A New Year and a possible new population fear
National Post, 01 January 2023
As global population growth continues to slow, the fear of overpopulation may be replaced by one of too few people
Mothers going into labour last night might have wondered if their babies would be born soon after midnight and designated the first baby of 2023.
On Nov. 15 this year, many mothers delivered not knowing that their children might have a claim to be the planet’s eight billionth inhabitant. For baby six billion back in 1999, the UN secretary-general was on hand to congratulate a Bosnian family whose son, Adnan Mevic, was chosen to symbolically mark that population milestone. A Bangladeshi girl was baby seven billion only 11 years ago. But population growth is slowing. The world’s population is expected to take 15 years to reach nine billion in 2037, and then level off at about 10 billion in 2080.
The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs greeted the news of baby eight billion with a statement entitled “infinite possibilities for people and planet.”
It’s hard to overstate how astonishing that is, namely, that the UN would greet the eight billion milestone with equanimity and hope rather than agitation and hysteria.
In 1968 one of the most influential books of the past century was published, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. The environmentalist (in)famously began: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
That growing population would lead to mass starvation and environmental catastrophe was the dominant thinking on the UN conference circuit and in the chancelleries of Europe for decades, even with Ehrlich being proved spectacularly wrong.
Global population was 3.6 billion when Ehrlich wrote. The mass starvation of the 1970s never happened. The economist Julian Simon, who believed in the creative potential of free people, proposed a 10-year wager with Ehrlich, 1980-1990, that human ingenuity would make a basket of raw metals cheaper — meaning more abundant rather than more scarce. Simon won. The battle to feed humanity is indeed over. Humanity won.
The father of defining man as a voracious consumer, rather than a creative producer, was Thomas Malthus, who considered the world overpopulated in the late-18th century, at one billion. Malthus had a very long run, but by 2022, the sun had set on the doomsayers’ day.
Ehrlich and his fellow-travellers have been proved wrong. Even as population grew considerably, poverty has fallen dramatically in the past three decades. More than a third of the world’s population, which hit five billion in 1987, lived in extreme poverty in 1990 (36.3 per cent). By 2019, that figure was 8.6 per cent, a more than 75 per cent reduction. The UN Millennium Development Goals — to reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015 — were achieved ahead of time.
It is one of the great good news stories of history, that human liberty and ingenuity have made it possible for eight billion people to live at increasing standards of economic well-being. What every right thinking person thought was impossible in 1972 is now just ordinary life 50 years later — billions upon billions no longer in subsistence, with rising living standards, better nutrition and education.
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