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The Population Bomb Hits 8 Billion
The world’s population is reaching 8 billion for the first time in history this month. This is the population bomb that Paul and Ann Ehrlich described in their 1968 book. They warned that the fight to control population growth was over and that hundreds of millions of people would die of famine.
The growth of the population slowed perceptively over the next half century, and some now proclaim the population bomb never detonated. In fact, another 4 billion people were added to the world’s population in the 54 years after Ehrlich’s book. Tragically hundreds of millions of people did in fact starve to death, even as food production has markedly increased, but malnutrition remains one of the leading causes of infant mortality.
Why did this tragedy occur even though it’s still often dismissed as something that never happened?
The conventional narrative was that as people’s incomes rose, they would have fewer children, so the US could use “development aid” to turn the tide. This demographic transition theory was so embedded in academic and government views of population that the idea of actually doing anything directly about birth rates was considered completely unnecessary. Everything would happen automatically. And we could continue to pretend that “development “worked.
In the United States, even as it got more prosperous, a huge post-World War baby boom pushed births to over 4.5 million annually. Even as birth rates then peaked in 1964 and started to decline, the US population continued to grow by over 3 million annually as the baby boom generation grew up and had its own children.
On top of this, we decided without much thought to dramatically increase immigration levels at exactly the same time the baby boom population birth rate explosion peaked and was starting to decline. So, while birth rates have markedly slowed, we are still adding a city the size of New York every decade and a population of 226 million in 1980 now exceeds 330 million.
Even as the US assumed its own population explosion was under control, it decided it would bring the worldwide population under control as well. It was thought if the US along with development assistance simply distributed tons of contraceptives to the third world under an international family planning program, birth rates in Pakistan and Mexico and Nigeria would plummet as unwanted childbearing would be avoided, and the population bomb would not explode.
Since 1965 the US has spent billions through the US State Department, the World Bank and the United Nations distributing pills, condoms and IUDs throughout the third world, under a voodoo demographic theory of “contraceptive inundation.”
One trick the family planners used was to assume for every 1000 boxes of contraceptives distributed in say Egypt, the birth rates would automatically decline by “x” number of points, irrespective of what the in-country census numbers indicated.
In 1979, first lady Sadat of Egypt took US first lady Rosalyn Carter on a tour of an Egyptian village to highlight the success of “family planning.” The Muslim village bigshot who “distributed” the family planning largesse from International Planned Parenthood, for example, asked his wife to show Mrs. Carter how successful the contraceptive distribution programs were.
She dutifully brought dozens of boxes from under her own bed where the head man for the past year had stored them, still filled with UN purchased condoms and cycles of pills, still wrapped, as “proof.”
Supporters would claim this was all a success as hundreds of millions of women apparently have decided not to have “unwanted children” through the miracle of “family planning.” After all, have not birth rates now declined?
Yes, birth rates did eventually decline but the reason was not what demographers had assumed.
According to Robert Gillespie of Population Communication, what happened to propel birth rates downward over the past decades was the advent of worldwide social media. Parents everywhere saw what opportunities lay around the world and how “others” are making it.
Parents worldwide from Iran, Brazil, Pakistan and Egypt, decided that the chances of their children finding success was inversely related to the number of children they had. A smaller number of children meant the odds of the children, not the parents, finding a decent education and job opportunities went up dramatically. Birth rates declined even in nations such as Brazil that opposed “family planning” programs or in Iran where such programs from the UN and World Bank were negligible.
Third, while global family planning programs rested on absurd ideas, the idea of limiting population was not to stop the growth of either the poor or non-western or non-white people. It was not an outgrowth of Sanger’s eugenics.
According to Hubert Humphrey, the program was to prevent societies of all kinds from being overwhelmed and thus made unstable by the sheer numbers. This was especially true given so many of the less developed “Group of 77” at the United Nations were enthralled with socialism and government controlled and regulated economies that made providing for any population let alone a dramatically expanding population, a grueling and largely unsuccessful endeavor.
The boom in population was actually quite sudden. The dramatic decline in child mortality was not foreseen as suddenly growth rates soared not because people were having more children but because so many of their children were surviving. On top of which, the absence of free enterprise and economic freedom was an automatic sentence of mass poverty for billions, especially in the southern hemisphere and what was described as the less developed world.
Just take South Asia. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had 600 million people when the US started “family planning in 1965 when Vice President Hubert Humphrey successful campaigned to annually authorize $50 million for the Office of Population. (Now over $500 million). The three countries now have 1.8 billon people and are burdened by staggering poverty held in place by a ridged caste system, violent Islamic culture that downgrades women and education, and largely state-run socialism that prevents economic growth and entrepreneurship.
But the family planning mafia got a strangle hold on US population policy and we wasted nearly half a century inundating the third world with condoms even as in South Asia for example the three countries tripled their numbers.
Ironically, while it is assumed that human invention and ingenuity would develop the technology necessary to sustain life on this planet for a growing population, elites in most western nations are trying hard to force continued poverty onto the very countries where poverty is most endemic—through crazy policies banning fossil fueled based fertilizers or eliminating cattle.
That was not always the case. US assistance and development money helped agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug’s ingenuity in dramatically increasing grain yields to bring a “Green Revolution” and fed billions previously thought destined for only starvation.
But the good news ends there. Half of the people of Africa lack access to both potable water, simple sanitation and access to electricity. But with fracking and natural gas production, Africa with its reserves could lift millions of poor people out of poverty.
But the World Bank and top European countries are actively prohibiting the construction of electrical generating facilities in Africa while working to import billions of cubic meters of natural gas, even as the populations of the African continent remain in energy poverty.
There is a very close connection between per capita income and per capita energy production, but the obsession with net zero carbon admissions is forcing the 1.4 billion people of Africa to remain in poverty (compared to 321 million people in 1965.). Europe, that has so mismanaged its energy future, is ending fossil fuel production in their own countries while importing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas through the back door from Africa while lecturing the poor about how fossil fuels are to be prohibited.
Published in Environment
I don’t consider eight billion to be an alarming number; I won’t consider ten billion to be an alarming number, either.
The world is growing richer. I think you’re correct that increased fossil fuel consumption is desperately needed in the developing world: Africa should put its incredible hydroelectric potential to use as well. Efforts to push Africa to “sustainable” sources of energy — by which people usually mean wind and solar — are tragically wrong-minded: Africa needs reliable baseload electric power to lift it out of poverty (just as America and Europe need it to remain prosperous).
Paul and Ann Ehrlich got it wrong. Their predictions of widespread starvation and unsustainable populations didn’t materialize. The crisis didn’t materialize.
Instead, the world has continued, with occasional hiccoughs, to grow wealthier. If we can discourage the climate handwringers from crippling us all with their misinformed and unrealizable energy nonsense, the world can continue to get wealthier.
Overpopulation is, with rare exception, not a problem.
What Paul and Ann Ehrlich predicted:
What happened:
Your article didn’t seem to make this point very emphatically. That decrease was a stunning consequence (stunning, to the statist ruling class) of the enormous increase in the economic power of markets in the world.
According to the elite, like the Ehrlichs, the prevalence of market action (i.e., property rights) is the cause of hunger, not the cure, as it turned out to be. So they were arguing that the rich nations had a moral obligation to eliminate more of individual self-ownership and personal responsibility, and replace it with state ownership of and responsibility for the individual human being.
Fortunately for the human race, that increase in state power didn’t happen.
Yet.
Leave it to politicians and bureaucrats to turn good news into a catastrophe.
Without them, we would be looking at a happy miracle. They need to be stopped. Let the world have cheap energy. It’s the source of life.
A friend of mine was a special needs teacher-turned-school superintendent. He refused to allow the town to “blame” the special needs students for our budget woes. “I will not pit the families and students against each other!” He was a wonderful person. He was on track to be a priest when he fell in love and got married instead. Had four children. :) Best superintendent in Massachusetts for a long time. :)
At any rate, he said in a private meeting when one of the teachers asked why there were so many “special needs kids now”: “It’s actually the best news in the whole world. Our neonatal intensive care units are making miracles happen every day!”
Rev. Malthus, call your office.
Yes but:
Not to say there isn’t crushing poverty etc., but ignoring countries’ own actions – developing countries act, they are not just acted upon – is a mistake. (Perhaps exactly the one that ‘let’s just fund a lot of confoms’ made?)
A similar graph for China would show even more growth.
Going back to India, you may be interested in this book that compares the North and the South and how/why they have diverged.
I am not buying the “social media” thing. If that were true, then Italy was hooked on social media in 1960. I’ll stick with the usual explanation is wealth leads people to move from subsistence farming to more skill based employment and thus children are less valuable to a family. I would also accept a change in religion practices.
It’s education, especially the education of women, that correlates with decreased fertility.
It happened in Western Europe, it happened in parts of India, it happened in Iran.
Basic facts wrong.
Birthrates didn’t “peak” in 1964, they peaked in the mid 1950s. The big decline started in 1959. (see below for data, but anecdotally that also fits my personal experience. I was born in 1962, one of my brothers was born in 1959. His high school class was the peak year for our high school. When I graduated, it was a three-year school with a total student population of about 1500. Five years after I graduated, when my neighbors younger sister did, the school had been converted to a four-year school and had a total Student population of under 1200.)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birth-rate
Demographers before the pandemic predicted that population growth in the countries that consume 90 % of the world’s goods ( population cohort between 0-64) would only grow 0.4% for the entire decade ( not per year, but for the entire decade) between 2020 and 2030 and total world population would start to decline around 2050.
I think it would be safe to assume that the growth rate predicted between 2020 and 2030 failed so far to even grow that much and is now negative and will be negative for the entire decade. Therefore I think we can say the “population bomb” has failed to detonate and bring about the worldwide doom predicted.
That said, given the terrible fracturing of trade blocs and alliances due to the Ukrainian War, the ability to feed this effectively shrinking world will be a challenge. Also negative population growth often results in negative economic growth and a whole new set of problems of overcapacity in key industries which can also lead to deflation and the withering of industrial output.
Ah, it sounds like someone has been listening to and/or reading Peter Zeihan.
The cure is worldwide free markets. With less waste of human capital in poor countries, everyone will be better able to be a productive member of society.
Children on a farm are an asset to the family after the age of 4 or 5. The children can help with the work on the farm.
Children in a modern urban setting are almost always a net expense to the family until they move out of the house in countries with child labor laws.
Perhaps you also implying capitalism, which includes a legal framework for property rights, pooling of money, and limited liability. Capitalism and free markets are a great pair to create prosperity.
I think “waste” here means unproductive use of humans. Digging with shovels is better than digging with hands and digging with machines is better yet! Capitalism+Free markets allows for the invention and manufacturing and optimal deployment of machines.
I’d like to see an amendment to the minimum wage hikes that allows for less pay for anyone subject to child labor laws.
More likely to see employers deal with those headaches and employ minors in school.
i would actually rather repeal, but I think this is more doable politically.
The neo-Malthusians assume they have perfect knowledge of future technology and resources and that reproduction and virtually all economic activity should be constrained by that assumption. It is the same mentality that shapes the Davoisie.
The other dumb assumption is that high birth rates cause poverty without an inkling that that assumption may be backwards. Infant mortality and a societal breakdown in which clan and family ties are all that matter create a strong incentive to call up reinforcements. And clearly, the experience of the entire developed world is that rapid economic growth deters baby-making.
Japan, China and much of Europe are on the verge of a solyent green era of having a huge bulge of elderly persons with fewer workers to support them and productivity is not increasing.
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. But you can’t really have free markets without capitalism.
This is so Bjorn Lomborg…and so correct. There is a success quotient that seems ‘conveniently’ overlooked. Economic prosperity produces human flourishing; and economic prosperity cannot happen without affordable and distributable energy; and human flourishing produces more intellectual advancements. Period. Economic prosperity advances the technological, biological, agricultural, energy-efficiency, etc. fields.
As long as human flourishing is a competing value with power and wealth, prosperity solves problems more quickly with less human suffering than any far-fetched population control from a top-down, human/governmental approach. And generally speaking, it takes more people to work through these technological advancements. Intentionally reducing the pool of productive human intelligence is counter-productive to arriving at beneficial solutions to human suffering.
Of course it may be pollyannish of me to assume that human flourishing is a competing ethic in this calculus.
It is true that we cannot simply assume tech progress but bad results caused by artificial limitations from heavy-handed planning by morons is close to a certainty. “So Bjorn Lomborg” is very high praise.
Poor countries have unregulated markets which is basically a free market. But they are poor, because they don’t have the legal framework for capitalism.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-difference-between-capitalist-system-and-free-market-system.asp
No discussion about human population dynamics (past, present, and future) would be complete without the inclusion of the late Hans Rosling (professor of international health at Karolinska Institute in Sweden), a masterful presenter on the subject.
Here, for your enjoyment, is a 13 minute video of his 2012 talk in Doha, Qatar:
From the article you linked: “Can You Have a Free Market Without Capitalism? Yes, a free market can exist without capitalism.“
That articles describes capitalism poorly and claims that capitalism works when supported with New Deal and Great Society programs. Yikes, the commies have taken over investopedia.
I found other links that view capitalism positively that say same things.
But just trying to put the alternative view out there that capitalism and free market are not necessarily the same.
In a pure free market, I can paint Mickey Mouse and sell it. In capitalism, Disney can protect their intellectual rights and prevent me from that free trade because it is their product.
Everything said is spot 0n, but we ignore what in fact propelled the US to the top and what has kept most countries way behind except to the extent they follow or at least feel compelled to compete with the US. Top down can’t work as the top, unless the place is tiny like the Nordics, serves its own interests and those interests are removed from the mass of the population. The US had a bottom up model with a few but essential conditions. As we move away which we’re doing at light speed, it will not end well, nor for the rest of the world, including China which is pushing us (with our help) toward terminal policies. We imposed conditions on the central government which we failed to impose on state governments. Rather than fixing the state governments, we passed power to the center. Now the question is can it even be fixed?
I Walton,
With respect, it seems to me that you have the laws of economics backward.
Not competing means not participating in the market, where you exchange goods with everyone in the market whenever you each have an economic advantage in the two goods–regardless of what other countries do in the market.
Economics teaches us that far from keeping a person back, participating in markets propels him upward.
With respect to the article, the period of history that Respondeo EtsiMutabor refers to in the OP bears this out. Instead of increased population leading to increased extreme poverty as the anti-market ideologues, Paul and Ann Ehrlich, predicted in their 1968 book, the increased access to markets (in other words, increased property rights) had the opposite effect. The unprecedented, massive worldwide elimination of extreme poverty over the course of a few short decades.
That sounds like Anarchy. Anarchy is a myth and cannot exist in nature. It is a waste of time to consider it. There will always be rules and order. Look at prisons as an example of emergent order. Here’s a podcast and an article.
Free market is not anarchy in anything except trade. You still have physical property theft, but Disney does not own my labor or my paper or my ink, so pave stolen nothing from them.
It is enacting laws that govern trade, like copyrights, that government gets involved and says the intellectual property is legally recognized capital. That did not spring up over night.
In fact, some of that capitalist law has made it harder for independent farmers to compete in a free market, because someone else’s capital accidentally ends up in their crop.
The USA have had intellectual property rights protection from the beginning (see Section 8 of Constitution). That has served us well. I think that Congress has abused this by granting nearly unlimited copyrights and also made a farce of drug patents. That needs fixing. Also, any invention partially paid for with tax dollars conveys patent rights to *all* taxpayers.
That should be clarified. No patent should cover something that is self-replicated in nature. This includes seeds, viruses, bugs, or software.
Anyway, I think we are of the same mind when it comes to the distinction between capitalism and free markets, but differ as to the proper level of pureness that is best.
I think it is more likely the population hits 7 billion before it hits 11 billion.
I think we would both agree on No to pure free market, though we may differ on where that line is. I’m still leaning to small timers having more free market than large market share corporations. No squashing the little guy.