The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [95]
When Asia experienced a population boom in the early twentieth century, it had no such emigration safety valve. In fact, Western countries firmly and deliberately closed the door, terrified by the ‘yellow peril’ that might otherwise head their way. The result was a typical Malthusian increase in self-sufficiency. By 1950 China and India were bursting with the self-sufficient agrarian poor.
The demographic transition
It is hard now to recall just how coercive were the population policies urged by experts in the mid-twentieth century. When President Lyndon Johnson’s adviser Joseph Califano suggested that an increase in famine relief should be announced before a visit by Indira Gandhi to the United States, Johnson supposedly replied that he was not going to ‘piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems’. Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (remembered these days as being about collective action, but actually a long argument for coerced population control), found ‘freedom to breed intolerable’, coercion ‘a necessity’ and that ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’ Hardin’s view was nearly universal. ‘Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control,’ wrote John Holdren (now President Obama’s science adviser) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977, but not to worry: ‘It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.’ All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed: people must be ordered or at least bribed to accept sterilisation and punished for refusing it.
Which is exactly what happened. Egged on by Western governments and pressure groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, coerced sterilisation became a pattern in many parts of Asia in the 1970s. ‘Dalkon Shield’ contraceptive devices, the subject of safety lawsuits in America, were bought in bulk by the American federal government and shipped to Asia. Chinese women were forcibly taken from their homes to be sterilised. Cheered on by Robert McNamara’s World Bank, Sanjay Gandhi, the son of the Indian prime minister, ran a vast campaign of rewards and coercion to force eight million poor Indians to accept vasectomies. In one episode, recounted by the historian Matthew Connelly, the village of Uttawar was surrounded by police and every eligible male sterilised. In response, a crowd gathered to defend the nearby village of Pipli, but police fired on the crowd, killing four people. A government official was unapologetic. In this war against ‘people pollution’, force was justified: ‘if some excesses appear, don’t blame me ... Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.’ Eventually Sanjay Gandhi’s policies proved so unpopular that his mother lost an election by a landslide in 1977, and family planning was treated with deep suspicion for many years thereafter.
Yet the tragedy is that this top-down coercion was not only counter-productive; it was unnecessary. Birth rates were already falling rapidly in the 1970s all across the continent of Asia quite voluntarily. They fell just as far and just as fast without coercion. They continue to fall today. As soon as it felt prosperity from trade, Asia experienced precisely the same transition to lower birth rates that Europe had experienced before.
Bangladesh today is the most densely populated large country in the world, with more than two thousand people living on every square mile; it has a population greater