Malthus: Menace to Minority

Last month(September 2010) in the myriad of dreadful events like the floods in Paksitan, one news caught my attention. It was about a guy, James J. Lee who took a few employees of Discovery Channel Hostage. According to the news, he hated the shows like "Kate Plus 8" and "19 Kids and Counting." on the Discovery Channel. He had protested against them and had served some jail time. He demanded that Discovery Channel network air "programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility." He had the following on his website "Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding cultures,". His myspace account appears to be shut down for now, but you can find some of his ramblings here and here. From his Save the Planet Protest site he demanded the following(bolding and italics, are mine)
Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it.
Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!

He rambles about a bunch of other important matters like War, Environment, Global Warming etc. But the gist appeared to me that he was paranoid about Human Population growth and he desperately wanted an end to Human Births. He blamed discovery channel for fostering shows that promote human population growth and war.

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A few years ago, my friend in India had the following(italicized) to say in one of our email communications.

I agree with you on the subject of the discrimination that our society exercises on Muslims. There could be many reasons for it. some (of) them could be the mistakes committed by Muslims themselves. Here, through sai organization I went to couple of Muslim Bastis on couple of occassions. .... the number of children in a house was observed around 6. Ironically, the bread winner is just one (father); in some places you may find one more (eldest son). This might be one of the reasons for their lower economic conditions. They are not interested in studies. Some of them also found to have inclination towards crime and get some intant(sic) money. Hence, reformation is required from both sides.

The views expressed above are not unique to my friend and are harbored by many more. Different versions of that opinion are expressed by people in the country of my dominion. Replace the Muslims with immigrants and minorities; Voila, the discourse is the same.

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The fear of population was originally stated by Thomas Robert Malthus in his three volume book titled 'An essay on the principle of population'. The central observation of this book, later came to be termed as 'Mathusian Catastrophe' is that if the population growth is left unchecked, it will be forced to subsistence levels as agriculture production(Arithmetic progression) cannot keep pace with human growth(Geometric Progression). 
He wrote this theory to refute his compatriot Marie Jean Antoine de Condorcet. Condorcet in his seminal work 'Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind' wrote about the perfectibility of human mind and society.

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The theory proposed by Malthus has become so widely accepted and twisted that crimes have been committed in that belief. History has proven over and over again that when bad ideas are taken in faith by the powerful, it can lead to some bad results for the powerless.

During the darkest days of Indian Democracy called the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi, son of then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, committed crimes in the name of family planning program to limit population growth. According to author Mark Tully "His inexperience did not stop him from using the Draconian powers his mother, Indira Gandhi, had taken to terrorise the administration, setting up what was in effect a police state.[Mark Tully 'Amritsar Mrs. Gandhis last Battle, pp. 55, ISBN 81-291-0917-4]

During the emergency it was reported that he forced evacuation of a slum of 250,000 people, mostly muslim, near Turkman Gate and Jama Masjid in Delhi. The government officials and police officers forcibly performed vasectomies in order to meet quotas. By official orders, men with two children or more had to submit to sterilization. Many unmarried young men, political opponents and ignorant, poor men were also believed to have been sterilized. This forced sterilization program had wide repercussions for government led family planning programs later on. Luckily for India this period lasted only two years from 1975-1977 and Indira Gandhi herself restored democracy to India.
(P.S.: Compulsory Sterilization of a group of humans has been practised by law in several countries like USA and Germany until very recently.)

In China the 'one child only' policy was started in about 1980 and is still in place today. This created social consequences like gender selective abortion, female infanticide, girl abandonment, kidnapping by officials etc causing imbalance in the sex ratio of male to female in the population as a whole to its current level of 117 to 100. The young men in china find it diffcult to find a suitable mate as is expected. This has other repurcussions at the lower end of society like forced prostition, bachelors 'purchasing' wives, social unrest, violence by restless young men etc.

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Malthus has been proven wrong all along and for well over 200 years since the first publication of his theory in 1798. The argument has been that agriculture growth will not be sufficient to cater to the needs of humans and its high growth rate. Until about 1950, the farm productivity was limited by the availability of natural fertilizer which was manure from animal waste, labor which was mostly human and arable land which is limited or decreasing. The other inputs - sun, air and water are almost free. So the powerful, elite and regular folks alike bought into the notion that population growth should be limited by any means. That meant prevention of immigration, forceful sterlization, blaming large families(most of which happen to be minorities).

The argument for 'food supply running out' has been largely quelled by invention of synthetic techniques of making fertilizers that replaced natural fertilizer namely manure. The availability of cheap nitrogenous fertilizer has clearly prevented the long-predicted “Malthusian catastrophe,” or population crisis. The cost of food as % of household income has dropped from one-third of the average U.S. household income in 1955 to less than 15 percent today. The labor issue was resolved by Industrial revolution where large machines replaced much of human work on the farm. In developed countries unlike the developing countries, obesity is the problem and not malnutrition from lack of food.

But the fear of 'population crisis' is well alive today and raises its ugly head almost every year especially in times of economic crisis. It manifests as a case for stopping all forms of socail welfare programs to the poor, the recipients of which being the minorities in the society. It is cited as a case against immigration.

It is time for some fact checking. The global population growth has been in a decline for about five decades now. As per US Census Bureau, the world population rate is currently at 1.1% in 2010 from a high of 2.2% in 1962. Infact there are quite a few countries like Russia, Germany, Latvia, Italy and Japan that have negative rate of natural increase in population. For complete list of growth rates by country, see here. These countries face challenges of aging population with the median age shifting to the right, with fewer working young people having to support more aged and retired members of their country. The other factor is the fertility rate. The necessary replacement rate is about 2.1 and fertility rate of US is at 2.05. There are about 100 countries that have a fertility rate below the replacement levels.

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It might appear that I am in support of unlimited human growth. I am not. I am against the 'social darwinists' who took a leaf from Malthus and made this world a bad place to live creating unsustainable public policies, commiting crimes and suffering for the general public. The solution to the human population growth is economic growth itself. Help the underdeveloped sections around the globe grow economically; let people choose their path, provide education, give them independence to choose, let democracy prevail; and population growth as in developed countries will be controlled to a point where public policy has to be changed to support child bearing like that in Japan now. This is already happening in sections of developing countries like India, where the educated and economically well off couples in the upper and middle class prefer a single child.

To put it better in the words of Chris Anderson who in his book 'Free' said
A look at the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggested that we get smarter faster  
than we reproduce—human ingenuity tends to find ways to extract resources from the earth faster
than we can use them. This has the effect of increasing supply faster than demand, which in turn
depresses prices.
......[parts ommitted for brevity]......
Humans are wired to understand scarcity better than abundance. Just as we’ve evolved to overreact
to threats and danger, one of our survival tactics is to focus on the risk that supplies are going to run
out. Abundance, from an evolutionary perspective, resolves itself, while scarcity needs to be fought
over. The result is that ..., people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and
every- thing; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they’d been medically vaccinated
against the force of fact.

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I think it is time to put Malthus and his theory to rest.