MikeLigalig.com

...Amid all the headlines predicting famine and chaos, there appears an astounding paragraph written in 1957 by Isamu Shimura, the Japanese managing director of Toyo Menka Kaisha.  Inverting the usual way of looking at population and economics, he showed himself far more astute than many experts when he wrote:

Instead of thinking our population is too large for our economy, I believe it is more correct to say the scale of our economy is too small for our population.  Instead of surplus, unwanted persons, we should view our people as our most valuable natural resource.  This is not only the humane but the realistic view.  The Japanese people are hard-working, energetic, resourceful, with a high level of education, skills, and competence.  We are at the beginning of revolutionary industrial changes among which the recent achievements in synthetic chemistry and the potentialities in the peaceful use of atomic energy are mere portents.  These new discoveries indicate clearly that in the economy of the future, whose beginnings are already among us, the economic resources which count will not be natural ones but human-- intelligence, skill, and foresight.
                                                                                                                          -ditto-



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The lesson Hong Kong teaches is that there is no fixed level of resources, no natural capacity, no predefined limit to what people might do if given the opportunity to exercise the real factors in development: enterprise, creativity, and risk.

For the Catholic Church in particular, Hong Kong stands as a sharp rebuke to the reigning zero-sum ethos of the   day-- and brings us back to the core of Catholic social teaching: the value of human life not only to its possessors but to their neighbors as well.  In the dismal abacus of our day, when a pig is born in China, national wealth goes up; when a child is born, it goes down.  Almost all the fervor for population control traces back to this premise, which reflects a theological confusion as much as an economic one, and it derives from the historical tendency of Western experts to see Asian peoples as mouths and not minds.  
                                                                     
                                                                                                                 -ditto-
             


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In my own profession of journalism it is common enough to deride economists as practitioners of the "dismal science."  Yet in most cases it is the economists who have maintained faith in human ingenuity and initiative and who have rejected counsels of despair and control.  The majority of them have never been found on the front lines of the movement for population control.  And the reason is that the best economists spend their lives emphasizing that economic life is not about numbers, but about the triumph of the human mind when given the freedom to innovate and respond.  It is the market economist who argues for hope, who points to creativity when others push for control, who recognizes that people are good, in a fundamental, real sense: assets, not liabilities.  

                                                                                                                  -ditto-


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It was this human capital that took a desperate refugee population in Hong Kong and turned it into a world-class financial center; this human capital that saw Japan and South Korea arise from the ashes of war; this human capital whose success in turning around centuries of poverty has led to what the World Bank calls "The East Asian Miracle."  And it is this philosophy of freedom that offers an answer, really the only answer, to the challenge posed to us by what John Paul II has so presciently recognized as a culture of death.

Certainly in a world where many still go hungry at night there is much to be done.  But instead of looking for ways to reduce the number of those seeking to take their place at the table, we should look for ways to eliminate the perverse policies that prevent a bigger banquet.  And here Adam Smith will prove a more gracious host than Thomas Malthus.  

                                                                                                                  -ditto-


William McGurn is Senior Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review
for the full text of First Things, Population and the Wealth of Nations, please go to http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9612/articles/mcgurn.html



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I'm reading it and doing my own research on the matter (thanks in part to your postings!)

Good Night, Isles, and here's to a great week for us all!

~

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Hmm. Nice poetry.

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Na hala, ako na lay sumpay. Ato lang maningleson aron maibot sa tsinelas...


Population control, which was a 60s and 70s buzzword, has since loosened its once vise-like grip on the world's imagination. The specter of a world bursting at its seams has lost its scare value not just due to more momentous subsequent world events but also to the growing perception (which I personally subscribe to) that it was made out to be more terrifying than it really is. Western countries joined the Malthusian bandwagon not so much from genuine concern for the future of mankind but from immediate national self-interest. The fact that the dramatic rise in world population (which started in the preceding century) was brought about largely by developing countries created panic in some established societies hell-bent on preserving their cherished way of life--whatever it is. The mantra of the demographic shift altering world geopolitics in favor of children of a lesser god, so to speak, was chiseled into the minds of decision-makers by supremacist policy-makers.

In the USAID stricture cited above, the population explosion issue was apparently used to further the American imperialist dream. The US of A then was losing and would eventually lose the Vietnam War, and clearly was still far from having decisively clinched Pax Americana. Keeping a lid on Philippine population growth was part and parcel of Uncle Sam's quest for hegemony. Countries with large growing populations but blessed with rich natural resources were targeted because such countries could reasonably be expected to be able to support larger populations, grow wealthy and be on the road to becoming bona fide world players. Such a development would negatively impact (sorry, I never use this word in this sense, but I'm being carried away by the appropriate imagery of its medical connotation) on their bloated sense of self-importance.   

It may be noted that numerous studies have shown no correlation whatsoever between population density and poverty. There is, on the other hand, an unmistakable link between a country's poverty level and its government's scale of corruption. Ah, Philippines. But that's another story.


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Let the Filipino Race grow and let them actively spread the seed of Visayas, Luzon, Mindanao unto the nations of the world.
Let the blood of the Filipino mingle with the bloodline of other peoples..., and save the genetically isolated peoples of Japan, Northern Europe, North America, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc. Let the dominant traits of the Filipino intermingle with the genetics and seed of other peoples...

hehe, na murag Genesis man ta ani da.
(Joke!)

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