Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #57, released on 3 May 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (64 minutes, with video). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com
This transcript is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. I have not checked the transcript against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell
I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.
In this episode of my podcast, I'm going to try to bring it all back to center, try to summarize everything I’ve talked about and everything that has motivated me in this project. What is Demographic Doom, and what am I hoping to accomplish here?
This is an unusual episode. If you're looking at the Youtube version, you can actually see my face in this episode. Usually you don't, and the reason for that is most of my episodes are heavily produced. I write a script for every episode and I sweat over that script for weeks before I record the podcast, and then I edit it. I very heavily edit my podcasts, and this one is different. It's totally off the cuff. You might might find a few edits in here now and then, but mostly I'm just spewing my theories without a script. I ought to be able to do this, because you should know your own theories, the theories you've worked on for four years. You should be able to cough them up on demand, so that's what I'm going to do.
So what is our Demographic Doom? I've named my project this. I've named my podcast this. My Twitter feed is called @DemographicDoom. So what is the Demographic Doom that we're facing?
Well it's complicated, and it's also very simple. Let's start with the simple part: What is the biggest crisis facing mankind right now? I think what you're going to say is climate change, and that's certainly a humongous crisis, but it's not the thing that is going to cause mankind the most pain, because even if we have screwed up the environment, mankind will adjust. People will move from place to place. They will adapt to the changing climate, just they like they've adapted to conditions in the past.
Our even bigger doom is something that we cannot adapt to, [that] we cannot negotiate at least in the short term. And the core of our doom is the lack of babies in the developed world. We're not producing enough babies to sustain ourselves, at least in the industrialized countries. And this is measured by something called the "fertility rate". It's a statistic that says how many babies each woman in a society is producing on average. They need to need to produce about 2.1 babies per woman. They need to produce 2, first of all, because men can't do it. Men are kind of deadbeats. They can't produce any babies, so an average woman has to produce 2 babies to make up for the average man. And that 0.1 is sort of like a fudge factor, because not every baby that you produce is going to go on to produce a child themselves. They could die in childhood.
So the commonly accepted "replacement rate", as it is called, is 2.1, and there is hardly any country in the developed world that is anywhere close to that. They've all fallen far below that, and I mean every country—every country that's safe to visit, let's say.
That includes China. China had this One-Child Policy, which seemed brilliant at the time, but now they don't have enough babies because they've achieved their goals of only one child per couple. China is peaking in population. But it's also true everywhere in the Western world, in Europe and North America. Europe is especially bad. It hasn't produced enough babies for some time now.
So this why is this a disaster? You know, an environmentalist is gonna say, "Well, that's great for Mother Earth. We're gonna reduce the population. There's gonna be less impact, less pollution, less carbon produced if we have fewer people." And that sounds wonderful except for the problem of getting there, because if you're going to have less than two babies per woman, the natural tendency then is to end up having too many old people.
If each generation produces half as many children as the previous generation, then what you have is an upside-down pyramid where old people dominate the planet. And that's bad news for the economy, bad news in all sorts of different ways. So why is it bad news? Well, it's bad news because old people get old, and at a certain point, you retire. But even if we make retirement illegal, at a certain point old people get sick. And they get sicker and sicker as they get older and older.
It used to be you just died at age 60. You'd have a heart attack, and you died. Now people live to 70, 80, 90, 100, and if you've got too many people on the top of the pyramid and not many people at the bottom of the pyramid, the whole economics of the world are unsustainable.
Just think of it within our current system: There was a time when there was maybe five or six workers for every retired person. That would have been back in the days when Social Security first started, and today we're getting to the point where there's barely one or two workers supporting one retired person [an exaggeration], and that's simply unsustainable. You can't keep going that way.
And there's other problems with a falling population, and those have to do with the commitments you've already made. Governments have made huge debt commitments, and if their populations were to fall by half, they can't make payments on those commitments, so those commitments have to go into default.
And there's the whole idea of institutions not being sustainable because they simply don't have enough bodies. There's certain economies of scale in having a lot of people. If you take, let's say, a community of 20,000 people, and you cut it down to 10,000 people, then you might not be able to support things like your sewer system and all your municipal services, because those are all set up for a much bigger population.
So in many different ways, a fall in population is a disastrous thing and at least in the medium term, it is not good for the environment. The simple calculus that environmentalists use is every human being is producing so much carbon, so you reduce the number of human beings, you're reducing the amount of carbon. And that sounds correct in a stable-state universe, in a place that is just like us, but it's not going to happen that way.
Once institutions start collapsing and government debt becomes unpayable, what you have is governments that become weaker and weaker and weaker and are less able to enforce environmental regulations. You know, if the US Government were to collapse—which is not impossible—the Environmental Protection Agency would also collapse, and suddenly people are going to be throwing stuff into the rivers because there's no strong governmental authority enforcing environmental rules.
So, yes, over time it's probably best that we have fewer people on the planet. We have 8 or 9 billion right now [officially 7.7 billion]. Maybe it's healthier to have 4 or 5 billion or even less. The whole problem is getting back there while still sustaining your society. So this is the core problem. The core of our Demographic Doom is not enough babies in the developed world.
Now we have all sorts of other little kinds of Doom all branching off of that one Doom. I would say that the Number Two Doom that we're facing—that is actually going to cause a lot more pain a lot more quickly—and that is economic collapse. And the economic collapse in our society really hinges on government debt. We seem to be coming out of a pandemic right now. This is May 2021, and we're coming out of a pandemic where the government has spent tons of money. The US Government alone has spent roughly twice as much money as it has taken in in taxes. In the past two years, in 2020 and 2021, it will almost certainly spend twice as much money as it is taking in.
Even before the pandemic, the government was borrowing one of every four dollars it spent. So governments have been are deeply in the hole. We haven't seen any major effects of this right now, but there will be, because to spend this money that the government doesn't have, the government is borrowing this money and ultimately it is printing this money. And this just can't go on forever. It didn't sustain Venezuela or Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. You can't just print money forever. Sooner or later you have to pay the piper.
So this is the Doom that is bearing down on us right now. Within a very short period of time—it could be tomorrow, could be two years from now, it could be five years from now—but sooner or later there will be some kind of major monetary collapse when we realize that all the government all the money that the government has printed isn't good for anything. There's going to be devastating effects. I can't predict exactly what those effects would be. Will it be hyperinflation? Will it be a stock market collapse? But it's going to be big.
You may ask, well, what has this got to do with demographics? What it has to do with demographics is that our whole system was built for a different population profile. Our system rose up in an era when things were always growing. That's what America was always from the beginning. It's growing, growing, growing. And this was especially true in the late 40s and the 1950s, when we had the Baby Boom. We produced a lot of babies, and the population shot way up. Now the population is leveling off. Our whole system is built upon the idea that things everything would grow forever, and whenever everything doesn't grow forever, then we got a crisis. All of these economic assumptions that we've made during these growth periods become invalid and they have to crash. Things have to crash.
And I'm talking about a crash along the lines of the Great Depression or even worse because our government this time is the one that's deeply in debt. Government wasn't too badly in debt [at the start of] the great depression but now it is. And the government is the underpinning of the currency, the US dollar. If the government fails, in some form the US dollar has to fail as well.
So the immediate crisis is the Baby Boomers, the people of my generation who were born between 1946 and 1964, and there were tons of us. In my neighborhood, a lot of families had had four or five kids in the family. Now you very rarely see four or five kids in a family, but it was the norm back in my day.
All of these Baby Boomers fueled the economy. They were a drain on the economy initially in the 1960s and 70s, because they were using up educational resources. They were requiring government resources and not paying any taxes, because kids don't pay taxes. But then in the last quarter of the 20th Century and in the first decade of the 21st Century, those Baby Boomers came of age. They began to earn a lot of money and spend a lot of money, and they were the great engine that drove our economy.
What's happening to those Baby Boomers now? Well, they're retiring and instead of producing tax revenue and producing goods and producing stuff that powers our economy, now we're draining the government. We're draining the government of its resources. We're collecting on our Social Security. We're spending Medicare money. We're redeeming our stocks. We are now a drain on society.
And because we, as the Baby Boomers, didn't have many kids ourselves—and as a matter of fact, I’ve had zero myself—and our children, or the children I didn't have—aren't having many children. So we've got a top-heavy system with too many Baby Boomers retiring all at once [with] no workers to support them. Yet the government is still spending money like it was the boom times. The boom times I consider 1980 to 2008. Those were the big boom times. You may not remember them fondly, but in retrospect, they were a time of great economic growth around the world. And we're still spending money and making commitments as though that growth was going on even though it has ended.
So in 2011, the baby boomers started retiring, started reaching age 65, and they're just like a tidal wave—a tsunami of old people, a silver tsunami. That's kind of a one-time demographic issue. It's not so much that we don't have enough babies but that we don't have as many babies as we did in the Baby Boom. So to sustain our Social Security system and our pension systems, we would have had to keep making babies at the same rate we did it during the Baby Boom, which obviously didn't happen. Since 1964 until the end of the century, America was at least making as many babies as [people who] were dying. It was at least replacing the population, [but] now in the 2020s, especially with the pandemic, we're hardly making babies at all.
You can tell this if you live in America or Europe and you go out for a drive. How many kids do you see? Well, not many. By comparison, how many dogs do you see? It seems like everyone's got a dog, everybody's out strolling with their dog—their beautiful Labrador Retrievers or whatever—and they're doting on their dogs. But how many kids do you see? What is the proportion of dogs to baby carriages out on the street today? Depending on your city, I'll bet the dogs are five-to-one to baby carriages or ten-to-one. The past couple days, I’ve gone driving in the Boston area, and I see one or two baby carriages and only a handful of kids—actual human children—and tons and tons of dogs, because that's where everybody is putting their parental attention now. They're putting it onto their dogs.
Now I love dogs. I transport dogs for a living, and I enjoy hanging out with dogs, but as an investment, it's not really a good investment for society. You devote 10 years to a dog [but] what happens at the end of those 10 years? Well, the dog dies, and it contributes nothing to society, whereas if you had invested 20 years in a child. He would have contributed something to society.
Let's go back to the global situation. As I say, there's not enough babies in the developed world, but what about the undeveloped world? What about the poorest countries in Africa? There we have what was once called a “population explosion”. It's still happening in Africa. Nigeria and Niger and Congo—all these places are still producing a lot of babies, so their population is exploding.
The populations of the rest of the world are not exactly shrinking yet, because we still have some momentum built up. It's called “demographic momentum” where if you stop having babies right now, the population doesn't fall immediately. There's a lagging effect, but most of the countries of the world are coming to a peak.
China may already have reached that peak where their population doesn't grow anymore. After today it's going to start shrinking, and that's an obvious result of the One-Child Policy where couples were instructed to have only one child, and they did. It was wildly successful. But if every two people have only one child and you do that generation after generation for a whole society, sooner or later the population falls. There's been news stories lately that this is the year that the population has actually fallen. Some of the Chinese authorities dispute that, but if not this year, it's certainly close, and by some reckoning, 2011 was the date that the working population began shrinking.
The working population is the people between the ages of, let's say, 16 and 64 who are actually producing things for society. That number is what's really critical, because those are the people who are paying taxes to support all the other people, all the dependents. The young people and old people who can't work, they are called "dependents". And the people who work are the engine of society. The proportion of people who are dependent—the old and young—to the workers: That's called the “dependency ratio”, and that's just going up, up, up—meaning that there's more and more dependent people.
So what are the solutions? Well, we could just make retirement illegal. We could say, no, you can't retire at 65; you have to wait until 70—which Japan has done. I think you have to be 70 to earn your pension. But there's a limit to how much you can do that, because when people get old, they get sick. Their faculties wane, and that's something you can't negotiate with. Old age is a lot of failing systems all at once, and there's no magical elixir to make people live longer or to make people healthier.
It used to be, for example, that if you had a heart attack at age 60. You died. That's the way things worked for most of human history. It's only in the mid-20th Century that medical science learned to save people from heart attacks. So you save someone from a heart attack, and what happens? Well, they die of something else, but in the meantime you've got 20 or 30 more years of medical care you've got to spend on these people because they didn't die at age 60.
So we've got a medical crisis where we simply have too many old people getting sick, getting cancer, having coronary problems, having all sorts of things that require doctors and hospitals, and fewer and fewer people paying into the system in their prime working years. So just raising the retirement age won't do anything.
Someone has suggested robots. Robots will save us from our dwindling population. So what we do is we just build robots to replace all the workers who aren't working and we get just as much work done by having robots. That's great. That might solve any labor shortage, but there's one problem with robots, in that they don't pay taxes and they don't consume anything. An ordinary worker will work hard, make some money, pay that money to someone else to power the economy and pay taxes, but robots don't do any of that. Robots just build things, and it's really hard to tax them.
You could try to tax the corporations that build the robots, but that's been very difficult. Most of the US Government's tax revenue comes from individual wage earners. Corporations, as you might have guessed, don't pay many taxes, and it's really, really hard to get corporations to pay taxes, because they can always move things around, move things offshore, rearrange their profit structures so they don't have to pay taxes. So the people left paying taxes are the real workers, and right now there aren't enough real workers to come anywhere close to paying society's debts or the government's debts.
To look at the government: The US Government, as I said, is spending twice as much money in 2020 and 2021 as it is taking in in taxes. This is just like someone spending on their credit card twice as much money as they are earning in salary. There's all sorts of arguments that say, well, the government can get away with this because the government prints the money. Yeah, you can get away with it for a certain amount of time, but you can't produce value for a society by printing money. Sooner or later, something's gonna break, and when it breaks it's gonna be catastrophic.
In this moment when I'm recording this video, things don't look very bad. We're coming to the end of a pandemic. People are starting to poke their heads out into the real world. People are starting to travel and go to restaurants again, and things are beginning to look up.
And the stock market! You wouldn't believe the stock market in May [2021]—in fact, the stock market throughout the whole pandemic. At the beginning, in March of 2020, there was a stock market crash—as one would expect as news of the pandemic spread. But then the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates and pumped more money into the system, and stocks blew up.
The great irony of the pandemic is stocks hit all-time highs. I mean the pandemic destroyed the economy, laid waste to the economy, vast swathes of the economy, yet the stock markets rose, and other asset markets like residential real estate rose, and it's just insane! It doesn't make sense. It's like the last gasp of a bubble economy. At some point the stocks are going to crash [and] bad things are going to happen.
I'd be a rich man today if I could predict when it will happen. I would have predicted it would have happened two years ago, three years ago. In fact, I was making videos about the coming economic collapse back in 2010 [Here’s one.], and it hasn't happened. That doesn't mean it won't happen. I just don't have enough knowledge of the timing to become a rich man over it.
So back to the demographic part of things: We don't have enough babies, [and] it's a bad thing. If you don't believe me already—that not enough babies is a bad thing—I’ve got plenty of other podcasts about that. There's plenty of other writings about that—that not enough babies is a bad thing. If that's true, how do we bring the babies back? What's the solution to the baby bust? And my contention—and the reason I call this “Doom”—is that there is no solution. There's nothing a government can do to bring back the babies. Everything that you propose I can shoot down pretty quickly.
A tax credit? Let's give parents a tax credit for every baby that they have. Do you think that any parent gives a damn about a tax credit at the end of the year? No way! They're looking at the cost of having a baby, and the cost is just astronomical. Back in my day, back in the day when there were four or five kids in the family, the per child [cost] was not all that [high], because there [were] not so many rules to obey. Kids were just kind of let loose. They were cut loose to entertain themselves all day, and now you can't do that.
There's all sorts of rules. You have to supervise your child at all times. You can't leave your child unattended. You got to have certain mandated car seats, and how many car seats can you fit in a car? In my day, everybody piled into the Cadillac—you know, six or seven kids all piled into the Cadillac, and we all went somewhere, and you can't do that anymore. You gotta have a government-approved child seat in every car for every child, which means you've got to have a mammoth SUV or minivan if you plan on having more than two kids.
So child rearing has become extraordinarily expensive, and for parents the benefit is really emotional and nothing else. It used to be, in most of human history, that if you had a lot of kids, your kids were your retirement plan. They assured that you would be taken care of in your old age. Now we've replaced all that with pension systems, and kids are not expected to support their parents anymore.
So from a parent's standpoint, there's really no practical benefit in having a child. I mean there's an emotional benefit. Raising kids is fun, but, boy, is it labor intensive! And all those dreams you had, all those entertainments that you used to enjoy, like jetting off to the Caribbean, or, you know, doing things spontaneously with your spouse, you can't do that if you got kids. Kids are a huge drain in money and a huge drain in opportunities. It's called the “opportunity cost”. If you're raising kids, you can't be doing other things.
And it's an absolutely huge risk. Not every baby comes out of the womb in perfect shape. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, and in maybe 10 or 20 percent of births, in the end there's something that goes seriously wrong with that child, and that child becomes a burden to their parents—potentially a burden to their parents for life. So if you were a potential parent, you say, “Yeah I'd like to have kids someday,” but when you crunch the numbers and look at the cost of this thing and look at how unstable your own income is—You don't have lifetime employment anywhere anymore. Your life is financially unstable. You can barely care for yourself. Who in their right mind would have a kid these days?
Any government program that proposes to solve that just doesn't understand the immensity of the problem. A tax credit at the end of the year is trivial. You can even pay parents a bounty for every child that they produce, but that's trivial compared to the true cost of parenting, and you wonder if you have that bounty… if you say, "You make a baby [and] I'll give you five thousand dollars," well, you wonder what kind of parents would fall for that. Is that the best and the finest parents?
[How about] free child care? Is that going to solve it? Is that going to encourage people to have more babies? Free child care or more support for parents? There's evidence that this won't help either, and my evidence is the country of Sweden. Sweden offers all this stuff. The Nordic countries have a very strong parental support system with subsidized child care and all sorts of perks for families and parents, and their birth rates, their fertility rates are not much different from countries that don't offer any of that stuff like Romania or the United States. Just the fact that your government is supportive is not sufficient to encourage people to have more babies.
There's no way to do it. There's no no way to bribe people. There's no way to threaten people. It was really easy to threaten people into not having kids. The Chinese were very good at it. There [were] forced sterilizations, and there were all sorts of substantial penalties for people who had more too many kids. That part was easy. They can't just reverse the system now and punish people into having children. There's just no mechanism to do it, short of kidnapping women and impregnating them and forcing them to have babies in child labor camps—which I wouldn't put past the Chinese authorities. Anything short of that will not encourage parents to have more children
[Pauses to view himself on the camera monitor.] So I’ve got these interesting stripes on my face. You see I got the sun coming in on me. You think I should move? Or maybe I should just keep going. Let's just keep going....
So mankind is facing an economic crisis of not enough workers and the government not being able to acknowledge that and reduce its spending. Instead, it's printing money. That's the immediate crisis that's going to cause everybody a lot of pain in the short term. And in the long term we have this lack of babies, which actually started way back in the 1960s, and there's no way we can make more babies or encourage more people to have babies—at least within our current system.
This means that countries and institutions will collapse. I can't say how or when or why or exactly what will happen, but you can't sustain a country on a falling population. The Japanese have been pretty good at doing it so far, but even their system can't keep on. You can't keep producing 100-year-olds and 90-year-olds and not producing any babies without at some point running out of resources to take care of all those old people.
So I said there were a lot of other problems that branch off of this one core problem of not enough babies. We have too many babies in the underdeveloped world, so why can't we just take all those extra babies from Nigeria and bring them on over to Germany or the Netherlands? That only works when you're taking highly educated immigrants.
So we have all the countries of the western world going to Nigeria and raiding Nigeria for all of its talent—all of its doctors and nurses and engineers and people with skills that Nigeria has spent money training. Those are all sucked up by the Western world, sucked up by North America and Europe, and what's left in Nigeria are people raised in harsh circumstances, raised in poverty, raised without much education. You just can't take an uneducated person from a very poor country and bring them to France and Germany and expect them to function. They have no clue how to get along in a developed country.
So if you were to open the floodgates and let every Nigerian into into France, they would develop enclaves of Nigeria within France—which they've already done—and this would cause great tensions in French society—as it is already done—and it would not solve the core problem of not having enough talented workers, not having enough people to power French society. They're producing a lot of babies in Nigeria, but you just can't import babies because what the developed countries are lacking is not babies, per se. Babies are easy. What developed countries are lacking is parent—people willing to raise a child for 20 years. If you don't have that, then there's no point in importing babies from Nigeria.
So there's no solution. The fact that some of the some of the world is still exploding while most of the world is shrinking, you can't just transfer one to the other—not without causing huge problems. So immigration is not a solution. Government incentives are not a solution. There is no solution to the the birth crisis—within our system. The only solutions I see are when our system collapses in some form. Maybe some people will be open to different ways of producing babies and different ways of addressing these problems.
What has happened here is that we have neglected an infrastructure, and the infrastructure is our children. Countries of the western world have not invested adequately in the next generation. It's all been about profit right now, making as much money as possible right now, without any substantial investment in the future. What that means, just like neglecting any form of infrastructure, like not maintaining a bridge, it means eventually the infrastructure collapses and you've got to suffer the consequences.
So after that collapse, that inevitable collapse, then people might think about, “Well, what can we do to revitalize our communities and bring new children into our communities?” Knowing all of these barriers to it. And that's where I have my own solution. It's a theoretical solution. I'm not really sure I'm ever going to see it in my lifetime, but I have a solution.
My solution is called the “post-nuclear family”, and it's a system that allows more children to be raised at lower cost overall. My solution is actually pretty simple: I want to bring back the big family. Big families used to be the norm, especially in rural societies. You might have 8 kids in one family. I want to bring that back, but I want to start at 9 kids—9 kids evenly distributed—and perhaps as many as 18 kids all living in one in one household.
But no parent can support that. No parent can afford that. No parent wants to give up all the rest of their lives to raise children. So if you're going to have a big family of between 9 and 18 kids, it's got to be a group effort. You have to have a group of adults to do this. Let's say you had 8 adults or 10 adults and you had 9 to 18 kids, well you could distribute the duties of parenthood. It might be that you only have to be a parent one day a week, and you're distributing the risk. So if you have 9 kids and one of them turns out to have some serious birth defects, if you've got a lot of adults to distribute that risk over, it's not so devastating.
So the aim here would be a certain economy of scale by increasing the size of the family and increasing the number of parents. That's the core idea, and once I’ve proposed this core idea, there's all sorts of questions you're going to ask, and the bulk of my efforts right now are focusing on trying to answer those questions. How would you organize a group of parents to raise a bunch of kids? What is the organizational structure, and how well will it work?
So I’ve covered this in other podcasts. I don't know if I should… I'll just give you a few of the highlights here....
I call it the “post-nuclear family” because it's what happens after the nuclear family. The nuclear family is wonderful. I grew up in a nuclear family. A mother, a father, several kids—that's the nuclear family. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's not doing the job. It's not producing enough kids, the nuclear family.
What happens now is a couple, for emotional reasons, they want to have a kid, so they have a kid. They focus all their attention on that kid. That's it. They have one kid. They might have a second kid if they're really ambitious, [and] they stop at two. That's how the nuclear family works, and that's just not enough. It's not enough for all the people like me who have zero kids. So we've got to come up with some system to have more kids.
Now when I talk about “we”, I'm not talking about society as a whole, because I think society as a whole is doomed. The United States as a country is doomed, but your community—whatever you regard as your community, a community of like-minded people or a geographical community—your community is not necessarily doomed because you can organize yourselves in some way to make more babies.
And I propose initially that, let's say, four couples, four ordinary couples like you see today, who want to have kids but don't feel that they can afford to raise them, they decide to pool their resources, and they decide to raise all of their kids in one household. So that's the starting point. And my project from here, my inquiry from here is, okay, if that happens, what are all the implications?
First of all, I'm proposing that the kids be distributed in age so if you have a household of 9 kids, they're evenly spaced from age zero to age 18. It would be every two years if there are 9 kids. If there are 18 kids in the family, they would be spaced every year.
Where do the babies come from? Well, initially they would come from those four couples. Where they come from in the future, that's a big open question, but what I propose is that once a family is established with, say, 9 kids, it always has 9 kids forever. So as an 18-year-old graduates from the family, moves on, we bring in a new baby, and we keep the cycle moving. So this household—which is a physical house somewhere—always has between 9 and 18 kids. Always. And by doing that, what you're building is a sort of family culture, which we don't have today.
What we have today is a man and woman fall in love. They decide to have a baby, and they have one baby and stop, and they haven't had a chance to build a family culture, which is what you have in big families of 8 or 9 kids. You have this internal society where the older kids are doing a lot of the work of taking care of the younger kids, or watching the younger kids, or babysitting the younger kids, and you're developing systems that work.
There was a book, I think in the 1940s, called “Cheaper by the Dozen” about a couple that had a dozen or so children, and they talked about all the systems they use to manage this huge brood. These systems are sort of a software that you develop over time, and if you just have two kids or a handful of kids and you stop, every generation you've got to reproduce that culture.
You wouldn't have to do that if you continuously raise children one after the other. Then the culture and the systems that you build to manage this brood, they're perpetuated, they're preserved, because each child teaches it [to other kids]. There's a certain way that our household works, and each child teaches that way to the younger children.
So that's one element. The other element is that none of the parents that sponsor this group should be living in the household.
So picture a big house. It could be a mcmansion. There are plenty of unsold mcmansions in America. Let's turn that into a big Brady Bunch house. "The Brady Bunch", if you don't know, was a TV series of the 1960s or 1970s, where a divorced couple were raising 6 kids. [CORRECTION: In the show, whether the parents were divorced or widowed is never stated.] In my system I'm proposing raising 9 kids, maybe more, so it's not that too far off. You raise all these kids in one household, but the parents don't live there. The parents live in their own apartments, houses, just as they normally would, and they come into the household for scheduled duties. So if there are 8 parents, one of them can be on duty one day a week, something like that. There's some sort of division of labor. You come in to serve certain needs, to perform your duties, but you do not live there.
The reason for this is it preserves the integrity of the family, because the way adults live should not be the way that children live. If you're an adult and you collect fine china, well, you don't want kids running around in your house, because this hobby of collecting fine china is incompatible with kids. A lot of the things that adults do are things that you don't want kids to be exposed to. Adults can watch movies that you don't want kids watching and if you don't have any adults living in the household, then you can preserve the household as you want it to be—as a sort of protected environment where you control the inputs and the outputs. You control what comes in.
For example, the household can have an electronics policy that concerns how you use computers, what sort of electronics and online services you have access to. You can control that if it's a household just of kids. If you have a mix of parents and kids, it wouldn't work. So parents come in for scheduled duties, scheduled responsibilities and then they leave, and they go back to their own homes.
The analogy I use is a church—like the kind of church that I grew up in. All sorts of different members of the community come in to support the church. They turn up for church functions. They help maintain the church, but they do not live at the church. It's sort of a congregation. This is a family of kids being supported by a congregation of adults, who only become a congregation because they already believe in certain aspects of parenting. They agree on certain principles of how children should be raised.
This is something that requires no government intervention. In fact, you really don't want the government meddling in something like this. This is just 8 adults deciding, “We gotta do something. Our culture is being lost. Our community, everything that we value, is being lost. We gotta do something. We also gotta do something because there's no one to take care of us when we get old”—which is another aspect of my post-nuclear family. I propose that no adults live in the household except the elderly adults who need care.
So imagine a big house, big McMansion. The kids occupy most of the house, but there's a little wing where the old people live, the people who need care. What this allows is the children [can] provide a lot of that care, a lot of that routine care. Let's say you have an invalid grandmother. Well, the kids can at least bring the bringing the grandmother food.
I propose that the kids do as much as they possibly can of the parenting tasks themselves, which is another radical aspect of my system. Today, what happens is you have two parents. They're raising one or two kids. They wait on their one or two kids hand and foot. They make all the meals. They do all the cleaning. They change all the diapers of these one or two kids, and these kids grow up pampered, with high expectations, a high sense of entitlement, which is unhealthy in itself.
What I propose is if you've got a household of 9 to 18 kids, you can now start using the labor of older kids to care for younger kids. That's the way big families have all always worked. If you're a 16-year-old, there's an awful lot of things that you can do to take care of your younger siblings. You're legally capable of babysitting them, but you can also change diapers. And you can also spend all that time teaching a young child language and playing with a young child, which is now entirely falling upon the adults.
So if you grew up grow up in this family, from the moment you're conscious, you're aware that you have a lot of brothers and sisters, a lot of people hovering around you. And most of the people who are taking care of you turn out to be not that much older than you. They could be teenagers. A teenager can do almost everything that an adult can do in terms of the routine care for infants.
Kids can prepare meals. You don't need an adult to prepare meals. You need an adult to bring food into the house. You need an adult to pay the rent, but you don't need an adult to prepare meals. There should be a system among the kids to do that. And you don't need an adult to change diapers, because an eight-year-old can learn to change diapers. And an eight-year-old can learn to talk baby talk to a baby. You don't need a PhD in child development to talk baby talk to a baby.
So I propose that this family system is deeply focused on caring for one another. It's a system that trains children from the very beginning to care for one another. The care you provide to your siblings is dependent on your maturity, depends upon your age and your ability. So you don't have 8-year-olds doing things that they're not capable of doing, but you do want them to do everything that they are capable of doing. 8-year-olds can change diapers just as well as a 32 -year-old can change diapers.
If you're going to develop the system, you've got to have an educational plan. [If] you bring all these kids into your household, it's because you really want to program them. You're creating a household because you want to program kids in your way of life and your way of thinking, so there has to be an education plan. There has to be school.
This is all open as to what school will look like. I see it as homeschooling. The way I would do it is I would hire a professional teacher. If you've got a lot of adults supporting this this family, then maybe you can hire a professional teacher to come in Monday through Friday, 9-to-5, and manage the educational plan of these children—which doesn't necessarily mean teaching. It could be assigning resources. So if you want to teach a toddler how to sing his alphabet, you don't need an adult to do that. You could assign an 8-year-old to do that. You [say], “Johnny, can you can Susie her alphabet.” And you can monitor that situation to make sure it's getting done and to make sure certain benchmarks are met, but a teacher in this system it is more of a resource manager who is assigning resources and not really doing much teaching of their own.
Part of the educational system is formal teaching. You have a curriculum that all the adults have settled on—things that should be learned, books that should be read—and then you have the inherent education of training people to care for each other. So childhood is a training program where we should be training children to care for other children, other people. We should be training children to care for their younger siblings and for those old people who need care. So in this giant household of 9 to 18 kids, there's babies that need to be cared for, and there's also old people that needed to be cared for, and your job as a kid in the middle years is to care for all these people, is to care for one another. This is part of your culture that this family would be inculcating.
At some point, kids get old. They age out of the system. They turn 18. What happens to them? If this is a warm family with lots of interconnections, [I don't think] kids will be raging at the bit to get out. I mean, they want to go out and see the world, but they should also be closely connected to their family even after they turn 18. Part of the job of childhood is to build family loyalty, so that kids, when they're free to leave, to just walk away, that they do stay close and they do stay loyal to the family.
I propose that these children who graduate from the system are expected to support the family in very concrete ways. One of the ways they support the family is through family taxes. If you're a member of a family—either one of the founding adults or a graduate of the family—you are expected to pay a certain proportion of your income as family taxes to support the family back home. You can go and travel. You can take a job in a far distant country, as long as you're sending your family taxes back home. And you're expected to keep in touch with your family, and that's not a big thing. If the family really works in childhood, then people will always be coming back to their families.
And they'll definitely come back to their families when they get too old to take care of themselves. It should be natural that, after you've gone out and made a living and sent money back to your family and done your family proud, eventually you'll come back to your family and care for your family, because people who are in their 60s or 70s can make excellent parents. They're very experienced by then. They can serve their duty as parents in this family [because] they have a lot more time than someone would have in the middle years. Eventually when you get too old, where you need care, where you need assistance, that assistance should happen right there in the same household where you were raised. So obviously I'm talking about long-term thing here. Going from birth to old age, that's a span of 80 years.
I don't see this plan happening anytime soon—not before the collapse, not before the Armageddon, the economic Armageddon—because people aren't motivated enough. People don't see any problems.
You know, there's only a few people who really grasp the problems of underpopulation. Most people think we're still in a population explosion. A remarkable number of people think that we have a population crisis. They're still producing videos about that. This started back in the 1960s with a book called “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich, about how populations are exploding, that we're all going to starve because of it.
Well, it turns out we didn't starve. Most of us didn't starve, and populations fixed themselves all by themselves. They were already doing it by the 1970s, because we already had birth control. People were deciding to have babies instead of just having them. So we do not have a population explosion except in those selected African countries. It's almost exclusively limited in Africa now. Africa and India and a few countries around India are still producing more babies than they need, but that's slowing down, especially in India. Africa remains a crisis, but outside of Africa, we have an underpopulation problem, not an overpopulation problem.
The majority of world citizens just don't get that, just don't understand that [the population explosion] was last century. It's not this century. So only a few people really grasp how serious this is, and it will take a huge economic crisis for anyone to change, anyone to be so motivated that they would want to get together, want to find some like-minded people to raise children with. That could take 10 years or 20 years or 50 years.
Once you embark on this kind of adventure, you're in it for the long term. You want to not just create a family, not just raise kids together, but to create a system where you can continually raise kids, continually produce kids and sustain whatever way of life you believe is important.
