I don’t know what to think of the threat of birth rate decline Noah Smith dwells on today.
My first instinct is, it’s a kind of recondite concern. The sort of thing very smart people will obsess over but turn out to be not a very big deal.
My next thought is, if it is for real, it is such a big deal, such a global concern, that we are not really capable of dealing with it: look at our response to climate change, for example.
(And yet, I find myself counter-arguing, while our response to climate change has not been ideal, we have made a lot of progress — not through the way expected, legislation and restraint, to be sure, but through technological advances.)
Finally, a question: is this an affluence problem or a poverty problem? Is it “life is so pleasant I don’t need to have kids, a spouse, that kind of risk, responsibility and attachment” or is it “how can I afford to have kids when I don’t think I can afford to grow old?”
My fatalist strain tells me this is an affluence problem that will only be solved by growing poor, like trees pollinating more when they are under stress of drought, but I of course support Noah’s idea of studying this more seriously.
Big picture idea: technology, while making life better, is also often the source of our next major communal concern. Fossile fuel was great until it wasn’t — climate change. Social media (as Noah might have it) was great until it wasn’t — population decline… (Makes me think that the decline in fertility rates, too, is not an affluence or poverty problem, as I just suggested, but, as with climate change, mainly a technology problem.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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