And Baby Makes Seven Billion

By WILLIAM MCGURN

Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby. That's especially true when that baby is born to a mother somewhere in Africa or Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, some time this coming Monday, probably in India, the world will welcome its seven billionth person. Well, maybe welcome isn't exactly the right word.

At Columbia University's Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN "the consequences for humanity could be grim." Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared "the earth is full," suggesting that a growing population means "we are eating into our future." And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a "human swarm" that is "overbreeding" in a way that "prosperous, well-educated families" from the developed world do not.

The smarter ones acknowledge that Malthus's ominous warnings about a growing population outstripping the food supply were not borne out in his day. The track record for these scares in our own day is not much better. Perhaps the most famous was Paul Ehrlich's 1968 "The Population Bomb," which opened with these sunny sentences: "The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, 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."

The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of "triage" that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when "The Population Bomb" appeared.

The record, alas, doesn't seem to matter. Like so many other articles on population, one in the New Yorker this month concedes that the predictions Malthus made "proved to be wrong." Like so many other articles too, it goes on to conclude that "the premise of [his] work—that there must be some limit to population growth—is hard to argue with."

The truth is that the main flaw in Malthus is precisely his premise. Malthusian fears about population follow from the Malthusian view that human beings are primarily mouths to be fed rather than minds to be unlocked. In this reasoning, when a pig is born in China, the national wealth is thought to go up, but when a Chinese baby is born the national wealth goes down.

Behind this divide between those who worry about limits put on human exchange and those who worry about limits to growth are two very different views of the human person. The former believe that so long as people are free to trade and use their talents, the more the merrier. The latter treat people as a great mass of more or less interchangeable cogs, hence the worries about "sustainability" and "carrying capacity" and the like.

This latter is a highly static view, one that grossly underestimates the power of an individual to improve life for millions. Perhaps the best example of that power is Norman Borlaug, whose scientific work introduced high-yield varieties of wheat and rice that helped farmers greatly increase their food production. In so doing, the "father of the Green Revolution" helped poor nations feed their people, and give the lie to all those predictions of hopelessness and starvation from Mr. Ehrlich and Co.

  The static view of the human person underestimates the dynamism of ordinary men and women going about their business in a free economy. The young people "occupying" Wall Street may decry capitalism, but societies open to risk and initiative and free exchange have always done better by the "99%" than those that do not. That is why a place like Hong Kong, with no natural resources, has prospered while many other countries rich in natural resources (some in Africa) have not.

Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," suggests that human progress is driven when people connect with one another and exchange ideas as well as goods. In our own day, he believes, this interaction has been accelerated by the revolution in technology that has made distance largely irrelevant. It's one reason he takes a generally benevolent view of population growth.

In a line bound to seem extravagant to the doom and gloom set, he offers his own prediction: "I would go further and say that the mixing of ideas made possible by the Internet makes the drying up of innovations almost impossible to achieve, even if we wanted to, and the improvement in living standards almost inevitable."

In short, it all comes down to your conception of the human person. Another way of putting it is this: Instead of looking for ways to reduce the number of people at the banquet of life, we would do better to look for ways to lay a better and more bounteous table.

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The More, the Better As Europe and Asia become 'veritable old-age homes,' the U.S. will enjoy the benefits of a growing population. March 24, 2010 WSJ

By NICK SCHULZ A gloomy mood might seem to be justified at the moment. Unemployment is nearing 10%. We have just witnessed a bitter financial crisis, a series of debt-deepening bailouts and a bruising fight over health care. Conservatives fret that we're running out of time to tackle the entitlement crisis. Liberals fret that we're running out of time to tackle the climate crisis. Roughly 60% of poll respondents say that America is on the wrong track. Meanwhile, China has resumed its torrid economic growth and has become for the U.S. what Japan was in the 1980s—the seemingly unstoppable Asian force that will soon leave America's economy behind.

How to respond? "Declinists have always projected America's imminent demise," the editors of Newsweek wrote earlier this month. "For a change, they're onto something." Joel Kotkin would disagree. In fact, he is in a cheerful mood, in part because he has been thinking less about the present than about the near future, when the news, he says, is likely to be much brighter, at least for America.

"In stark contrast to its rapidly aging rivals," Mr. Kotkin writes in "The Next Hundred Million," "America's population is expected to expand dramatically in coming decades." He points to a slowly rising birth rate and to the continuing in-migration of young workers from poorer countries. Most of America's population growth between 2000 and 2050, he notes, "will be in its racial minorities, particularly Asians and Hispanics, as well as in a growing mixed-race population." No other developed country, he says, "will enjoy such ethnic diversity."

For Mr. Kotkin, population growth translates into economic vitality—the capacity to create wealth, raise the standard of living and meet the burdens of future commitments. Thus a country with a youthful demographic, in relative terms, enjoys a big advantage over its global counterparts. In the next four decades, Mr. Kotkin observes, "most of the developed countries in both Europe and Asia will become veritable old-age homes" because of stagnant population growth. And the economies of these countries, already devoted to a vast welfare-state apparatus, will face crushing pension obligations—but without the young workers to defray the cost.

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The Next Hundred Million By Joel Kotkin
Penguin Press, 308 pages, $25.95

Inevitably, Europe and Asia will decline, Mr. Kotkin predicts, and America will thrive. Indeed, the U.S. will emerge, he says, "as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history." What about the billion-person behemoth across the Pacific? Not to worry. Mr. Kotkin thinks that, by midcentury, China's one-child policy will cause it, too, to suffer from the burdens of an aging population.

If Mr. Kotkin is right about America's "next hundred million" people being the key to its happy destiny, where are these people going to live? In the suburbs, he believes—and why not? For most Americans, Mr. Kotkin writes, the suburbs represent "the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community." He adds that, even with one hundred million more people, the U.S. "will still be only one sixth as crowded as Germany." In short, there is lots of room to grow.

Mr. Kotkin's vision of America's next four decades—expanding, browning, adapting and thriving—is largely convincing. He's no Pollyanna, however. He worries especially that upward mobility is more difficult than it once was and that class polarization is a real possibility, because a knowledge economy like America's tends to widen class divisions. The result is "an expanding affluent class of the highly educated, a stubbornly impoverished population, and a shrinking middle class."

Here is one area where Mr. Kotkin might have said more. The collapse of the family in America's underclass persists—with more families than not headed by single mothers. Mr. Kotkin is delighted to report that the family in America is taking ever new shapes, adapting and "resurging" in different forms. This claim may well be true for the broad middle class. But in that stubbornly impoverished sector, the family isn't resurging at all. America's relatively high birthrate—a source of national strength generally, as Mr. Kotkin says—contains a large percentage of out-of-wedlock births. In some urban neighborhoods, the rate stands close to 70%. The most "successful nation in human history" still has some work to do.

Mr. Schulz is editor of American.com, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of "From Poverty to Prosperity" (Encounter, 2009).

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