Noah Smith – Why Paul Ehrlich – Population Bomb – Was Wrong

Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.

Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.

Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day. 

‘Data Analysis – Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong

And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes

Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.

And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:

When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:

As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.

Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.

Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968

Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:

Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.

Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.

In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:

The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.

These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions

Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019

So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.

Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)

Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.

What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.

And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.

Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.

In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.

There is a lesson here for the modern day.

Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs

In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.

For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!

Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.

So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.

It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage. 

The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.

This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.

Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.

But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:

When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.

But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong

Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.

First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.

It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.

(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)

But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.

And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene. 

Statistics on biodiversity and habitat loss generally all point in the same direction.

I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.

This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:

But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.

This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.

Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.

So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’

For more blogs and articles on Demography, Environment, Eugenics, Limits to Growth, Political Strategy, Statistical Analysis, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Posted on February 16, 2021

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.

However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Posted on November 25, 2021

We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.

This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Posted on May 3, 2022

In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

Posted on September 30, 2020

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

Posted on April 10, 2020

The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Posted on January 14, 2024

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Posted on January 2, 2024

The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.

Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.

Global Population Decline and Rebalance

Posted on January 17, 2024

The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.

However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.

Population Growth or Decline?

Posted on October 20, 2019

Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?

This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.

Global Population Decline and Impacts

The developed world zeitgeist, especially Anglosphere, is that population growth has been one of the key issues of environmental sustainability and nativist conservative politics, left and right.  However, as the article from First Links below explains, we are in fact approaching peak population, due to below replacement fertility and to be followed by ageing and decline, or balance?

Many are realising that ‘population growth’ is not such an issue, it has stalled with long term fertility decline (below replacement), while recent analysis suggests peak mid century (Lancet etc.) while researchers Bricker & Ibbitson (‘Empty Planet’) predict precipitous decline after the peak.

The headline number is not the issue but as the late Hans Rosling said, it’s the make-up and how the population is managed at different life stages e.g. oldies now outnumber youth which has electoral repercussions when voting for short term horizons aka Brexit.

Population obsessions, have also been used to support an unsubstantiated environmental link of ‘sciency sounding’ PR that deflects from carbon regulation, fossil fuels, often blames ‘immigration’ to at least preserve the status quo; from the time of Malthus and Galton through ZPG, and the UNPD (whose formulae are used by ABS & UK too).

The issue is not just skills gaps nor is demanding all retirees continue to work (involuntarily), but how to fund budgets when we are dependent upon taxes from working age and temporary churnover via PAYE system, but these cohorts are in decline viz a viz increasing numbers of retirees?

OECD demographic data, i.e. medium to long term trends of working age/retirees + kids, is more informative and gives comparisons with other nations, vs. our obsessions with short term headline NOM net overseas migration data snapshots that make for media headlines (but normally dominated by students and backpackers).

Quite obvious, like elsewhere, temporary churn over is important, as ‘net financial contributors’ to support budgets, when more retirees/pensioners are tugging on the same with ageing declining tax payers.

Click through to see OECD Australian working age demographics with other comparable nations. 

All have passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, hence, how can budgets be supported further? Increase taxes for low income types and/or retirees (mooted in the US by some in the GOP), or cut services and health care, or privatise more services for user pays (political suicide)?

From First Links Newsletter Australia:

‘Embracing the bright side of population decline

Emma Davidson   30 March 2022

A growing body of research is showing that global population growth is slowing down and will likely drop into negative territory within the next few decades.

One study predicted that the global population would peak at 9.7 billion people in 2064 – up from around 7.9 billion currently – before falling to 8.8 billion by the end of this century. If this is true, it’ll be the first sustained period of world population decline since the Black Death.

But what’s worrying some experts today is that many countries are already seeing natural population growth come to a standstill. Here in Australia, the lack of immigration contributed to population growth of practically zero in the year to March 2021 . Similar stories are playing out in the UK, the US, and many other developed countries.

Shrinking populations and financial markets

What economic impact will these demographics shifts have? After all, we can’t ignore the human aspect of our economies. Financial markets are complex, interconnected ecosystems, and our attitudes and behaviour are key to how they perform.

Well, when it comes to population decline, many analysts are bearish.

They say lower birth rates create ageing nations, with fewer people available to look after the elderly. These stretched workforces limit innovation and productivity. Growing economies need growing populations, it is claimed.

However, I believe this is an overly pessimistic view. I’m far more bullish about the impact of declining populations. There are many possible benefits to having fewer people in the world. And I suspect even the negatives aren’t quite as bad as people suggest, given humans have an incredible knack for adapting to change.

Wage growth

It’s widely thought that a smaller working-age population could lift wages. Fewer workers give the labour market greater bargaining power, leading to better working conditions.

There would also likely be more opportunities for women and ethnic minorities, increasing workforce diversity. Research shows that diverse organisations tend to financially outperform their less inclusive competitors. They are also six times more likely to be innovative and agile.

Economic growth might slow, but it is my hope that the above changes would lead to healthier, happier, and more engaged workers – and a more even wealth distribution.

The late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling argued convincingly for bringing the world’s final 1 billion people out of extreme poverty to limit population growth and provide better opportunities for millions of families who are struggling.

I’m confident that humans can adjust to a ‘new normal’ where economic growth is still a goal, but not the only goal. Instead, perhaps we can focus more on creating a world where living standards and wealth distribution are our barometers of success.

Then, freed from poverty, some people will inevitably go on to become the scientists, entrepreneurs and leaders of tomorrow that we’ll need when populations decline.

Innovation and productivity

The conventional logic is that bigger is better when it comes to population and innovation. More people means more researchers and innovators (as well as more consumers to sell to). And yet, only three of Bloomberg’s top 10 most innovative economies have populations exceeding 10 million people (South Korea, Germany and Sweden).

So, it’s clearly not just a numbers game.

Investing in education and encouraging more people to work in research and development also facilitates the flow of new ideas. Furthermore, automation can accelerate innovation and productivity by performing all of the tedious, time-consuming tasks that would usually fall to humans, freeing them up for more value-oriented work.

Initial predictions for automation were bleak. The ‘rise of the robots’ would mean job losses, economists said, as employers replaced workers en-masse with machines that never get sick or tired.

More recent research is challenging that theory. One study found that each robot per 1,000 employees boosts employment at a firm by 2.2%. Essentially, automation makes companies more competitive and profitable, helping them to grow the business and swell their ranks.

Sustainability matters

It’s common to hear industry commentators make statements like “ignoring the environmental benefits for a moment” or “sustainability aside” when talking about population decline. But we can’t simply forget about the environment. It’s too important. Ever-growing populations continue to put a strain on the world and its resources.

Declining populations can help

Researchers recently calculated that having one child fewer saves approximately 59 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. “Having one less child saves each parent more than 20 times (of CO2 emissions) as living without a car, or about 70 times as much as eliminating meat from the diet” Sustainable Population Australia says.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that people should stop having children. I have written previously about the potential repercussions of a ‘baby bust’ if rising infertility rates are ignored. In addition, and as things stand right now, the global human population begins to decline at the end of this century and is likely to continue along the decline trajectory.

What I am wanting to highlight is the environmental benefits that are associated with population decline.

Finding the right balance

Of course, there are some roles that robots simply can’t fill. Ageing populations will place more pressure on our healthcare and elderly care systems, for example. And it’s hard to imagine artificial intelligence ever having as good a bedside manner as a real doctor or nurse.

Australia’s healthcare and superannuation systems are excellent, which should relieve some of this burden. But we must also find ways to make certain roles, such as elderly care, more rewarding.

Automation is therefore just one piece of the puzzle. We must also recognise there are complex services that only humans can provide.

There are undoubtedly challenges we face with declining populations, and I don’t pretend to have the answers.

But do our narratives have to be so gloomy? There is far more room for optimism based on the human capacity to adapt.’

Emma Davidson is Head of Corporate Affairs at London-based Staude Capital, manager of the Global Value Fund (ASX:GVF). This article is the opinion of the writer and does not consider the circumstances of any individual.

For more articles and blogs on immigration, population growth, demography and economics click through:

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Hans Rosling – GapMinder – Factfulness – Human Development – Adult Education

China PRC – Fertility Decline – Peak Population?

Population Growth or Decline?

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’ 

Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.

However, by 2012 Randers had revised own his global population peak estimate down to 8 billion or so which concurs with more recent research of Bricker & Ibbitson presented in ‘Empty Planet’ and The Lancet peer reviewed research paper by Stein Emil Vollset et al. titled ‘The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power’ which states that fertility rates have declined much faster than expected.

‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?

Giles Parkinson 7 November 2012

What will the world look like in 40 years time. In 2052, will we have enough food and water? Will there be too many people? Will our standard of living be higher. Will we have taken decisive action on climate change.

To briefly summarise Jorgen Randers, the renowned Norwegian futurist, the broad answers to those are yes, yes, maybe, no and no. But it’s the way he reaches those conclusions that makes his latest book 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years, so compelling.

Randers made his name as the co-author of the book “The Limits to Growth”, which underpinned the Club of Rome’s work on resource depletion and helped spawn the sustainability movement. Not that he thinks the book and his work had that much impact. “I spent 40 years working on sustainability and failed. The world today is a much less sustainable world,” he lamented during a visit to Australia this week.

Now 67, Randers runs the centre for climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School.  And having outlined 12 scenarios for the world running from 1970 to 2100 in his first book, he now feels there is enough information to make more concrete forecasts.

It is not a picture he finds particularly attractive, but one he sees as inevitable because of mankind’s inability to look beyond short-term solutions and the obsession with growth. “I’m not saying what should happen, but this is the sad future that humanity is going to create for itself.”

Here are the base numbers for his predictions. Unlike others that predict a world population of 9 billion in 2050, he sees it peaking at 8 billion in 2040 and then declining, because he says the rich world will choose jobs over children, and the poorer urban families will choose fewer children.

He expects the world economy to grow much slower than most, because it will be harder to increase productivity at the same rate as has occurred in the last four decades. The low hanging fruit in the agricultural, manufacturing and office sectors have been picked. And he does not believe the poor countries will “take off”. He says that by 2050, the world economy will be no more than 2.5 times bigger than it is today, rather than four times bigger as many assume.

The US has a bleak outlook because their average disposable incomes will not grow, because they have already gone further than most in productivity and have a huge debt to China. And, Randers says, because the US is not capable of making simple decisions, it will also be not capable of making difficult decisions. He puts the current debate around climate change, or the lack of it, as an example.

“China is the real winner and they will be 5 times as rich in 40 year time,” Randers says. That’s because of China’s ability to make quick decisions that are in favour of the majority. 

The rest of the world, he suggests, remains poor

Still, while the economy and the population will not grow as fast as some predict, and there will be no huge shortage of food, water or energy, it will still grow fast enough to trigger a climate crisis, because the short termism of the political class and business means that greenhouse emissions will not be addressed. He expects emissions will peak between 2030 and 2040, and will have only returned to 2010 levels by 2050 – pushing the world beyond the 2°C scenario and locking in disastrous climate reactions in the second half of the century.

“We will spend more money repairing the damage of climate change after it has occurred instead of spending up front avoiding the climate damage,” he says. “We know what to do. The only reason we do not do it is because it is slightly more expensive than doing nothing, so we don’t do it. It is very frustrating.”

He says capitalism is design to allocate money in the short term, and any efforts by politicians to suggest that capital be allocated to the longer term is usually rejected by voters. (He could be talking about the Australian political debate). And he doesn’t hold up much hope for international agreements, at least not of the sort being sort by the UN from 192 nations on climate policy. “If you had 192 wives and were deciding where to put the sofa in the living room, you would understand the problem.”

Click through for more articles about Demography, Environment, GDP Growth, Limits to Growth, Population Growth & Younger Generations.

Population Decline in Asia is Near with Africa to Follow

Recently Nikkei Asia, drawing on research from the University of Washington, published an article contrary to much of the western Anglo or European world’s view of population and humanity, i.e. start of long term population decline has arrived, not infinite increases.

While they present and analyse well, albeit dependent upon sub-optimal UNPD data, they acknowledge the lowering fertility rates from which headline population data is derived.

Since the time of Malthus then fossil fuel supported ZPG Zero Population Growth it has been assumed that high fertility and higher populations were inevitable. However, ZPG relied on high UNPD fertility rates and data, with catastrophic or pessimistic predictions that are now looking less likely.

More recently several demographers and researchers have successfully analysed and argued to show that fertility has peaked, population is to follow by mid century or earlier, as opposed to UNPD forecasts based on unclear or unexplained fertility rate changes in China and India, i.e. declining then rising again to peak at double figures.

The new population bomb –  For the first time, humanity is on the verge of long-term decline

KAZUO YANASE, YOHEI MATSUO, EUGENE LANG and ERI SUGIURA, Nikkei staff writers

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 06:06 JST

TOKYO — For the past 200 years, a rapidly rising population has consumed the earth’s resources, ruined the environment, and started wars. But humanity is about to trade one population bomb for another, and now scientists and policymakers are waking up to a new reality: The world is on the precipice of decline, and possible extinction.

The twin forces of economic development and women’s empowerment are combining to end the age brought on by the Industrial Revolution, in which economic growth was buoyed by a growing population, and vice versa. Since the early 19th century, the rising tide of humanity has provoked many dire predictions: English economist Thomas Malthus argued as early as 1798 that population would grow so fast it would outstrip food production and lead to famine. In 1972, the Club of Rome warned that humanity would reach the “limits to growth” within 100 years, driven by a relentless rise in the global population and environmental pollution.

Today the world’s population, which stood as 1 billion in 1800, is now 7.8 billion, and the strain on the planet is clear. But scientists and policymakers are slowly waking up to the new numbers: The population growth rate reached a peak of 2.09% in the late 1960s, but it will fall below 1% in 2023, according to a study by the University of Washington, published last year. 

In 2017, the growth rate of people aged 15 to 64 — the working-age population — fell below 1%. The working-age population has already begun to drop in about a quarter of countries around the world. By 2050, 151 of the world’s 195 countries and regions will experience depopulation.

Ultimately, the study forecasts that the global population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064 and then start declining.

Over the approximately 300,000 years of human history, cold-weather periods and epidemics have caused temporary drops in population. But now humanity will enter a period of sustained decline for the first time ever, according to Hiroshi Kito, a historical demographer and former president of the University of Shizuoka.

East Asia is one region that already faces the world’s most acute baby bust — led by South Korea’s total fertility rate of 1.11, Taiwan’s 1.15 and Japan’s 1.37 average from 2015 to 2020, according to the United Nations publication “World Population Prospects 2019.” A country’s population begins to drop when fertility falls below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1. This has led to labor shortages, pension fund crises and the obsolescence of old economic models.

Southeast Asia, which has powered global growth as a part of the “Asian Miracle,” is also at a critical juncture. Thailand once had a total fertility rate of more than 6, but it is now 1.53, coming closer to Japan. In 2019, the working-age population began to decline, and the economic growth rate was around 2.4%. That is roughly one-third the 7.5% economic growth the country experienced in the 1970s.

Vietnam, meanwhile, became an aging society in 2017. In January the government began raising the retirement age for men and women [now 60 and 55, respectively], in an effort to head off a pension crisis. It will reach 62 for men by 2028 and 60 for women by 2035.

But the biggest force behind the “degrowth” trend is China. The University of Washington predicts that its population will begin to drop from next year, and that by 2100 it will plummet to 730 million from the current 1.41 billion. By that same year, 23 countries, including Japan, will see their populations shrink to half their current levels or less, according to Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who has focused much of his career on improving global health.

The University of Washington study comes as a corrective to previous estimates that saw the global population continuing to grow through this century. “World Population Prospects” in 2019 estimated that the population is likely to continue to grow, reaching 10.9 billion by 2100. But new projections show the birthrate in developing countries falling faster than expected.

Murray believes global fertility will converge at around 1.5, and likely lower in some countries. “This also means that humanity will eventually disappear in the next hundreds of years,” he said.

The new reality will create new dynamics — already visible in some cases — in areas from monetary policy to pension systems to real estate prices, to the structure of capitalism as a whole. As global population approaches its peak, many governments are increasingly under pressure to rethink their policies, which have so far relied mostly on demographic expansion for their economic growth and geopolitical power.

Getting old before getting rich

Asia’s baby boomers are reaching retirement age, and the population as a whole is growing older, and governments have experienced a rapid increase in social security spending, including for pensions and medical care.

With an over-65 population of more than 21% and a per capita gross domestic product of above $44,000, Japan has become a “super-aged society.” When the working-age population and companies can no longer support the social security system, government funding becomes the only option.

In China, the number of births skyrocketed after the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961, and the total population increased by about 190 million in the following decade. China’s baby boom generation, which is 1.5 times the size of Japan’s total population, will begin to reach the retirement age of 60 next year. The burden of this mass retirement will fall on a society of the “unwealthy elderly,” who will grow old before they become wealthy.

China faces the prospect of growing old before it becomes wealthy enough to pay for the pensions of the coming wave of elderly retirees. 

“It’s a hard life,” said Chen, 59, who lives in a farming village in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province. He works as a plasterer, building brick houses. Chen suffers from a chronic illness, but with no pension he does not plan on retiring when he turns 60 this year. He stayed in the village instead of moving to a city so he could take care of his parents.

China’s transition to a market economy since the 1980s sent migrant workers streaming to cities. Families in rural areas are increasingly unable to support their elderly relatives. Just over 70% of the population has joined the pension system that was set up in 2009. Its benefits are about 10% the average income of the working-age population. An insurance system for elderly care, like that of Japan, is still in the trial stage…..

For more blogs and articles about immigration and population growth click through below.

Expert Analysis of Australia’s Populist Immigration and Population Growth Obsessions

Demography, Immigration, Population and the Greening of Hate

Population Pyramids, Economics, Ageing, Pensions, Demography and Misunderstanding Data Sets

China PRC – Fertility Decline – Peak Population?

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Grey Tsunami – Electoral Demographics – Ageing Populations vs. Youth

Population Growth or Decline?

UNPD Global Population Growth Forecasts Debunked

Population Pyramids, Economics, Ageing, Pensions, Demography and Misunderstanding Data Sets

Interesting article ‘The end of the population pyramid’  but one would suggest that it’s no longer a ‘population pyramid’ inverted or otherwise, while ‘pro-natal’ or positive eugenics policies and working age population data require more scrutiny, especially when backgrounded by antipathy in Australian (UK and US ) media and politics towards post 1970s ‘immigration’, influencing older monocultural voters (ditto Hungary etc. to avoid ‘immigration’ central to conservative political messaging, even to the point of conspiracy theories like round ‘Soros’).  

For example, constantly conflating increased temporary churn over via the NOM (since 2006) from students etc. with permanent migration yet there is no strong if any correlation, then worse, blaming the same ‘population growth’ for environmental degradation (allowing fossil fuels and regulation off the hook AKA strategy of  ZPG supported by Rockefeller Bros, Ford and Carnegie Foundations in the ’70s, and with the mantle passing to Kochs and similar groups).

The world, especially including more educated and empowered women in the developing world, have already decided to have fewer children reflected in sliding fertility rates to below replacement; not aware of any research showing substantive outcomes from pro-natal policies except bringing plans forward on having children, to be followed by a fertility dip?

Population data cannot be compared easily in a global context due to different definitions, collection methods and presentation, while demographers use multiple types of population data sets to base their e.g. workforce analysis on, related to dependency ratios and pensions.  

For example, in some cases economists are using some dubious methods in arguing the case against offering an increase in the SCG super contribution guarantee by claiming a binary i.e. would preclude any wage rises; also claiming increased sustainability of the state pension by claiming a low(er) dependency ratio by falsely presenting plenty of workers to support a future of pensions only (no need for super).

However, ‘statistics 101’, it appears that the forecasts or projections of the general or ‘estimated resident population’ counting 15-64 year olds of ‘working age’, but not parsing through or filtering out the significant numbers of ‘temporary residents’ caught up in the NOM who have limited and/or no work rights vs. citizens and permanent residents with no restrictions.

If the latter is presented well, then the ‘population pyramid’ is not just inverted, but without temporary ‘churn over’ it would look more like an upright arrow with a very chunky head and slim body below it to support….. which portrays the issues ahead for working age in supporting the tax base and increasing numbers of aged dependents, how? 

Australia’s retirement income system generally comes up in the top 5-10 globally, due to superannuation and pension means testing.  However, many in Australia including both conservative MPs and those of the left, are being led into a cul de sac in both denying the benefits of industry super funds looking after members’ interests and for reduced or more restricted immigration hence access to Australia for temporary residents.

Worse, younger Australians’ futures are and will be thrown under the bus due to LNP and lesser extent the Labor Party, catering to ageing electorates with middle class welfare, low or no taxes and for now, a more nativist and insular view of the world due to Covid and our nativist conservative media oligopoly favouring the LNP and radical right libertarian policies.

From Inside Story Australia:

‘The end of the population pyramid: Fears about a declining birthrate reflect a twentieth-century view of how the economy works

1 June 2021 John Quiggin 

News of a sharp fall in births during 2020 has provoked a fresh wave of hand wringing about the implications of an ageing population. The decline can’t be attributed solely to the pandemic — most of the babies born in 2020 were conceived before the virus took hold — but it appears to have accelerated as the impact of the pandemic has been felt.

Some of the worries are prompted by old-fashioned, not to say primitive, concerns about birthrates as an indicator of “national vitality.” But they mainly reflect a twentieth-century view of the economy that is deeply embedded in our ways of thinking and economic measurement, even though it is now almost completely obsolete.

Underlying this view is the notion that “a surplus of young people” is needed to “drive economies and help pay for the old,” as the New York Times put it in its report on the 2020 figures. But this model of the economy only emerged in the twentieth century, and it looks likely to end in the twenty-first.

For most of human history, old people were expected to work as long as they could, just as children were put to work as soon as they were able. The very young and the very old depended on their families to support them.

That changed radically with the emergence of the welfare state at the end of the nineteenth century. Children were excluded from the workforce and required to attend school until the official leaving age, typically around fourteen. Governments paid for schools but generally required parents to support their children in other ways, as they’d done in the past.

At the other end of life, the new system of age pensions meant that old people (most commonly those over sixty-five) became entitled to public support, sometimes subject to a means test. Pensions were paid out of taxes or contributions to social security schemes.

Either way, the cost was borne by the “working-age” population, generally defined as fifteen to sixty-four. With a high birthrate, the age distribution of the population was shaped like a pyramid, with a large working-age population at the bottom supporting a small group of retirees at the top.

Underlying the pyramid was the idea that physical work predominated. Young, strong and needing only on-the-job training, workers would leave school at fourteen and immediately start contributing to the economy. By sixty-five, they would be worn out and ready for retirement. The more young people the better.

To see what’s happened to that assumption, we need only look at the US data on employment by age. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the pyramid concept looked reasonable enough. Around 60 per cent of young people aged sixteen to twenty-four were employed, compared with barely 30 per cent of those aged fifty-five and over.

By 2019, though, before the pandemic, the gap had largely closed. Just over 50 per cent of people aged sixteen to twenty-four were employed, compared with 39 per cent of those over fifty-five. While many of the jobs held by young people are now part-time and low-waged, older workers are typically earning just below the peak they reached at around age fifty. The figures suggest that average earnings per person are already higher among the old than among the young.

The modern economy is quite different from the one assumed by the conventional population pyramid. To become a productive member of the community, young people need academic or vocational post-school education, and that requires large-scale spending by government or parents, or through loan schemes like HECS. Even as the proportion of young people in the population has declined, developed countries like Australia and the United States have been able to maintain or even increase the proportion of national income allocated to education.

A return to high birthrates over the next few years would create the need for a large increase in education spending. The pay-off in terms of a more productive workforce would not be fully realised until the second half of this century, when the expanded age cohort entered the prime-age workforce in their late twenties and early thirties.

At the other end of the age distribution, official retirement ages have been abolished, and the eligibility age for the pension has been pushed to sixty-seven, with further increases in prospect. For a significant group of manual workers, physical exhaustion still makes retirement a relief. The undervaluing of older workers persists, pushing many into retirement whether they want it or not. But working past sixty-five is an increasingly attractive economic option for a large group of white-collar workers.

A realistic model of the future workforce is one in which productive workers are mostly aged between twenty-five and seventy. Given that life expectancy will never be much above ninety-five, the typical person will spend about half their life in the working-age population and the other half evenly divided between education and retirement.

In other words, despite the concerns expressed since the 2020 population figures were released, the age distribution associated with a lower birthrate is unlikely to cause major problems in how people in countries like Australia are supported during the years they spend out of the workforce.

Meanwhile, a lower birthrate is having an unambiguously beneficial impact on the size of the world’s population. The world is already overcrowded, and the growing population is straining the capacity of the planet. Even with falling birthrates, the world’s population is certain to rise between now and 2050.

By 2100, the total figure might return to the current level of eight billion, or perhaps a little fewer. The idea that we should push people to have more children in order to lift this number, rather than make marginal adjustments to the economic institutions we have inherited from the twentieth century, is simply nonsensical.’

For more articles about Ageing Democracy, Demography, Economics, Government Budgets, Immigration, Pensions, Statistical Analysis, Superannuation, Taxation and Younger Generations click through.