Ask A Genius 1387: Sex Education, Population Ethics, and Demographic Myths: A Data-Driven Dialogue on Fertility, Race, and Policy

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/16

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore sex education, reproductive autonomy, and global demographic trends. They critique coercive pro-natalism, racialized panic over declining birthrates, and ineffective political solutions. Emphasizing evidence-based strategies, they argue for ethical, values-driven approaches to population support, grounded in human rights and global demographic realities.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Fact-based sex education—there is data—plenty of it. If you want to reduce the number of abortions, the most effective strategy is not banning them—it is providing better sex education. The more informed and educated teens are about sex, the fewer of them get pregnant, which means fewer abortions. So maybe part of the decline in sex is a decline in coerced sex, or that internalized pressure to prove yourself, or to say yes when you are not sure.

Rick Rosner: I was thinking about that today. There are at least four primary reasons for the drop in sex rates. One is a feeling of doom, existential uncertainty about the future. Whether justified or not, it makes people hesitant to bring more people into the world.

Two: the unaffordability of marrying and having kids. Three: the sheer distraction of the modern world—constant entertainment, online interaction, streaming, and games. There’s just so much else to do besides trying to hook up.

Thing four: the avalanche of porn. If you want to have an orgasm, it is easy. You can look at any of the hundreds of millions—maybe billions—of free images and videos available online. That changes everything.

Number five is choice glut. People have access to so many potential partners through social media, dating apps, and reality competitions that they become less willing to settle for anyone.

And those reasons… When you list them like that, none of them are especially noble.

People don’t necessarily abstain for moral or ethical reasons. Sure, there are ethical arguments against having kids—concerns about overpopulation and bringing kids into a volatile world—but those aren’t the dominant forces.

On the flip side, there are arguments that we should keep growing the population. Those usually come from people I think are, frankly, assholes—growth for the sake of growth.

However, again, most factors leading people away from childbearing today are not ethically motivated. The semi-ethical one is, “It is unfair to bring a kid into this world.” 

Jacobsen: But even that is rooted in misunderstanding—a skewed view of how bad things are. I wrote about this. Let metry to recall the framework. So there’s the conservative stereotype: that people who don’t want kids are selfish, nihilistic, and working against “God’s plan.”

Then there’s the capitalist angle—people like Trump or Musk pushing population growth because it benefits economic expansion. And beyond that, there’s a racial subtext: the belief that white people need to have more babies to maintain cultural dominance. So there’s this overlapping racialized pro-natalism.

I looked at the UN Population Prospects—the median variant series 2024. Of 193 UN member states (excluding the Holy See and the State of Palestine), 42 are experiencing absolute demographic decline.

For context, only two were in decline in the 1980s. Then 14 in the ’90s, 8 in the 2000s, 10 in the 2010s, and seven more in the 2020s. So, yes, it’s growing—but bumpy and still just about a quarter of all states.

Meanwhile, 63 countries have peaked, and others are still growing. It’s a mixed picture—not universal collapse. So we’vegot three camps:

1. Conservative scaremongers are painting child-free people as anti-human.
2. Hyper-capitalists and white nationalists are pushing reproduction as a numbers game.
3. And then, ideally, sustainable growth advocates, who argue for measured, ethical, policy-based approaches.

That third camp is where the actual values conversation happens.

Moreover, the growth-for-growth-sake crowd is arguing for valueless expansion—just more people for more GDP.

On the other hand, regressionist market logic is also value-empty. But in the middle—the values-based, human-centred approach—we find universalist principles like those enshrined in UN human rights frameworks.

Ultimately, it comes down to people with functioning reproductive systems—women, and some trans people—and how much autonomy and support they have.

I looked into evidence-based strategies that genuinely help increase sustainable population without coercion. They are:

• Equal parental leave
• Affordable childcare
• Flexible, family-friendly workplaces
• Support for dual-income households
• Reproductive autonomy and accessible healthcare
• Shared domestic responsibilities

That’s the only valid roadmap.

But what are Republicans offering? 

Rosner: A half-baked $5,000 check from Trump for new parents. It’s not just bad—it’s insultingly bad. Exactly. It’s like saying, “Here’s five grand—now go fix a collapsing demographic economy.” It’s embarrassing.

When you look at the programs that work—the ones that increase fertility rates in countries—they offer tens of thousands of dollars in benefits per year. Childcare, paid leave, and family subsidies. All of it.

And $5,000? That doesn’t cover jack shit. Raising a kid from zero to eighteen in the U.S costs about a third of a million dollars, not including private school or college.

Jacobsen: I will jump in here because I looked into this today, so I can speak confidently. So I’ll give Trump and his team a little credit—they’ve got the right idea at the value level. But it’s not evidence-based.

If you had a value like “we want more families” or “we support children,” and matched it with what we know works, you’d have a coherent, effective policy. But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re halfway there—and that, at least, is something you can work with.

Let’s imagine a good-faith version of that proposal. I can give them one piece of credit. I’ve seen people argue—sometimes on social media, sometimes elsewhere—that cultural attitudes matter. If you create a culture that values families and children, it modestly improves fertility rates.

So combine that with strong policy support and financial backing, and you could create an environment where people feel safe having kids.

Rosner: I had a thought—let’s take the racist argument seriously for a second, just for analysis. The one that says “White people need to reproduce more” or that “White people are going extinct.” It’s a shitty argument, but let’s entertain it briefly.

Jacobsen: First of all, white people are already a minority globally. About 1.4 billion out of 8.2 billion. I looked that up for another article. Everyone’s in the minority globally. No matter how you slice it, every racial group is a global minority.

Rosner: But here’s my new thought: Let’s say the worst-case scenario for racists comes true. White people start getting “bred out of existence.” If whiteness turns out to be valuable, it’s easily reversible.

Just isolate the genes responsible for whiteness, which, by the way, are among the most mutable in the human genome. Then move people to wintry climates, let them reproduce for 100 generations, and boom—Whitey re-evolves.

Just good old-fashioned Darwinism. The physical traits associated with whiteness—skin tone, eye colour, melanin levels—are phenotypic adaptations to climate and are some of our most easily shifted traits.

So the idea of a permanent racial disappearance is scientifically absurd. If whiteness is useful, evolution will bring it back. And you don’t even have to go that far. If someone felt the need to preserve Whitey, well—you could just CRISPR people and give them whiteness.

We know the genes involved, and they’re simple. If whiteness ever turned out to be some culturally vital characteristic, you could bring it back. It’s not hard. It’s way easier than bringing back woolly mammoths.

So even in a world where whiteness declines demographically, it’s not lost forever—it’s just paused. So we’re not losing anything by Whitey becoming even more of a minority than he already is. It’s reversible, if the world truly wanted it back.

Now, among all minorities, I’m sure the largest is Asians, right?

Jacobsen: Yes. Okay, let me pull up the data so we can be accurate. These are sensitive issues. First, globally, ancestry is defined in various ways: descent, heritage, nationality, pan-ethnic identity, tribal affiliation, or regional origin.

In the United States, the government uses five broad racial categories for civil rights tracking:

• Asian
• Black or African American
• Native American or Alaska Native
• Pacific Islander
• White (or in your terms, “Whitey”)

Now, in terms of self-reported ancestry in the U.S., here’s the approximate breakdown:

• German: 12%
• English: 9%
• Irish: 9%
• “Unspecified American”: 5%
• Italian: 5%

In pan-ethnic terms:

• Hispanic/Latino: ~20%
• African American: ~14%
• Asian American: ~7%

So if you take German, English, Irish, and Latino, that’s about half of the U.S. population. These are fluid categories, but that’s how the U.S. tends to quantify them.

Globally, it looks like this:

• Han Chinese (Sinitic language family): 17%
• Indo-Aryan (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi): 13%
• Arabic-speaking peoples: 6%

No matter how you slice it—in the U.S. or globally—no one group is a majority. Everyone is a minority, and most are relatively small minorities. There are over 7,000 distinct ethnic groups currently extant in the world. So my argument is: Let’s treat each other as people first, then by group, identity, or heritage.

Rosner: Wait, wait—there’s more. This point cements your argument. Is it a good one? The whole “Whitey panic” is ridiculous. First of all, Whitey has never been a majority globally. You’d have to go back pretty far in time to imagine that, and even then, it would be region-specific.

And I don’t think this is only a liberal obsession with whiteness. It’s everyone’s obsession—because Republican assholes in the U.S., and white supremacists globally, have made whiteness itself into a kind of mythological status that must be preserved at all costs.

Jacobsen: Which is not only scientifically absurd but morally vacant.

Rosner: And I would argue—yes, there are counterarguments—but they’re fucking stupid. The claim that Whitey is disappearing is bullshit, because Whitey has never been a global majority. Sure, racists will say, “White people invented civilization,” which conveniently ignores China, India, and multiple African civilizations. It’s just revisionist nonsense.

That line of argument is both ahistorical and arrogant. It pretends thousands of years of global innovation outside of Europe didn’t happen. Yet, people still act like Whitey’s in decline—as if that’s some civilizational emergency. But again: White people have never come close to being the majority of the world population.

Jacobsen: Yes. That’s everyone’s blind spot. It used to bother me—I never fully understood why until I dug into it recently. And what I found is that Americans project their domestic racial categories onto the entire planet.

Sometimes, it works the other way: the world mimics American racial quibbles, even though those categories make no sense in other cultural or historical contexts. The more objective, global systems of categorization—things like language families, ethnic descent, region, etc.—are much more appropriate. They vary a bit, but they tend to converge on some shared understandings.

The real issue is taking a framework developed for civil rights tracking—valid in the U.S. and applying it globally, as if it were universal. That’s what’s frustrating. People treat a system designed for about 4% of the world’s population as the template for understanding all of humanity.

It does not hold for other nations—culturally, politically, or demographically. And just to be clear, we’re not making a value judgment about Americans or anyone else—we’re just pointing out a conceptual error that gets repeated over and over.

And now, unfortunately, we’re out of time.

Have a good night.

Rosner: Talk to you tomorrow.

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