Rethinking the population problem

Public Interest, Spring, 2005 by Nicholas Eberstadt

I FIRST met Lord Peter Tamas Bauer (1917-2002) in October 1977, five years before the already eminent professor was made a life peer for his pioneering contributions to the field of development economics. For me, this was a fateful encounter, a milestone on an entirely unexpected intellectual journey.

At the time, I was 21--and, as anyone who knew me way back then can attest, I was very Left. One of my first courses at the London School of Economics that semester was "The Economic Analysis of Underdeveloped Areas," co-taught by Bauer and Professor Hla Myint. To put the matter plainly: Bauer was an absolutely infuriating professor. At his lectures, he would deliver long and provocative presentations that I knew to be wrong: completely wrong, deeply wrong, obviously wrong.

The only problem was that I couldn't figure out how to prove they were wrong. Bauer would typically end his lectures with an invitation of sorts: "Now I will entertain any question--no matter how hostile." I used up my life-time supply of those invitations in fairly short order. Then I was faced with a dilemma: Either I had to come up with new facts, or get new opinions. Unfortunately, I simply was not able to find the necessary new facts.

Bauer the professor, in short, set me up for my downfall. But my road to ruin was further paved by Bauer the man. Peter Bauer was blessed with an absolute and extraordinary generosity of spirit. In my particular case, he went far beyond the call of his official duties in his efforts to help a wrongheaded American student to think a little more clearly.

I remember fondly his many kindnesses, though I did not fully understand at the time how utterly unusual those were in university life on either side of the Atlantic. The wide-ranging chats, at his instigation, in or around his LSE office: Bauer's erudition and acuity were dazzling to me, and he could be screechingly funny when he chose. Then there were the invitations to Saturday lunches at which some respected policy opinion of the day was devastatingly dissected, always with ample quantities of alcohol, and often with the assistance of interesting new acquaintances.

Shortly before the end of my studies at LSE, Peter invited me out for a farewell. In the course of our conversation, he came around to the issue of my "worldview." Smiling mischievously, he said, "I suspect you are at a point that we describe in economics as 'unstable equilibrium.'" Of course, he was right, and it's been downhill--or depending on how one looks at it, uphill--ever since.

The new Malthusians

Bauer is perhaps best remembered today for his trail-blazing studies on the workings of markets in low-income countries; for his trenchant analysis of the shortcomings of "development planning"; and, of course, for his devastating critique of the modern worldwide convention we call "foreign aid." Yet if any small part of Bauer's opus is representative of his unique combination of towering intellect, healthy skepticism, and engaging wit, it is surely his assessment of the "population problem"--that is, the "population explosion" and its consequences for living standards and development prospects, especially in low-income areas. Here one sees not only his great qualities as a thinker but also the elegance and persistence with which he communicated his ideas.

Bauer did not have much to say about the population question until his 1981 book Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion. There he delivered a chapter-length essay titled "The Population Explosion: Myths and Realities." In the introduction to that volume, Bauer wrote, "The central theme of this book is the conspicuous and disconcerting hiatus between accepted opinion and evident reality in major areas of academic and public economic discourse." Though he only came to address population issues after three decades of renowned work on other topics, he demonstrated that disjuncture to be every bit as striking as in his other, already acclaimed, areas of economic inquiry.

In order to appreciate the significance of Bauer's contribution to the population literature, it is first important to recall the climate of academic and public policy discourse on the population question at the time Bauer was writing. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a worldwide network of activist anti-natal organizations--including private foundations, bilateral foreign aid agencies, multilateral institutions like the United Nations family and the World Bank, and a host of recipient groups the world over--were making the case that rapid population growth was having deleterious, or even disastrous, effects in low-income areas, and perhaps even on the world as a whole. Poverty, unemployment, hunger, and social strife were just some of the afflictions the "population explosion" was said to be visiting on a hapless planet.

Anti-natal policies had also been widely embraced--in principle or in practice--by rich and poor governments alike, and a great many eminent personages were warning of the risks of not pursuing even more aggressive policies for curbing planetary population growth. Paul Ehrlich--Stanford University biology professor, acknowledged authority on the population patterns of butterflies, and author of the best-seller The Population Bomb--flatly stated that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," meaning we had lost. Robert McNamara, then-president of the World Bank (and in an earlier incarnation the progenitor of the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction"), insisted that "the threat of unmanageable population pressures is very much like the threat of nuclear war," and identified what he termed "rampant population growth" as "the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the peoples in the underdeveloped world."