7 billion: Can the population keep growing?

It is “presumably just a coincidence” that the U.N. has picked Oct. 31—Halloween—as the day the 7 billionth living human being will be born, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. But we all have reason to be frightened by the bacteria-like rate at which humans are reproducing. After making our start as a scattering of nomadic tribes involving thousands of individuals, humanity took about 200,000 years to build its number to 1 billion, in 1800. Adding the next billion took only 120 years. Since 1960, we’ve been adding a billion people every 12 or 13 years. By century’s end, the U.N. estimates, we may number 10 billion.

“Don’t panic,” said The Economist in an editorial. First of all, “the growth in the world’s population is actually slowing.” In 1970 the average woman gave birth to 4.45 children during her lifetime. Today, that figure is 2.45, and in many nations fertility has even dropped below the so-called “replacement rate,” meaning that their populations are now declining. Secondly, agricultural productivity has boomed by 350 percent since 1970, and it may continue to rise in coming decades. The key to mankind’s future, said Tim Worstall in Forbes.com, will be the spread of prosperity. As people get richer and healthier, they stop making babies as a hedge against early mortality, and focus on raising one or two children well. Despite the West’s current economic problems, the global economy, powered by the developing world, is “growing very nicely indeed.”

But what about the undeveloped world? asked Joel Cohen in The New York Times. Nearly half the world—including much of China, most of India, and nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa—lives on $2 a day or less. About 900 million people are chronically hungry or undernourished. The world might sustain 10 billion people in some fashion, but the measure of our success will be whether “every child born will be wanted and well cared for and have decent prospects for a good life”—a standard we are failing even now. “Indefinite population growth is physically impossible on a finite planet,” said Roger Martin in the London Guardian. Inevitably, we’ll deplete what’s left of the Earth’s fossil fuels, forests, minerals, fish, and fresh water. While welcoming our 7 billionth co-tenant of this once-bountiful planet, let us remember that “the more we are, the less for each.”

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