In the last few days, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade. Shortly afterwards, Congresswoman Mary Miller said at a rally, “President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.” Maybe she misspoke. Her spokesperson certainly claimed she did. Nonetheless, her quote is still instructive. Whether Congresswoman Miller believes it or not, there is a broader chorus of voices that believes that there isn’t enough reproduction in the Western world.
Contrastingly, there is also a set of voices which believes the exact opposite. Researchers at the University of Washington predict that the global population will reach a maximum of close to 10 billion around 2064. Against this prediction, there are intellectuals who believe that we are perilously close to collapse by global overpopulation. It seems we are, at once, in danger of collapse by both overpopulation and underpopulation. Which is it? Is it either?
These implicit predictions about humanity’s reproductive future shape some of the American public’s thinking around issues like choice and immigration. We don’t often talk about these predictions in public. When we rarely do discuss them, we certainly don’t tease out all the implications. Yet, these predictions about the direction of populations are incredibly motivating. Sometimes, these predictions can even inspire those who fear “white replacement” to buy guns and do something about it. Other times, these predictions can also motivate inventors to meet the coming climate challenge by deploying new technologies to wean us off of carbon, as our planet’s population increases. Essentially, the anxieties around population can drive bad outcomes or good ones instead, but they are anxieties nonetheless.
The Population Question
There is a Native American proverb that goes, “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.” But this proverb assumes things. Will there be children to come? If so, how many? Simply put, the population question is: who will reproduce and how much will they do it?
There are racial dimensions to this question. After all, both between countries and within them, different demographic groups have different rates of reproduction. For those extrapolating current trends into the future, the population question can be answered by a theory like white replacement.
The racial dimensions of the population question in the American context are often polarizing. In 2014, National Geographic tried to visualize what the average American would look like in 2050. They published an article with photos of people who already exist in America to describe the coming “normal”. This photo is one example:
Visuals like this set off different reactions in our two political poles. The despicable alarmism of a Tucker Carlson’s fear-mongering over “white replacement” is sometimes met by the thirst on the left to praise racial change. In fact, there seems to be a flawed strain of thinking which finds the very idea of “white” to be morally blameworthy. Therefore, any dilution of “whiteness” is wrongly seen as a cause for celebration. For example, in 2014, a progressive magazine published an article commenting on the National Geographic story and the article says, “let us applaud these growing rates of intermixing for what they are: An encouraging symbol of a rapidly changing America. 2050 remains decades away, but if these images are any preview, it's definitely a year worth waiting for.” As our political climate continues to swirl with polarity, these anxieties and desires will only increasingly clash.
The population question is also an open geopolitical question. Everyone assumed Japan would continue to challenge the United States for global primacy in the early 1980s, only for the Japanese population to stagnate and decline. This type of demographic and national decline isn’t limited to Japan. Increasingly, the question is being posed: has the West also lost the will to live? Has China? What does it say about our world’s dominant societies that people don’t choose to reproduce in them?
But zooming out beyond race relations and beyond geopolitics, what can we say about the broadest population narratives about humanity as a whole? Are we currently under threat of collapse by underpopulation? Might we collapse by overpopulation instead? In this post, I analyze both of these narratives. I conclude they’re both wrong, or at least they can be.
The Musk Theory of Underpopulation
Elon Musk has recently begun pondering the underpopulation theory. In an interview, Mr. Musk recently warned, “population collapse is the biggest threat to the civilization”. In a recent tweet, Mr. Musk frames the question slightly differently—
Mr. Musk believes that the population is unsustainably declining in advanced nations. The following is his recently (maybe still currently) pinned tweet—
Mr. Musk’s broader cultural critique is that the rest of us, especially in the West, aren’t having enough kids. He often jokes that he’s doing his part to solve the problem. But, let’s engage with the substantive question embedded in Mr. Musk’s argument. Is declining population a likely civilizational risk?
Mr. Musk doesn’t spell out what his underpopulation crisis would look like, but we can exercise our imagination. If America were to have a rapidly shrinking population, then it is likely that our social infrastructure, things like social security & national defense budgets, might start to become unaffordable. When national budgets become unsustainable, hard zero-sum choices will have to be made about who gets what, where, and when. It isn’t a stretch to say that this process will be incredibly painful, and that standards of living will begin to slide backwards. In the worst case, could a shrinking population precipitate civil war?
This story seems plausible enough, but is it likely? To tackle this question of underpopulation, we can start by inverting it. Is the opposite true? Is overpopulation a threat today? Has it been in the past?
The Malthus Trap
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. In this essay, Malthus theorized that as a country became richer (to him this meant producing more food), it would increase in population. However, Malthus then inferred that, because a population grows exponentially and food production cannot, there would necessarily be devastating famine, war, or disaster as the population continued to increase and food became more scarce.
Other thinkers took Malthus a step further. They wondered if the famine, war, and disasters that Malthus predicted could spiral out of control. They wondered if these catastrophes could end humanity for good. This idea that a growing population would lead to disaster was named The Malthusian Trap.
The Malthusian Trap theory was frequently applied by colonial powers in their analysis for why their subject peoples were suffering from famine. For example, this idea was applied to the Irish during the Irish potato famine. It served as a useful intellectual tool to shift blame for colonial mismanagement from laws to laws of nature instead. Yet, these colonial administrators were wrong. Overpopulation wasn’t the cause of famine, bad administration was.
Similarly, Malthus was wrong. As Peter McLaughlin describes, “The population of England continued to increase, from 8.3 million in 1801 to 21.4 million in 1871, and yet predictions of catastrophe did not come to pass.” The main reason Malthus was wrong was that he hadn’t factored in technological progress. He assumed farmland wasn’t capable of becoming far more productive.
Other neo-Malthusian thinkers have been wrong too, up till now at least. For example, in 1980 an ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, bet against an economist, Julian Simon, that the price of five selected metals would increase in the coming decade. Mr. Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian view was that as the Earth’s population increased, these metals would become more scarce and therefore more expensive. Mr. Simon had a different view. Mr. Simon bet that technological innovation would either reduce our need for these specific resources or that technological efficiency would make us able to do more with less of them. As a result, he expected that the prices for these metals would decrease. In 1990, Mr. Simon was right and Mr. Ehrlich was wrong. A check was promptly sent Mr. Simon’s way.
Mr. Simon’s position has a long record backing it up. For tens of thousands of years, the prices of commodities have actually become cheaper not more expensive. In this long term view, technology has always beaten population growth. The story is simple. As John Tierney explains, “Often the temporary scarcity led to a much better substitute. Timber shortages in 16th-century Britain ushered in the age of coal; the scarcity of whale oil around 1850 led to the first oil well in 1859.”
We’re now in a period where commodities are becoming more expensive. The prices at the pump, the prices of groceries, and the prices of cars might all point to a neo-Malthusian conclusion. The question can be framed in present terms. Are we currently in a Malthusian moment?
I don’t think so. At least, we don’t have to be. For if we are to take a longer view, I believe that these price spikes will drive tremendous innovation over the longer term, some of which is probably happening as I write this now. I have a similar intuition on the climate crisis. We can invent our way out.
It is not a guarantee that we will make fundamental breakthroughs in technologies like carbon capture or nuclear energy, but it is a guarantee that talented people and significant financial resources are flowing into these areas at an increasing rate. Something will happen. As long as people continue to exhibit this kind of agency, an accident, a eureka, a paper, or a product will radically change our relationship with carbon. The dynamics of the ecosystem will flip from decline to rise.
On the broader point, an extreme Malthusian might argue that surely the Earth cannot support one hundred trillion trillion trillion humans, for example. At some point, these skeptics might argue, innovation cannot continue to solve basic constraints such as land, water, and food. What then?
The response I’m partial to is that we’re going to expand beyond Earth. Unless there is some ceiling to technology, if the universe is infinite, surely these Malthusian predictions cannot necessarily be true. Essentially, there is a whole universe of resources, land, water, and other things for us humans to colonize and explore. Where is the carrying capacity problem then?
The Underpopulation Question Revisited
Just as technological improvement wasn’t factored into the overpopulation predictions, it has been understated in the underpopulation fears. When Mr. Musk says “population collapse is the biggest threat to the civilization”, he looks through the lens of the past and not the future. In fact, there are already technological reasons to believe that underpopulation will not come to pass.
Presently, there are very high barriers to population growth. Some of these include: the asymmetrical and high cost of pregnancy for women, the direct costs of raising a child, and the opportunity costs of children for their parents. If progress is made on any of these barriers we can expect to see the population rate increase in the wealthier world.
On the asymmetric costs of pregnancy, solutions are presently emerging. For example, artificial wombs look increasingly likely to debut in the coming decades. Frankly, in a country like Japan where the government is trying to bribe its own citizens to have children, might an embrace of subsidies for this type of technology be their silver bullet?
There are some market risks. Essentially, when artificial wombs make it to market, the costs of delivery by this method will probably begin quite high, as supervision by skilled-labor and a lot of energy inputs will be required to bring a child to life. Yet, one could expect that over time supervision by AI could bring down some of those costs. Furthermore, if the cost of electricity generally comes down, then there is no reason that energy intensive processes cannot become more affordable. Therefore, innovation in the energy sector could include a future of low cost artificial pregnancies.
In the American context, the main impediment to progress on this front will not be technological but instead it will be cultural. Will people accept artificial wombs? Will governments allow them? Will the lines of pro-life politics be fundamentally redrawn when the impulse to boost populations clashes against a technologically skeptical conservatism?
Surrogacy has already become more popular for wealthy people. There seems to be little organized resistance to it at present. Yet, this might change as techno-surrogacy increases. If resistance does increase, we will need people to advocate for this technology. We will need people to exercise agency on this issue.
Even if artificial wombs withstand theological scrutiny, will they withstand technocratic scrutiny? One hopes that as new technologies like artificial wombs become technologically feasible, the American government will not so heavily regulate these new industries so as to kill competition and innovation within them. If artificial wombs are regulated like new drug entrants, progress will slow to a crawl.
On the costs of raising a child, one can imagine a future where robots make the cost of childcare far cheaper. Again, fundamental innovation in energy could unlock possibilities here. Essentially, the inventions of C3PO and R2D2 could help make raising children affordable, and in a world of cheap energy, the cost of operating household robots will likewise be low. Furthermore, while the cost of education shows no sign of decreasing presently, I intuitively feel that there will soon be a reckoning on education costs of all sorts, from preschool to college. The system can change.
Yet, regardless of these technological advances, they will mean nothing if we stand in the way of deployment. After all, we invented a miracle vaccine for COVID-19, but a significant portion of the nation didn’t want to take a shot. Similarly, if new technologies for birth or childcare are polarized around religious or political lines, then we might become our own worst enemies. If these technologies are over-regulated or explicitly banned, we cannot hope to make progress on the population question. The key point here is that we have to make a genuine push to deploy new technologies. We will require agency to stave off an underpopulation crisis.
The Same Solution
As you might have surmised, the fear of overpopulation and death by climate change and the fear of underpopulation and death by apathy will likely both be solved by a similar set of innovations, at least partially. Namely, these would be innovations in the cost of energy. People often run thought experiments on what the world would look like if energy were cheap and abundant, and I think this is an area where the implications are clear. Importantly, I also think this is the direction we will go as a society. Not in the far future, but in the near present.
As you sit here today, depressed by the cost of gasoline, it can be hard to imagine that there can be a world with abundant and near zero cost energy, but in the coming decades, my belief is that this can be our reality. A breakthrough might not come from solar or wind or geothermal, but it might be something new entirely. It might be a breakthrough in fusion, an area where ARPA-E and others are bolstering a new batch of companies and efforts. It might be a breakthrough in space-based solar. This too is an area where we might see a lot more innovation as the cost of launch continues to decrease. It might even come from space based fission. These efforts sound ridiculous because we’ve seen so little groundbreaking work in energy in the last few decades, but just remember that few people anticipated the steam engine or the atom bomb. Progress is possible, even if it feels unlikely. Yet, this is not to say that the future will invent itself. It will take agency to make this all-important progress.
Redrawing Political Lines
In some American states choice is being outlawed. It seems that we’re in the mid-game of a long twilight battle over the politics of choice. This battle looks likely to intensify. It is still unclear how much progress will be made. Perhaps a lot.
Yet, my broader hope is that technology could offer a way to radically change the contours of this battle. Perhaps coming technology can be seen as both pro-life and pro-choice. If birth outside the body becomes the new normal, then how will the politics of choice change? If some of the anti-choice fervor is driven by fear of underpopulation, can technology alleviate those concerns?
If the politics of reproduction reshapes itself in the coming moment, we might have a new trans-partisan coalition willing to support technological advance that will both increase individual liberty and increase population. Yet, this too is an area where the agency of individuals will make or break our ability to make progress.
Conclusion
The broader question is whether we are at risk of running out of either food or people. The simple answer is that we’re not destined for it. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” A similar sentiment can apply here. We are not destined for the world to end in ice nor in fire. Yet, if we stand in the way of technological breakthroughs, we may be in danger of both. We have agency over our destiny. It is important we act accordingly.