The following e-mail dialogue was carried on between Steven Mosher, President of PRI, and Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus, San Diego State University, after “Population Control Kills” appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune on July 27, 2005.
Dear Mr. Mosher:
I read your July 27 commentary, which appeared as “Population control kills,” in the San Diego Union-Tribune. I was disappointed to discover that your remarks appeared at times to be both irrational and/or irrelevant.
As for the illogicality in your piece: It seems unreasonable to conclude, as you do, that the greater the number of children that today’s poverty-stricken Africans have, the better will become their economic status.
As for the immaterial nature of your composition: It is not attempts by African government officials to control population that is the main cause of the epidemic of poverty, illness, and despair suffered by the populations of nearly all African countries. The guilty parties here are the autocratic, corrupt, and economically inept dictators who have exercised unremitting brutal control of almost all African nations since the end of colonialism.
Patrick Groff, San Diego, CA
Dear Mr. Groff:
Thank you for offering your opinion on my editorial, “Population Control Kills,” which in the course of three short paragraphs you manage to characterize as “irrational,” “irrelevant,” “illogical,” etc.
You say it is illogical to view children as net economic assets, producing more than they consume over their lifetimes. But the whole history of the human race attests to this truth. It was increasing population densities that drove technical and scientific innovation, allowed labor specialization, and permitted economies of scale — all of which made human progress possible.
Here you will want to read Ester Boserup’s The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965), about how population drives agricultural efficiency. Another useful book is Noble Prize winner Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford 1981), which dismantled another tenet of Malthusian theory — i.e. that famines were always (or mainly) caused by absolute deficiency of food.
I agree that it is not population control (largely imposed from abroad, by the way) that is the chief cause of Africa’s ills. But with its undermining of primary health care, diversion of resources into quixotic anti-people schemes, and rampant human rights abuses, it has certainly made matters worse. Much worse.
It seems to me that our views here are not so far apart. Perhaps we can agree that our foreign aid priorities ought to be promoting democracy, respect for human rights, and basic services, such as primary health care.
Respectfully,
Steven W. Mosher, President
Population Research Institute
P.S. I take it from your e-mail address that you are an academic at San Diego State University. Are you teaching these views, or have you merely absorbed them from others?
Dear Mr. Mosher:
Thank you for your prompt and informative reply to my prior email. As for the issue of whether or not it is proper for governments to encourage parents to have as many children as possible, I suggest that your views on this matter contrast with those held by officials in many countries, e.g., India and China.
I sense that, up to a point, you are correct in concluding that increase in populations over time “drives agricultural efficiency” and “technical and scientific innovation.” Apparently, we disagree as to what is that “point” in time.
I am aware of another of your remarks, i.e., that it is wrong to conclude that “famines were always (or mainly) caused by absolute deficiency of food.” The key factor here, of course, is whether distribution of available food within a nation will be carried out even when most of its people cannot pay for it. It may appear moral to argue this must occur. However, this kind of distribution of the wealth of nations (in this case, their food) does not appear historically to be a sound economic policy.
As for your final paragraph below: I suspect that here you express an ideal situation, a kind of pie-in-the-sky theory as regards economic aid from the U.S. to African countries. The failure of President Johnson’s War on Poverty is a reminder to me that simple giveaways to low-income people may not cause them to become self-sufficient.
Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus
San Diego State University
Mr. Groff:
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
My position is not that governments ought to encourage parents to have as many children as possible. Rather, it is that governments ought to respect the natural right of parents to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children. Even the UN Population Fund pays lip service to this principle, even as it violates it in practice. The Indian Prime Minister, by the way, has recently ringingly reaffirmed this fundamental freedom of parents, in an implicit rebuke of some overzealous Indian officials and states who would impose a two-child policy.
As to what the “point” ought to be, I cannot say. Nor can anyone else for that matter. It depends entirely on the future rate of technological progress.
I will say that most of the global population limits that would be imposed by those who are worried about human numbers seem to me far too low. I am not speaking here of fringe estimates, such as the “100 million” thrown out by Garrett Hardin some years before his death. I refer to such products of “consensus” as the Global Biodiversity Assessment, which opined that “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion.”
Such numbers, which are based on the crudest kind of static analyses of current production and consumption patterns, seem to me perfectly unreasonable. They also provide a rationalization for the kind of tyranny that we see expressed in China’s one-child policy.
I don’t think of education, primary health care, or infrastructure projects as giveaways but investments. An African who can read and write, who is not debilitated by malaria, and who can get his goods to market along an American built road, obviously has much better economic prospects than one who is illiterate, sick, and stuck in the bush.
Steve Mosher
