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© 2012 Sanjeev Sabhlok's revolutionary blog
Thanks to FB, my attention was brought to this article, किसे जीना है किसे मरना है खरबपति तय करते हैं । In English, the same story is outlined here. This is about Bill Gates's passion for reducing world population.
That is his key goal in life. To do that his pathway is the fllowing:
1) Vaccines to reduce infant mortality
2) Greater availability of contraceptives
3) Increase access to abortion.
While (2) and (3) can be directly understood by the lay man in terms of effects on population, (1) is causing great confusion.
People are jumping to the conclusion that the West has a conspiracy to sterilise them! Vaccines to sterilise the world!
Not at all. What Bill Gates is using is by now outdated (but proven) theory that reducing infant mortality reduces the demand for children. This is actually true.
In BFN Online Notes I've noted:
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Box 15
Fertility is related to the level of freedom
The subject of human population growth has spawned numerous debates over the past 210 years since Malthus first published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. I am summarising below a rigorous and persuasive model that has been found far better at explaining observed changes in human population than Malthus’s conjectures. This models explains fertility at the individual level, ie, the number of children a couple choose to have. Being an economic model, it applies well on average; not necessarily to specific individuals. If you are interested in a more detailed discussion, you can read my PhD dissertation.[1] Even though no parent consciously calculates the things summarised below, this model successfully predicts, on average, the number of children parents actually choose to have. It also applies irrespective of whether parents live in developing or developed societies.
A model of fertility
When considering the number of children they want to have, couples ask themselves either explicitly or implicitly the following questions:
a) Survival of children: “How many of our children will survive?”
Human population hardly increased for tens of thousands of years. Malthus’s laws seemed to apply: populations would rise for a while and then be decimated by natural causes, bringing them back to square one each time. Until modern health came on the scene, it was critical to the survival of the human species for each woman to have about seven children. That was roughly the ‘natural’ level of fertility that the human species had evolved to. On average, of these seven children, just over two would survive well into adulthood. However, this need for women to have all the children they could possibly have, has changed dramatically after modern health has come to the scene. Malthus’s laws no longer seem to apply.
But the high fertility of the past was not an instinctive phenomenon; it was a rational response to the high mortality rates that parents observed. Parents estimate the probability of their children not surviving childhood, by looking around them. Infant and maternal mortality rates are generally high in less free countries because these countries are poor and can’t afford health care. In societies like Nehruvian India parents may rationally choose to have all the children they can possibly have. Nonetheless, even with the extremely poor health care programmes put in place in India, more children and women started surviving than they had in the past. This led to an unanticipated bump in India’s population as parents had not anticipated that so many more of their children will survive. Newer parents have quickly re-adjusted their estimates of child survival, and have fewer children than their parents did.
Having access to family planning technology has been important for this choice to be exercised, but not critical. Numerous historical instances of family planning being practiced without modern technology are well known. Even today, one-third of Italian couples (Italy has a particularly low birth rate) use withdrawal as the family planning method since Catholicism doesn’t encourage contraception. When parents are determined not to have children, technology becomes a secondary factor.
b) Cost-benefit:
After the survival question has been answered, there is another important question. Parents can choose to have (1) fewer but better-educated children, or (2) a larger number of poorly-educated children. Parents answer this question by maximising their benefits and minimising their costs.
“What will we gain from our children?” Parents everywhere, but particularly in countries such as India which do not have old-age pension or welfare systems, take into account two kinds of financial and non-financial returns from their children: one, some form of ‘help’—not necessarily financial—when the children are young, and two, ‘insurance’ if the parents need to be looked after in old age. This insurance comprises of two components, a financial return if needed, and a non-financial ‘care’, if needed. This gives us the total expected benefit from each child. To estimate this benefit, parents first need to predict their country’s future economic prospects. That will tell them what their children could earn in the future when they (the parents) are old. Parents generally look at the current economic policies of a country to predict the future. If capitalist, free market policies are in place in a country, parents expect future growth in incomes for their educated children. On the other hand, if socialist policies are in place, parents can’t see much of a future for their children.
“What will the children cost?” Bringing up children and, in particular, educating them, costs time and money, both the real costs of bringing up children and the opportunity costs of the time of parents and the children, assuming that the state provides ‘free’ education.
Final decision:
· Parents will choose to educate their children and hence have fewer children since parents only have limited resources, if they expect their children’s future income to become significantly larger than if they were not educated. This will happen only if the future economy is likely to generate good jobs for educated people.
· Conversely, they will choose not to educate their children and hence have more children if they believe that their children’s future income will not be affected by the children’s level of education because of the poor future economic environment.
What rational parents will choose in socialist India
In India—which was predominantly socialist at least till the late 1980s—the so-called ‘education’ provided in ramshackle school buildings in villages and slums was not really an education. The future income of such children was only marginally impacted by such ‘education’; nepotism and bribery were far more influential in securing jobs. Jobs that required genuine education were very scarce, anyway: many MA degree holders could also not get jobs beyond that of junior office clerks.
Parents in village India could see clearly that there was no point in having fewer, more educated children. It was far better for them to have many children and use these children as labour when the children were young, save money for their old age, and also hope that at least one or two of these children would take care of them in old age. Child labour was therefore significantly exacerbated by Nehru’s socialist policies. The first major change in fertility in India was prompted by declining infant mortality rates. But it was only from late-1980s, with increasing liberalisation, that parents in villages realised that educating their children made economic sense. Today they know that educating their children can make a huge difference to their children’s future income. Therefore, private English medium schools are sprouting even in remote villages wherever the modicum of good governance is being delivered by governments. Parents are sensible enough not to send their children to government schools. I commend millions of Indian villagers for displaying eminent common sense and reacting rationally (and in my mind, beautifully!) to economic incentives, something their urban well-educated counterparts rarely display when talking about our villagers’ highly evolved thinking capacities.
Some implications
We therefore learn that policies of freedom and good governance always reduce the demand for children. Indeed, policies I advocate in this book will not only stabilise India’s population, but will help to significantly shrink it over the next 50 years. The wealthier a society becomes, the lesser parents need to be financially supported by their children in old age. That further reduces the ‘demand’ for children. They do continue to need non-financial ‘care’, though, and so this demand never falls to zero. Most people will still have at least one child.
What is the ‘optimal’ level of population for a society? There is no such level. Nevertheless, once a free society arrives at a sustainable balance with the environment, then the society can aspire for is average woman choosing to have 2.05 highly educated children. That would sustain that level of population potentially for ever. Of course, this is not something for a government to spend its policy resources or taxpayer’s money on. An important implication to keep in mind: this model shows that it is not sensible to introduce old age pensions in a society. Where such schemes exist, the demand for children can plummet precipitously, and relations between parents and children can get strained. Let the government not disturb this age-old relationship.
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[1] A copy of the dissertation is available at:
I've outlined detailed pathway re: population in BFN so I won't repeat it. Only the diagram:
The main problem I have with Bill Gates is that he is barking up the wrong tree.
Population is NOT a problem I've explained here:
Lack of freedom is THE problem.
With freedom population tends to achieve the "right" level.
By focusing on population control Bill and Melinda Gates are barking up the wrong tree. And creating a huge problem about the use of vaccines itself!
I suggest Bill Gates has NO BUSINESS in trying to dictate the family size of anyone's family but his own. He should focus on increasing liberty.
And second, his understanding of climate science is seriously flawed. He has rushed to the wrong conclusion on that topic.
Fight for liberty, is all I say.
Here's a wonderful debrief on the utterly useless Rio(+20) conference by none other than the brilliant environmentalist and (classical) liberal Lord Monckton.
People find it VERY HARD to understand what I'm saying, so I've go to keep trying different ways of saying the same thing.
I wrote that a bigger population is richer. Most commentators got even more confused than ever before.
What I'm saying is that the SHEER NUMBER OF PEOPLE IS NEVER A PROBLEM. Indeed, on average, a larger population is more productive because of network effects, and adoption of ideas from smarter people.
If at all there's a problem with population it is because we've managed (in India) to collect so many illiterates (and more problematically) HALF BAKED literates. All because of Mr. Nehru and his passion for socialism – a passion that the "educated" people of India can't seem to rid themselves of.
Now answer this question. Which is better:
If India only had one genius (say, Narayana Murthy) or one billion of them?
Clearly we will be better off if there were 1 billion Narayana Murthys in India. We'd all be so much richer and better off.
So what's the problem? NEVER the sheer population, but SOCIALIST POLICIES that DESTROY FREEDOM and lead to illiteracy.
And if that policy gap can be addressed by OVERTHROWING SOCIALISM, then A BIGGER POPULATION (OF WELL EDUCATED GENIUSES) will be far better for India than a smaller population.
The day the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF HALF-BAKED 'EDUCATED' people of India can understand this basic point, India can begin to change.
I thought this deserves its own blog post:
I AM NOT AGAINST LIBERTY. i want that there should be more economic freedom in india.
But on the other hand population should be controlled too. Because it is already too late to wait for economic development to stabilize population.
NO NO NO NO NO
You have NO BUSINESS, NO AUTHORITY, NO RIGHT to “control” population. You may please help out by (a) not having children, (b) committing suicide, but thou shalt NOT interfere in the freedom of any other human on earth to have his or her family.
On the one hand you say you are “not” against liberty, but on the other you are a RADICAL DICTATOR who wants to enter the bedrooms of people and control what they do. Sorry Tilopa, you don’t even REMOTELY understand the meaning of liberty.
What is the ONLY action compatible with the liberty of other human beings?
Increase liberty, which will increase education, which will increase wealth and kick-start a chain of reactions that will ultimately stabilise population.
In the case of India this means TOTALLY THROWING AWAY SOCIALISM.
And it means finding good leaders who can govern India in a manner that will increase liberty, wealth, and stabilise population.
Remember what I wrote?
India could have had 40 crore less people, with much higher standard of living
For those in India who are DEEPLY confused about population (and are likely to remain so, given that our socialist education system has not taught them to think critically), here's a VERY SIMPLE table.
hope this at least raises a few questions in their mind, if not making clear the underlying dynamics of this reality.
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Year
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Population (billion)
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Per capita income (USD)
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1750
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1
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300
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2010
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7
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10000
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(I've not verified this data but it is likely to be in this ball park.)
A stronger POSITIVE CORRELATION PERHAPS CANNOT BE FOUND IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.
If you break up this data by country you'll IMMEDIATELY realise that the level of freedom explains 90 per cent of the variability in income.
So what we are saying is that FREE PEOPLE become rich.
Here's a simple graph:
This one is an extract from my draft manuscript, DOF. Given that this topic has been raised and most "educated" Indians don't have the capacity to read books, I'm extracting this section for their benefit. Hopefully they can read short extracts.
Please note that the language in the draft below will be significantly improved in the coming months/ years.
I’m not your ‘population problem’!
Some people suggest that there is a population ‘problem’. They say, for instance, that there ‘too many’ people in India. The mean there are too many poor people in India. No one is saying that there are too many rich or ‘beautiful’ people. Perhaps the lowest point of this diatribe against the poor was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb. But even recently, in 2011, The Age entitled an article: ‘Yearning for a baby: why developing countries say they need IVF too’[1]. This impies that mothers from developing countries are different to those from ‘developed countries, and that developing countries are ‘over’-populated. A racist, anti-life sentiment. Why don’t we first ban ‘developed country’ women from using IVF – so they can lead the way? Indeed, why not all developed country people commit suicide first?
Evidently, it doesn’t occur to such paternalistic fools that they are referring to their fellow human beings. It is intolerable for anyone to suggest that the mere presence of others on this vast Earth is a ‘problem’. As I have said above, let such people commit suicide. One less racist, anti-life fool. And why is India’s population a ‘problem’ and not America’s or Europe’s?
Let’s ensure first that all the rich Americans like Bill Gates and Barack Obama – and all film stars and famous people – are sterilised and then we can discuss this issue further.
Such racist views ignore the huge increase of European populations in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the historical context, India is now barely beginning to recover its original ‘share’ of world population after the disproportionate expansion of Europeans during their colonial period (Table yy). I’m not suggesting that ‘historical proportions’ of population have intrinsic meaning, but we must rap the knuckles of those who cry wolf about the so-called ‘large’ number of poor people on earth.
And why did the number of Europeans increase so rapidly in the 18th and 19th centuries? Because of the great boost to commerce, industry and science that arose from advances in liberty and led to startling improvements in health and general prosperity (improvements that Karl Marx the blind ‘economist’ missed). The most significant advance came from simple improvements in sanitation and public health which cut down infant mortality by more than half. Given that it takes time for people to realise that more children will survive than they initially expected, European birth rates rapidly begin to exceed death rates, leading to a massive growth in population. Like in developing countries later, it took decades for European fertility to re-adjust and return to replacement levels. The ‘surplus’ population so generated migrated across the world and – supported by European technical advances – fuelled colonialism and imperialism.
As a result of this massive European ‘population bomb’ the share of undivided India in the world’s population plummeted from 21.5 per cent in 1750, to 17.3 per cent in 1900. This share has barely recovered since then, and will return to around 22 per cent of world population by about 2020, tapering off in due course as birth rates fall with greater freedom.
In that sense India and other developing nations are seeing a delayed return to their ‘orignal’ share of world population, consistent with global advances of freedom and science. It is clearly a good thing that the world now has a higher (and more innovative) population. The Earth can sustain a very large, prosperous human population. Gandhi was entirely wrong (being ignorant both of science and economics) when he is reported to have said: ‘The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed’[2]. I don’t know about greed, but there is enough on Earth for all of mankind, for a very very long time. There is no shortage of resources, since natural resources harldly matter; it is human ingenuity that is relevant.
Table yy: Population of undivided India as a ratio of world population
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World
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India*
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Indian proportion of world population
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1750
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791
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170
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21.49
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1800
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978
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186
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19.02
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1850
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1262
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222
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17.59
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1900
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1650
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285
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17.27
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1950
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2517
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439
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17.44
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1990
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5295
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1078
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20.36
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2025
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8473
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1882
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22.21
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Note: Figures are in millions. *Includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.
Sources: Various, based on research I conducted in 1998 (the 2025 projections were of from reports published in the late 1990s, and may now be over-estimates) [Update using Angus Madison’s last book].
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No relationship between population size and prosperity
Most concerns about so-called ‘excessive’ population are based on ignorance about the way humans choose to reproduce, and about the meaning of ‘natural’ resources. Even some educated Indians have bought into the hysteria created by some people in the West about India’s allegedly ‘large’ population. India’s National Population Policy (2000) thus states: ‘Stabilising population is an essential requirement for promoting sustainable development with more equitable distribution.’[3] But the historical context and moral underpinnings make this an obnoxious policy. But it must also be challenged for erroneously making a link between income (or quality of life, more generally) and population size.
Two mechanisms are supposedly responsible for this alleged ‘relationship. First, a Malthusian route is suggested whereby land and natural resources experience a diminishing marginal capacity to sustain increased population. In relation to this, the point to note is that natural resources only constrain us so long as we haven’t yet thought of new ways to change the situation. But more generally, human abilities far exceed the constraints that nature may impose.
Resource ‘scarcity’ usually vanishes within a fairly short time once markets are allowed to operate freely. This is because of the incentives created by price signals. When it become temporarily scarce, the relevant resource’s price will rise. Alternatives then become economically viable, and, as increasing economies of scale set in, the market demand increases for the alternative ‘resource’, with the new ‘resource’ ending up cheaper than the resource it displaced. More venture capital is invested by businesses in areas where resource constraints are being felt, for that’s where the quick profits will first emerge. Recycling, and inventing more efficient ways to use existing resources, is also more likely with free markets. Where extremely large research costs are involved, and the outcome extremely uncertain, it might be appropriate for a government to subsidise research (the case of fusion energy is perhaps the only one that comes to mind).[4] Box 99 discusses the example of energy.
India’s ‘problem’ is not the size of its population, or its ‘limited’ resources, but that its socialist (centrally controlled) policies and governance make it nearly impossible for businesses to invest profitably in new research, or to introduce substitutes.
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Box 99
Energy: There is no resource shortage
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The second ‘proof’ that population is allegedly a problem is that social investment apparently dissipates when spread over a larger than smaller population. Thus, if a society wants to educate a large number of people, they will apparently end up being educated badly since a fixed sum of money needs to be spread across all of them. This is incorrect, for the more the people, the more the taxpayers (except at the beginning of the demographic transition). Assuming constant marginal tax rates, proportionately more revenue is generated. This yields the same per capita availability of funds for education, as with a lower population. In any event, education is an investment with perhaps the highest rate of return. Funds can be readily borrowed during the demographic transition to educate children who will easily be able to repay this loan in the future because of the wealth generated from education.
Economic growth is ultimately related to the level of freedom in a society. It is totally unrelated to its absolute population size. Instead, there are many benefits of a large population, particularly on the increased level of innovation through network effects (assuming a high quality education system).
In brief, population size is a non-issue. There might be some environmental impacts, but these are minimial in the free society which has developed sufficient resources, scientific knowledge, and technologies to preserve the environment. The setback to the eneviroment in the early stages of industrial development is easily alleviated as greater prosperity emerges. So ultimately we only need one thing: equal freedom. Governments don’t have to get involved in preventing people from being born nor in subsidising new births. Planning for their family should be left to the citizens. After all, determining the size of their family (so long as they remain responsible for its care) is their basic freedom.
[1] http://bit.ly/rgkPFv. The Age, 14 August 2011.
[2] Cited in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, Volume X: The Last Phase, Part II (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1958), page 552.
[3] [http://populationcommission.nic.in/npp_intro.htm]
[4] One has to be very cautious about such things, e.g. see Terence Kealey, Sex, Science and Profits, London: William Heinemann, 2008.
[5] Carl Sagan in Broca’s Brain, New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, p.27.
[6] James A. Lake, former president of the American Nuclear Society in 2000-2001, at
[http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ites/0706/ijee/lake.htm].
[7] Book 2 is freely available at [http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/] though I find the genuine pleasure of reading only comes through the paper edition.
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