It’s no secret that having children is considered to be a lifestyle choice, rather than something that’s just generally accepted as something most of us will do.  But what happens when there are fewer children on Earth, and in the West?  The zero-sum global warming fundamentalists would tell you that the Earth will be a better place without so many people.  The more rational would tell you that we need more people, not less.  A new documentary, Demographic Winter, explains why this problem is a lot more immediate than the problem of, say, global warming.

Demographic Winter asserts that “every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness.” And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. In particular women find that their time becomes more highly valued in occupations outside the home. There are no iron laws of demography, but one that comes pretty close is that the more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have [...] And finally, the most profound event of the 20th century may have been the sexual revolution’s drive toward gender equality, enabled by modern contraception. Unlike other creatures, people can have the fun of sex without the side effect of parenthood.

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that’s just the problem – according to happiness researchers, people don’t really enjoy rearing children.

We say we don’t want to bring kids into This Kind of World, and by “This Kind of World,” we mean the kind where we don’t have to bother with them.