Underpopulation

Elon Musk confirmed rumors that he had fathered twins with Neurolink exec Shivon Zilis with the remark that he was “doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.” Though Elon, currently a father of 9, plainly was making a quip to deflect a question, he has worried publicly about underpopulation before. Back in 2017 he tweeted, "The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care." Last year he called falling birthrates "potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization."
 
I have a lot of respect for Mr. Musk’s outside-the-box thinking and admire his acumen at turning visionary ideas into remarkable and successful companies. But that doesn’t prevent him from saying the occasional wacky thing. It is wacky to say that earth is underpopulated. There is no underpopulation problem. There are nearly 8 billion people on earth, which is more than 3 times the world population when I was born, a time when no one thought the world was too empty. (The US population was 152,000,000 then; it is 332,000,000 now.) Global population is rising by 83,000,000 per year, which is about equal to the entire current populations of the UK and Netherlands combined.
 
Let’s acknowledge the non-wacky underpinnings of his comments. Fertility rates are falling everywhere. (The fertility rate is the average number of children per woman in her lifetime: a rate lower than 2.1 will lead to a falling population in the absence of immigration.) Wealthier countries, especially in the West and in East Asia, have seen them drop dramatically in recent decades. Singapore, presently the second wealthiest country per capita in the world (after Luxemburg), is a good example. Back in 1972, fearful of a rapidly rising population and a fertility rate of 3.04, Singapore instituted a “Stop-at-Two” policy with economic penalties for a third child, including higher hospital fees and denial of maternity pay. The fertility rate then collapsed, probably for unrelated reasons since the rate also dropped in countries with no such penalties. By 1986 Singapore’s fertility rate was 1.43. In 1987 the government, with fears reversed, not only eliminated remaining penalties, but adopted the slogan “Have Three or More (if you can afford it).” Large families are now given economic benefits but they haven’t helped: the current fertility rate in Singapore hovers around 1.2. Similar, if less dramatic, trajectories were and continue to be repeated across the developed world. This has major demographic consequences for the affected countries, notably a rise in the average age in national populations. This has obvious implications for the labor market, for health care, and for social welfare costs.

 
Nevertheless, the developed world is not the world. According to the World Bank the global fertility rate in 2022 is a solid 2.4. With very few exceptions the countries that have fertility rates below replacement level also have large scale immigration that keeps their populations rising anyway. The exceptions (e.g. Japan, Russia, Hungary, and South Korea) discourage immigration either by intent or just by their cultural insularity, but all could be more open if they chose; so far the current residents simply don’t favor this. For most of the developed world, however, immigration continues apace or is rising. The US population, for example, despite a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.78 is expected to grow from its current 332,000,000 to over 450,000,000 by mid-century. This is based on immigration rates of the past decade, but this may be an underestimate if the surge in immigration in 2022 continues going forward. Underpopulation is not an issue. It was not an issue as long ago as 1968 when earth’s population was a mere 3.5 billion and Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. It won’t be an issue in the unlikely event 22^nd century demographic trends return the earth to its 1968 level.
 
All that said, billionaire Elon Musk is well able to afford his 9 children, and I wish him and their mothers joy of them. But no one needs to self-sacrifice just to help the underpopulation crisis. The crisis doesn’t exist.
 

The Unknown Hinson – Pregnant Again