Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing in its absurdity. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of our 60% off promotion.
Pandas are arguably the most frustrating creatures in all of nature. They're adorable, they're chill, they look like living teddy bears that any kid anywhere in the world would want to keep in their room... and the little buggers absolutely refuse to breed.
Scientists have tried everything short of sticking a couple of pandas in a hot tub after stuffing them full of oysters and putting Barry White on the Pandas Loving Pandas Spotify channel, but it's still easier to find a blind guy paying extra for the IMAX screen than a baby panda.
But it’s humans who’ve encroached on the pandas' special habitat — and their fertility problems aren’t a choice.
So what's our excuse?
Across the First World — and even a few poorer places that once teemed with large families — people just aren’t making babies anymore. Like we need to.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned two years ago that his country stands "on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society." It is "now or never when it comes to policies regarding births and child-rearing," he admonished parliament. "It is an issue that simply cannot wait any longer."
If Japan doesn't start making babies, the population will shrink by almost two-thirds over the next 75 years, without enough young people to care for and pay for the old people — much less keep essential services going. That's what Kishida means by societal collapse.
China's demographic wounds are probably as well-known as they were self-inflicted. The Communists bought so completely into doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich that Beijing instituted the infamous One Child Policy, and now there are multiple generations of Chinese with no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles. There's a generation where every eight great-grandparents have just one great-grandchild to dote on, and more of those generations to come.
Poor Russia is a special case. Life under Soviet rule was so toxic — politically, culturally, even environmentally — that Russian women quit making enough babies almost 60 years ago. Soon after, Russia would also achieve the distinction of becoming the first industrialized nation with declining life expectancy.
We're all pandas now.
Not everybody went Full Panda, of course. We had homeschooling neighbors who moved away because their brood of five was expanding again — I swear, I never once saw Mrs. Whatshername without a baby bump and at least two or three youngsters in the front yard — and needed a bigger house.
For most of the rest of the wealthy parts of the world, babies are like last season’s designer handbag: still expensive, but no one’s lining up for one anymore.
Keeping things brief enough to avoid inducing the MEGO effect, let me run just a few of the scary baby-making numbers by you.
The figures are shocking for anyone who hasn't been following "The Birth Dearth," as Ben Wattenberg named it in his book in 1987. When Wattenberg published all those years ago, the U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) was a comparatively robust 2.2 babies per woman of childbearing age. That's just above the replacement rate of 2.1, but, as Wattenberg warned, not enough growth to keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent.
Today, America's TFR is 1.63.
Absent a sharp increase in legal immigration, at that 1.63 TFR, the American workforce will shrink by 20% in the next 30 years, but the population of retirees will — will, regardless of anything else — increase by more than 50%.
We'd also have a much smaller workforce servicing a national debt that already consumes a trillion dollars of the taxes paid each year by working people. There are all kinds of models for societal collapse you might envision for a shrinking cohort of workers impoverished by a growing cohort of retirees — and legions of childless singletons murdering every old person they can get their hands on isn't even among the top five most absurd.
In Robert Heinlein's sci-fi classic, "Time Enough for Love," space settler Lazarus Long hears the latest news from old Earth. Demographics have gotten so bad that we passed a law making everyone 70 and older legally dead. Their wills go into effect, their assets distributed or seized, and they can even be killed with impunity. On Lazarus's timeline, that was maybe 500 years from now. If nothing changes on our timeline, I give us 50.
Here’s the part I didn’t tell you: I fudged the big one. The real numbers are even worse.
No country on Earth has yet to find the secret to reversing a birth dearth once it takes hold. The downward trend continues, despite the occasional spike. It took 40 years to go from 2.2 to 1.6, but if countries like South Korea or Italy are any indication, it will take less time to go from 1.6 to 1.0.
In other words, projecting that our 1.6 TFR won't keep shrinking was a steaming pile of fudge. Barring some miracle that no one has discovered, our native-born workforce will shrink by far more than 20% just as my teenage sons enter their peak earning years. The elderly — including me, long before then — will take bigger and bigger bites out of their paychecks.
"In space travel," Slartibartfast said in one of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels, "all the numbers are awful." In shrinking demographics, they're worse.
There are still plenty of people who want to become Americans — as opposed to coming here illegally for all the free goodies — and Americans are still the all-time world champions of assimilation. If we fail to turn around our demographics with, ah, domestic production, we'll have to get serious about streamlining our cumbersome legal immigration system and bolstering our assimilation structures from primary public school education and on up.
There’s little reason to think we’ll turn things around domestically. From Hungary to South Korea, every First World government that’s tried to reverse the birth dearth has failed. And they've tried pretty much everything.
Last year, Time called South Korea "the world’s poster child for demographic decline" with a TFR of just 0.72 — and despite the government spending $280 billion over the past 18 years just to get people to have some babies. There are even government-run matchmaking services.
"Saha-gu, a district in South Korea’s second largest city of Busan," the Wall Street Journal reported in March, "offers singles who match at its events around $340 to spend on dates. Those who get married receive roughly $14,000 upfront and are feted with housing subsidies and more cash to cover pregnancy-related expenses and international travel."
Here's the kicker: there have been zero takers for the $14 grand. Not even one couple.
Hungary went all-in on pro-natal policy. Newlyweds receive a monthly allowance for two years after they get married. Parents receive monthly stipends of up to 70% of their salary (capped at 140% of the minimum wage) for the first two years of a child's life. Grandmothers can get in on the benefits, too. The “Women 40” program allows women early retirement after 40 years of employment so that grandma can pitch in with the grandkids.
One particularly creative inducement is interest-free baby loans for married couples, with a portion of the loan forgiven on the birth of each child. Women with four or more kids are exempt from the country's income tax for life.
There are even more incentives — extra vacation days per kid, housing benefits, and the like. TFR has increased a little in recent years, but even with all those programs, Hungary still makes far too few babies.
We can debate why people aren't having babies, but there's no single answer.
Easy access to birth control, abortion, or abortifacients is certainly a factor. No-fault divorce has made marriage a riskier proposition for men, who, on almost a whim, can find themselves out on the street and with limited access to their children. We go to school longer and marry later, abbreviating the fertility window. Surely, easy access to porn and "smart" sex toys, hook-up culture, and many women's unrealistic expectations — the "three sixes" — play parts, too.
There was one feature of modern life that turned out to be not nearly as important as I'd assumed: the radical increase in two-income couples since the 1970s.
Bethany Mandel — columnist and mom of six — wrote this week that "The problem isn’t just a drop in babies, it’s a drop in marriages." [Emphasis in the original.]
Since 1970, the US marriage rate has fallen by 60%. While married couples (especially religious ones) still do have children — and statistically have more sex than singletons do — there are simply far fewer of them today.
So maybe instead of a $5,000 baby bonus, Trump should consider a one-time tax break for newlyweds.
"A one-time payout of $5,000 — an amount that wouldn’t even cover the cost of one of my births — isn’t a life raft, but a pat on the head as families struggle to stay afloat amid rising costs," Mandel wrote, "child care shortages and a culture that undervalues parenthood."
She nailed it with those last five words, but we undervalue marriage, too. What to do about that pernicious pair of problems is beyond the scope of this week's essay, but maybe I'll revisit it in the near future.
But if $14,000 and other assorted goodies aren't enough to get people married in Busan, you have to wonder what it might take in Boston, Baltimore, or Buffalo.
The good news is that not having babies is a self-correcting problem. Big families seem to be a cultural norm passed down by people who have big families. People who don't breed... well, ask a Shaker how that works out. At last count, there were four of them left.
Saving pandas from extinction requires human intervention, and I kind of resent that. Trying to save a breed that won't even breed... well, it feels a lot like paying for Europe's defense when all of European NATO lacks the means or will to muster a small peacekeeping force for postwar Ukraine.
Saving humanity from some of our worst or laziest ways might also require... human intervention. But here's the thing. The work — if that's what you want to call it — is a whole lot of fun. Men and women, we're literally designed for it.
My wife and I contributed our share with two fine sons and enjoyed every moment of it. The rest is up to the next generation. Maybe instead of tax breaks, they just need a hot tub and some Barry White.
Previously on the Thursday Essay: Our Elites Owe Us More Than a Shrug and a Rewrite
