Elon Musk is no stranger to raising controversy with his practical solutions and low tolerance for nonsense political soundbytes. He made headlines again this last week by contrasting the widely held progressive viewpoint that over-population is ruining our planet.
The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2017
In an interview with CNN Money, Musk explained more fully that the lack of population growth is the true danger — not “overpopulation.”
The core reasoning behind this statement is surprisingly understandable. The concept that overpopulation will doom the earth has been so hammered into the collective psyche of America that thinking outside the box takes a surprising amount of deep thought, yet once examined, it makes sense that slowing population growth in America and other first world countries could be dangerous.
Governments, economies, and cultures require constant population growth to maintain their existence. If a family dies without any children, the family line dies with them — and society is no different.
Look at Social Security for instance. While never a fiscally sound concept, and fraught with other issues, one of the most serious contributing factors to Social Security’s looming bankruptcy crisis is the lack of growth in the next generation of American workers. As baby boomers are retiring and collecting Social Security paychecks, millennials are funding that retirement with payments into the system – but what happens if there aren’t enough millennials to cover those costs? Insolvency and decay.
Further damage is being done to other critical public infrastructure, from the currently volunteer-only US military to the larger economy as a whole. As the number of consumers tapers off and eventually begins to decline, economic growth stagnates and innovation stalls.
We’ve been told for years that burgeoning population growth is killing our planet, and that mass starvation will be the end of civilization, but we may have been looking in the wrong direction. A potentially catastrophic economic implosion could be looming just beyond the horizon — not to mention the earth-altering cultural and geopolitical shifts created by shrinking population demographics. Intervening in a population’s growth trend lines is not an instant process, happening on the span of decades rather than days or months, and the true concern behind Elon Musk’s opinion is that we may realize the disaster far too late to change it.
