Who's afraid of synthetic wombs?
The latest Twitter drama
There's been some discourse on synthetic wombs lately, and I, of course, need to tell you about it.
It all started in the first days of 2022 when global fertility issues entered the public consciousness. This article from Vox's Future Perfect is a perfect example. It escalated progressively until we reached the climax: a tweet from Elon Musk.
Population collapse is a huge deal. 183 out of 195 countries have gone below the population replacement rate! China, once a population bomb, is now showing a weak fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman. That's even below Japan's.
The world's population is aging. We're not going to fight climate change, boost growth, or come up with new cool stuff this way.
Making babies should be a global priority. Unfortunately, as you know, it's not that easy.
Despite what many people say ("it's because of the chemicals!"), it's not that we can't make babies anymore; it's that we don't want to. Yes, they're cute, but they're expensive. Sorry, babies.
Cost disease is a real thing. Basic needs (rents, food, education, health, transportation) are way more expensive than they used to be. People need to study longer to get jobs; most women have joined the workforce... No one has the time or money to have as many babies as before.
Housing costs play a huge role there. Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood have summed that up perfectly in the Housing Theory of Everything:
Across the developed world, the number of children that women actually have is well below the number they say they would like to have. According to one recent study, after controlling for other factors, a 10% rise in house prices was associated with a 1.3% fall in overall births. Put together with the huge rises in housing costs we’ve seen over the past four decades, this implies a massive reduction in births across the Western world. One report estimated that rises in the cost of UK housing between 1996 and 2014 may have led to 157,000 fewer children being born in that period alone.
Combine these effects with the fact that higher incomes allow people to have more kids because they can more easily afford things like childcare, and housing costs may be causing dramatically fewer children to be born than people would like to have. There is also a fiscal cost to this, of course, but it is fundamentally a personal, human one: fewer brothers and sisters, less time spent with grandparents, and less of the meaning that children bring to their parents’ lives.
These paragraphs really struck a chord with the georgist part of me.
And finally, you need to add in other factors that make people lonelier than before: obesity, fewer local communities, wokeness, Tinder, covid...
As a result, we have a big problem on our hands, and no signs of it getting any better. Even when dictators give people huge incentives to make babies, it doesn't really work.
So, people have started proposing ideas a bit more out of the box.
And then all hell broke loose. A lot of people were offended, insults were hurled. How dare these robot people try to take away the sanctity of pregnancy?
To be honest, I have no idea how synthetic wombs would work and what issues they could cause. Furthermore, I'm not sure how much the burden of pregnancy compares with the burden of child-rearing when considering having children.
But I'll always be in favor of discussing ideas, even uncomfortable ones, if they're a step in the right direction. Please, can we stop being offended by anything?
Thankfully, we got some thoughtful replies, like these from Devon Zuegel and Grimes:
I am also particularly fond of this comment by Amanda Askell:
What people might be missing is the notion of choice. The original comments weren't about how we should force everyone to use synthetic wombs. They were about how we should have this option available for people who want to. If there are possible issues with synthetic wombs, let's try to fix them, instead of downright banning them. Women have the right to do what they want with their bodies, even outsourcing their functions to machines!
Unfortunately, I'm a bit pessimistic that artificial wombs will see the light of day anytime soon. What government would allow even basic research in this direction?
Some people say we're too capitalistic, I say we're not enough.
Noah Smith's I can only promise you that it's going to get weirder is also a good article on the topic.