1. Demographics

For a smart guy, Elon Musk is pretty dumb.1 Today he tweeted out the following:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming

4:27 AM ∙ Aug 26, 2022

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198,753Likes24,032Retweets

This is incorrect.

Not the > / < risk calculation, but the idea that we face “population collapse.” That is not a thing.

Once upon a time I wrote a book about fertility rates and demographics. It’s pretty good, actually. If you will forgive the immodesty: My book turned out to be exceptionally prescient. More or less all of the trends discussed have continued. It’s a good place to start if you want to understand demographic change.

Here’s the precis: Fertility rates are falling more or less across the board. There are a thimbleful of countries where they remain elevated, but pretty much any society which transitions to modernism sees marked declines in fertility. Nearly every developed country is below the replacement rate.

Depending on the rate of fertility decline, most demographers expect world population to peak in the next 50 to 100 years and then begin a slow decline as demographic momentum dissipates.

In my book I explain why, on balance, this is a dangerous situation that we ought to care a lot about. And it has nothing to do with population “collapse.”