FAPPAF Bucket

News of a population bust might come as a surprise to many Americans. More than two centuries after English scholar Thomas Malthus argued that population growth exceeded the earth’s ability to feed us—“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote—the media continue to warn us about impending environmental catastrophe and mass starvation caused by an exploding human population. These Malthusian alarms persist even though the last 200 years have proved Malthus completely wrong. As the world’s population shot up, starting around the time of the Industrial Revolution, worldwide standards of living rose in tandem. People proved far more resourceful in expanding food production, tapping new veins of natural resources, and inventing technologies to accommodate a growing population than Malthus dreamed possible. When mass deprivation has occurred in modern times, it has invariably resulted from political tyranny and social chaos, not from an inability to derive enough resources from the earth.

The trend long went unnoticed because rising life expectancy kept populations expanding. But by the 1960s and 1970s, more and more countries started seeing their birthrates sink beneath replacement levels.

Since economic growth depends strongly on an expanding population—something poorly understood until recently—aging countries’ economies face serious problems.

Further, economists have recognized that what’s essential to wealth creation is human creativity, not natural resources. Famously disputing the neo-Malthusian warnings of Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, economist Julian Simon called people the “ultimate resource.” Human beings, he observed, discovered how to convert oil, coal, and uranium, which had sat worthless in the earth for eons, into energy.

While other developed countries shrink and age, America’s population will grow by one-third through 2050, projections say. The working-age population in America will expand by some 45 million people even as it contracts by 100 million people in Europe and by 10 million in Japan.

And a disturbing fact embedded in our high birthrate is that 35 percent of all American children are now born to single mothers—and the percentage is growing. Extensive research shows that children raised in single-parent households don’t do as well in a range of areas, from school to work, and any sizable decrease in academic achievement or work-participation rates would erode the advantages of a growing working-age population.