A Modest Proposal
Why Liberals Should Care About Population Growth
If you want to live in a pluralistic society, you might have to be un-pluralistic about those things which make it possible to live in a pluralistic society.
But what are those things? National defense might be one. Prosperity might be another. Functioning courts and good political institutions would be a third. A culture of a certain base-line respect for difference might be another.
You probably wouldn’t think a high birthrate would be up there.
In fact, in certain elite circles talking about the importance of high birthrates will get you accused of being sexist, patriarchal, heteronormative, etc. It seems rather impolite. Global warming arguments aside, the common accusations are that if you care about population growth you are 1) “policing women’s bodies” and 2) making heroes of those who can have kids while stigmatizing those who can’t or don’t want to.
And yet pluralism and liberalism didn’t come from a vacuum. They came into maturity as a result of the Industrial Revolution. You can’t actually be tolerant of others who disagree with you when things are scarce. Pluralism is a luxury of abundant societies. And abundance is a function of growth. Numerous studies show that aging societies with declining birthrates are risk averse and anti-innovative. The best and brightest leave, creating a vicious spiral. Western feminism would not have occurred without the Industrial Revolution. The ability to come up with phrases like “smash the patriarchy” is a function of living in a wealthy society. If you care about reform, if you care about liberal institutions, you can’t be indifferent to prosperity at the collective level.
Now you can solve the population growth problem with other things besides birthrate. You could have more immigrants, more international adoptions. You could also use technology to bio-engineer more lives. But excepting the last option, the other two don’t solve for growth at a global level.
In Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen makes the (compelling) argument that it’s much better to live in a society whose population growth rate is 2% rather than 1%, especially when you compound. The former end up becoming prosperous and innovative, while the latter end up stagnating by comparison.
Obviously, population growth isn’t enough. Culture matters, too. But without a sheer critical mass, culture won’t make much of a difference. Innovation happens at massive scale in cities, not in the boonies, where there’s less serendipity and fewer collisions of minds. It’s fine to live your best life in the boonies, it’s fine to not want to have kids as a matter of personal choice. The point is just that if you want these to be experienced as a choice—if you believe in liberty and choice—you might consider the paradox that some things cannot be up for grabs, at least at a collective level.
One of the blindspots of liberalism is the realization that it, too, needs what sociologists call “a plausibility structure.”
We are liberal about such plausibility structures at our own peril.
No matter what you do as a matter of personal preference, or what you think the solutions are as a matter of culture and policy, it’s worth considering that choice itself is a second-order good. If you live in a society that is terrible, all the formal choice in the world will be basically meaningless.
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The argument that long-run-sustainable liberalism requires growing abundance is solid. The argument that growing abundance requires a high birthrate is less so. The key problem with it is that the long run here is quite long: South Korea has had below-replacement birthrate since the 1980s and today has among the lowest rates in the world. Would you describe it as a risk-averse, anti-innovative society? I wouldn't.
Moreover, the medical extension of existing lives, and especially of healthspan, can make the long run still longer-- not just by keeping the population from dropping, but by lengthening the span of time for which people are young at heart and in mind, creative and innovative.
Now at some point, as with immigration, this will hit a limit. But suppose, as seems likely, that we can use immigration and life extension to keep economic growth going well into the 22nd century, even as global population stabilizes and then slowly declines. That's a pretty good runway for our efforts to either bioengineer more lives, as you say-- or to accelerate innovation-per-person-lifetime further, perhaps with the help of stronger AI-- or both.
So there is plenty of reason to believe that the theoretical problems with low birthrates will not materialize in practice.
Additionally, one wonders about what life would be like in a world without uncles, aunts, siblings or cousins. It’s one thing to be an only child, however a society of only children would be uncharted territory.