Marigolds for Malthus

The reputation of Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), had a rough couple of centuries after his assertion that efforts to alleviate poverty never could be more than temporary in their effects since population always consequently would rise to absorb all the new resources (food in particular) dedicated to the purpose. The poor thereby would become more numerous but no better off. Then, in concert with the industrial revolution, for the next two centuries after Malthus’ essay population soared while per capita income and food production rose along with it. The world grew wealthier and better fed while the percentage of poor diminished. The predictions of latter day Malthusians fared no better. Paul Ehlrich’s influential 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted global famine by the end of the 1970s. Instead the “green revolution” boosted agricultural production faster than population growth and again the global percentage of poor dropped for the next 50 years.

Yet, though they underestimated the rate of increase in agricultural and industrial productivity, the Malthusians were not and are not simply foolish. There are negative consequences to population growth. All of our most serious environmental problems are at bottom a population problem. Were the population of the earth today (7.8 billion) what it was the year I was born (2.5 billion) little need be done to address them beyond what has been done already. In fact, we could all go back to burning coal and driving gas guzzlers and still be ahead of the game.

At the beginning of this century, global population was expected to rise to 14 billion before 2100, which portended a frightening increase of demands on natural resources. It seems, however, that those initial expectations were wrong. Current mainstream guesses (and they are no more than educated guesses) are for a rise to 9.7 billion, and even this might be high. Historically, population soars in a region when industrialization takes hold and incomes rise, just as Malthus predicted. Industrialization happened first in Europe and then sequentially in other regions with the same demographic result. Then it appears something happens as industrial economies mature. The fertility rate is the lifetime number of offspring expected per woman on average, and a rate of 2.1 or higher is required to keep the population steady or growing. In recent decades in the West and in the advanced economies of Asia the rate has dropped well below the 2.1 replacement figure. The USA is currently 1.8. In several countries (Italy, Russia, Cuba, Japan, et al.) there are absolute declines in population. In Japan, where immigration is minimal, more people turn 80 every year than enter the work force thereby constraining economic growth and impacting the affordability of social welfare programs. Only high immigration levels keep numbers in the US, Canada, UK, and several other immigration magnets growing. Enough poorer countries are still expanding rapidly to keep global population rising strongly, but even among them fertility rates, while high, are trending steadily downward. If the trend continues so that world population at some point reverses course and goes into decline (by choice, not by catastrophe) the benefits would outweigh the inevitable attendant economic stresses.  Malthusians still have grounds to worry, but at least they now also have grounds to hope.

Why people are choosing to have fewer (or no) kids is a matter of much debate, and the proposed answers tend to vary along with the politics of the proposers. No one really knows. Apparently at a certain stage of economic and social development, at least so far, most women (the ultimate arbiters) make this choice, while ever larger numbers both of men and women grow disenchanted with the notion of even being couples, much less parents. (See Half of Singles Don’t Want a Relationship or Even a Date by Bella DePaulo Ph.D.) The change in my lifetime has been dramatic. Adult singles were very much the exception when I was a kid; today they outnumber coupled adults. Further, the median age for first marriage in the USA in 1960 was 22 for men and 20 for women, meaning half of brides were teenagers. Today it's 28 for women and nudging 30 (29.6) for men, and that is for those who marry at all. (While single parenthood is an ever more popular option, those who deliberately choose it have fewer kids on average than couples.) Young people just have a different set of priorities and (perhaps unrealistic) expectations nowadays.

In the way that one thought sometimes leads to another with only a tenuous connection, Dr. DePaulo’s article brought to mind a novel by Gore Vidal I first read as long ago as 1968. The eponymous protagonist Myra Breckinridge, deeply concerned about global overpopulation, takes a teaching position at an actors’ school in Los Angeles. Myra is a classic film aficionado who argues that no insignificant film was made between 1935 and 1945. She asserts that every culture has a mythology and the movies of 1935-45 form the American mythology. The characters in them are the gods and goddesses of our myths. They define our sense of ethics, our world view, and our ideals of masculinity and femininity. She believes the sex roles embodied in these films were all very well for building a nation and fighting Nazis, but are inappropriate to a 1968 overpopulated world with nuclear weaponry. She wants to remold our mythology through movies in order to create an America and (to the extent Hollywood movies have global reach) a world that is more sexually fluid. The birthrate thus will fall and pressure will be eased on the nuclear trigger. A school for actors is as good a place to start as any.

The traditional gender types reflective of 1935-45 are embodied by two students at the film school who plan to marry. Rusty is handsome, swaggering, and an ass. His wholesome, pretty, and somewhat air-headed girlfriend Mary-Ann wants nothing more than a white picket fence and four children with Rusty. Myra reprograms them by sexually humiliating Rusty and seducing Mary-Ann. She considers it a great success when the shattered Rusty shouts he is “sick of women.” He then acts so hostile to Mary-Ann that she announces, “I’ll never marry! I hate men!” Both are now better able to bring Myra’s vision to their future screen roles.

In 1970 this book was made into a movie (trailer) starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed. Also in the movie are a 77-year-old Mae West, a young Tom Selleck, and an even younger Farah Fawcett. The film would be “so bad it’s good” had the filmmakers not altered the ironic ending of the book and thus tilted the result heavily toward the plain bad. The film bombed at the box office so badly that sales of the novel (previously a best-seller) nearly stopped. Nonetheless, it seems that Myra, whether on page or on screen, was ahead of her time.

Too Many People - Paul McCartney