The Underpopulation Crisis

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0:00:04.0 Paul Matzko: I’m not sure what your puppet master of choice happens to be, the sinister entity secretly pulling all the strings, maybe it’s the Cokes, George Soros, the Bilderbergers, or even the lizard people. But before I lose you, and you turn back to stringing yarn between photos stuck to your bedroom walls, let me tell you about a real mastermind, an individual who built a nation-​spanning movement of think tanks and institutes, that man was an eye doctor in Michigan, named John Tanton. Sounds a bit underwhelming, ey, ophthalmologist, Michigan, but Tanton might be the most influential person you’ve never heard of.

0:00:48.9 Alex Nowrasteh: He’s like the Johnny Appleseed of nativist organizations.

0:00:51.8 Paul Matzko: That’s Alex Nowrasteh, the CATO Institute’s immigration policy expert. I asked him about Tanton’s nativist legacy.

0:01:00.3 Alex Nowrasteh: John Tanton was a Michigan optometrist, who recently died in 2019. And he spent his life pursuing population control in the United States and abroad. So he got started on this in the 1960s with Planned Parenthood in Michigan. He basically founded several chapters of Planned Parenthood, opened numerous abortion clinics, on the idea that population growth is bad, and we need to reduce the number of births in the United States. And this eventually brought him to the idea of immigration restrictionism. So he thought I want to… He wants to protect the environment by reducing the number of people, and the main way to do that in his mind, the most effective way to do that would be by limiting immigration to the United States.

0:01:49.9 Alex Nowrasteh: He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which is an activist group, NumbersUSA, another activist group with the name, Young numbers, to reduce the numbers of people in the United States. He expanded into groups like zero population control, an advocacy group, negative population growth, which is another group that wants to shrink the population, in of the United States. Center for Immigration Studies, which is a nativist Think Tank, ProEnglish, which is pushing for English as the national language and other groups that try to reduce immigration in the country. So he’s founded and funded and found funding for all of these groups.

0:02:29.5 Paul Matzko: Tanton is dead, but his soul is marching on in the form of eco-​fascism. You spend a lot of time online, you might have come across the hashtag Pine Tree Gang going by the slogan, bees, not refugees. And if you follow politics closely, you’ve likely encountered the right wing pundit Ann Coulter, who talks openly about the choice America faces between quote, greening or Browning, linking the preservation of the environment to the defense of white supremacy. Eco-​fascists take the phrase, blood and soil very literally. Here’s the thing. While you’re probably viscerally repelled by the Eco-​fascist violence and their hatred, part of their views are more mainstream than you might think. Focus on their core logic. Humans are bad for the environment. Therefore, we need fewer humans. Immigration brings more humans, therefore we need less immigration. The first part of that thinking is so widespread in American culture as it has to be anodyne at this point. You probably know someone who says they aren’t having children because they don’t wanna bring a kid into this broken down disaster of a planet. A Vogue article recently asked, is having children and act of quote, pure environmental vandalism, as the logic goes, the world already has too many people. If you wanna be part of the solution, not part of the problem, then you shouldn’t have kids, or at least not as many kids.

0:04:05.7 Emily Partridge: You can add Miley Cyrus to the growing number of millennials who won’t have kids because of climate change. She’s waiting to become a mom until the issue is properly addressed.

0:04:14.5 Paul Matzko: Heck, even Miley Cyrus won’t have children until we mitigate climate change, saying, quote, we’re getting handed a piece of shit planet and I refuse to hand that down to my child, a pretty far cry from her Party in the USA era. But even the arguably chillest man in Hollywood, Seth Rogen took a break from self medicating to say…

0:04:35.9 Seth Rogen: And why, there’s enough kids out there. Who needs fucking more… Anyway… What do you mean?

0:04:38.4 S?: Oh, there’s so many.

0:04:39.9 Seth Rogen: We need more people, who looks at the planet right now and thinks, you know what we need? More fucking people. That’s what I… That’s the confounding thing.

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0:04:53.9 Paul Matzko: Now, of course, Vogue, Rogen Cyrus, they’re not eco-​fascists. They aren’t racists who hate immigrants. But they are an example of how John Tanton’s environmental paranoia has percolated throughout American society. Fears about overpopulation are acting in a sense, like a form of planetary birth control, as fewer and fewer people all over the world are willing to have kids. Yet these apprehensions are rooted in antiquated fear of overpopulation. When you look at the actual data, and you reflect on what it signifies, it becomes clear that the crisis facing the world during our lifetimes is not overpopulation. But under-​population. Birth rates are falling around the world, creating cascading problems in countries like Japan and China that, unlike the US haven’t been able to paper over the crisis through immigration. But through a combination of US immigration restrictionism, and just the ongoing natural decline in birth rates over the next 20-30 years, the full extent of the under-​population crisis is going to become very apparent in the US as well. I am Paul Matzko, this is Building Tomorrow. And we desperately need more people.

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0:06:47.5 Paul Matzko: Let’s start by grounding this discussion in some hard data. First, it’s worth noting that global population decline at some point in the future is inevitable. It’s coming. You can’t stop it. There is no model in which global population growth continues indefinitely. Even the most optimistic model, the official United Nations estimate predicts that world population will continue to grow from almost 8 billion people today until it hits about 11 billion people in 2100 before starting to decline. But the UN’s estimate makes a huge and questionable assumption that the decline in birth rates is relatively constant, that the pace at which the decline happened in say the US over the last 100 years is the same pace it will decline in say India today. But there are huge flags signalling that that’s a flawed assumption that the pace of decline is much more rapid in emerging economies today than in the past. And as a result, instead of peaking in 2100, global population will more likely peak in 2050 or even 2040 and go into a steeper than expected decline.

0:08:14.6 Paul Matzko: We know that as societies become wealthier, better educated, that families have fewer children. Some of that’s a function of kids switching from a financial asset into a financial liability. You know that first post-​birth trip to Costco to pick up a box of diapers will drive that point home very quickly. But it’s also because women given the choice and knowledge about other lifestyle possibilities typically choose to have fewer children. And yes, I know that you know a homeschooling family out on a the farm in Indiana who had a dozen kids, but that’s become an extreme outlier. I asked journalist John Ibbitson, who wrote an excellent short primer on the subject titled empty planet, the shock of global population decline, about the connection between empowered women globalized access to information and falling birth rates.

0:09:09.2 John Ibbitson: It’s that smartphone. We were in a university campus at Seoul, we were at a dinner party in Brussels. We were in a favela in Sao Paulo, in Nairobi, Beijing, New Delhi. And we talked to an amazing assortment mostly of young women. The amazing thing that we found was their message was almost always the same. It didn’t really matter what your level of development was. People wanted women especially wanted about two kids. The difference is the men… In Brussels the guys at the dinner table agreed that their partners were entitled to jobs, were entitled to the same kind of opportunities that they were you heard that in Seoul, we heard it in California. You also heard it in Nairobi and Sao Paulo and New Delhi but the women wouldn’t have much say in that discussion.

0:10:00.3 John Ibbitson: Their husbands were determined that there would be as many kids as they thought the family needed, who’s going to win? The women who in the developing world, every bit as much as the developed world want control over their bodies want control over their lives, want freedom, want autonomy, or the men who want them just to remain as they traditionally were subservient. And as you pointed out, Daryl was conducting at a particular conversation in New Delhi. And he noticed that the women kept looking under their saris at their smartphones. Even in a slum in New Delhi, they had a phone and they had a plan, which meant that they had the sum of human knowledge there in their hands. And as we said, in the book, we know how this ends, it’s just a question of how long it takes. And we now know the answer to that, too, that, in fact, India is down to replacement rate.

0:10:58.7 Paul Matzko: The official estimates haven’t caught up yet with the reality on the ground. And this isn’t just happening in India, this is a truly global phenomenon. Falling fertility rates are here and a in total global population is not far behind. Here are the cold hard numbers. If you want to simply replace one generation with the next, then the average woman needs to have 2.1 children that point one 0.1 creating a buffer for infant child mortality and infertility. Statisticians call this number The fertility rate. And if you look at the family size statistics for America, the number of kids per woman has fallen from seven in 1800, to about four in 1900. And a remarkable slump to around 1.6 Last year, which is well below the 2.1 replacement rate. If that pace held, and there are actually reasons to expect it to fall even further. But even if it held, the US population would be roughly a sixth smaller with every generation. Put it this way. When the sport of baseball was invented in 1839, the average American family parents and kids included could have fielded an entire baseball team. Today, you’re lucky just to be able to play catch.

0:12:26.8 Paul Matzko: And this falling pattern is evident in nearly every country in the world. The global fertility rate nearly halved from 4.7 Children in 1950 to just 2.4 in 2017. And that’s true of countries that still have above replacement level fertility rates like India, which went from 5.91 in 1950 to 2.18 today, or Peru from nearly seven in 1950 to just 2.2 today. By the end of the 2020s. Almost all global population growth will come from the continent of Africa alone. If you look at the top 20 countries with the highest fertility rates right now, all without exception, are African. Nobody tell Ann Coulter. But even in Africa, only the number one ranked country in the world in 2015, Niger, would even break into the top 20 of countries in 1950 and just barely by 2100 countries like Japan with a fertility rate of just 1.37. Will more than halve their population from over 125 million people today to under 60 million. The same will be true of Italy, Greece most of Europe. Birth rates are plummeting everywhere. The depopulation of the developed world is going to be rapid and stark.

0:14:11.1 Paul Matzko: Now, maybe you’re thinking to yourself, hmm, half as many people doesn’t sound so bad more for everyone else. The misanthropically inclined are probably figuring out just which neighbors on their street they wouldn’t mind seeing disappear. But it is a serious question worth our consideration. Why is population decline a problem? First, it’s worth briefly noting that we structured so much of our economy and society around the assumption of constant population expansion. Take for instance, social security, which despite common misconceptions is not some kind of personal accounts that you pay into and then pull the money out of in retirement. It’s a transfer of funds from present day workers to fund past workers who are now retired, there’s no there there no big pot of money. And Social Security is already on an unsustainable path by 2035, it won’t be able to cover the promised payments, because the ratio of present workers to past retirees has grown too large, which could lead to benefit cuts of as much as one fifth.

0:15:22.0 Paul Matzko: But that’s assuming that population continues to grow. If US population actually falls by as much as our top-​line fertility rate would indicate, we’ll be positively nostalgic for a time when we only cut benefits by 20%. And the same is true of Medicare our disability system, and so on. All were created with the assumption of population growth. Whether or not you’re a particular fan of these programs, the under-​population crisis will create a fiscal cliff making the switch over to any kind of alternative much more difficult. Furthermore, we’ll be trying to solve those problems just as tax revenue declines as the number of workers declines. And those won’t be the good kinds of declines tax cuts and the like. Falling tax receipts will mandate government austerity, but without creating any kind of economic boost as a result, that’ll lead to capital flight and out-​migration, especially in a the world where more and more work can be done remotely, a vicious cycle of tax hikes, benefit cuts and economic stagnation.

0:16:31.0 Paul Matzko: That might sound like a bit of a reach. But bear in mind what happened to the last Empire before the post-​world war II rise of Pax Americana. At the turn of the 20th century, the sun never set on the British Empire, its military might was unquestioned. And it was one of the world’s wealthiest nations, yet by the middle of the century, it was a shell of what it had been just a generation before, impoverished by excessive taxation of workers to pay for unsustainable social programs, as well as the costly albatross of an empire hanging around its neck. That could just as easily and just as rapidly happen to the United States.

0:17:16.3 Paul Matzko: That’s all big picture abstract future stuff. But the idea that population decline leads to community crisis, economic stagnation and a culture of despair is really quite intuitive. I mean, have you ever visited Ohio? I say that in jest, Ohio is an underrated, resilient and really very beautiful state. But the many shrinking Rust Belt and rural towns in Ohio are a picture of what an under-​population crisis can do to a community. When I was a kid, maybe eight years old, my family made the interminable drive through Ohio, on the way to somewhere anywhere else. We stopped overnight in Wapakoneta, Ohio, planning to visit the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum.

0:18:08.1 S?: Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger, Tranquility…

0:18:12.0 Paul Matzko: Only to find that it was closed. Given that the only other option in town for a visit was a store named Big Bear Plus, we tried touring nearby Lima, Ohio instead. And even though this was nearly 30 years ago, I can still picture in my mind’s eye, the decrepit factory buildings, rusted smokestacks, and just how empty and quiet the playgrounds and streets were. And sure, I could tell a dispassionate story about bad economic policy, de-​industrialization, and how a town like Lima lost about a third of its population over the last 50 years.

0:18:53.0 Paul Matzko: But that story is true of hundreds of similar towns all across the country. Towns that face crisis of declining tax revenue as the working population shrinks. Where schools close or consolidate as the number of children falls. Where the best and brightest of the next generation go elsewhere, anywhere in search of opportunity. I can tell you about these trends, but you really have to live in these towns to know how it feels to be part of a proud community with a storied history of past accomplishments that is now seemingly trapped in the downward spiral of economic and social decline. What if Lima, Ohio is the future of America writ large? That doesn’t sound great. Does it? But I have some good news. The future doesn’t have to look like that.

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0:19:58.7 Paul Matzko: Have you seen the movie musical, In the Heights? I know some of you are Hamilton stands. So maybe you’ve also seen Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical about the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City. It’s a neighborhood filled with young people. It’s diverse with residents originally from across the African and Latin diasporas, like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. And it has a long history as a center for migrant communities from across the world, like Russia and Greece. It’s a community filled with entrepreneurs and hustlers of every kind, it’s a dynamic place. And it’s the furthest possible place from Lima, Ohio that you could imagine. Why? Immigration. Immigration is why the US has not yet felt the full effects of the under-​population crisis. Immigrants are quite literally saving us from a dismal future, delaying its advent buying us time.

0:21:00.3 Paul Matzko: First, there’s a direct effect from immigration, the only reason the US population has grown over the last 30 years is because immigration has made up the difference for our below replacement fertility rates. In 1965, Congress reformed our immigration laws which had previously banned almost all immigration. Making it possible for 80 million people and their descendants to come to the US. Without them, US population growth would have stagnated. Today, we’d be a country of about 250 million people instead of 330 million people. To put that difference in perspective, the total number of immigrants since 1965 is the same as the combined populations of California, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s just three states. That’s not that much.” But remember those are big states. To put it another way, 80 million is also the population of the 30 smallest states combined. That’s right, 30 entire states, from Minnesota and South Carolina on down through Vermont and Wyoming.

0:22:10.1 Paul Matzko: Imagine if you snapped your fingers Thanos style… And we lost the combined populations of 30 states. If you did that today, if we suddenly lost 30 states worth of population, do you think America would be better off, or innovative, stronger, or prosperous? Or do you think we’d be poorer, weaker, and more stagnant? That’s what our society would be like without the last half century of immigration. And it almost happened, it’s a bit of a regulatory accident that it didn’t. And without more immigrants going forward, the US population will start to fall within the decade. In other words, immigration is the reason why right now, the US isn’t facing the struggles of under population inflicted countries like Japan, and Italy, and the like. We’re like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, getting a sneak peek at what our present would have looked like without immigrants. And it might still be our future if we do nothing.

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0:23:17.6 Paul Matzko: Furthermore, if your concern is not just population decline and associated ills, but also a decline in economic growth and innovation, then increasing immigration is a kill two birds with one stone style solution. Immigrants punch above their weight on every measure of entrepreneurship, research and development. For example, an immigrant is 80% more likely to start a business than a native born person is. 80%. That’s everything from hotel owners, to fast food franchises, and your favorite food truck. But that also includes the half of all Silicon Valley start-​ups that have at least one immigrant founder. Companies like Google, Uber, Tesla, PayPal, Stripe, WhatsApp, and so many more. Add in second generation children of immigrants, and fully 43% of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Including Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs. As Apple, CEO Tim Cook put it, “Apple would not exist without immigration.”

0:24:27.2 Paul Matzko: Immigrants build things, big things, life improving things. They are the source of US dominance in so many digital and emerging technologies. Immigrants in the US have produced more patents than immigrants in the next 26 countries combined. You look at the chart ranking immigrant contributions, and it’s so lopsided, it’s ludicrous. Perhaps the perfect example of the immigrant contribution to medical innovation is Katalin Karikó, the biochemist who came to the US from Hungary in the 1990s and pioneered mRNA-​based gene therapy.

0:25:03.3 Paul Matzko: The very technology that made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines possible. Which has saved hundreds of thousands of US lives, and will save millions of lives globally from COVID-19. Yet Karikó almost didn’t stay in the US, which would have meant losing access to our world leading network of labs, and venture capital, and the like. Why? Because of problems involving her spouse’s Visa. Can you imagine how much the US and the World nearly lost because of bad immigration policy? The mind-​boggles. The good news is that the US remains a highly desirable destination for immigrants from around the world. The primary barrier at the moment is the byzantine labyrinth of our immigration process.

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0:25:53.2 Paul Matzko: A tangle of dozens of different visa types, opaque applications, and get this multi-​year wait lists. If you’re from India, you’re looking at an eight and a half year wait. If you’re a Filipino or Mexican applying for a family-​based visa, well, you better buckle up buckle, ’cause you’re looking at a 22-​year delay.

0:26:13.3 Paul Matzko: And that’s the best case scenario for the relatively tiny fraction of those who qualify for each of whom there are many, many more who fall afoul of immigration caps and Visa quotas. But if we were to rationalize that system and start welcoming in these people who I remind you we desperately need, then we still would have a big edge in the international competition for migrants. We’re a big country, big homes, land lots of land, the best colleges, the most prolific research labs, and so much more. People want to come here because we are, still and often despite ourselves, the land of opportunity. And if we can attract immigrants from countries that still have rising populations, we can create a lasting multi-​generational pipeline between immigrant communities here in the US and those back in the old country, locking in our national advantage for another generation or two.

0:27:11.3 Paul Matzko: This is how it worked with, say, Scandinavian immigrants, the Minnesota in the 19th century, and how it works with Latin American immigrants today. We’ll need every advantage we can get come 20 or 30 years from now, when the rest of the developed world wakes up to the under-​population crunch and the desperate global competition for immigrants begins in earnest. You can actually get a taste of what’s coming by looking at the growing internal competition within the US, between various states seeking to attract immigration from each other. If you’re a college grad, you can take your pick right now of things like $10,000 in moving costs from Maine or $10,000 towards your mortgage down payments in Iowa or $12,000 in cold hard cash from West Virginia. That’s going to become the norm globally in our lifetimes, countries are going to be desperately bidding against each other for immigrants, offering all kinds of bonuses and benefits.

0:28:13.1 Paul Matzko: The current nativist discourse obsessed with immigrants not paying their fair share of taxes or taking too much welfare or whatever, will flip completely on its head, we’ll be begging immigrants to come here at any cost. When historians some day look back at this moment in US history, the thing that will seem most alien to them, most bizarre, hardest to comprehend will be understanding how, just before the global under-​population crisis struck, Americans actually tried to slow the rate of immigration instead of doing every damn thing in their power to accelerate it. But eventually, at some point, immigration rates will slow as global population falls. Immigrants as welcome as they are, are not a permanent fix for the under-​population crisis, because eventually birth rates will fall below replacement even in the countries that are currently major senders.

0:29:12.7 Paul Matzko: Immigration, it buys us time, time to prepare for the inevitable under-​population crisis to make the kinds of needed reforms to place our society, the economy on a more even keel. But there is another way of buying time, have more babies. Sounds simple, right? And there is a growing pro-​natalist movement that wants to use government subsidies to encourage families to have more babies. Now, I should note the strong social conservative streak among the pro-​natalist movement, which isn’t surprising given for instance, long-​standing Catholic antipathy towards birth control and various religious movements that see large families as a tool for spreading their faith.

0:29:57.3 Paul Matzko: But we don’t have to cede natalism to conservatives or those with outdated patriarchal gender norms who see kids as an anchor to keep women in skirts at home. There is a liberal argument for natalism. In part, it’s rooted in the belief that free, innovative and prosperous societies are growing societies, we are humanists who believe that people are capable of extraordinary things when their potential is maximized in a free society. And for that to happen to be a bit obvious, you need people. Being pro-​natalist can also be an expression of female empowerment. Yes, for much of the three waves of the feminist movement, giving women choice meant making it possible for them to have fewer children. But we’ve reached a point where more than a few women want to have more children but don’t have the resources or freedom to do so. Birth control is both a negative and positive concept.

0:31:00.1 Paul Matzko: In an ideal world, women should be able to have all the children they want, whether that number is zero or 10, and not one child more. Yet when polled, an overwhelming majority of women ages 15 to 34, more than four out of five say they would like to have children, and when asked how many, the total average is 2.2 kids, yet the fertility rate is only 1.6, meaning that many mothers are stopping short of their desired number of children. You see, our angst about climate change is creating pressure on women to have fewer children than they would otherwise prefer. We’re putting the onus of fixing centuries of environmental mistakes on mothers. The cultural consensus demands that they as individual women atone for a societal problem. It’s like the child-​bearing equivalent of a familiar environmental hyper-​individualism, you know the type, the activists who school people into driving a Prius or recycling their cardboard, when the reality is that systemic reform to energy consumption is what’s really needed, not individual conspicuous conservation.

0:32:13.8 Paul Matzko: I asked Lauren Hall, a political scientist and author of The Medicalisation of Birth and Death, a book I avidly recommend about the way potential mothers are green shamed into not having children.

0:32:26.6 Alex Nowrasteh: Women’s preferences are important. And I see some of this in the kinds of moralistic arguments against having children. Well, it’s… Climate change is really bad, we’re gonna all die in a fiery pit, so why would I bring children in this world? I don’t know why that… Why women have to… Why that’s a preference that will fall more on women, that they have to sort of sacrifice their preferences for these broader societal ends.

0:32:57.0 Paul Matzko: Besides environmental angst. What’s causing that gap? And what can we do about it? Well, obviously, pregnancy is hard, giving birth is hard, parenting is hard, it’s all freaking hard. Look into the eyes of any mother you know, and you’ll see a bone tired exhaustion staring right back. Most parents are sleep-​deprived for the first eight years of their kids lives. But still, even when surveyed after having their first kid, a large majority of mothers want another. But there is a basic practical reason why so many families opt out of an otherwise wanted second or even first kid, money. Kids are expensive, they cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars from birth through age 18. And unlike in pre-​modern days, kids are not sources of labor, they’re not net fiscal positives for their families.

0:33:53.4 Paul Matzko: If kids weren’t so expensive, more families might feel free to have more children. Part of this is a function of the brokenness of the American health care system when women get forced into bad medical situations because of the convoluted nature of health insurance and the perverse incentives they create. Doctors end up mis-​treating pregnant women all the time. That’s turned giving birth in a hospital into something like being on an assembly line.

0:34:21.7 S?: You move mothers from room to room, you move them from place to place. You keep them on this assembly line in order to keep the hospital efficient. So it becomes much less about what does is this labouring woman need, and what is the hospital system need?

0:34:36.7 Paul Matzko: Clearly, addressing the declining birth rate also means fixing our broken healthcare system and making child birth more affordable, safer, and accessible. But the cost of having a kid doesn’t stop at birth. Kids are freaking expensive for the whole time they’re living with you. Which is why about a dozen countries, mostly in Europe, have state subsidized child allowances. For instance, Luxemburg gives parents the equivalent of $325 a month for each child until the kids are 18. This summer, the US is beginning a similar experiment with monthly child tax credit payments.

0:35:14.3 S?: So if you’re a working family with two kids, you’re gonna get $500 a month into your bank account on the 15th of every month, starting in July. This tax cut will be put into your account automatically. If not, it will be mailed to you.

0:35:29.4 Paul Matzko: And these programs do have some effect. For example, Sweden has some of the most generous benefits in the world, including 16 months of paid parental leave, a substantial child allowance, a family housing allowance, and a publicly run and paid for daycare system. The expansion of those programs in the ’90s knots boosted the Swedish fertility rate from a low of 1.56 in 2000 to a high of 1.9 a decade later. Though it has since declined somewhat, still, that’s a solid two or three-​tenths better than the US and significantly higher than most of Europe.

0:36:07.1 Paul Matzko: However, that boost comes at a significant cost. In Sweden, the childcare benefits are nearly as expensive as their entire retirement program, their version of Social Security. It’s fantastically expensive, and has only partially, and perhaps only temporarily arrested the decline. The fertility rate is still below population replacement and falling. But that boost to the fertility rate plus a relatively high level of immigration means that Sweden has continued to grow. Unlike, say, Germany or Portugal. It has bought itself time and given itself an advantage over many of its peer European nations heading into the global under-​population crisis. Whether it will use that time wisely, well, that’s a different question.

0:36:54.5 Paul Matzko: Now, the US doesn’t necessarily need to imitate the Swedish example in terms of policy. Nor is it clear how we’d be able to pay for a second Social Security system on top of our already ballooning national debt and our expensive imperial obligations. But Sweden is a great example of how removing practical barriers to having children can lead to a boost in the fertility rate. But there is one relatively easy, relatively cheap thing, that the US can do now. Doesn’t require a new government program or an expansion of the welfare state indeed, it means removing an ill-​advised government policy that has simultaneously depressed the birth rate, boosted the gender wage gap, and led to a lot of avoidable misery. Intrigued? Well, Harvard economist, Claudia Golden has done some fascinating counter-​intuitive work on the gender wage gap.

0:37:50.5 Claudia Golden: So women have sought career and family in large numbers ever since we just saw the 1970s in the US, and the most recent cohort of college graduate women who desire career and family is the largest group ever, the success rates of their predecessors in achieving career and family when young have been rather disappointing, and only by reducing the cost of temporal flexibility can gender gaps in earnings and in occupations be substantially narrowed. And can the twin goals of family and career be achievable by a larger fraction of women, and the most important point here, is it’s in men too.

0:38:42.2 Paul Matzko: Lots of big concepts there, so let’s unpack it. You’re likely aware that women earn less than men for doing the same work, about $0.84 on the $1 in 2020, Golden found that most of that gap is explainable by the way in which our tax regime and work culture expectations create a false choice for women.

0:39:03.6 Paul Matzko: You see, our tax structure rewards companies that give full-​time employees benefits, but does not equally privilege part-​time employees who receive health and other benefits at significantly lower rates. Also, our bosses tend to reward face time, giving raises and promotions to those who can be physically present in the office during the standard 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week work day, but this means that most workers have little of what Golden calls temporal flexibility or put that in less fancy terms, working when you want to work. So maybe that means you can work less than 40 hours a week, or work 40 hours, but you spread those hours across three or four long days rather than the traditional five day week, that kind of temporal flexibility can significantly change a mother’s range of options for things like Child Care, to put that in practical terms, say you’ve got a family member, a mother or a cousin who can watch your kid three days a week, but not five.

0:40:08.5 Paul Matzko: Under our current system, potential mothers often feel forced to choose between full-​time work or staying at home full-​time to provide child care, it’s either or, there are penalties for either choice. On the one hand, not having a wanted child, and on the other, facing huge penalties that will follow that woman for the rest of her career by creating a gap on their resume. In countries that don’t have these perverse incentives like Denmark, mothers will often simply reduce the number of hours they work, go part-​time, but keep their benefits and spend more time at home for a few years before returning to full-​time work later on and not bearing the same kind of blow to their careers. More women could have it all if we just didn’t punish them with misogynistic tax policies. But ultimately, even a smarter tax policy structure won’t fix the under-​population crisis, remember whether we boost the fertility rate or increase the number of immigrants, we’re simply buying time. In the long run, the entire globe is trending towards sub-​replacement fertility, the question is whether your country will hit the wall in the next decade or the next century, and maybe if we’re fortunate, we’ll discover and develop the kinds of future tech that could permanently reverse the decline in birth rates.

0:41:34.8 Paul Matzko: For example, one of the basic barriers to having children is that pregnancy and giving birth is still painful and physically dangerous, it can leave mothers with lifelong ill consequences for their physical and mental well-​being, but imagine if it didn’t. That’s the promise of research into artificial wombs. You might not have heard, but in 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia successfully gestated baby sheep lambs in artificial wombs for four weeks. Now, that might sound a bit freaky, kind of like those pods from the Matrix movies, Neo rising, gasping from the ooze, but once you get past the first wave of techno-​phobic aversion, it’s actually a rather exciting technology, the initial use case for humans is to help the survival odds of premature babies. Here’s Dr. Emily Partridge, one of the medical researchers.

0:42:31.2 Emily Partridge: Right now, what happens if you’re born at 23 weeks, the analogy that we use is you’re sort of like a fish on dry land, you’re really not ready to be out of a fluid environment, and we sort of have to do our best to try to compensate for those physiologic [0:42:48.2] ____ in sorts.

0:42:48.3 Paul Matzko: So imagine if it could become routine for premature babies to be able to be in an artificial womb for those crucial transitional weeks, survival rates would rise, the burden on women’s bodies would lessen, and both would provide a boost to fertility rates, and that’s technology that will likely be a standard part of medical care in a decade or so. But who knows what the future of medical tech looks like, stuff we’re not even thinking of right now, whatever it is, we need time to get there, we need buy time for innovation, whether it’s artificial wombs for children, automated assistance for elder care, or any of a thousand potential innovations that will mitigate the downsides of living in a future marked by an aging declining population. Perhaps one day that tech combined with smarter policies and a sense of cultural optimism will be advanced enough that we’ll even be able to reverse the decline in births entirely. In any case, time is our most valuable resource. While we’re talking about innovation, I want to explicitly address the environmental objection to population growth. As mentioned earlier, in the US, it’s a bit of a trend for celebrities to announce they’re postponing having children until anthropogenic climate change is addressed.

0:44:21.1 Paul Matzko: It’s been the theme of several organizations created during a youth climate activism trend in 2019, like the birth strikers in Europe and the #No future no children movement in Canada. Here’s a group called The Conceivable Future, that in addition to a love of bad puns wants people to have fewer kids.

0:44:42.1 S13: And when we talked about this together, just the experience of having that conversation was really liberating, it was like one of the big kind of pivot points in my life, being able to say, This is why I fight. Conceivable future opens our doors to anyone who wants to have a conversation about how climate change is shaping their reproductive lives, that’s not just women, it’s not actually just people of reproductive age, either grandparents or would be grandparents. But we welcome anyone who is wrestling with what climate change means for their future, it’s not attached to like, Oh, you’re gonna have a child, or I’m not gonna have a child.

0:45:19.7 Paul Matzko: Now, it’s easy to make fun of these more radical expressions of natal skepticism, but there is a serious core question behind their extreme proposals, after all, it is true that every additional human being added to global population is a net contributor to carbon emissions. So aren’t we just mitigating one global crisis, the under population crisis by contributing to another, the climate change crisis. Well, I have good news for you. We’ve already bent down the climate curve, as I call it, per capita carbon emissions are already falling in the developed world, and emerging technologies promise to accelerate that trend. We are on the cusp of the moment when for the first time in human history, it is cheaper to generate energy via renewable carbon emission less processes than not. Wind and solar are already less expensive than fossil fuels, and the base load issues of variable renewable power sources, the wind that doesn’t blow with the same speed all day, it’s going to be transformed by new solid state battery technology that’s being rolled out over the next several years, tapping into the limitless emission free geothermal energy in the Earth’s crust, as Iceland has done for generations, is starting to become more economically viable and widely accessible.

0:46:42.5 Paul Matzko: And while we’re still a few decades out, we’re getting closer than ever before to unlocking the limitless fusion energy of the stars. And it’s not just declining future carbon emissions, it’s reversing past carbon emissions, carbon capture technology, which literally sucks the carbon out of the air and uses it for things like cement production is edging ever closer to commercial viability. Environmental technology is a booming sector going from strength to strength, and yet there’s never been a wider contrast between the doom and gloom of the general public on environmental issues and the hopefulness and just sheer excitement of those who actually work in Energy and sustainability technology. This may be an obvious sounding point, but all of that innovation is done by people. We’re going to grow and innovate past the environmental problems of the past and present. Every kid that is born, every immigrant that maximizes their human potential in a new country, every additional person is a potential scientist, engineer or innovator who could discover the next incremental advance that conserves more of our planet.

0:47:55.8 Paul Matzko: So I say to those who are not having children in order to save the planet, it is precisely because we want to save the planet that we should have children. Which future do you want? I want a future that looks like Washington Heights not Lima, Ohio. I want some city-​esque arcologies, oceans dotted with wind and wave energy farms, roads and skies filled with self-​driving cars and delivery drones, technologies that can help the elderly live independently and prosperously. I want schools, playgrounds and streets filled with the laughter of happy children. This is the future we should all want. This is Building Tomorrow.