why the oligarchy needs you to have kids

Far from trying to depopulate the planet, the champions of late stage capitalism are desperate for you to breed.

Go back in time a century or so, and you’ll find scholars and industrialists fretting that our planet was about to be filled to bursting, draining every resource until the world is dead and our only option to preserve humanity is to colonize space. This is one of the origins of the conspiracy theory that the moneyed elites are trying to depopulate most of our planet until they and maybe 100 to 500 million of us they allow to survive are all that will be left to enjoy a hyper-sustainable Eden.

Today, if you ask the wealthy and powerful for their opinions on birth rates and you’ll hear panicked shrieking. We may reach peak humanity in just four years given what’s happening to the world at large, the U.S. is looking at a shrinking population, just like Japan and South Korea, and American millennials are kicking the bucket at a rate that worries actuaries monitoring our current demographic trends. And for those of us still alive, loneliness, depression, bills, and doomscrolling are mostly what awaits.

Scientifically speaking, it makes perfect sense that our numbers are faltering. Look at any species living in an ever more unstable and stressful environment, and you’ll find that it sacrifices reproduction for survival. We are not immune to these pressures just because we have wi-fi and flushing toilets. But this is a huge problem for our wealthy overlords and their business interests. They desperately need us to breed.

Elon Musk just cannot stop worrying about declines in birth rates. Jeff Bezos dreams of space colonies housing up to a million people each across the solar system to one day house a trillion of us. Marc Andreessen looks like a moderate trying to mediate a compromise by only asking for 50 billion of us to make his grand plans work. Political leaders are also panicking as most pension systems only work when the population is growing, and failure to have more people working than retiring or dying means they’ll have a global financial crisis on their hands.

won’t someone think of the billionaires?!

Our oligarchs will also suffer in the only meaningful way they can: financially. The new lifestyle of the rich and famous is to borrow against their investments, transfer stocks to their kids, and pay taxes never. But for that to work, their assets must grow in value not to have their enormous loans called in for repayment, necessitating the sale of all that precious principal, and generating a massively taxable event.

With fewer people, you end up with a lower GDP, lower asset values, and lower growth or stagflation before all of the above starts to decline at an accelerating rate. It’s just a matter of simple math. Fewer people means less production and less consumption. In a world where growth is the only acceptable outcome, this is a disaster. Banks, hedge funds, and investors can no longer rely on the green lines going up to keep serving as collateral for the lavish and tax free lifestyles of the rich and politically connected.

Hence the emergency. Our tech oligarchs desperately need us to spread all over the solar system, forced to buy whatever they own, or run our own little businesses and side-hustles through their apps so they can rent-seek to their heart’s content. Their financial models require 15 billion Uber drivers and nine billion DoorDash couriers by 2153 to work. As far as they’re concerned, we’re letting them down.

Oh, and yes, in all those models, they are also immortal disembodied hyper-intelligent machine gods zapping from space station to planetary and lunar habitat to keep track of their growing spacefaring empires. Just thought that warranted a mention.

when everything is someone else’s problem

Which is quite ironic as this is very much a problem of their own making. After telling us not to have kids we cannot afford and setting up a system that mutated capitalism into fiscal parasitism, effectively looting us for all we’re worth to meet wildly optimistic quarterly targets, then making a surprised Pickachu face when we did what they told us and stopped having kids we couldn’t raise.

Now, they demand we reverse course, sounding as if they’re planning a sort of human zoo in which we’ll be forced to multiply or else, once again borrowing from sci-fi they didn’t understand at all, but in which they think they’d enjoy being the villains. Except it’s way too late for that, and they’ve doubled down on the very policies guaranteed to make our lives far worse and more dangerous, while increasing mortality for all ages.

If they really wanted to boost our numbers, they would demand that governments the world over pour trillions into renewable energy, grants for scientists, engineers, space agencies, and urban planners, as well as fund improvements in education, lower costs of child care, make our cities healthier, more walkable, and community-focused, give us generous paid parental leaves, and rethink how we define employment, work, and the social contract in an age of runaway automation.

But they don’t, because deep down, they don’t actually want to be responsible or pay for anything as greed has very literally broken their brains, putting them into a more or less perpetual state of aggrieved entitlement. Which is why instead of actually getting their wish, they keep freaking out on social media about the dire straights humanity is in today — in no small part because of them — and daydream about a magical world in which everything will be solved without them lifting a finger as they get even wealthier while we dutifully create more consumers for their grand ambitions.