TOM UTLEY: Elon Musk is right - it's NOT selfish to have lots of children

Many years ago, when our boys were still at school, I had the misfortune of finding myself sitting next to a very haughty woman at a dinner party. Indeed, one of the rare occasions on which the Duke seemed lost for words came when a cheeky reporter asked him how he could rail against population growth, given that he himself was a father of four. To his credit, if my memory serves me, Prince Philip conceded that this was a fair point This week, I thought of my sneery fellow guest at that dinner party when the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk, who vies with Amazon's Jeff Bezos for the title of the world's richest man, attracted gales of derisive laughter for declaring that one of the biggest problems facing humanity is not that there are too many of us, but too few. Yes, I know it's tempting to think that life would be more agreeable if there were fewer people about, with less crowded trains, fewer traffic jams, cleaner air, more pandas and polar bears, cheaper housing and millions more acres of rainforest left undisturbed by the chainsaw and the plough. You have only to consider that in the Georgian economist's day, when he predicted imminent disaster and mass starvation from a population explosion, there were only about one billion people in this world.