Here is a post which might be worth reading
http://bponews.blogspot.com/2006/10/in-defense-of-swaminomics.html

Now, my humble six cents:
1. Poor people have a sad living, but not a sad life in general - humans adjust to conditions and dont commit suicide en masse. Extremely important distinction. So let us not jump in and curtail the civil rights of procreation of parents saying that bequeathing poverty is morally unjustifiable.

2. Now the possible negative economic externalities for society. Hmmmmmm…. since the children of the Indian agricultural poor GET little de facto state services (and since a lot of us would stand for limited de jure help except for disability benefits, primary education vouchers, health insurance financing and the like) then where is the negative externality? If there is some externality, which I am missing use moderate taxation (positive and negative) strategies for incentives.

3. Water and other resources you point out is what is the main problem (Higher population density is by itself not a problem, right). While an increased demand of stuff is not technically an externality, but pollution might be one. Aesthetics seems to be one with you. Well, we can and are buying resources in the world market and news - even India’s population is stabilizing ! If Simon is “right” and Malthus was “left”, I am right-of-center.

4. The transition then is the ugly problem, you say. Sure - just like ugly poverty has been in the world for millenia. The government should further invest in small family awareness campaigns, and maybe subsidize condoms, pills and the like. That is all, besides some tax incentives as I have mentioned earlier.

5. Now to your discounting of long-term economic and strategic benefits. Firstly, to hell with Keynes. I am certainly hoping to live for more than 25 years. Even the US-Canada and intra-EU trade is not the same as say intra-Japan trade, so for many decades the nation will remain the biggest free trade unit. Here is where India and China will get efficiencies of scale which will reflect in per-capita figures. Sure we have to further deregulate our internal economies but let us not fudge two issues here.

6. The second long term benefit which you dismiss is the geopolitical angle. Larger absolute GDPs and larger efficiencies for “crowded” countries. But still one army. Still one negotiating team. Think about it.

In short, population has to be controlled. Just like poverty. But just like communism isnt the second problem’s answer, arresting, disqualifying or heavily charging farmers, politicians or journalists with more than say 2 children isnt the answer either. It just brings in more bureaucracy and is downright immoral in my opinion.

Try to explain small family benefits. Distribute condoms. Privatize education. Some labor will immigrate resulting perhaps in remittances and peace lobbies. Discuss and debate. But viciuosly attack an established columnist for obviously trying to make a point (correct or incorrect) with some entertainment-added-value for the lay man?

Not expected from one of my favorite bloggers.

Technological innovation kills the need for people to be employed in their old occupations. My point is that in agriculture it is not a good application as it stands today.

The problem is not over-population, but what to do with it? That is the dilemma facing the rulers of the world. If you don’t occupy the majority of the populace in some productive thing, and you don’t give them an opportunity to earn, the rulers are in trouble.

But ‘organic’ agriculture is one way of employing a huge number of people.

The reality is that the world will come to understand that the tractors, combines, and harvesters are no good. Do you know which country is amongst the highest exporters of such stuff right now? Brazil, how come? They are planting staple food in areas cleared of the Amazonian rainforest. What happens after 10-30 years? Desertification. You suck nutrients out in 3-5 years, then you pump artificial nutrients through fertilizers, but a point of no return comes in. The land has to heal before it is ready for producing food. Land is not a dead machine but a living thriving piece of earth which technology just brushes over.

Regarding food distribution: As long as there is a jungle, there will be wolves and deer, enough said.

Anyway, what is your solution to using our population?

One small point of contention though: Lalu/RabriDevi have a lot of (ill-begotten) wealth; so presumably, their offspring would have a higher than average incomes - meaning we should welcome them??

My point is that having more children than one has resources to make productive citizens out of is where the main problem lies. I am not refering to individuals or societies which have sufficient resources at their disposal to invest in the upbringing of their next generation.

On the comment made by Sarika Das, I agree that better border control is necessary so that India is not swamped by illegal immigration from Bangladesh and Pakistan. They are generally economic refugees but their impact on India goes beyond the economic impact alone: they change the demographics of India and ultimately harm the dominant ethic of India.

Whether the government should impose a 2-child limit or not is a different matter which should be dealt in a separate discussion.

realitycheck disagreed with me on my statement that “the higher the numbers of the poor, the lower their wages, and consequently the higher the standard living for the non-poor” and wrote that “If that were true, the rich / upper middle class would be having a high standard of living in India today. Yes, they can afford a lot of servants, that is important but not equal to high standards of living.”

My point is that the non-poor have a higher standard of living compared to what they would have had had there not been such a glut in the numbers of the poor. If the laboring classes were smaller, their wages would have been higher and therefore those who enjoy the benefits of low wages would have been able to afford much lower quantities of labor and thus their standards of living would have been lower. The comparison is not between the living standards of the rich countries versus the poor countries, but rather the living standards of the non-poor in India today as compared to what they would have had if they had to pay higher wages for labor.

In response to Edwards comment where he write:

On the one hand I agree with you: Northern India is having far too many children, and the writer you focus on obviously fails to understand this. But Kerala is not having too many children, Kerala is already having too few, and just here comes the problem. This is the part where I disagree with you: there are two population problems not one, and age structure is important.

My point that it is bad to have more children than can be supported does not contradict your position that some societies have the converse problem of having fewer children than they should have (given that they have the resources and need to have more children so as to avoid a demographic and economic decline.) There may indeed be several, not just two, different population problems. The fact that I discuss one problem does not imply that I deny the existence of others.

Moving on, Edward admits that he does not fully understand the phenomenon of demograhic transition. That one has not dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in the academic theses of demographic transition does not imply that broadly the idea is not well-understood. Aerodynamics, to take an example, is well-understood but that does not mean that there is no disagreement on the finer details or that there is no possibility of further advances in aeronautical engineering.

Edward quotes me, “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” and the most puzzlingly goes on to say:

But really is that all we aspire to, that the majority of Indians have clean water and personal hygiene? Or are we after something bigger, coz if we are, the best way to do it isn’t to crash India the way China has been crashed.

No, a glass of clean drinking water is not all that we aspire for. The point is that if we do not have the resources to provide the majority of Indians with even clean drinking water, we do have a problem providing them with all sorts of other resources which are required to give people a decent chance at living a human existence. If you cannot provide even drinking water, can you reach beyond and provide them with food, health care, education, recreation, a means of livelihood, and so on? What sort of logic is it that says “OK, we really cannot provide the basic necessity but let’s just go ahead and reproduce even faster so that one of these days there will be a demographic dividend”?

Amit Kulkarni strikes an optimistic note and writes:

The current trend is toward controlling population, because you really can do without slave labor with the help of technology. We can feed and clothe all the current inhabitants of the earth, and a half. I think that as yet no one has figured out how to think positively and use population effectively for constructive purposes, and not just as another dumping ground for consumption based society.

There is a gap between the realm of what is theoretically possible and what is actually likely to happen. Yes, the earth would be able to support 10 billion sometime in the future, or even a few trillion if you belong to the Julian Simon camp. What matters to me is not some future utopian state but the state today and how we transit from the present misery to the future utopia without needless suffering.

To a starving child, what matters is whether it gets food now, and it could not care less if your theories show that billions more can be supported by the earth.

In the end, saying that the earth can support (either now or at some distant time) x number of people is meaningless. You have to condition that number on what level of consumption: with my income I can support anywhere between a family of one (myself alone) or a family of 1000. At the high extreme, the only thing the family will be able to afford will be some basic calories and nothing else — no clothes, no shelter, no education. Not just numbers alone but at what standard of living is important.

Amit claims that “I think that agriculture just can’t be done with tractors, combines, harvestors and fertilizers. It needs manual labor.” This is too far out of the reality I know for me to be able to address this astounding claim. So I will pass over it in silence.

He asks though “how can we use India’s huge population constructively?” There is not enough space in this comment box for the long answer which I have worked out :). The short answer is: imaginatively.

Moving on to Chandra’s comment, he disagrees with my statement that “it is not the number of people that matters, but rather what resources these people have at their disposal matter.” He writes:

You are implying that only the rich (or rich countries/societies) can have more children. It is not about what resources (disposable or not) are available to the children but how productive these children (as Amit says). It is classic Indian problem. Sure resources help - but India’s problems are less about resources and more about constrains, legal or otherwise (and mostly non-financial), keeping people from being productive.

I do not imply that only rich can have more children. People can have as many as they want. But the consequences of that decision is visited upon the people to some extent but more importantly it is visited upon the children (who, we should note, have no say in the matter of their birth.)

My position is a normative one: I think that people (and thus by extension, socities) should not have more children than they have the ability to support them. By resources I mean all of it: material, institutional, political, what have you. Merely saying something like, “There is enough food; we just need a better distribution system” is pointless. If we are not smart enough to distribute what food we have efficiently, then it is no different from not having sufficient food in the first place — the result of starvation is the same irrespective of whether the food was not grown or that the food was grown but rotted in the fields.

Thanks all for adding to the discussion. This response to the comments has grown really long. I will have to address the misunderstanding of Malthus at a later date. Stay tuned.

“Cheaper labour does not necessarily mean higher standards of living. If that were true, the rich / upper middle class would be having a high standard of living in India today. Yes, they can afford a lot of servants, that is important but not equal to high standards of living. Clean environment, a happening city, a framework to work hard and play hard, parks, riverfont dining, lakes, and national parks, miles of bike trails, are all missing from the picture.”

You have really driven the nail on the head with this comment. Economics tends to simplify things and that can be dangerous when analyzing poverty. The poor cannot be seen as just a source of cheap labour, because they wield huge political power in a democratic society such as ours. However, what Amit is saying is not entirely false either, because the poor are also disadvantaged when it comes to organized political power. They lack the resources: time, negotiation skills, communication, nutrition that it takes to build a support group around an issue. It’s not impossible, but very very difficult. In a nutshell, economics cannot be divorced of sociology, but at the same time, the lack of strong sociologic institutions does not discredit the deductions of a purely economic viewpoint.

Pre-independence, Malthusian economists warned that India is headed for a demographic disaster in the 20th century, as its population seemed to outstrip its resources. It goes to say that while not a disaster, India’s case is not one of envy. Because, it seems that while its middle class and old-world rich has grown in prosperity, the poor have not received much of the economic dividends. Poverty is probably the least well understood problem of our country. After all, we have failed miserably on many fronts to tackle it. What I do know is that poverty is not just the lack of access to nutrition, shelter or clothes.

It also includes the lack of access to jobs, legal recourse, land and education. Take Kerala for example, which has attained literacy standards akin to developed economies. Yet, people lack access to jobs because of an inhospitable business environment. They lack legal recourse because the judicial system moves at a snail’s pace. Had these elements been unshackled as illiteracy had been tackled, Kerala still would not lag behind other states.

Poverty has to be tackled on many fronts. It’s an uphill battle, probably the biggest humanity has ever fought. Forget wars over land, water, WMDs etc – those are irritations compared to the effort in providing people with the ability to lead healthy lives. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we haven’t achieved much. But, it shouldn’t be acceptable either.

Very frequently I keep listening from “so-called” economists that India is infact “blessed” with a huge population. Even politicians and administrators are now slowly talking about “advantages” of our huge population. This is completely wrong. The quality of life available to each individual due to this huge population is pathetic.

Its time we again seriously focus on population control for the betterment of mankind.

I am not sure I agree with that assessment. You are implying that only the rich (or rich countries/societies) can have more children. It is not about what resources (disposable or not) are available to the children but how productive these children (as Amit says). It is classic Indian problem. Sure resources help - but India’s problems are less about resources and more about constrains, legal or otherwise (and mostly non-financial), keeping people from being productive. Till now people usually ignore these constrains and blame population growth; now it seems the trend has turned 180 - ignore these constrains and celebrate population growth (as so called demographic divide). If all it took was population growth for a booming economy, India would have been rich long time ago. But population growth isn’t the sole cause for keeping India at the bottom of global HDI decade after decade.