Pronatalism has been getting a lot of attention lately as the likes of tech billionaire Elon Musk and GOP vice presidential hopeful JD Vance have called on people to have more kids, sounding the alarm on falling birth rates and shrinking populations.
In 2021, Musk called population collapse potentially the greatest risk to civilization’s future. And last year, he urged people in Italy and other developed countries to have more kids. In addition to his existential warnings, he also flagged economic consequences, saying Italy is “a good place to invest” but adding that “companies investing ask themselves: Will there be enough people working?”
To be sure, governments around the world have also implemented various policies to make having a family and raising kids easier. But according to Emily Klancher Merchant, assistant professor of science and technology studies at UC Davis, and Win Brown, research affiliate at the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, birth rates aren’t a problem in and of themselves.
“Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic, and environmental problems that are almost always better addressed more directly through regulation and redistribution,” they wrote earlier this month in The Conversation.
What’s more, the pronatalism movement is based on the misguided belief that larger populations are necessary to drive economic growth, the experts argued.
Without direct intervention from governments, any additional wealth that’s created usually ends up with people who already have higher incomes at the expense of workers and consumers, they added.
“Seen this way, pronatalism is a Ponzi scheme,” Merchant and Brown wrote. “It relies on new entrants to produce returns for earlier investors, with the burdens falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the bulk of childbearing and child-rearing, often without adequate medical care or affordable childcare.”
A Tesla spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a post on X commenting on the Fortune story, Musk said, “Something deeply misanthropic about these people.”
Meanwhile, pronatalist policies have had little effect on birth rates, they said, pointing to Italy’s 2020 Family Act as an example. While it subsidizes childcare, increases paternity leave, and boosts the salaries of mothers, the country’s birth rate has continued to fall.
In the U.S., the demographic tilt toward an older population has raised fears that younger generations will not be able to support Social Security payments for older generations.
But Merchant and Brown said Social Security can remain solvent without Americans having more kids. Instead, pro-immigration policies can increase the size of the working-age population that pays into the retirement system. And lifting the income cap on Social Security taxes can also reinforce the program.
Governments can still support parental leave, child tax credits, and high-quality childcare—but for the sake of helping children, not necessarily to increase birth rates, they said.
“Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population,” Merchant and Brown concluded. “But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.”
