Aug 17 A few Indian states are considering laws to tackle the growth of their populations. Predictably, these include limits on the number of children a couple can have. Much easier to put that kind of futile measure on the books than to address, picking one, educating women.
After I heard about this, I thought I'd write my Friday mathematics column around ideas on population, showing thereby how wrong-headed these proposed measures are. The power of population for economies, https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/the-power-of-population-for-economies-11628184138539.html (Friday Aug 6). Let me know your thoughts. cheers, dilip --- The power of population for economies Give me a rupee for every time I have heard "demographic advantage" applied to India in the last several years, and I'd be sitting on a small fortune. Invariably, the mentions are tinged with pride, as if we've suddenly transformed into a commendably and overwhelmingly young nation. Truth is, we used to be even younger and are getting steadily older. But that's a story for another time. Over 200 years ago, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in his "Essay on Population": "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." Ever since, that bleak vision has influenced plenty of scientists. Malthus addressed an age-old and ongoing wrangle. For population often sets off furious intellectual battles, whose antagonists barely speak to each other. In one corner are pessimists - usually biologists - who believe that the human population is increasing so rapidly that we will end in catastrophe. In the other corner are optimists - usually economists - who believe that humanity stands a good chance of solving its population problems. Biologists see a newborn as another hungry mouth. Economists see two tiny hands that will one day contribute to economic growth. Pessimists worry about exceeding the capacity of the earth to support us all. After all, there are animals that endure sudden collapses when their populations rise beyond a limit. Does mankind face the same fate? Optimists remind them that no such collapse has ever happened to humans. Economic growth can both feed billions of humans and slow the population explosion, and don't families in prosperous societies have fewer children? Pessimists see growth itself as the problem. The world cannot keep adding 80 million people a year, as it does today, forever. Which is right: optimism or pessimism? "It is hard to think of a question more fundamental to our crowded world", Charles C. Mann wrote in a revealing article ("How Many is Too Many?" The Atlantic, February 1993). Demographers often cite a figure called the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). This is the number of babies a woman will have, on average, in her lifetime. 2 is replacement level: if every woman had two babies, children will exactly replace their parents and eventually the population will level off. (Because some children die, replacement level is usually taken as 2.1). TFR has recently been in the news in India. For example, Uttar Pradesh has just announced measures to "control" its population growth. Its draft Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill proposes penalties for couples who have more than two children, like denying welfare schemes and even the PDS to them. Apart from the bureaucratic nightmare these kinds of measures will set in motion, it's not even clear they are effective. In any case, UP's TFR was 2.7 in 2016 - likely lower now - which, while higher than replacement level, is a significant drop from over 4 at the turn of the century. It still trails India as a whole - 2.22 in 2018 - but it has indeed been decreasing. Why? Because what we call development - healthcare, jobs, education especially of women - inevitably lowers the TFR. That's the lesson, the world over, of the last half-century. In 1968, the United Nations Population Division studied TFR trends in different parts of the world. In the developing world, the TFR was at a then-alarming 6.0. The most likely scenario, UNPD projected, was that this figure would fall to 5.1 by 1985; and even this modest drop was greeted with much skepticism at the time. But in 1985, the TFR in developing countries was down to 4.2. As a whole, they had done twice as well as UNPD had estimated, pulling TFR almost halfway to replacement level in 17 years. That downward trend continues. Given their massive populations, India and China dominate TFR calculations for the developing world: today, China's TFR (about 1.69) is well below replacement level and India's is not far above. Good news? Certainly population optimists like to quote TFR trends. But consider the not-so-good news too: since 1968, the Earth has added over 4 billion more people. Sure, it's likely that future TFR figures the world over will be the lowest in history. Even so, today's children will replace themselves, and their children will, and so on. The immediate future remains one of an enormous and growing world population. That will have consequences, some unpleasant. But those unpleasant consequences may not necessarily be the result of the disaster Malthus predicted. They are more likely to stem from what Mann described with elegant delicacy: "the human race's perennial inability to run its political affairs wisely." Consider sub-Saharan Africa, where we regularly hear that overpopulation has caused terrible damage to the land. Droughts have led to overgrazing, erosion and deforestation; the Sahara is moving southwards at about six miles a year. Africa's population dilemma, you'd think, is nowhere as acute as here. But then there's what Michael Mortimore of Cambridge University found in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, by examining soil samples (e.g. "Working the Sahel", 1999). For generations, Nigerian farmers would simply move on when resources were exhausted. But with population pressure, land grew ever-more expensive. This forced farmers to take better care of what they owned, because moving on was no longer viable. The result? Nigeria's grain production levels were, far and away, higher than they had ever been. The country's steadily increasing population had actually increased the productivity of its land. So what are the reasons for the hunger and suffering that sometimes seem endemic to sub-Saharan Africa? Traditionally, land in Africa was common property. It gets overused, but higher yields give people incentive to cheat the system, make a handsome profit and vanish. It is those who play fair who are left to deal with the consequences: the ancient tragedy of the commons. Add ethnic conflict, also endemic to the region, and catastrophe is never far away. Governments are mandated to address issues like these. But sub-Saharan Africa's tragedy is that governments have failed their people, and on two counts. First, they have rarely stopped and punished civil strife. On the contrary, too many governments have actually participated in it. Wars have driven millions of people there from their homes and into starvation. Remember the brutal civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s, when "Biafra" was a synonym for widespread starvation. Second, they have not addressed land-use. A reasonable response to the overuse of common property would have been to reform land-use rules. It's happened elsewhere in Africa. That it has not happened in sub-Saharan Africa may say more about corruption, inefficiency and warfare than a growing population. That's worth thinking about. In a time of political violence, of a justice system that delivers much less that it promises, it's worth thinking about in relation to UP and India as well. So: Optimists or pessimists, they might agree on at least the contours of the problems the world faces - shrinking reserves of potable water and fuel, signs that productivity increases in agriculture may be levelling off, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity and more broadly, climate change. When there were fewer of us, these problems were not as severe as they are today. And there were usually ways around them anyway. (Like moving on.) But those days are gone. Which of our problems will we solve? Which will we leave untackled? The answers will depend largely on our desire and ability to find wiser and more responsive government. Can India's demographic advantage address that? If so, I might paraphrase a great Indian: into that heaven, without doubt, let my country awake. -- My book with Joy Ma: "The Deoliwallahs" Twitter: @DeathEndsFun Death Ends Fun: http://dcubed.blogspot.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dilip's essays" group. 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