The Population Controllers Get Everything Wrong. Again.

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 27, 2023

 

Today, the movement dedicated to limiting the growth of the human species by means of repressive governmental controls is celebrating a rare species of victory — rare because their cause’s urtext, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, is hopelessly flawed. Their victory is such only insofar as repressive governmental controls will not be necessary to curb the growth of the human population. We’ve voluntarily defused the “population bomb” by simply declining to breed.

 

A recent study commissioned by the Club of Rome projects that the global human population will continue to grow into the middle of the 21st century to reach roughly 8.8 billion. At that point, it will crest and begin to decline rapidly. Sounds bad, right? Wrong! “The new forecasts are good news for the global environment,” the Guardian reported.

 

Indeed, we should seek to hasten humanity’s collapse. “The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels,” the outlet breathlessly relates. After all, as one of the study’s authors observed, there’s plenty of work to be done to address the “paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”

 

This Malthusian misanthropy is common among those who remain beholden to a defunct theory of human development that has nevertheless justified some of the most egregious eugenicist abuses that have occurred since World War II.

 

Surveying the demographic landscape in Japan, where the workforce is shrinking, deaths far outpace births, and the population is expected to shrink by about 20 percent by the middle of the century, Time magazine’s Ciara Nugent found a lot to love.

 

“I want to be clear that population control is not the solution to climate change,” Nugent wrote in January. “But it doesn’t make sense for developed countries to ignore the positive role that their shrinking populations could play in the climate fight.” Fewer people translates into less production, which necessarily means reduced consumption, which in turn gives way to “less damage to the natural world.”

 

“Humanity faces an imminent survival dilemma,” said Richard Heinberg, Post-Carbon Institute senior fellow, following China’s surprise announcement that its population declined for the first time in six decades in 2022. “China’s slowdown both in terms of economy and population looks like an event worth celebrating,” he wrote. It is a development that will contribute to “human happiness and the protection of nature,” which are threatened “by the endless expansion of resource extraction, production, consumption, pollution, and human numbers.”

 

Even on the terms the population controllers have set for themselves, this is all nonsense. They are correct that a declining population would translate to lower rates of consumption and production, but that would also put downward pressure on economic growth. If your only priority is environmental protection, economic growth is your best friend.

 

In the developing world, where economic centralization is more common than it is in the democratic West, economic policies are geared toward rapid rates of development (as you might expect). As a result, environmental protection gets short shrift — which makes intuitive sense if you were to devote any serious thought to the subject. Environmental initiatives are a product demanded by a robust and stable middle class. The richer a society is, the more time and resources it has the luxury of devoting to its environmental standards.

 

What’s more, the crises that would result from a steadily declining population are likely to eclipse those posed by environmental issues. Fewer people would threaten the social safety nets in the developed world since there are now fewer people contributing to the support of the elderly population perched atop the inverted demographic pyramid.

 

A declining population would result in persistently higher rates of unemployment. And it would limit rates of innovation because there would be fewer minds dedicated to innovating and still fewer hands available to bring their creations to life. Stanford University economics professor Charles Jones explored the economic effects of a declining population in a paper that argues such a condition would have sweeping and deleterious consequences for living standards worldwide.

 

Few ideas can claim to be as intellectually discredited and morally bankrupt as population control and its various permutations. Fortunately, the Club of Rome has a fantastic track record of being reliably wrong. It predicted that the prices of critical commodities would increase markedly over the decades, but those prices went down. It insisted that global energy and agriculture industries would recede by the end of the 20th century, but both sectors expanded and increased their outputs. “Limits to Growth,” the Club’s famously alarmist 1972 book, “simply misunderstood the meaning of the word ‘reserves,’” the Economist editorialized in 1997.

 

“The Earth has cancer,” the Club’s 1974 manifesto read, “and the cancer is Man.” This supposed observation is better understood as a statement of faith. And what a monstrous faith it is.