The Depopulation Panic

Demographic transition is inevitable; authoritarianism is not.

Lately, we’re told civilization is about to end—not from too many people this time, but from too few. The loudest alarms are coming from a corner of the right that has turned falling birthrates into an existential freak-out. Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has repeatedly warned that “population collapse is potentially the biggest risk to the future of civilization.” Media provocateur Tucker Carlson frames declining birthrates as a civilizational threat tied to immigration and national identity. And now–Vice President J. D. Vance has derided “childless cat ladies,” casting demographic anxiety in a way that manages to fuse resentment toward women with nostalgia for a social order that never quite existed. These arguments don’t just flirt with racism, white nationalism, and misogyny; they rely on them. The subtext is rarely subtle: we aren’t having enough babies, while they are.

A little plainspoken honesty helps here. Every generation seems convinced it’s living through the end of the world—usually because other people are reproducing incorrectly. Fifty years ago, the panic was overpopulation: too many mouths, not enough food, humans breeding like rabbits with credit cards. Now we’re told the same species is doomed because we’re not breeding enough. Apparently civilization is so fragile that it collapses the moment Americans stop having kids they can’t afford, in cities they can’t live in, while working jobs that don’t pay enough to raise them. If hypocrisy were renewable energy, we’d have solved climate change by now.

Strip away the hysteria, and the real picture is far less dramatic—and far more manageable. Yes, demographic change creates challenges. Aging populations raise dependency ratios. Fewer workers support more retirees. Long-promised benefits from programs like Social Security and Medicare need realistic financing. Labor shortages show up in healthcare, construction, and education. Infrastructure built for growth needs updating, not neglect. These are serious issues—but they are engineering problems, not signs of imminent extinction.

What turns them into a crisis is not demography; it’s political paralysis. We have known for decades how to fix most of this. Modest adjustments to retirement ages. Closing obvious tax loopholes. Smarter immigration rules tied to workforce needs. Real family support—childcare, housing, healthcare—rather than finger-wagging sermons about fertility. Yet our captured, performative version of democracy can’t seem to pass any of it. Too many politicians make a living off outrage, not solutions. Too many media outlets profit from panic. So the can gets kicked, and the public gets told to be afraid.

That’s the truly dangerous part. When democracy looks incapable of handling solvable problems, people start shopping for strongmen. And authoritarian “solutions” to population change are almost guaranteed to be ugly. On the left, coercive state planning could treat families like spreadsheet inputs. On the right, forced-birth policies wrapped in nationalism could turn women into instruments of the state and immigrants into enemies. Either way, complexity gets crushed, freedom shrinks, and someone else decides for you.

There’s a better path, and it doesn’t require panic, purity tests, or baby quotas. It requires grown-up self-government. When ordinary citizens—across age, race, party, and class—are actually engaged in weighing trade-offs, they tend to land somewhere sensible. Not utopia. Not ideology. Just workable compromises that spread costs fairly and invest in the future. This is where a circular economy and a circular culture matter: systems designed for continuity, reuse, and resilience rather than endless expansion. The same logic applies to democracy. Broad participation creates feedback loops. Feedback loops create learning. Learning beats yelling.

So here’s the call to arms—not to the loud 15 percent on either extreme, but to the middle 70 percent who are exhausted by nonsense. If you don’t step forward, someone else will step over you. Demographic transition is inevitable. Authoritarianism is not. No strongman, billionaire, or cable-news prophet can “fix” population change for us. But together—arguing honestly, laughing at absurdity, and refusing panic—we can design a future that actually works. Democracy, like civilization, doesn’t die from too few babies. It dies when citizens give up on thinking for themselves.