A Push for Population Control

Take a moment to think about the past week in your life. What stress, if any, did you experience? What could have been the source of that stress? The American Psychiatric Association consistently cites one sweeping cause of stress in its national and focus group studies: feeling overburdened.

Now reflect on your personal responses to that feeling of strain and tension. The APA has also documented typical reactions that feeling of overburdenedness: acting irrationally, and decisional paralysis. In one case, people move to quickly to relieve stress and forego other, more viable solutions. In the other case, people don’t move at all; they shut down.

Humor my adolescent cynicism for a moment and take the APA’s results and apply them to our social, political, and economic systems. There are inordinate layers of administration and power that affect your daily life: your teachers, bosses, township officials, School District officials, county officials, State legislature, Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, and Chief Executives. And as hard as they may work to solve problems, they seem to fail. Unemployment is up 5.4% from 2008, GDP rate of growth is down 25% from the global composite, and national debt rate of growth is up 25% from the global composite. We, as a nation, are less able to find work, less able to make money, and are having to spend more money.

I use the words ‘able’ and ‘having’ because the rising cost of living and our stagnating collective incomes are not our fault. They are nobody’s fault. They are symptoms of Malthusian overpopulation.

Head of biology at University College London Steve Jones argues “Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom, and we have agriculture to thank for that. Without farming, the world population would probably have reached half a million by now.”

The World Wide Fund for Nature and Global Footprint Network argue that carry capacity has actually been exceeded in terms of our rates of consumption of global resources. In 2006, WWF’s “Living Planet Report” stated that in order for all humans to live with the current consumption patterns of Europeans, we would be spending three times more than what the planet can renew. Humanity as a whole was using, by 2006, 40 percent more than what Earth can regenerate.

Clearly, our global population is outliving its means. We are overburdened.

But this isn’t an ecological issue. It’s not even an economic issue. It’s a quality of life issue. Demographers, politicians, and environmentalists alike have acknowledged the feasibility of society fluctuating around a statistical carrying capacity—resources would be rationed strictly, travel would be regulated heavily, and the illusion of free will would vanish faster than our fossil fuels. In fact, they have theorized that our proximity to that carrying capacity is much closer than expected. But scientists and statesmen are so wrapped up in whether or not the world could live in such crowded instability, I doubt they stop to think whether or not we should.

So I will pose a basic question: Is it better to foster solutions for living with a precipitously growing population, or to mitigate the growth of the population itself?

Of course, the issue is not as black-and-white as that question frames it to be, and, of course, it is possible to do both. But want to urge us to emphasize the latter option. Why? Because the former erroneously places value on the sum of human wellbeing, while the latter stresses the share of our limited resources. If I must invoke the cliché: it’s quantity versus quality.

Dr. Filip Spagnoli, a Belgian philosopher and statistician, poses an incisive elucidation of this moral dilemma on his website:

Imagine the discovery of a new type of chair. This chair would produce great happiness and wellbeing to those sitting in it. As we live in a world with limited resources, suppose we would only be able to produce one hundred such chairs. Suppose also that the chair would have to be produced in such a way that sharing the chairs will not work (for example, the production of happiness requires genetically coding the chairs). However, the method of distribution of the chair is undetermined: could be a lottery, could be money, could be only for heads of state etc. That’s not important in the present context. Now, imagine also that a greater total of wellbeing (call it utility if you must) could be produced with the same investment, and by giving each and every individual a very, very small increase in his or her personal wellbeing. For example, we could use the money in order to fit all chairs in the world with a massage function. In total, all these small improvements in wellbeing would produce more total wellbeing than just providing one hundred individuals with great happiness by way of the newly invented happiness chairs.

The ethics behind choosing population control as a viable option don’t seem that complex to me. Once smaller families and smaller communities are accepted as a societal norm, no one will be grieving the loss of children who were never born. If there is anyone for whom we grieve, it is the millions of children born each week whose families will be hard-pressed to provide for their basic needs. And inevitably the cycle will repeat without purposeful intervention. I’d rather that those children are never born than for them to carry on despondent lives as the world struggles to conjure its next fix for its depleted resources.

This article will be continued later with a summation of my research on population control methods and their effectiveness.

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