Bill Nye, a former engineer who wears a lab coat and once hosted a children’s show, is now a “woke” political activist with a Netflix show. He is hardly alone among environmentalists in talking about the need for a smaller human population, but his dive into this discussion has brought him about as much grief as one might expect.
“So,” Nye asked his science-y panel, “should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?”
“I do think that we should at least consider it,” said “ethicist” Travis Rieder.
“Well,” Nye shot back, “‘at least consider it’ is like, ‘Do it.'”
“One of the things that we could do that’s kind of least policy-ish,” replied the ethicist, “is we could encourage our culture and our norms to change, right?”
Not everyone on Nye’s panel agreed with this idea, it should be noted. Rachel Snow of the United Nations Population Fund specifically disagreed and said it’s a human right for families to have as many children as one wants. This is despite — or perhaps as a corrective to — her organization’s historic role as a public relations apologist for China’s one-child policy.
This strain of belief that people are the problem is quite a bit older than belief in catastrophic global warming or even global cooling. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wanted to impose a tax on diapers. Other scientists, including one of President Obama’s advisors, have either endorsed compulsory government regimes of sterilization and abortion or at least (in the case of one of President Obama’s science advisors) as a potentially necessary measure, preferable to the alternative of doing nothing.
In fact, there’s a much easier way of discouraging fertility in developed countries that isn’t nearly as imposing as others. And the United States is already a world leader in implementing this specific solution. Simply avoid a policy of government-mandated paid parental leave.
If you really want to “encourage our culture and our norms to change” in a way that reduces childbearing, this is the part of current U.S. policy that you should most want to keep. In fact, you should probably seek to even go beyond the status quo. Surely there are ways to discourage the many American companies that do voluntarily provide paid parental leave. What better way to make sure people have fewer children than to threaten what’s really important in life, their career?
This would be, of course, a stupid policy. But given the premises — that people are merely consumers of resources, incapable of the creation and innovation that constantly makes for a better quality and less resource-intensive way of life — what do you expect?
Personally, I’d like to see government reward parents, but with a plan that has two features: First, it should reward not only corporate employment but also the choice of parenting as a career. Second, the best policy would spread the burden for parental leave (because it is an expensive burden to pay someone not to work) equally by using the tax code instead of just squeezing the employer who is fair-minded enough to hire people despite their potential eligibility for parental leave.
It’s hard and expensive (both in time and money) to raise children, and it’s something society should encourage (sorry, Bill Nye). Employer-mandated parental leave might make it easier but at the direct cost of skewing hiring decisions against people who have families and discouraging hiring in general. But combine a generous tax credit with the existing unpaid leave, and you’re doing well.
Then again, if your priority is the opposite of this — a smaller population as a curb on global warming — then you should like the existing policy of no paid leave, and perhaps even advocate for repeal of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees unpaid parental leave. You want a reward of time off for those global warming time bombs you keep hatching? As if!
