Tag Archive for: Paul Ehrlich

The Population Crash

In 1968,  Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book extrapolating global population growth data to predict a catastrophe as humanity’s demand for resources outstripped supply. The book became a bestseller and catapulted Ehrlich to worldwide fame. But today, just over a half-century later, humanity faces a different challenge. We are in the early stages of a population crash.

Ehrlich’s basic math wasn’t necessarily flawed. In 1968, the world population was 3.5 billion, and today the total number of humans has more than doubled to just over 8 billion. Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential growth can appreciate that if human population doubles every 50 years, within only a few millennia, an unchecked ball of human flesh would be expanding in all directions into the universe at the speed of light. Which means, at some point, Malthusian checks will apply.

But where extrapolation yielded panic, reality has delivered something completely different. Today population growth is leveling off almost everywhere on earth, and the cause of that decline started, ironically, back in the 1960s when Ehrlich wrote his book. The reasons for this are subtle, because the only ultimate determinant of population growth is the average number of children a generation of women are having, and the impact of that and other variables take decades to play out.

In the late 1960s, the United States, along with most Western nations, had just moved out of its baby boom years, that period from 1946 through 1964, when women were still having lots of babies. Having grown up during the Great Depression, followed by a world war, the choice to have large families may have been a response to the adversity these women and men experienced as they came of age. That theory is borne out by subsequent history.

Over the past 50 years, in a pattern that has been repeated around the world, as prosperity increased, the average number of children per woman of childbearing age has decreased. The chart below provides hard evidence of this correlation. Tracking data per nation, the vertical axis is the average number of children per woman. The horizontal axis is the median income. A clear pattern emerges. In extremely poor nations, birth rates remain at Ehrlichesque levels. But once a nation’s median income rises barely above poverty, at around $5,000 per year, the average number of children per woman drops below replacement level.

One may view this chart and conclude that if an average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to keep a population stable, this cluster of nations averaging around 1.5 children per woman can’t be that bad. But that reasoning ignores basic math. At a replacement rate of 1.5 per woman, for every 1 million people of childbearing age living in a nation today, there will only be 420,000 great-grandchildren. This means that nation’s population will drop to 42 percent of what it is today in less than a century. And the numbers get worse very fast.

South Korea’s current fertility per woman, for example, is a dismal 0.81, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 66,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

This collapse is just now becoming apparent in overall population numbers because it is only when a numerically superior older generation, the product of fecundity, begins to die that absolute totals begin to drop. As baby boomers, known to demographers as the “pig in the python,” reach the end of their lifespans, the consequences of the decade decline in birth rates will finally be reflected in dramatic downward shifts in total population. That process is already underway.

In China, a nation that enforced a “one child” policy from 1979 until 2015, absolute population decline has begun. With a current fertility rate of 1.3 (possibly lower, estimates vary), China’s population peaked in 2021 at 1.4 billion and is projected to decline to possibly as low as 488 million by the end of this century. This decline is exacerbated by the fact that among China’s youth, men outnumber women by about 120 to 100, thanks to “illegal gender selection” that was widespread during the one-child era.

In the United States and most Western nations, the solution to collapsing birth rates has been to import people. To pursue this policy to its ultimate conclusion is to replace Americans of European descent—along with Asian Americans and Latino Americans—with African migrants, insofar as the Sub-Saharan nations of Africa remain in desperate poverty and hence retain skyrocketing, youthful populations. And to be clear, this is merely a statement of demographic fact based on current data.

Data also indicates that once migrants arrive in America and other prosperous nations within a generation, they too experience crashing fertility rates. This means that importing people into prosperous nations does not solve a nation’s demographic challenges, it only postpones that reckoning. Meanwhile, a new problem arises as these developed countries can only maintain economic stability if they ensure the African countries they are using as human “farms” never escape desperate poverty (e.g. their average income never rises above $5,000 a year).

These are the challenges posed by post-prosperity population collapse in any nation that successfully rises out of poverty. There are three choices: Either go extinct within the next century, buy some time by replacing your own citizens with foreigners from poverty-stricken nations, or figure out how to convince women in prosperous societies to have more children.

Lifeboats to Survive a Post-Crash World

While the severity of the looming population collapse in developed nations is plain to see and beyond serious debate among demographers, it remains virtually ignored by politicians and the media. This doesn’t mean there aren’t private citizens who have decided to do something about it. Earlier this month, I spoke with Malcolm Collins. He and his wife Simone are using a fortune they earned as technology entrepreneurs to help support people who want larger families. His observations help illuminate the underlying reasons why prosperity correlates with low fertility, and he begins to offer strategies to reverse the trend.

American Greatness:  When did you first become aware of population collapse?

Malcolm Collins: Back in 2015, I was working as a [venture capitalist] in South Korea and modeling their economic conditions. I realized that they were facing a 95 percent drop in population within the next century. There was no 50-year timeline to predict for the South Korean economy, because there won’t be a country in 50 to 60 years.

Coming back to the U.S. was like coming back in time to bring two messages from the future. One, it will not fix itself. Nobody has systemically reversed the decline. And two, even when it is incredibly severe, nobody panics because it isn’t immediately obvious. Fertility collapse leads to more fertility collapse, and then you have population collapse. China is within 10 years of getting crazy; they could go full Handmaid’s Tale to cope.

AG:  What do you mean when you say the leveraged growth economic model that nations have relied upon for the last 75 years is dead?

MC:  Let’s say you make a $10 investment, and $2 is equity and $8 is debt. If that investment’s value grows by 20 percent, you have doubled your money. But if the investment just shrinks by 10 percent, you have lost half your money. The reason why our economy has grown is that worker quantity has gone up exponentially and productivity has gone up arithmetically. If the population declines exponentially then we will deal with an economy that is declining on average with brief moments of uptick, which is the exact opposite of what we’ve had for the last 75 years.

AG:  Can artificial intelligence make up for the loss of an expanding workforce?

MC:  A.I. is as likely to kill us as solve all our problems. Most of the people familiar with A.I. developments are A.I. apocalypticists. Best case, A.I. will replace units in the economy. It might allow us to add units the same way the Fed adds dollars.

AG:  So when we discuss demographics, A.I. is the elephant in the room?

MC:  There are a lot of elephants in the room. We could talk all day about endocrine disruptors and their impact on fertility.

AG:  In Peter Ziehan’s recent bookThe End of the World is Just the Beginning, he claims North America will escape most of the problems coming to the rest of the world. Do you agree?

MC:  North America will come out differentially well, but it will still be much worse off than it is today. America will have more power and will consolidate power, but the average American will have a quarter of what they did. Globalization was amazing for us, we bought cell phones that were manufactured overseas by workers making 10 cents per hour. What is essentially slavery all over the world has enabled us to live well for the last 50 years. It’s going to be like Byzantium when Rome fell. The Byzantines were better off than the Romans, but they were still worse off than they’d been.

AG:  What are the primary causes of a post-prosperity population crash?

MC:  It is most correlated to wealth and gender equality. In earlier eras, another kid was another hand in the factory or helper on the farm. Today, especially in urban environments, every individual kid no longer adds incrementally to a person’s quality of life. Today you need an exogenous motivator to have kids, such as religion or ethnic pride.

The other core reason is we have structured our economy to organically milk every individual worker for the maximum productivity they can provide, and we don’t think long-term. A free market economy organically determines what it needs to pay someone to get them to not spend time with their family or their spouse; it naturally selects the minimum amount to pay to get the maximum amount of time.

When we look at the data, there is no intrinsic reason to have two kids or more, only exogenous reasons. What is relevant to us as pronatalists is the people that want to have big families. If you have one-third of the population having no kids, which is about typical in developed nations, and one-third only having two kids, then the final one-third has to have four kids or more for the population to stay stable.

AG: Can you describe the process whereby nations (mostly African) in poverty may lower their birth rates?

MC: If you look at the African immigrant community, you see what you see in the rest of the world. Once they arrive in prosperous nations, their birth rates drop. As for the remaining high-fertility African nations, either they become prosperous and begin rapidly depopulating, or they will remain in poverty and become irrelevant as the developed world begins collapsing and no longer invests in them in order to extract resources. To the extent Africans come to the U.S. and do keep a high birth rate, they will be conservative Christians. They may become the biggest defenders of Christianity.

AG:  Coming back then to the developed world,  you have used the term “sterilizing mimetic packages.” What does that mean?

MC:  Mimetics is how we look at ideas and concepts as evolving entities. Mimetic packages coevolved with humans and became symbiotic. They positively modified human fitness. For example, across religious traditions, you see arbitrary denial rituals such as Lent. Every culture has an immune system to protect people from sterilizing mimetic viruses, but when you go out today and look at the modern Unitarian Universalists, Progressive Reform Jews, or feminists—scratch beneath the surface, they all hold the same views and values about the world. This was not true 30 years ago. They have been hollowed out by the virus.

AG:  What do you mean by “the virus.”

MC:  What happened is our culture, in academia and social media, now confronts an alliance of movements that are all the same religion beneath the surface. Some call it wokeism, but that understates the scale of the forces arrayed against us. It is difficult to fight. This alliance of movements has created what is analogous to a hospital that has evolved a superbug, a mimetic virus that infects humans and convinces them that all they should do with their lives is spread the mimetic virus of wokeism, and signal to others how infected they are. People may think of the virus as wokeism although the sterilizing effect it has is more complicated than that.

In the past mimetic sects used to just burn heretics at the stake, but the presence of wokeism is so pervasive that if it is stopped in one place, the virus starts rerouting itself to the remaining nodes within a network. If one node falls prey to an antivirus, the other nodes just disconnect. To stop the superbug we face today, you have to cut once and cut deep, everywhere.

AG:  How will some people and groups escape this and how do we avoid what you have referred to as “authoritarian population clusters” being a consequence of that?

MC:  People who are resistant to sterilizing mimetic packages are usually people who have more of a propensity to dehumanize people different from themselves and outside beliefs they don’t immediately share. They have an intrinsic disgust reaction to people who aren’t part of their cultural unit. This prevents them from being deconverted, i.e., infected with values that contradict their belief—typically either faith-based or tribal—in traditional families and childbearing. Our challenge is to help communities and cultures develop an immunity to the woke supervirus without having to rely on the dehumanizing extremes that have evolved over millennia as a survival mechanism.

AG: What are you doing to create clusters of above replacement communities?

MC: We have to create a new culture. Our goal is to experiment with this. Can it be done? The answer is maybe. So far, nobody has ever created a birth rate stable multicultural system in a post-prosperity world.

Ways to Increase Birth Rates

The concept of exponential growth easily quantifies just how decisively a single cluster of high-birth-rate individuals can change the population trajectory of the world. With three children already born, and dozens of healthy frozen embryos waiting for activation, Malcolm and Simon Collins intend to have a large family. A very large family. And the math works, as he pointed out. If one family with eight children can spawn descendants that themselves all have eight children, after 11 generations—in less than 300 years—they would number 8.5 billion.

For this reason, Collins believes that over time, religious communities will again become the dominant demographic group in America and around the world. White evangelical Christians, an endangered and embattled minority in present-day America, will outbreed their progressive antagonists. This could be reflected in voting results within a generation. Within a century or two, based on current trends, devout Christians, along with devout Jews, may inherit the earth.

Collins was emphatic, however, that the message they are attempting to spread was not exclusionary. Their goal is to help people overcome the barriers to having children to preserve all cultures. South Korea is only one obvious example of population collapse. Within the United States, much smaller subcultures—for example, the many tribes of Native Americans already small in number—face population collapse.

The pronatalist organization the Malcolm and Simone Collins have established, with the unsubtle URL “pronatalist.org,” is devoted to making it easier for people to have children. The organization, still in its early stages of development, aims to offer resources on several fronts. They are working with partners to make reproductive technology more widely available, as well as egg and sperm donation and surrogacy. At the same time, they are engaging in fertility planning advocacy based on a concern that most women aren’t aware of how soon they should either bear children or freeze their eggs.

Pronatalist.org is also working to develop urban daycare programs based not only on a shortage of affordable daycare services but also the lack of high-trust institutions in cities. They are developing a “full stack” education system that will help rescue children from the sterilizing effects of public school indoctrination while building high-trust urban communities of like-minded parents. Finally, they are partnering with a dating application that focuses on matching people who are mutually interested in long-term relationships, including children.

Criticism of pronatalism is predictable and consistent with the sterilizing mimetic packages of wokeism that have compounded the already existential problem of post-prosperity population collapse. Reports on what the Collins are doing range from bemused: “New kids on the block: geeky, wealthy, entrepreneurial pro-natalism activists,” published on Bioedge.org, to an overtly hostile report, “Why Wealthy Tech Elites Believe It’s Their Mission to Repopulate Earth,” which makes an unwarranted accusation that pronatalism is synonymous with “the return of eugenics.”

Preemptive strikes aside, a fervent and effective pronatalist movement may be the only hope if humanity is to avoid total demographic collapse. Contrary to Paul Ehrlich’s predictions, the late 21st century will bring with it unavoidable turmoil as nation after nation confronts not too many people, but instead, an aged dependent population dying en masse, with almost no youth left to replace them.

The demographic Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. We may be thankful that some people on the ship are building lifeboats while there is still time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Alternatives to the Nihilistic Futility of Mass Immigration

In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted mass-starvation by the mid-1970s due to an exploding human population outstripping agricultural capacity. Global population in 1968 was 3.5 billion. Today there are 7.6 billion people living on planet earth. Clearly, Ehrlich’s dire predictions were wrong, but the book was a huge bestseller.

In 1987, author and commentator Ben Wattenberg published The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies? In this prescient book, Wattenberg correctly identified the early signs of what is now widely understood—in every developed nation on earth, birthrates are well below replacement levels. Wattenberg’s book didn’t sell nearly as well as Erlich’s. The truth is, Ehrlich wasn’t entirely wrong. Throughout most of the so-called “developing world,” birth rates remain well above replacement levels.

To illustrate his point, Ehrlich made frequent reference to the “doubling time” of a population. It’s an apt concept because it refutes the argument that human innovation and enterprise can accommodate limitless population growth. In a public lecture at Stanford in the 1970s, Ehrlich drew a grim laugh when he explained that eventually unchecked human population growth would result in a solid sphere of human flesh expanding into the universe at the speed of light.

The fact that population growth rates vary among nations, with extremes at both ends, is not sufficiently acknowledged. It is central to discussions of immigration and refugee policies, environmental health, economic models, and the fate of nations and cultures. Yet despite its centrality, exploring practical solutions on this topic invites accusations of racism, ethno-nationalism, even neo-colonialism.

To explain why this discussion cannot be avoided, Ehrlich’s concepts are useful. And alongside exploring the implications of a population’s doubling time, the implications of a population’s “halving time” shall also be included. To provide an example from each extreme, the following cases use data from Somalia for the high-growth scenario, and Japan for the negative growth scenario.

Somalia currently has a population of 11.3 million. On average, women have 6.2 childrenInfant mortality is 8 percentLife expectancy is 55. Their population is projected to increase to 27 million by 2050, a doubling time of under 30 years. At this rate, in just 800 years there would be a Somali standing on every square foot of land area on Earth including Antarctica. In other words, there would be 1.5 trillion Somalis. Can human innovation accommodate this? Perhaps. With high-rise cities and colonies throughout the solar system, why not? But where does this end?

It has to end somewhere. Using Ehrlich’s approach, to visualize what a doubling time of 30 years means, and taking into account the average human body consumes two-cubic feet, within 3,000 years, there would be a solid ball of Somali flesh extending to just beyond the orbit of Jupiter, nearly a billion miles in diameter. In 5,000 years this cosmic flesh ball would exceed the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. And within 10,000 years—a span of time that is neatly symmetric with recorded human history—there would be a solid ball of human protoplasm expanding at the speed of light in all directions, on track to absorb the entire known universe.

Based on Japan’s projected population pyramid in 2050, where the population of Japanese aged 75-79 is expected to be more than twice as numerous as those under the age of five, Japan’s population will drop by 50 percent every 70 years. This means that in less than 2,000 years there will be only one Japanese person left in the world. And to extend the metaphor, in less than 5,000 years, what is left of the Japanese people will occupy the volume of one human ovum. The Japanese will disappear into nothingness.

How Japan Copes With Population Decline
These comparisons, while mathematically accurate, are hypothetical to the point of absurdity. But the consequences of these trends are relevant now. How these demographic realities are dealt with in the coming decades will, perhaps more than anything else, define the type of global civilization we leave our children and grandchildren. Examining the policy response by the Japanese to their population decline is useful, since Japan is the only nation on earth with both a homogenous population and a strict policy against mass immigration.

The Japanese have countered their population decline by becoming world leaders in robotics. Their economy, while superficially considered weak due to high debt and monetary deflation, is actually quite robust by other standards. Despite recent setbacks, the Japanese have a history of trade surpluses, meaning their debt is primarily held internally. And because their population is in slow decline, their housing and infrastructure spending is limited to maintenance and upgrades. Their productivity and innovation remain among the highest in the world.

Japan is pioneering an economic model that adapts to a stable, declining population. While this is not necessarily something all nations must accept, it offers important tips for the future. Moderate population growth probably can continue indefinitely, as humanity continues to urbanize and begins to harvest resources elsewhere in the solar system. What is unsustainable and unacceptable, however, is for human populations, anywhere, to continue to double every 30 years.

Somalia’s Population Continues to Explode
How Somalia’s population continues to increase at its current rate is instructive, since it applies more generally to dozens of much larger developing nations across mostly Africa and the Middle East. In the context of a GDP of $7.1 billion, Somalia has an annual trade deficit of $2.1 billion. They receive foreign aid equivalent to 27 percent of GDP, along with remittances sent from Somalis living overseas equivalent to 22 percent of GDP. Nearly half of all Somalis, 46 percent of the population, are “food insecure.”

According to the CIA, “Somalia scores very low for most humanitarian indicators, suffering from poor governance, protracted internal conflict, underdevelopment, economic decline, poverty, social and gender inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite civil war and famine raising its mortality rate, Somalia’s high fertility rate and large proportion of people of reproductive age maintain rapid population growth, with each generation being larger than the prior one. More than 60 percent of Somalia’s population is younger than 25, and the fertility rate is among the world’s highest at almost 6 children per woman—a rate that has decreased little since the 1970s.”

With rare exceptions, Somalia’s situation is mirrored across the continent. Africa’s population has exploded as a result of foreign aid in the form of medicine and food, without commensurate advancements in governance, infrastructure, the rule of law, advanced literacy, technical capacity, individual freedom and internal stability, or any of the other hallmarks of developed nations.

Africa is a welfare continent. In 1960, when most African nations achieved independence, the population of the entire continent was a mere 285 million. Today there are 1.3 billion Africans, and by 2050 Africa’s population is estimated to exceed 2.5 billion.

How Cultures are Altered by Foreign Aid and Welfare
Why the Japanese choose to reduce their population, and why the Somalis choose to increase their population so rapidly, cuts to the heart of cultural issues as much as economic ones. As median income rises, birth rates fall. In a nutshell, that explains the declining populations of developed nations.

But what if instead of affluence, guaranteed subsistence is offered? This describes the impact of foreign aid in Africa, and the result is a sustained population explosion. And as aid falters or is interrupted by war and instability, as the efficacy of aid becomes precarious in direct proportion to the additional hundreds of millions each decade who depend on it, the inevitable result is mass migrations. Which is equally problematic.

In developed nations, a comprehensive system of welfare awaits the migrant. This is completely unlike the challenge of indentured servitude, or at the least, freedom devoid of government assistance, which greeted immigrants to America prior to the 1960s. The result is predictable; a population explosion enabled by welfare, and an immigrant culture where entrepreneurial talent makes the logical choice to work in the informal economy to avoid losing the welfare benefits.

Without indulging in conspiratorial fantasies, the incentives to perpetuate mass migrations are obvious. Immigrant communities that depend on government benefits will vote for Democrats. Somali immigrant Ilhan Omar, recently elected to represent Minnesota’s 5th district, adds to the far-left wing of congressional Democrats. Omar, along with far-left Democrat Keith Ellison who narrowly won election as Minnesota’s new attorney general, were elected with overwhelming support from Minnesota’s burgeoning Somali population. Similar patterns are observable from California to Texas to Florida, and everywhere in between. In America, immigrants from developing countries are turning red states blue, and they are turning blue states bluer.

Current Welfare and Foreign Aid policies are Unsustainable
None of this is sustainable. Socialism, whether through foreign aid to developing nations, or through more government benefits approved with the swing voters coming from developed nations, eventually collapses. Productive citizens, outvoted, overtaxed, and disenfranchised in their own nations, lose their incentives to work hard. This leads to several inevitable conclusions.

First, it is beyond the capacity of developed nations to accommodate ongoing migrations from the developing world. Just the increase in Africa’s population each decade exceeds the entire current population of the United States or Western Europe.

Second, current foreign aid policies are completely unsustainable, because they facilitate this population increase without improving any of the other “humanitarian indicators” that might lead to a cultural shift towards lower birth rates.

Third, while it is possible to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, the more people there are, the harder that gets. The environmental impact of Africa’s population quadrupling in the last 60 years, and doubling yet again in the next 30 years, is nothing short of catastrophic.

Solutions Exist, But They Won’t Be Easy
French President Emmanuel Macron has been refreshingly blunt about Africa’s challenges. Speaking in Lagos earlier this year, he said, “I am sorry; if you have seven or eight children per woman, even when economic growth is 5 percent, you will never end the fight against poverty. In Europe, centuries ago we had such large families, but ask the women today. If it is their free choice then I am fine but when this situation is due to forced marriage and no education, it is crazy.”

Paul Ehrlich devoted chapters of The Population Bomb to his ideas for how to lower population growth. None of them anticipated the fact that in developed nations, it turned out that affluence was all it took for birth rates to fall voluntarily. Ehrlich’s prescription for the developing world was harsh. He suggested “triage” where nations on a clear path to self-sufficiency would continue to receive food aid, and nations failing this test would have food aid eliminated. But despite its progressive brutality, Ehrlich was recognizing that foreign aid, just like welfare, is unsustainable when the ratio of payers to recipients is relentlessly narrowing.

What can be done?

One controversial idea that deserves development and discussion is the concept of international charter cities. This would involve a nation or coalition of nations being invited into, say, Mogadishu, to set up a zone administered by the visiting nations, subject to their laws and law enforcement. The resulting stability would encourage foreign investment. Over time, these charter cities could become charter regions, where it is conceivable that migrations could be reversed. For example, Somali expatriates, from St. Paul to Sweden, might welcome the chance to return to their homelands to live and work in an area where economic growth and political stability offer them a return to the land and culture they cherish, without sacrificing the safety they found abroad.

Another idea, equally controversial, would be to use foreign aid funds to instead co-invest with private partners in big infrastructure in Africa. For example, within the security of charter regions, constructing nuclear power plants. Or throughout Africa, to invest in economically beneficial infrastructure projects that violate some environmentalist wishes while fulfilling others. An example of such a tradeoff would be an aqueduct to divert water from the Ubangi River to Lake Chad. Just a small percentage of runoff from the mighty Ubangi would restore Lake Chad, enriching the economy and the ecosystems across the Sahel.

Industrializing Africa might actually save the environment, because with economic development, not only are smaller families a welcome consequence so is a cleaner environment. Another demonstrated result of prosperity is the voluntary migration of people from rural areas into cities. With urbanization, economic growth can reduce the footprint of humanity on Africa’s great wildernesses.

The course currently plotted for humanity is alarming. Mass migrations from the developing world will eventually turn developed nations into socialist police states with diminished economies and shattered dreams. Meanwhile, unchecked population growth in the developing world will create political, economic and environmental havoc. It is time for new approaches and clear thinking.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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