Population explosion?  What population explosion?

In conjunction with the UN's "Day of 6 Billion," there were a number of newspaper articles on population issues, all reporting the same general good news:  while the world's population continues to climb, the rate of growth is levelling off, and especially so in the very high growth parts of the world.  From the LA Times:  "...the birth rate is now declining in every nation on the planet.  This phenomenon...is driving projections by scientists that worldwide population is moving toward stabilization or even a slight decline, perhaps as early as 2050."

Consider also this, from the Wall Street Journal:  "But this 'population explosion' did not erupt because people suddenly began breeding like rabbits.  Global population exploded instead because people finally stopped dying like flies...In fact, global fertility levels today are thought to be at least 40% lower than they were in the early 1950s."  As the author, Nicolas Eberstadt, argues, the "population explosion" is really a "health explosion":  "Life expectancy for low-income Asia, Africa, and Latin America has leapt since the early 1950s by more than 20 years - from about 41 years to 63...Over those same years, infant mortality in the 'less developed regions' is thought to have dropped by almost two-thirds."  The result is a narrowing in the life expectancy gap between the developed and less-developed worlds - from about 25 years in the early 50s to around 11 today.  Despite these increases in population, people are doing better than before.  One reason is economic productivity.  For example, despite its problems, Africa's per capita income has nearly tripled over the course of the 20th century.  As income increases, kids become costs and not benefits and parents react rationally by reducing their fertility.

Some more interesting things about population (all from The Ultimate Resource 2, Julian Simon, Princeton University Press, 1996):


Over the years 1965-93, birthrates fell or remained constant in every country in the world except some of the most very very poor.  In fact only 11 of 92 countries saw their birthrates rise over that period. And when extended to 1998, as noted above, birthrates have fallen in EVERY country.  This trend is directly connected with economic growth. Most countries have slowed down their baby production as they have grown. If you look at Western European countries between 1950 and 1990, you can see this slowdown and eventual absolute drop in fertility.  Italy, the former West Germany, France, Spain, and England/Wales have all since the early 1980s been seeing birthrates of less than 2.0 per woman, after following the same sorts of long term trends we are seeing elsewhere in the world.  That rate implies absolute declines in the population. The first evidence of this trend, at least in peacetime, was seen as far back as the 1930s in Western Europe.  Note that this is before the IUD and The Pill were even invented.

Birthrates in the now-developed world 200 years ago were comparable to what we now see in the third world, as the West was going through a period of transition from agriculture to industry.  That transition lowers the benefits to having lots of children and raises the costs, leading to a reduction in birthrates.  That same transition also provides the wealth and technology to reduce infant mortality rates, leading to women having to have fewer pregnancies to produce the desired number of kids (which has extended the lifespans of women enormously!).  The rest of the world is just earlier along the same trend we've seen in the west.  The evidence from our own history is unequivocal, and unless one thinks that non-Western folk are a lot less rational than we are (however much that might be), there's no reason to doubt they will see population growth rates level off, as the evidence already shows they are.

On the rationality of child-bearing decisions, quoting Simon "In virtually no observed society ... does actual fertility approach women's fecundity (potential fertility).  And in many 'primitive' societies, fertility is quite low."  There is historical data showing the close tracking of the bountifulness of the annual harvest and the marriage/birth rate.  Bad harvests led to fewer marriages, which seems a quite rational decision, especially when methods of birth control were more crude.  If I could, I would reproduce Simon's graph showing the inverse relationship for the total fertility rate and per capita GDP.  I could also add his data showing no relationship whatsoever between population density and economic well-being.

Bottom line:  the world is getting better not worse.  Humans are perfectly able to control their own population without disease or famine, but instead by creating the wealth that renders large families unncessary and provides the birth control technology (and education) to prevent wanton pregnancy.

Moreover, notice how most reports view increases in population as negative, even if the rate of growth is slowing.  That's a bias right there.  Population growth is neither good nor bad.  It depends upon the social institutions into which new lives are born.  Where there is freedom, increases in the population surely mean more mouths to feed, but they also mean more hands to produce and more minds to create.  More people means that more things can be produced to feed those people.  Too often, articles on population issues take a "pac-man" view that only sees new lives as consumers of resources.  It is forgotten that more people means that we can produce more stuff too, and produce it more efficiently.  That's why a planet of 6 billion in 1999 is uncountably more wealthy than the same planet was with 1 billion in the past, or it would be with 3 billion in the present.  But the key condition is freedom.  Without it, new babies are indeed more mouths to feed, but without the corresponding ease of being hands and minds to produce.