The Myth of Population Part 1: The White Pestilence

Note: The following is excerpted from Steven Mosher’s book, Population Control—Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.

Most of us grew up on a poisonous diet of overpopulation propaganda. Remember the lifeboat scenarios in high school biology, where we had to decide who we were going to push overboard, lest we all die. Recall the college class in which we were assigned to read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which begins with the author mournfully intoning “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and ends by advocating the abandonment of entire continents to famine and death in order to “cut … out the cancer [of population growth].1 Look up the speeches of former Vice President Al Gore, who warned of an “environmental holocaust without precedent”--a “black hole” in his words--that will engulf us if we do not stop having babies.2 In this and a myriad of ways we have been force-fed--and most of us swallowed whole--the nasty theory that there were too many people, along with its even more terrible corollary that it is necessary to practice inhumanity in order to save humanity--or some worthy fraction thereof.

But what if overpopulation is, as economist Jacqueline Kasun has remarked, a false dogma? What if the assorted population controllers, radical environmentalists, self-serving politicians, and others are wrong about our breeding ourselves off the face of the planet? From Ehrlich on, they have been peddling a worst-case scenario--times ten. Everyone has read passages similar to the following, taken from James Coleman and Donald Cressey’s Social Problems, one of the standard social science textbooks from the nineties:

The world’s population is exploding. The number of men, women and children is now over 5 billion. … If the current rate of growth continues, the world’s population will double again in the next 40 years…the dangers of runaway population growth can be seen in historical perspective… It took all of human history until 1800 for the world’s population to reach 1 billon people. But the next … 1 billion was added in only 130 years (1800-1930), [the next billion] after that in 30 years (1930-1960), and the next in 15 years (1960-1975). The last billion people were added in only 12 years (1975-1987). If this trend (of runaway population growth) continues the world will be soon be adding a billion people a year, and eventually every month.3 [Italics added]

Since even the most frantic of population alarmists now agree that the world’s population in the early nineties was only increasing by some 90 million per year (an increment which has since fallen to 76 million) there was zero chance that the world would “soon be adding a billion people a year,” much less “ every month.” But literally millions of college students learned otherwise and, like me, began to obsess about the numbers.

Over six billion of anything is a mind-boggling number, and not just for the numerically challenged. Few people have the independence of mind to grasp what this number truly represents: A great victory over early death won by advances in health, nutrition and longevity. Even fewer are aware that the world’s population will never double again. In fact, as we will see, it is already close to its apogee.

Like other Baby Boomers, I lived through the unprecedented doubling of the global population in the second half of the 20th century. Never before in human history had our numbers increased so far, so fast: from 3 billion in 1960 to 6 billion in 2000. But Ehrlich and Company, I came to see, glossed over the underlying reason: Our numbers didn’t double because we suddenly started breeding like rabbits. They doubled because we stopped dying like flies. Fertility was falling throughout this period, from an average of 6 children per woman in 1960 to only 2.6 by 2002.4

Life expectancy at birth, on the other hand, was steadily rising, climbing from 46 years in 1950-1955 to over 65 years from 2000-2005. The less developed countries saw the most dramatic increases: life spans there lengthened from 41 to 63 1/2 years.5 You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that, with everyone living half again as long, there will be more of us around at any given time. Longer life spans in fact account for about half of all population growth over the last half century. The happy fact that billions of us were cheating death for decades at a time would seem cause to celebrate, not to mourn.

Population control enthusiasts refused to celebrate. They were too fixated upon the numbers. Those riding the population train to fame, fortune and government funding scarcely deigned to notice improved life-spans. Moreover, they seemed completely oblivious to what demographer Joel Cohen calls “the most important demographic event in history.” This occurred around 1965—our census numbers aren’t accurate enough to be more precise—when the population growth rate peaked and then began to fall. From adding 2.1 percent to the world’s population each year world population growth dropped to increments of only 1.2 percent by 2002. To put the matter plainly, the population train began to brake in 1965. It has been losing momentum ever since.6

On the fantasy island of overpopulation human numbers are always exploding, but a close look at the real world reveals a different reality. The unprecedented fall in fertility rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every corner of the globe, affecting China, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The latest forecasts by the United Nations show the number of people in the world shrinking by mid-century, that is, before today’s young adults reach retirement age. Many nations, especially in Europe, are already in a death spiral, losing a significant number of people each year. Listen closely, and you will hear the muffled sound of populations crashing.

The old “demographic transition” charts showed birthrates leveling off precisely at the replacement rate. But many of today’s young adults in Europe and elsewhere are too enamored of sex, the city, and the single life to think about marriage, much less about replacing themselves. A single Swedish woman may eventually bear one child as her biological clock approaches midnight, of course, but she is unlikely to bear a second. What was supposed to be the perfect family—a boy for you and a girl for me and heaven help us if we have three—has been scorned by moderns on their way to extinction. The declining number of traditional families has been unable to fill the fertility gap thus created.

This is the real population crisis. This population implosion, by reducing the amount of human capital available, will have a dramatic impact on every aspect of life. Peter Drucker, the late management guru, wrote back in 1997 that “The dominant factor for business in the next two decades—absent war, pestilence, or collision with a comet—is not going to be economics or technology. It will be demographics.”7 Drucker was particularly concerned with the “increasing underpopulation of the developed countries,” but a decade later this reproductive malaise has spread even to the less developed world, and is a truly global phenomenon.8

By 2004, the U.N. Population Division (UNDP) found that 65 countries, including 22 in the less developed world, had fertility rates that were below the level needed to ensure the long-term survival of the population.9 Most of the rest, the agency warned, were likely to enter this danger zone over the next few decades. According to the agency’s “low-variant” projection, historically the most accurate, by 2050 three out of every four countries in the less developed regions will be experiencing the same kind of below-replacement fertility that is hollowing out the populations of developed countries today.10 Such stark drops in fertility, cautioned the UNPD, will result in a rapid aging of the populations of developed and developing countries alike. With the number of people over 65 slated to explode from 475 million in 2000 to 1.46 billion in 2050, existing social security systems will be threatened with collapse.11 It will prove difficult, if not impossible, to establish new ones.

These sobering projections show that the population of the world will continue to creep up until about the year 2040, peaking at around 7.6 billion people.12 This is only a fraction more—one-sixth or so--than the 6.5 billion that the planet supports at present. Then the global population implosion, slow at first, but accelerating over time, begins. We fall back to current levels by 2082, and then shrink to under 5 billion by the turn of the next century. That population will be much older than we are today.