We got into one of those Malthusian shouting matches on The Patio this morning. That is why we attached a picture of Thomas Malthus to this morning’s outing. He is smiling, an unusual expression for him. We had promised to stay away from all that, the assertions and denials that the human population of the planet was going to decline. It made news when we hit 8 billion. China represented one-and-a-half of those billions, and we have been hearing about China’s population surge all the years we have shared the ominous news that we would exceed the amount of food available and we would all starve in short and unpleasant fashion.

This morning we were told that wasn’t true. In fact, the birthrate for China has declined to the extent that there will be less than a single billion citizens, and India will stand as the most populous nation on earth. The implication is that the upward pressure of population and the finite nature of the food supply would cause misery. Instead, it seems that there is a common sense answer to the proposition advanced by Thomas Malthus two hundred years ago. His growth model theory was that populations expand in potentially exponential manner. Food supply and other resources grow in a linear fashion. We have been fighting over that proposition for what seems like a very long time.

The Malthusian thinkers believe that growth is inescapable and will eventually reduce living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. That sort of reasoning can be applied to all sorts of things. Not just food, but everything. We have been told that Oil is in that diminishing basket, but so are all the semi-precious metals like lithium that are supposed to provide battery power to operate what we consider sustainable economies. The word this morning had some of our Malthusians a little rattled. China’s population is supposed to shrink by a third over the next quarter century.

Down to under a billion human beings, less than a paltry thousand million.

By the same predictions, India will replace China as the most populous nation on Earth much sooner. So you can see why a summer Friday with blue sky like this morning can evoke passion. It would seem that there is some sort of “common sense” approach to family size. It takes a while to kick in, apparently. We are doing something like that here in America, though not as dramatically. We are currently about 360 million in population. Our childbirth rate is a still a little over “replacement,” but we also have welcomed around 7 million “migrants” outside our traditionally generous immigration laws.

We will see how that works out. The Chinese are aware that they are confronting some contraction. That will impact their options in international relations, so the interests of Taiwan and the Philippines and other island nations in the southwest Pacific are contributing factors to the future that is rushing at us.

Regardless of our personal impression of Malthus and his theories, we wound up in general agreement that the changes in the number of people would determine changes in the globe’s future. And that other thing- the “migrants” near El Paso include a lot of young Chinese men cross into Texas in military-sized small units.

We take comfort in the realization that in only twenty-five years there will be fewer young Chinese men available to cross the border. We will not have to deal with it, based on our personal demographics. But we would be interested in talking to the people who set this up twenty-five years ago, you know? The Chinese might be thinking the same thing this morning….

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