Too Many of Us

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As if the pandemic were not enough, a new source of alarm is running through our American punditocracy. It’s called “population stagnation.”

That’s a demographer’s term. It means that we are not having enough babies to replenish our population, so our population growth is declining. The terms “we” and “our” bear watching here. The pronoun referents matter immensely, but we’ll get to them later.

What sparked the current spate of alarm was the most recent US decennial census. It shows the second-slowest US population growth on record, second only to the low growth rate during the Great Depression.

The phenomenon is not confined to us Americans. It’s a near-global trend, at least in the developed world. It’s advanced in Japan, but it affects Europe and most of the G-20. It’s even happening in China. The only parts of the world that are still growing significantly in population are in the global South: Africa, Latin America, and some parts of southern Asia.

The alarm comes almost entirely from economists focusing on national or regional economies. Developed economies, they say, wax less rich as fewer babies are born and the population gets older. The proportion of young folk in their prime working and child-rearing years declines. So old folks—many retired or infirm—become a larger part of the population. Thus, the reasoning goes, they will have to work longer before retirement, or their standard of living will decline. Some pundits even predict the decline of whole societies, including economic vibrancy and new ideas.

Not only are these predictions based largely on unfounded abstract speculation. They miss the big picture by a mile.

For at least half a century, the big picture of our entire human species has been that there are too many of “us” on our small, finite planet. And here the pronoun “us” is quite concrete: it means every one of the estimated 7.8 billion people on Earth. The fact that there were about a third as many of us when I was a child, a mere 63 years ago, shows just how fast our global human population is exploding.

How are there too many of us? Let me count the ways. First, we are polluting our planet by changing natural substances into pollutants that our planet cannot absorb. In the process, we are exhausting the natural substances that have driven our economic success and so our human population explosion.

Fossil fuels are the most glaring example. Not only is our burning them changing our climate so drastically as to approach—if not already to have passed—a tipping point. Fossil fuels are also very close to running out, leaving us with few energy alternatives and enormous stranded assets if all of us don’t, like Germany, begin energy transformation immediately.

A secondary effect of our use of fossil fuels is almost equally drastic. We have turned much of them into plastics, paints, insecticides, herbicides and other chemicals that don’t occur naturally and that Nature can’t digest. They are creating mammoth trash gyres in the middle of our oceans. They are poisoning our streams, rivers, lakes and seas. They are even polluting our own bodies with toxins and nanoparticles.

Detritus from our plastics and chemicals factories are found everywhere, including our rivers, lakes and deep seas. They are maiming and killing, en masse, the other species with which we share this planet. Yet we depend on those other species for food, clothing, science—the detailed study of our biosphere and our way of life—and our recreation, rest and spiritual renewal.

This last point is a grossly under-appreciated consequence of overpopulation. The great English naturalist David Attenborough has tried to warn us in his alarming late-life documentary film, “A Life on Our Planet.” In it, he documents the rapid disappearance of non-human species and wilderness—to the extent of a probable ongoing mass extinction caused by human activity.

Finally, there is the threat of disease. Biologists and ranchers alike know what happens when you concentrate animals too much, i.e., when they outgrow their habitat. Eventually they experience a population “crash,” whether due to inadequate food supplies, competition for food and territory, or disease spread by overcrowding.

Evolving new disease agents spread more quickly among concentrated populations. So the more densely packed we live, the more pandemics we can expect. And we have a risk factor that no other species on Earth possesses: our rapid and indoor-packed mode of air travel. As I’ve detailed in another essay, we can now travel a thousand times as fast as we could when the Black Plague ravaged the world. So air travel spread Covid-19 among us three orders of magnitude faster. The only thing that saved us was Covid’s relatively low death rate—a bit of plain, dumb luck.

The next time we may not be so lucky. The Black Plague is estimated to have wiped out about a third of Europe’s population. Imagine how a similarly deadly airborne viral plague might affect our global civilization, spread by modern air, sea and land travel. Imagine how our self-image as a species, our sense of personal security, and our civilization would change with a third of us dead or dying, and no one quite knowing who or where might be next. Could democracy, which is on the ropes even today, survive such an onslaught?

Despite our enormous self-conceit, we humans are not immune to the laws of biology. We are part of, and immersed in, the biosphere of our planet. If we ignore its laws, we can expect to suffer the same sort of drastic population decline, or even extinction, that so many other species have suffered, from the dinosaurs on.

So no, pundits and economists, peaceful population decline, let alone slower population growth, is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. In the long run it’s vital to human survival, as long as it happens gradually and in a controlled and expected manner.

The alternative is abrupt, unexpected and catastrophic decline, which we can neither manage nor control. The known causes could be war (including nuclear war), pandemics, famine, or displacements, famine, and/or war caused by climate change.

Accordingly, the most dangerous change in human governance over the last decade was not the election of Donald Trump, nor Xi Jinping’s making himself China’s latest emperor, nor Vladimir Putin’s anointing himself Russia’s latest tsar. It was Xi’s China abandoning its tough but necessary one-child policy, which had been primarily responsible for China’s meteoric economic rise in the first place.

Which brings us to our postponed question: the meaning of “we” and “us.” In a well-intentioned but grossly misguided op-ed piece, Farhad Manjoo used population stagnation as a reason for advocating increased immigration into the United States. His essay focused on the US, thus limiting the scope of “us” to Americans. But his introduction, like many other cursory reviews of population stagnation, paints the whole phenomenon with alarm, just as the most myopic economists do.

I hasten to add that I agree entirely with Manjoo’s conclusion. We do need more immigration into the United States—a point I have argued vehemently myself, for different reasons. But the reasons have nothing to do with population growth or decline. Immigration revitalizes and strengthens our American society by bringing good people—strong, resilient people, with the gumption to relocate despite the risks—to us from somewhere else. But it has no net immediate effect on global population.

In fact, in the intermediate and long term, immigration into America actually decreases global population growth. It’s well-known (and a cause of the phenomenon of population stagnation itself) that birth rates decline rapidly with increasing standards of living. So immigrants to America, who generally increase their standard of living significantly within a single generation after arriving, are likely to have fewer babies here than if they had remained in their relatively impoverished countries of origin. Thus, immigration to “us” likely restrains global population growth eventually.

But Manjoo’s reliance on population stagnation as a rationale for increasing US immigration is as bogus as economists’ insistence that our women (or maybe all women) should have more babies. The notion that an aging society inevitably declines absent population increase is simplistic, mechanistic and ultimately illogical. Here are four reasons why.

First, the quality of life matters more than its quantity. This is so even for life that you eat. That’s why fine diners and fine restaurants buy pasture-raised meat, rather than the products of antibiotic-overusing and superbug-producing factory farms. The same principle applies to “higher” forms of life like us. Who would want to live in a teeming ghetto or slum if he could live in a sparsely populated suburb or on a spacious, bucolic farm?

Maintaining the same or an increasing proportion of youth as human longevity increases requires a corresponding increase in total population. That’s just arithmetic. On a planet with limited resources—now declining due to exhaustion and climate change—increasing population means more people have to live with less, for example, in teeming slums or in a struggle for survival like that in parched Darfur or maimed Syria today.

Second, the notion (raised by Manjoo) that more people means more good ideas is contrary to history and common sense. Plato, Socrates and the ancient Greeks worked out the fundamentals of civic virtue, democracy and justice millennia ago in sparsely populated Greek city-states. We haven’t improved much on their ideas since—certainly not with our malapportioned American Senate or its filibuster.

Among the greatest thinkers in human history were Isaac Newton (who co-invented the calculus and with it modern astronomy), Adam Smith (who invented analytical economics and market theory), and Charles Darwin (who explained evolution by natural selection and thus founded modern biology). All came from the “upper classes” in Britain, with spacious homes or noble estates. In fact, Newton escaped the Plague in London by moving to his family’s country estate. Has any thinker of comparable stature ever come from a teeming city? Even Albert Einstein fled Nazifying Germany to come to America, where he had more Lebensraum, both in thinking and in living.

Third, increasing population density leads to increasing distraction, interruption and delusion—hardly recipes for deep, clear or original thinking. Our Internet—the most powerful means of human communication ever invented—allows 2.85 billion people, at least in theory, to talk among themselves, individually or in arbitrary groups. (Facebook alone has that many regular users.)

What’s been the result? Donald Trump was President, a near-majority of Americans accepted his “Big Lie” of a stolen election, innumerable Americans have accepted bizarre and irrational conspiracy theories, and the moron-dictator (aka President) of the world’s most populous Latin nation speculated on air that a Covid vaccine might turn its recipients into crocodiles.

Perhaps Manjoo is right that a bigger population produces more ideas. He never wrote (although he implied) that they would be good ideas. Valuing quantity over quality is no better for ideas than for life itself.

Finally, consider the labor-balance theory of aging. It holds that you need more youth to support the aged. But it ignores the impacts of automation, increasing productivity, and existing wealth.

In our mid-seventies, my wife and I bought an automated vacuum cleaner to do our floors. Computers, cell-phones and the Internet keep us in better touch with our doctors, pharmacists, other health-care providers and ever-improving medical science than we could have done (or did) at any time during the last century. Increasing wealth, increasing retirement security and better social organization allow us, despite our declining physical condition, to live lives of comfort and ease that would have been impossible, even for the rich, only half a century ago. We don’t need or have servants or personal nurses, although occasionally we employ contractors, including some to clean our home. And as we age, we use fewer resources, eat less food and get much of our entertainment (and much our social contact) electronically.

At the end of the day, the notion that every aged person requires the support of so many young people is nineteenth-century thinking. It’s why my great-grandparents—but not subsequent generations—had five or more siblings.

Today that sort of family is rare in America, apart from the Amy Coney Barretts among us. Better and more productive agriculture, modern medical and other science, more equitable distribution of wealth, better social organization and a better social safety net for workers and retirees have rendered large families economically unnecessary, if not obsolete.

That’s why birth rates have been falling, worldwide, along with social and economic development. At least in developed nations, a stable or declining population is living richer and better lives than before under conditions of modern social, technological and economic development.

The goal of economic and social policy ought to be to continue that trend. Ultimately, we ought to want our species to be fewer in number, each enjoying a better, richer, safer, healthier and more interesting life. Ultimately, we ought to want to avoid the stress and calamity, in every species biologists have studied, that come with overpopulation and exhaustion and pollution of habitat. (I leave aside for now the notion of emigration to other planets. If our species survives, that eventually may happen. But mass migration to Mars or another planet is highly unlikely to come quickly enough to serve as a relief valve for overpopulation on Earth, let alone to retard global warming.)

The biblical command to “go forth and multiply” was appropriate two millennia ago, when the world was young and we humans were few. Today, it’s an invitation to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, plague and death. We are the only species on Earth equipped with the brainpower and foresight to avoid those Horsemen, by the simple expedient of consciously controlling our population to match the availability of space and resources (including other species) on our small planet.

Dismal scientists, pols and pundits who advocate doing the opposite—merely for short-term, localized, abstractly hypothesized advantage—ought to be ashamed of themselves, both as scientists and as human beings. Malthus still stalks us all, and quantitative economics confirms how right, if a bit premature, his fundamental vision was. The last thing our species needs is a nationalistic race to see which tribe can grow the fastest.

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