👶 The upside to population decline

Maybe we can help offset less quantity with more quality through smarter and healthier people. Maybe.

There are downsides to childlessness that have nothing to do with the big-picture economic issues I typically write about in this newsletter. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh offers several wonderful, if highly personal, examples in a recent essay:

• Childlessness can lead to cultural disconnection and premature old-fashionedness, as parents often stay more in touch with modern trends through their kids. (“I had never heard of Charli XCX until the recent meme that Kamala Harris decided to run with. Having investigated, I still don’t understand what is going on.”) 

• Childless people — men, at least — are unexpectedly formal, defying bachelor stereotypes. (“My crew, meanwhile, are fastidious and almost quaint: handshake greetings, as though we’d just met. The Men Behaving Badly trope — beer stains, rough talk — gets it exactly wrong.”)

• The childless, lacking ever-present kiddo chaos, overreact to minor inconveniences. (“File it under, ‘Sweating the small stuff’. If there isn’t much stress or inconvenience in one’s life, what little that exists becomes all the harder to bear. There is no chance to develop that crucial tolerance for faff.”)

• The bustling and vital urban life enjoyed by the childless depends on other people having kids. (“The life of big cities depends on the young, whether as service staff or as conceivers of new ideas or just as unconscious providers of ambient energy. As much as I might prefer their zero-to-18 phase to play out elsewhere — incubators on offshore sites, a terraformed Mars — I need them.”) 

Ganesh concludes with his concern that the “childless cat lady” sort of talk from some politicians these days will taint the important issue of demographic decline, and that “it will be a while before a public figure can discuss the demographic issue without risk of association with woman-baiting cranks. A shame.”

It would be a shame because the big-picture economic problems caused by declining birth rates and slowing/stagnant population growth — leading to eventual outright population decline — are significant.