5: The Bomb That Didn’t Explode
An unlikely bedfellow has slipped under the covers with the sleeping giant of overpopulation: The new ally stirs under the namesake of “population implosion.”
For decades, populationists have predicted a population-driven Armageddon caused by exponential growth, which the McGraw-Hill Online Learning Center Glossary defines as “growth at a constant rate of increase per unit of time.” The basis of this warning is the mathematical truth that small percentage increases, continued over time, produce large totals.
These comments are typical:
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Paul and Anne Ehrlich: “Human populations grow in a pattern that is essentially exponential, so we must be alert to the treacherous properties of that sort of growth . . . What begins in slow motion may eventually overwhelm us in a flash.”
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Population Action International: “It is not physically possible for population growth to continue for long at today’s levels . . . There is also the sheer power of continuing exponential growth to consider. One demographer calculated in 1974 that at then-current growth rates, in seven centuries only one square foot of land would be available for each human being.”
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Paul Ekins: “The unsurprising fact that exponential population growth, combined with increasing per capita consumption of resources combined with increasing destruction and exploitation of the natural environment, is unsustainable, is already resulting in calamity and will result in catastrophe sooner rather than later if current trends are not reversed.”
4 One of the most influential modern statements of that warning (more than two million views on YouTube alone) is Albert Bartlett’s video lecture bombastically titled The MOST IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See.
Bartlett, a retired physics professor, begins by declaring, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” The first part of his lecture is devoted to showing how things quickly become very big when they grow exponentially. He includes the famous story of the inventor of chess, who supposedly asked to be rewarded with one grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, two grains on the second square, four on the third, and so on through all sixty-four squares, doubling each time. The total would be over a hundred times greater than the entire world’s current annual production.
But Bartlett’s real concern is population growth. In 1999, he says, the world’s population was six billion, and it was growing 1.3 percent per year, at which rate it would double by 2052. But that’s not the end of it: “If this modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would reach a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in 2400 years.”lay
Since that isn’t possible, he reasons that population growth will stop, whether people plan for it or not. “Zero population growth will happen . . . Today’s high birth rates will drop, today’s low death rates will rise, till they have exactly the same numerical value.”
We have to decide what measures are needed to stop population growth, he says, because if we don’t, nature will decide for us. He cites the AIDS epidemic in Africa as an example of “nature taking care of the problem.”
Bartlett is continuing a long populationist tradition; as long ago as 1798, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus said that population grows exponentially (he said geometrically, but he meant the same thing), and his disciples have echoed him in various ways ever since.
There is nothing wrong with Bartlett’s arithmetic. He explains the nature and results of exponential growth very accurately. There’s just one problem: the world’s population is not growing exponentially.
Joel Cohen, a leading expert on population trends and growth, says bluntly: “Because of its great simplicity, the exponential model is not very useful for long-term predictions, beyond a decade or two. Surprisingly, in spite of the abundant data to the contrary, many people believe that the human population grows exponentially. It probably never has and probably never will.”
5The scary populationist forecasts of a sardine-can world assumed that the growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s would continue largely unchanged. Ehrlich, Holdren, and their co-thinkers were certain that only compulsory population control could have any effect, and even that would be too late to avoid mass famine in India and other countries.
Commenting on the 1972 debate discussed in chapter 1, prominent populationist Garrett Hardin ridiculed Barry Commoner’s claim that birth rates could slow without compulsion, calling predictions of declining birth rates “fictional” and a “pleasant superstition,” while Ehrlich and Holdren said Commoner’s argument was fatally flawed because “the developed countries still have high growth rates . . . The reduction in birth rates associated with the demographic transition was not adequate to compensate for the even more dramatic fall in death rates.”
6In that very year, the US birth rate dropped to replacement level. Within a few years, birth rates in most Northern countries did the same. In those countries the decline, which populationists said couldn’t happen, actually happened sooner and faster than Commoner or anyone else expected. Far from growing “at a constant rate of increase per unit of time,” the human population’s rate of increase has been slowing down for almost fifty years. In some countries population growth has stopped, and in most others it is likely to stop in the first half of this century.
world Population Growth Rate, 1950-2050
There is true irony here; global population growth had started to slow down five years before Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world’s annual growth rate peaked in 1963, and it has declined since.
The best predictor of long-term trends on population size is the total fertility rate (TFR), the number of live children each woman will have, on average, in her lifetime. The global replacement level averages about 2.3. It is about 2.1 in rich countries where the child mortality rate is low. In poor countries, it is higher. In the long run, population will increase if the rate is higher than the replacement level and will decline if it is lower. In at least 116 countries, representing about half of the world’s population, the TFR is now below the replacement level.
It is important to understand that TFR is only part of the story: a country’s total population usually continues to grow for decades after the TFR falls below the replacement level. China is a case in point; its fertility level has been below its replacement level since the mid-1990s, but because so many women in China are still in or just reaching their childbearing years, the number of births each year still exceeds the number of deaths. As the population ages, it will start to decline in absolute numbers, but that point is still at least a decade away. This factor, called demographic momentum, means that reductions in birth rates will not have a short-term effect on total population.
Some countries have already reached the turning point. This table compares recent US Census Bureau projections for the populations of six countries in 2010 and 2040, in millions.
7 | 2010 | 2040 |
|---|
| Germany | 82.3 | 76.8 |
| Italy | 58.1 | 53.2 |
| Japan | 126.8 | 103.9 |
| Poland | 38.5 | 34.5 |
| Russia | 139.4 | 116.6 |
| South Korea | 49.6 | 48.3 |
In 1980, twenty-three European countries had fertility rates above replacement level. Today none of them do, and in seven countries fertility is half what it was then.
8 Some demographers believe that by 2060 Europe’s population could fall by one-quarter, and Japan’s population by half.
The European decline has been so rapid that sensationalist press stories now warn of social crises caused by depopulation. Publishers have rushed out books with titles like The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies? and The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It. These books, most of them by right-wing ideologues, offer predictions of imminent depopulation, collapsing tax revenue, and bankrupt pension plans, forecasts that are no more reliable than the warnings of imminent global famines made in The Population Bomb and Famine—1975! four decades ago. They highlight some current statistics, project them forward as irreversible trends, mix in conservative (often racist) political prejudices, including certainty that no real social change is desirable or possible, and presto!—an instant best seller about impending catastrophe.
Contrary to what populationists have been predicting for years, the rate of growth is slowing dramatically. And contrary to what the “birth dearth” crowd now claims, the world’s population is still growing, and it isn’t likely to fall even to 1990 levels for a very long time.
Projected Population Growth, 2009–2050
The United Nations projects that the total world population will be over nine billion in 2050. That’s three times as many people as in 1950, so depopulation is obviously not on the agenda.
What really concerns the right-wing birth dearthers is not declining population as such but continuing growth in the South, where birth rates have fallen more slowly. When right-wing demagogue Patrick Buchanan warns of The Death of the West, he’s actually bemoaning the fact that privileged white Americans like him, always a global minority, will be ever more outnumbered as the twenty-first century proceeds. It’s no accident that many American and European birth dearth writers advocate blocking immigration—especially nonwhite immigration—to stave off the decline and fall of the existing imperial order.
If the UN’s 2010 projections are correct, the world’s population will stabilize by about 2100, but such long-range population predictions are notoriously inaccurate. Even short-term forecasts are subject to frequent revision as new data come in and as the failures of previous forecasts become evident; for more than a decade, each of the UN’s biennial forecasts of population growth has been significantly different from the previous one.
In the past some demographers, generalizing on their understanding of European history, claimed that all countries eventually experience a “demographic transition” from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates, driven by economic development and changing living standards. Further research has shown that even Europe didn’t follow the supposed pattern, and it’s even less applicable to countries whose development was interrupted and severely distorted by colonialism and continuing Northern plunder.
The drivers of today’s falling birth rates are complex and their interactions are not well understood. Economics, politics, religion, education, and family structure all play a part, and the relative impact of each differs from country to country. Most demographers believe that if current trends continue, global population will stabilize in this century, but any more precise forecast than that contains a high level of uncertainty. As Joel Cohen reminds us, “Most professional demographers no longer believe they can predict precisely the future growth rate, size, composition, and spatial distribution of populations.”
9It is abundantly clear, however, that simply making contraceptives available in the South, the principal action advocated by many populationist groups, won’t solve the problems of poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction. As the noted Sri Lankan feminist and scholar Asoka Bandarage has written, such technical solutions to complex social problems go in the wrong direction:
Neither the population issue nor the broader politico-economic crisis that it represents can be resolved by increased funding for family planning programs and quick-fix contraceptives. Poverty alleviation and the economic empowerment of women must be the cornerstones of population policy. To eradicate poverty and to reduce economic inequality, however, we must move away from the capitalist, competitive, “growth first” model of development and toward a new model that places survival of humans and the environment before the needs of corporate profit and technological advancement. We need sustainable and democratic models of development that honor social, ethical, and ecological principles, including the essential oneness and equality of all human beings.
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