The Wall Street Journal
July 31, 1998
An Unconventional Academic Sounds the Population Alarm
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Could the population bomb do in the human race, after all?
The idea that we might all perish in a Malthusian meltdown -- in which
people proliferate beyond the earth's capacity to support them -- gained
widespread publicity more than 25 years ago. More recent population
projections have been more sanguine. Most demographers see world
population increasing from 5.8 billion today to a crowded, but arguably
manageable number of about 7.8 billion 25 years from now, before growth
begins to slow dramatically.
But a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University named Virginia
Abernethy is stirring up the world of population scholarship with a
warning that we shouldn't rest quite so easy.
Most population projections today assume that global fertility rates
will decrease as women become more affluent and better educated. As they
pursue schooling and careers and learn about contraception, the idea
goes, they will delay having children and have fewer of them. This
explanation, known as the "demographic transition" theory, is so
universally held that many experts feel only a crackpot would challenge
it. Yet Ms. Abernethy, who is 63 years old, is doing just that.
Rare Outlook
An academic gadfly, Ms. Abernethy, stands the conventional wisdom on its
head. She argues that parents have a biological urge to have large
families and that they will seek them, resources permitting. "People who
perceive expanding economic opportunity raise their family size target;
they want, and usually have, more children," she has written.
As a result, Ms. Abernethy says that rising living standards -- and the
expectation of a better life for billions of people -- might cause
population to grow faster, not slower, than predicted. If Ms. Abernethy
is right, population should grow more rapidly in developed countries,
and fall less rapidly in developing lands, than the mainstream view
predicts. Even small differences in fertility rates can lead to huge
population differences over time.
Ms. Abernethy's outlook runs counter to so much received wisdom that
critics openly sneer at her. "She's a nut," says Lant Pritchett, an
economist at the World Bank in Washington. Adds John Bongaarts, research
director at the Population Council in New York, "Her ideas are ignored
by the demographic community. I'd say that's justified."
>From her base at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, Tenn., Ms. Abernethy does
bring unusual credentials to the population-studies field. She has a
Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard, where her dissertation looked at how
American women approached motherhood. During postdoctoral work in
psychiatry, she studied unwanted pregnancies among the mentally ill. The
environmental movement in the 1970s led her to become concerned about
the planet's limited resources and unbridled population growth that
could degrade life for everyone.
The same worries today, coupled with her theories on what drives
fertility, lead her to some controversial positions. She opposes most
foreign aid, for example, because she believes it artificially raises
living standards, thus encouraging women to bear more children. She also
has advocated caps on immigration, which she thinks leads women to view
richer nations as havens for children who can't find opportunity at
home.
Although her ideas are unconventional, Ms. Abernethy edits Population
and Environment, an important journal in the field. And her theories are
exposing some inconsistencies in the views of mainstream population
experts, who see the world's families growing inexorably smaller. She
"makes a world of difference" in the population debate by throwing into
doubt complacent views, says Garrett Hardin, an emeritus professor of
biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
'On the Right Track'
"There's a widespread belief that poorer societies will just repeat
richer ones in lowering fertility," says Mr. Hardin, a respected author
on population and the environment. That may not be the case, he says,
adding: "I agree with all of her major ideas. She's on the right track."
Ms. Abernethy's argument, which she calls the "fertility-opportunity
hypothesis," explains some striking facts that the mainstream view
doesn't account for. In the U.S., for instance, relative affluence has
always positively influenced birthrates. Births fell sharply during the
Depression, and then soared after World War II, when the economic good
times sparked a baby
boom.
Ms. Abernethy herself had four children from 1957 to 1962, and sees
support for her population theory in her own experience. "We all had the
sense of being very prosperous and that the U.S. was the most powerful
country in the world," she says. "I expected my own children to be
better off than I was, and many parents felt the same."
Similar patterns can be found elsewhere, such as England, where
population quintupled in the 19th century on the strength of jobs
created by industrialization. Ease of emigration to North America
supported this trend, Ms. Abernethy says. More recently, she notes,
birthrates rose in Egypt, Algeria and Morocco following oil booms and in
Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution.
Birthrates can plummet in hard times, too. The fertility of Russian
women shriveled after the collapse of the Soviet system, for example.
And Bangladesh has seen its fertility rate tumble from more than six
births per woman in the 1960s to about 3.4 today, not as a result of
prosperity, suggests Ms. Abernethy, but because it remains miserably
poor.
Even prosperous nations such as Japan, France and Italy have seen their
birthrates drop in recent years, Ms. Abernethy says, because people in
these countries have a growing perception of scarcity and more limited
economic opportunity than in the past. These examples have put
professional demographers on the defensive.
"It is a classic case of a group closing ranks and not wanting to
disturb the theoretical status quo," says Brian Berry, a professor of
political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas who has
criticized the conventional view.
Wrong Embrace?
Part of the problem is that experts and the media alike have embraced
too enthusiastically the notion that rising living standards lead to
declining birthrates. "Affluence is not the only factor, just one factor
in declining birthrates," acknowledges Lester R. Brown, president of
WorldWatch Institute in Washington, D.C., an environmental research
group.
A supporter of the demographic transition theory, Mr. Brown says, "In
general, as poor countries become more affluent, fertility goes down.
But you can find exceptions the other way."
Economists are increasingly interested in these exceptions, which they
say reflect the positive effect of income on birthrates. Diane J.
Macunovich, an economist at Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y., has
found that as highly educated women earn more money in the U.S., their
fertility rises too. Mr. Berry, meanwhile, has studied shifts in
birthrates over 300 years in the Massachusetts city of Concord, finding
similar oscillations caused by economic conditions.
Demographers concede that "positive income effects" influence
child-bearing, which means that affluence does push up birthrates. "If
you control for everything else and income rises, you probably do get a
little rise in births," says Mr. Bongaarts of the Population Council.
"But in reality this isn't usually the case." The trouble with the idea,
he adds, is that "so many other factors drive fertility" -- such as the
availability of contraception and increased interactions between
villages and cities -- "that it swamps the income effect."
Ms. Abernethy is aware that her views jibe with conservative positions
on immigration and foreign aid. A delegate to the 1996 Republican
National Convention, she sits on the board of two Washington, D.C.,
policy groups -- the Carrying Capacity Network and
Population-Environment Balance --that advocate reduced immigration.
But Ms. Abernethy says her concern about overpopulation sometimes makes
her allies with those on the political left. For example, she supported
an insurgent -- and ultimately failed -- drive in the Sierra Club
calling for the organization to support reduced immigration. She
insists, however, that her advocacy in no way influences her
scholarship.
And while she isn't surprised that her fertility theories produce a
strong response, she says: "Professional demographers don't consider me
a kook. They are beginning to pay attention."
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