The Battle That Never Was

In 1970, Paul Ehrlich sat down on the couch next to Johnny Carson. The Stanford biologist had become an unlikely celebrity on the strength of The Population Bomb, whose opening line announced that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Mass famine was certain within the decade. Hundreds of millions would starve. Carson’s audience of millions listened intently. Carson invited him back, again and again, over a dozen appearances across the decade. Doom made excellent television.

More than half a century later, the famines Ehrlich prophesied never came, but strangely the fear persists. Many still think the earth is bursting at the seems with humanity while the reality is that, if current trends continue, there won’t be too many people but too few. On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, economist and chief operating officer of the Acton Institute, to ask how we got the future so wrong and what a truer account of the human person might tell us about the demographic questions now pressing upon us.

Across most of the world, fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level. A consistent demographic trend with serious momentum. Just as a growing population compounds across generations, a shrinking one does too: fewer children today mean fewer parents tomorrow, and the arithmetic gets harder to reverse the longer it runs. Barrows walks through the social and economic challenges that follow: shrinking workforces supporting growing numbers of retirees, strained welfare systems, and hollowed-out communities.

Yet the old fears linger. The Malthusian intuition that people are a drain on a fixed stock of resources still shapes how many think about children, family, and the future.

The error runs from Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century to Ehrlich in the twentieth. The error is counting human beings as stomachs and mouths alone while forgetting that they come with minds and muscles. Human beings, Barrows argues, are net problem solvers, bringing more into the world through creativity, innovation, and work than they consume.

This is not naïve optimism but a claim about human nature. Why, Barrows asks, do we face material scarcity at all? His answer is arresting: scarcity is an occasion for virtue. The limits of the material world call forth precisely those excellences, ingenuity, diligence, cooperation, service to one another through productive work, that constitute so much of a life well lived. We are made to meet constraints and, in meeting them, to be perfected.

The evidence bears this out. Barrows points to the economics of “time prices”: measuring the cost of goods not in dollars but in the hours of labor required to earn them. By that measure, nearly everything has grown radically more abundant over time. The hours of work that once bought a bushel of wheat now buy many. Scarcity retreats before human creativity, not automatically, but wherever people are free to innovate, exchange, and serve one another.

Economics can take us this far, but not all the way. Drawing on Pope Benedict XVI, Barrows insists that human existence cannot be reduced to transaction. A child considered as a line item on a household balance sheet will always look like a liability; the categories themselves are the problem. Children are not costs to be managed but gifts to be received, the supreme gift, to families and to societies. What Benedict called the logic of gift stands as a rebuke to every accounting of human life that begins and ends with the ledger.

It is a case Barrows and his wife, Dr. Kimberly Barrows, will soon make at book length in their forthcoming One More: The Case for Another Child.

Paul Ehrlich told Johnny Carson’s audience that the battle was over and humanity had lost. He was wrong twice: wrong about the outcome, and wrong about what human beings are. The battle to feed humanity was never really a battle at all, because every generation arrives bearing the means of its own provision: minds, hands, and hearts.