Misconstruing the "population problem." (Editorial)

• Author: Sachs, Aaron

The creation of a growing public awareness that the earth's limited resources cannot support unlimited population growth represents a major achievement for the global environmental movement. But that movement may also have created a monster. Because the population debate touches on such inflammatory issues, fro abortion to the fear of losing scarce resources and jobs, it tends to rile people up before they have a chance to think about what's really happening. Faced with worsening social tensions and uncertain economic prospects, people yearn for a quick and easy solution. They want to blame everything on "overpopulation"--on a horde of irresponsible parents somewhere far away, who are simply having too many children.

In Western Europe, for example, the hottest political issue by far is immigration. Many voters have registered their opinion that "overpopulated" North African countries have no business sending their human surplus to Europe to take away jobs that should belong to native Europeans. In the United States, natives of California have been known to blame not only unemployment but also crime, environmental degradation, and even traffic congestion on Mexican immigrants and their fertile parents.

Just in the past couple of years, however, people with wide-ranging expertise-i women's issues, reproductive medicine, social development, and demography--have come to a remarkable consensus that resoundingly rejects this scapegoating tendency. Overpopulation, the experts have agreed, is not the cause of the world's problems, but the effect of an underlying socio-economic inequity--between rich and poor, and between the industrialized and developing worlds. It is not the disease, but only a symptom.

Of course, higher population densities do exacerbate the...