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Population Predictions Bomb: 300 Million in U.S. Still Thriving
By Todd Seavey
As the American population officially passes the 300 million mark today, it's worth remembering, as John Tierney recently did in the New York Times, that many of the environmental movement's dire predictions about the effects of a booming population have proven false.
Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted increased war, famine, and mass die-offs of humanity as resources dwindled and wealth decreased. Instead, we find rising standards of living and increasing longevity except in places kept poor by oppressive governments and civil war. Ehrlich famously lost a bet to the libertarian economist Julian Simon, who correctly predicted that the prices of a handful of representative natural resources would fall rather than rise -- that is, become more readily available instead of scarcer -- during the late twentieth century. And Ehrlich failed to take into account the efforts of agricultural scientists like ACSH Trustee and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug to make food more abundant -- keeping an estimated one billion additional people fed in Borlaug's case.
Furthermore, demographers find that modernization seems to lead to a leveling off of birth rates, and in places like Japan and Italy, the birth rate has even fallen below replacement level. Since it sometimes seems that intellectuals greet every trend with alarm, we are now beginning to hear warnings about the possible negative effects of underpopulation. Simply remaining calm and letting things take their natural course never seems to be treated as a viable option. Still, in one little-noticed side effect of changing population projections, aid groups operating in developing countries now talk of providing contraception as a mere complement to general health services provision rather than as part of a presumed moral imperative to prevent developing-world births. Indeed, talk of "population control" is now regarded as retrograde and condescending at the offices of organizations such as the Population Council.
As for the developed world: the U.S. is the third most populous country on Earth -- behind China and India (with the latter likely to outgrow the former soon, despite the occasional talk of China potentially dominating the twenty-first century). That means that approximately one out of every twenty earthlings is an American -- and there are many nations whose inhabitants have as many relatives living in the U.S. as they do in their own nations' largest cities, giving them at least an indirect stake in American-style freedom and prosperity. Despite the occasional growing pains, I'm inclined to think that on balance, the more Americans, the better -- for us and the rest of the world.
Todd Seavey is Director of Publications at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org) and editor of HealthFactsAndFears.com. He does not pretend to know the precise IQs of the teeming masses, but he does note, as an aside, that ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan's daughter, Dr. Christine Whelan, has written a book on Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women.
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