Population Decline Is Bad For Us

Weekly Standard: Innovation Would Suffer With Slackening Demand

(Weekly Standard)  This column was written by Jonathan V. Last

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Fertility rates around the world are dropping for a variety of complex reasons. While population itself continues to increase — the United States, for instance, recently passed the 300 million mark — this is the product of waning demographic momentum. The rate of increase is slowing, and by 2080 world population will peak somewhere in the vicinity of nine billion before contracting.

Which leads us to the next question: Is population contraction a bad thing?

Some think not. There is a school of thought that argues that smaller populations are good. Population-control proponents claim variously that:

• We do not have the food to sustain higher populations.
  
• Our planet already suffers from overcrowding.
  
• The environmental impact of increased populations will bring catastrophe either through pollution or consumption of finite natural resources.
  
• Decreased population will lead to higher wages and a better quality of life as available supplies exceed reduced demands.
  

These arguments seem reasonable at first, but do not withstand scrutiny.

Let's start with food. The worry about mass starvation is a remnant of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 sensation "The Population Bomb." Ehrlich wrote that, in the face of expanding populations, "the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

As Ehrlich himself admits, this prediction proved faulty. Instead, the availability of food has greatly increased, even with growing population. Demographer Philip Longman notes that, between 1980 and 2001, the price of food declined by 53 percent. Famine, observes Longman, has become "a political problem — a matter of fair distribution, not of inadequate supply."

How did this happen? The Danish economist Ester Boserup upended the classical Malthusian model of agriculture in 1965 by proposing that population increase fosters agricultural innovation, which, in turn, spurs leaps in production. Her theories have been borne out.

What about overcrowding? Everywhere you go today, you find traffic jams and sprawl, with people packed into condominiums and crowded malls. But this is a problem of density, not population. There's plenty of land available out there. The problem is that people who used to live in the countryside have relocated to cities: There are fewer people living in the Great Plains today than there were in the 1920s.

Environmental concerns are more interesting. However, such end-of-the-world warnings are not new. In the 1970s, many scientists were concerned about a new Ice Age. But leave aside global warming, on which science is conflicted, and take the other concern principally cited by environmentalists: that the Earth has a finite supply of resources that we shall surely soon deplete.

This, too, is an argument we have heard before. As Massimo Livi-Bacci explains in his "Concise History of World Population" more than 100 years ago, economists "feared that coal supplies would be used up, and about 30 years ago the Club of Rome made similar predictions regarding other raw materials." Instead, markets and human innovation stepped in to provide greater efficiency.

For instance, in the America of 1850, you needed an average of 4.6 tons of petroleum equivalent to produce $1,000 of goods and services. By 1950, you needed only 1.8 tons, and, by 1978, 1.5 tons. Markets are exceptional engines of conservation.

Which leaves us with the economy. In 1971, Simon Smith Kuznets won the Nobel Prize in economics for his theory of "tested knowledge." As Kuznets explained: "More population means more creators and producers, both of goods along established production patterns and of new knowledge and inventions."

Kuznets was codifying what others had noticed before. Adam Smith remarked that "the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants." As Livi-Bacci observes, "All things being equal, population increase leads to increased per capita production."

[kaliveotin]

What idiotic e3xpert believes that the world population will not automatically decrease until at least nine billion people, 20 years ago people believed that population would automatically decrease at five billion. because of resources and disease.The earth can allow 22 billion people comfortably. More or less comfortably. Water and food define our limitations, disease or plague are thre only potential controls. It will be next to impossible to control pro-creation habits. While India and China are close to saturation. Most of the Earth is ready to explode with respect to population. We better find another planet.

Excuse me please step aside Kaliveotin and make room for me to make my comment:

I agree

Thanks I'll get out of your way now....

[mrthornman]

The author is wrong on so many levels....

[feelfree1]

Just think how much better this world might be if the population of contributors to the "Weekly Standard", and other fascist extremist propaganda rags, suddenly contracted!

[lestb35]

Don't you wish these so called "experts" would SHUT UP!!! Every day it's something else. This just shows that anyone can claim anything and find data and make a somewhat convincing argument no matter how illogical or lacking of common sense.

[creeper00]

If you'd like an example of how far the religious right is willing to take this, look at the link here:

http://www.quiverfull.com/

[itgranny]

Oh my! I don't know where to start. We're dirtying up our world at an alarming rate and this nut job thinks it's our duty to continue doing so.

The polar ice cap is melting due to global temps rising.

Our water supply (lakes and streams and ground water) is getting dirtier and dirtier.

We're displacing billions of gallons of ground water so we can water the desert to grow food.

Our rain forests are the earth's air purifiers yet they are getting bulldozed.

Forest fires, nature's way of cleaning house, are being prevented because people build homes in the forest. Natural housekeeping doesn't get done and in turn, the danger of forest fires becomes more and more dangerous and costly.

Swamps are being drained for development. Rivers and streams are being diverted so we can have our recreational lakes.

We'll get ours though. Eventually human population will get high enough and that Mother Nature will feel it necessary to send in a disease to cull the herd. Bird flu anyone?

[jgr3936]

Wow, what a moron. Ask a conservation biologist what increased global population, "innovation", and consumption have done to our world. I cant even begin to address the stupidity of this article.

[larry3736]

Who is "us"? If, by "us", they mean the well-heeled right-wing intellectuals who write for and subscribe to the Weekly Standard, then yes, a contracting population is a dire threat, for their whole way of life depends on a perpetual worldwide labor supply that is cheap, abundant, desperate and docile. Without teeming masses of unemployed, they might have to start paying a decent living wage, even to their nannies. But it's great to hear there is actually plenty of land, and since they own quite a lot of it, maybe they'd like to donate some to resettle the millions left homeless as global warming turns central Africe into a desert.

[jebediah76]

So glad this article is being laughed at so rigorously.

The thing that gets me about all of this is that the only reason any of his consequences for population reduction to be so drastic is that the people who's job it is to make money will have to either take losses or show smaller gains.

THIS IS THE ONLY REASON that population reductions will hurt the rest of us - Eventually every Ponze scheme collapses - and the economy is about the biggest one ever.

[grumpas]

I am glad to see no one is fooled by this extremist right wing nut case who wrote this article! We are populating ourselves in oblivion while these people play their fiddles and watch the world burn from the balony of their palaces! Most of them claim they are pro life! But, I personally do not believe it! They are the same religious right nuts who have been in control for 6 years or more now! Who don't give a *** about human suffering as long as their bible is followed to the letter! I personally do not believe if their is a God up there he want's us to destroy this planet in the manner we currently are! I have been alive for 64 years now! In the last 20 to 30 years I have grown alarmed at the kind of world we are creating for our Grandchildren to live in! I am glad I will be dead and gone and not have to live with the result of our ignorance!

[jebediah76]

Here is one to chew on:

Money is a measure of power Those with lots of Money like it not just because it gives them stuff and houses but because it gives them Power.

If population is on the increase now, and those who grab the most money have the most power -

The inevitable shift will come when poulation decreases:

The ability to bring in money will no longer be a measure of power. The ability to put it where it needs to go will be the deciding factor.

This is not taught in business schools - they are only taught profit, growth, and that's about it.

[rafterman1]

In addition to the overall dead end arguments the author makes, he forgets one important one: quality of life. Even if he were right and we could keep adding people, just because we can doesn't mean we should. Those of us here need to have a decent quality of life, to enjoy our existence he best as we can.

Just as an example, I live in a medium size city, so it's not like I live in NYC or LA. Yet traffic is horrendous and I end up in line waiting for just about everything. You can't go to the bathroom without somebody in your butt. I can't imagine what it's like in NYC. While I certainly can't complain about my little grievences compared to people starving in Africa, still...it is my life and I only have a frame of reference for that. And right now, there are too many d@mn people in this country. We may be able to support more people for basic existence, but people need space in order to live properly. Like the Statue of Liberty etching say, "yearning to breathe free...". But these days, it's hard to breathe free when there's someone constantly in your face.

[mjv2944]

This is a car load of real genuine BS!!!!!!

[mrthornman]

jebediah76 got it right:

The world economy is built on the human race expanding into infinity. Which of course is not possible, since the earth is finite in size and resources. In other words, a Ponzi scheme.

[marcpcbs]

I always like the "two birds with one stone" management scenario any time it can be applied. So here's a dream

We definitely need to stop this population explosion sooner than later. I believe we should keep the surface of the planet as a clean air and clean water garden by moving light industry, tourism, some residential habitat and light manufacturing, and our prisons info orbit around the earth. We can put heavy industry in orbit around the moon. Just in case one of these poisonous or radioactive stations fall out of orbit it will hit the moon instead of the earth.

We could keep the surface of the planet for the appreciation of nature. Schools, The Arts, minimal footprint surface tourism. And greatly reduce the amount of pollution and also stop loosing so many species every year.

We have learned many times in the past that when you shoot for quantity you normally suffer in the area of quality.

[sjc_1]

I am more for quality than quantity. The earth only has so many resources and they allow us to get to a position of sustainability and balance. If we are scrambling to solve the problems of over population we can forget that fact. Look at energy, water, climate change drought and associated crop failures. We need an optimum number of people, but too many people cause us to lose sight of why we are here in the first place.