Last December, one of the world’s wealthiest men, with public pretensions to being an intellectual, took the stage at a hard-right festival in Rome named after a character from a 1980s children’s fantasy film, and delivered an astounding streak of falsehoods.
The world’s population will be “one tenth of its current size” within three generations, he claimed. In fact, it is predicted to rise to ten billion. The birth rate, he said, “is maybe half the replacement rate”. Actually, it is above replacement globally. “Farming and cows do not have any meaningful effect on the environment,” he said. “Objectively, this is true.” Objectively, it is not. Methane is the second-biggest anthropogenic greenhouse gas and cows account for about 15 per cent of it. More than once, the host stopped Elon Musk to ask if he meant what he was saying. When he said the low birth rate meant there might not be “enough people to work” in a company in Italy, the host pointed out this was in 50 or 60 years at the earliest. “I think it’s even sooner than that,” replied Musk.
After a display as loose with the facts as this, it would seem a good thing that the Tesla billionaire’s philanthropic foundation – the Musk Foundation – has made one of its largest commitments yet to a demographic research centre at the flagship campus of the University of Texas at Austin. But it seems this centre is the omphalos of Musk’s garbled apocalypticism.
The $10m gift for the Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI), which is led by Dean Spears, Mark Budolfson and Diane Coffey, has received little media attention (before a recent Bloomberg Businessweek feature). The size of the gift is notable in a time of austerity in academia. Although it does not announce itself as such, the PWI is the most well-funded North American research outpost of the movement known as effective altruism or long-termism. This school of thought is associated with the Global Priorities Institute which opened at Oxford in 2018 and was the workplace of the philosopher William MacAskill, whose bestselling 2022 book What We Owe the Future brought long-termism to public attention. Seeded by a $383,000 grant in 2021 by Longview Philanthropy on the topic of “population decline”, the PWI has become an arsenal for the Depopulation Bomb.
MacAskill’s book begins with several pages of gender-neutral pictograms; each figure represents ten billion lives, and the whole series spans the next 500 million years. A full record, he observes, would fill 20,000 pages. Long-termism pays much attention to these future lives. It is this vision of the unstoppable momentum of technologically enabled demographic growth that inspires the bizarre long-termist fixation on space colonisation. It is also the very part of the theory that the Austin scholars want to revise. Citing MacAskill’s pictograms, a working paper from the PWI says that “there might not be a lot of [humans], after all”. The title captures the message: “With a Whimper: Depopulation and Longtermism”. The projections of demographic scholars have fed a growing sense that, like honeybees facing colony collapse, humanity is approaching its own slow but inexorable extinction – it is a victim of its own prosperity and indifference to the conditions of its reproduction.
This is a story about the offspring of a marriage between moral philosophy and demography, and how the attempt to grapple with uncertainty about what is often a very distant future has led to distorted facts of the kind Musk blurted out on stage in Rome, misconceptions that have in turn bent a concern for the species into a paranoid defence of specific European cultures.
If the New Right has long promoted what is known as the “great replacement theory”, by which elites were supposedly encouraging the immigration of non-white populations to replace autochthonous populations, the demographic catastrophists are positing a vision of what we might call a “no-replacement theory”, more dire because it presents the possibility of a world without humans.
As Musk has put it more than once: without humans, we will have no humanity at all. “If there is not at least a birth rate which is keeping population constant, then people will disappear,” Musk said.
“Disappear, Mr Musk? Disappear?” his Italian host asked. Musk confirmed: “Disappear.”
Concerns about demographic decline are not pure fiction. An OECD report published in June this year stated that the world’s industrialised countries have the lowest birth rates in modern times, half of what they were just 50 years ago. The reasons for this are well known and often recited. As countries get richer, birth rates fall as women embark on time-consuming careers that punish time lost to parenting, and people pursue – and can afford to indulge in – callings other than reproduction and child-rearing. Plummeting fertility is in many ways a tribute to the rising autonomy of women in advanced industrial societies. Programmes to help combine parenting and careers can have an effect at the margins but even the poster children for this policy, the Nordic countries, have seen slumps in fertility.
The US had long been the exceptional country, but this relied on specific subsections of the community which are now behaving differently. Hispanic women have halved their fertility since 2008 and teenage motherhood has become rare. Previously seen as too outré and wonkish for public consumption, demographic decline has become a buzzy topic for the media. There was an Economist cover story on “The baby-bust economy” last June. “Suddenly there aren’t enough babies,” read a Wall Street Journal article in May. “The whole world is alarmed.” Grandees weighed in. “Global population crash isn’t sci-fi any more,” read a column by the historian Niall Ferguson. “From the baby boom to the baby bust,” read one by Martin Wolf.
So where should the extra humans come from? How can an ageing population not become an intolerable burden on the state pensions and nursing-home staffing demands of the near future? The intuitive response is: immigration from countries where fertility remains high. Yet even more porous borders might not be enough. Musk exaggerated when he said in 2022 that China’s population is declining by 40 per cent every generation, but at current rates it could decline by a startling 25 per cent. Keeping the population stable would require tens of millions of immigrants and most demographers predict that fertility in sub-Saharan Africa will begin to decline too.
The inadequacy of immigration to keep population steady has plagued discussions for decades. The great replacement may be a right-wing conspiracy theory but the United Nations published a report in the year 2000 on what it called “replacement migration”. The projections were absurd and untenable, pointing out that Germany would need 3.5 million net migrants to keep its population at 1995 support levels. As the memorable title of one criticism put it: “Replacement migration, or why everyone is going to have to live in Korea”.
Beyond the arithmetic, the politics of solving population decline through immigration seems to be moving in the opposite direction. “We need Hungarian children,” said Viktor Orbán in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.” Hungary is also a good example of the limits of policy. Spending roughly 5 per cent of GDP, including permanently lifting income tax for mothers of four and more, has only lifted the birth rate from 1.2 to 1.6, still below replacement levels. Poland attempted a fertility-boosting spending programme but, as Politico has reported, birth rates have fallen to the level of the Second World War.
In his bestselling doomerist doorstopper, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (2022), the demographer, geographer and business consultant Peter Zeihan argues that fertility decline is the trigger for “decivilisation”: “A cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage but destroy the bedrock of what makes the modern world function.” “All countries suffer terminal demographics,” he writes. “The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? Do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light?” From the “Fifth Demographic Summit” in Budapest that brought together Orbán and the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, to “NatalCon” (also in Austin) which united Christian nationalists and eugenicists, the topic seems to animate the right.
A New York Times op-ed last September, titled “The world’s population may peak in your lifetime. What happens next?” included an arresting graphic that showed a typical “hockey stick” line of exponential growth of population – but one that became an ice pick as exponential decline kicked in. The author landed a six-figure contract with Simon & Schuster to convert it into a book: After the Spike: Why Global Depopulation Is Coming Soon and What the Dwindling of Humanity Portends.
What made the graph so striking was the failure to include dates on the x-axis, meaning the spike rises up and then descends precipitously without a clear indication of when this is supposed to take place. It was clear, as the science writer Olivia Nater pointed out, that this was a time scale at least two millennia in the future. In other words, the projection blew past the year 2100, when UN demographers cease to make forecasts. It drifted deep into what demographers concede is the space of pure speculation.
The power of the image, then, was less social science than social science fiction.
The author of the New York Times piece was the economist Dean Spears, the founding director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative. The assistant directors are the philosopher Mark Budolfson and the demographer Diane Coffey. All three are early in their careers. They finished their PhDs about a decade ago, all at Princeton, and all received tenure only last year. The trio has a cameo appearance in the footnotes of MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. It comes in a section discussing the subfield on which effective altruism is built: a corner of moral philosophy, influenced by utilitarianism, called population ethics. The lodestar of the field is the philosopher Derek Parfit. Population ethics has long been stalked by an argument Parfit made in the 1980s. In what he memorably labelled the “repugnant conclusion”, he pointed out that for any number of human lives, we could imagine a group slightly larger that had a worse quality of life.
The tension of this trade-off troubled those who advocated population growth for its own sake: what if those extra lives lived were miserable? The philosophical debate ended in an uncharacteristically definitive way in 2021 when 29 people, including MacAskill, Spears, Budolfson and Coffey, signed a statement declaring that policy proposals should not be constrained by the possibility of running into the problem of the repugnant conclusion.
The shackles of this ethical problem were simply cast off. The vexed balancing act between quality and quantity that runs through utilitarianism had been jettisoned. This could be seen in MacAskill’s delirious advocacy on behalf of the tens of trillions of future lives that marked the opening pages of What We Owe the Future. Yet the reader who got to the end of his book would find that demographic anxiety begin to creep in. MacAskill warned that the sputtering out of accelerating population would lead to across-the-board stagnation and concluded that people could make a difference in three ways: donation, political activism and having children.
Elon Musk loves to have children. He is reported to have fathered 12 at the latest count. He also loves contrarianism. The attraction of the population-implosion message of no-replacement theory is the way it reverses inherited wisdom. Musk’s early life – as with mine – was crammed with the message of overpopulation. There were too many mouths to feed, not enough food; or at least, a maldistribution of food and mouths. Famine in Africa was read as a foreshadowing of a world famine to come. The icon of this line of thinking was the entomologist Paul R Ehrlich’s multimillion-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb.
There was a famous wager between Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon about whether the price of a basket of commodities would rise or decrease in price over time given the increasing pressures of population growth. Simon won, helping cement a theory of Prometheanism and the limitlessness of growth. Humans, Simon titled his most famous book, were The Ultimate Resource. No-replacement theory does something similar. Everything is permitted when the alternative is zero civilisation. “If there are no humans, there is no humanity.” There is a reason why this is Musk’s favourite phrase: it is the ultimate licence. Some have suggested that effective altruism is a philosophy beloved of the wealthy because it tells them that the best thing they can do for humanity is to accrue as much wealth as possible. The greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the investment in breakthrough technologies. Long-termists at the PWI pooh-pooh lowering fertility rates to reduce carbon emissions. On the contrary, they argue, the costs of solving climate change through Big Push investment or carbon capture paid through taxes will be proportionally smaller with more taxpayers.
Another reason demographics is such an entertaining parlour game for the billionaire class is the ideas thrown up through the application of exponential growth curves. An example can be found in the work of Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have proved adept at attracting media attention for their proud pro-natalism, which has amounted to three children with a fourth on the way. They’ve had profiles everywhere from the Guardian to NBC, not only because of their Wes Anderson-esque appearance and giggleworthy names for children (Industry Americus!), but also their enthusiastic use of assisted reproductive technologies including a “Year of the Harvest” when they fertilised 26 eggs for future implantation and used pre-implantation genetic screening to find the “optimum” embryos.
The more colourful aspects of the Collins’ efforts are also in line with a mandate laid out in What We Owe the Future. Concealed in the utilitarian commandment to have more babies for the sake of future economic returns is the concession that those returns will only materialise after at least several generations. MacAskill points out that one will need to create an ideology or a subculture that prizes high levels of fertility for its own sake. A classic example here would be the Mormons, but fertility has even fallen with that religious group.
The pro-natalists are stuck. State policy doesn’t really work. Religion seems to have lost its power to inspire endlessly large broods through either faith, peer pressure or guilt. And attempts to create techno-optimist communes have stalled.
Fears of fewer humans are almost always fears of fewer specific humans. This was true in the 19th century when the French panicked over their shrinking nation and it was true at the height of the Cold War when the spectre of overpopulation was decidedly non-white. In the most iconic novel of the New Right, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, Calcutta slum-dwellers drift in an enormous flotilla of rusted ships to arrive in the south of France where liberals welcome them with open arms, only to be plundered and slaughtered. While long-termist debates speak of humanity as such, racial and cultural anxieties lie just beneath the surface.
In Rome, Musk struck a pose as the defender of the human species but drew his biggest applause when he responded to a softball question about immigration by saying that “we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear”. Italy, he added to further applause, was not its buildings but its people. Implicit in what he was saying was that newcomers could never be true Italians and that something was fundamentally important about a continual inheritance through a population of certain values and habits and tastes. The statistical curve of human population seemed to divide into different subpopulations after all. Demographic catastrophism rescued cultural particularism through the back door.
The New Right has always used multiculturalism against assimilationist forms of liberalism, and Musk is pulling the same manoeuvre only in a language of birth rates. By raising the spectre of no-replacement theory, Musk gives aid and comfort to those who prioritise the protection of a biologically defined cultural community, even if it shrinks in on itself. Saving humanity becomes defending insiders against invaders. Japan and South Korea foreshadow the outcome of this approach. Both countries have a historical aversion to immigration and both are at the bottom of fertility league tables. In 2012, the conservative American columnist Ross Douthat called Japan “a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain” of PD James’s Children of Men. Japan’s birth rate then was 1.4 and Britain’s was closer to replacement level, at 1.92. The UK’s has since fallen by almost a quarter to 1.56. Today it’s Britain itself that evokes James’s infertile Britain.
If the demographic catastrophists acknowledge that even the most targeted interventions, such as in Hungary, have only a small impact, then they are ironically sanctioning a future for countries, including Italy, to look like the most pronounced version of their worst-case scenarios: walled states with populations ageing towards disappearance.
[See also: Is there a progressive argument for pro-natalism?]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024