CHAPTER 40 THE KEY VALUESCHAPTER 40: TABLE OF CONTENTS Altruism versus Selfishness The Value of a Poor Person's Life The Born and the Unborn What is to be Lost? The Value of Per Capita Income in the Short Run The Value of Saving Versus the Value of Creating The Question About Sound Judgment People as Destroyers and Creators When is Coercion Justified? The Value for Truth Values About Population in Relation to Other Values Summary "If the less stringent curbs on procreation fail, someday perhaps childbearing will be deemed a punishable crime against society unless the parents hold a government license. Or perhaps all potential parents will be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the governments issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."Stewart M. Ogilvy (Honorary President of Friends of the Earth) "Just as we have laws compelling death control, so we must have laws requiring birth control -- the purpose being to ensure a zero rate of population increase. We must come to see that it is the duty of government to protect women against pregnancy as it protects them against job discrimination and smallpox, and for the same reason -- the public good. No longer can we tolerate the doctrinaire position that the number of children a couple has is a strictly private decision carrying no social consequences."Dr. Edward Chasteen The preceding chapter listed values that come into play whenever population issues are discussed - even in scientific discourse. Now let's consider some of these values at greater length - hopefully, not too-great length - because the issues raised in various chapters come together here at the end. Ultimately, every belief about resources, the environment, and population comes down to values. And policies are choices (well- informed, we hope) based on some ranking of these values, though not always expressed or admitted by the policy makers. Altruism versus Selfishness The issue of altruism underlies several of the specific issues below, and appears at various other places in the book. Hence we need to consider the general value for putting a bit of our energy and resources into the community pot for others to have in the future, as well as taking out of the community pot for our own use the resources that our ancestors sacrificed to bestow upon us. This matter came up earlier in discussions of Keynes' phrase "In the long run we are all dead", which implies that we should focus upon only what is good for us and our own generation, rather than consider future generations as well (see chapter 12 and below). Quite analogous is another issue: Should we address ourselves only to the demographic welfare of our particular countries or ethnic or religious groups, or should we take the cosmopolitan view that all human beings' welfare matter to us? Those who have a strong value for the strength and persistence of their own group often believe that it is relative strength that matters, and therefore they prefer that other groups not grow or even decline in size, along with the increase in their own group. Obviously this value affects one's views of various population policies. The lives of people of other countries, ethnicities, and religions matter to me, irrespective of the fates of the groups to which I belong. I take pride and pleasure in the human race as a whole as well as in my own groups. Misunderstanding is common about the connection between particular economic-political philosophies and altruistic values and activity. The free-market ideology in no way precludes a group from redistributing to other groups in the present or future as generously as it chooses; Milton Friedman makes this point again and again. This school of thought argues that redistribution in money is more efficient than redistribution in goods, but there is no limit except community values and wealth on how much a community should redistribute from the richer to the poorer. Conversely, there is nothing in socialist doctrine that makes it incumbent upon one country or group to give from its wealth to those who are poorer. The Malthusian objection to redistribution as restated forcefully in our times by Garrett Hardin - that supporting the poor is a bad policy because it keeps more of them alive to the detriment of all [**cite - see folder] - has no role in the intellectual framework of this book. Both the data and the theory set forth here imply that additional poor persons in this generation do not make others poorer in this and future generations; the supposed depletion of resources upon which the Malthus-Hardin argument hinges is simply wrong. Hence the rest of their argument falls to the ground. More about this issue under the heading "The Born and the Unborn" below. THE VALUE OF A POOR PERSON'S LIFE Some have written that the lives of the very poor are so miserable that an economic policy does them a service if it discourages their births. This assumption obviously depends entirely upon one's values and view of the world. The belief that very poor people's lives are not worth living comes out clearly when Paul Ehrlich writes about India. I came to understand the population explosion emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi.... The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people. Ehrlich writes nothing about people laughing, loving, or being tender to their children - all of which one also sees among the poor in India. Yes, there is misery in India. I, too, have witnessed and winced at it. Intestinal disease is everywhere and blindness is not uncommon. A fourteen-year-old girl catches bricks on a construction job for a dollar a day while her baby, covered with flies and crying, lies on a burlap sack on the ground below the scaffold on which the young mother works. A toothless crone of indeterminate age, with no relatives in the world and no home, begins with a cake of wet cow-dung to lay a floor for a new "dwelling" of sticks and rags, by the side of the road. All this I have seen. And yet these people must think their lives are worth living, or else they would choose to stop living. (Please notice that to choose death does not require violent suicide. Anthropologists describe individuals - even young people - who decide they want to die and then do so. Frail people frequently even die on their own schedules, waiting until after weddings or birthdays of relatives.) Because people continue to live, I assume that they value their lives positively. And those lives therefore have value in my scheme of things. Hence I do not believe that the existence of poor people - either in poor countries or, a fortiori in the U.S. - is a sign of "overpopulation." The most important scientific magazine in the world headed a news story "Planetary Malignancy", and went on to precis an article likening the "proliferation of human communities" to "a malignant ecopathological process" that is "ultimately ecocidal." Based on the same notion that population growth is a destructive phenomenon - without any mention of the value of life in itself - the recently-declassified U.S. National Security Council 1974 basic plan describes continuing covert U.S. population control programs in Africa that utilize just about every dirty political and media trick to coerce the Africans to have fewer children. These programs run the risk of causing destructive political fallout for the United States, as happened in India in the 1970s when the U. S. was implicated in coercive sterilization programs. (This subject was discussed at greater length in the first edition, Chapter 00, and will be discussed further in a book I hope follows soon.) THE BORN AND THE UNBORN One hears that "It doesn't make sense to take into account the lives of people who have not yet been born." This comes up in two contexts: 1) with respect to the long- run effects of population growth upon the economy 50 or 100 or 200 years in the future; and 2) when someone like me suggests that the level of per capita income in the short run is not the only criterion, and not the end-all and be-all of population economics, but that the sheer number of people alive, enjoying life, may also be relevant. In reality, most people and all societies act in ways that show concern for people who have not yet been born, whether or not they justify these actions metaphysically. Governments build public works to last beyond the lifetimes of the present generation, explicitly taking future generations into account. And young families take their own unborn children into account when they save money or buy a house with enough space for children. So taking unborn children into account is a basic fact of life, and hence requires no defense when we are considering the long-run as well as the short-run benefits of population growth. Furthermore, many of the people who make this objection are themselves ecologists who properly urge that we should take a long-run view of the planet's welfare. It seems to me that it would be sensible for ecologists to apply the same sort of thinking to economics as they do to biology and the environment. But let us go further. Some people say that they cannot feel a concern for unborn children. Granted. But does this imply that it is foolish or impossible for others to feel such a concern? You certainly can feel concern for someone you do not know - and similarly for an unborn person. For example, prospective parents often imagine terrible events in which their unborn children would be injured or killed; this thought can arouse an emotion much stronger than an imagined (or real) scene in which a living person on another continent, of another race and nationality, is injured or killed. It seems to me beyond doubt that at least some people feel a sentimental tie to children who are not yet born, and who might not be born. Given that some people take unborn children into account, it is clear that the importance of unborn children can vary among persons, all the way from zero to high. This is the sort of value about which economics and other science has nothing to say. As an individual, I myself attribute value to unborn children. And since this value gets so little public expression - some people assuming that it does not exist - I will take this opportunity to say a few words about it, even at the risk of seeming preachy. Holding the standard of living constant, I think it better to have more rather than fewer people. Even if more people implied a somewhat lower long-run income level - which is not the case - I would be in favor of a somewhat lower standard of living per person if more people were alive to enjoy it. But what does it mean to like the idea of more people? To me it means that I do not mind having more people in the cities I live in, and seeing more children going to school or playing in the park. I would be even more pleased if there were more cities and more people in unsettled areas - or if there were another planet like this one. It means that if faster growth means more crowded parking lots for a while, I prefer having the more people. Others see it differently, as seen in that Planned Parenthood bumper sticker: "Population Growth: How Dense Can You Get?" I hold this value for more life because it is generally consistent with the rest of my preferences and tastes. It is a value that many other people hold, too, perhaps unconsciously. And others may come to recognize its importance to them as they come to recognize, as I did, that population growth bodes well rather than ill for civilization, in the long run. Keynes's remark "In the long run we are all dead" came up earlier. Within that clever phrase lies much of the confusion, and much of the conflict over values, that is at the heart of discussions about population growth. Let us focus first on the word "we". Its definition determines whether Keynes's remark is literally true or literally false. If "we" means those of us who are now having this discussion, the remark is literally true. But if "we" includes our children, and our children's children, and their children, and on and on, then the remark is literally not true, because that chain of being need not ever end. So which meaning of "we" should we adopt? (If neither makes sense, then the remark is obviously meaningless.) This is a matter of values. And here we should note that the basic ecological viewpoint - which I respect greatly - assumes the ongoing "we", as is implicit in ecology's attention to the long-run, and indirect effects of contemporary actions. And this "we" is thoroughly in keeping with the viewpoint that we should not consider only the benefits that we ourselves can derive from present-day changes, but we should also consider the benefits that we should bestow upon our posterity as our ancestors bestowed benefits upon us. Unfortunately, however, many persons who call themselves ecologists compound confusion by concurrently using both definitions of "we". When someone like me says that we ought to reckon not just the immediate but also the long-run effects of population growth, these persons parrot Keynes's remark. (You hear it so often it really does sound like a parrot.) But when I or another economist put less weight on the same event a century from now than now, and laugh at worrying about what might happen seven billion years from now, these same persons accuse us of being selfishly myopic. The only approach to this issue which is not hopelessly inconsistent with itself, and which enables us to make sensible decisions about public and private policies, is to use the concept of discounting future events with an appropriate discount factor. This is one of the handful of most basic economic ideas, and its use is crucial here. WHAT IS TO BE LOST? The following catchy argument, derived from Pascal's Wager, is found in Ehrlich's Population Bomb: If population control is undertaken and is successful in preventing births, but it turns out to be unnecessary, then what is lost? As mentioned in the Introduction, Ehrlich and others suggest that nothing is lost. But unlike the case with Pascal's Wager, where the only "loss" is that the wagerer lives a righteous life without "needing" to, one's answer to Ehrlich's question depends upon one's values. If you value additional human lives, and some lives are unnecessarily prevented from being lived, that is an obvious loss. The fact that this is not a loss in Ehrlich's eyes tells us his implicit values. This point of view does not square with the Dr. Seuss headnote to chapter 39. The Ehrlich argument boils down to an inverted (or perverted) Golden Rule: Do unto others - prevent their existence - what you are glad no one did to you. There is an unhappy analog here to the "compassion" shown by special interest groups and legislators when they "generously" manipulate the governmental mechanism to take money from some taxpayers in order to give it to some other persons or activities whom they think deserving. This is charity on the cheap - the sense of doing good without having to sacrifice from your own pocket to pay for it. This is often seen in initiatives labeled as "saving the environment". The population control analog is that the Ehrlich doctrine takes away from those who might live them the lives that they might live, and the lives of children from parents who would like to bring them into the world and enjoy them. And Ehrlich et al., recommend this policy without first showing the way by sacrificing their own lives - which I would guess they would claim are too valuable to be sacrificed (and about which I would agree! We need all of us.) They are giving others' lives away under the justification that it is good for the unborn not to live, and for the rest of humanity that they not live. Ehrlich et. al. sometimes say that they themselves abstain from having children, or limit their number, for the good of others. Maybe this is their intention, or maybe they are claiming as a sacrifice something they would do anyway. If they are really abstaining, it is most regrettable, because their children - like others - would enrich the rest of us, on balance. THE VALUE OF PER CAPITA INCOME IN THE SHORT RUN Economists have long used the concept of an "optimum population" for a given country, which sounds very scientific. But discussions about optimum population sizes or growth rates must have some criterion of better and worse, and this criterion is usually the short-run per capita income of the present population, including the "quality of life" as income. No one, however, is prepared to take the short-run income criterion to its logical conclusions: do away with lower-income people. Removing the lower half of the income distribution in any country will raise the average income of the remaining people by simple arithmetic. And logically this should continue to the point at which only one person is left - the richest person at the start. Of course this is absurd, but it is the kind of absurdity that the criterion leads to. Here is another way to raise per capita income and wealth in the short run, then: Drive the birthrate down to ridiculously low levels, and perhaps to zero births - the particular level depending upon the weight one gives to the future relative to the present. For example, if the future is discounted at, say, 10 percent per year, the value of per-person income would be maximized into the infinite future if people stop having babies completely. This is because it takes a long time before babies begin to produce, though they consume immediately. Hence a baby born today lowers the income of everyone else, on average, by simple arithmetic. So having no babies at all next year would be good for computed per capita income next year. But no one wants to go that far with the average-income criterion, either. The value that in the past I subscribed to as a criterion for decisions about population growth is one that I think a great many other people also subscribe to, as they will find if they inspect their beliefs closely. In utilitarian terms it is "the greatest good for the greatest number." Under the influence of Hayek's writing, however, I no longer rely on this value because the idea of adding people's happinesses is fraught with difficulties so great that it is unworkable. Instead, I now use what I call the "expanded Pareto optimum" - that is, that if no one is made worse off, and there are more people to enjoy life, that is a preferable state of affairs. And in the long run, population growth is consistent with a larger expanded Pareto optimum. Other things being equal, a greater number of people is a good thing, according to this value criterion. If forced to choose, I might well prefer to have more people and a lower per capita income in the immediate future. But even if such conditions were to exist, any income decline would be only temporary; in the long run, per capita income will be higher if there are more children (or more immigrants) now. Hence this choice is an unlikely one. (This leaves aside the issue that any trade-off between fewer people and less income implies government coercion, which I would find odious even if there were an economic argument in its favor - which there is not.) This criterion seems to be consistent with our other values - our abhorrence of killing, and our desire to prevent disease and early death. Indeed, why should we feel so strongly that murder is bad, and that children in war-torn countries should be saved, and then not want to bring more people into the world? If life is good and worth supporting, why does preventing murder make sense, but not encouraging births? I understand well that a death causes grief to the living - but I am sure that your abhorrence of killing would also extend to the extermination of a whole group at once, under which conditions there would be no one to suffer grief. So, what are the differences between the murder of an adult, the infanticide of another's child, and the coercion of someone else not to have a child? The main difference between murder and forcing someone not to bear children is that murder threatens our own persons, and unregulated murder would rip up the fabric of our society - good reasons indeed to be against murder. But we also condemn murder on the moral ground that murder denies life to someone else - and in this respect (and only in this respect) it seems to me that there is no difference between murder, abortion, contraception, and abstinence from sex. I am not equating abortion or contraception to murder, and I am not branding as immoral all who do not have as many children as are biologically possible. Nor do I want to impose upon you my own values, and these their conclusions. Rather, I just wish us to get clear on the meaning of the moral distinctions we make. Again, lest these words be taken out of context - and they probably will anyhow - I am not equating murder to abortion or contraception. What I am saying is that the single similarity among them - acting so that potential human life will not be lived - should make us aware of the full consequences of abortion and contraception. THE VALUE OF SAVING VERSUS THE VALUE OF CREATING The conflict between the value of saving versus the value of creating is personified by auto mechanic Louis Wichinsky. He worked out a system for his car to burn vegetable oil, and his input is the used vegetable oil he gets from the deep- frying operations at his local diner and Burger King. Curiously, though he is a creative person - witness his invention - he turns the creative energy to saving old oil, rather than to developing better ways to create the new oil that he believes should be obtained from rapeseed. His only contribution to the issue of how to produce the oil is to say some southern states should be "ordered to grow nothing but rapeseed". This predilection away from building and toward saving - usually through government coercion of other people - is seen in the money-collecting campaigns of "environmental" organizations. Next time someone comes to your door to ask for donations - often in the guise of asking for your signature to a petition - ask some close questions. It is likely that the solicitor will collect for an environmental organization; every stranger who has come to our door for the past eight years has been from an environmental organization. (This excludes the Girl Scouts and the cancer and heart groups, who are neighbors.) Ask if the solicitor is getting paid, and you will learn that he/she gets a commission of thirty percent or more "off the top", with other chunks going to the persons up the line. Then ask what the organization will use the residual money for, and the answer always is: political activity, and consciousness raising (which often means soliciting more money). Never will the money be used to clean up a playground or to plant trees, and certainly not to build a hospital or a park. The aim is not to build and create, but only to "protect" - which usually means stopping the progress of others who want to build factories, stores, waste disposal facilities, homes, and resorts. THE QUESTION ABOUT SOUND JUDGMENT The organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) placed a newspaper advertisement in which they compared the meatpacking industry to a notorious mass killer who ate the dead bodies of his victims. The same organization seeks to ban the horsedrawn tourist carriages in Washington, D.C. And animal rights groups have successfully halted research on brain injuries that involve shooting 125 anesthetized cats in the brain each year. What should one make of such ideas? Are the implicit values lopsided? A key failing of many doomsayers with respect to the environment is a lack of proportion in their judgments, together with a willingness to force those judgments upon others. If homeowner Green is so concerned about his/her lawn that s/he does not want to have any children lest her/his kids trample the grass, one would consider this attitude not illogical but somehow out of proportion -- a bit hysterical, perhaps. If, however, Green begins to agitate that no one else in the neighborhood should have children because the neighbor children might trample on Green's lawn, or on the lawns of still other homeowners, one would consider Green to be a bit nutty - or perhaps dangerously nutty. This is akin to doomsayers' behavior with respect to various potential dangers -- nuclear power, chemical contamination, and so on. In such cases the doomsayers are literally prepared to throw out the baby with the bath water. (Indeed, the phrase seems made to fit this situation.) They are prepared to sacrifice massive benefits to others to reduce low-probability risks to themselves. Not only do the doomsayers seem to make evaluations that are out of proportion - the dangers tend to be exaggerated - but they wholly overlook the potential positive long-run effects of the problems induced by the additional people. Maybe kids running over the lawn do not benefit us by causing improvements in lawn-care technology. But more people putting pollutants into the air eventually leads to the search for solutions which eventuates in inventions that in the end leave us better off than if the problem had not arisen. It is this crucial dynamic process that is wholly left out of the doomsayers' thinking on these matters, and it makes their behavior even less appropriate to the situation -- and therefore even more hysterical. With respect to natural resources, the lack of proportion in thought, and the resulting hysteria, apparently result from a wholly incorrect assessment of the trends. The usual historical process again is: a) more people, b) more problems, c) more search for solutions, d) finding solutions that leave us better off than before we had begun. The evidence for this process is powerful: the observed long-run increase in availability rather than increasing scarcity of natural resources, as shown by the prices. These apocalyptics are "un-balanced", in the most basic sense. The media contribute to this - while literally paying lip-service to "balance" - by playing up the most dramatic forecasts of doom that they can find a justification for publishing. One journalist wrote that he prefers that there would be another 7,000 elephants on earth rather than another billion people. The tradeoff here is more than a hundred thousand people for one elephant. Does he really mean that? Is each elephant worth 100,000 people? In what sense? How would this square with other judgments we make in society? One can think it important that we have elephants in zoos, in game reserves, and other places where we human beings can benefit from them, but not think of elephants' lives as being good in themselves. This is in contrast to the view that elephants' lives are good in themselves, even if they are not part of our human life at all. One cannot logically quarrel with the latter value. But perhaps those concerned about elephants might ask themselves whether their viewpoint is consistent with their abhorrence of the death of a person unnecessarily, or a person's sickness. For some, non-human nature simply comes before anything human. There is a conflict about water that is used in towns and in Everglades National Park, where the great white heron and the American crocodile use it. The Park superintendent said, "We have urban demands, agricultural needs and the park all competing. When the pie is divided, we want guarantees that the park's slice comes out first." Where is a sensible balance between yew trees and the lives of cancer patients? About sixty pounds of yew bark - which means the death of about three yew trees - is required to treat a single breast-cancer patient. The National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club fought against the Forest Service harvesting the trees for this purpose. Judgment comes into play here in two respects: 1) the specific tradeoff between the lives of trees and people that is considered acceptable; and 2) the likelihood that the endpoint will be the extinction of yew trees. The second judgment quickly proved unsound; the synthesis of taxol - the product derived from the yew bark - was quickly developed. Hence the yew is most unlikely to be wiped from the face of the earth. Certainly there is some reasonable trade-off between human beings and animals (a subject which was introduced earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 10). If I am told that a fireman died to save the lives of a zoo, or a forest reserve full of animals, I am saddened but not horrified or outraged, any more that I am if a fireman dies to save a museum full of paintings. The key question is: what trade-offs will we consider thinkable and reasonable? One fireman for one elephant? or a thousand firemen for one elephant? or one fireman for 8,000 elephants? Dave Foreman, the founder of the Earth First! group which engages in "ecological sabotage" such as pulling up survey stakes, pouring sand into the crankcases of bulldozers, toppling power line towers, and putting spikes in trees one of which shattered the blades of a timber saw and nearly killed its operator. - offers this tradeoff: "[A]n individual human life has no more intrinsic life that does an individual Grizzly Bear life." And the slogan of PETA's philosophy is "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." These values affect our daily life. An animal rights group made clear that for public choices the life of a human is of no more value in their scheme of things than the life of a baboon. A baboon liver was transplanted into a man who would otherwise die, and who could not even use a human liver transplant if it were available. The result: "An animal rights group said it will picket the hospital Tuesday to protest the use of animals as organ donors...`Animals are more than spare parts for humans'" said People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). And after the boy died, a spokesman for the Fund for Animals said, "Animal rights groups should feel vindicated, though we don't applaud the death of any person." So even if we agree that there is some number of trees or animals that might be traded for a human life, the number matters a lot. Unlike George Bernard Shaw's remark - Now that we have established what you are, madam, it is simply a matter of deciding on the price - the price matters greatly in human-animal tradeoffs, and in fact reveals what one's principles are. The implicit cost of saving a single condor or wild burro may be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This may be far more than the cost of saving an additional human life by building better highways, say. Does this valuation by the doomsayers seem in reasonable proportion, given our other values? It seems to rest on the idea of "save the burros (or the snail darter) at any cost." Indeed, in surveys people often say we must save the environment "at any cost." But if the respondents themselves were forced to pay that cost in some way -- that is, if their remarks were to be translated into some action that they themselves could control or pay for -- it is not likely that they would so wholeheartedly back these statements with action. Yet these poorly-constructed survey questions influence policymakers. PEOPLE AS DESTROYERS AND CREATORS "If we have more children, when they grow up there will be more adults who can push the nuclear button and kill civilization," some say. True. More generally, as one writer reduced the matter to an absurdity: "All human problems can be solved by doing away with human beings." But to have more children grow up is also to have more people who can find ways to avert catastrophe. WHEN IS COERCION JUSTIFIED? Chapters 20 and 21 discussed coercion with respect to conservation and waste disposal. Now the subject is coercion with respect to the number of children people have. Some people advocate forced birth control "if necessary." Again to quote Ehrlich, "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." Garrett Hardin is even more explicit in his famous "The Tragedy of the Commons", saying "Freedom to breed is intolerable." He refers to his viewpoint as "lifeboat ethics". The logic for having the state control the number of children parents may rear has been stated as follows. In conditions of scarcity the civil right to have unlimited births simply does not exist. Such a claim [the right to have children] is attention-getting and suspect. It is a favorite argument of minorities in support of their own overproduction of births. The right to have children fits into the network of other rights and duties we share and must dovetail with the rights of others. When all of us must curtail our production of children none of us has an overriding civil right of this kind. The closer we live together and the more of us there are, the fewer civil rights we can exercise before they infringe upon those of another. This adverse relation between dense population and personal freedom is easily documented around the world. It is time for people sincerely interested in civil rights to expose such special pleading, and to intervene when it is leveled against local or national programs. A briefer statement is that of Kingsley Davis: "It can be argued that over- reproduction - that is, the bearing of more than four children - is a worse crime than most and should be outlawed." Many Americans have become persuaded of the necessity of such coercion, as these Roper poll results show: Q. The population crisis is becoming so severe that people will have to be limited on the number of children they can have. A. Agree 47% Disagree 41% And the astonishing kinds of programs that have been suggested in the "population community" are summarized in table 40-1. Some countries have enacted into law coercive policies with respect to fertility. In India during the first Indira Ghandi period, in the state of Tamil Nadu, "Convicts... who submit to sterilization [could] have their jail term reduced"; and in the state of Uttar Pradesh, "Any government servant whose spouse is alive and who has three or more children must be sterilized within three months, pursuant to a state government order issued under the Defense of Internal Security of India Rules. Those failing to do so will cease to be entitled to any rationed article beyond the basic four units." In the state of Maharastra, population 50 million, the legislature passed an act requiring compulsory sterilization for all families with three or more children (four or more if the children were all boys or all girls), but this measure did not receive the necessary consent of the President of India. And in other states in India, in Singapore, and perhaps elsewhere, public housing, education, and other public services have been at times conditioned on the number of children a family has. It is this possibility of coercion - by penalty, taxation, physical compulsion, or otherwise - that concerns me most. Singapore has now reversed its course and on eugenics grounds (see page 000) now offers incentives for middle-class persons to have more children than they would otherwise choose to bear. (This switch should be sobering to any country that wants to restrict births.) But I am against government pressure in either direction, both because I am opposed to such pressure in itself as well as because I do not think that any government knows better than the parents what will be good for the society as a whole. I hope you share my belief that it is good for people to have the greatest freedom to run their own lives. Such a desire for individual self-determination is entirely consistent with full information about birth control, because information increases ability to have the wanted number of children. It is also consistent with legal abortion (but also consistent with abhorring abortion). And it is consistent with public health and nutrition measures to keep alive all the children that people wish to bring into the world. I am unqualifiedly in favor of all these policies to increase the individual's ability to achieve the family size she or he chooses. The same belief leads me to be against coercing people not to have children. By definition, coercion reduces people's freedom to make their own decisions about their own lives. Following on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, there was much discussion about human rights in China. But the largest-scale violation of human rights in China - indeed, aside from the killing campaigns and famines in the Soviet Union and China, one of the grossest violations of human rights in history - is the denial to 100 million Chinese couples of the right to have another child. More specifically, at issue is the forcing of IUDs into the wombs of 100 million Chinese women against their will, the compulsory X-rays of these women every three months to ensure that the IUDs have not been removed, and the punishment and sometimes forced abortion of those women who have children anyway. Added in 1993 to this long-standing policy was a proposal for compulsory abortions and sterilizations, as well as a ban against marrying, for people with "hepatitis, venereal disease or mental illness"; also mooted by the Chinese was a policy to kill "congenitally abnormal" children. The province of Gansu already had a program in operation of mandatory sterilization for the "mentally retarded" . There is a puzzle here: Why do we not hear from the feminist movement about this violation of women's rights? Or from Planned Parenthood about this violation of reproductive rights? Or from the African-American organizations about the U.S. actions in Africa to coerce governments to reduce their birth rates? Non-interference with other countries is a non-issue in this context; Planned Parenthood has long been involved in international population control activities. What's going on here? In the first edition I wrote: " Though I would vote against any overall U.S. policy that would coerce people not to have children - including taxes on children greater than the social cost of the children - I do accord to a community the right to make such a decision if there is a consensus on the matter." I would not write that now. I have seen more and more evidence of how poorly governmental regulation of private activities turns out - how often the results are just the opposite of what was intended (see Chapters 00 and 00 on agriculture and the environment) - just as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have long argued. I also have been increasingly impressed by the likelihoods that a) the so-called cleverest people are wrong about these and other fundamental matters - see the comments on pages 000 about how wrong have been the predictions with respect to population and resources of economist John Maynard Keynes, philosopher Bertrand Russell, Nobel-winning mathematical economists Paul Samulelson, Wassily Leontief (member of the board of Population-Environment Balance), Jan Tinbergen, James Meade, and many many others; and b) the willingness (or eagerness) of such clever people to bend government policy and hence the lives of a country's citizens to the yoke of their ideas, to disastrous ends; the example of the eugenics movement in Great Britain (here I mention Keynes again, Nobel-prize winning mathematical economist James Meade, the founders of the population research establishment in Great Britain - whom I honor for their many path-breaking scientific discoveries in demography, despite the origin of their interest) and of course the horrible history of the eugenics idea and population control in Nazi Germany. I am not saying that many of the contemporary activities of organizations that began with the wrongest and most dangerous ideas about human nature believed in by their founders such as Margaret Sanger (see her autobiography) should now be considered tainted; I think that the population-control organizations should be examined for what they are now, not for what they were then. But I do believe that there is a continuing dangerous possibility that such organizations get so carried away by their general beliefs in the necessity of population control that they want to impose their ideas through the government apparatus, and I now do not believe that the government ever should have the right to do so, all the more because I have seen how these matters so often proceed on the basis of scientific ignorance and messianic zeal. THE VALUE FOR TRUTH Perhaps the most important value in discussions of population and environmental policy is the value for truth. Journalists often inquire into scholars' motivations. Several have asked me, "Why are you saying these things?" They seem doubtful when I answer that my strongest motivation is simply to find and state the truth about these matters. But perhaps this would seem more credible if you know when I originally got interested in the economics of population I had exactly the opposite belief that I now have - I believed that population growth was, along with war, the greatest of dangers to humanity. It was only after I began to study the subject and found that the data did not support that original belief that my thoughts changed. And I was not disposed to close my eyes to the evidence because it did not square with my original beliefs. Rather, it was my beliefs that had to change, and I felt the need to study the subject more deeply to arrive at a satisfactory body of theory and empirical information. That's how I got into this field - just the opposite of being drawn to the field by beliefs that I now hold. (Does this mean that I claim to be perfectly truthful in all aspects of my life? Of course not; I'm as human as the next person.) In my view, untruth is the ugliest and most dangerous pollution that humans face today. It is just about the only current pollution that cannot somehow be transformed into a product of value. The various chapters contain many illustrations of statements so contrary to fact that they are either the product of ignorance or cynical dishonesty - between which it is often difficult to distinguish. Occasionally, however, one comes upon a falsehood so blatant that it seems impossible that it is other than an out-and-out lie. The self-confessed lie of the Club of Rome detailed in Chapter 00 is one example. Here is another, authored by the Sierra Club: "Giant lumber companies...are deforesting the U. S. at the fastest pace in our history (fundraising letter, no date). Compare that statement with the figures in chapter 10 that show an increase rather than a decrease in U.S. timber growth. Still another example is found in the following statement by Haroun Tazieff, an eminent volcanologist who served as French secretary of state for the prevention of natural and industrial disasters, about his experience with dioxins and PCBs: [When] I was ... a Citizen Lambda [John Doe] I had believed in what was thus universally and imperatively affirmed as incontestable truth: that PCBs, and the dioxins they emit when heated to 300o Celsius, were frightful poisons. One or two years of this propaganda had led government officials -- just as incompetent as I was in matters of polychlorobiphenyls -- to make them officially illegal. A half-dozen years later, I found myself responsible for the prevention of disasters, natural and technological, for the French government. The natural ones I knew quite well, since they are related to my profession. As for technological disasters, it was necessary to inform myself. The very first dossier I asked to have delivered to me -- so much had I been convinced of the extreme hazard of PCBs -- was the one on the explosion at the chemical plant in Seveso, Italy, in July 1976. The study of this dossier and the inquest I led at the time revealed to me, first of all, that this so-called catastrophe had had not one single victim. (This gives the "Hiroshima of Chemistry," as it had been baptized by an ostensibly serious monthly science magazine, a tinge of anticlimax.) Second, I learned that dioxins, according to the judgment of all the actual experts consulted (and of the very knowledgeable Academy of Science), are not at all "frightful" and have never, anywhere, killed anyone. Thus, the matter of presenting the industrial accident at the ICMESA factory in Seveso as an apocalyptic catastrophe was a matter of deliberate disinformation -- in less diplomatic language what one calls a lie. The stories of Love Canal and Agent Orange in Vietnam are quite similar to that of Seveso. Sometimes public figures are frank about ignoring or manipulating the facts. Ambassador Richard Benedick stated: "A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect." Former Senator Tim Wirth said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing anyway, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Here is another report, about Senator Albert Gore Jr., a U.S. vice-presidential candidate in 1992: Lately Gore and the distinguished biologist Paul Ehrlich have ventured into dangerous territory by suggesting that journalists quietly self-censor environmental evidence that is not alarming, because such reports, in Gore's words, "undermine the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." The fact that there are any such reports in print is amazing, because people try to hide evidence of dishonest tactics. The existence of such public reports is strong evidence that a lot of this is going on. And it suggests that the participants are so convinced of the virtue of their ends that they believe that any means are justified, no matter how indecent. Here is my own value in this connection (whether or not I manage to live up to it): I believe that one should never shade the truth for effect, no matter how slight the exaggeration or the omission, and no matter how important the issue. And I believe that anyone who desires the label "scientist" - as I do - owes it to readers to present a balanced selection of the available evidence, even when one desires to advocate a particular point of view (which is entirely compatible with being a scientist). Yes, I try to put matters as sharply as possible, both to catch your attention and make my exposition as clear as I can, which leads some critics to label me "extreme" or "exaggerated" or "intemperate". But writing pointedly is very different from manipulation of the evidence to achieve those aims. I hold this value for its own sake, and also because I believe that tampering with the truth is harmful in the long run - possibly harmful to one's own cause (John Stuart Mill taught excellently in On Liberty that people with minority views inevitably lose much more than they gain if they resort to the cheap tricks that people espousing majority views can get away with), and surely harmful to the overall cause of human progress. I do not claim that I live up to this ideal perfectly, only that I hold the value. Herman Kahn liked to say, "I'm not an optimist, I'm a realist". I aspire to describe the situation as it really is. Based on the trends, the future looks extremely bright. But that conclusion emerges from the data and from the theory built on those facts, not from a predetermined point of view. Many do not believe that scientists should simply try to tell it like it is. For example, climatologist Stephen Schneider - who has been the most vigorous academic proponent of the view that the planet is warming due to CO2 and other emissions, and that governments should intervene in individual's lives to change the course of events - takes this position: On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but -- which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do this we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. The italics in the quotation above are mine, and indicate the quotation that I had intended to provide here. But Schneider complained that that quote (which I also used elsewhere) was not "in context". So I am happy to include the entire section. My understanding of "out of context" fits this joke: Tell your child about how little Billy Beaver builds his little dam, and your child says: "You said 'dam'". In this light, I do not consider that the italicised words are out of context. But I am delighted to report that Schneider also now rejects the statement. As to whether he was originally correctly quoted, I cannot know. Though Schneider says the quotation is a "distortion" and threatened legal action if this quote is used, he did not mention suing the original source of the quote and obtaining a correction. A curious aspect of Schneider's case is that (as discussed in Chapter 00) in the 1970s - a short time before he began to offer up scary scenarios of global warming - he had urged that the planet is cooling, and that steps should be taken to mitigate that effect. So one wonders: Does this sort of person ever stop and ask himself such questions as: Why should anyone believe me now if I was so wrong then? Would it have been a good thing if I had then been more effective in getting the public's attention? What about if I had stretched the truth then as I now advocate doing - would that have been a good thing? Another example of bending the truth for environmental ends is the supposed Fifth Gospel speech of the 19th century Suquamish Indian Chief Seattle about how "The earth is our mother...I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes..." and so on. The speech was written by a scriptwriter for a 1972 film. And though the truth has long since been made known, the environmental groups continue to publicize the speech. A children's book about the speech sold 280,000 copies in six months, and was nominated for an American Booksellers Association Abby Award. (The winner of the award the previous year was a faked autobiography of a white man who claimed to have been raised by Cherokee Indians.) Still another example: Tom Horton, a Chesapeake Bay Foundation staff member, and Cindy Dunn, a field officer of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, discussed the relationship of publicity to the state of the bay. "I think it's safe to say it's declining", says Dunn. "Changing", says Horton. Why, then, is it so frequently described as dying? "To raise money," Horton says, laughing. "It's hard to get people's attention," says Dunn. If you said the bay is suffering from eutrophication, you've just glazed over your public [s' eyes]." Here is how truth was perverted by network television in Somalia: In the famine-stricken town of Baidoa, the crew set up an expensive satellite system in the courtyard of the regional hospital, so the well-paid correspondent could broacast live with scenes of people dying in the background. The crew also wanted to film a surgeon performing an abdominal operation - but asked to place a garbage pail filled with bloody, amputated limbs on the operating table, next to the patient, because it would make a better image. An unusual view from the inside of the truth-bending process comes from Gene Lyons, a Newsweek writer who initiated a story on wildlife in Yellowstone Park, following on a book by Alston Chase that was very critical of the National Park Service. The series of event were, in brief, that "the National Park Service lied - not once, but many times. Most distressing of all, however, was that my editors bought it." And the decision-makers "bought it" not because the truth was not brought to their attention but because "They're afraid of it." Nor was that occurrence unusual. The "NPS has been sacrosanct for so long that it has grown unaccustomed to dealing with reporters who do any more than write down what they're told and compose what are known in the trade as `puff pieces.'" Lyons, a writer with very considerable credentials who quit his job because of this incident of falsification of the truth, concludes as follows: "What my story tells readers...is difficult to say. At present the urban-sentimental, wildlife-as-welfare-client view of natural resource issues is the prevailing belief of the national press." One does not often find documentation of falsification such as Lyons provided, because it is human nature that few of us are willing and consider themselves able to throw up a job in defense of the truth. Here again is the headnote from chapter 18: Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge pollution] debate is the false information being disseminated by well-meaning zealots who oppose any human activity on the Coastal Plain. Do they believe that their cause is so just that they are above and beyond the truth? (Walter Hickel, former governor of Alaska, 1991). Caring about getting the facts right - especially the numbers - is a crucial part of commitment to the truth. Consider the species-loss case in chapter 31, and the Kurt Waldheim statement about famine in chapter 00. Still another example is the assertion that "140,000 Mexican women die yearly from illegal abortions", given in the medical magazine Hippocrates, which got the number from a book by Alan Riding, a former New York Times reporter. The assertion is patently ridiculous, because the total number of deaths from any cause of women in the childbearing ages of 15-44 was only about 20,000 per year in the 1980s. Upon inquiry by another journalist, neither the magazine nor the book author nor prestigious publisher Alfred A. Knopf would correct the error. Some combinations of pride and ideology can be greater than commitment to truth. VALUES ABOUT POPULATION IN RELATION TO OTHER VALUES There is a tendency among most of us human beings to attribute an entire constellation of values that are not ours to people who differ from us in some particular value. This polarization often is used to make our opponents seem to be devils so as to get others to reject the opponents and the particular value in issue. Population and political attitudes are an excellent case in point. Those who are for (against) population control and consider themselves to be of the political Right refer to those who are against (for) population control as being on the political Left; those who are for (against) population control and consider themselves to be of the political Left refer to those who are against (for) population control as being on the political Right. Those who do not accept the view of population growth presented in my work have referred to this view both as Leftist and Marxist, and as Rightist and Radical Rightist. Because the Reagan Administration was closer to this view than the previous Carter Administration, and than the Democratic Congress, Planned Parenthood has spent large sums of money "accusing" those who are against population control of being the "Radical Right" (see Figure ??-1). Figure ??-1 In fact, views about population growth (and about immigration) span the political spectrum, and all political groups are split on these issues. The only exception is the Libertarians - who vehemently reject both the labels "Liberal" and "Conservative", and are consistently in favor of complete reproductive freedom and against barriers to immigration, both on grounds of their value of free choice. The Austrian economists, and Milton Friedman, share this and many other views with the Libertarians, and reject the label "Conservative" when others apply it to them (see Hayek's essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative" though they do not consider themselves to be Libertarians in general; if the reader insists on placing me in some niche, the closest niche is that of Hayek and Friedman (who disagree with each other in many important ways), and more generally, the niche of David Hume and Adam Smith. It should be noted here, however, that the nineteenth century writer who had the soundest understanding and presented the best statement of population economics, taking into account the role of knowledge creation, was Friedrich Engels, and through him, Marx. SUMMARY Science alone does not, and cannot, reach conclusions whether any population size is too large or too small, or whether the growth rate is too fast or too slow. Science can sometimes give citizens and policy makers a better understanding of the consequences of one or another decision about population. Sadly, however, scientific work on this subject has too often only misinformed and confused people. Social and personal decisions about childbearing, immigration, and death inevitably hinge upon values as well as upon probable consequences. There is necessarily a moral dimension to these decisions over and beyond whatever insights science may yield. REFS *The entire matter was investigated by James A. Miller and published in Population Research Institute Review, Volume 1, March/April 1991, and May/June, 1991. OUT Perhaps if people come to recognize that such social decisions are a matter of values, and that science cannot prove that we are overpopulated or on the road to overpopulation, people may be less likely to choose to coerce members of their own group not to have children. DO AS I DO? OR AS I SAY? "How can one call upon people in poor countries to reduce their birthrates if we in rich countries go on having many children?" This pious sentiment is frequently heard. Some countries' populations may be growing so fast that on balance a reasonable citizen might want to slow down the birthrate. If the citizens of Singapore decide that immediately increasing the economic welfare per person is worth the price in slowed population growth, then someone with my values can accept most programs that will help them achieve their goals. I especially sympathize with the goal of enabling poor people to feel that, for themselves and for their children, the future will be economically better than the present. It is good to be able to believe that individuals and societies have a chance to get ahead economically, in my view. I am, however, strongly against Westerners telling Indians that "science proves" that fewer Indian births ate a good thing, unconditionally. That is a lie, and an abuse of science. And I am against the U.S.'s putting pressure on other countries to adopt population control. programs. Yet some have added that we cannot ethically be in favor of lower birthrates in poor countries without also supporting strict control of population growth in out own country. There are several reasons why this argument is not persuasive. First, if peoples of all countries have a right to make decisions about social and personal population policies on the basis of what they want and what they believe is good for them, why should this not hold for us, too? Second, birthrates and growth rates in the U.S. are presently lower than those in most poor countries, and hence should give us no cause for embarrassment. Third, and most important, additional people in more- developed countries may well be of benefit, on balance, to people in poor countries. The positive effects include bigger markets for poor-country products, increased development of technology that poor countries can later use, and a larger pool of potential technical aides such as agronomists and Peace Corps workers. Of course the rich countries may not pay fair prices for the raw materials they buy, or may exploit the poor countries in other ways. Unfortunately, no one has yet even begun to analyze scientifically what the net effect is. And God said: `Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed - - to you it shall be for food (I, 29)'". page# ultres tchar40 February 17, 1994