ABSTRACT
Barring atomic disasters, the size, growth rate and distribution of the world’s population
over the next twenty to thirty years will largely determine the condition of man in the
twenty-first century. That is to say, demographic factors will influence greatly man’s adaptation as one species in nature’s larger scheme. Just how, and how well, man will adapt has never been argued more widely by scientists and by ‘true believers’; their
respective identities not always distinguishable. Human fertility and migration as related to wealth, power, food supplies, energy and environmental quality-these are the modern
Malthusian issues. To be sure, there is optimism in some quarters-especially perhaps among some
economists, technological fixers and theists. But hardly a month passes that one more baleful prognostication of man’s future is not published. Doomsday authors are among the best-sellers, no matter the dubious nature of many computerised games simulating
various scenarios of food, fuels, minerals, materials, environmental degradation,
economic growth and population growth. Such studies tend to be flawed by the well-known fallacies of ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, Trejudice in, prejudice out’ (Simon, 1981). At the very least, however, one may be certain that continued population growth in most societies entails, as Ridker (1979, p. 121) has pointed out, more local conflicts over land and water use, the need to live with even greater uncertainties and risks of major ecological or nuclear disasters, more dependence on rapid scientific and technological development to reduce the uncertainties and risks and few social options, and the
continued postponement of the resolution of other problems, including those resulting
from past growth. On the other hand, if rapid population increase can be slowed down, there are political and economic advantages: more time, resources and additional options
by means of which to overcome ignorance, redress mistakes of past growth, implement
solutions and plan with greater freedom of choice. As human beings we are all ecologically dependent and substantively
demographic-even statistically treatable, however abhorrent that fact may be to Lord
Snow’s ‘literary-humanists’. If the brotherhood of man amounts to nothing more than this, our common membership in nature’s web, the consequences are not insignificant, especially today. But there is another underlying aspect of ‘world politics and population’ to be noted in these introductory pages. And that is power. That population is an ingredient of national power to be inventoried, rulers from Caesar Augustus and the Han Dynasty to the present have demonstrated by taking censuses and surveys of their people. This is not surprising in as much as it is people who both produce and consume. And national political power derives from the quality and quantity of people as contributors, supporters, allies, enemies,
voters, as well as from the economy. The powers of nations, I take it, are the very stuff of international politics. Which brings me to the question set for this chapter: ‘what should every lecturer in politics know about population as a factor in the political economy of the world?’
