In 1980, two American academics made a bet. Julian Simon, professor of economics at the University of Illinois, predicted that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten would fall over the coming decade. Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University, predicted that prices would rise.
What Simon and Ehrlich were really betting on was the future of humanity – specifically, how many souls could the good ship Earth carry without running aground? By 1980, the global population had seen a period of enormous growth: doubling between 1800 and 1930 to reach two billion people, and then doubling again to reach four billion by 1975. Every sign suggested that this rate of growth would only accelerate, and Ehrlich was among those who saw catastrophe looming. Changes in the prices of raw materials would indicate whether more people meant more strain on natural resources, indicating increasing scarcity, which would in turn indicate the imminent arrival of famine, war and mass death. Hence the bet.
The Ehrlichs flirted with the idea of putting sterilising drugs in the water supply
Ehrlich was a handsome and charismatic academic, and his warnings about ‘overpopulation’ had made him into a celebrity – a regular on talk shows and in magazines including Penthouse and Playboy. His message was a horrifying one. ‘In the 1970s and 1980s,’ he announced in the opening lines of his bestselling 1971 book The Population Bomb (co-authored with his wife Anne), ‘hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now’.
The situation was so grave, the Ehrlichs argued, that radical action was necessary to reduce further population growth. They proposed ‘luxury taxes’ on cribs and nappies and flirted with the idea of putting sterilising drugs in the water supply. They lamented the ‘pussyfooting’ of NGOs which refused to promote abortion as a means of population control. Their dislike of human noise and of crowds led the Ehrlichs to develop a kind of politicised misanthropy, writing that their terror of overpopulation was triggered by a taxi journey through Delhi:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
Julian Simon didn’t share this aversion to people, people, people, people. In fact, he didn’t buy the Ehrlichs’ argument at all. He shared neither the glamour nor the pessimism of Paul Ehrlich, and argued that resources were getting more plentiful, not less. If we were ever at risk of running out of one resource, Simon reasoned, scientific innovation could surely conjure up newer and better ones, perhaps from elsewhere in the universe. Humanity was nowhere near its natural limits, he said – our only constraint was a lack of imagination.
In the end, Simon won the bet. Not only did the prices of the five metals go down, so did the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty. Contrary to the warnings of The Population Bomb, as the number of people grew, so did the amount of wealth.
And the Ehrlichs’ predictions about impending disaster went mercifully unrealised. Nearly five and a half million people died in major famines between 1970 and 1990, not hundreds of millions, and since then famine deaths have dropped, even as the global population has risen. In fact, the near-abolition of famines is one of the great achievements of the modern era. The Ehrlichs were not just wrong, they got it precisely backwards.
What’s more, those people who did die of famine in the decade following the publication of The Population Bomb were mostly victims of communism, not of true resource scarcity. To date, radical leftism carries a higher death toll than ‘overpopulation’.
Nonetheless, some activists have continued the Ehrlichs’ political project into the 21st century, including within the radical left. The BirthStrike Movement, for instance – inspired by the work of Extinction Rebellion – urges supporters to ‘refuse to procreate’ in order to ‘maximise your positive impact on the climate change crisis’. Closer to the mainstream, the organisation Population Matters – which campaigns for a halt to population growth – features a ticker on its home page labelled ‘current world population’ that increases ominously at a rate of more than one additional human being per second. You might almost forget that every one of these new people is a newborn baby coming into the world, presumably much loved by his or her family. But there is a misanthropic strain of environmentalism that seems to endorse Friedrich Nietzsche’s disquieting words in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.’
Even aside from the sinister implications of population reduction efforts, it’s odd to worry about population growth at a time when so many governments are starting to panic about the financial crisis heralded by a dramatic fall in birth rates. The health and welfare costs associated with elderly care in low-fertility societies must be paid for by a diminishing pool of working-age taxpayers, and funding this is made more difficult by the fact that ageing societies are also less innovative, generating fewer patent applications per capita. The result is that we will all become a lot poorer.
Modern countries require a birth rate of 2.1 or above to maintain their populations – that is, the average couple needs to have at least 2.1 children. At the time of writing, the average rate across OECD countries is 1.43, with ‘ultra-low fertility’ East Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, as well as Hong Kong, experiencing the lowest fertility in the world, all with estimated rates of below 1.25.
In poorer parts of the world, the change is more recent and more dramatic. All of south-east Asia is either at or approaching sub-replacement. So is India, which recently crossed the sub-replacement threshold, and some of its regions have lower birth rates than that. Andhra Pradesh, for instance, is at 1.5 – lower than many European countries.
The only part of the world in which fertility rates are consistently above replacement is Sub-Saharan Africa, along with some parts of the Greater Middle East. The global population is expected to peak in the mid-2080s, and then – we must assume – the ticker on the Population Matters homepage will start trending downwards. None of this has happened because the Ehrlichs succeeded in attaching ‘luxury taxes’ to nappies and cribs, but because – for some mysterious reason – almost everyone in the world decided, all of a sudden, to have fewer children.
South Korea currently has the lowest fertility rate in the world at just 0.7
In some places, the coming population drop could be very dramatic. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at just 0.7. If this figure stays steady, then for every 100 South Koreans there will be just six great-grandchildren. Simple mathematics indicates that, if South Koreans continue to fail to reproduce, they will eventually become extinct, or be conquered and absorbed by a more populous neighbour (the North Korean fertility rate is one of the highest in the region). It could be that a ‘population implosion’ is the real existential threat to humanity, not the ‘population bomb’.
However, the South Korean birth rate probably won’t stay the same and neither will fertility rates in the rest of the world. The global rate could rise again, or it could fall even faster. Some unexpected intervention might arrive to save us, or to destroy us. We really don’t know.
We do know why the population grew so dramatically from the 19th century onwards: because the cascade of innovation we call the Industrial Revolution led to a sudden drop in mortality rates, particularly among babies. Global child mortality rates of more than 40 per cent fell to less than 10 per cent over the course of just two centuries, and people who would otherwise have died lived into adulthood and in turn had children of their own.
We have no idea why population growth has gone into reverse. This is perhaps the greatest sociological mystery of our time.
For anyone engaged in the business of predicting the future, Paul Ehrlich’s work makes for sober reading. It’s hard to imagine a public intellectual who has been more forcefully smacked round the head by history. In the conclusion of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich briefly considered the possibility that he might have made a mistake:
It is important for you to consider that I, and many of the people who share my views, are just plain wrong, that we are alarmists, that technology or a miraculous change in human behaviour or a totally unanticipated miracle in some other form will ‘save the day’.
Well, the ‘unanticipated miracle’ has now arrived.
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