One of the most remarkable changes in the last 150 years has been the increase in life expectancy. Most evident in Japan and western Europe, it’s a world-wide trend. Even in the poorest countries, life expectancy has jumped as modern medicine and medical technology spread.
An equally important trend is decreasing birth rates. This seems to be independent of culture; everywhere, economists and demographers tell us, as wealth increases, the birth rate falls. In the richest nations, including the U.S., it has fallen below replacement. The population of Japan is actually shrinking, and Europe is not far behind.
These 2 trends intersect in a frightening way. More and more people survive well beyond their productive years, living on savings and public and private pensions, and requiring far more, and more expensive, medical care than their younger compatriots. Meanwhile, there are fewer and fewer young people available to work and generate the wealth that pays for it all. Increasingly, their work is unproductive care of the elderly rather than productive generation of goods and services.
As the population ages, less of the national product is re-invested in regenerative, wealth-producing activities and more is consumed by the non-wealth-producing elderly. At some unknowable point, the pool of young workers simply runs out, or the number of elderly overwhelms the system and drains it dry. It’s a recipe for national bankruptcy and demographic suicide, and we haven’t yet found a way out of the trap.
Nature has a highly efficient way of dealing with the non-productive elderly: it kills and eats them. Ruthless, but it does have the virtue of actually working. Yet one of the first things that any human tribe does is find ways to interrupt that natural process. It’s truly said that if one wishes to know the quality of a civilization, look at how it treats the very young and the very old. But nature, while it may be thwarted for a while, always wins in the end. Develop an antibiotic or a pesticide, and after a while the organisms they attack evolve to resist them. Disrupt the population balance, and eventually starvation takes the place of predation.
Well, if nature always wins, then we have no choice but to accept its dictates – unless. We have placed a big bet that technology and social adaptation can accommodate an ever-growing number of elderly and an ever-shrinking pool of the young; in essence, that we can quite literally change the natural order of things.
That’s a big bet indeed, but not crazy. Mankind has gotten to this point by continuously improving productivity; that is, by using his brain to find ever-more-clever ways to make better use of his brawn, to produce more with less effort. A hunter-gatherer clan could just barely keep itself alive; a single modern-day farmer produces food for hundreds. The surplus is so great that the problem now isn’t starvation, it’s transportation and the diseases of obesity.
Economists since Thomas Malthus have worried about population outstripping our ability to support it. Yet every time a Malthusian limit loomed, we’ve found a way around it. Even the world wars of the 20th century and famines in the old Soviet Union and communist China (which killed more than the wars) didn’t cause a decline in population or slow down our march to ever-greater affluence for very long.
But what if Malthus proves right, and there is an ultimate limit to population? If so, the evidence suggests that it’s still far off and something to which we can adapt, assuming we act rationally and responsibly. Unfortunately, that’s not an assumption that can be taken for granted.
The key is technology. We’ve gone from burning wood for energy to coal to petroleum to natural gas to nuclear (wind and solar, extremely expensive and inherently unreliable, are a step back, not forward). From hunting and gathering to genetic engineering. From planting sticks to GPS-guided tractors. From craftsmen building one thing at a time to robot-assisted manufacturing. From the abacus to the supercomputer. Each advance has allowed us to support ever-more people in ever-increasing wellbeing.
The threat is the fear of technology and the over-regulation it drives. Technologies are not without their risks and costs, and regulation is a rational response. But the attitude of the bureaucratic regulator looking to protect his own job and a poorly-informed, non-expert public is, understandably, you can never be too safe. If that isn’t balanced by a common-sense realization among our leadership that yes, you can be too safe, and that being too safe leads to a culture of fear and stagnation, then technological progress will grind to a halt, and mankind with it. Malthus will be vindicated; not because of a limit, but because of the refusal to challenge it.
– Kenneth D. Gough © 2019
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