March 23, 2001
Volume 3/ Number 9
Dear Colleague:
The United Nations Population Division issued World Population Prospects, The 2000 Revision on February 28 inciting another chorus of doom and gloom by population control fanatics. Yet under population, not overpopulation, is our long-term problem.
Steven W. Mosher
President
Regarding World Population Prospects
The United Nation’s latest population numbers (World Population Prospects, The 2000 Revision) predict that human numbers will grow from their current 6 billion to approximately 9 billion at mid-century. (Thereafter, they are predicted to fall.) This final half century of growth has prompted the usual spate of jeremiads, but the fact is that population growth is leveling off for most countries. In the decades to come, the populations of many will go into absolute decline.
Today we speak of the haves and have-nots in economic terms. But the starkest division in the future may be between those who have children, and those who have not children. As the shrinking populations of Europe and Japan are discovering, it is a country’s young that fill it with hope.
Much has been made of the fact that 99 percent of projected population growth is going to occur in the developing countries. Most observers (for reasons known only to themselves) assume that these countries will remain poor as they grow in numbers.
Yet, under the right circumstances, population growth is a stimulus to economic growth. Every developed nation experienced rapid population growth that propelled it to economic take-off. The increase in numbers provided producers to fuel the economy and consumers to use its products.
The circumstances are the rule of law, as embodied in a constitution and a court system, and a guarantee of property rights, safe from government taxation or extortion. This formula transformed America, and it can transform Africa, a land rich in natural resources, into a continent of prosperity and influence.
Real development in Africa, however, has many obstacles, not least of which are those imposed by its would-be benefactors. The first and foremost obstacle is the view of the developed world that unborn children in the developing world are an enemy to be attacked.
Perhaps if, over the past 40 years, more emphasis had been placed on promoting property rights and the rule of law, and less on the promotion of sterilization and contraception, countries in Africa would be further along the road to development. There would be no need for even the most zealous opponent of human increase to fear the future.
