Elon Musk and others who urge people to have more children are essentially calling for a pyramid scheme, according to experts

The issue of pronatalism has received a lot of attention recently, with people like tech billionaire Elon Musk and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance urging people to have more children and raising the alarm about declining birth rates and shrinking populations.

In 2021, Musk called Population collapse may be the greatest risk to the future of civilizationAnd last year he urged people in Italy and other developed countries to have more children. In addition to his existential warnings, he also pointed to the economic consequences. Italy is “a good place to invest,” but added that “investing companies are asking themselves: will enough people have jobs?”

Of course, governments around the world have taken various measures to make it easier to start a family and raise children. But according to Emily Klancher Merchant, assistant professor of science and technology studies at UC Davis, and Win Brown, research associate at the University of Washington's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, birth rates in and of themselves are not a problem.

“Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic and environmental problems that can almost always be better addressed directly through regulation and redistribution,” they wrote earlier this month in The conversation.

Furthermore, the pronatalism movement is based on the false assumption that a larger population is necessary for economic growth, the experts argue.

Without direct government intervention, any additional wealth created would tend to benefit people who already have higher incomes – at the expense of workers and consumers, they added.

“Seen in this way, pronatalism is a Ponzi scheme,” write Merchant and Brown. “It relies on new entrants to generate profits for earlier investors, with the burden falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the majority of childbearing and raising children, often without adequate health care or affordable child care.”

Meanwhile, pronatalist measures have had little impact on the birth rate, they said, citing Italy's 2020 family law as an example. Although it subsidizes childcare, increases paternity leave and raises mothers' salaries, the country's birth rate has continued to fall.

In the United States, demographic trends toward an aging population are raising concerns that younger generations will not be able to pay the social security benefits of older generations.

But Merchant and Brown say Social Security can remain solvent even if Americans stop having more children. Instead, pro-immigration policies can increase the number of working-age people paying into the pension system. And raising the income ceiling for Social Security contributions can also strengthen the program.

Governments could continue to promote parental leave, child allowances and high-quality childcare – but to help children and not necessarily to increase the birth rate, it said.

“Viewed from this perspective, pronatalism offers a hollow-sounding promise that the social and economic problems of a country's present population will be solved by simply increasing its population size,” concluded Merchant and Brown. “But this amounts to borrowing money from the future to pay off the debts of the past.”

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com