The world’s birth rate is just about equal to, or possibly even below, the level at which the human population will hold steady — right about 2.1 babies per woman.
The United States’s birth rate has been falling for 18 years, is at a record low, and is still falling. Fewer children exist in the U.S. than did a decade ago. Every wealthy country, except Israel, has a birth rate below the replacement level, and most are well below. Nobody seems to have found a way to reverse this trend.
The baby bust will be the dominant story of the next 30 years, at least.
All this makes it really dizzying to go back 60 years and look at the panic about overpopulation.
The overpopulation panic of the 1960s had two distinct elements: believing the world couldn’t feed, house, or keep warm 6 billion people, and the U.S. couldn’t handle 300 million, and believing that something drastic was needed to curb the birth rate.
When reviewing the ’60s concerns about population, a good place to start is this dispatch in the New York Times from the 1964 World’s Fair by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.
To set the table, here are some of Asimov’s predictions about the future:
“By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
“Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it.
“At the New York World’s Fair of 2014, General Motors’ ‘Futurama’ may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light‐forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large‐scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy.
“ONE can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy.”
That’s when Asimov launched into his overpopulation diatribe, which took up a huge portion of this article. You thought the whole windowless-home part was the dark part. But no, the babies-being-born part was the dark part.
“As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life’s grim sign blinking out the population of the United States; with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds.”
Asimov warned, “A larger portion than today will be deprived.” His hope was in anti-baby propaganda.
“There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened — but, I suspect, not sufficiently.
“One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World’s Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen‐agers).”
Around the time of Asimov’s piece, the drumbeats for population control were part of the culture. The following are more pieces from the New York Times in those times:
“300,000,000 Americans Would Be Wrong”
“The evil of overpopulation: The Government has at last begun to see that its programs of economic aid abroad, its Alliance for Progress in Latin America, its antipoverty drive in the United States will be losing battles if the booming birth rate is ignored. The Government finally seems to be getting up enough courage to act.”
And here’s a piece worrying that UNICEF, by feeding the poor in Africa, is making the world worse:
“World population has increased about one‐half since 1930 and may more than double again by 1999. Probably one‐third to one‐half of the people who die—most of them agonizingly—in 1999 would never have been born if our efforts had not kept their parents alive.
“We do not like to face harsh facts. But whether we like them or not, there are going to be 2 or 3 billion human beings living wretchedly by the end of this century, who would not even exist if it were not for things we have done.”
The birth rate has dropped about 10% in the past four years, yet the New York Times still worried, in an editorial titled “Controlling Population,” that “the United States cannot relax its efforts simply because the rate of increase in population is now declining.”
Here’s one effect of all of this: The 1960s featured so much scaremongering about overpopulation and high birth rates that the people coming of age then (the baby boomers) all went into their adulthoods with a mission to preach the gospel of population control.
As a result of this boomer mind-virus, it wasn’t until the last few years, when Generation X started to take over institutions, that anyone here even mentioned that we have a low and falling birth rate and we’re running out of babies.