Many extreme proposals begin from a real constraint and answer it badly. Housing is scarce, care consumes time, careers punish interruption, and raising children competes with the income required to support them. Abundance may not remove the moral question, but it can change which tradeoffs remain necessary.
Forms of abundance to explore
- Cheap energy, automated construction, and a much larger supply of family-sized housing.
- AI and automation that reduce necessary paid labor without making human care disposable.
- Healthcare that heals infertility and protects pregnancy without industrializing reproduction.
- Education that becomes less expensive, less credential-bound, and easier to combine with early family life.
- Transport and remote work that allow extended families to remain geographically close.
- Public wealth or social dividends that recognize caregiving without making parents employees of the state.
Recovering mechanisms from bad proposals
- Replace compulsory dependency with material room for freely assumed obligation.
- Replace state matchmaking with institutions that help people meet and commit.
- Replace the exclusion of women from public life with careers that accept pregnancy, care, and uneven seasons.
- Replace reproductive production with medicine ordered toward healing and the protection of every life created.
- Replace demographic nationalism with communities confident enough to welcome children and newcomers.
- Replace uniform central plans with plural experiments that people can enter, leave, imitate, or reject.
Questions to resolve
- Does abundance raise fertility, or merely make low-fertility individualism more comfortable?
- Which constraints are genuinely material and which are cultural or relational?
- Can benefits be durable enough for families to trust without becoming politically impossible?
- What forms of abundance strengthen marriage and kinship rather than substituting services for them?