World Population Will Fall
Have you noticed that we keep finding new social problems? Every year. Before the second half of the 19th century, people didn’t use the phrase or have the idea.
Birth rates have been falling for two centuries. Now in most countries, whether rich or poor, they are well below death rates. Recently, the social liberation of women, the control of their own fertility, and the fall in death rates of children has accelerated it. Now a woman doesn’t have to have children. She can control how many times she is pregnant. And if she wants two children, she can get them without having to give birth to six—four of whom die young.
Half of humanity has been liberated from a life of endless pregnancy and childcare. Hurrah!
But it has created a new “social problem.” If you extrapolate the present very low birthrates, then world population will peak in, say, fifty years at about 9 or 10 billion people, and afterwards start falling. Under the extrapolation, it would fall quickly. Each new generation would have something like 20 percent fewer people.
Have you noticed that we keep finding new social problems? Every year. Before the second half of the 19th century, people didn’t use the phrase or have the idea.
The problem with problem-talk is that it results in more intervention by the state. So the state gets bigger. In Brazil, insult comedians are viewed as a social problem. Bring in our brilliant masters in the US Congress or the Brazilian Parliament. Make a law. Put the comedians in jail.
My fear is that we will repeat the terrible damage to humanity from our earlier great fear of over-population. An unscientific article in Science magazine in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” recommended compulsory sterilization of women. An even more unscientific book in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, then panicked the entire world, leading, for example, to the Chinese one-child policy. The science of both men was biology, not history or economics or demography or political science.
It’s not obvious that the problem is a problem.
It’s a mistake to extrapolate a problem into the far future. Technology is unpredictable, and sometimes solves the problem. A big problem in 1900 in Sao Paulo and Chicago was more and more horse manure on the streets. Then the auto was invented. One can imagine developments in the making of and caring for children that would persuade people to have more of the little darlings. I admit that having a child is terrifying. It can go south. But I also know that human biology, especially in your 20s, has a built-in urge to have children. And when even a 50-year-old man decides he wants a son, a future technology might be able to order one up, free, for example, from genetic diseases. Yes, it’s speculation, science-fiction stuff. But in 1900 we had no idea what life would be like now, did we?
And more routine economic effects could intervene. Bad policies of the state have made housing expensive, and not child-friendly. But a lower population would leave more houses. And lower population would make the average human more valuable. The immense enrichment of the world, which can be extrapolated, could help.
Don’t let inchoate fears run policy. Don’t be a child.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.