Category: Population

Niket in a comment raised the issue of the skewed sex ratio in the context of population control. To my mind, the differential preference for boys over girls is a consequence of overpopulation as well. If the population problem were to be addressed, the skewed sex ratio problem will also be addressed. For my views on the causes and consequences of the skewed sex ratio, check two earlier blog entries. The first, The Skewed Sex Ratio where I wrote: Continue reading “Sex selection in a Second-Best World”

The causal connection between population and poverty is widely researched and understood by many economists and demographers quite well. There is a causal link between poverty and population which is mediated by a third component which is broadly labeled the local resource base. Poverty cannot be understood without reference to the resource base that the population has access to. The three components of population, resources, and poverty are interrelated and influence each other in complex ways that vary across time and space. How these factors influence each other without any of them being the prior cause of the others is as interesting a study as it is depressing to note that the complex interrelations make problems arising within an economy nearly intractable to simple solutions.
Continue reading “The Population-Poverty Trap”

Some time ago in a piece titled Dutch Disease Disturbing the Universe I had written: Continue reading “The Road to Hell”

Now it is time to follow up on the comments and responses to my last post, A Promise and a Challenge. First a clarification: my offer to buy dinner for anyone who is able to persuade me to change my position on the market-based solution to India’s looming population crisis clearly states that the dinner will be at a restaurant of the winner’s choosing. That is, the winner does not have to travel anywhere to collect on the wager. If you are in Timbuktu, and wish to have the dinner in a restaurant in Timbuktu, I will get myself to Timbuktu to pay up for the dinner.
Continue reading “A Matter of Rights”

I appear to have stirred up a hornet’s nest in my last entry The Market for Reproductive Rights. I sort of expected the reaction from a few people. Much of the reaction has been of the knee-jerk variety. So here is a promise and a challenge.
Continue reading “A Promise and a Challenge”

Yesterday I proposed a Population Planning Authority of India which would have the mandate for formulating policies for population control and for enforcing compliance. Today I would like to outline a policy very briefly and then over time spell it out in detail.

At its core, the population problem can be characterized as an instantiation of the classic tragedy of the commons. If there is one problem that is very well understood by economists, it is that of open-access resource which leads to the tragedy and consequently the solution to the problem is also very well thought-out and sane. It is basic commonsense, really. Afterall, economics is codified commonsense. (Aside: that is why physicists insist that giving a “Nobel” for economics is sort of silly.)

The entire corpus of economic insight in the human condition can be boiled down to the two simple statements that I made yesterday repeated below:

1. Markets work, and
2. Incentives matter

(Aside: this is something isomorphic to the two statements a computer science professor of mine had made about programming:

1. A program is a state to state mapping, and
2. A state is a name to value mapping

End of digression.)

So therefore we use markets to solve the population problem by getting the incentives right. The central idea is to assign what is called property rights to every human with regards to reproduction. Every person should have an equal and limited right to reproduction and no person should have the right to an unlimited access to the common property resource by exceeding his or her quota of reproductive rights.

That is the core idea and the rest is mere details which should not detain anyone who has other pressing things to do. For the rest who are in no particular hurry, I will take a couple of minutes to go into some broad details. The finer details I will leave for later.

Imagine, if you will, that each person eighteen years or older has a right to have half a child ab initio. So if you want to have an offspring, you have to find someone who also has the right to have half a child. If and when you do find another person, you can now get yourself one child. Once you have that child, you and your mate will be required to undergo sterilization — with one small exception. You will not have to undergo sterilization if and only if you get yourself a permit to have another half a child at least before you spent your given reproductive right. How do you get a permit to half a child? You buy it off someone else who is willing to sell you his or her reproductive right. Who is able to sell his or her reproductive right? Some who has not had a child yet and who has undergone sterilization. That person has a permit for half a child and that permit is available for someone to buy it in the market.

So the basic point is this: as long as you hold a permit for having at least half a child, you will not be sterilized. The moment you don’t have the permit, you get sterilized immediately. You start off with a permit of half a child the moment you are of age to have a child, say at age 18. You can continue to hold that permit until one of two things happen. One, you submit to sterilization and you sell that half-child permit on the market. Or, two, you find someone else with half a permit and together you have one offspring and both of you have spent your ab initio reproductive right permits.

The above scheme allows a person to have an unlimited amount of children — provided they can buy the permits required. The price of the permits will be determined by the market. If half the population is willing to sell their reproductive rights, the other half of the population can potentially have twice the number of children that they could otherwise have. If no one is willing to sell his or her permit, then every person can have only half a child on average. If there are more sellers than buyers, the price of a permit will be low. If there are more buyers than sellers, the price will be high.

Frequently asked question: what about the fact that the rich will have more children by buying more permits? Answer: Yes, that is right. The rich do get to have more children. The rich are also able to take care of the children. The rich also get to buy more cars, and food, and more of all sorts of goodies. This way at least they will pay for having children and if the poor cannot afford to have children, at least they will be compensated for not having children by those who can afford to have children.

Well, that is it. The scheme is as sound a scheme that you will ever come across in this world or beyond. This is an idea that is brilliant even if I say so myself. It is the second most brilliant idea I have had[**]. Seriously though, I think that some policy makers with brains (tall order, I know) should take this up and implement the Population Policy Regulatory Authority of India and implement this policy. Who was it who said, “Sir, I have found an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.” (Note to self: google and find out the exact quote.) So also, I have stated the solution. I am not obliged to implement it.

More to come.

** In my list of brilliant ideas, RISC ranks 10th. Somewhat like the Star Wars movies, I will reveal the ideas in a random rather than in ordinal order.

POSTSCRIPT: For the humor impaired: only the last bits were said in jest. The rest is deadly serious stuff.

India faces a myriad of problems. Fundamental to solving
them is the problem of an exploding population. It is easy
to tell that I am obsessed with the problem.
Continuing on from
my last ruminations on India’s population problem, I
now propose an instrument for beginning to address India’s
most pressing problem.

First, let’s recognize that the political will
is critical for any sort of change to happen. Something may
be a great idea but unless it is politically acceptable,
that great idea will not see the light of day. So the
solution I propose has to be one such that is politically
feasible, not just that it is an imperative.

I think it is fair to assume that at least some thinking people
in the various political parties
recognize that India’s exploding population is a major problem
and that it needs to be addressed. However, they also realize
that any political party which is foolish enough to take the
unpopular measures needed to solve the population problem will
not be around for very long. The Indian voter is terrified of
any suggestion that they curb their prolific unconstrained
breeding. So no political party would be willing to commit
suicide by unilaterally declaring a tough population policy.

Let’s shift focus for a moment. Institutions exist which
take away the government’s discretionary powers so as to sheild
public policy from short-sighted political expediency.
Take for example,
monetary policy. In most civilized nations, monetary policy
is dictated by an independent central bank, not by the
political leaders of the government. Alan Greenspan, the
present chair of the Federal Reserve decides on the monetary
policy, not Mr. Bush, for instance. Another area where the
government has to be specifically kept out of is the
judiciary. An independent judiciary is another of those
institutions which civilized nations have to ensure that
the often perverse incentives of politicians don’t sacrifice
the greater public good for short-sighted political gains.

To sum up, there are institutions which are autonomous
and which have a mandate to formulate policies in some
specific area and no government can interfere in the
making of those policies and therefore the governments
are sheilded from any adverse fallouts of those policies.

I propose a new autonomous public institution called
Population Planning Authority of India which
will have the mandate to formulate population policies
and oversee their implementation. The PPAI has to be
formed by a statue, of course. To get that statute passed
you need the current parliament to wake up and realize the
benefits of a regulatory authority which would free the
political parties from being held responsible for any
unpopular policies.

Once the PPAI is formed, it can implement reasoned policies
for controlling the population. I have one such plan which
is based on two simple principles which are:

1. Markets Works
2. Incentives Matter

Stay tuned for the plan which I will outline in my next
post tomorrow.

Continuing from my last post, The Art of Living, I would like to explore the question of why the population problem is important. To start off with, allow me an analogy. Consider a tub made of staves of differing lengths. How much water the tub can hold is then dictated by the length of the shortest stave. If one were to pour water into the tub, the water level will continue to rise but only until the level reaches that of the shortest stave, when it starts overflowing. To increase the capacity of the tub, you will have to lengthen the staves.
Continue reading “The Leaky Bucket and Development”

{Continued from People Matter: India’s Population Problem.}

A big picture description of an economy would have to include at its minimum the resources within an area, the technology available, the population and how they are organized. The available resources are strictly limited in the short-run. For a given area and its resources, a factor called the carrying-capacity can be defined. This indicates the level of population which the area can sustain without resource depletion. Any population larger than the carrying-capacity would lead to unsustainable resource depletion. By this factor, any area which exceeds its carrying-capacity is considered overpopulated. It can be plausibly argued that India’s population exceeds India’s carrying-capacity. That is not to say that India is alone in this regard; even the US is vastly overpopulated by this criterion given its capacity and inclination to use global resources unsustainably. But my focus here is India.

Some of the effects of overpopulation should be briefly indicated. Intensive agriculture can impoverish the soil and the relentless conversion of forests and old growth to farmlands leads to soil erosion and desertification. India loses about 8,000 square miles of arable land each year. Fresh water reserves are used up faster than what nature can replace; groundwater levels fall. With the disappearance of forests, rainfall patterns change leading to droughts and floods. The biotic diversity decreases with the loss of animal habitat. Pollution of lakes, rivers and the atmosphere takes its toll in terms of health hazards.

At the social level, overcrowding leads to communal tensions and civil unrest. Malnutrition and poor health services create unnaturally high infant mortality rates. Education takes the back seat while the society is remorselessly driven to unemployment and underproductivity. The cycle of poverty finally gets a firm hold on the population at large and it is a vicious cycle from which it is almost impossible to break free. Though we may gloss over the details of the exact effects of all this, it can be reasonably argued that overpopulation is the corner stone upon which all the other ills of society are founded.

The scarcity of goods and the abundance of people are a potent formula for poverty. Poverty and exploitation are quite well suited. Let’s look at an analogy to see the connection and further explore its implications.

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Consider the hypothetical situation of two men who start out with equal resources at their disposal in terms of earning capacity and so forth. One of them, call him Blue, has two children whom he cares for with all his limited resources. The Blue children get reasonable education and become professionals. The other guy, call him Green, has six children. The Green children do not become professionals since they each had only one-third the resources as the Blue children. The Green children become labourers. The trend continues and soon Green has 36 grandchildren all of whom are not very well educated. The Blue grandchildren, numbering four now, continue on the footsteps of their parents since the parents were educated and more productive. The Blue children were able to have spare resources to educate their children and these became rich people who finally employ the Green grandchildren to work for them.

Now in this hypothetical situation, we need not ascribe any malice on the part of the Blue family nor any attempt on their part to exploit the Green family. All things being equal, the Green family just did not have any surplus to invest in the education and growth of their offsprings unlike the Blue family. The Green family just had to use all its steadily declining resources to feed its exponentially increasing population; they just did not have any left over money to improve their lot.

Let’s fast forward a few generations now. Given the rate of growth of populations — exponential — the Greens number in the thousands and the Blues are in hundreds. The Blues have steadily improved their lot since they keep getting richer doing more productive and creative work which is highly valued and the Greens work for the Blues in factories, houses, etc., at less productive (albeit necessary) positions.

What can be learned from this admittedly highly artificial scenario which we have developed? That humans are in one significant respect different from any other species on the planet. For any other species, numerical strength implies biological success and any strategy which leads to increased numbers is a winning strategy. Survival of the species depends upon successful breeding within the natural constraints of available resources. The name of the game is to proliferate as fast as possible to maintain quantity. Nature imposes quality control with ruthless efficiency. But for humans, the situation is different. Numbers alone do not ensure success since we have left that stage of evolution a few thousand years ago with the advent of technology and the need to effectively exploit the environment.

The concept of disposable resources comes into the game. Any resources which are not strictly required for the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, is available for purposes which are uniquely human. The surplus is available for education, scientific research, technological development and the pursuit of art and recreation. All of these activities ideally improve the quality of human life and also change the survival game in favor of those who have an excess at their disposal.

INDIA: BONDED LABOR

There exists, unfortunately, the notion of bonded labour. These are people who through circumstances are in perpetual debt and whose earning capacity is so low that they cannot ever hope to have any excess with which to repay their debts. Lacking any disposable resources at all, they continue to barely survive using all their earnings and don’t have any hope of ever breaking free of the cycle of poverty.

Consider, if you will, India. So we have a very large population of poorly educated people a large majority of which live at or below subsistence levels. All the available resources are used in trying to desperately survive and there is virtually no surplus. There is nothing left over for investing in those areas which are the most productive like education, social uplift and technological development. India has to buy from other nations some of the things that it needs and these tend to be costly because of a number of reasons.

Let us dispassionately look at the trade situation between India and say a developed country like the USA. They, USA, export to India products which are high cost, like weapons, software, airplanes, etc. These products are high in price and capital intensive. India, in return, exports to the USA products which are labour intensive, low cost and low value. So, we have the import of say a single airplane costing millions of dollars which a small number of people in the USA produced. In exchange for that airplane, we have to export the output of millions of Indians in say industries like stone, leather, carpets, etc., at a low price to the USA. The rate of exchange is naturally set by the forces of supply and demand. There are numerous sources from which USA can import all the labour intensive products that they need. But for India, the options are limited for high tech goods. To compete in the world market, therefore, a steady devaluation of Indian goods have to be maintained. The terms of trade continue on a trend adverse to the poor country and this is reflected in the steady devaluation of the local currency relative to the foreign currency.

The vicious cycle inexorably continues. The rich nations have the means to produce high value, high demand goods. They continue to have a surplus which they invest in technologies which are more productive and the gap increases. India has no surplus to invest in technological advancement and it continues in this race constantly falling behind. Any advantage gained is quickly dissipated in maintaining a burgeoning population through the import of essential goods like fuel and other scare commodities.

In effect, India is like a nation of bonded labourers with no recourse. The exploitation of this nation is inevitable given the circumstances however unfair it may appear to be. It is unfair that 20 percent of the world’s population consumes 80 percent of the world’s resources. It is unfair that India with 16 percent of the global population uses only 3 percent of its resources. But who is responsible for this imbalance and who are we going to complain to? Unfortunately, we have no one to thank but ourselves for the situation that we find ourselves in. Finally, what are we going to do about it?