"The Mythology of Overpopulation"

Wouldn't you know it, just when I've been thinking about overpopulation, and how sad it is that some people think there could possibly be such a thing as too many precious human souls, George Weigel comes to my rescue. He's a genius.

Here's some good info from his recent article on how, in fact, our future global problem is actually underpopulation (a long quote, but so full of good stuff that I found it hard to find bits to leave out!):

In the 1980s, the median age was 34 in western Europe and 35 in Japan. Absent an unanticipated and dramatic change in birth rates, the median age in western Europe in 2020 will be 47 and in Japan, 52.

In the 2020s, half the adult populations of Italy, Spain, and Japan will be above the official retirement age.

By 2030, China will be an older country than the U.S. 'Imagine Chinese workforce growth slowing to zero while tens of millions of elders sink into indigence without pensions, without health care, and without children to support them. China could careen toward social collapse--or, in reaction, toward an authoritarian clampdown.'...

Russia will almost certainly be in demographic free fall by 2050, if not sooner...Forty years out, Russia will have fallen in the world population tables from fourth place (in 1950) to 20th place.

Ever since the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich's intellectually fraudulent bestseller, The Population Bomb, enlightened opinion has held that "overpopulation" is the problem. It isn't, and never was. Now, thanks in part to the triumph of a contraceptive mentality in societies that have lost any religious sense of obligation toward the future, the grim truth is revealing itself: the problem is too few people.

Of course, there was always something instinctively counterintuitive about the anti-natalist cast of mind, which thinks of a newborn calf as a "resource" or an "asset" and a newborn child as a "burden" or "problem." [Hmm...Does this remind you of anyone...like our new president?] Now that implausibility turns out to have, not only the gravest moral consequences, but the most severe economic, social, and political results.

Yet the mythology of overpopulation is so deeply embedded in American elite opinion that even realistic observers...can still write that contemporary sub-Saharan Africa is "afflicted" with "the world's highest fertility rates." No, sub-Saharan Africa is "afflicted" with vast governmental corruption and ineptitude, ethnic and tribal madnesses, jihadism, and diseases ancient and modern. But it is not "afflicted" with people.

The false idea of "overpopulation" has helped make it very likely that our children and grandchildren will live in a far less stable world than ours--which has not exactly been placid.

So there. By having big families, we're just unselfishly doing our part to ensure that there is a next generation around at all!