Q&A
Questions from the audience, with responses from Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance
Is it right to say that with overpopulation, what we are creating is just an army of poor to serve mainly the developed world?
I believe it is a fair statement. Several of our guests, including world-renowned expert on contemporary global slavery Kevin Bales, world-renowned earth scientist and historian Naomi Oreskes, ecological economist Joshua Farley, and philosopher and historian Emile Torres, make a strong case on our podcast and in their writings that population growth – driven by patriarchal pronatalism, market fundamentalism, and techno-utopianism – benefits the wealthy at the expense of large populations of disempowered and poor people. Keeping people poor and disempowered makes it easy to exploit them for their labor and for their countries’ resources in order to enrich the wealthy.
The point is that everyone has the legitimate wish to live like people in developed countries. Then the logical solution is to reduce population in poor countries, not to count the growth rate as a whole, isn’t it?
This is a big question that goes beyond the false population versus consumption dichotomy, as a contraction is needed along both these variables. While most people who live in resource-scarce and low-income countries do wish to increase their standard of living, the question about whether they must move to a standard of so-called “developed” countries is problematic.
Much of the “development” agenda has been pushed on these countries from western thinking and ideology about growthism that has come at the expense of traditionally sustainable ways of living in these countries. Our guest Ashish Kothari, along with a number of international scholars, has written extensively on this phenomenon and on strategies to reclaim traditional wisdom and practices in these countries, while at the same time confronting harmful norms of patriarchy, human supremacy, classism, etc.
Ultimately, we must be advocating an overall contraction in population, production, and consumption. In high-income countries, that would require a radical reduction in production and consumption in addition to embracing and accelerating fertility decline. In low-income and high-fertility countries, this would require confronting harmful patriarchal and pronatalist norms while enabling resource security in ways that are independent from the destructive growthist “development” strategies. Check out our interviews with ecological economists Bill Rees and Clive Spash as well as UN Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter on extreme poverty for more information.
My 1974 BA economics thesis cited economists that with lower population growth, per capita income would increase. I believe the conditions and assumptions made then are still correct. Does current research confirm or question whether lower population growth will likely result in higher per capita income?
Yes, research by several of our podcast guests, including ecological economists Bill Rees, Joshua Farley, Clive Spash, and Mathis Wackernagel, confirms that a declining population, coupled with equitable wealth distribution through progressive tax policies, leads to higher per capita income and overall wellbeing. Demographer and podcast guest Vegard Skirbekk, author of Decline and Prosper! Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children, argues that choosing smaller families is one of the most responsible things we can do for our existing children both as parents and as a society, because it allows greater investment in the children already here. Of course higher consumption levels do come at an ecological cost, which is why it is all the more important to reduce population, production, and consumption accordingly.
The 1971 Limits to Growth study offered a likely dynamic: “overshoot and collapse”. It looks pretty likely that’s the path we are on – it just hasn’t happened yet. How is “overshoot and collapse” seen in current academic research and public policy?
Yes, we are right on path to what was predicted in the 1972 Limits to Growth study. In 2020, author Gaya Herrington conducted an analysis to determine to what degree the 1972 predictions align with the state of the planet today. Here’s her study: Update to limits to growth
Can you share more details on the UCS quote?
Yes, UCS has an entire page dedicated to population denial. It’s titled, Climate Change and Population. The quote that I used in my presentation can be found in the UNFPA 2023 State of the World Population Report on page 58. In 2022, a number of us met with a couple of key UCS staff members (after a request from us), and despite the ample scientific evidence we provided refuting their statements, they, without sufficient explanation, refused to alter their statement. We would welcome a strategic multi-org initiative that challenges such anti-scientific positions in not just UCS, but also organizations such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, the Audubon Society etc.
Some surveys indicate that birth rates for large nations are below replacement and, in some cases, as low as 0.8%. How does this square with your thesis?
Yes, fertility rates in many countries are below the replacement rate, including below a total fertility rate of 1, even though the global fertility rate is still above the replacement rate at 2.3. The decline in fertility rates in many countries is largely due to women having greater reproductive autonomy and access to reproductive healthcare information and services. This is a positive trend and must be embraced and accelerated. Many politicians and economists are panicking about fertility rates falling below replacement rates, but that is a fallacy.
At a population of 8.1 billion people, heading towards 11 billion this century, with billions projected to suffer and die due to devastating ecological and social consequences (especially in parts of the world that are already the most impoverished), “replacement fertility” is not a good goal. According to our colleague and podcast guest Chris Tucker, author of A Planet of 3 Billion, an aspirational global fertility rate of 1.5, and that in high-income countries of 1.0 for the rest of the century will help us arrive at a population of close to 3 billion through ethical means (unethical means would be the mass suffering and death that would result from exacerbating ecological and social crises). As such, it is an ethical imperative to not only allow this trend of declining fertility rates to unfold as it naturally is, but to also accelerate it by confronting harmful patriarchal and pronatalist norms, such as child marriage, abortion bans, sanctions on contraceptives, and vilification of people choosing no or fewer children.
For example, in Japan, the TFR is 1.26, and we are hearing apocalyptic headlines that Japan will disappear if Japanese women don’t produce more children. To put this number into perspective, Japan is the 12th most populous nation in the world, it has 8 times more people than the country’s biocapacity can support, and the population of Japan at the current fertility rate trend will reach 73 million by 2100, which is the same population Japan had in 1945. Japan, like many other low-fertility countries, is not disappearing, and we must become better informed statistically in order to counter such alarmist language.
If the general public isn’t interested enough in disasters caused by climate change to change their behavior to improve conditions, how are we ever going to “popularize” small families or no children at all? We’re already dealing with fewer abortion rights.
We must recognize that high fertility rates, especially as high as we have seen in the last few centuries, are not the norm for H. Sapiens. They are a direct result of patriarchal pronatalism – religious, economic, and ethnocentric political pressures on women to bear children for the very growth of these institutions (see our paper Challenging Pronatalism is Key to Advancing Reproductive Autonomy and a Sustainable Population and our interview with Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule as well as with Amrita Nandy, author of Motherhood and Choice).
Instead of “popularizing” small families, our goal at Population Balance is to remove these patriarchal barriers, and to allow people, especially women, to make authentic reproductive choices, which inevitably results in smaller families. Our colleagues at Population Media Center (PMC) are using creative storytelling strategies to help curb harmful societal norms and are having tremendous success. Check out our interview with PMC’s founder Bill Ryerson to understand their creative approach that is based on an ethic of enhancing self-determination. Across the world, in country after country, once women achieve the education, empowerment and means to control their fertility, fertility rates decline. This trend is so strikingly uniform across religious, cultural and political contexts that it has revealed women’s ‘latent desire’ for lower fertility – a general preference that surfaces forthrightly once conditions for women’s authentic choices align.
We also see that once women achieve autonomy, no degree of pronatalist arm twisting can convince them to produce babies for the church, state, or military; the rampant rise in contemporary pronatalism is not reversing the declining fertility trends. We should definitely be concerned about the rise in coercive pronatalism, in the form of abortion and contraceptive bans, as they are a direct response to the threat that declining fertility poses to these powerful institutions.
How do we get environmental groups and thought leaders to include human overpopulation as a primary driver of climate change? It’s still such a taboo topic.
The IPCC, which tends to be a relatively conservative body, is already unequivocal about the subject. So it’s not a matter of providing more information. People need a sense of agency in order to make meaningful change, which is why we frame the topic as a matter of granting women the autonomy and ability to choose what they already want. We also frame it as a matter of children’s rights, as UNICEF tells us that children born today face a future that is “unimaginably dire.” We can protect children by focusing our attention on the well-being of those already here, rather than on bringing new ones onto a struggling planet. To equip yourself with better arguments when speaking to people who seem resistant to the population discussion, we encourage you to check out our media articles where we challenge many of these dominant ideologies.
How can we make the media address this issue of overpopulation both here in the United States and worldwide during discussions about the changing climate?
Again the focus should be on how overpopulation is the result of centuries of pronatalism that has shaped our views on the role of women and the importance of childbirth. Pronatalism has operated at every level culturally, politically, and in women’s families and doctor’s offices and friend circles to make them feel inadequate if they choose not to have children. Now is a perfect window of opportunity to drive home this point in the wake of Trump’s Global Gag Rule, which is an egregious assault on women’s rights but, we argue, just a logical extension of pronatalism across the political spectrum. We write dozens of articles and letters to the editor (LTEs) each year to challenge these narratives, and we encourage you all to do the same.
How do you fight ignorance of religious and cultural norms about reproduction?
These norms must be seen as in the interest of patriarchal religious leaders who have one goal: to grow their flocks to increase the power of their institution. Notice that the vast majority, if not all, great religious texts are written by men. This is one of the reasons that fertility levels fall with education: because science-based information, as well as the opportunity that comes with education, tend to counter myths and stories that favor procreation.
Cultural norms, too, are based on outdated views of women and of children as assets to an agrarian society dependent upon unskilled labor. These norms naturally fall by the wayside as women gain access to education and opportunity, and choose the reproductive rates that work for them. Notwithstanding the efforts of governments at both ends of the political spectrum to institute pronatalist policy in countries all over the world, from Finland to Iran, once women experience the freedom and financial benefits of having fewer children, they are not turning back.
How can economic theories adapt to population decline? Japan, Italy, and South Korea are losing population, but economists say we must grow to advance economies and have jobs for everyone.
In this Guardian article, several of us explain why the idea that population growth is needed for economic growth is fallacious and harmful. This is not a reality but rather ideological thinking born out of media hype. South Korea, for example, which currently has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world at 0.7, has been below replacement-rate fertility for 40 years, and yet, its per capita income has been increasing on par with its rate of fertility decline. The same trend is true for Japan and Italy, both of which also have low and declining fertility rates. Demographer Vegard Skirbekk argues that even for mainstream economics (i.e. without having to adapt to new theories), declining fertility rates are good for the economy. From that logic, population growth therefore only supports two things – access to cheap labor by depressing wages and further empowerment of the elites. As such, we do challenge the mainstream debt-based global capitalist economic models because of their growth-obsessed ideology that commodifies nature, nonhumans and most humans and is accelerating overshoot.
What might be the ideal population for the world?
We believe, in alignment with several ecologists, that in a world where ecological and social justice and sustainability are aligned (i.e. humans and nonhumans flourish in co-existence commensurate with Earth’s natural limits), Earth could support between 1-3 billion people. For reference, Earth’s population in 1926 (the year my grandmother was born) was around 2 billion people, and in 1960, the population was 3 billion. Confronting patriarchal and growthist regimes can get us there within a century.
What other organizations do you partner with to fulfill your mission?
In addition to Population Connection, we regularly partner with Population Media Centre, Population Institute, Post Carbon Institute, the Institute for Humane Education, Phoenix Zones Initiative, Center for a Regenerative Future at the University of Denver, and several animal rights and nature protection organizations in Canada, the US, and India.
