Why a more populous world will need different rules of governance

The western obsession with individual freedoms, which has been globalised after 1945, may need to give way to a more realistic approach wherein groups become the units of governance

In a post on its website, the UN told the world a few days ago, "On 15 November 2022, the world's population is projected to reach 8 billion people, a milestone in human development." It omitted to mention that in 1900 it was just 1 billion.

In other words, we have added 7 billion people in 122 years. Had this explosive growth happened in any other species, nature, as it always does, would have taken remedial action. But we have gone the other way.

Thus, the UN added that this was "unprecedented growth". It attributed it to "the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine." Then it acknowledged that it was also "the result of high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries." India used to be amongst those countries. Now it's the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Realising that this growth of 7 billion in just over 100 years was nothing to celebrate because it really is bad news, the UN added some "good news". It said, "If it took the global population 12 years to grow from 7 to 8 billion, it will take approximately 15 years—until 2037— for it to reach 9 billion, a sign that the overall growth rate of the global population is slowing."

Then it tried to balance things a bit. He turned to the environmental impact of so many people. "Even though population growth magnifies the environmental impact of economic development, rising per capita incomes are the main driver of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption." So it wasn't the poor countries producing more children who were responsible; it was actually the rich countries.

Thus, "the countries with the highest per capita consumption of material resources and emissions of greenhouse gas emissions tend to be those where income per capita is higher, not those where the population is growing rapidly."

Finally, the release came to the point: "slower population growth over many decades could help to mitigate the further accumulation of environmental damage in the second half of the current century."

But that surely isn't the point. Even slower growth will leave the world with lots of people for another 200 years unless something — like some catastrophic event — happens to kill off several billion. But we must hope that it doesn't.

I have maintained for a long time that such large numbers of people will impact everything, including, most importantly, the rules of governance. This is because, to take an example from physics, just as light bends near a very heavy object, so must the rules of governance change when so many have to be governed. And they do.

The emergence of "strongmen leaders" in populous countries also needs to be seen in this light. Conversely, we can see that in the countries to the west of Russia, the failure to produce "strongmen" has resulted in a collapse of governance.

The core question is whether the rules of governance will be aimed at the individual or the group. When one gains, the other loses. To put it bluntly, will the western obsession with individual freedoms, which has been globalised after 1945, give way to a more realistic approach wherein groups become the units of governance? Indigenous caste groups are a good example. Whatever happens, it will be hard to govern large populations effectively with old principles.

There are exceptions, of course, but the trend is quite clear: large populations will eventually lead to strongman leaders or, even without them, fewer freedoms of the 20th-century type.