The late Buckley countered the Malthusianism of his day and prophetically wondered if underpopulation might eventually become a bigger problem.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on a startling trend: the global collapse in fertility rates. People are having fewer babies than ever before. As the Journal put it:
Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
It’s quite a turnaround from just a few decades ago, when the trendy global concern was overpopulation. Leading overpopulation alarmist Paul Ehrlich, who is still proffering his doomsaying, conveyed it in starkly misanthropic terms in his book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. He describes “one stinking hot night in New Delhi” as the moment that the problem of the “population explosion” came home to him “emotionally” well after he already understood it “intellectually.” “The streets,” he wrote, “seemed alive with people”:
People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
Former defense secretary Robert McNamara, one of the “best and the brightest” of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ squadron of technocrats, became a fanatical booster of population control once he left the Johnson administration to serve as president of the World Bank. In a 1969 speech at the University of Notre Dame, of all places, McNamara called for “a humane and rational reduction of the birth rate” because “human dignity is severely threatened by the population explosion — more severely, more completely, more certainly threatened than it has been by any catastrophe the world has yet endured.” He dismissed concerns that decreased fertility rates would lead eventually to population decline:
There are no grounds whatever for fearing that a nation’s population, under the influence of family planning, will dangerously ebb away. The danger is quite the opposite: that even with family planning—should it be inadequately utilized—the population will proliferate in the future to self-defeating levels.
These ideas had real-world consequences. In India itself, the “emergency” government of Indira Gandhi initiated — with World Bank support — a massive, top-down, horrifying effort to lower the birth rate. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote:
Like a great many progressives who dream of managing complex societies as though they were country post offices, Indira Gandhi was deeply worried about the purportedly dysgenic fecundity of India’s lower classes — she was a Ruth Bader Ginsburg before her time — and so she put her son in charge of a horrifically authoritarian program to reduce the national birth rate through a program of — barbaric portmanteau! — “compul-suasion.” The “compul” part involved sending out police detachments to march poor villagers into sterilization clinics; the “suasion” part was handing out a few rupees when the little people complained about it.
And then, of course, there is China’s one-child policy, from which it is still trying to recover.
At any rate, Ehrlich is on his way to getting what he wanted, and McNamara’s prediction is proving inaccurate. We’re set to have fewer “people, people, people.” But we’re not going to enjoy the consequences. When basic truths need restating, we must remind ourselves that societies depend, in the most practical sense, on having people in them. There is also the transcendent value of posterity, which gives people in the present something to work toward and connects them to the past. Edmund Burke taught us that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” That partnership becomes attenuated when there are fewer and fewer births.
In this, as in other things, the late James L. Buckley, brother of William F., proved wise. In 1984, Buckley served as chairman of the American delegation to the U.N. Conference on Population. The conference, held in Mexico City, was the birthplace of the U.S. policy of the same name, which “prohibits the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from funding any nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortion overseas,” as Alexandra DeSanctis put it.
He had to deal with typical U.N. shenanigans there, with the added obstacle of Soviet perfidy. The American delegation was also dealing with vitriol about the Mexico City policy from American media and “birth-control activists.” Buckley recounts in a 1984 National Review dispatch about the conference that McNamara “assured a national NBC audience that we would be laughed out of Mexico City.”
Despite Malthusian blowback, Buckley was satisfied by his delegation’s achievements at the conference. It had ensured that the conference adopted a position eschewing abortion as a method of family planning, pierced the “Malthusian gloom” that McNamara- and Ehrlich-types had wanted to dominate the proceedings, and secured an explicit endorsement of the proposition that “the best way for developing nations to achieve the twin objectives of economic development and population stability would be through the adoption of freer, market-oriented economic policies.”
In 2024, problems of and worries about overpopulation seem quaint; underpopulation is, increasingly, the challenge of today. Buckley suspected it might become that. Commenting on the Mexico City conference in 2010, Buckley had this to say:
Sophisticates were dismayed by our delegation’s insistence that economic development held the key to bringing population growth under control. So I chuckled when, twenty-five years later, I perused the October 31, 2009, issue of The Economist.
Its cover showed a diapered baby in free fall over the legend,
“Falling fertility. How the population problem is solving itself.” The text underscored the role of, yes, economic development in triggering record declines in developing-world fertility rates. The Economist noted that “By about 2020, the global fertility rate will dip below the global replacement rate for the first time.”
He concluded that “a future UN conference will no doubt be called to consider the plight of nations with population implosions.” Perhaps it can be held in Mexico City.