Global Population Growth

When I was growing up, the thrust of many popular books in nonfiction, science fiction, and movies was the unrestricted growth of the global population.¹ And we had the rising populations of China, India, Africa, and South America to prove it. Supposedly, human population would expand indefinitely, until we were packed shoulder-to-shoulder as in a crowded elevator.²

What we have seen since then—but perhaps not yet absorbed at a publicly conscious level—is that population growth in technologically advanced, highly educated, Western-oriented countries tends to level off and then decline. The shorthand version is that people who have a good life, plenty to eat and drink, interesting work and the free time to enjoy themselves, the benefits of modern medicine, and access to modern birth control along with the cultural mindset that supports its use, don’t automatically keep having one child per couple every eighteen months or so during a woman’s fertile lifetime. You need that kind of birth rate if you’re running an agrarian society, where most families tend to be physically isolated and experience a high rate of infant mortality. In the modern world, people just don’t need a lot of surviving children to help with the farm work. And modern women aspire to be something more than brood mares.

I can see this trend in my own family and the people around me, all highly educated with access to modern medicine. My mother and father had two sons, one gay and one in a childless marriage, net result: no replacement in the third generation. My mother had a brother and a sister; the sister was in a childless marriage; the brother had two daughters, who both married and between them bore a total of three children, net result: sub-growth replacement. My father had a sister, who married and had two children; they each married and bore two children; net result: generational replacement, but not enough for positive growth. Of the people I know, most are either childless or, if married, have one or two children. I know of only one person who is a member of a big family, six children, but his siblings have either two or one child or none; net result: not enough for positive growth.

The same story could be told across the educated middle class of America, as well as in Europe, parts of South America, and in Japan. India is still growing. Africa is still growing. And China … is a special case: their disastrous One Child policy, which allowed for abortion based on sexual selection, in a culture that vastly favors male children over females, doomed the succeeding generation to an overwhelming supply of young men without access to marriageable young women. China’s population is predicted to crash in a couple of generations.³

America and Europe are making up for the decline in their educated, advanced population by admitting aliens and “guest workers” from other countries. The United States draws them from Central and South America. The United Kingdom draws them from former British colonies like India, Pakistan, Kenya, and Jamaica. Western Europe draws them from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For a generation or so, these population additions will bring their agrarian-based cultural instincts and their fertility rate with them. They will provide a generation of support and service workers that the educated middle class is no longer supplying. But by the third generation these “aliens” will become citizens, acculturated, educated, technologically dependent, and they will lower their birth rate accordingly.

And in the high-growth areas like India and Africa, technological advances—which are easily transported and tend to create wealth wherever they land—will create new generations of relatively comfortable, relatively educated people with access to good medicine, birth control, and the popular culture to use it.

Right now, the planetary population stands at about seven billion. Various projections take that up to perhaps nine billion within a generation or two. But if trends in technology and literacy continue as they are currently headed—always allowing for negative feedbacks, planetary disasters, and extraterrestrial intervention—that nine million may be the peak. China’s population alone stands at a billion three hundred million, but their projected collapse would take them back to about five hundred million. That’s still a lot of people, but it’s also a sobering decline in population that will have a devastating impact on an economy geared to serve more than twice that number.

Declining populations are aging populations, because the old people have all that good medicine to keep them alive, and technologically advanced societies provide social services and transfer payments to keep them comfortable. But those services and payments, let alone the medical expertise, all require a working population of younger people to support them. Right now, that would look like a recipe for disaster: querulous old folks wanting support and services, and rebellious young folks not willing to work eighteen hours a day to provide it—with the net result of economic and social collapse.

But I see another trend at work. Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Age, we have replaced transportation and production systems based on human and animal muscles with machinery based on fossil fuels and steam power, and then with internal combustion and electric motors. Add, in the last generation, computerized information systems and communications, and the rise of “smart” machines. And soon, in the near future, we will bring on individual machines and complex systems guided by artificial intelligence.⁴

It has been at least two generations since we needed to employ human ditch diggers with shovels—except, maybe, in archeology—when we had backhoes that can do the work of ten men. We no longer need mindless sets of hands to assemble our cars, trucks, refrigerators, and other durable goods piece-by-piece by hand. And soon we won’t need legions of lawyers, accountants, and technicians to maintain the flow of information and business transactions when self-programming systems can do it faster and more reliably. The future is not only mechanized and computerized, but it will also be intelligent.⁵

Technology is doing away with both the unskilled labor of ditch diggers and, eventually, the skilled labor of knowledge workers. That will leave the survivors relatively free to pursue their personal interests and hone their artistic and creative skills. Humans will always need and crave the personal element—innovation, experimentation, and surprise—in our lives, our entertainments, our cooking, and our sciences. We will pay people to be our entertainers and storytellers, our craftworkers and chefs, and our researchers and inventors. But we’ll leave the physically wearing and mentally numbing work to the machines, where it belongs.

And the political and economic structures envisioned to serve a massive and growing world population—more social control, more distributive scarcity, more government intervention; less freedom, fewer choices, less room—will give way to a more relaxed, more aspiring, more gracious lifestyle. People will count and be valued as individuals rather than as cogs in a machine or, worse, as pests on a dying planet. Or that is my hope.

The intersection between population declines and technological advancements suggests to me a coming Golden Age—at least for those of us who have the children who will survive to enjoy it. And always, of course, so long as a nuclear war, asteroid impact, or extraterrestrial invasion does not take us back to the Stone Age.

1. See, for example: Paul Ehrlich’s and David Brower’s non-fiction The Population Bomb and Harry Harrison’s science-fiction Make Room! Make Room!, which became the basis for the movie Soylent Green.

2. Of course, as I learned in a college course about predicting the future, any prediction that extends a current trendline indefinitely becomes immediately suspect. Every system includes both positive and negative feedbacks. And all trends go in cycles. Nothing is forever.

3. See, among others, this analysis from the World Economic Forum.

4. If your notion of “artificial intelligence” is a human-scale mind with an active personality and opinions—such as Skynet, “deciding our fate in a microsecond”—think again. The reality is going to be expert systems capable of analyzing data in greater volumes and at greater depths and speeds than any human mind, with the capability for pattern seeking and self-programming in response to discovered conditions. You will be able to talk to it, give it verbal instructions, and receive reports and information. But it will not ever be your friend—or your enemy.

5. And there goes your Marxist “labor theory of value.” The future will also be capital intensive, with the question being “Who owns the machines?” and “What is the rate of return on their investment?” rather than who gets paid to work and sweat and think and drudge.

The Real Reactionaries

Political lines seem to be drawn these days between Progressives, who are supposed to be looking forward to the future and what it will bring, and Conservatives, who are supposed to be looking backward, to past traditions and the security they promised, and away from the future the Progressives want—and so they have been called “Reactionaries.” But, like most modern memes and the definitions that support them, the real world is more fluid and sometimes becomes curiously inverted.

When I talk to Progressives—who used to be called “Liberals,” although that’s a position I hold—they seem to be afraid of the future. For all their claimed allegiance to science and progress, they appear to want to keep everything the same. Oh yes, they believe that the “arc of history” bends toward a desirable future: social justice, socialism, collective consciousness, and some nebulously defined utopia where history itself will just … end, while humanity glides forward in some sort of uneventful but endlessly gratifying state of somnolence. But unless that rainbow is somehow hurried along toward its pot of gold, bad things are gonna happen, and that’s scary.

For example, they talk about climate change (formerly known as “anthropogenic global warming”) and insist that we need to bend our economy out of shape, divesting ourselves of reliable energy sources in favor of renewables, and submit to increasing government control of our lives and our prospects in order to keep the world temperature from rising a couple of degrees. That level of warming will supposedly cause the oceans to rise and the planet’s vegetation to change measurably in the next eighty years. It will supposedly destroy coastal property values, change growing patterns, and disrupt people’s daily lives. But if we act now through stringent regulation, they insist, we can keep the current climate, land masses, farming systems, and economic activities to which we have become accustomed.¹

That sounds like a Conservative yearning for the world to remain safe and familiar and not change at all. But change is inevitable. It has been going on for ten thousand years, not just in climate² but in technology, culture, language, and political and economic affairs. No single step or series of steps will hold back the tide, or time, or the changes that both will bring. Continuous jockeying and adaptation have always been the keys to human survival and prosperity.

For another example, Progressives are afraid of scientific discovery and technology itself and the changes they will bring. Automation and artificial intelligence will disrupt the current patterns of work and economic exchange. Genetic modification of crops will supposedly open the door to human diseases or rampant changes in the environment. But pesticides, antibiotics, and artificial fertilizer are also said to disrupt human health and the environment, so the Progressive vision of agriculture is a return to “natural” and “organic” methods that lower yields and increase crop damage.

The Progressive yearns for a world that operates along current economic lines—the better, I suppose, to further their planning for a Marxist revolution that will institute state control under a change of power. But the world’s economy has been changing for more than a hundred years, as new energy resources and engines replace animal and human muscles, as improved farming techniques reduce the labor input to agriculture, as the Industrial Revolution at first absorbed new hands into assembly-line production methods, and now as the Computer and Communications Revolution is absorbing those displaced workers into a knowledge economy. And when machine intelligence does away with the routine knowledge jobs of accountants and librarians, other fields will open up.

For a third example, Progressives appear to be afraid of the people they presume to champion, of the average person in a differentiated society. Such people’s voices and understandings are expressed, debated, and examined through unfettered speech. Their beliefs and visions carry through to social action with free and open voting. And their needs and desires are expressed in a free market, where eager entrepreneurs working under a capitalist system respond quickly and comprehensively to fulfill them. Instead, Progressives want a world where experts steeped in academic study and trained in policy decisions will project what is best for the society and so arrange its systems.

And again, the Progressive mind is yearning for the safe, the known, the predictable, and the governable. The Progressives have a vision for the future that is based on the experiences of the past, and new ideas, new relationships, new methods upset the status quo. They want to be the disruptive force that brings about change—the vision that Karl Marx and his fellow travelers penned almost two hundred years ago—and they will not be stopped or sidetracked by the natural disruptions that free thinking and unfettered technology are bringing about. In this, the Progressive is just as protective of the familiar and the reliable as any 19th century robber baron trying desperately to hold onto his wealth and power.

Change is inevitable. You cannot predict the future. Humanity’s only hope is then to continue developing deeper scientific understanding and more subtle and robust technologies. Yes, there will be disruptions. Yes, a number of people will be put out of work, lose their security, be moved off their property, and be forced to scramble and adapt to a changing economic and environmental conditions. And yes, on an individual level this may seem unjust and even cruel. But life itself is about evolution and adaptation to changing conditions.

As Louis Pasteur—a contemporary of Karl Marx—once wrote, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” That is, while you can’t predict the future, it is certainly possible to take prudent steps—learn everything you can, conserve your resources, stay light on your feet—to meet whatever eventualities the future throws at you. And that about sums up the viewpoint currently held by the rest of us “Conservatives.”

1. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the shoreline around the Bay—including many towns like Foster City, where I worked for ten years—was originally, say a hundred and more years ago, tidal marsh and mud flat. By ringing an area with armor rock and filling it with garbage and topsoil, developers made industrial and residential property that today is worth billions. But even now some of that once-reclaimed land—especially some marginal farmland along San Pablo Bay—is being restructured into wetlands for environmental purposes. So … one hundred years ago your property was a mud bank mostly under water, and a hundred years from now it may once again be flooded. Cities rise; property decays and is abandoned; land is developed anew. This is the reality of attempting to own a piece of the ever-changing Earth.

2. Remember that human beings in their current form, Homo sapiens, certainly lived through the latter part of the last Ice Age and emerged into a world with changing shorelines and crop patterns, floods from melting glaciers—coming off an ice cap a mile deep over much of the northern hemisphere—and droughts from higher average temperatures. And they survived—not without loss, of course, not without suffering—while using technology no more advanced than stone spear points and bent sticks. I think we can do better with what we know today.