Amatya Sen on Condorcet and Malthus

http://www.terrierman.com/history/malthus.jpg

Malthus's importance in the intellectual history of mankind is large; in fact it is his importance in that intellectual history that makes him still relevant today.

The 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Armartya Sen, rehashed the debate between Malthus and Condorcet in an essay entitled, "Population: Delusion and Reality" which can be read at >> http://www.asian-affairs.com/Crisis/amartyasen.html

As Professor Sen writes: "Visions of impending doom have been increasingly aired in recent years, often presenting the population problem as a 'bomb' that has been planted and is about to 'go off.' These catastrophic images have encouraged a tendency to search for emergency solutions which treat the people involved not as reasonable beings, allies facing a common problem, but as impulsive and uncontrolled sources of great social harm, in need of strong discipline."

Sen write that "If the propensity to foresee impending disaster from overpopulation is strong in some circles, so is the tendency, in others, to dismiss all worries about population size. Just as alarmism builds on the recognition of a real problem and then magnifies it, complacency may also start off from a reasonable belief about the history of population problems and fail to see how they may have changed by now."

Sen goes on to note that "The fact that Malthus was mistaken in his diagnosis as well as his prognosis two hundred years ago does not, however, indicate that contemporary fears about population growth must be similarly erroneous .... Whatever may be the proper response to alarmism about the future, complacency based on past success is no response at all."

Sen goes on to devote an entire section to "The Malthus-Condorcet Debate," which I encourage all to read as his interpretation of Malthus is conventional. So too his analysis of whether Malthus was right.

Sen observes that "Malthus's fear that economic and social development could only encourage people to have more children has certainly proved to be radically wrong, and so have all the painful policy implications drawn from it."

Sen goes on to note that while development seems to be the way to go in so far as lowering birth rates and improving human quality of life is concerned, it is sometimes perceived as being too slow for some countries.

"The problem is more complex, however," he writes, "because a 'contraceptive' that is 'reliable' in the long run may not act fast enough to meet the present threat. Even though development may dependably work to stabilize population if it is given enough time, there may not be, it is argued, time enough to give. The death rate often falls very fast with more widely available health care, better sanitation, and improved nutrition, while the birth rate may fall rather slowly. Much growth of population may meanwhile occur."

An example of such a country is Yemen, whose specific data I have detailed in an earlier post.

What does Sen say about population and the environment? Sen notes that "Condorcet was a pioneer in considering the possibility that natural raw materials might be used up, thereby making living conditions worse."

While Professor's Sen's environmental treatise is a little thin he is nonetheless explicit, noting that, "The long-run impact on the global environment of population growth in the developing countries can be expected to be large. As the Indians and the Zimbabweans develop economically, they too will consume a great deal more, and they will pose, in the future, a threat to the earth's environment similar to that of people in the rich countries today. The long-run threat of population to the environment is a real one."

Sen notes that Condorcet pointed to two ways that the world could be made better: "(1) developing new technology and new behavior patterns that would waste little and pollute less, and (2) fostering social and economic changes that would gradually bring down the growth rate of population."

Sen goes on to note that "On reducing birth rates, Condorcet's own solution not only included enhancing economic opportunity and security, but also stressed the importance of education, particularly female education."
Sen then goes on to talk about the limits of coercion in framing a successful family planning program whose goal it is to improve people's lives and reduce human population numbers. Sen details what happened in India and how the coercive family planning programs of India in the mid- 1970s have "poisoned the political well" and made further gains more difficult.

Sen also questions whether coercion really moved the needle very much: [W]hat is ... not clear is exactly how much additional reduction in the birth rate has been achieved through these coercive methods." Professor Sen notes that countries that outmatch China in life expectancy, female literacy rates, and female labor force participation have about the same TFR as that of China. Sen concludes that "While China may get too much credit for its authoritarian measures, it gets far too little credit for the other, more collaborative and participatory, policies it has followed, which have themselves helped to cut down the birth rate."

Sen closes with the example of Kerala, a state within India which, as Sen notes, has a population larger than most countries in the world (including Canada).

Sen writes that, "The roots of Kerala's success are to be found in the kinds of social progress Condorcet hoped for, including among others, a high female literacy rate .... Women have been active in Kerala's economic and political life for a long time. A high proportion do skilled and semi-skilled work and a large number have taken part in educational movements."

Sen notes that "This process (of lower fertility rates) has been voluntary and collaborative, rather than coercive, and the adverse reactions that have been observed in China, such as infant mortality, have not occurred in Kerala."

Sen notes that Kerala's birth rate is lower than that of China's, and that Kerala's experience is not unique: "Other societies, such as those of Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Thailand, which have relied on expanding education and reducing mortality rates (instead of on coercion) have also achieved sharp declines in fertility and birth rates."

If you want more, read the entire essay at the above link. For more information on Professor Amartya Sen, see>> http://www.nd.edu/~kmukhopa/cal300/calcutta/amartya.htm



Enough said? Probably not, but it will have to do for now.