Gary North – March 12, 2021
From 2011.
Beginning in the mid-1960’s, a propaganda campaign has been waged against the West. Those favoring government control over the economy have used the fear of a population explosion to persuade voters to allow the governments of the world to interfere with their lives. The Greens have made predictions about famine. These predictions began in 1798 in An Essay on Population, written by T. Robert Malthus. The first edition was published anonymously. His bold prediction of inevitable poverty was dropped in later editions, but people remember the first edition.
We need to know how long this nonsense has been going on. We need to recognize it when we hear it or see it.
THE POPULATION BOMB
Concern over population growth escalated in the 1960’s, especially after the counter-culture movement appeared around 1965. A major news magazine in the United States, U.S. News and World Report, announced in 1965: “The World’s Biggest Problem.” It asked: “How can the world feed all its people, at the rate the population is growing?” This article had been preceded by “World Choice: Limit Population or Face Famine.” Even National Review, then the most influential conservative intellectual magazine in the United States, got on the bandwagon in 1965.
In 1968, Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book, The Population Bomb, was published. In it, Ehrlich, a Stanford University professor of biology, warned: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. . . .” A far better estimate of the threat of worldwide famine was made in 1969 by Harvard University nutritionist Jean Meyer, who predicted that “food may at some time (20 or 30 years from now) be removed altogether as a limiting factor in population.” Meyer’s viewpoint received very little publicity, although it was to prove correct within a decade.
The predicted famines did not occur in the 1970’s or the 1980’s. What did occur was a surplus of food. The apocalyptic critics in 1965 should have paid more attention to the statistics of food production. After 1950, worldwide grain production increased steadily. From 1950 through 1975, this increase was in the range of 25% to 40% per capita. In the less developed countries (excluding Communist China), the increase was in the 13% range. Between 1950 and 1980, the world’s supply of arable land grew by more than 20%, and it grew even faster in the less developed countries. From 1967 to 1977, the world’s irrigated acreage grew by more than 25%. The price of seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and farm equipment also dropped in this period, in some cases by as much as half. In the 1980’s, grain farmers all over the world suffered economic losses as a result of overproduction. While these trends may not be permanent, they did create a tremendous public relations problem for the heralded famine-predictors of the counter-culture era (1965-70).
What also occurred was a dramatic fall of birth rates in undeveloped nations: a contraceptive revolution. In 1979, Ehrlich referred back to his book and others like it that had prophesied rising birth rates in the 1970’s: “But we were all dead wrong.” He still held that a crisis was coming: perhaps famine, or a pandemic, or nuclear war. In 1980, he made a $1,000 bet with University of Maryland economist Julian Simon over the future price of five metals — a bet on the limits to growth. Simon predicted that prices would be lower. He proved correct; Ehrlich paid off the bet in 1990. He could easily afford to pay off; in that same year, he was granted a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation Prize and half of the $240,000 Craford Prize, the ecologists’ version of the Nobel Prize. Simon was unknown to the general public. The media were overwhelmingly supportive of the apocalyptics. Rival viewpoints on the population question, despite the overwhelming evidence, received little attention from the major opinion-makers. The opinion-makers were strongly opposed to population growth because they were strongly pro-abortion. The apocalyptics seemed to provide scientific evidence for a looming catastrophe. This reinforced the legalization of abortion in 1973 (Roe v. Wade).
In 1942, Warren Thompson warned of the decline in the birth rate in Western Europe and its colonies, 1890-1940. “It is the most important demographic change of our time.” This decline in birth rates in the West has generally continued, although in the early 1990’s, it was reversed in the United States. By the late 1980’s, there was no Western European nation except Ireland with a birth rate anywhere near 2.1 children per family — the family replacement rate. Had Islamic birth rates been excluded, the birth rate figures would have been much lower in several nations. West Germany’s birth rate had fallen so low by the late 1970’s that the German population will die out in the year 2500 if the same birth rate is maintained. (There will be plenty of Muslims, especially Turks, to replace them.) By the late 1980’s, a new warning was being sounded: European life spans were lengthening, birth rates were dropping, and government retirement programs were facing a looming crisis: too many recipients, too few taxpaying workers. Yet the apocalyptics continue to warn of an impending explosion, a population bomb.
GLOBAL 2000
In 1980, a Presidential Commission reported to the President of the United States on the impending crises. Unlike most reports from Presidential commissions, this three-volume report received worldwide publicity. It was titled, Global 2000 Report to the President, but became known simply as Global 2000. It was a deeply political document. It was also a classic Malthusian document, meaning the 1798 Malthus, not the more mature Malthus. It warned on page 1:
If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.
For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now — unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends.
Nothing like this happened. Two comments are relevant here. First, there has been no revolutionary technological development, for example, along the lines of nanotechnology, where molecule-sized mechanical assemblers put together atoms and molecules in order to produce organic as well as inorganic substances in almost limitless quantities. This development, if it comes, will at last force a drastic revision of the legacy of Malthus. It looks technologically feasible sometime before the year 2070, but it has not happened yet. Second, “the nations of the world” — read: national governments — poured tens of billions of dollars worth of aid into the third world in the 1980’s, but in the handful of isolated socialist economies of Africa, things nevertheless grew worse. Outside of these tiny socialist economies, which were also suffering from civil war, the predicted food crises did not take place.
This absence of crises was predicted by a group of scholars in a book published in 1984: The Resourceful Earth. This book received very little attention from the press. Its editors offered another scenario: “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now. Stresses involving population, resources, and environment will be less in the future than now . . . The world’s people will be richer in most ways than they are today . . . The outlook for food and other necessities of life will be better . . . life for most people on earth will be less precarious economically than it is now.” This prediction came true for all but North Korea and Cuba.
The Malthusian apocalyptics in 1980 dismissed as irrelevant two centuries of economic and technological progress: 1780-1980. They also ignored earlier periods of population growth in European history. Economic historian Karl Helleiner writes:
The opinion, still widely held, that before the eighteenth century, Europe’s population, though subject to violent short-run fluctuations, remained stationary over long periods, or was growing only imperceptibly, is, I believe, no longer tenable. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that those oscillations were superimposed on clearly recognizable “long waves.” At least two periods of secular increase can be tolerably well identified in the demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the first extending from about the middle of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth, the second from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth, century. . . . In this sense the demographic development of the eighteenth century was not unique. What was unprecedented about it was the fact that the secular upward movement started from a higher level, and that it was able to maintain, and for some time even increase, its momentum. Population growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unlike that of previous epochs, was not terminated or reversed by catastrophe.
Something changed after 1750. The world experienced what Adam Smith taught in The Wealth of Nations (1776): economic freedom produces rapid, long-term growth.
Economic freedom is necessary but not sufficient to produce long-term population growth. A religious worldview favorable to large families must accompany economic liberty. Men must believe what David wrote so long ago: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate” (Ps. 127:4-5). The issue here is world dominion under God. This faith has faded rapidly in the humanist West. With falling birth rates among the populations of the industrialized world, rates of population growth are headed lower. When third-world nations industrialize, they almost certainly — a very dangerous phrase in demographics — will experience the same thing. (We must always add: unless people change their minds and then change their behavior.) It has already happened in Iran, whose birth rate is close to Germany’s: 1.4 children per woman.
The Malthusians always talk about the burden of more mouths to feed. They never talk about the economic benefits of more hands to work and more minds to think creatively beginning two decades later. They ignore the long-term capital returns from a 15-year or 20-year capital investment in morality and education. That is, they are present-oriented and therefore lower-class social theorists. Sadly, vocal Christian intellectuals in the late twentieth century joined the camp of the Malthusians.
Are many people facing famine today? If so, what is the proper solution? If not, why are so many Western intellectuals convinced that famine is imminent? How could a supposedly serious pair of scholars have written a book in 1967 titled, Famine-1975!? The famine never appeared. Instead, food prices fell. Per capita consumption of food rose. Yet the myth of looming food shortages continues to be believed. From 1798 until the present, Malthus’ predictions have been refuted by the facts, decade after decade. The West has experienced a growing population with increasing per capita consumption of food. Yet the myth still flourishes in the West. That starvation is possible in a major war is quite possible. The question is: If we avoid such a major war, is a famine inevitable? The apocalyptics’ answer: yes. This answer has been proven incorrect for over two centuries, but generation after generation of apocalyptics learn nothing from the evidence. Theirs is a religious worldview, impervious to the historical record.
GORBACHEV AND SOLZHENITSYN JOIN FORCES
In January 1994, a nationally circulated newspaper insert magazine, Parade, ran a three-page interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, the deposed ruler of the Soviet Union (1991), who immediately became the head of an environmentalist organization called the Green Cross. This worn-out Communist war horse was proclaiming the statist party line. Collectivist that he was, his enemy was still the same: the American consumer, who has too much wealth.
If we’re going to protect the planet’s ecology, we’re going to need to find alternatives to the consumerist dream that is attracting the world. Otherwise, how will we conserve our resources, and how will we avoid setting people against each other when resources are depleted? . . .America must be an example to the world. America should do what we have done — that is, to abandon any attempt to impose a certain model on other peoples. If we just say, “Xerox the American way and standard of living,” then we must answer the question, “What do we do about the fact that 260 million people in America use 40% of the world’s energy resources, and the 5 billion people in the rest of the world use what’s left?” America must be the teacher of democracy to the world, but not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard. The world can’t support that. Even now, only one third of the world’s population is provided for adequately. We should, therefore, develop other models.
He called for “a new consciousness based on environmental justice.” There is no blueprint, but there must be action. A new evolution is upon us. “There is no clear answer, except that the old ideologies in our civilization must give way to the new challenges of our civilization. The growing environmental movement must be a vehicle for that.”
What is worth noting is that only a few weeks before, on November 28, 1993, the New York Times “Op Ed” page published an essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in which he proclaimed an almost identical thesis. The article was titled, “To Tame Savage Capitalism.” If any person was responsible for destroying the reputation of Soviet Communism in the West, it was he. His three-volume study, The Gulag Archipelago, chronicled the terrorism of Soviet Communism from Lenin to the 1960’s, and he was generally believed by Western intellectuals, who had rejected similar reports for over half a century. He was exiled from the USSR in 1974. The critic of the Soviet Union has also been the critic of Western capitalism. He now joins hands — or at least propaganda efforts — with Mr. Gorbachev, the protegé of Mr. Andropov, the former head of the KGB, the Soviet secret police that Solzhenitsyn despised.
In his essay, Solzhenitsyn decried the spiritual vacuum in the former Soviet Union, a vacuum that capitalism cannot fill. This has been a continuing theme in his writings: the failure of secularism, East and West. The West is now in trouble. It now faces “environmental ruin” and “the global population explosion.” The third world constitutes four-fifths of mankind, and will soon constitute five-sixths. It is “drowning in poverty and misery,” and it will soon “step forward with an ever-growing list of demands to the advanced nations.” He, too, rejected the growth model of Western capitalism. “The time is urgently upon us to limit our wants.” He attacked the United States without naming it for having resisted the demands of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. He did not mention what these demands were: to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by government edicts in order to reduce global warming.
There are four major problems here. First, there is no clear-cut scientific evidence of global warming. When the temperature changes of the world’s oceans are included in the analysis, there is no evidence of directional change, 1890 to 1990. The evidence that temperatures have increased comes from temperature measurements taken at sites in or near cities, where temperatures have increased. In any case, the increase in carbon dioxide emissions accelerated after World War II, but temperatures have not risen since then. Second, the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions are natural, most notably from termites, which contribute some 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to mankind’s supposed output of five billion tons — in an atmosphere of five quadrillion tons. Mankind’s contribution is less than one millionth of the total atmosphere. Third, there is no evidence that global warming is a bad thing. Plants grow much faster in a high carbon dioxide environment. Fourth, it would be bad economics to invest heavily in anti-global warming technologies today when far cheaper technical solutions are likely to appear long before the supposed problem gets worse. (As for atmospheric ozone, there was no increase or decrease, 1978 to 1991.)
In 1977, Ballantine Books, a popular paperback book company in the U.S., published The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age. The book began with this warning: “There is growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend” (p. 5). But there was no temperature evidence for this frightening scenario, either.
Like Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn repeated the oft-quoted statistic that the U.S. is a huge consumer of the world’s resources. Gorbachev used the 40% figure; Solzhenitsyn used 50%. Neither figure is accurate. The U.S. share of world output/consumption has fallen slowly but steadily as other nations have increased their output and hence their consumption of resources. In 1989, the U.S. share of world output was in the range of 26%. This information was available to the authors in 1993.
Solzhenitsyn complained: “When a conference of the alarmed peoples of the earth convenes in the face of unquestioned and imminent threat to the planet’s environment, a mighty power, one consuming not much less than half the earth’s currently available resources and emitting half its pollution, insists, because of its own present-day interests, on lowering the demands of a sensible international agreement, as though it did not itself live on the same earth. Then other leading countries shirk from fulfilling even these reduced demands. Thus, in the economic race, we are poisoning ourselves.” We must therefore “learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” or else “humankind” will “simply be torn apart, as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.”
He recommended no economic blueprint. Solzhenitsyn has resisted offering an economic blueprint — which he sees as Western and hence unspiritual — throughout his career. But he is opposed to capitalism. He has long opposed industrial growth and the ideal of economic progress. He has cried out against the supposed depletion of economic resources. He warned years ago against imminent Malthusian disaster: “. . . in all cases the population will be overtaken by mass destruction in the first decades of the twenty-first century. . . .” He did predict in 1974 that the creative West would eventually “set about the necessary reconstruction.” But he offered no blueprint for this reconstruction, any more than Gorbachev did two decades later. Both men perceive capitalism as morally bankrupt despite — or perhaps because of — its enormous economic success. They damn it as immoral, but they propose nothing to replace it. This opens the door to the creation of a socialistic New World Order in the name of third world poverty, environmental ethics, and overcoming the population explosion. This means a larger, more powerful State with the international authority to bring sanctions against those nations and individuals who violate the new ethical order. The mild socialist (Solzhenitsyn) and the mild Communist (Gorbachev) are strongly opposed to the free market. In this, they are not alone.
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