He is worried about a lack of (white) people on this planet.

  • tal
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    11 months ago

    Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization,” accompanied by a list of countries where fertility rates are supposedly in decline

    They are in decline everywhere, and it is a serious issue at the levels that it has hit in many countries. It’s way, way below the ~2.1 TFR required to sustain a population, which means you wind up with an inverted population pyramid, and a lot of old people needing to be supported by a few young people.

    Europe isn’t actually the worst-off place – South Korea, Japan, and East Asia plummeted down even sooner.

    Take a look, at, say, South Korea:

    https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2023/

    And governments haven’t generally had a lot of luck with pulling it up with policy changes.

    • Flying SquidOP
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      1211 months ago

      No. The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.

      What Musk, and hopefully not you, is worried about is the decline in white people being born.

      • @ram@feddit.nl
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        411 months ago

        What Musk, and hopefully not you, is worried about is the decline in white people being born.

        What’s the source of this claim? It certainly isn’t this article that doesn’t provide any proof besides wild speculations.

        • Flying SquidOP
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          111 months ago

          There are nearly 8 billion people on this Earth. Most of them aren’t white. The number of white people is regularly decreasing. So where is this population crisis exactly? Unless you think it’s a crisis that we’re running out of white people.

          • @ram@feddit.nl
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            -111 months ago

            That’s a leap of logic. You are saying that since the human population is not collapsing on a global scale, the decline of population of particular countries is not a problem at all and you somehow associate a donation made by Musk to address this issue with racism. Even the author of the article admits she doesn’t know exactly what the money is being used for:

            The specificities of what Musk’s $10 million will accomplish remain unclear, beyond Bloomberg’s report that PWI will use it to research fertility, economic growth, and the future of the human population.

            • Flying SquidOP
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              211 months ago

              He didn’t specify particular countries. He said that population collapse is the greatest threat to civilization (wonder who’s civilization he’s talking about there) and that there is a real population crisis.

              If he meant specific countries, why did he not say so?

              But sure, the guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa with a father who exploited black workers in an emerald mine and whose car company has repeatedly had problems with racism, the guy who once said that U.S. media and schools were racist against white and Asian people isn’t even a little bit racist.

              Believable.

              • @ram@feddit.nl
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                111 months ago

                If he meant specific countries, why did he not say so?

                The tweet from Musk that this article refers to is a response to another tweet that did mention specific countries, ie: Japan, US, China, Singapore, UK, Italy and South Korea. Half of them are primarily non white.

                But sure, the guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa with a father who exploited black workers in an emerald mine and whose car company has repeatedly had problems with racism, the guy who once said that U.S. media and schools were racist against white and Asian people isn’t even a little bit racist.

                He may very well be a racist, but this article makes a piss poor job to demonstrate the donation was influenced by racism.

                • Flying SquidOP
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                  311 months ago

                  The tweet from Musk that this article refers to is a response to another tweet that did mention specific countries, ie: Japan, US, China, Singapore, UK, Italy and South Korea. Half of them are primarily non white.

                  But they are Asian and he’s good with Asians as I already showed you.

                  Note none of them are countries with high black or brown populations. Can’t imagine why the tweet or Musk weren’t concerned about those.

      • tal
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        11 months ago

        The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.

        It will, however, soon reach a peak and then enter decline. However, that’s not the relevant factor – people in Country A aren’t going to cover pensions or education subsidies or the like in Country B. You need individual countries to have something on the order of a sustainable population. That means that the combination of fertility and immigration (if the country has positive immigration; some countries, like many of those in Eastern Europe, have serious net outflow) needs to be sufficient to sustain that country’s population.

        You can do some of it with immigration, and in the US, we’ve done quite a bit, but as can be seen by the political response to the European migrant crisis – a swing to the far right – populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration. So there’s only so much you can do via immigration.

        EDIT: Oh, if you were responding to my comment as to “decrease”, I was responding to a comment about fertility rate decrease, which is what the article said – that is decreasing everywhere. I’m not saying that population is decreasing everywhere, not yet.

        where fertility rates are supposedly in decline

        They are in decline everywhere

        The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.

        Global population will start to decrease as a result of that too. But that’s a trailing factor.

        • @gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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          811 months ago

          populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration.

          So they’ll shrink and get problems. Either they learn from that and let immigrants in or they’ll die out completely. This might be a problem on a national level, but not on a global one.