The Overpopulation Myth

The earth is not overpopulated, despite the wrangling of radical environmentalists, what the late economist Dr. Julian Simon called the "doomsayers." It is said that the whole population of the world, complete with a suburban-lifestyle, could fit into an area the size of Texas. The world’s population standing toe to heel would fit into an area about the size of the Jacksonville, Florida city limits. Space is not a problem. On the contrary, the real problem is public policy that restricts human reproduction (as has been decreed in China), limiting the production of world-changing, super human minds like Steven Jobs.

Neither is there a coming crisis of food (i.e., a massive shortage of it). Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug argues in “Feeding a World of 10 Billion People: The Miracle Ahead” (chapter 2 in Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, Prima Publishers, 2002, pages 30-59) that the root cause of environmental degradation that threatens human existence is “mistaken economic policy.” Food production processes have become increasingly more effective and efficient. We now have the technology to feed 10 billion people. “The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology” (p. 59).

Nevertheless, fear-monger activists still beat the overpopulation drum. False prophets like Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore maintain that the world population “crisis” is comprised of four elements: rapid and unsustainable population growth, resource dilapidation leading to a lower standard of living for everyone today, the need to reduce birth rates via rigorous proactive public policy. Doomsayer Dr. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), a book long-championed by the Left in the West, predicted a situation of near disaster characterized by widespread famine and death by starvation. Exactly none of its predictions came true.

Population doomsayers' thinking stems from nineteenth century theorist Thomas Malthus, who argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that unchecked human populations would grow until they would not be supportable by the amount of available agricultural land, at which time many would be killed by famine and starvation. “[T]he power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” Malthus was mistaken (and he later changed his mind): global food production has grown faster than population. But his original theory still captivates people of the radical environmentalist crowd. Doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin seem to think the Earth has already exceeded its carrying capacity.

Alternatively, economist Dr. Julian Simon (a notorious optimist) has argued that population growth does not cause economic havoc. Some of Simon’s most famous works include The Ultimate Resource 2 (1998), Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration (1990), Research in Population Economics (1981), and Economics Against the Grain Volume Two: Population Economics, Natural Resources and Related Themes (1999).

The more people, the better, says Simon. Population growth does not negatively impact economic growth. Human knowledge continually provides a means to produce more finished products from fewer raw materials.

More recently, Bill Frezza pointed out: "As Simon well understood, every person enters the world not just with a stomach to feed, but with hands to work and a brain to solve problems." As he said, "The end is not near, the doomsayers are consistently wrong, and Mother Gaia will not punish us for being human." Wired online magazine (Ed Regis) well-cited a summary of "doomslayer" Simon's findings:

“Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way,” he says. “Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials – all of them – have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.

“Fear is rampant about rapid rates of species extinction,” he continues, “but the fear has little or no basis. The highest rate of observed extinction, though certainly more have gone extinct unobserved, is one species per year …” (in contrast to the 40,000 per year that some ecologists had been forecasting for the year 2000).

“The scare that farmlands are blowing and washing away is a fraud upon the public. The aggregate data on the condition of farmland and the rate of erosion do not support the concern about soil erosion. The data suggest that the condition of cropland has been improving rather than worsening.” As for global deforestation, “the world is not being deforested; it is being reforested in general.”

Still, there is one resource that the world does not have enough of, that’s actually getting rarer, according to Julian Simon. That resource: people. “People are becoming more scarce,” he says, “even though there are more of us.”

In terms of natural resources, Dr. Russell Roberts reminds us that, thanks to technology, there is only one-fifth of the amount of aluminum in a Coke can today as was needed 40 or 50 years ago. Natural resources are becoming more available all the time, not scarcer. The human mind is the greatest resource, and sustained economic development requires more human minds, not less. Simon showed that worldwide per capita income climbed from USD$100 in 1900 to $5,000 a century later, in real dollars.

That fifty-fold increase to match the six-fold rise in population (from one billion to six billion people) is amazing. Technology improves our lives, and the human mind is wonderful at finding more solutions to problems. Along with the increase in population, raw materials and energy have become less scarce, the world food supply has increased, and pollution in freer nations has diminished. No matter how fast population increases, food supplies increase at least as fast.

In his 1995 article “Population Growth Is Our Greatest Triumph”, Simon argued that since the Eighteenth Century “there has been rapid growth in population due to spectacular decreases in the death rate, rapid growth in resources, widespread increases in wealth, and an unprecedently clean and beautiful living environment in the richer capitalistic countries along with a degraded environment in the poor and socialist countries. The increase in the world's population represents our victory over death. In the 19th Century, the earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years ago, only 1 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average. You’d expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of human mind and organization over the raw forces of nature. Instead, they lament that there are so many to enjoy the gift of life.”

Nicholas Eberstadt reminds us in his article “Population and Resources” (chapter 3 in Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, Prima Publishers, 2002, pages 62-91) that the Twentieth Century witnessed not only a population explosion but also a health explosion that has led to increased longevity, and a prosperity explosion that has made every corner of the globe wealthier than ever before. The decrease in infant mortality rates, the doubling of life spans since 1800, better access to health care, and better health care have led to the population explosion. However, in “The Population Explosion Is Over” (New York Times Magazine, November 23, 1997), Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, cautions that the “prediction that spawned a generation of alarmists has now been turned on its head. But the prospect of an emptier planet is creating its own set of problems.” World birthrates have fallen so much in recent decades that forty-four percent of modernized countries are hardly (or not even) replacing their populations. Radical ecologists with environmentalists and their mistaken science are causing harm to the world.

In July 1995, Sheldon Richman, then Senior Editor at the Cato Institute, provided testimony before Congress regarding the international population stabilization and reproductive health act. Some of his more pertinent conclusions were: (1) There is no population problem. The plunging death rate and increasing life expectancy represent progress. (2) The growth in human population has been more than met by increases in the production of food and other resources, including energy. Hunger in the world is a political rather than an ecological phenomenon. (3) Countries are not poor because their populations are growing. The most densely populated nations are among the richest. What the poor nations suffer from is not too much population but too much government, especially when it curtails trade.

And nothing has changed since then. Libertarians and conservatives would be wise to herald the same principles today.

John Cobin, Ph.D.

Escape America Now

Policy of Liberty on Facebook
Policy of Liberty on Twitter