One of the central “policy problems” faced in modern societies is population growth. I used the scare quotes because it’s not clear that population is a state issue at all, much less a problem.
Population, after all, is the sum of the consequences of millions of individual actions, some of them choices and some just actions. A woman has a certain number of children, for complex reasons. If we add up the results within a nation, the result is the growth in the overall population. Or, currently in many nations, decline.
The reasons vary substantially across the individuals involved. The availability of contraception, social norms, family pressures, or sexual violence and the problems of political stability all play a role. Thinking of the aggregate as a single variable factor—“population”—and as something that can be manipulated by changing policies is a strange conceit of central planners.
There has been a lot of famously breathless worrying about population growth. One of the first, of course, was Thomas Malthus, whose views were actually more complex than the “population crisis” claim we find in his followers.
Bad Predictions
Perhaps the most famous Malthusian doomsayer is Paul Ehrlich, who famously said: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That was in his extremely influential 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich went on to predict:
“At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. ... The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion. ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
That’s some serious hogwash. The population of India was 530 million when this “prediction” was made; India has more than 1.34 billion in 2018, and there is less poverty, not more.
Further, readers may recall that Ehrlich was a gambler; he foolishly took Julian Simon’s famous bet on commodity prices. Ehrlich lost, of course, but never came close to admitting that he was in any way mistaken.
Simon asked Ehrlich to pick a few commodities in 1980 whose supply would run out 10 years later, leading to skyrocketing prices. Ehrlich picked a few. None of them ran out, and prices were actually lower by 1990.In 1969, Ehrlich predicted that life expectancy in the United States “will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics.” I could go on; there are hundreds more very specific predictions of disaster that have been not only wrong, but qualitatively in the wrong direction.
Every time Ehrlich and other population alarmists have said “down,” the actual result has been “up”: The population has increased without causing major problems; the biggest problem of the poor in many countries is obesity, not starvation; and the world is less polluted and the air is cleaner (from everything except carbon dioxide, a problem Ehrlich never even mentioned) than it was in the 1960s. Things are better, not worse, and things are better, most of all, for the poor.
In a sense, Ehrlich has been consistent: Every 10 years or so, he just adds another decade to his fatuous “predictions” and cooks up a new batch of nonsense. And he has managed to get paid a fortune to do it.
The point: It’s not surprising that a seller of ideological snake oil would continue to sell the same useless concoction of nonsense, as long as people line up to buy it. But that raises the real question: Why would anyone buy this nonsense? How could a fake scientist continue to be listened to, and even respected, when not one of his specific predictions are even in the correct direction?
I have an answer. And I have to admit that I hope I’m wrong, because if I’m right, it’s a pretty horrible indictment of the moral impoverishment of the population alarmists. But hear me out, and see what you think.
