Conservatives rightly mock the left for its endless alarmism about “global warming.” Whether the latter is a threat or not, the very notion that we humans can mitigate the warming power of a sun that a million planet earths could fit inside seems more than a stretch.
Sadly, conservatives have their thumbsucking qualities too. Think their weird obsession with birth rates. Endlessly invested in notions of decline allegedly foretold by a failure of parents to have enough babies, they attach apocalyptic nonsense to individual choice.
Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, is the latest (but surely not the last) conservative pundit to promote the birth rate crisis narrative. Writing at the New York Times, Stone writes that doom awaits us thanks to an alleged failure of Americans to produce enough babies to exceed the so-called population “Replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman. In Stone’s words, “If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages.”
Of course, missed by Stone is that there’s no such thing as “shortages” in a free, or even partially free economy. Instead, the people who constitute the market merely adjust to the situation around them. And they’re adjusting quite well.
Not only is the production of nearly every market good from the prosaic pencil to the wildly advanced iPhone an effect of literally billions of interconnected hands, machines and minds the world over (thus mitigating this odd focus on rates of birth within specific countries), it’s also worth noting that as Stone and his organization join a stadium-sized echo chamber of alarmists about falling birth rates globally, production of increasingly capable robots by Elon Musk’s Tesla (among others) is setting the stage for the entrance of literally billions of capable hands into global production.
For perspective, travel back in time to over 100 years ago when Henry Ford miraculously created cars for “the great multitude.” His monumental achievement was an effect of him dividing up work among thousands of workers on the path to herculean productive leaps that powerfully increased car production alongside routine declines in the cost of cars.
Factor in what you’ve just read not just as robots enter the workplace, but also technology that has made it possible for literally anyone with basic computer skills to produce code in a few hours that used to take large Silicon Valley teams months. It’s just a comment that the birth rates occupying the minds of always alarmed conservatives are no match for technological advances that will render the babies of today and tomorrow the productive equivalent of tens of thousands of babies from the past.
Applied to Stone and alarmism that will fill books and op-eds in the future as further evidence of the powerful folly of “prediction” from the expert class, future production alongside lower rates of birth will substantially dwarf what humans produced in the past such that the biggest problem for governments won’t be “strained entitlements,” but what to do with all the tax revenues flowing their way.
Which means the crisis isn’t the population decline that Stone laughably claims we’re not prepared for, rather it’s the looming growth of government. Precisely because those in the proverbial arena are much more than ready for lower birth rates, the biggest challenge will be a federal government profiting way too handsomely from all the future growth that Stone and others can’t see due to blindness born of a baseless birth rate obsession.
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