I don’t hold any illusions that the news media will suddenly cease its scare tactics about lower birth rates in certain industrialized countries. But we can stop paying attention.

A recent example in The Washington Post is The Demographic Time Bomb That Could Hit America, by award-winning journalist Catherine Rampbell. I have no doubt that Rampbell is a bright and informed person. However, as with so many of the other fearmongering articles and op-eds about the dropping birth rate in the U.S., she makes a critical error — the assumption that our growth-based economy is the be-all, end-all, the only thing worth protecting.

This one cites government statistics showing that the U.S. birth rate is dropping, but then almost immediately pivots to Japan (which is the focus of the rest of the piece). Japan, like Germany and a few other nations, has seen its birth rate drop over the years, to the point that younger generations are much smaller than older generations. “Why does this matter?”, Rambell asks rhetorically. She answers:

“Well, it’s hard for an economy to grow with fewer workers. And as more people age out of the workforce, a swelling number of retirees must depend on a shrinking number of working people to power the economy. The tax base required to fund public services for those retirees — including health care and elder care — also shrinks.”

This is the entire idea behind every scare tactic think piece on the dwindling birth rate. (1) Young people must work to support old people. (2) Fewer young people means less support for old people. (3) The economy must always grow. All three are assumptions that only come true if we ignore a variety of other facts.

Taking them in reverse order... The economy doesn’t always have to grow. It is, in fact, the constantly expanding economy that is responsible for the ongoing depletion of the planet’s resources. Each year, already, we consume 1.7 years’ worth of resources. If we want our descendants to have somewhere to live, with a quality of life even close to what we experience, then our economy needs to shrink. We need to extract and burn fewer fossil fuels. We need to produce, buy, and throw away fewer plastics. We need to reduce our rates of rainforest razing, pasture-paving, subdivision building, and so on. No amount of free-market logical circles can change the size of our planet or its finite amount of resources.

Secondly, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of young people — folks just now reaching child-bearing age — to support the very people who brought the planet and global economy to the brink. I think this is only the assumption because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, and that’s never a good reason for anything. It was a cheap and easy way out in years past, when populations were steadily expanding — tax the current workers to support today’s retirees. But it was never a sustainable plan, and never should have been assumed to be longterm solution. Putting the onus on newly minted adults to pump out babies in ever greater numbers just because older people don’t have the means to support themselves is absurd. Especially considering that brand new adults are typically on the lower end of the wealth and income scales.

And thirdly, young people should be working to support themselves, first and foremost, and if they choose to do so without having children, it can’t in any way be logical that this makes them suddenly to blame for larger generations from decades ago.

It wasn’t young people, either adults or children today, who set up the whole economy backward, rigging it so each generation is expected to produce more babies than the previous one in order for the oldest generations to live comfortably. It was in fact the older generations who set it up this way, apparently without realizing their descendants might someday choose to have fewer babies.

“But”, you might ask, “still, what about the older people?” No, I would never propose anything as drastic as reducing public services for retirees, cutting pensions, or withholding medical care. I think it’s fairly obvious that they, as a group, aren’t to blame for the way things got set up; it was only a greedy small percent who rigged the game this way. But I also think it is (or should be) fairly obvious what the solution entails — at least in general principle.

Picture something with me. I’m imagining two piles of money. Both piles are roughly equal in size and value. One pile is currently assigned to about 99% of the world’s population. The other pile is for one percent of the world’s population. This is how the world’s wealth is divided in real life. Now go back to that first pile. That pile isn’t distributed evenly among the 99%, is it? No, it turns out that almost all of that pile belongs to older people. That’s true in most First World countries. If we assume children technically don’t own anything, then they have zero wealth. Young adults typically begin with zero wealth and often (especially in the U.S.) incur dramatic early debt — for education, housing, and transportation. So they have negative wealth, as a group.

Now, having pictured those two piles of money — one belonging to a very small group of mostly heirs, CEOs, stockbrokers, etc. and the other belonging mostly to middle class older people — does it make sense to go looking for the tiny sliver of the pile that belongs to poorer young people, when you need money for public services? No, it does not.

I do have a political ideology on this topic, but right now I’m talking about math and practical ways to pay for public services that benefit us all. The math says to head for the pile that belongs only to a small number of very wealthy people. That’s going to be your easiest source for supporting anything. Not the pile that is already thinly divided amongst billions.

As it turns out, Japan, Germany, and the U.S. aren’t just three countries with falling birth rates; they’re also three of the wealthiest nations in the world. In the U.S. especially, wealth is concentrated in a handful of corporations and families and gets noticeably thinner the more people you add to the equation. This is why it strikes me as ridiculous to start by assuming the non-wealth-having youngest generations should be responsible for supporting the more-wealth-having older generations. Can you imagine Robin Hood robbing the poor to help support other poor people? He would be no hero.

Conclusion

To save the environment, we must eventually cease growth of both the population and the world economy — and hopefully someday shrink them both. As for the aging generations, we must stop expecting unwealthy young people to foot the bill.