Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, said this week that low and rapidly declining birthrates are “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.
“There are not enough people. I can’t emphasise this enough; there are not enough people,” he told The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council.
“So many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control. It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble, mark my words,” the father of six added.
His comments come as more people are opting not to have children, citing concerns such as climate change and inequality. Two experts give their verdict on the tech billionaire’s views.
Robin Maynard, director at Population Matters
We know what’s happening to the climate, particularly in rich, developed countries such as the US, where Elon Musk lives and works. It’s a very high fossil fuel producing and using country, much like the UK and other European nations.
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We know that we’re challenging our ecosystem, and if there were fewer of us consuming less, many more of us could live far better, particularly those people in the poorest countries, which are hardest hit by climate change.
Even the most optimistic projections from the United Nations suggest that we’re likely to see about two billion more people on the planet by the middle to the end of the century. So this idea that our population is declining is mythological and optimistic.
If Musk wanted to really help humanity, the best thing he could do would be to turn his attention to addressing the unmet needs of the 270 million women in the world that the UN has estimated are without access to safe contraception. This would reduce the impact on the environment because there will be fewer feet on the planet.
There’s something patriarchal and chauvinistic about Musk suggesting that having more and more children is the way to save the planet. Everyone in the global north should think about having a smaller family.
Our carbon footprint is 16 to 20 times that of somebody who was born in sub-Saharan Africa.
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A fantastic initiative called Project Drawdown looked at the top 100 available solutions to climate change. Much to the researchers’ surprise, No 2 was educating girls and enabling access to safe, modern family planning. Those measures could prevent more carbon dioxide over the next 20 to 30 years than all onshore and offshore wind combined.
I love people. I don’t want them to have a “ghastly and uncertain future”, which was the phrase used by a number of scientists who recently reviewed papers looking at where climate change is taking us.
There’s no shortage of young people to keep us thriving as a civilisation, but we need to prioritise space for nature and our ecosystem. Take the heat off the planet.
Chris Murray, professor of global health at the University of Washington
I think this idea from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that there’s a population explosion is coming to an end, so Musk is right on that.
Our view as compared with the United Nations is that once women have access to education and opportunities to pursue careers, on average they choose to have about one and a half children. If you lay that out over time, that leads to the world population peaking in 2060, then declining.
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And if every woman, on average, chooses that they want to have one and a half children, a few centuries along the line there won’t be many people left, so Musk is also correct that civilisation could crumble.
We’ve been so used to the idea that we have a population explosion, and now it’s about getting people’s minds around the challenge that we’re rapidly shifting to declining numbers, with the exception that there’s still high fertility in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
When there’s below replacement-level fertility you get an inverted population pyramid. You get more people in the age group older than you than the age group younger than you. That has rather extreme implications for social security, stability, fiscal stability and health insurance.
I think in places where our population is declining, most people would agree that helping women to have children and also pursue careers is both good for society and gender equality.
Most governments in the high-income world are thinking the opposite of putting limits on women having children. They’re thinking of how you support women to have a job and a family.
