Kathy Andersen

ECN-240 Essay Portion, 2nd Exam

Cart before the Horse:

Fears of Population Growth Restricting Growth Instead of Empowering People

The population alarmists Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich contended that the
rate of growth of the human population would tax the Earth’s resources to the extent of
mass starvation and conflict. Malthus saw a vicious cycle in which the human
population was growing exponentially and that it would continue to increase until it
exceeded agricultural production. Ehrlich catapulted the debate into prominence again
and further argued that we had reached untenable levels of population and now the
disastrous effects could not be avoided, only mitigated. From these theories they
advocated immediate action to limit population growth and sparked a tradition of
thought of the Earth as being too crowded with humans as dirty consumption machines.
However, as Emily Boserup and Julian Simon point out, human ingenuity has proven
that this is false. In the face of Malthus’ predictions, population did rise but the world
did not face widespread famine, disease, and war. In fact as conditions have improved
the birth rate in many developed countries has fallen below the replacement rate. Thus
the focus concern should not be to restrict human population growth but to deal with
the social and environmental problems facing people today.

Malthusian rhetoric underemphasizes the adaptive ability of markets. History has

shown the capacity of supply and demand as market mechanisms for dealing with
shortage. We did not run out of food as Ehrlich feared in the 1970s and 80s. Prices of
necessary and exhaustible resources have fallen and the economy as a whole continues
to grow. In a comparison of three pairs of countries following WWII, market-directed
economies performed better than centrally-planned economies even with greater
population pressure (Simon 2005). Thus the insistence on pending crisis caused by the
pressures of population growth is unfounded.

Overlooking these powerful trends, a Malthusian philosophy is also harmful in

that it engenders restrictive human population control measures. Because of fears of
overpopulation, it has become a priority to control reproduction in many countries to
the detriment of their people. For example, China and India both foresaw huge
population increases and in the second half of the twentieth century enacted measures

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such as the one-child policy in China and numerous birth control programs in India.
Besides restricting human rights, the one-child policy in China has had numerous
adverse affects including increased infanticide, gender discrimination against female
children, and disparities in freedom to have children based on economic status. In
India, the often coercive birth control programs also disregarded the human right to
reproduction and discriminated based on class and ethnicity.

Instead of these shortsighted measures, governments should spend their efforts

addressing the current social causes of misery. Improving healthcare and education and
empowering women will both help every nation achieve lower population growth rates
and harness our human capacity to deal with challenges. There will be a natural decline
in birth rate as predicted by the demographic transition model. As a country grows its
economy it sees improvements in healthcare, education, and hunger that lead to a
decrease in the death rate, especially in infant mortality. There is an imbalance as the
birth rate remains high, but as the economy improves, and as families and cultures
adjust, the birthrate falls to below replacement levels. This transition theory has been
observed in many developed countries and has played out recently in Chile (Class PPT
presentation, Teitenberg and Lewis). Kuznets saw the basic obstacles to economic
growth as arising from delays in adjusting social and political institutions (Simon 2005),
thus addressing the political issues and bad government would do more to improve the
economic realities of the worlds people than a focus on controlling reproduction. In
conclusion, a country should focus on transitioning to the third stage, in that way
solving the root of the problem to alleviate and end the pressures of population growth.

It is the most precious thing to hold a baby in your arms. This, to witness the growth
of a human being, to envision all the personality the individual will develop and the
things they can accomplish, is to grasp the great capacity for free thought, ingenuity,
and change stored within a small hand. If people are free to imagine, create, and initiate
their ideas they will be able to contribute their productivity to the advancement of the
human race, and I would contend along with Simon that each person can contribute
more than the sum of the resources they consume. Instead of restricting human
population growth, and instead of giving people up to the free market, the best policy is
to deal with the social causes of misery, because “human intellect could best be
transformed into beneficial goods and services in an atmosphere of political and
economic liberty” (Wattenberg 1998). In the span of human history we’ve seen

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problems of population encountered and overcome by human effort, and I believe that
we can work to continue this in the future.

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 Bibliography

Wattenberg, Ben. “Malthus, Watch Out.” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 1998.

Simon, Julian. “Lack of Individual Liberty is the Cause of the World’s Population
Problem,” More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment,
University Of Maryland, last modified 2005.
[http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/articles/popenvi2.txt]