Cows, Not Cats: On J.D. Vance, Demographics, and the Earth's Carrying Capacity

In slandering "childless cat ladies" and elected Democrats, J.D. Vance made the express claim that people who don't have children lack a stake in the country's future and thus should not have as much political power as those who do have children. As Professor Buchanan explained in a recent Verdict column, that claim is worse than insulting; it bespeaks a profound ignorance of what makes a society function. I would add that Vance's view is reminiscent of property qualifications for voting. They were typically defended on the ground that only those who own real property have a sufficient attachment to (literally) the land to deserve a say in its governance.

But Vance's comments do not merely reflect reactionary views about the franchise. Last week's episode of the WNYC/NPR radio show (and podcast) On the Media (titled "Revenge of the Childless Cat Ladies") connected Vance's statements and Vance himself to the natalist movement that sees below-replacement birth rates in east Asia, Europe, and the United States as a threat to human civilization. As the show's co-host Brooke Gladstone suggested in a question to one of the guests, much of the worry is barely veiled racism in the form of the great replacement theory: countries with below-replacement birth rates could avoid population decline with increased immigration from parts of the world with higher birth rates, but the same people who lament birth rate decline tend to be anti-immigration. Vance and the broader Trumpified Republican Party are prime examples. Notably, Vance made his cat lady assertion while being interviewed by great-replacement-theory promoter Tucker Carlson.

That said, and as Vox columnist and On the Media guest Rachel Cohen explained, there is a non-racist version of the pro-natalist movement. As Cohen summed up (without endorsing) the pro-natalist view in a recent essay, it goes like this:

Those worried about declining birth rates paint a scary picture of the future. As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers will shrink, too. There will be fewer people paying taxes to support welfare systems, which will still be supporting large elderly populations. The result, they warn, will be economic stagnation and political strife: higher unemployment, more acute labor shortages, diminished investment, fewer innovations, and greater poverty.

But note that none of the problems described in that sequence would occur with sufficient immigration to supplant births. True, eventually the world's population will level off and begin to shrink, but current projections strongly suggest that won't occur for another 50 to 75 years. Meanwhile, given the rapid progress in artificial intelligence we have recently witnessed, it is difficult to imagine that worker shortages will be a substantial problem. Indeed, most of the worries go in the opposite direction: that AI will take jobs away from humans who want to hold them.

To be sure, that is not to say that the techno-future is utopian. Japan's decades-long project to replace human caregivers for the elderly with robots has been largely a bust. Perhaps the robots will improve in the coming decades, but even if not, as the author of Robots Won't Save Japan and the article just linked observes: "Care crises aren’t the natural or inevitable result of demographic aging. Instead, they are the result of specific political and economic choices." The goal should be to find the sweet spot of human jobs for human-to-human interaction, with the robots working in the back offices.

Meanwhile, the much larger immediate worry is not population decline but the fact that human consumption patterns already are straining the Earth's carrying capacity. The On the Media episode included a segment ostensibly debunking the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus (at the turn of the 18th to 19th centuries) and Paul Ehrlich (in the late 1960s and early 1970s). I say "ostensibly" because we have every reason to think that, absent radical change, they were right about their bottom line, even though they were mistaken about the mechanisms.

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Last month I gave three talks at Vegan Summerfest, an annual 4.5-day conference on all things vegan. I discussed my talks and the conference more generally on the Our Henhouse podcast. At Summerfest, I met author Chrissy Benson, who then interviewed me for her Vegan Posse podcast. My talks focused on animal rights and activism, as does much of the discussion on the two podcasts. Meanwhile, Summerfest included a great many panels and talks on the other two main reasons to promote eating a plant-exclusive diet: nutrition and the harm that animal agriculture does to the environment, including major contributions to global warming.

As in the past, I learned a great deal at Summerfest this year. Most relevant to today's topic were various presentations that can be summarized like this:

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.  . . . By shifting towards more plant-based diets, we would save large amounts of land through reductions in grazing land, and croplands for animal feed.

Malthus thought that humanity was doomed because the population increased geometrically while the food supply increased only arithmetically. Neither of those propositions turns out to be true over the very long run, although gains in agricultural productivity are at risk of reversing due to soil erosion, global warming, and more. In any event, the key point is that the climate crisis is fueled by our overconsumption--and consumption of animal products is by definition overconsumption.

The bottom line, then, is that cows are much more important than cats to how demographic trends will affect the future.