Malthusians vs Cornucopians.........
The Malthusian Orthodoxy
Betsy Hartmann *
The impact of population growth is a source of endless debate. There is a vast literature on the subject, by demographers and economists, sociologists and development planners. The subject not only involves the impact of population growth per se, but problems of population distribution between urban and rural areas and imbalances in the age structure of populations. What emerges most strongly from the literature is the difficulty of generalizing on a global level; the impact of population growth differs from country to country and is influenced by a variety of factors.
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Yet the complexities of demographic research and the wide variation in scientific opinion have largely been screened from public view. Instead, Malthusian alarmists, who range from environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich to senior international technocrats like former World Bank president Robert McNamara, command the widest public audience. While the population bomb briefly went out of fashion in the 1980s, it is very much back in vogue today.
There are several reasons why the alarmist message enjoys such credibility. It not only makes good shock headlines in the press, but also draws on deep undercurrents of parochialism, racism, elitism, and sexism, complementing the Social Darwinist "survival of the fittest" view. The most extreme Malthusians even advocate that famine relief be cut off to poor overpopulated countries: Let the unfit starve until their numbers are brought under control. In 1985, at the height of a major African drought, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm wrote in The New York Times that the United States should stop giving emergency relief to African countries that failed to reduce their population growth, since such aid would "merely multiply empty stomachs."1
The fact that such suggestions are taken seriously is a sad commentary on just how far Malthusianism has penetrated our value system. So pervasive are its assumptions that many of us have internalized them without even realizing it. Only by understanding the basic fallacies of the Malthusian approach can the way be cleared for a fresh look at the population problem.
The alarmists draw their ideological inspiration from Thomas Malthus, the British clergyman-turned-economist who wrote in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Malthus maintained that, unless restrained by "preventive checks," human populations would double every twenty-five years. The result would be geometric growth -- 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. -- outstripping the earth's capacity for food production, which could at best be expected to increase in an arithmetic progression -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. Humans were, according to Malthus, little different from animals or plants in this respect; their numbers would be held in check by the limited carrying capacity of the planet. "The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law," he proclaimed, "and man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it."2 Only "misery" -- the poverty, famine, and pestilence brought on by overpopulation, supplemented by the man-made deprivations of war and slaughter -- would keep human numbers down.
Malthus was wrong on two basic counts. First, contrary to his predictions, it is possible for population growth to slow and ultimately to stabilize, not because our numbers are held in check by "natural" forces of famine and pestilence, but rather as a result of improvements in living standards and other social changes which alter the need for many children. Malthus' native land underwent such a demographic transition.
Malthus' second mistake was to underestimate greatly the capacity of the earth to feed and clothe a growing human population. It is perhaps not surprising that someone writing at the close of the eighteenth century failed to foresee the tremendous advances in human productive powers that would soon unfold in both industry and agriculture, outstripping population growth. In fact, at least one school of economic history maintains that the crucial force behind technological change-the "prime mover" of economic progress-was none other than population growth. In their influential study, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, historians Douglas North and Robert Thomas conclude that population growth "spurred the institutional innovations which account for the rise of the Western world."3 Far from blocking any long-term improvement in mass living standards, population growth is thus seen by some historians as the basic explanation for such improvements.
The modem-day proponents of population control have reinterpreted Malthusian logic, selectively applying it only to the poor majority in the Third World and, in some cases, to ethnic minorities in the West. It is not a giant step from this partitioning of Malthusian laws to a similar partitioning in the realm of human rights: Upper-and middle-class people have the right to voluntary choice as to whether and when to bear children, but the rights of poor people are subordinate to the overriding imperative of population control.........
Specious views of the species
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has probably done more than any other single scientist to legitimize and popularize the belief that overpopulation is the main cause of the environmental crisis, from global warming to the depletion of the ozone layer. Like many biologists, he sees the human species through the same lens with which he views animal and plant populations which multiply beyond the carrying capacity of their environments and subsequently die off. Thus, his latest book (co-authored with Anne Ehrlich) The Population Explosion, compares the exponential growth of human populations to that of pond weed, and warns us that nature may end the population explosion "in very unpleasant ways," such as famine and AIDS, if people do not act immediately.22
The Ehrlichs believe that virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated. By their definition, carrying capacity is "the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities," and "if the long-term carrying capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants, that area is overpopulated."23 By this logic, the land degradation caused by a uranium mine on a Native American reservation is a sign that the area has too many people!...............
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<font color=blue>The Cornucopians
In recent years, Malthusian fatalism has met its match in the unrepentant optimism of certain influential New Right economists. In their book, Me Resourceful Earth, Julian Simon and Herman Kahn challenge the "limits to growth" philosophy and claim that "if pre-sent trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded(though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now."69
These conservative Cornucopians believe that free enterprise and nuclear energy can do the trick, just as long as there isn't too much government interference through environmental regulation. According to Simon, temporary shortages of resources simply spur the development of new techniques to find them, so that in the end we are better off than if the shortage had never occurred. Mean-while, population growth produces the "ultimate resource," "skilled, spirited and hopeful people," who, provided they live in an unfettered market economy, can come up with the new ideas to make the system work.70
The Cornucopians, who found a sympathetic ear in the Reagan White House, heavily influenced the drafting of the official U.S. Policy Statement for the 1984 UN International Conference on Population. In a major reversal of policy, the document described population growth as a "neutral phenomenon," which has become a problem only because of too much "governmental control of economies" and an "outbreak of anti-intellectualism, which attacked science, technology and the very concept of material progress" in the West.71
There are a number of obvious flaws with the Cornucopian approach. The unbridled faith in science, technology, and human inventiveness translates into a lack of concern for the very real constraints on the environment we face at the end of the twentieth century and begs the question of appropriate versus inappropriate technologies. Arguably, what is needed is more government environmental regulation, not less. Nor will higher rates of population growth necessarily yield more geniuses if the majority of the world's people remain trapped in poverty. Even the best of brains need food for sustenance and education for development. And the savage pursuit of "free market" economics has hardly ushered in anew dawn of development-on the contrary, in the "lost decade" of the 1980s and these less than hopeful first years of the 1990s, more and more people are becoming marginalized. In the end, the Cornucopians dodge the real issues of power and inequality just as the Malthusians do.
The Cornucopians performed a great service, however, by opening up the population debate. After more than two decades of hegemony, the Malthusian orthodoxy was forced to go on the defensive and cede some ground in order to save the church.
The relaxation of the Malthusian position was reflected in a1986 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report, which retreated substantially from past alarmist assessments of population growth. While concluding that population growth was more likely to impede progress than promote it, the report found that it was not the unmitigated environmental and economic evil it had been portrayed to be. According to the report, there is no "necessary relation" between population growth and resource exhaustion, and the effect of population growth on the economy is mixed. Even when population growth has a negative impact, slower growth alone will not guarantee progress.72 The report helped to establish a "Middle ground" in the population debate, a middle ground, one might note, already occupied by many demographers and economists who have consistently held a more reasoned view of the issue.
Today, however, that middle ground is shrinking as Malthusians in mainstream development, environment, and national security circles go on the offensive once again. As a political consensus builds for population control, critics are branded as either right-wing Cornucopians or agents of the Vatican (see Chapter 8). The result is a serious stifling of independent research and democratic debate, and the continued distortion of social policy.....
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