Too many of them, too few of us
Yesterday, Doug Fabrizio had Werner Fornos, President of the Population Institute, as a guest on his show on Radio West to talk about the “problem” of overpopulation in lesser developed countries (LDCs). The new euphemism of “responsible family planning” was a main focus of the show, which lamented, among other things, the fact that the Pope won’t “take responsibility” any time soon to teach people in LDCs that they should be using birth control to limit their number. Brazil, however, was praised in the show because it has the highest rate of birth control for any “Catholic” country.
Meanwhile, policymakers have long been dealing with the dire problem of population decline in developed countries. By and large, developed countries have much lower birthrates than those in LDCs, as this graph shows. In the developed countries of “Old Europe,” the constantly declining birthrate throughout the last half of the twentieth century has created a situation in which these countries will hardly be able to fund the pensions in their social market economies, let alone all the other programs those welfare states offer, by the mid-twenty-first century, the same time table by which Werner Fornos warns us that there will be too many of “them” (i.e. people in LDCs). In Germany, for example, “[w]ith a birth rate of 8.45 per 1,000 people, down from 9.35 in 2000, there will no longer be the workforce around by the middle of this century to keep the welfare state afloat.”
In Russia, reported the Times Online on Saturday, “[a]ccording to the Federal Statistics Service, the population of 143 million could plummet to 77 million by the middle of this century. It dropped by almost half a million in the last year alone.” (The Times article also notes that there were 1.5 million births last year in Russia as opposed to 1.6 million abortions in the same year.) The French, with trepidation of the implications for social policies such as laïcité, can foresee the day when Muslim immigrants, who have a much higher birthrate than native French women, will begin to outnumber them. The birthrate in the United States is also declining so that there is an average of 2.08 births per woman. Even in Latter-day Saint families, “four is the new eight,” as the saying goes.
In contrast to the concerns about overpopulation voiced by Werner Fornos and Doug Fabrizio’s callers yesterday, Philip Longman has addressed the prospect of global population decline in an article in Foreign Affairs last year. First acknowledging that most people think that overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe, Longman argues that the opposite is actually the case:
a closer look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s. And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today’s children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world’s citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover, the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.
So why the concern from Fornos and others about overpopulation? A look at the website of the Population Institute, of which Fornos is President, provides a hint:
Population growth is a complex issue that directly or indirectly impacts virtually all areas of our lives and the conditions under which we live—from the environment and global stability to poverty and women’s health and empowerment.
Much of the discussion on Radio West centered on the unsustainability of the growth represented by birthrates in LDCs, addressing issues of the environment (population growth in LDCs harms the environments there), poverty (population growth increases the number of poor in those countries), and women’s rights (ostensibly, women in those countries don’t want to be having so many children but do so because they are oppressed), and on “responsible family planning” as the solution to this problem.
But is “responsible family planning” really the answer to the externalities of population growth in LDCs? What if these countries need such population increases as a contributing factor on their own roads to development? Would political liberalization (i.e. democratization and the firm establishment of stable political institutions) be sufficient to curb the perceived negative externalities of population growth without stigmatizing people who choose to have large families?
Would there be any harm in fully funding programs that educate people about contraceptives and provide affordable access to them? Then we could see if women really do want to have fewer children…
Comment by RoastedTomatoes — September 27, 2005 @ 1:00 pm
I think one has to distinguish between underpopulation or growth in the developed world and overpopulation for the underdeveloped world. The carrying capacity for a place like Haiti clearly is very different from say Germany for a wide variety of reasons. I think it quite clear that many 3rd world nations would benefit from spending resources to improve the quality of their life, rather than having 5 – 12 kids. It truly would make a very large difference. Even in the US I think that most poor would benefit from having children after 26 rather than before, and having fewer children. The other big issue is having a stable family (i.e. two parents where possible)
Comment by Clark Goble — September 27, 2005 @ 1:08 pm
Of course I don’t think that there would be any harm in doing that. Those countries are free to do so once they develop to the point where they can fund such initiatives for their citizens.
But is contraception really the answer to the world’s problems? Maybe we can (should?) have large families and still solve the pressing questions of the environment, poverty, and urbanization at the same time. That is, maybe we could find solutions to these problems that don’t include telling people in LDCs that there are too many of them to keep things comfortable on this planet.
Comment by john fowles — September 27, 2005 @ 1:09 pm
Clark, why do you think that poor families in America would benefit from having fewer kids? Isn’t that a paternalistic decision by you about whether the life of a poor person is worth living? Aside from having more money to buy X-box games with, how would poor families in America benefit from having fewer kids?
What is your view of the Foreign Affairs article that I linked that observed that population decline, in the big picture, is also a problem for LDCs, whose populations are declining before the country gets rich and socialized, whereas at least in developed countries with declining populations, the economic prosperity (to which high population growth during the period of development contributed?) preceded the declining population?
Comment by john fowles — September 27, 2005 @ 1:14 pm
Oops, my comment # 3 was in response to RT.
Comment by john fowles — September 27, 2005 @ 1:15 pm
The problem isnt quantity, its quality.
Comment by Kurt — September 27, 2005 @ 1:26 pm
John, I think that many of the poor are unable to take care of the children they have. I say that after having spent a lot of time among the poor. It’s not an issue of X-box or the like. It’s an issue of basic needs. Further, by waiting to have kids and only having the number of kids you can support, you make your chance to be stable unlikely. I’m not saying don’t have kids. Just that if you wait a little – until your late 20′s, you’re much more likely to be successful and have the same number of kids.
Comment by Clark Goble — September 27, 2005 @ 2:05 pm
I should add that I think that “responsible family planning” is a good thing and is what most couples probably do anyway, discussing with each other if and when they should have their next child. My impression from the show, however, was that this is not the sense in which “responsible family planning” was used. Rather, it was used somewhat euphemistically to mean “we (in developed countries) should be teaching people in LDCs that they should limit their reproduction through contraception to at most replacement level (i.e. two kids per couple). This is something that is not so obviously a good thing and that is why I wonder if it is the right solution, or even beneficial, necessarily, for countries that are in the process of development.
Comment by john fowles — September 27, 2005 @ 2:56 pm
John regarding 3rd world nations, I think the one issue that really hurts developed countries is the socialized programs. i.e. who pays for retirement, for social security, for medicare when they were designed around increasing growth. That’s less of an issue in the 3rd world. Admittedly that’s because of the horrible status of people there. But frankly from a demographics perspective people die early and don’t have social programs benefiting them in the same way. So I’m not at all convinced that lowering the birth rate would be bad.
Please note that I’m not suggesting massive lowering. But I think it unarguable that many in these nations get pregnant far too young and have more children than they are able to support.
It seems to me that convincing women to put off children long enough so as to become educated and have a family career is just an inherently obviously wise thing to do. I don’t see why that need entail only a maintainance birth rate of two children. Especially given that the death rate in these countries is so high due to infant mortality, disease and especially HIV.
Comment by Clark Goble — September 27, 2005 @ 4:00 pm
I’m pretty uneducated (sadly) on this topic. I have always tied birth rate not only to the strength of the economy, but also to the type. Basically, like nineteenth century America, children are an economic asset in agrarian societies. In information based societies, children are an economic liability. There are exceptions of course; China for one – population limitation is enforced despite the agrarian nature of the bulk of their population.
While contraception is available in free and economically advanced societies, it seems that contraceptives without economic development is just cutting out an additional resource from developing economies, no? Or, are these societies not agrarian anymore? Or am I just confused?
Comment by J. Stapley — September 27, 2005 @ 6:58 pm
J. Stapley,
Whether children are an asset for an individual is a different question than whether they are an asset for society as a whole. My extra kid may be good for me, but he may also drive down the wages your kids can earn.
Most economic historians believe that living standards among agrarian workers improved significantly in Europe after the population was significantly reduced by several waves of bubonic plague. 19th century America was very unusual in that there was a lot of underpopulated land to be settled.
Another interesting fact of historical demography that fertility rates begin falling sharply in France around the beginning of the 19th century, decades before they fell in the rest of Europe. This despite the fact that France was primarilly rural. It was the most populous country in Europe, but far from being the most industrialized or urbanized. It’s still a bit of a mystery what drives these things.
Comment by ed — September 28, 2005 @ 9:59 am