2.1a Common Sense and Journalistic Explanations

Common Sense

Common sense relies on personal experience and lay knowledge to explain why people do what they do. Everyone uses common sense in everyday life to predict how others will behave and explain why people do what they do.

During the 2020s, a pronatalist movement gained steam in the United States. Pronatalism is the belief that people are not having enough children and that this is a problem for humanity. Billionaire Elon Musk is a promoter of this belief (Caruso & Aizin, 2025). He is the father of at least 14 children with four different women. He shared his personal experience on X (formerly known as Twitter): “Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception. Most people I know have zero or one kid” (Musk, 2022). Musk uses his common sense (knowing many wealthy people with few children) to argue against the expert explanation (people make decisions about having children based on cost).

Journalistic Accounts

Elon Musk is a public figure. His opinions are shared widely by social media users and picked up by journalists as newsworthy. Journalistic accounts also draw on information from experts when reporting. For example, an article in Wired debunked Musk’s warnings by talking with demographers who are experts on global and historical trends in population growth and decline (Reynolds, 2022). Reynolds, the journalist, quotes Tomáš Sobotka, a fertility researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography, and the United Nations to debunk Musk’s claims. The research from these organizations concludes that the global population will grow through 2100, with some regions losing population. This journalistic account does not address Musk’s claims that money is not a deciding factor for having children, at least among wealthy families. Fortunately, sociologists have also studied this question, and their explanations for how people decide to have children have gone through peer review.