Reason Takes On Neo-Malthusians

The Big Coffee Table Book of Doom! by Ronald Bailey. Excerpts:

"the total global fertility rate has fallen from over 5 children per woman in 1970 to 2.45 today, rapidly approaching the 2.1 rate that is the threshold of population stability. The fact is that education is great contraception; the higher the female literacy rate, the lower a country's total fertility rate. And according to United Nations data, female adult literacy has increased from 70 percent in 1980 to over 82 percent today. Since 1980, literacy among women ages 15 to 24 has increased from 78 percent to 90 percent.

Longer life expectancy,lower infant mortality, and mass access to education, modern contraception, and market opportunities outside of the home are attainable only in countries where there is some measure of social peace and rule of law. If the global trend toward less violence continues, then opportunities for women to control their own fertility will grow."

"In a 2013 study, Spanish demographers Félix-Fernando Muñoz and Julio A. Gonzalo calculated that future population growth will most likely continue to track the U.N.'s low-variant trends. "Overpopulation was a spectre in the 1960s and '70s but historically the U.N.'s low fertility variant forecasts have been fulfilled," noted Muñoz."

"Butler chooses a Google Earth aerial photograph of the New Delhi city grid to make the point that human beings are now "urban animals.""

"he caption for the New Delhi photo notes that the city has an average population density of 30,000 per square mile. Sounds bad, right? Not when you consider that the population density of Brooklynk averages 35,000 people per square mile. Manhattan's population density today is 70,000 people per square mile, down from 87,000 per square mile in 1910."

"Urban dwellers have greater access to education, market opportunities, and medicine, and they have fewer kids. Meanwhile, reducing the number of people tearing up the landscape as hardscrabble subsistence farmers ultimately means that more land can be set aside for nature."

"humanity may have reached peak farmland. Agricultural productivity per acre is improving faster than the demand for food; as a result, fewer acres are needed to grow crops. These trends suggest that as much as 400 million hectares could be restored to nature by 2060, an area nearly double the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. Secondary forests like the one that surrounds my cabin in Virginia are now expanding on abandoned farmland."

"rash disposal has been largely tamed in rich countries. A 1991 report for Resources for the Future once calculated that if the current rate of waste generation is maintained, all of America's garbage for the next 1,000 years would fit into a landfill measuring 120 feet deep and encompassing 44 square miles, about one-thousandth of one percent of the surface area of the United States."

""by the middle of the twenty-first century most of the world's industrial wood will be produced from planted forests covering a remarkably small land area, perhaps only 5 to 10 percent of the extent of today's global forest." Again, human ingenuity produces more from less, sparing nature."

"In rich countries, skies are actually lightening. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that since 1980, emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulates, and sulfur dioxide are down by 67, 52, 53, 50, and 81 percent respectively. The best evidence finds that increasing wealth from economic growth correlates with a cleaner natural environment. That is to say, richer becomes cleaner."

"the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2014 Synthesis Report notes that there is low confidence that climate change has so far affected any global trends toward increased flooding, hurricanes and typhoons, or droughts."

"In his insightful 2013 book The Infinite Resource, the technologist Ramez Naam counters such thoughts with another question: "Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you?" In this thought experiment, you don't get to pick which people are never born. Perhaps there would have been no Newton, Edison, or Pasteur, no Socrates, Shakespeare, or Jefferson. "Each additional idea is a gift to the future," Naam writes. "Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations." Fewer people means fewer new ideas about how to improve humanity's lot and to further decouple our endeavors from the natural world. "If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor," Naam writes, "then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.""