Slow population growth isn't a crisis, it's an opportunity

When a syndicated opinion piece titled “What America needs is ... more Americans” ran in the Star Tribune last week, readers likely took economist Tyler Cowen’s argument at face value: Population growth in the U.S. has slowed to a crawl and that’s bad.

The contrasting view was captured famously by nature writer Edward Abbey, who proclaimed that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Why should we assume slow or even no net population growth is bad? What could be wrong with a stable population in a world where each additional person adds to the burden on the climate system and where enough resources simply don’t exist to support an unlimited population at the lifestyle Americans expect to maintain?

Cowen was likely reacting to a recent notice from the Census Bureau that the country’s population “grew at a slower rate in 2021 than in any other year since the founding of the nation.” Abbey’s line was penned after a lifetime spent observing the impacts of development, sprawl and resource extraction across the American West. Could both be right?

Not that long ago concern over unchecked population growth was widespread. When Paul and Anne Erlich’s 1968 blockbuster book "The Population Bomb" warned that the global population would soon outstrip the food supply, leading to mass starvation and death, governments and activists worldwide took notice. So did Hollywood, producing such films as the 1973 thriller "Soylent Green," which featured Charleton Heston as a detective navigating a New York City crowded with 40 million people where food had become so scarce that a sort of industry-supported cannibalism became the last resort of the masses.

But the Erlichs’ most dire projections ultimately proved wrong; they were unable to foresee massive increases in the global food supply made possible by the “green revolution,” driven in part by the University of Minnesota graduate Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his research on expanding agricultural productivity.

Despite an increase in caloric production though, population growth rates began to fall sharply in many countries soon after the birth control pill became widely available – suggesting that many people preferred to have fewer children when given control over their own fertility. Which seems, of course, to be what’s happening in the U.S. today: couples are electing to have children later in life, or not at all, for a range of reasons that includes COVID in the short term, but also the lack of economic opportunity and even the projected impacts of climate change in the longer run.

In 2019, before COVID hit, the U.S. fertility rate was already the lowest it had ever been and is now well below the replacement rate that would yield a stable population, so we depend on immigration for most of our modest net growth. That’s good, since immigrants enrich American culturally and are often themselves drivers of innovation.

So should we be worried about the 0.1% growth rate the Census Bureau has calculated for the U.S. in 2021? Economist Cowen argues yes: Without continuous growth America will stagnate economically, innovation will slow and we will fall into a “mood of stasis and complacency.” Abbey, of course, is no longer with us to provide a counterpoint, but no doubt he would have said “Good, it’s about time!” if told U.S. population growth had fallen to near zero.

Going forward we should treat this slowin g– or perhaps even reversal – of population growth as an opportunity. Ed Abbey might have called it a “remission,” while advocates of steady-state economics would suggest that a system which aims to hold population relatively steady and emphasizes both the efficient and equitable use of resources can yield a society that is more sustainable and just in the long run.

Or perhaps it’s simply a chance to rethink the assumptions that we can grow our way out of our problems and that bigger is always better. Years ago another economist, E.F. Schumacher, titled his influential 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful.” The idea was innovative then. Perhaps it can be again.

— This is the opinion of Times Writers Group member Derek Larson. He teaches history and environmental studies at The College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. He welcomes your comments at twg@anderson-larson.net.

This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Slow population growth isn't a crisis, it's an opportunity