Elon Musk’s Reported $10 Million Donation to Fertility Research Is Deeply Unsettling
Elon Musk’s Reported $10 Million Donation to Fertility Research Is Deeply Unsettling
Just another day of fearmongering about birth rates for the billionaire father of 10.
He is worried about a lack of (white) people on this planet.
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Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization,” accompanied by a list of countries where fertility rates are supposedly in decline
They are in decline everywhere, and it is a serious issue at the levels that it has hit in many countries. It's way, way below the ~2.1 TFR required to sustain a population, which means you wind up with an inverted population pyramid, and a lot of old people needing to be supported by a few young people.
Europe isn't actually the worst-off place -- South Korea, Japan, and East Asia plummeted down even sooner.
Take a look, at, say, South Korea:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2023/
And governments haven't generally had a lot of luck with pulling it up with policy changes.
No. The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
What Musk, and hopefully not you, is worried about is the decline in white people being born.
What Musk, and hopefully not you, is worried about is the decline in white people being born.
What's the source of this claim? It certainly isn't this article that doesn't provide any proof besides wild speculations.
There are nearly 8 billion people on this Earth. Most of them aren't white. The number of white people is regularly decreasing. So where is this population crisis exactly? Unless you think it's a crisis that we're running out of white people.
That's a leap of logic. You are saying that since the human population is not collapsing on a global scale, the decline of population of particular countries is not a problem at all and you somehow associate a donation made by Musk to address this issue with racism. Even the author of the article admits she doesn't know exactly what the money is being used for:
The specificities of what Musk’s $10 million will accomplish remain unclear, beyond Bloomberg’s report that PWI will use it to research fertility, economic growth, and the future of the human population.
He didn't specify particular countries. He said that population collapse is the greatest threat to civilization (wonder who's civilization he's talking about there) and that there is a real population crisis.
If he meant specific countries, why did he not say so?
But sure, the guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa with a father who exploited black workers in an emerald mine and whose car company has repeatedly had problems with racism, the guy who once said that U.S. media and schools were racist against white and Asian people isn't even a little bit racist.
Believable.
If he meant specific countries, why did he not say so?
The tweet from Musk that this article refers to is a response to another tweet that did mention specific countries, ie: Japan, US, China, Singapore, UK, Italy and South Korea. Half of them are primarily non white.
But sure, the guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa with a father who exploited black workers in an emerald mine and whose car company has repeatedly had problems with racism, the guy who once said that U.S. media and schools were racist against white and Asian people isn’t even a little bit racist.
He may very well be a racist, but this article makes a piss poor job to demonstrate the donation was influenced by racism.
The tweet from Musk that this article refers to is a response to another tweet that did mention specific countries, ie: Japan, US, China, Singapore, UK, Italy and South Korea. Half of them are primarily non white.
But they are Asian and he's good with Asians as I already showed you.
Note none of them are countries with high black or brown populations. Can't imagine why the tweet or Musk weren't concerned about those.
The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
It will, however, soon reach a peak and then enter decline. However, that's not the relevant factor -- people in Country A aren't going to cover pensions or education subsidies or the like in Country B. You need individual countries to have something on the order of a sustainable population. That means that the combination of fertility and immigration (if the country has positive immigration; some countries, like many of those in Eastern Europe, have serious net outflow) needs to be sufficient to sustain that country's population.
You can do some of it with immigration, and in the US, we've done quite a bit, but as can be seen by the political response to the European migrant crisis -- a swing to the far right -- populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration. So there's only so much you can do via immigration.
EDIT: Oh, if you were responding to my comment as to "decrease", I was responding to a comment about fertility rate decrease, which is what the article said -- that is decreasing everywhere. I'm not saying that population is decreasing everywhere, not yet.
where fertility rates are supposedly in decline
They are in decline everywhere
The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
Global population will start to decrease as a result of that too. But that's a trailing factor.
populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration.
So they'll shrink and get problems. Either they learn from that and let immigrants in or they'll die out completely. This might be a problem on a national level, but not on a global one.
“Population decline” as a political football right now is just a stalking horse for conservatives to push a homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, and racist agenda. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about LGBT folks not having kids, thinking that the ability to birth children is what defines a woman, lamenting the effects of women’s lib, or worrying about “replacement” via immigration, I could find my own fertility clinic.
I will believe people believe that there is a serious danger in population decline when they start passing policies meant to address it. I will believe they’re concerned about the impact of an aging population when they open the borders to immigration. I’ll believe they’re worried about births when they increase taxes to the point we can sustainably provide pre- and post-birth medical care, pediatric care, day care, and education.
Or we could spend that money on increasing services for retirees and adjust to lower and more sustainable levels of population, rather than doubling down on the idea of infinite growth. We could use the explosion in productivity to benefit the people whose productivity increased, rather than sending all of the additional money gained to the top of the income strata. That seems like less of a population Ponzi scheme.
Let in immigrants so I can retire in comfort on the basis of paying another 40 million people $5/hour to pick my vegetables and cook my food, make having kids not an economic burden that women and families have to sacrifice their careers for, or just make it easier to retire and be taken care of by funneling part of the economic excess from hypergrowth to things that benefit the public.
Otherwise I’m going to continue to thing that the “concerns” about declining population growth aren’t really the concerns in play.