Elon Musk recently declared in a Wall Street Journal interview: “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate. And yet so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control. It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
Elon Musk has seven children. When the Journal asked Musk if that is why he has so many children, he answered, “I’m trying to set a good example,” later joking, “I practice what I preach.”
This is the exact opposite of what Thanos argued. “It’s a simple calculus. This universe is finite, its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” But Thanos is just an imaginary comic book villain. The real diabolical character is Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. “Society needs rescaling – we’ve got to reduce the size of the entire human enterprise.”
Ehrlich was taken very seriously by the Chinese Communist Party before they officially imposed their One-Child policy. Award-winning journalist Charles C. Mann reports that the birth limit “led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred [as well].”
China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, which was tasked with implementing the One-Child policy, grew into a gigantic bureaucracy with half a million full-time employees and 85 million part-time employees. Ehrlich got an army to impose his vision. According to the Chinese government itself, the policy prevented 400 million births. The primary victims of the policy mandates were females. Mothers suffered, and the Chinese cultural preference for sons meant that girls were aborted more often than boys.
The Washington Post reports that out of “China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives…China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.” and “India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census.”
Abortion becomes much easier to rationalize if you think reducing population growth saves humanity from starvation. A Lancet report in 2016 estimates 56 million abortions occur annually with 15.6 million in India alone. There are 140 million births a year, so 196 million children are conceived and 28 percent are aborted. Imagine if a disease caused 28 percent of children to die within the first 24 hours of life?
The ideology of scarcity has been the greatest virus to ever afflict humanity. The mother of Elon Musk gave us a great gift when she chose to give her son a life. How many Elon Musks, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einsteins have we lost under this deadly ideology of Malthus, Thanos, and Ehrlich?
Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance, available for pre-order at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress
World's Richest Man Says We Need More Children