Once again we are hearing the plaintive laments: too many people, too little food, too few trees. If the world could just learn to control its population, it is said, the environment would be safer from grubby human paws, and food could then be distributed or redistributed so that everyone could eat well and be happy.
Unlikely as it would seem to this non-Catholic, of late we have been hearing these ideas with alarming frequency from the Vatican. I would have expected the pope and his cardinals to be strong opponents of the population control mentality, and strong advocates of pro-natalist policies.
Anti-growth messages have issued from the pope in his 1990 New Year’s Day address, and in his statements about the environment during his latest Africa trip, but his concerns are most strongly voiced in the 1988 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, which warns of “the reality of an innumerable multitude of people” resulting in “the increasing devastation of the world of nature.” Indeed, the pope speaks of a debacle of “crisis proportions,” and concludes that the very idea of progress “now seems to be seriously called into doubt.”
This rhetoric goes on and on. We hear that “world peace is threatened by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life.” Also of “the existence, especially in the southern hemisphere, of a demographic problem which creates difficulties for development.” And of “limits of available resources” and of “the need to respect the integrity and cycles of nature … an ecological concern.”
All of this reads like it came straight out of yellowed economics textbooks which spoke of communism as a system which effectively used all its manpower, or socialism as an economic framework for eradicating misery. With all due respect, the pope’s vision simply does not square with the facts. Thus, to the extent that he believes he must move away from, or qualify, the traditional Catholic preference for large families and “be fruitful and multiply,” the pope is drawing erroneous conclusions from flawed premises.
The key question before us is whether more people are beneficial or detrimental with respect to human progress. The most important and amazing demographic fact — the most important human achievement in history, in my view — is the decrease in the world’s death rate. It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high 20s. Yet in just the last two centuries, life expectancy at birth in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to roughly 75 years.
Then, since World War II, life expectancy in the poor countries has leaped upwards — by perhaps 15 or even 20 years since the 1950s — because of advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. Is this not an astounding triumph for humankind? This decrease in the death rate is the cause of there being a larger world population now than in former times.
To put it differently, in the nineteenth century the planet Earth could sustain only 1 billion human beings. Ten thousand years ago, only 4 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average. This extraordinary increase in the world’s population represents humanity’s successful fight against death.
One would expect lovers of humankind to jump with joy at this triumph of mind and heart over the raw forces of nature. Instead, many lament that there are so many people alive to enjoy the gift of life. And it is this worry — a misplaced concern, as we shall see — that leads them to approve inhumane programs of coercion and denial of personal liberty in one of the most precious choices a family can make: the number of children the couple wishes to bear and raise.
Throughout history, adequacy of supplies of natural resources has always been a source of concern that has led to calls for population control. Yet the data clearly show that natural resource scarcity, as measured by the economically-meaningful indicator, of price, has been decreasing rather than increasing in the long run for all raw materials, with only temporary exceptions from time to time.
The trend of falling prices of copper has been going on for a very long time. In the eighteenth century BCE in Babylonia under Hammurabi — almost 4000 years ago — the price of copper was about 1200 times its price in the U.S. now, relative to wages.
As for oil, the price rise in the 1970s did not stem from an increase in the cost of world supply. The production cost in the Persian Gulf is perhaps 15-25 cents per barrel. Concerning energy in general, there is no reason to believe that the supply of energy is finite, or that the price of energy will not continue its long-run decrease forever.
Food is an especially important resource. A typical doom saying forecast came from a key document of the environmentalist movement, the Global 2000 Report to President Carter: “Real prices for food are expected to double” by the year 2000, it said. But the evidence is particularly strong that food prices are on a downward trend despite rising population. The long-run price of food relative to wages, and even relative to consumer products, is down due to increased productivity.
Famine deaths due to insufficient food supply have decreased during the past century even in absolute terms, let alone relative to population, a matter which pertains particularly to the poor countries. Per-person food consumption is up over the last 30 years, and there are no data showing that the bottom of the income scale is faring worse, or even has failed to share in the general nutritional improvement, as the average has improved.
Africa’s food production per person is down, but by 1991 few any longer claim that Africa’s suffering has any-thing to do with a shortage of land or water or sun. Hunger in Africa clearly stems from civil wars and collectivization of agriculture, which periodic droughts have made still more murderous.
There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all — human beings. Yes, there are more people on earth now than ever before. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods — by how much we must pay to obtain their services — we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries. The amount that one must pay in India to obtain the services of a driver or cook has risen, just as the price of a driver or cook — or economist — has risen in the United States over the decades. This increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce economically, even though there are more of us. Along with the increase to life expectancy, this trend is perhaps the most conclusive refutation of the fears expressed in Sollicitudo about the deterioration of the situation of people in poor countries.
Though one receives a very different impression from reading the newspapers, which focus on every temporary setback, the standard of living — the measure of purchasing power — is higher now than ever before throughout the world, both in the richer countries and in the poorer countries, among the poorer classes and among the richer classes. Taken together with the wage data, the national in-come data and the data on consumption patterns provide unmistakable evidence: People produce and consume more than ever before, all over the world.
The evidence with respect to air indicates that pollutants have been declining, especially the most dangerous type of pollutant, particulates (the dirty black stuff thrown into the air from chimneys, the cause of the old London fogs and increased death rates.). With respect to water, the proportion of monitored sites in the U.S. having water of good drinkability has increased since the data began in 1961.
To sum up the statistical history, there now are more people on earth than ever before, and also better material conditions of life than ever before. A reasonable first-order hypothesis, then, is that a larger population leads to a better life rather than to a poorer life. These data by themselves are far from conclusive, of course, but they certainly suggest that the scientific burden of proof is upon anyone who suggests the contrary view that more people have a negative effect in the long run.
Sound scientific practice seeks a theory that fits the broad range of data. The Malthusian theory of increasing scarcity, based on the assumption of fixed resources, runs exactly contrary to these data and to the long sweep of history. Therefore, it makes sense to seek another theory, one that fits the facts: More people, and increased income, cause problems in the short run. These problems present opportunities and prompt the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions are eventually found, and in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen.
Yes, more consumers means less of the fixed available stock of goods to be divided among more people. And more workers laboring with the same fixed current stock of capital means that there will be less output per worker. The latter effect, known as “the law of diminishing returns,” is the essence of Malthus’s theory as he first set it out.
But if the resources with which people work are not fixed over the period being analyzed, then the Malthusian logic of diminishing returns does not apply. And the plain fact is that, given some time to adjust to shortages, the resource base does not remain fixed. People create more resources of all kinds.
When we take a long-run view, the picture is different, and considerably more complex, than the simple short-run view of more people implying lower average income. In the very long run, more people almost surely imply more available resources and a higher income for everyone.
In earlier years, there could be an honest difference of opinion about which kind of economic system — free enterprise or socialism — would be the more effective. By 1991, however, there is irrefutable evidence that an enterprise system works better than does a planned economy. And under conditions of freedom, population growth poses less of a problem in the short run, and brings many more benefits in the long run, than under conditions of government control.
At the heart of a free, market-directed economic system, according to Friedrich Hayek, are two general institutions: Â privateness of property, and the family. They are both necessary for economic development. An unfree, centrally-directed socialist system will necessarily prevent the free existence of these two institutions. It is no wonder that the Church’s traditional teachings come into conflict with communist regimes.
Twenty or even ten years ago these ideas about population growth were so far out of the mainstream of scientific discussion that a person might prudently have continued to be skeptical even if the arguments and data made sense in themselves. But in the last few years there has been a radical shift in the views on these matters held by economic demographers as well as by official institutions.
The World Bank was for many years the strongest and shrillest voice calling for population control on the grounds that the world is running out of natural resources. In its 1984 World Development Report, however, the World Bank did an about-face and said that natural resources are not a reason to be concerned about population growth — though it still calls for population control.
The official U.S. National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences issued a major report in 1971 that said population growth prevents economic growth. But in 1986 the National Academy of Sciences issued another major report that almost completely reversed the 1971 report. For example, it now says that “The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint on economic growth in the near to intermediate term . . . Â On balance, then, we find that concern about the impact of rapid population growth on resource exhaustion has often been exaggerated.”
A host of review articles by distinguished economic demographers in the last three or four years have con-firmed that the “revisionist” view — a label that I and some others have acquired, though I am not fond of it — is indeed consistent with the scientific evidence, even if not all the writers would go as far as I do in pointing out the positive long-run effects of population growth. The consensus is more toward a “neutral” judgment. But this is a huge change from the earlier judgment that population growth is economically detrimental.
It is also relevant that the forecasts made by the doom-sayers in the 1960s and 1970s have turned out to be happily, laughably wrong. The Famine 1975! forecast by the Paddock brothers was followed by gluts of food and a farm crisis in the U.S., while Paul Ehrlich’s primal scream about “What will we do when the pumps run dry?” was followed by gasoline cheaper than since the 1930s. Less happily for some, forecasts of shortages of copper and other metals have helped cause economic disasters for mining companies, and for the poor countries which depend upon mining, by misleading them with unsound expectations. Even the doom saying organizations dedicated to environmentalism and population control will not repeat their dire forecasts of ten or twenty years ago.
Why the persistence of doom saying error? One reason is that for those who wish it, one way to have more government intervention is to convince the public that we face worsening problems and that the only possible solution is for the government to “do something.” This connection is manifest in much of the writing of the environmental and population control movement. It helps explain the violent rejection by so many persons in that movement of the idea that resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, and that our air and water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier.
Here I wish to emphasize a qualification: I do not say that all is well everywhere, and I do not predict that all will be rosy in the future. Children are hungry and sick; people live out lives of physical or intellectual poverty and lack of opportunity; war or some new pollution may finish us. What I am saying is that for most relevant economic matters, aggregate trends are improving rather than deteriorating.
Also, I don’t say that a better future happens automatically or without effort. It will happen because women and men will struggle with problems with muscle and mind, and will probably overcome, as they have in the past — if the social and economic system gives them opportunity to do so. This needs to be stressed because there are many people who assume that if the government isn’t doing something about a matter, nothing is being done.
In the short run, all resources are limited. An example of such a finite resource is the amount of attention that you will devote to what I have written here. The longer run, however, is a different story. The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world’s population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue into the foreseeable future.
The pope and some other churchmen believe that material life has been getting worse rather than better, and they therefore make statements which seem out of keeping with the great traditional teachings of the Church. In contrast, the Church’s traditional teachings on these subjects will enhance humanity because they are consistent with the economic realities, and I urge the Church to hew to them.
The Pope recognizes the horror of the actions which some countries such as China have resorted to due to the belief in “overpopulation” which he shares, and he properly denounces those actions. “It is very alarming to see governments in many countries launching systematic campaigns against birth.” If the Church will come to recognize what demographic- economic science has arrived at during the past few years — that contrary to conventional belief, more births are not economically detrimental in the long run, and that the problem of China is not her population but rather her socialistic system that prevents development — the Church can then bring its moral position into consonance with its assumptions and aspirations.
Adding more people causes short-run problems, but people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. The ultimate resource is people — skilled, spirited, and hopeful people — who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith and social concern, and so inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the poor and the rest of us as well.