mises | The world is overpopulated. The street are clogged, traffic is in a
snarl, and people are living – both figuratively and literally – right
on top of each other. There’s hardly enough room to swing a cat these
days, right? Wrong.
The world is not overcrowded at all. There are vast swaths of
unpopulated land all over the place. Siberia, Canada, Africa, Australia,
even the rural USA all contain more than enough wide open spaces. So
why do people labor so resolutely under this delusion? The reason is
simple: most people, especially those with the time and inclination to
carp about overpopulation, live in areas of high population density, a
non-representative sample of the world as a whole. We call these places
cities, and the reason why people live in cities, despite their
complaining, is that there are benefits for large populations
congregating close together.
It is convenient to live in a place with lots of other people,
because each of those people can potentially do something for you, from
repairing your shoes, to cooking your meals, to running entertainment
venues, to, perhaps most importantly, providing you with gainful
employment. Try living out in the middle of nowhere and see how easy it
is to feed yourself, much less make a living and survive medical
problems. The division of labor means that the more people there are
nearby, the more able we are to fulfill our wants and needs. Hence,
crowded cities.
This misconception of the world’s population problems has led some to celebrate the declining birth rates
we now see in most of the developed world. But the anticipation of a
little expanded breathing room causes them take the wrong view on the
economic impacts of a declining population. This has to do with an
incomplete understanding of human action.
Those who worry about overpopulation tend to view people as nothing
more than consumers.
Resources are finite; humans consume resources.
Therefore, fewer humans will mean more resources to go around. This is
the core idea behind the opposition to expanded immigration. Namely, the
fear that more people will mean less work and less wealth for the rest
of us. But while the two premises of this syllogism are true, they are
also woefully incomplete, making the conclusion incorrect as well.
The reason is that humans are not merely consumers. Every consumer is
also a producer as well, and production is how we have improved our
standards of living from the dawn of man till today. Every luxury, every
great invention, every work of art, every modern convenience that we
enjoy was the product of a mind – in some cases, of more than one. It
then stands to reason that the more minds there are, the more
innovations we will have as well. A reductio ad absudum reveals
the obvious truth that a cure for cancer is more likely to emerge from a
society of a billion people than from one of only a handful of
individuals.
More importantly, these innovations result in a multiplication of
resources, so our syllogism changes to the following: Resources are
finite; humans consume resources; humans produce resources; therefore,
if humans produce more resources than they consume, a greater population
will be beneficial to the species.
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