Musk's Mask Is Slipping
To say this is concerning is an understatement.
Musk has said some crazy things over the years. At this point, I feel like I could write an entire book on the questionable things that have passed the billionaire’s lips. However, potentially, one of the most dangerous and revealing declarations Musk has made is that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming” and that “America is trending towards extinction.” You see, Musk subscribes to the idea that in the near future, we will experience a sudden and catastrophic population collapse. So much so that he recently argued that the US eliminate the voting rights for people without children. Not only is this a demonstrably false stance, but how Musk is trying to tackle this made-up problem illuminates the deeply concerning ideology he holds beneath the surface.
You see, almost all scientists who actually study population growth and decline entirely disagree with Musk. Even those who take the most pessimistic population projections estimate the world population will be 8.8 billion by 2100. The UN’s far more supported estimate is a global population of 10.4 billion by 2100. Now, there is evidence across the board that a minuscule decline or plateau in population will happen globally and in the US after 2080. However, experts are almost unanimously stating this isn’t a problem. Patrick Gerland, chief of the United Nations Population Estimates and Projections Section, has even stated that framing this as a collapse “is probably too dramatic.”
Why is Gerland so calm? Well, for a population to stay constant, women need to have roughly 2.1 children in their lifetime, assuming no immigration and life expectancy remains the same. Samir KC, a demographer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna, has looked at what would happen if the world’s total fertility rate stayed at 1.84 babies per woman (the UN’s estimate of what it will be in 2100) for a thousand years. Samir found that the global population would fall from 10.4 billion in 2100 to 1.97 billion in 2500 and 227 million in the year 3000. So, no, there is no imminent threat of population collapse.
This means that Musk’s claim that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming” is factually wrong. Not only that, but it is actually the opposite of what science says. You see, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified population growth “as one of the two ‘strongest drivers’ of carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion.” Basically, renewable energy can’t expand fast enough to meet growing energy demands due to increasing populations, and as such, we are holding on to fossil fuels to meet energy demands. So, a static or marginally declining global population can massively help our fight to save the planet.
Not only that, but the predicted population decline, even in the worst-case scenarios, isn’t a problem. Prof. Alice Reid, director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, stated, “Both lower fertility and smaller populations should be celebrated rather than feared.” Why? Well, lower birth rates are often tied to increased education of women, greater gender equality, and higher living standards. Indeed, one of the major reasons people in developed countries like the US and Japan don’t have kids is because they don’t want or need them.
However, the economy is the other primary reason people aren’t having kids in developing countries. Many simply can’t afford to have kids. Private fertility clinic ReproMed has found that 47% of respondents to their survey are delaying having children for economic reasons. Research commissioned by Forbes also found that 24% of people labelled ‘Dual Income, No Kids’ are not to have kids for financial reasons. A survey of 2,000 US parents of children under 18 found that 1 in 5 aren’t having a second child because it would cost too much.
This means that population decline might actually be a self-correcting issue. While the overall economy will decline with a shrinking population, the average individual’s financial situation will likely improve. House prices will fall, and wages will rise due to supply and demand. As such, the birth rate will increase, as those who are choosing not to for financial reasons will finally be able to start a family.
This is why many long-term global population projections find that our global population will self-regulate and stagnate at a level slightly above our current global population.
So, Musk is wrong. But that isn’t really an issue. He is allowed to be wrong. What’s worrying is his approach to solving this issue.
Take Shivon Zilis, who is director of operations and special projects at Musk’s Neuralink and who had two kids with Elon through IVF. The two didn’t have a relationship; instead, Musk told Zilis that he “really wants smart people to have kids.” Putting aside the workplace ethics here, that is a hair’s breadth away from bad science powered eugenics!
You see, intelligence isn’t actually driven by genetics. Several studies have found that socioeconomic status changes the heritability of children’s intelligence. Genetic factors explain less of the variance in intelligence among poorer families, and the reverse is found in richer families. Even then, intelligence isn’t much of a signifier of success. Nobel Laureate in Economics James Heckman explained that intellectual abilities comprise only 1–2% of career and financial success. In other words, intelligent people having kids won’t make any difference to the general population’s success, output, productivity or ability. But, ensuring better economic status for the working class can. Needless to say, union-busting Musk isn’t really a fan of this approach.
Combine this with the fact that Musk has stated several times that increasing diversity in medical care requires lowering the bar, alluding to the fact he thinks Black and Hispanic races are less intelligent, and you can see how dangerous his point of view is here. It is literally a hop, skip, and a jump away from the false racist eugenics that embolden genocides and Nazism.
This is why his argument that the US should restrict the voting rights of people without children to encourage people to have kids is profoundly worrying. Firstly, this stick approach isn’t likely to push a significant number of people to have kids. Most voting adults in the US are already dissociated with politics as it is. What’s more, adults with kids tend to be older, especially in modern times, and older people tend to be more conservative (at least at the moment), and parents tend to be more conservative than single adults. Musk’s voter restriction idea would undermine democracy and push it to the right. It would also make politics pay-to-play, which is terrible at any time, but when wealth is being stripped from the working and middle class to the upper class like it is today, this will cause a worrying consolidation of power towards the top.
In other words, Musk is displaying key signs of fascism. Namely, wanting to centralise authority, suppress opposition, undermine individual interests for the nation’s perceived good, and having to shift away from empiric science to justify these moves. It’s not just his stance on population growth that highlights this, and if you want to see more examples, I highly recommend Some More News’s piece on Musk’s Hitler Problem. Now, Musk isn’t a fascist, but he definitely is displaying fascistic tendencies. Considering how powerful and potentially manipulative Musk is, this is profoundly worrying. If we want to live in a truly free democratic society, we might have to defend it from people like Musk.
Thanks for reading! Content like this doesn’t happen without your support. So, if you want to see more like this, don’t forget to Subscribe and follow me on BlueSky or X and help get the word out by hitting the share button below.
Sources: The Independent, Wired, BI, The Independent, HP, Parents.com, PubMed, Elvtr, Pew Research, The Guardian