Zero Offspring Behaviour

ZIRPs, ZOBs, and collapsing birth rates

Now that interest rates are being raised and the tide of cheap credit is receding, we are, in Warren Buffett's words, seeing who has been swimming naked.

ZIRP (zero interest-rate policy) phenomena refer to the kind of ludicrous investments made by venture capitalists in the past decade, things like:

• The Metaverse, which came to be associated with a fake world populated by legless NFT avatars.

• Piles of e-scooters from multiple different firms.

• Juicero, a machine that squeezed a pouch of juice.

• Free unlimited hosting of online content.

ZIRP is a fascinating topic, but it has been done to death. Instead, I want to write about the domestic version of the same phenomenon: Zero Offspring Behaviour. ZOB, for short.

A sculpture from the Degrow exhibition by Bene Bergado

The characteristics of ZOB are having lots of time to devote to obsessions, a lack of family responsibilities, and a sense of being a participant in history rather than everyday life.

I started thinking about ZOB when Barbenheimer became a thing. It was inconceivable that anyone with kids under 14 could dedicate an entire day — or two evenings — to cinemagoing. Barbie and Oppenheimer are both worth seeing, but turning them into a zeitgeist-defining event is a ZOB.

Once I noticed one ZOB, I started seeing ZOBs everywhere:

• Attending a yoga retreat is not a ZOB (there were plenty of parents and even kids at the one I was at in Spain), yet going on a ten-day silent meditation retreat is.

• Effective Altruism (based on the ideas of the childless thinkers Jeremy Bentham, JS Mill, and Derek Parfit) manages to be ZOB and a ZIRP phenomenon aligned as it was to the speculative crypto dealings of Sam Bankman-Fried.

• Nerdy obsessions, in general, are a ZOB. See, for instance, my favourite Comic Book Guy scene. Yet, bizarrely, running ultramarathons is not.

• Existential philosophy is a ZOB. The ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Sartre are difficult to imagine if they had had a regular domestic life. In a godless world, these philosophers are akin to celibate priests.

There are some potential paradoxes and exceptions to the rule.

Modern thought is grounded in the ideas of three fecund thinkers. Charles Darwin had ten children. Karl Marx had (at least) seven. Sigmund Freud had six. Whereas modernist literature was the preserve of the childless. TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust all seemingly took art more seriously than everyday life.

I am, of course, not judging anyone who chooses a child-free life or has childlessness thrust upon them. This is simply an observation that helps one make sense of the world. Nevertheless, as someone who does not have children, such discussions are never entirely academic. These choices have societal ramifications.

Birth rates across the world are plummeting. In South Korea, the birth rate is set to plunge to 0.7 in 2024. Given that a country needs a birth rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population this means that if the trend continues, within a few generations, there are going to be 94% fewer South Korean children. In Scotland, the figure is 1.22. It is a long way from the average offspring in the 90s sitcom 2point4 Children.

Such figures are welcomed by degrowth and climate activists as a necessary brake on human overpopulation. The carrying capacity of the planet is a hotly debated topic with people like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich predicting mass starvation, while others trust human ingenuity to solve problems like soil degradation and polluted waters.

When a clip of primatologist Jane Goodall appeared on Twitter recently advocating a reduction in the human population to 450 million, she was accused of being genocidal. She had been speaking at the World Economic Forum, a group seen by conspiracy theorists as the puppet masters behind our debased modern life. This is the same organisation that has previously promoted eating bugs and owning nothing. Now there is no evidence that Goodall has plans to murder people, but voluntary euthanasia is becoming more common. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll see suicide booths to gain carbon credits?

Given that many progressive activists argue for degrowth, it is ironic that 23 films that form Marvel's Infinity Saga ultimately lead to Thanos, a utilitarian environmentalist who wants to prevent resource depletion through a Malthusian population cull. The result, in the film, is that everyone is miserable, but Thanos might contend that the next generation would be happier. Such arguments are not countenanced in the Marvel universe where life is sacred.

The question of why birth rates are plunging has drawn many responses. It could be due to reduced fertility or increased individualism, high house prices or fears of climate change. Either way, with fewer people having children, we can expect zero offspring behaviours to increase.