Feeling crowded?

Today, America’s population hit the 300 million mark, and counting. Has anyone hit the alarm bell yet?

No. The warnings of earth’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Globally, it is astonishing that the world’s population has roughly doubled, from 3 billion to 6 billion, in the four decades since Paul Ehrlich’s influential book, “The Population Bomb,” predicted global mass starvation beginning as early as the 1970s. Instead, by 2005, malnutrition had declined to the lowest level in human history, according to United Nations figures. How could forecasts of population doom have been so wrong? The core Malthusian assumption is that population would always increase faster than technology can respond. Instead, during the postwar era, it’s been the other way around. High-yield agriculture has increased food production faster than the global population has grown; energy production and industrial production have risen much faster than global population.

I featured this article recently, but today is a good day to look at it again, now that we’ve hit the mark. 

So, the predictions were off. And we have a shortage of young people, as it turns out.

“Since 1975, the proportion of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24, those who are about to enter or who have just entered the workforce, has been in decline,” said Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute (PRI).  “In 1975, it was 18.7%.  Today, it is 14.2%.  The United Nations Population Division projects it will drop to 13.0% by 2030 and continue declining from there even with our currently high immigration levels.  At the same time, those over 65 will swell dramatically in number and percentage.  This course is unsustainable.

Odd to hear this on the very day we hit a new high in population. But that doesn’t reflect rate of growth.

Contrary to what most people think, American population growth is slowing.  From 1995-2000, it averaged 2.9 million annually.  From 2000-2005, it averaged 2.8 million per year, and is projected to continue to decline for the foreseeable future.  Said Joseph A. D’Agostino, Vice President for Communications at PRI: “Labor is a renewable resource, but it is not being renewed fast enough.  Much attention is paid to the prevention of overfishing, overhunting, excessive logging and other phenomena that could threaten the supply of vital resources.  Why is so little paid to the decline of our most valuable resource of all, human labor?  Something has to be done about this soon, because children cannot be manufactured in China and shipped to us in bulk once we suddenly realize we need more.”

In fact, look at the post below, and you’ll see that China is definitely not one of the places where children are being produced.