America's Premier Pronatalists Have 'Tons of Kids' To Save The World, Musk, Dad of 11. Why?
'America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,' The Guardian, May 25, 2024. - Elon Musk (father of 11) supports their cause. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents? - Edited -
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The Collinses didn’t tell me Simone was pregnant when we were making plans for me to spend a day with them at home in Valley Forge, Pa., but I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. They are the poster children of the pronatalist movement, on a mission to save humanity by having as many babies as possible. Malcolm, 37, and Simone are “CEOs and non-profit entrepreneurs”: they acquire businesses with investor money that they improve and eventually sell “or turn into a cash cow”, as she puts it, ploughing their earnings into their charitable foundation, which encourages people to reproduce. They plan on having a minimum of 7 children.
This is not Quiverfull, the fundamentalist Christian belief that large families are a blessing from God. The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth.
This is a numbers game, focused on producing the maximum number of heirs – not to inherit assets, but genes, outlook and worldview. And it’s being advocated by some of the most successful names in tech.
The world’s most famous pronatalist is father-of-11 Elon Musk. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),” he warned in 2022. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes. “Of course I’m going to have a big family,” Altman said the same year. “I think having a lot of kids is great.” The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (father of 5) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collinses pronatalist foundation in 2022.
The data, pronatalists fear, points to a looming crisis. As societies become more prosperous, people are having fewer children; after 200 years of overwhelming population growth, birthrates are plummeting. Since setting up the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, Simone and Malcolm have become the movement’s spokespeople.. Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/25/american-pronatalists-malcolm-and-simone-collins
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- 'Why Do These People Think Having A Bunch of Babies Will Save the World?' Daily Kos, May 29, 2024.
..But it’s hard to escape the feeling that this isn’t about saving civilization: It’s about extremely wealthy people who want to spread their genes to a maximum number of offspring and establish a kind of genetic elite on a planet that already has more than enough people....More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/29/2243287/-Why-do-these-people-think-having-a-bunch-of-babies-will-save-the-world
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