The Economist: How to deal with a falling population
Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of decline.
THE population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the curve flattens out as the colony stops growing.
Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar. For thousands of years, the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden spurt during the industrial revolution which produced, between 1900 and 2000, a near-quadrupling of the world's population….
…Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century. …
Some regard this as a cause for celebration, on the ground that there are obviously too many people on the planet. But too many for what? There doesn't seem to be much danger of a Malthusian catastrophe. Mankind appropriates about a quarter of what is known as the net primary production of the Earth (this is the plant tissue created by photosynthesis)—a lot, but hardly near the point of exhaustion. The price of raw materials reflects their scarcity and, despite recent rises, commodity prices have fallen sharply in real terms during the past century. By that measure, raw materials have become more abundant, not scarcer. Certainly, the impact that people have on the climate is a problem; but the solution lies in consuming less fossil fuel, not in manipulating population levels.
That last paragraph is a keeper. The phrase “sustainable growth” is widely used, but we already have sustainable growth. It is called markets. The price of commodities factors in not only what is being bought and sold today but also anticipated future demand and future unprocessed resources. "Raw material prices are dropping." And when there is a jump in the price of raw material, it is usually not because of a shortage of materials but rather a lag in the expansion of capacity that transforms raw materials into finished goods.
The “sustainable growth” rubric is based on a faulty assumption that resources are becoming perilously scarce, and it exemplifies straight-line projection thinking. Long before scarcity becomes a significant problem, price signals inform the market to find other ways to meet needs spurring innovation. As more people worldwide experience rising prosperity, we can imagine a circumstance where a particular raw material becomes increasingly more difficult to access. That will raise the cost of products that require that material. People will use less of the product, and entrepreneurs will invent substitute products that address the same need.
Sustainable growth, as it is used by many, is little more than a euphemism for state planning of the economy to allocate what is an “obvious” looming shortage of raw materials. The unequivocal pronouncements about climate change, based on the nascent field of climate science, is another manifestation of a fantasy where a messianic intellectual expertocray emerges to save humanity from the blunderings of common mortals engaging in trade in the marketplace. The Modernist dream of a scientifically planned and managed society dies hard.
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