"Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties."

"That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them. Directly behind the villa is a six-bedroom mansion.... When in Austin, he often stays at a third mansion about a 10-minute walk away.... One of the mothers, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink... has moved into one of the homes with her children. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the mother to three of his children, is in a protracted legal fight with Mr. Musk and has so far steered clear. The third mother is Mr. Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five living children, all in their late teens or older. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to visit, though he is estranged from at least one of those children.... Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a person who understands his thinking.... In 2021, without Ms. Boucher’s knowledge, Mr. Musk donated sperm to Ms. Zilis, who became pregnant with twins through I.V.F.... That same year, the billionaire and Ms. Boucher were expecting a second child also conceived via I.V.F. but carried by a surrogate.... Further complicating matters, Mr. Musk took a name that he and Ms. Boucher had chosen for their daughter — Valkyrie — and gave it to one of Ms. Zilis’s twins...."

From "Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His. As the billionaire warns of population collapse and the moral obligation to have children, he’s navigating his own complicated family" (NYT)(free-access link).

I wonder what kind of "control" he is doing with IVF.

"In 2023, the United States experienced its lowest birth rate since 1979, with a total fertility rate of 1.62 births per woman..."

"... well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. This decline, attributed to factors such as financial concerns, unstable work hours, and lack of paid leave, has resulted in approximately 3.6 million births, marking a 2 percent decrease from the previous year. Experts and public figures, including Elon Musk, have expressed concern over the long-term implications of this trend on the country's demographic and economic future."

A Grok news summary at X (that comes with the warning "Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs").

Elon Musk, not content to be mentioned by his robot Grok, adds a tweet of his own (responding to a video from a woman propounding the "Great Replacement Theory"). Musk writes:

"Population decline is a lot like global warming: It’s abstract, it seems far off, it’s easy to imagine that it won’t happen..."

"... or that maybe its effects won’t be so bad. It’s also alike in that solutions can require a long time to take effect and that many politicians are staunchly opposed to most of them, especially conservatives.... The problem isn’t all on one side of the aisle, though. Enough centrist Democrats oppose growth-friendly policies to thwart ongoing efforts to put them in place...."

Writes Jeff Wise in "America’s Population Could Use a Boom/Failing to address population decline may exact a heavy toll" (NY Magazine).

"People are awful; these beautiful creatures have a right to thrive in their habitats. Seriously, the planet didn’t need 8 billion people."

"It’s not like a high percentage of them especially in the US are smart, compassionate and empathetic."

That's one of the most recommended comments at "What Should You Do When the Bear Is Cinnamon? Scientists have uncovered a genetic mutation that makes it dangerously difficult to distinguish a black bear from a grizzly" (NYT).

Let me — without compassion or empathy — point out that the commenter is herself lacking in compassion and empathy. I presume she regards herself as compassionate and empathetic because she only withholds compassion and empathy from those who are not compassionate and empathetic.

"Musk doesn’t eat lunch, possibly because an unflattering picture in a swimsuit taken on a yacht in Mykonos went viral..."

"... over the summer. Since then, he has been on a diet. At Fonda San Miguel... he... orders a frozen margarita (he calls it a slushy with alcohol).... Musk is telling me that companies are like children when the first plates land on the table: the lamb chops in a pepper sauce, and shrimp with cheese and jalapeños.... Musk is capricious, but he sees himself as a problem solver, and the problem is everything from the potential end of life on Earth to climate change and even traffic.... Recently, he has dreamt up his own (rather unhelpful) peace plan for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.... Musk is very exercised about population decline.... Some friends, he reveals, have indeed suggested he should have 500 kids, but that would be a 'bit weird.'... [H]e predicts that 'the current trend for most countries is that civilisation will not die with a bang, it will die with a whimper in adult diapers.' But he says ageing should not be solved. 'It’s important that people die. How long would you have liked Stalin to live?'... Musk has a dystopian view of the left’s influence on America, which helps explain his wild pursuit of Twitter to liberate free speech. He blames the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. 'It’s full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,' says Musk. 'It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.'"

From "Elon Musk: ‘Aren’t you entertained?’/The Tesla chief talks to Roula Khalaf about moving to Mars, saving free speech via Twitter — and why ageing is one ‘problem’ that should not be solved" (Financial Times).

"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."

Newsweek reports.

The big mystery about the monument wasn't how it got there, but just who paid to buy the land and put it up. It looks a bit like Stonehenge, but it's not ancient. It went up in 1980, financed by someone who worked through a banker who was sworn to protect his anonymity. 

The stones were engraved with 10 principles (in 8 languages), and the first one is blatantly evil, once you penetrate the euphemism "Maintain":

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature

"There is little countries can do to lift their native-born birthrates; nor is it even clear why the U.S. fertility rate, which now stands substantially below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman, is so low."

Says the Editorial Board of The Washington Post in "The 2020 Census is a clarion call for immigration."

I was just saying that President Biden's plan to vastly increase support for families with children could be justified by the need to inspire Americans to keep having children. Here's what I wrote 3 days ago: 

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the "remarkable slackening" in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don't maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don't worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. But if you took the other side of that debate... you'd better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It's terribly expensive!... [Y]ou're going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit. The old scheme of locking women into childbirth as a consequence of indulging in sex failed long ago, and you sound like a fool talking about it now, especially if you attempt to stand on the foundation of love for babies, when what you are doing is justifying freeing rich folk — people who make over $1 million a year — from paying a 40% capital gains tax. Can't dishearten them in their enthusiasm for investing? What about the young people who are disheartened about having children? Worry about them.

But the WaPo editors have nothing to say about these new children-friendly policies. They just say there's little that can be done to motivate Americans to choose life with children. They go right to immigration: 

This nation’s prosperity, pluck, ambition and effervescent character are the products of more than 100 million immigrants who have sought better lives in the United States since its founding.

It's probably true that these children of Americans who are not getting born would probably be dull slackers compared to the plucky, effervescent immigrants. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Temujin writes: 

"Over the past decade, the United States population grew at the slowest rate since the 1930s, the Census Bureau reported on Monday, a remarkable slackening..."

"... that was driven by a leveling off of immigration and a declining birthrate. The bureau also reported changes to the nation’s political map: The long-running trend of the South and the West gaining population — and Congressional representation — at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest, continued, with Texas gaining two seats and Florida, one. California, long a leader in population growth, lost a seat for the first time in history.... 'This is a big deal,' said Ronald Lee, a demographer who founded the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California at Berkeley. 'If it stays lower like this, it means the end of American exceptionalism in this regard.' It used to be clear where the country was headed demographically, Professor Lee said — faster growth than many other rich nations. But that has changed. 'Right now it is very murky,' he said."

The NYT reports. 

Why isn't a "remarkable slackening" in population growth a good thing? I thought we were concerned with global warming? Or is that only every other day?

(To comment, email me here.)

Joe Rogan explains why he's leaving L.A. and relocating in Texas.

Key reason for rejecting L.A.: "too many people."

"A great nation with thousands of years of history and a brilliant civilization is rapidly degenerating into a small group of the old and the weak thanks to these wrongheaded population-control policies."

Said Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, quoted in "Beijing’s one-child policy is gone. But many Chinese are still reluctant to have more" (WaPo).

China’s population is forecast to peak at 1.45 billion as early as 2027, then slump for several decades. By 2050, about one-third of the population will be over the age of 65, and the number of working-age people is forecast to fall precipitously. Who will power the economy? Who will look after the elderly? Who will pay the taxes to fund their pensions?...

“To put it frankly, giving birth is not only a family matter but also a national issue,” read a commentary last year in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the ruling Communist Party. “Not wanting to have kids is just a lifestyle of passively giving in to society’s pressures.”...

Some parents spend $15,000 a year bringing their toddlers to English, piano, dance, art and gymnastics classes, the manager said, noting that Wuhan isn’t Beijing or Shanghai.... Many Chinese parents would prefer to channel all of their resources into just one child....

Zeng Yulin, 32 who has a master’s degree in international economics, takes her 3-year-old daughter Yuewei to art classes and skating classes twice a week. Then there are the singing classes and the public-speaking lessons. In addition, Zeng will teach her English at home....

In a 2017 survey of working mothers by Zhaopin.com, one of China’s biggest job websites, only 22.5 percent said they wanted a second child. Nearly three times that number said they did not want more than one....

It's hard to get women to have the number of children that's best for the group. It's too much of a personal decision — emotional and economic. There are reasons for having a lot of children and reasons for having very few children. The group can do things to shift women from the first group to the second, but it's hard to move them into the middle position — especially after you've established one child as the ideal. It's funny (but not funny) for the government to apply pressure about "passively giving in to society’s pressures," especially when it created the very pressure that it now wants to pressure people not to give in to. 

"You probably want to know how much weight you’re going to lose when we remove the cyst; women always want to know."

Said the surgeon to Pagan Kennedy, who had "an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit that, doctors warned me, could at any time rupture and fill my abdomen with blood and pus." He also said — about the value of a complete hysterectomy — "You don’t have to get the procedure right away... You could wait. That would give you time to complete your family." She didn't like that either.

The doctor quotes appear in "Why You Want to Eat This Baby Up: It’s Science/Researchers are beginning to ask why some people want to squeeze puppies and others want to sniff babies" (NYT). Kennedy herself "never experienced so much as a pang of baby hunger" and "believed this emotion was just an invention — some myth that the patriarchy created to keep women down."

For the most part, people like me are invisible. We’re rarely studied or quantified. There is a medical term, tokophobia, for women who are terrified by pregnancy.... Few women are willing to declare, “Yeah, put me down as someone who definitely will never have kids.”... It's so much easier to describe yourself as undecided....

When scholars discuss [declining fertility rates around the world], they usually observe the link between the birthrate and female empowerment: Women who have access to birth control, education and self-determination tend to have fewer children. But we rarely talk about the women who — once they’re free to decide — decide to have no children at all.

Is this an expression of practical concerns or inborn wiring? The truth is, we just don’t know....

Let me add: Human beings evolved under conditions in which sexual desire and rape would produce pregnancy and childbirth, so the element of wanting to bear children was unnecessary in the female. Human beings did, however, need to want to take care of the babies who did enter their lives, and that, it seems to me, explains the phenomenon the headline aggressively forefronts. We've emerged from the conditions under which we evolved, and it does expose the problem of a lack of an urge on the part of women to undergo the difficult process of pregnancy and childbirth, even if we have a great inborn potential to love and care for any baby that would exist if we did go through that process.

"Historically, the antinuclear movement didn’t emerge from environmental concerns, which is why arguments for nuclear’s environmental advantages often fall on deaf ears."

"The movement originated out of a panic among European and American intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s about overpopulation, expressed most luridly in such popular books as the entomologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1969 'The Population Bomb.' They believed more power plants would exacerbate human density and urban growth. But nuclear power champions like Alvin Weinberg, the longtime director of America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, countered that nuclear could supply energy enough to forestall the social collapse the neo-Malthusians feared. In the end, the green revolution and the demographic transition that followed third-world economic development met food needs and limited population growth, now predicted to level off at 10 billion by 2100. But by then nuclear power was anathema to the Democratic Party and American and European Greens, a tragic misalignment of liberal values. The tide may be turning. Politics may catch up with necessity. But the 'Green New Deal' recently championed in Congress includes even existing nuclear power production only grudgingly, and promotes the notion that 'A Bright Future' disputes — that 100 percent renewables can save the day."

From "A Sensible Climate Change Solution, Borrowed From Sweden" by Richard Rhodes, reviewing "A Bright Future/How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow," Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvis.

"To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair."

Said the official Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, quoted in "Burying ‘One Child’ Limits, China Pushes Women to Have More Babies" (NYT).

It is a startling reversal for the party, which only a short time ago imposed punishing fines on most couples who had more than one child and compelled hundreds of millions of Chinese women to have abortions or undergo sterilization operations.

The new campaign has raised fear that China may go from one invasive extreme to another in getting women to have more children. Some provinces are already tightening access to abortion or making it more difficult to get divorced....

“Women cannot decide what happens to their own ovaries,” one user complained on Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, after Jiangxi detailed the abortion guidelines in July.

Forgetting how evil it can be to envision your power enlarged by the growing and shrinking of various population groups.

You’ve gotta read @JoyAnnReid’s brilliant take on the politics of the space-time continuum. Spoiler Alert: The future will win.https://t.co/IORjWfFUhf

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 4, 2018

"Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill to hand out hectares of land free of charge in Russia's Far East in a bid to attract people to the vast region."

"Under the law, Russian citizens can receive a one-hectare land plot owned by state or municipal authorities in such regions of the Far East as Sakha-Yakutia, Kamchatka, Primorye, Khabarovsk, Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin, the Jewish Autonomous Region, and Chukotka."

If the population of the entire world lived in one city, how large would that city be?

It depends upon the density of that city, but here's a graphic depiction:



That's just about fitting everyone in a space, not supplying them with water, food, and everything else they'd need.

I ran across that graphic as the result of a search I did after reading the comments to an NPR article, "How China's One-Child Policy Led To Forced Abortions, 30 Million Bachelors." Someone in the comments had said: "The entire world population could theoretically live in Texas. Underpopulation in industrialized nations is the real problem." I thought the necessary space was quite a bit less than Texas. And somebody else said: "No, it 'theoretically' could not. The reason for that is that you have to be able to actually move. And you have to be able to move to the LAND that you are FARMING to grow food. The argument that you could pack people like sardines someplace is completely without any kind of logical merit."

China ends the one-child policy.

But maybe it's too late. The Chinese government had already started allowing 2 children to couples where the father or mother had been an only child, but many of them declined, "citing the expense and pressures of raising children in a highly competitive society."

A professor of demography at Peking University, Mu Guangzong, explained:

“I don’t think a lot of parents would act on [the new policy] because the economic pressure of raising children is very high in China. The birth rate in China is low and its population is aging quickly, so from the policy point of view, it’s a good thing as it will help combat a shortage of labor force in the future. But many parents simply don’t have the economic conditions to raise more children.”

"The number of future humans who will never exist if humans go extinct is so great that reducing the risk of extinction by 0.00000000000000001 percent can be expected to save 100 billion more lives than, say, preventing the genocide of 1 billion people."

From a Vox article titled "I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried."

We're supposed to equate the failure to come into existence with the death of an existing human being? Will Vox sign on to the abortion-is-genocide position?

ADDED: That last question suggests that Vox is signing on with the people its headline calls "nerds." That's an inappropriate suggestion. 

"In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life."

"In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing. They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million... For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity."

From a NYT piece called "1.5 Million Missing Black Men."

50 years ago today: Lyndon Johnson delivered his "Great Society" State of the Union Address.

"We worked for two centuries to climb this peak of prosperity. But we are only at the beginning of the road to the Great Society. Ahead now is a summit where freedom from the wants of the body can help fulfill the needs of the spirit.... The Great Society asks not how much, but how good; not only how to create wealth but how to use it; not only how fast we are going, but where we are headed...."

Full text of speech here. Video of part of the speech here.

The State of the Union speech wasn't the first time LBJ used the term "Great Society." He'd introduced it in 1964 in 2 graduation speeches. This is from the University of Michigan speech:

Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor....

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes and highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States....

For the record, there are something like 318 million Americans, with something like 80.7% living in urban areas. So LBJ was right about the four-fifths. We failed to re-build the entire urban United States.

I was especially interested in the line about leisure. The Great Society is "a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness." I actually found the second clause hard to read and checked the audio to see if it was a mistake. I even thought it might be some southern rural parlance — "afeared [be]cause of boredom" — before I realized he was talking about something we rarely hear about anymore: the problem of too much leisure. People back then feared that leisure would cause boredom and restlessness. In the Great Society, we were supposed to use leisure to "build and reflect."

What happened? Was the prediction of leisure wrong, or is our present-day busyness something we've manufactured to camouflage leisure and thereby stave off boredom and restlessness... and — God forbid! — reflection?