Overall i liked the video. It basically said a lot of the things that i have been thinking too, namely that pro-natalist arguments are usually extremely bad and unscientific, and that most pro-natalists are weirdo racists and ethno-nationalists. One thing is for certain, if humanity goes extinct it won’t be due to having too few or too many children, it will be because of climate change, nuclear war, or maybe an asteroid. But i think there are a couple of points where the video could have gone a little further or thought things through to their logical conclusion:
The first observation i would make is that she treats this whole issue in a very general way that does not distinguish one country from another, socialist or capitalist, imperial core or global south. Frankly i would have no problem with the population of capitalist imperialist countries dropping drastically while increasing in the global south and socialist countries. I think the less people that the West has at its disposal to man its armies and work in their factories making weapons, the better and safer for the rest of the world. Conversely, i wouldn’t mind socialist and anti-imperialist countries having more manpower to defeat the imperialist West economically and militarily. Because the likelihood is very high that the latter are not going to let go of their hegemony without starting another world war.
The second problem i have is that she kind of offhandedly comments that migration is perfectly fine as a “solution” (i put it in quotation marks because i don’t necessarily agree that for most countries this is even a problem that needs solving, as i said, less people in the West may not be such a bad thing, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that we want to keep our populations from falling). On a surface level it’s a great short term solution, and bonus points for pissing off the racists and xenophobes! But thinking about it in the longer term you realize that you would have to assume that a) migration from the global south to the “developed” countries is natural and constant, and b) that the “donor” countries will continue to have a higher fertility rate than the “receiver” countries.
Neither is necessarily true, nor would we want it to be. I’ll start with the second one. Why do many global south countries currently have higher fertility rates? Because of material conditions of course. As this video itself recognizes, an increase in economic and social development seems to be highly correlated with lower fertility rates. Eventually as their standards of living equal ours so will their fertility rates. So in order to make it possible to continue balancing out low fertility rates in the West you would have to keep the global south perpetually underdeveloped. I for one do NOT want to keep those countries impoverished for the sake of making children for us.
As for the first assumption, again it is a case of adverse conditions which are causing the flow of population from the global south to the “developed” countries. People are not driven to immigrate because they see “oh there are many people here and less over there, i guess i’ll go over there”. We’re talking about human beings, not particles of an ideal gas dispersing from high density into low density zones. People leave their countries because of wars, instability, deterioration of the environment (climate change), economic deprivation, underdevelopment, etc. Normally people don’t want to leave their homes en masse. So once these problems are resolved the net population flow will cancel out - some natural migration will always occur but it will be mutual: just as many people from the West will be migrating to the global south as vice versa once the material conditions are equalized across the globe (assuming all countries have equally permissive immigration policies)
Now where it gets really problematic is when you start to make relying on migration for the sake of maintaining population numbers (or for the sake of cheap, exploitable labor) a conscious policy. Because this means that you are suddenly forced to try and do your best to keep the global south underdeveloped and destabilized. Else fertility rates will equalize and migration will eventually even out around that net zero i just talked about. Not to mention that such policies further harm the global south by causing brain drain and poaching away their most trained and skilled professionals who are needed to develop those countries…
Sure if we lived in a world where all countries were socialist and were dedicated to trying to improve conditions for everyone around the world, i would say open all the borders and who gives a shit about fertility rates? Below replacement, above, makes no difference to me if there are fewer or more humans in the world so long as everyone lives well. But we live in an unequal world where rich capitalist countries exploit the poorer ones, where socialist countries are under constant threat by imperialist powers, where the bourgeoisie purposely keeps large parts of the world impoverished and in chaos in order to exploit the displaced and the desperate.
Maybe this all goes a bit beyond the scope of the video, but i feel like these are important things to think about. We should not restrict ourselves to thinking about issues like this just from our own Western perspective, looking exclusively to our own selfish interests, but also from the perspective of the rest of the world too and with their interests in mind as well.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
