The war against population: the economics and ideology of population control

National Review, Dec 13, 1985 by Wayne Lutton

THERE IS NO doubt that optimism sells--even among conservatives, who traditionally have tended to see the world as "a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements are for the worse," as George Will put it several years ago. Witness the popularity of the "damn the deficit" supply-siders and the success of George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty.

Despite its somber title, The War against Population is most definitely an optimistic book. Its author, Jacqueline Kasun, professor of economics at Humboldt State University in California, charges that it is a myth that the world is overpopulated and that we are in danger of running out of vital natural resources. On the contrary, Professor Kasun contends that the world is far from overcrowded; economic problems in any case are certainly not raceable to the size and growth rate of populations; and, in fact, rapid population growth stimulates economic and technological developments. According to Mrs. Kasun, the real danger is presented by those who call for restraints on population expansion, characterized here as "anti-natalists."

Should some of this sound familiar, it is not surprising. For Professor Kasun is a devoted disciple of Julian Simon, the University of Maryland economist, who discounts the negative impact of population size and growth on a nation's economic health. Lately, Simon has gained attention by claiming that illegal immigrants, far from hurting the U.S., are a positive good, and that out economy will thrive if immigration is allowed to increase. Conservatives embrace these views at their peril.

Many of the basic points raised in The War against Population are essentially restatements of what Simon has argued elsewhere. But Simon is not Mrs. Kasun's only source. She cites, for example, Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, who estimates that world agricultural resources are capable of supporting forty billion people, or more than eight times the current world population. Although food production in Africa fell by 14 per cent per person during the 1970s, and Africa is today unable to provide adequate nourishment for its 513 million inhabitants, Revelle calculates "that the continent of Africa alone is capable of feeding ten billion people"--more than twice the world's population and more than twenty times Africa's current numbers.

Millions, perhaps, of Indians face starvation, and India is currently depleting natural resources at a frightening rate, with trees being cut down for firewood faster than they can be replaced by saplings. This does not discourage Mrs. Kasun from calling on her readers to consider seriously the opinion of an Indian economist, Raj Krishna, who claims that India has the potential of feeding "not only the people of India but the entire population of the world!" The author then draws our attention to a biologist, Francis P. Felice, who "has shown that all the people in the world could be put into the state of Texas, forming one giant city with a population density less than that of many existing cities, and leaving the rest of the world empty."

If some of what Mrs. Kasun writes resembles science fiction, any number of her other contentions are equally open to serious question. She states that "economic studies have failed to demonstrate that population growth has bad economic effects"; indeed, she says, statistical evidence shows that countries with more rapid rates of population growth have a higher rate of per-capita output. Elsewhere, she asserts that larger numbers of workers generate a faster rate of technological improvement because of their creative interaction with each other.

Actually, it is low-population-growth countries that are currently enjoying the greatest advances in productivity and rises in living standards. Low population growth does not appear to have harmed Japan's productivity. And far from promoting technological developments, large populations tend discourage innovation and automation (as in American agriculture and the garment industry, where the use of alien labor has retarded modernization).

The author decries policies promoted by various international agencies that encourage so-called developing countries to limit their rates of population growth. She is no doubt correct to note that central economic planning, so favored by Third World dictatorships and the U.S. State Department, "is an economic and human disaster." However, there appears to be little evidence to support her claim that families in these countries adjust their procreation to available resources. Consider Bangladesh, a country blessed with fertile soil and a climate that permits three crops a year. Bangladesh has the potential of being year rich, but its economy is overwhelmed by a population of nearly a hundred million living in an area the size of Iowa, which has only three million people. And millions more are added to the population of Bangladesh every year.