In this chapter I consider a selection of important demographic narratives that are often framed as moral panics. Demographic narratives are stories about demographic issues that inform public opinion and debates. A moral panic has been defined as a widespread feeling of fear that is commonly an exaggerated response to social issues. Moral panics often work their way through the media and moral entrepreneurs to influence public opinion. They take social concerns to the level of threat to the existing order. In this chapter I look at how some demographic narratives blend into moral panics. I examine four in particular: global “overpopulation”, the “right” composition of national populations, the “threat” of specific cohorts and the idea of a decline of “family values”.

OVERPOPULATION

In 1968 an entomologist at Stanford University, Paul Ehrlich, published a book called The Population Bomb. It became a bestseller; millions of copies were sold, and it became a very influential text for people trying to understand global demography. It was co-written with his wife Anne Ehrlich, but her name was dropped from the final text. The book was less a measured analysis and more a polemic with incendiary remarks such as “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”. With this doomsday scenario of overpopulation leading to famine, pollution and social and ecological collapse, it moved up the bestseller list and had an influence on popular opinion that persists today. It heightened concerns about rapid population growth, especially in what was then called the Third World (what we would now call the global South).

Apart for the lack of social sensitivity and the inability to see human population dynamics as different from animal populations (a form of the biologizing of human behaviour common among other sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson), it had a racial bias. The problem was configured as: there were too many people from the so-called Third World. The population problem, in this reading, was in effect too many Black and Brown people overwhelming not only their own societies but the earth's ability to cope.