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March 30, 2005

THE MORE THE MERRIER PART II: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POPULATION BOMB

In certain political circles west of my own, it is received wisdom that overpopulation is a problem, wisdom that one must be a fool (or worse, a conservative) to doubt. Yet it is difficult to recall a concept about which so many people have been wrong -- and with such dire consequences.

There are, of course, finite limits to the number of people that can live on Earth. But it is not enough to point out that there are limits, and then use that fact as justification for the notion of a "population bomb". There is, after all, a theoretical limit to the amount of food I can stuff myself with; you don't want to give me free access to your kitchen just because such limits exist. The question in both cases is this: where do those limits lie, and are they ever likely to be reached? And the answer in both cases are these: somewhere ridiculously high, and no.

Just as the fatal flaw of the anti-immigrationists lies in assuming a fixed supply of jobs and public services without accounting for new ones created by immigrants, so do population alarmists fail to account for technological that come about from higher population. Increased demand for a commodity leads to higher prices, which creates an incentive to use that commodity more efficiently, to find more efficient ways of producing or extracting it, and/or to come up with a substitute for it. While there are finite limits to raw materials, there appear to be no limits to human ingenuity.

Thomas Malthus nearly single-handedly started the population control movement two centuries ago when he noted that population grows geometrically (x+x) while the food supply grows arithmetically (x+n, where n<x). He concluded, wrongly, that this would mean the world's population would outstrip the ability to feed itself. This reasoning eventually led to the vile utilitarianism of Margaret Sanger and forced abortion policies in China. Yet, history has not only been unkind to Malthus' theory: it has punched it in the face violently and repeatedly while calling it rude names. Improvements in farming technology have, if anything, resulted in too much food, in that it cannot be produced at profits high enough to keep Western farmers happy without subsidies.

So what about raw materials, such as oil and steel? When these start to run out (and we're a lot further from that happening than the population nuts would like you to think), prices will rise and so make it worthwhile to find new ways of getting such materials (such as oil from tar sand, or recycling steel), or to find substitutes. If we don't mess with these incentives by making them artificially cheap (i.e. price controls), we will never find ourselves short of them. Worries about the water table are misplaced for the same reason, or at least in as much as they don't identify subsidised water as the primary danger. There is never going to be a shortage of seawater. Desalination technology exists, and will be a widespread reality if the water table runs low.

Will a growing population make global warming significantly worse? Doubtful. The most environmentally unsound stage in economic development is that of early capitalist industrialisation, as is happening today in China. But, Western nations have already been through that stage and are, despite growing GDPs, getting cleaner. And this means that Western corporations, if anti-globalist do-gooders are not allowed to interfere, can build plants in poor nations or sell them their technology so that they can skip the dirty phase of development altogether.

"This is all very well", I hear some saying, "but what about starvation and disease in the third world? Doesn't it show that overpopulation is dangerous?" No. Of course, overpopulation there is a problem in the sense that there are too few people competing for too few resources. But it makes as much sense to blame this on overpopulation as it does to blame the fact that I get drunk after drinking twelve cans of Strongbow on my being underweight.

The fundamental problem in the third world is not population density. My house is more densely populated than any nation on Earth, but the UNFPA have not paid me a visit (yet). Rather, the problem in these nations is not enough capitalism and no democracy. There is little incentive to build housing, for example, when acquiring property rights is near impossible and getting permission to do anything with land involves endless bureaucratic hoop-jumping and bribes. Nor would there be anyone to buy it at the end of it all: people are desperately poor in the absence of property rights and when there is nobody but themselves to sell their produce to.

Blame for the plight of the third world falls squarely upon Western intellectuals and reactionaries. The intellectuals who saw the opportunity to experiment with socialism on the world's poor, and whose reflexive reaction to any effort to roll back the damage they have caused is "globalisation is exploitation!", are to blame for making wealth creation and entrepreneurship impossible for the people they pretend to care for. And reactionaries who have erected trade barriers to protect Western jobs have made it impossible for the world's poor to sell goods outside of their own nations.

So are there benefits to a growing population? Under capitalism, yes: exactly the same benefits that come from immigration. The more people who are allowed to apply themselves to the very real problems humanity faces, the more likely we are to find solutions to them. Just as immigration from poor, non-market countries to rich capitalist ones brings more minds to bear on these problems, so will bringing the third world with their growing populations onto the free market.

Capitalism may be, as Irving Kristol once remarked, the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived. It is certainly a lot less fun than excited ranting about overpopulation and the need to Do Something™ about it. But it works, and the lives and happiness of a growing number of millions depend on its spread.

Posted by Lewis at March 30, 2005 07:02 PM