Hawaiʻi now has more residents 65 and older than children under 18.
At statehood, the Islands were young. They are not anymore.
This did not simply happen. Some of it was planned. The man who led the planning died in April at the age of 100, after a long life of honorable service. He counted the slowing of Hawaiʻi’s growth among his proudest achievements.
Gov. George Ariyoshi led the state of Hawaiʻi for 13 years, from 1973 to 1986 — longer than anyone before or since. He belonged to the last generation that believed, without irony, that government could improve the condition of man. He dressed for the office he held: pressed suits, perfect hair, a bearing that reminded people of Kennedy. He and his wife Jean matched the dignity of the role. Today’s politicians often carry the detachment of people who half-suspect the whole thing is theater. Ariyoshi never did.
Ariyoshi was not a cynic or a schemer. He was a capable, earnest man who believed the most respected experts of his age. And the experts were wrong.
In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. It opened by declaring the battle to feed humanity already lost. Hundreds of millions would starve in the coming decade, he warned, no matter what anyone did. Four years later, the Club of Rome released a report built on a computer model. Factor in population growth, food, resource depletion, industry, and pollution, and the machine predicted total collapse. The model was treated less like a guess and more like an oracle.
The books sold millions. But beneath the charts sat one assumption: that a human being is a mouth and nothing more. The models saw people as problems, never as problem solvers. Every child arrived on the ledger with a minus sign.
Scripture starts from the opposite premise. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him,” says Psalm 127. A blessing, not a burden.
The blessings came. The same humans the models had written off went on to breed drought-resistant crops and feed them manmade fertilizer. Famine retreated to the margins of the earth. A trucker named Malcom McLean packed cargo into standard steel boxes, and over the next 50 years the shipping container rewired world trade. Moving goods became so cheap that distance nearly stopped mattering. A farmer in Iowa could feed a family in Osaka, and a factory anywhere could serve customers everywhere.
None of this was in the model. A computer could extend a curve. But it could not foresee the impact of a steel box.
Where the prophets were believed most completely, the results were darkest. China’s One Child Policy enforced the arithmetic with forced abortions and sterilizations.
Hawaiʻi’s response was gentler, and the worry behind it was not lunacy. The Islands grew fast after the war — new subdivisions, new hotels climbing out of the sand at Waikīkī. A reasonable person standing in the governor’s office in 1975, watching the curves climb, could honestly ask how much the Islands could carry.
Ariyoshi’s answer was “managed growth.” He used no coercion. Instead, he built a State Plan that set targets for slowing population growth. And he wielded a Land Use Commission that kept most land closed to building. What land remained was wrapped in red tape that slowed development to a tree snail’s pace.
The plan worked the way a tourniquet works. Growth slowed, as did homebuilding. The supply of houses fell behind the number of families who needed them. Prices did what prices always do when many people chase few homes. Working families were priced out, then pushed out — to Las Vegas, to Texas, to anywhere the math still worked. The state that set out to slow the growth of its population ended by exporting its children.
Ariyoshi never disowned the project. In 2009 he published a short book looking back on 50 years of statehood. In it he wrote with evident satisfaction that annual population growth had “slowed to about 1.5 percent, at least partly due to managed growth policies.” In the same pages he looked ahead: by 2035, he projected, our state’s population would be 1.6 million people.
Ariyoshi was optimistic. Hawaiʻi’s population has declined now in five of the past six years and is below its peak of 1.45 million. The model missed again, this time in the other direction.
The planners who could not foresee abundance also could not foresee the empty cradle. Today, Hawaiʻi has nearly twice the population it had in 1972, yet has fewer children enrolled in school.
The old ideas did not die when the famines failed to arrive on schedule. They split. One branch grew more radical. There are people today who describe humanity as a cancer on the planet, who greet falling birth rates as good news, who tally each new child chiefly as a carbon cost. That is the same arithmetic with the mask off: People as problems, all the way down.
The other branch grew respectable, and it lives closer to home. The staunchest defenders of Ariyoshi’s machinery today are not socialists. They are homeowners whose home values owe much to the scarcity his policies built. Many are conservatives who distrust government in every arena except land use. They praise the free market on Tuesday and testify against the apartment project next door on Wednesday. Managed growth survives because scarcity has shareholders.
Ariyoshi deserves better than blame and worse than a shrine. He placed too much faith in academics to predict the future and too much faith in the state to control it. In this he was a man of his time.
Every generation believes some prophecy. Ours may be the conviction that decline is destiny — that the young will leave, that the schools will empty, that the best a government can do is manage the shrinking.
There is another way to plan. Build as if children are a blessing. Open land for the families we hope to welcome rather than ration it to keep out the ones we fear. Build the houses, the classrooms, and the roads for a Hawaiʻi that grows, and let families, churches, and builders do the work the models never accounted for.
A state that plans for decline will get it. A state that receives the next generation as a gift may be surprised by what that gift brings with it.
The Islands were young once. They could be young again.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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