"Overpopulation is NOT the cause of social or economic problems."

[Cheetah]

According to Brendan O’Neill, of spiked-online.com.

I found this article in a Norwegian newspaper, and they said it was translated from an earlier article by O'Neill published on spiked.

I wasn't able to find the exact article in question, but I found two that I believe are of the same stock:

A prejudice in search of a scientific disguise
The Royal Society’s two-year study of population seems to have already decided that there are ‘too many people’.

Spoiler :

The Royal Society in London, the prestigious, 350-year-old scientific institution, is launching a major study into the alleged problem of overpopulation. It will spend two years and thousands of pounds employing a working group to find out what is likely to be the impact of the twentieth century’s unprecedented growth in human numbers on politics, economics and the pursuit of ‘sustainable development’.

RS, take a tip from me, a friendly critic: in this era of belt-tightening, save yourselves loads of time and oodles of cash by simply writing down and press-releasing the following words: ‘Overpopulation is NOT the cause of social or economic problems.’

I’m not being a philistine. I’m not opposed to having big, deep, profound studies into the issues that impact, or don’t impact, on society. But when it comes to evidence for the fact that overpopulation is not the driving force for social disarray, there is already an embarrassment of riches.

There’s the fact that life has improved for the vast majority of humanity even as population has grown exponentially. When the original population scaremonger Thomas Malthus (a member of the Royal Society, funnily enough) predicted in the 1790s that if people didn’t stop breeding then ‘premature death would visit mankind’ - that there would be ‘food shortages, epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people]’ - there were a mere 980million human beings on Earth. Today, there are nearly seven times that number – 6.7 billion – and while there are still problems of poverty and hunger, especially in parts of the Third World, for most of us living standards and life expectancy have leapt forward.

In China, for example, there are now more people than there were on the entire planet in the era of Malthus, and yet their lot is better than it was for most of the unfortunate souls alive in the 1790s. In 1949, the population of China was 540million and average life expectancy was 36.5 years; today the population of China is 1.3 billion and average life expectancy is 73.4 years. And there are now six times as many cities in China (655) as there were five decades ago and around 235million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the past 15 years alone. All in the most populous nation on Earth. Where there are more ‘mouths to feed’ on a daily basis than there were across the entire globe in the period of Malthus’s food-shortage panicmongering. Clearly there is something other than human numbers which determines people’s fortunes.

There is also the fact that it is often people in the most overpopulated parts of the planet who have the nicest lives. Take Manhattan. There are 1.7million people crammed on to that tiny island and their lifestyles are the envy of millions of people around the world (including me). Yet in Africa, which is far more sparsely populated than some would have us believe, there are still major problems of poverty and malnutrition. Despite the claims of cranky outfits like the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) – which has argued that in order ‘for the whole planet to avoid the fate of Rwanda, Malthusian thinking needs rehabilitation’ (nice) – Africa actually contains 11 of the world’s 20 least densely populated nations. And some of these not-very-densely populated African countries have severe social problems. It’s not human numbers that cause them; it’s something else, something social and therefore eminently fixable.

Unfortunately, however, despite the rich factual, anecdotal and theoretical evidence that human numbers do not determine human beings’ fortunes, it seems unlikely that the Royal Society’s ‘comprehensive study’ will come to this conclusion. Because this smells a lot like advocacy research rather than actual research – that is, it’s an already-existing conclusion in search of supporting facts, rather than an exploration of facts in the name of reaching some open-ended, enlightening conclusion.

So the RS working group contains not one, but two leading members of the OPT: Jonathon Porritt, who has sung the praises of China’s one-child policy because without it ‘there would now have been 400million additional Chinese citizens’; and David Attenborough, who says he has ‘never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people and which doesn’t become harder to solve when more people are involved’. (Er, what about building dams? Or launching revolutions? Or building gleaming new cities? All those things are better done with more people rather than fewer. These Malthusians seem ignorant of the fact that human society has advanced more in the past 200 years than it did in the previous 20,000, precisely when there was an ‘explosion’ of people. That sweeping progress both created the scope for having more people, while at the same time being facilitated by those increased numbers of people.)

Even the supposedly sedate and objective chair of the working group – Sir John Sulston of human genome fame – said at the launch of the study that if we don’t get to grips with ‘where we are going in relation to population’, then ‘we may survive but we won’t flourish’. The difficulty of being properly objective on this issue in our era of widespread, unquestioned, utterly conformist neo-Malthusianism was captured in the media coverage of the RS’s announcement. ‘Population explosion scrutinised as scientists urge politicians to act’, screamed the Independent, next to a picture of lots of people on a crowded high street. ‘The human population is far higher than any other primate at any time in history’, said the BBC, next to a picture of thousands of people at a rock gig (hard evidence, surely, that the planet is overpopulated).

Given the Malthusian affiliations of some of the members of the working group, the scary-sounding pronouncements of its chairman, and the pre-emptive expectation of the media that this study will find that there has been an ‘explosion’ of human primates who are causing all manner of ecological disasters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is an exercise in dressing up the trendy prejudice that the planet is swarming with too many people in some pseudo-scientific garb. It’s a search for serious-sounding Facts, with a capital F, with which the Malthusians marauding through the corridors of power and influence might make their prejudices sound a bit more profound and a little less prejudiced. I hope I’m wrong. But the signs aren’t good.

The rise and rise of neo-Malthusianism is one of the most depressing trends of our age. It captures, above all, the severe lack of social and cultural and political imagination today. In essence, influential people’s inability to imagine new ways of organising society, or new ways of delivering affluence and plenty to humankind, leads them to view all problems as a consequence of there being limited, finite resources and too many bloody human beings hoovering them up. Miserabilist mathematics takes the place of social experimentation and debate. In truth, the real problem today is the limits that have been imposed on human thinking and ambition, the sustainability-obsessed straitjacket we have all been forced in to. Once we wriggle free from these intellectual handcuffs, who knows, we might find that there is no limit to how many people we can have on this planet, or to how full and free and satisfying their lives can be.

The rise and rise of the Champagne Malthusians
spiked’s editor joined the population-control lobby in a posh church in London as they quaffed ‘luxury’ drinks and fretted about overbreeding.

Spoiler :

In March 1933, the International Birth Control Movement held a Malthusian Ball in London. In the opulent surroundings of the five-star Dorchester Hotel, the great and the good gathered to discuss the problem of poor people’s breeding, the ‘Negro issue’, the best way to promote ‘family planning’, and other burning Malthusian dilemmas. All while decked out in diamonds, gowns and tuxedos, doing the foxtrot and clinking their champagne glasses as they mulled over how best to stop the lower specimens of humanity from getting knocked up with such dumb abandon.

Last week I attended a modern-day equivalent of the Malthusian Ball. It was in the luxurious crypt of St Pancras Church in Euston rather than at the Dorchester and there was no dancing this time. But we were invited to drink ‘luxury Belgian beer from champagne flutes’ and to peruse £1,500 paintings depicting ‘teeming crowds’ as we debated the ‘population problem’. The attendees were more casually dressed than their 1933 forebears - no floor-draping dresses - but once again, in between sips from champagne glasses, men and women with pronunciation far more received than mine gathered to fret over how humankind is spreading like a ‘cancer’ (their word).

Sponsored by Deus, ‘the luxury Belgian beer’, and supported by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), the posh population-control lobby, the Malthusian knees-up kicked off with a ‘debate’ inside St Pancras Church itself. It felt entirely fitting to be plonked in a pew surrounded by Christian paraphernalia while listening to angry men say things like ‘we’re doomed’ (Roger Martin of the OPT) and ‘I am disgusted and sickened’ (Aubrey Manning OBE). Just as the original population scaremonger, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), issued warnings about sex and procreation and too many dirt-poor people from a pulpit, so these modern-day Malthusians described human beings as ‘environment trashers’ in hallowed surroundings, too. Same , different church.

Of course when I say it started with a ‘debate’, I don’t mean a debate. The only disagreement between the six panellists was whether the ‘population bomb’ is still ticking or has been temporarily defused. All agreed that there is a thing called a ‘population bomb’ - such a swell of sweaty human beings that everything might one day explode and cause environmental apocalypse on a Mad Maxian scale. When the chairman asked if anyone in the audience (about 200 people) thought population growth wasn’t a problem, only two people put their hands up. One was me. And the other one, when he spoke, turned out to be quite concerned about population growth after all. So it was just me then, hand aloft, being stared at by a churchful of Malthusians, a bit like if a chimney sweep had wandered into that 1933 Ball.

The similarities and differences between the Malthusian Ball 80 years ago and last week’s luxury beer-drenched ‘debate’ are striking. The key similarity is that both the old tiara-wearing Malthusians and the tiara-less ones today can only understand humanity’s problems in biological terms. Lacking any grasp of how society works - or more to the point how it doesn’t work sometimes - they instead see all crises as the fault of individual licentiousness and breeding. And possessed of such a deep pessimism that they can only conceive of mankind as pillager of the Earth rather than creator of things and ideas, they have a childlike view of the planet as a larder of limited resources that we are greedily hoovering up.

Then and now, the fatal flaw of Malthusianism is that it views social problems, like poverty and unemployment, as failings on the part of the individual. So it’s not because economic affairs are badly organised that some people are unemployed – it’s because some dozy women 18 years ago had too many children and now their newly adult sons and daughters are competing for jobs in an overcrowded market. It’s not because society has skewed priorities that some people around the world go hungry – it’s because very poor African women have too many kids (five-ish, compared to 1.9 in the UK) and these little black babies’ demand for food outstrips how much food exists.

Obsessed with the idea of limited resources and the insatiable greed of men, Malthusians’ only solution is to save resources by reducing the number of men. A progressive possessed of a social outlook looks at the problems facing mankind and says (in a nutshell) ‘we need more stuff’ – a Malthusian looks at them and says ‘we need fewer people’. Their belief that all the world’s problems are caused by there being Too Many People has not only been proved unfounded again and again (we have continually discovered new and improved ways to make and distribute resources), but it also inevitably makes them misanthropic. Those who think human numbers can continue rising should remember that ‘unremitting growth is the doctrine of the cancer cell’, said Professor John Guillebaud in St Pancras Church, capturing well the Malthusians’ view of humanity as a virus on Gaia’s person.

Yet there are differences, too, between yesteryear’s Malthusians and today’s. For a start they no longer refer to themselves as Malthusians. The only person who used the M-word during last week’s debate was me, much to the irritation of the 200, er, Malthusians. They’re extremely careful about what they say. Where the May 1933 edition of Birth Control Review, which reported on that year’s Malthusian Ball, openly said that ‘to get a strong and healthy nation it is essential that we breed from the right stocks’ (1), today’s Malthusians won’t even utter the phrase ‘population control’. ‘Can we all agree not to use those two words’, said Professor Guillebaud. ‘Because this is not about control.’

‘Helping the poor’, ‘female empowerment’, ‘choice’ – today’s Malthusians sound more like feminists than imperialists. Yet there’s something creepily disingenuous in their use of the language of rights. The Malthusians’ adoption of a PC lingo is a cynical attempt to overcome some massive historic embarrassments. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Malthusianism was tightly tied up with Empire, eugenics, even with Nazism. The discrediting of those racist projects dealt a heavy blow to the population-control lobby and its ideas about superior races and inferior over-breeders (the Malthusian Ball was designed to raise funds to help ‘develop interest in birth control in the Far East, especially India’) (2). In the mid- to late twentieth century, redfaced Malthusians desperate to distance themselves from their super-shady past started to talk about ‘family planning’ rather than ‘population control’ and ‘female empowerment in the developing world’ rather than ‘spreading the propaganda and practice of birth control among the nations that most need it’ (as the 1933 Birth Control Review more honestly put it).

Yet beneath the PC veneer, there lurk many of the same ideas, and much of the same disingenuousness. I absolutely support the right of women in the developed and developing worlds to have as many or as few children as they choose, and to have access to contraception and abortion services as and when they need them. Yet what the Malthusians are offering women has nothing to do with rights or choice. Already they were starting to use this language in 1933, when the Birth Control Review argued that the funds from the Malthusian Ball would guarantee ‘the rights of the millions of poor and struggling women’ (2), and now things have come full circle with Professor Guillebaud saying last week that it is ‘plain wrong to coerce people [in the Third World]’.

Yet when you promote ‘family planning’ on the basis that too many children will ‘destroy biodiversity’, on the basis that women are spawning ‘environment trashers’, on the basis that ‘we are doomed’ if women keep on breeding irresponsibly, on the basis that our offspring, little more than a species of ‘ape’, will do ‘sick and disgusting’ things to the Earth (all direct quotations from last week’s Malthusian get-together), then you’re not giving women a choice – you’re giving them an ultimatum: ‘Stop breeding or the planet gets it.’ You are polluting their decision-making universe with your own prejudices, using the politics of fear to get them to make the ‘right choices’. That is coercion. And whether you’re doing it in order to create a ‘strong and healthy nation’, as in 1933, or to ‘protect biodiversity’, as in 2010, the result is the same: women’s freedom of choice is undermined, and ordinary people are branded with the blame for what are in fact social problems.

‘Eros has triumphed [and] Gaia is exhausted’, said the programme for last week’s suicidal shindig in London. Who could possibly think that was a bad thing, the triumph of the god of sex and beauty over the green god Gaia and its constant demands for sacrifice and self-denial? Only a Malthusian, the kind of person who fears the masses enjoying a little bit of Eros because it might just create another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another arse to wipe.

All in all, Brian O'Neill argues that Malthusians have always said that there are too many people, and they have always been shown to be wrong. He seems to be of the idea that more humans have always meant more development, and with our ingenuity we will find ways to overcome any possible problems. After all, we have always done so in the past. Furthermore, he seems to think that any push for family planning or womens choice or education in developing countries, if such a push originates in a desire to stop the population boom, is immoral, and is a form of coercion.

While I agree with O'Neill that more people means more ideas and faster development, I do not agree with what I see as his assumption of limitless resources. There may live an extreme concentration of comfortable people in Manhattan, something that was unthinkable a few hundred years ago, and people in developing countries are getting better and better lives, even though there are becoming even more and more humans on this planet.

But I also see the reports of how we are depleting our resources: How the fisheries are expended, how soil erosion limit the amount of arable land, how our modern lives require an increasing amount of cheap energy, that will dwindle as peak oil is approaching and passing, how fresh water sources are shrinking, and how phosphorus deposits are shrinking, to name a few.

I do not see that we are able to keep the modern, western way of life and bring all humans up to this standard, while increasing the amount of people on this planet. I don't even think we are going to be able to keep the modern, western way of life while not getting people in the developing world up to this standard.

And I do not share O'Neill's confidence in our ability to find replacement resources and technologies that will enable us to pass the coming Malthusian catastrophe.

So, I guess that is what I think.

Anyone else?

 

[Trev]

I am of the belief that we haave not yet overpopulated the planet and that growth in numbers of humans will not harm the wealth of society as a whole. That time may come, possibly when population doubles from now, but there is still immense capability to increase food production and other resources. Certainly in Australia, we could quadruple our food production easily if we used the resources available, particularly the water in our tropical regions, much land useful for agriculture is still unused and many rivers are not utilized for irrigation.
Increasing amounts of resources are being dedicated due to subsidies to biofuels very inefficiently and immorally, this effort should go to supplying more food for humankind. The effort required to grow biofuels and process it is so high it only marginally reduces coal and oil use. Wave and tidal energy in particularly should be used to replace coal and oil based energy resources, making hydrogen for a fuel source where electricity is not suitable.

 

[Integral]

Malthus' model was reasonably correct for the entire world up to about 1800. However, it's nigh-useless for studying the post-industrial period. A pity, really, that his model was developed at the same time that technological advance was starting to make it defunct!

As an idle question: aren't we going to hit net world zero population growth within forty years? I seem to recall this from somewhere.

 

[Tee Kay]

Malthus' model was reasonably correct for the entire world up to about 1800. However, it's nigh-useless for studying the post-industrial period.

The math is useless, the basic principles are still valid.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Bullcrap.

Sure the more people = more chance someone will come out and do something positive for humanity/help develop an area

... BUT

The more people means more poverty which means there is actually a less likelier chance someone will come out and help humanity/help develop areas.

Not to mention he is basing this entirely on the assumption that there is endless amount of natural resources which will never run out, which is obviously not the case.

Regarding Trev's post, Food is not the problem, we can produce more food. (Although we will eventually get a huge problem when most decent land for growing food becomes an eroded landscape incapable of providing food) The problem is resources, Poor countries want to achieve Western Standards, and Western Standards mean consummation of lots and lots of resources. The planet already can't handle us in the Americas, Europe, Australia and East Asia. If we added another two billion Indians, Africans and Indonesians the world is doomed unless we in the west change our ways.

As an idle question: aren't we going to hit net world zero population growth within forty years? I seem to recall this from somewhere.

Probably, but it won't be due to natural causes, it will be do to the Environmental collapse in most countries of the world leading to war, genocide, famine, disease among other things. Basically Rwanda all over the world, and as things are today, it is inevitable.

 

[JerichoHill]

I agree in that overpopulation as a concern isn't in the top 5, possibly 10, things we as society should be bothered with. Economic development tends to reduce birthrates.

It best to get out of the way of the train coming at you than worry about the storm that could hit in 30 minutes.

@Integral - National Geographic

 

[Tee Kay]

The more people means more poverty

Not necessarily. A too small working population can be a problem too.

Not to mention he is basing this entirely on the assumption that there is endless amount of natural resources which will never run out, which is obviously not the case.

 

[Integral]

The math is useless, the basic principles are still valid.

Well, no, not really.

What we call the 'Malthusian model' has a few reasonably specific predictions. One is that the wage rate and standard of living should be negatively related to the population level.

But does this hold? Well it did for a long time, but not so much now:


The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed things. Now outside the developed world, you could quite easily make a compelling case that the Malthusian trap still holds.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Not necessarily. A too small working population can be a problem too.

Which is caused by poverty in the first place.

And as Malthasus said, Poverty means more People which means more Poverty. It's a vicious vicious circle aimed to bite you in the butt, it sucks yes.

Historically, natural causes dealt with overpopulation quite easily, with famines, diseases and war.

Today, we make food producing more productive, not to mention Western "Aid" (which is actually making things worse IMO), diseases with modern day healthcare don't happen and we are don't have wars anymore. So Overpopulation is a problem.

What happened to societies that got overpopulated and could not sustain itself, and where natural causes couldn't stop it?

Ancient Times example: Anasazi of Northern Mexico
Middle Times Example: Easter Island
Modern Times example: Rwanda and Burundi

Make the conclusions from there.

edit: In Rwanda and Burundi, natural causes (war) did stop it. I'm wrong there.

 

[Hakim]

I believe this is the original article by O'Neill:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7723/

 

[warpus]

I am of the belief that we haave not yet overpopulated the planet and that growth in numbers of humans will not harm the wealth of society as a whole.

Our natural resources are our wealth, and doubling the population of the planet would damage that greatly.

 

[Tee Kay]

TLO: all of those are non-industrialized societies. The rules are a bit different for industrialized ones. Just as agriculture allowed us to support larger population so has the Industrial Revolution wreck havoc with the classic Malthusian model.

On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution didn't give immunity either since people still have limited resources, and still vulnerable to environmental mismanagement (actually, some of the examples from Collapse are really issues of mismanagement.)

 

[TheLastOne36]

TLO: all of those are non-industrialized societies. The rules are a bit different for industrialized ones. Just as agriculture allowed us to support larger population so has the Industrial Revolution wreck havoc with the classic Malthusian model.

On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution didn't give immunity either since people still have limited resources, and still vulnerable to environmental mismanagement (actually, some of the examples from Collapse are really issues of mismanagement.)

What the Industrial Revolution has done is move the problem away from public eyes.

America and Europe are lucky to be located in such rich agricultural lands, the pending world collapse will not be having a huge effect on America and Europe other than the fact we will not be able to have so many material possessions.

None of the problems we will be facing have to do with limited resources, but more to mismanagement as you said. Only difference is that back then, they didn't know any better, we do now.

 

[JohnRM]

Of course. Our economic system is the cause of our economic and social problems.

 

[Cheetah]

Economic development tends to reduce birthrates.

Economic development also tends to increase the amount of resources consumed per person.

While I see economic development as a good thing, and I believe the progress in developing countries is slowing down and eventually stopping the population growth, by then we will easily be 9 billion people, all of which would like to have the living standard of a person in the USA.

There is no way we have the electricity, the oil, the meat, the fish, the copper, the phosphorus, the fresh water, the timber and all the other things that will be needed to satisfy all those people.

By then we will have two options:
1. Forced redistribution of goods.
2. Free-market distribution of goods.

(1) will be impossible as billions of people would object to their goods being taken away - and populations in the richest and most powerful countries would never allow it.

(2) will mean that those who are rich enough will be able to procure the wanted goods, and those who aren't will not even get the needed resources.

I can not see how we can avoid a future situation where lots and lots of poor people are dieing. My guess is that we will fall from a world population close to 9 billion and down to 5 billion, with a lot of destroyed ecosystems as a bonus.

 

[Integral]

Though don't forget -- the history of humanity is the history of lots and lots of poor people dying.

I mean, sustained economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon after all.

 

[GoodGame]

Nit: to start with the word "overpopulation" immediately suggests that there is a problem. So to label a study as "prejudice" when it starts with the word "overpopulation" then I'd say that's a correct value judgement.

That said, investigating the impact of never-before-seen population growth is important. We have to assume that the ecology is like a giant biochemical pathway that can be broken if overloaded on some side of the equation.

EDIT: I do like the examples the critical article makes: of China more populated yet relatively better off (politics and civil rights ignored); and Africa having problems that are largely social dynamics, not population/resources.

But still those ignore the biological aspects.

 

[TheLastOne36]

EDIT: I do like the examples the critical article makes: of China more populated yet relatively better off (politics and civil rights ignored); and Africa having problems that are largely social dynamics, not population/resources.

We will see how China is doing 20 years from now when alot of their farmland becomes eroded, and their environment is destroyed.

The "better off-ness" is only a bubble.

 

[Agarwaen]

Human societies respond population pressures with new form of organization and technology.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Human societies respond population pressures with new form of organization and technology.

Best answered in Picture form: