When it Comes to Population Growth, Many Demographers Disappoint

The liberal Huffington Post regularly runs articles with which I agree about the downside of global population growth – although as consistent and complacent liberals they routinely ignore the downside of immigration-driven U.S. population growth. Still, it’s nice to read about the value of family planning, birth control and reproductive health for women worldwide, as well as the dire consequences of humanity’s heedless exploitation of Mother Earth.

Heck, HuffPo even has a Green section devoted entirely to coverage of the environment. Folks I know and admire like Robert Walker of the Population Institute are regular contributors.

Thus, when I recently saw in my inbox the headline, “Tuesday's Daily Brief: Depressing News About Population Growth,” I naturally assumed that the “depressing news” was that human population was growing even faster than previously believed, or that demographers and scientists were now concluding that since we humans seemed incapable of limiting our excesses, Nature and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would do it for us.

Imagine my dismay then when I clicked on the link to the article and was confronted instead with this headline: “U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression.”

Slowing U.S. population growth should be cause for celebration, or at least cautious optimism, not depression! Instead, the article wailed:

America's population is growing at its slowest rate in decades, and the sluggish economy is mostly to blame, according to one expert.

The expert is one William Frey, a distinguished demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who called the trend toward slower population growth “troubling.”

What troubles me is that all too many professional demographers like Frey, while experts with numbers and population projections, are ecological ignoramuses who have swallowed the Kool-Aid that endless population growth is possible and desirable on a finite planet with a degraded environment and dwindling resources.

When I first came to the population stabilization movement four decades ago, I naively assumed that because demographers were those who understood the long-term numerical, social and economic dimensions, and implications of current population growth rates, that they also grasped the environmental significance. I was woefully uninformed.

Those experts sounding the alarm about the unsustainability of population growth are not, by and large, demographers, but rather scientists, including biologists, ecologists, geologists, climatologists and physicists.

With rare exceptions like the late, insightful Dr. Leon Bouvier or CAPS advisory board member Charles Westoff, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Demographic Studies & Sociology at Princeton University, most demographers actually subscribe to the perpetual growth dogma. Indeed, most are cheerleaders for the unsustainable growth juggernaut; their bread is buttered by that juggernaut, to which they supply useful information on trends.

It was while jogging the streets of Santa Ana, Calif. with Orange County’s official demographer back in the 1990s that I realized how mistaken my earlier assumptions about the demographic profession had been. I had naively expected him to be opposed to the county’s then-booming population, and suffered a rude awakening upon learning that he was actually pleased by it and saw his professional duty as contributing constructively to Orange County’s fulfillment of its destiny of “healthy” growth ad infinitum.

Local and state governments desperately seeking growth employ demographers, as do advertisers and businesses desperately seeking ever more customers and revenue.

Of course, this is entirely appropriate, but it should make us skeptical, particularly those of who consider growth’s adverse environmental consequences – not of the information demographers provide – but of their underlying motives.

When a distinguished demographer like Frey describes slowing U.S. population growth as “troubling,” it’s a sign that many practitioners of this profession are giving us just one side of the story.