Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | F | Free Inquiry

Optimum population: overcoming 'growthmania'.

Article Excerpt
The very idea of defining an "optimum population" challenges centuries of economic and political assumptions that growth is by definition a good thing. So be it. The challenge of overcoming that assumption is at least as important as any optimum population number we may calculate.

How 'GROWTHMANIA' BEGAN

Before the 1300s, unlimited growth scarcely figured in human thinking. Then came the Renaissance, the age of exploration, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and a worldwide scientific enterprise that is still accelerating--a period of enrichment and growth without parallel in human history. Its success led to a widespread conviction that growth is natural, desirable, and forever benign. In important ways, the West is still caught in that Age of Exuberance--in a state of "growthmania"--and we are busily communicating it to the Eastern and Southern hemispheres.

Growthmania is a formidable belief system. Curiously, it originated in a sudden, brutal population reduction: the fourteenth-century Black Death, the sharpest population collapse in human history. The Black Death readjusted the ratio of people to land, leaving peasants who survived with more farmland and wealth. New wealth flowed into depopulated cities. The institutional constraints of feudalism were swept away, replaced by the first stirrings of what we now know as capitalism. (1) The subsequent age of exploration further improved the ratio of land to people by opening the New World, more than quadrupling the arable land available to Europeans. (2)

In the twentieth century, modern medicine and public health programs lowered mortality in the poorer countries. Modern agriculture fed the rising numbers. But too little was done too late to lower fertility. That created a fundamental demographic imbalance. The resulting population growth dwarfed all previous human experience. World population quadrupled in one century, a change so astonishing that it has altered--or should have altered--our assumptions regarding humanity's connection with the rest of the planet.

Capitalism favors the entrepreneur, the business adventurer. It serves the successful, and so do its theoreticians. Today, conventional economies is grounded in the expectation of endless growth: economic growth for greater profits and population growth for more markets and cheap labor. Sadly, thinking in terms of economic growth per capita would be more reasonable.

MIGHTY ENGINE, NO BRAKES

Are we plunging toward collapse because of our very success? Philosophers since John Stuart Mill have warned against the illusion of perpetual growth. Endlessly expanding numbers cannot enjoy endlessly expanding consumption. Post-Keynesian economists ignore the fact that material growth must at some point become a logical impossibility on a finite planet. When?

John Maynard Keynes is something of a demigod to conventional economists. Yet he was never as wedded to growthmania as ninny of his followers. He raised serious questions: Can growth go on indefinitely? Would it be desirable? (3) Is market capitalism motivated by greed a sound moral basis for society? Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus worried (perhaps prematurely) about how many people the earth could support, but he did not ask the next question: What will increasing human numbers...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!