Go Ahead And Hate Elon Musk's Super Babies, But He Is Right About Pronatalism
Anti-natalism policies kicked off the eugenics movement and social Darwinism. Now history is repeating itself.
Elon Musk really likes babies. He likes them so much he has given them cutesy humanist names like X Æ A-12 Musk.
But before you hate on Musk (or anyone having large families), let's discuss a cheerier subject — the fall of humanity.
Stay with me…I promise there's sex in this story.
It all began with one of the fiercest fisticuffs in history. On one side was English economist Thomas Robert Malthus. On the other side was the philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
If you have ever taken an economics 101 class, you have probably heard of Malthus. He's the gloomy curmudgeon who predicted that as populations increased exponentially, food supplies would only increase linearly, leading to food shortages and an eventual population die-off. Thus, Malthus advocated controlling birth rates by eliminating "defective" people through sexual restraint. Malthus called this theory "The Cycle of Misery."
Not a fun guy, that Malthus.
Marx (also not much fun) cried bullshit. To Marx, the problem was not overpopulation. The problem was how capitalism put resources only in the hands of the elite, leaving the working class hungry. And if the land-owning class would just play nice and share, famines wouldn't happen.
Of course, Marxist debates continue today, but Malthus was dead wrong. We didn't have the doom and gloom population collapse he predicted.
Today, Malthus' 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, is considered one of the most short-sighted and intellectually flawed arguments in demographic history.
It’s flawed for several reasons. When Malthus wrote his treatise, the population was only one billion. Poverty was rampant, and life expectancy was a depressing 50–55 years. Today, the world population is edging close to 8 billion. Now, the U.S. life expectancy is 77 years, and a middle-class person would be considered a Baron by eighteenth-century living standards.
But Malthus' overpopulation theories were not only wrong; they had devastating consequences for the poor.
Malthusian science stems from some squirrely syllogistic logic. Basically, if you alleviate poverty, poor people will have more sex, and sex leads to more children, and more children leads to overpopulation, and overpopulation leads back to poverty. Until…famine self-corrects populations and the people having sex die.
I told you I would tie it back to sex. I always do.
Regardless, Malthusian science really screwed over those sex-loving Irish people during The Potato Famine of the 1840s. At the time, Ireland was under British rule. The British government subscribed to Malthusian theory and reasoned that starvation would reduce surplus populations, which was the natural ebb and flow of population distribution.
This wasn't "let them eat cake." This was — let's just let one million people slowly die of starvation.
Today, the Malthusian argument still gets repeated on TikTok and Reddit boards.
It goes something like this: The earth is reaching its capacity and cannot handle any more resource-draining humans. Then these population doomsayers trot out some whatabousim argument on why people having tons of kids really suck. What about global warming? What about pollution? What about the starving children we can't feed?
While it is true that overpopulation affects global warming, starving children will go hungry with or without population growth. The two are not correlated.
Yet many look at those having large families and see them like deer herds that must be controlled or picked off lest they eat your vegetable garden.
Deers are not humans. Deers don't even wear pants…yet. Most importantly, deer don't produce their resources. But humans do. We are very industrious. For example, I am eating a bioengineered Impossible Burger as I write this article. It's delicious. Please don't kill my children or sterilize my womb if we run out. We can make more burgers.
I jest, but these collective illusions hurt society. Most economists, scientists, and demographers worry more about declining birth rates than overpopulation.
But it's not overall population growth or decline that should alarm people. It's where we are experiencing population growth — only in older generations — the people not having sex.
Fewer babies have been born in the last decades, but more people live longer. In 1960, 9 percent of the U.S. population was sixty-five and older. In 2018, 16 percent of the population was sixty-five and older. Demographers call this inverted population growth.
Inverted population growth comes with dire economic consequences. With an inverted population, as people age, society lacks a younger working class to support the retired class. So your retirement will look a tad less posh without anyone to fund social security or rising healthcare costs. Then the economy goes broke, the collapse of humanity happens, and god damn it…no one gets to have sex!
The U.S. childbirth rates have been dropping since 2007, and many economists are worried. To maintain the current population size, every American woman must have 2.1 children each.
But that’s not happening. In 2017, the birth rate was 1.8. In 2020, the U.S. birth rate was 1.64 — the lowest in thirty-two years.
It's been called the great "baby bust," and it has progressives and conservatives spitting flames with a hot new buzzword — pronatalism.
Pro-natal policies are incentive programs to encourage couples to have babies. If that sounds like a Handmaid's Tale dystopia, you have probably been getting your news from TikTok.
Progressives (primarily childless ones) fearmonger these policies as the monster under the bed coming for your womb, but pronatalism proponents do not want to turn women into baby-making machines. The main goal of pro-natal policies is to correct dropping birth rates, so older adults don't die in hovels. More importantly, these policies help struggling mothers in poorer states.
Some of the recent pro-natal policies include;
- The personal exemption (pre-TCJA)
- The Child Tax Credit (CTC)
- The Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC)
- Bennet-Romney's proposed Young Child Tax Credit (YCTC).
I won't mince words. If you are against pronatalism, you are also against supporting childcare tax incentives and any policies that alleviate the burden of childcare from mothers.
Conservatives' hands are not clean in this debate either. They want to incentivize marriage first and childcare second. There is a reason why the states with the most draconian abortion laws also have the highest maternal and infant mortality rates.
Between the fray are reproductive-aged women who are frankly sick and tired of everyone telling them what they can and cannot do with their uteruses. Big families. Small families. Zip it!
Here are a few myths surrounding the pronatalism debate.
Myth: Pronatalism oppresses women
Author of Tomorrow's People The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers, Paul Morland, has a different spin on the Atwood-Esque outcome tied to pro-natal policies.
Morland compares Sweden and Greece. Sweden has the second-highest birth rate in Europe, while Greece has the second-lowest birth rate. Yet over 60% of Swedish women participate in the workplace, while only 43% of Greek women are slogging it to work. (They must be at home having sex.)
Morland points out that these statistics seem counterintuitive. If Greek women are staying home, then they should be having more kids. And if Swedish women are more career-driven, then they should be having fewer kids. But that is not what is happening.
The reason is simple. Countries like Sweden have generous parental leave programs and tax breaks for parents.
And it's not just Sweden. In almost every country with incentivized pro-natal policies, childbirth rates are higher, and women have greater equality.
Myth: Pronatalism harms democracies
Recently, Putin revived the Stalin-era "Mother Heroine" Award — a payment of 1 million rubles ($16,500) for any Russian mother who births at least ten children, provided they all survive. (Not the exhausted mother. The kids.)
When Putin gets behind pro-natal policies, it's understandable to get concerned.
Putin is no fool. He is also a student of history. In speeches, he declared, "Russia's fate and its historic prospects depend on how many of us there are…."
In an article for The Atlantic, the author of What to Expect When No One's Expecting, Jonathan Last, shines a harsher black light on this debate. He argues that when birthrates from authoritarian regimes outnumber birthrates from liberal democracies, the authoritarian societies "inherit the earth." In other words, there is strength in numbers.
Myth: Billionaires are going to seed the population with super babies leading to another eugenics movement
Recently, I have read several sensationalist articles fanning some very tiny flames into conflagrations.
The brainless Chicken Littles claim that Musk and other billionaires will start a race of super babies who inherit the earth.
When you ask these alarmists how tech billionaires plan to accomplish this goal, they give you a blank stare — the same one they give when consuming conspiracy theories on TikTok.
But I understand why Musk's "we need more smart babies" nonsense raises hackles (and sells newspapers). His dramaturgy is reminiscent of the eugenics movement — the immoral pseudoscience that sought "racial improvement" by only allowing whites and intellectuals to procreate.
The eugenics movement began in America in the early 1900s, led by Charles Davenport (1866–1944) and Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton advocated for a superior human race where only the fittest and above-average intelligent couples procreated. The Nazi party later championed eugenics to create an Aryan race. We all know how that ended.
Today, Americans prefer to forget eugenics' homegrown roots because of our natural propensity to erase history that has the stink of ignominy.
And boy, does our shit stink. Some of our national heroes — Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, Francis Crick, George Bernard Shaw, and Alexander Graham Bell— were huge eugenics proponents. But you won't see their names in the eugenics column in your child's history textbook.
But what is genuinely depressing about these debates is the eugenics movement began with anti-natalism policies, not pronatalism policies. Proponents of the eugenics movement advocated starving the proletariat and implementing sterilization programs. And they succeeded. More than 60,000 Americans were sterilized during the eugenics movement's heyday.
Extremists want you to believe that pronatalism is a grim Hobson's Choice between Elon Musk's super babies or Putin's handmaids. And if you are a true Malthusian misanthrope, you might even utter platitudes about when people create more people, troubles arise.
Actually, humans are pretty awesome. We can accomplish some amazing feats when we come together in this Panglossian sing-along. Pro-natal policies are pro-social policies.
Whether pro-natal money incentives will increase the birth rate is a thorny subject. Most economists argue that it may work but will be costly. At the very least, I suspect most couples would jump for joy if they had Sweden's parental leave programs.
Either way, if we don't implement pro-natal policies, we might be having a different debate in the future. One Malthusian prediction might come true — "The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes."
And that is going to result in some strange billionaire baby names.
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator with only two children. For more info: www.CarlynBeccia.com
