Wicked problems of modernity
Why falling fertility is like climate change and what that means
In most regions of the world, including the US, people are having fewer than 2 children per woman on average. The fertility rate has fallen significantly in the past 10-20 years with no obvious end in sight. If trends continue, this means global human population will peak in the second half of this century, and then possibly decline quickly thereafter, with a lot of plausibly bad consequences.
This has been in the news a lot lately, as have various analyses of what to do about it. Most recently, Very Online people have had a little kerfuffle/controversy thing over a Guardian profile of the, um, eccentric “pronatalist activists” Simone and Malcolm Collins. So it’s a popular thing to debate and have takes about, and lo and behold, I have one! :)
My take is: we can think more productively about this challenge by comparing it to climate change. Both are in a class of problems I call “wicked problems of modernity,” but climate change has gotten serious and constructive attention for decades. Many lessons from that experience can help us understand What Should Be Done (tm) about the fertility challenge and see what the next few decades likely have in store for us.
Parallels
Here are some important ways in which climate change and fertility decline are alike:
Both are complex multi-causal phenomena with many contributing factors. No one technology you could develop or social institution you could change would stop or reverse either. Any effective program for addressing either must change many things at once.
But the causes are almost all unintended side effects of modernity. The Way We Live Now (tm) is, in developed countries, fundamentally different from that of our preindustrial ancestors, and our uniquely modern habits, expectations, and desires are deeply intertwined with why our carbon footprints are so much larger, and our families so much smaller, than theirs were. Most remaining societies with small carbon footprints and/or large family sizes are extremely poor by modern developed-world standards. This is why I call these problems “wicked problems of modernity”. Many of their causes are great blessings— but not unmixed ones.
The knock-on effects of both have very long lag times, such that catastrophic consequences predicted by extrapolative models— like coastal cities flooding due to sea level rise, or regions becoming uninhabitable due to extreme summer heat, or rapidly aging and shrinking societies suddenly becoming poor and stagnant as they run out of young workers and innovators— are still far in the future. This creates institutional incentive problems that make it harder to take effective action, since in some sense nothing we do now will really matter for decades.
Yet we can see some consequences even now. Think of Western megafires or emptied-out Japanese towns; Gulf Coast hurricanes or tottering social security finances. So people are pushing to address both problems…
… but initial efforts have long been ineffective at meeting the scale and complexity of both.
This has led to anti-modern doomerism which asserts that developed-world society is bound to collapse due to our supposedly terrible, selfish, hedonistic, materialist/consumerist, shortsighted, unsustainable lifestyles, and we must return to premodern, supposedly wiser ways of living to save ourselves. With climate change this sort of sentiment skews left, with fertility decline it skews right. But the quasi (or not so quasi) religious denunciations of modern Westerners’ alleged sins can be remarkably similar in tone.
On the other hand, there’s also a lot of denialism that the problems are really significant, or that they even are problems at all. Here the tone and motivations are more different, but one commonality is denial driven by dislike of some of the people raising the alarm. Degrowther eco-socialists are obvious kooks— so climate change must not be so bad. The Collinses are obvious kooks too, and moreover some “pronatalists” are white nationalists or misogynists or the like— so falling fertility must not be so bad.
Lessons
A major difference is that both discourse and institutional action on fertility decline are much less advanced than is the case for climate change. We’ve talked a lot this century and done a lot more— especially in the past 10-15 years— about decarbonizing the economy, and it’s made a real difference: CO2 emissions are close to a global peak and the same models that once warned of a real risk of extreme levels of warming, more than 4 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline, are now more or less ruling out those scenarios. We still have a long way to go, but we’re on a hugely better path than before.
What can we learn from that experience about addressing wicked problems of modernity generally?
Finding effective solutions takes decades. The hope for a practical, abundant zero-carbon future we have today is hope that we did not have in the 1990s or 2000s or even early 2010s. Lots of solutions that people patiently worked on for all those decades looked way far off and infeasible to scale, until they didn’t.
Hectoring and controlling people doesn’t work. Most people still don’t care enough about climate change to accept significant short-term material sacrifices to address it. This is in spite of decades of lecturing and protest and an alarming increase in climate-related disasters since the 2010s. Except for a few cases where visible compliance costs are relatively concentrated (e.g. clean electricity mandates), regulations and taxes designed to forcibly speed up decarbonization have been politically unsuccessful across the developed world.
Technologies and policy changes can work, if they have clear short term benefits. The spread of cheap solar power, electric cars, and heat pumps has exceeded all expectations, and decarbonization of other energy-intensive applications has become much more viable. This was and is significantly accelerated by targeted subsidies. Those subsidies remain popular because people see them as enhancing comfort rather than forcing sacrifice; new green technologies work better in ways we would desire even if climate change were not a problem, which makes them far more compelling.
Breaking down the problem is crucial. To address climate change, hundreds of things have to be done differently, and each one only makes a relatively small impact. But systematic analysis like that done by Project Drawdown can point us to the highest-ROI places to spend limited resources on the problem.
If you want mainstream buy-in, you have to speak mainstream language. This is a great lesson from the excellent Electrify Everything course by Nate the House Whisperer. He emphasizes that for any set of solutions to make it across the adoption chasm from “that thing those weird nerds do” to “the right next thing for normal people like us,” advocacy has to be message-disciplined to meet ordinary people where they are. Normies care about how they can live better right now by doing what you want to help them do. They don’t care about what the earth will look like in 2100 and are not motivated to sacrifice to improve that long-term prospect.
Next steps
So what would an anti-population-decline strategy look like if it were informed by the lessons of the climate change fight?
First, it would focus on key stylized facts that can inform constructive engagement with the problem and push against both doomerism and denialism. Two such facts stand out to me:
The fertility shortfall is mostly a gap between desired and achieved fertility, i.e. people now are more likely to have fewer kids than they say they want compared to the past. This is bad in itself, since getting to have as many kids as you want is a pretty important source of life fulfillment for most people. And it means we can and should abjure moralistic hectoring (or worse, coercion) aimed at convincing people to have more kids than they currently want. Instead, we can focus on finding ways to help people close the desired-achieved gap that already exists. Such approaches are much more likely to reach the mainstream, rather than just giving a sense of moral satisfaction to activists.
In the US, the shortfall is recent. TFR was at or very near replacement for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, and was above 2.0 as recently as 2007. This means it is perfectly possible for a large, rich, dense, modern, post-sexual-revolution polity to have replacement-level fertility, because the US in 2007 was all of those things. That’s both a useful focusing instrument for constructive analysis— let’s delve into what changed since 2007!— and a useful refutation of doomerism.
Second, it would break down the problem. By analogy to Project Drawdown, it would be a great service for someone familiar with the quantitative data around fertility and its responses to different interventions to maintain a list of contributing factors and possible solutions, attempt to compare impact and efficiency among the solutions, and allow interested folks to look at lists sorted by various plausible metrics.
Third, it would prioritize solutions with clear, short-term collateral benefits. Child allowances considerably reduce child poverty. Greater access to IVF, or the development of future techniques like in vitro gametogenesis, would directly make childbearing possible for many who can’t do it now. Improved relationship-match-finding institutions would reduce loneliness. Fixing “marriage penalties” in the tax-and-transfer system would make our welfare state fairer and its incentive structure less perverse. These are all good and important things in themselves, and it should be possible to build broad mainstream support for them without appealing to their long-term fertility effects, just as more and more mainstream folks are buying electric cars even though they don’t care about climate change, because they’re low-maintenance, cheap to operate, and fun to drive.
Fourth, it would look for the most-transferrable best practices. Plenty of rich countries have child allowances that make for much lower child poverty rates, for starters. Then for more comprehensive policy successes focused on institutional support for parents, France and the Bolzano region of Italy come to mind. On the other hand, South Korea can provide many examples of “worst practices” to avoid or push against, like:
don’t concentrate good jobs in a few extremely demanding employers based in a single ultra-dense city
don’t raise the cost of childrearing with intense zero-sum arms races for educational status
don’t let cultural gaps between men and women grow and fester into mutual resentment.
Again, all of these are amply justifiable in general human flourishing terms, regardless of their effect on fertility.
Fifth, it would emphasize technological experimentation. Plenty of plausible technological developments, of varying difficulty levels, could potentially be pronatal:
fertility-span extension via cheaper/better IVF, in vitro gametogenesis, artificial postponement of menopause, etc
devices to make pregnancy and parenting (especially infant parenting) easier: everything from small incremental advances, like cheaper and/or more conveniently designed car seats, to further-out stuff like cell-cultured breast milk, diaper-changing robots, or even artificial wombs
even technology that facilitates, rather than obstructing, meaningful committed relationships— imagine a dating app that actually increased the marriage rate!
None of these are even close to proven out; all will need a great deal of high-risk R+D work to advance, just as green energy, electric vehicles, and so on once did.
Sixth, it would prioritize adaptation. Just as a certain amount of climate change is “baked in” already and we need to adjust proactively to that, so too will our populations continue to age for quite awhile regardless of any fertility changes that may happen now. Freer immigration is often a good local solution but by definition cannot be a global one. More durably and generally applicable adaptations include extensions to human healthspan and span of peak cognition, as well as technologies that further increase per-worker productivity and substitute for manual labor, to make it possible for a shrinking number of prime-age workers to support more non-workers and to extend the “prime-age” range by lessening the need for retirement. Again these require technological experimentation, and again these would all be good things to develop even absent fertility decline.
Finally, it would acknowledge uncertainty. A fundamental challenge is that we don’t know yet just what to do, as we did not know what to do about climate change in the late 20th century, and now as then, finding out is going to take decades of work during which the problem will get worse. But it’s OK— our long term conviction should be that modernity is a hardy weed and ingenuity will get us through.
Questions
I’d love comments on:
Are there parallels I haven’t mentioned between fertility decline and climate change?
Are there differences I haven’t mentioned that would cut against the narrative of this post?
What are other wicked problems of modernity, and what can they teach us?