Surviving (and Winning) the Coming Fertility Crisis

Could preventing a general population collapse lead to new opportunities for frum communities?

Orthodox Jews (and Anabaptists like the Amish) have been getting a lot of press lately. Ok. To be more accurate, those two demographics have been mentioned a few times in high profile discussions. And to be even more precise, by “high profile” I mean discussions where lots of professional economists and their students hang out. For example, there was this article by economist Robin Hanson.

What’s all the excitement about? Well it seems that birth rates in nearly all countries are slipping below population replacement rates (i.e., 2.1 births per woman). As a result, not only will populations fall and entire ethnic groups effectively disappear, but a lot of public infrastructure and social institutions are likely to collapse. In some ways, this is already beginning to happen in countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan.

“History belongs to those who show up”

If there’s a bright spot in all this, it’s that population subgroups with high birth rates will come to dominate what’s left of our civilization. Which sounds great for Orthodox Jews.

Well, kind of. You see, catastrophic social changes always come with unexpected consequences. Sure, we’ll all probably be happy to see the end of some of the morally indefensible excesses of western civilization. But I for one would miss reliable electrical supply and heated homes. And Robin Hanson seems to think it’s unlikely that societies run by Orthodox Jews and Anabaptists would be good at maintaining such complex systems.

Rabbi Akiva (Pesachim 112a) seemed to agree:

תנו רבנן שבעה דברים צוה ר"ע את רבי יהושע בנו בני …ואל תדור בעיר שראשיה תלמידי חכמים

Rabbi Akiva commanded his son…do not live in a city whose leaders are Torah scholars

Or, as Hanson puts it:

These groups reject many of the dominant world culture’s cherished values, including innovation and open debate.

I would suggest that Orthodox Jews aren’t quite as opposed to innovation as one might think. In fact, I’ve written an entire book chronicling the quiet, subversive innovation that’s marked mainstream Jewish practice over the past 500 years or so. And, much to the disappointment of some parts of the community, integration of internet-based technologies into many aspects of frum life has been nearly as complete here as anywhere else.

Still, it’s worth thinking about how our growing demographic dominance might look - and how it might change us. Perhaps you’d like to share your own reactions.

Killing two birds?

From the perspective of general society, current demographic trends should be terrifying. Nations whose fertility rates have already dropped to 1.3 or even lower have entered a population death spiral from which recovery is virtually impossible. But it’s not quite that bad everywhere. Yet.

So Hanson - and some fellow economists like Bryan Caplan - have proposed that governments incentivize their citizens to marry and have children. The idea hangs on the principle that every good has a defined price that consumers should be willing to pay for it.

One fascinating illustration Hanson offers is how it would have been cheaper to pay slave-owners in the American south to free their slaves than to fight the Civil War. The estimated economic value of the labor of all four million slaves (in 1860) equaled four billion dollars. Now consider how the total economic costs of the war (both sides) were around $2.8 billion. Add to that the human costs: 640,000 soldiers on both sides died. And don’t forget how much extra economic activity those 640,000 men would have contributed had they lived out their natural lives.

All told, it would make obvious economic and human sense for the US government to have simply purchased the freedom of its slaves rather than submit their people to five years of war. Arguably, such an approach would also have made the transition from slavery to citizenship a lot smoother - and faster.

Now, how much should society be willing to pay for a single life? From the money that governments spend on military defense, health care, and safety infrastructure, it would seem that we attach a very high economic value to life. Besides the moral value of such spending, this makes clear economic sense when you consider how each US citizen generates around $16 million of gross domestic productivity (GDP) through his lifetime.

So, with such purely economic considerations in mind, why not offer significant rewards as incentive? You could pay women $100,000 each to NOT abort their babies, and then pay all mothers hundreds of thousands of dollars more to raise their children to adulthood. Hanson suggests that the $350,000 paid for each child would, effectively, be revenue neutral, since those children would eventually grow up to generate income and pay taxes. You can read the fascinating details in his article.

All large programs like these come with unexpected consequences. Imagine how some of those might impact our communities? Devoting time and energy to lobbying efforts for charter schools or education vouchers is a fools errand when you stand it up next to a possible fertility benefit program!