April 20, 2022
U.S. Total Fertility Rate Alone is Not Enough to Determine Demise of Nation
On January 18, 2022, Elon Musk took to one of the world’s largest social media platforms (Twitter) and shared: “We should be much more worried about population collapse.” His tweet earned 195K Likes, 5,314 Quote Tweets, and 20.5K Retweets. He followed his first comment with two additional tweets, noting first, that: “UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s birth by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is the best case unless reversed.” And, second: “If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars.”
Musk is known for many things including his wealth, business acumen, and tendency to speak freely on critical and/or controversial topics. His assessment on world population – that human population will deplete beyond repair, leaving those left behind to sift through the rubble of yesterday’s civilizations – is no exception. Musk accompanied his tweet with an NPR article, U.S. Birthrate Fell by 4% in 2020, Hitting Another Record Low, from May of 2021. The article, as its title lends, covers the total fertility rate in the U.S. and the decline in the total number of births in the nation. After outlining the many facts and figures pulled to support the narrative of the piece, journalist Bill Chappell notes: “Even before the pandemic, the annual population growth rate in the U.S. was seen falling to its lowest levels in the past 100 years – and the nation’s falling birthrate is just one part of that equation. The number of U.S. deaths had been rising as America’s large baby boomer generation ages. And, immigration, the tool that the U.S. and other countries use to compensate for an aging workforce and population declines, has fallen from the heights reached in 2016, when more than 1 million people moved to the United States.”
We, as a nation, have seen these headlines and figures before. They are as inflammatory as they are inaccurate. Add to that the final sentence of Chappell’s 2021 article, and we begin to see where this theory – that population decline will lead to ruin – begins to crumble. He closes, sharing: “That dynamic has shown signs of a sharp reversal in recent months as a growing number of migrants have been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border since President Biden took office.” While total fertility rate has been below replacement level for some time now, the number of immigrants coming into the U.S. drives our population growth.
Musk’s tweet, along with the NPR article, lead to a much bigger question: Do we, as a nation and a planet, actually want to continue to grow or would a slow and gradual reduction in our numbers lead to a more environmentally and economically sound world? NPG was founded in 1972 to educate all who will listen regarding the need for policies designed to slow, halt, and eventually reverse population growth. We firmly believe that both the United States and the world are already vastly overpopulated, and that we must begin to turn the tide to achieve smaller numbers. We respectfully disagree with Mr. Musk when he states that we should be worried about population collapse. With more than 800 million people lacking safe drinking water and nearly 10% of the world’s people living in extreme poverty, we should be worried about the exact opposite!
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Bruce R Hackney
I am not an educated man. I am an electrician with a GED. However, I realized what nonsense Musk was stating while watching/listening to this twitter thread on Youtube. I had typed in overpopulation or something along those lines and Musk came up in the algorithym. It continues to baffle me that overpopulation is staring us in the face, yet it seems as if nobody wants to acknowledge it….
Joel
In 1970 on the first Earth Day , there were around 3.5 Billion people on this planet . Now , just
52 years later , there are almost 8 Billion people on earth . Q: How did the world get by with only 3 Billion people ? A: Just fine . Humanity was thriving with 3.5 Billion people and there were a lot more wild animals , forests , and open spaces . The notion that civilization and the US can’t exist with fewer people is absurd .
Jerre McManus
I always have one question for anyone who frets over “population collapse” which is: Would your community be more or less stressful to live in if the population density decreased by 20% over the next year? The honest answer is obvious. Higher stress levels in a population lead to higher crime rates, more medical problems, strained personal relationships, and a lower level of overall happiness.
Stuart Hurlbert
Elon’s piece reflects a phenomenon we might call “The Arrogance of the Super-Bright But Narrowly Educated Technocrat”. One of my personal encounters with it occurred when I was invited in 2018 to give a talk on human population issues at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. A few hours before my talk SIO geophysicist Jennifer Haase put out be email to the whole SIO community an attack on me accusing me of belong to “hate groups” and likely to give a talk of dubious quality. The sequelae of her kicking the wrong “sleeping dog” were numerous, hilarious and highly educational for the entirety of SIO, and are described in a 12 page article in a bioethics journal:
Attempts by scientists to suppress discussion of overpopulation: a California case that backfired nicely
Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 29(5): 154-165, September 2019 https://eubios.info/EJAIB92019.pdf
Here three paragaphs that address the “narrowly educated technocrat” issue:
Ms. Haase is presumably an above average geophysicist
if she’s employed by SIO, but that is not incompatible with being completely uninformed or ideologically blinkered on other issues, and willing to shoot from the hip on them as well.
This problem is not confined to academics of course. Consider this quote from a recent piece about celebrity actors, “Hey Hollywood, Smugness Isn’t a Political Strategy” (McArdle 2017):
“[C]elebrities are stupid about policy, often breathtakingly so. On the other hand, so is everyone else. You want to hear some really stupid ideas about policy? Grab a group of whip-smart financial wizards, or neurosurgeons, or nuclear physicists, and sit them down for a nice dinner to debate some policy outside their profession. You will find that they are pretty much just as stupid as anyone else, because policy is not about smart. I mean, smart helps. But policy is fundamentally about domain knowledge, and that knowledge is acquired only by spending a great deal of time thinking about a pretty small set of problems. Funnily enough, this is also how one gets good at finance, or neurosurgery, or nuclear physics.”
Now check out the whole article on line.
Kathleene Parker
I see 2 factors here: One, he ignores (as defined in the last NPG Forum paper), the COLLAPSE of the previous high death rate and two, he buys into media/Wall Street-generated propaganda on “You HAVE TO HAVE growth,” something I heard on Albuquerque T.V. recently though the Rio Grande last summer WAS DRY IN ALBUQUERQUE where it is actually the combined waters of the Rio and the Colorado! And though both Lake Mead and Lake Powell, THE LARGEST RESERVOIRS IN NOTH AMERICA, are substantively at DEAD POOL, or so low that water can’t be DRAWN FROM THEM as the Colorado River, the main source of water in the region flows at LESS THAN HALF NORMS, nor can hydro–you know, for Biden’s plug-in cars–can’t be generated. I keep thinking of the book COLLAPSE and the author pondering why civilizations, like Easter Island kept doing the same things, even though they knew they were in crisis. Well, fast forward to the U.S., the worst drought in 1,200 years and Biden inviting in the world, with many of them settling in desert mega-cities with no idea where they will get water. What irks and frustrates me is we who support NPG know the absurdity of Musk’s statements, but as a lifelong journalist, I confront one reality, no, he is NOT AN UNINFORMED IDIOT, he is no more uninformed than all the rest of our nation or the world dependent upon a handful in Big 6 Media who UTTERLY CONTROL THE FLOW OF ALL INFORMATION–as they previously could not under law!—and who are owned by people who feel it is in THEIR INTEREST to keep us absolutely IGNORANT ABOUT POPULATION or its ramifications to climate, species extinction, or roughly 50 million people living in a region known for catastrophic, PROLONGED DROUGHT. And increasingly, such media centralization and wok ownership of once-great newspapers like the DENVER POST, mean that a time-honored form of trying to speak out is gone, the letter to the editor! This as ‘our’ media criticize state-run media in Russia, when I as a lifelong journalist see little discernible difference in the ‘product’ produced by either.
A trease
This proves yet again, that being a “successful” and I use the word loosely, business man, doesn’t mean you’re not an uninformed idiot. In 1970, when we went to the moon the US and world population was ~200 million and 3.6 billion respectively. Today, with ever more of the worlds resources having to be used to simply support our exploding population there will be, by necessity, far less resources for other endeavors like space exploration or saving the environment. We have opted in to a quantity over quality lifestyle. That’s why billionaires take fun rides into space while millions starve. It’s not an accident that the most stable and successful countries are those with lower population growth rates and those like our neighbors south of the border and places like Africa, with booming populations are desperate to leave. The future way to human prosperity, space exploration and a sustainable environment is not paved by billions more people. Quite the opposite.