How fitting that Thomas Malthus was a man of the cloth. For the insight for which he remains best known--that human beings are fated to breed themselves to destruction--has over the centuries hardened into an established orthodoxy, complete with its own high priests and votaries. Just last week they gathered under the auspices of a special session of the United Nations General Assembly to consider how best to get the organization's member governments (especially Uncle Sam) to pony up the cash to keep the message of people reduction alive well into the next millennium.
That's not how they put it, of course. Ostensibly, the session was called to evaluate the "progress" made in implementing the plan of action drafted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. For decades the U.N. had maintained that economic development depended on population control, and Cairo was no exception.
In recent years, however, the effort has been tainted by revelations about Big Brother's enthusiasm for the enterprise: forced abortions in China, forced sterilizations in India and so on. The genius of the U.N.'s Cairo strategy, however, was to morph the population issue into a question of sexual and reproductive "rights," requiring the administration of thousands of national and international bureaucracies in turn funded by higher taxes at home and more aid from abroad.
Now, we are all for letting people decide for themselves how many children they want to have, and our guess is that even on the thorniest issues, such as abortion, the world will be a more peaceful place if nations are left to sort out their laws themselves. But autonomy and diversity is a one-way street at the U.N.
Last month, for example, its Women's Anti-Discrimination Committee expressed "concern" that Chile did not have laws permitting either abortion or divorce. And though the talk about reducing population is couched in terms of individual "freedom" and "choice," the context of these choices is a world where more babies--especially yellow, brown and black babies--is thought to be a scourge that threatens the well-being of everyone. Just look at the dark references on the U.N. website to the impending birth of the world's six billionth person.
We've been here before, of course. In 1974 Paul Ehlrich told us that the world was on the verge of "famine" in which "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." When the World Bank's Robert McNamara raised the issue in a 1977 speech, he hailed population growth as a threat greater than "thermonuclear war" and lamented that decisions about such growth rested with ordinary mothers and fathers rather than being in "the exclusive control of a few governments." More recently Lester Brown of Worldwatch picked up the Malthusian trumpet, telling anyone who will listen that China will soon be unable to feed itself.
What you won't get from the U.N. is that the news on the ground is very different. One World Bank report noted that by almost every measure of human welfare we can imagine--infant mortality, life expectancy, calorie intake, primary education--life has been getting better, and that the most dramatic gains have been in the Third World.
As the Bank put it, "The average income in the developing world has doubled since 1960. There has been a dramatic expansion in world trade and a world-wide trend toward more open economies.…Social development has been remarkable." While we're at it, we might add that food consumption per capita is higher than it's ever been.
Surely the message here is that the way to improve the lives of the Third World peoples does not lie down the preferred U.N. path of glitzy international confabs that discover ever more "rights"--especially the kind of "rights" that cannot be had without the massive expansion of government services. On the contrary, the path to human freedom and autonomy lies in the extraordinary opportunities that come with greater integration into world markets. Instead of exacting ever more tax dollars from their own workers to fund programs aimed at limiting the numbers of the poor, Western governments in particular would do better by everyone to tear down the walls of protectionism that keep out so many of the latter's goods and services.
In the U.N.'s Cairo effort, alas, what we are essentially left with is a church trying desperately to paint a new face on a much-discredited Malthusian creed. We note, too that this special session comes at a time when Congress has before it bills dealing both with population funding in particular and the U.N.'s claim that Washington is $1.29 billion in arrears.
Given the general unaccountability of the U.N. apparatus and its current penchant for concocting ambitious spending programs in tandem with equally unaccountable interest groups, it is probably too much ever to expect those who assembled in New York last week to embrace a new vision of wealth, one that looks to set a bigger banquet rather than reduce the number of seats at the table. But we might at least insist that they not peddle their gospel of gloom on America's dime.
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