Two cheers for population growth

Our contributor Gary Day has come up with an original solution for America’s perpetual public school funding crises: Have fewer kids. How, Gary asks rhetorically, can schools provide a decent education when there are so damn many children in them? (Click here.)

For that matter, Gary adds, “Unless the world gets a handle on rampant population growth, Nature herself will eventually, inevitably step in. And her methods of controlling population tend to be on the drastic side (war, pestilence, famine, etc.).”

Gary is hardly alone in this view, of course. In 1798, when the world population numbered less than 1 billion, Thomas Malthus predicted that sooner or later population would be checked by famine or disease. In 1968, by which time the world’s population had grown to 3.5 billion, Paul and Anne Ehrlich said much the same thing in The Population Bomb.

This year, with the world’s population at 7 billion, Alan Weisman’s book Countdown argued yet again that there are too many people in the world. Biologists recently calculated that an ideal population— the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption without ruining the planet— would be 1.5 billion.

The good old days

In other words, the world would be a better place if we could only get rid of 5.5 billion people. Yet even that drastic 1.5 billion figure is half again as many people as inhabited the world when Thomas Malthus said there would soon be too many people. Why is today’s world capable of accommodating so many more people than it could in 1798?

Here’s my wild guess: The world was changed by people— people who were able to focus on specific human problems precisely because there are so many more people now than there used to be.

The trouble with all these well-meaning population doomsayers, I submit, is that they look at people as useless burdens on the planet rather than ingenious problem solvers. They look back wistfully to the good old bucolic days when moveable type and anesthesia and airplanes and antibiotics didn’t exist because what few people walked the Earth were mostly too busy working on farms from morning to night. They look at children as expensive nuisances rather than as potential adults who might some day change the world for the better, or at least pay taxes.

McCormick and Edison

For all its problems, I submit, our world of 7 billion is a better place to live than it’s ever been. If you disagree, please tell me what past age you would have preferred. And if you agree, ask yourself: What force changed the world, if not human ingenuity?

Robert McCormick’s reaper vastly multiplied the amount of food a single farmer could produce. Edison’s electric light extended every community’s productive waking hours. Elisha Otis’s elevator enabled people to live and work happily in buildings ten or 20 or 40 or 80 stories high.

Curiously, Robert McCormick was the youngest son of a large family. Edison was the youngest of seven children. Elisha Otis was the youngest of six children. Where would we be today if, for the sake of global population control, their parents had been limited to two children?

Third son of a third son

You may accuse me of cherry-picking these examples, but try Googling the biographies of your own favorite inventors and scientists. A case can be made, I think, that the youngest kids in large families apply themselves more ingeniously, if only because the best opportunities close to home have been snapped up by their elders.

This notion first occurred to me while researching Death of a Gunfighter, my 2008 book about the Pony Express superintendent Jack Slade (1831-1864). Slade, I discovered, was the third son of a third son of a third son. His British grandfather, excluded from inheritance of the family business, emigrated in the 1790s to Alexandria, Virginia, where he flourished as a nail and rope manufacturer.

His third son, having been similarly passed over for a stake in the family business, migrated to the wilderness of southern Illinois in 1816, founded the town of Carlyle and established a general store, a mill and a ferry, which he passed to his eldest sons. His third son— Jack Slade— headed West during the Gold Rush and ultimately played a critical role in opening the West and saving the Union during the Civil War.

China’s spoiled brats

So it goes. I don’t know that any historian or sociologist has studied this phenomenon, but if anyone did, I suspect they’d find that America was settled and expanded primarily by younger children, if only because they had no good reason to stay close to home.

I’m not suggesting that we produce larger families for the sake of producing more Edisons. I am suggesting that our larger “global family” may be creating the same positive effect— producing literally billions of people who may improve the world in ways we can’t imagine.

We don’t know how many potential Edisons and McCormicks were lost to China’s “one child per couple” policy. We do know that the absence of siblings produced three generations of spoiled brats as well as a gender imbalance, destroyed society’s most effective organizing unit— the family— and that China today lacks enough young workers to support its aging population. The only thing worse than population growth, apparently, is population stagnation.

Isaac Singer’s theory

The Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he was concerned because, in the future, his novels would be read only in translation. Not at all, he replied: A century from now, there will be 150 billion people in the world, and in order to survive they’ll have to specialize. And perhaps a few million will specialize in Yiddish.

I would add: Some people are concerned that in 20 million years the sun will explode and all human endeavor will be lost. That may have been a valid concern back in the days when Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse and maybe a dozen other polymaths represented the sum total of human ingenuity. But millions of people, working over millions of years, will find a solution even for that solar calamity— perhaps by moving everyone to another solar system. And the more people addressing the problem, the more likely it is to be solved.♦


To read responses, click here.
To read a follow-up by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a response by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read Dan Rottenberg's reply to Tom Purdom, click here.