Impeccable Ignorance

Population Control Goes Out With a Whimper

Posted on September 6, 2013
by Stefano Gennarini, J.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

 Here are three articles from the past week that address the slow hard fall from grace of population control…

1. Jonathan Last’s Review of a book that exposes Paul Ehrlich for the fraud he was. Ehrlich, an entomologist, not a demographer or economist, wrote the all-famous “Population Bomb” in the 1960s and became a world celebrity by prophesying that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices causing humanitarian disasters of biblical proportions. Needless to say, his poor science helped the world turn a blind eye to brutal population control programs for the past five decades. He was exposed repeatedly by Julian Simon, an economist, who rightly predicted that with population increases, production would also increase and commodity prices would go down. Simon believed human ingenuity could resolve resource scarcity, and he was right. He also insisted that what populations need are robust civil and political rights regimes to enable individuals and enterprises to flourish.
Simon perhaps never gained popularity among conservatives because his science led him to be in favor of a liberal U.S. immigration regime.

2. The Daily Beast has a piece about Obama’s “science diplomat”, John Holdren, people say he is a genius, but they find it hard to explain why he espouses Ehrlich’s bad science, even after it has been repeatedly disproven. So much for making decisions based on scientific evidence. The U.S. is still funding population control programs, and is still advocating that other countries do it. We are currently involved in re-educating women in the developing world, and especially Africa, to have fewer children. Apparently, they have been living for millennia with the false belief that having many children will ensure a comfortable retirement for their future. We are informing them instead that having fewer children (2 children max) will ensure a better future for them because the few children they have will love them all the more when in their old age they have to support them by themselves without the help of other siblings.

3. In this week’s Friday Fax, Susan Yoshihara looks at the profound instability created in China by the one-child policy. According to Yoshihara the changes to the one child policy that are in the works are too little too late. Not only is an economic and humanitarian disaster already unfolding, the one-child policy has actually become a cultural norm so engrained in the chinese way of life, that few chinese couples are even interested in having more than one child, preferably male. This is the kind of social engineering that U.S. family planning policies want to achieve in Africa. It is also the kind of norm that European countries are actively trying to fight, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, with little success.

After decades of population control programs to avert a seemingly inevitable population Armageddon, the people and institutions that are primarily responsible for the false alarmism are on their way out. While some at the United Nations, UNFPA, USAID and the Obama administration still cling to their condoms and bad science under the pseudonym “family planning program” or the oxymoron “reproductive rights” ( it never has to do with women choosing how many children to have and always with USAID telling women not to have any more children), economists and demographers are all agreed that the problem the world is facing is population aging and population decline – caused by human beings. Unfortunately, it will takes  decades, and maybe centuries to re-trace the trail of misery and ignorance they have left.