[Peace-discuss] Population control

[C. G. Estabrook]

There's nothing new about the anxiety that population will
outrun resources.  Rev. Thomas Malthus published "An Essay on
the Principle of Population" in 1798 and argued that food
supplies increase only linearly (1, 2, 3...) while unchecked
population would increase geometrically (2, 4, 8...).  The
population hysteria of a generation ago, signaled by Paul
Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" (1968), merely restated Malthus in
global terms.  (The hysteria was curiously contemporaneous
with the "crisis of democracy," i.e., the worldwide demand by
excluded groups for political recognition.)  Ehrlich's math
just wasn't so elegant: he predicted that "in the 1970s and
1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." 

Given that the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles, it's difficult to separate
population limitation from eugenics.  Population cannot be
reduced in the abstract.  Specific people have to be convinced
or coerced not to have children, and it will be done by those
who have political power, not those who don't.  Malthus was
sure there were ways: if people couldn't be convinced simply
to postpone marriage, then unhealthy conditions should be
encouraged so that "the annual mortality were increased from 1
in 36 or 40, to 1 in 18 or 20."  Again, Ehrlich says the same,
not so elegantly: he urged a cutback in government programs of
"death control," i.e., public health. The Nixon administration
(the administration most responsive to liberal demands of any
in the last century, as the EPA shows) obligingly cut health
benefits and pumped money into population control. The Clinton
("welfare reform") and Bush administrations continued policies
of population control amongst the poor, from direct anti-natal
programs in Haiti (the US promoted birth control implants) to
the prevention of the provision of cheap anti-malarial drugs
in Africa.

The suggestion we heard the other night was that people should
be educated with the dubious proposition that, if they don't
have a kid, they can get more education and so a better job
(i.e., they can presumably rent themselves to the owners of
capital on better terms, such as not making any demands on
their employer for the care of their offspring).  This
campaign rests on the specious supposition (among others) that
people are too ignorant to realize where their real interests
lie, without the beneficent intervention of population
limiters.  In fact, it's clear from the history since Malthus
that population increase slows when people have the
circumstances of their  life assured.  The population of
Old Europe and Japan, with the best social services in the
world, are falling to the replacement rate and below. 
Primitive countries that lack social supports (the US and the
Third World) see populations increase (though not by the rate
predicted by the ZPG hysterics).  People aren't poor because
they have a lot of children: people have a lot of children
because they're poor -- and the family is the only social
security.  

--CGE