P. T. Bauer on the population question.

• Author: Eberstadt, Nicholas

Peter Tamas Bauer abjured sentimentalism--or at least professed to--but even so, this gathering is an unabashedly sentimental occasion for me. Peter was my professor. He was also my teacher, which is not necessarily the same thing (a distinction that anyone in the academy will appreciate). And he was my friend.

I first met Peter Bauer in October 1977. At the time I was 21, and very Left. One of my first courses at the London School of Economies that semester was "The Economic Analysis of Underdeveloped Areas," co-taught by Bauer and Hla Myint, and further fortified through a few cameo appearances by Basil Yamey.

To put the matter plainly, Peter Bauer was an absolutely infuriating professor. At his lectures, he would deliver long and provocative presentations that I knew to be wrong--completely wrong, deeply wrong, obviously wrong. The only problem was, I could not figure out how to prove they were wrong.

Peter would typically end his lectures with an invitation of sorts: "Now I will entertain any question--no matter how hostile." I used up my lifetime supply of those invitations in fairly quick order. Then I was faced with a dilemma: either I had to come up with new facts, of get new opinions. Unfortunately, I simply was notable to find the necessary new facts. Bauer the professor, in short, set me up for my downfall. But my road to ruin was further paved by Bauer the man.

Peter was blessed with an absolute and extraordinary generosity of spirit. In my particular case, he went far beyond the call of his official duties in his efforts to help a wrongheaded American student to think a little more clearly. I remember fondly his many kindnesses, though I did not fully understand at the time how utterly unusual those were in university life on either side of the Atlantic. There were the wide-ranging chats, at his instigation, in or around his LSE office--Peter's erudition and acuity were dazzling to me, and he could be screechingly funny when he so chose. Then there were the invitations to Saturday lunches at which some respected policy opinion of the day was devastatingly dissected, always with ample quantities of alcohol, and often with the assistance of interesting new acquaintances. (It was at one of those sessions I first met an upcoming journalist named John O'Sullivan.)

Shortly before the end of my studies at the LSE, Peter invited me out for a farewell. In the course of our conversation, he came around to the issue of my "worldview." Smiling mischievously, Peter said, "I suspect you are at a point that we describe in economics as 'unstable equilibrium'." Of course, he was right, and it's been downhill--or depending on how one looks at it, uphill--ever since.

Myths and Realities

Bauer did not have much to say about the population question--that is, the "population explosion" and its consequences for living standards and development prospects, especially in low-income areas--until his 1981 book, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion. There he delivered a chapter-length essay titled "The Population Explosion: Myths and Realities." In the introduction to that volume, Bauer (1981: 1) wrote, "The central theme of this book is the conspicuous and disconcerting hiatus between accepted opinion and evident reality in major areas of academic and public economic discourse." Though he only came to address population issues after three decades of renowned work in other areas, he demonstrated that disjuncture to be every bit as striking as in his other, already acclaimed areas of economic inquiry.

To appreciate the significance of Bauer's contribution to the population literature, it is first important to recall the climate of academic and public policy discourse on the population question at the time Bauer was writing. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a worldwide network of activist anti-natal organizations--including private foundations, bilateral foreign aid agencies, multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank, and a host of recipient groups the world over--were making the case that rapid population growth was having deleterious, or even disastrous, effects in low-income areas, and perhaps even on the world as a whole. Poverty, unemployment, hunger, and social strife were just some of the afflictions the "population explosion" was said to be visiting on a hapless planet.

Anti-natal policies had also been widely embraced--in principle or in practice--by rich and poor governments alike, and a great many eminent personages were warning of the risks of not pursuing even more aggressive policies for curbing planetary population growth. Paul Ehrlich--Stanford University biology professor, acknowledged authority on the population patterns of butterflies, and author of the best-seller The Population Bomb--flatly stated that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over" (Ehrlich 1968: 11), meaning that we had lost. Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank (and in an earlier incarnation the progenitor of the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction"), insisted that "The threat of unmanageable population pressures is very much like the threat of nuclear war," and identified what he termed "rampant population growth" as "the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the peoples in the underdeveloped world" (cited in Bauer 1981: 42).

It was not only sometime...