The Age of Underpopulation

I took my title from an article at Watts Up With That entitled "The Age of Underpopulation is Here" by Steve Goreham. I've written about the birth dearth and the dangers of underpopulation for a long time, but it is clear that even the most pessimistic estimates of 5 or 10 years ago are turning out to be best-case scenarios. 

    Goreham gives the barebone warning that although "total world population still continues to rise, ... population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate."

Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.

Goreham also gives his perspective of how this happened, starting with the 1968 release of Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb (ironically released after birth rates had already fallen to or below replacement level in many advanced countries). That book warned that "'[i]n the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.' The author warned of coming famines and resource shortages and advocated for compulsory population control."

    This resulted in the same knee-jerk reaction that we have seen with global warming. 

    The fear of overpopulation produced a population control movement by the early 1970s. A consistent theme of the movement was that population growth was unplanned. Ehrlich stated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.”

    The United Nations indicated that people were not intelligent enough to plan their own families. James Grant, Undersecretary General for the UN, wrote in 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”

    Convinced by the overpopulation elites, governments of the world endorsed tragic population control measures. By the 1970s, it became US government policy to grant foreign aid only if population control measures were implemented. The World Bank and the UN also established policies requiring population control in exchange for loans or aid.

    During the last decades of the 20th Century, population programs proposed by Western intellectuals and the UN were implemented in the form of anti-human policies by the governments of China, India, and dozens of other nations. The government of India established sterilization and intrauterine device insertion quotas in 1966. Over 40 million people were sterilized between 1965 and 1985, most coercively.

    The People’s Republic of China implemented population policies in 1970 and adopted a one-child policy for all families in 1979. By March 2013, the China government reported that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had been carried out since 1971. Sex-selection abortion became common and even the killing of girl babies was practiced in both China and India.

    Population control policies typically disproportionally impacted disadvantaged races or social classes. In India, coercive policies often targeted people of lower castes. In 1966, sterilization programs were set up at federally funded Indian Health Service hospitals in the US. Thousands of Native American women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, often without informed consent. In Peru, sterilizations targeted rural natives of Incan descent.

    But the overpopulation intellectuals were wrong. Famine did not kill hundreds of millions of people as Ehrlich predicted. Instead, an agricultural revolution increased global output of corn, rice, and wheat by a factor of five from 1960 to 2023. The malnourished portion of world population declined from 30 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today and continues to fall.

 But, as he discusses, these programs did not cause birth rates to decline (with the possible exception of China). Rather, Goreham writes:

    ... Fertility rates dropped faster in South Korea than in China, driven by economic development, rising incomes, and increased levels of education and workforce participation for women, without forced population control measures. Fertility rates dropped faster in Brazil and Mexico due to demographic changes, than in India where forced population control was employed.

    What is the lesson from the overpopulation crisis that did not occur? The United Nations, the intellectuals, and strident political leaders were dead wrong about overpopulation. People do not multiply like cancer cells. Rather than being a species “out of control,” humans plan their own families and react to changing societal conditions. The lesson from the overpopulation debacle is that people adapt to their environment.

But Goreham does not really discuss why the sudden and abrupt change in fertility rates other than a throwaway line that "[w]omen entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined." Nor does he discuss the societal or economic fallout that will follow in the wake of the decline.

    For some explanation of why the tremendous decline in birthrates, even in third-world countries, I would refer you to an article at Imperium Press entitled "The Third World is Going to Cop It" which I originally came across at Vox Day's blog. The author of that piece begins:

If you look closely at demographic data worldwide, you’ll find something interesting: Europeans are not the only ones suffering birth rate collapse. In fact, the third world is in worse trouble than we are, and demographic trends will look very different by the end of this century than they do now.

 And his explanation for the decline? Modern liberalism.

    The author explains that while Western peoples, where liberalism formed and grew, have evolved a certain immunity or resistance over time, the peoples of other cultures, exposed to the pure, most poisonous forms of liberalism, have no immunity and cannot cope. He then digs into the demographic numbers to show that rate of decline in Total Fertility Rates is much greater among countries outside of the West with the result that even if current TFR was higher in most second and third-world countries even recently, they have now fallen below most Western countries. In short, he writes (footnotes omitted):

    What’s happening globally is quite simple—peoples whose culture and folkways have never had so much as a whiff of materialism, individualism, and liberty are coming in contact with 100% proof, high-test, late-stage liberalism, and they are getting piledriven by it like a welterweight Funko Pop collector by Dan Severn in his prime. Not only is it not a fair fight, it’s grotesque and cruel, like kicking a puppy. These people are defenseless. Liberalism seems to have especially buck broken societies with universalist religions, even tribal societies like Afghanistan, which 20 years ago averaged 7.5 children per woman but which would hit zero births within about two centuries at the current rate of decline. Some religions like Hinduism, particularly those denominations which are more traditionalist and clannish, have fared better, despite that Indian TFR has been suppressed by government campaigns since the 1970s, and despite that 37% of Indian women of childbearing age are sterilized.

    Whites, specifically northwestern Europeans, have also fared better. America, despite the cratering fertility of its minorities, would achieve zero births in about 300 years given current trends, mostly on the strength of its white population’s relatively stable TFR, centuries after many third world countries would reach zero births. However, whites have fared better for very different reasons than Hindus.

    Like Mithridates himself, we have been exposed to the poison of liberalism for a long time, and have built up a tolerance to it. We, particularly Germanic and Celtic descended Europeans, have undergone a ruthless selection process. For decades, even centuries now, we have been under extreme Darwinian conditions that have excluded from the breeding pool those individuals who engage in race-mixing, homosexuality, careerism, materialism, and sense-gratification. Whites today have passed through a crucible that is still going, in fact, reaching a fever pitch—this is part of why you have seen the rise of a genuine illiberal movement in the alt right. And our descendants will be fitter and less liberal still than us. Our ethnic competitors are going up in a puff of smoke. This is not something to be celebrated, it is a tragedy. Multiculturalism, liberalism, universalism, and other viral, entropic belief systems will kill off cultures that, although they have taken advantage of our hospitality, are in some cases still noble and deserve a place on this earth—in their own backyard.

That's one way of looking at the issue. 

    The two primary drivers of fertility rates that demographers generally acknowledge are (i) the educational attainment of women and (ii) religiosity.  

    The first one deals with materialism: the more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to pursue achievement outside motherhood and the family structure. As noted by Goreham, earlier, "[w]omen entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined." As we see playing out all around the world, women are trading motherhood for careers and financial and social independence while in their prime child bearing years--as feminism has encouraged them to do. The DINCs (duel income no children) really encapsulate this philosophy with their bragging about all the things they can do with the greater time and spending money they enjoy because they do not have children. (Of course, as they age and wither away they will expect your children and grandchildren to provide them with the support and services they otherwise would have received from a family). 

    Now one reaction to this could be to try and put the genie back in the bottle. (Afghanistan and other Muslim countries come to mind with the attacks on girls' schools to stop education or "morality police" to keep women subservient). But the desire for greater economic prosperity both individually and at a national level will make this an impossible proposition. 

    But there is a way to counteract the trend. Demographers have found that cultures or sub-cultures with greater religiosity have higher birth rates. Some explain this by arguing that being religious tends to make one more hopeful about the future and, therefore, more likely to invest in children; or that these groups simply value having children over other forms of material prosperity. The cynical might see greater religiosity as simply discouraging women from obtaining an education or working outside the home. But whatever the reason, it seems to work.