The Economist: Horrid History: Population Control
The road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work, a new book argues.
(A review of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population)
AN HISTORIAN who grew up as the youngest of eight children might well be expected to approach the question of whether the world is overpopulated from an unusual angle. Matthew Connelly, a professor at Columbia University, dedicates his study of those who thought the planet had too many people and tried to do something about it to his parents, “for having so many children”.
Yet, he assures the reader, it was not his personal experience of large families that drew him to the subject....
...When, years later, Mr Connelly began his own book on population growth, he still thought of the topic as a way to offer a broader understanding of world security. He ended up writing a very different—and angry—book, one about people who looked at the human race reproducing itself and saw what a gardener sees when looking at a prize plant: something to be encouraged to bloom in some places and pruned in others.
Mr Connelly starts with the 19th-century campaigners who published illegal manuals on birth control. He traces the evolution of population control through early-20th-century eugenics movements and the “population bomb” hysteria of the 1960s and 1970s to its culmination in large-scale attempts to cut birth rates in poor countries. He draws on the archives of non-governmental organisations and international bodies such as the World Health Organisation, as well as interviews and public sources, to tell his tale.
The population controllers are often arrogant....
..Mr Connelly's most devastating critique of population control is not that it destroyed lives, or was based on imperialist or eugenic ideas, but that it did not work. In country after country—even in China—birth rates were already falling when the government began implementing more coercive policies. Furthermore, statistical estimates suggest that as much as 90% of the reason that women have families of a particular size is simply because that is the number of children they want. Where women gained education and rights, birth rates fell. As with reproduction itself, for people to become less fruitful, desire must precede performance.
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