Fun with birth rates and population statistics, from Eugene Kusmiak at unz.com:
Elon Musk often tweets (or x’s) about the danger of depopulation: “Far too many people are under the illusion that Earth is overpopulated, even though birth rate trends are so obviously headed to population collapse”, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse”, etc. Many other people have also recently become concerned about extremely low birth rates in much of the world. Birth rates have fallen to well below replacement level in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and they are now declining sharply in Africa. The “demographic transition” from high to low fertility has happened or is happening everywhere.
Perhaps thanks to Mr. Musk, a lot of people are now discussing population issues – are there too many people or too few, is the global population exploding or collapsing? I’m not going to comment on whether the world has too many or too few people, because it seems so obvious that more people are better than less. But we should at least be able to agree on something empirical like whether we are currently headed for a world as crowded as Hong Kong or as empty as Siberia. And I think we can. Population math is not that hard. It is just arithmetic, so it’s surprising that a brilliant technologist like Musk has gotten this so wrong.
