“I really want to emphasize that it’s important to have children and to create the new generation. And as simple as it sounds, if people do not have children, there is no new generation,” said Musk, one of America’s most innovative entrepreneurs.
“One can’t depend on other countries for immigration,” he told an Italian gathering, “and in fact, if you look at say the population worldwide, it’s almost everywhere in the world, and it seems to be a function of almost how – once a country industrializes, once a country urbanizes, the population conveniently starts to decline,” Musk said. “We don’t want Japan to disappear, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we don’t want France’s culture to disappear, I think we have to maintain a sort of reasonable cultural identity of various countries or we simply will not be those countries.”
Musk is not alone. Even the secular American media is suddenly noticing that small families mean fewer cousins, aunts and uncles. “Families are shrinking,” writes Faith Hill in the liberal Atlantic Magazine. “A cousin-sparse future, then, could be a greater loss than people might recognize. It might also make the relationship that much more important: With fewer of them around, cousins may need to depend on one another even more.”