6. The Population Bomb was a Dud
The Reverend Thomas Malthus, British economist, wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 arguing that population tends to increase faster than the food supply, with inevitably disastrous results, unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease.[1] Malthus thus promulgated the “first great doomsday theory”, as it is called by Wallace Kaufman in his book No Turning Back, which is a scathing indictment of the excesses of the environmentalist movement. [2]
Wallace, an award winning science writer and former active environmentalist has this to say about the origins of the “population crisis”:
The ghost of the gloomiest of all the Romantics is still channeled through the mouths of environmental media stars such as Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan. . . He (Malthus) was passionately concerned with the plight of the poor. He felt the wrongs of the present painfully, but could only theorize about the future, since he understood little of the forces changing his world. He offered a patently unrealistic solution – “we should facilitate instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing mortality”. In other words, let the poor and sick die off.
According to Malthus, “the power of population is indefinately greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” He warned that population growth was already outrunning resources. Don’t be misled by the optimism of scientists, Malthus declared. Their revelations are brilliant, but useless in avoiding catastrophe. The earth’s carrying capacity was being strained, he said, and the world must begin shedding its weight of people.
Malthus could see little but the world nearby in time and space. The discussions with his father that led to his anonymously published Essay on the Principle of Population took place when harvests were poor and war raised British food prices to record levels. His grouchy view of the human mind prevented him from realizing that human ingenuity in the Western world was already multiplying productivity more rapidly than the population could consume the results.
If science and industry had been stopped in the mid-nineteenth century, the world population would have outstripped nature’s support system. Instead, we modified those systems. For more than 100,000 years, humankind has been using technology to increase the earth’s carrying capacity faster than it has increased its own numbers. Early hunters and gatherers, who used only clubs and sticks, probably needed several hundred acres per person to survive. The stone-tipped spear and arrow reduced the acreage a little, and agriculture probably reduced it to an acre or two per person. Technology has played a much greater role in increasing carrying capacity than in decreasing it.[3]
It is illuminating to note that the population of the world when Malthus wrote his Essay was only just reaching one billion people (not until 1804). The population of the world today has just reached 6 billion.[4]
Paul Ehrlich, a spiritual disciple of Malthus, in his book The Population Bomb written in 1968, predicted famine and disaster on a scale unprecedented in world history: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”[5] He said that starvation would be rampant and that “a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century” [6]
He predicted population levels exceeding 8 billion by the year 2000 and said if present trends continue for 900 years (a big if), we could have “some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the earth. Sixty million billion people. This is about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth’s surface, land and sea…”[7] It is interesting that his book has been updated numerous times, with the failed predictions conveniently edited out.
Is the world’s population out of control? Are we destined for disaster? According to the United Nations, maybe not. The U.N. recently felt compelled to issue a 1998 report, rather than wait until the scheduled 2000 report. Why? Because recent trends in population control have significantly reduced estimates of future growth. It seems that the message is getting through to manage family size.
Normally, long-range projections are produced every five years. However, the changes introduced in the 1998 Revision of World Population Prospects (United Nations, 1999a and 1999b) have made their early revision necessary. In recent years a major reassessment of the prospects for fertility decline has taken place. In the developing world, only 17 countries with less than 4 per cent of the world population, had shown no signs of a fertility reduction by 1995 and in many of the countries where fertility reductions had started, the decline had been rapid.
Furthermore, in countries that are already far advanced in the transition from high to low fertility, fertility does not necessarily stabilize at replacement level. Thus, the number of countries with below-replacement fertility is large and increasing. By 1995, 44 per cent of the world population lived in countries where fertility was at or below replacement level (2.1 children per woman). Forty-nine countries, including China, were in that group and many of those countries had been experiencing below-replacement fertility for at least a decade or two. In ten countries, fertility had reached levels below 1.5 children per woman and more recent data confirm that low fertility persists. These developments justify the assumption that fertility will remain below replacement level during most of the 1995-2050 period in countries with below-replacement fertility today. The 1998 Revision has incorporated such an assumption in the medium projection, whereas the 1996 Revision assumed a return to replacement-level fertility in all countries. Such differing assumptions have important implications for the long-term future: whereas the medium scenario of the preceding long-range projections, consistent with the 1996 Revision, yielded a world population of 10.8 billion in 2150, the present ones, which are consistent with the 1998 Revision, produce a population of 9.7 billion, 1.1 billion lower.
The present set of long-range projections permits an assessment of the long-term impact of different fertility trends. The medium scenario, with a fertility that eventually stabilizes at replacement level (2.05-2.09 children per women), leads to zero population growth in the long run. In contrast, the high scenario produces an ever increasing population because its fertility stabilizes at 2.5-2.6 children per woman, and the low scenario leads to a decreasing population since its fertility stabilizes at 1.5-1.6 children per women, about half a child below replacement level.
The three scenarios result therefore in very different sizes for the world population. By 2150, the population of the world is 24.8 billion according to the high scenario, 9.7 billion according to the medium scenario and 3.2 billion according to the low scenario. The low and high scenarios illustrate how deviations of about half a child from replacement level, if sustained over the long run, can produce large deviations from the path leading to an unchanging population size, as embodied by the medium scenario. Because of the nature of exponential growth, the deviations expand over time (see table 1 and figure 1). Thus, whereas the differences of the high and low scenarios with respect to the medium scenario are moderate in 2050 (at less than 2 billion each), they amount to 15 billion and 6 billion respectively in 2150. Aside from reflecting the uncertainty surrounding the projection of population size into the long-term future, these deviations underscore the importance of attaining replacement-level fertility as soon as possible and sustaining levels very close to it over long periods. Even a deviation of about 0.2-0.3 children per women above the fertility of the medium scenario, if sustained until 2150, would result in a population of 16.2 billion persons instead of the 9.7 that the medium scenario yields. [8]
The bottom line? A small downward variation in fertility rates (the ‘low’ scenario) can result in the world population increasing towards a peak of less than 8 billion in 2050 and then steadily decreasing to 3.2 billion in 2150, one hundred years later. That is almost half the present world population of 6 billion. Think what that will mean for housing and land prices, that everyone of course knows will never go down. For more proof of the space available today, take a (long) drive through Wyoming, where for hours you may see nothing but an occasional antelope herd.[9]
Phillip Longman got it right in 2004 with his book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About It. No hysteria or unfounded gloom and doom just unbiased research.
[1] Reverend Thomas Malthus. Principle of Population (1798)
[2] Wallace Kaufman, No Turning Back (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 35.
[3] Ibid., p. 35.
[4] United Nations, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Long-Range World Population Projections: Based on the 1998 Revision, Executive Summary, from the website (http://www.popin.org/longrange/exesummary. htm).
[5] Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1971), p. xi.
[6] Ibid., p. 3.
[7] Ibid., p. 4.
[8] United Nations.
[9] The author of this book personally drove at 110 miles per hour for 1 1/2 hours and saw nary a human soul while traversing Wyoming recently.