CHAPTER 29 POPULATION GROWTH AND LAND CHAPTER 29: TABLE OF CONTENTS Historical Examples Effects of Population Growth on Land Available for Recreation and Enjoyment The Future Benefits of "Blight" Conclusion Afternote: Population, Land, and Wa Chapter 8 examined whether farmland is a) deteriorating in the world as a whole, and b) being paved over in the United States at a rate that is very high relative to historical standards. On balance, neither is true. And chapter 9 discussed the "vanishing farmland" scam. Chapter 6 examined the long-run possibilities for food production, and found that potential supply is immense and expanding because of technology which already exists, making land become progressively less important. Now we continue those discussions by focusing on whether population growth will squeeze humanity toward the limits of food production because of the limited supply of land. We find that land will continue to be an ever-diminishing constraint even with a growing population. It is "common sense" that population growth induces immiseration due to increased pressure on the land. Simple arithmetic shows that more people imply smaller farms per farmer, and hence a harder struggle to produce enough to eat, until each of us is nightmarishly scratching out three skimpy meals from eighteen hours' work a day on a plot the size of a window box. "More people, less land," in the words of one population-control organization. The historical tendency over centuries past toward smaller farms is seen in figure 29-1. FIGURE 29-1. A Polish Village's Farm Boundaries Along with this specter hovers another: additional people causing land to be used up and ruined, especially in arid areas. The semi-governmental Smithsonian magazine editorializes that, in the desert, "traditional, more primitive agricultural techniques using natural ecological cycles are all that will work...and that means small populations." The head of the Population/Food Fund, Charles M. Cargille, M.D., writes that "overpopulation contributes to...deforestation and agricultural practices damaging to soil fertility." And according to the Christian Science Monitor, "The will may be needed more to control population than to deal with the more obvious aspects of desertification." Even as knowledgeable a scholar as Bert Hoselitz - the founder of the important journal Economic Development and Cultural Change - in the mid-1950s wrote as follows: Since rates of population increase show a tendency to remain high in most Asian countries, it is likely that great pressures for the extension of the agricultural area will remain....Hence, we have little reason to expect that Asian countries can hope to see within the next decades a decline in the absolute number of persons dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood....agricultural population pressure is likely to be greater in future years. Yet the long sweep of history until the present reveals that population growth has not led to these apparently logical consequences for agriculture, as we saw in chapter 5. Asia is thriving, contrary to all the dire forecasts of a few decades ago. And amazingly, since the first edition of the book we find some African leaders concluding from the comparative economic performances of Asia and Africa that land is not a problem at all - perhaps just the opposite. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in 1992 said that "people from East Asian countries with scarce resources and large populations `may tend to be more disciplined than people who take life for granted'...Some Africans `have so much land that they don't know what to do with it." (This comment must shock the U.S. State Department representatives in Africa who exert heavy diplomatic pressure on African governments to reduce the rate of population growth for the ostensible purpose of preventing the person/land ratio from falling.) Unfortunately, the reasons for Africa's lack of progress are not so simple. Reducing the quantity of land per person is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce a high standard of living - witness land-rich Australia. Africa's problems clearly stem from lack of economic freedom and a low starting level of education rather than lack of land. Both countries' experiences call into question the "common sense" belief that population growth will inevitably cause bad effects by reducing the land supply. So: The world eats as well or better now than in earlier centuries, even in present- day poor countries, even though there are more people per unit of land. How can we explain this affront to common sense? Here is one part of the explanation: Though more land per person was available in the past than at present, people did not farm all the land available to them, for two good reasons. (1) People were physically unable to farm larger areas than they actually farmed. Studies show that the amount of land peasant farmers can handle without modern machinery is quite limited by the availability of human strength and time. (2) More important but even less understood, farmers in the past had little motive for farming more land. In the absence of markets, farmers grow only as much as they expect to eat, as was discussed at length in chapter 4. Ask yourself, please: Why would a subsistence farmer grow more than his family can eat? Does an urban housewife buy so many vegetables in the weekly shopping trip that they spoil? Malthus well understood this "natural want of will on the part of mankind to make efforts for the increase of food beyond what they could possibly consume." It is no more a miracle that output increases when population increases than it is a miracle that you, the reader, manage to have enough vegetables to last the week even when guests are staying with you. Reduction in the amount of land available to the farmer causes little hardship if previously he was not farming all the land that was available (though he may have to change his farming practices so as to cultivate the same land more intensively). The other side of the coin is that when farmers need more land they make more land, as we have seen in chapter 8. The notion of a fixed supply of farmland is as misleading as is the notion of a fixed supply of copper or energy. That is, people create land - agricultural land - by investing their sweat, blood, money, and ingenuity in it. But what will happen to the supply of land as income rises and people demand more food luxuries such as meat, which requires large quantities of grain as feed? Or to sharpen the question, how about the effect of a rise in income combined with an increase in population? If there were to be increased "pressure" on the land, we would expect the existing land to be worked more intensively, which would require additional labor. Therefore we would expect to see a rising proportion of the labor force in agriculture. In Figure 29- 2 we see that just the opposite has occurred in the U.S., as it has in all countries - including the poor ones; the proportion of people working in agriculture has continually declined, and may well decline forever (see chapter 6). FIGURE 29-2? Changes in Agricultural Labor Force, Agricultural Production, and Total Male Labor Force in Developed Countries, 1950-19??[-a from Council of Econ Advisers]?? A decline in the proportion of people working in agriculture would be enough to sustain progress. But the data give us yet another picture that is so astounding that it seems weird: The absolute number of acres each farmer cultivates eventually rises when income becomes high, despite increases in population. When we look at data for the U.S., Great Britain, and other more-developed countries given in Figure 29-3, we see that the absolute number of farm workers is going down, and therefore the absolute amount of land per farm worker is going up, despite the fact that the total population is going up, reversing the earlier trend seen in Figure 29-1. Figure 29-3[xx** from Sullivan] Please re-read the preceding sentence carefully. It does not say that the proportion of the population working in agriculture is going down in the richer countries. Rather, it says something much stronger. The absolute number of farm workers is going down, and consequently the absolute amount of land per farm worker is going up in these countries. This fact makes it very clear that the combined increases of income and population do not increase "pressure" on the land, in contrast to popular belief and opposite to the state of affairs in poor countries that have not yet been able to adopt modern farming methods. The extrapolation of this trend for the future is extraordinarily optimistic: As the poor countries get richer, and as their rate of population growth falls, they will reach a point at which the number of people needed to work in agriculture to feed the rest of the population will begin to fall - even though the population gets bigger and richer. So much for a long-run crisis in agricultural land caused by population growth! Let us push this idea even further, in order to see how a simple-minded extension of trends can lead to absurd conclusions. A continuation of the present trend in the U.S., carried to the same absurdity as the nightmare described earlier, would eventually have just one person farming all the land in the U.S. and feeding everyone else. Where will this benign trend stop? No one knows. But as long as agriculture is pointed in this economically desirable direction, we need not be concerned about how far the trend will go - especially as there apparently are no technological or environmental forces to stop it. While countries are still poor they cannot embark on a course of mechanization sufficiently intense to increase total output and at the same time reduce the total number of workers in agriculture. But at least the proportion of workers in agriculture falls as they modernize, as is already happening in almost every developing country despite population growth. And eventually the total number of farm workers is likely to start falling, too. This is not happening yet, but the poorer countries can expect eventually to experience the same trend that was at work in the past in the now-rich countries. A quick bit of economic education: Upon viewing the decline in the agricultural labor force, some quibbler will say, But what about all the jobs in agriculture that are lost? Job "destruction", as Richard B. McKenzie puts it, is a confusing label for the very essence of economic progress - making a given amount of goods with fewer people. This not only enables us to have more goods, but it makes the labor of life easier and more enjoyable. If 7 million jobs had not been "lost" in American agriculture since the 1930s - a decline from 10 million to 3 million farmers, while population doubled - scores of millions of Americans would still be eking out short, painful, and poor lives in subsistence farming by following a mule and farming with hand implements, taking the kids out of school most of every year to help get the crops in. Nostalgia for that sort of life is never found among those who have experienced it. (For an extraordinary account of this rural poverty, see William Owens, A Season for Growing???). Before we consider historical examples, it is useful to look at Figure 29-4 and note that neither population density per unit of arable land, or per unit of total land, provides a compelling explanation of whether a country is rich or poor. FIGURE 29-4. Population Densities for Selected Areas of the World HISTORICAL EXAMPLES The increase in agricultural output as population rises (with or without an accompanying rise in income) has in most countries been accomplished largely by increases in the amount of land that has been farmed. This accounts for the land statistics that we saw in chapter 8. As population increases, people build more arable land in response to the increased demand for food. Let's consider some examples. Ireland. In the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century in Ireland - a period of very rapid population growth - peasants invested a large amount of labor in new lands, even though they did not own the land. Every new holding marked out in mountain or bog made possible the creation of a new family....The state, for all the advice of government committees and private investigators, played no significant part in works of drainage and clearance until the time of the Famine. The landlords, with outstanding exceptions, were hardly more active. The main agent of reclamation was the peasant himself. In spite of the immense discouragement of tenurial relationships which increased rent in proportion, or more than in proportion, to the increase in the value of his holding, he steadily added an acre or two a year to his cultivated area or his sons established themselves on land hitherto unused. The peasant and his children were driven to such arduous and unrewarding work by the two forces which give their distinctive character to many of the institutions of the Irish countryside, the pressure of population and the landlords' demand for ever increasing rents. Evidence for the rapidity of Irish land expansion is clear: Over the decade 1841-51 the amount of cultivated land increased by 10 percent, though even in the previous decade - when population growth was at its fastest before the famine that started in 1845 - population increased only at a decadal rate of 5.3 percent, from 7,767,000 to 8,175,000. This suggests that rural investment was enough to account for all - plus some more - of the increase in food required by the population growth during those years. China. From 1400 to 1957 the cultivated acreage in China expanded fourfold-plus, from 25 million hectares to 112 million hectares. This increase in cultivated land accounted for more than half the increase in grain output that sustained the living standard of the eightfold-plus increase in population over the same period, and investment in water- control systems and terracing accounted for much of the rest of the increase in output. "Only a small share of the rise in yields can be explained by improvements in the `traditional' technology." In this context, where the "rural technology in China was nearly stagnant after 1400", growth in output had to be accomplished either with increases in capital (including land) or in labor per person, and it is clear that additional investment was very largely, if not almost completely, responsible for the growth. Furthermore, this capital formation seems to have been caused by population growth. Europe. Wilhelm Abel documented the close relationship between population, food prices, and land reclamation in Europe from the Middle Ages onward, and Slicher van Bath did the same for the period from 1500 to 1900. When population grew at a fast rate, food prices were high, and land creation increased. Population grew very rapidly starting around 1000 (see figure 22-4). Abel tells us that prices then rose, and "land reclamation was at its peak" starting "in the middle of the eleventh century and its end in the mid-fourteenth century," the time of the Black Death and depopulation. Even marshes were cultivated during the boom period. "The first great dykes in the Netherlands were probably constructed about A.D. 1000." Slicher reports that "The higher cereal prices after 1756 stimulated agricultural development....Around Poitiers the area of reclaimed land was usually either 30 or 35 ares [sic] or about 2 hectares. In the former case the reclamation was the work of a day- labourer for a whole winter, in the latter that of a farmer with a team of oxen." Other countries. Data for Japan show that arable land increased steadily from 1877 until World War II, even though the number of agricultural workers was decreasing steadily. The amounts of livestock, trees and equipment also rose at rapid rates. These increases in agricultural capital were in response to the rapid increase in Japanese population together with the increase in the level of income in Japan. In Burma, the amount of land in cultivation rose at an astonishing rate starting in the middle of the nineteenth century. The cultivated area was fifteen times as great in 1922-23 as in 1852-53. Over the same period population increased by a factor of almost five. In addition to the increase in population, the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) enabled Burma to sell its rice to Europe. Both these forces gave Burmese farmers an incentive to reclaim land, and they did so with extraordinary rapidity until World War II, when millions of acres were again overrun by jungle. The foregoing examples show that in the poorer agricultural countries the creation of new land has been the source of most of the long-run increase in agricultural output which has kept up with population growth. But what will happen when there is no more "wasteland" to be converted into agricultural land? Not to worry; we can be quite sure this will never happen. As the available land for crops becomes more and more costly to transform into cropland, farmers will instead crop their existing land more intensively; this practice becomes more profitable than dipping into the pool of undeveloped land, because the unused land is relatively inefficient. The enormous possibilities in this direction are described in chapter 4. Evidence for this process is found in the international statistics showing that, when population density is higher, the proportion of land irrigated is higher too. This process may be seen particularly clearly in Taiwan and India, where, after farmers exploited a large proportion (but by no means all) of the unused land, irrigation began in earnest. Let's look more closely at India, because so many good-hearted Westerners have worried about it. The total area of all cultivated land increased about 20 percent from 1951 to 1971. Even more impressive is the 25 percent increase in irrigated land from 1949-50 to 1960-61, and then another 27 percent increase from 1961- 65 to 1975. [***### get recent data] Nor has India reached a high population density even now. Japan and Taiwan are about five times as densely populated, as seen in Figure 29-4. Figure 29-4 And the yield of rice per hectare is almost four times as great in Japan as in India; vastly more fertilizer is used in Japan, and three times as large a proportion of the agricultural land is irrigated (55 percent versus 17 percent). [**see Avery data] Excellent data from Taiwan show how land creation and improvement responded to population growth. During the period from 1900 to 1930 much new land was developed, along with an increase in the amount of irrigated land. Then, from 1930 to 1960, when there was less new land left to develop, more land was irrigated. At the same time, the effective crop area was increased by multiple cropping, and the use of fertilizers allowed total productivity to continue rising at a very rapid rate. This continues the sequence that begins in more "primitive" and sparsely populated areas where the pattern of farming still is to farm a patch for a year or two, then leave it fallow for several years to regain its natural fertility while other patches are farmed (a process I could still see in India in the early 1970s). There the response to population growth is to shorten the fallow period and to improve land fertility with labor-intensive methods. How much capacity still exists for enhancing land through irrigation, new seeds, fertilizer, and new farming methods? In chapter 6 we saw that the capacity is vast, much much greater than would be required to handle any presently-imaginable population growth. The use of traditional farmland is no longer the only way to produce food. And of course our capacity to feed ourselves is not limited to what we now know how to do; it will certainly increase greatly as we make new technological discoveries. No matter how the increase in capacity occurs, however, the key element in developing and harnessing the capacity to replace land with technology is the pressure of an increased demand for food - which arises from an increased world income, population growth, and improved markets so that farm produce can be bought and sold without the prohibitive transportation costs still found in most very poor countries. But what about "ultimately"? People worry that the process "cannot go on forever." The earlier chapters on natural resources and energy argue that it makes sense to discuss the future that we can presently foresee - 20 years, 100 years, even 500 years from now. To give much weight to an even more distant time - so far in the future that we do not even give it a date except that it is a figure with several zeros in it - is not sensible decision-making. Furthermore, there is strong reason to believe that "ultimately" - whatever that term means - natural resources will be less scarce rather than more scarce. And there is no reason to think that land is different in this respect. EFFECTS OF POPULATION GROWTH ON LAND AVAILABLE FOR RECREATION AND ENJOYMENT The availability of recreational land and wilderness is another facet of the land supply that concerns us. People worry that population growth and an increasing use of land for cities, roads, and agriculture will reduce the amount of recreational land. It would seem obvious that a larger number of people must imply less recreational land and the disappearance of wilderness. But like many intuitively "obvious" statements about resources, this one is not correct. The facts: Recreational and wilderness land area has been growing by leaps and bounds during the period for which data are available. Land dedicated to wildlife areas, national and state parks, and recreational uses has risen from 3.3 million acres in 1900 (plus another 46.5 million acres in the national forest system) to 10.6 million acres (plus 160 million) in 1930, 49 million acres (plus 181 million) in 1960, to 176 million acres (plus 186 million in forests) in 1990 (See Figure 29-5). Figure 29-5 from Nelson] More important than the area of land given over to recreation is the accessibility of recreational land and wilderness to the potential user. Because of the better means of transportation, the increased level of income, and the larger number of vacation and weekend days off - to which population growth has contributed over the centuries - the average person in a well-off country now has far greater access to many more types of recreational land than in any earlier time. The average American is now richer in ability to enjoy resort areas, recreational areas, and the wildest of wilderness than was a king 200 or 100 years ago. To put it in economists' terms, the cost of a day in the wilderness has steadily gone down, and the time and money available to enjoy it has gone up, owing in part to population growth. And there is no reason to expect a change in this trend in the future. (On the other hand, the value of a day in the wilderness may have decreased as the number of people sharing it has gone up. This tempers somewhat the generally positive conclusion reached above, but not enough to invalidate it). The benefits to the individual American can be seen in the rapidly-increasing numbers of visits to principal recreation areas, as seen in figure 29-6. Of course, one may look upon the increased numbers of visits as an indication that the wilderness is not so isolated anymore, and hence that it is less desirable - the point of view of an eighteenth-century prince who wished to enjoy the entire forest all alone and could afford to do so. That imperial attitude differs from the democratic assumption that more people sharing in the enjoyment of something is a good thing even if the experience is not perfect for any one of them. FIGURE 29-6. Visits to Principal Recreational Areas in the U.S. Figure [xx** land in parks, from Nelson] This section on recreational land has regrettably been limited to the U.S. because I have not been able to assemble data for other parts of the world. And the complexities of the analysis also would be greater if we were to try to make economic and ethical sense of the conflict between, on the one hand, recreational land in foreign countries, and, on the other hand, agricultural land devoted to larger and smaller rates of population growth in those countries. It is worth pointing out, however, that despite its very high population density, even China has for some time been engaged in an extensive effort to restore the forests that earlier had been cut down to push agriculture higher up the mountain slopes. The purpose of the Chinese reforestation is mainly to preserve the land from erosion. But the outcome will also be a boon for recreation. So high population density is seen to be consistent with increasing forest areas even in China. More generally, after centuries of decline, the volume of trees is increasing not only in China and the United States, and the total area of the world under forests shows no signs of decline over the decades, as Figure 10-7 shows. Of course, the global trend includes regions of decline as well as of growth. Tropical rainforests are being reduced, for example, though nowhere near so fast as the public thinks. Given that agricultural productivity per acre in presently developed countries is increasing faster than population growth (as well as faster than the growth in total crop production) and given that we can expect all countries to eventually reach this productivity level and go far beyond, it follows that the total amount of land used for crops in poor countries will eventually decline, as it has been declining in the U.S. (This decline has been occurring even as U.S. exports of grain have been increasing over the decades, and therefore the trend of less land feeding more people holds even more strongly if we consider only domestic U.S. food consumption.) This suggests that in the future there will be a larger amount of land available for recreation because less land will be used for crops. For those interested in investment tips: The foregoing implies that, in comparison with recreational land, agricultural land may not be a good investment for the very long run. This contrasts with a perception that has existed since the beginning of agricultural history, to wit, that flat land accessible to markets is more desirable than hard-to-reach hilly or mountainous land - that Illinois land is more valuable than Tennessee land, say. The land of the Canaanites was said to be desirable in the Bible because it was "spacious," and good for agriculture. But in the future, land will be desirable because it is beautiful and interesting for recreation. (Don't rush out today and sink the family fortune into hilly land, however. The long run I am talking about may be a hundred or more years into the future.) Are these statements that agricultural land is becoming less scarce, and recreational land more available, just science fiction? It seems to me that a fair-minded person who examines agricultural history must conclude that the facts are more consistent with the view that a greater demand for food leads eventually to a higher output per person than with the common view that it leads to a lower output per person. The simple Malthusian speculation about population growth leading to diminishing returns is fiction; the induced increase in productivity is the scientific fact. Do additional people increase the scarcity of land? In the short run, before adjustments are made - of course they do. It is true with land just as with all resources. The instantaneous effect of adding people to a fixed stock of land is less land to go around. But - and this is a main theme of this book - after some time, adjustments are made; new resources (new lands in this case) are created to augment the original stock. And in the longer run the additional people provide the impetus and the knowledge that leave us better off than we were when we started. (The theory is discussed at greater length in chapter 4.) How you weigh the short-run costs against the intermediate-run and longer-run benefits is a matter of values, of course. THE FUTURE BENEFITS OF "BLIGHT" One expects that people's constructive activities will constitute some saving for later years - harbors, buildings, and land clearing. But as discussed earlier in chapter 00, a case can also be made that even activities that are not intentionally constructive tend to leave a positive legacy to subsequent generations. That is, even the unintended aspects of people's use of land (and of other raw materials) tend to be profitable for those who come afterward. These examples were given: 1) The "borrow pits" by the sides of roadways, byproducts of taking material elsewhere. One may first think of the pits as a despoliation of nature, an ugly scar on the land. But it turns out that borrow pits are useful for fishing lakes and reservoirs. 2) Garbage dumps. Later generations may find dumps profitable sources of recyclable materials. 3) Pumped-out oil wells. The empty hole is likely to have value to subsequent generations, as storage for oil or other fluids, or for some as-yet-unknown purposes. CONCLUSION Is the stock of agricultural land being depleted? Just the opposite: The world's total stock of agricultural land is increasing. Will farmers be farming ever-smaller plots of land as population and income grow? Just the opposite: Despite population growth, increased productivity leads to larger farms per farmer. Does population growth in the U.S. mean that too much good agricultural and recreational land is being paved over, at the expense of agriculture and recreation? Flatly no: The amount of recreational land is increasing at a rapid clip, and new agricultural land is being made as some older land goes out of cultivation, leaving a very satisfactory net result for our agricultural future. AFTERNOTE: POPULATION, LAND, AND WAR The traditional economic motive for war - acquiring farm land - is fast disappearing, as an indirect result of population growth. For economically advanced nations, it does not pay to make war to get another nation's agricultural territory. A sensible citizenry would not even accept a slice of another country as a gift. For example, the U.S. would get little additional economic benefit from Canada by "owning" it. Adolph Hitler assaulted Europe with perhaps the worst catastrophe in history since the Black Death because, he said, the German "people" needed more "living room." The biblical Hebrews attacked the Canaanites to obtain a homeland. The settlers of the Americas warred on the Indians for cropland and ranchland. The U.S. fought with Mexico and Canada to expand its area. Blacks and whites battled for the land of Rhodesia. "Zimbabwe's war wasn't just about voting rights and black men in parliament. "The war was all about land," said Moven Mahachi, Zimbabwe's minister for land resettlement. This idea that population growth breeds war has been used to justify national policies to "control the birth rate", as Margaret Sanger did with respect to Germany, Italy, and Japan prior to World War II. She labeled "overpopulation as a cause of war", and cited John Maynard Keynes as authority. "[I]nternational peace could in no way be made secure until measures had been put into effect to deal with explosive populations." A typical recent statement is "... the closer man approaches the limits of ultimate density or "carrying capacity," the more probable is nuclear warfare." But the idea about land and territoriality and population that Hitler held - the idea that has prevailed since the beginning of recorded history - does not apply in a modern world. Additional territory nowadays generally has no value. And to top it all off, oft- denounced population growth is the underlying cause of this happy situation. This does not mean that wars have ended. Nations start wars for many reasons. David S. Kleinman argues cogently that if ever a population change might have altered the propensity for war, it should have been the Black Death, by increasing the availability of land -- but warring continued unabated. Quincy Wright concluded that economic issues have not been the main cause of war, or even the dominant cause. In sum, studies of both the direct and indirect influence of economic factors on the causation of war indicate that they have been much less important than political ambitions, ideological convictions, technological change, legal claims, irrational psychological complexes, ignorance, and unwillingness to maintain conditions of peace in a changing world. But it seems inarguable that the desire for more agricultural land has been a major motive for wars in the past. Ask yourself: Why would a country want a larger land area? And how might it help a nation's material standard of living to increase its land area? Imagine the U.S. suddenly owning a chunk of empty land now in Mexico or Canada. The area of U.S. agricultural land already is huge. Yet only about two million people -- 2% of the U.S. labor force -- work on farms. Even a doubling of the size of the U.S. would put dirt under the feet of only another two million people. And people in agriculture do not derive higher than average incomes from farming. Therefore, newly-made farmers would not gain much by an increase in U.S. agricultural land. Put it differently. Say a foreign buyer makes a fair offer for all U.S. cropland. The offer would be less than a tenth of one year's national income. The market value of U.S. cropland is about what we spend in two years for recreation plus one year's expenditure on tobacco (without even including expenditures on liquor). Clearly, then, all the cropland in the U.S. would not be worth even a minor skirmish. Agricultural exports and the balance of payments don't change the picture. Japan has a whopping trade surplus without exporting much food. Nor is annexing a piece of Canada or Mexico with people on it beneficial. U.S. citizens would not increase their wealth if the Mexican and Canadian owners were to stay where they are and continue to take whatever "rents" that the land provides. Kings in the past have thought to conquer territory in order to "farm" the taxes. But a modern nation cannot rip off some of its residents for the benefit of others. Nor would more territory make urban people feel less crowded. One's sense of crowding does not depend upon the total land area of the country, or even the land area per person. The most important factor is the size of a person's home in square feet of floor space. Let's hypothetically give each person two rooms measuring l5 feet by l5 feet -- a spacious luxury apartment with many times more space than Abraham Lincoln had in the log cabin in which he grew up. If high-rise housing with that much space were built to the height of the Sears Building in Chicago, or the World Trade Tower in New York, or even the Empire State Building, l55 million people could live on Manhattan Island, while more than a billion could live within the land area of New York City. Still another non-reason for wanting to conquer another nation nowadays is acquisition of its stock of assets. Perhaps in pre-historic times it made some sense for a nomad tribe to attack and expel the inhabitants of a "city" in order to take over its dwellings and utensils. But nowadays if the conquering country is as rich as the conquered, it already has a stock of assets with which its population works. Exchanging all the old stock -- or even part of it -- for a new and strange stock of assets is not likely to increase the output of its citizens. The notion of a poor population taking over the developed world, as dramatized in Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints, is even less plausible. The uneducated poor demonstrably have no capacity to operate the instruments of a modern society, or else they would not be poor. A "horde" of them moving into and taking over a rich country would soon find herdsmen sheltering themselves and their flocks in computer factories. As someone once remarked, if Indians and Americans exchanged countries, in a few decades the U.S. would look like India now, and India like the U.S. (On the other hand, if Indian newborns and American newborns exchanged educational upbringings at birth, the countries also would exchange appearances very rapidly.) The process by which we come to this astonishing state of affairs is even more astonishing. A spurt of population growth, or of income, inevitably puts short-run pressure on resources such as agricultural land. The impending shortages, and the concomitant increase in prices of the resources, cause a search for ways to mitigate the shortages. Eventually some individuals or organizations succeed in finding new solutions to the resource problems. The discoveries eventually cause humanity to enjoy greater availability of resources than if population growth and pressure on resources had never occurred. page # ultres\ tchar29 February 9, 1994