Referring to world population growth, 3 years before World War II broke out, Ranji Palme Dutt (in “World Politics in 1936”, published as a Left Book Club edition by Victor Gollancz) wrote:

“The expansion of world production, even within the capitalist fetters and omitting the Soviet Union from the totals, has far exceeded the growth of world population. Already, by 1925, despite all the destruction through the war, world production had increased in 1918 by 18 per cent, as against a growth in world population by 6 per cent…In the subsequent years, 1925-1929, the expansion was still more rapid. Between 1913 and 1928, while world population increased by 10 per cent, world production of foodstuffs and raw materials increased by 25 per cent and world industrial production by a still greater proportion.”

He makes the point, too, that:

“It is thus abundantly clear that there is no world ‘over-population’. The plea of ‘over-population’, of the ‘pressure of rising population on natural resources’, etc., which is commonly put forward by reactionary and imperialist schools of thought as the natural and God-given cause of the drive to expansion and war, has demonstrably no basis in world facts.”

This is still true. Between 1850 and 1991, world population probably grew by nearly 5 times (according to data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census and various historical estimates of world population). Meanwhile, estimates of productivity growth over the same period (i.e. mid-to-end 19th century to the mid 1990s) are much greater. For example, the renowned management science expert Peter F. Drucker notes that from 1881 to 1994 “the systematic study of work, tasks and tools raised the productivity of manual work in making and moving things by three to four percent compound on average per year –for a fifty-fold increase in output per worker over 110 years. And according to Marshall Martin, head of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University in the United States, U.S. farm labor productivity rose seven times from the end of World War II to the 1990s, whereas non-farm business sector labor productivity grew by 2.6 times. (Purdue News, March 1997) (Taken from: “Abundance, Poverty and Power”, Thomas Smith, August, 2001).

It is surely symptomatic of the times we live in –accurately referred to as the “military-industrial complex” –that the same Malthusian story about over-population has been promoted since at least the 1960s.

November, 2005