Elon Musk often tweets (or x’s) about the danger of depopulation: “Far too many people are under the illusion that Earth is overpopulated, even though birth rate trends are so obviously headed to population collapse�, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far�, “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse�, etc. Many other people have also recently become concerned about extremely low birth rates in much of the world. Birth rates have fallen to well below replacement level in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and they are now declining sharply in Africa. The “demographic transition� from high to low fertility has happened or is happening everywhere.

Perhaps thanks to Mr. Musk, a lot of people are now discussing population issues – are there too many people or too few, is the global population exploding or collapsing? I’m not going to comment on whether the world has too many or too few people, because it seems so obvious that more people are better than less. But we should at least be able to agree on something empirical like whether we are currently headed for a world as crowded as Hong Kong or as empty as Siberia. And I think we can. Population math is not that hard. It is just arithmetic, so it’s surprising that a brilliant technologist like Musk has gotten this so wrong.

My grandfather had 10 children, my father had 1 child, I have 0 children. This seems like a bad trend. If everybody did this, there’d be nobody left. And a lot of people are doing it. In the West, the average fertility rate is now only 1.5 children per woman. In the Third World, fertility is higher but falling quickly. The rest of the world is just a few decades behind us in its demographic transition.

Fertility rates are typically measured in children per woman over the course of her reproductive life. In the United States, fertility is about 1.7 children per woman. 2 children per woman (actually slightly higher to allow for childhood mortality) is necessary to have a stable population. 1.7 children per woman means 0.85 children per person, so at that rate each generation would be only 85% as large as the previous generation. Other developed countries have even lower fertility than the US. Europe averages 1.5 children per woman, China 1.2, Korea 0.8. In Korea, each generation is only 40% the size of the previous generation. They appear to be plummeting to extinction.

This is not just happening in the developed world. In rich countries, the birth rate collapsed decades ago. In poor countries, it is collapsing now. Even Moslem and African countries are not immune. Here is the fertility rate in Iran in recent decades:

People who are worried about depopulation have proposed many theories about why this is happening. They sometimes blame low birth rates on the decline of religion, the rise of feminism, less marriage, more divorce, non-procreating sexual identities, women in the workforce postponing motherhood until their 30s when they discover they are no longer fertile, consumerism, high tech, and many other cultural changes that have swept the West recently. But Iran has none of these problems, yet it now has Western-level birthrates too.

I think the answer is much simpler: the Pill made it easy for couples to get the family size that they want. So now, for the first time in history, we can all see how many children other people really desire. And for most couples, it is few or none. This is not a problem to be solved, it is a fact to be accepted.

But whatever the reason, the birth rate is currently below replacement in America, Europe, and Asia, and people are starting to worry about depopulation.

Below, I’m going to present 3 possible population scenarios. The first 2 – underpopulation and overpopulation – are widely believed, by opposing sides, but I will argue are impossible. The 3rd – which comes out in between – is what I think will actually happen. I’ll end this essay with implications of scenario 3 for the future.

Scenario 1: Depopulation because of falling birth rates.

The table below shows the future population trajectory, over 5 generations, of a country whose fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman. I start with a population of 100M people per generation which is approximately the size of a generation in the United States. (The US population is 340M, life expectancy is 76 years which is 3 or 4 overlapping generations depending on how long you define a generation to last, so there are about 100M people in each generation.) Although this time series can be created with just a calculator, I actually wrote a computer program to do the predictions because scenarios 2 and 3 will be more complicated.

With each woman averaging 1.5 children in her lifetime, every generation is only 75% as large as the previous generation:

Obviously I could run this sequence for more than 5 generations to get even smaller numbers, but 5 generations represents about 125 years which is a long time. No one can really predict 125 years in the future. The point of this projection is simply to show how bad below-replacement level birth rates are. If you believe this is going to happen, as apparently Elon Musk does, then you should be extremely worried like he is.

Since each generation is exactly ¾ as large as the previous, these numbers can be generated by simply multiplying 100M times the series 1, ¾, ¾^2, ¾^3, etc. But because I want to run several different population simulations, I calculated this using the actual distribution of US family sizes – most people have 0, 1, or 2 children, a few have more, some many more – and computing how many children each family would have, but adjusting the distribution to make the overall mean family size 1.5 children which is typical of Western countries today.

Another way to characterize this population collapse prediction is to call it the “no heritability� scenario. In every generation, some people have big families, some people have small families, some people have no families, and in this simulation future generations behave exactly like previous generations in the aggregate, even though there is obviously a huge amount of natural selection going on – the great variety in family sizes must be altering the composition of future generations because some people have many more children than others. A “no heritability� scenario like this is not a realistic possibility, given biology. In fact, no heritability is unrealistic even if you ignore biology entirely because some religions encourage large families and those parents teach their beliefs to their kids, so the children in large families tend to have large families themselves simply because they learned this from their parents. So, I will consider the (biological and cultural) heritability of family size next.

Scenario 2: Overpopulation because of heritable family size.

Now imagine that the number of children people choose to have is fully heritable. “Heritable� generally means genetically determined, although I’m going to be a little imprecise below by considering the transmission of religious ideas from parents to children as a form of “cultural heritability� too. An example of full genetic (not cultural) heritability is race. 100% of white couples have white children. 100% of black couples have black children. Race is 100% nature, 0% nurture. Whites don’t become black by moving to Africa and living in a “black environment�. Nor do they become Amerindian by living in North or South America. You don’t get your race from your environment, your education, or your childhood experiences, you get it entirely from your parents’ genes.

If family size was as genetically determined as race, then 100% of the children in large families would themselves have large families when they grow up. For instance, if a couple had 10 children, then all of those children would have 10 children themselves, producing 100 grandchildren, 1000 great-grandchildren, etc. That is obviously not what actually happens, but it would be interesting if it was. “Full heritability� means children behaving exactly like their parents behaved. The children from big families would have big families of their own later in life, and the children from small families would likewise grow up to have small families of their own. What happens over time will depend very much on how large the biggest families are because, genetically, the people who have the most children win.

I found data for family size (meaning number of children) for Western countries, and it clearly does not have a “normal� distribution. Its mean is about 1.5 but its range goes from 0 to over 20 children. So, it’s got a very long right tail. It actually forms a “log-normal� distribution. The vast majority of families have 0, 1, or 2 kids, a small number have 3, 4, or 5, and almost no one has more than 5. Almost no one, but not absolutely no one, and the difference between “none� and “almost none� is crucial because, for evolution, the people with the most children are the only ones who really matter in the end.

I generated a log-normal statistical distribution of family sizes for 100 million people that matches very closely the actual distribution of family size in the US. I set the mean to 1.5 so if family size was not inherited, as in the “no heritability� scenario above, each generation would be exactly ¾ as large as the previous generation. But now I will simulate the results when the number of children people have is completely inherited from their parents.

Since maximum family size is important in this scenario, we need to know the maximum number of children that one woman can have. According to the Guinness Book of World Records,

The greatest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69…. She was the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c.1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. She gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.

69 kids is pretty extreme. In the US, there are some TV celebrities called the Duggars who became famous for having 19 kids. While that’s a lot, it’s certainly not impossible for a couple whose religion forbids contraceptives. If a woman is fertile for 25 years, nurses her infants for 6 months, and gets pregnant as soon as she stops breastfeeding, she can expect 20 pregnancies during her lifetime. If they all live, that’s 20 children, more if any are twins or triplets. So, health + no birth control = 20+ children. I honestly don’t know why there aren’t more families doing this. Any Bible-believing Jew, Christian, or Muslim is required to “be fruitful and multiply�, which logically means they can’t use birth control (and explicitly means that if they’re Catholic), so why don’t they all have 20 kids? Are they all hypocrites?

In any case, people almost never have more than 20 children, so in all my simulations, I set the maximum family size to 20. This seems like a reasonable physical maximum for a woman during her lifetime, so my program will not allow more than that.

To be specific, to run this simulation I matched the values of my family size distribution to actual US and European data:

I couldn’t find any data on how many families in the West have more than 5 children because these families are so rare. So, I have no idea how many families really have 20 children. But the ideal log-normal distribution contains very few:

That is, I will be simulating only 18 people out of a total population of 100,000,000 as having 20 children – undoubtedly an underestimate. But those 18 people multiply fast. Since they have 20 children per woman (or 10 children per person in the couple), those 18 people (9 families) produce 180 children. And since full heritability means every child acts exactly like their parents, those 180 children grow up to be adults who themselves have 1800 children. And those 1800 become 18K in the next generation, then 180K, then 1.8M, etc. After only 5 generations, the descendants of people who have at least 10 children per family become a substantial proportion of the entire country. And after that, the country’s super-fecund population really takes off (not shown below).

Here is the population for only 5 generations, starting at 100M, but multiplying under the assumption that family size is fully inherited:

Note that generation 0 behaves just like in the previous simulation – they average 0.75 children per person. But the next generation averages many more than 0.75 children per person, because each person is predicted to behave exactly like their parents did. Since the children of generation 1 come mostly from parents who had large families, most people in generation 1 will have large families too.

Although this simulation begins with almost all families having between 0 and 3 children and virtually none having more than 10 children, the families with 0 to 3 kids don’t contribute much to future generations while the big families increasingly do. After 5 generations of small families having few children and large families having many, with family size handed down perfectly from parents to children, the population changes from 99.9% of families having 0 – 9 children to roughly half having 0 – 9 and half having 10 – 20. And after 10 generations, 94% of families have 10 – 20 children in them.

Again, I’m not trying to predict 10 generations (250 years) in the future. That’s impossible given the speed that technology and culture change. But I am trying to demonstrate how much of a role heritability plays in whether that future will be underpopulated or overpopulated. The biggest factor that needs to be considered if you want to predict future population is how genetically (or culturally) inherited family size is. It makes all the difference between the US having 23M or >1B people per generation just a century from now. And yet all of the experts currently arguing publicly about whether the future will have too few or too many people ignore this single most important number – how heritable are large families?

Scenario 3: Partial heritability.

Of course, no human trait is completely non-heritable, or completely heritable. How many children people want, like everything else, is somewhere between 0% and 100% inherited. I couldn’t find any empirical estimate on the heritability of how many children people have, and in any case it would have changed drastically since the advent of the Pill gave people easy control over family size. So, the next best thing is to find something correlated with number of children whose heritability has been studied. I believe the personality trait most correlated with family size is religiousness. It has been estimated that religiousness is about 40% genetically inherited, and its total heritability – genetic plus upbringing – must be much more than 40%. So, I am going to do the following calculations assuming that family size is 40% inherited. There are reasons to think this is a minimum, the most important being that when this behavior is religiously-motivated, the genetic inheritance is reinforced by parental teaching.

From what I’ve seen, the only groups in the US who consistently have large families and also successfully pass on the habit of having large families to their children are a few geographically-isolated religious sects. In particular, there’s good-quality family data on the Mormons and the Amish:

• According to research from the 2016 Next Mormons Survey, today’s Mormon adults grew up in families of 4 children.
• The fertility rate of the Amish is about 6 children per woman, on average.

There are other groups in the US that probably have very high fertility – Hasidic Jews, Muslims, and Hindus – but I couldn’t find reliable fertility data on such small religious groups.

The reason Mormons, the Amish, and other religious sects, but not Protestants and Catholics, have large families generation after generation probably has little to do with their genes. It is because these are tight-knit religious communities with deeply-held beliefs which are passed down successfully from parent to child. When making long-term predictions, genes matter more than culture because culture changes much more quickly than our physical genetic makeup. But I’m only trying to predict the next 5 generations. Even if the genetic heritability of family size was low, groups like the Amish who have large families because their religion discourages birth control would likely pass on their beliefs to their children for at least that long. So, the combination of genetic heritability plus short-term values transmission should make family size very sticky for at least a few generations.

Here are the population sizes of the next 5 generations assuming each person inherits 40% of their parents’ preference for number of children:

Even with only 40% heritability, large families contribute so many more children to future generations than small families do that by generation 5, 8% of the population has 10 or more children. And by generation 10, almost half of all families have 10+ children. Put another way, the median number of children in generation 0 (the present) is just 1 child per family. The median number of children in generation 5 rises to 4. The median in generation 10 explodes to 9. Evolution can work wonders when it can easily distinguish between people who are fit (meaning, have many children) and unfit (few children). Of course, these results all depend on whether the desire to have children is partially inherited, which I suspect but cannot prove.

The people who have the most children are always the most “fit� in the Darwinian sense of the term, and survival of the fittest is still operating. Evolution never stopped. All that happened was that, with the invention and normalizing of cheap and easy contraceptives 60 years ago, the “fittest� changed to those who refuse to use birth control.

To summarize the results of the 3 scenarios above: in 5 generations, no heritability of family size reduces a 100M population to 23M, full heritability expands it to 1392M, and partial heritability produces 231M. I’m not arguing that you should agree with my estimate that fertility is 40% heritable. But I am saying that you need your own estimate of that number to even do the calculation. It’s the most important factor in the formula. But the experts debating this issue, and proposing public policy solutions to fix whatever problem they think is happening – whether it’s overpopulation or depopulation – don’t even consider it. As is so often the case lately, the experts can’t do the math and so can only spout nonsense.

In each of the 3 scenarios above, the first generation acts like us: with an average fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman (0.75 children per person), the next generation is exactly ¾ the size of the previous generation. But after that, the scenarios diverge – to population collapse, population explosion, or collapse followed by explosion. The first 2 scenarios are biologically impossible, leaving something in between as more realistic. The 1960s’ fear of a Population Bomb has already been widely discredited, forgotten by all but a few Boomers who haven’t noticed how much the world has changed since then. The fear of Human Extinction, currently frightening the Tech Bros, needs to be discarded as obsolete too.

I call scenario 3 “Population Recovery�, but you could also call it “Population Replacement�. It entails the wholesale replacement of modern childless individuals with people who behave quite differently. In a few generations, the >=10 child family lines will replace the <=2 child family lines.

This is great news for America and Europe. Our current birth rate collapse will turn around and fertility will come back with a vengeance. We don’t need a political program to make this happen. Our biology will make it happen whether we pass “pro-natalist� legislation to encourage children or not. The simple fact of people who want large families having them and people who want small families having them, and their children behaving like their parents did whether from genes or upbringing, will take care of it.

Thank goodness! The future would be bleak indeed if we had to rely on conservative politicians to save us. Luckily, the Right can continue their 100% losing streak in the culture wars, and everything will be just fine. In fact, it might be better if conservatives keep losing. The more progressives win the culture wars, the more they drive their own most loyal supporters to extinction. It’s worth remembering that over the past century, the Left has gone from trying to violently establish a Workers Paradise to now encouraging their most ardent believers to “liberate� themselves with chemical castration and genital mutilation. Whatever you think of the latter, it’s far less destructive than the former. 100 years ago, the Left was murdering tens of millions of their class enemies (land-owners, small businessmen, “rich peasants�). Today, the Left is persuading tens of millions of their own supporters (gays, trannies, college-educated women) to not have kids. This is a fantastic improvement no matter what aspect you consider:

• Eliminating the next generation through voluntarily not having children is nowhere near as evil as eliminating the current generation through mass murder.
• Gruesome surgery by doctors is less harmful than organized slaughter by soldiers.
• Not reproducing the in-group is more moral than executing the out-group.
• Figurative suicide is a lot nicer than literal homicide.

There’s no comparison really. During the past century, the Left went from ordering “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class� to asking boys “can I cut your dick off to make you a girl?� Though creepy, that’s just not as bad – you can say “no� to gender-affirming doctors, and in fact most people do. The only way anyone could think that 21^st century Leftism is as bad as 20^th century Leftism is if they forget the enormity of what 20^th century Leftists did. Communists killed 100,000,000 people during the 20^th century. Today, they have not only cut way back on their murders, they have also embraced childlessness which ensures that they won’t produce descendants who will murder again in the future. We should not only be thanking them for no longer killing millions of people, we should also thank them for sterilizing themselves and everyone who drinks their Kool-Aid. So, let’s give thanks for our blessings: we are blessed to be living in a century when the Left is primarily suicidal, not homicidal.

Israel as an example of scenario 3.

Israel is the country farthest along the path of scenario 3. Their population, shrinking just decades ago, is now booming. They currently have the highest fertility rate in the Western world – even higher than most non-Western countries. This demographic turnaround occurred not because rich secular Jews decided to have a lot of children, but because poor religious Jews did.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development includes all developed countries and many major developing ones. Of all OECD countries, Israel has by far the highest fertility rate – over 3 children per woman – twice the OECD average. According to the OECD,

The highest [fertility] rate was recorded in Israel at 3.1, where women had on average one child more than women in Mexico and Turkey, the countries with the second and third highest rates [2.3 and 2.2], respectively. These three countries were the only OECD countries with a level above the replacement fertility rate (2.1 children per woman).

Amazingly, prosperous Israel not only has higher fertility than impoverished Mexico and Turkey, but their birth rate is rising while that of every other high fertility country is falling. Israel’s combination of high and rising fertility is unique in the world.

Just a few decades ago, Israelis were panicked that the low birth rate of rich liberal Jews combined with the high birth rate of poor Arab Muslims meant that it was inevitable that Muslims would someday become the majority in the country. Meir Kahane made his career on the message “They Must Go� – meaning expel the Palestinians from Israel to prevent their inevitable takeover of the Jewish State. Now the situation has reversed completely. The Jewish birth rate in Israel is currently higher than the Palestinian birth rate, and the difference is widening not narrowing.

How did Israel accomplish this? By creating some terrific pro-natalist political program? No. It’s because a small group of ultra-Orthodox Jews called Haredi had so many children that they grew to be a large group whose population is now growing exponentially. The extremely religious Haredi are both increasing the population of the country as a whole, and replacing the secular Jews who, like all modern Westerners, have few children.

Haredi Jews are often called “ultra-Orthodox� because they are extremely conservative religiously. Hasidic Jews in New York, recognizable by their black clothes, long beards, and side curls, are examples of the Haredi in America. Haredi women need to ask permission from their Rabbis to use birth control, and usually don’t get that permission until they have had several children already. With a fertility rate of between 6 and 7 children per woman in Israel, the Haredi have produced an enormous baby boom.

According to the Times of Israel:

While secular and traditional Jews, Druze, and Christian Arabs average fewer than two and a half children per family, and the birth rate among Muslim-Israelis is declining rapidly, approaching three children per family, many religious Jews have more than four children, and Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) average 6.6 children per family. As a general rule, the share of the Haredim in the population doubles every 25 years, or every generation. In other words, the Haredim make up only six percent of the 50-year-olds, but 24% of the infants. As a result of this exponentially increasing growth rate, half of Israel’s babies are expected to belong to Haredi families in just 25 years.

The liberal journalists go on to lament the effect that the “demographic tidal wave� of Haredi voters is having on Israeli politics:

Last fall’s elections provided Israel with a five-alarm warning about an approaching demographic tidal wave that is intensifying, with a preview of the extremist strand of Judaism that plays an outsize role in the [Likud-led] coalition, even as it discriminates against women, minorities, and many others – a type of Judaism that runs counter to the basic values set forth in the Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence. One day, this population will constitute a majority of the population, and will not need the likes of Netanyahu to form a government.

Israel, founded by leftists as a socialist state, is becoming so intensely religious from the gigantic Haredi population boom that its politics has gone off-the-charts right-wing. I don’t want to speak out of turn about Israeli politics, but let me just mention one incident during the recent demonstrations for and against the Netanyahu government. In July 2023, a right-wing Mizrahi protester was recorded taunting left-wing Ashkenazi protesters about the Holocaust. According to press reports:

A well-known activist in the Likud party with ties to senior politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told protesters against the judicial overhaul on Saturday that “I wish another six million would be burned,� a remark that led to the premier ordering his removal from the party and to police opening a probe.

“Ashkenazim, whores, may you burn in hell,� Itzik Zarka shouted at protesters at the Ein HaNatziv intersection near Beit She’an, referring to Jews of Eastern European origin.

“I am proud that six million of you were burned, I wish that another six million would be burned,� Zarka said, referencing the Holocaust.

So, when people describe the current Likud coalition government in Israel as “far right�, they’re not kidding. And Netanyahu is the “liberal� in the coalition. The takeover of Israeli politics by Haredi religious fanatics is not a possible future, it’s the actual present. As George Soros would say, “I’m not predicting. I’m observing.�

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have not only saved Israel from depopulation, they have also drastically altered its politics. The Right in America would love to accomplish what the Haredim have done in Israel:

• Want to solve the depopulation crisis? Israel’s already done it.
• Want far right extremists to win every election? Israel’s now doing that.
• Want liberalism to die out in your country? Israel’s already killed it in theirs.

Similar right-wing victories should be coming to Europe in future generations. Israel is currently the only country in the world with a super-fertile ultra-religious minority powering a “demographic tidal wave�, but I believe this will happen to many other countries in the coming decades.

The timing of scenario 3.

The countries which first experienced birth rate collapse – in Europe – should be the countries to first experience birth rate rebound. And the countries that today are only beginning to experience birth rate collapse – in Africa – should be the last to rebound later. In fact, the European population rebound has already begun. Birth rates in Europe actually bottomed in 1999 and have been rising, albeit slowly, ever since. (Births dipped slightly after COVID, but not to the depths of 20 years ago.) So, all is not lost for the supposedly doomed white race. The often-foretold Death of the West will not occur, at least not from Westerners having no children. (War or Replacement Immigration could still do it though.)

Just as people who grew up in the 1960s worrying about the Population Explosion don’t seem to even perceive the depopulation happening all around them now, so people who are growing up today worrying about Population Collapse may also never recognize the Population Recovery that will occur during their lifetimes. Don’t be stuck with the fears of your generation – the world is quickly changing in front of our eyes from Population Explosion to Population Collapse to Population Recovery. What is happening in Israel today will happen in Europe and America soon. Asia, unfortunately, was several generations behind Europe in its birth rate collapse, so may be several generations later in its recovery.

How fast could scenario 3 happen?

Let’s look at the Haredi statistics in more detail to understand how exponential growth works in the real world. Haredi Jews were about 1% of Israel’s population when the nation was founded. Since then they have had 3 times as many children as the average Israeli family. As a result, over the past 3 generations, their 1% of the population grew to 3% then 9% then almost 27% of the youngest generation (today’s children). If they can maintain the same fertility advantage for 2 more generations, they will grow to 81 then 243 times the size of their original population. This will have two dramatic effects: it will make them the majority of the population, and it will more than double the size of the whole country. To be exact, in 2 more generations, the Haredi will be 243 * 1% / (243 * 1% + 1 * 99%) = 71% of Israel’s youngest generation and 54% of the entire population of the country. That’s the real world power of maintaining high fertility for 5 generations – from 1% to 54% in 125 years. And none of that growth came from proselytizing or converting others. It was all simply from having more children than other people.

In Western countries, just as in Israel, someone is going to win the fertility race. I don’t know who, but somebody will. And when they do, this will change everything. In particular:

• It will solve the West’s depopulation problem.
• It will make the fertile group the majority of their country, presumably making them the dominant power.
• It will consign the groups which currently have 0 or 1 children per family (liberals and the non-religious) to complete oblivion.
• It will consign the groups which currently have 2 or 3 children per family (conservatives, evangelicals, and many immigrant groups like Hispanics) to practical irrelevance.

I can’t predict who the high-fertility people of the future will be. But when I looked for examples of groups in the US who keep having large families generation after generation, every group I found – Mormon, Amish, Hasidic, Muslim, Hindu – was strongly religious. So, it’s likely that the people who will have the most children in the future – those who will replace us secular moderns – will be religious too. In fact, if they really go to the extreme of having 10 or more children per family, that means they shun birth control completely, and that probably means they take the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply� literally. Not so long ago, most Catholics did this, and not using contraceptives is still the Church’s official position, although it’s now seen as an impossible demand by virtually all Catholics. So, maybe the super-breeders of the future will be even more devout than the Mormons, Amish, etc. of today.

Although scenario 3 is really a smooth process – large families continuously produce more descendants than small families until everyone is descended from large families and prefers them – it might not look smooth as it’s happening. At some point, there will be enough people who want large families that a visible group of them will undergo exponential growth. They may seem to come out of nowhere but then their numbers explode. For instance, some Christians might decide that God wants them to have as many children as they can. Imagine a religious revival in the US that convinces 2% of the population to stop using birth control. A century ago, when most Catholics did this, 10 children per family was typical. With families that size today, this group would grow 5 times as fast as the rest of the country. In one generation, this sect would grow to 5 times its original size, becoming 10% of the youngest generation. In another generation, it would be 25 times its original size and would comprise one-third of that generation. In one more generation, they would grow to be three-quarters of the children and more than half of the entire American population which, because of them, would then be approaching 1 billion people. Exponential growth in our moribund society would sweep everything before it: No more depopulation. No more Western lifestyles. Nothing left of modern Woke culture. The nation would be changed beyond recognition in 3 generations.

This is, of course, not a prediction. But it is a warning: a small group that commits to high fertility for several generations can overwhelm the West. Exponential growth makes anything possible.

What sort of people will inherit the earth?

My computer simulation of scenario 3 began, like today, with almost every family having between 0 and 3 children and hardly any huge families. But when the children of the few huge families became adults, there were more families like that in the next generation. These adults behaved somewhat like their parents, so they were a little more likely to have huge families themselves, producing a relentless increase in such families over time. After several generations, much of the country ends up with families of 10 or more children. So, I expect people who have many children to simply outbreed people who have few children until all that remains are people with many children. Obviously, it’s hard to understand why any particular parents would burden themselves with 10 children. Why would someone choose such a difficult path? Hardly anyone does this today, so this behavior seems strange to most of us, even though 100 years ago it was commonplace. We’ve forgotten our past when large families were the norm. But while I don’t know why someone would do this, in some ways it doesn’t matter why, it only matters that some people will. Having a lot of children is obviously evolutionarily adaptive and probably partially heritable, so if a few do it today, many will in the future.

But if the massive-breeders really do displace the low- and no-breeders, then everyone we think of today as the normal Western elite – those self-directed individualists who live the life they choose, do “responsible� family planning, have only as many children as they can afford, leaving their family with enough disposable income for travel, entertainment, paying for college, saving for retirement – that kind of Westerner will be gone, replaced by people with very different ideas about how to live.

Maybe the large families of the future will be motivated by religion. Or maybe it will be something else entirely. But what is certain is that these people will be different from us in some important way. They will not be rational utility-maximizers, selfishly calculating how many children they can fit into their preferred lifestyle. Just to be clear, I’m not passing judgment on either them or us. I am a rational utility-maximizer and I’ve calculated that the best number of children for my lifestyle is zero. But the 10 children family man and woman of the future will not be like me. I don’t understand them. I’m not acquainted with any such people today. They’re not in my social circle. But, whether we understand them or not, they will still replace us.

The modern world gives people every incentive to drastically limit how many children they have – from potentially 10 or 20 to typically 1 or 2. A few people will simply ignore those incentives. But not many will. Those incentives – to enjoy life, get ahead, postpone having kids, spend your money on yourself – in a word, to have fun – are just too enticing for most people to resist. This is not just true in the West. The American way-of-life is desired world-wide. Every country on earth is full of people who want it. American pop culture, though often derided, keeps growing more pervasive, more ubiquitous, more dominant around the globe. The Russian and Chinese governments may disapprove of American “decadence� and “degeneracy� but just as blue jeans and rock music were intoxicating to the Soviets, there is nothing they can do to keep Western culture out. In fact, they haven’t kept childlessness out at all – Russia and China have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. Asia is not only providing no opposition to Western ways, they have embraced the fun of a child-free life harder than anyone.

So, American values have won, are winning, will win world-wide. They fulfill universal human desires – for riches, an easy life, leisure time, an office job (which, in spite of people grousing about it, is far better than back-breaking farm labor or dangerous factory work), every new toy that Silicon Valley can invent – phones, games, social media, robots, AI – and, whether from Hollywood or Bollywood, cheap entertainment forever. Not every government can provide this, but every country wants it. The only problem is, to afford all of its joys, people can’t really afford children too. Having few or no kids is a central part of the modern affluent lifestyle, but this aspect of modernity cannot last.

The Western way-of-life, having defeated everything that came before it, has triumphed totally today. Yet even now, at its apparent zenith, when everyone who can be tempted by its promises has been seduced, and so many embrace the pleasures of a secular child-free life, then that lifestyle itself is, by definition, killing off the descendants of anyone who falls for its charms. Those who remain afterwards will, by process of elimination, not be susceptible to the delights of childlessness at all. I hope that most aspects of Western civilization – science, technology, capitalism, prosperity, freedom – will survive into the future, but the child-free life will not. Childlessness simply cannot survive biological competition with children.

Who are the people who are removing themselves from the future?

While it’s hard to imagine who the fecund people of the future will be, it’s easy to see who they won’t be. The people who are removing themselves from tomorrow are the ones who don’t have children today.

I don’t claim to understand what motivates people to have 10 children – who will dominate our future – but I do understand people with 0 children – who dominate our present. First of all, I am one of those 0 children people. Secondly, we can all easily see what the childless around us are like. So, I can’t say much about those who will replace us, but I can say a lot about those who will be replaced.

It’s obvious who isn’t passing on their genes to future generations – all the people today who choose not to have kids. The most humorous example of these non-parents are the climate change activists in Extinction Rebellion and related groups BirthStrike and the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movementâ€�. Extinction Rebellion are highly educated social strivers who publicly show off their moral virtue by reminding everyone about why they have no children. Their political program is literally that they refuse to have kids until the government fixes the weather. But of course it’s all a sham. They’re not sacrificing their lifelong yearning for children in order to save the Environment. They’re indulging their lifelong desire to not be encumbered by children and calling it Environmentalism. No one joins Extinction Rebellion, BirthStrike, or VHEM who actually wants to have kids. Politics is just an excuse to be completely selfish: “Look at me. I’m super virtuous and self-sacrificing because I plan to spend all of my time and money on myself, not on anyone else, ever.â€� It’s a con – the government will never fix the weather and they will never have kids. Extinction Rebellion and its ilk are inadvertently superbly eugenic, removing insufferable nuisances from future generations. 100 years from now, nobody will say, “My ancestors were in Extinction Rebellionâ€� because no Extinction Rebels will have descendants at all. A century from now, people will say, “In a world of DINKs (Dual-Income No Kids), my ancestors had many children. They were the righteous in a world of selfishness.â€�

Almost everyone on the left side of the political spectrum is choosing genetic extinction today. This is eugenics on a greater scale than anyone could have imagined 100 years ago. And, unlike the eugenics of the past, it’s all being done voluntarily. Consider the term LGBTQQIP2SAA – every letter stands for a different way to have sex without creating children. The project of the Left today seems to be to convince everyone who will listen to them to not reproduce. This can end in only one way – with no one remaining who listens to them. Our era is like a movie where a death cult convinces all of its members to kill themselves. It isn’t a horror movie because the more the bad guys succeed, the less of a danger they are to everyone else. It’s more like a black comedy.

Think of all the categories of people we see in the world today who didn’t exist at all 100 years ago – the girlboss, the HR lady, the DEI commissar, the climate activist, the grievance studies major, the perpetual grad student, the blue-haired cat lady, the antiracist ally, the non-binary teacher, the LGBTQ+ parade marcher, the BDSM dungeon master, the bugchaser, the library drag queen, the MTF beauty contestant, the celebrity who turns her kids trans – all of these freaks will be gone 100 years from now. Just as the past contained none of those pests, the future won’t either because they are all choosing to remove themselves from posterity.

Of course, there have always been nags. In previous generations, these personality types would have been Abolitionists, Suffragettes, or teetotaling Christian Temperance Union killjoys. But the big difference between then and now is that the Abolitionists, Suffragettes, and Church ladies had children. Today, their annoying progeny are childless. This is huge. The future will be great!