The Costs of Degrowth
Your thoughts on what we lose when the population shrinks
All through August, you’re invited to play Mutual Dependence Bingo. Get a bingo in any direction, and on September 1st, I’ll send you a pdf of the first chapter of The Dignity of Dependence. Two bingo-scorers will get the whole book as an advance reader copy. I’ll have a thread this weekend for you to share bingo-chasing stories from the first week.
Last month, I shared my essay (“Children Are Not a Harm to Reduce”) about degrowth environmentalism and demographic decline. I was drawing on the new book After the Spike (the source of the image above).
I posed two questions to the Other Feminisms commentariat:
What (if anything) do you find most compelling about degrowth appeals? What is least compelling?
Where (if anywhere) have you seen serious planning in your communities for the coming population contraction? (e.g. many colleges will close).
Sam had a vivid way of summarizing the demographic realities:
Births globally have already peaked. 2012, in fact, was the year that saw more births than any other year before or after, likely ever.
In other words, we are already at peak 13-year-old this year. Globally, peak baby and peak child have passed, and peak teenager, peak college-aged person, and peak military-aged-male are all right around the corner, with all the implications those entail. We can roughly track when those will happen by following the 2012 birth cohort as they age.
Amy highlighted a demographic vicious circle:
This isn't planning for changing demographics, it's a result of/response to them, but because I'm from a rural area and of childbearing age, I am heartbroken by the retreat of rural hospitals from obstetric care (and this trend will accelerate with the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and corresponding Medicaid cuts because a LOT of births are covered by Medicaid). A doctor is quoted in one of these articles as saying, "Birth hasn't changed but our society's tolerance for risk has changed" and when I heard that my response was, "Yep, that pretty much covers it."
These collapses happen fast. You cross a threshhold where a labor ward, an elementary school etc. no longer makes any economic or practical sense for a community. If you can see it’s coming in five years, shouldn’t you think about fleeing now?
Magdalen brought up one worrying gap in planning for a smaller future:
I don't think I see any level of planning for a future with fewer children at any level of society around me. I don't even see it where it would be the most directly rational--e.g. in people within my extended family/friends with no children, and who have not forged close relationships with and don't live near their relatives in the younger generation. I genuinely have no idea what these people intend to do when their care needs increase!
Vikki hypothesized about why this problem may not feel urgent:
One is that there wasn't going to be help that would come to them from children, anyway! "End up in a nursing home / assisted living" is considered mostly-unavoidable. But, like, one tragedy is that people don't have a vision of the joy of a loyal son/daughter/daughter-in-law/grandkid showing up to visit, or even to care for them. (Or that it would be shameful to "be a burden" to them--which we've talked about here before, of course!)
I know how much it mattered that my brother was still living near my mom and dad when my dad entered hospice. I was a looong train ride away, and (with one toddler underfoot and one baby on the way) a lot less helpful with the daily duties of care.
Finally, Leslie reminds us that the only constant is change:
This discussion reminds me of the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann (there's an Atlantic article that summarizes the book). What's least compelling to me about degrowth appeals is that some of it appears to be a fantasy: the fantasy/myth of restoring "untouched" nature. In reality, humans have always been adapting the natural world, often drastically, even when total population was much smaller. I appreciate the argument that After the Spike seems to be making: that population numbers aren't the most important factor in environmental health. Good policy (which is tricky!), and technology seem to be as or more important than population as such. But it's a bit disorienting and humbling to realize what you may consider untouched nature might be the result of human activity, even if it was long ago! It's very interesting! I think we should absolutely be striving for better environmental stewardship, but I also think having a more realistic understanding of how the Earth has always been changing, both because of human activity and non-human natural factors, can lend some perspective to the discussion.
I think it’s crucial to think of ourselves as active stewards of the world, not as people who can live so lightly as to make no impression. We have the burden (and freedom!) to make choices. Better we make them on purpose.
I want to push back on the idea that a school and or an obstetric unit disappears because it "no longer makes any economic or practical sense for a community." A hospital closing its maternity ward because it doesn't turn enough profit, or because Republicans decided to strip too many of the patients of their health insurance, is not about what makes sense for the community. It's about what makes "economic sense" for other people, namely screwing that community over.
One thing I do see people my age thinking about in their planning for this reality is that they do not factor social security into their retirement plans as heavily as previous generations. Millennials and later seem to realize in greater proportions that social security is a Ponzi scheme dependent on population growth and that the government is headed toward insolvency.
The techno-optimists hope we can make up for this through increased productivity. For me, I lean toward the belief that population may be the sort of thing that works under a negative feedback loop instead of a positive one. If the population begins to decrease, I am hopeful that we will see a meaningful decrease in housing prices that makes younger generations more open to having more children. It will be hard and take a great deal of dedication, however, to overcome the parenting knowledge gap and helicopter culture that is created by small families where teenagers don’t have the conventional experience of helping with small children. (Speaking from experience on that one, as my husband and are both basically only children raising 3+ kids.)