It is widely believed among libertarians, and really everyone of anti-globalist sentiment, that there is a high-level global depopulation conspiracy. This belief is perhaps best summed up with the pithy phrase, “You are the carbon they want to reduce.” Bill Clinton recently acknowledged that he believes immigration is necessary for economic growth because our country has below-replacement fertility levels. While the global elites have given us many reasons to believe that they want depopulation, this is largely the residue of a panic about population growth from the 1960’s through 1980’s where many believed famine was imminent and ignored the vast increases in calorie production that accompanied the advent of modern industrial farming. Now, public policies across the developed world all demonstrate that governments are proactively, and unsuccessfully, trying to to increase birth rates in ways that are amenable to the public. In short, when it comes to population growth, the Very Serious People got what they thought they wanted but had never considered the impact of plummeting birthrates.

The population growth panic was started in earnest by the infamous book “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich which was released in 1968, though popular concern about overpopulation dates back to Malthus. A dystopian overpopulated future became a common trope in science fiction and was just one of many panics that academics and globalists have pushed on the world while selling panic as responsible planning. For one amusing example, the film Soylent Green is set in 2022 and though they were close to accurately predicting the 2022 population (7 billion in the movie, compared to 8 billion in real life) in the film that population level lead to the government feeding the public through stealth cannibalism. In real life, in 2022 Americans were suffering from obesity while wasting enormous amounts of food daily, and global extreme poverty had continuously gone down (not counting a rebound due to destructive COVID policies.) Despite that, for decades demographers have predicted the global population would peak in the 21st century, perpetually growing populations remain in the popular imagination.

The UN and various globalist oligarch organizations perpetuated overpopulation panic and tried to decrease birth rates, saying a variety of zany things about the need for much lower populations and proposing drastic actions. The invention of hormonal birth control and the legalization of abortion were primarily framed as serving the purpose of liberating women and allowing them to progress in the work force, but it was never hidden that the government desired to get birth rates down. The most famous and coercive example of population control policies being implemented was China’s “One Child Policy,” which was criticized by many, but widely praised by big international organizations and think tanks. Few considered the obvious problems that would impact a society where the average married couple had only one child but four elderly parents to take care of without the assistance of other siblings.

As birth rates have fallen everywhere in the world —including sub-Saharan Africa, which is the only region still showing long-term population growth— governments have changed course and looked to a variety of incentives to at least slow the rate of population decline. It seems preventing population collapse may now occupy the Very Serious People. Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, just published an article titled “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Going Gray.” While the magazine does publish multiple viewpoints, it can also be fairly said to be a top publication of the Atlanticist establishment and it probably reflects at least a large segment of elite opinion. Though the article isn’t panicked, it goes on at length about the challenges the entire world will face from depopulation. Further, it provides a rare admission that the entire premise of prior elite opinion was wrong. The author, Nicholas Eberstadt, writes,

Just two generations ago, governments, pundits, and global institutions were panicking about a population explosion, fearing mass starvation and immiseration as a result of childbearing in poor countries. In hindsight, that panic was bizarrely overblown…Despite tremendous population growth in the last century, the planet is richer and better fed than ever before—and natural resources are more plentiful and less expensive (after adjusting for inflation) than ever before.

While current governments feel they must bring in immigrants to sustain their populations, it is expected that even Africa will reach below-replacement fertility by the end of this century, and most countries will be losing population. It takes a length of time roughly equal to the average life expectancy to go from below-replacement fertility to net population decline. What this means is that even if one doesn’t care about the population of your country being supplanted by people from elsewhere, immigration cannot solve this problem in the long term. By the end of the lifetime of the children of children being born now, immigration will have stopped working to make up for economic and social challenges associated with low birth rates if trends are not reversed or at least slowed. The pool of even the lowest skilled workers will persistently decrease as demand increases. It is often noted that Ancient Romans invented the steam engine but only used it as an amusement, because the large population of slaves or indigent workers meant there was no need for such labor saving devices. That may be overly simplistic, but the principle applies here. Global trends mean that bringing in immigrants to supplement population is not the path to future prosperity, but instead it is innovations which allow the economy to thrive with a smaller percentage of the population being working age than has historically been the norm. In many countries the “population pyramid” already isn’t a pyramid, meaning there are fewer young people than old people, and countries which address this through mass immigration may be least prepared to survive the future.

The population decline encouraged by design is probably irreversible. Prior societies have faced similar problems but this time it is on a global scale, with some of even the most impoverished countries having fallen below replacement birth rates. It seems to be the case that given birth control options and economic opportunities, in our secular age women simply don’t want to have enough children to sustain the species. The obsession that Democrats have with birth control and abortion may make it seem like they still believe in controlling population growth, and perhaps some do. But as opposed to being a depopulation conspiracy, at this point it is probably entirely political. It is currently politically impossible to tell women they have to have children to be good citizens after decades of propaganda about “liberating” women from the burden of motherhood and sex education classes that serve to terrify girls of having children at a young age.

For all of this, what interests me the most is that our academic class and the oligarchs who hold conferences where they present strategies about how to manage humanity do not think things through. For once, they got exactly what they want and before they even reached their prior goals they were trying to reverse the trend. In a recent article I told the story of how South Korea ran an ad campaign saying “one child per family is too many for Korea” but were panicking about population decline by the time they hit 1.2 children per woman. There could not be a clearer example that, like some of history’s worst philosophers, those who think they are fit to shape our destiny as a species have not even considered what would happen if their ideas come to fruition. Unfortunately, we’ll all be forced to live through the results.