For the past four years Dr Rosling’s mesmerising graphics have been impressing audiences on the international lecture circuit, from the TED conferences to the World Economic Forum at Davos. Instead of bar charts and histograms, Dr Rosling uses Lego bricks, IKEA boxes and data-visualisation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation to transform reams of economic and public-health data into gripping stories. His aim is ambitious. “I produce a road map for the modern world,” he says. “Where people want to drive is up to them. But I have the idea that if they have a proper road map and know what the global realities are, they’ll make better decisions.”

It followed, as night followed day, that measures to help the “common people,” like the poor laws, would only increase their overall distress, even if they “alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune.” Suddenly, the moral order was turned upside down: Helping people was really hurting them, and vice versa.

The influence of these arguments was galvanic, and as much cultural as political. The fictional responses to Malthus—which shifted from disdain to horror to clinging embrace, and then to something more complicated—amount to a barometer of humanity’s own assessment of where it stands in the natural order. What was scarier, the specter of teeming hordes of humans devouring the planet—”actuarial terror” is how a scholar of romanticism aptly characterized Malthus’s peculiar power—or the sort of measures that might be taken to prevent this?

It’s no surprise that the enlightened literati during Malthus’s lifetime arrayed themselves against him. He seemed to be justifying a callous indifference toward the worst off. “Sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus,” Shelley thought, were “calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph.” Then, too, the standard narrative of the 19th-century novel was the so-called marriage plot—so it was awkward that, by Malthus’s logic, it might be better to burn than to marry.”

Aug 19th 2010 | Beijing

Southern Weekend had already taken up the cause in March, describing the hitherto little publicised case of Yicheng county in the northern province of Shanxi. Yicheng, it said, had been trying a two-child policy for 25 years. Despite its more relaxed regulations, the county has a lower-than-average population growth rate. It also has a smaller-than-average imbalance between boys and girls. Elsewhere a traditional preference for boys, combined with the one-child policy, has resulted in widespread abortions of baby girls.

In many other areas, something more like a two-child policy has been emerging. Rural residents are usually allowed to have a second if the first is a girl (typically after a gap of four years). Ethnic minorities can have more. Many places have started allowing parents who themselves lack siblings to have two offspring. A senior family-planning official said in 2007 that in effect the one-child policy applied to less than 40% of the population.

The government, however, shows little inclination to scrap it. September 25th will be the 30th anniversary of an “open letter” by the party that is often seen as marking the policy’s launch. The letter spoke of having a one-child strategy for 30 or 40 years, encouraging some to hope that it might end as early as this year. In February, however, an official said it would remain unchanged at least until 2015.

Ever since Parson Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his 1798 essay on population, it has been trotted out by millenarians and self-styled Cassandras as the basis for predicting famine and global woe. Malthus’s arguments were resurrected as a best-seller for the modern era in the 1968 overpopulation-panic classic The Population Bomb. More recently, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs has cited Malthus to explain the dire state of Africa, and Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson to predict a coming 20 years of global misery. The recent food crisis — which pushed 100 million-plus people worldwide into absolute poverty — has elevated Malthus’s reputation as a prognosticator to the Delphic levels of a Nostradamus or an Al Roker.

But despite his centuries-long global celebrity and recent revival, the parson’s predictions have been wrong from the start. He was wrong about the future of his native Britain. And he was wrong about the future of everywhere else.

Malthus’s argument, laid out in his Essay on the Principle of Population, begins with condescending absolutism: The quantity of land is the ultimate arbiter of how much can be produced, and the unwashed masses will always breed until they’ve used up the maximum productive capacity of the land. This leaves populations condemned to live on subsistence incomes, with birth rates matched by death rates, in turn determined by the difficulty of acquiring food. The only way to improve lives, Malthus concludes, is to shrink population sizes. Offering relief to the poor simply creates more miserable paupers.

Within Malthus’s lifetime, however, the quantity of land stopped being the primary determinant of a country’s output: We began making a lot more stuff in a lot less space. The world’s output in 1820 was smaller than South Korea’s GDP today, according to statistics from British economist Angus Maddison. Global agricultural output has tripled since 1950 alone, while global GDP has increased eightfold. Out of 140 economies tracked by Maddison between 1950 and 2000, all expanded, and only four didn’t at least double in size. Eighty-eight percent saw rising incomes per capita (so much for a subsistence income), and none saw a decline in population. All those extra people can’t eat the industrial and services output that accounts for the majority of GDP growth, of course. But with the money they make, they can tap into what is now a $600 billion global trade in agriculture.

Oct 29th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Lower fertility is changing the world for the better

This link between growth and fertility raises awkward questions. In the 1980s the link was downplayed in reaction to Malthusian alarms of the 1970s, when it was fashionable to argue that population growth had to be reined in because oil and natural resources were running short. So if population does matter after all, does that mean the Malthusians were right?

Not entirely. Neo-Malthusians think the world has too many people. But for most countries, the population questions that matter most are either: do we have enough people to support an ageing society? Or: how can we take advantage of having just the right number for economic growth? It is fair to say that these perceptions are not mutually exclusive. The world might indeed have the right numbers to boost growth and still have too many for the environment. The right response to that, though, would be to curb pollution and try to alter the pattern of growth to make it less resource-intensive, rather than to control population directly.

The reason is that widening replacement-level fertility means population growth is slowing down anyway. A further reduction of fertility would be possible if family planning were spread to the parts of the world which do not yet have it (notably Africa). But that would only reduce the growth in the world’s numbers from 9.2 billion in 2050 to, say, 8.5 billion. To go further would probably require draconian measures, such as sterilisation or one-child policies.

The bad news is that the girls who will give birth to the coming, larger generations have already been born. The good news is that they will want far fewer children than their mothers or grandmothers did.

Food production will have to increase by 70% over the next 40 years to feed the world’s growing population, the United Nations food agency predicts.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.

The world population is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century.

Climate change, involving floods and droughts, will affect food production.

The FAO said net investments of $83bn (£52.5bn) a year – an increase of 50% – had to be made in agriculture in developing countries if there was to be enough food by 2050.

By James Morgan
BBC News, Kenya

High in the hills of Kenya’s Mau forest, some 20,000 families are facing eviction from their farms – accused of contributing to an ecological disaster which has crippled the country.

The authorities are to start the process of removing them any day now. Farmers will be asked to surrender their title deeds for inspection.

If their documents are genuine, they have a chance of being resettled or compensated.

If not, they will simply be told to go.

“We are afraid. Not only me, but all of us here,” says Kipkorir Ngeno, a teacher and father of six.

“They call us squatters – a very bad name. But this is my land. It is not illegal.”

Two points worth making here. One is that Mr Mulligan seems to be arguing that we shouldn’t improve education and access to contraception in developing nations, where population is growing most rapidly, because that would limit population growth, which drives technological development. This is, in a word, offensive. I have no idea why any economist would feel good advocating for measures that deny women the opportunity to get an education, work, and use family planning to take control of important life decisions.

Secondly, Mr Mulligan has taken a rather know-nothing view of population growth. In developed countries, the demographic transition (where declines in death rates are ultimately followed by declines in birth rates) was associated with increased investments in human capital for women and children. Family planning allowed women to participate in the workforce and increased household incomes, while smaller families sizes enabled parents to invest more in a child’s education, better preparing them for skilled work later in life.

Giving contraceptives to people in developing countries could help fight climate change by slowing population growth, experts said Friday.

More than 200 million women worldwide want contraceptives but don’t have access to them, according to an editorial published in the British medical journal, Lancet. That results in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year.

If those women had access to free condoms or other birth-control methods, rates of population growth would slow, possibly easing the pressure on the environment, the editors say.

“There is now an emerging debate and interest about the links between population dynamics, sexual- and reproductive-health and rights, and climate change,” the commentary says.

In countries with access to condoms and other contraceptives, average family sizes tend to fall significantly within a generation. Until recently, many U.S.-funded health programs did not pay for or encourage condom use in poor countries, even to fight diseases such as AIDS.

…

Forests in Kenya have shrunk by at least 60% since 1990, mainly because more people are cutting down trees for fuel. It is doubtful whether Kenya’s government is strong enough to save the Mau forest on which Nairobi depends for water and hydroelectric power. And if Kenya cannot save a forest on which its capital depends, what hope is there for Congo’s rainforest?”

Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Africa’s fertility rates are falling. Can the continent take advantage?

CAREFULLY stepping round another heap of fetid refuse in Sodom and Gomorrah, it is easy to despair of Africa’s future. Accra’s notorious slum is aptly named. Here, about 30,000 families (no one knows for sure how many) crowd into a warren of hastily thrown-together shacks on the fringes of Ghana’s capital: there is no power, sewerage or running water, diarrhoea and other diseases are rife and deadly fires rapidly take hold. It seems to contain all that is wrong with modern Africa—too many people, deep poverty and the failure of inept or corrupt governments to do anything to help. Yet Sodom and Gomorrah also has a more hopeful story to tell.

Africa is undergoing a “demographic transition”. As our briefing shows (see article), African women are now following their sisters in Asia and the rich world by bearing steadily fewer children. Admittedly, Africa is lagging behind Asia by about 20 years, and the continent’s fertility rates are still high, but the trend is clear. In Mozambique in 1950 a woman had, on average, 6.5 children over her lifetime; now she has five. In Ethiopia the figure has dropped from seven to five; in Côte d’Ivoire it has almost halved from its peak; in Botswana it has more than halved. The only exceptions are war-torn places such as Congo.

—

Africa’s population
The baby bonanza

Aug 27th 2009 | JABI, SOMALIA
From The Economist print edition
Is Africa an exception to the rule that countries reap a “demographic dividend” as they grow richer?

IN JABI village, on the Juba River in southern Somalia, the mothers are mostly girls. They marry as early as 14 and have their first baby soon after. Their duties barely advance them above a donkey: childbearing and rearing, working in the fields, fetching water from the crocodile-infested river, sweeping faeces from the straw huts. Most have been raggedly circumcised. They have no contraception. There is no school. How many women in the village have died giving birth? “We cannot count the number,” blurts out Asha Hussein; she and the other women weep.

To most people, this is the familiar Africa, a place of large families and high fertility, a continent in which societies are under extreme stress and where the young massively outnumber the old. Teeming, environmentally degraded, ravaged by poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDS and civil war, Africa appears the most plausible candidate ever to suffer a Malthusian disaster.