We Don't Face Crisis of Scarcity or a Population, But a Crisis of Capitalism

Mounting concern over declining birth rates, the devastation of the climate crisis, and a rising conservative pronatalist movement have led to a renewed focus on population. People across the political spectrum express show up on both sides of the debate, whether about the economic challenges of an aging population, our planet’s destruction (and its very real human toll), or pushing a regressive agenda.

Late last month, The New York Times published “Depopulation is Coming, Don’t Expect it to Solve Our Problems.” I read it eagerly. Economists Michael Geruso and Dean Spears do make important points. They write: “Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.” Here, here! And, in making their argument against depopulation, they also share a vision for the future where systemic barriers driving birth rates down, like the high duress placed on mothers, are no longer so prominent.

Those are great points, but they don’t tell the whole story and we need to be honest about the real crisis.

These questions bring me back to the beginning of my life’s work. The authors reference Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which argued that, if the population kept growing, humanity would implode from famine or disease due to a lack of resources. It came out when I was a young woman and took the world by storm.

When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play.

I wondered, “Is this true?” The resulting research led me to write my first book, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which proved that our growing population was not the problem. Instead, concerns over scarcity—at least in the realm of food—pointed to a larger culprit: Concentrated corporate power and extreme economic inequality which together promoted meat-centered diets.

In a moment when population is again in the limelight and meat-based diets are increasingly valorized, I want to return to the argument I made then. It feels more important than ever.

About three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to livestock that provide only about 11% of our calories. And just four corporations—JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill, and National Beef—control over three-quarters of the global beef market. In pork, three firms account for two-thirds.

We can see concentrated power still hard at work here. Meat is the most inefficient way to feed ourselves.

Here’s the key point: Meat production is not only wasteful, it’s incredibly destructive. For one, it furthers destruction of carbon-absorbing rainforests while adding cattle-emitting methane—a particularly intense greenhouse gas. According to one report, “Cows pack such a punch that, if they were a nation, ‘cow country’ would rank as the world’s sixth worst greenhouse gas emitter.” And, tragically, cattle farming alone is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation.

These mega-corporations—with their substantial hold on the meat market—have no real reason to slow or stop their production; instead, they profit, while we bear the brunt of the destruction.

Let’s return to the question of population. We know that the meat industry—as one of the big drivers of our climate crisis—is a huge part of creating scarcity-based depopulation rhetoric. At the same time, we know that depopulation is no longer an idea simply made mainstream by Ehrlich et al., but a reality driven by declining birth rates.

The decline in birth rates is a phenomenon across the West, but the U.S. has a distinct landscape. In a 40-country comparison, we come in 38th—third worst—for childcare affordability. For single parents in the United States, a gargantuan 32% of income is spent on childcare. According to The Guardian, in Massachusetts, infant care costs almost $27,000 per year on average--“21% more than the average rent, and 83% more than in-state tuition at a public college.”

While the cost of childcare is mind-boggling, it’s not a stand-alone issue: We are in a full-blown cost of living crisis. The U.S.’ median income is just over $80,000 a year, yet to live comfortably in Mississippi—the U.S.’s most affordable state--a family of four would need to make around $190,000 in 2025. All of this in a nation where the richest 1% of Americans make 139 times as much as the bottom 20%.

When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play. This means explicitly naming the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.

We face neither a crisis of scarcity nor a crisis of population. Rather, we face a crisis of capitalism.

The solution is a democratic economy with rules against monopoly and an adequate safety net that provides the resources we all need to thrive.