Elon Musk’s comparison between Nigerian and European births points to a world in which the centres of population, labour and consumption are moving south. Whether Africa’s growth becomes economic strength or mounting pressure will depend on what happens to its children after birth.
Elon Musk has a gift for reducing a large anxiety to a sentence. “Nigeria alone had 4 million more births than the entire EU last year!” he recently wrote on X.
The statistic admits two readings. In an ageing Europe, it sounds like a warning. In an Africa commonly described through poverty and scarcity, it can be received as evidence of future power. Neither reading goes far enough.
For much of the modern development debate, African population growth has been viewed through a Malthusian lens: more people competing for limited food, employment and public services. Musk begins from the opposite fear, as he has consistently canvassed, that
This post was originally published on this site.
