ARTICLES

Children Aren't the Problem

OVERPOPULATION CLAIM IS BOGUS, SAYS LOCAL ECONOMIST

George Neumayr

According to Northern California economist Jacqueline Kasun, the world faces a serious population problem. It needs more people.

"Through our meddling to reduce births we have greatly aggravated a fertility problem that is going to get worse and worse," said Kasun in a recent interview. "It is going to be extremely hard, [given] modern social security systems, for this shrinking younger generation to take care of the growing elderly population."

Kasun, a self-described "mainstream economist" trained at New York's Columbia University, is an expert on population theory. In the 1970s, she began an intense investigation of the overpopulation claim, in part out of a sense of personal guilt. "I really felt I was threatening the world's food supply," she says, recalling the birth of her third child.

She discovered that her guilt was misplaced. The idea that large families threatened civilization was a "scam" and tool of "newspaper hysteria," which almost none of her colleagues in mainstream economics took seriously. "I found out right away that economists didn't believe in it. The economists were ignoring the whole thing."

Kasun published her findings in the Christian Science Monitor, America, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Like her friend and colleague Julian Simon, she argued that the world had more than enough resources to accomodate population increases.

"If all of the people in the world moved to Texas, each person could be given the space available in the typical American home and all of the rest of the world would be empty," she wrote. "Most of the world is still empty."

"Not only do farmers use a mere fraction of the world's arable land, they also use the available agricultural resources at only a fraction of their productive capability. Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, has estimated that the less-developed continents -- those where present food supplies are most precarious -- are capable of feeding 18 billion people, or six times their present population."

She also debunked the notion that people represent a danger to the environment, pointing out the distortions in the press: "It may be true, as the London Economist claimed, that an area the size of Switzerland was logged in Brazil in 1989. But Switzerland would fit into the forested area of Brazil 138 times, that is, Brazil cut a fraction of one percent of its forested area.... This was probably less than the volume of timber growth that was occurring."

The world's problems derived from misgovernment and evil behavior, not the existence of large families, she maintained.

"War and socialism, not overpopulation, are the reasons for the mass starvation in so many countries.... In Ethiopia, soldiers seized not only the food but the draft animals as well. In China, India, and Mexico, as well as in the former Soviet Union, the government appointed itself as the only buyer of food crops, paying farmers less than the cost of their inputs. The result was tragically low food output. In all cases, when the government paid higher prices, farm output greatly increased.... Correcting our behavior is far more important than reducing our numbers."

Looking back, Kasun has no regrets, despite the "persona non grata" status opposing overpopulation theory earned her at Humboldt State University, where until recently she taught economics and statistics.

She continues to write voluminously on the subject. Ignatius Press is publishing a second edition of her book The War Against Population this year.

That title is no exaggeration, she says. The population control lobby "hates people." Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, among other organizations, are clamoring for "Congress to stop the growth of population." To Kasun, a believing Anglo-Catholic, these groups appear almost devilish in their resentment of humans.

"Satan got so mad at God when he created man. He hated the human species and he has been trying to destroy us ever since.... [These organizations] want to control other people's lives.... They want to keep people out of much of the earth.... They don't want to obey God; they want to be God. This is the ultimate sin."

And, sadly, says Kasun, her profession is falling under the sway of this quasi-totalitarian ideology. Humboldt State's economics department, for example, is now home to "sustainable economics," a code phrase for a sweeping system of restrictions on "private property" and family size for the sake of population stablization.

A child of the depression, Kasun entered economics to study the essential issue of that period, "material wealth." Economics, she still believes, is an honorable field. It developed, she points out, under the influence of "Christian men" who wanted to establish a law-based market system that would "give incentives to human beings to serve their fellow man." To see economics, then,employed as a Trojan horse to undermine man's good deeply disturbs her. "It breaks my heart for economics because economists know it's not true," she says of the new fad of sustainable economics.

Kasun applauds the Roman Catholic Church for opposing the overpopulation juggernaut. She attended the United Nations Cairo Conference in 1994 as an observer and says the Catholic Church "did a heroic job against all kinds of odds." She also says that she fell in "love with the Muslims" there, because of their clear-eyed rejection of western cultural imperialism. "The first thing that I encountered when I got there was an African woman, a pediatrician from Kenya, who stood up at the Planned Parenthodod [event] and denounced [Planned Parenthood] and said they were doing horrible things to the people in Kenya.... The Muslims offered a vigorous resistance to all this awful stuff." A sheikh's obliviousness to the West's novel definition of marriage particularly charmed her. "We only know one way to have a family, and that is for a man to have a wife and for the two of them together to have children," he said. "He acted as if it were news to him that there was something else," she says.

The Clinton administration, however, behaved disgracefully, witnessed Kasun. She saw Timothy Wirth, Clinton's point man at Cairo, "flanked by Planned Parenthood." And the Clinton administration's mischief continues, she emphasizes. This year's United Nations meeting at the Hague, which revisited the controversial family issues of Cairo, revealed that the United States government is still beating the drum for an international right to sexual immorality. "They want the full range of reproductive rights for all persons, all ages.... They made a special pitch for adolescent reproductive rights which are to include sexual pleasure.... Parents must be sensitive to their children's sexual needs, [they said.]"

Kasun isn't totally despairing, however. The birth dearth in Europe and America will expose the lie of population control, she predicts. And the media, always ready to report catastrophe, will "enjoy" covering the story. "I think people are getting a little weary" of the left's "propaganda machine," she says.