While there are many different factions of pronatalists, there are only a few prominent arguments, and for the purposes of this article, only the economic arguments matter. Lyman Stone summarizes the pronatalist economic argument well: if there are fewer people in the future, then there will be less demand for goods, causing asset prices—and everyone’s savings—to decline. In the wider economy, this downward spiral would be bad for firms, government revenues, social services, and economic growth. As the population and economy decline, markets will shrink, leading to increased monopoly power and increasing importance of intergenerational inheritance. The increasing inter-generational primacy of inheritance is bad—according to Lyman Stone—since it leads to decreased social mobility. To cap off Lyman Stone’s apocalyptic prognostications, even immigration cannot be relied upon to supply the number of bodies needed to sustain the economy. These arguments are not unique to Lyman Stone and are generally representative of utilitarian pronatalist economic arguments, as seen in a 2023 article by “former” CIA analyst Martin Gurri.
Before getting to the deeper issue, there are a few basic economic fallacies which must be refuted here. Specifically, is it necessary for the wellbeing of everyone in the economy that prices and demand be constantly increasing?
We can think about this using a hypothetical free market economy that is also experiencing a declining population due to birth rates below replacement level. Rather than seeing a downward spiral of price deflation leading to an economic shutdown, what we would see is that entrepreneurs and consumers would adjust to the declining population through normal market activity. Entrepreneurs would still act to provide for the future demands of consumers. Innovators would still try to commercialize new ideas and inventions, leading to industry disruptions and spurring economic development. Consumers would still accept or reject the products offered to them by entrepreneurs, meaning that some entrepreneurs would succeed while others would fail and go out of business. The production of goods for consumers would still occur. …
With these elaborations, we can finally understand why technocrats like Lyman Stone support pronatalism. Beyond the appeals to personal happiness—which appear to be mere rhetorical facades rather than genuine concern—the draw to pronatalism is clearly born out of faulty economic reasoning. To draw from the beginning of this article, Lyman Stone’s pronatalism understands “the economy” to be some creature that needs a growing supply of people to grow and bestow benefits upon us, lest the statistics start to trend downward. There is no consideration for why man produces. There is no concept of discrete actions, no idea that the economy is the result of actions. There are only trend lines and aggregate statistics.
Beyond faulty economic reasoning, I cannot think of a colder, grosser argument for people to have children. This is not a movement that really loves families and children; rather, it is a movement of regime-friendly technocrats who want more cogs for their machine. They may be “pronatal,” but they are most certainly not pro-human.
It looks like these pronatalist look to production for production’s sake. Production of goods is just for making the economy stronger. The production of people is just to make the economy stronger. They miss all points for doing anything in the economy or, for yourself for that matter. Goods are produced to fulfill the desires of individuals and only to fulfill those desires. Any other reason is GIGO.