For more than two decades, population control groups have waged a powerful political and philosophical campaign to advance the proposition that a continued rise in human numbers is one of the world’s gravest problems. Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote a best-selling book in which he described population growth as a “bomb,” and claimed that during the 1970s it would “explode,” causing hundreds of millions of deaths, leading to war and violence, and destroying the planet’s ability to support life. An equally apocalyptic view was expressed five years later by Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank:
The greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the majority of the peoples in the underdeveloped world is rampant population growth…The threat of unmanageable population pressures is very much like the threat of nuclear war .… Both threats can and will have catastrophic consequences unless they are dealt with rapidly.
A large international apparatus of population control groups has promoted the idea that we are in the midst of a runaway crisis. Population growth, these groups maintain, is a major cause of poverty, starvation, pollution, unemployment, and political tension today; extreme measures are called for. The United Nations and the World Bank have made population control a central part of their work. Public opinion has also been strongly influenced. Polls show that much of the public in the Western world believes mankind is darkly threatened by current population growth. Indeed, this view has become so strong that until very recently it was considered intellectual heresy to question publicly.
But in the last few years that has begun to change as an expanding revisionist school of population studies has taken root. Research by economists, demographers and social historians has show that much of the alleged harm from population growth has turned out to be nonexistent and that population change has often been used as a scapegoat for problems that actually have other sources. Revisionists point out that it is not slowed population growth that brings social prosperity, but rather social prosperity that brings slower population increase. The result: A great, new population debate is now underway.
What brought about this turnaround? Why is it that the last decade’s conventional wisdom has suddenly been called into question? Three reasons stand out.
First, there was the shock of reality itself. As new data on population growth and its effects came in over the last decade or so, it was clear that the dire predictions of the “population explosionists” had failed, and failed utterly, to come true. There were no population wars in the 1970s. There were famines but they were not population famines. The exponential growth and predicted calamities just didn’t take place. On the contrary, there were many pleasant surprises.
For instance, Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968 that it was a “fantasy” to think that India — which he cites as a paradigm of overpopulation — could feed itself anytime in the near future, “if ever.” One participant at the Second International Conference on the War on Hunger in 1968 argued that India’s 1967–68 grain production of approximately 95 million tons represented the maximum possible level. Yet today India’s annual grain production is over 150 million tons, and the country has become a net exporter of food. The fact that the quality of life has improved so markedly and so rapidly even in India — which, until recently, was referred to as an international “basket case” — suggest that those who argue that production can never keep up with growing numbers of people do not appreciate how quickly new technology and improved economic structures can convert formerly “redundant” people into productive resources.
Another fact the traditional population theorists did not fathom was how fast the world was changing demographically when they made their dire predictions. As recently as 1970, women of the less developed world were bearing an average of six children each. Today, that average is down to 3.7 children. When you consider that about 2.2 children would produce stable populations in the less developed countries (that is, each generation merely replacing its parents, with a small factor for childhood mortality, etc.) then this remarkable fact can be seen: In just the last 15 years or so, the less developed world moved three-fifths of the way toward a fertility rate that yields “zero population growth.”
So great was the change, it now appears, that the official United Nations’ estimates of world population in the year 2000, put together at the end of the 1960s, will be more than 20 percent too high.
To be sure, it should be noted that the less developed countries did not all share equally in the fertility fall. Fertility in Asia dropped very rapidly, while in parts of Africa it has remained high. But, after all, it was in Asia (with 2.8 billion people, almost 60 percent of the world‘s total) that the population problem was supposed to be the worst. Africa, the partial exception to the worldwide downward fertility trend, is still a relatively sparsely inhabited continent with a total of 550 million residents and low overall population density, even excluding desert areas.
Another factual development often overlooked by population alarmists is that, contrary to popular claims, the standard of living in most of the Third World has been rapidly improving, not declining, during the last few decades — the very decades when population was growing fastest. The Third World infant mortality rate has fallen from 125 deaths per 1,000 births in 1960, to 69 in 1986; life expectancy at birth has risen incredibly — from 42 years to 61 years; adult literacy rates in the third world doubled in 20 years; the number of physicians per 100,000 people went up 2.5 times; and the calorie supply per capita rose from just 87 percent of healthy daily requirements to 102 percent. The claim that rapid population growth vetoes social progress runs head-on into strong countervailing evidence from the last 25 years.
The second major factor that led many to question the prevailing orthodoxy was the serious human rights violations that followed in the wake of the population control alarms of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1976 the Indian government declared, “Where a state legislature…decides that the time is ripe and it is necessary to pass legislation for compulsory sterilization, it may do so.”’ In the six months following that ruling, over six million Indians were sterilized, many thousands forcibly. That episode inspired such fierce resistance among Indians that the government of Indira Gandhi was eventually brought down.
Even before the government issued this public justification, coercion in the name of population control had been rife in India. The distinguished demographer Richard Easterlin reports that when he was a member of a United Nations Family Planning Mission to India in 1969, a program administrator in Bombay told him how strong-arm tactics were used in the slum districts to assure that government vasectomy targets were met. When he expressed concern at this, a surprised official answered, “surely, the end justifies the means.”
Indian authorities were not the only ones who held this view. In November 1976 — after the forced sterilization program had already been unveiled — World Bank president Robert McNamara paid a personal visit to the Indian family planning minister — “to congratulate him for the Indian Government’s political will and determination in popularizing family planning.”
An even more massive campaign of intimidation and violence in the name of population control has been, and to a considerable extent continues to be, conducted in China. In the early 1980s reports began to reach the West that the Chinese government was exerting enormous and often brutal pressure on couples to limit their family size to one child. After a graphic series of articles was published by the Washington Post in January 1985, American authorities could no longer ignore the evidence. Upon returning from a four-year assignment in China, when he was finally free to publish his findings without risking expulsion, correspondent Michael Weisskopf filed his report:
“What emerges from more than 200 interviews spaced over three years with officials, doctors, peasants and workers in almost two-thirds of China’s 29 local jurisdictions is the story of an all-out government siege against ancient family traditions and… reproductive habits…
“Nowhere is this dark side of family planning more evident than in Dongguan in southern China. Here, abortion posses scoured the countryside in the spring of 1981, rounding up women in rice paddies and thatched-roof houses. Expectant mothers, including many in their last trimester, were trussed, handcuffed, herded into hog cages and delivered by the truckload to the operating tables of rural clinics.…
“Any mother who becomes pregnant again without receiving official authorization after having one child is required to have an abortion, and the incidence of such operations is stunning — 53 million from 1979 to 1984, according to the Ministry of Public Health .…
“Nor is the timing of abortion usually a factor. Many are performed in the last trimester of pregnancy — 100,000 in Guangdong last year, or 20 percent of the province’s total abortions and some as late as the ninth month…
“In the Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot…hospital doctors practice what amounts to infanticide by a different name .… After inducing labor…doctors routinely smash the baby‘s skull with forceps as it emerges from the womb. In some cases newborns are killed by injecting formaldehyde into the soft spot of the head…
“China’s family-planning work is backed by the full organizational might of the Communist Party, which extends its influence to every factory, neighborhood and village. Every Chinese belongs to a “unit” — workplace or rural governing body — and every unit has a birth control committee headed by the party officials.
“Few unauthorized pregnancies can elude the tight supervision of the birth control activists, a phalanx of female members of the party…who are deputized by local officials to monitor the reproductive lives of Chinese couples .…
“They keep detailed records of every woman’s menstrual cycle, checking to make sure of regularity… A positive test spells trouble for any woman who already has a child. She is urged to have an abortion, offered a cash bonus and time off from work as a reward. If she refuses, the pressure mounts.
“First come the tactics of persuasion played out in what is known euphemistically as ‘heart-to-heart chats. If she holds her ground, the talks intensify.… Now the pregnant woman is criticized for resisting and warned of the penalty for unauthorized birth, which varies from place to place but can include loss of farmland, fines of up to $1,000, firing from factory jobs, public censure and denial of land, medical benefits, grain rations and educational opportunities for the unplanned child.…
“Meanwhile, the meetings go on, often all the way up to the point of delivery. Where talking fails, force often prevails.”
The Indian and Chinese programs are extreme examples of human rights violations carried out in the name of population control in a number of countries. What is worse, international authorities of the population control movement have presented, and continue to present, rationalization and apologies for harsh measures of these sorts. In 1983, the United Nations awarded its first UN medal for family planning achievement. Its joint winners: the heads of the Chinese and Indian programs.
American population control groups continue to praise the Chinese program. They fought to overturn Congress’s 1985 decision to end U.S. foreign aid to the United Nations’ Family Planning Agency (UNFPA) because of UNFPA’s close collaboration in the Chinese brutality. In late 1989, a foreign aid bill restoring UNFPA funds was passed, only to be vetoed by President Bush.
The sad fact is that it is not merely officials of totalitarian governments who are willing to see these delicate family decisions transferred from the private to the public realm. Traditionally, international family planning efforts supported by the United States aimed to do only one thing: extend human choice by bringing modern supplies and services to persons who wanted but could not afford them. Recently, however, important parts of the international family planning apparatus have begun to veer dangerously beyond voluntary family planning, toward social control and coercion. In a widely cited 1984 report, the population division of the World Bank — an institution which is dependent upon American sponsorship — presented a mainstream rationalization for taking the voluntary family-planning movement a step further, into active efforts by national governments to suppress reproduction through financial, political, and social pressures. “Ensuring that people have only as many children as they want…might not be enough,” the World Bank report asserted. Where “privately desired”’ childbearing exceeds the “socially desired” level, it claimed, government ought to step in. Readers with a sense for realpolitik will detect in this logic a chilling door-opening for massive state intrusion mic the most sensitive of human prerogatives.
In addition to the problem of making such fundamental decisions for people without their consent, there is a deeper philosophical issue. The argument is often made by advocates of state-dictated population control that the life of certain Asian or African or Latin American peasants is miserable, and that we who understand cannot allow them to perpetuate their misery. Population revisionists, on the other hand, start with the belief that there is dignity and potential in every human life, that even an existence considered deprived by modern standards can carry great meaning and pleasure. Population revisionists believe it is very dangerous to construct a generalized, systematic argument the bottom line of which is that humans are economic, social and ecological nuisances — in short that people are a kind of pollution.
So, sharp changes in demographic conditions as well as worrisome human rights trends helped spark some of the new thinking on population. But probably even more important in reshaping the debate has been a third factor: the influence of new research and empirical analysis on the causal results of population growth. Over the last decade the prevailing shibboleths about alleged economic and social ill-effects have been examined, one by one. Most of them have been found wanting.
For instance, it was claimed in the 1960s that the presence of children in a society would depress savings and investment. It was also argued that population growth would have major negative effects — slowing income growth, increasing unemployment, and deterring technological innovation. None of these assertions has proven true.
When the population scare was in full bloom it was claimed that population growth reduced educational attainment — which turned out to be absolutely false. Population rise was said to be responsible for the growth of Third World mega-cities. In truth, the rural to urban shift has been shown to spring primarily from other sources. It was asserted that population was the major cause of world hunger. But population level has had almost nothing to do with the famines of recent decades. Experts agree that those famines have been, almost without exception, the result of civil strife; of political and economic disruptions.
Through most of the 1970s those who saw population as a problem insisted that less was always better. After all, more people meant more mouths to feed, more feet to shoe, more schools to build. More people, in short, meant more trouble.
Plenty of activists still think that way but many scientists have changed their minds. They believe it is a mistake to talk of population as an undifferentiated global problem. What matters is not some abstract total number of people in existence, but where they are and how they are living. There are certain countries with ample population and others with too few people. It does not matter to the people of Zaire — which suffers underdevelopment partly because in many parts of the country there are not enough people to support an efficient infrastructure — that there are 97 million people in Nigeria. Zaire has certain needs and Nigeria has certain needs, and it is nonsense to lump them together under the simple heading of “overpopulated Africa.”
Related to this is another insight of new demographic thinking: The number of people which a given area can support is subject to constant change, and is related to the way those people are economically and socially organized. There are 120 million people jammed onto the rocky islands of Japan. Yet, because of their well-structured and highly productive society, they are among the richest and longest-lived people in the world. If you had asked the Algonquin Indians who inhabited the island of Manhattan in the 1700s how many people they thought it could support, they might have told you it was already full. Holland — which few people would describe as being unable to support its population — has a population density of 354 people per square kilometer; India, which we are told is one of the most overpopulated nations in the world today, contains 228 people per square kilometer.
There are many other such interesting contrasts. The United States is the richest nation in the world, and is sparsely populated with 25 people per square kilometer. West Germany is the second richest nation, and is densely populated — 246 people per square kilometer. South Korea is even more densely populated — 409 citizens per square kilometer — yet it is also one of the fastest growing countries on earth. A very slow-growing and very poor nation is Bolivia — thinly populated with just six persons per square kilometer. The poorest nation in the world is Ethiopia. It is also one of the more sparsely populated — 35 Ethiopians per square kilometer.
In other words, there are dozens of lightly populated countries that are poor, dirty, and hungry. And there are plenty of countries with large, dense populations that are prosperous and attractive. This is not to argue that density is an advantage, but rather that the number of people is not the critical variable in determining these things.
There is no such thing as a “proper” number of people — economic success can be achieved in both sparsely and densely populated countries. Revisionist demographers like to point out that each baby comes equipped not only with a mouth, but also with two hands and a brain. People not only consume, they produce — food, capital, even resources. The trick is to organize society so that each person will be an asset and not a burden. In a country whose economy is a mess even one additional baby can be an economic liability. But if the country is structured in such a way as to allow that child to labor and think creatively, he/she becomes an asset.
In short, people are a valuable resource. The fundamental insight of a diverse group of revisionist scholars — including Simon Kuznets, Colin Clark, P.T. Bauer, Ester Boserup, Albert Hirshman, Julian Simon, Richard Easterlin, and others — was in building up a body of thought that emphasizes the creative potential of individual humans and demonstrates their productive capacities when living in well-organized societies. Because these humans supply more than human demand, their school might rightly be called “supply-side demography.”
Within the citadels of population alarmism at the United Nations, the World Bank, and elsewhere, resistance to these new insights continues to be strong. But the monolithic character of the population debate has thankfully passed. One of the first public airings of the insights of supply-side demography took place at the World Population Conference sponsored by the United Nations and held in Mexico City in 1984. Under the leadership of James Buckley and Ben Wattenberg, the American delegation introduced several revisionist declarations into the conference report. The main one was a plank suggesting that in Third World efforts to moderate population growth, economic development ought to be given equal emphasis with family planning. Economic growth is, of course, desirable in its own right. But the more direct, often overlooked, effect of economic growth on population is its vital role in bringing about the very social transformations which ultimately reduce high birth levels. Improvements in income, education, and health, and the changes in cultural mores and living patterns that economic development brings — like improved female status, more urbanization, and so forth — all act powerfully to suppress fertility.
That is the position Indira Gandhi came around to later in her life. In 1984 Mrs. Gandhi stated:
The very best way of inducing people to have smaller families is more development. Where we have highly industrialized areas or much better education or even much better agriculture, we find automatically families tend to grow smaller.
To put the idea in shorthand, one might say that economic growth is itself the equivalent of a powerful contraceptive.
Not only is development the best way of reducing family size, it may be the only fully effective way, short of coercion. To see why this is the case, consider the surveys throughout the developing world show that when women are asked what number of children they consider ideal, what number they would like to have in their lifetime, how many they desire, the answers average approximately four children per woman. That would of course double the population every generation (two parents yielding four children).
Such an answer is not terribly surprising. After all, roughly three-quarters of the people of the developing world still live in rural settings — in villages where hands are needed for agricultural labor, where social practices tend to be traditional, where values change slowly. For a variety of reasons, most families in the Third World still want relatively large families. And that is rational behavior.
Consider specifically the case of Africa. The World Fertility Survey canvassed ten nations there. It showed that African women want families even larger than their already high current average of over six children. It is absurd, then, to argue that high world fertility is just a result of unmet demand for modem contraception. In many places such demand is limited or nonexistent because Third World families view children as social and economic assets.
It should not be assumed from any of this that revisionist demographers are opposed to family planning programs.… But while contraception is a family right, revisionists would argue, it is not a national duty. Too many governments — under pressure from the international population control apparatus — are setting up programs which pressure families about childbearing choices, on the false grounds that unless certain nationwide fertility goals and timetables are met, social progress will be unattainable.
In truth, the formulation is exactly reversed. Fertility levels reflect a society‘s level of development and proceed apace with it. Small families are a symptom, not a cause, of socio-economic advancement. Former Population Association of America president Richard Easterlin has written that, “Family planning programs may be a misuse of scarce public funds early in the development process,” because cultural modernization must take place before birth desires will decline significantly and demand for contraception will root. There is no shortcut. A society that is backward in every other way cannot be jumped to an advanced demographic stage (absent force, that is). Attempts to push new reproductive attitudes onto a society faster than its social and economic standing allow it to assimilate such changes only brings on instability.
It follows from all this that socio-economic development ought to be the centerpiece of population policy. And if rapid social and economic progress is the goal, as the U.S, delegation at Mexico City asserted, then the institution of free markets ought to be the favored instrument. (In the period since 1984 even the opinions of world communist leaders have been added to the economic history of the West in making that case.)
The influence of the global move toward market-based economics on population policy can be seen in a landmark report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 1986 the academy released the results of a major two-year study by some of the world’s leading experts on population and economic development. The summary report was a committee document, and as such contained plenty of the usual genuflections to the previous generation of scholarship. It surprised those who had taken the pessimistic view of population trends as an obvious truth. It suggested that while slower population growth might be helpful in some developing countries, the economic, resource, and environmental benefits would usually be very modest.
The critical insight of the academy scholars is the fundamental premise of revisionists and supply-side demographers, namely that in most nations, the crucial variable in determining future development will be the structure of the country‘s economic and political institutions, not the number of people. The “key” factor, the academy wrote, is the “mediating role that human behavior and human institutions play in the relation between population growth and economic processes.”
The academy particularly emphasized the importance of free markets in achieving this development. They suggested that national leaders interested in directing their people down the path to further development and continued decline in birthrates ought to stop ignoring the new lessons on the importance of socio-economic reform, and to start freeing up their economies.
As a hardheaded scientific document…the academy report caused a considerable stir in the demographic community. One leading authority, Dr. Allen Kelley of Duke University, described the report as representing “a watershed .… It retreats very substantially from many previous assessments which concluded that population growth exerted a strong negative impact on development.” We have before us,” he concluded, “a strong revisionist interpretation.”
Revisionist demographers accept that population growth must eventually end. That will happen as a matter of course, they believe, in an organic natural process that occurs as a society matures, modernizes, and the incentives for very large families disappear. A society need not wait until it is rich for this to happen. Even modest levels of development bring steep drops in birthrates. Assuring that contraceptive availability matches private demand in the interim is a reasonable undertaking for governments and interested parties. But to force fertility preferences will inevitably lead to unhappy results. No intellectual justification can be claimed to exist for intrusions on family and individual sovereignty when it comes to questions of family size.
It is now possible to leave behind the erroneous belief that population growth is a catastrophic, uncontrollable horror. The obvious, long-neglected truth is that in addition to consuming and making demands on society, people also produce. It is not governments, corporations, banks, or even natural resources that produce wealth, but people availed of efficient and open economic systems — witness the Japanese, the Swiss, the Taiwanese.
What prevents most developing countries from providing for their growing populations is not a lack of family planning programs or a paucity of physical resources or a shortage of Western aid. Rather it is a defective economy and government. Individuals concerned for the welfare of people in poor countries around the globe ought to focus not on raw numbers, but on the institutions that prevent citizens from exercising their creative and productive potential.
Population Research Institute (PRI) tries to present, for our readers information, the different schools of thought on population issues. These views do not always coincide with the views of PRI but they do contribute, in substantive ways, to the debate.
Karl Zinsmeister is a Washington-based writer and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He maintains what some consider a “revisionist” approach to the argument. Ben Wattenburg (also of the American Enterprise Institute) and Mr. Zinsmeister have previously described their shared opinions as a “production-ethic view of population” which “might be called a ‘supply-side’ demography.” This article is reprinted with permission. © The National Interest, No.19, Washington, D.C.
