🌎 Why we should cheer that Earth's population just passed 8 billion

Progress is made out of people

To paraphrase Soylent Green — that Down Wing, cinematic classic of techno-pessimism—economic growth is made out of people having ideas. “The more people there are searching for new ideas, the more likely it is that discoveries will be made,” observes economist Charles I. Jones in the paper “The Facts of Economic Growth.”

For population worriers, those who only see one more human aboard Spaceship Earth as one more mouth to feed, it’s troubling that according to the UN, global population hit eight billion last year. Arguing against that doomster mentality is science journalist Leigh Phillips, who recently wrote “Hurrah for 8 Billion Humans” for Compact. Here’s my recent email chat with Phillips:

1/ Has anti-humanist/overpopulation thinking changed over the decades since its popular emergence in the environmental movement, or are these the same old ideas in 2023?

There have been perhaps three major pulses of overpopulationism, or more correctly, ‘malthusianism’. The Reverend Thomas Malthus in the 18th Century was the first who warned that human population growth, an exponential, was at risk of outstripping agriculture, whose outputs only grew linearly. His belief that the working classes’ supposed tendency to procreate was what led to the existence of poverty led some 19th century politicians to oppose charity or poor relief laws as counterproductive as this would only result in greater numbers of these lower orders.

Understandably then, 19th century radicals, including Karl Marx, considered malthusianism a villainy, as it placed blame for class society on the supposed loose sexual morals of the poor rather than on the capitalist system. While those who today fret about overpopulation or overconsumption such as Greta Thunberg or Jane Goodall might be thought of as on the left, or at least green left, the classical left viewed Malthusianism as an ideological enemy.

And it wasn’t just about the aristocratic contempt for the working class that provoked the ire of these early socialists. Friedrich Engels also attacked malthusian thought for ignoring the possibility of technological progress, saying that scientific knowledge also advances at an exponential rate: “And what is impossible to science?” Again, while today there is widespread technological pessimism on the left, dismissing any possibility of improvement via innovation as mere ‘techno-fixes’, Engels was attacking Malthus and his co-thinkers for their technological pessimism!

Then, in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the critics of industrial modernity and its alleged excesses, its breaches of ‘natural limits’, were to be found on the reactionary, Counter-Enlightenment right, not the left—the sort of people who opposed the American and French Revolutions and their democratic offspring elsewhere, and wanted a return to absolute rule. The origins of the organic farming movement for example are to be found in the interwar far-right, and its Blud und Boden (blood and soil) belief that industry had severed man’s connection to the land.

Post-war such ideas largely disappeared, associated as they were with the losers of the Second World War. Then in the 1960s, as awareness rose of genuine problems of air, land and water pollution, overpopulationism rose once again as an explanation for these problems. These new Malthusians were not focussed on food supplies alone, but resource exhaustion in general. forecasting far worse to come if restrictions on immigration, one-child policies and sterilization programs were not adopted. Biologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne wrote The Population Bomb, predicting global famine by the 1980s. Paul was repeatedly invited on to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to promulgate these views while his wife would go on to try to get the Sierra Club to adopt anti-immigration laws that would make Trump blush.

Such thinking only returned in recent years in response to the current challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and allied environmental issues, primarily on the green left in the form of ‘degrowth’, ‘anti-consumerism’, localism, organic agriculture’s fear of industry and synthetic chemistry and so on, but there are many figures in the centre and on the right, even far right that embrace this neo-malthusianism as well. The green left’s embrace of such thinking however flies in the face of the classical left’s emphasis on expanding the forces of production.

2/ You note that climate concerns are having a real effect on family formation habits, including among Republicans. How did anti-natalism become so mainstream?