Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse

Early 20th-century France faced an existential threat: Its citizens weren’t having enough babies. In 1900, the average French woman gave birth to three children throughout her lifetime while over the border in Germany women were averaging five. For decades, France’s population had hovered stubbornly at around 40 million while that of its European rivals grew larger.

“It is the most significant fact in French life. In no other country in the world is the birth rate so low,” wrote American journalist Walter Weyl in 1912. French society swung into action to avert the crisis.

Pronatalist organizations sprung up, and by 1916 half of all French parliamentarians were part of a lobbying group that pushed policies aimed at raising birth rates. An annual prize was inaugurated, awarding 25,000 francs to 90 French parents who had raised nine or more children. Laws restricting abortion and contraceptives were passed, and mothers of large families were honored with medals according to how many children they had raised.

None of this shifted the trajectory of France’s falling birth rates. “Forty-one million Frenchmen face 67 million Germans and 43 million Italians,” lamented former minister Paul Reynaud in January 1937. “As far as numbers are concerned, we are beaten.

” Reynaud was right, of course, but only for so long. In the decades after World War II, the French population swelled—bolstered by a baby boom and strong immigration. This postwar boom has long since worn off, but France still has the highest fertility rate of any EU country : The much-feared population collapse never came to pass.

Anxiety about falling populations, however, never went away. Now the most prominent public worrier is Elon Musk, for whom stagnating birth rates don’t just represent a crisis for specific countries, but an existential threat to the entire planet. “Assuming there is a benevolent future with AI, I think the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse,” Musk said at an AI conference in August 2019.

The issue is clearly playing on his mind. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he tweeted in 2022. “Mark these words.

” Demographers have marked Musk’s words—but they don’t agree with his dire predictions. “With 8 billion people and counting on the earth, we don’t see a collapse happening at present time, and it’s not even projected,” says Tomas Sobotka at the Vienna Institute of Demography. Even the most pessimistic projections put the world population in 2100 at around 8.

8 billion . This is far below the UN’s more widely agreed upon estimate of 10. 4 billion , but it’s still about 800 million more people than are on the planet today.

Most projections agree that the world’s population is going to peak at some point in the second half of the 21st century and then plateau or gradually drop. Framing this as a collapse “is probably too dramatic,” says Patrick Gerland, chief of the United Nations’ Population Estimates and Projections Section. According to the UN , the only region that will see an overall decline between 2022 and 2050 is eastern and southeastern Asia.

Other regions tell a completely different story. The population in sub-Saharan Africa will almost double from 1. 2 billion in 2022 to just under 2.

1 billion in 2050. In the same period, India’s population will grow by over 250 million to overtake China’s as the largest in the world. For most of the world, population decline just isn’t something to worry about—“either now or in the foreseeable future,” Gerland says.

But what about the very distant future? Japan’s population is already declining, and the country has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world— Japanese women average 1. 3 children across their lifetime. For a population to stay constant, this number would need to be 2.

1, assuming there’s no migration and that life expectancy stays roughly constant. If the fertility rate stays below 2. 1 for long enough, the population number will start to fall.

In Japan, we can see this happening—having peaked at 128. 1 million in 2010, the country’s population slowly fell to 125. 8 million over the following decade.

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 below replacement levels for the next millennium. If that total rate held at 1. 84 babies per woman—the UN’s estimate of what it will be in 2100—the population would fall from 10.

4 billion in 2100 to 1. 97 billion in 2500 and 227 million in the year 3000. As Sabotka wrote over email, “this is not exactly a population collapse, but rather a slow-motion population decline.

” And we’re talking about time scales of millennia . Fixating on global population collapse today is like someone in the year 1000 worrying about the Y2K bug. What might happen in the next 1,000 years that could change the path of population growth? Nuclear wars, pandemics, whole new religions and family preferences, the prospect of colonizing other planets or hugely extending the human lifespan.

Hilary Greaves, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, says that if we really care about maximizing the number of humans on the planet, our top priority should be avoiding any risks that might wipe out humanity altogether. One thousand years is a long, long time. Assuming current population trends will hold over that period might be a big mistake.

For most of human history, our population grew at a crawl: Between 10,000 BCE and 1700 CE, the world’s population grew at a rate of just 0. 04 percent annually . At one point in our prehistory, the human population might have dropped as low as a few thousand people .

Even after the advent of agriculture and the rise of cities, populations would fluctuate as infectious diseases and famines came and went. But in the 19th century this trend of extremely slow growth started to reverse as the number of people surviving childhood dramatically increased. It took 124 years for the world’s population to increase from 1 billion to 2 billion between 1803 and 1927.

Adding the next billion took 33 years, then 15 and then 12 . To people born in the latter 20th century, fast-growing populations seem the norm. “Our mental views are built around this view that a growing population is natural, that it’s more robust,” says David Weil, an economist at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Economically speaking, there is some truth to this. Fertility rates tend to fall as countries grow in wealth and women become more educated. Countries shifting from high to low fertility rates usually go through a period when there are lots of people of working age and proportionally fewer who are very young or very old.

This so-called “demographic dividend” is thought to be one of the main reasons the economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore grew so quickly in the second half of the 20th century. Sooner or later, however, the demographic dividend comes to an end. “Some day the party ends and you’re back to where you are,” says Weil.

But he argues that a slowly shrinking population doesn’t spell an economic disaster. He says that with fewer very young people in a population, as well as older people having longer working lives, the ratio of dependents to working-age people will gradually start to even out, and countries with smaller populations will benefit from innovation in countries that are growing. “I’m quite good with the idea that over the next century or so we’re just going to be adding more Einsteins that are born in India or China or Nigeria, so a shrinking number of people in European countries is not going to lead to technological stagnation.

” Falling populations might even be a thing to celebrate. That’s according to Vegard Skirbekk at the Norwegian Centre for Fertility and Health. In his new book, Decline and Prosper! Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children , he argues that a world with low birth rates could be a much nicer place to live.

When you have fertility that is somewhat below replacement levels, “we can cope quite well with it,” he says. The percentage of the US workforce working in agriculture has steadily dropped over the past century, but productivity per worker has never been higher. Simply put, we can produce more with fewer working-age people today than at any time in history.

With the right policies to redistribute wealth, falling populations could be a boon rather than a curse. Many governments don’t see falling populations in such a rosy light. China’s population will probably peak this year, and after decades of restricting family sizes, the central government is encouraging its citizens to make more babies.

Some cities are offering parents cash bonuses for second and third children , while others have pledged to build cheaper nurseries or cut rents for larger families. It’s unlikely that pronatalist policies can completely turn the tide of decreasing populations. Since 1996, the Japanese government has enacted a raft of policies to try to increase family sizes, but the preference for smaller families has stubbornly remained.

Samir KC, the IIASA demographer, always starts his course at Shanghai University by asking his students how many children they plan on having in their lifetime. This year, for the first time, some students responded by saying that they didn’t plan on having any at all. Rather than simply encouraging people without children to start having babies, societies need to adapt to suit a wider range of lifestyles, says Skirbekk.

There’s some evidence that societies with stronger social welfare nets and greater gender equality have higher birth rates, which might explain why Nordic women tend to have more babies on average than people in southern Europe. Expensive housing is another reason people limit their family size, even if they want more children. Countries that adopt policies to make their societies more fair and equal may bolster fertility rates while also benefiting those who don’t have children.

Meanwhile, countries like South Korea and Japan that have historically limited immigration are having to rethink their approach by allowing people to settle in areas with a dearth of workers. Immigration is also playing a role at a global level. Between 2000 and 2020, immigration to high-income countries contributed more to population growth than babies being born within their borders.

In fact, the biggest population loss today isn’t happening in Asia, but in Eastern Europe, where the UN projects that a combination of high emigration and low birth rates will see populations fall by a fifth in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Serbia. Perhaps one of the real drivers behind Musk’s fear of population collapse is an unwillingness to imagine a world that looks very different from the one he grew up in. More than half of all the increase in global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania.

By that same year, the proportion of the global population over 65 will reach 16 percent—its highest-ever level. Some countries will be struggling to adapt to aging populations, while others will still be growing rapidly. And the world will still not have hit its peak population.

If France’s turn-of-the-century population anxiety can teach us anything, it’s that it may be wiser to make a better world today than agonize over birth rates we have little control over. .