Reviews

Some readers may have noticed a Salt Lake Tribune headline, “Dire Famine Forecast,” warning of imminent global famine that would peak in eight years due to overpopulation. The story largely repeated the warnings of a famed scientist who said that “it’s already too late” to avoid disastrous famine soon due to overpopulation. The U.S. itself was said to be at great risk because our population was already too large. The expert said that the U.S. must act swiftly to make birth control mandatory, to cause many to be sterilized, and to pressure churches to cooperate. One can understand how such news from an acclaimed expert could cause fear and trembling among the Tribune’s readers back in 1967 when the story, “Dire Famine Forecast in ’75,” was published, still viewable at Newspapers.com. I don’t recall any apologies from the Tribune years later when food had become even more abundant globally in spite of significant population growth, showing that the respected and famous fearmonger Dr. Paul Ehrlich, was dead wrong. 

We live in a world where numerous people, especially the young, are told by authority figures that this is a terrible time to be alive and a terrible time to bring children into the world. They are taught that we are running out of water, energy, food, and other vital resources. The dread narrative also teaches that having children now is a disservice to those prospective children and is even an act of selfishness that will harm humanity and the planet. 

Some people are almost hysterical with fear based on the warnings they hear. If only we could return to the sustainable ways of our ancient ancestors in their beautiful, unpolluted, low-population world, then doom could be averted and we could have enough and be happy. But not now. There is no hope, only anger and fear until we can force mankind to submit to a new age of draconian controls, including population control, to reduce the human plague and save us from endless shortages and environmental disaster. 

Teachers, professors, political leaders, honored scientists and celebrities echo the narrative of scarcity, overpopulation, and environmental disaster, but do they speak the truth? Is the “science” they adore grounded in facts? Or are they spreading a false, unscientific gospel of gloom? If so, how can we rebut their claims and give hope to the rising generation?

A Resource Abounding in Evidence

Thankfully, Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley have published a resource abounding in evidence, hard data, and logical analysis that can be a powerful tool in exposing the misinformation and logical gaps of those stirring up fear of disaster from population growth. Their 547-page book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an

 Infinitely Bountiful Planet (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2022) provides the most thorough treatment I have seen on the issue of scarcity and the claim that growing population makes us worse off by depleting resources. Strong data from multiple perspectives show that resources and goods of many kinds don’t just become more plentiful overall, but they become more abundant per capita as population rises.

Abundance that grows more rapidly than population growth is what the authors call “superabundance.” They provide sound reasons for recognizing that increased population doesn’t just result in more mouths to feed, but in more hands to work and produce, more talent for specialized skills, and more minds to learn, create, innovate, and improve the world. Increased population can be a blessing, not a cause for trembling. Superabundance is good news that the world needs to understand. But for it to persist, we must understand and promote the conditions that allow it to exist. 

Hundreds of materials and goods are considered in this work, numerous databases are tapped, and multiple time periods are explored, all showing a generally consistent result: in terms of the time that one must labor to obtain a resource, the world over the past few years, decades, centuries, or millennia has become a much more abundant place, especially since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This is largely due to the systemic changes that included respect for individual property rights, economic freedom, and freedom of expression that incentivized innovation, encouraged the sharing of knowledge, and allowed resources of all kinds to become plentiful and affordable. It is not just that resources are becoming more plentiful, but the quality of life is becoming better, in spite of doomsaying about population and the environment. While this book is not aimed at evaluating the many scientific issues related to climate and environmental issues, the authors do rebuke fearmongers for their Malthus-like prophecies that have consistently failed and point to the overwhelming positives of our age compared to the past: cleaner air, cleaner water, improved sanitation, and the reasonable expectation that innovation and economic freedom can help humanity tackle serious problems as they arise.

The Poor are Blessed by the Rising Abundance

Importantly, it is the poor who arguably benefit the most by this rising abundance, which the authors measure in terms of the time price (the time of work required to obtain a measure of a given item) for basic goods (pp. 128–29). For example, in a community where the average person must work five hours a day to get enough bread or rice to eat, a 60% reduction in the time price for those goods results in three extra hours a day (180 minutes) for other pursuits or for earning money to buy previously unaffordable goods. For a rich person who may only need to work thirty minutes a day to earn enough for food, the 60% reduction in time price yields eighteen additional minutes. In other words, the benefit to the poor in this scenario in terms of time is ten times greater than it is for the rich. Abundance is good news for all of us, but especially for the poor.

Refuting Thanos 

Part One of Superabundance, “Thanos’s deadly idea: from antiquity to the present and beyond,” draws upon and refutes the simplistic Malthusian thinking of the villain Thanos in the popular film, Avengers: Infinity War (Marvel Studios, 2018). Thanos intends to destroy half of the life in the universe because “the universe is finite, its resources finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correction.” This grim attitude about intelligent life reflects those of numerous writers over the past century and beyond. Tupy and Pooley’s refutation of such claims is largely based on analyzing extensive data, especially in Part Two, “Measuring abundance.”

The authors convincingly demonstrate that population growth is not the cause of poverty or scarcity. In fact, for nations where a basic degree of economic freedom exists, population growth generally brings significant gains in abundance. This wonderful outcome, however, requires basic conditions such as a degree of economic freedom and freedom of expression. Superabundance is threatened by corruption and by those who seek great power and control. Thanos in fact sought to wipe out half of the innovators, producers, and problem solvers of the cosmos, a goal that would lead to greatly reduced abundance across the universe as a result of his ignorant and murderous tyranny. 

The Economic Good News Worth Studying and Sharing

Tupy and Pooley’s book provides so much data, analysis, and insights from research in many fields related to some of the most important social and economic debates in society today, that it should be considered a vital resource for many truth seekers. It could be helpful as a reference book to parents, students, scholars, and anyone interested in issues pertaining to resource and environmental crises, economic policy, and population issues. 

The good news surveyed needs to be understood by the young of our society before they become overly frenzied with fear and trembling over population growth and scarcity. This good news discussed by Tupy and Pooley includes:

• Extreme poverty has plummeted. “The share of humanity living on the edge of survival fell from 90 percent in 1820 to less than 10 percent today” (p. 287). 
• Maternal mortality has dropped dramatically. “The rate will have fallen from 1,000 per 100,000 live births in the first half of the eighteenth century to 70 by 2030” (p. 290). 
• Between 1950 and 2020, the population-weighted global income per person rose over 300%. This growth was not limited to wealthy Western nations. In China, personal income rose over 1,900%, and India saw a 690% gain. Nearly every country experienced large gains “except for a handful of war-torn African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and failing socialist countries such as Venezuela” (p. 22). 
• Population-weighted global life expectancy rose from 52.6 years in 1960 to 72.4 years in 2017. Some of the biggest gains were in poor countries over this time period. China had a 75% increase in life expectancy (from 41.2 years to 68.8 years), while sub-Saharan Africa had a gain of 51% (from 40.4 years to 60.9 years). The authors note that there is not a single country where life expectancy was greater in 1960 than in 2018 (p. 22).
• Global food supply from 1961 to 2017 rose from 2,113 calories to 2,917 calories a day, a 38% gain. Even sub-Saharan Africa, often viewed as the poorest region on earth, experienced a 22% gain from 2,004 calories in 1961 to 2,447 calories in 2017 (p. 23). For another perspective on the abundance of nutrition, “in 15th-century England, 80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20% spent on bread alone…. By 2020, in comparison, only 8.6 percent of the U.S. personal disposable income was spent on food, a figure which is itself inflated by the large amounts that Americans spend in restaurants” (pp. 292–93). 
• The boom in available food worldwide is reflected by the sharp drop in death by famine. This dropped from 19.5 deaths per 100,000 in the 1880s to 4.3 in the 2000s and just 0.4 per 100,000 between 2010 and 2016, “a forty-fold decline from the 1880s” (p. 292). 
• Education and literacy have been increasing globally. For example, the literacy rate for women fifteen years of age or older went from 56% in 1976 to 83% in 2018 (p. 24). 
• For a database of fifty key commodities, including aluminum, beef, chicken, cotton, oranges, plywood, rubber, soybeans, sugar, wheat, etc., every single one dropped in time price over the span of the database from 1980 to 2018. The average time price fell by 71.6 % and the personal resource abundance increased by 252% (p. 137).
• For the thirty-five finished goods in a database covering 1979–2019, all but one showed a drop in time prices, the exception being gold necklaces. The average time price dropped by 72.3% (pp. 171–72).

The Right Time for Babies

If you’re looking for the right time in history to bring a child into the world, I suggest that the ideal time might be one when mothers are less likely to die in childbirth, when children are more likely to live long lives, when families are least likely to starve, when young people are most likely to have good education, and when there is an abundance of the resources and services most suited to support meaningful, active, healthy lives—in other words, now, not the less abundant and often more dangerous past. 

Appropriately, Tupy and Pooley also share some of the tragedies that have occurred as a result of fearmongering about overpopulation. They report on the ugly consequences of the completely misguided one-child policy of China (pp. 60–67), which was inspired by a group of European elites in “The Club of Rome” that published The Limits to Growth in 1972. The Club of Rome’s wildly popular report predicted disaster for earth within the next century unless we cut population growth and resource depletion and take strong international measures. Though not discussed by Tupy and Pooley, it’s helpful to know that The Club of Rome later published a book that had something to say about their motivation and methodology in focusing on the threat of environmental disaster. In their 1991 The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of The Club of Rome, they admitted that fear over the environment was necessary to “unite” humanity (apparently under the utopia of a global government, the kind that elites have long dreamed of):

The Common Enemy of Humanity Is Man

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. (The First Global Revolution, p. 115)

On the next page, in contrast to the message of hope and abundance that arises from numerous measures, The Club of Rome spoke of the many reasons for despair, including the (rapidly declining) problem of “extreme poverty” and the “throbbing song of calamity” promoted by their allies in the media:

There are so many reasons for doubts and despair: the disappearance of values and references; the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the world and the difficulty of understanding the new emerging global society; unsolved problems such as continuing environmental deterioration and extreme poverty and underdevelopment in the southern countries; the impact of mass media often operating as a magnifying glass for a crushing reality and a throbbing song of calamity. (The First Global Revolution, p. 116)

The aims of The Club of Rome must be suspect, both in 1972 and up until this day. Their influence on China, sadly, was terrible in its human costs, with future economic trouble still looming from the inadequate supply of talented young workers today who can provide for their elders and keep the economy healthy. China has begun to recognize that population growth is needed after all for lasting economic success. Meanwhile, the forced abortions, sterilization, shaming, and economic persecution of those who dared have more than one child that occurred in China’s past are lingering causes for mourning. 

A Suspect Claim

Tupy and Pooley also focus on the horrors of population control that was imposed upon India during the “Indian Emergency” from 1975–77 under Indira Gandhi’s heavy hand and the active support of the West (pp. 68–71). The U.S. government, the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and other wealthy organizations gave massive grants for population control and “family planning,” ultimately even supporting coercive measures. For example, World Bank President Robert S. McNamara praised India for its progress in population control, “noting without alarm coercive policies including, in his words, ‘compulsory abortion’ and ‘sterilization laws’” (quoted by Tupy and Pooley on pp. 68–69; also see Chelsea Follett, “Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India”). To these examples of harm caused by fearmongering over population growth, one might also consider the many people who have given up the joys and blessings of raising children and even seeing their own grandchildren grow and learn to become productive human beings able to make the world a more abundant place. Not all can have children and not all will want them, but it is tragic if some walked away from the blessings of a family due to a false gospel that made them think they were sparing the earth by living a childless life. It is even more tragic that many thousands suffered from forced sterilization, forced abortion, and other coercive measures in the name of saving the planet. 

We need to get the word out that we live in a world of hope and abundance where a growing population leads to growing benefits for mankind, not hunger and doom. Shame on those who exploit fear over population and climate to obtain power and gain at humanity’s expense. 

Conclusion

Overall, I find Superabundance to be a carefully written, thoughtful, and original work that makes many important contributions relative to some of the most important issues in our day. It is a book that is not only important for our material welfare, but one that I feel even has spiritual implications that may be of interest to Latter-day Saints.

In Part 2 of this series on Superabundance, we will explore a dramatic wager between a doomsayer and an economist who once shared the doom and gloom view, but was strongly persuaded by economic data showing that human talent was the most critical scarce resource. With more human talent, more prosperity was possible. The outcome of that wager motivated Tupy and Pooley to begin their own exploration. Further details of their painstaking work will also be presented in Part 2. Part 3 will examine the implications of Tupy and Pooley’s insights for Latter-day Saints and other people of faith who wonder about the apparent consensus of doom from many institutions and elites of our day.