Overpopulation is not a thing
Talking about it distracts from the things we should be focusing on
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. In it, he argued that, because population increased geometrically (parents have more than two kids, which then have more than two kids, etc.) while food production only increased linearly, there would be a point in time where population demand for food outstripped supply, and then there would be famines, mass poverty, starvation, a whole lot of really bad stuff. Malthus also argued that population growth was the source of poverty, and that limiting it is key for countries to become prosperous.
Malthus’s solution to this problem was population control by controlling birth and/or death rates. Basically, “we must either kill people or stop people from having children in order to keep our population growing at a steady level and prevent mass poverty and death.” This is obviously very, very wrong (Henry George debunked the idea that population growth leading to poverty in Book 2 of Progress and Poverty), yet weird ideas around population have persisted and are the source of much suffering throughout world history.
For example, take the Irish Potato Famine. The head of Ireland during the famine was Charles Trevelyan, who was one of Thomas Malthus’s students during his time at the East India company. After taking over Ireland, Trevelyan was slow to disburse food aid, believing that the famine was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” Trevelyan also believed that “the judgement of God” was the reason that Ireland was hit by the famine, and believed he should not do anything to solve the problem. The worst part is, after the famine, Trevelyan was knighted by Queen Victoria for god knows what reason.
More recently (though still in the past), the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich released an alarmist book known as The Population Bomb. The book opens in a very grim tone, stating that “the battle to feed humanity is over,” and that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich predicted in many articles that he wrote after the 1968 publishing of the book that sometime within the next fifteen years, this mass starvation and mass death event would happen.
It didn’t. There’s a great NYT Retro Report video about the Population Bomb that you can watch here:
The gist of why Ehrlich’s (and Malthus’s) theory failed is very simple: we can actually grow the food supply by a lot, and people actually do not need the state to tell them to have fewer babies. In Ehrlich’s time, the world was undergoing the Green Revolution, a period of technological and agricultural advancement that greatly increased crop yield and food supply throughout the developing world. Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for his part in the Green Revolution in 1970, two years after Ehrlich published his book predicting that the world’s food supply would no longer be able to support population growth.
As for fertility rates, a picture speaks a thousand words:
As countries and the world become richer, more technologically advanced, and as the country’s populace gets more educated, women choose to have fewer children. The planet will probably max out at around 11 billion people by 2100 or so.
However, despite this empirically verifiable fact, even back in the day, Ehrlich’s manifesto had major sticking power back when it was released. The primary suggestion that Ehrlich had in order to limit population growth was to reduce the fertility rate by any means possible. China’s one child policy was partially inspired by this idea that fertility rates had to be brought down by force.
Even worse than the one child policy, the idea that government force was warranted to bring down the fertility rate led to major human rights abuses in India. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, with the assent of President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and the Indian Parliament, initiated a system of rule by decree throughout India known as the Emergency. During this period, her son, Sanjay Gandhi, directed a program of forced sterilization throughout the country in an attempt to reduce population growth, pressured by organizations like the United Nations, USAID, and the World Bank. In 1976 alone, over 6 million people in India were sterilized, often against their own will, many of whom are still suffering from the consequences of such actions today.
So, we know a few things so far:
Fertility rates have dropped precipitously since the overpopulation scares of the 1960s and 70s.
Fears of overpopulation are pretty overblown, since technological advancement and economic growth help avoid the worst.
“Overpopulation” is often an excuse for racism, human rights abuses, or other disastrous policies that do not actually help the human condition.
However, there are still many stories and Twitter trends going around about how we need to stop having children “for the planet” or something. This idea is wrong, for one of many reasons: our biological existence is not the reason why carbon emissions are high, and we are the ones who will bring carbon emissions down.
What do I mean by the first one? The very biological existence of a human does not contribute to climate change in any meaningful capacity (just as the biological existence of a gorilla or shark does not) — every person only produces about 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per day (compare that to over 220 pounds per person on one airplane flight from LAX to SFO), and most of this is recycled back when we consume food.
The reason our planet is seeing such a high level of carbon dioxide emissions is because of, well, everything else we’re doing. Our energy is carbon intensive, our transportation system is carbon intensive, and so on and so forth. The reason we need people is that, while we may be the ones who made this carbon intensive energy and transportation system, we are the only ones who can solve climate change.
As countries become richer and more well-educated, they undertake massive investments in research and development — research and development done by people educated at universities in those countries that grow as the countries develop economically. It’s our moral imperative to, rather than obtusely focus on population control, help countries become richer so we have a larger force of people who help us with the next breakthrough technology. We do not solve climate change by shaming people in the developed world for having children, we solve climate change by making the necessary investments in economic development and technology so that everyone is able to live a life worth living.
This is not to say that we in the developed world do not have a moral imperative at home with regard to our warming planet. We in the developed world must change our lives through:
investing and using clean energy
car-free or car-light living
Already we are seeing dividends from investment in clean energy. The price of photovoltaic solar power has dropped precipitously over the last twelve years, with it being cheaper than gas, coal, wind, and nuclear.
Continuing this movement towards cleaner energy, urbanization, and car use reduction is what we must work on. We do not need Malthusian and Ehrlichian proclamations of destruction and poverty due to a growing population. They serve merely as distractions, rooted in racism, that do not serve the best interest of our world and country. The source of wealth and growth is people — it’s about time we decided to use our raw talent and power for economic development and technological advancement to solve climate change, rather than distract ourselves over “overpopulation.”