Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman, took to Twitter on Sunday to explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a reduced birth rate in high-income countries, as opposed to the projected “baby boom” due to people being compelled to stay indoors.
Musk also posted a Scientific American story headlined “The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom” with his followers.
With former partner and Canadian musician Grimes, the father of seven just welcomed his youngest daughter, Exa Dark Siderl Musk, or “Y” for short.
While Elon Musk’s research was published in 2021, it was not the first one to mention the declining birth rate.
The study cited in the Scientific American article was undertaken by Bocconi University in Italy. It discovered that from 2016 to the beginning of 2021, birth rates in 22 high-income nations (including the United States) showed “statistically significant reductions in birth rates in the last months of 2020 and early months of 2021, compared to the same time in previous years.”
The dip was most pronounced in Italy, where the birth rate fell by 9.1%, followed by Hungary (8.5), Spain (8.4), and Portugal (8.4%). (6.6). According to the survey, the birth rate in the United States has decreased by 3.8 percent.
In December 2021, National Geographic published another report revealing that China’s birth rate has dropped by 15%.
Many media sources and pundits anticipated that the COVID pandemic, which resulted in widespread economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020, would lead to a baby boom. However, it appears that the opposite has occurred: birth rates have fallen in many high-income countries as a result of the crisis, according to a recent study.
From 2016 through the beginning of 2021, Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the United States. They discovered that in the last months of 2020 and the early months of 2021, seven of these countries exhibited statistically significant decreases in birth rates when compared to the same period in previous years. The biggest cuts were in Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, with reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4, and 6.6 percent, respectively.
According to Aassve, the United States witnessed a 3.8 percent reduction, but this was not statistically significant—possibly because the pandemic’s effects were more evenly distributed across the country and because the study only had data through December 2020. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on Monday.
