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The 2 Cases For Having More Children

An appeal to emotion and logic...

February 20, 2023

You’re in a funeral home. It’s a small funeral. Most are when the deceased is almost 90.

Who’s in the room? A few friends. The two kids. A couple grandkids? The funeral director and maybe a couple people who read the obituary.

This is the reality for most people today.

I found myself in this spot 2 years ago.

But it was a little different…

The Emotion

I always said to myself, “I never want to have more kids than I have arms to separate them!”

I went to Uncle Roger’s funeral in September of 2021. My mind changed that day.

Roger and Carol had 4 kids.

The result? 23 people. Kids, grandkids, great grandkids and their partners in that room to express their love of dad and grandpa. There were more that couldn’t make it.

I’ve heard first hand, life gets lonely when there is no one left at the end.

A staggering 80% of women who end up childless, never intended to be childless.

That is a long second half of your life wondering what could have been.

The Logic

The world’s population will peak before 2030. That’s great for the Paul Ehrlich, Population Bomb types, not so great in reality.

I don’t blame you if you’ve never heard about this problem. It’s going to take 30 years to play out. We don’t like future problems, we’re busy manufacturing immediate ones.

Summed up, the problem is: people aren’t having enough children.

There are many factors behind this, most of them good.

  • Increased education opportunities for women

  • Increased societal wealth

  • Migration to cities

  • Increased availability of contraception

  • Anxiety about the future

  • Decreasing fertility levels

  • Cultural narrative changes

Why does this matter?

The replacement rate to keep population stable is ~2.1 children per woman. We passed that number in Canada and the USA 50 years ago in 1973. Immigration is masking the decline.

No civilization in history that we have data for has ever recovered from this type of population collapse.

What happens next? Two examples:

Detroit’s population has declined by ~66% in 70 years. The cause is different but the results will be the same. One person moves away and no one moves in (hard to imagine but it will happen).

Houses get overgrown. They attract vermin. Someone else moves out. Eventually the city doesn’t have enough tax revenue from home owners to keep the street lights on in that zip code. This is already happening in Japan.

***

National Debt. Pensions. Cost of Upkeep. Lower population means a smaller workforce. You can only squeeze so much juice out of an orange.

A smaller workforce means less people to tax. But, pension obligations, national debt and costs to run cities don’t magically shrink. This means in order to maintain the “cost of doing business” each worker needs to be taxed at a substantially higher rate.

Social security is estimated to run out by 2034 and 40% of Americans under 50 believe it’s a ponzi scheme.

They might be right!

Thank you for reading this far, I’m humbled! Could I ask you for a small favour? Sharing this newsletter with 1 person is completely free and helps me out a lot!

The Refinery

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