The Brooklyn Rail

Jason E. Smith’s article, “After the Wave, Winter” in the July-August Field Notes provoked much response. Two writers sent in comments. We are publishing them here, with brief responses by Smith.

The article by Jason E. Smith in Field Notes of July-August 2024 (“After the Wave, Winter: Demographic Decline and the ‘Production of Men’ in the 21st Century”) contains interesting analyses and insightful ideas on demographic aspects of capitalism. Smith reviews in enlightening ways how different theorists, Marx in particular, have linked population growth and the development of capitalism. There are, however, some assertions in the article that I think are worthy of critical remarks.

1.
It can be useful to start with some key demographic notions. The change in the size of a population in a given geographical unit (say, a country) during a year is the number of births minus the number of deaths plus the number of arrivals—immigrants—minus the number of departures—emigrants. Calling “net migration” M the annual total of immigrants minus emigrants, it is obvious that the change in population is the total of births, B, minus deaths. D, plus net migration, M. That is ∆P = B + M – D, where ∆P, is the annual change in population. If we divide this equation by P, the population size at the start of the year, we obtain ∆P/P = B/P + M/P – D/P. Each of the fractions in this equation has a name: ∆P/P is the rate of population growth, often abbreviated RPG; B/P is the crude birth rate or CBR; M/P is the net migration rate or NMR; and D/P is the crude death rate (or crude mortality rate), CDR; so that RPG = CBR + NMR – CDR; that is, the rate of population growth is equal to the crude birth rate, plus the net migration rate, minus the crude death rate. If we define the biological growth rate as the birth rate minus the death rate, that is, BGR = CBR – CDR, then we have RPG = BGR + NMR; the rate of population growth is the sum of the rates of biological growth and net migration.

Now, if the geographical unit has zero net migration, so that M = 0 and NMR=0, that is, the number of immigrants equals that of emigrants, then ∆P = B – D, and RPG = CBR – CDR, that is, the rate of population growth is equal to the biological growth rate. This is exactly what happens if the population we are considering is the whole world, since for now (unless we consider that astronauts in space stations are no longer part of the Earth population) the net migration rate of the planet is zero. But migration, of which Smith says very little, is a key factor to explain the population size for regions or nations. The three territories in the database of the World Bank with the lowest average rate of population growth, that is, with the greatest rate of population decrease, in the period 2000–2023 are the Northern Mariana Islands, with an average rate of population growth of -2.1% per year, and American Samoa and Ukraine, both with an average rate of population growth of -1.2% per year. The Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, are both unincorporated territories of the United States with shrinking populations, presently around 50,000 people each. More interesting is the case of Ukraine, whose population of 49.2 million in 2000 shrank to 37.0 million in 2023, with this massive shrinkage due both to migration and to excess of deaths over births each year during recent years. Thus, for instance, in 2017 (always according to World Bank database) the birth and death rates in Ukraine were respectively 9.4 and 14.5 per thousand, but the net migration was -50,000, a large outflow of people. On February, 2022, Russia launched a major invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian birth and death rates reported by the World Bank for 2022 are respectively 7.6 and 21.4 per thousand (note the significant drop of the birth rate and the dramatic increase of the death rate with respect to 2017), but the reported net migration was an outstanding -6.67 million. The estimated population of Ukraine, 43.8 million in 2021 dropped to 38.0 million in 2022 and 37.0 million in 2023. These are mid-year estimates of all residents regardless of legal status.

At the other extreme of the World Bank ranking of territories by average rate of population growth during the period 2000–2023 we find, for instance, Angola, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar, with respective average rates of population growth of 3.5%, 4.6% and 6.2% per year. The population of Angola grew from 16.4 million in 2000 to 36.7 million in 2023, while the UAE grew from 3.3 million to 9.5 million, and the population of Qatar, the territory with the highest rate of population growth in these years, grew from 0.6 million to 2.7 million. In these three countries, for each year in the present century, the birth rate is much higher—three, four, or more times—than the death rate, and the net migration is positive in almost all years of the period 2000–2023.

However, if we compare the rate of biological growth (birth rate minus death rate) with the net migration rate, the differences between these three countries are staggering. During these years in Angola the net migration rate is always close to a tenth or less of the rate of biological growth, in the UAE and Qatar the net migration rate is many times bigger than the rate of biological growth every year. Thus, for example, in 2007 in the UAE this rate was 13 times bigger than the rate of biological growth, as there was a net migration of 104,000 people. In Qatar the net migration that year reached 206,000 people and the net migration rate was almost 17 times bigger than the rate of biological growth. These hundreds of thousands of people migrating into these and other oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf are mostly workers coming for jobs from other countries of the Middle East or Asia. Thus, foreign residents make up presently more than two-thirds of Kuwait population and that ratio is even higher in Qatar and the UAE. These migrants are subjected to horrible conditions of work and housing, as a recent fire in Kuwait has highlighted. The accelerated accumulation of capital in these countries has been a powerful attractor of people from other countries. Rarely is the accumulation of capital slowed down by lack of workers.

Leaving aside the demographic rarity of the Gulf states, overall, as shown in the table, low-income countries have much higher rates of population growth than medium-income countries, and these have lower rates than high-income countries. For high-income countries as a group the World Bank reports an average rate of population growth of 0.5% per year for the period 2000–2023. That is also the rate for France, while Italy had a much smaller rate of 0.1%. The population of the United States grew in this period 0.7% per year, that of Spain 0.8%, and that of Norway 0.9%. These three countries have recently had a positive and substantive net migration rate; that is the only explanation of a positive rate of population growth, because in these countries birth rates are either similar to death rates or lower (in Spain, each year since 2015 the birth rate has been lower than the death rate). The only high-income country with negative population growth in the 2000–2023 period is Japan, with a rate of -0.1% per year, the consequence of an elderly population with resultant high death rate and low birth rate, and basically zero migration. Considering the whole world, the average annual rate of population growth between 2000 and 2023 was 1.2% per year. Humanity expanded from 6.1 to 8.0 billion people in this 24-year period. In 2022 worldwide there were 17 births and 8 deaths per thousand population—that is, more than two births per each death: in other words, a total of 136 million births versus 64 million deaths. In the next several decades unless some major catastrophe occurs, there is no risk of humanity shrinking.

2.
Smith claims, citing recently published research, that in just a few centuries, “a mere blink in the history of human habitation of the Earth,” the world population will revert to 1920 levels. Thus, the span in which the world population had been more than 2 billion would have been a brief spike in history. These are very risky assertions. Population growth projections for the world at large are disputed. While some authors claim that fertility is falling in many countries faster than expected, others, like Jane O’Sullivan, claim exactly the opposite. Of course, all this is just forecasting that ignores the possibility of major hits to population from sources such as climate change or nuclear war that could trigger a demographic calamity at any time.

Smith says that women’s struggles in North America and Europe in the past half century have prioritized increasing women’s control over reproduction and family size, including the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. These struggles intensified at a moment of generalized profitability crisis in the late sixties and early seventies, one effect of which was the undermining of the family wage. Women began entering the labor force en masse in the early seventies; it is no coincidence that fertility rates began declining at the same time.

This suggests, in my opinion, a too close link between fertility rates and the participation of women in the labor force. Indeed, an examination of some specific cases reveals that there is no such strong link. As shown in the following figure, while sometimes fertility (the average number of births per woman) and the female labor participation rate (the percentage of women ages 15+ in the labor force) followed parallel paths, as in the US since 2006 or in Japan in 1991–2005 (both falling), or in Italy in 1995–2010 (both rising), in other periods these two variables fully diverged (as in Japan after 2005 or in Spain in 1960–1997). In the United States the fertility rate slightly increased between the early seventies and nineties, at a time when women were increasingly present in the labor market. Then after 1990 both fertility and female participation in the labor market mostly stagnated for more than decade, until in the past fifteen years both variables started to decline.

For some countries Smith makes very specific forecasts, as for instance when he says that the population will “soon” be halved in China, Japan, Italy, and South Korea or when he asserts that Nigeria’s population will be larger than China’s population “by the end of the century.” These are very risky forecasts. If population projections for the world at large are disputed and risky, for specific countries they are even riskier, because population dynamics can be strongly modified in unexpected ways. The decline of population that started in the republics of the old Soviet bloc around 1990 and extended in many of them for two decades or more was totally unexpected before it occurred. The population of Bulgaria, for instance, 6.5 million in 2022, had been 9.0 million in 1988.

3.
Marx presented his views on population, which Smith discusses quite thoroughly in his article, mostly as disagreements with the views of other economists like Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, who basically followed Malthus in population issues. It would be difficult to assert whether Marx had a theory of population. Though he remarked that each mode of production has its own laws of population, his comments on population are dispersed in his works and they are not always consistent.

In several parts of manuscripts of the 1860s that Engels edited into Volume 3 of Capital, Marx speculated on the relationship between population growth and capitalist production and accumulation:

essentially, the capitalist production process is simultaneously a process of accumulation … the concentration of capital that goes with it, is a material means of increasing productive power. Now, this growth of the means of production includes the growth of the working population, the creation of a working population, which corresponds to the surplus capital, or even exceeds its general requirements, thus leading to an overpopulation of workers. A momentary excess of surplus capital over the working population it has commandeered, would have a two-fold effect. It would, on the one hand, by raising wages, mitigate the adverse conditions which decimate the offspring of the labourers and would make marriages easier among them, so as gradually to increase the population. On the other hand, by applying methods which yield relative surplus value (introduction and improvement of machinery) it would produce a far more rapid, artificial, relative overpopulation, which in its turn, would be a breeding ground for a really swift propagation of the population, since under capitalist production misery produces population. It therefore follows of itself from the nature of the capitalist process of accumulation … that the increased mass of means of production that is to be converted into capital always finds a correspondingly increased, even excessive, exploitable worker population.

There are three key ideas in this passage: First, in the long run, the process of capitalist development will lead to an increase in working population (“the increased mass of means of production (…) always finds a correspondingly increased, even excessive, exploitable worker population”), so that Marx expects an indefinite population growth under capitalism. Second, by referring to the rise of wages during periods of accelerated accumulation leading to less infant mortality (“conditions which decimate the offspring of the labourers”) and more births because more marriages, Marx asserts that population growth will accelerate during periods of fast capital accumulation (expansions of the business cycle in modern terms). Third, by speaking of periods in which there is an increase of relative overpopulation because the introduction of machinery displacing workers will lead to faster population growth, Marx claims that “under capitalist production misery produces population.” Marx is asserting, then, on the one hand, that rising wages will lead to faster population growth and, on the other hand, that falling wages and misery will also lead to an increase in population. His forecast of an ever-growing population in capitalism is increasingly at odds with the demographic reality of countries like Japan and others.

In other parts of these manuscripts that then became volume 3 of Capital, Marx referred to the effects of capitalist production on the health and mortality of workers. He cited the official English Health Report of 1863 that reported that in proportion as the people of a district were working in collective indoor occupations, other things being equal, the district death rate by lung diseases would be increased because of bad ventilation and the consequent lung disease. He reported mortality figures for industries carried on in enclosed places, collected by the Board of Health in 1860 and 1861, showing that for men between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five, for which the death rate from consumption and other pulmonary diseases in English agricultural districts was 100, the death rate in highly industrial districts like Coventry was 163, in Leeds 218, in Preston 220, and in Manchester 263. In districts where women were in great numbers working in textile industries under crowded and poorly ventilated conditions while men were working in other activities, the rate of death from pulmonary diseases between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five was much higher in women. Thus, for instance, in Towcester where the chief industry was lace manufacture, with women workers, the death rate from pulmonary diseases between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, per 100,000 population, was 239 for men and 577 for women. In a healthy country district where agriculture was the main activity, the corresponding rates for men and women were respectively 331 and 333. These were very insightful observations on the health of workers—they would be presently labeled occupational epidemiology—and the toll imposed on it by capitalist production, but Marx was not here theorizing on population growth.

At the end of the first volume of Capital, in the sections dealing with the accumulation of capital and the so-called primitive accumulation, Marx unequivocally stated his view that the accumulation of capital, “economic growth” in modern terms, would imply expansion 0f the population, which increasingly would be composed of wage-workers:

Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part invested in labour power. A part of the surplus value turned into additional capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional labour fund. If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (...), then the demand for labour and the subsistence fund of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital produces yearly a surplus value, of which one part is yearly added to the original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning (...) the demand for labourers may exceed the supply, and, therefore, wages may rise (...). The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-working class supports and multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production (...) The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly reincorporate itself with capital for that capital's self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.

In the context of a discussion of “The so-called primitive accumulation,” Marx referred to the dynamic relations between accumulation of capital and population growth, specifically to the population of wage workers which can be enlarged or decreased by different factors:

capitalist production (...) not only constantly reproduces the wage worker as wage worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus population of wage workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence…

However, migration interferes with this setting, as Marx immediately explains, because

in the colonies this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother country, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour market is always understocked. The law of the supply and demand of labour falls to pieces.

It is also in the colonies that

the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with impediments (…) What becomes of the production of wage labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? The wage worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market.

Marx made quite interesting remarks on the health of workers in the inaugural address to the Internation Workingmen Association in 1864. There Marx cited reports of medical officers showing that the interruption of work in the textile districts of Lancashire during the crisis of 1861 had had overall favorable effects for the health of the workers. During that crisis due to the interruption of the exports to England of American cotton from the Southern American plantations because the US Civil War, the Lancashire textile industry had stopped working and the nutrition of workers had worsened because their income reduction, but they had ceased being exposed to the unhealthy emanations of the factory environment and the extenuating work. Their health was indeed improving, the same it was improving the health of their children: infant mortality was falling because mothers were now being able to breastfeed their children and had no money to buy for them “Godfrey's cordial”, an opiate syrup to “calm” the babies that was very popular at the time. That Marx did not consider this episode as a mere anecdote is proven by the fact that he mentioned it also in the first volume of Capital. Interestingly, Robert Fogel, who received a Memorial Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his studies on economic and demographic history also mentioned the deleterious effect of Godfrey’s cordial in commenting on major causes of high mortality and stunting among children below age three in 19th century England. He probably did not know Marx had mentioned that “cordial” more than a century before.

Coming back to Marx, note that in this reference to the industrial crisis of 1861 due to the lack of cotton in the English textile industry Marx was saying that a decrease in income because of an economic downturn could be favorable to the health and the survival of workers and their offspring because it would reduce or totally remove major harmful effects of capitalist social relations. This is a view which is at odds with the assertions in the manuscript of 1864–1865 that was turned into Volume III, in the sense that in that manuscript it was the prosperity accompanying accelerating capital accumulation that would reduce death rates.

Overall, Marx’s views on population are neither particularly consistent nor particularly relevant to the demographic reality of the twenty-first century. His rejection of Malthus’s views, his critique of the “dogma” of the economists of his time who saw capital accumulation as depending simply on population growth, and his multiple references to the damaging effects on health of different aspects of capitalism (be they Godfrey’s cordial or the overcrowding of workers in unhealthy environments leading to lung diseases) are major insights into demographic aspects of modernity. But population in the twentieth century has followed paths of rather unexpected demographic explosions and unexpected declines that are largely at odds with expectations of all schools of economic thought, including Marx’s, and pose major uncertainties for the future.

The Eurocentric optimism of the nineteenth century was comfortable with expectations of indefinite growth of production and indefinite growth of population, Earth limits were ignored by basically all authors theorizing on social progress. Then the twentieth century highlighted—with two world wars, the development of means of mass annihilation, and the ecological disasters associated with “progress”—the human ability to develop not only productive forces but also highly destructive ones. Eleven years ago, it was stated in the prestigious journal Science that if the patterns of consumption of 5.7 billion people in poor and middle-income countries were to match the consumption patterns of the 1.3 billion people in the rich world, two more Earths would be needed to support everyone on a sustained basis; spiraling socio-environmental processes are the basis of the belief that the pattern of contemporary economic growth is unsustainable. But right now, humanity numbers 8 not 7 billion, and demographers’ forecasts of the world population—which of course do not consider potential irruptions of catastrophic climate change, world war, or major pandemics—diverge in a wide and wild range between the idealists who expect just 6 billion in 2100 and the doomsayers who expect over 14 billion. Economic ideologies usually predicate an absurd optimism that ignores the major risks faced by the present system of nation-states and a runaway world capitalist system with its leading principle of maximizing production. Whether the Earth community is able to correct course and move toward a smaller humanity economically organized in a system that is not at odds with the rest of nature and with its own survival is the big question at the start of the second quarter of the twenty-first century.