_____News____United Nations_______________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

 “No Scientific Basis…”
A population expert takes a critical look at his colleagues’ analysis.

Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt is one of America’s leading thinkers on demography, foreign aid, and poverty. He is a visiting fellow at the Harvard University Center for Population and Development, a consultant for the World Bank, and holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Since the death of Julian Simon in February 1998, Eberstadt has become the foremost intellectual critic of the population-control movement.

Austin Ruse—who has covered the population debate at the United Nations—spoke with Eberstadt about the most recent developments in the field.

What was the significance of the March meeting of population experts at the United Nations?

Nicholas Eberstadt: The expert-group meeting revised the presumptions of standard demography.

The consequence of their new assumptions is that world population projections likely will be described as the peaking of world population at around 7.5 billion around the year 2050, with more or less indefinite population declines for the world as a whole thereafter. This is all clearly very prospective, since there is no great scientific precision for long-range projections.

One of the things that kept coming up in a number of the papers was the uncertainty—the tacit admission that the experts have no idea what they are doing.

Eberstadt: The mathematical techniques are very elegant and very rigorous. The parameters that one establishes for these techniques is entirely loosey-goosey. One has an elegant computational system which is subject to the dangers of “garbage in, garbage out.” The fact of the matter is that there is no scientific basis, no robust scientific basis for the long-term anticipations of future fertility levels in any given society, much less the world as a whole.

In any look toward 2050, you have the problem of trying to calculate how many babies those who are currently unborn are going to be having. You can’t do that.

So what this expert-group meeting really did was to revise the gestalt, or revise the Rorschach test of what is considered respectable by people who are called demographic experts.

It seems that the UN Population Division is under a lot of political pressure not to let the predictions of fertility go too low.

Eberstadt: Well, there are other people who probably know much more about this than I do. It is surely the case that they have to be accountable to the many different members of the greater United Nations community.

I know that this office has to send their biennial revisions of proposed projections for countries to the member states. I am not sure whether the member states have to sign off or not.

A demographics expert has pointed out that in order to hit the new, lower prediction that is now being advanced for fertility levels, the Population Division is actually being forced to predict an increase in fertility in countries like the Czech Republic—from 1.2 to 1.9—and that this is highly unrealistic.

Eberstadt: Well there is, in all of the projections that have been done over the last decade, the presumption that the rich countries, the developed countries, are currently at an abnormally low level of fertility and that over time their fertility rates will increase back toward the replacement levels—or in some cases, above the replacement levels . . .

Is this based on any evidence?

Eberstadt: There is one bit that it is based on. There is a “nerdy” but not unimportant difference in fertility rates, between what is called the period rate and the so-called cohort rate.

A period rate is like a snapshot. If you could see the US as one woman who went through ages 15 through 49 all in the course of this year, then you would have what we call the current annual fertility rate for the United States. But of course that’s make-believe. What people really do is they live real lives. They are born in year X and die in year Y, and have Z number of children.

Now looking over the course of a real person’s lifetime, that‘s called the cohort rate. Now the basic difference between the period rate and the cohort rate appears under one particular set of conditions, which is when social mores are changing—for example, if all of a sudden women are deciding they are going to postpone childbearing.

This happened in the United States back in the 1970s, when the US period fertility rate dropped down to about 1.7. Now that “snapshot” rate is up to almost 2.1.

Only what has happened, over that time, is the cohort rate didn’t really drop. It just turned out that—really, truly—women were just postponing their childbearing, and they really didn’t decide they were going to have fewer children.

On the basis of this, there are a lot of people in research organizations and national governments who are saying, “Well that’s really the same thing that’s happening in Russia today, and in Japan. . . . The cohort rate will be higher; over time here will be an increase. It is just that with the transition from Communism, or with the social changes going on now, there is a temporary lull. . . . The fertility rate will eventually rise to reflect that.”

And you would call that sort of reasoning “science fiction?”

Eberstadt: I would say that is a possible theory: a possible theory, hardly an established fact.
There are many respectable demographers in Europe who are saying, “No, this is whistling past the graveyard.” There are others who are saying that the rate will be coming up. Let’s just wait and watch.

One of the interesting questions regarding fertility is “how low can it go?” We don’t know where the bottom is, do we?

Eberstadt: Of course we don’t, because we don’t know what the future is. The whole glory of this “expert meeting” is that it is expert opinion jogging and hustling, trying to catch up with established reality. And the same thing can be said about “how low can we go.”

When the German fertility rate of the 1980s went down to 1.5, you say, “Well it went down to 1.5.” And when the East German rate after Communism goes down to 0.7 (the period rate), you say, “Well it can go down to 0.7.”

There was an article in Population & Development Review about two years ago by a person who describes herself as being a devotee of socio-biology who made the argument that while women may not want to have babies themselves, child-rearing is an innate human impulse, and so we feel quite confident that the majority of women over time will rear at least one child. Okay, so you say, “Stop for a moment, and listen to what you just said.” If a majority of women—51 percent of women—raise at least one child, that means we are talking about a total fertility rate of 0.5.

It seems that the Population Division has been beating a different drum than the more ideological agencies like the UN Population Fund. They have been drawing attention to this demographic collapse at least since 1997.

Eberstadt: My impression is—and I say this with great affection—the UN Population Division group is a group of defiant nerds. They are statistical nerds who want to do their work as accurately as they can. They will be happy when their projections accord with subsequent events. And if they do not, they want to adjust them. But they are empirically driven, and want to get their numbers as good as they can get them.

That’s obviously not UNFPA’s concern, nor even their self-described task. UNFPA has gone from being a sort of a clearinghouse for information—a neutral clearinghouse for information about population questions—to a radicalized anti-natal activist group. It is not I who says that, it is they who say that. In their mission statement now, they say they are champions of what they describe as the universally accepted goal of world population stabilization— which means the lowest population total in the quickest time.

Dr. Joseph Chamie, the head of the UN Population Division, seems to be debating the Population Fund. He issued a report last summer that rebuts almost all of UNFPA’s alarmist rhetoric about overpopulation causing starvation, disease, and environmental degradation.

Eberstadt: They did put out that report on population development and the environment and I thought that was a pretty careful report. It had a lot of worrisome and potentially troubling commentary within it, but it was of a different caliber and tenor than UNFPA reports.

One thing that I notice in a lot of Chamie’s work is that there does not seem to be unanimity of opinion within his own shop. For instance, in the current report that they gave the expert-group meeting in March, they spoke critically of certain countries that had stalled in the fertility decline.

Bangladesh, for instance, had “stalled” at 3.3. Did you pick that up?

Eberstadt: Oh, sure. My guess is if you quizzed the UN Population Division on their preferences, you might find that their personal preferences or outlooks are close to those of the members of the Population Association of America.

That is just a surmise or a guess. But, the situation is that, whatever their personal preferences or beliefs or outlooks are, they do not impress those on the physical data by torturing the numbers.

Did the “population bomb” go off?

Eberstadt: Yes, the population bomb went off in the 20th century. We’ve got four times as many people now as we had in 1900. But it wasn’t exactly a population bomb. It was a health explosion. The reason we’ve got four times as many people now as we had a hundred years ago is because life spans are over twice as long as they were a hundred years ago.

If only the death rates had changed, there would be 10 billion people here on Earth today. There are a little over 6 billion people. That’s because, not only did lifespans explode, but actually, fertility levels rather dramatically changed.

You make the point that fertility levels began to decline in the 19th century. Therefore we did not need the population control regime promoted by the United Nations, the US, and the European Union.

Eberstadt: Clearly, population policy is not the ship for fertility decline. The beginning of secular fertility decline is identified in post-Napoleonic France, which was very poor, very rural, very illiterate, and also very Catholic. So all of the supposed modernization criteria that are supposed to predict fertility change were not there at the start. It was a troubled theory from its very inception.

The experts say the beginning of the “fertility transition” is 30 live births per thousand. Why is that the case?

Eberstadt: It is just numbers. Thirty births per thousand is a very crude—wet your finger and put it in the wind!—sort of number. I guess they use thirty because there is a zero after the digit, but that would usually be a very high level of childbearing.

Birthrates per thousand are a little tricky because if you have a birthrate of thirty per thousand in a nursing home, that would be a rather different thing than thirty births per thousand in reference to a maternity ward. It depends on society, pay structure, and all that stuff. It is much more intuitively clear to say something like “four to five births per woman per lifetime.”

France hit that magic number in 1830, and Argentina hit it in 1930, long before contraception and readily available abortion.

Eberstadt: Take a look at the historical record, or even the more recent record. I think they pointed this out in some of the discussions in the papers. Mexico and Brazil have followed just about the same fertility-decline trajectory in the post World War II era. Brazil has never had a national population policy. Mexico has a very muscular, vigorous one, well financed.

So what is the net contribution to social fertility change of a national population policy, if the program is voluntary? If it is involuntary, as in China, you can forcibly terrorize people to have fewer people than they would desire. But if it is a voluntary program, working on voluntary premises, it is not clear to me why it should have a revolutionary effect on overall childbearing rates.

At the Cairo Conference, UNFPA changed its stress from population control to reproductive rights. It seems that they saw what was coming. They saw these steep declines in fertility rates, and they wanted it to keep going further down, so they changed the debate to focus on reproductive rights.

After all, who can be against rights?

Eberstadt: You may be right. My impression is that even after the Cairo Conference, the apocalyptic language the UNFPA officials used about continuous world population growth is really quite stark, like “looking over the edge of the cliff” and all that stuff.

I would say that this was part of a strategy—an expanding coalition that UNFPA attempted to forge for themselves, making allies and supporters of feminist groups. Putting a little less emphasis on population targets, and a little more emphasis on human and reproductive health, was a way to forge this constituency.

So again, the population bomb went off. Did it do any damage?

Eberstadt: It is hard to say where the growth of population has done damage.
In general the health of the human population today is much better today than it was a hundred years ago. The levels of affluence are vastly higher than a hundred years ago. Education, literacy, and living standards are generally much better.

It is also true that there are a larger number of people living below a given poverty line today than there were a few decades ago, given the enormous growth in human population. Even though disproportionately more people are prosperous, in absolute terms there are probably more people living below a certain threshold of poverty. So it depends upon your viewpoint and your philosophy and your moral basis. If you say that having more human beings in poverty is unacceptable, then there should be no more human beings. If you say a greater proportion of humanity is living better, that is what has happened. You have to decide what is important to you.