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Misery-guts

Thomas Malthus was both miserable and smug - which is a nasty combination.

Writing in 1798, he strongly opposed the idea that poverty could be alleviated by "schemes of improvement".

People are addicted to "the passion between the sexes," he tutted. Inevitably, they would breed faster than human ingenuity could increase food supplies.

The result? "Misery and vice," as sickness and famine drove the population back to a size that could be supported by bare subsistence for the vast majority.

Cancerous Growth

Do we live in a Malthusian world?

Doomster and modern-day misery guts, Paul Ehrlich certainly believed so.

Ehrlich was horrified on a trip to India ("people, people, people") and came back to write The Population Bomb, which opened with the words:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s 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..."

For Ehrlich, population growth was a "cancer."

"We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer," he wrote. "The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense."

Forced sterilisation was one of many "painful" measures, he advocated.

Slow Growth

Fortunately, both Malthus and Ehrlich have been proved wrong.

In 1968, as Ehrlich predicted doom, world population growth was peaking. Since then, human ingenuity has demonstrably outstripped population growth.

In the past 30 years, 2.3 billion have been added to the world's population, but real incomes per capita have simultaneously risen by two-thirds.

People have starved, but numbers can be counted in the low millions not the hundreds of millions Ehrlich regarded as inevitable.

And as Amartya Sen pointed out, resource shortages have seldom been the problem. Famines happen when societies fail to get available resources to the hungry - and democracies seem much less able to stand by and let people starve.

Peaks

So how high will world population peak?

In 1999, the United Nations feted Fatima Jasminko born in Sarejevo as the world's 6 billionth person (presumably Fatima will be dogged throughout his life by documentary makers after a simple story).

Now, according to the New York Times, demographers are stunned at how quickly birth rates are falling.

They once thought we'd get to 12 billion, but now reckon 10 billion will be the ceiling.

Warren Sanderson, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, is one expert who believes the final total may be considerably lower.

The UN figures, he says, make an assumption that is "patently wrong" - that birth rates will fall to "replacement level" of just over two live births per woman.

But birth rates are already below 2.1 in almost all rich countries and some poor ones.

"We don't have any examples of countries coming down from high rates, hitting the 2.1 barrier and stopping there," he says.

As a result, he says there is an 85% probability that the world population will reach 9 billion before 2100 and then fall.

Moderating the passion

Does this matter?

Well, a modern axiom is every indicator is a worrying indicator - and some people are already worrying about how the world will cope with ageing populations.

One worried soul is the New Scientist's Fred Pearce. He believes (subscription required) the world now "leaves little room for babies," and that the future of humanity depends on men "becoming more like women" by making time for children.

However, by far the most important issue is how developing countries react to changes in their age structure as population growth slows.

Population growth starts when health improvements give infants and young children a much higher chance of reaching adulthood.

At first, families become larger - but parents are not stupid. After a while, one or both of them take action to ensure the woman has fewer pregnancies

Demographic dividend

But parents tend not to settle for achieving the same size families as before health started to improve.

Invest more in fewer children, becomes their motto. A strategy that makes increasing sense as people move off the land, and educated women start to take paid work.

However, the lag between fewer children dying and fewer children being born creates a baby boom generation.

This generation is a burden when it is being educated, but a potential economic boon once it reaches the workforce.

Experts such as Harvard Professor, David Bloom believes that the baby boom generation is a developing country's best chance to achieve economic lift off.

"If you can absorb these young people into the workforce," he says, "a country collects a massive 'demographic dividend'"

Bloom and his colleagues argue that the East Asian miracle was powered by demography - with around a third of its growth explained by population dynamics.

Why policy counts

But the dividend is not automatically handed out.

Fail to educate your children, fail to offer your young people jobs, frustrate their entrepreneurial instincts and you have a demographic nightmare.

Unemployed young people - especially young men - are sure to fuel political instability, crime rates, and other signs of social distress.

Sound familiar?

Daniel Pipes has argued that terrorism is fuelled by rising standards of living not poverty.

He may be half right.

The poor are, unfortunately, usually too busy staying alive to cause trouble.

But baby boomers will light fires one way or another.

So a stark choice remains: enlist them in stoking society's furnace or stand well back while they pitch society onto the nearest bonfire.

David Steven | 20/08/02

[sidelights]

“Baby boomers will light fires one way or another. 

So enlist them in stoking society's furnace or stand well back while they pitch society onto a bonfire“