Musk's Prediction That Japan Will 'Cease To Exist' Is A No-Brainer

Tesla CEO and prolific tweeter Elon Musk has long highlighted the threat of declining birth rates, but over the weekend he singled out Japan with a warning that the country could one day "cease to exist," Kentaro Iwamoto reported for Nikkei.

Photo Insert: Japan’s population peaked in 2008 and has fallen to about 125 million by last year.

“At the risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birthrate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world,” said Musk, who recently agreed to a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion (£36 billion), said in a post at the weekend.

Musk played the demographer’s role after Japan’s population fell by a record 644,000 last year – the 11th straight year of decline, Justin McCurry reported for The Guardian,

Interestingly, most Scandinavian countries had registered zero population growth (ZPG) for so many years but not one of them collapsed or “ceased to exist.”

Musk apparently recast Paul Ehrlich’s projection in “The Population Bomb” decades ago that high population growth would cause famines since such growth outstrips food production and would even spur wars. Ehrlich’s principal theory collapsed as Nordic countries progressed while food wars never happened.

Some social media users said Japan was not the only developed economy experiencing long-term population decline, but others used Musk’s tweet to criticize successive governments’ half-hearted attempts to raise the birthrate in the world’s third-biggest economy.

Japan’s population peaked in 2008 and has fallen to about 125 million by last year, despite government warnings about the effect on economic growth and occasional campaigns to encourage couples to have bigger families.

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