7 Billion People: Boon or Bane?

The United Nations says that world population have reached 7 billion.

In attempting to visualize the impact of 7 billion people The Economist writes,

THE UN's doughty demographers have declared that October 31st is the day on which the world's population reached 7 billion. They may be wrong (the UN got the timing of the 6 billionth birth out by a couple of years) but no matter: the announcement has triggered celebrations in maternity wards around the globe and a hunt for the 7 billionth child. Yet the growth in the world’s population is actually slowing. The peak was in the late 1960s, when it was rising by almost 2% a year. Now the rate is half that. The last time it was so low was in 1950, when the death rate was much higher. The result is that the next billion people will take 14 years to arrive, the first time that a billion milestone has taken longer to reach than the one before. The billion after that will take 18 years. Where will all these people fit? The chart below, worked out on a maximum population density of six Economist staffers per square metre, gives the space needed to accommodate the world's population at various points in history, expressed in multiples of the borough of Manhattan. Looked at another way, each of us now has the equivalent of Red Square to ourselves.

7 billion represents merely a statistical estimate which most likely is an inaccurate measure of the real number of the world’s population.

Yet, the UN’s declaration seems loaded with political inferences.

For instance, the Economist article above tries to project maximum land allocated per individual or a population density. But this would be a chimera for the simple reason that all land area are not the same (e.g. mountains are different from coastline or from hills or from plateau; there are private owned and public owned) and that each individual does not use up or require as much space as what the Economist implies.

So the framing from the 7 billion figure could essentially foster political alarmism over a potential conflict from growing population relative to the scarcity of land which is fundamentally not only false but unrealistic.

The other implication of the UN’s hype is to give neo-Malthusians (who falsely believed that overpopulation would translate to a catastrophe for mankind or the Malthusian Catastrophe) room to advocate for more political controls on everyone. Their focal point has been centered on the strains to access scarce resources and to the environmental impact from a growing population.

Following charts from World Bank-Google Public Data

Yet even if there is some semblance of truth to the claim that we are now 7 billion people, the $7 billion question is that how have we been able to successfully reach this state in defiance of the doom mongers’ expectations of a ‘catastrophe’? And importantly if such factors will continue to support even a larger population?

The Economist rightly points out that world fertility rate have been going down.

If this slowing fertility trend should continue, then population growth trends would imply for a slowdown or even a potential peaking.

Nevertheless, another very important aspect that has supported today’s 7 billion people has been a huge jump in GDP per capita that coincides with the slowing fertility growth

The substantial improvement in per capita GDP has mostly been because of globalization and a more pervasive adaption of economic freedom.

Competition in free markets has been cultivating and accelerating the rate of technological innovations that has helped in resolving the scarcity problem in many aspects such as in the science and medicine, information and communications, business process and etc..

Largely uncelebrated hero Norman Borlaug discovered high yielding wheat varieties which he combined with modern agricultural techniques which paved way for the green revolution. Mr. Borlaug was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and was known as the ‘father of green revolution’ who has been credited with saving over a billion people from starvation

And further advancements in technology whose costs have materially decreased have became available to a wider range of people which has increased people's lifespans

The very impressive author Matthew Ridley wearing his Julian Simon hat (the famous free market economist who made a controversial bet against Malthusian Paul Elrich and won) sums up at the Wall Street Journal on why population growth trends will slow

(bold emphasis mine)

Birth rates have gone down because of prosperity, not poverty. Everywhere it has occurred, it has followed a fall in child mortality and famine and an increase in income and education. The wider availability of contraception has been necessary, even vital, for this shift, but it has not been sufficient.

To a biologist, the demographic transition is both surprising and intriguing. No other species drops its birth rate when its food supply increases. Frankly, no expert has yet fully explained the phenomenon. It remains something of a demographic enigma.

The best guess is that modern society causes human beings to switch their reproductive strategy from quantity to quality. Thus, once child mortality drops and paid work becomes available to the children of subsistence farmers, parents become more interested in getting one or two children into education or jobs than in begetting lots of heirs and spares for the farm.

Whatever the explanation, history shows that top-down policies aimed directly at population control have generally proved less successful than bottom-up ones aimed at human welfare, which get population control as a bonus. The faster poor countries can grow their economies, the slower they will grow their populations.

While present developments has generated much progress, there are still many afflicted by poverty. That’s because there continues to be meaningful resistance in embracing a bottom up approach in dealing with socio-economic development.

It's really not about the number of people but the process or the means by which people use to sustain their living. This means, in general, the world is much better off with MORE PRODUCTIVE people.