Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on:
This seems a bit strange to me, however, since the people urging us to panic about low birthrates are almost always conservatives who oppose the existence of such programs. Certainly, the two commenters I was citing seemed to feel this way.
But he also brings up two things that are simply ignored by people making the argument that we need forced child-bearing to make sure that our dependent elderly are cared for:
What’s more, it’s not entirely clear to me how true this really is. After all, children are a significant—and legitimate—claim on the public purse. And high birthrates seem likely to lead to low workforce participation on the part of women, which makes sustaining your retirement benefits more difficult. Conceivably you could get around that by making public spending on child care and preschool and after school programs even more generous, but that just gets you back around to where we started.
Considering that the people making these arguments would see most women turned into housewives, they’re actually suggesting that we dump what’s probably upwards of 40% of current workers from the workforce, because we’re that desperate for labor. Another thing that seems like it would be great for the economy is cutting that amount of income to so many households, who are already not spending because they don’t have enough money. And the key to making sure that there’s enough money for a dependent elderly population is to dramatically increase the number of dependents overall. Perhaps, if women put our minds to it, we can turn 75-80% of the country into dependents.