The Rational Optimist (23 page)

Europe probably came close to going down the same path as Japan in the eighteenth century. Just as in the thirteenth century, the European population boomed in the 1700s, helped by wealth generated by local and oriental trade and agricultural improvements. New crops like the potato, though often treated with suspicion when urged on the populace by rulers (Marie-Antoinette’s wearing of potato flowers put the French off eating them for decades), allowed the population of some countries such as Ireland to boom. Potatoes could be grown using a spade rather than a plough, and their fantastic productivity – more than thrice the calories per acre of wheat or rye – and high nutrient content encouraged a very dense population. An Irish acre in 1840 could yield six tonnes of potatoes, almost as much food as an acre of rice paddy in the Yangtze delta. (Sir William Petty, lamenting the idleness of the Irish in 1691, blamed the potato: ‘What need have they of work, who can content themselves with potato’s [sic], whereof the labour of one man can feed Forty?’ Adam Smith begged to differ, crediting the potato for London having the ‘strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions’.) At the time, an English worker needed twenty acres to grow his bread and cheese. The subsistence farmers of Ireland, even into the 1800s, were not only dependent mainly on their own muscle power for cultivation and transport, but were ‘out of the market’, consuming very few manufactured goods for lack of disposable income. (Rapacious English landlords did not help.) As the size of each family potato plot shrank, Ireland was a Malthusian disaster waiting to happen even before the
Phytophthora
famine of 1845 killed a million people and drove a million more to America. In the Scottish Highlands too, the population boom of the 1700s caused a retreat to subsistence, or crofting as it was known there. Only a vast ‘clearance’ and emigration to America and Australia, highly coerced and highly resented to this day, relieved the Malthusian pressure.

Denmark followed Japan’s path, too, for a while. The Danes responded to increasing ecological constraints in the eighteenth century by intensifying their agricultural labour. They banned cattle from forests to protect the supply of future fuel, which increased the price of manure. To maintain the fertility of their soil, they worked extraordinarily hard at ditching, clover growing and marling (laboriously digging up and spreading lime and clay subsoil to neutralise and release nutrients from sandy or acid soils). Hours of work increased by more than 50 per cent. By the 1800s, Denmark had become a country that was trapped by its own self-sufficiency. Its people were so busy farming that none could be spared for other industries and few could afford to consume manufactured products. Living standards stagnated, admittedly at a relatively decent level. Eventually in the late nineteenth century the industrialisation of its neighbours then created a market for Danish agricultural exports and these could slowly raise the living standards of Danes.

British exceptionalism

It was Britain’s fate to escape the quasi-Malthusian trap into which Japan, Ireland and Denmark fell. The reasons are many and debatable, but here it is worth noting a surprising demographic factor. Britain, more than any other country, had unintentionally prepared itself for industrial life in an elemental, human way. For centuries – leaving out the aristocrats (who left fewer heirs because they died from falling off horses) – the relatively rich had more children than the relatively poor. On average a merchant in Britain who left £1,000 in his will had four surviving children, while a labourer who left £10 had only two – this was in around 1600, but the differential was similar at other dates. Such differential reproduction happened in China, too, but to a much lesser extent. Because there was little or no increase in the standard of living between 1200 and 1700, this overbreeding by the rich meant there was constant downward mobility. Gregory Clark has shown from legal records that rare surnames of the poor survived much less well than rare surnames of the rich.

By 1700, therefore, in Britain most of the poor were actually the descendants of the rich. They had perhaps carried down with them into the working classes many of the habits and customs of the rich: literacy, for example, numeracy and perhaps industriousness or financial prudence. This theory accounts especially well for the otherwise puzzling rise in literacy during the early modern period. It may also account for the steady decline in violence. Your chances of being a victim of homicide in England fell from 0.3 per thousand in 1250 to 0.02 per thousand in 1800: you were ten times more likely to be killed in the earlier period.

Fascinating as this demographic discovery is, it cannot fully explain the industrial revolution. The same was not nearly as true of Holland in its golden age; and it would, for example, struggle to explain China’s rapid and successful industrialisation after 1980 – in the wake of a policy of deliberate murder and humiliation of the literate and the bourgeois in the Cultural Revolution.

What Europe achieved after 1750 – uniquely, precariously, unexpectedly – was an increasing division of labour that meant that each person could produce more each year and therefore could consume more each year, which created the demand for still more production. Two things, says the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, were vital to Europe’s achievement: coal and America. The ultimate reason that the British economic take-off kept on going where the Chinese – or for that matter, the Dutch, Italian, Arab, Roman, Mauryan, Phoenician or Mesopotamian – did not was because the British escaped the Malthusian fate. The acres they needed to provide themselves with corn, cotton, sugar, tea and fuel just kept on materialising elsewhere. Here are Pomeranz’s numbers: in around 1830, Britain had seventeen million acres of arable land, twenty-five million acres of pastureland and less than two million acres of forest. But she consumed sugar from the West Indies equivalent (in calories) to the produce of at least another two million acres of wheat; timber from Canada equivalent to another one million acres of woodland, cotton from the Americas equivalent to the wool produced on an astonishing twenty-three million acres of pastureland, and coal from underground equivalent to fifteen million acres of forest. Without these vast ‘ghost acres’ Britain’s industrial revolution, which was only just starting to raise living standards in 1830, would have already shuddered to a halt for lack of calories, cotton or coal.

Not only did the Americas ship back their produce; they also allowed a safety valve for emigration to relieve the Malthusian pressure of the population boom induced by industrialisation. Germany, in particular, as it industrialised rapidly in the nineteenth century, saw a huge increase in the birth rate, but a flood of emigrants to the United States prevented the division of land among multiple heirs and the return to poverty and self-sufficiency that had afflicted Japan two centuries before.

When Asia experienced a population boom in the early twentieth century, it had no such emigration safety valve. In fact, Western countries firmly and deliberately closed the door, terrified by the ‘yellow peril’ that might otherwise head their way. The result was a typical Malthusian increase in self-sufficiency. By 1950 China and India were bursting with the self-sufficient agrarian poor.

The demographic transition

It is hard now to recall just how coercive were the population policies urged by experts in the mid-twentieth century. When President Lyndon Johnson’s adviser Joseph Califano suggested that an increase in famine relief should be announced before a visit by Indira Gandhi to the United States, Johnson supposedly replied that he was not going to ‘piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems’. Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (remembered these days as being about collective action, but actually a long argument for coerced population control), found ‘freedom to breed intolerable’, coercion ‘a necessity’ and that ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’ Hardin’s view was nearly universal. ‘Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control,’ wrote John Holdren (now President Obama’s science adviser) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977, but not to worry: ‘It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.’ All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed: people must be ordered or at least bribed to accept sterilisation and punished for refusing it.

Which is exactly what happened. Egged on by Western governments and pressure groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, coerced sterilisation became a pattern in many parts of Asia in the 1970s. ‘Dalkon Shield’ contraceptive devices, the subject of safety lawsuits in America, were bought in bulk by the American federal government and shipped to Asia. Chinese women were forcibly taken from their homes to be sterilised. Cheered on by Robert McNamara’s World Bank, Sanjay Gandhi, the son of the Indian prime minister, ran a vast campaign of rewards and coercion to force eight million poor Indians to accept vasectomies. In one episode, recounted by the historian Matthew Connelly, the village of Uttawar was surrounded by police and every eligible male sterilised. In response, a crowd gathered to defend the nearby village of Pipli, but police fired on the crowd, killing four people. A government official was unapologetic. In this war against ‘people pollution’, force was justified: ‘if some excesses appear, don’t blame me ... Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.’ Eventually Sanjay Gandhi’s policies proved so unpopular that his mother lost an election by a landslide in 1977, and family planning was treated with deep suspicion for many years thereafter.

Yet the tragedy is that this top-down coercion was not only counter-productive; it was unnecessary. Birth rates were already falling rapidly in the 1970s all across the continent of Asia quite voluntarily. They fell just as far and just as fast without coercion. They continue to fall today. As soon as it felt prosperity from trade, Asia experienced precisely the same transition to lower birth rates that Europe had experienced before.

Bangladesh today is the most densely populated large country in the world, with more than two thousand people living on every square mile; it has a population greater than Russia living on an area smaller than Florida. In 1955 Bangladesh had a birth rate of 6.8 children per woman. Today, fifty years later, that ratio has more than halved, to about 2.7 children per woman. On current trends Bangladesh’s population will soon cease growing altogether. Its neighbour India has seen a similar collapse in fecundity, from 5.9 to 2.6 children per woman. In Pakistan the birth rate did not start dropping till the mid-1980s, but its decline has been catching up its neighbours: it has halved in just twenty years to 3.2 children per woman. Between them these three countries account for about a quarter of the world’s population. If they had not seen their birth rates fall so fast, the world population boom would have become deafening.

Yet they are not alone. Throughout the world, birth rates are falling. There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved. Until 2002, the United Nations, when projecting future world population density, assumed that birth rates would never fall below 2.1 children per woman in most countries: that is the ‘replacement rate’, at which a woman produces enough babies to replace her and her husband, with 0.1 babies added in to cover childhood deaths and a slightly male-biased sex ratio. But in 2002, the UN changed this assumption as it became clear that in country after country the decline in baby-making went straight through the 2.1 level and kept on dropping. If anything, the decline may accelerate as the effect of small family size compounds. Nearly half the world now has fertility below 2.1. Sri Lanka’s birth rate, at 1.9, is already well below replacement level. Russia’s population is falling so fast it will be one-third smaller in 2050 than it was at its peak in the early 1990s.

Do these statistics surprise you? Everybody knows the population of the world is growing. But remarkably few people seem to know that the rate of increase in world population has been falling since the early 1960s and that the raw number of new people added each year has been falling since the late 1980s. As the environmentalist Stewart Brand puts it, ‘Most environmentalists still haven’t got the word. Worldwide, birth-rates are in free fall ... On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birth rates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping.’ This is happening despite people living longer and thus swelling the ranks of the world population for longer, and despite the fact that babies are no longer dying as frequently as they did in the early twentieth century. Population growth is slowing even while death rates are falling.

Frankly, this is an extraordinary bit of luck. Had the human race continued to turn wealth into more babies as it did for so many centuries, it would come to grief eventually. When the world population looked like it would hit fifteen billion by 2050 and keep on rising after that, there was a genuine risk of not feeding or watering that number comfortably, at least not while hanging on to any natural habitats. But now that even the United Nations’ best estimate is that world population will probably start falling once it peaks at 9.2 billion in 2075, there is every prospect of feeding the world for ever. After all, there are already 6.8 billion on the earth and they are still feeding better and better every decade. Only 2.4 billion to go.

Think of it this way. After the world population first hit a billion in (best guess) 1804, the human race had another 123 years to work out how to feed the next billion, the two billion milestone being reached in 1927. The next billions took thirty-three, fourteen, thirteen and twelve years respectively to arrive. Yet despite the accelerating pace, the world food supply in calories per head improved dramatically. The rate at which the billions are being added is now falling. The seven billionth person won’t be born till 2013, fourteen years after the six billionth, the eight billionth will come fifteen years after that and the nine billionth another twenty-six years after that. The ten billionth, it is now officially forecast, will never come at all.