“There are not enough
people. I can’t emphasize this enough ... And I think
one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low
birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate,” argued the
Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year. He has returned to the
subject of “population collapse” on several subsequent
occasions. Contrast Musk’s position with that of the
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told her
Instagram viewers that “It is basically a scientific
consensus that the lives of our children are going to be
very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a
legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”
Humans impact the world in both good and bad ways. In a
new book, Superabundance:
The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human
Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, my
co-author and I have revisited a subject that’s
intimately connected to population growth: resource
scarcity. This debate goes back to the 5th century
BC, with both Confucians and the Greeks agreeing that
population growth needed to be controlled lest excessive
fecundity overwhelmed the food supply and famine
ensued. The English prelate, Thomas Malthus,
resurrected the idea in his influential Essay on the
Principle of Population in 1798, and people have
been arguing about the advisability of population growth
ever since.
The debate has given us the Chinese one-child policy
(1980–2015) and mass sterilizations during India’s
Emergency (1975–1977). HBO’s Bill Maher joked a
couple years back that “the great under-discussed factor
in the climate crisis is there are just too many of us
and we use too much shit.” More seriously, Patrick
Crusius, the shooter of 22 people in an El Paso Walmart
wrote, “Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of
our country. But god damn most of y’all are just too
stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical
step is to decrease the number of people in America
using resources. If we can get rid of enough people,
then our way of life can become more sustainable.” The
stakes, in other words, are as high as they have ever
been.
The relative scarcity of resources is typically measured
by looking at prices. If prices rise, resources are
deemed to be getting scarcer, and, if they fall, more
abundant. The media sometimes scare their readers by
reporting “nominal” prices (hence all the headlines
about food and fuel prices
being at a record highs), rather than “real” prices,
which take into account inflation. It was on the
inflation-adjusted prices of five metals that the
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and the
University of Maryland economist Julian Simon bet $1,000
in 1980. If the real prices went down over the next
decade, they agreed, Ehrlich would pay Simon. If they
went up, Simon would pay Ehrlich. Ehrlich lost.
The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes
in incomes. Typically, though not always, individual
incomes increase faster than inflation. That’s because
people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes
and across time. Contrast the productivity of workers
equipped with shovels and those driving giant
excavators. While real prices are measured in dollars
and cents, time prices are measured in hours and
minutes. To calculate a time price, all you need to do
is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by
the nominal hourly income. That tells you how long you
must work to afford something.
Consider U.S. manufacturing workers. Between 1900 and
2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn,
coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%,
96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively. That
means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound
of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5,
25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds. While people cannot eat
rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these
commodities are valuable inputs in the production
processes that impact the prices of goods and services,
and hence the overall standard of living. Their time
prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8%
respectively. All the while, the population of the
United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.
What happened to global time prices of resources? They
fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. The personal
resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the
globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent. Put
differently, for the same time of work that he or she
could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked
at, he or she can now get more than six. Over that
58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3
billion to 7.6 billion.
Surprisingly, we also found that personal resource
abundance increased faster than population in all 18
randomly chosen datasets that we analyzed. We call that
relationship “superabundance.” On average, every
additional human being created more value than he or she
consumed. But how does all that superabundance happen?
Musk offered a clue to the answer in the above-mentioned
speech. He noted that “I don’t know that we should
really try to live for a super long time. It is
important for us to die because most of the times people
don’t change their mind, they just die.”
Superabundance, in other words, is a product of the
human mind. It is ideas that lead to inventions, which,
after they have been tested in the marketplace, lead to
innovations that drive economic growth and increase the
standard of living.
But large populations are not enough to produce
superabundance—just think of the poverty in China and
India before liberalization. To innovate, people must
be allowed to think and to act. Such people can create
tremendous value.
In conclusion, the world is a closed system in the way
that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has
only 88 keys, but those keys can be played in a nearly
infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our
planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the
possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What
matters is not the physical limits of our planet, but
human ability to reimagine the use of resources that we
already have.
Link to the article: https://townhall.com/columnists/mariantupy/2022/09/18/does-the-world-face-an-underpopulation-problem-n2613218
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