FROM OVERPOPULATION TO DEPOPULATION: HUMANITY ALWAYS THE PROBLEM

National Review

 

An Enduring, Terribly Misguided Conceit

By NOAH ROTHMAN

September 18, 2023 4:19 PM

 

Dean Spears, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, penned a piece for the New York Times that its editors apparently found so enlightening they augmented it with flashy graphics.

 

“Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth,” Spears argues. Apparently, though, the author felt the need to guide his readers toward the conclusion that the “unprecedented decline” of the human species would be undesirable. “It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment,” he ill-advisedly concedes. Well, at least Spears is prepared to educate Times readers about the benefits associated with human output and innovation, right? Wrong. Sadly, the author wrote, “the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems.” The biggest problem with humanity’s retreat is that we’re just not going to be dying out fast enough.

 

The author doesn’t make a fetish of depopulation — indeed, he’s outright hostile to it. But Spears rules out encouraging natalism insofar as that approach might infringe on “reproductive freedoms.” It would be nice if “one in every four pairs of American adults would choose to have one more child,” but the author seems resigned to the reality that more and more couples will not prioritize procreation. “Low birthrates are no reason to reverse progress toward a more free, diverse, and equal world,” Spears observes. All the author appears to advocate is “a call to start a conversation now” about the industrialized world’s inevitable thinning out. The most we can allow ourselves to hope for our children is a comfortable, managed decline.

 

“Waiting until the population peaks to ask how to respond to depopulation would be as imprudent as waiting until the world starts to run out of fossil fuels to begin responding to climate change,” Spears assures his readers. “Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.”

 

Readers encounter only fleeting hints of skepticism over the claim that human population will peak at around 10 billion in the year 2085 before declining rapidly — only to settle out at levels unseen since the Bronze Age. That’s what “all of the predictions agree on,” Spears insists. Given the saturation-level coverage provided by the Times and other outlets to theorists like Paul Ehrlich and his bunk theory of overpopulation, one would think some healthy incredulity would be warranted here. Overpopulation and its Malthusian remedy, population control, are responsible for some of the worst eugenicist abuses mankind has witnessed since World War II. Those abuses stemmed from one terribly misguided conceit — that humanity was the problem.

 

Spears’s assumptions appear to spring from the same fallacious notion. But the theory says much more about the theorist than it does about mankind or our relationship to our environment.