Back in 1968, a Stanford professor of biology named Paul Ehrlich published a book entitled The Population Bomb. In it he wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” His work was hugely influential, rapidly becoming “settled science” and influencing views on birth control, abortion, population policy, and developmental aid.
Rarely has a simple prof been so influential, and yet so completely wrong.
His population growth forecasts were, if anything, under-estimates. He noted, for example, that India could not sustain a population of 200 million, which would be news to the 1.5 billion Indians alive today. He continued to maintain (until his death earlier this year) that he was fundamentally correct. What he missed with his mathematical accuracy on population was another implication of there being more humans, namely human ingenuity. Ehrlich was right that the world couldn’t feed itself based on the technology and agriculture of the 1960s, but he didn’t take into account a green revolution–produced by human genius–which made his dire predictions ridiculous. It’s odd that there are still some people wandering around today believing human overpopulation is some kind of threat, but then again, there’s still a Flat Earth Society, too.
I have written previously about the looming challenge of depopulation, a phenomenon which is happening across almost the entire globe. There is no simple cause: it occurs in social democracies with egalitarian cultures, consumerist America, authoritarian China, democratic India, and every culture and economy in-between. You can’t blame just the cell phone, or the government, or men, or feminists, or climate change. Even adding all these proposed causes together doesn’t make sense of the data, but the data are real.
Today I want to tackle one small aspect of the challenge. Increasingly, I see younger people (especially younger feminists) decrying that depopulation is even an issue. Their arguments tend to cite a woman’s right to choose whether to even have a child, often accompanied by images from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Handmaid’s Tale (as if Boston-as-Gilead was a real possibility in rapidly secularizing America). They often throw the argument back on those raising the issue, claiming it is inherently misogynistic and only the fever-dream of men wanting to put women back in their place. When faced with the implications, they offer a ‘so-what?’ shrug. I saw a recent social media meme that went, “sorry boomers, we’re not having kids to take care of you in your old age!”
To say this misses the point, or rather invokes politics in something far more important, is an understatement. So let’s conduct a little thought experiment to see just how wrong this sentiment is. Imagine for a moment that all the women in the world agree to invoke their bodily autonomy and stop getting pregnant today. What would the societal implications be, and when would they hit?
The field of prenatal medical care would enter a death spiral, leaving it completely closed in nine months. Pediatric medicine would follow, along with any need for child-care, ending completely within about a decade. Within six years, pre-schools and kindergartens would close, and since the progression in inevitable, finding teachers to educate the last classes of children as they advance would become harder and harder.
An entire portion of modern economies, developed to serve the needs of children and adolescents, would rapidly react to the market place void: no children’s clothing, kid’s meals, sports leagues, summer jobs. This would create new economic incentives (someone has to mow all that grass) but decimate other industries (amusement parks). The lack of a future generation would free up capital spent on schools, but degrade all the research and development which brings us new technologies, new medicines, new businesses.
There would also be a mismatch between supply and demand. Say goodbye to housing shortages. Prices will plummet as supply initially remains stable but demand begins to drop. And without heirs, what new mechanism will emerge to say who gets what vacated property? And who will work in all the fast food restaurants? Common places like gas stations, restaurants, and stores will face massive consolidation, leaving behind decaying and abandoned infrastructure when the government itself no longer has the means to redevelop it.
Universities close up in two decades, with a few surviving by offering continuing adult education. With them goes college sports, and of course all the professional leagues begin to resemble old-timer’s games as the few remaining athletes continue to play in the absence of younger competitors. The globalized world we all have become so familiar with begins to close in on itself. There is no longer the infrastructure to support things like international travel or media, so our aging population stays closer to home. The good news is war becomes less frequent; the bad news is euthanasia becomes more so. Why hang around such a place? Obviously, in about one hundred years, there is no one left to turn off the lights.
As a thought experiment, it’s quite depressing. Of course, we should not fall into professor Ehrlich’s error and neglect other factors. What about technology? What about immigration? What about the simple fact that not everybody will stop having babies at the same time? Let’s take them in order.
Technology can indeed provide some relief. We can automate some services, relieving the need for people to provide them. The appearance of human genius (like, say Leonardo da Vinci) does not correlate with simple population growth, but it does with resources, networks, and social stability, all of which would be under stress. Perhaps the robots can replicate, but that puts humanity in a near-term race to build and code the robots in the first place. This leaves open the question of technology acceptance. I see people who disdain the use of self check-out at the grocery store; will they embrace a robot doing remote cardiac surgery? Maybe Japan will successfully restructure their schools into nursing homes staffed by lovable robots, but is that the future we long for?
Immigration can also provide some relief, but it comes with a caveat. This immigration will not be yesterday’s immigration, it will be tomorrow’s. How will it be different? Yesterday’s immigrants came seeking a better life, and they needed their adopted home much more than that adopted home needed them. Tomorrow’s immigrants will be a sought after commodity, a limited resource, and they will know it. They will come expecting benefits, rights, and promises up front. Those schools will stay open but teach in foreign languages. Cultural norms will change to reflect the interests of the newcomers, who must be appeased. Those immigrants will arrive expecting to vote as citizens, as they should (in this case). Again, this solution is a very different world.
Finally, a nod to reality. Unlike our thought experiment, all women everywhere aren’t deciding to never have children. In most places, they are deciding to have one. This means all those harsh outcomes from our experiment are watered down, happening over decades to a century and not all at once every few years. But let’s not kid ourselves that a world with a declining population will be just like the one we have today, only smaller. The changes are still real, and the challenges remain. Anybody who has lived through a period or a place with unplanned growth can tell stories of how messed up things become when the government doesn’t plan for the growth. Unplanned population reduction is the same way. If you want a hint of the possibilities, take a drive through the small Midwestern towns that have hollowed out due to job and population losses.
We just did such a tour of Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. There are nice towns with vibrant centers, and places that look like movie sets for a zombie apocalypse. Some will never recover, and the people who still live there must just suffer one inconvenience after another. Lousy schools, no local hospital, with the major businesses being cannabis, fireworks, or liquor stores. Some of these lost towns made it for a while, but eventually the population decline got to them. Others are still thriving, but they require some population growth to keep making it. And one child per woman won’t provide it. Not to mention that the world has centuries of experience planning for population growth, yet we still get it wrong many times. To beat the dead horse, the world has never experienced long-term population decline, so the odds we will get it right are slim.
Look at major cities where the mayor or city council tries to decide today what schools to close. It’s a life-or-death decision for communities. Now imagine those same government figures having to decide who gets police coverage, or snow removal, or ambulance service.
I’m not advocating for any particular solution here. I’m pointing out that the people who will suffer the most if current population trends continue aren’t the baby-boomers. We will all be long dead before the changes really start crashing down. No, it is precisely those younger people so agitated by their elders telling them they need to start families. So make all the claims about your autonomy you like, and disregard what the old folks are saying. As we like to say in our family, “your punishment will fit your crime.”