What Happened to the Population Bomb?
– By Howard Sierer –
Liberals have a long history of misdiagnosing what they see as societal ills and inspiring government-mandated solutions that fail to cure the supposed problem while creating a raft of malign and unintended consequences for the rest of us.
I’m confident that within the lifetimes of most readers, today’s liberal fixation on impending climate catastrophe will be yet another example of misdiagnosis accompanied by the imposition of costly and ineffective “solutions.” Likewise, defunding the police and gender change for teens.
But I turn your attention to another insidious example: the once-supposed threat of world over-population and its liberal-inspired “solution” that is playing out today with dire consequences.
With a title and a subject that would never appear in print today, Doubleday published John Robbin’s book “Too Many Asians” in 1959. Its thesis: Asia’s attempts to improve its standard of living were being thwarted by its uncontrolled population rise.
The book was reviewed favorably by the liberal elite of the day, including the New York Times, all of whom advocated “an Asia-wide campaign, backed by the West, to spread the good word about family planning among the millions of ignorant peasants.”
Reporting on a 1974 U.N. World Population Conference, the Times said, “The consensus of the affluent industrialized Western nations” was based on the understanding that overpopulation “threatens to overstrain world resources, particularly food.”
In 1977, World Bank President Robert McNamara warned of impending doom, saying, “Short of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead.” He said it could even be the world’s number one problem because population growth was “not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the hands of literally hundreds of millions of individual parents.”
Like all liberals, McNamara was sure that only massive and comprehensive governmental action could avert the impending catastrophe. He was joined by all the usual suspects: the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Club of Rome with its “Limits to Growth”, the Population Institute, the Worldwatch Institute, and others, all of whom saw population control as the cure for poverty.
Responding to Western nations’ calls, China instituted its “one child per family” policy in 1980. Demographic changes literally take decades to evolve: that policy’s problems are only now coming home to roost. China just announced that its population fell by 850,000 last year, the first recorded drop since the Mao-induced famines of the early 1960s.
Western media responded to China’s announcement with commentary on the social and economic problems a declining population brings. The New York Times ran a story headlined “Why China’s Shrinking Population Is Cause for Alarm.” The article summarized the impacts: fewer workers supporting an aging society, the “hundreds of millions of Chinese women” who were forced to abort their babies, the shortage of girls and a large surplus of single men with no prospect of marriage, higher costs for the global economy, and more.
The U.S. faces some of these problems, with only 1.784 births per woman in 2022. To maintain a stable population, 2.1 births per woman are needed on a sustained basis. Utah’s 1.92 births per woman in 2020, the fourth highest in the nation, was also running below the replacement rate.
There is no easy fix once a nation’s population begins declining. China is offering financial incentives for larger families, but their impact so far is minimal. As a beacon of freedom and economic growth, immigration has allowed the U.S. to maintain a modestly growing population.
There is plenty of evidence to show that 1970s liberals got the problem backward. Instead of a growing population causing or sustaining poverty, the world’s experience is that growing prosperity leads to slower population growth.
Hans Rosling’s 2018 data-filled book “Factfulness” records that in 1965, there were 5 births per woman worldwide, while in 2015, there were 2.5. He explains that families in extreme poverty needed large families to provide the child labor required to subsist because many children died young.
As countries increased in health and wealth over the last 50 years, those needs diminished. Parents increasingly wanted their children to have better lives which meant having fewer of them. This trend was amplified as women became better educated and birth control became a widely-available option.
Liberals misdiagnosed a population bomb; their solution’s unintended consequences will affect the world for decades to come. As a result of listening to the Western liberal elite, China and, by extension, many other countries in the world are facing depopulation and its myriad problems.
As Robert McNamara said, the real solution to the supposed population bomb problem was “not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the hands of literally hundreds of millions of individual parents.” Their self-interested choices to have fewer children defused the supposed bomb.
Once again, the freedom that allows decisions to be made individually by millions of citizens produces results superior to the policy prescriptions and mandates of the liberal elite.
