Exploding Population Myths (executive summary)

Please note well Jim Peron's statements in his Personal Note: He is in favor of birth control, not against legal abortion, and not a Catholic. It should be entirely unnecessary--indeed, it should be inappropriate--to make such remarks together with a scientific or journalistic publication. Unfortunately, however, many people associate the opposite views with the idea that population growth is not economically detrimental, and that more people mean greater wealth rather than greater poverty in the long run. And they dismiss those ideas on the grounds of their supposed intellectual associations. That's why Peron feels--and rightly so--that he must tell you of his personal beliefs here.

It is the scientific data, not his ideology, that underlie Peron's conclusions. He provides an excellent overview of those data in this monograph, together with the theory that explains them. Exploding Population Myths is a fine introduction to the subject for those who have imbibed the conventional Malthusian ideas with their mothers' milk, and had the ideas reinforced by everyone from their teachers in elementary school to the newspapers and television in their adulthood. (Incidentally, Malthus himself rejected "Malthusian" ideas in the second and subsequent editions of his book, after he gathered a body of facts and saw that this first-edition theory did not square with the facts, but you don't learn that in school or in the popular media.)

The current gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the official environmental protection agencies acknowledge that the air and water in the rich countries have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever-better since World War II, defying simplistic Malthusian reasoning. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world--life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most important and amazing demographic fact--the greatest human achievement in history. It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high 20s in about 1750. Then life expectancy in the richest countries suddenly rose, so that the length of life you could expect for your baby or yourself jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75 years. Then, starting well after World War II, the length of life you could expect in the poor countries leapt upward by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the 1950s, caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. It is this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a larger world population nowadays than in former times.

One would expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of human kind 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 even regret the decline in the death rate. And it is this worry that leads them to approve the Indonesian, 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.

The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder economic development. All the statistical studies show that faster population growth does not cause slower economic growth. In the 1980s there was a complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the US National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any statistical evidence of a negative connection between population increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth."

This U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press, the anti-natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that foster population control abroad.

Interestingly, though the classic sources from which Peron draws evidence are not new, absolutely nothing has changed in the long-run trends. It matters not for the main conclusions whether you were examining data in 1975 or now. We are not at a turning point in history.

For proper understanding of the important aspects of an economy we should look at the long-run trends. Almost every long-run trend in material human welfare points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. And there is no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely. But the short-run comparisons--between the sexes, age groups, races, political groups, which are usually purely relative--make more news.

The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Blaming population for poor countries' problems is a tragic intellectual error. Read Jim Peron's book and you will have a sound basis for understanding these surprising phenomena.

From the Foreword by Dr. Julian Simon.