Smashing the 'too many babies' myth

Too many people...aaaaahhhhh!!!

I spent much of Friday afternoon kicking myself for not having visited The Daily Maverick for so long and especially letting Ivo Vegter drop off my radar.  Certainly is nice to know there are islands of sanity out there in the otherwise intellectually degenerating world of punditry.  Here Ivo lays into the anti-baby culture sweeping like an idiot herd across the global summit-hopping supposed intelligentsia.  Just as with Malthus, Erlich, and today’s neo-religio-eco-warm-mongering-cultists, the dire predictions of our resource future reveal a level of profound economic ignorance that would be funny were it no so tragic.

More than tragic though, it is actually deeply worrying, for these brain-dead crusaders are all about using their mythical predictions to tell governments that they need to do, help, regulate and control more and more and more.  If you want a tried and tested path to catastrophe, more state regulation of our natural and human resources is a sure way to get there.

Go ahead, have a baby

Ivo Vegter

When someone who will clearly make a great parent expresses guilt for having taken the liberty to procreate, there’s something wrong with us.

In the modern world, and particularly among the middle classes and wealthy intelligentsia, we have become so ridden with guilt-complexes, so convinced of our own evil, that we can’t even have babies anymore without indulging fashionable neuroses about it.

Giving life must be among the happiest things that can happen to anyone. When, recently, a friend expressed unmitigated joy at the prospect, it brought back to me how often one hears the opposite: people who are apologetic about adding to the world’s population.

Even if we ignore the spiritual joy and emotional fulfilment a child can bring, and consider procreation purely as an economic act, should we really believe that it is a danger to humanity, to our prosperity, or to our environment?
This distressing notion is premised on a myth.

The myth is that a person is merely a mouth to feed; that people are merely living like parasites on an ever-dwindling supply of resources that will inevitably run out.

As a general rule, which holds true for the vast majority of people, nobody can consume more than they produce. While they are children, that production occurs on their behalf, but without enough production to sustain a life, few people can survive.

There are many reasons why population growth rates tend to be higher in poorer societies. One is that they risk a higher rate of infant mortality. This used to be true the world over, even among the rich. King Louis XIV of France had five children, of which only one survived. Queen Anne of England fell pregnant eighteen times. Her longest-surviving child died soon after his eleventh birthday. Tsar Peter the Great had 14 children, of which only three made it to 20, and only one past 30. Even in wealthy Britain, life expectancy only crept past 40 late in the 19th century.

A more important reason why poor people have more children is that they grasp the simple economic fact that on average, a person’s potential production exceeds their likely consumption. They’re an economic benefit to their family, their village, and their country throughout their lives.

The inevitable answer to this observation is that even if people can produce enough to sustain themselves, we’re running out of resources.

The problem is, we’re not. This can be reliably concluded from the fact that even if a particular resource were to become particularly scarce, the price mechanism unfailingly makes it worth our while to economise, or seek alternatives, or both.

Resource replacement has happened before, and will happen again, but more often, the opposite happens: improved productivity and new finds simply combines to match growing demand.

The challenge of improving farm productivity has been with us for most of the last century, as the world’s population boomed as a result of growing prosperity, decreasing disease mortality, and improved living conditions. That challenge has been admirably met by people such as the late Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his spectacular successes in improving crop yields and farming methods in Latin America and Asia. Today, we feed a vastly expanded population on not much more land than was given over to agriculture in 1950.

There is much more that can be done – and is being done – to improve the productivity of existing farms, without significantly expanding the acreage needed to feed humanity by appropriating unspoilt natural environments. (That said, there are negative trends too: biofuels in particular place huge pressure on available arable land, raising food prices unnecessarily.)

Overall, however, despite the dire predictions made a few decades ago by eco-socialist academics such as Paul Ehrlich, using mathematical models of growth developed 200 years ago by Thomas Malthus, humanity is still feeding itself quite adequately today. There is no reason to believe that this has to end either soon, or catastrophically.

The first mistake inherent in these predictions is to presume that economics is a zero-sum game. This is the inherent flaw in ludicrous notions such as working out how many earths we’d need if everyone consumed like you or me. If the same calculation were made about production, would you find it reasonable to conclude that you produce several earths’ worth of goods and services? No. You produce enough to purchase what you need to (or want to) consume, as does most everyone else.

Click here to read the rest of the article at The DM…