Through some cosmic accident, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb," may have saved American power by sabotaging the rise of China. The trouble was, China listened to him. Early editions of the 1968 book began with this grim vision of an overpopulated world starving itself to death:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
As Charles Mann of the Smithsonian Magazine noted, Ehrlich's book caught a wave of paranoia that influenced public policy all around the world: "The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places."
Good timing carried "The Population Bomb" message far afield. Charles Rubin wrote that "it was precisely because Ehrlich was largely unoriginal and wrote in a clear emotionally gripping style that it became so popular. ... Ehrlich ... roars 'like an Old Testament Prophet' ... on the Johnny Carson Show." The world was ready for a prophet and he was it. Just how far afield his message carried in popular culture is demonstrated by the success of the 1973 science fiction movie "Soylent Green" based on the theme of overpopulation. It won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film.
Draconian population control became the cause of the day, much like Climate Change is now. Fortunately for the world, population control proponents were wrong and many countries lacked the fanatical single-mindedness to be seduced by the ideology to sufficiently damage themselves. But Mao's Red Empire was the exception. It possessed, among 20th-century states, the means and the monomania capable of reversing centuries of Chinese preference for large families and replacing it with a program of killing children long after the public sensed its destructiveness. Through a combination of coercion, contraception, abortion, and female infanticide, China curbed its population and deformed its demographics. By the time the error was conceded the damage was done. The Guardian ruefully noted:
China’s population will begin to shrink .. By 2050 as much as a third of the country’s population will be made up of people over the age of 60, putting severe strain on state services and the children who bear the brunt of caring for elderly relatives.
Worse, like some hapless driver who finds his transmission stuck in reverse, Mao's heirs have found there was no easy way to put the population in Drive again. "China's population fell for a second consecutive year in 2023, as a record low birth rate .. the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million ... well above the population decline of 850,000 in 2022, which had been the first since 1961 during the Great Famine of the Mao Zedong era."
The geopolitical consequences of China's demographic collapse are potentially profound. "China has for decades reaped the economic dividends that came with having a young workforce to fuel China’s emergence as a global industrial powerhouse. Now, the number of Chinese retirees will soon skyrocket, reducing the size of China’s workforce and putting pressure on China’s social safety net and healthcare system." By the 22nd century, China's population may only be 70% of its current value and the ratio of elderly to working-age population will be double that of the US.
The 21st century, commonly thought to be China's century, may yet be denied to it by a falling population, though this is by no means certain given the still unknown capacity of automation and artificial intelligence to make up for shortages in manpower. But the experience of Japan, whose population is also in decline, is strongly suggestive. "Japan is the world’s laboratory for drawing policy lessons on aging, dwindling populations," an IMF article noted. The study concluded that while technology might blunt the effect of a shrinking and aging population it could not wholly overcome it.
The impact of an aging and shrinking population is already visible in everything from economic and financial performance to the shape of cities and public policy priorities (such as the long-term solvency of public pension, health care, and long-term care systems).
With demographics having such a clear and accelerating impact, Japan is the test kitchen for “shrinkonomics”—a laboratory from which other countries are beginning to draw lessons..
If anyone deserves a medal for saving Biden's bacon it might just be Ehrlich. But Japan's fate — with China hard behind — is a warning to the rest of the world about what may lie ahead. As Glenn Reynolds wrote in the New York Post, "fewer people are being born; in most countries outside Africa, nations (including the United States) are not producing enough people to replace the ones dying. ... The world was doing OK with 3 or 4 billion people before, so why should we worry having that few people again?"
The trouble is 4 billion people on the way up is a very different population from 4 billion on the way down. The former was young and dynamic, with productivity increasing and risk-taking popular. The latter will be older, probably with a lower appetite for risk, and becoming less productive as it ages further. Some nations are already trying, with limited success, to encourage people to have more children. Others are relying on immigration, though if your native population is shrinking as immigrants pour in, it starts to look less like reinforcements and more like replacement.
The current crisis at the US border, reenacted at every Western frontier, is the aftermath of the Population Dud. Empty countries are being swarmed by the teeming outside. It is perhaps apt that the cultural role of the 1973 film "Soylent Green" should now be filled by the 2006 movie "Children of Men." "The film is set in 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Asylum seekers seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom." Unexpectedly a refugee is found who "is pregnant, making her the only known pregnant woman in the world [and the protagonists intend] to take her to the Human Project, a scientific research group in the Azores dedicated to curing humanity's infertility." Our fear of eating each other has given way to the terror of dying with no progeny.
We have gone full circle from "Soylent Green." In a way there was a population bomb, but not the one that Ehrlich predicted on Johnny Carson. The real bomb blew up a century of materialism that had accustomed Western civilization to think of the great unwashed as "useless eaters", the unnützer Esser who hang upon the coattails of the geniuses of the world.
Who could have foreseen that during the information revolution of the next century, we should come to regard this same dross as human capital, the major and perhaps only real source of creative wealth in history? Well, Elon Musk for one when he famously remarked that "if we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts." Perhaps Musk will be proved right. We can leave producing things to the robots and leave life to what it does best before and after us: to multiply, to think, and to dream.
