Development as Freedom (36 page)

I have argued, elsewhere, against the necessity of opting for one or the other approach in this dichotomy, and have presented arguments for a consequential system that incorporates the fulfillment of rights among other goals.
⁸
It shares with utilitarianism a consequentialist approach (but differs from it in not confining attention to utility consequences only), and it shares with a libertarian system the attachment of intrinsic importance to rights (but differs from it in not giving it complete priority irrespective of other consequences). Such a “goal-rights system” has many attractive properties as well as versatility and reach, which I have tried to discuss elsewhere.
⁹

I shall not repeat here the arguments in favor of such a goal-rights approach (though I shall take the opportunity of saying a bit more on this approach in the
next chapter
). But in making comparison with utilitarianism, it is hard to believe that it can be adequate to explain our support for rights of various kinds (including those of privacy, autonomy and liberty) only—and exclusively—in terms of their utility consequences. The rights of minorities often have to be preserved against the intrusion of a majority’s persecution and its grand gains in utility. As John Stuart Mill—a great utilitarian himself—noted, there is sometimes “no parity” between utility generated from different activities, such as (to quote Mill) “the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it.”
¹⁰
That lack of parity would apply, in the present context, to the importance that the parents attach to the decision on how many children to have compared with the importance that others,
including
the potentates running the government, may place on this subject. In general, the case for seeing intrinsic importance in autonomy and liberty is not easy to escape, and this can easily conflict with no-nonsense maximization of the
utility consequences (taking no note of the
process
of generation of utilities).
¹¹

It is, thus, implausible to confine consequential analysis only to utilities, and in particular to exclude the fulfillment and violation of rights related to liberties and autonomies. But it is also not particularly credible to make these rights completely immune, as in the libertarian formulation, to consequences they have—no matter how terrible the consequences might be. In the context of reproductive rights, the fact that they are taken to be significant does not entail that they are so overarchingly important that they must be fully protected even if they were to generate disasters and massive misery and hunger. In general, the consequences of having and exercising a right must ultimately have some bearing on the overall acceptability of that right.

The consequences of population growth for the food problem and hunger have already been discussed, and there is no real basis for great alarmism here, at this time. But if the process of population explosion were to continue, then the world might well be in a much more difficult situation even in terms of food. There are, in addition, other problems connected with fast population growth, including urban overcrowding and of course the environmental challenges at the local and global levels.
¹²
It is very important to examine what prospects of a slowdown of population growth can be seen now. This takes us to the second of the three questions.

Even though Malthus is typically credited with having provided the pioneering analysis of the possibility that population may tend to grow too much, the possibility that continued increase in population might conceivably lead to “a continual diminution of happiness” was in fact aired, before Malthus, by Condorcet, the French mathematician and great Enlightenment thinker, who first presented the core of the scenario that underlies the “Malthusian” analysis of the population problem, with “the increase in the number of men surpassing their means of subsistence” resulting in “either a continual diminution of happiness and population, a movement truly retrograde, or, at least, a kind of oscillation between good and evil.”
¹³

Malthus loved this analysis of Condorcet’s, was inspired by it and quoted it with great approval in his famous essay on population. Where the two men disagreed was in their respective views of fertility behavior. Condorcet anticipated a voluntary reduction in fertility rates and predicted the emergence of new norms of smaller family size based on “the progress of reason.” He anticipated a time when people “will know that, if they have a duty towards those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence but to give them happiness.” This type of reasoning, buttressed by the expansion of education, especially female education (of which Condorcet was one of the earliest and most vocal advocates), would lead people, Condorcet thought, to lower fertility rates and smaller families, which people would choose voluntarily, “rather than foolishly to encumber the world with useless and wretched beings.”
¹⁴
Having identified the problem, Condorcet noted its likely solution.

Malthus thought all this most unlikely. In general, he saw little chance of solving social problems through reasoned decisions by the persons involved. As far as the effects of population growth were concerned, Malthus was convinced of the inevitability of population outrunning food supply, and in this context, took the limits of food production to be relatively inflexible. And, most relevantly for the topic of this chapter, Malthus was particularly skeptical of voluntary family planning. While he did refer to “moral restraint” as an alternative way of reducing the pressure of population (alternative, that is, to misery and elevated mortality), he saw little real prospect that such restraint would be voluntary.

Over the years, Malthus’s views on what can be taken to be inevitable varied somewhat, and he was clearly less certain of his earlier prognosis as the years progressed. There is a tendency in modern Malthus scholarship to emphasize the elements of “shift” in his position, and there is indeed ground for distinguishing between the early Malthus and the late Malthus. But his basic distrust of the power of reason, as opposed to the force of economic compulsion, in making people choose smaller families remained largely unmodified. Indeed, in one of his last works, published in 1830 (he died in 1834), he insisted on his conclusion that:

It was because of this disbelief in the voluntary route that Malthus identified the need for a
forced
reduction in population growth rates, which he thought would come from the compulsion of nature. The fall in living standards resulting from population growth would not only increase mortality rates dramatically (what Malthus called “positive checks”), but would also force people, through economic penury, to have smaller families. The basic link in the argument is Malthus’s conviction—and this is the important point—that population growth rate cannot be effectively pulled down by “anything beside the
difficulty
of procuring in adequate plenty the necessaries of life.”
¹⁶
Malthus’s opposition to the Poor Laws and the support for the indigent related to his belief in this causal connection between poverty and low population growth.

The history of the world since that Malthus-Condorcet debate has not given much comfort to Malthus’s point of view. Fertility rates have come down sharply with social and economic development. This has happened in Europe and North America, and is currently happening over much of Asia, and to a considerable extent in Latin America. The fertility rates remain the highest and relatively stationary in the least privileged countries—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—which are not yet experiencing much economic or social development, and which have continued to remain poor as well as backward in terms of basic education, health care and life expectancy.
¹⁷

The general fall in fertility rates can be explained in rather different ways. The positive association between development and fertility reduction is often summarized by the ungainly slogan “Development is the best contraceptive.” While there may be some truth in this rather undifferentiated thought, there are various components of development, which the West has experienced together, including rise in income per head, expansion of education, greater economic independence of women, reduction of mortality rates and spread of family planning opportunities (parts of what may be called social development). We need a discriminating analysis.

There are several theories as to what is causing this fertility decline. One influential example is Gary Becker’s model of fertility determination. Even though Becker has presented his theory as an “extension” of Malthus’s analysis, and even though his analysis shares many features of Malthus’s analysis (including the tradition of seeing the family as
one
decision-making unit with no divisions within it—on this more presently), Becker has, in fact, negated Malthus’s conclusion that prosperity raises population growth, rather than reducing it. In Becker’s analysis, the effects of economic development on investment to improve the “quality” of children (such as investment in education) play an important part.
¹⁸

In contrast with Becker’s approach, the
social
theories of fertility decline point to changes in preferences as a result of social development, such as expansion of education in general and female education in particular.
¹⁹
This is, of course, one of the connections that Condorcet emphasized. However, we have to distinguish between (1) changes in the number of children desired by a family despite unchanged preferences, because of the influence of changing costs and benefits, and (2) shifts in such preferences as a result of social change, such as modification of acceptable communal norms, and greater weighting of the interests of women in the aggregate objectives of the family. Condorcet focused on the latter, Becker on the former.

There is also the simple issue of availability of birth control facilities and the dissemination of knowledge and technology in this field. Despite some early skepticism on this subject, it is now reasonably clear that knowledge and practical affordability do make a difference to the family’s fertility behavior in countries with high birthrate and scarce family control facilities.
²⁰
For example, the sharp fertility decline in Bangladesh has been linked to the family planning movement, and in particular to the greater availability of knowledge and facilities. It is certainly significant that Bangladesh has been able to cut its fertility rate from 6.1 to 3.4 in a mere decade and a half (between 1980 and 1996).
²¹
This achievement debunks the belief that people will not voluntarily embrace family planning in the less-developed countries. However, Bangladesh still has a long way to go,
and while it is going that way (the fertility rate has continued to drop rapidly), to get near the pure replacement level (corresponding to total fertility rates around 2.0 or 2.1) something more than mere availability of birth control facilities would be needed.

One line of analysis that has emerged very powerfully in recent years (and which I have already articulated in earlier chapters) gives the empowerment of women a pivotal role in the decisions of families and in the genesis of communal norms. However, so far as historical data are concerned, since these different variables tend to move together, it is not easy to separate out the effects of economic growth from those of social changes (given what statisticians call “multi-collinearity”). I shall presently pursue this distinction further, with the use of cross-section—rather than intertemporal—comparisons. What should be, however, abundantly clear is that some things “beside the difficulty of procuring in adequate plenty the necessaries of life” have made people choose radically smaller families. There is no reason why the high-fertility developing countries cannot follow others that have already reduced their fertility rates through the combined process of economic and social development (no matter which component of that development plays exactly what part).

However, we have to be more clear as to what the critical parameters would be in changing the climate of fertility. There is now quite extensive statistical evidence, based on comparison between different countries and different regions (that is, cross-section studies, as they are called), that link women’s education (including literacy) and the lowering of fertility across different countries in the world.
²²
Other factors considered include the involvement of women in so-called gainful activities outside the home, the opportunity of women to earn an independent income, the property rights of women and the general status and standing of women in the social culture. I have presented these issues already in the book, but there is a need to link up these discussions.

These connections have been observed in intercountry comparisons, but also in comparisons within a large country—such as between the different districts of India. The most recent—and the
most extensive—study of this connection is the important statistical contribution by Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio and Jean Drèze, discussed in
chapter 8
.
²³
As was noted, among all the variables included in that analysis, the
only
ones that are seen to have a statistically significant effect on fertility are (1) female literacy and (2) female labor force participation. The importance of women’s agency emerges forcefully from this analysis, especially in comparison with the weaker effects of variables relating to economic development.