Customer Reviews

Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population

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Though science is a progressive activity, social policies defended as "scientific," when examined in hindsight, often reveal themselves to be based on little more than ephemeral cultural beliefs. Historical analyses of social policies 50 years on almost always uncover strong, sometimes fatal, nationalist, class, race, or gender-biases. Yet, our faith in progress drives us to believe that the mistakes of the past were due simply to inadequate data or poor modeling, not a general and unavoidable gulf between what is knowable scientifically and what is necessary to function communally and politically.

Nicolas D. Kristof, in his review of Matthew Connelly's "Fatal Misconception," (NYT: March 23, 2008) expresses this faith (and error) when he asserts, "The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide."

Connelly does not dispute that the ability to control fertility is a welcome and empowering development. However, he makes a strong case that it has been "the emancipation of women, not population control, that has remade humanity." Connelly ably defends his central thesis - "the great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think one could know people's interests better than they knew it themselves" - and alerts us to the continued universality and threat of this misconception. International population control efforts of the 1960s and 70s are often characterized today, particularly by feminist scholars, as extensions of imperialist policies. But Connelly's warning that "the spirit of empire lives on when people are unaccountable to those they claim to serve" is something I think we would all do well to contemplate.

Connelly's book is thoroughly researched and extremely well written. Highly recommended.

This is a fine work of historical scholarship, but I have three problems with it. The first one is that it is too ideological, or, to put it another way, insufficiently dispassionate for a work of history. The second is that he is way too hard on the scholarly discipline of demography, the association of which with population control he overstates. Demography in the 20th-century achieved enormous triumphs in formal/mathematical theory, statistical methods, data collection, and (still incompletely developed) social science understanding of population processes. Connelly seems to suggest that any study or analysis at the population level denigrates individual liberty. I think that is an unreasonable assessment.
The third (and most important) problem is that it gets overly bogged down in the details of who said what to whom, bureaucratic squabbles, power struggles, etc. What gets lost in all these details are the grander historical contexts. For example, in the few decades after World War II, we entered the age of what I like to call "high modernism." The manifestations of this age ramified in music, art, architecture, and social/political theory. In the latter sphere we saw "modernization theory," "development economics," welfare state mixed economies, structuralism, and a general predilection toward management, planning, systems approaches, global governance, the sanctity of science, utopianism, and what would later be referred to as "metanarratives." Population control was one manifestation of this intellectual, political, and artistic movement, but the extent to which this context matters seems to escape Connelly's account. Is it a coincidence that the hey-day of population control was also the hey-day of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier?
The post-modernism of the 80s and 90s was characterized by skepticism about modernist metanarratives, and many of the grand theories of the previous decades began to be viewed as dangerously naive. The 1994 World Population Conference may have been a "Waterloo" of population control (a point that Connelly overstates), but the demise of population control had a far broader intellectual context that, again, Connelly does not sufficiently develop.
Is population control dead? Perhaps for now. But fatal misconceptions about human social life come and go. We may not see this one again, but our children and grandchildren very well might.

Matthew Connelly, an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, has written the first global history of population control by both governments and non-governmental organizations. He includes the histories of both pro-natal and anti-natal positions, and even touches on related issues such as eugenics and immigration. The book is largely critique of the neo-Malthusian "Population Bomb" mentality and the flawed (albeit well-intentioned) efforts of Westerners to limit population growth in their own countries and in the developing world.

As Connelly writes, "The idea of population control is at least as ancient as Plato's Republic, which described how a 'Guardian class' could be bred to rule, the unfit left to die, and everyone sold the same myth that political inequality reflected the natural order of things."

This harsh sentiment is reflected in policies ranging from today's One Child policy in China to the eugenics movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 1930s that attempted to limit the reproduction of the 'unfit.'

Of course, today many of the countries that attempted to limit population growth in the past are now desperately trying to foster it. Pro-natal policies abound in North America and Europe, with former president Vladimir Putin's offer to pay Russian women $10,000 for each baby being the most extreme example. In words that echo Phillip Longman (see THE EMPTY CRADLE: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What to Do About It), Connelly writes,

"Some have now declared a new population crisis...and we are told that we should fear too many elderly rather than too many children. Now most pronounced in Europe and Japan, the 'aging' of populations may proceed much and more rapidly in countries where fertility fell the fastest, such as China and Mexico, this time without the benefit of a societal safety net."

The world is now facing a slow-motion demographic crisis unlike any before in history. Past crises--be they plagues, wars, famines, etc.--tended to affect the population across the age spectrum equally, or perhaps hit the older and weaker harder. In the unfolding crisis, the elderly are the survivors. We are truly entering a brave new world.

The author makes a compelling case that population control groups are accountable to no one. Driven by their own particular ideologies, they operate with little regard to either the welfare of individuals within nation states or the overall interest of the countries they seek to influence.
The larger point is that international organizations behave in similar fashion to interest groups: i.e., controlled by elites and driven by narrow ideologies.

I was a public health activist in the 60s and supported population control as appropriate public health policy. Mr. Connelly's extremely well documented book about population contral has contributed to my rethinking population control and public health policy in general. The well written book raises important questions about health policy today. The book is must reading for health policy makers and students of public health.

Should be a required text in Schools of Public Health

In this remarkable book, Connelly writes about the international history of population control movements.

Strengths:
Exceptionally well-written (does not read like a typical university press history book), superbly researched (solid and extensive archival research), and poignantly (and passionately) argued.

Weaknesses:
None.

Recommended for:
the general public, politicians, family planning officials, the Board of Immigration Appeals

Great book.
Valuable historical insight, and fair warning to those societies being tempted, or coerced into commodifying human life.

Connelly manages to write a massive volume without substantively addressing several key issues:

1) the finite availability of natural resources and the limits to growth it imposes
2) the role of religious & cultural superstitions in fighting voluntary population control
3) the unlikelihood of people accepting a reduced standard of living
4) the relative value of informed versus uninformed decision making

Connelly analysis is essentially cornucopian. He shows no understanding of such concepts as ecological carrying capacity or the fact that critical fertiliser resources like phosphorus or potash (potassium) have a very limited supply relative to feasibly extractable resources. His 'development' solution for population control ignores the inability to provide anything more than a poverty-ridden, subsistence existence for the bulk of humanity at past let alone future population levels.

Connelly grossly privileges religion by avoiding any critique of how dogma plays into opposition to voluntary population control. That is intellectual cowardice at its most rank. The author can look forward to his book being used by Abrahamic fundamentalists who view population growth as an assertion of religious supremacy. Again his unwillingness to address these people, who are the opponents of the women's rights he claims to revere, is typical of academics of this blame-the-West mindset.

For all his smug posturing against `racism' he shows ironically little practical concern with the survival of our or other species as a whole. His own `fatal misconception' is that because some population control efforts have been motivated by racism or eugenic views that their overall goal is automatically invalid.

His moralising about `imperialism,' further ignores the fact that all modes of decision making are not equal. Is an illiterate peasant who sees fathering as many sons as possible for the sake of machismo and/or religious duty really as well placed to make decisions about population control as a scientists or politician with access to quality information and educated to consider longterm consequences of human actions?

Writing from a position of privilege and comfort in the West, Connelly can chastise those who dare to question the decision making ability of people engaged in a hand-to-mouth existence. Without some `elitist' intervention a great many positive social policies (e.g. women's rights, gay marriage) would never have come about. Ignoring that uncomfortable truth is the only way Connelly could justify his tired anti-imperialism rhetoric.

This author takes what he wants from the actual facts to twist them to his own agenda. The idea that having no limits to human overpopulation is preposterous.