Population Overload: And Then There Were Too Many
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
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The Black Death – an epidemic of bubonic plague in the 14th century – decimated between one third and one half of Europe’s population, yet it was the best thing to have happened to Mankind in many centuries. The depleted number of survivors shared in the vast fortunes of the deceased, laying the foundation for modern, entrepreneurial capitalism; the added physical spaces and vacancies made available via the devastation of numerous households spurred urban renewal and magisterial architecture on an unprecedented scale; the crumbling authority of the Church and its minions led to reformist religious stirrings and the emergence of the Renaissance in arts and sciences; labourers and women saw their standing in society much improved as the scarcity of workforce rendered them much sought-after commodities.
Seven centuries later, an “inflation of humans” led to an ineluctable devaluation and may have erased at least the latter of these achievements: wage growth. Wages have stagnated in direct correlation with the explosion in global population. The social fabric itself has been rent by the mounting pressure of an annual net growth in population which exceeds the citizenry of Germany: interpersonal relationships, social organizational units, tolerant co-existence, peaceful multiculturalism and diversity have all crumbled worldwide.
So, is the solution to our global and escalating woes another pandemic?
The latest census in Ukraine revealed an apocalyptic drop of 10% in its population - from 52.5 million three decades ago to a mere 45.7 million a decade ago. Demographers predict a precipitous decline of one third in Russia's impoverished, inebriated, disillusioned, and ageing citizenry. Births in many countries in the rich, industrialized West are below the replacement rate. These bastions of conspicuous affluence are shrivelling.
Scholars and decision-makers - once terrified by the Malthusian dystopia of a "population bomb" - are more sanguine now. Advances in agricultural technology eradicated hunger even in teeming places like India and China. And then there is the old idea of progress: birth rates tend to decline with higher education levels and growing incomes. Family planning has had resounding successes in places as diverse as Thailand, China, and western Africa.
Some intellectuals even regard the increase in the world’s population as a form of “quantitative diversification”: as technology homogenizes cultures, societies, and civilizations everywhere, the risks associated with such a monoculture grow. Homogeneous populations are less adaptable and, therefore, less fit for survival. The only defense lies in the sheer force of numbers. The greater the number of people, goes this strain of thinking, the more varied the human species, such variety and variation being the sole guarantors and generators of adaptability and, therefore, survival.
In the near past, fecundity used to compensate for infant mortality. As the latter declined - so did the former. Children are means of production in many destitute countries. Hence the inordinately large families of the past - a form of insurance against the economic outcomes of the inevitable demise of some of one's off-spring.
Yet, despite these trends, the world's populace is augmented by 130 million people annually. All of them are born to the younger inhabitants of the more penurious corners of the Earth. There were only 1 billion people alive in 1804. The number doubled a century later.
But our last billions - the sixth and the seventh - required only 19 fertile years. The entire population of Germany is added every half a decade to both India and China. Clearly, Mankind's growth is out of control, as affirmed in the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development.
Dozens of millions of people regularly starve - many of them to death. In only one corner of the Earth - southern Africa - food aid is the sole subsistence of entire countries. More than 18 million people in Zambia, Malawi, and Angola survived on charitable donations in 1992. More than 10 million expect the same this year, among them the emaciated denizens of erstwhile food exporter, Zimbabwe.
According to Medecins Sans Frontiere, AIDS kills 3 million people a year, Tuberculosis another 2 million. Malaria decimates 2 people every minute. More than 14 million people fall prey to parasitic and infectious diseases every year - 90% of them in the developing countries.
Millions emigrate every year in search of a better life. These massive shifts are facilitated by modern modes of transportation. But, despite these tectonic relocations - and despite famine, disease, and war, the classic Malthusian regulatory mechanisms - the depletion of natural resources - from arable land to water - is undeniable and gargantuan.
Our pressing environmental issues - global warming, water stress, salinization, desertification, deforestation, pollution, loss of biological diversity - and our ominous social ills - crime at the forefront - are traceable to one, politically incorrect, truth:
There are too many of us. We are way too numerous. The population load is unsustainable. We, the survivors, would be better off if others were to perish. Should population growth continue unabated - we are all doomed.
Doomed to what?
Numerous Cassandras and countless Jeremiads have been falsified by history. With proper governance, scientific research, education, affordable medicines, effective family planning, and economic growth, this planet can support even 10-12 billion people. We are not at risk of physical extinction and never have been.
What is hazarded is not our life - but our quality of life. As any insurance actuary will attest, we are governed by statistical datasets.
Consider this single fact:
About 1% of the population suffer from the perniciously debilitating and all-pervasive mental health disorder, schizophrenia. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 16.5 million schizophrenics - nowadays there are 64 million. Their impact on friends, family, and colleagues is exponential - and incalculable. This is not a merely quantitative leap. It is a qualitative phase transition.
Or this:
Large populations lead to the emergence of high density urban centers. It is inefficient to cultivate ever smaller plots of land. Surplus manpower moves to centers of industrial production. A second wave of internal migrants caters to their needs, thus spawning a service sector. Network effects generate excess capital and a virtuous cycle of investment, employment, and consumption ensues.
But over-crowding breeds violence (as has been demonstrated in behavioral sink experiments with mice). The sheer numbers involved serve to magnify and amplify social anomies, deviate behaviour, and antisocial traits. In the city, there are more criminals, more perverts, more victims, more immigrants, and more racists per square mile.
Moreover, only a planned and orderly urbanization is desirable. The blights that pass for cities in most third world countries are the outgrowth of neither premeditation nor method. These mega-cities are infested with non-disposed of waste and prone to natural catastrophes and epidemics.
No one can vouchsafe for a "critical mass" of humans, a threshold beyond which the species will implode and vanish.
Luckily, the ebb and flow of human numbers is subject to three regulatory demographic mechanisms, the combined action of which gives hope.
The Malthusian Mechanism
Limited resources lead to wars, famine, and diseases and, thus, to a decrease in human numbers. Mankind has done well to check famine, fend off disease, and staunch war. But to have done so without a commensurate policy of population control was irresponsible.
The Assimilative Mechanism
Mankind is not divorced from nature. Humanity is destined to be impacted by its choices and by the reverberations of its actions. Damage caused to the environment haunts - in a complex feedback loop - the perpetrators.
Examples:
Immoderate use of antibiotics leads to the eruption of drug-resistant strains of pathogens. A myriad types of cancer are caused by human pollution. Man is the victim of its own destructive excesses.
The Cognitive Mechanism
Humans intentionally limit the propagation of their race through family planning, abortion, and contraceptives. Genetic engineering will likely intermesh with these to produce "enhanced" or "designed" progeny to specifications.
We must stop procreating. Or, else, pray for a reduction in our numbers.
This could be achieved benignly, for instance by colonizing space, or the ocean depths - both remote and technologically unfeasible possibilities.
Yet, the alternative is cataclysmic. Unintended wars, rampant disease, and lethal famines will ultimately trim our numbers - no matter how noble our intentions and how diligent our efforts to curb them.
Is this a bad thing?
Not necessarily. To my mind, even a Malthusian resolution is preferable to the alternative of slow decay, uniform impecuniosity, and perdition in installments - an alternative made inexorable by our collective irresponsibility and denial.
From an interview granted to Transitions Online, August 2008
The Macedonian government has initiated a campaign to provide economic support and benefits to families with children.
Q: Do you think that the
economy maybe influences the society in some other way - maybe with the young
people going out of the country to work, or the fact that the majority of the
workers don't have free time for the family or...?
A: The fact is that the poor people have more children. The highest
birth rates in the world are registered in Africa and parts of Asia with less
than 1 US dollar a day in income. Birth rates decline as people become more
educated and wealthier. The lowest birth rates in the world are in Germany,
Scandinavia, and California. Even within Macedonia, poor minorities have the
most children per household.
People tend to rationalize their decision not to procreate by using economic
excuses. The truth is that many of them simply put career, money-making,
enjoying life, and seeing the world ahead of having children. It is a shift in
social values and priorities, not a decision driven by harsh economic realities
(and, admittedly, in Macedonia they are harsh).
Q: What is according to you the best idea to stimulate the people to
have children? What is your opinion about this whole campaign? How it may
effect
the economy on short, medium and on long term???
A: Not every problem can be solved by throwing money at it. Modern
civilization is self-centered, individualistic, hedonistic, and narcissistic.
People put themselves and their interests first. Experience from countries such
as Israel, France, Germany, and Scandinavia where childbirth and childrearing
are heavily subsidized shows that government intervention is futile and a
colossal waste of resources. In the medium to long-term, it has zero
(insignificant) statistical effect. In all these countries - despite the fact
that these policies are still being implemented - population growth is flat to
negative (except in Israel and France which have a lot of immigrants).
Instead of encouraging women to have more children, the government should make
sure that current families and households are well catered to: workplace
discrimination against pregnant women and women in childbirth ages should be
outlawed and persecuted; day care centers should be opened and made available
to young mothers; parenting classes and free medical care should be rendered
accessible and affordable; a whole gamut of goods and services - from public
transport to formula milk to textbooks should be made free to families with
more than 4 children; maternity wards should be improved and modernized; new
mothers should have preference in professional re-skilling and re-training.
The Misanthrope's Manifesto
1. The unbridled growth of human populations leads to:
I. Resource depletion;
II. Environmental negative externalities;
III. A surge in violence;
IV. Reactive xenophobia (owing to migration, both legal and illegal);
V. A general dumbing-down of culture (as the absolute number of the less than bright rises); and
VI. Ochlocracy (as the mob leverages democracy to its advantage and creates anarchy followed by populist authoritarianism).
2. The continued survival of the species demands that:
I. We match medical standards, delivered healthcare and health-related goods and services with patients' economic means. This will restore the mortality of infants, the old and the ill to equilibrium with our scarce resources;
II. Roll back the welfare state in all its forms and guises;
III. Prioritize medical treatment so as to effectively deny it to the terminally-sick, the extremely feeble-minded; the incurably insane; those with fatal hereditary illnesses; and the very old;
IV. Implement eugenic measures to deny procreation to those with fatal hereditary illnesses, the extremely feeble-minded; and the incurably insane;
V. Make contraception, abortion, and all other forms of family planning and population control widely available.
Lessons from a Demographically Vanishing China (Brussels Morning)
The Chinese leadership is worried: the population has been on the decline for two years in a row, signifying a seemingly inexorable plunge in birth rates to half the rate of 2016. Marriages are at an all time low, deaths at an all-time high, as the population ages. China is also one of the most expensive places on earth to raise a child in.
The same trends occur in the majority of the members of the European Union and even in Russia.
China’s one child policy imposed, often cruelly, between 1980-2015 has been reversed. Now, couples can have up to 3 children. But it is way too late. Times have changed: nowadays, even an only child is considered a career-retarding nuisance the world over or, at best, a New Age exercise at luxurious self-actualization in one’s late 30s or early 40s.
Rearing a child is an exorbitant, sapping undertaking. Half of all offspring cohabit with their parents for decades. The sacrifices required in terms of professional advancement, savings, old-age security, and privacy are mind-boggling.
Children are also a marker of gender disparities, inequality, and inequity. The onerous burden of reproduction and childcare falls disproportionately on the mother.
China has been doing its best recently, instituting new incentives for motherhood such as tax breaks, housing subsidies, and an extended maternity leave.
Also Read:
Euthanasia and the Right to Die
In Our Own Image - The Debate about Cloning
Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species
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