“While the footprint of each individual cannot be reduced to zero,
the absence of an individual does do so.”
– Chris Rapley, former director of the British Antarctic Survey
I SPENT SOME TIME, ONCE, in the slums of Brazzaville, on the Congo’s right bank, looking for never mind what, and found myself deep in a ramshackle maze, at the soot-stained mud entrance to a small hut cobbled together from scraps of corrugated iron. We were down in a gully somewhere near the Plateau district, and it smelled rank, as though a sewer had overflowed, though there were no sewers here, only open pits. Inside the hut was a small man, very short, dressed in a torn work shirt and flip-flops. He was, I’d been told, a vendor of potions, and he showed me his wares, rummaging in cardboard boxes to find them – birds’ feathers (symbols of power), the teeth of phacochères (warthogs), monkey skulls, dried baboon testicles. There were philters for gastroenteritis; “vaccines” against virtually all known diseases, including AIDS; prophylactics against this or that; aphrodisiacs; and charms against thieves, against traffic accidents, against impotence, against any misfortune. He sold me what I needed and steered me back to the outside, threading through the twisty alleys, and I found the way back to my hotel on the richer side of town, by the river – tumble-down too, but far less crowded.
There is nothing special about Brazzaville’s slums, as anyone who travels must know. These great and ghastly slums are everywhere in the teeming cities of the underdeveloped world, hundreds of them. Asia has dozens, Latin America and even Mexico ditto, Africa far too many. I’ve myself seen more than I’d like – among them Langa and Khayelitsha in Cape Town, the slums of the twin Congos, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, Addis Ababa, Nairobi (a terrifying place, where violent death has its own peculiar stench), and Douala, in Cameroon. Douala, referred to by other Africans as “the continent’s armpit,” is depressingly typical. The million-person shantytowns there are made up of cobbled-together shacks of cardboard and scraps of old tin. Whole families live in the burned-out wrecks of automobiles, under the shelter of a few planks leaning against a tumble-down wall, on plastic sheets in the open, with piles of refuse at every corner, open drains, rank ditches with open-pit toilets, clouds of flies; in the “markets” pathetic scraps of food are for sale, rotting fish, black bananas, tiny little piles of ground bark and flour. Where buildings do exist walls are cracking, tiles peeling off, seemingly on the verge of collapse. On the settlements’ fringes, the roadways are crowded with wrecked and burned cars, buses belching noxious fumes.
It’s true that these mega-slums are not produced just by overpopulation; they’re more a consequence of corrupt politics, a cruel aid regime, ignorance, a general failure of governance, and collateral damage of capitalism’s relentless predation – millions driven into the cities by the collapse of traditional farming and the arrival of a cash economy, the cities thus expanding far faster than governments can cope, even were they willing. And it’s also true that the poor in these dreadful slums aren’t the cause of our planetary problems, and surely not of climate change – the poor are more a consequence than a cause. The rich countries are the real cause, with their profligate ways and their grotesque overconsumption of natural resources.
So why do I raise the slums here?
Because while exponentially expanding population is not the only root cause of global poverty, it is one cause, nonetheless. The mega-slums are one consequence of a lack of reliable, affordable contraception. If contraception were available, the people who live in these slums would use it. You have only to talk to them to know that there is a fierce desire for betterment almost universally shared among ordinary people, and betterment most certainly means smaller families. There is nothing here that good government and money can’t fix (as Accra, in Ghana, has proved).
The poor become a planetary problem only when they try to get richer, as in all justice we should help them to become. Lessening human misery is a legitimate and necessary political goal.
As with all our other problems, complicated linkages exist. Affluence levels and numbers are intertwined.
If human population is an issue – and don’t listen to those who maintain it isn’t – and if we want to deal with it, as we must, three sets of difficult questions arise.
It took all of human history until 1830 for world population to reach 1 billion. To reach the second billion took 100 years, the third took 30 years, the fourth 15 years, the fifth a mere 12 years. The “explosion” in human population coincides with the invention of the first mechanical steam engine, the real start of the Anthropocene Era.
The global population at the start of 2010 was nearing 6.8 billion, and climbing. (On January 8 at 19:38 UTC, we were at 6,795,191,565, a nicely precise number, though it would have been seven or eight larger just a few seconds later.) We’re expected to add over 2 billion by 2050, bringing the total to about 9.15 billion.
But this is just a projection – it was, in fact, the UN’s “medium” projection in 2009, based on an unprovable assumption that world fertility rates will decline as they have in developed countries, and will eventually converge at about 2.02 children per woman, or pretty close to replacement level (which is generally assumed to be 2.1), thus stabilizing world numbers. The projection assumes a steady decline in global fertility, beginning almost immediately – a decline that, based on very sketchy data, does seem to have begun. The fertility rate of half the world is now down to 2.1.
The UN projection is often treated as a fact, rather than an assumption, and a number of countries and agencies have based policy on it. The 2.02 number is also fairly recent – the UN’s 2008 figures suggested 1.85 would be a more probable number, later revised upwards to 2.1, then dropped again. The newest downward revision was calculated because a few countries are experiencing persistently low fertility, and the most recent assumption is that 100 countries or more will achieve replacement rate by 2050, another 70 or so will peak at higher rates, and 30, China among them, will come in around 1.4. At one end of the range is Germany: by 2008, about one-quarter of German women were having no children. At the other is Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, which retains the highest fertility rate, at 7.4 children per woman, expected to decline to around 3.8 by 2050. By this time, Niger’s population will have tripled from its current 16 million, and could even reach 80 million – if catastrophe doesn’t intervene. If for some reason the anticipated fertility decline doesn’t materialize, the world’s population would increase to 10.6 billion. In other words, without a sharp reduction in the current fertility rate, the global population would increase in 40 years by twice as many people as were alive in 1900.
Contrary to the more optimistic assumptions, those developed economies that had already reached replacement levels or lower by 2005 were beginning to see signs that families were once again getting larger. The UN’s projections have assumed as much – fertility in developed countries has been going up and is likely to increase by some 14 percent by 2050. Partly this is a consequence of a benign public policy aimed at getting more women into the workforce. Working women historically had fewer children, because the demands on their time and energies were so onerous. By 2005, however, so many governments had made it easier for women to work and have families that the trend started to reverse.
In Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a slew of countries that were former Soviet republics saw fertility plummet, from 2.1 to 1.3 children per woman, far lower than replacement level, resulting in labor shortages and declining pension contributions within a decade. Russia has gone into panic mode. President Vladimir Putin declared in 2006 that declining population, by which he really meant Russia’s declining white population, was “Russia’s gravest problem,” and got the state to pony up almost $10,000 for any couple having more than one child. It worked, too: the rate edged up to 1.4 in 2007. In 2008, figures showed that Britain’s fertility rate had climbed back up by a shade under 2 percent, to the highest it has been since 1973 – and the net population increase was the highest since 1962.
To see what a difference small changes in fertility make, consider Kenya. Instead of declining as expected, Kenyan fertility actually rose between 1998 and 2003, from 4.7 to 4.8, an apparently tiny increase. But because the UN had assumed a reduction, the forecast population number for Kenya in 2050 had to be increased dramatically, from 44 million in a 2002 projection to 83 million two years later.
In neighboring Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni has been calling for higher fertility to produce the people he believes are necessary to fuel economic growth, the trend is even more drastic. The projections assume that Uganda’s fertility rate will decline by 60 percent by 2050, bringing the country’s rate to somewhere around three children per woman. But between 1960 and 2003, the decline was a miserable 3 percent – Uganda’s 7 million in 1960 became 29 million in 2005, and even if the UN’s projected decline came into effect, population will still triple to 91 million by 2050.
Population momentum is also a factor. Even if everyone agreed to set the maximum family size at two children, and there were a universally successful contraception program, population growth would slow, but age momentum would carry the population to almost 8 billion by 2050. Which means that substantial policy changes made now would have only a marginal effect for decades to come. To put it another way, if the population growth rate declines from 2.1 percent to 1.8 percent, the population’s doubling time has been extended only from 33 to 39 years.
Nevertheless, you could argue that a total of 8 billion is still better than 9 billion and change.
The egregious “futurist” Herman Kahn was a prominent scoffer, suggesting that the Earth could easily support a population of maybe 15 billion or so, all at a comfortable style of life, with current or soon-to-be-current technologies. (But then Kahn also thought nuclear war was a legitimate policy option.) The UN projects more than 9 billion by 2050, but almost 11 billion if no one changes their ways. On the other side of this fruitless debate are the ecological “activists,” as they like to be called, who propose that the Earth can only support a population of between 2 and 3 billion, maybe as low as 500 million. A British lobby group called the Optimum Population Trust, whose thrust is obvious from its name, asserted in 2009 that 5 billion would be the planet’s optimum – nicely vanishing nearly 2 billion of the world’s people. One recent study put the optimum population for North America at 200 million, down 140 million or so from today’s level. The more radical even point with gloomy relish to the prospect of a global pandemic as a corrective, some sort of necessary Gaia’s Revenge. “Billions will die. Get over it,” as a post to the First Post Web site put it in June 2008. Or as a letter to Worldwatch put it, “The risk of a demographic die-back, sooner or later, is severe, and an escalating environmental catastrophe is underway as destitute Third World people strip the natural areas for sustenance. Our only chance of averting the former and halting the latter is to quickly reduce birthrates.”1 You can even find a few folks who argue that the world would be better without any humans at all, although “better” for whom or for what is never specified.
What, indeed, is the number that will enable humans to live comfortably with other species on our small planet, and how do we get there? Most social scientists insist that the question is the wrong one, arguing that an upper limit, or any arbitrary number, can’t be divorced from the economic activity within which it is embedded. Given a fixed human population, the size of the economy and our impact on the planet are then determined by the affluence and technology variables of the IPAT formula (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology). As population increases, the impact of the other two, technology and affluence, are affected, and the larger the increase in numbers the more limited the options for economic development. Paul Ehrlich, somewhat notorious for his book The Population Bomb, nevertheless asked a legitimate question: “On the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s anti-birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the bishops assembled to celebrate the encyclical announced that the world’s food resources could theoretically feed 40 billion people. In one sense they were right … but is feeding 40 billion people a legitimate goal for humanity? Is any purpose served in turning Earth into a gigantic human feedlot?”2 The authors of The Limits update are more measured: “There are unavoidable tradeoffs between the number of people the earth can sustain and the material level at which such people can be supported. The exact numerical trade-offs are not knowable.”3
But to some degree, they are knowable. One plausible scenario was published in the State of the World 2010 (by the Worldwatch Institute), drawn in turn from figures calculated by the World Bank and the Global Footprint Network. The numbers suggest the global population supportable (and sustainable) at various levels of affluence.
These numbers assume a way of life similar to our own, in a sophisticated technological civilization, and are therefore conservative. Still, remember we are currently closing in on 7 billion people. This suggests that 5 billion, living in a highly efficient, sustainably minded world, would be better. Maybe less.
Many of the arguments, pro and con, for limiting population trace back, in the end, to the work of Thomas Malthus, a pessimistic parson who set out his ideas in An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 and revised in 1803. He forecast a tragic conflation between the increase in human population, which increases geometrically (what we would now call exponentially) and the available food supply, which can increase only arithmetically and would soon run up against the finite limit of available farmland. If humans didn’t regulate their own fecundity, Malthus argued, the Four Horsemen of the Book of Revelation would do it for them, through famine, pandemic, conquest, and war. After widespread criticism followed the first edition, Malthus went back to work. In the 1803 edition his analysis of the problems was the same, but he suggested a few faint rays of hope, based on what he called the principle of moral restraint – if people married later and had fewer children overall (the methods left tactfully unstated) then agriculture would likely be able sustain the population.
His ideas appealed because of their simplicity. It is, after all, a mathematical truth that a geometric progression will inevitably overtake an arithmetic one. And they appeal still, for they speak to the notion of the Earth’s carrying capacity – the maximum population it can support – one of the core postulates of the science of ecology. Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the 1992 World Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro, subscribes to this view: “Either we act to reduce population voluntarily and soon, or nature will do this for us, but much more brutally,” he declared.
We now know, of course, that humanity has utterly failed to exercise Malthus’s moral restraint, but neither did global famines and pestilences result. The dismal fate Malthus forecast was at first delayed by colonialism – the opening up of vast new agricultural lands – and then by the Industrial Revolution, which was able to extend human labor prodigiously. Instead of teetering on the edge of starvation, humanity invented the engine called economic growth, and for the next century or so economies expanded faster than their populations, bringing a sustained and almost universal increase in living standards. The Canadian prairies, the Australian plains, the American Midwest, the Argentinean pampas became, in the cliché of the time, the “breadbaskets of the world.” Protectionist laws were repealed, and people in the industrialized world benefited from cheap food imports.
Neo-Malthusianism reemerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, the last time food prices increased rapidly. Global population growth had picked up sharply after the Second World War, a consequence of high birthrates and rapidly declining mortality in the underdeveloped world, inspiring a whole industry of newly anxious forecasters. It was curious, because in many ways the numbers represented very good news indeed. Less than 100 years ago, more than 15 children out of 100 died in childhood, even in the developed countries. In Latin America infant mortality shrank from 20 percent to less than 2 percent. Between 1990 and 2006, child mortality in China dropped by nearly 50 percent. Still, what was good news for families was maybe not so good news for the planet.
When Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, he was greatly derided, pilloried in the popular press as a prophet of doom, a neo-Malthusian; his notions were overtaken by the Green Revolution, which proved that we could feed the world, and the many dire consequences he predicted failed to come to pass. In turn, the fads his book set off, like the Zero Population Growth movement, faded into obscurity. It didn’t help that the imminent famines he predicted failed to materialize (he thought the American population would be no more than 22 million by 1999), but his strident tone and the dismayingly drastic remedies he urged on governments everywhere made his book even less palatable: “Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” (One of these methods, he suggested, might be contraceptive chemicals in the drinking water.) In any case, in the developed world, the population seemed to be stabilizing all by itself, without any outside intervention.
Among the prominent critics of Malthusian assumptions is the liberal newsweekly The Economist, which was and remains insouciant about population, the global food supply, and human development, and retains a sunny optimism, sometimes in the teeth of the evidence. “If the world’s population growth was a false concern four decades ago, when it peaked at 2 percent a year, it is even less so now that it has slowed to 1.2 percent,” an editorial declared in May 2008. “There may no longer be virgin lands to be settled and cultivated, as in the 19th century, but there is no reason to believe that agricultural productivity has hit a buffer … There may be curbs on traditional forms of growth, but there is no limit to human ingenuity. That is why Malthus remains as wrong today as he was two centuries ago.”
But the population bomb did go off, after all. We’re feeling the effects of the detonation now. The deleterious effects of the Green Revolution – a biped whose one leg is irrigation and the other chemical intervention – are already obvious, as soils turn saline and unproductive and chemicals leach into groundwater. Global warming and climate change, pollution, soil and water degradation, pandemics – they are all to some degree caused by the size of the human population.
Even the bald assertion that “Malthus was wrong” is wrong. If you look beyond the shores of the developed world, his predictions have been painfully verified. “But then majorities have never counted,” Herman Daly says. “Only the articulate, technically competent minority counts. But even for them Malthus was not really wrong, since this minority has heeded his advice and limited its reproduction.”5
Many rich countries are again “pro-natalist” – that is, like Russia they are trying to encourage more people to have more babies, rather than stopping them. In those countries where the birthrate has dropped below replacement level – and that includes most of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, North America, and a few other places – the most obvious consequence is an aging population. The UN’s last population forecast (2008) said the global median age would rise from 29 now to 38 by 2050. That doesn’t sound so dramatic – and from the perspective of those of us long past 38, that number doesn’t sound very “old.” But there is another way of looking at it. The UN thinks global life expectancy will go from 68 now to 76 by 2050; in 2009, about 11 percent of the world’s population were over 60, but by 2050 that will have risen to 22 percent – and to 33 percent in the developed world. Which would make one person in three a potential pensioner – more than 2 billion.
One consequence of having too many old people and not enough young is that retirement ages creep upwards, while the work force shrinks. Pension payments balloon. And in an economic system in which growth is essential, more and more new people are needed just to keep the system afloat. (Population aging may not necessarily bankrupt social systems, as many fear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs, for one, has calculated that while pension systems may become stressed, the real costs are not likely to be crippling. “With slower population growth or even slight declines, the investment in infrastructure to keep up with demand will be smaller, and it is likely that retirement ages will rise.”6)
A stable population would have its own social and political implications. The current population pyramid would become a rectangle, or a house with a very shallow roof. All of our social structures, especially in business, remain pyramidal. This would mean that a lot more people remain at much lower rungs on the ladder. On the positive side, millions would gain incentive to find fulfillment outside the workplace, and fewer would automatically be promoted beyond their level of competence.
So how, in the middle of this swirling debate, in the face of apocalyptic forecasts on the one side and airy dismissals on the other, are we to devise policy?
In 1994, the UN International Conference on Population and Development acknowledged the need to slow global population growth, but could suggest no realistic way of achieving it. Instead, in the wonderfully platitudinous language of such conferences, it suggested a number of initiatives, some of which would reduce population, and others, equally necessary and fruitful, that would increase it. They included aiming for gender equality; eradicating poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; and ensuring environmental sustainability.
One reason for this bureaucratic tippy-toeing is that official attempts to control population growth have often veered into social engineering and worse. Author Matthew Connelly, in the disturbing polemic Fatal Misconception, documents some of the horrors that result – in extreme cases, the forced sterilization of “undesirables” and those deemed genetically inferior. All population control projects, Connelly declares, look at human beings not as individuals but as aggregate “populations” that can be shaped through the combined forces of faith and science. “That is why nativism, eugenics, pronatalism, and coercive or manipulative forms of ‘family planning’ share a common history,” he writes.
Connelly says that his book is the story of how some people systematically devalued both the sanctity of life and the autonomy of the individual,
how some people tried to control others without having to answer to anyone. They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking. Perhaps we would expect no less of nativists or eugenicists, who assumed that people unlike themselves must be “beaten men from beaten races.” Yet many more actually had the best of intentions, hoping to reduce poverty and prevent conflict … even family planning could be a form of population control when proponents aimed to plan other people’s families, demeaning those targeted as “acceptors,” including tens of millions of poor people who were paid money to accept sterilization. No less manipulative were those, mostly churches, who denied hundreds of millions access to contraceptives and abortion because they wanted them to have more babies.7
Millions of intrauterine contraceptives were fitted to women in poor countries. Instead of being seen as a risk, the permanent sterility that often resulted was viewed as a useful bonus, a surefire way of keeping numbers down. The World Bank was complicit, too, reluctant to finance medical aid, since saving lives meant more mouths to feed. India was among the worst offenders, even setting up “vasectomy camps” in the state of Kerala, and many thousands of enforced sterilizations were performed from 1975 to 1977. (In 2009, India resumed paying couples not to have babies.) In China, the one-child-per-family policy was enforced not just through taxation and propaganda, but in some cases through forced sterilization and abortion.
The Chinese policy, introduced in 1980, carried its own unforeseen consequences. It clashed sharply with the traditions of China’s patrilineal society, in which sons are expected to take care of their aging parents, and millions of families went to great lengths to ensure that their only child was a boy. Acting on this preference was facilitated by the introduction of ultrasound scans to rural China, making aborting females easier. The result today is a radical imbalance in the country’s gender ratio. Wifeless men, maybe 30 million of them, are called guang gun, or bare branches. That they also tend to be unruly, prone to violence and crime, was perhaps to be expected.
If we reject the notion that human “breeding” must be forbidden, what are the alternatives? The late Kenneth Boulding, an economics professor at the University of Michigan (and a poet of note), proposed the notion of two transferable birth licenses per woman, a nice theoretical exercise – using market forces to regulate scarcity – that was never taken seriously.8
But if you accept that population growth needs to be curbed, and if nothing else works, why not? It is, at least, an attempt to attain stability with a minimum sacrifice of individual freedom and variability. Herman Daly, who doesn’t expect it to be adopted anywhere either, nevertheless calls Boulding’s “the best plan yet offered” – and it is. According to Daly, “Part of our difficulty in accepting the transferable licence is that it is so direct. It frankly recognizes that reproduction must henceforth be considered a scarce right and logically faces the issue of how best to distribute that right and how to permit voluntary reallocation. But there is an amazing preference for indirect measures – find new roles for women, change the tax laws, restrict public housing to small families, encourage celibacy and late marriage, be more tolerant of homosexuality.”9 But are such radical measures necessary? Won’t effective contraception, made freely available, do the trick? Even that proposition has its opponents. “Family planning,” as contraception is usually called, has been condemned by some as unnecessarily coercive. The U.S. government under George W. Bush reduced funding for contraception on the grounds that it encouraged promiscuity. The Harper government in Canada has made scant secret that it regards contraception as the thin edge of the abortion wedge. And the Catholic Church obdurately refuses to think about the issue at all, except to condemn it out of hand.
Despite the opposition, contraceptive drives have been a success. The benefits of family planning campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s may not show up directly in global population statistics, except by way of omission – the numbers would have been higher without them, and population pressures vastly more serious – but they are real. The campaigns do work and they need not be coercive; many surveys show that women accept contraception eagerly when it is available, even in countries like Uganda, where the patriarchy is still intact and inviolable.
Typical of the prescriptions advanced for curbing global numbers is that put forward by Jeffrey Sachs in Common Wealth. The five most important policies, in his view, are these: improving child mortality statistics as the single most important step in encouraging poor families to reduce fertility rates; the education of girls; the empowerment of women; access to reproductive health services; and a continuing Green Revolution, which improves household income and thereby enables families to keep children in school longer.10 Notice this “empowerment of women.” In surveys of the literature of population, this notion pops up more than any other. I have been told by many people in Africa, from South Africa through Kenya to Uganda, and on the west coast in Ghana and in other places, that family numbers started dropping as soon as a generation of girls emerged from high school. Effective birthrate reduction programs in dozens of cultures share at least two essentials: easy access to the full array of family planning techniques, and a focus on the health, education, and empowerment of women – “empowerment” in this case including the often radical notion that a woman’s body is not her husband’s to use at will.
Our first stratagem must be to argue as loudly and as often as possible that limiting global population benefits everyone, individuals as well as nations. But the opposition remains formidable even to this simple assertion. Nationalist zealots and nativists everywhere want to forbid someone else’s families from growing but not their own, and the world’s spiritual leaders are trapped in some prelapsarian vision of how the universe is arranged. The Catholic Church, which has spent a good part of 2,000 years demonizing human sexuality (while elevating pederasts and sexual sadists into positions of authority with privileged access to children), is not alone, but it is the most visible and the most articulate, more damaging in its way than even the wildest of the antiabortion vigilantes, because so much larger in scale.
We need to make people see that population is a problem. Not the problem, but a contributory problem that calls for active solution.
We need to continue pointing out that we cannot solve the climate crisis or deal with the limits to growth as long as population is unconstrained. Yet all the salvation plans I mentioned in earlier chapters, including those of Al Gore, have ignored the issue altogether.
We need to reduce absolute numbers and enter a period of “degrowth.” The question is, how? We are right to be wary of coercion, in whatever form. But persuasion, even outright propaganda, is acceptable, as is tying international aid to population policy.
We need to make people see that population numbers must be considered in the context of all our other technological and economic problems. That, in the end, is the point of this book: people are entangled in the economy – people are, after all, the economy. Increases in numbers may or may not be necessary for economic growth, but the obverse is certainly true: if the population is growing, economic growth is essential; without it per capita GDP and national prosperity will decline. Only with a stable population can we contemplate a post-growth world economic system, a world without grotesque disparities in wealth, without booms or busts or depressions, without starvation and mass poverty.
We need to make everyone, social scientists included, remember that “population” is just an aggregate word for people – that global demographic trends are nothing but the hopes and dreams and loves and fears of women, men, couples, families.
We need to make contraception a right, up to and including abortion on demand – a point forcefully made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a G8 summit in March 2010. We need to make the techniques universally available. We need to keep making the point that if these solutions – extending education and health care to all, alleviating extreme poverty, making access to contraception universal – lead to the empowerment of women, who loses?
If all else fails … we need to consider the “market solution” of transferable birth licenses. That would work, if it was universal.
No population control idea is without hazard. Even more limited ones (such as Paul Ehrlich’s counter to Mr. Putin’s baby bribes, a tax on large families) carry with them ethical difficulties – what are we going to do, penalize a poor family if it has a child too many? How does that help the child, or the parents? (Ehrlich’s point is that there is a larger ethical obligation to the planet as a whole). But Matthew Connelly’s solution, merely to trust parents to make good decisions, won’t achieve the necessary results on its own. If their decision is to limit family size, for their own benefit or for the benefit of the planet, we must make sure they can do so easily, effortlessly, cheaply, and with encouragement and support. A propaganda war with this goal in mind is perfectly acceptable – not only in the U.S., where half the teenage pregnancies are still unexpected and unwanted, but everywhere on the planet.
We can’t solve the economy unless we solve population. We can’t stop growth unless we solve population. We can’t solve climate change unless we deal with population. Human numbers run, relentlessly, through all the issues that face us. Ducking a decision is not an option.