Institute for
Energy Research

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The religion of fractivists and other environmental extremists may be described as depletionism, a new Malthusian creed based on fear and selfishness.

Last week, a group of sustainable population organizations issued a global statement and call to action for World Population Day. According to the statement,

“World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice warned that runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population is crippling the Earth’s life-support systems, jeopardizing our future. Identifying population as a “main driver” of the crisis, its recommended actions include reducing fertility rates through education, family planning and rallying leaders behind the goal of establishing a sustainable human population.”

Modern concerns about overpopulation can be traced back to Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation (1798) where he theorized that humanity would not be able to produce enough food to keep up with the exponentially expanding population. Malthus’ view was the result of mistakenly believing that the supply of resources is finite and, therefore, would be depleted as population grew over time. William Stanley Jevons transferred this view to the study of mineral resources in The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865).

Thomas Robert Malthus

It’s clear that both Malthus and Jevons have influenced groups warning about overpopulation, leading them to believe that economic growth is bad in a world they perceive to be made up of finite resources. In 2016, Pierre Desrochers and Vincent Geloso published an article in New Perspectives on Political Economy in which they contrast this depletionist view with the modern view of resourceship.

Depletionism

Desrochers and Geloso identify three recurring themes in the depletionist worldview.

1. Depletionists believe that, everything else being equal, a reduced population will enjoy a higher standard of living. Their finite view of resources leads them to believe that a lower population would make more resources available for each person, creating a higher standard of living.
2. They tend to assume that humans experience decreasing returns on investment. The argument here is that it is increasingly difficult and expensive to extract the same value out of less concentrated resources as the fixed stock of resources is depleted over time.
3.  Depletionists also argue that past successes in overcoming our natural limitations are irrelevant to present and future circumstances. Depletionists often rely on newly discovered information or recently changed circumstances to argue that we lack the ability to overcome similar problems in the future.

Resourceship

Desrochers and Geloso contrast the depletionist worldview with the resourceship view, which they define by the following themes:

1. The resourceship view understands that a larger population that engages in trade and the division of labor will deliver more material abundance per person than a smaller population.
2. Human creativity can deliver increasing returns. As Desrochers and Geloso explain, “a long-standing tenet of resourceship is that the more human brains, the greater the likelihood of new beneficial innovations.”
3. Human beings are different from other animals because of our ability to trade and innovate. Desrochers and Geloso draw upon economist Henry George’s observation in his book Progress and Poverty to make this point. George writes, of “all living things, man is the only one who can give play to the reproductive forces more powerful than his own, which supply him with food.” In other words, our ability to trade and innovate means that we should not compare humans to other species, and we shouldn’t apply ecological constraints such as carrying capacity to the human condition.
4. Past success should be grounds for optimism. Over a long-term perspective, when people are engaged in specialization and trade, resources tend to become less scarce and less expensive. Because of this, Desrochers and Geloso explain, “as such, future projections based on very recent trends should not be taken seriously.”
5. People who hold resourceship views tend to oppose coercive measures to curtail population or resource use out of fear that the depletionists’ doomsday outlook will prevent their remedies from being limited to incentive-based measures. Desrochers and Geloso quote the French mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who explained that Malthusianism was, “the theory of political murder; of murder from motives of philanthropy and for love of God.”

Overpopulation Is Not a Problem

Between 1960 and 2016 the world’s population increased by 145 percent. During that same time, the real average per capita income in the world rose by 183 percent. This massive growth in population led to the largest reduction in poverty in human history. As Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute explains,

Rising incomes helped lower the infant mortality rate from 64.8 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 30.5 in 2016. That’s a 53 percent reduction. Over the same time period, the mortality rate for children under five years of age declined from 93.4 per 1,000 to 40.8. That’s a reduction of 56 percent. The number of maternal deaths declined from 532,000 in 1990 to 303,000 in 2015 — a 43 percent decrease. Famine has all but disappeared outside of war zones. In 1961, food supply in 54 out of 183 countries was less than 2,000 calories per person per day. That was true of only two countries in 2013. In 1960, average life expectancy in the world was 52.6 years. In 2015, it was 71.9 years — a 37 percent increase.

It’s clear that the data lend credence to the resourceship view of population. A higher population does not lead to more problems; it simply means that there are more minds working to improve the human condition.  When you combine more people with institutions that support human progress (property rights, markets, and the rule of law), humans are able to overcome the natural limitations that other species face. There are no limits to human ingenuity and economic growth.

Doomsday scenarios about population can make for a compelling narrative—which might be the reason why they are often championed in popular media and the press—but they are not based on a realistic understanding of the human condition. When you overlook the acting nature of humans and the institutions that make up a free society, it’s easy to believe that resources are finite and that the current path of humanity is inevitably doomed. But the reality is that the human condition is defined by our ability to act, and the trajectory of human progress is dependent upon the institutional framework within which that action takes place.

The author of this post is Alex Stevens, a Policy Associate at the Institute for Energy Research.

Editor’s Note: This philosophical guest post got my attention because it brought back memories of when the book “Limits to Growth” was a popular screed and Malthusian outlooks prevailed. The book was produced by the Club of Rome, a group of wealthy trust-funder types who worried the masses would crowd them out. It used computer models to claim we would run out of everything if we didn’t stop producing children. They were utterly and completely wrong about everything, just as Thomas Malthus was. He later rejected his own theory, in fact. Nonetheless, there are always people who are attracted to this nonsense because they, too, feel threatened by the prosperity of the common man, fearful their own playgrounds will be overrun by the lower classes.

This philosophy of depletionism is the foundation of fractivism and other forms of environmentalism extremism. It, too, is funded and promoted by modern Club of Rome types such as the Rockefeller foundations, the Heinz Endowments, et al. They want their wildernesses and the common man as far way from them as possible while they pursue their other special interests such as overseas oil and gas investments. They are de-growthers as far as the the U.S. is concerned; “haves” determined to eliminate any threats from “have nots” who might want a piece of the pie. 

The fallacy of their position, of course, is that the pie is always growing as well as long as there are more people. This is because there is, then, greater division of labor. This alone is what creates higher productivity and new wealth. More hands to do the work means more specialization and with it the growth of productivity. Technological advancements come about because we are able to specialize and the competition of capitalism ensures their is a race to get there, which ultimately delivers more for everyone. This is why commodity prices over the long-term tend to decrease, not increase. The real resource is our own labor and nothing else.

This is also why we’ll never run out of any resource. Our ability to utilize resources more efficiently grows with population, the increased division of labor, technological gains and competition. And, if one resource needed to produce a product becomes more scarce, then the price will go up. This incentivizes finding more of it, using less of it and/or switching to another, which is why we’ll never run out of any particular resource. It will simply cost too much at some point and technology will assist our shift to a new resource or a new technology.

Fractivists and environmental extremists understand none of this, of course, and probably never will. That’s why our battle for common sense and economic understanding must go on.