This is an unusual introduction. “I hope your article about us is very salty”, Malcolm Collins says very seriously, barely seated on his royal blue velvet sofa. His wife, Simone, agrees: “Lukewarm things don’t interest me. » With their thick black glasses – square for him, round for her – and their trendy geek look, the Collins don’t look like dangerous agitators. But the two thirty-somethings – he is 36, she is 35 – are on a crusade to keep the pronatalist movement alive, of which they want to be the respectable face. For months, they have been warning about the catastrophe that is looming, according to them, namely “demographic collapse” of civilization. Their credo: encourage people to have as many children as possible.
The couple entertains in their colonial-style stone house, an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The autumn sun streams in through the large windows of their veranda. Their three little ones are still in daycare. Tricycles and fire trucks wait in front of the shelves of toys. After several articles in the American and international press, the Collins’ communication is tight.
We are dealing with well-made heads – he graduated from Stanford (California), she from Cambridge (Great Britain). According to them, a “demographic collapse” is therefore to come and its economic and social consequences would be catastrophic. “Our species is dying,” they wrote in January in a column sent to New York Post. With his machine-gun delivery, Malcolm Collins, black polo shirt over raw jeans, could talk about it for hours. “Collectively, Latin America has already fallen below the generation replacement threshold, India has just crossed this bar, China is well below…”, he explains. That is 2.1 children per woman, the fateful threshold below which a generation cannot renew itself.
Popular in tech circles
The Collins did not invent the term “pronatalist”, which has long been used to describe government policies implemented to promote birth rates. This also refers to disparate groups, religious or not, extremists, who have in common their positions in favor of a high birth rate and which we find in the United States among anti-abortionists, Christian nationalists, ultra-orthodox Jews or white supremacists.
The Collins version, popular in tech circles, is on the contrary intended to be open, modern and scientific. To make their differences heard, the duo cultivates the art of controversy. It was in South Korea, when he worked for a venture capital company around ten years ago, that Malcolm Collins says he became aware of the phenomenon: “South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.79-0.8. This means that for every 100 South Koreans alive today, there will be 6.4 great-grandchildren. No economy or culture can survive with such demographic decline. » And to point out that the United States is today in the demographic situation “where Korea was in the 1990s”.
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