One of the growth industries of gloom is the population catastrophe crowd. For decades, this group has proclaimed that mankind is about to be done in by his own growth of numbers. There's just one thing wrong with the theory. It fails--miserably. Prediction after awful prediction slip into the gutters of human history.
The crux of the higher-population-is-bad argument is this. More people soak up more resources, eventually depleting them. That "should" cause mass starvation, warfare, disease, chaos. It sounds like something out of a bad Bible-thumper's sermon.
Reason and investigation tell us something far more positive.
As the world's population soared from two billion to four and now to nearly six, the resources we were supposed to deplete got not scarcer, but more abundant.
One element of a proof of this is that resource prices, on the whole, have steadily fallen. In their monumental mid-80s work, The Resourceful Earth, Julian Simon and Herman Kahn catelogued the decline in detail. The update of their work, The Ultimate Resource, due out shortly, shows that the trend continues.
Because resources on a wide scale support human food production, you'd logically expect that falling resource prices would make possible a greater per capita abundance of food. So it does. It's not just a case of "Simon says." The information's been available for decades from a variety of sources.
For instance, The World Food Outlook published by the World Bank in the fall of 1994 concluded, "World food production has more than kept pace with population growth. [For instance in] the 1980s world cereals production increased by 2.1% per annum while population grew by 1.7%."
Despite such data, outfits like the World Watch Institute continue to spew out negative tomes about impending doom. The Cairo population conference a couple years back consisted of little else.
Why the ignorance and evasion of the positive evidence?
From my experience writing The Positive Economist Bulletin, I'd say it's due to several factors. The two most outstanding are:
Even where a little liberty is allowed, amazing things happen. For instance, semi-socialist India began liberalizing its economy bit-by-bit in the second half of this century and has now become a net exporter of food. Per capita calorie consumption has risen, but so have sales to overseas customers.
But isn't there a limit to human population? Won't we someday become overcrowded despite our best efforts? Not necessarily.
As knowledge of human resourcefulness has increased, so have credible estimates of the Earth's population carrying capacity. Estimates of 50 billion are not uncommon. Serious cases are made for over 100 billion--and these do not assume startling technical breakthroughs, only more studied application of present means (which are improving constantly).
Would there be less open space? Not necessarily. Undersea and underground construction, as well as high-rise technology, for instance, are advancing rapidly. While a minority of people don't like living in cities, about 80% of mankind chooses to do so. Hence, no great social upheaval is involved, just a continuation of trends.
Beyond all this, there is evidence that as populations become wealthier, they tend to naturally limit their increases. You'd not know so from the doomers, but fertility rates are already below population maintenance in most highly industrialized nations. Only immigration and life-extension techniques allow those populations to slowly rise. As the nations from where the immigrants come begin to slow their population growth (as is happening), a good case can b e made that world population will stabilize on its own at somewhere around eight or ten billion.
Overpopulation worries are way overblown. The catastrophists are wrong, because they are not being objective. They are not being objective because they are ignoring (or ignorant of) relevant information. It's one more indication of how terribly important it is not merely to reason and theorize, but to possess updated data to reason about.