Earlier this week,
Sp!ked posted an interview with data scientist and demographer Stephen J. Shaw, the director of the documkentary
Birth Gap, under the headline "
Falling birth rates are the greatest crisis facing humanity – bar none".
Pretty strong language, and we were immediately reminded of The Population Bomb (1968), in which the late Paul Ehrlich warned that "overpopulation" would lead to mass starvation by the 1970s, to American life expectancy plummeting to just 42 by the 1980s. By the year 2000, the book predicted, England would cease to exist. And so on.
Prof. Ehrlich was wrong. Mr Shaw contends that the biggest problem we face a quarter of the way through the 21st century is precisely the opposit. The challenge is dealing with unprecedented demographic collapse in the face of falling birth rates.
"Wut?!", Walt hears you say. "There are 7 billion people crowding and destroying the earth, especially in my neighbourhood." Maybe Prof. Ehrlich was right after all, just out on his timing!
The answer to conundrum is to be found in a short story written by sci-fi master C.M. Kornbluth in 1951. It's called The Marching Morons.
The central character is real estate agent and con artist John Barlow, who is placed in suspended animation after a freak accident. He is revived in the distant future, in a confusing world filled with hypersexualized advertisements, vapid entertainment, and people who exhibit erratic, nonsensical behavior. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
Shortly after being revived, Barlow is introduced to two men, Tinny-Peete and Ryan-Ngana, who inform him that the lamentable state of society is the fault of the "morons", the world's vast population of unintelligent people, who greatly outnumber the much smaller population of intelligent people.
Ryan-Ngana says, "While you [Barlow] and your kindwere being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers, and tenant farmers were shiftlesslyt and sahort-sightedly having children -- breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"
So it is in the "first world" -- North America, Europe and, yes, Japan and China -- today. People of higher intelligence often choose to have few children (or no children at all) for pragmatic reasons, while people of lower intelligence, compelled by their sex drives, have larger families and reproduce in greater numbers.
So, Tinny-Peete and Ryan-Ngana explain to Barlow, the most urgent crisis of their time is the population problem ("Poprob"). The unbalanced trend has been carried to its logical extreme, with a total world population of five billion morons (with an average IQ of 45) living under the supervision of three million members of an elite, intellectual upper-class who secretly govern world affairs.
If the simple-minded morons are left to govern themselves, the world will descend into chaos and devastating war. As a result, the elite minority (of which Tinny-Peete and Ryan-Ngana are members) are effectively "enslaved" by the moron majority, working themselves to exhaustion while attempting to maintain global order and stability.
Controlling the morons' population growth is impractical for several reasons, but unless some corrective action is taken, the inevitable outcome will be the depletion of Earth's dwindling natural resources, followed by the total collapse of human civilization.
All attempts to solve Poprob have failed, and the elite hope that Barlow, as a man from a different time and with a different perspective on the problem, might be able to offer a novel solution.
Barlow has an idea, but he refuses to elaborate until Tinny-Peete and Ryan-Ngana agree to formally name him dictator of the entire world, promising him wealth, power, and fame.
Taking inspiration from his knowledge of fraudulent real estate deals, propaganda techniques employed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, and the myth of lemmings drowning themselves in the sea, Barlow devises a plan for the extermination of the moron population. Barlow orchestrates a massive propaganda campaign encouraging the morons to migrate to the planet Venus, which is billed as a tropical paradise.
The overcrowded and inefficient cities in which the morons reside are to be dismantled, their steel used to construct fleets of "spaceships" ostensibly intended to ferry people to Venus; in reality, the spaceships are not capable of making the trip - the best spaceship ever made had crashed on the moon - but they are capable of getting their passengers out of sight of the other morons, to some unspecified location where billions can be killed without damaging Earth's biosphere.
To allay any suspicion, forged postcards are sent from Venusian "colonists" to their families, describing Venus as a lush tropical paradise and encouraging them to follow. The United States Congress, under the control of the elite, promotes the colonization of Venus as an extension of manifest destiny -- this too, sounds familiar in 2026! -- and guarantees Venusian settlers permanent land rights on the planet.
This sparks widespread nationalistic fervor as the various nations of Earth all adopt similar approaches and race to reach Venus in order to stake their own claims. As more and more morons leave, the ensuing loneliness compels the rest to follow.
Barlow's plan is a complete success; Earth is gradually emptied of morons and Poprob is solved!
Sounds like a good plan to me! Of course there's a coda to the story. Once the final solution has been implemented, Barlow becomes surplus to requirement and is included in the "final cleanup". That doesn't matter. The real story here is not the solution but the analysis of the problem. Is it not a challenge for us -- call us "elites" if you like -- not in the future but in the present? Look around you.
