[CLIP] Elon Musk Has Been Sounding the Alarm on Birthrates. Is He Onto Something?—Catherine Pakaluk

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How do shrinking birthrates impact a population?

"When I was a kid, people used to write about it: They would say, in Japan, nobody has cousins. And in Japan, nobody has brothers and sisters…That is today the global reality. It's where everybody's going. They will have fewer and smaller kinship networks.

And so it's led some people to speculate about whether one of the reasons we see so much investment in political identity today, and, we'll say, larger identity politics in general, is because our own kinship identities are shrinking. We don't come from clans or tribes. We don't have extended families the way we used to. We don't have a dozen crazy aunts and uncles.

And so there's some kind of human loss there that I think is difficult to calculate. It's a more atomized society."

- Social scientist Catherine Pakaluk