Deriving Quality in Life

In response to my reaction to Froma Harrop's column on population growth, reader Barry comments:

As a math teacher who often has to explain exponential growth, I appreciate Froma Harrop's explanation of the perils of population growth, even though it makes both conservatives and liberals uneasy. The US population has more than doubled since I was born, and it is growing at a rate that will double again in about 70 years unless something changes. We have already seen the warning signs with 300 million people: loss of open space, ugliness spreading, congestion, depletion of some resources that make us more dependent on foreign sources, and more. What will things be like if the US reaches 600 million, well within the lifetime of those born now? Wishful thinking will not make the mathematics go away. It is clearly in our self interest to slow the growth of human population, and we can do this now without coercion just by making family planning available to all the world's couples who seek this but do not have the information or resources to use it.

Far be it from me to argue the mechanics of exponential growth with a math teacher, but it mightn't be as imprudent to wonder whether the principle actually has the political implications that accompany his calculations. My thoughts keep coming back to Social Security. If our population growth is so out of control, why is this federal pyramid scheme lurching toward insolvency?

According to U.S. Census historical data (PDF), the population of the United States was 76 million in 1900, 150.7 million in 1950, and 281.4 million in 2000. In 2050, the bureau projects (PDF), it will be 419.9 million. A few quick calculations show that the rate of population growth is slowing — from 98% during 1900–1950 to 49% during 2000–2050. Granted, the latter period will require a dramatically larger number of actual people to achieve that dramatically lower growth rate, but I question the wisdom of intentionally retarding a trend that is decreasing on its own.

Back to Social Security: According to that Census projection, 21% of 2050's 420 million people will be over the age of 65 (compared with 12% in 2000). The fewer the new citizens arriving (in one way or another) before that date, the higher that percentage will be. How will that affect our elusive quality of life? On its FAQ page, the Negative Population Growth organization to which Harrop approvingly refers simply, if humorously, punts on the matter of Social Security:

There is no denying that Social Security's viability requires some tough decisions. But adding scores of millions of new workers would at best postpone, not solve, the Social Security problem–and at an enormous cost in resource depletion and environmental damage. Rather, we should see the aging of America as an opportunity to begin transitioning to sustainability.

What a marvelously noncommittal phrase, "transitioning to sustainability"! When it comes to quality of life, it appears that the choice may be between lessening traffic on the way to work or managing ever to retire. Or maybe we just have to give the failed organizing principle of socialism another try.

Reading through the FAQ, one discovers markers of the underlying ideology behind the impulse to control the population of the United States, nicely consolidated in the essay on Darwinism with which it answers the plain question of "What is NPG's view of abortion?":

All successful species, [Darwin] said, have the ability to bear more young than their environment can support. This enables species to recover from food-short periods and it enables the best adapted to expand and fill new environmental niches when the opportunity presents. ...

That excess fecundity is central to the population dynamics of living creatures. ... The Darwinian controls, imposed in part by our destruction of the ecosystem, will stop the growth.

Seen in that light, family planning is perhaps the most fundamental advance in the human condition. ... Family planning is not just something that we are entitled to practice for our own purposes. It is something that the Earth itself badly needs, to escape the damage of continued human population growth. It is essential to the preservation of ecological balance in the face of a species grown far too successful. ...

Such foresight is good in theory, but it may not be sufficient in practice. The common good is probably the last thing on people's minds when they are making love, and abortion may be necessary, for the good of the woman and of society, when contraception is not practiced. In the United States, there is one induced abortion for every three live births. ...

The very idea of family planning is not very old, and the idea of tying it to social ends is a new one in human experience. We are far from knowing how to do it. Until we have learned, abortion plays a role as the final resort for women who don't want children or can't raise them. And Roe vs. Wade provides the legal framework to reconcile it with other societal goals.

I've elided many statements that would lead to worthwhile discussions, but the blending of Darwinism with environmentalism and a suspicion of human fertility, leading to a conclusion about the necessity of abortion, points to a defining belief: that humankind can, and should, micromanage itself toward an ideal set by an intellectual elite.

On the problem of Europe and Japan's having "too few working people to support the elderly," for example, the group suggests that "a reversal of population growth... offers those countries the opportunity to decide what population size is best for them." Simple as that. "If they decide a larger size is better suited for them, they can raise their fertility back to replacement level or increase immigration." Never mind that generations may have to suffer through such adjustments; never mind whether people (or which people) will reproduce on command; never mind that the immigrant solution can change a nation's culture irreparably.

What begins with Harrop's simple suggestion that "300 million is too many Americans" turns out, with very little research or thought required, to be quite a bit more complicated. Harrop and NPG may respectively dismiss concerns about our economic health as merely a desire for "100 million new customers" that "benefits business interests," but one cannot leave economic well-being out of discussions of quality of life. One also cannot ignore the dangers of the civilized world's leading by example on this count; the population of the Muslim Middle East, it's worth noting, grew 300% during the latter half of the last century.

The essential dividing line of the modern world may be between those who believe that quality of life derives from experience of it, as created, and those who believe that we can fine-tune our society to achieve a self-determined self-interest. The line isn't exactly between theists and secularists, but it's close. And it must be a cold realization for those in the latter group that their own prophet Darwin might point out that Nature selects for fertility and therefore for worldviews that celebrate it.

It doesn't take much discernment to name the cosmic force that achieves its ends by disrupting nature and corrupting faith. It doesn't take much consideration to realize that even well-intentioned social engineering can go horribly awry. And it doesn't take much imagination to envision the frightening strategies that may replace population-growth scare tactics when the fecund fail or decline to get with the program.