by Walter E. Williams
According to an American Dream article [1], “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and
Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on
the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State
of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World:
Women, Population and Climate”: “Each birth results not only in the emissions
attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of
all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or
planned births multiply with time. . . . No human is genuinely ‘carbon
neutral,’ especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation.
Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the
solution in some way. . . . Strong family planning programmes are in the
interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader
welfare concerns.”
Thomas Friedman agrees in his New York Times column “The
Earth is Full” (June 8, 2008), in which he says, “[P]opulation growth and
global warming push up food prices, which leads to political instability, which
leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, and so on in a
vicious circle.”
In his article “What Nobody Wants to Hear, But
Everyone Needs to Know [2],”
University of Texas at Austin biology professor Eric R. Pianka wrote, “I do not
bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world,
including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of
us.”
However, there is absolutely no relationship between high populations,
disaster, and poverty. Population-control advocates might consider the
Democratic Republic of Congo’s meager 75 people per square mile to be ideal
while Hong Kong’s 6,500 people per square mile is problematic. Yet Hong Kong’s
citizens enjoy a per capita income of $43,000 while the Democratic Republic of
Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a per capita income of $300.
It’s no anomaly. Some of the world’s poorest countries have the lowest
population densities.
Planet earth is loaded with room. We could put the world’s entire
population into the United States, yielding a density of 1,713 people per
square mile. That’s far lower than what now exists in all major U.S. cities.
The entire U.S. population could move to Texas, and each family of four would
enjoy more than 2.1 acres of land. Likewise, if the entire world’s population
moved to Texas, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, each family of four
would enjoy a bit over two acres. Nobody’s suggesting that the entire earth’s
population be put in the United States or that the entire U.S. population move
to Texas. I cite these figures to help put the matter into perspective.
Let’s look at some other population density evidence. Before the collapse
of the Soviet Union, West Germany had a higher population density than East
Germany. The same is true of South Korea versus North Korea; Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Singapore versus China; the United States versus the Soviet Union; and
Japan versus India. Despite more crowding, West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, and Japan experienced far greater
economic growth, higher standards of living, and greater access to resources
than their counterparts with lower population densities. By the way, Hong Kong
has virtually no agriculture sector, but its citizens eat well.
One wonders why anyone listens to doomsayers who have been consistently
wrong in their predictions—not a little off, but way off. Professor Paul
Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb,
predicted major food shortages in the United States and that by “the 1970s . .
. hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich
forecasted the starvation of 65 million Americans between 1980 and 1989 and a
decline in U.S. population to 22.6 million by 1999. He saw England in more
desperate straits: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England
will not exist in the year 2000.”
Expert Poverty
By a considerable measure, poverty in underdeveloped nations is directly
attributable to their leaders heeding the advice of western “experts.” Nobel
laureate and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal said (1956), “The special advisors
to underdeveloped countries who have taken the time and trouble to acquaint
themselves with the problem . . . all recommend central planning as the first
condition of progress.” In 1957 Stanford University economist Paul A. Baran
advised, “The establishment of a socialist planned economy is an essential,
indeed indispensable, condition for the attainment of economic and social
progress in underdeveloped countries.”
Topping off this bad advice, underdeveloped countries sent their brightest
to the London School of Economics, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale to be taught
socialist nonsense about economic growth. Nobel laureate economist Paul
Samuelson taught them that underdeveloped countries “cannot get their heads
above water because their production is so low that they can spare nothing for
capital formation by which the standard of living could be raised.” Economist
Ranger Nurkse describes the “vicious circle of poverty” as the basic cause of
the underdevelopment of poor countries. According to him, a country is poor
because it is poor. On its face this theory is ludicrous. If it had validity,
all mankind would still be cave dwellers because we all were poor at one time
and poverty is inescapable.
Population controllers have a Malthusian vision of the world that sees
population growth outpacing the means for people to care for themselves.
Mankind’s ingenuity has proven the Malthusians dead wrong. As a result we can
grow increasingly larger quantities of food on less and less land. The energy
used to produce food, per dollar of GDP, has been in steep decline. We’re
getting more with less, and that applies to most other inputs we use for goods
and services.
Ponder the following question: Why is it that mankind today enjoys cell
phones, computers, and airplanes but did not when King Louis XIV was alive?
After all, the necessary physical resources to make cell phones, computers, and
airplanes have always been around, even when cavemen walked the earth. There is
only one reason we enjoy these goodies today but did not in past eras. It’s the
growth in human knowledge, ingenuity, and specialization and trade—coupled with
personal liberty and private property rights—that led to industrialization and
betterment. In other words human beings are immensely valuable resources.
What are called overpopulation problems result from socialistic government
practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe, house, and
feed themselves. Underdeveloped nations are rife with farm controls, export and
import restrictions, restrictive licensing, price controls, plus gross human
rights violations that encourage their most productive people to emigrate and
stifle the productivity of those who remain. The true antipoverty lesson for
poor nations is that the most promising route out of poverty to greater wealth
is personal liberty and its main ingredient, limited government.
No comments:
Post a Comment