Diffusion of the Population Bomb

This week mankind reaches a new demographic milestone: 6 billion people living on the Earth. Too bad so many of them are Malthusian declinists, who regard all these human beings as net destroyers of the planet.

A recent New York Times story wails that if the world's population isn't curtailed soon, the globe will start to look as poor and crowded as Calcutta. Ted Turner says mankind is breeding like "a plague of locusts" and urges couples all over the world to limit themselves to one child. Zero Population Growth laments that the population of the U.S. is about twice the size it should be in order to protect the environment.

The mystery is why anyone takes these modern-day Chicken Littles seriously anymore. After all, every objective fact and environmental trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed doomsayers of the 1960s - from Lester Brown to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome - once predicted. Birth rates around the world are lower, not higher, today than at anytime in at least a century. Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. The "energy crisis" now is such a distant memory that these days oil is virtually the cheapest, not the most expensive, liquid on Earth. In sum, the population bomb propagandists have all the intellectual credibility of the Flat Earth Society.

Yes, it is true that in just this past century the number of human beings on the planet has just about quadrupled. But as the current issue of National Review points out, the simple and benign explanation is improved health and more wealth (see table). Consider the trends in life expectancy, arguably the single best measure of human well-being. From about the time of the Roman Empire through about 1800 average human life expectancy was less than 30 years. In the U.S. today, life expectancy is 75. Even in poor countries, like India and China, life expectancy has risen to above 60. We have doubled the number of years of life in just the past 200 years.

Meanwhile, infant mortality rates in the U.S., and across the globe, have fallen by about tenfold in just the last century. A century ago, if a woman had three children, the likelihood was that at least one of them would have died at birth or before the fifth birthday. Nowadays the probability of childhood death is less than 1 in 100. As the late, great doomslayer Julian Simon taught us, increased population is a consequence of mankind's victory over death.

The doomsayers fret that man is copulating uncontrollably like John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, who multiply until they die off from lack of sustenance. Thanks to unbridled human copulation, "we are adding another New York City every month, a Mexico every year, and almost another India every decade," writes environmental author Bill McKibben. Yet, we are nowhere near running out of room on the planet. If every one of the 6 billion of us resided in Texas, there would be room enough for every family of four to have a house and an 1/8th of acre of land - and the rest of the globe would be vacant. True, if population growth continues, soon some of these people would have to spill over the border into Oklahoma.

The dreaded population bomb that emerged as a worldwide obsession in the 1960s and 1970s has been all but defused. The birthrate in developing countries has plummeted from just more than six children per couple in 1950 to just more than 3 per couple today. The major explanation for smaller family sizes, even in China, has been economic growth, not condom distributions or coercive birth control measures.

The fertility rate in the developed world has fallen from 3.3 in 1950 to 1.6 per couple today. These low fertility rates presage declining populations. If Japan's catastrophically low birthrate is not raised at some point, in 500 years there will be only about 15 Japanese left on the planet. The average number of births to women in poor countries has dropped from 5 to 3 in just the past 50 years.

We used to worry about our capacity to feed the planet, but in the United States these days, we have to pay farmers to stop growing so much food. The dean of agricultural economists, D. Gale Johnson of the University of Chicago, has documented "a dramatic decline in famines" in the last 50 years. Fewer than half as many people die of famine each year now than did a century ago - despite almost a quadrupling of the population.

Virtually every natural resource has fallen steadily in price - following the same downward spiral that has characterized oil over the past 20 years. According to the most recent EPA statistics, pollution of the air and water is not increasing, it is decreasing - even though there are more people.

The population controllers at the United Nations and inside the U.S. environmental movement regard mother nature as pure and fragile and man's footprint on the Earth as the despoiler of this natural state. They worship the created, not the Creator. And they are in many cases hostile to economic development and human progress. They celebrate the planting of a new tree as magnificent progress, but abhor the planting of another fetus in a woman's womb as anti-progress.

But the good news for those of us with two, three, or God forbid, four children or more is this: The Malthusians are wrong. There is no ethical, environmental or economic case for small families. For those of us who believe there is intrinsic value and dignity in every human life, we should celebrate, not decry, that there are now 6 billion human beings on the Earth.

This article appeared in The Washington Times on October 13, 1999.

Population-control explosion

Article by Brian Doherty

There are too many people who think there are too many people. THOUGH IT WAS ADVERTISED AS A FORUM for deliberation, the fix was already in on the United Nations' International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo last month. The international popucrats just wanted to stage a media event to rubber-stamp a foregone conclusion to maximal p.r. effect. Sadly, they got away with it.

The headlines on the conference played up the phony conflict over abortion and contraception. By calling the conflict phony, I don't mean to imply that the Vatican and the handful of other countries joining in its disapproval were insincere in their objections to the conference document's stance on abortion and other artificial birth controls.

But their objections did play a useful role for their opponents, who had no intention of heeding them. Popucrats and the press were able to portray only superstitious reactionaries straight out of the Middle Ages as fighting the self-evidently humane and necessary goal of tripling world government spending on birth prevention to $17 billion a year. Thus, even the thought that there might be informed secular arguments against centralized population control was shut out of the debate. Cries of "Will no one save me from this meddlesome priest?" echoed through the still Cairo air, but it was howled with a wink. The pope played perfectly his role as Court Reactionary in the judgment hall of world opinion.

SINCE THE VATICAN IS AS MUCH AGAINST genuine reproductive freedom as the mainstream popucrats, the real question about overpopulation wasn't asked at Cairo. What are we talking about when we talk about "overpopulation"?

In his statements at the conference, Vice President Al Gore indulged in the usual anti-natalist trick of merely tossing out growing population numbers ominously, as if they were self-evidently frightening. Are they?

The total population density of the Earth fight now is around 10.6 people per square mile (not counting Antarctica)--less than 1/80th the population density of Los Angeles, and less than 1/1,120th that of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country often used as an example of the ultimate nightmare awaiting all of us through overpopulation. To put it into perspective, if everyone on earth were divided into families of four and given a quarter acre of land to live on (a good-sized suburban plot), they could all fit into one-sixth of the land mass in the United States alone.

Of course, the world's population isn't evenly spread. Most of it, by free choice, is concentrated in urban areas; strangely, people seem willing to pay a premium to live in "overpopulated" conditions. Anyone who travels outside of metropolitan areas or looks out the window of the plane as they fly over the country will see much more unpopulated land than populated. (While looking, thank the densities of population that create the economies of scale that make expensive endeavors like commercial jetliners prevalent.)

This is just anecdotal, though, while the evidence marshalled by population fearmongers consists of cold, hard numbers. Cold, hard, and dumb. Without a conceptual context for understanding how many is too many, the mere tallying of heads tells us nothing.

And by any operative measure of "too many," we are nowhere near "overpopulated." Our natural resources, including food, keep getting cheaper and more abundant. Since 1970, world population has increased around 50 percent. An alarming figure, no? But food prices have fallen 50 percent, despite government policies to drive them up by reducing production. Everything we use to live and thrive takes fewer man-hours to produce, costs less, and is more abundant than 100 years ago, despite the population more than doubling in the same period.

With the proper market institutions and technologies, there is no reason to assume we are 80 stories down in a 100-story plummet, either. While demography and resource economics are both uncertain disciplines, most signs indicate that the only surefire way to stabilize fertility rates is to make people richer. And the way to do that, historical evidence suggests, is more freedom and more economic growth, not central management.

CAIRO'S ANNOUNCED GOAL OF CURBING population at 7.2 billion in 20 years (it is currently 5.6 billion) is couched in rhetoric of female empowerment and "reproductive freedom" through relentless state-sponsored anti-natalist propaganda and birth control technologies spread whether they are wanted or not. China's violently enforced one-child policy might seem a reductio ad absurdum of the Cairo spirit. But the sort of programs popucrats want more of are already in effect in international aid programs, and they are only slightly more attractive than China's.

Such programs include India's policy of bribing women into sterilization through promises of government loans and gifts, and enforcing quotas on civil servants to bring women to sterilization camps for assembly-line procedures taking 45 seconds. (During the sterilization "season," teachers can be hard to find in classrooms since they are out meeting their sterilization quotas, for which they often resort to dragging in post-menopausal women.) In Indonesia and Bangladesh, women are given Norplant by popucrat medical technicians, who then often refuse to remove the implants when the undiscussed side effects are found unpleasant by the "patients." Under such circumstances, the doctor serves the goal of population reduction, not the interests or health of the patient.

This article was written in Nov, 1994.