The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [99]
It is somewhat distasteful to the intelligentsia to accept that consumption and commerce could be the friend of population control, or that it is when they ‘enter the market’ as consumers that people plan their families – this is not what most market-phobic professors, preaching anticapitalist asceticism, want to hear. Yet the relationship is there, and it is strong. Seth Norton found that the birth rate was more than twice as high in countries with little economic freedom (average 4.27 children per woman) compared with countries with high economic freedom (average 1.82 children per woman). Besides, there is quite a neat exception which proves this rule. The Anabaptist sects in North America, the Hutterites and Amish, have largely resisted the demographic transition; that is to say, they have large families. This has been achieved despite – or rather because of – an ascetic emphasis on family roles, which immunises them against the spread of time-consuming hobbies (including higher education) and a taste for expensive gadgets.
What a happy conclusion. Human beings are a species that stops its own population expansions once the division of labour reaches the point at which individuals are all trading goods and services with each other, rather than trying to be self-sufficient. The more interdependent and well-off we all become, the more population will stabilise well within the resources of the planet. As Ron Bailey puts it, in complete contradiction of Garrett Hardin: ‘There is no need to impose coercive population control measures; economic freedom actually generates a benign invisible hand of population control.’
Most economists are now more worried about the effects of imploding populations than they are about exploding ones. Countries with very low birth rates have rapidly ageing workforces. This means more and more old people eating the savings and taxes of fewer and fewer people of working age. They are right to be concerned, though they would be wrong to be apocalyptic, after all, today’s 40-year-olds will surely be happier to continue operating computers in their seventies than today’s 70-year-olds are to continue operating machine tools. And once again, the rational optimist can bring a measure of comfort. The latest research uncovers a second demographic transition in which the very richest countries see a slight increase in their birth rate once they pass a certain level of prosperity. The United States, for example, saw its birth rate bottom out at 1.74 children per woman in about 1976; since then it has risen to 2.05. Birth rates have risen in eighteen of the twenty-four countries that have a Human Development Index greater than 0.94. The puzzling exceptions are ones such as Japan and South Korea, which see a continuing decline. Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the new study, believes that these countries lag in providing women with better opportunities for work–life balance as they get richer.
So, all in all, the news on global population could hardly be better, though it would be nice if the improvements were coming faster. The explosions are petering out; and the declines are bottoming out. The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary. Now, is that not good news?
Chapter Seven
The release of slaves: energy after 1700
With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back in the laborious poverty of earlier times.
STANLEY JEVONS