This blog post is about the human population of the world. Are there too many people, or are there too few?
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| (A slightly inaccurate graph of the world's population growth, but the point is well made.) |
The county of my birth is very small; it could be
argued that there are too few people there. I was born in Worth County,
Missouri, which is the youngest of the 114 counties in the state. It is also
the Mo. county with the smallest land area and the smallest population.**
According to the U.S. census records, the peak population of
Worth Co. was in 1900 when the number of residents reached nearly 10,000. But
in the 2020 census, the population had dropped to under 2,000.
It can be argued, with good reason, that there are now too
few people in Worth Co. for it to be viable still, and the same is true for
many rural counties across the nation.
The population of some nations is decreasing, and some
people in those countries are worrying about there being too few people—especially
too few of the “right” kind.
I have long been concerned about the rapid increase of the world’s
population. When I was born in 1938, there were about 2.2 billion people living
on this earth, but by 1998 (just 60 years later) that number reached six
billion—and this year it topped eight billion!
If my home county had grown by the same percentage as the
world’s population between 1900 and 2020, it would have a population of around
49,000, not fewer than 2,000.
But already by the early 2000s, there was serious talk about
the declining population in Japan and the need to encourage more Japanese women
to marry and for couples to have more children.
And it is true, many of the wealthy countries of the world
are losing population, and even some in China, until this year the world’s most
populous country, are increasingly concerned about the current population decline
there.
The cover story of the June 3rd-9th
issue of The Economist was “The Baby-Bust Economy,” and they highlighted
the problem of the declining population growth in most of the world’s
wealthiest countries: “The largest 15 countries by GDP all have a fertility
rate below the replacement rate.”
Thus, they project that before the end of this century “the
number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black
Death.”
The unchecked growth of the world’s population has
long been a concern of some scholars, and others. It was 225 years ago when Thomas
Malthus published the first
edition of An Essay on the Principle of
Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798).
Malthus (1766~1834) was an English economist and demographer and is best known for his theory that population
growth will always tend to outrun
the food
supply
and that betterment of humankind
is impossible without stern limits
on reproduction.
Malthus was the first to write publicly about carrying
capacity and overshoot, which are central themes of William Catton’s book that I
introduced in my March
23 blog post, and that perceptive author refers to Malthus several times.
Malthus didn’t know of the coming industrial revolution in the
19th century or the “green revolution” that began in mid-20th
century. But as Catton clearly explains, the extension of the carrying capacity
of the earth was primarily based on the exploitation of depletable and
non-renewable fossil fuels.
It was quite disappointing that the concluding paragraph of The
Economist’s recent cover story states, “Unexpected productivity advances
meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by
Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate.”
True, such time-bombs haven’t detonated yet. But why do they
think that those time bombs are not still ticking in this world with its
continual global warming, ongoing over-consumption of non-renewable resources, and
increasing inequality and strife between the “haves” and “have nots”?
Because of the current, but insufficiently understood,
ecological crisis, there will most likely be a drastic, and catastrophic,
decline in the world’s population long before the end of this century.
Fortunately, rather than being a problem, the current
decline in population pushes the coming catastrophic decline further into the
future.
_____
** You might also find it interesting
that the land area that became Worth County in 1861 was the most northwestern
corner of the United States after Missouri became a state in 1821.
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I realize that in a short blog, you cannot do everything. The issue you've addressed, however, is extremely important for the obvious reasons you identify. I haen't yet read The Economist's more thorough treatment of this issue, but I would mention two other significant factors that complicate it. One is that the decline in populations in rich countries also means much larger portions of the population become elderly and must be supported by declining numbers of younger people. This raises grave issues for the distribution of income and wealth (and thus capitalism itself as a system) as well as for intergenerational tensions. Another is that a declining population can use greater increases of resources because the rich tend to have bigger ecological footprints than the poor.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Anton. And, yes, the first "significant factor" that you mentioned was in the longer article in The Economist: "An ever greyer population will mean higher spending on public pensions and health care, but there will be fewer people of working age to pay the taxes required. . . . That will necessitate later retirement ages, higher taxes or both." These are matters that have been widely discussed in Japan for a couple of decades already.
DeleteThe first "red flag" I saw when I read the "leader" in the new issue of The Economist was at the beginning of the fourth paragraph: "Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many." True, we have not reached the crisis that Malthus wrote about 225 years ago, but the ecological crisis is worse now than he could have dreamed of then. He didn't know about global warming, rising sea levels, significant increases in the number of wildfires (and smoke!), droughts (and severe water shortages) in some places and floods in others, and other similar matters that Catton was writing about in 1980 and that The Economist seems to dismiss cavalierly (at least in their current issue).
Regarding your second point: certainly the 15 countries with the largest GDP can, do, and will most likely will continue to use greater increases of resources than the majority of the world's population who are poor.
How can the people in this country, or in the other wealthy nations, ever develop a global consciousness, realizing that we live in one world and that we need to consider the needs of all people and not just the wealthy minority?
You have broad understandings and healthy concerns. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this informative, yet difficult blog post. According to some authorities, India's population is now, or soon will be, greater than China's. One wonders about China's population, as they had the one child policy for some time. Yet they still supposedly had the world's greatest population.
ReplyDeleteThe too few countries you mention may end up having higher populations if, because of climate crisis, there will be way more environmental refugees.
Unfortunately, humankind's willingness to change is way too slow. The overall political and spiritual common good is needed now, perhaps more than ever before in human history. Would that affluent nations become willing to live more simply that others may simply live.
Garth, I also appreciate you taking time to comment on this morning's blog post.
DeleteThe April 24 issue of The Guardian stated, "According to the UN’s projections, which are calculated through a variety of factors including census data and birth and death rates, India now has a population of 1,425,775,850, surpassing China for the first time." That is partly because of the one-child policy that China had for many years--and now they, too, are worrying about having enough young workers to pay what is necessary to take care of the elderly.
Yes, I think it is quite clear that there will be an increasing number of environmental refugees, but I also think that there will be increasing resistance in the wealthy countries to accepting such refugees.
I have long liked, and have spoken/written, the words Live simply so that others may simply live. But this is quite hard to implement on an individual basis, and I have no hope that it will ever become a policy or widespread practice in any wealthy nation.
This morning I also received the following brief comments from Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky:
ReplyDelete"A good alert, Leroy. Global warming and population boom should keep us awake. The U.S., of course, can take advantage of immigration and help with the population problem, but we are afflicted with humankind’s worst sin—selfishness."
Thanks, Dr. Hinson, for pointing out the matter of immigration in relation to the declining populations in many of the wealthy countries of the world. This has long been a problem in Japan and one of the reasons for ongoing decline in the population there. The strong desire to keep Japan's population almost completely homogeneous has kept the number of permanent immigrants low, but that is probably going to have to change. As you say, the ethnocentrism in Japan (and many other countries, including the U.S.) is a form of national selfishness.
DeleteOverpopulation and Global Warming are two separate issues, although they interact in complex ways. Overpopulation shows up when societies fail to find food, water, clothing, shelter, jobs, education and such for their people. There are tens of millions of refugees around the world, largely due to local overpopulation. Now immediate causes may look like ethnic strife or a prolonged drought, but it often boils down to overpopulation. The United States has hundreds of thousands of homeless people, so a case can be made that USA is overpopulated, too. Global Warming interacts with this problem by causing droughts and floods that exacerbate overpopulation, even as overpopulation sends those tens of millions of refugees looking for survival into richer countries, such as the United States. Why is US politics so tangled with the hordes on the southern border? Well, look at the horrible conditions in the countries from which those people have fled. How many Canadians want to flee their country to start over in USA? (Presuming the Canadian wildfires don't keep getting worse thanks to Global Warming.)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Capitalism loves some overpopulation. Desperate people drive down unskilled wages, and billionaires love that. Capitalism also loves short term gains, literally discounting future losses, such as Global Warming. Of course, the smoke photos this week from Wall Street might make some of them think twice, as some of the losses are no longer "future."
The complex derivatives that tangled the economy late in Bush's term were sold as economic stabilizers. However, it turned out that the price was catastrophe when the whole system started to fail. There was no cushion built into the economy. Overpopulation does the same thing to our biosphere. We have dodged Malthus thus far, but at the price of getting farther and farther over the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans. We are already paying a high price via the Great Extinction we have unleashed upon the Earth. The spread of tyranny that the stress has created is just making it harder to actually solve the problems. "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.." (1 Timothy 6:10)
Thanks so much, Craig, for your cogent comments. You expressed well what I was trying to say in my blog post, and I appreciate you doing that.
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