The Price of Liberalism: The Fertility Problem

I am a proponent of liberalism (more specifically, of the most consistent form of liberalism, which is of course libertarianism. But let’s not worry about different versions of liberalism today). Thus far, for the past few centuries that it has been ascendant, liberalism has been an enormous boon to humanity. It is largely to liberalism that we owe vast improvements in human beings’ standard of living, in our health, longevity, freedom, individual fulfilment, knowledge, access to great art, and just about everything that’s good in human life.

But this is no guarantee that this will continue. Nor is the basic rationality of liberalism any guarantee that it will have overall positive impacts on humanity. In the last few decades, a worrying trend has become apparent that could conceivably outweigh the advantages of liberalism. Furthermore, this trend might be attributed in large part to liberalism. Namely, liberalism might lead to the species ceasing to reproduce. The population will dwindle. Perhaps one day, the species will go extinct due to lack of reproduction. In that case, it would have been better if we had remained illiberal.

1. The Baby Shortage

First, just in case any readers don’t know this yet: The world does not have an overpopulation problem, as people used to think. Birth rates around the world are declining. They’re currently still high enough to have a net increase in world population each year, but the pattern makes it clear that the world is destined for declining overall population.

(https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521)

Specifically, birth rates have declined in the most advanced societies. See Wikipedia’s list of fertility rates by country.

The replacement fertility rate is about 2.1, meaning we need about 2.1 children per woman to maintain the population each generation. (It’s over 2 because of the possibility of children dying before they reach reproductive age; also, very slightly more than half of births are of boys.) Currently, about half of countries are above replacement rate, and about half below. The ones above replacement fertility are all or almost all very poor countries, especially countries in Africa. Basically, all the prosperous countries are below replacement.

So, as nations develop economically, fertility will decline around the world. Some think the world population will start to decline later this century; others think it will take till the next century.

Some of the Asian nations have shockingly low fertility. Japan has 1.3; China, 1.2. South Korea has a shockingly low 0.9 births per woman.

What’s bad about this? Three things:

• First, the decline in fertility means an aging population. That means more retired people, more people with Alzheimer’s disease, more people who need long-term care, with fewer young people to work and provide care.

• Second, the foregone goods of life. Our ancestors struggled through millennia of suffering, oppression, and danger. Now that we’ve finally made it to the point where no one has to go hungry, where for the first time, almost everyone can live happy, healthy, free lives … people want to stop reproducing. If new people could have great lives, that is a reason to produce more people. But because of the decline in fertility, the next centuries will contain a lot less value than they could.

• Third, eventually the species may go extinct if we keep reproducing below replacement rate. (Though that would probably take centuries, and a lot of stuff is going to radically change in the meantime. So we can’t really make predictions.)

2. Why?

Prosperity

The fertility collapse is largely a function of prosperity, in a pretty direct way:

• In prosperous nations, people have better career options open to them, but children interfere with those options. Children compete with career; the better your career options, the harder it is for children to beat career development.

• In prosperous nations, people also have many fun things to do (say, taking vacations in Maui), which children interfere with. Again, the better your other options are, the harder it is for children to compete.

I’m asserting (but I’m not going to argue the point) that liberalism contributes to prosperity, so it thereby also contributes to low fertility.

But there are some more direct connections that also seem plausible. Liberal views about sexuality, gender roles, etc., might be contributing to low fertility. Contrast the stereotypical conservative views with liberal views about these things:

Sex

Conservative view: The purpose of sex is reproduction. Non-reproductive sex might even be wrong. Premarital sex is bad or wrong. People, especially women, should be chaste.

Liberal view: The main purpose of sex is recreation. All kinds of sex between consenting adults are good, as long as everyone has a good time.

Family

Conservative view: Family is the most important thing in life.

Liberal view: Family is fine, but career success and personal fulfilment are at least comparably important.

Gender roles

Conservative view: Men and women have distinct roles that they should stick to. Men should function as breadwinners; women should mostly stay home to raise children and take care of the home.

Liberal view: Traditional gender roles are oppressive and based on erroneous stereotypes. Men and women are pretty much the same, and there’s no reason why women should not be just as career-oriented as men.

Religion

Conservative view: Embraces traditional religion.

Liberal view: Either rejects religion or gives liberalized, more permissive, less literal interpretations of religion.

Abortion

Conservative view: Abortion is wrong. Even contraception might be wrong (according to Catholics).

Liberal view: Abortion is fine. Contraception is extra obviously fine.

LGBTQIA+ stuff

Conservative view: Homosexuality is bad. Transgenderism is bad.

Liberal view: Homosexuality and transgenderism are obviously fine.

. . .

On all of these fronts, the conservative view is the one that promotes greater fertility.

Sex

People have the highest sex drive in their youth. But in a conservative society, it is hard for people to have sex without being married. They might consider it wrong, and anyway the men have a hard time finding women willing to do it. Young people thus try to get married early, basically so they can have sex.

In a liberal society, fewer people wind up marrying at all, and those who do tend to marry later. This leads to fewer babies, because women don’t like to have babies while single. For those who marry later in life, they tend to have fewer children and are more likely to not have children at all. That’s partly because the medically best time to have children is when you are young; also, older people tend to have less energy and less excitement about having kids.

Family

Obviously, the more you value family, the more likely you are to have children.

Gender roles

Liberalism results in more women having interesting careers, which tend to compete with children, which results in fewer children. If women are mostly staying home to take care of the kids, they’ll probably be interested in having more kids.

Religion

Traditional religions sometimes directly promote fertility. Genesis 1:28 says, “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.’” Religion also motivates all the other conservative views.

Abortion

Abortion directly results in fewer children being born, as does contraception.

LGBTQIA+ stuff

Homosexual relations don’t produce children. By discouraging homosexuality, conservative cultures might cause more children to be born. This probably would not happen through gay people actually becoming straight. But some gay people might take opposite-sex partners in spite of still being gay (this has happened), in which case they might have children that they would not have had if homosexuality had been more socially accepted.

The current popularity of transgenderism directly decreases fertility: some young females are undergoing medical transitions that will physically stop them from ever having children. (See Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage.) In more conservative societies, this would not happen.

. . .

I think the biggest factors in explaining the recent drop in fertility are the points about sex and gender roles. It would make sense that abortion would also be a huge factor, but empirically, almost all of the fertility decline in the U.S. occurred before Roe v. Wade (see graph; Roe is in 1973).

3. Liberal Solutions?

All this poses something of a dilemma, because the liberal views on nearly all of the above points are clearly the correct, rational views. (Sorry, conservatives.) (Exception: abortion.) But that doesn’t stop them from having big negative effects on society. Widespread knowledge of the truth can be harmful.

Compare: If we thought we were obligated to give almost all of our income to charity, that would be very good for society. But that view is not in fact true; we aren’t in fact so obligated. And this case is similar: you aren’t obligated to have many children, even though this would be good.

Is there a solution to the fertility problem that is compatible with liberalism?

Pro-natalism

One solution is to supplement liberal beliefs with another correct belief: pro-natalism, the view that having children is praiseworthy.

Some philosophers are now defending anti-natalism, the view that reproduction is immoral. I’m not going to address their arguments since I’m coming up to the end of this post. But here is the short argument for pro-natalism:

1. Most of you (readers), if you had children, would have children with happy lives.

2. A happy life is good.

3. It is good to produce good things.

4. Therefore, it would be good for you to have children.

How good is it? That depends on how good your children’s lives would be. But let’s just say: in all probability, creating a life would be extremely good, likely the best thing you ever did in your life by a wide margin (unless you go around saving people’s lives. Which you should do, but most people don’t.)

Curing Aging

Another solution would be to develop more technology. For instance, when we cure aging, that will greatly diminish the rate of population decline (or increase the rate of growth).

Artificial Wombs

If having children were less costly, more people would do it. To that end, we need to develop artificial wombs, whereby babies could be gestated without having to occupy someone’s body for 9 months.

Incentives

Perhaps there could be a political solution. Maybe, e.g., we could give big(ger) tax breaks to people who have children, thus improving the benefit/cost ratio of reproduction. Producing children is a big positive externality, for which people are not adequately compensated.

(Problem: This would have relatively small effect on the most productive members of society, who might be the ones we most want to encourage to reproduce.)

. . .

Q: What other solutions are there? We don’t have to go back to promoting false conservative ideas, do we?