There Are Enough People

All I hear is “not enough *white* babies are being born”

I continue to came across more and more doom-and-gloom article about declining birth rates. I first wrote the below in 2024, after seeing an article from a “liberal” at Vox who has three kids and plans to have three more.

Now I understand everyone wants their views to be “right” and popular. So if you personally want kids, then that has to be the “right” thing to do - and people who don’t have kids are wrong.

But from a purely factual perspective, saying there aren’t enough people is simply bonkers.

As I discuss in both “Fight the Power” chapters of Losing My Religions, our genes, families, and society “conspire” [sic] to pressure us to have children. This is not to say that no one should reproduce, but simply that we should question whether reproducing would make our life better and also provide a good existence for another person.

But on the macro level - there are enough people. When I hear people talk about declining birth rates, I only hear “not enough white babies are being born.” (Or Japanese, or Korean.)

Despite a lot of progress, many hundreds of millions of people live in terrible poverty right now. Instead of trying to convince educated yuppies to have more babies, we should create policies that help people who already exist - through greater immigration and / or aid + trade.

(I get the political obstacles of trying to help non-white non-Americans. But working in this difficult area seems much much better than complaining about car seats.)

A comment on this post by NonZeroSum James:

I only hear “not enough white babies are being born.” (Or Japanese, or Korean.)

This is exactly what I hear. I’ve tried to explain to a friend of mine that the “wrong” people having babies (whether it’s foreign babies or the poor and uneducated in your own country) the solution is not coercive eugenics, but building a healthy, sustainable culture that is appealing to all, diverse, and robust. Then it doesn’t matter where babies are born if the system they are born into helps them reach their potential (which is the same potential as those of us currently in the position of being highly educated/wealthy yuppies).

…Incidentally my next post is about how saving lives actually reduces over-population in developing nations. Also did we forget that everything’s going to be produced by robots in the future? None of those new young people are going to have jobs, right? [Doomers need to get their stories straight! ;-) ]