Exploding the Myth of the Population Bomb

During the last three decades, the issue of overpopulation - or perceived overpopulation - has been discussed in various capacities.

The primary instigators of these discussions have been the radical environmentalists, the radical animal rights activists, and certain wealthy elites in our Western society.

All of these groups more or less assert that human beings are destroying the planet. There are too many of us, they say. Hence, we must utilize “family planning” (read: abortion, contraception, sterilization), even in a coercive manner, to limit the number of people born into the world.

As a result of this elitist, anti-life mentality, also known as the “contraceptive mentality,” several countries, including the U.S., are steeped in what the late Pope John Paul II called a culture of death.

In third world countries, abortion, contraception and sterilization seemingly abound; yet the most basic needs of food, clean water and medicine are often lacking.

It would seem that international organizations such as the United Nations and Planned Parenthood are more interested in reducing the population of those less fortunate than in working to promote authentic economic development in developing countries.

The main questions involving this matter, I submit, are these: Is the world indeed overpopulated? What can be done to promote economic development and responsible parenthood in a way that is morally acceptable to virtually everyone?

The assertion that the world is overpopulated is essentially a myth. In a January 29, 2005 address given by Cesare Bonivento, Roman Catholic bishop of Papua New Guinea, at the Family Life International Symposium held in Papua New Guinea, Bishop Bonivento cited a 2003 report issued by the United Nations Population Division warning that “future fertility levels in most developing countries will likely fall below 2.1 children per woman, the level needed to ensure the long-term replacement of the population. By 2050, the UN document says, three out of every four countries in the less developed regions will be experiencing below-replacement fertility, with all developed countries far below replacement level as well.”

Bishop Bonivento continued: “The deeper reductions in fertility will have as a consequence a faster aging of the population of developing countries, and this aging will stress social security systems. Globally, the number of older persons (60 years or over) will nearly triple, increasing from 606 million in 2000 to nearly 1.9 billion by 2050.”

Interestingly, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released a report in 2004 predicting “that the world's population will increase by almost 40% by 2050, to 8.9 billion inhabitants” and that “such a demographic increase is an obstacle for development and for the environment.”

Bishop Bonivento gave the following observation for the aforementioned contradictory report: “Why such an evidently contradictory evaluation? Because the warnings of the other UN agencies and of the demographers are jeopardizing UNFPA's effort to curb the population with any means, including legal abortion. UNFPA is the agency supporting the Chinese one-child policy, which includes forced abortion for women having a second child.”

Now, what can be done to foster economic development in third world countries? According to Dr. Brian Clowes, author and researcher for Human Life International, such a program would: “provide basic health care and prenatal care to women and children, thereby dramatically reducing infant mortality rates; build road systems and bridges to remote areas, thus promoting regional economic self-sufficiency; help break down artificial economic barriers, such as family-run utility monopolies and overly complicated procedures for securing permits in order to start small businesses, thereby stimulating healthy competition; improve agricultural production with rural electrification, mechanization and adequate grain storage, thereby improving nutrition; provide clean running water to villages, reducing endemic diseases; and provide basic education to those who are not receiving it.”

Finally, the widespread promotion of natural family planning, also known as natural fertility regulation, is vital, as it is “morally acceptable to all religions and cultures.” Information on natural family planning can be found on the following websites: www.ccli.org, www.popepaulvi.com.

This article did nothing to burst the overpopulation bubble for me. The UN forecast is consistent with most other population growth forecasts I've seen and the author causally dismisses it without offering a shared of evidence that it is not accurate. The statements that: 1) the population will be older in 2050; 2) that the population will have grown from the current 6 billion to 8.9 billion by 2050 and 3) that most developed and some undeveloped countries will have birth rates below replacement level are not mutually exclusive or inconsistent yet the author seems to think so.

Most of the third world is an economic basket case and cannot create enough goods, services, food, health-care, education and jobs to take care of its people. As a result, there is a massive out migration from these countries into the first world where they are overwhelming our ability to provide education and health-care. The inability to sustain the current population seems to be the very definition of overpopulation. That's why 10% of Mexico's population has fled Mexico and come to the United States. Their country is overpopulated and is unable to sustain them. If it were governed better could it support more? Probably, but the point is moot because it is very unlikely to happen.

The article suggests that this economic refugee crisis is a symptom of poor governance and a failure to grow the economy rather than a symptom and outward manifestation of overpopulation. I'd suggest that it is a distinction without a difference. Those countries are impossible to govern well because they are overpopulate.

We have been trying for decades to help these countries grow economically and govern themselves better with little success. There is little reason to believe that as their population expands by 30% in the next 50 years they will hit on the magic formula for good governance and economic growth. It is more likely that the misery will increase and that it will have an increasingly negative effect on the first world. (Have you read anything good about the schools or hospitals in Los Angelos lately).

Expansion of world population by 30% most certainly is a crisis and unfortunately it is all but a forgone conclusion that it is going to occur. Lets start building that wall at our southern border. Thank goodness that after 50 years population growth, according to most models is going to level off and then slowly shrink. It is going to be a miserable 50 years especially in the third world and then taking care of the old people is going to create another tough 50 years. That is when the population Ponzi scheme is going to come home to roost particularly in the socialist first world that has structured things like Social Security on the notion that population can increase exponentially forever.

Jewish World Review / February 12, 1998

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell Julian Simon, combatant in a 200-year war

THE RECENT DEATH OF JULIAN SIMON was a special loss because he was one of those people who took on the thankless task of talking sense on a subject where nonsense is all the rage. A professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Julian Simon wrote fact-filled books about population -- all of them exposing the fallacies of those who were promoting "overpopulation" hysteria.

Ironically, Professor Simon's death comes during the 200th anniversary of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population which started the hysteria that is still with us today, despite two centuries of mounting evidence against it. Like so many other theories that can survive tons of contrary evidence, overpopulation theory relies on slippery definitions and a constituency that needs a mission more than it wants facts.

What Malthus said two centuries ago was that human beings have the potential to increase faster than the food needed to feed them. No one doubted this -- then or now. From this he made the fatal leap across a chasm of logic to say that there was a real danger that people would in fact grow so fast as to create a problem of feeding them.

The truism that the capacity to produce food limits the size of the sustainable population does not mean that population is anywhere near those limits. No automobile can drive faster than the power of its engine will permit, but you cannot explain the actual speeds of cars on roads and highways by those limits, because only an idiot drives at those limits.

Julian Simon set out to explain what happened to real population in the real world, not what happens in abstract models or popular hysteria. In the real world, as he demonstrated with masses of facts and in-depth analysis, we are nowhere near to running low on food or natural resources.

Professor Simon made a famous bet with the leading hysteria-monger of our time, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Simon had offered to bet anybody that any set of natural resources that they claimed were running low would in fact be cheaper in the future than today. Professor Ehrlich took him up on it. Simon allowed Ehrlich to pick which resources and which period of time.

Ehrlich and his fellow hysterics chose a bundle of ten natural resources and a period of ten years. At the end of the decade, not only was the real cost of that bundle lower than at the beginning, every single natural resource that the Ehrlich camp had picked had a lower real cost than when the decade began.

If we were really running low on these resources, they would be getting progressively more expensive, instead of progressively cheaper. This is elementary supply-and-demand economics. But those addicted to overpopulation hysteria are no more interested in economics than they are in evidence.

What overpopulation theory provides is far more emotionally satisfying than facts, logic or economics. It is one of a whole family of theories which depict other people as so dangerously thoughtless that imposing the superior wisdom and virtue of some anointed social missionaries is all that can save us from disaster.

This vision inspired the eugenics movement in the early decades of this century, the recycling movement today and innumerable other heady crusades in between. Contrary facts mean absolutely nothing to the true believers. Those who insist on talking about those contrary facts encounter only hostility and demonization.

Julian Simon understood that. In a letter to me a couple of years ago, he mentioned a certain Nobel Prize-winning economist who had said to him that "even with all his prestige he would not say that population growth might well be a good thing because he was afraid he might lose credibility." Such is the power of intimidation in our time.

"Yes, one can always argue that such prudence is wise. But we all know the consequences of such 'wise' choices," Simon wrote. It is a society where strident hysteria drowns out truth and where our policies are based on headstrong nonsense, loudly shouted.

With a full understanding of the opposition and smears he would encounter, Julian Simon nevertheless wrote The Economics of Population Growth, Population Matters, and -- his best-known book -- The Ultimate Resource. To him, the ultimate resource was human intelligence.

We should also add, in honor of Julian Simon, the courage to use that intelligence.

-- from http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell021298.html

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