After all, Ehrlich made those claims in 1968, and that was a long time ago. But in 1990 he published The Population Explosion, a sequel to his first bestseller.¹ Yet again time has proven that Ehrlich’s premises, on which his projections are based, are severely flawed. If an excess of three decades worth of statistics contrary to his theories do not dent his reputation, then Ehrlich deserves the title Teflon Prophet.

It is not the facts that compel Ehrlich’s supporters as much as a fanatical adherence to his solutions: global central economic planning more ambitious than anything Marx ever dreamed of. Ehrlich says he “can’t really see any truly insuperable barriers to reorganizing our society so that virtually everyone could lead a more pleasant, productive, satisfying life.”² As he sees it, our choice is to abandon the market for an “orderly, planned way to a sustainable human life-support system or to be brutally forced into that shift by nature.”³ When he wrote so wistfully about “reorganizing our society” did he envision himself as one of the reorganizers?

Ehrlich recognizes that reorganization would mean “giving up many things that we now consider to be essential freedoms.” While the costs would be great, so would the supposed benefits, which include “avoiding the total collapse of civilization and the disappearance of the United States as we know it.”⁴ Ehrlich is serious, and he’s taken seriously by the anti-capitalist coalition. His perceived sainthood rests not on acumen or accuracy, but on the fact that the solutions he offers are ideologically in tune with his supporters.

The most recent major study to disprove the theories of Ehrlich came from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In its book Global Food Projections to 2020, the IFPRI looks back at the last 30 years of world food production—coincidentally the period since the publication of Ehrlich’s first book. With the advantage of hindsight the Institute finds “that most regions have made substantial inroads against poverty and averted widespread famine in recent years.”⁵ The result has been a significant drop in the numbers of malnourished children. In high-risk developing countries malnutrition rates declined from “an aggregate rate of more than 46 percent in 1970 to 31 percent in 1997.” That translates “into an absolute decline of 20 million malnourished children since 1967.”⁶

In 1990 Ehrlich had a very different view of Latin America. He lamented: “Since 1981, per-capita food production has also been lagging” there and that “population growth is already outstripping food production.” Yet the IFPRI says that per capita cereal production increased from 225.3 kilograms in 1967 to 253.4 kilograms in 1997. During the period of 1990–1997 cereal production was growing at an annual rate averaging 1.9 percent, compared to a population growth rate of 1.7 percent.⁷ Ehrlich’s book was already wrong by the time it was printed: per capita food production, instead of lagging, grew by 11 percent over the next decade and cereal production increased faster than the population.

What the IFPRI has to say is good news all around, but more so for the developing countries. Instead of heading toward global famine, food supplies are increasing for the vast majority of the world’s population. The IFPRI found:

• “caloric availability per capita rose in developing countries between the 1960s and the early 1990s by 400 kilocalories, reaching nearly 2,700 kilocalories per day by 1997″;⁸
• per capita cereal production, from 1967 to 1997, “rose substantially”;⁹
• per capita gains in cereal production “rose from 176 kilograms in 1967 to 226 kilograms in 1997, an increase of 28 percent.”¹⁰

No Malthusian Crisis

The IFPRI is not alone in its conclusions. Tim Dyson, professor of population studies at the London School of Economics, wrote in the British Medical Journal that “a global malthusian crisis is unlikely to occur during the next few decades.”¹¹ Dyson surveyed the various regions of the world and found a healthy scenario regarding food and population. He said that famines on the Indian subcontinent “will be things of the past” provided the region remains politically stable. In China he found “no cause for alarm,” and both “Latin America and the Middle East have a record of progress in feeding their people and this is likely to continue.”¹²

Ehrlich, who projected massive famines in his first book, ignored his original projections in his second book. Instead of admitting he was wrong he wrote: “Of course, [as if he knew this all along] food production worldwide has continued to increase somewhat faster than the population for the last four decades.” But while some people believe this will continue for the foreseeable future, he says, “all signs point in the opposite direction.”¹³

Dyson wrote that the trend, instead of reversing, has continued unabated: “Food production should be able to keep up with the growth in world population that is projected to occur over the next 25 years. An important reason for this is that the worldwide growth in cereal yield shows no sign of slowing down.”¹⁴

Data from the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) shows worldwide cereal yields to have increased from just over one ton of cereal per hectare in the early 1950s to about 3 tons by the late 1990s.¹⁵ And worldwide averages are significantly below those of the developed world, implying room for a great deal of growth.

Areas that Ehrlich once said were hopeless are today feeding their own people. In his 1990 book Ehrlich claimed that food production in India, which had increased contrary to his prior warnings, had finally “lost momentum.” But the IFPRI data shows Ehrlich to be inaccurate yet again. Instead of losing momentum, rice production in India grew from 3.7 metric tons per hectare in 1990 to 4.2 in 1997. In addition, wheat production increased from 2.2 tons to 2.6, and maize increased from 1.5 tons to 1.7 tons.¹⁶ India, which was importing over 9 million metric tons (mmt) of cereals in 1967 was exporting almost 2 mmt by 1997.

Ehrlich had even less hope for the entire South Asia region. Yet the Institute’s data show that its food production increased throughout the ’90s and surpassed India’s in percentage terms. In 1990 Erhlich said Vietnam, once “a rich food exporting region,” was suffering from ecological destruction.¹⁷

In 1967 Vietnam imported 1.5 mmt of cereal. By 1982 imports were down to 0.6 million, and when Ehrlich’s book was released, Vietnam was exporting 1.2 mmt. By 1997 exports were up to 2.8 mmt.¹⁸

There are two fundamental reasons that Ehrlich has consistently, and substantially, erred with his projections. All his calculations are based on two false factors: he assumes food production must decrease while population growth rates remain steady. As we’ve seen, food production has continued to increase for the three decades since he first sounded his warnings. But Ehrlich felt such declines were inevitable and said the “tragedy” would be compounded by the fact “that the world population seems committed to a growth rate of closer to 2 percent for the next few decades.”¹⁹ While “few” is indeterminate, it is safe to assume he meant more than a couple; say, 30 years—until 2020.

But instead of remaining near 2 percent population growth rates had already declined by the time Ehrlich wrote his book. Population growth peaked around 1970 at 2.1 per cent. By 1980 it was down to 1.73 percent, and when Ehrlich’s book was published it had dropped to 1.7 percent. In 1995 the Institute for Demographic Studies said the rate had declined even further, to 1.5 percent.²⁰ And it continued to plummet so that by 2000, at 1.3 percent, it was closer to 1 percent than to Ehrlich’s projected 2 percent. Even the United Nations, which usually overestimates population growth, says that growth levels by 2015 will be down to 1.03 percent.²¹

Point of Agreement

There is one area on which Ehrlich, Dyson, and the Institute all agree: sub-Saharan Africa. There cereal-production rates declined almost from the day the colonial powers pulled out until today. In 1967 per capita cereal production was 127.9 kilograms but by 1997 it had dropped to 124.6 kilograms. This production rate is only one-fifth that of the developed countries and is about half the average for the developing countries. In spite of being the least populated continent, perhaps partially because of it, Africa’s per capita food production is significantly lower than that of South Asia, the next poorest region in the world.²²

In August 2000 the FAO warned that 17 countries faced severe food shortages, all in sub-Saharan Africa.²³ But what is clear is that in the majority of these cases, 12 countries by my count, political problems and war are the main cause of food shortages. Almost all the “basket cases” of the world from 30 years ago are now well on their way to feeding themselves, but not Africa. That raises the question why. If we look at the successes we see some dramatic changes. From 1958 to 1962 an estimated 30 million Chinese starved to death under an artificial famine created by socialist economic and agricultural policies.²⁴ Market reforms were instituted after Mao’s death, and food suddenly became more plentiful. The late political scientist David Osterfeld noted that after reforms, food production increased by 40 percent.²⁵ Since the early ’90s, when Osterfeld wrote his book, cereal production in China has increased by a further 17 percent.²⁶ In addition, market reforms have vastly increased the wealth of nonfarmers in China, making it relatively easy for them to afford to import the surpluses of food being produced in much of the rest of the world.

India, which Ehrlich had written off, has also turned into a food exporter. Again market reforms predated the rise in production. The late Julian Simon noted in Atlantic Monthly that “Most price controls were lifted, and price supports were substituted for controls. Indian farmers had a greater incentive to produce more, so they did. They increased production by planting more crops a year, on more land, and by improving the land they had. They also introduced higheryield strains and improved fertilizers.”²⁷ Since Simon wrote those words cereal production in India has increased 50 percent further.²⁸

But Africa has continued down the road of state intervention. What market reforms have been instituted have been half-measures and often repealed later. In many cases, such as Zimbabwe, the government has waged war on private markets intentionally, undermining private property rights and the incentives to produce. Reforms in Africa have been so half-hearted that the IFPRI produced a paper on the subject titled The Road Half Traveled.²⁹

Throughout Africa state marketing boards often hold a monopoly on critical foodstuffs. Frequently these boards will pay farmers below-market rates and then sell the produce on the world market with all profits going to the government or to individuals in the government. It remains true that Africa is a bastion of state control over agriculture. But it is not enough that the state withdraw from agricultural matters. The rule of law and the sovereignty of individual property rights must be upheld. It is difficult for any business, let alone farmers, to plan for the future if they cannot enter into secure contracts or if they have no legal claim to the property they use.

Other factors that undermine agricultural production include the periodic influx of “food aid” to Africa, which destroys local production. Often such aid is given to the central government and is used to expand state activities that attract human capital from the private sector. Paradoxically, one factor in Africa’s lack of development may be that the continent, on the whole, is underpopulated. Agricultural production needs to get to markets, and for that to happen, infrastructure is needed. But infrastructure cannot be built if the numbers of people it will serve are few. One simply does not build multimillion dollar highways to villages of 200 people.

The battle to feed humanity is not over. And while the fight is still being waged, it does appear that, contrary to Ehrlich, humanity is winning. Throughout the world, market forces have vastly expanded the ability of mankind to feed itself. And as a result, food per capita has continued to grow for the last few decades. Nations that only a few decades ago were pronounced hopeless now produce surpluses because of market reforms. Endemic starvation is essentially limited to one corner of the world where markets are not embraced and where private property is not secure. Of course, this does not stop the anti-capitalist coalition from blaming capitalism. Nor does it prevent the coalition from suggesting new forms of socialism, on a global scale, as the solution.

But the evidence, which grows daily, indicates that the fight over food is more illusionary than real. Substantial progress is intentionally ignored and starving children are used as propaganda to persuade the world to adopt global economic planning. A phony crisis is being invented in the hope that it will persuade people to adopt a counterfeit solution.

1. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (London: Hutchinson, 1990).
2. Ibid., p. 184.
3. Ibid., p. 44.
4. Ibid., p. 181.
5. Mark Rosegrant et al., Global Food Projections to 2020 (Washington, D.C., International Food Policy Research Institute, 2001), p. 3; www.ifpri.cgiar.org/pubs/books/globalfoodprojections2020.htm. See also Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical
Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 9.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., pp. 5, 8.
8. Ibid., p. 5.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Tim Dyson, “Prospects for Feeding the World,” British Medical Journal, October 9, 1999, p. 988.
12. Ibid., p. 989.
13. Ehrlich, p. 68.
14. Dyson, p. 990.
15. Ibid.
16. Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
17. Ehrlich, p. 73.
18. Rosegrant et al., p. 10.
19. Ehrlich, p. 109.
20. Jim Peron, Exploding Population Myths (Chicago: Heartland Institute, 1995), p. 35.
21. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, and Mark Rosegrant, The World Food Situation: Recent Developments, Emerging Issues and Long-Term Prospects (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1997), p. 28.
22. Rosegrant et al., p. 5.
23. Report can be read at www.fao.org/WAICENT/faoinfo/
economic/giews/english/eaf/eaftoc.htm.
24. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996).
25. David Osterfeld, Planning versus Prosperity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 64.
26. Based on data in Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
27. Julian Simon, “The State of World Food Supplies,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1981, pp. 72–76.
28. Based on data in Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
29. Mylène Kherallah et al., The Road Half Traveled: Agricultural Market Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, n.d). It can
be found at www.ifpri.org/pubs/pubs.htm#fpr.

The difference is wealth. San Francisco is one of the wealthiest areas in our part of the world, while Haiti is the poorest. Poverty makes natural disasters worse. Wealth mitigates natural disasters. You would think that those who worry about the poor of the world would promote policies that increase wealth. Instead, they push policies that restrain wealth creation, and they do it intentionally and knowing it will restrain wealth creation.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, an affiliate of the German Green Party, issued a report that referred to wealth areas, like San Francisco, as being populated by “over-consumers.” On the other hand, poor areas like Haiti were called “under-consumers.” But that is a misnomer since the report writers also make clear that in their ideal centrally planned paradise the “under-consumers are not to catch up with the over-consumers.” They indicate that in the name of equality the over-consumers must have their wealth taken from them. They very explicitly attack those who would try to help develop the poor nations of the world because such people “work at lifting the threshold—rather than lowering or modifying the roof…. Poverty alleviation, in other words, cannot be separated from wealth alleviation.”

The truth is that wealthy people can bear the burdens of the worst Mother Nature throws at us. I know the Greens want us all to live in tune with nature, but Mother Nature has no feelings, no compassion, and is quite happy to turn you into fertilizer.  Condemn materialism and wealth all you want, but it saves lives. Sure, if you hate humans, then you won’t care. But whatever problems wealth creation is claimed to cause, they pale in comparison to the problems that accompany poverty.

The quake in Haiti inflicted massive death because poverty magnifies the evil that comes with natural disasters. The San Francisco quake led to few deaths, even with a similar magnitude, because the area is productive and wealthy. And, many of the deaths that did happen were because of failed government policies. For instance, the collapse of  the Cypress Freeway, which killed 42, was built by the state on a landfill that tends to liquefy during an earthquake. That liquefaction, combined with the state’s failure to reinforce known flaws in the highway, directly led to the collapse and the deaths.

Similarly, the other major concentration of destruction was in San Francisco’s Marina District. The Marina District was the site of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which was built by the city on mud flats and wetlands. After the Exposition ended the city then sold the property to developers for housing. It was here that seven buildings collapsed and 63 more were damaged so severely that they had to be torn down. Four died in the Marina District.

The disaster in New Orleans was a similar example. When the government-maintained dikes failed during hurricane Katrina, the city was flooded. The people who suffered were the poor, especially the poor who relied on government mass transit to evacuate them. The better-off fled in their cars. But a huge percentage of citizens didn’t own cars. Randal O’Toole wrote:

“We have heard that 60 percent of New Orleans residents are black, but it has been little noted that a third of those black families do not own a car — nor do 15 percent of white families. It is these people who were left behind when those with cars evacuated.”

O’Toole notes that in previous years, when wealth was lower in the country, death rates from hurricanes were higher. When Galveston was hit by a hurricane in 1900, people couldn’t escape in time because autos didn’t exist. Now major cities can evacuate before a hurricane arrives because people have cars. Even mass transit works better to evacuate people when more people own cars since it is used to evacuate far more manageable numbers.

Policies that destroy wealth creation today mean a poorer world tomorrow, and poverty — not wealth — exacerbates disaster.

This ranking is curious because the actual life expectancy of the average American differs very little from that of the average European. At birth, average life expectancy in the European Union is 78.7. For the average American it is 78. And this doesn’t adjust for factors that can affect the averages which are unrelated to health care, such as lifestyle choices, accident rates, crime rates, and immigration. Health isn’t entirely about longevity but it certainly is a major component. 

What is not mentioned by Moore, or others citing the WHO report, are the measures being used to rate the various countries and who is doing the measuring. There are many ways to nudge ratings in one direction or another that are not directly related to the actual item being measured.

For instance, one might produce a study on transportation. The purpose of transportation is to get people from where they are to where they wish to be. You might rate how quickly people can move, how cheaply they can move relative to their income, how conveniently they can move, and how free they are to move. 

You would think the United States would rate high in such a study. Americans tend to be wealthier than the rest of the world. There is widespread ownership of cars. Gasoline prices are lower than in most other countries. On average, the typical American can travel quicker, cheaper, and more conveniently than people in most parts of the world. But what if this index included other factors as well? For instance, if a major component was the percentage of commuters who use public transportation, that would push the United States far down in the ranking. A larger percentage of the people in other countries have no other option but public transportation. 

In 2000, when the report was issued, WHO was run by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and a socialist. She doesn’t think the results of a health system alone are important. Rather, she wants to know if the system is “fair.” In introducing the WHO report she wrote that while the goal of a health system “is to improve and protect health,” it also has “other intrinsic goals [that] are concerned with fairness in the way people pay for health care.” She is clear about the ideological factors she thinks are important: “Where health and responsiveness are concerned, achieving a high average level is not good enough: the goals of a health system must also include reducing inequalities, in ways that improve the situation of the worst-off. In this report attainment in relation to these goals provides the basis for measuring the performance of health systems.”

True to her ideological roots, Brundtland prefers socialized medicine over private care. Drawing her first conclusion about what makes a good medical system, she declares: “Ultimate responsibility for the performance of a country’s health system lies with government. The careful and responsible management of the well-being of the population—stewardship—is the very essence of good government. The health of people is always a national priority: government responsibility for it is continuous and permanent.”

One WHO discussion paper states, regarding “fairness” in financing, “we consider only the distribution, not the level, as there is no consensus on what the level of health spending should be.” Equal results, not necessarily good results, are the focus. 

When Moore or others refer to the WHO index as proof that private health care doesn’t work, they aren’t being totally honest because they fail to disclose that the index lowers the scores of systems that don’t satisfy socialist presumptions.

A Second Rigged Study

The New York Times in August editorialized that American health care “lags well behind other advanced nations.” The newspaper relied in part on the WHO rankings as proof. For the rest, it relied on a more recent study by the Commonwealth Fund. But that study, which compared the United States to five other wealthy countries, has weaknesses similar to the WHO study.

The Commonwealth Fund marked down the United States partly because “All other major industrialized nations provide universal health coverage, and most of them have comprehensive benefits packages with no cost-sharing by the patients.” Again the American system loses points because it doesn’t provide socialized medicine. And the Times neglected to note that “no cost-sharing” means the people have paid through taxes whether they receive the care or not. 

Non-Emergency Visits

The United States also was penalized because seeing a physician for non-emergency reasons is harder to do on nights and weekends than in the other five nations. The Fund said “many report having to wait six days or more for an appointment with their own doctors.” 

The survey didn’t look at the treatment of serious conditions. Waiting weeks or months for chemotherapy is not held against a health-care system, but waiting a few days to have a check up is. Waiting time for “elective” surgery is counted (the United States was a close second to Germany), but waiting time for non-elective, serious surgery did not count, though that is precisely where socialist systems do the worst.

This issue is not unknown to the Commonwealth Fund. In 1999 it published The Elderly’s Experiences with Health Care in Five Nations, which found significant delays for “serious surgery.” Only 4 percent of the American seniors reported long waits for serious surgery. The rate was 11 percent in Canada and 13 percent in Britain. For non-serious surgery the differences were more obvious: 7 percent in the United States, 40 percent in Canada, and 51 percent in Britain. 

In the latest survey, the United States came in dead last for health “safety,” but many of the scores were only a few points apart. For instance, 15 percent of American patients said they “believed a medical mistake” had been made in their treatment within the last two years. Notice this is merely patient perception and nothing objective. But the best score was in Britain, where 12 percent said this.

The United States is also marked down because 23 percent of patients report delayed or incorrect results on medical tests they took. That is far worse than the best country, Germany, at 9 percent. But what constitutes a delay? If a result is expected in a week but takes two, that is a delay. But if it is expected in three weeks and arrives then, that isn’t a delay. Thus what constitutes a delay depends on expectations, leading to counter-intuitive results.

The United States also lost credit because fewer Americans report having a regular doctor for five years or more. But Americans are more mobile than many other people. CNN reports that Americans move every five years on average. In comparison, Britain has a moving rate of 10 percent a year, or an average of once a decade. And 60 percent of those move about three miles.

Freer to Change Doctors

Americans are also freer to change doctors if they wish. Britain requires patients to sign up with physicians, and once they do so, they are pretty much stuck unless they want to end up on the waiting list of another physician. Patients often have to wait to get on the books of a physician and only then can they be treated; that is, they wait to get on a wait list. This is true even for heart transplants. The inevitable waiting is a disincentive to change doctors.

Another measure used by the Commonwealth Fund is centralization of medical records. If a country has a system that allows doctors anywhere to tap into the patients’ records, it is rated higher. The United States has no centralized database and so is rated lower. Many Americans may prefer to have their records private and dispersed. When the Clinton plan was proposed in 1993, one of the rallying points that helped defeat it was the centralization of health records.

Out-of-pocket expenses were counted against a system as well. In socialized health care these expenses are zero or very low but are replaced with taxes. Taxes, however, don’t lower a country’s score because the care “is free.”

Countries were also judged on the number of patient complaints. But different cultures have different attitudes toward complaining. Jeremy Laurance wrote in the Belfast Telegraph recently that the National Health Service needs “a healthy dose of American belligerence.”

Finally, the United States is ranked last among the six nations surveyed  in infant mortality. What is not discussed is that nations define infant mortality differently. Any infant, regardless of size or weight or premature status, who shows sign of life is counted as a live birth in the United States. Germany, which ranks number one in the Commonwealth Fund survey, doesn’t count as a live birth any infant with a birth weight under 500 grams (one pound). How valuable is a comparison under those circumstances?

One could easily design a survey that would rank American health care high and other nations low. But this does not mean the American system is what it should be. Its successes and innovation can be attributed to the vestiges of freedom, but government has saddled the system with so much intervention that it is far from market oriented. Instead of worrying about irrelevant international rankings, we should be working toward freeing the medical market.

Many would say the core principle of liberalism is freedom, and since the word liberalism is derived from the Latin liber, which means free, that is a reasonable conclusion. But underneath this is the principle of peace. Or perhaps it is better to say nonviolence. 

If I wish to gain a value I can do it peacefully or violently. Liberalism eschews the use of violence in gaining values. Only peaceful methods are permissible. 

The violent methods are often obvious. We can simply knock someone over the head and take what we want. If the value we seek is not material, but some other form of satisfaction that depends on others acting in ways we prefer, we can pull out a whip or a rifle and force them to do as we wish. 

Throughout history many have sought to gain values by such means. And for a few it worked, or worked well for a time. It does not work when such violence is practiced wholesale, nor does it work well for the vast majority of people. 

Violence fails over time because it is inherently destructive. It produces nothing. At best it merely rearranges the existing pool of goods to satisfy those who hold the whip. Worse yet, violence destroys existing wealth. 

Wealth, broadly construed to include nonmaterial values, tends to be consumed and destroyed when violence is exercised. Imagine the theft of a television. The criminal may break down a door of a home or smash a window. He may terrorize the owner, before successfully walking off with the television. 

He has redistributed the existing pool of goods more to his favor. But in the process he has also destroyed. The owner is not only out a television but a window or door as well. And even if the criminal has managed to steal the television without destroying a material aspect of life, he has destroyed something valuable to human beings: their peace of mind, their sense of security, their ability to feel at home in the place where they live. 

While it may redistribute some material wealth, violence usually does so at the expense of other material wealth and almost always at the expense of immaterial wealth. 

The more violent a society is the poorer it tends to be. That’s because violence or the threat of it discourages the production of wealth. When productive people realize that the fruit of their efforts is for naught, they tend to make less, or no, effort. The man who tills the field diligently only to have harvest after harvest confiscated for the use of others ceases to till. In this sense random violence is far less harmful than systematic violence. 

And that brings us to the state. Unconstrained government engages in the threat of violence and does so systematically. This is an efficient way to keep people frightened enough to comply “voluntarily” with the state’s requirements. It conserves the resources of those making the threats, while effectively confiscating wealth. 

But such systematic and pervasive threats have negative consequences as well. Taxation is an obvious example. It rests on the threat of force, but it is not the violence of the petty criminal who says: “Your money or your life.” His violence is random and often fleeting. He may confiscate what money his victim is carrying. He may make his victim fearful and angry, but the victim won’t have to endure the experience again the next day, the day after, and for as long as he can anticipate. 

I have been mugged and I have been taxed. The mugger took far less, showed up only once, and didn’t try to persuade me he was doing it for my own good. 

The tax man is entirely different. His threat of violence is imposed on everyone. Some people do not regard this as violence, but all they need do to see their error is watch what happens if someone refuses to comply. It is well documented that taxation leads to the results mentioned above. It redistributes existing wealth, making some people worse off; consumes wealth, making the entire society poorer; and discourages the production of future wealth. 

A great liberal author, Felix Morley, wrote, “The state, in short, subjects people, whereas society associates them voluntarily. . . . State and society . . . are naturally and continuously in opposition.” 

As Morley pointed out, the moralist who wants vice—behavior which, though perhaps morally objectionable, does not violate the rights of others—prevented violently may argue that such violence “may be utilized to forward morality, and to oppose immorality.” But “since the State has no conscience, and is primarily a mechanism of material power, the human welfare side of State activity should blind no thoughtful person to its underlying menace. And the potential of the State for ‘The Abolition of Man’—to use the telling phrase employed by C.S. Lewis—is the greater because Man himself has created and directs this juggernaut that rolls over him.” 

Morley argued that the advocates of coercive methods “exaggerate the potential of the state for good [and] underestimate its capacity for evil.” When one understands that government produces nothing, but merely rearranges existing wealth while consuming vast amounts of it in the process, you understand that such power is almost always destructive. Morley, like Albert Jay Nock before him, noted an increase in state power comes at the expense of society. This is why attempts to promote civil society through the violence of law, as in the suppression of vice, does not enhance civil society but ultimately undermines it. 

“The State, in the last analysis, has absolutely nothing to offer that it has not already expropriated from its subjects,” Morley said. “So, in worship of the State, men sacrifice their souls to a false god that can give them in return only what has already been placed by the worshippers themselves on this sacrilegious altar.” 

Health of the State 

What is true domestically is also true internationally. War is the ultimate expression of force. The World War I critic Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the state.” That is because government power expands during war. In 1949, with World War II fresh in mind, Morley reminded his readers that “the strength by a victorious State through war is in large part taken not from the enemy but from its own people. All the private elements in Society—the family, the church, the press, the school, the corporation, the union, and other co-operatives—are subject to special discipline by the State in wartime. . . . And it is scarcely necessary to emphasize that once an emergency control has been established by the State, all sorts of arguments for making it permanent are forthcoming.” 

It is well known that in collectives individuals can lose moral restraint. A lynch mob will kill, although as an individual each member would be horrified at the thought. Likewise, state power is a collective power in which the individuals who participate in decision-making lose their normal sense of responsibility for their actions. In fact the law often explicitly denies individual culpability in those who wield power. 

None of this implies pacifism. To reject violence as a means of gaining values does not require the renunciation of self-defense to protect one’s values. 

In the end it matters not the intentions behind the accumulation of power, for good intentions do not determine results. The nature of state power is such that whether it is expanded in the name of welfare, state security, or morality, the results ultimately are the same. Social power is diminished, and the restraints of common morality are reduced.

Since those claims were made another long ten years have passed. But now the United Nations has released a report showing that, first, the accident has not been nearly as deadly as originally projected, and second, that although the accident was horrific, the official response made things worse for large numbers of people. Chernobyl also has some lessons on the detrimental effects of welfare. Moreover, even after hundreds of scientists have produced an exhaustive report on the matter, the environmental ideologues refuse to change their tune, but instead denounce the scientists.

The myth-busting report, “ Chernobyl ‘s Legacy,” was published in two versions by the Chernobyl Forum, a collection of international organizations formed in 2002, including the World Health Organization, the UN Development Program, and the World Bank, along with the governments of Russia , Belarus , and Ukraine . (The second version of “ Chernobyl ‘s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts and Recommendations to the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine ” is online at http://chernobyl.undp.org/english/docs/chernobyl.pdf. Quotes in this article appear in both versions, except one, which is taken from the second version.)

When Unit 4 of the Chernobyl reactor exploded it was predicted that tens of thousands would die. The report notes that “Claims have been made that tens or even hundreds of thousands of persons have died as a result of the accident. These claims are highly exaggerated.”

This doesn’t mean no one died. But the numbers directly attributed to the accident are much lower than most would assume. The year of the accident 28 people died from exposure to acute radiation syndrome (ARS), all of them emergency workers at the reactor. From 1987 until 2004 19 more emergency workers died from a variety of causes, “however their deaths are not necessarily—and in some cases are certainly not—directly attributable to radiation exposure,” the second version reported.

The main problem found in the general population was for young children who drank milk that was produced by cows that ate contaminated grass. For them there was a clear increase in thyroid cancer. But this cancer is highly treatable. The report noted: “

For the 1152 thyroid cancer cases diagnosed among children in Belarus during 1986–2002 and treated, the survival rate was 98.8%.”

Except for these two groups, the direct medical impact of Chernobyl was minimal. According to the report, “Among the general population affected by the Chernobyl radioactive fallout, however, the radiation doses were quite low, and ARS and associated fatalities did not occur.”

Chernobyl took place in 1986. The Soviet Union ‘s socialist system finally collapsed in 1991. In the years immediately following the collapse living standards dropped. The economy was a disaster, and medical care had become almost nonexistent. People all across the region saw life expectancy decline. Chernobyl ‘s effects were tiny in comparison to the larger picture.

The 50-some deaths are firm numbers. But the projections of possible other deaths are estimates. The Chernobyl Forum reported: “[T]he number of deaths over the past 20 years that may have been attributable to the accident are only estimates with a moderately large range of uncertainty. The reason for this uncertainty is that people who received additional doses of low-level radiation have been dying from the same causes as unaffected people. Moreover, in all the groups studied, of both emergency workers and resident populations, any increase in mortality as compared to control groups was statistically insignificant or very low. Estimates related to projected deaths in the future are even less certain, as they are subject to other major confounding factors. In reality, the actual number of deaths caused by the accident is unlikely ever to be known with precision.”

A year ago the New York Times reported that “for the millions who were subjected to low levels of radioactive particles spread by the wind, health effects have proved generally minimal.” It added that there was no rise in leukemia rates except for a small number of plant workers. Nor has any increase in birth defects been noticed nor decrease in fertility rates.

The reason for this is simple. Only people in the immediate vicinity of the accident were exposed to sufficient radiation to cause problems. As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission explains in its “Fact Sheet on Biological Effects of Radiation,” “Radiation is all around us. It is naturally present in our environment and has been since the birth of this planet.”

Most people seem unaware of this. The average American is exposed to 300 millirems of radiation per year, and over 80 percent of that is from natural sources. Residents of Denver receive about 1,000 millirems because of the altitude. A person working in a nuclear power plant is exposed to about 300 additional millirems per year, while regulations limit annual occupational exposure to 5,000 millirems. However, pilots, airline crew members, and frequent flyers can be exposed to an additional 500 to 600 millirems. That’s quite a bit when you consider that living next door to a nuclear power plant only increases exposure by 1 millirem per year. If that worries you, remember that the human body produces about 40 millirems per year entirely on its own.

For most people affected by the reactor accident, levels of exposure were not extraordinary. “ Chernobyl ‘s Legacy” states that “the average doses received by residents of the territories contaminated by Chernobyl fallout are generally lower than those received by people who live in well known areas of high natural background radiation in India , Iran , Brazil and China .”

Dr. Burton Bennett, chairman of the Chernobyl Forum, told the BBC last year: “This was a very serious accident with major health consequences, especially for thousands of workers exposed in the early days who received very high radiation doses, and for the thousands more stricken with thyroid cancer. By and large, however, we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, with a few exceptional, restricted areas.”

Mass Evacuations

At the time of the explosion entire regions were evacuated—due more to panic than anything else. Dr. Fred Mettler Jr. of the Chernobyl Forum, a Veterans Affairs hospital radiologist, said, “People were evacuated from areas that now have dose levels lower than where I live in New Mexico.” And the evacuation itself caused many problems and possibly harmed far more people than the accident.

At first the Soviet Union tried to hide the accident from the world. This unnecessarily exposed people in the immediate vicinity to risk, especially children who now suffer from thyroid cancer. As Bronwen Maddox of the Times of London wrote last year: “Better warnings in the first week could have averted this. But the Government’s desire at first to cover up the explosion meant that it delayed warning people or moving them to safety.”

Later, when the disaster became public knowledge, the Soviets exaggerated the health effects. Maddox wrote: “The underlying level of health and nutrition [in the region] was abominable; there was every interest in exaggerating the impact to get aid money; the Soviet culture had never been shy of using science for political ends.”

Of course environmental activists and antinuclear ideologues also had reasons to exaggerate the consequences, hence the predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of the accident. Add to that the natural tendency of the media to prefer the sensational aspects of any story, and it is no wonder that people around the world were in an induced panic. Individuals who lived in the vicinity suddenly found themselves being relocated, often against their will. They lost their homes and were subjected to regular medical checkups, all of which had to raise their anxiety levels. Many of these people simply came to assume that they had been exposed and were doomed.

Fear of course is detrimental to health. “People have developed a paralyzing fatalism because they think they are at much higher risk than they are, so that leads to things like drugs and alcohol use, and unprotected sex and unemployment,” Dr. Mettler said. In an article about the Chernobyl report, the Washington Post noted “that lifestyle disease, such as alcoholism, among affected residents posed a much greater threat than radiation exposure.”

Tomihiro Taniguchi, a deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “[T]he situation was made even worse by conflicting information and vast exaggerations—in press coverage and pseudoscientific accounts of the accident—reporting for example, fatalities in the tens or hundreds of thousands.” Taniguchi added that “many of the 350,000 people evacuated and resettled by authorities would have been better off staying home.”

The Chernobyl report states that “individuals in the affected population were officially given the label ‘ Chernobyl victims,’ thus frequently taking on the role of invalids. It is known that if a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences. Thus rather than perceiving themselves as ‘survivors,’ the affected individuals have been encouraged to perceive themselves as helpless, weak and lacking control over their future.”

Predictably, people have taken advantage of the accident. Kalman Mizsei, a director of the UN Development Program, said “an industry has been built on this unfortunate event,” which has a “vast interest in creating a false picture.” The Russians and environmental ideologues have already been mentioned. Moreover, millions of people were paid benefits on the basis of being victims.

The negative consequences of welfare for Chernobyl “victims” are real. Seven million people received various benefits from the Russian government due to their exposure. Although the effects of radiation diminish with time, the number of people claiming to be disabled is climbing. In Ukraine in 1991, 200 people were considered permanently disabled from Chernobyl . In 1997 the number was 64,500, and by 2001 it was 91,219. The report is blunt: “The dependency culture that has developed over the past two decades is a major barrier to the region’s recovery. The extensive system of Chernobyl-related benefits has created expectations of long-term direct financial support and entitlement to privileges, and has undermined the capacity of the individuals and communities concerned to tackle their own economic and social problems.”

Furious Reaction

How has the UN report been received? The media found it a fascinating story because it has the element of sensationalism that sells papers and boosts ratings. But the beneficiaries of Chernobyl , and the ideological groups that use the accident for their own agendas, are furious. They refuse to accept the report and instead denounce the UN for producing it.

Greenpeace in particular was most upset. William Peden, a Greenpeace researcher, said that the projection of 4,000 deaths total “is ridiculous” and “many thousands more may die in the decades to come.” Jan van de Putte, another Greenpeace activist, says the UN was “denying the real implications” of Chernobyl and that is “insulting [to] the thousands of victims.” He also said the report is dangerous because it may lead to “relocating people in contaminated areas.”

Greenpeace also asserted that the low death projection omitted the harm to much of Europe. But this was omitted because there wasn’t any. Most of the radiation fell within a few dozen miles of Chernobyl. It’s yet another example of how environmental ideologues will bend science around politics.

The huge gilded cathedral was a gift to the Bulgarian people from the last tsar of Russia. Orthodox believers regularly came in to pray before the icons and light candles. Some bought small bouquets of flowers to lay before the icons. These acts of worship were what inspired this old woman to spend her morning picking tiny flowers. That and hunger. Bulgaria was part of the Soviet bloc. It was a socialist state that promised a social “safety net.” To provide that safety net it took away individual choice and freedom. The Bulgarian people were shackled from head to foot by the state. All work was for the state, and in return it promised to care for them during their declining years.

But socialism was a system doomed to failure from the start. The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises predicted the collapse of socialism nearly 90 years ago. He said that socialism was not a new economic system but the obliteration of economics all together. Socialists tried to abolish prices and profits—the two main feedback loops of an economic system. Without them the socialists were flying blind.

Inefficiency and mistakes accumulated. Five-year plans simply could not do what markets did so easily. No social planner could accumulate the diffused knowledge needed to make rational economic decisions. They guessed. And often when completely desperate they copied from the West. But Western systems were the result of prices and profits performing their functions. What worked well under one set of local circumstances couldn’t translate to another locale. It was as if a mother bought shoes for her child by measuring the feet of the neighborhood children and averaging it out.

The socialist system was doomed. It was being crushed under its own dead weight. And then in just a few short weeks socialist nation after socialist nation collapsed. The collapse was the result of political protests. The people who “benefited” under socialism could no longer live under it. They took to the streets. But what inspired them was the long-term economic decay that socialism created everywhere and anywhere it was tried.

Just a week after seeing this woman I stood in the main square of Prague. It was here, in 1989, that hundreds of thousands of Czechs stood up for freedom, helping to knock down Marx’s house of cards. I saw the memorials to those who gave their lives to end the socialist domination they experienced. One young student, in protest to the horrors of communism, had set himself alight in the main square. Not long afterward a second student did the same thing. I visited the museum of communism and walked through the exhibits. The horrors were real. The promises illusionary.

The left promised not totalitarianism and horror, but prosperity and equality. They promised safety nets for all. No one would be needy again. But it didn’t work. As Mises showed, it couldn’t work.

I walked past the old woman outside the cathedral. I had seen her sitting there when I went inside. I read in the guide that such things were common. And unlike in the West, where guidebooks often encourage visitors to ignore “beggars,” this guidebook said these older women were often alone and had no income except for what they earned hawking wildflowers to worshippers.

I started to walk away but stopped. I didn’t have much cash on me for this trip and had converted only a small sum into the Bulgarian currency. I knew what I needed for dinner and the taxi to the airport. I turned back and handed her a 20-lev note. It was a mere pittance in the West, about ten Euros, but it was far more than she would receive all day. At the hotel it bought a full dinner. At the local grocery stores it would obviously go much further. I just wanted to hand it to her and leave quickly. Her plight was too disturbing to want to linger.

I reached out with the note, and she looked up. She took it, but clutched my hand at the same time. She wouldn’t let go. She pulled my hand toward her and started kissing it repeatedly. She was saying something, but I couldn’t understand her. I kept telling her it wasn’t necessary, but she couldn’t understand me either. As I stepped back I looked down at her face chiseled by hardship and pain. I realized she had lived through the worst years of Bulgarian history. She suffered the horrors of World War II and the tyranny of Todor Zhivkov, the communist dictator who ruled her nation with an iron fist.

She pressed me to take the small bouquet from her. I declined, thinking it best she keep it to sell to someone else that day. I hoped she would have more customers.

The rest of our group was wandering around the stalls set up across the square from the towering dome. Rita Jongen, a good friend from the Netherlands, was standing with me waiting for the others. I suggested that we walk over to some of the small stands on this side of the cathedral just to browse.

There was a row of maybe 15 to 20 small tables filled with knitted ware and other goods.The vendors were all women and mostly elderly. These were the lucky ones. They had the skills to make items to sell to the tourists. I was now cash poor and not able to purchase anything. But as I do in the West all the time, I was just window shopping, although none of these women had a window—just an old table on the sidewalk. Each stood next to the table wearing several layers of clothing to protect themselves against the frosty air.

As Rita and I walked slowly past the tables, I stopped looking at the goods for sale. I watched the women instead. The entire row of women came to attention when they saw us walking by. They would pull out their favorite item and display it for us. Their expression changed; so did their posture. They were trying desperately to sell us anything they could.

Food on the Table

In much of the West shop clerks often ignore the customer. It makes little difference to them if they have a sale or not. For these women the sale meant food on the table. It was all they had to offer. They were proud of their goods. We walked to the end of the tables, and Rita turned to walk back. But to walk back meant walking past those women again, and I could not do it. I saw their faces and their desperation. I couldn’t buy from one of them at that point. And I knew I couldn’t buy from all of them. That was what they needed most—a customer—and I couldn’t be that customer.

I asked Rita to step into the street instead. I told her I couldn’t go back the way I came. I couldn’t endure the look of anticipation as we walked back toward a table or the despair when we passed by without purchasing anything.

These women reminded me too much of my own grandmother. She knit blankets as well, but not out of need. I still cherish the large blanket she knit for me many years ago. My great-grandmother came from Eastern Europe. I still remember her from my childhood, though we could never speak to each other. She never learned English. Because my great-grandmother immigrated, my grandmother had a decent life. She worked until she retired at 65. She saved a bit here and there. She and my grandfather bought a house together in the 1940s, which was hers till she died.

She was only a shop clerk. My grandfather was a steelworker at the local mills. But they ate well. The house was heated and air-conditioned. It had a nice yard that made Grandma proud. She loved giving gifts to her grandchildren and lived until she was 95 years old. She survived mainly not on a safety net, but because she worked in a society where effort was rewarded. She saved. For much of my grandmother’s life there was no Social Security. She never took welfare and never would have even if it were needed. She never really had a safety net. She had freedom.

These women in Bulgaria did not have freedom. They had a safety net. The socialist “safety net” may have killed thousands, tortured thousands, imprisoned tens of thousands, but it existed. It promised “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” But it couldn’t deliver. It took away opportunity for them to provide for themselves when it took away their freedom. In return it promised a safety net that proved illusive. It was a “grand” idea, but one that couldn’t work and that didn’t work. And the failed promises of socialism were visible in the faces of each of these women.

I am told that we advocates of liberal capitalism are heartless. We don’t want to provide a safety net to the vulnerable in society. But what our critics ignore is that their safety nets are mirages conjured up by their own magical minds. They don’t really exist. They result from plundering private wealth, but the very act of plunder destroys wealth production. It sets in motion a series of incentives that undermine the ability to produce and that inadvertently increase human needs.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need is a formula guaranteed to destroy ability and increase need. The socialist illusion can only survive for so long and then it comes crashing down under its own dead weight.The great problem is that when that happens many innocent people are caught in the avalanche. These women were probably such people.

Private Alternatives Destroyed

For their entire lives they were told the socialist safety net would take care of them. But the net disintegrated. One day it was there, and the next it was gone. Worse yet, during the creation of the net the private alternatives to it were intentionally destroyed. Individual initiative was undermined and discouraged. The great collective was going to exist long after the individual died. That collective would care for the needy, the old, and the vulnerable. But it didn’t for long because it was a system that was self-defeating.

What horrifies me is that the West has not learned the lessons that are so cruelly taught in the former Soviet-bloc nations. People believe that a slower form of creeping socialism won’t have the effects of full-fledged-socialism. They believe that some socialism can work, provided you don’t let it get out of hand. But they forget that the incentives created by the system are what doom it. They reward need and punish ability, and then wonder why need increases in spite of their plans, programs, and policies. Today in most Western countries anyone can be on welfare in one form or another.

Socialism isn’t just for the poor anymore. The new, improved, Westernized socialism promises handouts to all. Corporate leaders line up for government subsidies. University students can’t imagine life without the dole. Single mothers don’t worry about fathers for their children since they have Nanny to care for them.

The left wants a world where all are beneficiaries relying on the goodness of Nanny to care for them. Of course to pay for this, taxes will have to go up. No worries, they tell us. They crow that one can have good economic growth with high taxes. So each day creeping socialism picks up a little speed. Each day the incentives create more needy and make growth harder to accomplish. And those at the economic margin—where work costs more than it’s worth—are sucked into the dependency vortex. Then the margin shifts a little more, and those individuals at the new margin find themselves destroyed by this economic black hole.

More and more dependency is created. Private alternatives are crowded out or banned. And the socialists promoting this plan ignore what happened in the Soviet bloc. They don’t look into the despair-ridden faces of those who relied on a safety net that has crumbled. The left ignores that its system is doomed to fail again. It ignores the multitudes who are counting on the system to sustain them.The West is making the same mistake.

We know the disaster is coming. Across the Western nations the social welfare/pension system is unsustainable. The warnings have been sounded repeatedly from without and within the various governments. Yet almost without exception the politicians ignore the warnings in their pursuit of power and votes. They don’t want to lose support by being honest and telling people they were taken for a ride. The welfare state the people depended on is demographically doomed. The number of recipients is destined to skyrocket as Baby Boomers retire, and birth rates have plummeted so far that each year there are fewer workers to sustain the retirees.

I fear that one day our streets may be littered with the old selling flowers in the hopes of earning a few cents to buy a loaf of bread.

The headline in the New York Times screamed: “World Hunger Increasing, New U.N. Report Finds.” Coming as it did just two days before Thanksgiving, the irony couldn’t be lost on the average reader. The opening paragraph made clear that the situation was dire. “The number of hungry people worldwide swelled in recent years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to war, drought, AIDS and trade barriers, according to a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization” (FAO).¹

What exactly is happening here? Haven’t market liberals been applauding the good news that world hunger is diminishing? Didn’t the left-of-center Bjørn Lomborg make that same point in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist? Have the environmental doomsayers finally been proven right?

The headline was not quite accurate. The FAO report, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003,” covers undernourishment in the developing world only from base years 1990–1992 to 1999–2001. The results can depend on how that time frame is examined. During the full period, the number of undernourished dropped both in raw terms, from 816.6 million to 797.9 million, and in percentage terms, from 20 percent to 17 percent.² But if the period is divided into halves, a slightly different picture emerges. The raw number of undernourished dropped to 779.7 million in the first half, but then increased to 797.9 million in the second. The increase in the second half is less than the decrease in the first half, meaning that over the whole period the raw number still declined by 18.7 million. During that same period, the population of the developing world increased by a massive 662.2 million. Thus within a ten-year period, about 681 million additional people were being fed.³

The choice of base year can also affect how dramatic the decline in hunger will appear. The report uses 1990–92. From then until now the undernourished proportion of the population declined from 20 percent to 17 percent. Had the UN gone back one decade further, the decline would have been more impressive, since in 1980, 28 percent were hungry. While the improvement may have slowed down, we should not overlook that this is still an improvement.

The Times reported “that more than 840 million people, or 1 in 7 world-wide, went hungry.” The foreword to the report says: “[A]n estimated 798 million were undernourished in 1999–2001.” Why the discrepancy?

The UN report basically covers the developing world. But in one section it mentions a total world figure of 842 million, which includes 10 million in the industrialized nations and 34 million in transitional nations, mainly the former Soviet bloc.⁴ In a sense that 842 million figure is a combination of apples and oranges. Being undernourished in London and being undernourished in rural Tanzania are two different things.

The general improvement in undernourishment rates applies across most of the globe. During the last decade, hunger rates dropped in Asia and the Pacific from 20 to 16 percent and in Latin America and the Caribbean from 13 to 10 percent. Even sub-Saharan Africa’s rate dropped from 35 to 33 percent. Only in the Near East and north Africa did rates go up, from 8 to 10 percent. Some of the subregions had rather impressive declines. East Africa saw a decline from 44 to 39 percent; southern Africa, from 48 to 41 percent; West Africa, from 21 to 15 percent; east Asia, from 20 to 16 percent; and South America, from 14 to 10 percent.⁵

Such large regional drops in hunger rates were ignored by the Times. It reported instead: “Only 19 countries, including China, reduced hunger among its people throughout the 1990s.” That is simply not true. The real number is far in excess of 19. The reporter apparently misread the report, which says: “In 19 countries, the number of chronically hungry people declined by over 80 million between 1990–1992 and 1999–2001.”⁶ The Times inserted the word “only,” giving the impression that everywhere else hunger increased or stayed the same. The word “only” is not in the report for good reason. The report ignores many countries where hunger is not a problem. (The word “only” did appear in an FAO press release. But the context made clear that this is 19 countries within the developing world only and it doesn’t say they were the only developing nations where the rate improved.)

The report’s statistical tables tell a different story from the one the Times told. The tables clearly show that of the 90 developing nations, 32 saw a reduction in the total number of undernourished people. In 60 nations, or two-thirds of the developing world, the total number went up, but as a percentage of the population, the rates actually declined.

A Few Bad Places

The problem is that a few spots in the world are suffering badly. As noted, hunger is up from 10 to 14 percent in the Near East;⁷ in central Africa it was even worse. Hunger rates there went from 35 to 58 percent.⁸ By looking at the nations that saw dramatic shifts in undernourishment rates, either improvements or declines, we can start to pinpoint some of the major causes of world hunger today.

For instance pro-market reforms in China are clearly having benefits. At the beginning of the last decade the number of undernourished there was 193 million. Even though the population increased by 105.5 million, the number of undernourished declined almost 58 million—to a raw total of 135.3 million. The percentage of undernourished dropped from 16 to 11 percent. On the other hand, hard-line socialist North Korea saw the opposite happen. During the base years 18 percent of North Koreans were undernourished, but by the end of the decade, the rate had increased to 34 percent.⁹

In Vietnam, markets were liberalized and the number of undernourished dropped from 27 to 19 percent. In Venezuela a “pro-poor” socialist government took over and the rate of undernourished jumped from 11 to 18 percent.¹⁰

It quickly becomes clear that world hunger today is not caused by a strain on the planet or an inability to produce food, as many environmentalists have contended. Hunger today is primarily a politically induced problem. As FAO director general Jacques Diouf says, “Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.”¹¹

Hunger is routinely caused by bad economic policies or armed political conflict. The cessation of conflict in Angola brought undernourishment rates down from 61 to 49 percent. In Mozambique the end of the civil war saw a decline from 69 to 53 percent. In contrast, the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo increased the rate from 31 to 75 percent.¹² The FAO report noted: “Eight countries suffered [food] emergencies during 15 or more years during 1986–2003. War or civil strife was a major factor in all eight.”¹³

Undernourishment figures for the Near East, another region where hunger increased, shows a similar pattern. For the region as a whole the UN says the rate increased from 10 to 14 percent. But if you exclude Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate would have hardly changed—from around 6 percent to 6.5 percent.¹⁴

Economic Growth Is Key

A key factor in reducing hunger is economic growth. The report notes: “In countries that succeeded in reducing hunger throughout the nine-year period, GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent—more than five times higher than the rate in countries where undernourishment increased in both subperiods (0.5 percent).”¹⁵ If, as the report notes, strong economic growth is associated with a reduction in hunger, then globalization is critical to ending world hunger. A World Bank report has stated that “the more globalized developing countries have increased their per capita growth rate from 1 percent in the 1960s, to 3 percent in the 1970s, 4 percent in the 1980s, and 5 percent in the 1990s. Their growth rates now substantially exceed those of the rich countries.”¹⁶ The FAO report acknowledges this: “Overall, countries that are more involved in trade tend to enjoy higher rates of economic growth.”¹⁷

This doesn’t meant that nature has no role to play. Many food-insecure countries are still plagued by periodic droughts and/or flooding, which limits their ability to grow food. On the other hand, even these problems are exacerbated by local cultural and/or economic policies. Many African countries promote subsistence farming in the belief that a nation of farmers will never go hungry. But only a nation of farmers can starve to death since during natural disasters they have nothing to trade for food. The FAO report verifies this indirectly: “Throughout the developing world, agriculture accounts for around 9 percent of GDP and more than half of total employment. But its relative importance is far greater in those countries where hunger is most widespread. In countries where more than 34 percent of the population are undernourished, agriculture represents 30 percent of GDP, and nearly 70 percent of the people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.”¹⁸

Today the West gets blamed for protectionist agricultural policies that keep out imports from the Third World. A change in such policies is needed immediately. But change will help only those Third World countries that have liberalized their domestic markets. Generally speaking, the nations that have liberalized are not the ones still suffering high rates of hunger. The nations that are starving are mainly the victims of local politics and internal warfare. The planet can well feed the numbers we have now and many, many more. The problem isn’t unsustainable development or an inability to produce. It’s a problem of getting governments out of the way.

Notes

1. Somini Sengupta, “World Hunger Increasing, New U.N. Report Finds,” New York Times, November 25, 2003; http://college3.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2003/11/25/1126810.xml.
2. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2003,” p. 31; www.fao.org/docrep/006/j0083e/j0083e00.htm.
3. Calculations based on tables in ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. Ibid., pp. 31–32.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., p. 32.
8. Ibid.
9. Based on table in ibid., p. 34.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 32.
13. Ibid., p. 14.
14. Based on tables in ibid., p. 32.
15. Ibid., p. 8.
16. World Bank, Globalization, Growth, and Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.
17. “The State of Food Insecurity,” p. 16.
18. Ibid.

Rarely are the protesters themselves poor. They tend to come from wealthy nations, born to families that are better off than the people for whom they claim to speak. Their critics contend that they don’t represent the poor at all, but are more in tune with the political fashions among the affluent of the world. Now a continuing poll of world opinion backs this up.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed some 66,000 people in 44 nations.* Generally the results have been met with much interest. But the antiglobalization movement itself is rather unhappy, and for good reason.

The populations of the poorest nations support globalization to a greater extent than do those of the wealthiest nations. The survey noted that: “Only one-in-ten Americans and Canadians (10%, 11%) characterize globalization as a very good thing, and fewer Europeans agree. By comparison, nearly six-in-ten in Nigeria (58%), and more than four-in-ten in Kenya (46%), Uganda (44%) and South Africa (41%) see globalization as a very good thing” (p. 85). Only Jordan has a majority that says globalization is bad.

It is true that in all 44 nations a majority of people said globalization is either “somewhat good” or “very good.” But those who see globalization as “very good” are significantly more likely to come from poorer nations.

Even with contentious “cultural” issues, majorities, especially among the young, see globalization as good. And most agree that they have better selections of foods and medicines as a result. When antiglobalization forces target fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, it again appears they reflect the values of the world’s economic elites. Germans, by a six-to-one margin, think that fast food has a negative effect on their lives. In Canada and the United States significant margins share the German view. But more than seven out of ten in the Philippines, Vietnam, and China, give fast food thumbs up.

“Commercialism” and “consumerism” are further favorite targets of the antiglobalists. And while 63 percent of the French say both are threats to their culture, the poorest countries, on the whole, don’t see it that way. The survey reports that this criticism is not prevalent “in the Middle East/Conflict Area. Majorities in Lebanon (64%), Uzbekistan (57%) and Jordan (54%) say commercialism is no threat to their culture. Pluralities in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan agree” (p. 88). In Vietnam 66 percent say commercialism doesn’t threaten their culture. In Nigeria it’s 65 percent, and in Angola it’s 56 percent.

Multinationals Not Unpopular

Multinational corporations are another favorite target of the antiglobalists. Again this is at odds with the views of the world’s poor. The survey reports: “In 33 out of 43 countries in which the question was asked, majorities think that foreign corporations have a generally positive influence on their countries. Majorities in every African country surveyed say major foreign companies have a good influence” (p. 97). The survey also notes that: “Dislike of foreign firms is mostly limited to people in the major advanced economies of Western Europe, the U.S. and Canada” (p. 11).

Once again anti-globalist attitudes are more in tune with those of the wealthy and well-off. For instance, 93 percent of Vietnamese and 78 percent of South Africans view multinationals favorably, while only half of Americans and French do. What is particularly ironic is that in every nation surveyed, multinationals have more favorable support than the antiglobalists do themselves.

Support for international markets tends to indicate support for domestic economic freedom as well. A majority in 33 of the nations surveyed agreed that people are better off with free markets. The highest level of support was found among the residents of Vietnam, ostensibly a socialist state, where 95 percent agreed. And while the United States is often seen as being the most “free market” country in terms of ideological support, in fact the free market has higher levels of support in Lebanon, Vietnam, South Korea, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa.

The antiglobalists have denounced world capitalism and domestic free markets. They claim to do so on behalf of the world’s poor. But it appears that globally most people disagree with them—most especially the poor themselves.

The Green Left is today pushing a new legal principle that would seem to mandate that governments around the world repeat this disaster. It’s called the Precautionary Principle. It means that any new technology or substance should be banned or restricted until it is proven harmless. Of course, life is rarely that simple. Even if chlorine slightly increases the risk of cancer, it dramatically reduces the risk of dying. But the environmentalist doesn’t seem to understand this. Joe Thornton, who was an analyst for Greenpeace, has written: “We need to treat organochlorines as a class. There are 11,000 in commerce plus thousands more that are produced as by-products. It would be truly impractical to regulate them one-by-one. . . . It makes sense to treat organochlorines as guilty until proven innocent.”²

Any such rule that treats all chlorine as the same would be impractical. A ban might save a few lives from some forms of cancer, but it would surely cost millions of other lives because of impure drinking water.

The precautionary principle says we shouldn’t allow something to happen as long as someone believes it may be a threat and until we can prove that it isn’t harmful. A coalition of Green groups enshrined this concept in the Wingspread Statement, which said: “In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”³

Of course, the “public” referred to is not the public at all but the Green groups themselves.

As Jeremy Leggett wrote in Global Warming: A Greenpeace View: “The modus operandi we would like to see is: ‘Do not emit a substance unless you have proof it will do no harm to the environment.’”⁴ The European Commission took the principle to heart. When it banned animal-growth hormones in 1985 it did so not because of any evidence on hand, but because their safety had not been conclusively proven.

Imagine what the precautionary principle would require in day-to-day living. We are faced with choices and tradeoffs every day. Doing one thing precludes doing other things. We can’t go to the movies on Friday night and at the same time visit the in-laws. But the precautionary principle would strip us of entire classes of options. Normally, if you have to decide whether to do something or not, you weigh evidence and choose accordingly. If you applied the precautionary principle instead, you’d do nothing. You would only go to the movies if you could prove in advance that going was better than not going. But how could you do that?

We’ve all gone to films that were wonderful experiences, and no doubt we’ve also been to some so abysmal that we walked out before the end. We are certain that the choice was good only after the fact. We can make educated guesses, but we can’t prove, in advance, that one option is better than another.

The precautionary principle is tantamount to a coup in legal theory. Say a developer wants to build an apartment and a Green group condemns the plan, saying it’s “harmful to the environment.” The group would not have to present any evidence to stop the developer. Rather, the developer would have to prove that all possible outcomes from his plan are good. But he could never do that. This would also be true for the inventor, scientist, industrialist, and virtually anyone else who has to deal with the physical world—in other words, all of us. We must remain stagnant until we can prove that any particular action is good under all possible scenarios.

The established principle that puts the burden of proof on those who would block free action is clearly superior to the precautionary principle. The reasons are relatively simple. We can’t know the future, and we can’t prove a negative. We don’t incarcerate people because they belong to a group or class that might commit a crime. But the precautionary principle says that anything that deals with the environment—and that really means everything—is deemed dangerous until proven otherwise.

That principle drives the environmentalist agenda. There is no convincing evidence that biotechnology is dangerous to humans, but the environmentalist lobby posits theories, unsupported by facts, that such a danger might exist. Therefore it demands that biotechnology be proven safe. How? No answer—because there is no answer. One can disprove a positive but not prove a negative.

Treaties Embody Principle

This theory is now embedded in various UN treaties and the proclamations of international bodies:

• The UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity states, “[L]ack of scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimise such a threat.”
• The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change states, “lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures” that prevent actions from being taken.
• The UN’s 1992 Rio Declaration states: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary principle shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
• Author Jonathan Adler notes that the UN’s Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety “creates mechanisms whereby national governments will be able to restrict, or even prohibit, the importation of genetically engineered crops.” Like many environmental treaties, the preamble of the protocol “reaffirm[s] the precautionary approach” contained in the Rio Declaration. The protocol goes further, however, by explicitly stating that “lack of scientific certainty” about potential risks of biotech products “shall not prevent [a member] from limiting or banning such products.”In other words the lack of evidence does not mean something cannot be declared guilty.⁵

The principle first appeared in the 1982 UN World Charter for Nature. The charter said that “Activities likely to pose significant risks to nature shall be preceded by an exhaustive examination; their proponents shall demonstrate that expected benefits outweigh potential damage to nature, and where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities should not proceed.”⁶

Inertia thus becomes the primary human state, and everything must be justified in advance because it is deemed harmful until proven beneficial. In addition, proponents must show that no possible alternative is safer.

Understandable Attraction

One can see the attraction of the precautionary principle to the environmentalist lobby. From the start the lobby was long on scare-mongering and short on facts. Even when sufficient time has gone by to test its theories, many claims have failed to be substantiated. No wonder, then, that Joel Tickner, in the newsletter for the Science and Environmental Health Unit, argues for the principle in this manner: “Proving cause takes extensive time and resources.”⁷ It’s much easier to merely assert harm and let your opponents grapple with the impossibility of proving it isn’t so.

The environmentalist Institute for Science in Society has admitted that “The precautionary principle is about the burden of proof.”⁸ Peter T. Saunders of King’s College in London even compares the precautionary principle to the burden principle used in the courts: “Just as society does not require a defendant to prove his innocence, so it should not require objectors to prove that a technology is harmful.”⁹But this is backwards. In a rational process, the new technology is the defendant—innocent until proved guilty—and the objector is the prosecutor with the burden of proof.

At least one prominent advocate of the precautionary principle is candid about his reasons for turning that legal maxim inside out. Boston University law professor George Annas says: “The truth of the matter is that whoever has the burden of proof loses.”¹⁰

Be that as it may, the precautionary principle is appealing to the environmentalists because, in the words of Britain’s Social Issues Research Centre, “it prevents scientific debate.” The Centre adds: “The burden of evidence and proof is taken away from those who make unjustified and often whimsical claims and placed on the scientific community which, because it proceeds logically and rationally, is often powerless to respond. This is what makes the principle so dangerous. It generates a quasi-religious bigotry which history should have taught us to fear. Its inherent irrationality renders it unsustainable.”¹¹

Notes

1. Michael De Alessi, “Precautionary Principle Is Risky Gambit,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2003.
2. Quoted in Jonathan Adler, “The Precautionary Principle’s Challenge to Progress,” Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths (Roseville, Cal., Prima Publishing, 2002), p. 274.
3. Available at www.gdrc.org/u-gov/precaution-3.html.
4. Jeremy Leggett, Global Warming: A Greenpeace Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 459.
5. Adler, p. 282.
6. See www.un.org/documents/ga/res/37/a37r007.htm.
7. Joel Tickner, “Precautionary Principle,” The Networker, May 1997, www.safe2use.com/data/precaut1.htm.
8. Peter T. Saunders, “Use and Abuse of the Precautionary Principle,” Institute of Science in Society, July 13, 2000, www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/PrecautionP.html.
9. Quoted in Ronald Bailey, “Precautionary Tale,” Reason, April 1999; www.reason.com/9904/fe.rb.precautionary.shtml.
10. “Beware the Precautionary Principle,” Social Issues Research Centre, no date, www.sirc.org/articles/beware.html.

The UN has been making such projections for about 50 years. Generally, the projections seem to err on the high side—hence the need for reductions. The UN now says the population in 2050 will be 8.9 billion. But this is its “medium variation” projection, which has always been a tad high. The “low” projection usually misses the mark as well, with the real number being somewhere in between. If the agency’s record remains consistent, the actual figure will be between 8 billion and 8.5 billion.

This is significantly below previous projections, which were grabbed onto by various environmental groups to promote their agenda. The U.S. Department of State in 1969 said the world would have a population of 7.5 billion by 2000. This reflected UN projections of the day. According to the UNPD, the figure for 2003 is 6.3 billion, 1.2 billion below 1969 projections.

Using its medium projection, the UN also estimates that by 2050 some 75 percent of the least-developed countries in the world will have birth rates below replacement levels. In these regions the total numbers of births per woman have been cut in half in the last 50 years. More important, much of that drop was in the last ten years.

For some years we “population optimists” have been arguing with the environmental pessimists that the overpopulation problem was illusionary. There was a population problem, but not the one for which everyone was planning: children and working-age individuals, as a percentage of the population, would be dropping steadily as the world’s population aged faster than at any time in history. The cause of this is easy to understand: the number of infants born is decreasing every year, while life spans continue to grow because human existence has improved so much. Thus higher percentages of the population are elderly.

The most recent UN numbers verify the case of the optimists once again. The average life expectancy in the world is now at 64.6 years. But by 2050 the UN estimates it will rise to 74.3 years.¹ During that same period the average number of children born per woman will decline from 2.83 to 2.02. Population stability requires a rate of 2.1.²

Currently some 63 nations have birth rates low enough to lose population.³ By 2015 the UN estimates that 82 nations will fall below replacement level. And by 2050 it estimates that 156 nations will be below replacement, with another ten on the edge. Only 23 countries will have fertility rates over 2.5.

The only reason that world population will still grow in 2050, in spite of declining birth rates, is that so many people will be living longer. Longer life spans, not high birth rates, have been the main reason for the world’s population explosion over the last 50 years. But the population explosion that began in 1950 will flicker out by 2050, with world population figures going into decline.

This huge drop in birth rates, coupled with longer life spans, spells disaster for the welfare states of the world, especially for programs that support the elderly. These programs rely on people of working age to pay in while the elderly collect. But if the number of workers declines, while the number of recipients continues to increase, disaster looms.

In 2000 the world had 606 million people over the age of 60. By 2050 this figure is estimated to grow to 1.9 billion.⁴ More incredible is the projected increase for those who live past 80 years. In 2000 there were 69 million such people worldwide; by 2050 this will increase to 377 million.⁵ Living to 100 was once an anomaly. In 2000, just 167,000 people worldwide accomplished that feat. By 2050 it is estimated there will be 3.3 million people over the age of 100. Projections show that the United States will have 471,000 centenarians by 2050, exceeded only by Japan, which will have over 1 million.⁶ Those over 80 in the United States will total more than 29 million.⁷

Welfare State Problems

What is even more troublesome is that these trends are most pronounced in the welfare states. Sweden will see its elderly (60-plus) increase from the current 22 percent of the population to 33 percent, while the percentage of children (up to 14) will be just over 15 percent. Just 51 percent of the 2050 population will be of working age (15–59), and many will not be employed. A minority of the population (subtracting the unemployed) will be trying to support a majority.⁸ In the United Kingdom the percentage of elderly will increase from 21 percent to 30 percent.⁹ In Slovenia only 45.6 percent of the population will be of working age. The rest will either be elderly or children.¹⁰ In New Zealand the over-60 crowd will almost double—from 15.7 percent to 29 percent. Children under 15 will comprise just 16.3 percent.¹¹

Add in all the various recipients of government largess, and a growing majority of people will be sustained by a shrinking minority. The burden on young workers will have to increase substantially just to sustain the current system. Clearly that can’t work.

When we look at the percentage of children in each country, it quickly becomes apparent that the problem will get much worse. What problems these programs face in 2050 will be nothing compared to those which will arise in the years after. The UNDP projects that the percentage of children will drop from 30.1 percent in 2000 to 20.1 percent by 2050.¹² This will happen even though infant mortality has plunged dramatically and will continue to do so. The 1995–2000 infant-mortality rate worldwide was 60.9 children per 1,000 live births. The UN projects that by 2050 this will drop to 21.5.¹³

Many welfare policies were created during the baby boom and are built on the premise that workers will always exceed beneficiaries. But today’s demographics make it clear that these schemes can’t work much longer. While it is true that over a dozen nations today have large numbers of children (that is, future workers), these are almost all in Africa and none of these nations are welfare states. By 2050 some 22 nations, most of them welfare states, will have a minority of workers. These nations include Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, Greece, Estonia, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland. Another 19 will have working-age populations above 50 percent but below 53 percent, including Finland, France, Germany, and Sweden.

The UN report notes: “Europe is the major area of the world where population ageing is most advanced. The proportion of children is projected to decline from 17 per cent in 2000 to 15 per cent in 2050, while the proportion of older persons will increase from 20 per cent in 2000 to 35 per cent in 2050. By then, there will be 2.4 older persons for every child and more than one in every three persons will be aged 60 years or over. As a result, the median age will rise from 37.7 years in 2000 to 47.7 in 2050.”¹⁴

Like a pyramid scheme, in a welfare state the number of payers has to grow faster than the number of recipients. As long as that happens the illusion that the system works can be maintained. But current trends indicate that the opposite is happening. UN projections for the developed world, where most welfare states are, show that the working-age group will see its numbers shrink by 0.32 percent per year. In the same countries, however, those over 60 will see their numbers grow by 2.29 percent per year and those over 80 will grow by 3.39 percent.¹⁵

Political attempts to counteract these trends will consist of short-term fixes. The problem, however, is long term and increasing, and there is no reason to expect things to change dramatically. If anything, birth rates may be overestimated, compounding the problem.

Only short-sighted political agendas prevent governments from grappling with this demographic disaster. But the aversion to facing facts will become increasingly difficult with each passing year. Private alternatives will have to be more seriously considered if the workers of today are to be able to look after themselves when they grow old. Reality can only be faked for so long.

Notes

1. United Nations Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, Annex Tables,” www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2002/wpp2002annextables.PDF, p. 41.
2. Ibid., p. 36.
3. Calculations such as this, unless otherwise stated, are made from the data provided in ibid. and are gleaned from numerous pages throughout this section.
4. UN Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, Highlights,” February 26, 2003, www.un. org/esa/population/publications/wpp2002/WPP2002-HIGHLIGHTSrev1.PDF,  p. 16.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 17.
7. Ibid.
8. Annex Tables, p. 61.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 60.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Ibid., p. 46.
14. Ibid. p. 16.
15. Highlights, p. 17.