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Up with Industry. The most spectacular rises in population have come with industrialization. The "laws" which govern it are not yet well understood, but the early stages of industrialization, in any country, seem to be associated with a moderate rise in the birth rate, a sharp fall in the death rate and a consequent jump in population.
The steep rise does not continue long. The death rate goes on dropping, as better medical services become available; but the birth rate drops too, and the curve of population increase levels off. In some cases the population actually declines. Nearly every industrialized nation has passed through these stages. Industrial Britain's population rate curve resembles strikingly the curve of industrial Japan (see map). Britain has reached, and Japan has almost reached, a stable population level.*
Some nations and religious groups make vigorous efforts to increase the numbers of their people. They are seldom if ever successful. Thoroughly Roman Catholic Eire has one of the lowest birth rates in the world and its population is stable. Eire is behaving more or less as the Neo-Malthusians want all countries to behave. It is not industrializing (Vogt hates industrialization), it is not greatly increasing food production. But 79% of Irishmen under 30 and 60% under 40 are not married. Thirty-five percent of Irishwomen do not marry at all. "Ecologists" might call this balance; few sociologists would call it healthy.
The Neo-Malthusians point to India and China and warn that if the world helps them increase their food supply, they will respond by overwhelming the world with a billion more Asiatics. Vogt is especially loud in crying this warning. He even wants the U.S. to stop sending food to Greece, lest the Greeks process each ton of wheat into more Greek mouths to be fed.
Sterilization Bonus. Vogt suggests that the U.S. should help no country with food or anything else unless it first agrees to limit its birth rate. One method he favors: a bonus to males who allow themselves to be sterilized.
Such super-isolationism, with hints of the old "yellow peril," is one of the ugliest Implications of Neo-Malthusianism. The world is already overpopulated, the argument goes. Some areas, like the U.S., are luckier than others, but even the U.S. will soon run out of food. Therefore it should not help foreigners. Let them starve now, before they increase their numbers (with our help) and overwhelm us.
Are any countries really overpopulated? It depends on what is meant. A handful of primitive savages, who live by hunting, can "overpopulate" an enormous area of fertile country. They eat up all the food available to them, though the land over which they roam could support, if turned to farming, many hundred thousand people.