The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  As a result of these trends, women in 1970 globally averaged 4.7 children over the courses of their lives, and that has fallen to 2.45 children in 2013. A population becomes stable when as many people are born as die. This occurs when the total fertility rate is approximately 2.1 children per woman; the extra tenth of a child takes into account pre-reproduction deaths, infertility, and people like my wife and me who choose not to have children.

  Leading demographers expect that as the twenty-first century unfolds, women across the globe will be giving birth to fewer and fewer children. The upshot will be slowing population growth and eventually a reversal of trend in which world population begins to shrink. According to a long line of environmentalist doomsayers, this was not supposed to happen.

  The Population Bomb

  “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” predicted Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich was not a lone voice proclaiming the advent of imminent massive famines. A year earlier in their bestselling book, Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?, William and Paul Paddock warned, “By 1975 a disaster of unprecedented magnitude will face the world. Famines, greater than any in history, will ravage the undeveloped nations. A swelling population is blotting up the earth’s food.” They confidently added, “Our technology will be unable to increase food production in time to avert the deaths of tens of millions people by starvation.”

  In his famous 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin flatly declared, “The freedom to breed is intolerable.” To illustrate the harms of the freedom to breed, he conjures up the arresting example of a pasture open to all people in a village. Each herdsman, seeking to maximize his individual gain, puts as many cattle on the pasture as possible, leading eventually to its destruction from overgrazing. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons,” wrote Hardin. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all.” According to Hardin, ceaselessly breeding human beings treat the Earth like a village commons and would soon “overgraze” the planet. Hardin thus concluded that “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

  Another prominent prognosticator of population doom is Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute. Back in 1963, when Brown was a young bureaucrat in the US Department of Agriculture, he declared, “The food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades.” In 1967, Brown explained, “As the non-recurring sources of [agricultural] productivity are exhausted … the rate of increase in yield per acre begins to slow.” In 1974, Brown maintained that farmers “can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.” In 1989, Brown stated that “global food insecurity is increasing,” and further claimed that “the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing.” Brown contended that “population growth is exceeding the farmer’s ability to keep up,” concluding that “our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.” In 1995, Brown starkly warned, “Humanity’s greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.” In 1996, Brown again proclaimed, “Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding.” In a 2012 Scientific American article, Brown asked, “Could food shortages bring down civilization?” Not surprisingly, Brown’s answer was an emphatic yes. Given his past record, he astonishingly claimed that for years he has “resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.” Now, however, Brown said, “I can no longer ignore that risk.” Also in 2013, Brown once again declared, “The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity.”

  The population doomsters offered stark plans to handle the impending global famines. The Paddock brothers advised a form of triage, in which the United States would pick countries worthy of food aid and leave tens of millions of people in India, Haiti, and Egypt to starve to death. In The Population Bomb Ehrlich compared humanity to a growing cancer on the Earth. “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people,” wrote Ehrlich. What must be done? “We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” What sorts of heartless decisions? The November 25, 1969, The New York Times reported, “Dr. Paul Ehrlich says the U.S. might have to resort to addition of temporary sterility drugs to food shipped to foreign countries or their water supply with limited distribution of antidote chemicals, perhaps by lottery.”

  That was then, but what about now?

  Though it is tragically true that over the decades tens of millions have died of the effects of malnutrition, the world-spanning massive famines predicted by Ehrlich and the Paddocks did not come to pass. Instead, world population since 1968 has essentially doubled from 3.6 billion to 7.2 billion today. While the overpopulation dirge has become somewhat muted as a result of their massive predictive failure, many of the more radical environmentalist ideologues still sing the same old Malthusian song.

  Malthusianism Forever?

  Modern promoters of imminent population doom are the intellectual disciples of the eighteenth-century economist Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In the notorious first edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus claimed that human numbers would always outrun the amount of food available to feed people. Malthus advanced two propositions that he regarded as completely self-evident. First, that “food is necessary for the existence of man,” and second, that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” Based on these propositions, Malthus concluded that “the 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. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.” In other words, Malthus was arguing that population doubled at an exponential rate of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so forth, whereas food production increased additively, rising one unit at a time, like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and so forth. Malthus additionally asserted that “population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence.” Malthus therefore dismally concluded that some portion of humanity must forever be starving to death.

  According to Malthus, there are two kinds of checks on population, preventive and positive. Preventive checks, those that prevent births, include abortion, infanticide, and prostitution; positive checks include war, pestilence, and famine. In later editions of his essay, Malthus added a third check that he called “moral restraint,” which includes voluntary celibacy, late marriage, and the like. Moral restraint is basically just a milder version of the earlier preventive check.

  If all else failed to keep human numbers under control, Malthus chillingly reckoned:

  Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the f
ood of the world.

  Reading Malthus in 1838 was a eureka moment for the founding father of modern biology, Charles Darwin, who declared in his autobiography, “I had at last got a theory by which to work.” Darwin realized that Malthus’s thesis applied to the natural world, since plants and animals produce far more offspring than there are food, nutrients, and space to support them. Consequently, Darwin noted, “It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species.” This insight formed the basis for one of the most important modern scientific theories, the theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection.

  Ever since, biologists have been entranced by the idea that if Malthusianism can explain the operation of the natural world, it should also explain the functioning of human societies. Are we not just complicated animals? Shouldn’t this biological insight apply to us, too?

  The Neo-Malthusians

  The most prominent among the neo-Malthusians is Paul Ehrlich. Despite his utter failure as a prophet, Ehrlich continues to preach that overpopulation is humanity’s biggest problem. “The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources, and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption,” wrote Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, in the March 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. During a May 2013 conference at the University of Vermont, Ehrlich asked, “What are the chances a collapse of civilization can be avoided?” His answer was 10 percent.

  Even now the Ehrlichs are far from alone in propagating forecasts of overpopulation doom. “The world faces a serious overpopulation problem,” asserted Cornell University researcher David Pimentel in his 2011 article “World Overpopulation.” “The world’s biggest problem?” asks a 2011 op-ed by researchers Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in the Los Angeles Times. “Too many people,” they answer. “We are a plague upon the earth,” declared nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough. “Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.” Attenborough expressed these dour sentiments in The Telegraph in January 2013.

  In his 2013 rant Ten Billion, Microsoft Research computer scientist Stephen Emmott argued that humanity’s growing population constitutes “an unprecedented planetary emergency.” Emmott asserts, “As the population continues to grow, our problems will increase. And this means that every way we look at it, a planet of ten billion people is likely to be a nightmare.” In the somewhat more hopeful 2013 book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, journalist Alan Weisman declares that “this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet.” We can choose to limit population growth, argues Weisman, “or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.”

  More Food Equals More Kids?

  In fact, the chief goal of most species is to turn food into offspring: the more food, the more offspring. “To ecologists who study animals, food and population often seem like sides of the same coin,” wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1990. “If too many animals are devouring it, the food supply declines; too little food, the supply of animals declines.” They further asserted, “Homo sapiens is no exception to that rule, and at the moment it seems likely that food will be our limiting resource.” By limiting, they meant starvation.

  Neo-Malthusians like the Ehrlichs, Pimentel, and Emmott cannot let go of the simple but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction. For example, in an article called “Human Carrying Capacity Is Determined by Food Availability,” in the November 2003 issue of the journal Population and Environment, Duke University researcher Russell Hopfenberg wrote: “The problem of human population growth can be feasibly addressed only if it is recognized that increases in the population of the human species, like increases in the population of all other species, is a function of increases in food availability.” More food means more kids.

  It is true that as food supplies have increased, so have human numbers. But Hopfenberg and other neo-Malthusians are overlooking some crucial data. The countries with the greatest food security are also the countries that are experiencing below replacement fertility. High fertility does not correlate with improved food availability. Consider that of the thirty-four nations that are members of the rich country club the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only Mexico has an above replacement rate fertility of 2.22 children. All the rest are at or well below the replacement rate. More generally, as food security has increased around the world, instead of increasing as Hopfenberg’s neo-Malthusian theory would suggest, global average fertility rates have dropped from around 5 children per woman in 1960 to 2.45 today.

  Instead, the highest fertility rates occur in countries where food insecurity is greatest. The International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2013 Global Hunger Index takes into account undernourishment rates, percentage of underweight children, and child mortality rates in various countries. Of the nineteen countries where the level of hunger was rated as alarming or extremely alarming, fifteen had total fertility rates higher than 4.5 children per woman. It is notable that Niger’s total fertility rate of 7.6 children per woman is the highest in world. As we shall see, demographers have developed persuasive explanations for why people in countries suffering from food insecurity choose to have more children.

  So how did humanity avoid the massive famines so confidently predicted by environmentalist millenarians like Ehrlich, Brown, and the Paddocks? Unlike deer that starve when their food runs out, people work to increase supplies. As it turns out, food plants and animals are populations, too, and can be, contrary to Malthus, increased at exponential rates.

  Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution

  Norman Borlaug is the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. For spearheading this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. One of the great privileges of my life was getting to meet and talk with Borlaug many times. He died in 2009 at age ninety-five.

  Borlaug grew up on a small farm in Iowa and graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he studied forestry and plant pathology, in the 1930s. In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico. At that time, Mexico could not feed itself and was importing half of its wheat supplies. Backed by $100,000 in annual funding from the foundation, Borlaug and his colleagues succeeded brilliantly in boosting the productivity of poor Mexican farmers. They did this by breeding new, highly productive dwarf wheat varieties that enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient in grains by 1956. By 1965, Mexican wheat yields had risen 400 percent over their levels in 1950.

  In 1952, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding a similar effort to boost the productivity of poor farmers in India. In the mid-1960s, India was importing grains to avert looming famines. The dwarf wheat varieties developed by Borlaug and his colleagues were again decisive in winning the battle against hunger on the subcontinent.

  In the late 1960s, as noted earlier, predictions of imminent global famines in which billions would perish were widespread. Recall that chief among the doomsters was The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who, as we’ve seen, predicted that in the 1970s “millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also declared, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” And he further insisted that “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”

  As we now know, Borlaug
and his team were already engaged in exactly the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn’t work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they launched a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. Soon after Borlaug’s success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research working at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia. By 1968, when Ehrlich’s book appeared, the US Agency for International Development was already hailing Borlaug’s achievement as a Green Revolution.

  Borlaug’s achievements were not confined to the laboratory and fields. He insisted that governments pay poor farmers world prices for their grain. At the time, many developing nations—eager to supply cheap food to their urban citizens, who might otherwise rebel—required their farmers to sell into a government concession that paid them less than half of the world market price for their agricultural products. The result, predictably, was hoarding and underproduction. Using his hard-won prestige as a kind of platform, Borlaug persuaded the governments of Pakistan and India to drop such self-defeating policies. Fair prices and high doses of fertilizer combined with new grains changed everything. By 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat, and by 1974 India was self-sufficient in all cereals.

  Instead of cheering the successes of the Green Revolution, Ehrlich doubled down on his predictions of imminent global collapse. In a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe,” in Ramparts magazine, he excoriated people “lacking the expertise to see through the Green Revolution drivel” for failing to realize that by “the early 1970s, the ‘Green Revolution’ was more talk than substance.” Ehrlich derided officials in the US Department of Agriculture and Agency for International Development for supposedly “rav[ing] about the approaching transformation of agriculture in the underdeveloped countries (UDCs).” He continued, “Most historians agree that a combination of utter ignorance of ecology, a desire to justify past errors, and pressure from agroindustry” was behind the Green Revolution propaganda campaign. In his dire scenario, famines would soon break out first in India and Pakistan, but soon spread to “Indonesia, the Philippines, Malawi, the Congo, Egypt, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico.” Ehrlich’s prophecy of famine ends by proclaiming, “Everywhere hard realities destroyed the illusion of the Green Revolution.”