CHAPTER 39
               Ultimately - What Are Your Values?


     "Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, 
are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.  I 
know social scientists who remind me that people are 
part of nature, but it isn't true.  Somewhere along the 
line -- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that -
- we quit the contract and became a cancer.  We have 
become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.  It 
is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will 
choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, 
and the Third World its suicidal consumption of 
landscape.  Until such time as Homo sapiens should 
decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for 
the right virus to come along."David M. Graber 
(National Park Service research biologist)
     The market for cat food in the U.S. "is two-and-a-
half to      three times the size" of the baby food 
market, says      Anthony J. F. O'Reilly, president of 
H. J. Heinz Co., a      major producer of both 
products. "That will tell you      something about our 
changing tastes," the executive      cracks.

The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 1980, p. 1.

CHAPTER 39: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Some Values Relevant to Population Policy
The Rate of Discounting for Futurity
Altruism versus selfishness
Racism
Space, privacy, and isolation
The right of inheritance
The inherent value of human life
The acceptability of various methods of preventing life
A value for numbers of people
Animals and plants versus people
Individual freedom versus community coercion
Eugenics
The Value of Progress
Values Masquerading as Rights or Other Entitlements
Conclusion


If we didn't have birthdays, you wouldn't be you.
If you'd never been born, well then what would you do?
If you'd never been born, well then what would you be?
You might be a fish!  Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob!  Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.
Or worse than all that ... Why, you might be a WASN'T!
A Wasn't has no fun at all.  No, he doesn't.
A Wasn't just isn't.  He just isn't present.
But you ... You ARE YOU!  And, now isn't that pleasant!

Then, out of the water!  Sing loud while you dry!
Sing loud, "I am lucky!"  Sing loud, "I am I!"

     If you'd  never been born, then you might be an ISN'T!
     An Isn't has no fun at all.  No he disn't.
     He never has birthdays, and that isn't pleasant.
     You have to be born, or you don't get a present.
   A small number of academics - many of them biologists, and 
almost none of them economists - have convinced a great many 
politicians and laymen that rational population policies with 
respect to fertility, mortality, and immigration can be deduced 
directly from actual or supposed facts about population and 
economic growth.  The persuaded politicians believe it is 
"scientific truth" that countries should reduce their population 
growth. And the persuading academics want the politicians and the 
public to believe that such judgmental propositions really are 
"scientific." For example, the front page of the canon book of 
the population control movement in the U.S., The Population Bomb, 
says "Paul Ehrlich, a qualified scientist, clearly describes the 
dimensions of the crisis...over-population is now the dominant 
problem...population control or race to oblivion?"

   But it is scientifically wrong - outrageously wrong - to say 
that "science shows" there is overpopulation (or underpopulation) 
in any given place at any given time. Science can only reveal the 
likely effects of various population levels and policies. Whether 
population is now too large or too small, or is growing too fast 
or too slowly, cannot be decided on scientific grounds alone. 
Such judgments depend upon our values, a matter on which science 
does not bear.
   Whether you think that it is better for a country to have a 
population of, say, 50 million human beings at a $4,000 per 
capita yearly income, or 100 million at $3,000, is strictly a 
matter of what you consider important. And further, please keep 
in mind that if the empirical studies and my theoretical analysis 
are correct, the world can have both a larger population and 
higher per capita income. This is as true for less-developed as 
for more-developed countries. But the judgment about whether this 
is good news or bad news, and whether population is growing too 
fast or too slowly, or is now too large or too small, depends on 
values. This is reason enough to say that science does not show 
that there is overpopulation or underpopulation anywhere.
   Because of the belief that population policies can be deduced 
from scientific studies alone, particular values enter implicitly 
into policy decisions, without explicit discussion of whether the 
values really are those that the decision makers and the 
community desire to have implemented. For a leading example, 
because almost all economic analyses of "optimum" rates of 
economic growth take per capita income as the criterion, this 
criterion implicitly becomes the community goal and the guideline 
for policy makers. In some cases values are smuggled in 
consciously, though without discussion; in other cases the values 
enter without any conscious recognition.
   This chapter presents a list of some important values related 
to population policy. Some of these values are discussed in more 
detail in the next chapter, where I express some of my own views. 
A discussion of the rhetoric of the anti-population movement that 
appeared in chapter 22 of the first edition is related to the 
subject of this chapter; a central element is the claim to being 
compassionate, and the charge that those who do not wish to spend 
taxpayers' money for various welfare purposes lack compassion, 
with the implicit assumption that people's welfare is best 
advanced by government action rather than through voluntary 
spontaneously-cooperating systems.  Discussion of various related 
religious values may be found in my 1990 book.

            SOME VALUES RELEVANT TO POPULATION POLICY

The Rate of Discounting for Futurity. 
   The relative importance given to the nearer term versus the 
further future affects investment decisions.  It enters into 
every weighing of the costs and benefits of resource use and 
population growth. This was discussed in chapter 19.
   The proposition that we should focus on the short run, and not 
pay attention to the benefits of more people that accrue in the 
long run because "in the long run we're all dead" - Keynes' 
famous foolish phrase discussed in chapter 12 - has a curious 
similarity to the thinking of young children.  For children there 
really is a free lunch - consuming without having to work to pay 
for the goods - for twenty years.  And children are not 
predisposed to invest and save for the future - every parent 
knows how hard it is to induce children to study now in order to 
have the benefits of education in adulthood, and to know the 
virtues of saving money.  But the activity that children find 
least natural - hard work - becomes emotionally necessary to most 
of us later on in the life cycle.  The need to work, and to 
create, may be seen most purely in gardening, where the work is 
almost its only reward.  It is as if we need to cultivate and 
produce in order to give back what we have earlier taken in 
during our lives.  The psychological explanation here is mere 
speculation, of course, but the need to work even when the 
product of that work makes no material difference to the worker 
is as much a plain undeniable fact as is the need of children to 
play.  The attitude that we should consume without attending to 
what we leave behind, and without considering how many and which 
persons we will leave behind, is analogous to the childhood stage 
of the life cycle.
   There is a curious contradiction in the thinking of the 
population control-environmentalist movement with respect to the 
future.  On the one hand, they say they want to "save the planet" 
for our children and grandchildren.  On the other hand, they want 
to reduce as much as possible the number of children and 
grandchildren for whom the planet is to be "saved".

Altruism versus selfishness. 

     Our willingness to share our worldly goods - either directly 
or (more commonly) indirectly through taxation - affects a 
variety of population-related policies, as has been discussed 
vehemently at least since Malthus. Should additional children or 
immigrants be welcomed into a community if there will be an 
immediate burden upon others (though benefit later on)?  Should 
the poor be supported by welfare rather than left to die?  Each 
of us has some willingness to contribute to others, but that 
willingness differs from person to person, and from moment to 
moment.  In discussion, this factor usually gets tangled up with 
the matter of whether the transfers are a sacrifice contribution 
or an investment.

Racism. 
   In our private behavior we tend to favor our kin, our 
coreligionists, those who come from the same place, and those of 
similar race.  This partiality is largely beneficial; charity 
begins at home has much to commend it as a principle of human 
action.  But allowing such tastes to affect public policy with 
respect to immigration, welfare, and birth-control campaigns is 
another matter; certainly these tastes often do influence public 
policy, especially with respect to race.

Space, privacy, and isolation. 

   This is the Daniel Boone/Sierra Club value.  How much of your 
isolation in the forest are you prepared to give up so that 
others may also enjoy the experience?


The right of inheritance. 

     Should only the blood descendants of the builders of a 
country be allowed to enjoy its fruits, or should others be 
allowed to come in and enjoy them, too? This issue is at the 
heart of immigration policy in the U.S., Australia, Israel, Great 
Britain, and every other country in which the standard of living 
is higher than in the country of some potential immigrants.  The 
issue also arises domestically.  For example: Are Native 
Americans or blacks morally entitled to partake of the benefits 
of social investments made by whites in past years?  Do whites 
have a responsibility to repay African-Americans for the profits 
made by exploiting slave labor in previous centuries?

The inherent value of human life. 

   Can some people's lives be so poor in standard of living that 
they would have been better off had they never been born?  
"Humane Society and health officials say that feral cats lead 
miserable, disease-ridden lives and that killing them is more 
humane than leaving them on the streets."  Many have values about 
poor people exactly similar to these values about cats, but since 
Nazi times the view is applied publicly only to the unborn rather 
than to people already born.  
   A contrasting value is that no life is so poor in goods that 
it does not have value.  Still others believe that only the 
individual should be allowed to decide whether his or her own 
life is worth living.  Surprisingly to me, the issue of these 
conflicting values which are crucial (though usually only 
implicit) in deliberations about population policy, is rarely the 
subject of explicit discussion.  At least one economist  
developed a model in which he made explicit the assumption that 
some people's lives have "negative utility" - a truly amazing 
piece of economic analysis, to my mind.  But this technically-
elegant essay raised no furor of backlash in the literature.  

The acceptability of various methods of preventing life. 

   To some people, abortion or contraception or infanticide are 
acceptable; for others, any of these may be unacceptable.

A value for numbers of people. 

   Both the Bible, which urges people to be fruitful and 
multiply, and the utilitarian philosophy of "the greatest good 
for the greatest number" lead to a value for more people. This 
value may be held by those who do not believe in a personal God 
as well as those who do.  Many people of all theological beliefs 
do not share this value.  (It would be unsound for the reader to 
infer from anything written in this book that I hold any 
particular theological belief, though several have ventured to do 
so in print.) 

Animals and plants versus people. 

   According to the Bible, "And God said, Let us make man in our 
image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the 
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the 
cattle, and over all the earth.... Be fertile and increase, fill 
the earth and master it and rule the fish of the sea, the birds 
of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth" 
(Genesis 1:26-28).  (This does not imply that humans should treat 
the world about them with lack of care:  "[R]eplenish the earth," 
says Genesis I, 28.)
   In sharp contrast is the view of some environmentalists. 
Consider, for example, the "Greenpeace Philosophy" of the whale-
protecting group: "Ecology teaches us that humankind is not the 
center of life on the planet. Ecology has taught us that the 
whole earth is part of our 'body' and that we must learn to 
respect it as we respect life - the whales, the seals, the 
forests, the seas. The tremendous beauty of ecological thought is 
that it shows us a pathway back to an understanding and 
appreciation of life itself - an understanding and appreciation 
that is imperative to that very way of life."
   Many of the environmentalist views are held and expressed with 
quasi-religious fervor, as others have noted 
   A sharp shift in values has occurred over the 
decades:

	Thus the nineteenth-century child was taught that 
nature is animated with man's purposes.  God designed 
nature for man's physical needs and spiritual training.  
Scientific understanding of nature will reveal the 
greater glory of God, and the practical application of 
such knowledge should be encouraged as part of the use 
God meant man to make of nature.  Besides serving the 
material needs of man, nature is a source of man's 
health, strength, and virtue.  He departs at his peril 
from a life close to nature.  At a time when America 
was becoming increasingly industrial and urban, 
agrarian values which had been a natural growth in 
earlier America became articles of fervent faith in 
American nationalism.  The American character had been 
formed in virtue because it developed in a rural 
environment, and it must remain the same despite vast 
environmental change.  The existence of a bounteous and 
fruitful frontier in America, with its promise not only 
of future prosperity but of continued virtue, offers 
proof that God has singled out the United States above 
other nations for His fostering care.  The superiority 
of nature to man-made things confers superiority on the 
American over older civilizations.  That Uncle Sam 
sooner or later will have to become a city dweller is 
not envisaged by these textbook writers, although their 
almost fanatical advocacy of rural values would seem to 
suggest an unconscious fear that this might be so.


   This shift in values can be seen neatly in the wonderful book 
Birds of America, published in 1917.  The descriptions of many 
birds include evaluations of their effects on humanity in general 
and on farmers in particular; a bird that helps agriculture was 
more highly valued than a bird which harms it.  Nowadays 
naturalists often evaluate humankind for our effect upon the 
birds rather than vice versa.
   The shift in values can also be seen in the 1990s call for the 
return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park about seventy years 
after Congress passed a law to eradicate them because of their 
danger to cattle and humans.

Individual freedom versus community coercion. 
   Another important value in debates about population.  The 
willingness to coerce others to attain one's ends with respect to 
conservation, the environment, and population growth is 
illustrated at many places in this book.  

Eugenics. 
   The beliefs that the human race a) can, and b) should, be 
improved by selective breeding was rife in the 1920s and 1930s.  
Along with these beliefs have gone the belief in the benefit of 
race-selective immigration policies. These beliefs bulked large 
in the thinking of Margaret Sanger when she began the 
organizational activities that led to Planned Parenthood.  
Earlier on, eugenics and the Eugenics Society of London had been 
one of the main channels of thought that led to the founding of 
the Population Investigation Committee in Great Britain, as 
important a population research center as any in the world.  J.M. 
Keynes began as a strong supporter of eugenics, which went hand-
in-hand with his then-Malthusian economic outlook.  When he later 
invented Keynesian economics, which saw benefit in a larger 
market, he flip-flopped and favored larger populations for a 
while.  He later flip-flopped again, and again came to worry 
about population growth.  But all this time he remained a strong 
supporter of eugenics, serving as a director of the Society from 
1937 to 1944, and being the Vice President in 1937.  So the 
connection between Malthusianism and population control is close 
historically.
   Some of the main population institutions in the U.S., too, 
arose out of interest in eugenics - for example, the Population 
Reference Bureau and Planned Parenthood.  Since Hitler's demise 
this idea has dropped out of public statements, and I do not 
assert that present officials of these groups are eugenicists 
(though I would like to hear them deny it publicly).  But their 
original aim of population control in the poor countries and 
among poor persons continues unchanged.  And the association 
between the ideas of eugenics and population control are joined 
together in the writings of such persons as Garrett Hardin.
   The concept of lives that are "not worth living" - used in the 
title of a book in 1920 by two German professors, one of law and 
one of medicine  - is central to eugenics, and was also central 
to Nazi ideology; by 1941, 70,000 patients had been killed by 
physicians in German hospitals.  It reappears in many apparently 
benign guises - even abstract economic analysis by a Nobel-prize-
winning economist.   And economist James Meade was a member of 
the Eugenics Society from the 1930s to the 1970s, and was 
treasurer in the 1960s.  (He also analyzed the situation of the 
island of Mauritius and concluded that population growth was its 
bane.  As was discussed in Chapter 00, in the 1980s Mauritius 
went from large unemployment to labor "shortage" in a handful of 
years by changing to a free-enterprise system.)
   The eugenics view was widely rejected with horror during and 
after the Hitler period.  But it is again with us.  R. J. 
Herrnstein entitles an article "IQ and Falling Birth Rates", and 
asserts that "the average intelligence of the population will 
decline across generations to the extent that reproduction shifts 
toward the lower end of the [income] scale," and he quotes with 
approval that "Vining tentatively infers the equivalent of a 
four-to-five point drop in IQ over the five or six generations 
spanning the demographic transition in the United States" - that 
is, Americans supposedly have gotten less intelligent over time.  
Herrnstein therefore favors policies encouraging fertility among 
high-income, high-education groups and discouraging population 
growth among others.
   As discussed in chapter 32, the evidence persuades me that one 
cannot improve the level of human intelligence by selective 
breeding, and hence eugenics policies have no rationale - and 
they would be unacceptable to me even if there were evidence in 
their favor.

The Value of Progress

   Of all the values that I have long held without 
examining it, the value for progress - along with the 
value of human life, no matter whose it is - is perhaps 
the most important.  Perhaps my unthinking acceptance 
of this value is at least partly a result of my being 
an American; the value has been associated with both 
political parties, in early as well as in present 
times.  Thomas Jefferson wrote:  
[W]e are bound with peculiar gratitude...that [we are]      
permitted quietly to cultivate the earth and to      
practice and improve those arts which tend to increase      
our comforts...to direct the energies of our nation to      
the multiplication of the human race, and not to its      
destruction.

A very different sort of political thinker wrote 
something quite similar:
The settlement of this great and generous land and the      
development of its resources created a diverse and      
expansive American republic of hope, opportunity,      
experimentation, mobility, and personal freedom.

It came as a surprise to me that many others do not as a matter 
of course consider it desirable that people should have greater 
access to educational and economic opportunity, better health, 
and the material goods that constitute the standard of living. 
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Duke of Wellington 
commented on the first railroad in Great Britain that it would 
"enable the lower orders to go uselessly wandering about the 
country."  And the present Duke of Wellington inveighs against 
the birth of additional people who might share the pleasures of 
life in England and on the planet with him.  But there are also 
many who are not members of the "nobility" who associate negative 
spiritual and metaphysical values with various aspects of 
progress.  For example, when "progress" in painkilling drugs is 
mentioned, they mention drug abuse in return.  And their views 
are in no manner inherently illogical or foolish, though they may 
be unpalatable to others.  

Values Masquerading as Rights or Other Entitlements

   The concept of rights - apart from any specific body of 
secular law - has become used widely in discussion of subjects 
related to people and other species (a subject introduced in 
chapter 10).  Such rights are often asserted without explicit 
justification as if they are undeniable.  A typical example is a 
letter to the editor following a (facetious) article about a 
man's battle with moles in his lawn:  

What makes him think that he owns the world and has      
more right to inhabit it than moles?  Were your readers      
supposed to chuckle over his escapades of trying to      
poison, gas and shish kebab a helpless animal?  Who      
really cares what Mr. Sautter's lawn looks like? 

Or this from the Indian ambassador to the United States:

     The view that the human race is endowed with the      
divine right to ruthlessly exploit planetary resources      
for its own short term benefit is no longer valid and      
must be decisively rejected...we must shed the quaint      
belief that ours is a race in some special way entitled 
to exploit this planet infinitum for its own selfish 
purpose. 

There is further discussion of values concerning various species 
in chapter 31 on species.   The likening of the human species to 
cancer and other virulent diseases has long been a common piece 
of rhetoric (see edition 1, pages 000).  Now AIDS has become a 
favorite analogy to people.  "We, the human species, have become 
a viral epidemic to the earth...the AIDS of the earth."  And "If 
radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human 
populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like 
AIDS."  Author William Vollmann is quoted in Publishers Weekly:  
[T]he biggest hope that we have right now is the AIDS epidemic.  
Maybe the best thing that could happen would be if it were to 
wipe out half or two-thirds of the people in the world."  The 
Economist wrote in an editorial: "The extinction of the human 
species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing."  And 
another by the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson: "The sin our 
descendants are least likely to forgive us is the loss of 
biological diversity."   There is an interesting contradiction 
here, as Robert Nelson pointed out.  On the one hand, homo 
sapiens is said to be no different than other species; on the 
other hand, it is the only species whom the environmentalists ask 
to protect other species.  They attribute to us a special duty, 
but not a special privilege.

CONCLUSION
   My aim here is not to discuss the above values, but simply to 
point out that they operate importantly in discussion of these 
matters. Their universal validities are usually taken for granted 
by those who assert them, though to others they may seem to be 
simply odd preferences which may be atypical, unhallowed by 
tradition, quite arguable, and perhaps no more than one person's 
tastes.  (The status of other values discussed in this chapter 
may be the same as far as arguability goes.)

ENDNOTES
page # \ultres\ tchar39 February 17, 1994