Is Tech Literally Destroying Humanity?
Why Human Population and Tech Have An Inverse Relationship
Despite the ongoing claims that the earth is going to become over populated, we should be concerned about the opposite problem. Birth control pills, condoms, and abortion do not make the world better. People are having fewer kids than ever before in history. Far fewer. Consider the following:
Fertility rates have dropped in half since the 1950s (which were already low historically). And the above chart is based on UN estimates, an organization known to be heavily biased in favor of alarmism on overpopulation. So an alarmist organization says that just in 65 years, birth rates halved globally? That is interesting.
If birth rates of honey bees, trout, or sperm whales halved in such a short period, ecologists would be panicking. They would wonder what would happen if the trend were to continue? What if it drops below replacement rates for an extended time? What if some sort of disease wipes out a large portion of the population, and the species is unable to recover thanks to ever falling birth rates?
But with humans, not only are we not panicking, we are pushing harder to reduce birth rates further. We are allowing a billionaire software mogul from Seattle to go to Africa to tell people in villages how to use condoms. And the rates continue to drop.
But here is the thing: the UN numbers are very likely underestimating the drop in fertility globally. Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson recently published Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline and argue precisely that. They did a detailed study, country by country, of how many children per woman were born and found that the rates are most likely much lower than commonly cited statistics like those from the UN. The fear of overpopulation is not only wrong, they argue it is exactly backward. Consider this quotation:
“The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
“Never happened before?” What is going on with humans? Why are we not having children anymore?
China recently removed their misguided and oppressive 'one-child policy' only to find out that people didn't want much more than one child anyway. Reuters reported that in 2018 (two years after the one-child policy was rolled back), the birth rates fell to the lowest in recorded history. That should sound familiar to us here in the USA. Our fertility rates are at historic lows as well. The USA's total fertility rate dropped to an all-time low of 1.81 in 2019. That is way below the replacement rate of 2.1. And almost half of all nations are also below replacement. Mexico is below replacement. Brazil is below replacement. India is just barely above the replacement rate. And outside of India, almost all of Asia is well below replacement. And again, these are based on the widely accepted stats that are probably wrongly inflating the rate!
And while some nations still report high fertility rates (especially sub-Saharan Africa), it is important to remember how quickly fertility rates can drop. Remember, Japan went from 5+ children per woman to below replacement in 15 years! Africa (thanks to the UN, Bill Gates, and others) now has widespread access to condoms and birth control pills. If the causes of the drops in other nations take place there, it might just be a few short years before Africa follows the rest of the world to sub-replacement rate fertility. And the authors of Empty Planet state that their research would have them believe this is likely. They report on interviews conducted with women in Africa and learn that many young women hope to have far fewer children than their parents had (many saying that they would like 1 or 2).
Fertility is the most basic element of the survival of any species. Stop having babies, and you disappear very quickly from the world. There seems to be a mental virus preventing births. We will talk more about the reasons shortly, but humans are acting in a way that would disturb any environmentalist if it was happening to another species.
And remember the quote from Bricker and Ibbitson, "Once [population] decline begins, it will never end."
But you might respond, we have no reason to worry. There are still plenty of humans, and even if we steadily decline in population, we would have centuries to figure out and solve the problem. This sort of thinking has several significant issues including the fact that it assumes that the causes for the drop are not getting worse. The rate has dropped in half in the past 65 years. What if the decline accelerates in the next 65? What if it is quartered or worse? Other major problems with this thinking will be discussed more below.
The dangers of overpopulation are a myth. Despite warnings for decades that continue growth would bring starvation and extreme poverty, the opposite has happened. The world has less hunger and less extreme poverty than at any other moment in history. It turns out that overpopulation is not really the problem. Dense cities can be oppressive and filthy, but they can also be rich and healthy (think Manhattan). A common misconception is that earth’s resources are fixed and that more people will use a larger percentage of a fixed pie culminating with there being no pie left at all. But in reality, resources are created. We can create energy (solar, wind, nuclear, additional mining, new technologies, etc.). We can increase our food output. We can develop and grow resources and technologies to match the growing need. And the last generation has proven this. Over the past 25 years, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty despite the fact that the world added around 2 billion people in that same time.
So the dangers of overpopulation are clearly overstated. But few realize how much danger there is in the other direction. Great hardships come from a shrinking population. Let's examine some potential adverse outcomes.
Bad for the Economy
Look at Japan (which has had fertility rates far below replacement for decades), and you will see how much this hurts the economy. Japan was one of the first countries to see its fertility rate drop. In 1950 Japan had a fertility rate of over five children per woman, but it dropped like a stone from there. By 1965 it fell below the replacement rate (2.1) and has progressively dropped since. Today, Japan has a fertility rate of about 1.4 children per woman. As a result, the average age in Japan has steadily risen. The average person in Japan was 26 in 1930. It is 48 today. Plummeting birth rates are the cause of this aging. Having many old people and barely any young people can devastate an economy. When I was a kid, Japan was an economic powerhouse. Its economy was growing by close to 5% every year, and many were predicting that Japan's economy might overtake the US at some point. But starting in the early 1990s, everything changed. The median age rose to 37. Waves of retirements started. Innovation (a particular skill of young people) slowed. Fewer and fewer new workers entered the workforce. And the economy stagnated. Since 1993, Japan's economy has averaged less than 1% GDP growth per year. They have fallen from their lofty position as the main rival to the US economy. And so no one predicts Japan will overtake the USA anymore. Today, the rival is China, which passed Japan years ago.
But Japan is surviving, right? Yes, but it is critical to keep in mind that they were one of the most wealthy nations in the world before all this started. And they aged when many other nations were still young. What happens when poor nations like Mexico (now with a fertility rate slightly below replacement) or Brazil (with a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman- well below the replacement) suffer from an aging population and stagnated economy? And how will it affect them that much of the rest of the world is also going through the same trend?
The answer is that it will almost certainly be a humanitarian crisis. The elderly need young people to take care of them. They require more resources while contributing little to the economy. A poor nation that suddenly gets poorer and older will be a nation that suffers, fails, and dies.
The authors of Empty Planet argue this will happen much sooner than anyone thinks. By 2050 they say the global population will start to decline (with many nations starting well before that). Far from a future of people living on top of each other, we may be moving to a future in which an old and dying population desperately wishes there were more young people to innovate, pay taxes, and provide basic care for them. Instead of packs of kids roaming the streets, there will be elderly people working well into their retirement years trying to keep society from failing completely.
Bad for the Environment
Since 1950, the world's population has more than doubled. If population growth is bad for the environment, you would think that this would have caused irreparable damage to the environment. But a funny thing happened along the way. Things got cleaner, not dirtier. Factories no longer dump their waste in the Great Lakes. Industrial districts no longer are choked with black smoke and smog. International treaties on fishing, whaling, and poaching have brought many animals back from the edge of extinction. Cars are cleaner. Oil takers have more safety precautions and cause fewer spills. Cities once covered in dirt and soot are now fresh and clean. And for those most concerned about global warming, remember that cars today produce much less hyrdo-carbons than they did a few generations ago when the population was much smaller (thanks to regulations on emissions for vehicles, clean energy, etc.).
How is it possible that the treatment of the environment got better as the population doubled? The answer is that this is what rich countries can afford to do. In today's world, the most polluting countries are the developing ones. According to World Population Review, the top 5 most polluted countries are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Bahrain. These countries pollute not because they do not want to have clean environments but because they are poor, and they prefer having food on their tables to having a perfectly clean world to live in.
So what happens when the population drops and these already poor countries get poorer? The answer is that it will not be good for the environment.
Bad for Women (and Men)
One of the most fundamental purposes to the existence of every living creature (humans included) is passing on our genes to the next generation. That makes it so strange that our society seems so hell-bent on not perpetuating the human species. If one of the fundamental purposes of every species is procreation, we would expect procreation to be central to much of our physical and mental processes as human beings. And so it is. As I have argued before, men and women are different primarily so that the next generation can be conceived, fed, protected, and raised to adulthood. But what happens when those things don't happen anymore. What happens when men and women start getting married but no kids follow? What does it do to men and women when we go from having a natural birth rate (4-6 children throughout a woman's childbearing years) to 1 or 0?
How does this affect gender roles? As sperm is cheap, and fertilized eggs are expensive. Men can spread their seed everywhere, but it takes nine months followed by years of nursing and raising for a woman to do her part of procreation. So, it makes sense that men are born with physiology that enables fighting, dangerous and challenging work, and acts of strength. Men are also born with mental tendencies more given to take risks. And because of the genetic differences, in traditional societies, men would be sent to hunt, chop down trees, pull hoes through dirt, and go to war. The natural, historic division of labor was that women tended to manage the home while men tended to be in charge of protecting the tribe, providing shelter, and getting food. In a traditional society, the differences between men and women were clear. The term “that is women’s work” may sound like a misogynist statement, but there was a time when ‘men's work’ and 'women's work' were necessitated by circumstance and physiology.
And both roles were honorable. Women usually were surrounded by other women and children. Each woman would have two or three sisters, two or three sisters-in-law, and two or three daughters. And these groups of women would work together to accomplish 'women's work' - an incredibly important part of traditional societies. They would protect and train children. They would make sure that the house was in order. They would prepare the food that the men brought back from their labor.
Everyone had their role. Life was difficult but meaningful for both men and women.
But what happens when we suddenly say that women no longer have 4 to 6 children but 0 or 1? Women with zero or one children are suddenly left without this traditional role. Men go out and do what we always did. Sometimes that work is in a traditionally physical role in the trades, but often, it is in the less pleasant cubicle; but there is still a solid vestige of what men were built for. We go out, compete for salaries, challenge coworkers, and act in some ways just like men have always operated. But the traditional role for women is almost completely gone. The one child is put on a bus and sent to free public schools (also a modern invention), and then the woman has nothing particularly important to do. She does not have two sisters nearby. She does not have two sisters-in-law. She is at home alone without kids to watch, modern tools to make caring for the house easier (vacuums, washing machines, etc.). The urgency, necessity, community, and meaning of "women's work" is gone. Women could stay at home, vacuum meticulously, and become gourmet chefs for their husbands (the idealized 1950s housewife), but that is a poor exchange for the vital, communal, and difficult work that was once required to raise the next generation.
And so, starting about the time fertility rates began dropping, women have increasingly entered the workforce. Men, after all, seemed to be fulfilled doing this sort of work; why shouldn’t that be good for women as well?
This created changing workplace dynamics. The entrance into the workforce created a problem for women. First off, traditional workplaces for women were to be surrounded by other women. Men and women are different. Jokes are different. Men tend to be more confrontational and more competitive. And the workforce that women were entering had been built for men. They entered a world of bawdy jokes, rough and tumble office politics, long hours, and cut-throat competition. While this environment might make some women happy, for many, this was a very unsafe and unpleasant space. It is not a surprise that as women first started to enter the traditionally male-dominated workplaces, the dynamics were complicated and difficult. Sexual harassment and abuse were common. The male culture rewarded confrontation and competition along with male “locker room talk,” but this sort of talk was, traditionally, not the sort of talk that men did in front of women. Women protested, and over time, the harassment of women in the workplace has been reduced by shaming, firing, and suing men who violate good standards of behavior.
Women have also successfully changed the workplace to be much more female-friendly in other ways. They have added flex time, worked to pass legislation mandating maternity leave, and encouraged ‘diversity’ hires to make it more advantageous for corporations to hire and promote women. But despite these changes, women still struggle to keep up with men. After 50 years of cultural, legal, and tax incentives pushing for diversity, as of 2017, only 32 of the Fortune 500 corporations have female CEOs. There is a persistent wage gap, with women earning about 80% as much as men for similar jobs. This wage gap, despite claims that it is just due to bigotry, is instead due to the fact that women make choices that are good for women but bad for corporate advancement. They choose to have children, choose to take time off to raise them in the early years and choose to work fewer hours. In short, they choose to maintain some vestige of the traditional role they once had, which makes sense.
And in addition to the time that women take maintaining some shadow of the traditional role, men have other advantages in the workplace. Men are naturally more competitive, so when it comes to salary negotiations, pushing for promotions, and going the extra mile to get noticed, men are more willing to do this. They are more inclined to cause waves in the office to get what they want. This is the same instinct that helped men survive in a more tribal life, and it works well in the industry that men set up over the past 1000 years of capitalism.
So, we are left with the question, why do we as a culture ask men to do something similar to what we have been built for but ask women to do something similar to what men were built for? Birth control. In other words, the reduction of fertility, far from being the liberator of women, has forced women to take on roles and work in environments that were built for men.
The fact is that both men and women would be happier if birth rates increased dramatically. Society would become much more sane.
Endangered Humanity?
Because I write this in 2023, most people think of Covid-19 when they think of pandemics. And while opinions vary on how bad Covid actually was, everyone agrees that it was not a threat to humanity. It killed mostly the elderly and had a fairly low mortality rate. In terms of global pandemics, it was relatively mild. But plagues and pandemics can get so much worse. For example, during the middle ages, the bubonic plague is thought to have wiped out at least between a third and a half of the population of Europe. What if something similar happens again? And now with the increasing development of biological weapons, such a possibility seems like it is only a matter of time.
And... what about war? Genghis Khan is thought to have killed about 11% of the world population. And that was using spears and swords. We now have nuclear weapons that could wipe out the whole world. The fact that our species is here on earth is a miracle. Humans are amazing, but we are very vulnerable and mortal things. Disease and war are real things that have killed large percentages of the world population in the past, and there is no reason to think that something similar will not happen in the future - but this time with even more danger thanks to the technological developments of nuclear and biological weapons.
And in the past, we were able to bounce back from war and disease because we had 5 or 6 kids per woman on average. We repopulated when war or disease tried to wipe us out. That is why any species has children. To replace those that die. And when a species loses that power, warning lights should blink.
Causes of the Fertility Drop
What is causing the drop in population? The authors of the Empty Planet give a list of causes (secularization, urbanization, feminism, and birth control) along with “technology.” But I would argue that technology is in many ways the root of the other causes. It is technology that has enabled urbanization by allowing fewer and fewer people to farm thanks to high tech farm equipment and engineered fertilizers, seed, and pesticides. It is technology that has allowed ideas like feminism to be propagated by movies, television and Youtube. It is technology that helps spread secularizing ideas by thinkers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. And of course birth control itself is a technology.
As Westerners, we give a lot of praise to science and technology. We see all the good things that they do. But one thing we have to recognize that all of this technology has done: it has shrunken our families. Tech has reduced the number of humans that would be in existence today. And remember, it is tech (via nuclear and biological weapons) that is perhaps the greatest outside threat to human populations.
So technology is both suppressing birth rates and threatening the lives of those already born.
Shall the Amish Inherit the Earth?
Darwin's theory states that the species best able to survive and reproduce generation after generation will dominate. If sagging fertility rates cause the broader society to become less numerous, what groups might rise? Well… what do we think of when we think of a culture that has not embraced technology? If you live in the USA, you probably think of the Amish.
Amish rules vary by region and bishop, but, generally speaking, the Amish are skeptical towards technology. They are known for not driving in cars, not staring at cell phones all day, and not sitting around watching TV at night. And almost certainly as a result, the Amish are deeply religious, anti-urban, not feminist, and opposed to birth control. And needless to say, the Amish do not make nuclear or biological weapons.
And so the Amish have somewhere over five children per woman and their population doubles every generation or so. If they can maintain the principles they live by now… maybe sometime in the next few centuries we will all be Amish.
I say this somewhat facetiously. I am not predicting that the Amish will take over the world. The idea of this strange sect dominating the population seems outlandish and unlikely. Who knows who will dominate future populations? But I bring up the possibility only to show how much the rejection of technology can affect something as fundamental as who reproduces!
Imagine a magician from the time of Isaac Newton had invented a time machine and traveled forward in time to the 21st century. Looking around, America would seem outlandish and strange… except for one thing: the Amish. Hardworking rural farmers using horses and having lots of kids would not be anywhere near as strange as the childless couple jetting around the world visiting beaches on every continent. Now imagine the time traveler gets back in his time machine and travels another 500 years into the future to the year 2523. Will that future generation look more or less familiar? If the laws of reproduction have anything at all to say, it is likely that the people that have filled the earth in that future time will have developed a culture that shares the Amish skepticism to the technologies that have destroyed fertility rates and developed humanity threatening weapons. The future world very well may look a lot more like the Amish than like Star Trek.
In conclusion, technology is certainly negatively impacting the human population. This has all sorts of dangers associated with it - from economic to environmental to societal problems - but perhaps the greatest threat is to the future of humanity itself. If humanity is going to survive we need to develop at least some of the sentiment of the Amish. We need to at least be a little skeptical when the next technology comes along. Our survival depends on it.
Thanks for the article, I was not expecting the tie in to technology - very thought provoking. Interesting how I see in Scripture that in the millennial kingdom it looks more "Amish" and low tech.