Conservatives and Overpopulation

A few days ago I read an article by a conservative writer criticizing Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation for writing  that Africa would be better off  if Africans had fewer children, and the population grew slower.  The piece itself was unimportant. It was odd and unconvincing. (It is hard to sell  the idea that people who are too poor to support children should have a bunch of them, or that women are deprived by being offered the means to have only the children they want and can care for and are  unethically selfish if they take advantage of those means.)

However it illustrates attitudes on a topic about which many conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, are importantly or even dangerously wrong – overpopulation.  It should be obvious that human populations cannot grow exponentially forever, that life is better for most people when there is a healthy relationship between the number of people and the means for taking care of them, and that gross imbalances between populations and means get corrected one way or another. It should be obvious that societies with  primitive and failing economies, bad governments,  and nothing like the liberal order cannot support large, dense, growing populations well.  It  should be obvious that birth control and family planning are better ways of managing  populations than famine, epidemics, childhood diseases, and war. Yet it obviously is not obvious to many conservatives.

They  also fret over the stable  or slowly decreasing populations in Europe and Japan.  However there is nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself. (Reasonable worries for Europe over too much immigration from non-Western societies should be considered separately since such immigration is not the only way to deal with internal changes in demographics.)  Europe and Japan are pretty crowded already. In the long run Asia, the Americas, and definitely  Africa would benefit from following their trend.   

There is  a political side to overpopulation  that conservatives who care about freedom should consider.  People’s  having enough elbow room is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a free society, but it helps. A person in this country can live a freer life in Wyoming or West Texas than in Manhattan or San Francisco.  Some of that probably has to do with things not being too crowded. People may be less likely to butt forcibly into their neighbor’s business if their neighbor is not right on top of them.