Population bomb

If you’re old enough to remember Woodstock, you’ll probably remember The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller that predicted global catastrophe unless urgent and drastic measures were taken to halt population growth. He likened population growth to a cancer that must be cut out at any cost, and advocated rigorous population control through incentives, penalties and compulsion. He condoned “apparently brutal and heartless decisions” and “intense pain” because the “crisis” justified it. Of course Ehrlich wasn’t the first author to draw attention to a potential population crisis. The English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus popularized the subject in the 18th century. The post-Second World War revival of the view that population growth is a threat to living standards originated with a group that included William Vogt, a now largely forgotten American writer and advocate of social engineering whose 1948 book, Road to Survival, was the biggest environmental best-seller of all time until eclipsed in 1962 by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Vogt claimed a choice had to be made between more people, less nature and less people or more nature.Vogt and his contemporaries were naturalists who advocated measures to tilt the balance between man and nature in nature’s favour. They opposed widespread use of drugs and pesticides that reduce the effectiveness of natural “overpopulation” controls and argued for enlightened government intervention to discourage increased food production via chemical fertilizers. The population-control movement clicked with the pessimistic spirit of the times despite critiques showing that “overpopulation” was an invented crisis, that there is no direct relationship between population and poverty and that people’s well-being depends instead upon the economic decisions they make and the policies constraining those decisions. World Population Day should serve as a reminder that a little information in the hands of those who think they know best and are able to influence policies imposed on others is a dangerous thing. The impact that the population-control frenzy has had on international aid policy provides a good illustration.The Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to the inventor of DDT in the same year Vogt’s book was published. Vogt disapproved of DDT and swamp drainage because they reduced the effectiveness of malaria as a natural control for human populations. But DDT was banned because Rachel Carson linked it to the collapse of bird populations after the U.S. government encouraged its widespread misuse. Malaria control remains a prominent international aid mandate because more costly and less effective controls such as bed nets are now required to stem an upsurge in child mortality. And this upsurge is occurring because the cheaper, more effective solution was banned by those who felt they had the right to take a fundamental economic decision away from parents. The man vs. nature choice which preoccupied Vogt remains evident in campaigns such as the Millennium Development Goals with its emphasis on poverty reduction. Not that there’s anything wrong with poverty reduction. The question is: How? Most top-down efforts at poverty alleviation are still based on the belief that there is an inverse relationship between the quality and quantity of human life, and that sharing existing wealth among a smaller number of people is the way to go because it limits environmental impacts. Constraints imposed on foreign governments and their people in exchange for aid are similar to those imposed on taxpayers when they are coerced by domestic policy decisions made “in their best interest” by others. Advocates of poverty-reduction initiatives in developing countries cannot look to the success of comparable campaigns in the First World for inspiration: Poverty levels in the United States in 1996 were higher than in 1965 when president Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched, despite the $5.4-trillion spent in the process. International “development assistance” policies are but one example of the false premise underlying all public policy: that decisions taken by elite groups result in better outcomes than those made by people deciding for themselves. The rapid development of today’s rich countries occurred without aid when markets worked with minimal distortion and individuals were given freedom to make their own economic decisions. This was the reason so little attention was paid to population growth in the century following the death of Malthus. Invented crises justifying massive public-sector spending are deceptions which disadvantage ordinary people everywhere. All countries should be developing countries, and public-sector planning of any sort frustrates development by distorting the information on which economic decisions are based.