Social Security is a Ponzi scheme high birthrates won't fix

This article first appeared in Newsweek on September 19, 2024.

Our media outlets have a strange obsession with declining birth rates. While the world's population clocks in at 8.2 billion and adds another 70 million per year—and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that population growth is a major contributor—we read near-daily headlines about the "crisis" of declining birth rates.

While often attributed exclusively to the right, handwringing about women's fertility decisions and their societal implications is equally the province of the left. Though the target of their criticism differs—the right is obsessed with women's failure to conform to an archaic notion of femininity, while the progressive critique centers on the inadequacy of our social safety nets—the left is equally off base in its explanation for declining fertility. By all accounts, many women are not having babies not because they can't afford them or don't have time for them, but because they simply don't want them. Which, if we truly believe women have rights, should stop pronatalist scheming of any political bent right in its tracks.

What unites birth-rate alarmism from the left and the right is a common anxiety about an aging society and smaller workforce. Our Social Security system is predicated, like all Ponzi schemes, on an ever-growing base of contributors at the bottom to fund the cohort at the top. When it was signed into law in 1935, birth rates hovered around three children per woman and climate change was barely a matter of scientific inquiry, let alone a reality threatening the survival of millions. It was easy to imagine that our population and economy could grow indefinitely. It was also easy to assume that the fossil fuels, fresh water, topsoil, metals and other resources that power that growth would last forever.

It goes without saying that today's reality is profoundly different. Today, climate change is only the most well-publicized example of our state of profound ecological overshoot—the state in which Earth's bounty is being depleted at a rate faster than it can regenerate. The collapse of biodiversity, declines in fresh water and mounting pollution threaten our very survival by compromising the functioning of ecosystems that make planet Earth the abundant, comfortable home it is for Homo sapiens. Of those who say they do not want children, a sizable percentage feel that way due to concerns about their children growing up on a planet dramatically altered by climate change. UNICEF has said that due to climate change and pollution, children face a future that is unimaginably dire. Surely, there is a better way to address the challenges of an aging society than by bribing women to have babies they don't want.

What is needed is reform of the system. As currently formulated, the system relies on perpetual population growth as each generation must be larger than the one before. As ecologists and most people with common sense—although apparently not economists—recognize, perpetual growth is impossible on a finite planet.

Many such reforms are glaringly obvious. In the United States, income over $168,600 is not subject to the Social Security tax. The income bracket of many of the loudest proponents of higher birth rates, like Elon Musk, should give us a clue as to why raising or eliminating this cap is a less salient option for them than ramping up pronatalist pressures.

Indeed, while corporate leaders like Elon Musk profit from abundant cheap labor, the rest of us would be better served by an economic system focused on maximizing well-being rather than benefits for the already wealthy. Now would be a good time to move beyond outdated and unworkable social contracts and explore what sort of system that might be.

We might ask, for starters, whether bloated military and policing budgets really serve us as well as creating strong social safety nets that support people at all life stages and make conflict less likely?
We might wonder what savings might be realized from a smaller population's smaller demand for infrastructure, which in fact are likely to far exceed the lost tax and social security revenues?

We might question, fundamentally, the bizarre obsession with "productivity," which conveniently forgets that babies not born are not only laborers not added to the workforce. They are also consumers who will never create demand for the mountains of technospheric junk that are the end products of so much of our "productivity."

Or let's take Elon Musk's favorite low birth rate hobgoblin, "innovation." A declining population, the story goes, will lack for the innovation supposedly born of simply having more humans; those with this fear have apparently not queried girls and women overburdened with unplanned motherhood about just how innovative they feel.

Of course, the truth is that no amount of innovation will be able to correct the cascading social and ecological harms wrought by decades of overshoot, whose solution we already know: a planned, thoughtful contraction of our population and consumption. The only sensible path forward is to encourage further birth rate declines around the world, and turn our attention toward maximizing quality of life, and not just quantity of humans.