TOM EATON | Depopulate your mind of centuries-old bigotries

This week’s news that China’s population has started to fall was not a surprise to anyone who has been following demographic trends, but it may yet prove to be an era-defining milestone: the moment the western world starts to understand that overpopulation is no longer a thing.

According to Beijing, deaths outnumbered births in China for the first time since Mao’s ruinous social engineering experiments, with the population falling by about 850,000.

Personally, I tend to take Chinese statistics with a mountain of salt. If you believe, for example, that Covid-19 has killed 5,273 Chinese citizens since the start of 2020 — Thursday’s official tally — then I have a bridge to sell you.

Still, I think it’s safe to assume that while the numbers might be dodgy, the overall picture — of a falling population — is probably fairly accurate. Which means China has finally joined an accelerating global trend.

Africa, of course, remains on a robust upward trend — Nigeria is on track, in the next 30 years, to become the world’s fourth most-populous country after India, China and the US — but beyond our continent, babies are becoming a scarcer commodity.

The decline is particularly acute in Eastern Europe, as plunging birth rates and accelerating emigration are producing startling statistics. Between now and 2050, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia will all lose about one in five people.

Many of the beliefs amplified by those writers half a century ago survive today, in many cases without any interrogation and often with a clear slant towards fascism, racism and eugenics.

Japan, likewise, is undergoing radical societal shifts as its population shrinks by about half a million people a year, forcing it to reassess its historical resistance to immigration. Outside big cities, a growing number of villages are entirely populated by old people, or being abandoned altogether.

This is not to say that the world’s population — about 8-billion, has started dropping. The UN predicts it will peak at 10.43-billion in 2083. But demographic trends are slow — imaging turning a cruise ship — and the fact remains that the annual rate of growth of the human population peaked in the 1960s and has been dropping like a rock ever since.

The trouble is, that drastic change in numbers since the 1960s hasn’t had an equally drastic change in beliefs about the dangers of overpopulation.

Partly to blame, perhaps, is the huge cultural impact of the 1960s Neo-Malthusians.

Named after Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 An Essay on the Principles of Population envisioned the disastrous combination of exponential population growth and fixed agricultural output, these writers added a dash of dystopian sensationalism (and more than a little fascism) to make the same point: babies produced by poor people in sunny, faraway lands were about to kill us all.

The exclamation mark in Famine 1975!, published in 1967, said it all, as brothers William and Paul Paddock fretted that the developing world was about to run out of food and the US would have to decide which countries lived and died.

But it was The Population Bomb, written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and published in 1968, that entrenched the overpopulation bogeyman in the public’s mind. The book, which openly advocated for mass sterilisation and prenatal sex discernment so poor families could abort baby girls rather than keep on having more and more daughters in an attempt to have a boy, sold more than 2-million copies.

That same year, writing in Science magazine, Garrett Hardin wrote in his Tragedy of the Commons that the only solution was “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”, which would have the effect of “relinquishing the freedom to breed”.

Many of the beliefs amplified by those writers half a century ago survive today, in many cases without any interrogation and often with a clear slant towards fascism, racism and eugenics: I’ll never forget hearing some well-off pensioners in a gentrified Western Cape village welcome the arrival of Covid-19 as a way of “hopefully” wiping out a “few billion” people. They didn’t specify which people they wanted dead, but it was clear they weren’t thinking of anyone in their bridge club.

I doubt they and their ilk will ever admit that the Malthusian nightmare they cling to is nothing more than pseudoscience used to prop up centuries-old bigotries. But as China’s gradual contraction starts to produce unprecedented ripples through the global economy, perhaps the overpopulation bogeyman can finally be left with Thomas Malthus in a distant and unrecognisably different past.