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Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller?
In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus.
Sachs presented five Reith lectures titled “Bursting at the Seams” in 2007. He reiterated the main points on population in an op-ed for CNN last October, to greet the globe’s seven-billionth inhabitant. “How can we enjoy sustainable development on a very crowded planet?” Asks Sachs. Two ways: the first requires a change of technologies and more global cooperation, he writes. The second is the stabilization of the global population. Developed world birth rates are down, he says, “The reduction of fertility rates should be encouraged in the poorer countries as well. Rapid and wholly voluntary reductions of fertility have been and can be achieved in poor countries.”
Given the options, Sachs's same-old pro-privatization development policies will be greeted as enlightened, none so more than his position on “reducing fertility.” He’s not promoting mandatory sterilization, after all, and he’s in tune with a growing crowd that’s recycling old population myths for the new save-the-planet context. But smart people have been working for decades to delink poverty from population. At the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development world leaders pressed by women’s groups agreed. As Radhika Balakrishnan, feminist economist, director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers puts it, “how population behaves is more important than how it grows.”
Given global distribution and consumption patterns, one of Jeffrey Sachs’s children in the United States, for example, probably destroys more of the planet’s resources in a day than your average small African village.
At the Reith lectures, Sachs made clear that he won't be proposing problem solving that affects his own ilk’s consumption habits. Quizzed about Western greed, he shot back: “I do not believe that the solution to this problem is a massive cutback of our consumption levels or our living standards. “ So it’s back to poor women and their kids.
Around the world, high-level women leaders including former presidents Michelle Bachelet (of Chile) and Mary Robinson (of Ireland) have launched an initiative to focus global attention on women’s expertise and leadership as regards Climate Change and development. Sachs’s focus on women as the “problem” takes us in exactly the opposite direction.
The sad thing is, thousands of genuine development experts were in town the week that Jeff Sachs’s Washington Post piece appeared. As he was basking in the media glow, they were enjoying no money media attention at all at the United Nations’ fifty-sixth Commission on the Status of Women.
MADRE convened a panel of sister organizations—represented by women whom executive director Yifat Susskind introduced as the “world’s foremost rural development experts.” Decide for yourself.
I had a chance to talk with Fatima Ahmed, director of Zenab for Women and Development in Sudan and Rose Cunningham, director of Wangki Tangni, an indigenous women’s group in Nicaragua. (I really, really encourage you to watch this video.)
Asked about the challenges they face, Ahmed and Cunningham talked about climate change, but they talked much more about soil erosion and deforestation driven by rapacious corporations. Top of their list of concerns were war, discrimination and the destruction of indigenous knowledge. Population comes up only in discussion of their communities’ tendency to help and—shock— share with those in trouble. Afterall, development isn’t only about profits and resources, said Cunningham. “It’s also about people and animals.
Putting people first? Now that would really be a new era. How about a woman from the global South for World Bank president?
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160 Comments so far
Show AllI haven't made up my mind on Jeffery Sachs. But I doubt I'll read that much more as I don't see myself having an influence either way. But I've made up my mind on population control years ago - hell yes. It pains me every time I hear the argument come up on the left (radio or the web) and I have to listen to apologists for our current levels or the idea that hey, we've got enough food for 20 billion, so why worry?
There are a million sources of information on why we should worry that are better than anything I can recount here - recently I quite liked Lester Brown on Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136394365/food-shortages-the-hidden-driver-of-global-politics.
It is clear that everyone in the US needs to have free birth control (one of the few good things about Obama so far).
It is clear that everyone in the World needs to have free birth control (the ultimate bang for the buck in foreign policy aid if we weren't so stupid over here to figure that out).
It is clear that there is plenty of unmet demand for birth control (so the above two items can even be done in isolation with benefit).
Finally, it is clear that the demand can be increased quite easily using non-coercive means (e.g. Novelas written to show the advantages of having less children).
Sometimes people don't even realize that it isn't required to prevent people from having three kids to get a NPG. In the US, if everyone who had more than 3 kids just had 3 kids and all else remained the same, our TFR would be 1.75 which is a very reasonable number to reduce the population in a controlled manner. The reason China has it's coercive system in place is that the waited too damn long.
Agreed.
Thanks for saving me some typing time.
It would be nice to think that Ms. Flander’s article is the last such hurrah on the subject, and it’s gratifying to see so many opinions here to the contrary.
Unfortunately, “the force is not with us” who understand that population growth will be our undoing, and it hasn’t been –since Malthus, and since John Stuart Mill’s amazingly advanced and eloquent advocacy for the concept of an optimum population –per:
> http://webpages.charter.net/123goto/tct.htm#mill
Religious traditionalists assure us that “God will provide”. For capitalists and neocons (those who trouble to think beyond the next acquisition), growth is a sacrament. We are assured (at least for public consumption) that the invisible hand of Adam Smith (if unfettered) will work things out for the best. The old Left and the new insist that numbers don’t matter, that our perceptions of scarcity are being stage managed by oligarchs behind the curtain (which is often true) –that the redistribution of wealth will provide.
Then we have those liberal “sustainability” progressives –who counsel that we need only to mend our wasteful ways, to conserve, to say a big “yes” to nuke plants with electric cars, to install more nano-tech solar panels, and “is that trip or thing necessary?” –until we’re taking turns breathing and growing vegetables in our hair.
** The truth is: multiple train wrecks loom ahead (and per that “There Is No Tomorrow” video). Jimmy the Greek would be giving long odds against our civilization remaining intact for even a few more decades, and it’s really quite amazing we’ve made it through the last 50 years.
While it behooves us to show our colors and resist self-destruction –even when the situation is pretty much hopeless, we also owe it to the future (however distant) to hedge against the great likelihood that our efforts to save the present era will fall pathetically short –by “investing” and bridging the best of our culture across time to whatever eventually replaces our civilization. Morris Berman refers to those who answer such callings as “monastic individuals” but, of course, it’s really about our common cultural needs of community, belonging, and continuity –lest our “individual” lives become meaningless.
To end on a positive note: as conditions deteriorate, people will probably become more spiritual --or "religious", and I mean that in the best senses of the word. Such "death bed conversions" are more than just a coping mechanism. Religious behavior can be much more than misdirected spirituality and regimented thinking.
In losing nearly everything, without the encumbrances of our false prosperity and "techno-tronic" claptrap (an Eric Fromm term), there's an opportunity to see each other and ourselves more clearly and more simply as the needy social creatures that we really are. We might at last be open to each other's grace. The art of living during this period will be to build upon such social-spiritual insights, to nail down and to preserve "lessons learned": lessons of the heart.
Craig
I think a way to solve the problem, is that anyone that Is currently living on less then $2.00 dollars a day should be band from procreating.. There, in about a generation that will eliminate about half the world’s population. Problem solved!
And I am sure that Jeff Sachs will sleep much better knowing that the world will someday be a world of only those that can afford to live by his standards.
Hey Jeff, I was just wondering, if all those undeserving people aren't around anymore, who is going to wash your car, cook your meals, and do your laundry? And in general, wipe your ass?
I do suppose that the elitists plan on keeping enough of the undeserving around to do the menial work. And allow them to breed just enough to maintain a sufficient workforce.
Brave New World.
Reproductive control by women should be the main focus, as it is THE major Factor in improving both THEIR lives, and the lives of their families. This shouldn't be a divisive issue!!! ONLY developed nations can help Third World people to attain power over their lives thru population control.
Just look at the horrror caused by the Catholic church on the Haitians,
encouraging them to breed uncontrolled until their tiny island was overrun, and caused so many to die in the earthquake there!!!