Elon Musk Contra the Demographic Collapse

In opposition to inhabitants management advocates equivalent to Bill Gates, the futurist and father of six warns that the world is having too few infants.

Rejecting outdated predictions of the penalties of unchecked inhabitants development promoted by inhabitants management advocates equivalent to Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, Elon Musk has been warning us for the previous few years that the actual menace is the proven fact that we’re not having sufficient youngsters. In truth, Musk—a father of six—appears to consider that our very survival is at stake if folks don’t start to have extra youngsters.

In a June 21, 2019, tweet Musk explicitly rejected inhabitants doomsayers like Gates and Sachs by warning that the actual inhabitants situation is an growing old and declining world inhabitants by 2050, not “overpopulation.” Musk adopted that tweet with one on July 26, 2021, when he wrote that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” Citing Norwegian tutorial Jorgen Randers, whose e-book 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years predicts that the human inhabitants will begin dwindling round 2040, Musk has mentioned that the world’s inhabitants will start to appear like an inverted pyramid over the subsequent three many years: “Demographics, stratified by age will look like an upside-down pyramid with many old people and few young.”

Earlier this month, Musk received a variety of consideration when he instructed these gathered at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council merely that “There are not enough people…I can’t emphasize that enough, there are not enough people.” For Musk, the low start charges might contribute to a societal collapse:

So many individuals, together with good folks, suppose that there are too many individuals in the world and suppose that the inhabitants is rising uncontrolled. It’s utterly the reverse…have a look at the numbers—if folks don’t have extra youngsters, civilization goes to crumble, mark my phrases.

With fertility charges at an all-time low in 2021, Musk is refuting the doomsayers who’ve been warning of uncontrolled international inhabitants development. In 2011, Sachs wrote an alarmist op-ed lamenting the start of the “7 billionth individual.” The Sachs answer to this supposed downside—selling inhabitants management via elevated international entry to abortion and contraception—runs counter to the teachings of the Catholic Church, but Sachs is commonly an honored visitor speaker on sustainability at the Vatican. In truth, in October 2021, the pontiff named Sachs to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. This, regardless of the proven fact that for Sachs, “sustainable growth is the stabilization of the global population.”

Likewise, Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda have spent the previous twenty years selling international inhabitants management by coupling their philanthropy to international international locations with household planning alternatives. In February 2010, at an invitation-only “Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference” in Long Beach, California, Gates supplied the keynote speech on “Innovating to Zero!” which supplied an equation demonstrating that inhabitants development was the main contributor to the enhance in CO2.

Gates has claimed that every particular person on the planet places out a median of 5 tons of CO2 per yr, and signifies that there isn’t a such factor as a wholesome, excessive inhabitants development nation. For Gates, should you’re a wholesome nation, you’re low-population development.

Gates will not be alone in coupling international support with inhabitants management. In a 2008 e-book titled Fatal Misconception, creator Matthew Connelly writes that in the Nineteen Sixties, President Lyndon Johnson leveraged meals support for household planning throughout crop failures in India, thus creating an incentive for the nation’s sterilization program. According to Connelly, India’s Ministry of Health and Family Planning admitted that, “The large numbers of sterilizations and IUD insertions during 1967-1968 was due to drought conditions.” Eventually, extra subtle incentives equivalent to bicycles and radios have been used to encourage girls to just accept sterilization. Under Indira Gandhi in the mid-Nineteen Seventies, sterilization grew to become a situation not only for land allotments, but in addition for irrigation water, electrical energy, ration playing cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises and promotions. There have been sterilization quotas—particularly for the Dalits (the untouchable caste), who have been focused for household planning.

China—which as soon as sought to regulate its inhabitants via its coercive one-child coverage—now finds itself turning to insurance policies that incentivize girls to have extra youngsters. The new Three-Child Policy in China has been applied to mitigate its most precipitous decline in inhabitants in many years. While for years the ruling Communist Party applied insurance policies to gradual the development in inhabitants, it now finds itself in an period of contraction in complete inhabitants measurement. The decline in the start fee and a rise in life expectancy implies that in China there are too few staff in a position to help an unlimited and growing old inhabitants. Incentives haven’t labored and in 2018, the complete variety of births in China fell to fifteen.2 million, a drop of almost 12 p.c nationally from 2017. The New York Times writes that some cities and provinces have reported declines in native start charges of as a lot as 35 p.c.

Although Musk has gotten some consideration for his warnings of inhabitants implosion, Sachs and Gates nonetheless maintain sway in most conversations about sustainability and inhabitants management on this nation. In a lot of California’s largest cities, pets are changing folks. Earlier this yr, San Francisco was named “the most childless” metropolis in the nation with the proportion of kids in the metropolis falling to 13 p.c. The metropolis’s proportion of youngsters beneath 18 is even decrease than New York City’s 21 p.c. Documenting the declines way back to 2017, the New York Times launched a younger San Francisco couple dwelling in a compact studio house on the fringes of the Castro district “with their demanding 7-year-old whom they dote on and take everywhere: a Scottish terrier named Olive.”

The future appears bleak, except we start to concentrate to the warnings Musk has made. The 2017 analysis revelations that sperm counts for males dwelling in the West have plunged by 60 p.c since 1971 reminds readers of P.D. James’ nice dystopian novel, The Children of Men, with its chilling prediction of a future society that may not reproduce. Set in Britain in 2021, James’s horrifying fiction described a world of mass infertility—a world by which no youngsters had been born in additional than 25 years. In the novel, the final child to be born is now an grownup and the inhabitants is rising steadily older. Few marry, even fewer fall in love, and suicide is rampant. Recalling the spiritual rituals that used to accompany the start of a kid, the rectors of the Anglican Church in the dystopian society often supply baptism ceremonies for the kittens of the growing old childless {couples}—replete with bonnets and christening robes for the feline companions.

No one needs to dwell in such a world. It is time to start to concentrate to the warnings of Elon Musk—and reject the inhabitants management zealots equivalent to Gates and Sachs.

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.