Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.” Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.¹ Visiting a school that’s populated by a student body smaller than its intended capacity, Lewis-Kraus describes the scene looking “as if everyone had evaporated overnight.” He laments that in South Korea, “In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand.” It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time. 

But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence? 

Precisely how the falling birth rate of a single species (humans) would lead to “mass extinction,” in Musk’s words, is unclear. “Mass” in this term refers to a multitude of species, not many individuals in one species, which is already implied by the word “extinction.” Whatever Musk may mean by this, experts say he is wrong. More vital than his misuse of language is how he manages to flip reality: there already is a mass extinction event occurring today—driven in no small part by human-induced climate change and other human pressures—in which many species are facing catastrophic declines, and it would be far less likely to be happening with a lower human population. 

The human population is still growing quite a bit. About 132 million people are born every year. That’s more than a third of the total United States population. It also amounts to around 361,000 births every day. A number of people equal to about half of 132 million will die every year. That means that overall, about 180,000 people—or the equivalent of Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s population—are added to the world’s population every day. (For perspective, that’s a number greater than the populations of more than half of the U.S. state capitals.) The human population has never been higher than it is today in all of history, and it will be higher tomorrow. And this increase has come on rapidly: the world’s human population was just around 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and it's already reached a little over 8.2 billion today. When you plot it out on a graph, like this one from Population Matters, it’s striking:

The U.N. projects this growth will continue for decades, possibly peaking in the 2080s and falling by the end of the century. But this assumption, that population growth will halt by the end of the 21st century, is just a prediction based on shifting factors like life expectancy. The human population may hypothetically, barring external pressures, continue to grow well beyond 2100. 

To get a sense of the bias in Lewis-Kraus’s New Yorker article, that statistic about South Korea—that only 230,000 people were born in a single year in the country with the world’s lowest birth rate—is presented as an alarming, even dystopian, figure worthy of urgent attention. For perspective, though, that number is about the same as the total number of chimpanzees alive in the world (a species that has a real fertility crisis and is trending toward extinction).² Chimps are Homo sapiens’ next closest relative among other animals, and so they are a good proxy for a natural great ape population density. Of course, the dearth of chimps is not “natural,” as it’s being largely driven by human encroachment, but this disparity should put into perspective how out of balance the human population and birth rate are. For more perspective, consider these statistics on global biomass: livestock mass is 30 times the wild terrestrial mammal biomass and 15 times the marine mammal biomass. Humans’ collective body mass is six times greater than all wild mammals. Human-made material, including plastics and buildings, weighs more than all life combined.

Top: the global biomass distribution of mammals illustrated proportionately. 

Bottom: enlarged views of the biomass of wild terrestrial (left) and marine (right) mammals. Source: Greenspoon, L. et al. (2023) “The global biomass of wild mammals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The New Yorker article also mentions Augustus, the second Caesar and first emperor of Rome, and his fixation “on the decadent urban élite’s apparent refusal to perpetuate itself.” Lewis-Kraus suggests that the Roman elite may have declined to the point of extinction—or at least of leaving little genetic legacy in the European population. And yet, humans did not go extinct, nor did the global population collapse. In 100 A.D., 85 years after Augustus’s death and the height of the Roman Empire, there were at most 400 million human beings in the world.³ This means that if 95 percent of today’s human beings were to evaporate overnight, we would still have a global population higher than 400 million. That’s more people than existed during Rome’s greatest territorial extent, a time after Homer, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Alexander, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Jesus, and many other important figures had all made their contributions to the Western world. This population level, which amounts to five percent or one-twentieth that of today (at most), was hardly a threat to civilization, and much less to the human species.⁴ 

What’s going on here? Are these ostensibly rational and educated commentators, whether authoritarian, liberal, or egalitarian, all suffering from the same mass delusion, tricking themselves into thinking there’s a scarcity of human beings? Or is there a more rational explanation: could they actually be bound by shared ideological commitments? 

In her Atlantic piece, Bruenig argues that the left should claim the right-wing birth-rate rhetoric in order to justify putting forward modest welfare policy increases. Well, at least for those who have children. But at the same time, instead of taking a moment to wonder if Millennials having fewer kids will really lead to human extinction, she unfurls her banners and from the parapet declares triumphantly: “humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals”! This is a pretty unequivocal reinforcement of a particular human supremacist ethic. This ethic, also gleefully championed by fascists like Matt Walsh, is central to the value system currently annihilating life on earth and is apparently shared by every commentator on this issue. This idea can be found running through not just Bruenig’s leftism and Walsh’s rightism, but through Ezra Klein’s centrism as well. His “abundance agenda” espouses spreading human development and quietly accepting the demise of all the wildlife that would have otherwise inhabited the land being developed, or whose habitat will suffer the consequences of expanded fossil fuel energy systems, like catastrophic climate change. 

There are other more discrete ideological commitments that bind these apparently politically disparate commentators together in their panic over birth rates. 

One driver is nationalism. Pundits advocating for national supremacy in the international arena are often also those advocating for higher domestic populations (and working themselves into a frenzy about non-existent declines). The stated reason is that countries need large, productive labor forces and militaries to outcompete other countries for relative standing. Liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias, for example, has been clear about this motivation since his 2020 book One Billion Americans, in which he argues that the U.S. needs to increase its population to compete with China (and others). The 20th century fascist movements were also very open about their imperative to out-populate, and thus outcompete, national rivals. Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini instituted policies that sought to increase the country’s birth rate by reducing women’s employment and access to contraception, and instituting harsher punishments for abortions, which Mussolini outlawed. He explicitly justified these policies as necessary for defeating rivals and expanding Italian colonies in Africa. It should be noted that these policies didn’t work to increase the birth rate. Contemporary autocrat Vladimir Putin has also tried to engineer a birth-rate increase with authoritarianism. That will also probably fail.

Another motivation for birth-rate panic, aside from nationalism (and connected to it), is plain old class war. Oligarchs are desperate to maintain an army of slaves⁵ and soldiers—slaves to serve them, soldiers to protect them from threats internal and external. Self-proclaimed “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh recently posted online that young people foregoing procreation because they don’t have sufficient financial resources are “cop[ping] out.” Because, he argues, much poorer people throughout history have been capable of having children, young people in the U.S. should as well, regardless of their finances.⁶ But this is misleading for a few reasons. First, just because younger people are having fewer kids now, that doesn’t mean they never will. In the U.S. today, surveys of middle-aged women and men find that not having had children is far rarer than having had children. According to government health statistics, “Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child.” This suggests that a vast majority of Americans eventually become parents. There’s no reason to believe that Millennials and Zoomers will widely deviate from this tendency, especially if they begin to catch up with older generations in household wealth. 

But the bigger problem with Walsh’s argument is that it only makes sense if you care about the quantity of human life more than the quality of human life. Sure, it is technically low cost to impregnate someone. But in the U.S., providing a stable, healthy, safe, and enriching upbringing for a child has become increasingly difficult due to rising costs of living, stagnant wages, and disinvestment in public goods and services. When someone is making a choice about whether to have a child, they ought to be anticipating loving that child and wanting the best for them. So a rational person should look at the conditions in which the child would be raised and make an educated judgment about whether they would be able to provide safety and stability. The world as it is simply contains a scarcity of these things, and they are diminishing thanks primarily to the actions of leaders committed to Walsh’s ideology. Walsh doesn’t care about this: he is a rich guy who sits around spouting his opinion for lots of money. He sees your children as occupying the lower classes; he sees them as the slaves who will wait on him and his class or the soldiers who will protect them. He is fine with your children living miserable lives, as long as they fulfill these roles. Other positions that the right wing promotes reveal their utter contempt for children’s quality of life: cutting childcare, defunding school lunches, eliminating universal public education, and expanding child labor. 

Bruenig’s second recent column about pronatalism, “The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right,” is mistitled. There is no coalition on the right that is “pro-baby.” Bruenig’s claim that “yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd” reveals how out of touch this viewpoint is and how insincere she seems to be. Since when does the ideology that denies the existence of climate change, ignores the true sixth mass extinction event that the earth is currently experiencing, defunds medical research, denies the danger of pandemics, salivates over nuclear war with enemies, and shrugs off hormone-disrupting pollution truly demonstrate a belief that “humanity ought to persist on this Earth”? When authoritarians bemoan falling birth rates, they’re not really concerned about children’s health and well-being or about imminent human extinction. They’re concerned with maintaining a certain system of production that is dependent on cheap, abundant, and disposable labor.

There are a couple of other important motivations behind this birth rate panic. One is racial: most of those who champion higher birth rates tend not to extend that advocacy to non-white people. This is especially true of Elon Musk, who has openly endorsed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory online and is reportedly “concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe.” It’s hard to see such calls to procreate as anything other than racist fearmongering. 

Another motivation relates to gender. As Mussolini demonstrated, engineering fertility is a way of controlling women, getting them out of the labor market and tied to domestic servitude. Many of the pundits calling for increasing the birth rate are also those who advocate for a “trad” lifestyle in which women are financially dependent on their spouses and are unable to do anything but domestic labor. Again, these are not confined to right-wing extremists. Elizabeth Bruenig, the leftist Atlantic writer, is against abortion philosophically and practically seems to favor policies that make it less accessible. She also advocates for women to have children while they are young. Ezra Klein and libertarian economist Tyler Cowen recently enjoyed a sprawling discussion that included a consideration of the “abundance agenda” for birth rates. While Klein is skeptical of some of the practical suggestions Cowen makes for using political engineering to increase birth rates, he is very friendly to the philosophy underlying them. He agrees with Cowen, who says that he should be “obsessed with fertility decline.” “I kind of am,” replies Klein. Cowen explicitly voices paranoia over being “replace[d]” by non-whites and Klein lauds the unapologetically large families common in Israel. Ultimately, Cowen says, “cultural conservatism” is the way to go: 

“The more uncertain we are about birth subsidies,  [...]  doesn’t that mean we should all the more commit to some kind of revival of cultural conservatism on matters of family? [...] Families should be expected to have three or four children, and that’s the alternative. Yes, we should try subsidies, but the more uncertain we are, we’ve just got to go the Ross Douthat route. I think he has five kids now. Good for him.

To which Klein replies, “I don’t think this is wrong. I just don’t think it’s doable.” Klein is right about the practicality of the idea, and he goes on to say that “shaming” people into parenthood doesn’t work. Beyond “shaming,” though, the idea that one is “expected to have three or four children” implies that there might be some negative consequence imposed on people who do not fulfill this requirement. In a society that has already outlawed the constitutional right to an abortion for people who must do the childbearing, these consequences might well play out worse for women than men. There are few examples of government intrusion in a more intimate and consequential aspect of life.

One exchange is particularly revealing of the right-wing obsession with the birth rate. Cowen says: 

“What if someone said, a true abundance agenda  [is] to zero out Medicare and Medicaid, [...] and spend all of that on science and birth subsidies and social security for that matter. [....] Christian Scientists — they still have decent life expectancy. [...] We’d have many more people. It’d be a much younger society, more dynamic society. Scientific advances would mean we’d cure many more diseases, forms of cancer. People would probably live longer. Why not do that? Just go crazy on innovation and number of births.” 

Here he moves beyond the imperative to control women and onto the next great right-wing tenet: eliminate welfare. Essentially, Cowen is suggesting eliminating programs for the elderly and the poor and diverting that money to subsidize childbearing people. His mention of Christian Science is telling, as adherents of this sect tend not to live as long as the general population. He doesn’t say it explicitly, but by focusing on eliminating welfare for older and poorer citizens, he is advocating for a demographic strategy of producing lots of offspring and letting the ones he deems less evolutionarily fit, mainly the older and poorer, die off. This is called "r-selection" among other species. It’s a strategy used by creatures, like some rodents, fish, and insects, often when there is environmental scarcity of resources. Apparently it’s a strategy that Cowen sees fit for humans. We need to call this what it is: a clear example of 19th-century social Darwinism and a grim case of, like Walsh, another far-right authoritarian advocating for quantity of human life over quality of life. It is a view of life that is fundamentally incompatible with maximizing well-being, health, and happiness for all. 

Whether delusion or propaganda or both, “demographic collapse” is a false problem. The fact is, the human population will absolutely never disappear due to a low fertility rate, unless there is some environmental impact on the physiological ability to reproduce.⁷ This is not impossible, given all the known and unknown effects of chemicals and plastics permeating the environment, which are already negatively impacting hormones and reproductive health.⁸ Microplastics have been found in every human testicle—and region of the planet—where they’ve been looked for. But even with these pressures, the human population continues to grow (while wildlife continues to decline). Even as the global fertility rate has rapidly fallen in aggregate over the last half-century, humanity’s actual population has increased dramatically. Fertility rate tells us very little, if anything, about actual population collapses. Baby booms, by definition, happen in a single generation. The human urge to reproduce is (probably) ineradicable. Without outside pressures, humans will continue to want to have children and shape the world to accommodate them and to maintain some population, even if it’s not as high as it has been at other times. The human population is currently so massive, so out of balance with the rest of life on Earth, so pathologically “abundant” that it would take decades or centuries of decline to put a noticeable dent in it—unless, that is, there is some external force which leads to mass death and reproductive crisis, like, say, the ongoing ecological crises, pollution, nuclear war, or a deadlier pandemic than the one that’s still ongoing. 

If the quantity of human life does one day stop growing and actually starts to decrease, it is likely that, in many places, if history is any guide, the quality of human life will be fine and could even increase with it. Perhaps more importantly today, the quality and quantity of non-human forms of life—which, unlike Musk’s mass-human-extinction lie, are in a state of actual mass extinction—would receive a vital respite. More forms of life would have more good opportunities to exist. As with many other issues, if the right wing’s greatest fears were to come true, it would almost certainly be fine for everybody… except, maybe, a few oligarchs.

Notes

1. And to the novel of the same title once. The reporter of the piece is a satisfied father of two. He seems to have gotten the impression that the simple absence of children is what is dystopian about the film, rather than the deteriorating social fabric, fascist rule, and civil war. 

2. There are even fewer orangutans.

3. The lower end estimate is 170 million, or just 2 percent of today’s population.

4. It was a threat to other species, however, with Rome in particular eradicating huge numbers of large animals.

5. There are technically more slaves alive today than existed during the Atlantic slave trade: “Although slavery is illegal in every country in the modern world, it still exists, and even on the narrowest definition of slavery it's likely that there are far more slaves now than there were victims of the Atlantic slave trade,” according to a BBC report. Some on the political right also talk about legalizing slavery or make the outrageous claim that slavery was beneficial to Black people.

6. If the statistics hold, a vast majority of Millennials and Zoomers will have at least one child.

7. Certain groups within the population may disappear, but unlikely because they simply decided to stop having children.

8. The right wing, however, has vehemently opposed regulations that would limit our exposure to chemicals that may be harmful to human fertility.

Correction 4/19/25: the piece has been updated to reflect that 230,000 births in 2023 applied to South Korea, not Seoul. An earlier version of this article had stated that the births were that of Seoul.