Wendt Scholar  Nicholas Eberstadt

This week's UN "State of World Population" report warns that by 2008, more than half the world's population will live in urban areas. Shock, horror! But there is a serious point to the UN report: it wants to slow down urbanization by reducing birth rates. The only problem is that it provides no compelling reason for so doing.

For years, the UN Population Fund has been seeking to justify its existence by issuing reports claiming that we must reduce birth rates in poor countries in order to achieve "sustainable development." While intuitively appealing, these ideas are not supported by evidence. In reality, global living standards improved dramatically over the past century, despite a near-quadrupling of human numbers--and they can continue to improve at current and future population levels.

There is no need for governments to alter our patterns of reproduction. Moreover, apart from morally reprehensible coercive schemes such as China's one child policy, it is not clear that government population policies can do much to change human numbers anyway.

Let's start with the much discussed idea of "overcrowding." If population density is taken as the basic criterion for overcrowding, India and Rwanda (each with over six times the world's average population density) would surely qualify as "overcrowded." But Belgium is considerably more "overcrowded" than Rwanda, and oil rich-Bahrain is three times as "overcrowded" as India. Wealthy, urbanized Monaco, meanwhile, is the most "overcrowded" country in the world, at 700 times the world average.

In most minds, the notions of "overcrowded" and "overcrowding" conjure images of hungry children, unchecked disease, squalid living conditions and teeming slums. Those problems are all too real in today's world--but the proper name for those conditions is "human poverty."

Even though the number of people on the planet has increased considerably over the last 200 years, we are not running out of resources and we are certainly not getting poorer. Consider the twentieth century's "population explosion": between 1900 and 2000, human numbers almost quadrupled, leaping from 1.6 billion to six billion. But global GDP per capita quintupled over this same period.

Over these same years, furthermore, food production has steadily outstripped population growth, while practically all natural resources--ranging from copper to aluminum--have become cheaper in real terms: which is to say less scarce.

These trends provide some clues as to why there was a "population explosion" in the first place. It was not due to people suddenly breeding like rabbits--it was because they finally stopped dying like flies. Over the 20th Century, average life expectancy doubled from around thirty years to over sixty years and infant mortality rates have declined substantially all over the world. With fewer people dying, populations increased, even though global fertility levels have been in decline since the 1960s.

This "health explosion" caused the "population explosion"--and this dramatic, ongoing health surge is in large part due to unprecedented and extraordinary improvements in material living standards, particularly over the past few decades. Food continues to become cheaper and medical technology continues to improve.

Nevertheless, proponents of population stabilization worry that human numbers will more than double over the coming century unless governments take action. But their plans to control population by imposing state-mandated family planning have no scientific basis.

Globally, there is no causative link between the availability of contraception and fertility levels--the rate of contraception use is virtually identical in Jordan and Japan, for instance, but Jordan's fertility rate is more than three times higher. In 1974 Mexico brought in, a national family-planning program. Brazil has never implemented such a program but, during the following 25 years, Mexican and Brazilian fertility levels fell at nearly identical rates.

The truth is that parental preference is the key determinant of family size amongst illiterate people in poor countries, just as it is among educated people in rich countries. Anti-natal population plans are therefore futile--unless they follow China's lead and impose coercion with its terrible consequences.

At any given income level--including even very low income levels--parents around the world have been opting for fewer children since the 1960s. As a result, future world population may be far lower than the population alarmists have imagined, and "world population stabilization" will be achieved without the emergency government interventions they advocate.

Fortunately for our troubled planet, "overpopulation" is not a problem. With sensible policies, health and prosperity will continue to spread around the world, as will continuing improvements in nutrition and medicine.

Human ingenuity has historically found the answers to the problems of scarce resources, and it is humans who create the technologies that allow us to accommodate larger numbers of people on the planet, in increasing comfort.

By ignoring the potential of human beings, anti-natalists blame the poor for their poverty and propagate false solutions. The poor need economic freedom so they can raise themselves up, not sterile UN schemes.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.