Can the world industrialization project be sustained? - free market capitalism and industrialization

Monthly Review, March, 1994 by Isidor Wallimann

Population Growth

All industrialization has been associated with significant population growth. The world's population roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900 and again from 1900 to 1950. In 1800, it still took far more than a hundred years for the world population to double. Today, it takes only thirty-eight years. Some 1.7 billion people inhabited the planet in 1900. In 1990 it was 5.3 billion, and in the year 2025, there will be 8.5 billion. Only about a fifth of the total population lives in the fully industrialized part of the world (including Eastern Europe). About two-fifths live in India and China, with China having a slightly larger population than India. Altogether 60 percent of the wofid's population lives in Asia, about 9 percent in Latin America, and about 12 percent in Africa. The reasons for the ever faster population growth are well known. Although birth rates have shown a tendency to decline, they have not decreased fast enough to compensate for gains due to lower infant mortality and a general increase in life expectancy. These gains have not been made possible by high-tech medicine, but rather by relatively simple techniques such as an improved diet and better control over bacterial environments (hygiene, water supply, food storage, antibiotics). Presently, it is not expected that AIDS or illnesses such as cholera or tuberculosis, although spreading, will

significantly alter the rate of population growth in the near future.

One of the correlates of industrialization has been that birth rates decrease with increased urbanization and a higher standard of living. Experience in fully industrialized countries has shown that population growth tends to stabilize at a low positive rate, while some countries even have a slightly negative growth rate. This experience leads to the notion that, if the entire world were industrialized, urbanized, and economically developed, population too would be stabilized. Of course, the crucial assumption made here is that it is possible to provide the entire world with the standard of living of industrial countries, irrespective of the nature of economic systems and ecological considerations.

Experience also shows that most campaigns to hasten the reduction of birth rates are successful only in societies with a sufficiently high standard of living. They can also be successful in relatively poor societies with low standards of living if, and only if, social and economic justice is simultaneously given a very high priority. The more vulnerable people become economically, threatened by the industrialization and urbanization process, the more they are inclined to maintain birth rates that enhance population growth. This pattern is often seen as an example of irrational behavior. However, as is well known among development workers and agricultural specialists, when individuals and their families must live at the margins of existence, they tend to minimize risks and not to maximize profits and accumulation. By maintaining higher birth rates, they aim to spread severe existential risks to more individuals, which from their point of view is a very reasonable thing to do.