Economist suggests reproducing our way out of climate change

Economist Casey Mulligan argues that population control is overrated as a solution to global warming:

The director-general of Unicef has been quoted as saying, “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race.” And one of the benefits of reduced population, it is claimed, is reduced carbon emissions and therefore mitigation of climate change.

This statement takes technology for granted, yet technology itself depends on population. [NYT]

Mulligan's argument goes like this: i) only innovation can save us from climate change, and ii) more people equals more innovation, iii) population control would result in fewer people, therefore population control is bad for climate change.

Mulligan's first premise is dubious. The consensus at yesterday's UN Summit on Climate Change was that we already know how to prevent climate change but lack the political will to act. But let's grant Mulligan his first premise for the sake of argument.

The second premise is where Mulligan's argument founders. A larger population doesn't automatically translate into greater innovation. The two are probably correlated: The more humans there are, the more likely one of them will be the next Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, or Norman Borlaug.

The real question, though, is whether a larger population would generate enough additional innovation to offset the extra resources required to sustain it. Mulligan gives us no reason to think so.

More importantly, the innovators of tomorrow need to be educated and nurtured. Yet the most explosive population growth is taking place in the world's poorest communities. When resources are very scarce, rapid population growth may stifle innovation.

Untold human potential is squandered because of lack of reproductive choice. In a world where 200 million women lack access to contraception, unplanned pregnancies can derail women's education or employment. Family planning isn't just about having fewer babies, it's also about timing births to make the best possible use of resources. Ever wonder how many potential Marie Curies had to drop out of school because they got pregnant? The real Curie didn't have her first baby until after her first Nobel Prize.

Poor families with many children often pull them out of school to support the family. Children toiling in sweatshops are unlikely to become tomorrow's engineers and agronomists, no matter how brilliant they are.  Game-changing high tech solutions won't come from shantytowns without running water, electricity, or primary education. 

The world desperately needs scientific and technical innovation. For example, global food production will have to increase by 50% by 2050 in order to support the planet's projected population of 9.1 billion, according to the latest figures from the UN Agricultural Organization.

If we want to increase innovation, we should support family planning and cultivate the potential of the people who are already here.  It's safe to assume that there are potential Curies and Borlaugs among the world's tens of millions of child laborers. Simply adding more mouths to feed without increasing educational opportunities won't produce the innovators that Mulligan is hoping for.

If Mulligan is serious about fostering innovation, he should support family planning because it gives women and children better odds of achieving their full potential. 

Comments

[Alon Levy]

In preindustrial societies, the correlation goes the other way: more people equals lower standard of living for everyone; any extra innovation would be absorbed by the extra mouths to feed - see chart for preindustrial England here. This is true in terms of the environment as well - if Nigeria's population doubles then there are twice as many people to find solutions to shantytown pollution, but also twice as many people living in said shantytowns.

The best that can be said is that in rapidly innovating industrial societies, population growth no longer creates economic problems, only environmental ones. It doesn't increase innovation, beyond what's necessary to keep up with population. In a counterfactual world where feminism took hold in 1800, spreading birth control worldwide, world population today might have been stable at 1.5 billion, rather than 6.5 billion and increasing. That would've meant one quarter as many people to work on increasing farm yields, but also one quarter as much demand for food.

[squashed]

I agree with you. This economist is an idiot.

By his theory, Bangladesh should be one of the most advance country in the planet. It has the highest density population of any country. Almost unlimited human resource.

Except they can't afford educating most of them, the population is sustainable only because they live in very fertile delta land.

A person is not a free range chicken that can magically grow up and be an innovator. Higher education is a difficult infrastructure to built

[Alon Levy]

Bangladesh actually has had good economic growth in the last two decades. It's gone up from preindustrial standard of living (say, Europe in 1600) to early-industrial standard of living (say, Europe in 1800). But yeah, any population growth in a preindustrial country, or in a country with a resource-based economy, is just going to mean more crowding and more problems.

The basic problem is that people living in rural areas aren't a human resource. You need big cities for that. Even shantytowns could do - slums in Dhaka or Mumbai are a lot more economically productive than the villages people fled to those slums from.

[Daniel]

For liberals it is impolite, nay, racist, to even suggest that non-whites should limit their population growth. Only white people (particularly Christian white people) should limit their population growth, to the point of national suicide if that may be the case. This fella is reasoning as a true liberal. He probably believe that there is a moral imperative that western nations admit billions of the teeming masses into their own countries.

Bangladesh is the size of Wisconsin, with a population of 150 million, and most of the country is elevated just a few feet above sea level. Pakistan has 173 million, India 1+ billion. The other day it was reported in the news that ONE hasidic woman in Israel, who had just died, had 1,500 living descendants.... Nature will not withstand such recklessness. Somehow, someway there will be a reaction.

[Alon Levy]

For liberals it is impolite, nay, racist, to even suggest that non-whites should limit their population growth. Only white people (particularly Christian white people) should limit their population growth, to the point of national suicide if that may be the case.

Really? The people who came up with the Population Bomb hypothesis were all liberals. Many 1960s-era development schemes, all promoted by liberals, involved birth control; even today, liberal development economists like Amartya Sen stress the importance of reducing fertility rates worldwide.

Conservatives occasionally support population control when they can use it to argue for eugenics. Usually it's bundled with supporting laws meant to increase majority-race birth rates through restrictions on birth control and abortion. However, I've never seen a conservative argue for providing cheap birth control as development policy for the third world.

The other day it was reported in the news that ONE hasidic woman in Israel, who had just died, had 1,500 living descendants....

ZOMG! The Jews are taking over the world!

[JustMe]

Why do I get the impression that the modern role of an academic economist is to act as something akin to a professional troll?

[Alon Levy]

Because he's an Expert. He's an Important Person, so everything he says must be taken Very Seriously, even if it's as close to his subject of expertise as the Hmong language is to mine (I'm a number theorist).

[mitchell porter]

My favorite application of Mulligan's new syllogism comes when you apply it to itself, and it turns out that overpopulation is the solution to overpopulation.

[MobiusKlein]

It's even worse-
even if you grant all three arguments, it falls apart because there is a time delay between the birth of the new generation for innovation and when they can actually start innovating.
If you figure it will be 25 years before those innovators come into their innovative prime, then their innovations will have to overcome the C02 footprint of 2035, increased by the additional population.

[Manju]

this is an old julian simon arguemnt

[Mandos]

One thing I've noticed about academic economists is that the incentive structure for generating theories has a strong bias towards "counterintuitive" results. You know, "Ah ha! You never THOUGHT that pumping PCBs into baby formula will result in humanity achieving THE SINGULARITY, did you???" I've been calling it "Freakonomicism".

[Alon Levy]

It's not economics - it's every field. In math, it's a lot more exciting when something that should intuitively be true isn't, because that generates new research. In political science, they even have a professional, non-snarky term for this effect: the beautiful surprise criterion.

The problem with the Freakonomics types is that they think that being professors in one field gives them special insight in other fields. But even that's not unique to economists - biologists and cognitive scientists who talk about social sciences tend to be as clueless as economists who talk about psychology and sociology.

[Alex Russell]

Manju is right, it's a Simon argument. The best single place to see this question gone through in all its nuts and bolts is still the dispute between Julian Simon and Herman Daly.

"The real question, though, is whether a larger population would generate enough additional innovation to offset the extra resources required to sustain it. Mulligan gives us no reason to think so." Yeah - no reason but "this is the shape of the world" confidence, as if a time traveller had come back and assured Mulligan and Simon that this would turn out to be the case, or as if God wouldn't have it work any other way, because that would be wrong.

Although your caution is good, there can still be a possible Mulligan-esque fault in your general conceding of the frame, "so many people - so many geniuses like Norman Borlaug and therefore their fruits." One thing I remember Borlaug saying at one point (I think this is a close paraphrase) was that you really didn't want population to keep on growing to 9 billion or 12 billion or etc., because then it would be difficult or impossible to meet the food need without converting a whole lot of the world's forests to farmland, which you really don't want to do. He did not say, you're going to need another fellow like me and if you get him he'll expand the horizons again. One thing that working geniuses like him generally do believe in is the physical world and its real difficulties.

[Bestcelebrity]

The best that can be said is that in rapidly innovating industrial societies, population growth no longer creates economic problems, only environmental ones. It doesn't increase innovation, beyond what's necessary to keep up with population. In a counterfactual world where feminism took hold in 1800, spreading birth control worldwide, world population today might have been stable at 1.5 billion, rather than 6.5 billion and increasing. That would've meant one quarter as many people to work on increasing farm yields, but also one quarter as much demand for food.

[Alex Russell]

Bestcelebrity, did you mean to include more to that, or did you just mean to quote Alon Levy?

[cfrost]

This fella is reasoning as a true liberal.

Oh, horseshit.

'He probably believe(s) that there is a moral imperative that western nations admit billions of the teeming masses into their own countries.' . . . 'Bangladesh is the size of Wisconsin, with a population of 150 million, and most of the country is elevated just a few feet above sea level.'

And your solution is? As climate warms, sea level rises and Himalayan winter snows on deforested slopes melt ever more quickly into the rivers that flow to Bangladesh, the people in Bangladesh will probably not agree to drown so as to spare other nations the specter of their "teeming masses". Globally, as soil is worn out, pasture denuded, and rural people migrate to overcrowded cities, the overflow is seeping into the western nations. The teeming masses of nasty little brown people are already bursting the rivets, pouring through the hull and overwhelming the immigration services bilge pumps, in case you hadn't noticed. The squishy, sentimental, "liberal" approach would be to plan for the inevitable with some degree of humanitarian quarter. The conservative approach would be what? A hard-headed, "realistic", lifeboat ethic? The teeming masses aren't sheep that are easily led to slaughter and borders cannot be hermetically sealed. Bin Laden and his freinds are only the outriders of forces that will not be stopped when billions of beople become desperate.

But of course this is all liberal hand wringing. There's no such thing as global warming and once markets are truly free, the invisible hand of entrepreneurship or whatever will fix everything.