Is it better to have more or less population in your country and the world? I ask the question in a short article in the Spring issue of Regulation. I review a few economic and philosophical arguments on both sides of the debate.
On the one hand, we have known a certain type of currently recycled environmental argument:
In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that an exploding world population was hitting resource constraints and that, within a decade, food and water scarcity would result in a billion or more people starving to death. Governments, he opined, should work toward an optimal world population of 1.5 billion. … In 1965, the New Republic announced that the “world population has passed food supply,” and that world hunger would be “the single most important fact in the final third of the 20th Century.”
On the other hand, I dismiss is the utilitarian claim that a larger population is better because it means more “utility” (in the economic sense). One of my replies is follows the very interesting article of The Economist on “population ethics”:
A non‐existent individual cannot be included in any utility calculus because there is no “he” (or “she”) to include.
Even if no utility calculus at all is possible, however, political economy suggests a moral presumption that a larger population is beneficial to most individuals:
It is a good guess that the more numerous is mankind, the larger the opportunities for beneficial exchange, which includes all sorts of voluntary relations between individuals.
At any rate, there is no reason to believe that this topic should be a political matter:
There is no reason to believe that the size of mankind should be the province of collective choices—which are, in practice, government choices. … Like in so many other areas, economics (albeit with some minimal value judgements of the sort “live and let live”) suggests that a superior alternative is usually available: individual choices in a general context of liberty. Let each potential parent decide, or agree on, what will be the number of his or her own children. These individual choices should determine the number of humans, instead of a certain group of individuals “collectively” deciding how many children families should have.
READER COMMENTS
Colin M Steitz
Mar 30 2023 at 11:32am
I think the answer is simple, in general people live if they recieve value or expect value from living, not to mention the value people create, hard to say the margin value is negative for any country.
Seems to me that the institution you are born under is far likelier a predictor of life satisfaction (and freedom from hunger and extreme poverty).
Lizard Man
Mar 30 2023 at 1:17pm
Don’t real estate values and wages the world over indicate that lots of people living together in cities create a lot of positive externalities and enhance productivity?
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 30 2023 at 3:09pm
Lizar Man: You are right if you add that other conditions are necessary. Before the Industrial Revolution, many large cities had most of their inhabitants live in what we would now call dire poverty.
vince
Mar 30 2023 at 3:23pm
The oceans say less people. Eventually there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. Microplastics already are in seafood.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 30 2023 at 3:42pm
Vince: In the 1960s, with 3.5 billion people on earth, with it was the food that said no! I know this analogical argument is not decisive, but it does suggest that doomsayers with a political agenda and no understanding of markets (I am not speaking of you) have little credibility.
vince
Mar 30 2023 at 4:31pm
Microplastics in fish is not a just a projection. Research shows more than half of ocean fish contain microplastics.
Jon Murphy
Mar 30 2023 at 5:00pm
It seems to me that microplastics, not people, are the problem.
Be careful here: that research is a projection. Almost all is. It’s prohibitively costly to test all fish in the ocean. So, they test a sample and project from that.
vince
Mar 30 2023 at 7:24pm
This seems like hair-splitting. What was the source of the microplastics? Who put it in the oceans? And projecting from samples is basic statistics.
Jon Murphy
Mar 30 2023 at 7:50pm
Not at all. We can reduce microplastics without mass genocide.
Craig
Mar 30 2023 at 10:16pm
Difficult question because circumstances vary but I think one can look at Hong Kong and Singapore and draw an inference from these resource poor areas that the single greatest resource is people.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 2 2023 at 11:16am
Craig: That was Julian Simon’s argument. See my essay “Running Out of Everything.”
Mactoul
Mar 31 2023 at 9:33am
Bigger isn’t always better. Maybe a certain population or density is optimal, I doubt if a lot of people living in overcrowded countries would not prefer it were less crowded and their countries and cities were less crowded.
BS
Mar 31 2023 at 11:49am
This came up over at Marginal Revolution a while back. The theme, if I recollect, was that more people = potentially more ingenuity = potentially more rapid progress (including how to feed, house, etc, the more people). A lot of moving parts, though, not the least of which is how much people are restrained from approaching full potential by the circumstances of where they are born and live.
People do have diets they prefer and places they’d prefer to live. In particular, if most people want natural seafood and a detached home, I suppose there must be a hard upper bound.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 31 2023 at 10:33pm
BS: Real prices (too high or not to high) will lead each individual or family to decide what is the limit for them individually.
BS
Apr 1 2023 at 11:38am
In a completely rational world, yes. In the one we inhabit, I suppose we’d have rogue nations overfishing.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 2 2023 at 11:29am
BS: Remember that “nations” don’t overfish more than they walk or think; individuals do. That a fisherman who does not face effective constraints would grab “free” fish is of course entirely rational. Indeed, the “dark side of the force” is also rational. I agree with you if what you mean is that any rational theory of society has to take this rational behavior into account. Very few people will decide to have more children just because they cost more; the ones who do will do it for other reasons. (Another example of rationality: When I was young and “stupid,” I once lit my cigarette with a $5 or $10 bill at a dinner reception; it was not irrational or actually stupid, but a means to impress my date, who was worth more than $5 or $10 to me!)
vince
Mar 31 2023 at 12:48pm
Anyone want to claim that humans have been good stewards of planet earth?
john hare
Mar 31 2023 at 1:12pm
Yes, as we put it to use. Are you are one that believes we are a cancer on it and should eliminate ourselves?
vince
Mar 31 2023 at 1:25pm
Nice hyperbole to a simple question. Seems a little defensive. Maybe the problem is, as you say, the use to which we put it.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 2 2023 at 11:31am
Vince: Not really. The problem is who decides what use “we” put it to.
nobody.really
Mar 31 2023 at 2:52pm
As compared with … what?
As far as I can tell, earth continues to circle the sun; humans may have subtracted some mass from the planet in the form of rockets and such–but earth has also absorbed meteors and dust over time, and this might make up the difference.
Or are you suggesting that humans have done (or are doing) things that change LIFE on earth–and presumably in a bad way? Surely humans have produced change, though I know of no universal standard for judging change “bad.”
But let’s compare humans to —
In short, these microbes rendered the earth completely recognizable, triggering multiple cycles of global warming and cooling, and leading to the extinction of various other life forms due to oxygen pollution. Compared to these consequences, human consequences seem trivial.
Mactoul
Mar 31 2023 at 9:51pm
You are forgetting the all-important matter of time scales.
The oxygen crisis was very slow– tens or even hundreds of million years. Thus giving plenty of time for life to adapt itself.
But the present crisis is instantaneous in comparison–it is like end-Permian extinction that took out probably 90 percent of the species and was very near thing indeed.
Again a peculiarity of modern crisis is that we humans themselves are not adapted to the environment we have created.
All liberal affluent populations have birth rate quite lower than the rate required to maintain themselves. This pretty clearly shows that non-adaptive nature of liberal affluent societies. And indeed we find these societies rife with pathological behaviors — such as sexual targeting disorders and like
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 31 2023 at 11:02pm
With due respect, Mactoul, don’t you feel like a philosopher-king with a vengeance?
Mactoul
Mar 31 2023 at 11:39pm
No philosophy, just biology.
nobody.really
Apr 2 2023 at 1:00am
An accurate point of distinction—but I question its relevance to the question of stewardship. If I initiate a process that will result in the extinction of most current life forms, does the slow pace of that extinction excuse my conduct? Does the prospect of evolution excuse my conduct?
Putting aside the question of “stewardship,” I think this statement puts a finger on the issue: Libertarian fantasies notwithstanding, large parts of the world’s resources/systems are not subject to private ownership, but are owned in common—and we’re facing a tragedy of the commons.
The liberal affluent societies seem to have no shortage of outsiders seeking to join them. So this looks like a conventional build/buy decision: Westerners can produce a labor force domestically and/or import one, depending on comparative advantage. We do some of each. (The next time you hear someone complaining that Westerners are “outsourcing labor,” reflect on how true that is.) But either way, Western nations do not seem to lack for humans; they just choose not to obtain as much as they could.
The US has exhibited a great capacity to absorb outsiders without losing its affluence or its liberalism. Ok, in fairness, Robert Putnam has presented some data suggesting that rising rates of immigration may trigger greater xenophobia—so maybe there is a trade-off between immigration and liberalism.
In any event, humans in the US who want to live in rural settings—or at least small-town settings—may face difficulty finding incomes, but little difficulty finding homes. It’s expensive to live in urban America, but cheap to find houses abandoned by people heading to the cities. And with greater opportunities to work remotely, people will have ever greater opportunities to live in small towns if the want to. Some have—but most have not. Whether or not people are “adapting” to urban living, evidence suggests that the marginal human prefers it.
vince
Mar 31 2023 at 3:31pm
“As compared with … what?”
As compared with not good? If we can’t agree on what is good, then there’s no point in pursuing the question.
Hmmm, so microbes are responsible for humans, who are responsible for …
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 31 2023 at 10:54pm
Vince: You raise good questions, but two crucial points must not be ignored. First, humans would be steward for whom? For which masters and owners would they keep the earth? Or is it for future owners who will be wealthier? I deal with this issue in a review of Mark Mitchell’s recent book (in the current issue of Regulation), concluding that
Second, in anything but a tribe, “we” cannot generally agree on what is “good.” Each individual has is own preferences and values. My review of Buchanan and Brennan’s The Reason of Rules may be of interest in this respect. We can only agree on abstract rules that try to prevent what is not good. On this last point, Hayek’s theory is useful: see my review of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, the third part of which is forthcoming.
Mactoul
Apr 1 2023 at 2:17am
In Great Society there is no agreement on what is good.
Is such a society possible?
Any historical or present examples?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 2 2023 at 11:38am
Mactoul: Whether it will or not reveal to be a realistic dream–which will only be known at the end of history–we know many historical examples. That’s what Western societies starting clearly evolving towards with the Enlightenment (and the following Industrial Revolution). There were setbacks. A good place to start your intellectual journey is Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.
Mactoul
Mar 31 2023 at 9:17pm
Biologically speaking, human population right now is in a very peculiar situation– humans stand at top in the food chain but our population far exceeds typical population of apex predators.
This is singular and biologically very precarious situation. Again biologically species that enjoy a great and fast rise in population typically suffer a population crash.
Only 10000 years ago humans were living in bands of few hundred people. Now we are expected to live in cities of 10-20 million. Are we really adapted to live like in anthills?
A species forced to live in situations it was not adapted to — very precarious indeed.
Jose Pablo
Apr 1 2023 at 7:05pm
“Let each potential parent decide, or agree on, what will be the number of his or her own children. These individual choices should determine the number of humans, instead of a certain group of individuals “collectively” deciding how many children families should have.”
Hear!, Hear!!
I am always puzzled by the fact that this could even be a debate …
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