Peterson there the pill wasn't legalized in Japan until 1999 when that country's total fertility rate was already well under replacement levels but perhaps you can see why declining fertility rates might have peaked the interest of some conservatives because why the exact reasons that we're having less kids are hotly contested we do know that it has something to do with countries getting richer and more particularly women becoming more educated [Music] let me show you another graph from our world in data this bubble chart compares the total fertility rates of the world's countries with those countries GDP per capita which is an albeit flawed measure of national wealth what we see is a pretty strong correlation between a country being richer and a country having lower fertility rates there are several proposed reasons for this one is that in poorer countries children are often an econom iic benefit to a family they very quickly become an extra pair of hands which can support a family business or help around the house making life easier and boosting the parents' income in fact with children being so useful and infant mortality rates being relatively high in poorer countries you might have more children than you otherwise might choose to in case some sadly pass away as a country gets richer this is less and less the case laws might be introduced Banning child labor the government is likely to introduce compulsory education up to a certain age children very quickly cease to be an economic Boon and become an economic burden instead not only can they no longer boost the family finances by working and not only do you still have to feed them but you might need to buy them school books and uniforms and transport them around just as important however is this graph this graph Maps national GDP per capita against the world bank's gender parity index what it shows is a positive relationship between a country National wealth and women and girls within that country having more equal access to education it's worth saying that this is very much a two-way relationship it's not only that wealthier countries tend to extend more opportunities to women but that surprise surprise utilizing the skills and talents of your entire population tends to be economically beneficial this does have implications however for having kids in countries where women are expected to work there's simply less time for being pregnant giving birth and raising children given that taking the necessary time out of work to raise a kid can have a significant impact on a woman's career Prospect and earning potential children only become more of an economic burden as couples have to weigh up the joy and fulfillment of having children with the increased security of Greater earnings and it's here that the conversation surrounding declining fertility rates becomes kind of politically contentious because at this level the fact we're having less children appears to be a product of social political and economic changes which many of us view as deeply positive it is a good thing that women are no longer the property of their husbands that they can go to school and are able to pursue their desires and Ambitions in the world and there is a way of engaging in this conversation which is sensitive to that in the hands of some of the most vocal PR natalists however that tends not to happen which I guess means that it's time to show a bunch of clips from the podcast sphere which it's maybe scary enough let me show you another picture this is the thumbnail from an episode of British podcaster Chris Williamson's modern wisdom podcast Williamson is an EXL Island contestant turned British Joe Rogan alike which I don't mean as an insult I think he would really like that comparison like Rogan his show features a range of guests including Health gurus the very occasional celebrity and a glut of political commentators usually of the more contrarian variety yeah the idea that we are living through a climate catastrophe seems highly suspect to me highly suspect but also somehow very sexy the fertility crisis has become something of an obsession of Williamson he's had several pronatalist campaigners and researchers on to discuss the topic and often brings it up in other conversations too you'll be maybe the fifth sixth seventh conversation that I've had on something to do with birth rates uh declining fertility and um I'm going to keep on banging this drum but this thumbnail is particularly telling for the state of the conversation surrounding falling fertility rates because the more competive pronatalist seem to quite like being accused of being misog s in an era in which the importance of Any Given political issue is often judged Less on Merit than on how controversial it can be made to appear such accusations help set them up not simply as people studying a phenomenon which has been overlooked but as Renegade modernday galileos who are being suppressed by the political establishment and so we did something that pissed off the deep State bad to suggest that there might indeed be a little bit of either intentional or completely accidental misogyny to some of these pronatalist conversations does risk playing into this victim narrative but the reality is that almost all of the leading PR natalists steep their discussion of this topic either in tired anti-woke grievances or at least inel adjacent views of sex and relationships seriously I've watched so many of these videos over the past couple of months it has kind of broken my brain if you create a society in which you don't get lotted you're not celebrated you're not like the cool people for getting married and or having kids you're not going to do it because you're not an idiot Simone and Malcolm Collins's based Camp podcast generally swings towards the more extreme end of this spectrum there's a pretty Stu contrast between the website of their pronatalist dorg Foundation which is fairly professional and reasonable and their YouTube channel which looks like this whether as a result of audience capture or simply an attempt to get more clicks through sensationalism by the time of the 2024 US presidential election the Collins's slightly Oddball response to declining fertility rates had descended into them ranting about how the Democrat Party is actively trying to keep women single in order to get more votes women in society historically they would rely on a partner to help care for them and to help care for their kids oh and now it's the state yeah and when you disintermediate the family unit you can use the state both to decrease the bat of a woman to not have a partner while also acting as the caregiver like these women are sort of like nuns to the state they're basically married to the state amid this Hyperbole and invective the Collins's core argument is that the drop in global fertility rates is primarily the result of Shifting cultural priorities some mixture of the decline of religion and the rise of feminism has they argue caused a shift in gender roles which is damaging relationships and by extension leading to a lack of kids I think part of this is progressivism has made women undatable and unmarriable like the modern iteration of it they're supposedly egalitarian solution to stopping the decline in fertility rates is thus to encourage groups who already seem to be having more kids to have even more and while they strongly refute any accusation that they have eugenesis tendencies this does seem to amount to encouraging rich people like themselves to reproduce over others the point of why governments need to encourage pronatalism is because they need to produce more taxpayers if governments only produce more non- taxpaying very low earning citizens their infrastructure is still going to crumble they are still going to be politically unstable they're still going to have pension fund nightmares what you need is high taxpayers and so any government incentive to have kids should disproportionately incentivize those most likely to pay a ton of taxes this focus on cultural change runs throughout the podcast defied version of the fertility rates conversation in fact Chris Williamson's conversation with mads Larson is a pretty good case in point Larsson is a literature scholar and evolutionary psychology Enthusiast whose interest lies in what he calls mating ideologies in short the changing ways in which societies think about sex and relationships it is the foundation of all social orders we like to think that politics philosophy all those big subjects are what it's all about but at the foundation it's how men and women reproduce um and upon that everything else rests that thumbnail aside Larsson is less of a controversialist than the Collins is nevertheless both he and Williamson are pretty certain that declining fertility is a direct result of more and more people being single this it's worth saying is very real Trend between 1990 and 2019 the proportion of 25 to 54 year old Americans who are single increased from 29% to 38% it's also increased ever so slightly more among men than women as Larson tells it the key factor here is a shift in our contemporary mating ideology which has allowed women to become more choosy in who they date and have kids with women have been empowered to have their own jobs make their own money be free and importantly to choose their own Partners For The First Time in human history the result of that has been that the better women are doing the more they exclude uh the lowest value men from their potential pool of Partners the challenge as he sees it is that there simply Aren't Enough quote unquote high value men to go around the women who miss out thus end up sad and alone as do the quote unquote low value men what's interesting about this conversation and so many others like it then is how quickly it transforms into a fairly generic manosphere debate with all of the usual concerns the idea that there are reasons to not want to have children one reason is an overwhelming self-centered narcissism that's not the only reason but it's definitely one reason and people talk about you know the interference with their personal freedom and their desire to pursue their career and in that I read something like the absolute inability to ever sacrifice your own narrow self-interest and I do mean narrow to the to the what would you say concerns and needs of other people as with the collinses these conversations often include moments of qualification in which the interviewees attest that they're big supporters of women's rights and gender equality it's very important for me to State uh that I am an enormous supporter of equality for women but whether they intend to or not these conversations cling to highly misogynistic views of the world which Cloud any real explanation for why we're having less kids Larson's frame of a shift in mating ideologies for example quickly naturalizes women's subservience to men the supposed tendency for heterosexual women to seek quote unquote higher value male Partners is interpreted as some Primal urge rather than the historically contingent outcome of a world which in the case of the US and the UK at least didn't allow women to independently open bank accounts until the mid 1970s on a far more fundamental level there's also this sense that despite these claims by Pro natalists that they're all for women's Liberation there is this sense that all of this is kind of women's fault women are portrayed as beings with agency who are denying men relationships and children while men themselves are seen as passive victims of the fertility crisis how do you know that it's women's standards being too high and not men the standard of men [Music] decreasing um because it's it's relative I mean men are men and women are women uh going out and saying to men you have to get better I mean who would go out and say uh Somali need to get better or this gendered perspective is aided of of course by the fact that if you troll through the many many podcasts which have been recorded about fertility rates over the past few years there's something which feels like it's more absent than it should be maybe not entirely but enough that it would be ludicrous not to mention a good 90% of them are just super lengthy conversations between two dudes if you genuinely think that the decline in fertility rates is primarily the result of women making different choices than they used to it just feels like a good starting point would be to you know ask one the other core problem with these conversations however is that it's just not that clear at all that the decline in fertility really is primarily the result of cultural concerns in fact despite Jordan Peterson's comments about narcissism there is plenty of evidence to suggest that most people still do want to have children the real question then is why they're not able to achieve that desire oh let me show you some polling from Gallop this is a line graph tracking changing opinions on the ideal family size upon Americans from 1935 to the present day what it shows is that after a steep decline during the 1970s a preference for larger families has been broadly increasing for some decades the same data set shows that not wanting to have kids at all remains pretty rare with just 8% of respondents replying that they neither have children currently nor want them in the future UK polling has similarly found that among 18 to 34 year olds just 13% are currently childless and determined to stay that way all of which leaves us in a kind of odd scenario if the vast majority of people still want to have kids then what's stopping them well we have some polling data here too although the answers are a little muddier when the topic of declining fertility first began gaining some mainstream attention a few years ago the New York Times commissioned a poll asking Americans aged between 20 and 45 Who currently had or expected to have fewer children than they would ideally like why they expected to fall short of their goal the top five on that list Child Care is too expensive want more time for the children I have worried about the economy can't afford more children and waited because of financial instability in short time and money and this polling was carried out before the pandemic and rampant inflation inspired a new wave of economic anxiety noting the particular drop off in births among Millennials the Washington posts Andrew vanam wrote in 201 23 that just about every Source we consulted pointed to the broader economic climate hammered by the Great Recession soaring student debt precarious gig employment skyrocketing home prices and the covid-19 crisis Millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other Generation The Guardian was even blunter in an article earlier this year leading with the headline it's money yet other polls complicate this simple explanation the Pew Research Center recently asked a bunch of questions to the relatively small subset of Americans who neither have children now nor think they will in the future of those who actively want kids but who are simply pessimistic about their chances direct economic concerns sit alongside worries about clashes with their careers and broader fears about the state of the world and the environment in fact the more one digs into this topic the more one gets the sense that declining for ility rates is kind of an everything problem the historian Adam TW has argued that the period we're living through is the age of the poly crisis a scenario in which repeated Financial crises have combined with war environmental breakdown pandemics political instability housing shortages and wage stagnation to create a widespread sense that the world is just generally screwed that this might have an impact on birth rates is unsurprising some aspects of this poly crisis such as rising house prices and rents actively make it much harder to be able to afford to have children others such as the climate crisis and geopolitical uncertainty make it harder to justify making the decision to have children in spite of those financial challenges and to simply try to make it work anyhow all of which makes it doubly fascinating that conservative commentators are leaning so heavily into this issue because fixing the fertility crisis doesn't appear to be something that is fixable through targeted interventions even simply paying people to have kids doesn't seem to do the trick the level of cash handout required to counterbalance the rising cost of housing energy and food that loone actually clothing and feeding a child would be ludicrous reversing the trends in fertility rates then kind of involves trying to at least make some progress on all of that other stuff yet many of the most vocal PR natalists are at least fellow Travelers with those who seek to either deny or exacerbate these problems it's not the money it's not the money it's not the money it's the culture there's a sense that the popularity of pronatalism among conservatives is rooted precisely in this contradiction to argue that we need to do something about declining fertility rates from a conservative perspective you have to argue that so-called population collapse is a greater threat than the climate crisis inequality nuclear war misogyny populism and so many other issues and while for many of us that might seem like an inconvenience to many conservatives and their hangers on it's an opportunity it gives them a reason to play down all that other stuff think about how much public attention has been galvanized toward climate change worthy cause something that people probably should be concerned about about not trying to destroy the ecosystem so on and so forth yeah it's not going to happen in 75 years there are more pressing concerns this newfound focus on declining fertility means they can represent eles not merely as anti-feminists or climate denialists or Defenders of billionaires tax avoiders and cheats but as Crusaders for a far more important cause the real problem however is that none of these figures actually have any realistic solutions to this great threat that they're supposedly so impassioned by the Collins is want more babies born to the super rich Matt Larson suggested we explore the benefits of polygamy Elon Musk is currently salivating at the prospect slashing the size of the US state despite his own pet issue clearly requiring greater support for both parents and older people there's so much government waste that's going on that I would call it a Target Rich environment like you it's hard in every direction there's this just mad waste when I first started researching this video that wouldn't have bothered me all that much I wasn't entirely convinced that population decline was anything more than a right-wing fantasy but or the global population evidently can't continue to rise forever and now almost certainly won't I have become pretty convinced that the speed at which is currently set to decline does present us with some real and significant challenges it will require us to rethink our aversion to Taxation and spending our openness to migration our obsession with economic growth as an indicator of human progress and much more besides easing the transition to a world of downward population Trends will also like be helped by providing support to those who do want children to ensure mothers and parents aren't unjustly held back in their careers or placed in financial hardship the loudest voices in pronatalism today simply aren't able to have those conversations doing so would run counter to their other political priorities and quite frankly stop them from being able to use the issue as a source of panic and distraction it is however going to be a topic that we're all going to be hearing a lot more about over the coming years which we should all give a lot more thought to I five great job in fact demographic change is something I've been thinking about a lot lately and that's because the political and economic consequences of our rapidly aging Society is at the heart of my debut featurelength documentary Boomers which is out now and available to watch over on nebula Boomers follows me on a road trip around Europe and the us as I explore the lives and Legacy of the baby boomer generation if this video you're watching now has been about the big dip in fertility over the past 40 years and its acceleration over the past decade Boomers is about the big bulge of births which preceded that it investigates how that great mass of baby boomers passing through our society has affected our politics our housing markets our culture the stock market and so much more Boomers is available to watch exclusively on nebula the premium streaming platform that myself and a bunch of other fantastic creators have been building over the last few years it's just one of several exclusive films and series which have released on nebula during 2024 we've had wend over productions's game show series The Getaway Abigail thorn of philosophy tubes horror comedy Dracula's ex-girlfriend and Jesse gender's sci-fi short identities we've got some incredible stuff in the pipeline too with Patrick williams' the dinner plan and Bobby Brock's featurelength documentary 17 pages all of those join a massive backlog of Indie Creator content stuff like my nebular exclusive class how to research like a PhD student in which I talk you through my process for finding reading and processing the piles of books and articles which inform these videos that clasp and all of those gorgeous shows are completely exclusive to nebula if you want to sign up to nebula and watch Boomers today then you can get a special discount on doing so by using my personal link go. /om Nicholas that will give you 40% off an annual plan meaning that you can watch Boomers and my class and all of those other nebul Originals for just $3 per month or if you don't want to add another subscription to your monthly budget you might want to check out our lifetime memberships which obviously cost a bit more up front but which secure you access to nebula for as long as both you and the platform exist you can also feel super smug in knowing that the revenue that we raised from those lifetime memberships is going into a fund so that we can produce more high quality original Productions like Boomers the getaway and the dinner plan so that you can have lots of stuff to be entertained and educated by to keep you laughing and learning long into the future furthermore using my personal link go. nebula.com Nicholas means that I get an extra little Kickback to continue helping me to make videos like this one so thank you so much to everyone who has signed up using that link already that link again is go nebula.com Nicholas enjoy Boomers and I will see you over on [Music] nebula smashed it thank you so so much for watching this video and happy holidays to those of you who are celebrating a holiday of some description over the next few weeks and all that's left for me to do is say a quick thank you to my top tier supporters over on patreon who are agent Maxwell Alexander Blan Amit sing paraha Bill Mitchell dickon Spain Fiasco Linguini Gabriel KO Gary Glenn suden jaraba Jimmy Dunn Lisa Yuan Neil zild guard paulus edicus Richard Richard rapoon Sergio Suarez sofhia R strange weekend yilson zedy Reese and Zoe alen if you'd like to join them in getting early access to my videos little hints at what I'm working on copies of scripts to videos and my weekly Blog the Friday update then you can find out how to do so over at patreon.com slom Nicholas but other than that thank you so much for watching this video once again and I'll see you in the next one