THE MYSTERIOUS ROLLER-COASTER

What is it that drives the roller coaster of US fertility rate up and down? To this there can be only one answer: at present nobody knows. (I will come to other countries in a moment.) Most suggestions have turned out to be naive and easily refutable. All we can say is that it varies quite slowly, going up and down, with no discernible pattern that can (at present) be tied to any other time-varying phenomenon.

For example, the dean of population controllers, Paul Lysenko Ehrlich, an expert on butterflies, claims that the low birth rate of the 1930s was due lo the Great Depression. This is patent nonsense, since the drop toward the minimum in 1935 was well under way from at least 1921-22, throughout the following economic boom years and beyond the crash of 1929.

Others claim that fertility rises after wars. Not true in the US, nor in other countries, where statistics have been less distorted by immigration.

Immigration of more fertile women is a possibility, though I understand the case is not very strong.

Economic growth is what determines it, speculate others. The figure above is sufficient to refute that. Since the Great Depression, US economic growth has been consistently positive, sometimes more, as in the 80s, sometimes less, as in the present recession. But it has never been negative during the entire period from 1940 shown in the figure, so there is no way to make economic growth correlate with fertility.

But there are other things that are related to economic growth, such as poverty. The figure above is taken from the July/August 92 Midnight Economist (Radio Script, Reason Foundation, 3145 S. Sepulda Blvd/#400, Los Angeles, CA 30034). But that's just by the way, for "poverty" is another issue attacked by the very people allied with the population controllers, who are opposed to economic growth. [I have put "poverty" in quotation marks because 1) the "poor" in the US are far richer than the average citizen in most other countries, especially the dictatorships, and 2) unlike South America or China, where the poor are needed by rich to live on, in the US they are an economic nuisance needed by nobody except the poverty industry of social workers and political demagogues.]

Now all of this goes for the modern US. If you look at the countries of the recent or present Third World, a very striking cor-relation can be found: that between increasing development and decreasing fertility rate. The probable reason is that in a primitive society a child is an economic asset (help in the fields), whereas in a developed country it is an economic disadvantage (e.g., college fees). As a country industrializes, its fertility rate drops. Here is a table based on World Bank data of some Asian countries:

Fertility rate

COUNTRY 1965 1990

Hong Kong 4.5 1.5

South Korea 4.9 1.8

Singapore 4.7 1.9

Japan 2.0 1.6

Thailand 6.3 2.5

China 6.4 2.5

Indonesia 5.5 3.1

Philippines 6.8 3.7

Malaysia 3.3 3.8

India 6.2 4.0

Nepal 6.0 5.7

Pakistan 7.0 5.8

Afghanistan 7.0 7.2

The literacy rate (Hong Kong 90%, Afghanistan 29%) is also negatively correlated with the fertility rate; however, this is more likely to be a parallel consequence of development rather than a cause of decreasing fertility.

Going back to the chart of US fertility rates, how can a char-latan like the Butterfly Boy be taken seriously when he talks about a population bomb in 1968 and a population explosion in 1990?

Good question. I looked in the index of the latter under "population growth in US." Absent; the only item treated is "population growth in Florida." As a population heads toward a coming decrease, its average age must of course increase, since the older people are remnants of the big population, and the young people are harbingers of the coming smaller one. Older people retire, and Florida is a favorite state for retirees. Population ex-plosion!

Yet I am sure there are more ZPG chapters than Flat Earth Society chapters in the country. The whole thing is so absurd and incredible that perhaps you think my chart must be wrong. I don't think so: I used the Bureau of the Census figures as contained in The Statistical History of the United States (1976) through 1970 and in the current Statistical Abstract of the US from 1971 up. A com-puter program then made a curve from the data I typed in.

So the only explanation I can offer for the ZPG cult with its credo of "There are too many of you others!" is that it is impossible to overestimate human stupidity.

[More: J.L Simon, The Ultimate Resource, Univ. of Princeton Press, 1981.]