Population Implosion

Daniel Engber writes in Slate about the putative environmental benefits of cutting the human population. He points out that bringing a child into the world is nearly as environmentally hostile an act as owning a private jet:

Our other green lifestyle choices can't even begin to offset the cost of adding a brand-new CO2-emitter to the population. When I ran my own numbers through Al Gore's carbon calculator, I discovered that a switch to 100 percent wind and solar power would reduce my emissions by just 1.3 tons per year. That's not even enough to account for one quarter of today's average American. Meanwhile, I'd have to do quite a bit of driving around in a Hummer H3 to mimic the environmental impact of creating another version of me. Not to mention the fact that my children might eventually decide to have their own children, who would emit even more carbon dioxide down the line.


Engber calls the Chinese experiment in radical population control a failure in both moral and practical respects, but despite its moral shortcomings and despite the fact that the Chinese fell well short of their one child goal, the policy has to be counted one of the greatest revolutions ever. Moreover, it has been an enormous economic success.

The economic explosion that followed the precipitous drop in the Chinese fertility rate has been perhaps the most dramatic in history. Twenty plus years of double digit economic growth has taken the Chinese from one of the per capita poorest countries in the world to a role as the worlds leading industrial producer. China will soon be the number two economy in the world, and the average increase in per capita income has been huge.

Those who doubt the causal relationship need to take a look at the statistics for other countries. There is very close correlation between drops in fertility and economic progress, and the opposite is equally dramatic - countries with high fertility rates don't make economic progress.

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