The Carrying Capacity Network (CCN) — which describes itself as “a nonadvocacy group [that] works to increase understanding of the interrelated nature of environmental degradation, population growth, resource conservation, and quality of life issues,” — held its second annual National Carrying Capacity Issues Conference in Washington, DC this past June. Several hundred would-be population controllers attended and the air was thick with the usual overpopulation/ecological disaster rhetoric, liberally laced with nasty anti-immigrant, anti-Roman Catholic bigotry.
One of the principle speakers and exhibitors at the CCN Conference was Donald Mann, the president and founder of Negative Population Growth (NPG). Mr. Mann and his NPG group believe that “the optimum size for U.S. population lies in the range of 125 to 150 million, or about the size [the country] was in the 1940s.” (The U.S. population is now some 256 million). According to Mann, “with a slow and gradual decrease in our numbers, that size could be reached in about a century .…” Mann notes that this “would mean a reduction of nearly 100 million from our present numbers in about a century, or roughly 10 million per decade.” Well, let’s see how reasonable that century-long “slow and steady decrease” might actually be.
Annual U.S. population growth currently in excess of nearly two million births over deaths (4.1 million births less 2.2 million deaths) plus yearly net immigration of some 750,000 — 1,000,000, gives a total increase of some three million people yearly. Mr. Mann wants to “reduce annual immigration to an overall ceiling of about 200,000…so that it roughly balances with emigration (out-migration).” Immigration would thus no longer be a contributor to U.S. population growth, which now would be solely dependent upon the natural increase or decrease (births minus deaths) of the populace. To achieve NPG’s 100 million reduction of the U.S. population, Mr. Mann says that the nation “must…lower [its] total fertility rate (the average number of children per woman) to about 1.5 and stabilize it there for roughly 50 years.” After that time the rate could rise back to the long term replacement level of 2.1, about where it stands today.
To achieve an immediate zero-growth state, the U.S. birth numbers would have to be cut in half. But Mr. Mann is not seeking a mere parity between births and deaths — he wants the U.S. population to decline by “rough1y 10 million per decade,” or some one million yearly. With immigration no longer a factor, the one million yearly reduction can only come from a further decrease in the birth figures down to a level of just one million births per year! In other words, an immediate yearly reduction in births of some 75% would be required — and maintained for decades — to achieve Donald Mann’s NPG goal.
Such a reduction in births has never occurred in all of human history, and would require a total fertility rate (TFR) of some 0.5 births per woman, far below the 1.5 level that Mr. Mann erroneously says will do the trick. (The lowest TFR figures ever documented are the 1.3 now being recorded in “Catholic” Italy and Spain.)
Similarly, the U.S. birth rate per 1,000 population, now languishing at about 15.0, very near the lowest rate ever recorded in U.S. history, would plunge to about 4.0, by far the lowest rate in all of human history. Even the inmates of the Nazi ghettos and death camps managed to achieve a higher reproductive rate!
Not only did Donald Mann seriously underestimate the birth rate reductions that would be necessary to achieve a 100 million reduction in the U.S. population over the next century, but he apparently gave little if any thought to the inevitable dislocations that would follow such a decline. The United States has yet to work its way out from under all the economic woes which followed in the wake of the “birth dearth” of the 1970s, during which there were some 10 million fewer births than had occurred just 15 years earlier. That birth decline led to major economic disruptions, beginning in the hospital maternity wards, which closed by the hundreds, through the baby food and maternity clothes manufacturers, on to the nation’s school systems, which for the first time in memory had a surplus of teachers and classrooms. Major retailers went bankrupt as a result of the sales which never materialized from the millions of customers — infants, children and teenagers — who were never born.
Today, according to American Demographics (May ’90), “A demographic bulldozer works away at the [nation’s] housing market. The bulldozer is the baby bust. Every year it further erodes consumer demand at the bottom of the housing pyramid.” And this, it should be noted, is the result of a single decade’s birth decline of some 10 million, a birth decline which occurred while the total U.S. population was actually increasing by more than 20 million! But Don Mann seeks a population decline of 10 million in each decade of the next century, a decline which necessitates a birth drop from current levels of some 30 million per decade for the remainder of the 1990s and for several decades of the 21st century!
And so it went — ridiculous claims, faulty statistics, phony crises — plus lots of raw, naked bigotry against immigrants in general and one church in particular. (Guess who?) The CCN people even managed to find an oriental “Uncle Tom” in the person of a young lady from China, an immigrant herself about a dozen years ago, who having obtained a law degree, became a citizen, married an American, and now proceeded to lash out against further immigration, especially from the Orient.
