My friend Nihar over at hoopyfrood.org uses the analogy of saving drowning children in his new year musings to argue that we, the non-poor, have a moral responsibility for charitable giving for the benefit of the poor. I find much value in that argument. While I am willing to burden the rich with giving, I also have to hold the poor responsible to no small extent for the poverty in the world. The poor, as I have argued before, are responsible for their poverty.

Here’s a brief response I wrote to Nihar’s post, for the record.

Nihar, an excellent post with valuable insights.

I agree with your view that helping alleviating at least some of the horrendous misery that exists around the world is an imperative for moral people. That said, I would like to look at the obverse side of the issue. It is good to hold people to higher moral standards and demand that they meet them. If one pushes responsibility on the affluent, one should also demand the non-affluent to be more responsible as well. Though cliched, it is still true that it takes two to tango. Alleviation of poverty cannot be the sole responsibility of the non-poor. Perhaps the poor are to some extent — maybe even to a major extent — responsible for their poverty.

If one puts a collective burden the rich to solve poverty, one should also put a collective responsibility on the poor for their poverty. I say collective because individuals are helpless to do anything about the circumstances of their birth. Life is a random draw and you don’t get to choose your parents. Collectively the poor help perpetuate their poverty by their fecundity. If the number of children born to poor parents exceeds the capacity of the society to lift children out of poverty and provide them with a decent shot at life, then the numbers of the poor will continue to expand.

Today you save one poor child from drowning, to use your analogy. But that poor child grows up and produces more children and the world then gets burdened with the saving of multiple children from drowning. At some point, you have to impress on people that they have a personal responsibility towards the children they produce — and that if they cannot care for the children they bring into the world, they out of basic human decency should avoid doing so. It is selfish for adults to procreate in circumstances where neither the adults nor the society has the wherewithal to take care of the children. The rights of the children must matter, not just the rights of the adults who have the opportunity to have sexual intercourse.

The charities that I support are of two kinds: the first, those who help provide education to the children of the poor; the second, those that help the poor have only that many children as they can provide for. The former helps those unfortunates whose parents were irresponsible; the latter helps prevent more unfortunates from being born.

Atanu

What say you?

[Reposted from Asian Correspondent.]

Mr. Kumar had come to Lucknow from a small village eight days before, leaving his wife and four children behind. He hadn’t found work yet. He tried lowering his daily price from 100 rupees to 80 and then 60, without luck. Like many of the workers around him, he was sleeping on the ground by the temple.

One could safely assume that Mr Kumar’s parents were not well-off and further that he has half-a-dozen siblings. Since he did not get any education, the best he can do is provide unskilled labor. The aggregate supply of such unskilled labor relative to aggregate demand depresses the price of labor to subsistence (or below) levels. Mr Kumar, in his turn, continues the tradition of parenting the next generation of unskilled labor by producing not a couple but four children. This is great for depressing the price of labor and naturally for the upper socio-economic strata which the policymakers inhabit. What literally kills the poor is great for the non-poor. The poor apparently very willingly participate in their own destitution through their fecundity.

These poor then go and vote for the likes of Mayawati. She controls the public purse strings and as the article notes,

Urvashi Sharma, a local activist, says the Uttar Pradesh state government has allocated huge sums on projects of limited social value, including a $90 million monument being built to honor political leaders near the Gomti River. It involves a massive domed monolith and public meeting area stretching over several city blocks, with a statue of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kumari Mayawati across the street and a gallery of giant stone elephants, her political party’s symbol. Navneet Sehgal, the state’s secretary of urban development, says the project is an economic stimulus and has created jobs.

Navneet Sehgal is an idiot but understandably so because most likely he has no clue about what causes what. However, Mayawati is not an idiot. She fits the pattern of Indian political leadership which has, since independence starting with Jawaharlal Nehru (after whom the great Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal project is named), been of parasites with the morality of pond scum.

But Mr Sehgal and Mr Kumar probably support Mayawati at the polls. It is hard to feel sorry for people who work hard at inviting the disasters that they suffer. What bothers me is that this cycle of stupidity and misery is hard to break through reason and rationality and will eventually only be broken by nature’s vicious intervention.

Coming back to the title of the WSJ piece: megacities are not choking India; people are choking India.

Here’s part 1 of Dr B’s lecture. (Just disregard the hyperbolic title “The most IMPORTANT video you’ll ever see.”)

(About 1 hour and 20 minutes in total — believe me, that’s time well spent.)

It is good to watch a well articulated and well reasoned lecture. I liked the presentation. I generally agree with the content. But one must remember that in general, technological progress can play havoc with any long-run prediction. Yes, the world is going to run out of fossil fuels — all indications are that the stock is limited. But substitution is a fact and when something becomes scarce, substitutes are found.

In part 7, Dr B quotes Isaac Asimov on population. Asimov’s view is exactly congruent with how I feel. So I will quote it here for the record.

Bill Moyers had asked Asimov, “What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?” Asimov’s reply:

It’s going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution.

But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren’t you through yet, and so on.

And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies.

Mumbai is not too unpleasant at this time of the year weather wise. Spent last evening in Colaba meeting with a friend. Best way to get there from my office in Lower Parel is to take a local train and then a cab from Churchgate station to Regal theatre.

Local trains going south in the evenings are not crowded. The compartment I entered had a couple of dozen people. A woman entered the train carrying an infant on her hips. She was also visibly pregnant. She was begging. Accompanying her was a girl I guessed was about three years old. The girl went from person to person begging. She would go down on her hands and knees and try to touch the shoes of the passengers. She was wearing a full-length dress which once must have been very pretty but now was in tatters.

The guy sitting opposite me tucked his feet below the seat and looked out the window. The little girl crawled further under the seat and then gave up. She turned to look up at me. Her grimy face reflected the beauty that comes from the pure innocence of being a child. Her hair was tied in an untidy bunch on her head. She scratched her head as she pleaded with her eyes and extended a hand to me. I dug into my pocket and gave her a two-rupee coin. She turned away wordlessly and in a few minutes was gone with the pregnant woman with the infant at the next stop. Total take in this carriage was Rs 2.

One of my friends has a three-year old daughter. She is a delight to her parents. The father simply adores her. Seeing the daughter father bond, I feel envious of my friend. She is lucky. She is wanted and loved and is cared for. Life is a random draw. “Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to an endless night.”

The girl on the local train is not one of the “missing girls” some agonize over. Selective abortion and female feticide is for some a crying shame. Day before yesterday’s The Times of India lamented on the front page the female to male ratios: 933 females to 1,000 males in the 2001 census; Delhi—only 821; Punjab—876; Haryana—861. The child on the train is here and there are no government officials crying themselves hoarse about her rights. No, they are only concerned about the rights of unborn babies. Those who are born can fend for themselves in the local trains.

I sometimes wonder why. Why are they so eager that people have more children? Don’t they get it that the decision to not have a girl child is a rational response to an intolerable situation? And to avoid the problem of “missing girl children” you have to change the situation, not just make it illegal to abort female fetuses?

I have a theory. Human labor supply in India is immense. This keeps the price of labor low. The fecundity of the poor helps the rich. Because if it didn’t, the rich are powerful enough to have figured out how to stop the poor from reproducing so rapidly. It also seems to me one of the contributing factors why Mother Teresa is held in high regard around the world. She was helping out the rich have access to cheap labor. Someone has to fill up the slums of Mumbai for the rich to have low cost labor. The poor oblige.

[Related posts:
Oct 22, 2003--The Skewed Sex Ratio
Oct 28, 2003--The Lopsided Sex Ratio (revisited)
June 23, 2004--Sex selection in a Second-best World]

At this point you may ask what the devil am I going on about. I was coming to that. You see, one astute reader of this blog (and you are all astute, dear readers, I hasten to add) wrote to me pointing out a column by one Mr Swaminathan Aiyar in The Times of India of 23rd September, 2006. Rohit, the said astute reader, wrote to say that he finds something not quite right with that column. Anyone reading this blog knows of my abiding interest in population matters (the population category has about 36 articles, some of which are worth reading even) and Rohit asked me to comment.

Without someone’s prompting, I am unlikely to read a rag such as The Slimes Times of India. I scanned the article, shook my head in disbelief, and promptly decided to blog it one of these days. As is my wont, I equally promptly moved on to other distractions and forgot about the unbearable silliness of Mr Aiyar’s musings. I would have been writing about the cog dis of the POTUS right now (which I will have to get to later, for sure) but for the fact that Rohit revealed himself to be not just astute but persistent as well. Thank goodness not all the readers of this blog (astute as a bunch) are as persistent as he is. Else I would be busy writing all my promised pieces all day long and have no time to surf the web. Anyway, time to get on to the point that I want to make.

Mr Aiyar’s column is cleverly called “Swaminomics” and I suppose he is an economist of some sort or the other. One cannot be sure, of course, since there was “Reaganomics” and Mr Reagan, a minor actor and later a major POTUS, did not even act as an economist in movies, leave aside be one. Just adding “-nomics” to your name therefore does not reveal what your day job is. For all I know, you may be a computer programmer with a diploma from NIIT on J2EE or something mysterious as that. Still, to have a regular column dealing with matters economic in a national newspaper could mean that one was an economist. But then one has to remember that it is The Times of India we are talking about after all and perhaps we are justified in having our doubts.

The column titled “Lalu Yadav’s Demographic Dividend” says that Lalu, the ex-chief minister of Bihar, fathered nine children and thus bequeathed an example for all Indians to procreate with abandon which will undoubtedly lead to India’s GDP growth while China’s GDP growth sputters out due to its misplaced emphasis on population control through its draconian one child per couple policy. Lalu, claims the column, moves as mysteriously as God himself.

Perhaps Mr Aiyar was just being facetious. Perhaps he is not serious and the aim of the column was to poke fun at Lalu Yadav who, as Mr Aiyar admits, presided over the “economic and social stagnation” of the state of Bihar. Not mentioned is the broad-daylight shameless looting by Lalu of public funds by the thousands of millions. Perhaps Aiyar does not seriously admire neither the man’s mendacity nor his fecundity. But I doubt it. I think that the columnist is indeed seriously peddling nonsense, and it is errant nonsense at that.

Briefly, the column talks about three demographic phases: first, there is a baby-boom with its high dependency ratio; in the second stage, there is a baby bust, accompanied with improving dependency ratio and a “demographic dividend” from more savings; the third stage – the write forgets the third stage. Perhaps each “demographic dividend” is a distinct phase. I am confused about the phases bit. But let me get down to a few details.

He writes,

“[T]he middle-class remains shocked that Lalu has fathered nine children, worsening the population explosion (viewed by this class as one of India’s top problems).

Yet, economists are now unanimous that rising population is giving India a ‘demographic dividend’ that will soon help it grow faster than China. Seen in this light, Lalu Yadav’s contribution to the demographic dividend may outstrip his contribution to the railways.”

Never mind who is responsible for the recent so-called success of the Indian Railways. It was a dismally mismanaged public sector monopoly and a few public-spirited bureaucrats may have been responsible for promoting a few good policies which, given the massive inefficiencies already present, resulted in the easy picking of some low-hanging fruits. Crediting Lalu with improving the railways is silly at best; perhaps it would be more appropriate to praise Lalu for not yet stealing (as far as one can tell) the 50 million tons of steel rails scattered along the railway lines. But enough about Lalu.

Let’s examine “growing faster than China.” GDP growth rates don’t mean a whole lot. Like many extremely poor countries, India’s GDP growth rate is much faster than, say, a developed country like the US. What matters is the absolute per capita GDP and to some extent the growth in the per capita GDP. The operative phrase is “per capita.” Let me put it in more personal terms.

It could be that the peon in our office is getting a 20 percent raise every year while I am stuck with only 5 percent raises annually. Yet, if I earn 40 times what the peon earns, the peon would be happy to be stuck with a low annual rise as long as he gets my salary. Rates of growth have to be read in the context of what the base is.

So even if China’s GDP were to grow at 5 percent, and India’s were to grow at twice that rate, if China’s GDP is three times that of India’s, then in absolute terms China adds more production than India every year. Sure, if the differential growth were to persist for 25 years, India will catch up eventually. But 25 years is the long run (and as Keynes noted, in the long run we are all dead) and what happens 25 years hence is not going to bother us.

The story gets even worse when you move to per capita GDP growth rate. If the population is growing at rate x and GDP is growing at rate y, then the per capita GDP growth rate is (y – x). Since compared to China, India has a lower GDP growth rate and a higher population growth rate, India’s per capita GDP growth rate is lower than China’s. What matters is the per capita GDP (which is another way of stating the income of the average person) and to some extent the per capita GDP growth rate, not the GDP nor the GDP growth rate. I would rather be stuck with an average American income growing at 2 percent a year than have an average Indian income growing at 8 percent a year.

Reading that column once again underlined my conviction that those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense. All you have to do is pull out an Excel sheet and do a bit of figuring. I just did that. If today India’s per capita GDP is $700 and China’s is $2,000, and if India’s per capita GDP grows at 10 percent a year while China’s grows at only 5 percent per year, India’s per capita GDP in the year 2031 – 25 years hence — will be $6,143, still lower than China’s $6,268. The average Chinese will still earn more than the average Indian despite (an unlikely) twice the per capita GDP growth rate compared to China. And even if India were to have the same GDP growth rate as China, if India’s population growth is higher than China’s, then India’s per capita growth rate would be lower than China’s.

This is all very tedious. I should not have to poke around in an Excel sheet to make my point. I blame the pathetic Indian education system that even some columnists for newspapers (rags or not) are innumerate. I am forced to go on about GDP, per capita GDP, GDP growth rates, and per capita GDP growth rates because of a silly column when it should be absolutely clear to the average 7th grade student what it all means. My patience, and I am sure yours as well, is wearing thin at this point. But we have a few more points to address. So stick with me.

The story Mr Aiyar is telling appears to be this: “Indians have been having more children than the Chinese and that is good because India’s GDP growth rate will be higher than China’s sometime in the future. And therefore India is better off. So having a higher population growth rate is good. Therefore Lalu Yadav is god. And all you who were promoting lower fertility were ignorant neo-Malthusians. And the Supreme Court of India is ignorant of “demographic dividend.” So Lalu’s nine children is a miracle of nature, not ignorance of contraceptive methods.”

Seriously, why do we “neo-Malthusians” fret about India’s population. The answer is simple: because we care about the quality of life, not just about quantities. Here are some numbers. India has about 17 percent of the world’s population and 2 percent of the world’s land area, and about 1.7 percent of the world’s fresh water. Those who are reading this blog have access to adequate quantities of fresh water, but the majority of Indians don’t have clean water to drink, leave alone for personal hygiene. More than half of children below the age of five are malnourished in India. These and many more facts like them paint a simple picture: that we have more people than we have resources.

That is the basic incontrovertible fact: there is an imbalance between the number of people and the amount of resources available for them. When you do the arithmetic, the average figures are deplorable. But then, averages don’t matter to those who write newspaper columns because they are sitting pretty with umpteen times the average amount of resources at their disposal. So they can comfortably write about neo-Malthusians scaring the middle-class people. That there are those who are above average merely implies that there are many who are below even the deplorable average. The suffering of those hundreds of millions don’t matter to those who are comfortably sprouting nonsense about the demographic dividends.

The age structure of an economy matters, of course. Demographic transition is a well-understood phenomenon. You cannot study the development of economies without realizing that at some point in the path to development, an economy will reduce its fertility rate and move towards a lower population growth rate. The critical question is not whether but when. And it my contention that that point should have been decades ago instead of being some decades hence. It should have been earlier because it has to be at a point where the balance has not gone so askew that too many people are living with too few resources.

There will be a demographic transition in India’s future. It will have to go through the population bottleneck. But instead of going through the population bottleneck at an earlier stage (with less pain), now we will go through it with a great deal more pain at a later stage.

Why do so many otherwise seemingly educated people who should know better not pay attention to the damaging fecundity of the poor? I think I have an answer. It is because the damage that the poor do by multiplying beyond reason is primarily to themselves; the rich actually enjoy what I would call a “population dividend.” The higher the numbers of the poor, the lower their wages, and consequently the higher the standard living for the non-poor.

You may notice that there is a construction boom in most urban areas in India. You need people to do the slave labor. The US had imported slaves from Africa. Urban India gets its slave labor from the rural areas. These laborers live in horribly deplorable conditions. And they procreate. Women laborers at construction site often have three or four children hanging around. Children as little as toddlers play barefoot among the rusting steel, cement and other construction material. It is heart-breaking to see how the children have little future other than being labor for future constructions – and a significant percentage will never see adulthood, I am sure.

These are disposable children and are sacrificed to those who write glowingly about the demographic dividend.

Remember I started this piece with the matter of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy? This is why I did that. If a person really believes that the more people there are, it is better, then they should behave consistently with that belief. That is, he or she should immediately go out and bring 20 or maybe 40 people home and thus increase the household income growth rate. They don’t because they realize that merely adding people who are below the average household income will not increase the average household incomes. Only by adding people whose incomes are greater than the current household incomes will the average household income go up.

That is what Mr Aiyar needs to ponder. He has to understand that it is not the number of people that matters, but rather what resources these people have at their disposal matter. Nine children born to a couple who can barely feed, clothe, and educate even one means that there will be nine under-nourished, illiterate, unproductive people who will actually slow down, not speed up, economic development.

Hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance? You decide.

[Pg 369]

Time is the greatest binding constraint for an individual. In the long run, as Keynes astutely observed, we are all dead. Time, however, is not the greatest binding constraint in the case of institutions and the collection of institutions we call a nation state or the even bigger collection of institutions we call the global economic system. The binding constraint there is the enormous complexity of the systems relative to the bounded rationality of humans.

Given the complexity of the system, and the bounded rationality and finiteness of individual human existence, the challenge for an individual is to somehow gain a sufficiently informed view of the fundamental problems so as to contribute in some way, however small, to the solutions.

Since we cannot contribute to the solution of all problems, we have to choose the battles we individually wish to fight. For me, the population problem is paramount for human welfare. As I have recorded before (here, here, here and here), of all the problems facing India, the population problem is perhaps the most neglected and misunderstood. I choose it to be the battle that I most want to fight and, I hope for India’s sake, win.

You recently wrote:

That is why I claim that natural disasters like the recent tsunami cannot hold a candle to the destructive power of humans.

I did a little arithmetic that adds support to your statement from unexpected quarters. This sounds very insensitive but is not really so. Each and every person destroyed by the tsunami is irreplaceable. I was trying to comprehend the enormity of the destruction through comparative numbers, when I was struck by a yet more stupendous scale that boggled the mind.

CIA 2004 India population slope estimates:

Of course, all humans are unique, like everyone else, so these are about numbers alone. It is instructive to note that natural disasters cause disproportionate loss of life in the poorer parts of the world. Earthquakes in California kill a few hundred at most compared to the tens of thousands (even hundred thousands) killed in the developing world by similar magnitude events. Floods in the US kill a few tens of people, while floods in Bangladesh kill in the order of hundred thousand.

I believe that the reason for this disparity can be traced to the greater population densities in the poorer parts of the world. Extreme population pressure forces people to live in dangerous areas. The flood plains of the Ganges river delta is not where you would like to live if you had a choice. When tens of millions have no choice but to live in disaster-prone areas, a natural disaster’s direct impact is amplified and hundreds of thousands perish.

Aside from the direct impact of the disaster itself, the second-order effects are also quite acute. The ecological system comprising of people, land, and other resources is always poised at the edge of criticality. Given the unsustainable population, it is forever tottering on the brink. An event like an earthquake or a flood catastrophically disrupts the system. There is little or no spare capacity for the system to absorb the shock and cushion its impact.

Paradoxically, the system persists for the very same reason as that which induces the horrendous losses: excessive population. First, due to the excessive population, people have to live at the edge. Then, a disaster strikes. It kills a small percentage but a very large number. Finally, the system recovers its lost small percentage of people within a very short time and is back to its earlier critical overloaded state.

Will there be a change? I don’t think so. The rich and the powerful aren’t directly affected since they live in safer areas and even when disaster strikes them, they do have the spare capacity to rebuild. Aside from sending in the odd donation following a disaster, the rich get on with their lives. They don’t have an incentive to address the systemic issues. Perhaps a vague sense of guilt moves most of us to contribute to the disaster relief but that just addresses the symptoms, and does nothing to eliminate the underlying causes. While it would be cheaper on the long run to addresses the causes, it is more convenient in the short run to quickly apply a few patches and cover up the cracks. It is the “band-aid” school of disaster management. (I suppose the rich irony of calling fund-raising concerts “band-aid” is lost amid the hysteria that follows a major headline-making disaster.)

It is all Karma, neh?

The disruption wrought by microbes have repeatedly changed the course of human history. It was probably pestilence as much as any other single factor that accounted for the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere in teh sixteenth century…

On the other hand, the Black Death may have fueled the burst of human creativity known as the Renaissance. At the time plague struck, medieval society had fallen into economic stasis, caused in large part by the “Malthusian deadlock” of dense population. The plague broke that deadlock by decimating the population, liberating land for diverse uses, creating the need for laborsaving devices, and unleashing the ingenuity of Renaissance society. The catastrophe of pestilence “gave to Europeans the chance to rebuild their society along much different lines … It assured that the Middle Ages would be the middle, not the final, phase in Western development. …

Even our success in besting microbes can bring untoward consequences. Chief among these is a distrubance of population balance. For example, elimination of malaria from Mauritius led to a doubling of the population within a decade, even though the birthrate remained constant. Stated more broadly, relief from pestilence is a major factor in the population explosion that has threatened human welfare and for which no satisfactory remedy has yet been established. For the moment, the global epidemic of AIDS may provide a macabre counterbalance: the population of Africa faces decimation; and still emerging, but vast and largely unchartered epidemics of the disease are threatening India and China. [Emphasis mine.]

For now I will pass on without any further comment on the population problem, and move on to the other big concern of mine: education. Again from Michael Bishop from the chapter Paradoxical Strife:

… our nation has allowed the means of primary and secondary education to deteriorate. In doing so, we have incurred great risk, described seventy years ago by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:

The art of education is never easy. To surmount its difficulties, especially those of elementary education, is a task worthy of the highest genius … [But] when one considers … the importance of this question of the education of a nation’s young, the broken lives, the defeated hopes, the national failures, which result from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated, it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage. In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, … [a country] that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”

We have not heeded Whitehead’s warning and it has retained all its original prescience. Our elementary and secondary teachers are reglected, disrespected, inadequately compensated, and improperly prepared. Many of our children attempt to study in the midst of physical squalor and personal decay. We can expect little improvement in how our youth learn until we have changed all of that. The change will require great resolve: we have allowed the deterioration to run very deep.

What is true for the US, holds with even greater force for India when it comes to primary and secondary education. When are the so-called leaders of this nation ever going to wake up to the fact that India is today what it is because it has “not valued trained intelligence”?

“Are there possibilities where a large population is not ridden with poverty?”

Yes, casual empiricism demonstrates that there are large populations in the world that are not ridden with poverty. Take, for instance, approximately 300 million in North America (US and Canada, primarily.) Or the 500 million in Western Europe. Taken together, the population of US, Western Europe, Japan, the Asian Tigers, and Australia are above a billion people who are not poverty stricken.

Poverty (P) is a function of not just population (p) alone. In mathematical notation, P=P(p) is not the correct formulation of the P, the poverty function. Instead, the poverty function is P=P(p, t, r, i) where p is population, t is technology, r is resources, and i is institutions. The greater the population p, the greater is the poverty, all other things being equal. Hence p enters positively in the function. The greater the technology t, the lower the poverty function. So t enters negatively in the poverty function. Therefore, we can denote the poverty function as P=P(p+, t-, r-, i-).

A poor third world country has high population and relatively low t, r, and i. Compare that to that of an advanced industrialized economy: low p, but high t, r, and i.

The important thing to recognize is that it is not the raw population numbers that matter. It is what can be called the ‘normalized’ population numbers which we can denote as ‘np’. The normalization has to be done with respect to the other parameters t, r, and i. So np=np(p, t, r, i). Again in mathematical notation, P(p, t, r, i) = P(np(p, t, r, i)) = P(np).

The last bit is shorthand for “poverty is a function of normalized population figures.” More compactly, P = P(np+) which means that the higher the normalized population, the higher the poverty.

How does one arrive at the normalized population figure? The first step is to take the raw population figure p and divide it by the resource numbers r. Note that the resource r is a vector. For instance, it would include scalars such as total arable land area, the total amount of fresh water, the stock of physical capital such as roads, power stations, stock of fossil fuels, the stock of renewable energy resources, factories and farms, and so on. Then you do the same for the other parameters, technology and institutions and arrive at the normalized population figure.

The bottom line is that raw population numbers don’t amount to a hill of beans. Indeed, any raw number is essentially meaningless. We need to normalize the raw numbers before they can be meaningful. For instance, India is the largest producer of milk and produces 38,945,021 gallons of milk a year as compared to Denmark with only produces 1,045,983 gallons a year. India therefore produces 30 times more milk than Denmark. But that is meaningless unless one also knows that India’s population is 300 times that of Denmark. The proper normalization in this case is per capita milk production and consumption. That is, you take the raw milk production numbers and divide it by the respective population numbers to get the meaningful statistic that Indians only produce 10 gallons per year per capita while Denmark produces 100 gallons per year per capita.

It is simple arithmetic and those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense.

(Disclaimer: All the numbers above are straight out of a hat. They are definitely not accurate. They are for illustrative purposes only. The exact numbers are left as an exercise for the interested reader. For all others who are basically lazy like me, the fake numbers should suffice. You gets what you pays for.)

“Considered that population and poverty are positively correlated, how can it be shown that solving the population problem alone will solve the poverty situation. Are there other causal factors to consider?”

It would be silly to posit that solving the population problem alone will solve the poverty situation. That line of thinking will arise from a failure to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions.

Solving the population problem is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for poverty alleviation. Necessary conditions are — umm — necessary. If you don’t meet that condition, what you expect to happen won’t happen. But if you do meet the condition, what you expect may still not happen. That is so because while the condition is necessary, it is not sufficient for the event to occur.

So some conditions are both necessary and sufficient, some are necessary but not sufficient, some are sufficient but not necessary, and some are neither necessary nor sufficient.

Taking the horse to the water is a necessary condition for the horse to be watered. It is not sufficient because the horse has to do the drinking. If the horse doesn’t want to drink, fulfilling the necessary condition is clearly not sufficient for the horse to be watered. On the other hand, the horse may want to drink but if it not led to the water (the necessary condition), the horse will not be watered.

Not having shackles on one’s leg is a necessary condition for winning the marathon but it is not sufficient.

I would leave the rest of the discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions for the aforementioned interested reader. For now, here is the bottom line. Solving the population problem is a necessary condition to address the poverty issue but it is far from sufficient. Having a very high normalized population number is like wearing shackles during a marathon. Removing the shackles is a necessary condition but merely removing the shackles will not assure you victory; you will have to run faster than the others to win.

Whatever else one can say about India’s progress, there is no way anyone can claim that India has made any progress in reducing poverty. Hundreds of billions of rupees have been spent in poverty reduction and yet we have not able to not just reduce poverty, we have actually seen an increase in the number of the poor.

How on earth could we have achieved this: spending huge amounts and still not being able to reduce the absolute headcount of the abjectly poor? The answer is not hard to find. The analogy I use is this: imagine trying to fill a leaky bucket. There is no way of ever filling it if the rate at which the bucket leaks is greater than the rate at which water flows into it. India’s misfortune is that the rate at which the population of the abjectly poor increases overwhelmes the resources available to lift people out of poverty.

Consider this report from the BBC simply titled 24 Children:

In the small town of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, down an alleyway off the main street and behind some shops, is the home of Mohammed Omar and his wife, Aasiyah Begum… They have 24 children… Aasiyah Begum has given birth to 29 children she thinks, but five have died.

Of the hundreds of millions of Indians who are abjectly poor, one thing we can be sure of: to a first approximation, they are poor because their parents were abjectly poor. Poverty, like riches and skin color, is inherited.

Amartya Sen, an economist who has spent some time thinking about the matter of poverty, had once remarked that if poverty were a contagious disease, the rich would eradicate it pretty rapidly. I see his point, that in the short run, poverty is not contagious. But I feel that in the long run, poverty is highly contagious. The deadweight of the poor can produce sufficient friction in the workings of the economy that even the non-poor find it difficult to survive.

Poverty is the outcome or consequence of a large number of factors. Oppression and exploitation are certainly very potent factors that keep the poor in poverty. But the most important factor for the poverty of the poor is, in my considered opinion, the real uncontrolled fecundity of the poor. I realize that in this age of political correctness and global social forums, this is not going to make me popular.

The question of economic development of the country cannot be answered without reference to the poor. We need to ask hard questions and if the answer turns out to be less than palatable for some people, so be it. But we cannot pretend that we can solve problems without understanding fully what are the causal factors that create them.

The gap between us and them at the bottom is wide and becoming wider still. A number of questions need to asked and then answered. How wide is the gap? Is that gap good or bad? Can the gap be eliminated? Should it be eliminated? Will it be eliminated? Whose job is it to eliminate the gap? Which side of the gap does the fault lie? Should the gap be filled by leveling things downwards or should things be leveled upwards? Is it possible to level it upwards?

Before we get to the normative questions, we should have knowledge of what is. We have all come across the usual list of standard laments such as the following from a Cornell University report:

• One reason for the increase in malnutrition is that production of grains per capita has been declining since 1983. Grains provide 80 percent to 90 percent of the world’s food. Each additional human further reduces available food per capita.
• The reasons for this per capita decrease in food production are a 20 percent decline in cropland per capita, a 15 percent decrease in water for irrigation and a 23 percent drop in the use of fertilizers.
• Biotechnology and other technologies apparently have not been implemented fast enough to prevent declines in per capita food production during the past 17 years.
• Considering the resources likely to be available in A.D. 2100, the optimal world population would be about 2 billion, with a standard of living about half that of the United States in the 1990s, or at the standard experienced by the average European.

I don’t trust projections that talk about the standard of living of people a hundred years hence. Could anyone living in the year 1900 have imagined any of the things lying around your desktop today? They could not have imagined any of the things we take for granted. They could not have imagined that 2 billion people – that is more people than entire population of the earth in 1900 – would be living lives of such unimaginable luxury that their greatest troubles would be due to the excesses of affluence. We too are clearly quite not up to the task of imagining a world 100 years hence because the rate of technological change itself has accelerated.

I don’t trust any projection that talk about the distant future. What concerns me is the present and the near term: of the order of 10 or 20 years. In the long term, as Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead, anyway.

As Joel Cohen noted, “Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century.”

Take a look at the figure below from The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA):

In the 45 years since 1950, India added five times as many people as did the US. India added 571 million people, while the US added 109 million. Compare that to the growth in per capita GDP. India’s GDP grew from $180 in 1960 to $463 in 2000 — an increase of $283 in 40 years (figures in constant 1995 dollars). Compare that to the US: from $12,837 in 1960 to $31,806 during the same period — an increase of nearly $19,000, or 67 times the increase relative to India. (Data from the World Bank.)

In the 100 years from 1950 to 2050, India will add 1.2 billion people to reach a total of 1.5 billion. Let’s read that number again: it will be one thousand five hundred thousand thousand. During the same period, the increase in the US population would be about one-sixth that of India. I am not going to go into the projected difference in the per capita GDPs; it is too depressing even for me.

The important thing to note is that no country with large increases in populations has ever been, or is likely to be, a developed country. We have to do a little arithmetic to convince ourselves that there is no way on earth can India move out of the poverty trap without changing its population growth rate, no matter how pretty a song you sing about IT superpower or how nimble a dance you dance about BPO. All this song and dance about India being a superpower in 2020 is merely arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while the Titanic band is paying ragtime.

We need to understand what is at stake and wake up to the fact that we are short on lifeboats, that the hull is breached, the captain has ignored the warnings, the builders have messed up the design, and the binoculars were missing.

[Continue on to part 5 of Numbers.]

The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield.Source

Ignoring the warnings was just one of the many things that went wrong. The design itself was flawed. It was a systemic failure.

Even though only 12 feet of the hull was gouged open by the collision, enough compartments were damaged to cause the Titanic to sink. The problem was traced back to the bulkheads; they were not fully extended to the top of the compartments. As the ship went down, the water would fill up and pour over the bulkhead into the next compartment.Source

Then there were idiosyncratic factors. For instance, the ocean was dead calm on a moonless night. If the seas had been rough, the iceberg would have been sighted sooner due to the surf at the base of the tip of the iceberg. That was a factor beyond the control of the crew of the ship.

However, the iceberg could have been detected sooner had the two crew men assigned to lookout had binoculars. For some reason, they didn’t have binoculars. A simple precaution which would have averted the disaster. But for a pair of binoculars, the disaster may not have occurred.

The iceberg was detected too late for certain. Then there was bad luck, as well. If the ship had turned a bit more, that grazing encounter would not have happened. Perhaps if the ship had hit head on, the front would have been damaged but the ship would have survived. Attempting to miss the berg altogether presented the ship’s vulnerable side to the iceberg.

And now the final insult. The ship was doomed. But nearly all on board could have been saved had two things happened. First, if the inevitability of the demise of the ship had been fully appreciated by the captain and the crew. And most importantly, if the ship had sufficient life boats on board. The first factor was within the control of the crew; the second factor was outside their control but was within the control of those in charge of outfitting the ship before it sailed.

As it happened, there was no awareness of the seriousness of the situation.

Many of the passengers did not believe that the ship was sinking, and refused to board the lifeboats. As a result many of the boats left half full, and some of the starboard boats were filled with men. To add to the confusion and disorganization, many of the passengers were getting cold from the chilly air, and went inside to relax. They did not recognize the actual severity of the accident until the first emergency flare was released. At that time many passengers began to panic, but it was too late half the boats were released and the other half was swarmed by first–class women and children. Water began to flood the lower decks of the bow and the stern began to rise out of the water.

Some more details:

The passengers on the Titanic initially did nothing. The Titanic was believed “unsinkable” and so talk of an iceberg and lifeboats did not enter the equation. Some passengers carried on with playing cards, others sang songs especially in third class as they particularly were kept uninformed.

Whilst the first and second class passengers were required to assemble on the boat deck, the third class were confined in their sector of the boat and not given instructions for some time. They were be allowed access to the boat deck at 12.30 a.m. Orders were given to release the third class and bring them to the boats. However, most of the third class passengers were not familiar with the giant liner. Her passages, corridors and decks must have been a maze to them. Some would have inevitable got lost and spent their last few hours walking aimlessly around the ship.

There were insufficient number of lifeboats to begin with. Only about half of the 2200 people could be accommodated in the 20 lifeboats on board. Even those were not fully utilized because of what I call information failure.

There are lots of what ifs one can ask. What if they had designed the ship to better survive flooding of its water-tight compartments, what if they had sufficient life boats on board, what if they had heeded the warnings, what if they had realized the severity of the damage, what if the Californian had recognized that the Titanic was in mortal danger and sailed the six miles to its aid, what if the seas had been rougher, what if the crew had binoculars, what if the ship had hit the iceberg head on at slow speed or had turned just a degree more, . . .

If only, lord, if only. Fifteen hundred blameless people would not have drowned that night of Dec 14th 1912 in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

A mighty ship like the Titanic is not easy to destroy. There have to be a confluence of a large number of factors — both natural and human created — that lead inexorably to the end. What the tragedy of the Titanic is a metaphor for let’s discuss in a bit.

The unprecedented growth in human numbers and in human power to alter the Earth requires, and will require, unprecedented human agility in adapting to environmental, economic and social problems, sometimes all at once. The Earth’s human population has entered and rapidly moves deeper into a poorly charted zone where limits on human population size or well-being have been anticipated and may be encountered. Slower population growth, along with many other improvements in human institutions and behaviors, would make it easier for people to retain control of their fate and to turn their attention from the numbers to the qualities of humankind.

These themes have consequences for action. Stopping a heavy truck and turning a large ocean liner both take time. Stopping population growth in noncoercive ways takes decades under the best of circumstances. Ordinary people … still have time to end population growth voluntarily and gradually by means that they find acceptable. Doing so will require the support of the best available leadership and institutions of politics, economics and technology to avoid physical, chemical and biological constraints beyond human control. Migration can ameliorate or exacerbate local problems, but at the global level, if birth rates do not fall, death rates must rise.

India’s population problem is a sort of tragedy of the commons and there is little chance that ‘ordinary people will voluntarily and gradually’ solve this problem. The incentives simply don’t exist, even if the knowledge and the understanding existed about the social disaster of excessive population, for individuals to act for the social good.

The solution to India’s population problem has to “make sense” to those who produce the children. That is, they have to have an incentive to produce the socially optimal number of children. I have worked out a simple mechanism that would solve this problem. Details at — when else — 11.

[Continue on to part 4 of Numbers.]

The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield.[Source]

The passengers trusted that the captain was competent. The importance of that simple concept called trust can never be underestimated. Without trust, we would accomplish very little. We have to trust that those who are supposed to know, do know; that those who are supposed to do, are capable, etc. We trust that the pilot knows how to handle the craft, and the surgeon the scalpel. We trust that the policy makers know what they are doing.

We only learn of a betrayal of that trust only when it is too late. Whether it is a ship, or a ship of state, some worry whether those whom we trust are worthy of that trust.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Titanic was doomed due to a number of factors which were linked into a chain. If any of the links were not forged, it would have avoided that fate. The first link of that chain was the structural link. It was designed such that if a few of its forward water-tight compartments were to get flooded, it would sink.

Image source

There must have been some design considerations which dictated why the bulkheads did not go all the way to the ceiling. I am only noting the structural feature which made the Titanic vulnerable to negligent behavior. Perhaps if the Titanic was designed differently, it could have survived the negligent behavior of its crew.

The lesson to me is that the ship had a structural failure that was exposed due to the incompetence of its captain.

[Continue on to part 4 of HMS Titanic.]

A few years ago, he said, a journalist had called him up saying that he was doing a piece on world population and wanted to know from Joel how many people could the earth support. Joel told the caller that he could not answer that question off the top of his head. It could take him a few days and why didn’t he call back in four or five days.

It took Joel three years to definitively answer that question and a fine job he did, in my opinion. The book was published in 1995. I quote from the introduction:

Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century. Human numbers currently exceed 5.7 billion and increase by roughly an additional 90 million people per year. Second, the resources of every kind (physical, chemical and biological; technological, institutional and cultural; economic, political and behavioral) available to people are finite today both in their present capacity and in their possible speed of expansion. Today’s rapid relative and absolute increase in population stretches the productive, absorptive and recuperative capacities of the Earth as humans are now able to manage those capacities. It also stretches human capacities for technological and social invention, adaptation, and compassion.

Like in all other things, humans have a limited capacity for compassion too. When resources are severely limited, the thin veneer of civilization is easily scraped off to reveal the underlying unyielding will to survive at the expense of others.

[Continue to part 3 of Numbers.]

Now it was 9.40pm, and still the ice warnings came. At no time had Captain Smith or the senior officers ordered a cautionary reduction in speed, or had gone to the trouble of having extra lookouts posted, something which Captain Lord of the Californian had already performed before he called it a day and brought his own vessel to a halt in the ice. When you put-together the ice warnings Titanic had received that day, it revealed that there was an ice-field 80 miles long directly in her path, and only two hours away if the current speed were maintained. Surely somebody in the next couple of hours must realise that Titanic is steaming at full-speed into an ice-field which has already made other vessels to heave-to for the night?

The warning messages kept coming in. Ice ahead. John Phillips was the radio operator in the Marconi room busy at the controls of the transmitters, sending messages to Cape Race in North America.

. . . under the immense pressure of sending commercial traffic, and at the same time having to cope with incoming warnings and messages, he snapped, as the nearby Californian sent an ice warning to Titanic. “Shut up, shut up. I am busy. I am working Cape Race.” Phillips’ now infamous snub highlighted how the commercial traffic had priority over the warnings. Perhaps if the Marconi men had not been so busy sending messages, the Titanic would never had foundered. But all of the previous warnings didn’t stop that happening either, so a last minute aversion was unlikely.

[Continue on to part 3 of HMS Titanic.]

The man said, “All I want is a few pennies. I want one penny on the first square of a chess board, two pennies on the second square, four pennies on the third, eight pennies on the fourth, and so on till we reach the 64th square of the chess board.”

The king, like our present day innumerate kings, was immensely relieved. Here was this idiot asking for pennies when he could have asked for a ton of gold.
“Done,” said the king and asked his minister to make the arrangements.

The minister soon reported that he had finished counting the total amount the king had promised and it turned out to be around 184,467,441,000,000,000 or $185 million trillion. The annual GDP of the
US is $10 trillion. It would take the US about 18.5 million years to get that amount together.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are talking large sums when exponential growths are concerned. It does not matter what the value of the exponent is. It could be as little as 2%. In a matter of just 35 years, the world population of 6 billion would increase to 12 billion at a 2% growth rate. It is estimated that it took all of human history till the year 1804 CE for human populations to hit the billion mark. The latest billion was added to the human population in about 12 years — a million times faster.

World Population

Population      Year    Interval
----------      ----    --------
1 billion       1804    all of human
                        history
2 billion       1927    123 years
3 billion       1960    33 years
4 billion       1974    14 years
5 billion       1987    13 years
6 billion       1999    12 years

India’s population was around 350 million in 1947. Now we have three times as many people alive in India. Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, and MP make nearly 45% of India. They are also among the poorest states of India.

India has more people than all of Africa,North America and South America combined. And all these people, more than a billion,
or around 17% of all humanity, are jammed into only 2.4% of the world’s landmass.

It is crowded as all heck and still every year we add more people than the population of Australia.

Population in India density has risen concomitantly with the massive increases in population. In 1901 India counted some seventy-seven persons per square kilometer; in 1981 there were 216 persons per square kilometer; by 1991 there were 267 persons per square kilometer–up almost 25 percent from the 1981 population density. India’s average population density is higher than that of any other nation of comparable size. The highest densities are not only in heavily urbanized regions but also in areas that are mostly agricultural.

[Source.]

[Continue to part 2 of Numbers.]

Ice is a seasonal hazard in the unforgiving winter seas of the North Atlantic, and in the couple of days since leaving Southampton, many ships had reported ice in the exact area into which Titanic would be sailing.

On the 11th April, she received 6 warnings from ships stopped in, or passing through, heavy ice, 5 more on the 12th, 3 more on the 13th, and 7 on the 14th. All of these messages would have been written down as they were intercepted, logged in the radio book, and passed on to the officers on the bridge. There was now no way that the Captain, along with the officers, would have been unaware of the huge field of ice that now lay directly in front of Titanic. Source.

Perhaps other matters occupied the Captain’s mind, such as the need to retire from with a big bang. This was his last command and perhaps he did not want the ship to be late on its maiden voyage. Perhaps the owners of the White Star shipping lines did not want to let ice interfere with their grand ship.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied

I don’t know if Leonard Cohen is right about that. Not everybody knows.

[Continue on to part 2 of HMS Titanic.]

Does a person have a right to inflict pain and suffering on another person? If my action were to lead to immense suffering, and I plead that if you do not allow me to freely act you are impinging on some basic right I have, would you allow me that “right”? Or will you circumscribe my “right” to act as I please because otherwise it results in unnecessary pain and suffering to a human being?

For the benefit of those who have not been following this thread, I had proposed a mechanism, a market for reproductive rights. Some people reacted violently to the proposal. How can you, you horrible person, ever think of such a horror in which a person’s basic inalienable right to reproduce is taken away? How dare you suggest that I give up my right to have as many children as I please, you communist, you you socialist? How can you suggest such a hateful thing as a market for reproductive rights? Are children things or commodities to be traded in a marketplace, you heartless creation of Satan?

I apologize to all you sensitive souls who are so protective of your rights to reproduce. I apologize to all you wonderful people who are so concerned about the rights of other people to produce as many children as their hearts desire. Now get your butts out there and help out this one and the baby she carries. And not just those two, when you are done with it, go help out the 20 million or so much like those two who have no rights. You who are so concerned about the rights of those who produced these disposable children, let me see how concerned are you all about the rights of the children who are produced as the consequence of the unlimited rights to reproduction that you grant everyone.

What about the rights of the children? What do you have for these? Are they human or are they disposable?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a perfect world, there would not be any resource constraints. In a perfect world, choices will not have to be made: you would be able to eat your cake and have it too. But in this world, where there are limits — not just physical limits but limits to how much compassion and care that humans can display — in this real world of real limits, there can be no unlimited rights. If you grant unlimited rights for people to produce children, then you could end up condemning millions of children to subhuman existence. And that is what I see every day scores of times. I cannot turn my eyes away from the inhuman neglect of humans. Are you people blind?

I wish I could post this one picture all over the country on billboards that carried the “INDIA SHINING” advertisements. I want people to not be able to turn away like they do when they see the little hands begging for a living.

A few years ago I was at a lecture at Berkeley where Joel Cohen was speaking about the population problem. About an hour into the lecture which was accompanied by a slide presentation, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to talk about the ravages of civil war in Sudan. Some of you may find the next slide disturbing. It is a fine Spring day outside. If you don’t wish to see the next slide, I suggest you look out the window.” Then for the next twenty minutes he spoke about war with that one slide up on the screen. You had to look at it, you could not not see it. The slide is imprinted in my brain. It showed in the foreground a small child with a disproportionately huge head compared to its skinny limbs sitting on its haunches in a bare field; in the background were half a dozen huge vultures patiently waiting for their meal. The child was not yet dead.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“What about me?”

{I took the picture yesterday at the Lower Parel station at 4:45 PM.}

Goodbye, good night and may your god go with you.

Prashant told a story in which a poor slum dweller sells his half-child quota and later becomes rich and prosperous and regrets that he does not have a child and cannot have one. Thus, Prashant concluded that the buying and selling of reproductive rights cannot be a market since it differs from other markets where if you regret something, you can always reverse the decision.

Dr Malpani, of the 18 ways to make a baby fame, put paid to that misconception (pun intended.) When a guy gets surgically sterilized so that he can no longer produce babies, the procedure is not irreversible. So Prashant’s slum dweller who becomes rich can go back to the same market and buy many permits and father a whole host of children. Only this time around, he will not be fathering slum dwellers.

Prashant helps illustrate an interesting feature of the market for reproductive rights by his little story. Markets are where trades take place. We normally trade with other people at a specific time in a market, where one party is the buyer and the other party is the seller. But you could imagine a market where the same person is a buyer and a seller of the same thing but at different times (or intertemporal trade). That is, the trade is not between two people but just one person. The slum dweller is the seller of his reproductive right at a time when the money he receives from the sale is extremely valuable to him.

Imagine that he gets Rs 20,000 in cash, an amount that enables him to start his little business and which finally makes him rich in a few years. After becoming rich, now he goes back to the market and buys a permit an amount which he can afford and therefore in effect he traded with himself: his past self sold the permit to his future self. Absent this ability, the slum dweller would not have the Rs 20,000 to start his business, and instead would have an unlimited right to produce as many little slum dwellers as he wishes and these little slum dwellers would in turn produce many many more little slum dwellers in a few years. (In Mumbai you have had that process going on for a few generations and today we have an estimated 8 million–8,000,000–slum dwellers. Give another 25 years, and Mumbai will have 25 million people of which 12 million are expected to live in slums.)

Markets enable trade. Any trade undertaken voluntarily is welfare improving, both for the buyer as well as the seller. Both parties have to see value in the exchange, for otherwise the trade would not take place. The seller has to value the money received higher than the value of the good sold, and vice versa for the buyer. So the slum dweller has to value his reproductive right higher than the money he makes in selling his right. So as a seller he gains. Later, if it ever happens that he values having the right to have a child higher than the market value of a permit to have a child, as a buyer he again gains. Aggregate these sorts of gains over a large population, and the welfare gains are immense.

Selling one’s reproductive right is a reversible decision. Having millions of children without having the resources to feed, clothe, nurture, and educate them is irreversible. At the moment in India’s history, we don’t have the resources, the smarts, the political will, the fundamental ability to care for the millions that are being added every year to the population. We are taking irreversible decisions, one decision at a time. A no-regrets policy is what we need.

Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote a wonderful book called Last Chance to See. It is part travelogue, part humor, and deadly serious. It was about the disappearing flora and fauna of the planet. In the end of the book, he recounts a Sybilline tale. I found it so compelling that I copied the story down and if you care, here is Sifting Through the Embers.

It is a cautionary tale. There are problems which I call “the escalating variety”. First, it appears to be no problem at all. Therefore it is considered a pointless waste to consider paying even a modest amount to solve it. In the next stage, the problem becomes more manifest but now the cost of the solution has also mounted. So people say, yes, there is a problem but we can’t afford the solution now; perhaps later when we are wealthier, we will solve that problem. But time goes by and the problem continues to become more acute and the price of solving gets higher and higher. In the end, one pays an enormous amount to solve a problem which one could have solved with very little effort at an earlier stage. I have just explained in many words the wisdom contained in the saying a stitch in time, saves nine.

Please do read the story and when you do, pay special attention to what the old woman says at the end.

A little reflection on the facts leads one to conclude that the skewed sex ratio is a consequence of other underlying facts such as resource constraints, exhorbitant cost of dowry for getting daughters married, female illiteracy, and so on. Poor families have severe resource constraints, ranging from calories to clothing to education. If sons have a greater net present value (due to their future earning capacity), girls are disadvantaged in the share that they get of the limited resources.

It all boils down to the fact that this is a second-best world. There are multiple problems which conspire to create the skewed sex ratio. Merely addressing the effect leads to idiotic policy recommendations such as banning the determination of the sex of a foetus. One unforunate consequence of that ban could well be the increase in the number of new-born female infants killed, or worse still, chronic neglect of the unwanted girl child.

In a followup post, The Lop-sided Sex Ratio (revisited), I explained why I believed that selective abortion of female foetuses was better than the neglect of female children.

My position is that the fact is that some people value female children less than male children. This is a lamentable fact but a fact nonetheless. I did not dictate that people value girls less. I am taking that as given and (at least for the present) unalterable fact. Breast beating may feel good but will do little to alter that fact. Altering that fact would be an end that all right-thinking people devoutly wish for. It may take a few generations. Until then, what is the most humane way to deal with the problem. Do millions of unwanted girl children have to suffer inhuman neglect? Can society protect the rights of children with as much gusto as the protection of foetuses? Which is the lesser evil: the aborting of female foetuses or the terrible fate of an unwanted girl child?

I don’t support bans of abortions because in second-best world, it may be a welfare improving intervention. Of course, I should explain what a “second-best world” means before people jump down my throat for suggesting something so horrific as a second-best world.

I define a system to be “first-best” if the system is free from all defects or distortions, that is, an ideal system. In most real (as opposed to ideal) systems, there are multiple distortions and that makes them “second-best”. In the presense of multiple distortions, policy recommendations or interventions that are welfare improving in first-best situations, may not be welfare improving. In fact, applying first-best prescriptions to second-best systems could lead to significant worsening of the system. So what is one to do in a second-best world? If one could, the best thing to do is to remove all the distortions simultaneously and move to a first-best system. Otherwise, it may be necessary to actually introduce additional distortions to improve the system in some cases.

What I am saying above is an extension of what in the international trade literature is called the theory of the second best. Refer to Jagdish Bhagwati’s poineering work in that regard. I believe that the theory of the second best has a much wider applicability than just in international trade. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that the theory of the second best should be an essential tool in every thinking person’s mental toolkit.

A rough example would be the irradiation of people suffering from cancer. You would not recommend heavy doses of radiation for healthy people. Now if you take the stance that radiation is bad (a policy for first-best cases) and rigidly apply that in the case of a cancer patient (a second-best case), you could potentially hurt the person instead. What you did was introduce a distortion to counter some other distortion.

Another rough example: hand a pair of crutches to a person who is not lame, and you reduce his mobility. Remove the crutches from a person with a broken leg, and you reduce his mobility. Remove both distortions — the broken leg and the crutches — simultaneously and you have improved the system. Remove less than all of the distortions and you could make the system worse off.

Aborting healthy fetuses is a bad thing in a first-best world. A first-best world is one where children are not neglected, where resources are plentiful, where there is no overcrowding, where every pregnancy is wanted and there are no accidents, where women have full control of their reproductive choice, where women are not raped or coerced, … the list goes on. But it is not a first-best world. It is a second-best world and hard choices may have to be made.

For analytical purposes, it is instructive to state the problem of a low-level equilibrium trap at the level of a household. Imagine a low-income household living at a subsistence level in what is called a developing economy. Given its situation in a poor economy, it does not have access to, or is unable to pay for, services that are normally available in developed economies. For instance, the household may not have sufficient income to send its children to school because the children have to supply labor to the household even if schooling were available for free (which it is most often not available at all, free or otherwise.) Further, since children do add to household income and become net assets to the household at an early age in a subsistence economy, there is an incentive to have more children than is socially beneficial leading to a collective action disaster. For the household with a large number of children with low educational attainment, the future is bleak as the competition for resources intensifies and the succeeding generations continue to be trapped in a rapacious vicious cycle of large family sizes and grinding dehumanizing poverty.

Now imagine a moderate-income household in a developed economy. The number of children dictated by the circumstances is low enough for the family to afford to send them to school and thus ensure that succeeding generations will be well placed to continually increase their economic well-being. Given the household decision and the ability to educate its children, collectively the society ensures its future with low population growth rates, high per capita incomes, and so on.

The essential distinction between the two households above is the environment within which each makes rational utility maximizing decisions. The household in a developed economy has access to capital: its own private capital in terms of its wealth and its income, and the social capital in terms of institutions both private and public such as schools, hospitals, transportation systems, government support, access to credit and so on. In contrast to that, the poor household in a poor country has severe constraints in terms of credit, income, wealth, healthcare, and a million other things. The poor make choices that are “rational” within the constraints they find themselves in and it is unfortunate that their constrained rationality leads to a collective failure that ends up trapping them into an even more constrained situation. In other words, the “environment” is poor for a poor household in a poor country.

An example of such a constrained rational response is the number of children that the poor have. The poor, like the rich, have a natural inbuilt instinctive desire to procreate. Having children is an end in itself. Any society that lacks the genes which predisposes people to children is unlikely to leave very many descendents. But for the poor, the need for children transcends the need for children as an end in themselves. To them, children are productive assets. Where capital is relatively scarce, human labor is the substitute. Labor is required for gathering water, fuel, food production, caring for livestock and other household needs. Children provide that labor required.

Another compulsion that the poor face is the need to have children for old-age security. Lacking any publicly funded social security net, poor people over-insure in terms of having more children than is socially optimal. There are other reasons such as social norms (imitative behavior, for instance), religious (sons are valued for performing the last rites), etc, which compel people to have children. What is rational, or constrained rational, at the household level could on the aggregate translate into a collective failure at the social level. The more children people have in a subsistence economy the more likely they will be to continue to be trapped into a cycle of declining resource availability due to positive feedback effects. In other words, poverty increases the individual incentives for having more children, which in turn reduces the per capita availability of resources both natural and manmade which leads to deepening of poverty.

Is there a way out of this cycle of increasing poverty and population growth? I have argued elsewhere that the single most important and binding constraint in this situation is the credit constraint. Given access to credit, a poor household would be able to invest in factors that systematically reduce the need for having a large number of children and also educate the children that they have adequately. If a household could pay for health care, for instance, childhood mortality rates would be low and hence the need to over-insure against childhood death would be mitigated. Having access to credit would also allow families to invest in education and the returns on education could be higher than the cost of education. Higher educational attainment would imply higher household incomes and thus lower incentives to have more children in the next generation. Higher household incomes would on the aggregate translate to greater availability of social security and thus a lower need for children for old-age insurance.

However necessary releasing the credit constraint is, it is clearly not sufficient. There are other factors that need to be simultaneously addressed. For example, empowerment of women is a factor that is strongly correlated with development. For that to happen, female education is a necessary condition. To quote Dasgupta:

. . . high fertility, high rates of female illiteracy, low share of paid employment, and a high percentage of working at home for no pay – they all hang together. From the data alone, it is of course difficult to discern which of these measures are causing, and which are merely correlated with, high fertility. But the findings are consistent with the possibility that lack of paid employment and education limits a woman’s ability to make decisions and therefore promotes population growth.

The beneficial effects of parents’ education, particularly mothers’ education, on the well-being of their children have been much documented. Studies suggest also that education helps mother to process information more effectively, and enables them to use the various social and community services that may be available more intensively. Among other things, education appears to impart a degree of self-confidence to a person, enabling her to avail herself of whatever new facilities that may be on offer. This is invaluable for rural populations living through changing circumstances.
Source:The Population Problem: Theory and Evidence.
Journal of Economic Literature. Dec 1995.

To come back to the question that I am concerned with, namely, is there is a way out of the low-level equilibrium trap of high population growth and low educational attainment, the tentative answer has to be yes if for no other reason but that otherwise we are all wasting our time trying to transform India. The question then is what needs to be done to achieve that transformation. I believe that, among other things, these are what we chiefly need:

• Access to credit
• Female empowerment
• Universal literacy at the minimum, and
• Reduced population growth rates

How to get those things rolling is matter we will address ourselves to in the future.

[This entry was originally posted on Feb 13th, 2004. I have moved the entry here partly because I think it is pertinent to the current debate.]

The Law of Unintended Consequences is pretty well known, I suppose. It is part of a more general law which I call the Zeroth Law of Ecology which says that you can never really do only one thing. That is, you want to do only A but you find that you have also done B and C, both of which you had not intended doing. This is because the universe is complex and all its parts are interlinked and so when you do something to one bit of the universe, you end up disturbing the whole universe.

There must be many reasons why we cannot see all the connections. There may be ignorance, willful or otherwise, for instance. Or it could be that we are not omniscient. But, I believe, it is mostly due to what is called our bounded rationality, which means we are not clever enough to think through all the complexities of the universe.

I find paradoxical stuff fascinating. A paradox is puzzling only as long as you have not figured out the full story. Counter-intuitive stuff also give me thrills. Take, for instance, the observation that many people who win lotteries end up being not lucky after all: a good many of these lucky winners end up broke and sometimes worse off than they were before they got the windfall. It is like a winner’s curse with vengeance.

Thus have I heard that the Tathagata said: First do no harm; then try to do good. (For more of what the Buddha said, see “It’s the small stuff, stupid!”). Very sane advice, if you ask me.

Very few people are fundamentally evil, very few wake up and say gleefully with an evil glint in their eyes, “What can I do to screw up the happiness of my fellow humans?” Most say, “Let me help fix this, that or the other.” And since most people are ignorant about most things**, they end up monkeying around and muck up the whole works. Let me save you from drowning, said the monkey to the fish as he put it up on a tree. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

[**: Actually, everybody is ignorant about most things. Very few people know a lot about a few things, most people know a little about a few things, and an astonishingly large number of people in positions of power know f*all about anything.]

I guess by now you are wondering where all this is leading to, eh? Where is all this talk about good intentions and screw-ups taking us, you ask. Here. I want to first bring out a few examples of good intentions gone bad. Then ask what went wrong and then draw a general lesson. That general lesson will become a tool, a mental model, with which one can shape an argument, solve an apparent paradox. Then go on to add more tools till we have a somewhat complete set of tools which are extremely general purpose. Just thinking about these things is a delightful exercise. That in the end of all this, I would have changed a few minds about the nature of the population problem and my proposed solution, is an added incentive for me, to say nothing of the free dinners that I hope to collect from a bunch who have already taken up my challenge.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils for time is the greatest innovator.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

One of the more familiar of self-inflicted economic wounds is what goes under the name of rent control. The intent is to prevent greedy landlords from charging ungodly rents and exploiting poor people who cannot afford high rents. Who would be so mean-minded as to oppose rent control, one would incredulously ask. Isn’t it great that because of rent control the poor have a shot at finding housing? The truth is precisely the opposite: rent control hurts the poor the most by reducing the supply of rental housing.

I did a google on rent control perverse and got over 24,000 hits. Good reading if you have the time. Rent control has the perverse effect of reducing supply of affordable housing, creates disincentives for new developments, leads to deterioration of the existing stock of housing, and many other ill-effects that are certainly not intended. (Until about 6 years ago, Berkeley California which was home for me, used to have rent control laws. Housing was expensive and shoddy. After the removal of those laws, prices have started coming down because the supply of housing has gone up.)

I have been in Mumbai for about eight months. I can tell from a glance which buildings in any fancy neighborhood are under rent control: those that appear shabby and about to fall down. I visited an apartment in one such building. The inside of the apartment was lavish to the hilt; the outside was crumbling. The rent being paid: about $20 a month. Market rate: $2000 a month. Who lived in there? Someone who could afford $4000 a month in rent. How long were they living there? A short 30 years. Does the owner want the renter out? By god, yes. Can he get them out? No way in hell.

Why doesn’t the landlord fix the building? Answer: Are you crazy? How the heck can he afford to fix the building when he gets about one percent of the market rent for the building and from that income he cannot even hope to paint the entrance way of the building?

Laws are on the books ostensibly to protect tenants from evil landlords but they end up victimizing the tenants and penalizing the landlords. Because it is next to impossible to evict tenants in most parts of India legally, people prefer to lock up an unused apartment rather than put it on the rental market. I moved into an apartment in Mumbai which was two years old but was never lived in because the absentee owner dared not rent it out to anyone. Only through family connections and assurances of never ever wanting to settle down in Mumbai was I able to use the apartment. Anecdotal evidence indicates that a significant percentage of vacant Mumbai property is not available for rental because the laws make it impossible for legitimately terminating a rental agreement.

Bottom line for now: it is possible to be well-meaning and yet come out with astonishingly asinine policy out of ignorance and not having thought through the consequences. If one wants, one can spend the whole day just to list out idiotic ideas that harm the people they are intended to protect. I will discuss one more next time: the labor laws, specifically those that are supposed to protect the worker from being fired without reason but which results in fewer jobs for workers.

Connection with the topic of population control: many believe that it is inhumane to restrict reproductive rights of people. I intend to show that it is precisely the opposite: it is inhumane to not restrict it under the circumstances that we find ourselves in. I will show that those who argue that the poor will be hurt by a uniform policy of restricted reproductive rights are exactly wrong and that it is the poor who would benefit more than the rich.

There is more to come. Details at 11.

The point that Raj makes, if I understand him correctly, is that dire predictions about impending doom have turned out wrong in the past. No argument there. However, it is instructive to understand why the predictions were wrong and in which significant ways does a given prediction does not make the same mistakes. Lumping all projections as idiotic doomesday rants because some others of its ilk have been falsified is not very clever.

I am reminded of a joke. A man falls out of a very tall building. As he is falling past the 40th floor, someone asks “How is it going?” The man answers, “So far, so good.” At the risk of abusing the reader’s intelligence, allow me to spell out the point of that joke. Just because right now things don’t appear bad does not mean that the trajectory we are on is not disasterous. The man has not yet hit the pavement but the pavement is approaching at an accelerating rate: 32 feet per second per second, if I recall my physics correctly.

Talking of falling from buildings: it is not the falling that kills. It is the deceleration, the stopping that does the trick. Actually, it is not the stopping that kills either: it is because all the bits that constitute a person do not stop at the same time.

It is not a huge population that is a problem. The more the merrier, as many people prefer. The important thing is to ask whether there are sufficient resources available for everyone to have a good time. When I say resources, I mean not just the potential raw material resources but actually available resources and the distribution of those resources and the availability of institutions and technologies that allow the proper allocation of those resources.

You could have a country of only 10 million people which could be in dire straits because of a lack of resources (as defined broadly above.) Or you could have a billion people in a country but with a sufficiently large raw resource base, and the technology to process the resources efficiently, and the political and economic structure to efficiently and equitably allocate the resources for consumption and investment, etc, and yet have no population problem.

When we discuss the population problem, we have to recognize that it is a problem which has multiple dimensions. In such cases, it is easy to fall into what is called the dimensionality trap. Roman builders knew that larger the diameter of a pipe, the greater the flow of water through it. They built larger and larger diameter pipes but found that they would get a trickle in many cases. The dimension they had missed was that of the pressure head: the flow depends on the head, not just the pipe diameter.

I will explore every comment and objection which has been raised so far. To keep the post from becoming too long, let me briefly address a point that has been raised by a few people in private emails to me. My proposal is said to inhumane and does not respect the rights of people to have as many children as they please.

First, the question of rights. Does a person have a right to inflict pain and suffering on another person? If my action were to lead to immense suffering, and I plead that if you do not allow me to freely act you are impinging on some basic right I have, would you allow me that “right”? Or will you circumscribe my “right” to act as I please because otherwise it results in unnecessary pain and suffering to a human being?

What say you to this point before I go on?

(Disclaimer:Getting to the restaurant is not included in this offer. So if you want the dinner in Paris, for instance, you will have to get there on your own. I will pick up the restaurant tab but not the airline fare. Offer void where prohibited or taxed. Batteries not included. Some assembly required. Contents may have settled during shipment. Your mileage may vary depending upon weather and other driving conditions. Past performance is not a guarantee of future prospects. You get the idea.)

To make it fair, in case you do accept the challenge, you will have to promise to buy me dinner at a restaurant of my choice (I will pay my way to the restaurant) if I am able to bring you around to my point of view through the force of argument.

The problem we are addressing is a complex, multi-faceted beast. Nothing that is worth debating has simplistic and simple answers. Even an apparently simple question such as “How many people can the earth support?” provides serious challenges to thoughtful people and gives rise to substantial scholarly books such as the one by Joel Cohen who wrote a book with that question as its title. I invite you to read that book if you are serious about engaging in debate around a topic that is not only intellectually fascinating but also has enormous social, political, moral, ethical, and economic implications.

(Aside: Joel Cohen told me how that book came about. A reporter called him up and asked, “Professor, how many people can the earth support?” Joel replied that it is not easy to answer off the top of his head. Could he get back to the reporter by the end of the week? The reporter said fine. So Joel started researching the question and it took him three years to arrive at a tentative answer which occupies a book.

I kid you not: if after considering the problem in some depth, you can sleep soundly at night, I would say that you are an enlightened being who is not disturbed by affairs that afflict the merely mortal. End aside.)

There is a payoff in engaging in this exercise, one of personal growth. Both of us, you and I, will be enriched by this inquiry and debate. I ask you to seriously consider my invitation to debate and further, ask you to take up my challenge. Email me and tell me if we are on, and whether you want to pick up this challenge publicly or not. If you do want to accept the challenge publicly, then readers of this blog will know who are on which side of the debate.

The game is afoot. Time to take up the questions that have been raised as comments to the last post, which I will do shortly. Thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to email me and to comment on the proposal.

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

http://www.deeshaa.org/archives/2004/06/15/index.html#006187>

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.

The capacity of the tub represents development of the population. I argue that overpopulation is the shortest stave in the tub. The other staves are important — such as digital broadband access, electricity for all, subsidized higher education for the elite going to IIMs, free all expense trips for government ministers. But lengthening them will not alter the development potential (the capacity of the tub) one bit unless the shortest stave is addressed.

It is so because of what is called demographic entrapment which is that the population is large relative to the resources available and therefore it is poor. High fertility rates are highly correlated with poverty. The population continues to rise as a result and the ecological support further weakens, making it even more difficult for the population to make the demographic transition to a low fertility and high development state.

I am continually puzzled by the persistent neglect of the population issue in much of the popular debate about poverty, empowerment of people (especially women), the digital divide (and all sorts of other divides), AIDS, falling water tables, shortages of all kinds, and so on. I think that it is a profound lack of basic understanding of where the real constraint is that leads to this neglect. Allow me a personal anecdote to illustrate the importance of knowing where the constraint is.

My younger brother is a businessman in Nashik. He has a PC at home but asked me to bring him a new laptop from the US. What kind do you want, I asked. Problem is, he said, that his PC is very slow. What do you mean “slow”, I asked. Well, it takes a long time to download stuff with his PC, he said. It would be great to get a fast PC.

I asked him what he would do if the water supply was so meagre that only a thin trickle was all he got at the tap in his bathroom and it took an hour to fill his little plastic bucket. Buying a more expensive bucket will not make a difference to the trickle, would it?

Talking of buckets, I like to think of development in terms of filling buckets. If the buckets has too many holes, the leaks may be too much for a given flow to ever fill the bucket. While getting the flow into the bucket is important, it is also very important to plug the leaks. I have a bunch of suggestions which could plug the huge leak (population) in India’s development bucket. I will take that up the next time.

Right now, a reasonable estimate of the number of malnourished underweight uneducated children in India would be of the order of about 50 million. They will not grow up to be productive members of society, if they grow up at all. Think about it: 50 million. To put that in perspective: there aren’t that many people in many countries today. Or think about it like this: around 1850, the population of the United States was 23 million. Add the population of England, Wales and Scotland of 1851 — 21 million — and you have a total of 44 million people. That is less than the population of undernourished children in India right now as you read it.

The entire world in 1850 had the same number of people as exist in India today — a little over a billion.

I hope that we will find the time to contemplate the problem that we face and think deeply about how to solve it. For now, we could do worse than to meditate on what the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1848 book Principles of Political Economy :

There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presense of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character, and solitude in the presense of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or a flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

It is scarely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds cease to be engrossed with the art of getting on. Even the industrial arts might be as earnestly and as successfully cultivated, with this sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour. … Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.

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?

In 1965, about 40 years ago, there were less than 500 million of us. By 2004, the population of India has more than doubled. The effect of this incredible increase has been a falling standard of living in general, shortages, untold misery and conflict. It is foolish to expect that we can provide a decent standard of living to so many in such a short time. The vast majority of us do not have adequate drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and job opportunities. The preceding statement does not even begin to indicate the amount of human misery and sorrow which it implies. It hides within it the teeming millions who suffer without the slightest hope of ever seeing a future remotely human.

But let us get back to numbers again so that we can have at least an intellectual understanding of the problem before we begin to address the real issues. The population growth rate is a convenient measure of how fast the population is increasing. For India, it is at present 2.2 percent annually. This apparently innocuous looking number has terrible consequences. It implies that the population will double in less than 30 years. By the year 2030, at the current birth rate, India would have 1700 million people, surpassing China to become the most populous nation on earth. For the present, India has an additional 16 million mouths to feed, clothe and educate every year. Even the most optimistic scenario for the future of India is daunting due to demographic momentum. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University: “Suppose, over the next thirty to thirty-five years, India’s average completed family size dropped from the 1990 level of about 4.3 to 2.4 (replacement level) and remained there, and death rates didn’t rise. India’s population would continue to grow for almost a century, and when it stopped there would be about 2 billion Indians – as many people living in that one nation as populated the entire planet in 1930!”

A HUMAN PROBLEM

The numbers above are dry statistics and we are understandably dismissive of them since they have little relevance to more pressing problems at hand. So what’s the big deal? Well, it is a human problem and we have to feel the human issues involved to really understand what the implications are. An account of a personal encounter would be in place here. I walked out of a railway station while waiting in transit not long ago. It was noon time and the road in front of the station was crowded with the mad hustle of cars, buses, cycles, scooters and people. In the middle of the road, over a narrow divider, was the sleeping form of an old woman. She lay there in her rags with her eyes closed, perhaps asleep out of sheer exhaustion, with a stick and a battered tin can near at hand, in the middle of all the noise and fumes of the traffic in the noonday heat.

So here was a human being with all the capacity for love, pain, joy, hope, caring, companionship, contemplation and all those qualities that you and I have in common with every human. Nature had invested as much in her as in any other human on earth. Yet she was just a hopeless bundle of misery existing in a void without comfort or joy. I watched with a sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t do anything for her. And for the millions of others in circumstances not too different from her’s. It wasn’t the first time that I had seen something like this. It wasn’t even the first time that day. I am sure that you too have felt the pain. But we have stood by helplessly and turned away finally to cope with other problems.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being
something helpless that wants help from us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We may have unlimited compassion in our hearts but there is a limit to the sizes of our pockets. We have to shut out the dictates of our hearts to turn our attention to the urgent task of surviving. At best we dig out a few coins and hope to alleviate our conscience. The problem remains out of mind even though it is not out of sight. It is a human problem.

At another level of comprehension, it is an economic problem. The value of an entity is ruthlessly dictated by the ratio of supply and demand. We have too many people and hence each individual is valued so little. Pathetic though it is, the fact is that we have devalued human life to the point that millions continue to exist in conditions that afford little dignity and humanity and we are apparently unmoved to do anything about it.

What does this personal account have to do with the larger issue that I was discussing above? Pretty much everything, really, if you care to think about it. When I hear, for example, that so many millions of people live in dire poverty, I don’t really understand what it means. To fully understand it I would have to have the empathy to feel how it is like to be in that old woman’s place. Then to take that painful existence and multiply it a million fold (an impossible task, surely) and then I may have a hint of how much suffering is implied by that statement.

Well, you may say, all this thing about compassion and human pain is a lot of sentimental hogwash and doesn’t really concern you overly. But what if all this has an impact on you, your future and your children? Would you be concerned then? More about this later.

Let’s put the number of the abjectly poor in perspective. Consider the number of people below the poverty line at the time of India’s independence. We had about 350 million people then. Assuming that 50 percent of them were below the poverty line then, there were 175 million abjectly poor people then. Now, about 55 years later, we have 250 abjectly poor people. There has been an increase of 75 million in the ranks of the abjectly poor.

Whatever else one can say about India’s progress, there is no way anyone can claim that India has made any progress in reducing poverty. Hundreds of billions of rupees have been spent in poverty reduction and yet we have not able to not just reduce poverty, we have actually seen an increase in the number of the poor.

How on earth could we have achieved this: spending huge amounts and still not being able to reduce the absolute headcount of the abjectly poor? The answer is not hard to find. The analogy I use is this: imagine trying to fill a leaky bucket. There is no way of ever filling it if the rate at which the bucket leaks is greater than the rate at which water flows into it. India’s misfortune is that the rate at which the population of the abjectly poor increases overwhelmes the resources available to lift people out of poverty.

Consider this report from the BBC simply titled 24 Children:

In the small town of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, down an alleyway off the main street and behind some shops, is the home of Mohammed Omar and his wife, Aasiyah Begum… They have 24 children… Aasiyah Begum has given birth to 29 children she thinks, but five have died.

Of the hundreds of millions of Indians who are abjectly poor, one thing we can be sure of: to a first approximation, they are poor because their parents were abjectly poor. Poverty, like riches and skin color, is inherited.

Amartya Sen, an economist who has spent some time thinking about the matter of poverty, had once remarked that if poverty were a contagious disease, the rich would eradicate it pretty rapidly. I see his point, that in the short run, poverty is not contagious. But I feel that in the long run, poverty is highly contagious. The deadweight of the poor can produce sufficient friction in the workings of the economy that even the non-poor find it difficult to survive.

Poverty is the outcome or consequence of a large number of factors. Oppression and exploitation are certainly very potent factors that keep the poor in poverty. But the most important factor for the poverty of the poor is, in my considered opinion, the real uncontrolled fecundity of the poor. I realize that in this age of political correctness and global social forums, this is not going to make me popular.

The question of economic development of the country cannot be answered without reference to the poor. We need to ask hard questions and if the answer turns out to be less than palatable for some people, so be it. But we cannot pretend that we can solve problems without understanding fully what are the causal factors that create them.

We – you and I – belong to that elite 20 percent of the world’s population, whether you are in Mumbai or Manhattan.

The gap between us and them at the bottom is wide and becoming wider still. A number of questions need to asked and then answered. How wide is the gap? Is that gap good or bad? Can the gap be eliminated? Should it be eliminated? Will it be eliminated? Whose job is it to eliminate the gap? Which side of the gap does the fault lie? Should the gap be filled by leveling things downwards or should things be leveled upwards? Is it possible to level it upwards?

Before we get to the normative questions, we should have knowledge of what is. We have all come across the usual list of standard laments such as the following from a Cornell University report:

• One reason for the increase in malnutrition is that production of grains per capita has been declining since 1983. Grains provide 80 percent to 90 percent of the world’s food. Each additional human further reduces available food per capita.
• The reasons for this per capita decrease in food production are a 20 percent decline in cropland per capita, a 15 percent decrease in water for irrigation and a 23 percent drop in the use of fertilizers.
• Biotechnology and other technologies apparently have not been implemented fast enough to prevent declines in per capita food production during the past 17 years.
• Considering the resources likely to be available in A.D. 2100, the optimal world population would be about 2 billion, with a standard of living about half that of the United States in the 1990s, or at the standard experienced by the average European.

I don’t trust projections that talk about the standard of living of people a hundred years hence. Could anyone living in the year 1900 have imagined any of the things lying around your desktop today? They could not have imagined any of the things we take for granted. They could not have imagined that 2 billion people – that is more people than entire population of the earth in 1900 – would be living lives of such unimaginable luxury that their greatest troubles would be due to the excesses of affluence. We too are clearly quite not up to the task of imagining a world 100 years hence because the rate of technological change itself has accelerated.

I don’t trust any projection that talk about the distant future. What concerns me is the present and the near term: of the order of 10 or 20 years. In the long term, as Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead, anyway.

As Joel Cohen noted, “Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century.”

Take a look at the figure below from The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA):

In the 45 years since 1950, India added five times as many people as did the US. India added 571 million people, while the US added 109 million. Compare that to the growth in per capita GDP. India’s GDP grew from $180 in 1960 to $463 in 2000 — an increase of $283 in 40 years (figures in constant 1995 dollars). Compare that to the US: from $12,837 in 1960 to $31,806 during the same period — an increase of nearly $19,000, or 67 times the increase relative to India. (Data from the World Bank.)

In the 100 years from 1950 to 2050, India will add 1.2 billion people to reach a total of 1.5 billion. Let’s read that number again: it will be one thousand five hundred thousand thousand. During the same period, the increase in the US population would be about one-sixth that of India. I am not going to go into the projected difference in the per capita GDPs; it is too depressing even for me.

The important thing to note is that no country with large increases in populations has ever been, or is likely to be, a developed country. We have to do a little arithmetic to convince ourselves that there is no way on earth can India move out of the poverty trap without changing its population growth rate, no matter how pretty a song you sing about IT superpower or how nimble a dance you dance about BPO. All this song and dance about India being a superpower in 2020 is merely arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while the Titanic band is paying ragtime.

We need to understand what is at stake and wake up to the fact that we are short on lifeboats, that the hull is breached, the captain has ignored the warnings, the builders have messed up the design, and the binoculars were missing.

The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield.
Source

Ignoring the warnings was just one of the many things that went wrong. The design itself was flawed. It was a systemic failure.

Even though only 12 feet of the hull was gouged open by the collision, enough compartments were damaged to cause the Titanic to sink. The problem was traced back to the bulkheads; they were not fully extended to the top of the compartments. As the ship went down, the water would fill up and pour over the bulkhead into the next compartment.

Source

Then there were idiosyncratic factors. For instance, the ocean was dead calm on a moonless night. If the seas had been rough, the iceberg would have been sighted sooner due to the surf at the base of the tip of the iceberg. That was a factor beyond the control of the crew of the ship.

However, the iceberg could have been detected sooner had the two crew men assigned to lookout had binoculars. For some reason, they didn’t have binoculars. A simple precaution which would have averted the disaster. But for a pair of binoculars, the disaster may not have occurred.

The iceberg was detected too late for certain. Then there was bad luck, as well. If the ship had turned a bit more, that grazing encounter would not have happened. Perhaps if the ship had hit head on, the front would have been damaged but the ship would have survived. Attempting to miss the berg altogether presented the ship’s vulnerable side to the iceberg.

And now the final insult. The ship was doomed. But nearly all on board could have been saved had two things happened. First, if the inevitability of the demise of the ship had been fully appreciated by the captain and the crew. And most importantly, if the ship had sufficient life boats on board. The first factor was within the control of the crew; the second factor was outside their control but was within the control of those in charge of outfitting the ship before it sailed.

As it happened, there was no awareness of the seriousness of the situation.

Many of the passengers did not believe that the ship was sinking, and refused to board the lifeboats. As a result many of the boats left half full, and some of the starboard boats were filled with men. To add to the confusion and disorganization, many of the passengers were getting cold from the chilly air, and went inside to relax. They did not recognize the actual severity of the accident until the first emergency flare was released. At that time many passengers began to panic, but it was too late half the boats were released and the other half was swarmed by first–class women and children. Water began to flood the lower decks of the bow and the stern began to rise out of the water.

Some more details:

The passengers on the Titanic initially did nothing. The Titanic was believed “unsinkable” and so talk of an iceberg and lifeboats did not enter the equation. Some passengers carried on with playing cards, others sang songs especially in third class as they particularly were kept uninformed.

Whilst the first and second class passengers were required to assemble on the boat deck, the third class were confined in their sector of the boat and not given instructions for some time. They were be allowed access to the boat deck at 12.30 a.m. Orders were given to release the third class and bring them to the boats. However, most of the third class passengers were not familiar with the giant liner. Her passages, corridors and decks must have been a maze to them. Some would have inevitable got lost and spent their last few hours walking aimlessly around the ship.

There were insufficient number of lifeboats to begin with. Only about half of the 2200 people could be accommodated in the 20 lifeboats on board. Even those were not fully utilized because of what I call information failure.

There are lots of what ifs one can ask. What if they had designed the ship to better survive flooding of its water-tight compartments, what if they had sufficient life boats on board, what if they had heeded the warnings, what if they had realized the severity of the damage, what if the Californian had recognized that the Titanic was in mortal danger and sailed the six miles to its aid, what if the seas had been rougher, what if the crew had binoculars, what if the ship had hit the iceberg head on at slow speed or had turned just a degree more, …

If only, lord, if only. Fifteen hundred blameless people would not have drowned that night of Dec 14th 1912 in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

A mighty ship like the Titanic is not easy to destroy. There have to be a confluence of a large number of factors — both natural and human created — that lead inexorably to the end. What the tragedy of the Titanic is a metaphor for let’s discuss in a bit.

The unprecedented growth in human numbers and in human power to alter the Earth requires, and will require, unprecedented human agility in adapting to environmental, economic and social problems, sometimes all at once. The Earth’s human population has entered and rapidly moves deeper into a poorly charted zone where limits on human population size or well-being have been anticipated and may be encountered. Slower population growth, along with many other improvements in human institutions and behaviors, would make it easier for people to retain control of their fate and to turn their attention from the numbers to the qualities of humankind.

These themes have consequences for action. Stopping a heavy truck and turning a large ocean liner both take time. Stopping population growth in noncoercive ways takes decades under the best of circumstances. Ordinary people … still have time to end population growth voluntarily and gradually by means that they find acceptable. Doing so will require the support of the best available leadership and institutions of politics, economics and technology to avoid physical, chemical and biological constraints beyond human control. Migration can ameliorate or exacerbate local problems, but at the global level, if birth rates do not fall, death rates must rise.

India’s population problem is a sort of tragedy of the commons and there is little chance that ‘ordinary people will voluntarily and gradually’ solve this problem. The incentives simply don’t exist, even if the knowledge and the understanding existed about the social disaster of excessive population, for individuals to act for the social good.

The solution to India’s population problem has to “make sense” to those who produce the children. That is, they have to have an incentive to produce the socially optimal number of children. I have worked out a simple mechanism that would solve this problem. Details at — when else — 11.

The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield. Source

The passengers trusted that the captain was competent. The importance of that simple concept called trust can never be underestimated. Without trust, we would accomplish very little. We have to trust that those who are supposed to know, do know; that those who are supposed to do, are capable, etc. We trust that the pilot knows how to handle the craft, and the surgeon the scalpel. We trust that the policy makers know what they are doing.

We only learn of a betrayal of that trust only when it is too late. Whether it is a ship, or a ship of state, some worry whether those whom we trust are worthy of that trust.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Titanic was doomed due to a number of factors which were linked into a chain. If any of the links were not forged, it would have avoided that fate. The first link of that chain was the structural link. It was designed such that if a few of its forward water-tight compartments were to get flooded, it would sink.

Source

There must have been some design considerations which dictated why the bulkheads did not go all the way to the ceiling. I am only noting the structural feature which made the Titanic vulnerable to negligent behavior. Perhaps if the Titanic was designed differently, it could have survived the negligent behavior of its crew.

The lesson to me is that the ship had a structural failure that was exposed due to the incompetence of its captain.

A few years ago, he said, a journalist had called him up saying that he was doing a piece on world population and wanted to know from Joel how many people could the earth support. Joel told the caller that he could not answer that question off the top of his head. It could take him a few days and why didn’t he call back in four or five days.

It took Joel three years to definitively answer that question and a fine job he did, in my opinion. The book was published in 1995. I quote from the introduction:

Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century. Human numbers currently exceed 5.7 billion and increase by roughly an additional 90 million people per year. Second, the resources of every kind (physical, chemical and biological; technological, institutional and cultural; economic, political and behavioral) available to people are finite today both in their present capacity and in their possible speed of expansion. Today’s rapid relative and absolute increase in population stretches the productive, absorptive and recuperative capacities of the Earth as humans are now able to manage those capacities. It also stretches human capacities for technological and social invention, adaptation, and compassion.

Like in all other things, humans have a limited capacity for compassion too. When resources are severely limited, the thin veneer of civilization is easily scraped off to reveal the underlying unyielding will to survive at the expense of others.

Now it was 9.40pm, and still the ice warnings came. At no time had Captain Smith or the senior officers ordered a cautionary reduction in speed, or had gone to the trouble of having extra lookouts posted, something which Captain Lord of the Californian had already performed before he called it a day and brought his own vessel to a halt in the ice. When you put-together the ice warnings Titanic had received that day, it revealed that there was an ice-field 80 miles long directly in her path, and only two hours away if the current speed were maintained. Surely somebody in the next couple of hours must realise that Titanic is steaming at full-speed into an ice-field which has already made other vessels to heave-to for the night?

The warning messages kept coming in. Ice ahead. John Phillips was the radio operator in the Marconi room busy at the controls of the transmitters, sending messages to Cape Race in North America.

… under the immense pressure of sending commercial traffic, and at the same time having to cope with incoming warnings and messages, he snapped, as the nearby Californian sent an ice warning to Titanic. “Shut up, shut up. I am busy. I am working Cape Race.” Phillips’ now infamous snub highlighted how the commercial traffic had priority over the warnings. Perhaps if the Marconi men had not been so busy sending messages, the Titanic would never had foundered. But all of the previous warnings didn’t stop that happening either, so a last minute aversion was unlikely.

The man said, “All I want is a few pennies. I want one penny on the first square of a chess board, two pennies on the second square, four pennies on the third, eight pennies on the fourth, and so on till we reach the 64th square of the chess board.”

The king, like our present day innumerate kings, was immensely relieved. Here was this idiot asking for pennies when he could have asked for a ton of gold. “Done,” said the king and asked his minister to make the arrangements.

The minister soon reported that he had finished counting the total amount the king had promised and it turned out to be around 184,467,441,000,000,000 or $185 million trillion. The annual GDP of the US is $10 trillion. It would take the US about 18.5 million years to get that amount together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We are talking large sums when exponential growths are concerned. It does not matter what the value of the exponent is. It could be as little as 2%. In a matter of just 35 years, the world population of 6 billion would increase to 12 billion at a 2% growth rate. It is estimated that it took all of human history till the year 1804 CE for human populations to hit the billion mark. The latest billion was added to the human population in about 12 years — a million times faster.

World Population

Population      Year    Interval
 ----------      ----    --------
1 billion       1804    all of human history
2 billion       1927    123 years
3 billion       1960    33 years
4 billion       1974    14 years
5 billion       1987    13 years
6 billion       1999    12 years 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

India’s population was around 350 million in 1947. Now we have three times as many people alive in India. Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, and MP make nearly 45% of India. They are also among the poorest states of India.

India has more people than all of Africa, North America and South America combined. And all these people, more than a billion, or around 17% of all humanity, are jammed into only 2.4% of the world’s landmass.

It is crowded as all heck and still every year we add more people than the population of Australia.

Population in India density has risen concomitantly with the massive increases in population. In 1901 India counted some seventy-seven persons per square kilometer; in 1981 there were 216 persons per square kilometer; by 1991 there were 267 persons per square kilometer–up almost 25 percent from the 1981 population density. India’s average population density is higher than that of any other nation of comparable size. The highest densities are not only in heavily urbanized regions but also in areas that are mostly agricultural.[Source]

What an absolutely evocative expression. I cannot get that out of my head every time I muster up enough courage to read the newspapers. Most of those out there on the top deck are busy with something trivial while below decks the situation is dire.

It was a cold and dark night on the 14th of April in the year 1912. The dead calm seas were lit only by moonlight as the HMS Titanic made its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York across the North Atlantic.

Ice is a seasonal hazard in the unforgiving winter seas of the North Atlantic, and in the couple of days since leaving Southampton, many ships had reported ice in the exact area into which Titanic would be sailing. On the 11th April, she received 6 warnings from ships stopped in, or passing through, heavy ice, 5 more on the 12th, 3 more on the 13th, and 7 on the 14th. All of these messages would have been written down as they were intercepted, logged in the radio book, and passed on to the officers on the bridge. There was now no way that the Captain, along with the officers, would have been unaware of the huge field of ice that now lay directly in front of Titanic.    Source.

Perhaps other matters occupied the Captain’s mind, such as the need to retire with a big bang. This was his last command and perhaps he did not want the ship to be late on its maiden voyage. Perhaps the owners of the White Star shipping lines did not want to let ice interfere with their grand ship.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied . . .

I don’t know if Leonard Cohen is right about that. Not everybody knows.

I find it impossible not to breast beat, bitch and moan about the murder of innocent girls because their ‘net present value’ is lower than that
of boys. I am wierd that way.

Yes, I think the foetuses has rights. Not neccessarily all rights. But the right to life except under well defined circumstances.

One should not only breat beat and bitch and moan about murder of innocent girls, one should actively fight with all one’s might to prevent that. Why stop at girls, one should oppose all murders, period. Anyone who advocates the murder of anyone based on low net present value should be considered deranged and dealt suitably.

My position is that the fact is that some people value female children less than male children. This is a lamentable fact but a fact nonetheless. I did not dictate that people value girls less. I am taking that as given and (at least for the present) unalterable fact. Breast beating may feel good but will do little to alter that fact. Altering that fact would be an end that all right-thinking people devoutly wish for. It may take a few generations. Until then, what is the most humane way to deal with the problem. Do millions of unwanted girl children have to suffer inhuman neglect? Can society protect the rights of children with as much gusto as the protection of foetuses? Which is the lesser evil: the aborting of female foetuses or the terrible fate of an unwanted girl child?

How would I feel if I were in the place of a girl who was beaten, malnourished, worked nearly to death, neglected, not loved, not had even the shadow of the prospect of a decent human existence? I would rather that I was never born. The suffering of a human being is a lot worse in my estimation than the aborting of a female foetus.

Your view of which is better would vary and therefore your policy prescription would also vary. I stand by my position that it is a second best world and the prohibition of sex-based abortion is a first best prescription that does more harm than good. It merely addresses the consequence and does nothing to address the underlying causes, many of which are economic.

The booklet cover says it all: Missing. Released by the United Nations Population Fund or UNFPA, it maps the declining child sex ratio (in the age group 0 to 6) in the country: 20 pages talk of the last decade’s grim reality of the ‘missing girl’ child.

The national average dropped to 927 girls per 1000 boys in 2001 from 945 per 1000 in 1991. And Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh had a child sex ratio of less than 800 girls for every 1000 boys.

According to UNFPA, reasons for the decline have been attributed to the determination of the sex of the unborn child or foetus and eliminating the foetus when found to be female.

The breast beating about the skewed sex ratio in India has always puzzled me. What is all this bitching and moaning about, really? Why don’t these people analyse the situation in its entirety?

Consider the facts:

A. India is overpopulated.

B. Girls are valued less than boys.

C. Neglect of an unwanted child is a greater evil than the aborting of a foetus.

D. The lower supply of women of marriagable age will increase their ‘price’ leading to a ‘negative dowry’.

E. The lower supply of women would retard population growth.

A little reflection on the facts leads one to conclude that the skewed sex ratio is a consequence of other underlying facts such as resource constraints, exhorbitant cost of dowry for getting daughters married, female illiteracy, and so on. Poor families have severe resource constraints, ranging from calories to clothing to education. If sons have a greater net present value (due to their future earning capacity), girls are disadvantaged in the share that they get of the limited resources.

It all boils down to the fact that this is a second-best world. There are multiple problems which conspire to create the skewed sex ratio. Merely addressing the effect leads to idiotic policy recommendations such as banning the determination of the sex of a foetus. One unforunate consequence of that ban could well be the increase in the number of new-born female infants killed, or worse still, chronic neglect of the unwanted girl child.

So what should be the policy response? Either remove all the distortions that lead to the effect or do nothing. For instance, enforce a ban on dowry, enforce a strict limit on the number of pregnancies a woman can have, provide information and materials for effective contraception, increase the marriage age so as to delay the first pregnancy, enforce compulsory and free education for all children, and so on.

All the above may be more than there are resources for. So as a first step, the policy should be to let people make their own decision whether to have a girl child or not by aborting female foetuses. Collectively, it is a rational decision made under the existing constraints.

Of course, if a particular group goes overboard and has no female children, they should be awarded the Darwin Prize for having selected themselves out of the gene pool.