Billionaire Elon Musk continues to talk about his concerns of a population collapse and falling birth rate. He has been advocating that people focus on having more babies.
Last month he tweeted, saying, "population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming."
One of Musk's followers replied on Twitter, "Most peers of mine who don't have kids are hesitant or unwilling to make the lifestyle sacrifices necessary for being a good parent." Musk agreed with the comment.
Demographers and geographers across the world disagree with Musk's theory of "population collapse." According to them, the global population is growing, despite declines in some parts of the world.
According to the United Nations' global population projections, the world's population is projected to reach 8 billion by mid-November.
The global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in just eight years. By 2080, the world's population is expected to peak at 10.4 billion. There's a 50% chance that the number of people will begin to decrease by 2100.
A report from The Lancet predicts that the global population will drop to about around 8.8 billion people by 2100.
The UN report suggests that the fertility rate has not "collapsed," nor should it, but it has dropped significantly. In 1950, women typically had five births each, compared to 2.3 births globally last year. By 2050, the UN projects a further global decline to 2.1 births per woman.
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What Demographers Say
"He's better off making cars and engineering than at predicting the trajectory of the population. In some countries, the population is declining. Still, for the world, that's not the case," CNN quoted Joseph Chamie, consulting demographer and a former United Nations Population Division director.
According to Ken Johnson, a senior demographer at the Casey School of Public Policy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, in the U.S., the fertility rate is down due to a "significant" decline in teen births.
He said the other driver was a drop in births to women in their 20s. That trend has been around since 2008. People put off or decided not to have babies, partly because of the recession.
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"Births are way down, Covid pushes deaths way up, and then immigration is quite slow, too, so it is no wonder that the population growth rate is so low when you bring all those factors together simultaneously," Johnson added. "Is it a collapse of the number of births? No, I wouldn't say that."
Another demographer and a senior fellow with Brookings Metro, William Frey has said that he doesn't see the need for more couples to have more babies to address the age imbalance in the United States.
Photo: Courtesy of NVIDIA Corporation on flickr
