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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 29, 2024

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Conventional wisdom in many western progressive” countries proclaims that the world population will rise at unsustainable” rates for the foreseeable future, inevitably resulting in increasing poverty, global pollution, and starvation. Leftists dismiss the view that constantly improving technology and rising incomes will not only moderate but eventually reverse population growth. The world will be wealthier and better-fed by the year 2100. The data, however, favors the optimists. However, pessimists have been around for a very long time.

For thousands of years, prominent philosophers have wrung their hands over their fear of the negative impacts of population increases on life as they knew it. In the 5th century BC, Confucius argued that population growth would reduce the quality of life. In the second century AD, Tertullian worried that a “teeming population” in Carthage was becoming unsustainably “burdensome to the world.”

In Ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle argued that a growing population was not sustainable for our resources. St. Jerome wrote in the 4th century that “the population is too large for the soil.” But none of these warnings had much impact on modern society until world-famous doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, formerly a butterfly biologist at Stanford, successfully scared the nation with his 1968 book The Population Bomb. It was here that he attempted to convince his readers that the English economist, Thomas Malthus, was right in predicting the end of the world back in 1798.

Due to severe overcrowding with limited food, an organization titled “Zero Population Growth (ZPG) grew out of the book. As a result of this pompously inaccurate publication, Ehrlich was awarded a MacArthur Genius Award. This allowed him to make annual predictions of gloom, 100% of which proved false. It now appears that age has scrambled his brain as he maintains he is right about everything, just off in the timing. It reminds one of the global warming alarmists who brush aside their current errors claiming only their timing is off. They will soon be facing the opposite of their predictions as solar scientists are now certain that we will soon be entering a cooling period. The same thing happens to those who predicted we would soon run out of oil and natural gas until technological advances turned that idea upside down.

Now it is the turn of the population alarmists led by the United Nations with their prediction of 11 billion by the end of this century, who are about to wipe the egg off their faces. The demographers, who study population trends, are now certain that not only will we not reach that number, but instead predict the world’s population will begin to decline before we reach 9 billion people. This link will take you to a fascinating actual population clock accurate today https://www.census.gov/popclock/.

A population decline is a benefit in the near term, relieving pressure on the environment and the Earth’s resources. However, the economic models of our future will require a total rebuild. We need to prepare not for the consequences of a population boom but a population bust. Market economics failed to topple Chinese communism, but the potential halving of its population by the end of the century might. Their 30-year limitation of its citizens to have no more than two children per family actually led to the average birth rate voluntarily going down to less than one child per family.  When adding up the single-child families, the multi-child families, and the no-child families, who decided life was easier without any children, the birth rate is actually.

Africa is a key area for evidence of population decline, where Kenya has halved its birth rate in recent decades. Women are marrying later, getting an education, and places in the workforce. As a result of these three factors, not a single country in the so-called developed world has a replacement birth rate of 2.1 any longer. The United States will continue to grow a little due to immigration. India’s rapidly growing population has finally slowed and may one day reach its neighbor, Sri Lanka, which has had a stable population for the past quarter century.

Today, the worlds population is almost 8 billion, three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. Trends in population size are determined chiefly by levels of fertility and mortality and, in some countries, by international migration. Projections are highly uncertain, so one must be careful in predicting” what will happen a century from now.  

The United Nations, in its most recent report [1], estimates that in 2021 the average fertility of the worlds population stood at 2.3 births per woman over a lifetime, having fallen from 5 births per woman in 1950. The fertility rate is projected to decline further to average 2.1 births per woman by about 2050. The global average obscures the large differences in fertility rates by region. In countries with two-thirds of the worlds population, fertility rates are well below 2 percent per year, the rate necessary to sustain populations. Rates remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, West Asia, and Central and Southern Asia.

In Europe and Northern America, the average fertility rate in 2021 was only 1.5 per woman. In other words, absent immigration, Europe and North American populations will steadily decline. 

Partially offsetting the effects of declining birth rates, life expectancy levels at birth have been increasing, with a global average life expectancy of 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of almost nine years since 1990. The UN projects average life expectancy to increase to 77.2 years globally in 2050.

Combining these influences, the UNs medium scenario projects the global population to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100. In contrast, under a low fertility scenario, the UN sees the global population potentially peaking at 8.7 billion between 2060 and 2070 and declining to about 7.3 billion by 2100. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), another source of expert projections, foresees the global population reaching 8.8 billion in 2100.

More than half the growth in population by 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries: The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Even with high levels of immigration, the United States population is projected to remain below 400 million by 2100.

Economically we expect countries to struggle with fewer young workers and taxpayers. Automation will help, but robots don’t buy refrigerators or smart clothes for office parties. Consumption is the bedrock of any economy. Growth in every way has carried economics and industries forward for generations.

How do we first begin to face stable populations where growth will be elusive? How difficult will it be for new companies to break into old industries? Will the quality of product become far more important than prices? Job growth will eventually stop, and people will very likely stay much longer in their present positions. 

There is indeed no reason for any economies to panic as we likely have as much as three decades before the effects of declining birthdates will be evident on the size of most countries’ populations. Many countries like Sri Lanka will have experienced stability long enough for the other countries to study how they have managed their economies. However, the recent destruction of their farm yields due to limiting the use of fertilizers has at least temporarily hurt them badly. It is clearly going to be a new world for economics but not likely to be something society can not deal with.

[1] World Population Prospects 2022, United Nations Population Division, New York 2022.

NOTE: Tom Harris contributed to this article.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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