Our friend Pramit Bhattacharya’s piece in the HT is a reminder of why even on matters of great global import, highly rated experts and multiple national governments can get it wrong, badly wrong and that too, over a period of several hundred years. The consequences of these expert judgements being incorrect can be catastrophic as illustrated by the subject at the heart of Pramit’s piece: demographic forecasting. He writes:
“The eugenics movement spread across the West in the early part of the 20th century, with the focus gradually shifting from promoting desirable traits to removing undesirable traits.
In the US, this took the form of population control for minority groups (including forced sterilisations for African-Americans and native Americans). The movement took an even more horrific turn in Germany, with concentration camps designed to segregate, and eventually kill, those deemed undesirable by the Nazis.
The association with Nazism proved to be a death knell for eugenics. But the population control movement survived. In the post-War years, global concerns about food insecurity and environmental degradation stirred a new paranoia about population growth. The “undesirable” elements of the human race were now located in the Third World, rather than in the West.
The ideas of an 18th century economist and clergyman were used to drum up support for population control campaigns. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, Robert Thomas Malthus had warned that population growth would soon outstrip global food supply. The Industrial Revolution proved Malthus wrong. It raised productivity across all spheres of the economy, including agriculture.
Undeterred by the historical record, neo-Malthusians of the mid-20th century revived fears of an impending food crisis….”
Now, thanks to the emphasis the Indian education places on rote learning, Indian policymakers tend not to be the world’s most original thinkers. If there is a fashionable idea going around in Western universities, there is a 50:50 chance that someone important in New Delhi will latch on to it. Pramit writes:
“Malthusians such as the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Ehrlich went further, advocating a “series of financial rewards and penalties designed to discourage reproduction”. In his widely-cited 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich painted a vivid picture of the overflowing streets of Delhi to convey the urgency of defusing the ticking “population bomb”. The teeming millions of India and China became the new targets of population control, replacing African-Americans and the Jews. UN agencies and American philanthropic foundations helped spread the new gospel of population control.
Governments in developing countries such as India and China jumped aboard the population control bandwagon. Weak economic growth and high population growth had led to anaemic per capita income growth in these countries. Policymakers felt it offered a way to raise incomes per head and lower the strain on government finances at the same time.
The population control drive took a coercive turn with China implementing the one-child policy in the late 1970s. Under the cover of the Emergency, India undertook forced sterilisations. The allocation of Lok Sabha seats across states was frozen to penalise states with high birth rates (through the 42nd amendment in 1976).
When the United Nations Population Fund launched the Population Award in 1983, the first winners were the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Chinese family planning commission chief Qian Xinzhong.”
Thankfully, India’s democracy stymied Mrs Gandhi’s ability to fulfil her neo-Malthusian fantasies. The Chinese were not so lucky – their one child policy meant that hundreds of millions of abortions took place and, in addition, hundreds of millions of baby girls were killed after they were born.
What none of the demographers had predicted was that as countries started to get prosperous fertility rates would drop – first in Europe, then in America and then in Emerging Asia. The result: demographers are now beginning to scale back population projections sharply and the Chinese government is encouraging Chinese families to have a minimum of 3 children! Pramit writes:
“The faster-than-anticipated decline in fertility rates has stirred new fears about “depopulation”. For many years, UN projections had suggested that the global population would keep growing throughout the 21st century. But in 2022, it made a sharp revision, indicating that the global population would peak in the 2080s, and decline after that.
Some demographers and economists believe that governments should now encourage people to have more children. A depopulating world may not necessarily be good for either the environment or economic growth, they argue. The rising share of the elderly might precipitate fiscal crises around the world, and slow down growth.”
More than 200 years after Malthus’ grim forecasts of an overpopulated planet, we have now reached a stage where no one quite knows what to do about population. In particular, governments have no idea whether to tell people to have more children or less or whether any of this actually makes any difference.
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