Karin Klein is the inaugural editor of L.A. Reported and a former editor and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree."
Back in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the elephant in the climate-change conference room: Conversations about global warming, she said, were incomplete without discussions about family planning and global population size. She was vilified in many quarters for daring to allude to the obvious: More people equals more greenhouse gas emissions.
Decades of media coverage have echoed the dismay that was targeted at Clinton. I first noticed it more than 40 years ago when an article in the San Jose Mercury News covered the supposedly fearsome trend of declining birth rates in Japan, which last year reached an eyebrow-raising 1.14 births per woman. (The population replacement rate is 2.1 babies; the fertility rate in the United States is 1.6; in Southern California, it’s just 1.43.) Japan’s economic bubble did burst, but that was caused by the central bank sharply raising interest rates and tightening credit in response to hyperinflation. The economy is now in partial recovery.
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Still, one supposedly objective news article after another portrays fertility decline as an unmitigated catastrophe. “But there’s no reason to be alarmed,” a Los Angeles Times story said last year, citing the work of a researcher who predicts that fertility is being delayed rather than dropping altogether.
What about considering that there’s no reason to be alarmed because a lower birth rate would be helpful in the long term and should be applauded?
Instead, we’re fed solutions in search of a problem, from President Trump’s scoffed-at suggestion that a $5,000 “baby bonus” would incentivize pregnancies – has the man ever bought a disposable diaper? – to guilt-tripping women into accepting their traditional roles to the (more sensible) attempt to make college affordable for median-income families.
The criticism of lower birth rates comes from those who buy into the conventional thinking that growth is always good. Bigger companies, bigger profits, bigger defense systems, more buying. And yet birth rates are dropping not just in highly industrialized regions but pretty much everywhere – Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Latin America; as the Atlantic put it in May, “in every country on Earth.”
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Smaller population levels can reap benefits for Californians’ – and everyone’s – quality of life, for the economy, for the labor force and for all the non-human residents of Earth.
Think of the effort we’re now putting into curbing climate change, as little and late as it is. We stop using wood-burning fireplaces, we ratchet down our thermostats in winter and raise them in summer, we cover swaths of the desert with solar installations, we cut our beef consumption to reduce the volume of methane-laden cattle belches. Of course those efforts have to continue – clean, sustainable energy is a smart idea, period – but imagine how much greater the reduction of greenhouse gases would be if there were 10% or 20% fewer people.
Doomsayers seek to frighten us with predictions of slow or no-growth disaster. True, fewer people would result in shrinking the economy, but so what? With fewer people, we wouldn’t need such constant growth, such rampant consumption.
“But there will be labor shortages!” is another common complaint. Given how many jobs are being forked over to AI and how many new college graduates are having trouble finding work, this seems unlikely. But if it does happen, maybe employers will start paying and treating employees better. When the U.S. population was smaller, it didn’t result in economic disaster or failure to accomplish vital work.
One legitimate concern is that smaller working-age populations will be hard put to support the larger retirement-age populations during the early decades of declining birth rates. Sacrifices would have to be made: older retirement ages (at least there would be less ageism in the workplace as employers seek out needed workers) and possibly temporarily higher taxes.
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Long term, though, the math turns in everyone’s favor. If birth rates are always higher than replacement levels, there will continually be larger aged populations that need financial support. The only way out of that pattern is to weather the discomfort of lower birth rates for a while, but then have smaller populations of retirees to support in the future. (Smaller family sizes also are helpful to women in developing countries, who are able to get a better education and help support their own children toward a brighter future.)
Clinton and the like-minded people of 2009 were ahead of their time, but demographic trends show that popular opinion and behavior are catching up. The politicians, policy thinkers and corporate heads might be trying to prod young women toward more childbearing, but when you look at the reader comments under the stories about the issue, they overwhelmingly reject the conventional line.
Young people – increasingly unable to afford college, find stable jobs, access medical care, buy a house, enjoy travel and feel confident about the planet’s health – are taking the reins and defining their futures with one of the few effective tools they have: fewer babies.
Editor's note: The staff of Golden State is taking a vacation this month. Between Aug. 10 and Aug. 22, we will be on a light newsletter and posting schedule.
