Why having more children will save the world

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He has a history of saying the unsayable; thinking the unthinkable; doing the undoable. But that is why we are all enthralled by Elon Musk – the entrepreneur-contrarian who has defied naysayers, short-sellers and tech-sceptics to buck trends and realise vast dreams, from clean cars to rocket ships.

Now, though, he seems to have grasped an issue too thorny, too immovable, even for him. Musk has taken issue with that great establishment nostrum of our age: population – the view that there are just too many of us human beings, and if we want to do good, save the planet, and save ourselves into the bargain, we should all cross our legs and stop having children.

It’s the argument that father-of-three Prince William peddles, for example, in his role as the royal patron of the Tusk Trust, which promotes wildlife conservation in Africa. Four years ago he lamented: “Africa’s rapidly growing human population”. A fortnight ago, he repeated the view that “human population… presents a huge challenge for conservationists, [in Africa] as it does the world over.”

But Musk has no truck with such bien-pensant concerns. “Humans are the custodians of other life on Earth,” he says. And while he does not go as far as those who consider the fretting of rich white people about expanding African populations (due to double by 2050, to 2.5 billion) as a kind of “eco-fascism”, he does think we have got it all wrong when it comes to population. It is not too many people we should be worried about, he said at an event earlier this week, but too few. Birth rates do indeed present “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”, he added. But it is falling birthrates that are the problem.

All of this may sound like palpable nonsense to those in this country struggling to find an affordable home, or to secure a GP appointment, or a place for their child at a packed nursery or that outstanding-yet-hugely-oversubscribed local school.

It is not just environmentalists, in other words, who have become enthralled by the Malthusian mantra; every day we learn that resources are stretched. Surely, the simple logic runs, resources would become less stretched if there were fewer of us after them?

That’s not how Musk sees it. “There are not enough people,” he said on Monday. “I can’t emphasise this enough, there are not enough people.

“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,” he said. “Please look at the numbers – if people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble, mark my words.”

 

Elon Musk: ‘I can’t emphasise this enough, there are not enough people’ – AP

At first glance, looking at the numbers does little to bolster Musk’s argument. A thousand years ago, there were only around 320 million people on the planet. Then, 300 years or so ago, our numbers exploded. In just a century from 1700, global population almost doubled, from 600 million to 1 billion. No wonder Thomas Malthus, that demographer célèbre, issued his most famous warning of population catastrophe in 1798, just as mankind reached the billion mark. Yet that warning was swept aside by the sheer scale of change. In the two centuries since, we have increased more than sevenfold, to the estimated 7.7 billion of us on the planet today.

And we’re not stopping yet. According to UN figures, global population growth isn’t forecast to flatten until the end of this century, by which time there are projected to be almost 11 billion of us on the planet.

But importantly, this picture is very uneven. Asia will reach its tipping point half a century earlier, in 2050, and lose more than half a billion people in the rest of the century. In South America the picture is the same. Swathes of Europe, too, will soon see not so much a population boom as a population bust.

Take Romania, population just under 20 million today, forecast to collapse to 12 million by 2100. Or Italy: 60 million today, only 40 million in 2100. These are dramatic changes. Birth rates in developed countries are commonly already far below the 2.1 children per mother replacement rate. America’s fell to 1.86 children in 2006 (though it has recovered slightly since). In Britain, according to the ONS, “The total fertility rate for England and Wales in 2020 fell to 1.58 children per woman, the lowest since records began in 1938.” Worldwide we are hitting what the celebrated data analyst Hans Rosling famously called “peak child”. It is a trend accelerated by the pandemic, as parents have put off having children until better times. That is a familiar historic occurrence. Bad news – from recessions to climate change – hits birth rates.

Musk considers this to be a wrongheaded heaping of woe upon woe. In his mind, good times – economic growth, spreading prosperity, scientific, medical and technological advance of the kind whose Western-world ubiquity, in the memorable phrase of novelist Tom Wolfe, enabled “the average burglar-alarm repairman [to live] a life that would have made the Sun King blink” – have all been accompanied by population growth.

“Population collapse is a much bigger problem than people realise,” he tweeted earlier this year. Not least, perhaps, because the conventional wisdom of those UN forecasts was challenged last year by an influential study, published in The Lancet, suggesting that the world’s population will actually peak in 2064, far earlier than expected, and have declined by 2100 to 8.8 billion, 2 billion fewer than usually thought. “The societal, economic, and geopolitical power implications of our predictions are substantial,” noted researcher Professor Stein Emil Vollset at the time. “In particular, our findings suggest that the decline in the numbers of working-age adults alone will reduce GDP growth rates that could result in major shifts in global economic power by the century’s end.”

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With six children of his own, you might say Musk is doing his part. But there are those who feel that, like Malthus before him, he is doomed to failure; that no one can stand up to the juggernaut of demographic trends.

Among them is Parag Khanna, author of Move: How Mass Migration Will Reshape the World. He believes that declining populations will lead to an “all-out war for talent, recruiting young and able-bodied workers… to stave off an economic decline driven by demographic deflation.” Britain, he says, is lucky. As one of the few countries where climate change might actually make life more clement (others include Japan, Canada and Kazakhstan), he argues this island will be attractive to immigrants who will be able to take their pick of hollowed-out destinations. Perhaps that is why the UK’s own population is forecast by the UN to buck European trends and add another 10 million by the end of the century – and still be growing then.

Inevitably Musk, not one to shy from big problems – or indeed to miss an opportunity of promoting his wares – has a solution to the shrinking-population driven worker shortage that he fears is to come: the Tesla bot. “What is the economy?” he asked, introducing the 5ft 8in, 9st humanoid robot this August. “The economy is essentially labour.”

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If the bot works (and he suggested a prototype may be ready as soon as next year) “it will be quite profound”, shifting society to a place where “physical work will be a choice” and there may no longer be “any actual limit to the economy”.

But a life of ease and bounty should not, in his mind, stop us having children. Because to worry about a crowded Earth is ultimately, he insists, to miss the point. Humankind must, for its own security if nothing else, settle and populate not just this planet, but many others too, starting with Mars.

“Mars has a great need for people, seeing as population is currently zero,” he tweeted this summer. “Let us bring life to Mars!”

vnexplorer