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Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron caused a stir when he told an audience at the Gates Foundation, “One of the critical issues we have regarding the African demography is the fact that this is not a chosen fertility. . . . Please present me the lady who decided — being perfectly educated — to have seven, eight, nine children.” (The Twitter hashtag #PostcardsForMacron then presented the childless Frenchman with exactly that.)
But his comments should not have come as a surprise to anyone aware of the political and cultural climate of, say, the past five decades. Overpopulation has proven to be a persistent fear — even as the evidence for it grows weaker and weaker.
Political leaders are just one perpetrator here. Newspaper editors can be even more forthright. Recent columns in the New York Times, NPR, and NBC reveal the concerns of the overpopulation worriers more clearly. A representative headline, via NBC Think: “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.” The entertainment industry meanwhile pushes these fears to their extremes. Think Thanos in this year’s “Avengers” film, or Samuel L. Jackson’s Valentine in 2014’s “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” (Tag line: “Mankind is a virus. A cull is our only hope.”)
Hollywood hyperbole, you might think. Not exactly. Here is Paul Ehrlich writing in his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb”:
Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford when he wrote this manifesto, was no crank (well, he was, but he was not perceived as one by society’s right-thinking people at the time). As David Frum notes in his history of the 1970s, “How We Got Here,” Johnny Carson invited Ehrlich on The Tonight Show some 25 times in the ‘70s. Even President Carter was swept up in the current, appointing a commission that went on to predict “continuing high population growth, stagnating food production, a rapid decline in oil production after the mid-1990s, skyrocketing mineral and commodity prices, and severe water shortages in the Third World.”
None of these fears came to pass. And yet comments like Macron’s and headlines like NBC Think’s remain common. Declinism is a long-standing and so understandable characteristic in Western society, but for those afflicted by it, here are the facts:
The earth’s population is increasing, and for a time even at a pretty startling rate. As Jonathan Last details in his book “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,” it took thousands of years for the earth to hit the 1 billion mark, achieved around 1825. It took only 100 more years to hit 2 billion, and just 35 more to hit the 3 billion mark, which we reached in 1960. In the 58 years since, world population skyrocketed to 7.5 billion people. It’s easy to imagine the earth continuing this pace and adding another billion inhabitants every 12 years or so in perpetuity — easy, but wrong.
The world’s population growth will only continue its breakneck pace if fertility rates don’t crater. But that is exactly what’s happening. Total fertility rate, or TFR, basically the number of babies the average woman will bear over the course of her life, has decreased from nearly 5 in 1950 to 2.5 today. For context, a TFR of 2.1 is known as the replacement rate, or the rate at which population remains steady. But this decline in TFR is more drastic than it seems at first sight. In regions the UN considers “more developed” (Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan), TFR declined from 2.8 in 1950 to under 1.7 today. Demographic momentum keeps these populations stable or growing for now, but in the coming years the developed world will see their native-born populations shrink (Japan, already undergoing this shrinkage, is the canary in the coal mine here).
Now, the “more developed world” comprises just 17 percent or so of the world’s population, so this shrinkage will be more than cancelled out by growth elsewhere, where TFR remains above replacement. But fertility rates are declining even faster in the less developed world: from 6.06 in 1950 to under 2.6 today. Certain countries, mainly African nations such as Niger and Angola, maintain TFRs above 6, but these rates should follow the same pattern and fall precipitously as the countries develop. The case of Latin America is illustrative. Last: “The average fertility rate for Latin America in the 1960s was 6 children per woman; by 2005 that average had dropped to 2.5. Within a decade or two, every single country in Latin America will likely have a fertility rate below that of the United States.”
So what does this mean for future population growth? The UN foresees a continued increase throughout this century, nearing stabilization around 11 billion in 2100. As far as rates of increase go, that’s much slower than our pace over the previous century, when world population nearly quadrupled. But that could still be a massive overestimation. An analysis by Sanjeev Sanyal, formerly of Deutsche Bank and now Principle Economic Adviser in India’s Ministry of Finance, forecasts that global population will peak in 2055 around 8.7 billion people, and decline to 8 billion by 2100.
And Sanyal’s estimate seems more credible given the UN’s history of overestimating fertility rates. The UN’s 2010 forecasts assumed nearly every industrialized nation would see its TFR increase to 2.0 over the next 70 years, magically settling near the replacement rate. This, despite no country ever transitioning back to replacement-level fertility (for any five-year period) once falling below it. The UN has since revised downward their predictions of future fertility rates, but their past record does not inspire confidence. Skewed gender ratios in China and India (i.e. an overabundance of single males) also suggest fertility rates will come in lower than raw population counts imply in the world’s two most populous nations. And even if the world decides it wants to re-inflate fertility rates, government efforts to do so have not met much success (though it will be interesting to see whether China’s attempt to reverse its one-child policy bucks this trend). In short, if fears of a population bomb hardly made sense in the 1970s, they make even less sense now.
The earth’s population will increase over the next few decades, but we know what that entails. The world has coped with not just population growth but a population explosion pretty well, despite the dire warnings of doomsayers from Thomas Malthus to Carter’s commission. What’s more worrying is the unknown. As Last writes, “Since the Industrial Revolution (at least) there is no model for a country experiencing a sustained, structural shrinking of its population” — a fate soon arriving for the developed world, and if Sanyal’s analysis is correct the rest of the world too. In a contest of horrors, the onset of a unique experience in the history of modern man would seem more concerning than the fevered fears of Paul Ehrlich and other cartoon villains.
Matt Winesett is the Managing Editor of AEIdeas.
The earth’s population will continue to increase over the next few decades, but we know what that entails. More worrying is the specter of population decline.
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