PART TWO


                   POPULATION GROWTH'S EFFECT 

             UPON OUR RESOURCES AND LIVING STANDARD


   As for the Arts of Delight and Ornament, they are best 
promoted by the greatest number of emulators. And it is 
more likely that one ingenious curious man may rather be 
found among 4 million than among 400 persons....

WILLIAM PETTY, Another Essay in Political Arithmetic, 
1682

[Wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the 
wisest institutions, there will also be most people.  
David Hume, Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations 
(1777/1987, p. 382)





CHAPTER 22

                       STANDING ROOM ONLY?

                      THE DEMOGRAPHIC FACTS

"After performing the most exact calculation possible...I 
have found that there is scarcely one- tenth as many 
people on the earth as in ancient times...the population 
of the earth decreases every day, and if this continues 
the earth will be nothing but a desert".  Charles Louis 
de Secondat Montesquieu, 1721, in Cerf and Navasky, 1984, 
p. 299.
The facts of human population growth are simple.  
Paul Ehrlich, "World Population:  A Battle Lost?", 

in Reid and Lyon, 1972, p. 12).  
Chapter 22: Table of Contents
Population Growth Rates
The Approaching Victory Against Premature Death
Summary

   Schoolchildren "know" that the world's environment and food situation have been 
getting worse.  And the children's books leave no doubt that population size and growth 
are the villains. As the Golden Stamp Book of Earth and Ecology says, "Can the earth 
survive this many people?...If the population continues to explode, many people will 
starve.  About half of the world's population is underfed now, with many approaching 
starvation....  All of the major environmental problems can be traced to people - more 
specifically, to too many people." 
   This child's text distills into simplest form the popular adults' books and articles 
about population and resources.  And Herbert London's study of schoolbooks shows this 
text to be representative. Indeed, the National Education Association in 1980 published a 
guide for teachers that says "Food production is losing the race with the population 
explosion, and a massive famine within the next decade seems probable".  It then goes on 
to forecast across-the-board worsening conditions in natural resources and the 
environment.
   But these propositions that are given to children with so much assurance are either 
unproven or wrong. (Indeed, the NEA 1980 forecast has already been proven 
incontrovertibly wrong; it would be interesting to know what the NEA says now.)  This 
chapter deals with the demographic facts.  The next chapter considers various forecasts, 
and the following chapter examines the dynamics of the birthrate and of population 
growth, in order to lay the foundation for the economic discussion of these issues in the 
rest of Part II.

                     POPULATION GROWTH RATES

   The demographic facts, to the extent that they are known scientifically, can indeed 
seem frightening - at first glance. Figure 22-1 is the kind of diagram that, back in 
1965, impressed and scared me enough to convince me that helping stop population growth 
should be my life's work. What we seem to see here is runaway population growth; the 
human population seems to be expanding with self-generated natural force at an 
exponential rate, a juggernaut chained only by starvation and disease. This suggests that 
unless something unusual comes along to check this geometric growth, there will soon be 
"standing room only."
    FIGURE 22-1. How the U.S. State Department Saw the World's         Population Growth
   People have, however, long been doing arithmetic that leads to the prediction of one 
or another version of "standing room only." In fact, the phrase "standing room only," 
used so often in recent discussions of population growth, was the title of a book by 
Edward Ross in 1927, and the notion is found explicitly in both Malthus and Godwin (whose 
conclusions differed completely, however). Just one among many such colorful calculations 
is that of Harrison Brown, who worried that humanity might continue increasing "until the 
earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human 
beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots."
   One can get absurd results by simple extrapolation of other trends, too - especially 
short-term trends.  The rate of construction of university buildings in the 1960s would 
soon have covered the entire earth if the trend continued.  Or, the growth of inmates of 
American prisons from 1980 to 1981 was 10 percent (from 315,974 to 353,674) and from 1981 
to 1982 it was 11 eleven percent.  For amusement, Calvin Beisner extrapolated a 12 
percent growth rate the following year, then 13 percent, and so on, and by only the year 
2012 the number of inmates would exceed the entire projected population.  Nice 
arithmetic, but so what?
   People have worried about population growth since the beginning of recorded time. The 
Bible gives us this early story of population exceeding the "carrying capacity" of a 
particular area:  "And the land was not able to carry them...and Abram said to Lot:...Is 
not the whole land before thee?...If thou will take the left hand, then I will take the 
right; or if thou take the right hand, then I will go to the left." Euripides wrote that 
the Trojan War was due to "an insolent abundance of people." And many classical 
philosophers and historians such as Polybius, Plato, and Tertullian worried about 
population growth, food shortages, and environmental degradation. The Tiberius Gracchus 
about 100 BCE complained that returned Roman soldiers "have no clod of earth to call 
their own."   Early in the 1600s, John Winthrop left England for Massachusetts because he 
considered England so crowded.  And when England and Wales had fewer than 5 million 
people, one man expressed the wish for the earlier "times when our Country was not 
pestered with multitude, not overcharged with swarmes of people."   
   In 1802, when Java had a population of 4 million, a Dutch colonial official wrote that 
Java was "overcrowded with unemployed."  As of 1990, Java had 108 million people  and 
again it is said to be overcrowded, with too much unemployment.
   Just because people have worried about population growth in the past does not imply 
that we should not be worried now, of course. If a monster really has been on the loose 
for a while, the fact that it has not yet done us in is hardly reason to stop worrying. 
Therefore we must ask:  Is population growth an unchecked monster, on the loose since the 
beginning of time but likely to destroy us in the foreseeable future?

   Contrary to the impression given by figure 22-1, population growth has not been 
constant or steady over the long sweep of time.  Even the broadest picture of the past 
million years shows momentous sudden changes.  Figure 22-2 indicates that population 
growth has three times taken off at "explosive" rates.
   FIGURE 22-2. Deevey's Logarithmic Population Curve
   Another common misleading impression about world population is that a large proportion 
of all the people who have ever lived are alive now.  Not so.  A reasonable estimate is 
that 77 billion human beings were born from 600,000 B.C. to 1962 A.D., 12 billion up to 
6000 B.C., 42 billion from 6000 B.C. to 1650 A.D., and 23 billion from 1650 A.D. to 1962 
A.D.  Compare this to the 5+ billion who are alive now.  Of course many of the people 
born in earlier years died at young ages.  But even so, the number of years of human life 
lived on earth in the past was large relative to the present.
   The tool-using and tool-making revolution kicked off the rapid rise in population 
around 1 million BCE.  The aid of various implements "gave the food gatherer and hunter 
access to the widest range of environments." But when the productivity gains from the use 
of primitive tools had been exploited, the rate of population growth fell, and population 
size again settled down near a plateau.
   The next rapid jump in population started perhaps 10,000 years ago, when people began 
to keep herds and cultivate the earth, rather than simply foraging for wild plants and 
game. Once again the rate of population growth abated after the initial productivity 
gains from the new technology had been exploited, and once again population size settled 
down to a near-plateau, as compared with the rapid growth previously experienced.  The 
known methods of making a living constituted a constraint to further population growth 
once the world's population reached a certain size.
   These two previous episodes of sharp rise and subsequent fall in the rate of 
population growth suggest that the present rapid growth - which began perhaps 300 or 350 
years ago, in the 1600s - may settle down again when, or if, the benefits of the new 
industrial and agricultural and other technical knowledge that followed the early 
scientific and industrial revolutions begin to peter out.  And population size may again 
reach a near-plateau and remain there until another "revolution" due to another 
breakthrough of knowledge again suddenly increases the productive capacity of mankind.  
Of course the current knowledge-revolution may continue without foreseeable end, and 
population growth may or may not continue as long as the revolution does.  Either way, in 
this long-term view population size adjusts to productive conditions rather than being an 
uncontrolled monster.  (We should keep in mind, though, that our present, technical 
knowledge will support vastly larger populations than at present.) 
   To put the matter another way: This long-run view of demographic history suggests 
that, contrary to Malthus, constant geometric growth does not characterize human 
population history.  Rather, at each stage a major improvement of economic and health 
conditions has produced a sudden increase in population, which gradually moderated as the 
major productive advances and concomitant health improvements were assimilated.  Then, 
after the initial surge, the rate of growth slowed down until the next big surge.  In 
this view, population growth represents economic success and human triumph, rather than 
social failure.
   Deevey's picture of population history (figure 22-2) still leaves us with the image of 
population growth as having an irresistible, self-reinforcing logic of its own, though 
subject to (very rare) changes in conditions. That view is so broad, however, that it can 
be misleading. The entire world, for example, had a stable population over the seven 
centuries prior to 750 A.D., as seen in figure 22-3. And if we look more closely, in 
figure 22-4 we see that even for as large an area as Europe, where local ups and downs 
tend to cancel out, population growth did not proceed at a constant rate, nor was there 
always positive growth. Instead, there were advances and reverses.  Figure 22-4 shows 
that population change is a complex phenomenon affected by a variety of forces; it is not 
an inexorable force checked only by famine and epidemic.
    FIGURE 22-3. The Population of the World, 14 AD-750 AD
    FIGURE 22-4. The Population of Europe, 14 AD-1800 AD
   Now let us move to an even greater level of detail - a country or region.  Figures 22-
5, 22-6, and 22-7 show three histories where a decline in population has been more than a 
temporary episode.  In Egypt, the breakdown of the Roman Empire led to a series of 
population declines due to disease and bad government, declines that ended only in the 
19th century.  In Iraq's Dyala region (around Baghdad) there were a series of political-
economic perturbations that adversely affected irrigation and agriculture; it took years 
of population growth to overcome such setbacks - only to have another such breakdown 
occur.  And in Mexico, it was the conquest by Cortez that set off a remarkable population 
decline.  In the Spaniards' wake came wars, massacres, political and economic breakdowns 
among the indigenous civilizations, and new diseases, all of which caused death, 
desolation, and depopulation.
      FIGURE 22-5. The Population of Egypt, 664 BC-1966 AD
[Figure caption copy:]  NOTE:  McEvedy and Jones (1978, pp. 226-229) persuasively suggest 
that Egypt's population was nowhere near so high as Hollingsworth shows it to be.

                      FIGURES 22-6 and 22-7.
   A shocking example close to home for Americans is the population decline of Native 
Americans in California from perhaps 310,000 in 1769 to a low of perhaps 20,000-25,000 at 
the end of the nineteenth century. "The population decline became catastrophic between 
1848 and 1860. The number of Indians fell in twenty years from 200,000 or 250,000 to 
merely 25,000 or 30,000."
   These historical examples prove that population size and growth are influenced by 
political and economic and cultural forces, and not only by starvation and plague due to 
changes in natural conditions. 


THE APPROACHING VICTORY AGAINST PREMATURE DEATH
   The main cause of the rapid increase in population during the past two centuries - the 
most important and amazing demographic fact, and the greatest human achievement in 
history, in my view - is the decrease in the world's death rate.  It took thousands of 
years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high '20's.  
Then in just the past two centuries, the length of life you could expect for your baby or 
for yourself in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years in France, and the 
mid-30s in Great Britain, to perhaps 75 years today. (See figure 22-8.)  What greater 
event has humanity witnessed? 
Figure 22-8

   Then starting well after World War II, the length of life one could expect in the poor 
countries has leaped upwards by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s, 
caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine.  (See figure 22-9.)

Figure 22-9

   Again, it is this amazing decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being 
a larger world population nowadays than in former times.  In the 19th century the planet 
Earth could sustain only one billion people.  Ten thousand years ago, only 4 million 
could keep themselves alive.  Now, more than 5 billion people are living longer and more 
healthily than ever before, on average.  The increase in the world's population 
represents our victory against death, our advancing march toward life being ended mainly 
by the diseases of old age.  

   Most of the decline in the death rate is caused by a decline in disease, interrelated 
with an improvement in nutrition.  But the long-run decline in injuries is also worth 
noting; an example is seen in figure 22-10.
   Figure 22-10[acc accidents - see Holen and/or Lebergott in    folder.]
   The only places that have suffered a long-run interruption in this advance are a) some 
of the inner cities of the U. S., where violence and drug-related AIDS have raised the 
death rate among young black males, and have lowered life expectancy for all black males 
taken together in the latter 1980s ; and b) the ex-communist bloc of nations in Eastern 
Europe, which are suffering a demographic tragedy as a result of bad government and its 
disastrous effects on pollution (see chapter 17), industrial accidents, medical care, and 
perhaps even nutrition.  Throughout Eastern Europe, male mortality above the age of 30 
increased from 1958-59 to the mid-1980s, at least, as may be seen in figure 22-11.  In 
the Soviet Union even infant mortality rose between the mid-60s and the mid-80s.  All 
throughout Eastern Europe, the improvements in the death rate at all ages were far less 
than in Western Europe.  (See figure 22-12.)
     Figs 22-11 and 22-12[12[ruf Figs 1 and 2 from Bernstam and 
	Carlson]
     Fig from Eberstadt book?

   The standardized total mortality per 1000 men of working age  was almost twice as high 
in the USSR in 1987 as in Western "free market" countries (6.59 versus 3.63), and more 
than double in all major categories except cancers, including cardiovascular diseases, 
lung and respiratory diseases, and accidents.  For females the differences are not as 
marked, but still are important.
   Leave aside the exceptions, which are surely temporary.  One would expect lovers of 
humanity to jump with joy at the triumph of human mind and organization over the raw 
killing forces of nature.  Instead, many lament that there are so many people alive to 
enjoy the gift of life.  And it is this worry that leads them to approve the Chinese and 
other inhumane programs of coercion and denial of personal liberty in one of the most 
precious choices a family can make -- the number of children that it wishes to bear and 
raise. (See chapter 00).
   Not only do many not consider the successful fight against death to be good news, but 
many refuse to even recognize the good news.  For example, with respect to infant 
mortality, journalists compare the rates of different groups instead of focusing on the 
absolute improvement over time.  An April 2, 1991 headline was:  "Explaining Racial 
Differences in Infant Death."  The article illustrates a painful story about black-white 
differences with pictures of slavery days and unheated apartments in Harlem.  The result 
of this consistent emphasis on comparative rates rather than long-term trends is grim:  
Ask any group, "Is the trend of black infant mortality encouraging?"  Almost everyone's 
reaction in the United States - even a group of demographers I asked - is that black 
infant mortality is a bad  situation.  But a graph of black and white infant mortality in 
the United States since 1915 (figure 22-13) leaves a different impression.  White infant 
mortality in 1915 was almost 100 deaths per 1000 births, and black infant mortality was 
fully 180 deaths per 1000 births.  Both are horrifying.  And the rates were even more 
horrifying in earlier years in some places -- up to 300 or 400 deaths per thousand 
births.  

Figure 22-13
   Nowadays white infant mortality is about nine per thousand, and black infant mortality 
is about 18 per thousand.  Of course it is bad that mortality for blacks is higher than 
for whites.  But should we not be impressed by the tremendous improvement for both races 
-- both falling to about ten percent of what they were -- and the black rate coming ever 
closer to the white rate?  Is not this extraordinary gain for the entire population the 
most important story -- and a most happy story?  Yet the public has the impression that 
we should be mainly distressed about the state of black infant mortality. 

                             SUMMARY


   This chapter discussed some of the pertinent historical and contemporary facts about 
population growth. It showed that population growth is neither constant nor inexorable; 
it is not smoothly geometric, as Malthus thought it to be. Population grows at various 
rates under various conditions. Sometimes population size shrinks for centuries due to 
poor political and health conditions. That is, economic, cultural, and political events, 
and not just catastrophe, control population size.  But recently conditions have improved 
dramatically and population has added another growth spurt - joyous news for humanity.   
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