The “Don’t Have Kids” Argument Has Been Wrong for 1,800 Years
The Doomers Want You to Pre‑Grieve a Future Nobody Can See
Around the year 200, a lawyer turned theologian in Roman Carthage looked at the world and declared it full.
Human beings had become a burden to the Earth, Tertullian wrote; nature could scarcely sustain us, and he counted plague, famine and war as a merciful pruning of overgrown nations. When he wrote that, the entire human species numbered about two hundred million. Indonesia holds more people than that today, on one archipelago, eating better and living longer than any citizen of Carthage ever managed.
Tertullian’s complaint is the oldest surviving version of the argument you’re hearing on every degrowth podcast and in every doomer-laden comment section: the planet is at capacity, its future already spent, so the most irresponsible thing you could add to it is a child.
Every few generations someone makes the argument all over again - theology first, then political economy, then ecology, and now carbon accounting. Every generation updates the numbers but they keep the same, flawed conclusion - and it’s been wrong for eighteen centuries straight.
I see no reason to expect that it will be correct, now.
Malthus writes the workhouse into law
In 1798 an English curate named Thomas Robert Malthus published, anonymously, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Food production grows arithmetically, he argued, but population grows geometrically, and humanity lives permanently on the lip of famine. To Malthus, misery was nature’s own corrective measure, and any attempt to relieve the poor would only let them breed their way back to starvation.
The world held about a billion people when Malthus published. It holds more than eight billion now, and the average person today eats more calories per day than the average Englishman did in Malthus’s lifetime, when England was one of the best-fed countries on the planet. Malthus treated famine as a permanent feature of human life, but it has become so rare that almost every famine of the last half-century took the carnage of war or a cruel and deliberate policy to produce.
Tragically, his novel ideas were granted currency.
Parliament drew on them for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced parish relief with the workhouse on the theory that comfort would only encourage the poor to multiply. A decade later, as Ireland starved, senior British administrators reasoned in openly Malthusian terms that the famine was a natural correction it would be unwise to interfere with too vigorously.
The doctrine that there are just too many people has never once stayed on the page.
Someone always volunteers to decide which people count as surplus.
And the volunteers never nominate themselves.
Borlaug feeds the world Ehrlich gave up on
In 1968 a Stanford entomologist named Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterflies, published The Population Bomb at the urging of the Sierra Club’s David Brower.
Ehrlich opened by declaring the battle to feed humanity already lost, and predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s no matter what anyone did. He was so very charming and so very certain that Johnny Carson had him on the Tonight Show again and again through the 1970s. His book sold in the millions.
He suggested that England might not exist by the year 2000, and floated adding sterilants to the water supply if voluntary measures failed.
While Ehrlich taped television appearances, an agronomist was already doing the work that would prove him wrong. The son of Norwegian immigrant farmers from near Cresco, Iowa, Norman Borlaug had worked in Mexico since 1944, crossing thousands of wheat strains in obscurity for the Rockefeller Foundation. He bred semi-dwarf, disease-resistant varieties that put their energy into grain instead of stalk, and Mexico, a wheat importer when he arrived, was self-sufficient by 1956. In the mid-1960s, with India and Pakistan facing exactly the famines Ehrlich was predicting, Borlaug shipped his seeds across the Pacific. India’s wheat harvest went from around twelve million tonnes in 1965 to more than twenty million by 1970. Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat in 1968, India by 1974. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, while The Population Bomb was still selling. Historians credit the Green Revolution he started with saving hundreds of millions of lives, and his obituaries put the figure as high as a billion.
Ehrlich looked at a projected number of mouths and, in his arrogance or his hatred for the human condition (pick one), saw only the mouth; but every one of those mouths was attached to a brain and two hands, and one of the brains belonged to a farm kid from Iowa whose existence no model of 1914 could have valued at anything much.
The economist Julian Simon argued in The Ultimate Resource (1981) that human beings originate resources, since resources are useless rock and goo until a mind figures out what to do with them. Simon and Ehrlich settled it the old-fashioned way. In 1980 Simon offered a wager: Ehrlich could pick any basket of raw materials, and if scarcity was tightening, their prices would rise over the following decade. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, a thousand dollars’ worth. By 1990 the world had added about 800 million people and all five metals had fallen in price.
Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 but spiritually, he didn’t concede jack shit.
The same years produced The Limits to Growth. In 1972 a group of industrialists and academics calling itself the Club of Rome commissioned an MIT team under Donella and Dennis Meadows to feed a computer model named World3 with assumptions about resources, food and pollution, and the team published the output as a book that sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. Its standard runs showed industrial civilisation overshooting and collapsing somewhere in the middle of the century you’re now living in. Tertullian had scripture, Malthus brought arithmetic, Ehrlich owned television, and the Club of Rome rented a mainframe, and in every case the audience mistook the machinery of the argument for evidence of the conclusion.
Governments enforce it on the poor
You could file all this under “forecasters miss,” shrug, and move on, if governments hadn’t kept enforcing the forecast on actual bodies. They did, within living memory, with the enthusiastic backing of respectable institutions.
During India’s Emergency, between 1975 and 1977, Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay ran a sterilisation drive that handed quotas down to local officials. Those officials sterilised more than six million people in 1976 alone; they told teachers to produce candidates or lose their salaries, and police pulled men off buses. International development bodies funded and applauded the campaign, having treated population control as the central problem of the poor world for a decade, with the World Bank under Robert McNamara at the front of the queue.
China went further. The one-child policy ran from 1980 to 2015, and officials enforced it with ruinous fines and job loss, and in millions of documented cases with forced abortion and sterilisation. Because families limited to one child often made sure that child was a son, the sex ratio at birth climbed to 120 boys for every 100 girls at its peak, and China today has tens of millions more men than women. The state that once fined people for a second baby now offers cash subsidies for any baby at all, and in 2022 China’s population fell for the first time in six decades. The bureaucracy built a birth-suppression machine over thirty-five years and is discovering that the machine has no reverse gear.
The track record of treating children as a quantity to be managed downward: a workhouse, a famine memo, a sterilisation quota, and a missing generation of daughters. The people who paid were never the theorists; they were the poor, the rural, the folks one administrative layer too weak to refuse.
Degrowthers bill the unborn
Today’s degrowthers make the same case in carbon instead of calories. The Austrian-French philosopher André Gorz coined the name, décroissance, in 1972, and the economist Serge Latouche turned it into a movement three decades later. They argue the rich world must deliberately shrink its economy, and by polite implication its population, to stay within planetary limits. Their sacred number comes from a 2017 paper in Environmental Research Letters, where Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas ranked lifestyle choices by emissions saved and announced that having one fewer child saves 58.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, dwarfing everything else on the list. You’ve met that figure a thousand times, usually as a bar chart in which a baby towers over a transatlantic flight like a war crime.
Wynes and Nicholas borrowed the method from a 2009 study by Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax: charge a parent half of their child’s lifetime emissions, a quarter of each grandchild’s, an eighth of each great-grandchild’s, and so on down the centuries, all computed as if per-capita emissions stay frozen at present levels forever. The modellers assume the world achieves no decarbonisation at all, ever, and then bill your hypothetical child for the failure in advance. Analysts who re-ran the calculation under countries’ existing climate commitments found the per-child figure collapsing toward a small fraction of the headline, because your child’s emissions depend on the energy system she lives in, and that system is what the whole climate effort exists to change. A child born this year in a country with a decarbonising grid will emit less per year than you do now for most of her life, and her child less still. Emissions are a function of technology and policy. Population is the variable the modellers hold still because it’s the one that goes viral.
In 2021 Caroline Hickman and her colleagues surveyed ten thousand people aged 16 to 25 across ten countries for The Lancet Planetary Health. Roughly four in ten said climate change made them hesitant to have children, and more than half agreed that humanity is doomed. In 2019 a British musician named Blythe Pepino founded a group called BirthStrike, for people publicly declining to have children until governments resolved the crisis; she later wound it down, worried it had become a vector for despair rather than action. The despair was the product all along: adults told a generation that bringing a child into the world is an act of harm, and the generation believed them.
The data says otherwise. A century ago, natural disasters killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people a year. Today, with four times the population and a warmer planet, annual deaths from disasters have fallen by well over 90 per cent, because people protect each other with wealth, forecasting and infrastructure, and they build all three.
Climate change is a real engineering problem, and tens of millions of engineers, scientists and builders are working on it, and every one of them was once a baby some couple decided to create and raise as a generational, against-the-grain fuck-you to Ehrlich and his crew.
We’ve yet to crack grid-scale storage, scalable carbon removal, and fusion that pays for itself.
But I’d bet on humanity all the way down.
Now the shortage is people
The population bomb already fizzled. The world’s total fertility rate has fallen from about five children per woman in 1960 to roughly 2.2 today, hovering just above replacement, and more than half of all countries are now below it. South Korea’s rate hit 0.72 in 2023, the lowest any nation has ever recorded. Japan and Italy sit at about 1.2. UN demographers project that the human population will peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion and then decline, the first sustained decline since the Black Death, and they have revised that peak downward with each new round.
The arithmetic of who cares for whom has flipped: fewer workers per retiree, fewer young people to staff the hospitals and pay into the pensions, towns hollowing out, and fewer of the unreasonably energetic 25-year-olds who do a disproportionate share of the world’s inventing, a loss no pension model prices. South Korea and China and Hungary and Japan are now spending billions to coax births back, and finding they can barely move the number with those subsidies, because you can’t pay people to want a future they’ve learned to dread.
Nobody audits the people they love
Apply the footprint logic honestly and you can’t stop at children. Your spouse is a consumer, your best friend flies, and your aging mother draws down medical resources at a rate that would horrify a sustainability auditor. Every human being you love is, on the ledger, a stream of emissions and consumption stretching out for decades, and nobody runs the audit on the people they already love, because everyone understands privately what the framework’s defenders deny in public: the people you love are ends in themselves, and no ledger captures them. The child-footprint chart only works on people who don’t exist yet, because they’re the only ones who can’t look back at you.
And the prophets themselves never lived by the prophecy. Malthus married Harriet Eckersall in 1804 and had three children. Paul and Anne Ehrlich raised a daughter. The men who built the intellectual case against other people’s children went home at night to their own. When a doctrine’s own authors won’t live by it, you can decline too.
If you don’t want children, don’t have them; there are decent personal reasons on every side of that choice, and a person who knows their own mind owes nobody an explanation. This essay is for a different reader: who wants kids, who feels the pull every time a friend’s toddler grabs their finger, and whom the forecasters are talking out of the deepest thing they want. The doomers ask you to pre-grieve a future nobody can see, and to pay for that grief with the largest love available to a human life. And for what? A reader who believed Malthus in 1800 forgoes children on the eve of the greatest improvement in human welfare ever recorded. A reader who believed Ehrlich in 1970 forgoes them at the exact moment Borlaug’s wheat is coming out of the ground. A reader who believed The Limits to Growth in 1972 waits fifty years for a collapse the model’s own commissioners outlived. Every generation back to Carthage was born into a world someone credentialed had already declared finished, and every one of those worlds turned out to have more room and more future in it than the experts could imagine, largely because of the very people they advised against.
The doomers will tell you they’re protecting future generations from suffering. They do it by making sure those generations never exist, so that their suffering rounds to zero, along with everything they would have built and everyone they would have loved. No one who has watched a child learn to walk believes the ledger balances, and the people selling the trade have, for two and a quarter centuries, kept their own children off it.
Your child will be born into a declared-finished world. She’ll also be born into the wealthiest and longest-lived civilisation that has ever existed, one her great-grandparents would mistake for heaven, and she’ll improve it in ways you can’t predict, the way Borlaug’s parents couldn’t predict him.
The world Tertullian called full went on to hold everyone you have ever loved.
It hath room for one more.