Overpopulation Scare Replaced by Falling Birth-Rate Crisis

 The “Population Bomb” scare was a dud.
The opposite is now worrying scientists.

 

 

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

In my library is a set of books, all of which are about warning of the projected, serious problem of overpopulation. The titles include The Population Explosion by Yale-educated Richard Fagley;[1] The Population Explosion: The Indispensable Guide to Understanding and Solving Today’s Number One Environmental Problem by Paul and Anne Ehrlich.[2] Next is the most successful of the population-exploding warning books in terms of sales: The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich.[3] One book advocated one solution to The Most Urgent Threat of Our Time– The Population Explosion namely The Case for Compulsory Birth Control by Edgar R. Chasteen, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri. He was for most of his career a Professor at William Jewell College.[4] His book

put some spectacularly anti-human ideas on display, including advocacy of abortion, regret over medical advances reaching the developing world. He also advocated for an individualistic morality including a sexual ethic redefined around the therapeutic. In short, he got a lot of stuff wrong.[5]

Elmer Pendell, Ph.D., in his book Population on the Loose predicted catastrophe for humanity as a result of the runaway population growth he concluded was a major problem when he wrote his book.[6] Lastly, Harvard professor of biology, Karl Sax, wrote Standing Room Only: The World’s Exploding Population.[7] Although some authors predicted that, by the year 2000, the world population would exceed 10 billion, the concern was less the actual population number than the inability to feed the population. Although population-growth predictions were generally accurate, the predicted catastrophe never occurred:

Between 1960 and 2011, world population grew from 3 to 7 billion, an unprecedented rate of population growth that will never be seen again. In spite of the addition of 4 billion people in just 51 years, the world experienced some of the biggest improvements in living standards in human history, with declines in poverty and improvements in food production per capita in all major regions… The record of the last six decades suggests that progress can be made to reduce poverty and hunger, even while the world population continues to grow.[8]

This means that the decline in poverty and major improvements in food production and distribution were able to take care of much of the world’s 2022 population without a major catastrophe, which was almost 8 billion.

The New Threat: The Falling Birth Rate

The newest threat is not overpopulation but rather the falling birth rates which is predicted to be a far larger problem than overpopulation.[9] Lam writes that, when we

think of global population problems and you might think of the growing number of people in the world – currently about 8 billion – and our collective toll on the planet. But due to people having fewer children as countries become more prosperous, the real demographic problem may turn out to be falling populations.”[10]

He added that

The latest projections also indicate that there will be a sharp divide between countries with low birth rates and generally high incomes – such as most European nations – and a smaller number of countries, mainly in Africa, with higher birth rates and low incomes. …Nearly every country is predicted to have a birth rate that is too low to maintain its population by 2100, which may result in too few people of working age.[11]

The problem is that there are not enough healthy, young people existing in the population to support the older, often retired, elderly population. Other problems of an aging workforce include

increased healthcare and welfare costs. The country’s retirement age of 60—already raised from 58 in 2017—was first set at a time when life expectancies were shorter. Longer life spans today—and consequently longer time spent in retirement without income—have sparked economic fears within both the workforce and government. Labor unions in the country are urging companies to raise the retirement age again so workers can earn wages for a few more years.[12]

Examples in Asia

An example is the situation in South Korea which is now viewed as a “major demographic crisis.” One proposed partial remedy is to triple the monthly allowances for parents of newborns and reduce their mortgage interest rates. The government also plans to reduce regulations on hiring foreign nannies to increase the options for childcare.[13] One result of the demographic crisis is 24.5% of South Koreans over age 70 are still employed and the government is working to retain even more elderly persons in the workforce:

Elderly employment figures have seen a steady increase since the country’s statistics authority started to collect the data in 2005. Among these workers, half of whom are aged 75 and above, 42.1% are considered “simple laborers” by authorities …. with jobs that are not specialized and require just a few hours of training. Some 30% of them are working in the agriculture, fishing, and forestry industry, while 22.8% work in the social affairs and service industry. South Korea is projected to become the world’s most aged by 2044 and the number of people in their 70s exceeded those in their 20s for the first time ever last year. Authorities are scrambling to address the country’s aging population, including efforts to encourage employment among youth as well as the elderly and boost low fertility rates. To entice couples to grow bigger families, the South Korean government has even mulled granting military exemption to men who have three or more babies.[14]

The same demographic-shift problem is faced by several economies around Asia such as Japan, which one in every ten people is age 80 or older— the country with the highest proportion of elderly in the world. Specifically, those workers 65 and older in 2022 accounted for 13.6 percent of Japan’s workforce. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated that his country was “on the brink” of social dysfunction due to their demographic crisis.

Even China, has been attempting to coerce more seniors to go back to work because those over age 60 account for 20 percent of China’s population but make up only 8.8 percent of its workforce.[15] China’s state media is also encouraging

retirees to re-enter the workforce, [and] there are also discussions of raising the country’s mandatory retirement age, which is among the youngest in the world. Last month, Beijing released a silver economy plan promising to reorient its economy around the expanding elderly population, including investments in elderly products and services.[16]

Even Singapore is set to become a “super-aged” country by the year 2026. To forestall the problem, the government is now evaluating incentives to motivate more seniors to remain in the workforce. The workforce participation rate among those aged 65 and over, which has steadily increased over the past decade, was 31 percent in 2022.

Summary

The many doomsday predictions of overpopulation causing famine and poverty, touted by authorities from about 1960 to the 1970s, have proved dramatically wrong, largely because the many new technological developments during this time, such as the so-called green revolution, have been able to take care of a much larger population better than the smaller populations existing in the 1960s.

This is another example of the bored shepherd boy who cried “wolf” too many times. The third time when he sounded the warning that a wolf had attacked the village’s sheep, they ignored his cries. This time the wolf did attack the village’s sheep which scattered far and wide. This problem is also supported by the fact that the experts have also been wrong in other situations such as in evolution, global warming and the coronavirus epidemic. The lesson is that experts can be wrong again, urging caution when predictions are made.

See also Jerry Bergman’s post, “The ‘Population Bomb’ Bombed” (26 April 2019), and “Another Population Bomb?” (16 Nov 2022).

References

[1] Fagley, R. The Population Explosion. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1960.

[2] Ehrlich, P., and A. Ehrlich. The Population Explosion: The Indispensable Guide to Understanding and Solving Today’s Number One Environmental Problem. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1990.

[3] Ehrlich, P. The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books, New York, NY, 1970..

[4] Chasteen, E.R. The Case for Compulsory Birth Control. Prentice Hall, Engle Cliffs, NJ, 1971.

[5] Spencer, A.J. “Population Control and the Moral Order of the Created Order.” Ethics and Culture blog; http://www.ethicsandculture.com/blog/tag/Edgar+Chasteen, 21 September 2021.

[6] Pendell, E. Population on the Loose. Wilfred Funk, New York, NY, 1951.

[7] Sax, Karl. Wrote Standing Room Only: The World’s Exploding Population Beacon Press, Moston, MA, 1960.

[8] Lam, D. “Has the world survived the population bomb? A 10-year update.” Population and Environment 45(10); https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11111-023-00422-7, 30 May 2023.

 [9] Wilson, C. “Why falling birth rates will be a bigger problem than overpopulation.” New Scientist; https://www.newscientist.com/article/2423408-why-falling-birth-rates-will-be-a-bigger-problem-than-overpopulation/, 20 March 2024.

[10] Lam, 2023.

[11] Lam, 2023.

[12] Ewe, K. “How South Korea is tackling its demographic Crisis.” Time. p. 12, 11 March 2024.

[13] Ewe, 2024, p. 12.

[14] Ewe, 2024, p. 12.

[15] Ewe, 2024, p. 12.

[16] Ewe, 2024, p. 12.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,900 publications in 14 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.