Depopulation?

Marian Tupy has an article at Townhall.com asking Does The World Face an Underpopulation Problem? Tupy argues that contrary to what is deemed "common sense", the world, and human flourishing, has grown as the population has grown. But common sense in this instance is wrong because neo-maltusians look at resources as being used up. But all the resources that have ever been here are still here. What happens is that as population growns, we get more and more creative in how to use these resources more amd more efficiently.

Tupy notes that the price of strategic resources continue to go down in terms of the number of hours someone needs to work to purchase these materials.

The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes in incomes. Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase faster than inflation. That’s because people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes and across time. Contrast the productivity of workers equipped with shovels and those driving giant excavators. While real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes. To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by the nominal hourly income. That tells you how long you must work to afford something.

Consider U.S. manufacturing workers. Between 1900 and 2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn, coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%, 96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively. That means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5, 25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds. While people cannot eat rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living. Their time prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8% respectively. All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.

What happened to global time prices of resources? They fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent. Put differently, for the same time of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six. Over that 58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3 billion to 7.6 billion.

When looked at in those terms, it is pretty clear that far from being over populated, more people have brought greater human flourishing. The malthusians have always been wrong. The neo-malthusians are just as wrong. The China one child policy has been wrong. I suspect that as the world's population decreases, the cost of everything will rise because there are fewer people to spread the cost over.