Population Discourse and Elite Anxieties, From Overpopulation to Collapse
The obsession of some Western elites — especially conservatives — with birth rates and population size is centuries old. In recent years, however, an interesting reversal has occurred: worries about "overpopulation," which dominated much of the second half of the twentieth century, have given way to alarm about falling birth rates and a purported "population collapse." What happened? And why are some strands of the Western elite so preoccupied with population size in the first place?
The first question — what happened — becomes clearer if we look at the history of population science and discourse and at the logic behind conservative worldviews.
One of the most influential thinkers on this topic was Thomas Malthus. In his "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798) he argued that population tends to grow geometrically while food production rises only arithmetically. Ultimately, he said, population would press against the food supply, producing famine and widespread misery.
Today it is clear to anyone who studies the matter scientifically that the laws Malthus believed he had discovered were too simplistic—they fail to do justice to the complexity of human population development. While there were certainly many famines in human history, most of them had other causes, like diseases that suddenly shrank the workforce or natural disasters that ruined a year's harvest. On the other hand there were times when food production suddenly exploded, like in the Green Revolutions starting in the 1950s. Furthermore, Malthus, living through the socially chaotic times of industrialization and early capitalism in England, underestimated the ability of many historic communities to steer their reproduction rates on a local level and in a self-directed way — for example by delaying marriage, voluntary abstinence, early forms of contraception and sometimes infanticide.
Like many bourgeois theorists of his time, Malthus attributed social problems to the sheer number, alleged moral failings and imprudence among the poor, rather than to the living and working conditions shaped by his own class. His policy prescriptions ranged from relatively mild recommendations — like moral restraint — to harsher measures, such as withholding charity and social relief. In effect, some of his proposals amounted to allowing the poor to suffer the consequences of scarcity, as welfare efforts — in his belief — would only amplify 'the problem'.
In much the same spirit, but framed in modern terms, influential scholars and policymakers in the second half of the twentieth century viewed rising populations — especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America — as root causes of poverty, political instability and potential upheaval. The best-known example is Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), an alarmist book that sold millions of copies and shaped policy debates for decades. As a result of his and similar voices, population-control programmes spread globally, often tied to foreign aid and credit conditionality. From the US and other Western governments over the World Bank and UN programs to private agencies and foundations, a wide range of actors weighed in. Some measures taken were harmless or sometimes even empowering, for example when poor communities got access to contraception and voluntary abortions for the first time. But in many cases, these programs came with coercion and nightmarish human rights violations.
Many 'Third World' countries in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were pressured by Western institutions to implement population control measures and citizens were subjected to compulsory contraception or sterilization. The Indian government for example enforced sterilization of millions of individuals by making the procedure a requirement for getting access to water, electricity and medical care in the mid-1970s and beyond. Similar policies were enacted in Bangladesh and it is very likely that even the introduction of the one-child policy in China, which today is often considered by Western liberals as a prime example of communist overreach into the private life of citizens, was heavily influenced by those global efforts and Western discourse hegemony on this topic.
But also at home Western elites tried to bring birth rates down by force. Denmark for example forced birth control onto Greenlandic Inuit women during the 1960s and 1970s by placing intrauterine devices in thousands of Greenlandic Inuit girls and women, most of the time without their consent or even knowledge. Similar examples can be found in Canada, Israel and more, often targeting mainly indigenous, immigrant and/or impoverished communities. It's also important to mention that while the peak of overpopulation discourse and the big corresponding campaigns are over, involuntary contraception and sterilization practices still happen in many countries of the world although on a smaller scale and often in a more secretive manner.
If one reads through all of these examples, a pattern becomes obvious: While papers and policy announcements in the twentieth century often talked about a general, global overpopulation problem and conceptualized it in holistic and often ecological terms, in practice it was the birth rate in very specific communities that got targeted: It was mainly working class, poor, ethnic minorities and/or non-white people that suffered under coercive programs to bring down their birth rates. At the same time and despite pushing the narrative of a general overpopulation problem on the stage of international politics, many Western governments even tried to hinder their own white middle classes from accessing contraception and abortions at home.
Today, however, a new population-related concern has emerged in the West: anxiety over falling birth rates and a potential "population collapse." Especially on the currently influential far right of the political spectrum, more and more politicians are putting the issue on their agendas. Elon Musk, for example, tweeted that "population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," predicting a "mass extinction" of entire cultures if fertility continues to decline. U.S. President Trump declared in a speech: "We want more babies, to put it nicely."
The bit of truth in this is that the global demographic outlook has dramatically changed from the times The Population Bomb was written up to the present day. In 2025 roughly 8.2 billion people live on the planet and while the size of the human population is still growing, it is projected to peak in this century, maybe as early as the mid-2050s as some demographers predict.
Is this due to the population control programs of the 20th century and beyond? While they certainly had a measurable impact, researchers attribute the decline of birth rates in nearly every country of the world mainly to other factors. Firstly, it's important to consider that the annual world population growth peaked at 2.3% per year already in the early 1960s. Since then, growth proceeded, but slowed down. Secondly it seems that social, economic and technological changes in the previous decades improved the ability of young people to take control of their reproduction. Young people, especially women, who have access to education and contraception, generally seem to use these options to make sure they get in a sufficient economic position so they can feed and educate the children they get. On top of that most countries moved from very agrarian to more and more urban societies as with technological advancements fewer human hands are needed in agriculture. This changes the benefit calculation of having children for many families: Where once more children meant more helping hands and insurance for old age, they now became almost a luxury in crowded cities with little space and high educational costs. Given the opportunity, the masses seem to be much more rational with their reproduction than Malthus, Ehrlich and many Western elites thought.
Anyway, back to the anxiety about a potential 'population collapse'. As already mentioned, declining birth rates are a global phenomenon but especially in the United States and many European countries they have fallen below replacement level decades ago. Other rather spectacular examples are wealthy Asian nations, for example South Korea which has the lowest fertility rate of all right now (roughly 0.82). No one really denies that this development could bear some serious challenges: an ageing population that progressively outnumbers the young, putting new pressures on old pension, health-care and social-care models; a shrinking workforce whose contributions no longer cover the bills run up by the retired; and perhaps a gradual erosion of economic dynamism that historically came from cohorts of twenty-somethings starting businesses and families.
But if one knows the history of population size alarmism, it's not too far-fetched to get very skeptical about the ideology behind the apocalyptic rhetoric of the new population collapse discourse. As argued above, under the banner of population control mainly certain subgroups of societies got targeted in practice: Low-income working classes, poor people and/or non-white, indigenous and minority groups. And here, again, it is not the fertility rates of those groups that right-wing politicians lament about. What they want are white children, born in traditional families with stable enough income streams that they don't cost the elites anything. What motivates them is the fear of losing power when their own milieus shrink much faster than the rest of human civilization. And so, what seems like a huge paradigm shift, alarmism about overpopulation vs alarmism about population collapse can also be understood as different expressions of the same eugenic agenda.