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Babies Are Good — But Our Birth Rate Is Bad
It turns out that babies are good little assets to have around. Despite famed catastrophist Paul Ehrlich (still) warning of imminent population-driven “famines, pandemics, water shortages, climate disasters, resource wars,” the earth is awash in natural resources, with some experts attributing the abundance to humans having acted fruitfully by multiplying.
Efforts by governments throughout the world to boost birth rates have generally failed.
Early in May, the 2024 Simon Abundance Index found that from 1980 to 2023, the cost of the 50 most traded commodities declined by 70.4 percent. This means the supply of such materials as sugar, pork, iron ore, coal, copper, zinc, nickel, and gold, among others, exceeds the demand for them. Or, as the Index puts it, “population-level resource abundance rose by 509.4 percent over this time period.” (READ MORE from Seth Forman: Blacks and the American Dream.
At the same time, the earth’s population grew from 4.4 billion to 8 billion, leading the folks at the Index to conclude that “more people means more prosperity.”
The key to understanding this “superabundance,” writes Index co-author Marian L. Tupy, is that humans are not only consumers, but also creators. “Far from being a cancer on the planet, each of us, on average, grows the stock of human knowledge, thus benefiting the entire species. The human brain, in other words, is the ultimate resource.”
Free market economists have been gloating over this insight since “The Bet,”; the 1980-90 public imbroglio in which economist Julian Simon proved to ecologist Paul Ehrlich that human ingenuity will, over time, prevent the depletion of most natural resources — in this instance, any five basic metals of Ehrlich’s choosing. In October of 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 … the inflation-adjusted price difference for $1,000 worth of copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten in 1980.
Still, as with most hyperbolic libertarian claims, “more brains mean more prosperity” needs qualifiers. We can appreciate that humans are the “ultimate resource” in the sense that human inventiveness has, over time, eliminated many of the worst threats to humanity and made life, per Steven Pinker, better for all. A recent example of this might be the “fracking revolution” in gas and oil, which seems to have ensured human access to cheap and abundant energy far beyond what was expected 20 years ago.
But humans and their brains need to be nurtured to ensure they become net producers and not net consumers. That is why the population explosion projected in sub-Saharan Africa — the UN estimates that Africa’s population will increase from 1.3 billion today to 2.4 billion in 2050 and 4.2 billion by 2100 — has development economists griping about “critical infrastructure gaps” related to things like health, security, and education.
Numbers alone don’t cut it. No one seriously thinks that the mostly underprepared migrants pouring into New York City’s struggling public schools, raising the percentage of non-English speakers to 25 percent, has been good for the development of our “ultimate resource.”
As some scholars have noted, nations with high birth rates that struggle to feed, educate, and provide clean water and medical care for their people might not benefit from a higher birth rate. Indeed, the list of countries with a high Total Fertility Rate (average births per woman) is not an “enviable club”: Chad (6.26 TFR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.16 TFR), and the Central African Republic (5.98 TFR).
Nevertheless, for developed countries like the U.S., all other things being equal, more babies are critical not only for replenishing our work force, increasing economic growth, funding pensions, and solidifying America’s standing as the predominant world power, but also for infusing vitality and purpose into our lives — “choose life!” a widely-read book once implored.
The bad news is that we’re not choosing life. The Wall Street Journal reports on provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the number of births in 2023 (3.59 million) was lower than in any year since 1979, when the population had 111 million fewer people. The TFR, or the number of children on average a woman in the U.S. is expected to have in her lifetime, declined to 1.62, the lowest rate ever recorded and below the population “replacement” level of 2.1 kids per woman. (READ MORE: Why Are We Having Less Sex?)
Efforts by governments throughout the world to boost birth rates have generally failed. Will the news that more people mean more prosperity provide the necessary spark?
This article is an excerpt from The American Spectator’s Spectator P.M. newsletter. Subscribe today to read future letters from our staff!
The post Babies Are Good — But Our Birth Rate Is Bad appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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