Paul Ehrlich Spoke at Vatican Conference on Biodiversity
The population doomsayer's back!
Marian L. Tupy —
Forty-nine years ago, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University scared the bejesus out of much of the world when he predicted that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation. In his doomsday bestseller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
Since Ehrlich wrote those words, the world’s population has more then doubled. Yet, people consume more calories per capita, while living longer on a cleaner planet. Ehrlich’s jeremiad did not come true for a number of reasons. The Green Revolution massively increased agricultural productivity, affordable contraceptives made family planning easier, plummeting infant mortality has reduced the need for “spare” children, and rising incomes increased the opportunity cost for women who opt to stay at home with their children rather than enter the labor market—hence massive fall in global fertility rate.
That said, Ehrlich’s predictions were not without consequences. “In addition to China’s one-child rule,” Ehrlich must be held partially responsible for “abhorrent campaigns of forced sterilization in Indira Gandhi’s India and Alberto Fujimori’s Peru.” Surely a man with that much to answer for has been relegated to the fringes of society? Not on your life! In fact, next month Ehrlich will be addressing a Vatican workshop on “Biological Extinction.” Judging by the promotional material, he will feel right at home.
According to the Vatican, measures of human consumption have “calculated that in about 1970 we were using about 70 percent of the Earth’s sustainable capacity, and now… we are using about 156 percent. Nevertheless there are 800 million people chronically malnourished and 100 million on the verge of starvation at any one time. How have such imbalances, both among contemporaries and between the present and future generations come about, and how are they sustained? The problems wouldn’t go away if we had another 56 percent of the Earth to take care of our needs, but we could at least stop eating into the productive capacity of the Earth progressively as the years go by.”
Human settlement and agriculture have been the traditional enemy of nature and biodiversity. Thankfully, urbanization (over half of humanity lives in cities already) and falling fertility rates (there is a distinct possibility that earth’s human population will start declining during the course of the 21st century) will return some of the world’s surface back to nature. This trend will be greatly enhanced by improvements in agricultural yields. As Jesse H. Ausubel of Rockefeller University points out, “if the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s U.S. corn grower during the next 70 years, 10 billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today’s cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia. This will happen if farmers sustain the yearly 2 percent worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words if social learning continues as usual.”
If the Vatican wanted to get a real sense of the future of biodiversity on earth, it should have invited Ausubel instead of Ehrlich.
China’s Fertility Flip-Flop Shows the Folly of Legislating Family Sizes
Keep central planning out of family planning.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Recent attempts by the Chinese government to encourage higher birth rates have raised concerns about government interference in personal matters. These new measures continue the pattern of authoritarian regimes enforcing coercive familypolicies. State intervention in family planning has often resulted in human rights abuses. While some policymakers advocate for incentives to boost fertility rates, a cautious approach that prioritizes individual freedom offer a more effective and ethical solution to addressing declining birth rates.
This article was published in National Review on 1/18/2024.
After decades of the disastrous policy of limiting family growth by force, China, according to news reports, is now pestering its women through text messages and social media to have more babies. This meddling by the state, like past coercion, is counterproductive. China should stop telling couples how many children to have. Keep central planning out of family planning, and families will flourish.
Not content to regulate life outside the household, authoritarians have a long history of intervening in family affairs. The Chinese Communist Party’s recent family-policy flip-flop is unsurprising. Throughout history, communist countries have alternated between coercive measures aiming to produce larger families and ones intended to shrink the average family size. China’s one-child policy, for instance, was in force for 36 years (1979–2015).
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union financially penalized those without children, enacting a so-called “childless tax” that the country enforced from 1941 to 1990 in various degrees. The tax punished childless men between the ages of 20 and 50 and childless women between the ages of 20 and 45. A decree in 1944 expanded the childless tax to also penalize parents who had merely one or two children.
Communist Romania and Poland (post–World War II) implemented similar taxes modeled on the Soviet law. Those taxes, like their inspiration, lasted until the collapse of the USSR bloc in 1991. Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania went furthest of all, enacting strict prohibitions on birth control that resulted in a large number of abandoned children whose parents often could not afford to raise them.
The conditions in the communist nation’s overcrowded orphanages — nicknamed “child gulags” — were nightmarish. Yet signs at the inhumane institutions mockingly boasted, “The state can take better care of your child than you can.”
If communists are consistent on one point, it is that the state knows best. Always. Even when it comes to how many children each couple should bring into the world. Where communists have been inconsistent, though, is on whether that number ought to be higher or lower.
Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, it became fashionable among intellectuals around the world to worry about “overpopulation,” a concept that overwhelming evidence has since called into question. The resulting panic had its darkest manifestation in China’s one‐child policy, which saw more than 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions, an unknown share of which were coerced.
China’s official Xinhua News Agency has boasted that the one-child policy prevented 400 million births. “Excess birth” fines could reach up to ten times a family’s annual disposable income.
Revenue-hungry local officials continued to fine families and enforce childbearing limits even after the country loosened its one-child policy to a two-child policy (2016–2021) and then loosened it further into a three-child policy. As China’s officials grew increasingly concerned about the population’s aging and shrinking, the three-child policy was, at last, rendered merely symbolic in 2023.
Yet China’s vast population-planning bureaucracy remains in place and could easily be reoriented toward attempts to coercively engineer the size of the country’s population upward. In a CCP-run paper, some Chinese academics have called for a tax on childlessness.
And China is not alone. Some Russian politicians also would like to reinstate a childless tax (Russia’s leaders have been toying with the idea for more than a decade).
Today, while unfounded overpopulation fears retain popularity in some circles, plummeting global birth rates have led the pendulum of policy-maker opinion to swing toward the idea that the world might benefit from more, rather than fewer, children. The number of countries with “raising fertility” as an explicit policy objective keeps rising.
Thankfully, in most cases such initiatives do not involve coercion. From South Korea to Estonia, various countries have tried offering government subsidies, expensive new state programs, cash bonuses, or similar incentives to encourage their citizens to have larger families. But an overview of past efforts to alter birth rates, whether upward or downward, shows that such efforts have had lackluster results at best and resulted in tragic human-rights abuses at worst.
Rather than pursuing new initiatives that are costly and questionably effective, and risk wading into the territory of social engineering or worse, policy-makers concerned about birth rates should take a “first do no harm” approach to fertility.
As my colleague Vanessa Calder and I outlined in a recent policy paper, removing government rules and regulations that disproportionately affect families would enhance families’ freedom of choice and may reduce the cost of child-rearing enough to boost fertility. In other words, policy-makers can make it easier for parents to form the families they desire by simply stepping back and removing government barriers to fertility and family life.
The state’s thumb shouldn’t be on the scale of intimate family decisions, one way or the other. Reforming policies that artificially make family life harder offers a better way forward. Hopefully, policy-makers in China and elsewhere will come to recognize that.
1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023
A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
Malcolm Cochran —
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
The world should take note of which principles brought freedom and prosperity to India.
Harry Backhouse —
The 76-year story of modern India is one of the greatest stories of progress in history. At the time of its independence in 1947, it was a mostly agricultural economy of 340 million people with a literacy rate of only 12 percent and a life expectancy of only 32 years. Today, it has the fifth-largest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) and third largest by purchasing power parity. In his book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” Steven Pinker highlights six key areas of progress: life, health, wealth, safety, literacy, and sustenance. In every one of these metrics, life in India has significantly improved over the years.
Self-Sufficiency Is Self-Destructive
Since independence in 1947, India suffered the consequences of socialist ideals. In a quest for self-sufficiency, the government played a heavy role in the economy. Under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, India pursued Soviet-style “Five Year Plans,” intending to turn India into an industrialized economy. From 1947 to 1991, the government owned most key industries, including steel, coal, telecommunications, banking, and heavy industry. India’s economy was closed to foreign competition, with high tariffs and restrictions to foreign investment. For example, the import tariff for cars was around 125 percent in 1960. The policy of import substitution aimed to produce goods domestically instead of importing them from abroad. In reality, massive waste and inefficiency resulted, as Indian businesses were protected from international competition.
Furthermore, India’s private sector was heavily constrained. Overregulation and corruption stifled the business environment, and subsidies and price controls disincentivized production, leading to market distortions and fiscal deficits. The government required industrial licenses for the establishment, expansion, or modernization of industries, causing bureaucratic barriers and corruption. This environment tended to harm small businesses at the expense of large corporations, as large corporations could better cope with the complex bureaucracy. The period was often referred to as the License Raj, comparing the extent of control of the industrial licenses to that of direct rule by the British Empire before Indian independence.
Sustenance, Health, and Life
In his 2016 book, “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” Johan Norberg showed how these problems impacted daily life. When Norman Borlaug invented new high-yield wheat, India was facing a threat of mass starvation. Despite that, Indian state monopolies lobbied against both food and fertilizer imports. Fortunately, Borlaug was able to bring through his innovations. In 1965, yields in India rose by 70 percent.
From 1948 to 2018, the number of calories per person increased by two-thirds, growing from 1,570 to 2,533. For reference, the recommended healthy number of calories per person is 2,000 for a woman and 2,500 for a man. The average Indian now no longer suffers from undernourishment.
This achievement is even more remarkable when one considers the growth of the Indian population, which added a billion new citizens between 1948 and 2018. As well as having a greater population, Indians began living longer, with life expectancy more than doubling between 1947 and 2022. Furthermore, fewer children were dying—infant mortality fell dramatically between 1960 and 2022. Many children previously suffered from malnutrition. Parents could now watch their children grow up and have children of their own.
Wealth, Safety, and Literacy
However, problems in India remained. The License Raj continued to strangle the Indian economy in the name of protectionism. In 1978, the economist Raj Krishna coined the term the “Hindu rate of growth” to refer to slow economic growth of around 4 percent per year, which was prevalent in India from the 1950s to the 1980s. But Krishna was incorrect. The slow rate of growth had nothing to do with Hinduism or factors unique to India. Instead, India’s growth was low, because of the restrictive policies of the socialist government. As soon as India removed the restrictions to competition and commerce, it began reaching growth rates of between 6 percent and 9 percent each year.
The economic liberalization of India was prompted by an economic crisis in 1990. India, having borrowed heavily from international lenders to finance infrastructure projects, was facing a balance of payments crisis and had only two weeks until it would default on its debt. A new government under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao abolished the License Raj, removing restrictions for most industries and foreign investment into Indian companies. Restrictions on foreign technology and imports were scrapped, as were subsidies to fertilizer and sugar. India flung open its doors to the world, embracing competition in both imports and exports. Indian companies now faced foreign competition in the domestic market but also had the entire world market to sell to.
New industries sprung up, with India developing competitive industries in telecommunications, software, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, research and development, and professional services.
The result was a dramatic increase in the standard of living for ordinary Indians. The economy flourished as foreign investment flooded in. The innovating spirit of ordinary Indians was unleashed. Between 1993 and 2021, access to electricity went from 50 percent of the population to 99.6 percent. The literacy rate improved from 48.2 percent to 74.4 percent. This is even more remarkable considering that India added extra 600 million people during that period.
Having access to a microwave, refrigeration, and electric lighting are all amenities that we take for granted, but these conveniences are relatively recent for the average Indian. A virtuous cycle of more educated, well-fed citizens creates greater innovation and prosperity. It is also correlated with less violence, with the homicide rate falling by 48 percent between 1991 and 2020.
Absolute poverty also has been falling. In 1987, half of the Indian population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, this figure had fallen to 10 percent. Granted, there are still issues in India. Millions of people live in slums, and poverty remains a problem. However, it is worth appreciating just how far India has come.
As the Indian economist Gurcharan Das says about his country’s progress in the documentary “India Awakes,” “The principles that brought so much prosperity and freedom to the West are being affirmed in a country that is in the East.”
These principles are that of a market economy, openness to innovation, and a favorable attitude to commerce.
Life, health, education, and sustenance have all measurably improved. Violence and poverty have declined. Progress has occurred, and the world should take note.
Larger populations of free people create more economic prosperity through innovation, so policymakers shouldn’t make it harder for people to become parents and raise children.
The world’s population has never been bigger, yet rates of poverty and hunger are at historic lows. How is that possible? It turns out that population growth can fuel resource abundance and economic prosperity through innovation. Contrary to popular belief, resources have become more plentiful as the global population has increased. Analyzing historical data, the authors of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet” discovered that in recent decades resource abundance outpaced population growth, a phenomenon they call “superabundance.” This counterintuitive relationship arises from the fact that more people generate more ideas and inventions, leading to economic growth and improved living standards.
In other words, on average, free people produce more than they consume. Perhaps that is not so surprising, because human ingenuity is what transforms raw natural materials into valuable resources in the first place. A remarkable example is Hong Kong, which underwent a rapid free market metamorphosis from a barren island to a prosperous metropolis in the 1950s and ’60s.
However, it’s crucial to note that simply having a large population is insufficient to create abundance. The poverty experienced in China and India before their liberalizing economic reforms serves as a stark reminder of that. Merely having a large population is not enough; it is freedom that unleashes human potential and transforms living standards. Free societies foster innovation by granting individuals the liberty to explore new ideas, debate, trade and profit. And the more people do those things, the more opportunities arise for specialization, collaboration and technological breakthroughs. Under conditions of economic freedom, more people mean more entrepreneurs, more innovators and more creators.
Demographic Dilemmas
If it is true that free individuals engaged in idea generation and market exchange are “the ultimate resource,” as the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon called them, then the more, the merrier. In a free society, fears about so‐called overpopulation and resource depletion are baseless. Moreover, population growth rates are decreasing globally, with many countries now experiencing shrinking populations as fertility rates fall. Fertility is lowest in the high‐income countries, in many cases at record lows and in most instances “below replacement” (i.e., lower than needed to keep the population from shrinking).
Many middle‐income countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia, also have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. It must be noted, though, that smaller family sizes often relate to positive developments such as increased education for women and declining rates of child mortality. (More children surviving to adulthood decreases the incentive to have additional children as an insurance policy against a high likelihood of childhood death.) Moreover, many commentators celebrate the possibility of population decline for a variety of reasons, often believing that a smaller population will benefit the environment.
Others, however, fear that a smaller population size could come with various challenges. If a larger population has the potential to increase the rate of technological advancement and economic growth, then a smaller population could conversely slow the rate of progress. Such risks may be manageable through automation or immigration (although if birth rates continue to decline globally, then migration alone cannot counteract depopulation in the very long run). Thus, many thinkers across the ideological spectrum, such as Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat, have expressed concerns about subreplacement fertility and possible attendant tradeoffs.
Irrespective of whether or to what extent their worries are substantiated, such fears have motivated a variety of policies intended to help families and boost birth rates in countries from South Korea to Estonia. Unfortunately, such “pro‐natal” policies often take the form of expensive new government programs and subsidies that increase the burden on taxpayers while having little or no effect on fertility. In a recent Cato policy analysis I co‐authored with Vanessa Calder, we found that in almost all cases, countries with pro‐natal policies tied to explicit fertility targets failed to meet their stated goals. That conclusion fits with a larger body of research showing that the effect size of fertility initiatives is often small and comes at an enormous fiscal cost.
Ultimately, it is not the government’s place to encourage or discourage any particular family size, and past government attempts to alter fertility rates have sometimes even resulted in tragic human rights abuses. So, rather than embarking on new initiatives that are costly, are questionably effective and risk wading into the territory of social engineering or worse, policymakers should take a “first do no harm” approach to fertility. Instead of replicating costly efforts that have proven ineffective abroad, U.S. policymakers keen on supporting families and concerned about fertility decline should consider repealing the various government policies that can act as artificial barriers to fertility and raise costs for parents. In other words, policymakers should make sure that government policies do not interfere with individuals’ freedom to form the families they want to create.
Family‐Friendly Policies
First, consider policies affecting family budgets and work. By some estimates, housing is the greatest expense associated with raising children, and regulations that limit the housing supply, including land use and zoning regulations, make housing less affordable. Meanwhile, tariffs raise the cost of construction materials and push the cost of housing even higher. The cost of food, the second‐greatest expense associated with children, is inflated by subsidies that backfire, regulations and restrictive trade policies. Studies suggest that reforming such policies could reduce the retail price of milk, a staple among families with young children, by 15% to 20%.
Then there’s education: Increasing school choice would increase incentives for schools to meet the needs of students and their families. Next, consider child care. Various regressive regulations limit the supply of child care and push up prices. For example, Washington, D.C., adopted a licensing law requiring many child care workers to have a college degree. When it comes to child‐to‐staff ratios, requiring even one less staffer per infant reduces child care costs by up to 20%. In fact, many countries such as Denmark, Spain and Sweden have no government‐mandated maximum ratio at all. Removing laws that discourage telework and flexible work can also make life easier for parents. For example, pandemic‐era reforms removing barriers to telemedicine not only increased patient convenience but made balancing parenthood and career easier for some workers in medical fields by allowing for remote work.
Further, some healthcare policies excessively limit parents’ options regarding the way their children are conceived and born. Several government policies—including certificate‐of‐need laws restricting the creation of new birth centers and various state laws restricting vaginal birth after cesarean attempts to hospital settings and banning them at smaller clinics or birth centers—make it needlessly difficult for mothers who want to avoid cesarean sections to do so. Such restrictions not only disrespect mothers’ autonomy but can make having multiple children medically risky and, research suggests, may depress fertility, all without improving health outcomes.
Policymakers worried about families and fertility should similarly avoid overregulating the field of reproductive technology, which can help many couples struggling with infertility challenges. Policymakers should also avoid imitating Hungary, which nationalized its fertility clinics and subsidizes fertility treatments, resulting in fewer treatment options and lengthy wait times that have prompted many Hungarians to seek treatment in neighboring countries. Such policies not only diminish individual liberty but make bringing new children into the world unnecessarily difficult.
Finally, there are some well‐intentioned but excessive child safety policies that make raising children more expensive and time‐consuming. For example, one study found that extended‐age car seat requirements were associated with only 57 car crash fatalities in 2017 but with a reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year. Speaking of safety, Utah (2018), Oklahoma (2021), Texas (2021), Colorado (2022) and Virginia (2023) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” legislation that pushes back against overly burdensome and intensive parenting norms. More states should pass these laws so that children benefit from increased independence and parents benefit from reduced stress levels.
Those are just a few of the reforms to labor, trade, healthcare, education, housing and safety policies that would reduce the regulatory cost of raising children and help families. Although I am skeptical of the idea of expensive new government policies aimed at increasing fertility, believing them to be misguided and possibly beyond the proper scope of government, at the very least, any expansion of spending on families should be paired with deregulation of the goods that parents demand most and reform of policies that artificially and needlessly make family life harder.
If free people are the ultimate source of societal abundance—if people themselves are “the ultimate resource”—then we should reconsider overly burdensome regulations that potentially frustrate fertility aspirations. The work that parents do raising the next generation of human beings is important—and arduous enough without the government making it harder. To increase abundance, families must be free.
