The take away from a book I have been reading demonstrates the positive impacts of a reducing population that some countries have experienced. Most people are aware of the impact of imposed family planning in China that allowed for an estimated 30 per cent increase in investment for their economy.
Author Lester R. Brown describes this phenomenon as a demographic bonus in his book Out growing the Earth: The food security challenges in an age of falling water tables and rising temperatures.
The bonus results from shifting resources from smaller younger dependants who need nurturing and education to working adults who contribute to growing the economy where household savings increases, investment rises, worker productivity increases and economic growth accelerates.
Japan is another example of a country that has demonstrated how reduced family size has allowed an improvement in economic growth.
Japan's population rate declined 1951 to 1958 and the economy rose 1960 to 1980s with South Korea , Taiwan , Hong Kong and Singapore following a similar pattern.
The author also describes two similar smaller countries Thailand and Iran where individuals in each country were credited with bringing about the reduced family size. Thailand is mainly rice based while Iran is wheat and Thailand is mainly subtropical while Iran is semiarid and temperate. Thailand is mostly Buddhist and the Iran is majority Muslim. An influential citizen in Thailand Mr. Mechai Viravaidya, who in 1970s was given most of the credit for encouraging family planning which reduced the population growth from three per cent to 0.8 per cent.
In Iran it was Ayatollah Khomeini who promoted large families during the time of war with Iraq to produce more soldiers resulting in a 4.4 per cent growth rate. By 1987 leadership realized that population was burdening the economy, destroying the environment and overwhelming the schools. By 2004 population growth was cut in half and now has a rate similar to the USA.
Lester Brown has written over a dozen other books and papers on how stabilizing populations is key to maintaining political stability and sustaining economic progress. The author was also responsible for establishing the website: www.earth-policy.org. The site was closed in 2015 when the author was 81 but the information is still available through Yale University.
Some key features are needed to achieve the positive benefits of a stable population: universal elementary school, basic health care, family planning, and for poorest countries school lunch programs. The more educated girls are, the fewer the children they have.
Since the book is over 20 years old, a more recent source is Human Overpopulation on Wikipedia. Some of the highlights are the following; Global population increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8 billion in November of 2022. Two maps showing world population growth rates and fertility rates show the highest rates of three per cent population growth and six children per family for fertility, were mostly in Africa.
While there is some discussion about food shortages and famines also being caused by war, political instability and price controls and the ability of technology advances solving many problems in the past, I like a chart which shows the biomass of world mammals. The highest is livestock 60 per cent (mostly cattle and pigs). Next is humans at 36 per cent and last is wild animals, making up only four per cent.
Even with modest increases in human populations it is the biodiversity of planet which will suffer the most from too many people.
