The orthodox reply is that it’s bad because it affects the population pyramid. A country that runs sub-2 fertility for a while eventually has to support many more older people for each young worker, and so it causes some very significant economic slowdowns.
I’m skeptical that this is the actual contention. When I ask people who say they’re worried about the fertility crisis what its effects on productivity or social stability are going to be, they generally say they don’t know, but also “that’s not really the point”. My guess is the actually emotionally salient answers are that:
They view kids as a Very Important consumption good, and think it’s an obvious sign of things-gone-wrong if people’s subjective opinion is that they need to trade off kids for status
They think it’s prosocial to have children
They like talking about this issue because it highlights flaws with modernity and Standard Liberal Values, similar to how conservatives like to talk about nuclear power because it gives them an opportunity to criticize climate change activists for not seeing the obvious solution to their problems.
They want more highly educated, less religious people to have children.
I don’t think any of these are necessarily bad reasons, but if you want your answer, there you have it.
You left out “they think it’s desirable for people of their own ethnicity, race, and/or maybe class to have children, sometimes because they’re afraid of being replaced by people of other races or ethnicities that at reproduce more than their own”.
This can overlap with your fourth, but it doesn’t have to.
The orthodox reply is that it’s bad because it affects the population pyramid. A country that runs sub-2 fertility for a while eventually has to support many more older people for each young worker, and so it causes some very significant economic slowdowns.
I’m skeptical that this is the actual contention. When I ask people who say they’re worried about the fertility crisis what its effects on productivity or social stability are going to be, they generally say they don’t know, but also “that’s not really the point”. My guess is the actually emotionally salient answers are that:
They view kids as a Very Important consumption good, and think it’s an obvious sign of things-gone-wrong if people’s subjective opinion is that they need to trade off kids for status
They think it’s prosocial to have children
They like talking about this issue because it highlights flaws with modernity and Standard Liberal Values, similar to how conservatives like to talk about nuclear power because it gives them an opportunity to criticize climate change activists for not seeing the obvious solution to their problems.
They want more highly educated, less religious people to have children.
I don’t think any of these are necessarily bad reasons, but if you want your answer, there you have it.
You left out “they think it’s desirable for people of their own ethnicity, race, and/or maybe class to have children, sometimes because they’re afraid of being replaced by people of other races or ethnicities that at reproduce more than their own”.
This can overlap with your fourth, but it doesn’t have to.