For years, Elon Musk has consistently argued that one of the greatest threats to civilization is collapsing birth rates.
The billionaire CEO believes that declining fertility could hollow out economies, weaken workforces, and leave the West unable to sustain itself.
In an X post last week, he wrote: “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West. There will be no West if this continues.”
In August, Musk amplified a warning from political commentator Tim Pool, who wrote: “The population isn’t ‘collapsing’ — it has collapsed. The shoreline is receding and no one understands the tsunami about to hit us.” Musk reposted it, adding: “I’ve been warning about this since the turn of the century.”
Now, governments in Europe and the US are taking steps to combat falling birth rates, and introducing policies to encourage people to have more children — from tax breaks and family allowances to longer parental leave and subsidized childcare.
While Musk has been a vocal advocate for increasing birth rates, demographers told Business Insider that he is not directly responsible for governments taking action.
A wave of pro-natal policies
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has called for a “demographic rearmament.”
In July, his government pledged to replace the current low-paid parental leave with a new, better-paid “birth leave. ” This would offer parents several months of leave at around half their salary, capped at €1,900, or around $2,200 a month.
That same month, Spain passed a new family law extending paid maternity and paternity leave to 17 weeks, while some regions, including the capital Madrid, expanded their “baby check” programs.
Italy is leaning on financial incentives: since January, mothers of two or more children have qualified for lifetime payroll tax breaks, and families can access zero-interest “First Home” loans, alongside child allowances.
Hungary extended its own policy in January, granting lifetime personal-income-tax exemptions to mothers of two or more children.
Even the UK, typically cautious about family subsidies, launched one of its most ambitious early-years reforms in decades: starting in September, parents of children as young as nine months will be eligible for 30 hours of free childcare a week.
Meanwhile, the US passed a federal package in July expanding family tax credits and creating new savings accounts under the banner of the “Working Families Tax Cut.”
‘Musk and some other commentators have only made the issue more visible’
As governments step up pro-natalist measures, demographic experts told Business Insider it would be a mistake to see Musk and other tech leaders as the drivers of these policy shifts.
“Concern with low birth rates is nothing new and certainly nothing that anyone in the tech world, and certainly not Musk, should get any credit for originating or leading on,” said Ronald Lee, founding director of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at UC Berkeley.
He noted that pronatalist policies were already widespread in Europe and East Asia decades ago, while the US Social Security system was overhauled in the early 1980s with aging in mind.
Tomas Sobotka, deputy director at the Vienna Institute of Demography, made a similar point.
“This is not a new topic among researchers and many policymakers,” he said, citing France’s family benefits dating back to the 1930s and Japan’s interventions in the 1990s.
“Musk and some other commentators have only made the issue more visible — and, regretfully, also more politically polarized.”
Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, was even more blunt: “Tech leaders like Elon Musk may be experts in their fields, but they are not experts in demography. Their views on fertility are based on gut feelings and vague conjectures rather than scientific reasoning.”
The chorus grows
Other tech leaders have echoed Musk’s concerns.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has gone as far as to fund free IVF treatments at a Moscow clinic for women using his sperm.
In a July 2024 Telegram post, he called declining fertility “an increasingly serious issue worldwide” and urged his followers to “Defy convention — redefine the norm!”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has invested in reproductive-tech startups, including Conception, which is developing ways to extend fertility and even enable two men to have biological children.
An uncertain fix
Whether the flurry of new incentives will actually reverse the trend is far from clear. Fertility rates across the developed world have been below replacement level for decades, driven by high costs, delayed parenthood, and cultural shifts.
Experts note that lavish programs in South Korea, Japan, and Hungary have failed to reverse declining birth rates.
Lee said even Scandinavia’s generous parental leave and childcare systems have not prevented fertility from falling. “Financial incentives are mostly absurdly small relative to the cost of a child,” he said, adding that Hungary spends about 5% of GDP annually on pro-birth measures with little result.
Sobotka said governments can’t fully offset the costs and personal trade-offs of childbearing, though well-designed policies can still help parents realize their desired family size and lift fertility modestly.
“Altogether, these packages of family policies can boost fertility rates in the order of up to 0.2, maximum 0.3 children per woman,” he said.
Lutz was skeptical. He argued that while family support programs are valuable for child well-being, their impact on fertility is marginal at best and could even backfire if they push women out of the workforce.
Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Population Research Institute in Helsinki, pointed to Estonia as an example where expanded family policies in the 2000s initially boosted second and third births but ultimately could not stem a collapse in first births over the past decade.
“We need new and bolder solutions,” she said, “which also have to come from employers, city planners, and society at large — not just politicians.”
In the US, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center, argued that the modest measures being discussed will likely not “budge” birth rates because they don’t tackle the main barriers American parents say they face: expensive housing, unaffordable childcare, and the absence of paid leave.
Read the full article here
