At the risk of turning Common Sense with Paul Jacob into Common Sense About Elon Musk, consider the second best thing about Musk’s Twitter preoccupation: his own tweets.
“At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist,” Musk posted on Saturday. “This would be a great loss for the world.”
A very significant observation, at odds with so much of the Official Narrative of Approved Subjects and Opinions.
Recognizing that depopulation is the big problem for the developed nations of the world, not over-population rubs up against most of what we’ve been told for years.
But it’s true.
Japan is not alone, here, in showing a demographic collapse. It’s merely the most advanced in population decline. Russia is in a bad way, and many European countries’ native populations are in zero population growth. The United States, too, is growing only because of immigration, legal and illegal.
Behind the numbers, though, is a disturbing reality: the instability of our welfare state policies. In America, and in most advanced nations, government-run social pension programs require a growing population to properly service. Yet, Social Security, by removing the need to have children as a natural safety net (where we beget offspring to help take care of us in old age), actually disincentivizes the population growth that might make the system sustainable.
Elon Musk did not offer a fix. But by pointing to a very real problem, he’s done us a great service, speaking simple truth instead of propaganda.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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