Over the last few weeks there’s been a few articles concerning overpopulation out on the Web, a matter of some concern in today’s world. First up is an article in WaPo which discusses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on birth rates in the United States:
In a new report, economists writing for the Brookings Institution estimate that the United States could see “on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year” as a result of the economic recession triggered by the novel coronavirus.
The economists, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip Levine, derive their estimates from data on birthrates during the Great Recession and the 1918 flu pandemic. Both of those upheavals had a considerable negative impact on fertility. …
The reason? Children are expensive, and having a child is in many ways a financial decision. The loss of a job or otherwise uncertain prospects for a steady income lead many would-be parents to postpone having kids until things are more settled. In economic jargon, birthrates are “procyclical” — they tend to rise during times of economic growth and fall during recessions.
But I’m disturbed by this:
Economists use a tool called the value of a statistical life, or VSL, to help put losses of life on a level playing field with other policy considerations. Using a standard VSL of roughly $10 million, the permanent loss of half a million births works out to an economic loss of about $5 trillion over the coming decades.
The value of a statistical life (VSL) is the marginal rate of substitution between income (or wealth) and mortality risk. The VSL indicates how much individuals are willing to pay (WTP) to reduce the risk of death. Applied properly, the VSL can be used in benefit-cost analysis to evaluate the efficiency of government policies designed to reduce risk.
There is no mention of the benefit to society of not having those births occur due to the reduction in stress on the environment. One missed birth is meaningless, but in aggregate there will be some positive effect.
Lloyd Alter on Treehugger seeks to soothe my concerns:
… a new study published in The Lancet with a paragraph-long title, Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study makes the point again:
Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR [total fertility rate] lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.
…
It’s happening almost everywhere; the working adult population is already dropping in China, it’s coming in India, and only sub-Saharan Africa continues to increase to the end of the century. The world population will peak after mid-century and decline significantly by 2100. This is good news, and bad news:
Our findings show that some countries with fertility lower than replacement level, such as the USA, Australia, and Canada, will probably maintain their working-age populations through net immigration. Our forecasts for a shrinking global population have positive implications for the environment, climate change, and food production, but possible negative implications for labour forces, economic growth, and social support systems in parts of the world with the greatest fertility declines.
Concerns about labor forces can be alleviated through medical advances and voluntary reductions in consumption, preferably through price increases required by increasing wages to workers. I wish I was an expert in demographic forecasting, since it would be interesting to see how increasing prices would restrain population growth, as noted in the WaPo article, as well as Secular Cycles (Turchin & Nefedov).
Finally, Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine highlights the impact of plague on population, society, and, as a survivor of the AIDS epidemic himself, on individuals in this longish article:
It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.
It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind — surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the Native population in a relatively short amount of time — millions and maybe tens of millions died. …
We are wrong, therefore, to think of plague entirely as a threat to civilization. Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel. What made the American plague of the 16th century so brutal was that it met a virgin population with no immunity whatever. The nightmare that humans had been dealing with and adapting to in Europe and Asia for millennia came suddenly to this continent all at once, and the population had no defense at all. The New World became a stage on which all the accumulated viral horrors of the Old World converged.
[My bold.]
And overpopulation appears to be the mechanism, which is why I’m unsurprised at the Covid-19 pandemic, and will expect another one soon enough – as does Sullivan. One problem is unsafe practices in crowded conditions, but defining and banning all unsafe practices is not a simple thing to do in, ah, practice.
Plagues have often been catalyzing events, entering human history like asteroids hitting a planet. They kill shocking numbers of people and leave many more rudderless, coping with massive loss, incalculable grief, and, often, social collapse. They reorder the natural world, at least for a time, as human cities and towns recede and animal life reemerges and microbes evolve and regroup. They suspend a society in midair and traumatize it, taking it out of its regular patterns and intimating new possible futures. In some cases, a society redefines itself. In others, trauma seems the only consequence.
Investments, emotional and intellectual, are made void, freeing the survivors to rethink their roles and goals in society, as the roiling of society shows its fault lines. I have to wonder if Covid-19 was a necessary requirement for the George Floyd murder to bring our racial injustice problem to light, as well as the toppling of statues honoring people who had done nothing worthy of such memorialization. Or was Covid-19 too mild of an epidemic? We’re not exactly dropping in the streets, are we?
And, like most traumatic incidents, individual changes can be dramatic. I shan’t steal Sullivan’s prose any longer – go read it for yourself. His description of the consequences of surviving the Spanish Flu by Katherine Anne Porter is a little horrifying.
All of which leads me to an endpoint of thinking about E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), a story of how most of humanity now lives in a vast underground honeycomb of apartments, served by machines, hardly ever seeing another person face to face, communicating via telecommunications, and their shared helplessness when things go awry. I read into it a meditation on how one approach to overpopulation, strict regimentation and dictation of the habits of the madding crowd, as it were, will have unintended and deadly consequences. There’s not really a great connection between this story and the articles I’ve discussed in this post, but The Machine Stops has stuck with me for more than forty years, and if it came to mind now, there’s a connection, if analogical in nature, that’s worth considering.
