The population problem

By Robert S. Sargent, Jr.
web posted October 10, 2005

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the1970s, the world will
undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to
starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon
now. Dr. Paul Erlich, The Population Bomb, 1968.

…it is probable that by the year 2000 each of the major world
regions will have a population growth rate that either is zero or is
easily within the capacity of its expanding economy to support.
Donald J. Bogue, The End of the Population Explosion, from
The Public Interest, 1967.

We all know who got all the attention and adoration: the wrong
prognosticator. Since we know this, one would think that the
debate would be over, yet alarms are still sounding loud and
clear.

Dr. Neal G. Lineback is currently Professor Emeritus of
Geography at Appalachian State University in North Carolina.
He writes a column (Geography in the News) on geography
which is read in the classrooms of over 6,000 schools
worldwide. His columns also appear in newspapers, including
our local Transylvania Times, where I read him. Recently he
wrote a column titled: "6.5 Billion and Counting."

A summary of his article might be that the world's population has
grown in the past and continues to grow and we need to think
about some of the problems this entails. Nothing wrong with that
except that one of the assumptions one makes from the article is
that the population will continue to grow at the alarming rates in
the future as it has in the past.

For example, in his first paragraph he wrote: "…the population
has continued to spiral upward at an exponential rate." Later he
shows how each new billion milestone has come at an ever
shorter time period. And again, citing Thomas Malthus (the 19th
century political economist), he wrote: "Of course, Malthus was
correct in his prediction of an exponential increase in population."
One more: "…the earth's population is now growing at nearly
81,000,000 people per year." Even though Lineback doesn't
predict the future rate, what is a person, especially a child, going
to infer but that the population is going to continue to rise at the
same rate as in the past.

Let's go back to 1968 when Dr. Erlich wrote the infamous "The
Population Bomb." If we were to gather a bunch of experts at
the time and ask them what could happen to prevent Erlich's
population explosion prediction, there might be several answers:
a world war that killed billions of people, or perhaps a new
disease that would kill off billions before we could invent a cure.
Or, better yet, somehow bring down the fertility rate. (The total
fertility rate, TFR is the average number of babies born to
women during their reproductive years.)

According to the United Nations Population Division, the TFR of
the world in 1965-1970 was 6.1. Since the rate at which the
population will neither rise nor fall is considered 2.1, this rate
was indeed alarming. But gollee, by 1985-90, this rate had fallen
to 3.9. And, gosh, by 2000 it had fallen to an astonishing 2.8.
And according to the United States Census Bureau, the world's
TFR will fall to 2.3 by 2025. Now the United Nations "World
Population Prospects" estimates that by 2050 the population
growth will level off and by next century begin actually falling. So
whatever the world had to do to solve this "population
explosion," it did it, and continues to do it as each year the TFR
falls further than projections. We've had 35 years of falling
TFRs, but not one word about fertility rates in Mr. Lineback's
article.

What's wrong with this omission? From the same article written
by Donald Bogue as quoted above, he wrote: "It is quite
possible that nothing has sapped the morale of family planning
workers in the developing countries more than the Malthusian
pessimism that has been radiated by many demographic reports."
Another wrong is just the plain false sense of reality it gives to
Lineback's readers.

Finally, why this omission? I can only speculate that people who
are "concerned" about issues, this one being the problems of a
growing worldwide population, and are "compassionate" about
trying to do something about it, see any good news as distracting
from the focus. But the focus is wrong. Instead of focusing on the
short term problems of what can we do in terms of food, health,
and economic development in developing countries still
experiencing a growing population, the focus becomes one of
what can we do about finding a solution to the rate of population
growth? The answer to the second question is "nothing." We're
doing it. It's the first question that Dr. Lineback should have
focused on, and there's the problem.

Robert S. Sargent, Jr. is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right
and can be reached at  rssjr@citcom.net.

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com