Natalism, the belief in the need for higher birthrates, is increasingly a topic of concern for various thinkers and prognosticators (Robin Hanson, Tyler Cowen, Zvi Moskowitz, and Elon Musk among many others). However, the calls for natalist policies are almost unanimously from the political right. I would like to argue that it would behoove the political left to take on this banner as well.
The reason that the left has been reluctant to promote natalism are somewhat obvious. One of the core ideological constituencies of the political Left in many developed countries is young educated professionals, many of whom are child-free: some simply by the vicissitudes of professional life, and some of whom by ecological or personal choice. For the child-free members of this group, to embrace natalism would be hypocrisy. And for a leftist group or party to embrace natalism would be to risk alienating this important source of votes, funds, and political energy. Natalism is closely associated with the “traditional family” and “family values”, typically conservative calling cards.
That said, there are a two strong arguments to make for the left embracing natalism, one of them Machiavellian and the other Darwinian.
The Machiavellian argument is simply that natalism could be a powerful argument and political tool for advancing many leftist causes. I will take the American example here, even though the US is out of step with most western countries on these issues, but the example should be illustrative to other political systems nonetheless. Some of the dreams of the American left include expanding public healthcare, instating paid medical and parental leave policies, and funding public schooling, including higher education. A powerful political argument from the natalist perspective is that the cost and burden of having, raising, and educating a child is too prohibitive and that this is a significant reason for the choice of many adults in developed countries not to have children. By putting in place these policies, the cost of having, raising, and educating a child is distributed to society as a whole, just as the benefit of having that additional participant in the economy is distributed – public goods should have public funding. Should the American political left embrace natalism, it could seek common cause with natalists on the right to find compromises on these policies for the benefit of boosting the birthrate.
On the Darwinian side, Leftists should consider embracing natalism to ensure their ideological and demographic sustainability. In the short-term national scale, if left-leaning individuals and groups continue to have lower birth rates compared to their right-leaning counterparts, the political landscape could shift significantly over a few decades; higher birth rates on the right could lead to a future where conservative values and policies dominate simply due to numerical superiority and intra-familial transmission. As Robin Hanson argues, over time this could mean a far future that is populated by the descendants of high-fertility subcultures like Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are of course very religious and conservative. When Hanson first promulgated this idea, I was resistant and argued that
“The idea that society will be dominated by the high-fertility subcultures is reductionist and assumes that the part of society one is born into is nearly perfectly correlated with the part of society one affiliates with as an adult, which is not the case. Conservative religious groups have higher fertility, but many people raised in those environments convert to more secular or liberal worldviews as adults. Parts of society that don’t have high fertility compete with high-fertility parts by being more alluring. Equilibrium can continue indefinitely.”
However, I did the math, and posited a scenario in which there is a dominant culture D with fertility rate 1.5, and subculture S which is only 5% of the population but has a fertility rate of 4. To ensure that S never becomes dominant, the conversion rate from S to D needs to be approximately 29.33% per generation. This means that for every 100 S individuals, at least 29.33 need to convert to D each generation to prevent S from ever becoming the majority. 29% is a high barrier, considering that fewer than 10% of Amish leave their communities. It would be much easier to simply increase the fertility rate of mainstream society.[1] By promoting and supporting family-friendly policies that encourage higher birth rates within their communities, leftists can help ensure the populational vitality of the coalition.
In the long term global perspective, falling birth rates in secular, developed countries can lead to a significant population imbalance compared to developing countries, which, without stereotyping, are on average less secular and egalitarian than western countries. This will put secular liberal values at a disadvantage globally in bodies such as the UN or its successors. Further, countries experiencing starkly declining populations may increasingly rely on immigration to sustain their economies and address labor shortages (NB: I am pro-immigration and this is overall a good thing!). However, as shown in the previous link, this immigration will increasingly have to come from nations with more conservative cultures, posing increasingly difficult demands on systems of integration/assimilation, which may over time threaten the influence of liberal and secular ideals (we don’t have to go full Houellebecq and see some abrupt takeover). This process can be slowed and eased by boosting domestic fertility.
[1] Note that this sort of scenario only really plays out in a peaceful world; in a more belligerent time like in most of human history, dynamism in social organization and scientific and technological advance allowed the dominance of countries with small populations over larger ones; see, for example, the Mongol, British or Japanese victories over China, or Prusso-German successes over Russia, or for the most extreme examples the incursions of Pizarro and Cortez in the Americas.
Whither the West? 