SINGAPORE: Earlier this month, billionaire businessman Elon Musk posted on X about one of his favourite subjects—the declining birth rate. He specifically mentioned Singapore, saying that the city-state, along with “many other countries” is “going extinct.”
His post went viral, getting over 44.5 million views, and was also shared and commented on widely.
The context of Mr Musk’s doomsday prediction for Singapore and other countries was a tweet from Mario Nawfal, who hosts a popular show on the popular social media platform, which Mr Musk happens to own.
Mr Nawfal had written about Singapore’s birth rate reaching a “rock bottom” 0.97 children for every woman, which is substantially less than the 2.1 required for sustainability. This would result in a larger elderly population and a smaller number of working adults, he added.
Many in Singapore also paid attention to Mr Musk’s post, including a recent letter published in The Straits Times Forum calling on Singaporeans to “prove Elon Musk wrong.”
Singapore’s total fertility rate has been on a downward trend, from 1.12 in 2021, to 1.04 in 2022, to 0.97 in 2023. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Indranee Rajah said recently that “Based on current trends, the number of citizen deaths could exceed the number of citizen births in the first half of the 2030s.”
This week, some economists in Singapore have responded to Mr Musk’s tweet. In a Dec 17 piece in The Business Times, Song Seng Wun, an economic adviser for CGS-CIMB said that the Tesla and SpaceX founder is not wrong.
“Academics have been saying for years that if left as is, if the aging population problem is not addressed, people delaying marriage and delaying starting families will have implications on the resident citizen population,” the veteran economist added.
Meanwhile, Selena Ling, the chief economist at OCBC, argued that delaying marriage and parenthood is neither new nor a problem that only Singapore faces. She was quoted in BT as pointing out that a key issue in the matter is whether or not Singapore will be able to keep supplementing the workforce with foreign talent as well as “generate sufficient productivity gains to support sustained growth.”
Singapore is not the only country with a fall in the fertility rate that Mr Musk has drawn attention to. In late November, he posted that “2/3 of (South) Korea will disappear every generation.”
However, demographers have refuted his claims, saying that the global population is, in actuality, on the increase. They’ve said that the world is not in danger of a population collapse, although in large part, the current global population continues to grow not because of higher birth rates but because more people are living longer. /TISG
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