by Katherine McKay
The problem of global overpopulation has been considered to be one of the most pressing problems facing our world, because of both present and probable future effects. A great deal of public education has been devoted to persuading people to limit their families, and some governments with dictatorial powers have used coercive as well as persuasive tactics. In China, the rule of one child per family has been carried out with forced abortions where necessary. In India, where placards depicting a happy two-child family are posted everywhere, coerced sterilizations have sometimes been used to hasten the process of birth reduction.
Few people would dispute the necessity of curbing our world population. Libertarians, however, advocate personal rather than governmental solutions to social problems. Is there a free-market solution to the problem of overpopulation?
Children are the most common form of capital formation throughout human history. (I am indebted to The Great Reckoning, by Davidson and Rees-Mogg, for this insight.) Societies without developed financial markets and affluent populations need children as unskilled workers for the family livelihood and as social security for the parents in old age. It makes little difference how much governments exhort people to reduce their birth rates or pass out contraceptives; if there is no way to amass capital in the form of monetary assets, if there is no way to provide financial security for old age, if families need children as workers, people will continue to have many children as a matter of common-sense self-interest. (High infant and child mortality increases the number of children needed to insure that some will survive into adulthood.)
When families are poor and their labor is unskilled, children are economic assets and are produced in quantity. When families accumulate financial assets and cease to need children to labor for them and provide for the parents' old age, children become economic liabilities. The law of supply and demand indicates that the supply of children will thus rise where economic demand for them is great and will fall where economic demand is low. That this law is followed can be seen by comparing the birth rate in industrialized nations with that in developing nations. The birth rate in the former has now fallen to about 1.5 births per woman, below replacement levels, while the rate in the latter is about 3.3 births.
Ben Franklin, in responding to the question of how a young man might secure his fortune, replied that he would do best to marry a widow with nine children. At the end of the 18th century, nine children providing unpaid labor on a farm would produce considerable wealth. At the end of the 20th century, Franklin's advice would be a prescription for bankruptcy.
My own experience in India, where I spent several months in 1971 as a graduate student doing anthropological research in family and kinship systems, led me to a similar, if unexpected, conclusion. The family I researched was large and had many branches. Originally no wealthier than their neighbors in an undeveloped agricultural province of South India, one branch became the leading industrialists of the region by learning modern skills in the city of Madras and establishing businesses in their home city, amassing considerable wealth in the process. I tabulated the lifestyles of several branches of the family and found a clear-cut correlation between wealth, education and exposure to Western customs on one hand, and number of children in the family on the other. People who were not affluent, did not speak English well, had no university training, were craftworkers and lived in the traditional extended family setting (in which brothers and their wives and children all lived with the brothers' parents) tended to have six or more children. People who were affluent from working in the family-owned industries, spoke English well, had university degrees (some from Western universities) and lived in nuclear families apart from their parents and siblings' families had one or two children.
Even religious strictures regarding birth control are overridden by economic considerations. Though the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception and abortion are the same all over the world, in affluent countries they are widely ignored. The majority of American Catholics practice birth control; in Catholic European countries such as Italy and Spain, the birth rate is no higher than in the Protestant European countries. In fact, Catholic Italy now has the lowest birth rate in the world. If this theory is correct, the greater number of children in poor Catholic countries in Latin America and elsewhere has more to do with economics than with religion.
Much has been written on the dangers of large populations with high birth rates becoming affluent and consequently using up far more of the earth's resources than they presently do. I suggest that there is a self-limiting factor at work here. If the current trend of increasing global trade and production of wealth results in stable financial markets developing in such countries, people will no longer have to turn to the extended family and to their grown children for services provided in financially developed countries by insurance companies, banks, capital markets and old-age pensions. If these families abandon subsistence livelihoods to work in the new intellectually-skilled occupations demanded in the Information Age, as many are already doing, children will no longer be needed to provide the family with unskilled labor. As the children of newly- affluent families cease to be producers and become consumers, the advantage of limiting the number of children will be immediately evident to each family. Thus we may find the overpopulation problem solving itself with increased opportunities among populous nations for individuals to better themselves economically.
© Katherine McKay 1997
Resources: James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Great Reckoning, Simon & Schuster, 1993, pp. 170-171 and 300-301.
Nicholas Eberstadt, "The Population Implosion," The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1997.
