What’s the Point?
December 12, 2009
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Posted by Xanthippas
I like to read Volokh Conspiracy. I enjoy their intelligent and thoughtful commentary on (mostly) legal matters from a conservative/libertarian perspective. But not all participants are cut from the same cloth. Take for example this post by Jim Lindgren, wherein he criticizes Diane Francis for making a pretty stupid argument for population control:
The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.
Lindgren’s response?
A welfare state is in one sense a big Ponzi scheme. Without increasing numbers of people entering the scheme, there is no money to pay the people receiving the money. As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population.
Francis, a visiting professor at Ryerson University, also blogs at the Huffington Post. BTW, Jim Geraghty reports that she has two children, which is one more than I have.
Huh? So…because Francis is (presumably) a liberal (because only liberals would argue for severe population control) her argument for severe population control is undermined because where would we get the new bodies to pay for the welfare state (which only liberals support)? Also, she’s a hypocrite. I mean, is that the argument? If you can tell you’re smarter than I am.
Filled with nonsequiter-ish snark, Lindgren misses a chance to gut Francis’ stupid argument:
…imagine you are a bit richer. You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown. Schools, markets and factories are within reach. And suddenly, the incentives change. A tractor can gather the harvest better than children. Your wife may get a factory job—and now her lost wages must be set against the benefits of another baby. Education, thrift and a stake in the future become more important, and these middle-class virtues go hand in hand with smaller families. Education costs money, so you may not be able to afford a large family. Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you. And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring. Higher living standards, better communications and more education enable you to rely on markets and public services, not just yourself and your family.
Macroeconomic research bears out this picture. Fertility starts to drop at an annual income per person of $1,000-2,000 and falls until it hits the replacement level at an income per head of $4,000-10,000 a year (see chart 2). This roughly tracks the passage from poverty to middle-income status and from an agrarian society to a modern one. Thereafter fertility continues at or below replacement until, for some, it turns up again (see article).
The link between living standards and fertility exists within countries, too. India’s poorest state, Bihar, has a fertility rate of 4; richer Tamil Nadu and Kerala have rates below 2. Shanghai has had a fertility rate of less than 1.7 since 1975; in Guizhou, China’s poorest province, the rate is 2.2. So strong is the link between wealth and fertility that the few countries where fertility is not falling are those torn apart by war, such as Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where living standards have not risen.
In other words, raising living standards is nearly as effective as a draconian family size restrictions. What conservative wouldn’t get behind an argument to make everyone richer, and let them have as many kids as they want (because they’ll want less kids)? You can even make the principled argument that the present debated measures to control greenhouse emissions would only slow this process, and result in degradation to the environment as a result of population overgrowth.
Or if you’re Jim Lindgren, you can use it to take a cheap shot at the left that doesn’t connect because it doesn’t make any sense. Which means that I’m apparently a better conservative blogger than Jim Lindgren.
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tags: Conservative Bloggers, Economics, environment, Living Standards, Population Control
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Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think the shot was aimed so much at the Susan B. Anthony acolyte as it was at the massive welfare state. i.e. The government currently is incentivized for promoting moderate population growth to pay into an ever expanding benefit pool, how can they then turn back around and advocate a policy that is detrimental to that welfare state’s existence?
I guess I’m just a better liberal than you.
John,
I guess I didn’t make this clear, but welfare states are overwhelmingly first world nations, and nations concerned about population growth are overwhelmingly developing countries. There is no welfare state in China.
Of course there is no welfare state in China. Communism makes such an anachronism unnecessary. Welfare states are only the necessary extension of inherit unfairness of capitalist societies. (or so I have been told).
I suppose I am now misreading both Mrs. Francis article (about world wide (read first world) adoption of China’s policy) and Mr. Lindgren’s response about how current first world governments promote moderate population growth to pay into an ever expanding welfare state.
While it is true that I believe that Mr. Lindgren finds Mrs. Francis article distasteful. His true argument is that no first world government would adopt such a policy, since it is destructive to that country’s welfare state’s existence.
I think we get the argument, John, but the problem is it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. First, he compares a “welfare state” to a Ponzi scheme. Presumably in this case he’s talking specifically about Social Security, in which the currently employed are paying for the retirement of the old. But that’s a false comparison because Social Security doesn’t require a constantly growing base of “investors”. As I’m sure everyone is aware, at the inception of Social Security, lifespans were shorter and fewer people made it to retirement age, much less lived 40 years past it. While the rapid growth of the US population meant that there were more and more people paying into it, none of those people lost their investments at any point. They got their payouts at retirement. It’s not a system of a few benefiting at the expense of the many, it’s a system where everyone benefits at the expense of everyone. For most of your life you pay into it, then after a certain age you get paid out of it. There’s absolutely no scam involved. There are the arguments that SS benefits will be gone in however many (pick your own “the sky is falling” number), but even if that were true, the answer is not that we need more poor people to pay into it, it’s that we need more wealthy people to pay into it. Which goes hand in hand with a falling population. It’s actually the best of both worlds; in 30 or 40 years you will have solved the problem of insolvency both by decreasing the number of beneficiaries and increasing the amount paid in. Which is, coincidentally, another argument against draconian population controls. It would be actively bad to destabilize the system by suddenly contracting the population and creating stress on the system.
And to tackle the idea that first world nations “promote moderate population growth”, the European nations which actually offer benefits to people to have children aren’t trying to grow their populations, they’re trying to keep them from shrinking, and that’s far more due to their fears of waning cultural and political influence than it is to some perceived need to make enough money for this welfare Ponzi scheme. The US has no active program to combat its lack of population growth. The reason our population is nearly at a stable rate (the CIA World Factbook says that the 2009 population growth estimate is 0.975%, which is actually a loss) is because of a very strong religious movement in the US as well as widespread poverty.
Clearly, Lindgren’s assertion that a welfare state is a Ponzi scheme rests on a foundation of quicksand and a shaky grasp of facts. As for example, this assertion: “As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population.” Which means that they haven’t noticed that these European countries that conservatives over here love to excoriate as “socialist states” also happen to actually have shrinking populations.
And as for Lindgren’s stupid personal dig, it shows he can’t even do the math: how many people does it take to have 2 children? At least 2 adults. That’s beneath the replacement rate of 2.1, so…what is Lindgren pointing out? As far as I’m concerned, he basically opened his mouth and firmly inserted both feet. And probably is too stupid to know it.
Your snark makes no sense. Did you even read what Jim said? I wasted my time coming to your site.
Your site has a timer to ensure that those that post actually post what they intended? 5 minutes to read and make corrections? Are your fans that stupid?
Roger,
Unlike Jim Lindgren, we permit people to criticize us in comments. You are not required, however, to edit your comments.
Ignore him, I like the five minutes call back, wish I had it on email.
Perhaps, Roger, if you don’t understand why something is the way it is, the first thing to do is ask about it, not insult what you don’t understand. Although that does seem to be a fairly common conservative trait. Anyway, the point of the comment timer is to make sure bots or live people aren’t hogging bandwidth. Sure, we could lengthen that to 15 minutes (or shorten it to 2 if you prefer), but seriously, if you’re going to write a dissertation in our comments, the safest way to do it is to start it on your own computer, then paste it into this little box. That way you can do autosaves and if your computer dies from heat prostration with all the BS you’re spilling on it, you can recover the file. For most people I think our way works.
I think you’re being too literal with the ponzi scheme/welfare state analogy and relying way too much on the ad hominem. Big gov’t relies on a productive population to fund it and soemwhere there’s a balance between contributors and recipients. I’m not sure why the reproductive rate is so low in Western Europe but in that it is creates huge demographic problems and I think that’s evident.
Wait, wait, you think we’re being “too literal” with the Ponzi scheme analogy when Lindgren was the one who made it? No. He said it, he meant it. And nobody is relying on the ad hominem attack except Lindgren, who attempts to use it to back up his meaningless point, which is why he needs to be chastised for it.
As to your point, any government relies on a productive population. Even anarchy relies on a productive population. That fact does not support Lindgren’s claim that a) governments which redistribute wealth pursue population-growth strategies or b) that “you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population”. As you yourself say, bandit, “soemwhere[sic] there’s a balance between contributors and recipients”, which, if I may add, is partially a function of how much people are paying into the system when they’re productive vs. how much they take out when they get older. SS benefits in America don’t usually equal what somebody made when they were working, so we’re all used to the idea that the fund pays out less than you pay in.
Look, here’s what I’m trying to say but didn’t explicitly state before: the so-called “welfare state” enriches people. People who are enriched have less children. Therefore, a “welfare state” policy itself is population control. Therefore, for governments to encourage population growth, they would actively have to pursue policies that impoverish people. Lindgren’s argument, taken literally or metaphorically, is not true. Which, again, like I said before, is a completely sufficient argument against Francis in the first place. No need for potshots at states that give their citizens retirement money.