Crossed wires — Musk, his children and the population decline crisis

Daily Maverick

2 days ago

As has been periodically (and slightly breathlessly) reported for some time, Elon Musk has had 13 children with (at least) four mothers.
No, wait, it may be 14 because a paternity suit is under way. For any average person, this would seem a little eccentric, even with some leeway for his richly displayed narcissism. But Musk has gone on record many times, urgently warning about population collapse. Perhaps this is simply his contribution to mitigating what he sees as a global crisis.
Is it a global crisis? According to sociologist Dr Alice Evans of King's College, it is indeed. She has been studying the subject for a long time and has been very vocal about it. I listened to her on a recent podcast titled Interesting Times, and she went out of her way to disabuse her host (as well as me) of a common misconception.
Most people believe that, as secularism and education (both male and female) spread across the world during the previous century, they were accompanied by reproductive education (and rights), which have been the main contributor to the falling rates of childbirth.
Reproduction rate
All true. However, in the past 15 years, something curious and alarming has emerged. The reproduction rate has fallen off a cliff, not only in liberal Western societies, but in conservative or authoritarian societies such as Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Nepal and China. Worse still, those societies most supportive of child-rearing, like Sweden, which offers a ton of perks (like long maternity and paternity leave), have seen no uptick in childbearing at all.
Even attempts to nudge populations into child-rearing with generous financial incentives have seen little success. Singapore, France and Hungary (which really pushed the boat out with a tax holiday for life after two children) have seen little positive effect and even continuing declines.
The obvious question here is – so what? It turns out there are serious consequences resulting from population decline, which can only be arrested by women having an average of 2.1 children (this odd number stems from children who die before reproducing, as well as the slightly larger male population). Some countries, like South Korea, have seen their rates drop below 1.0. Do a little math and you end up with schools closing, empty commercial buildings, struggling universities and hospitals and the disappearance of child-focused stores (Toys 'R' Us is now a fond memory – it closed 735 stores in 2017, citing declining reproductive rates). The economic impact is frightening.
Smartphones
What is going on here? Evans has a theory, backed by data. Here is the big surprise – the sudden plummet in childbearing began at the same time as the ascendance of smartphones and personal digital entertainment.
Her claim is simple. People (particularly young people) disappeared into their screens and stopped going out, meeting each other, having sex, and bearing children.
Playing Call of Duty and scrolling TikTok are far less stressful than trying to meet and bond with strangers. She calls it the 'coupling crisis.' Forming a sustaining relationship takes energy, some sacrifices and sometimes a bit of luck. Being digitally entertained on your device, including being titillated by online porn, is much easier. None of the messy pitfalls of human interaction need to be negotiated.
She even points to a sort of real-world control group, which is Africa. Smartphone adoption is late on the continent – it has only just begun. And guess what? Birth rates in Africa have not yet fallen.
And then there is marriage. Evans says: '…in the US, over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married, so they're single. And that's the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, in China, in South Korea… If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or coupled is almost one-to-one with the decline in children.'
I am not sure whether the evidence is robust, or correlatory rather than causal – it looks like a difficult hypothesis to prove – but the decline in birth rates and the associated fall-off in marriages is real and vertiginous.
Musk's motivation
Let's return to Musk for a moment. There has been an attempt to tie Musk's position to the 'great replacement theory,' which is a racist view that whites are being replaced by non-whites, with correspondingly extreme proposals to respond to this presumed threat, including breeding programmes.
I don't buy this. I do not believe that Musk aligns with this position at all. I believe his motivations are more, er, personal, if a little weird. I think he just wants lots of little Elons around, who he hopes will be as smart as he is.
There is a related question. While birth rates around the world are plummeting, alarming economists and data-aware politicians, it is also the case that they are falling more slowly in religious and conservative jurisdictions. Again, a little high school maths suggests that political power will shift quickly and irrevocably toward the conservative and the religious.
There have been some Silicon Valley types reaching for technological solutions – artificial wombs, medical and pharmaceutical science to delay the onset of menopause, and so on – but this all seems a stretch to me. The shrinking of our population seems to be baked into our recent global cultural evolution. What a strange irony, given the panic about overpopulation mere decades ago.
People who think about these matters have two substantial shifts in society to consider – the hollowing out of consumer spending as population growth goes negative, and the fast political muscling up of family-minded traditionalists.
As though we didn't have enough to worry about. DM
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, It's Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.