Fewer children are born, but Elon Musk does not have to fear underpopulation

by time news
  • A declining birth rate is by far the greatest threat to civilization, and the world faces an underpopulation crisis, Elon Musk said on Twitter.
  • The statement is surprising, because a new report from the UN shows that the world population is still growing.
  • According to scientists, there is therefore no underpopulation crisis, as Elon Musk says. Our planet is in danger of becoming overpopulated.
  • He is right that the birth rate is falling, and that could cause problems in the future.

A declining birth rate is by far the greatest threat to civilization.

Elon Musk, CEO of electric car maker Tesla and space company SpaceX, said on Twitter.

The tweet comes shortly after it became known that the multi-billionaire had twins with an employee last year.

“I’m doing my part in the underpopulation crisis,” Elon Musk wrote in the tweet.

Several people are surprised about his firm conclusion, because projections show that the world population is growing. A report from the UN came out a few days ago which estimates that this will be the case until at least 2100.

There is therefore cause for concern about the global scarcity of resources and the influence of population growth on the climate, researchers tell the Danish medium TjekDet. They disagree with Musk that we are facing an underpopulation crisis.

Still, he has a point. Because while life expectancy is increasing all over the world, fewer children are being born, especially in the western world. And that can cause problems in the long run.

More elderly, fewer young people

The global birth rate has been declining for some time. According to the UN report, women had an average of five children in 1950 and 2.3 children in 2021. In 2050, the figure will be 2.1.

Especially in the western world few children are born. In 2021, only 1.5 children per woman were born in Europe and North America – in the Netherlands this figure was 1.54 in 2020. The African countries together have the highest birth rate in the world with 4.27 children per woman, but also here the figure drops.

This decrease is due to the fact that many people are actively choosing to have fewer children than in the past. But it has also become more difficult to have children, says Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen, a demography professor at the Institute of Health Research at the University of Southern Denmark.

One in five couples has trouble conceiving. This probably has to do with the environment in which many people live. We are surrounded by all kinds of harmful substances, such as phthalates, which disrupt hormones and affect fertility,” he says.

“Currently, all high- and middle-income countries are below the replacement level of 2.1 – meaning every woman has to have 2.1 children to keep the population level,” he says.

The declining birth rate in itself is not a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that the world’s population is also aging, says Flemming Konradsen, professor of global environmental health at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen.

Globally, the life expectancy of those born today is on average 72.6 years, compared to 64.2 years in 1990. In many countries, a decrease in the number of births combined with an increase in life expectancy means that the percentage of people in work is falling, resulting in fewer people are left to care for the growing number of older people. Perhaps that’s what Elon Musk means when he talks about a crisis.’

However, it is incorrect to equate the skewed population growth in Western countries in particular with a worldwide underpopulation crisis, according to Torben M. Andersen. He is professor of economics at the Danish University of Aarhus and researches, among other things, welfare models and demography.

‘I can’t quite follow Elon Musk in that regard. At the global level, all forecasts show that the world population will increase. And then you have to look at the resource issue. So, how many citizens are there relative to the resources needed to sustain them,” he says.

“In that light, there’s no denying that we’re headed for overpopulation.”

Solutions are there

All three researchers point out that the demographic problems of more elderly and fewer young people can be solved by, for example, raising the retirement age and taxes, so that people stay longer in the labor market and there is more money to support the elderly.

‘But then people have to be prepared to work longer, save more for retirement, receive less services or welcome people from countries where there is still a birth surplus,’ says Konradsen.

“It’s not necessarily popular or politically easy, but it can be done,” Andersen says.

Solving the global problems of population growth is becoming even more difficult.

“Global resource and pollution issues are more difficult to tackle because they also require global agreement,” Andersen says.

‘And the discussions about the climate show how much time it takes between recognizing a problem and taking actual, coordinated action.’

Differences in Resource Use

The resource problem is compounded if we want to give low-income countries the same standard of living as ours, Konradsen said.

‘Here in the West we use a lot more resources per person than people in many places in Africa, for example. So you could say it’s a bigger problem if there are a lot of Danes than if there are a lot of people living in, say, Mali, because they use less resources there than we do,” he says.

Therefore, Musk’s claim that the world is moving towards underpopulation is simplistic. But conversely, it is also simplistic to say that the Earth is overpopulated, Lindahl-Jacobsen believes.

‘We are already dealing with overpopulation given our way of life, for example in the field of energy supply. We emit so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases that this has led to today’s climate problems. So what is overpopulation or underpopulation? It all depends on how we live.’

TjekDet tried to get a response from Elon Musk, but was unsuccessful.

This article previously appeared on TjekDet.

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