Issue 9 | 25th March, 2023 | 11 minutes reading time
Heyo, Multitude readers, and a happy end-of-March to you. Somehow, we’re already here - three months through 2023, surrounded by the faltering remains of our new year’s resolutions. Writing Multitudes is the only resolution I’ve stuck to, though today’s issue is different than I intended (and also a few days late). I’d wanted to write about my many literary encounters with Oliver Sacks, but that’ll have to wait a bit. Instead, today we find out what unites Elon Musk having kids with his employees, weird Japanese sexual theatre, and Russia resurrecting a part of its Soviet-era legacy.
In the last few months, it’s felt like everyone on my Instagram feed has got married. In what feels like a violation of some law of nature, some of them are even having kids. I can’t fathom it; we barely stopped being children ourselves - how do they feel comfortable creating our own?
And yet they are, because having kids isn’t actually a violation of nature’s laws - it’s obedience. We’re hard-wired to propagate our species. What I can take solace in, though, is that I’m not alone in feeling this way. More and more people are having fewer (or no) kids. And there’s enough of us doing so for these small individual decisions to have really big consequences.
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Tim Urban posted an interesting infographic on Twitter recently. He divided all of human history into a hypothetical 1,000-page book. For the first 999 pages, Earth was home to less than 1 billion humans. Somehow on the 1,000th page (the present day), over 8 billion of us have shown up. Since October 2011 alone, we’ve added over a billion. More people in just over a decade than in the first 99.9% of human history.
Clearly, there are a lot of humans around. Whether you think there are too many likely depends on where in the world you are. Elon Musk believes we’ve got too few people (which he’s single-handedly trying to solve by having children with employees), especially since we’re going to be colonising other planets soon. This is what he said news of those children broke:
Less dramatically, if you’re in East Asia or Europe, you might genuinely be worried about dwindling populations, particularly of young people.
Statistically, countries need each set of parents to have 2.1 children to sustain population levels. In South Korea, only a quarter of this are being born. In Japan, it’s a little over half, but the country’s already got the oldest proportion of elderly people in the world. There are so few children that Japanese art supply companies are shutting down - there just aren’t enough customers. The few young people in the country are flocking to cities, leaving its villages in a dramatically termed “demographic death spiral”.
Despite being the world’s most populous country until recently, China’s experiencing this as well. Though its government denied it for a while, the country’s population reported its first decline in 60 years this January. The last time China’s population fell was because of the Great Leap Forward Famine. Disastrous as it was, birth rates boomed after the calamity. This time, that’s less likely. Europe’s going the same way. With the elderly increasingly outnumbering youth across the world, The Economist has declared that we’re now in the “Age of the Grandparent”.
This is triggering alarm bells for a couple of reasons. At an existential level, these societies are worried about vanishing from the planet. More practically, many of them have strong social welfare systems funded by working tax-payers. The problem is, they’ve got ever more senior citizens demanding welfare and fewer workers paying taxes to fund this.
So, governments are working overtime to find solutions. There are some basic policies to start with - giving families money, time and support to make raising children less burdensome.
But these vanilla solutions aren’t always enough. In China, for example, a legacy of the one-child policy is the 4-2-1 family structure. In each family, there are four grandparents, two parents, and one child. That one child often has to provide for the 6 elderly. No wonder they don’t want to add another dependant - a kid - to the mix, even with government support. More broadly, couples are turning to the DINK lifestyle (double income, no kids) because raising children is expensive. How can any policy compete against a snazzy acronym like that?
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Well, some governments are certainly trying, and they’re getting creative. None more so than Japan’s, where the problem actually goes a little deeper. The country has a record-high number of single people; in 2011, among unmarried people, 61% of men and 49% of women between 18-34 weren’t in any kind of relationship. A third of under-30s had never been in a relationship (though these figures only documented heterosexual couples). A 2013 survey showed that almost half of Japanese women between 16-24 despised sexual contact. In 2015, 40% of single Japanese people weren’t interested in finding a partner. The problem’s so deeply entrenched that there’s a common name for it - the “celibacy syndrome” or sekkusu shinai shokogun.
Japan’s legislators haven’t taken kindly to this, criticising the “lack of romantic ability” of its youth. It isn’t surprising, though; Japanese society is largely conservative and any public displays of romance or affection are heavily criticised. In the 1970s and 80s, this repression found a strange escape through the country’s artistic underbelly, as described in a strange scene from Ian Buruma’s memoir A Tokyo Romance:
On the revolving stage, a few of the girls broke into friendly smiles and slowly made their way to the edge, where the condoms and other props were laid out. One or two picked up a dildo or a cucumber and entered several transparent square boxes that were cranked up noisily over our heads. An old-fashioned Japanese ballad began to play on the sound system, something about a lonely mother waiting for her son to come back from abroad. Tsuda whispered in my ear that it was a wartime song.
“Now watch closely,” said Tsuda, who was an old hand at these things. One by one, the girls on stage moved to the edge and beckoned men in the audience to come forward and join them. Meanwhile, above us, in the transparent buckets, girls were busy inserting cucumbers and dildos into their vaginas.
The government’s not giving up on its un-romantic citizens, though. To spice up their dating lives, it’s set up AI algorithms that pair singles up (who needs Tinder when you’ve got the government playing cupid?). In April, it’s going to deploy “marriage concierges” to provide romantic expertise. The city of Tokyo’s doing its best to make sure that once people are matched up and on a date, it goes well. They teach them the “art of dating” and appropriate conversation when out with someone. They’ve even got photographers that will take flattering photos of you and stylists/makeup artists to help you look your best.
Russia’s been going through its own demographic spiral in recent decades. Its population has been falling since the mid-1990s, making it a land barren of babies. Though it’s trying to take advantage of global warming and build settlements in Siberia, it doesn’t really have the people to do so. The COVID-19 pandemic and their invasion of Ukraine have only worsened this. To quote The Economist
“Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10m.”
Vladimir Putin, caught up in nostalgia for Russia’s lost glory, is reviving the Soviet-era “Mother Heroine” award. It’s given to women who have ten or more children, thanking them for their ‘service to the nation’. Apparently, over 430,000 received the honour before the collapse of the Soviet Union (though I haven’t been able to confirm this from multiple sources). Its modern avatar comes with a monetary award of one million rubles (approximately 10 lakh rupees), which the government hopes will spur a great baby-making extravaganza. It seems generous until you consider the cost and, more importantly, the effort of raising ten children.
Of course, there’s one solution that can reliably help these countries out in just a few short years - immigration. These (primarily western, developed) nations can let in more people from developing countries where populations are growing, but that often lack adequate education and employment for these growing populations. To be fair, this is happening; since the 1990s, European population growth has been driven by immigration. But political sentiments today don’t favour this; Central European leaders signed a statement in 2021 that read "[i]ncreasing the number of European children is essential to preserving Europe's Christian culture and other religious traditions for future generations." At that meeting, Andrej Babiš, then Czech Prime Minister, said, "[t]he only sustainable solution against the extinction of Europe is to increase the birth rate."
Recommendations
It’s a little ironic that the International Monetary Fund recently published an article that called ageing “the real population bomb”. This was a reference to a 1968 book titled The Population Bomb, which essentially predicted that overpopulation, especially in developing countries like India, spelt the downfall of humanity (and, worryingly for the western world, the spread of communism). The mania it triggered contributed to things like China’s one-child policy, forced sterilisations in India during the emergency, and the growth of female foeticide in India. Mara Hvistendahl’s brilliantly written Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men tells the harrowing tale of how this came to be. It’s in my top three non-fiction reads of all-time and I’d highly recommend you check it out.
Utopia, a show by the BBC, illustrated one of the most creatively insane ways to ward off a potential overpopulation crisis (far better thought out than Thanos snapping his fingers). The trailer’s below, and you can find the first couple of seasons on YouTube. It was unfortunately cancelled, and the American remake (I haven’t watched this, though it’s available on Prime Video) didn’t make it past the first season either.
Anyhoo, that’s it for this issue. Hope you like the venture back into trivia-territory. Feel free to share this with other curious people you know below.
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Till next time,
Shantanu