The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.
The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.
Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.