From Doom to Doom: Population Explosions and Declines
As population growth booms and slows, the only constant is panic.
By George Friedman
The United States appears to be facing a possible population crisis. Statistics from the National Institutes for Health show that the U.S. birthrate has declined to the extent that it cannot sustain the current population level. Conventional wisdom suggests that countries experiencing population decline – largely industrialized nations – face serious problems. Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, we feared the threat of an exploding population. There are some subjects for which any outcome appears dangerous: a growing population because it outstrips resources and a declining population because it threatens to slow the economy. Are warnings of a new crisis valid?
In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich argued that by the 1970s, the world’s population would outstrip its resources, leading to hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation – including tens of millions in the U.S. Other researchers suggested the catastrophe was less imminent but agreed that population growth, paired with resource stagnation, would inevitably lead to an apocalyptic scenario. The perceived danger posed by population growth became utterly mainstream thinking. But it was based on two key errors. First, the population growth curve did not materialize as anticipated, as the global population grew at a lesser rate because of slowing growth in advanced industrial countries. Second, the assumption that resource production had peaked and had no further room to grow proved incorrect. Considering these fears, it seems ironic that the recent news of population decline should be greeted with such dread.
As I have written elsewhere, population decline is closely related to the movement of people from rural to urban areas, and that movement coincides with industrialization. In preindustrial agricultural societies, children were a valuable, productive asset – even a six-year-old child could carry out essential household tasks. The global population surged, in part from necessity, as families needed more productive hands, and boosted by advances in medicine that reduced perinatal and infant mortality. The industrialization of society changed things. Children, in an advanced industrial society, attend school into their late teens or 20s, constantly consuming wealth and rarely producing it. Parents in urban areas like London or San Francisco find they can satisfy their emotional needs with only one child. They do not the need eight or nine children to work as field hands, as in previous centuries; further, outside the least developed countries, having eight children would be economically catastrophic.
Children, of course, are born not only of microeconomics but also of lust. The development of hormonal contraceptives in the 1960s coincided with – and mitigated – the panic around population explosion. If a couple has less than two children, the birth rate will decline. Add this to the Industrial Revolution and to declining real prices of energy and other resources, and Ehrlich’s models collapse.
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