Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore reminds us that according to the Census Bureau, “some time in the weeks ahead the U.S. population will reach 300 million. This means that there will be roughly three times as many people as there were a century ago […]. Americans have been bringing a new baby into the world roughly every eight seconds and a new immigrant arrives every 30 seconds — the equivalent of a new Chicago every year.” He continues:
This demographic milestone is not cause for alarm — as some prophets of doom would have it. Rather, it is cause for celebration. We 300 million Americans are on balance healthier and wealthier and freer than any population ever: We breathe cleaner air, drink cleaner water, earn higher incomes, have more leisure time, and live in less crowded housing. Every natural resource we depend on — water, food, copper and, yes, even oil — is far more abundant today measured by affordability than when our population was 100 million or even 30 million.
Thanks to the rapid pace of technological progress, there’s every reason to believe these resources will be still more abundant when our population reaches 400 million — which should happen about 40 years from now. As the late economist Julian Simon reminded us, thanks to our free market capitalist system, the history of America is one of leaving the storehouse for every successive generation more endowed with wealth, knowledge and natural resources.
[… Yet] America remains a vast, unpeopled land. Texas alone is so large that we could put every U.S. family of four in the state and give them two acres to call their own — and the rest of the country would be deserted. Our farmers grow about three times as much food on one-third as many acres and a third fewer man-hours as 75 years ago — and we have the technological capacity to feed a population many multiples of what we have today.
Our population is rising mainly because early childhood death rates in the U.S. have fallen by 90% in the last century, and continue to fall: A child born today in the U.S. is four times more likely to live to adulthood than one born in 1950, and 12 times more likely than one born in 1900. And these children will live longer, as the nearby chart shows. Life expectancy has increased by more than 30 years in the last century.
This good news is an eloquent rejoinder to 40 years of seemingly endless jeremiads issued by neo-Malthusians from Paul Ehrlich to Al Gore. […]
Instead, as nations have grown richer over the past 50 years, birth rates around the globe have fallen by half. Human beings don’t breed like field mice — they can and do control their fertility. Ironically, even Thomas Malthus came to realize that humans control their breeding as a result of the “superiority in their reasoning faculties” and a capacity to “calculate distant consequences.”
[…] Growth brought about through the free market isn’t a planetary curse at all, but rather the ultimate contraceptive and ecological protector. […] [Emphasis added.]
We’ve still got a tremendous amount of work to do to share our good fortune with the rest of the human race. (Which is why, as I keep saying, it’s a sin for the church to be wasting its time, talent, and treasure on pointless, angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin disputes about Scripture and sexuality.)
But even so: Is this a great universe that the Creator is building — with us working as a cosmic construction crew — or what?
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