Polaris was 3.5 degrees off true north in 1492. Portuguese navigators knew this. They didn’t rename it or find a better star. They built the Regiment of the North Pole — a correction table that used the Guards of Ursa Minor to calculate where the actual pole was, relative to where Polaris appeared to be. The star kept its title. The procedure absorbed the error.
Replacement fertility — 2.1 children per woman — functions the same way in demographic policy. It’s the fixed star. When rates drop below it, commentators search for the perturbation: smartphones, housing costs, feminism, anxiety about the future. Each explanation is a correction factor, an attempt to determine how far the observed rate has drifted from the natural baseline and what force pushed it there.
The argument that names capitalism as the unifying cause doesn’t escape this structure. It replaces many small correction factors with one large one, but the reference point stays. The assumption remains that 2.1 is where the pole is, and something is dragging societies away from it.
Axial precession doesn’t drag Polaris anywhere. It moves the pole. After enough centuries, the star you called “north” is just a star. The Regiment worked because the drift was slow and the voyages were short. But the procedure conceals a question it can’t answer: at what displacement does a reference point stop being a reference point and start being a name for where the pole used to be?