How pro-natal is your company? Maybe the SEC should require a ‘Demographic Disclosure’
Timothy P. Carney
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The Securities and Exchange Commission exists in order to regulate the financial sector and publicly traded companies in order “ to promote fair dealing, the disclosure of important market information, and to prevent fraud,” according to the federal government.
So why is it becoming a climate cop?
OPENING DAY: CHANGE IS INEVITABLE AND USUALLY BAD
Why is the SEC requiring companies disclose how their actions potentially affect the climate? What does that have to do with its duties?
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler says that companies should be forced to disclose their climate impact because investors care about climate impact. “It’s about bringing consistency and comparability to disclosures that are already being made about climate risks,” Gensler said, “and investors seem to be today making decisions about this information, these disclosures.”
This is a brand new justification for the SEC to mandate certain disclosures: We think people want to know these facts about a company!
If the Biden administration follows through on this, it opens up a hundred possible things that we could require companies to disclose. Many required disclosures would be trivial and political, but the Biden administration and its supporters believe that climate change is momentous — that it will cause all sorts of societal disruptions for generations to come.
Well, here’s something else that will change every aspect of our life for at least a generation: The Baby Bust.
The birthrate in the U.S. has been falling since 2008, and before the pandemic fell to 1.7 babies per woman. Much of the country is depopulating, and America had fewer children in the 2020 Census than we did in 2010 — not as a percentage of the population, but in raw numbers. The U.S. working-age population has flatlined and will begin a long, steady decline in a couple of years.
Millennials are much less likely to want marriage or children than their predecessors and much more likely to say that they can’t achieve the family goals they do have.
One major contributor to this collapse in marriage and family formation is corporate America. Work and family are increasingly hard to combine. Workism is the greatest enemy of family.
So if I were tasked with demanding a new disclosure from corporations, it should be this: How are your corporate actions affecting the birth rate?
Are you working your employees too hard? Are you providing disincentives for them to have kids? What about your customers? Are you charging family-friendly prices, or are you making family life more difficult? Are you fueling mental instability with your addictive products (gambling, social media) and thus reducing the supply of people who are prepared for marriage and family?
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The questions could be endless.
I don’t really think the SEC should stray this far from its narrow task, but Gary Gensler does. If he believes the SEC should force companies to disclose their impact on civilization-threatening trends, he should start with the Baby Bust.