The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.
Malthus’ argument was brought up again by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, when he published The Population Bomb which, according to Wikipedia, “warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth” (the emphasis is mine).
For an example of how Malthus’ arguments are still very much in fashion, you can read this article in The Guardian, or listen to the following newscast by Public Radio International (click on the arrow to begin playing; a transcript is available here):
[wpaudio url=”https://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/102820111.mp3″ text=”PRI’s The World – Global Population to Reach Seven Billion” dl=”0″]
Keep Calm and Carry On
Obviously, neither Malthus’ nor Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions have come true. This is all thanks to technological innovation. That is, increases in agricultural productivity have consistently outpaced the rate at which the world’s population continues to increases.
This has been true since the beginning of time, so why worry now?
It is true that food prices are high and that there is a famine in the Horn of Africa. But as far as I can tell, food prices are high mostly as a result of misguided policies (e.g., ethanol mandates). Not only that, but economists are confident that famine is the result of human action, and not of a lack of food to go around.
Moreover, there are several untapped technological innovations which could be used to feed the world. One obvious example is biotechnology, which some argue is being kept out of the regions that most need it. Another example is urban or peri-urban agriculture. Vertical farming is yet another example. And Nathan Yaffe recently discussed some low-hanging fruit for agricultural productivity.
Likewise, population bomb-type arguments conveniently dismiss the idea of a demographic transition, i.e., the transition from high to low birth and death rates as countries grow richer.
Concretely, the demographic transition means that the size of any population eventually tapers off and hits an upper bound. In the limit, the demographic transition could even mean that the size of a country’s population actually decreases when fewer than 2.1 children are born per woman in a given country. Western Europe and Japan are both good examples of this.
Enough Already
Ultimately, I find the rhetoric surrounding the birth of the seven billionth person to be irresponsible, because it can easily lead to misguided population control policies. History is rife with stories of governments trying to impose a limit on the number of children a couple can have, which leads to abandoned children, unsafe abortions, and so on.
Very often, the rhetoric surrounding population debates reminds me of the rhetoric surrounding immigration, which discusses the costs of immigration while ignoring its benefits. In both cases, people seem to be unable to see further than the end of their noses as they conveniently ignore the general equilibrium consequences of both population and immigration to focus purely on the partial equilibrium consequences.
Maybe I am being stupidly optimistic. In order to oppose my views, I suppose some would resort to the four most dangerous words in the English language and claim that “This time it’s different,” that technology will not save us this time around. Maybe. But I’ll go with the last 2.5 million years and say “Maybe not.”
[…] Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering – Marc F. Bellemare […]
“Maybe I am being stupidly optimistic.” No you’re being ignorantly optimistic. Increases in agricultural productivity have NOT consistently outpaced the rate of population growth. Both agricultural innovation and the population growth as always come in fits and starts. History isn’t filled with endless feasts. It’s filled with very real famines, famines that last generations. The worst coincide with dramatic local climate changes, rising food and fuel costs, and collapsing capital markets. Sound familiar?
You’re the one asserting that this time is different. Take a look at a few books on the issue: “The Great Wave” by David Hackett Fisher, “A Distant Mirror” by Barbara Wertheim Tuchman and “Extrodinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay. There is one clear lesson in history: when everyone starts claiming there is nothing but blue skies on the horizon, it’s probably time to batten down the hatches.
Yes, because famines are clearly the result of overpopulation, and not of misguided policies. Less snarkily, see the case of China: the famine of 1958-1961 was the result of the Great Leap forward. The country is not currently experiencing famine as a consequence of having over one billion citizens… In the spirit of your reading suggestions, let me encourage you to read Dikotter’s book on the Chinese famine, O Grada’s book on famine in general, and any of Amartya Sen’s popular-press works on famine and hunger.
One should also take into account the peaking of global oil production, given how petroleum-intensive current agricultural processes are.
Marc,
I’ve been following your blog, learn from it, and like it a lot. Being lazy, I only comment when I see something I disagree with. So this comment is an exception to the rule.
Briefly, (I’m pressed for time here), it’s not enough to shoot down the most exaggerated fears and then declare that we have nothing to worry about.
In India, which has more poor people than anywhere else, it’s clear that if fertility rates had fallen earlier and faster in the north, then real wages would have been higher. If northern India were more like southern India demographically, we would be a much richer, and less grossly unequal country today. We have diminishing returns to land. The argument about technical progress is a red herring. Most of the technical progress in agriculture has been exogenous (see Evenson and Gollin) (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5620/758.short), it is certainly not increased by having more cheap labor.
Basic economic theory should warn us that more people would mean lower incomes with diminishing returns. We don’t have a shred of evidence to suggest that, in current conditions, as opposed to the distant past, we need more poor people in Africa and India for technical progress that would overcome diminishing returns.
Development economists should pay more attention to the role of food prices and real wages. Eswaran and Kotwal (JDE, 1993, ) laid this out really well, but sadly, everyone seems to read their papers on contractual structure but not this, their most important one. The connection with population is direct although they don’t focus on it. Just do the comparative statics on N.
All this is before taking the impact of agricultural expansion on deforestation and through to climate and its impact on food production and the world’s environment into account.
There is now a solid literature on the effect of female education and child mortality on fertility. For example, see Dreze and Murthi 2001 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2001.00033.x/abstract), and Lavy and Zablotsky 2011 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16856). So why imply that realising that a large population has adverse consequences is going to push us into some kind of coercion? That is not the policy implication that anyone familiar with the demographic literature would draw. In fact, twenty years ago, Jean Dreze pointed out that China’s one-child policy did very little to lower its fertility. Most of its low fertility is explained by a cross-country regression with female literacy and health variables on the right-hand side.
The economics profession has really failed big time in ignoring, or worse, pooh-poohing the adverse consequences of large populations by determinedly looking away from economic theory and evidence while doing so. The only prominent honorable exception I can think of is Partha Dasgupta. We can do better.