The (In)Visible Hand: Populations, Economies, and State Power

In November 2022, as the world’s human population passed the eight billion mark, observers disagreed about what the future held. The numbers were not in question: the UN’s World Population Prospects projected that the global population would continue to grow until the 2080s, peaking at 10.4 billion and declining slightly thereafter. The disagreement concerned what the numbers meant, both in that moment and for the future. Some saw in the UN’s figures the triumph of human ingenuity. UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaimed that “the milestone is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet.” Others, however, saw looming disaster. Among the worriers, some believed that 10.4 billion—and even the eight billion of 2022—were too many people for the Earth’s delicate ecosystem to handle, while others saw disaster looming after the peak, when the world would likely experience an absolute decline in human numbers.

The debate over whether the world is headed toward catastrophic overpopulation or disastrous depopulation elides the fact that global population is a statistical fiction. Populations are political objects, constituted through the statistical practices by which governments count their subjects and register vital events. These forms of enumeration give rise to populations that are legible to and manipulable by the governments that make them, counting and classifying people in ways that facilitate specific governmental objectives and policies. Populations are thus an effect of state power. Censuses of various kinds have existed since antiquity, each reflecting the exigencies of the governmental or non-governmental (usually ecclesiastical) authority that carried it out.6 Governments in Europe and North and South America began collaborating to standardise census-making practices and share their results in the nineteenth century. After World War II, the UN Population Division attempted to extend standardisation to all countries of the world, making it possible, for the first time, to calculate the total number of Earth’s inhabitants by aggregating the populations constituted by national censuses in every country.

While natural scientists in the second half of the twentieth century sometimes considered global population size and growth in relation to the natural environment, social scientists and governments typically focused on the size and growth of national populations in relation to national economies. More recently, attention to the worsening climate crisis has sharpened calls for global population control, but has also fostered the realisation that addressing climate change will require directly cutting emissions, which is unlikely to occur through any reasonable reduction in population growth. This realisation, together with growing concern about depopulation, has refocused population thought on the relationship between national populations and national economies and whether, in any given country, the former is growing too quickly or too slowly to engender growth in the latter. This essay examines how governments came to view population change—specifically the manipulation of birth rates in one direction or the other—as a lever to promote economic growth, often with disastrous consequences.

Economies are the statistical twin of populations, constituted through methods of national income accounting that emerged between the world wars. In the years following World War II, the UN began to statistically represent the world as a community of sovereign nation states, each defined by an economy and a population. Dividing the former by the latter produced gross national income (GNI) per capita, which served as a measure of the wellbeing of a country’s residents until the introduction of the Human Development Index in 1990. GNI per capita provided a seeming index of quality of governance by which countries could be ranked relative to one another, producing a moral imperative for governments to maximise their economies relative to their populations. It was only in the late 1950s and 1960s, largely through the work of the US-based Population Council, that manipulating rates of population growth became a strategy for increasing GNI per capita.

In the mid-twentieth century, using the data collected by the UN, economists and demographers could array the countries of the world along what they presented as a universal path of progress toward higher per capita national income and thus greater wellbeing. On the economic side, the path was most iconically described in the late 1950s by the economist Walt Rostow as “the stages of economic growth.” According to this model, societies transitioned across five stages, over a period of several decades, from agrarian economies with little overall economic growth (stage 1) to industrial mass-consumption economies with rapid self-sustaining economic growth (stage 5). While the phrase “economic development” is today often used as a synonym for economic growth, mid-century economists understood development as the qualitative transformation described by Rostow from an agrarian economy with little growth potential to an industrial economy with continuous growth.

Drawing generalisations from England’s Industrial Revolution, mid-century demographers at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research expected that the process of economic development would be accompanied by massive demographic change, which they termed “the demographic transition.” According to demographic transition theory, societies with low-growth agrarian economies had high birth and death rates, which balanced one another to keep population stationary. As countries acquired the infrastructural prerequisites for industrialisation, however, mortality rates would fall while fertility rates remained high, spurring rapid population growth. This growth would eventually be slowed by the further progress of industrialisation, which would change the economic calculus of childbearing and thus reduce birth rates. In the final stage of economic development, birth and death rates would be balanced at low levels, with no overall population change. Princeton’s demographers characterised demographic transition, like economic development, as a universal, unilinear, and irreversible process in which the countries of Western Europe and North America were in the lead and those of Africa, Asia, and Latin America trailed behind. They were initially unconcerned about the population growth entailed by demographic transition, as they expected it to be temporary and driven by economic development, a process that would increase GNI per capita even as population sizes increased.

Almost as soon as economists and demographers articulated these theories of economic development and demographic transition, it became clear that the countries across the world were not following their predictions. In parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, public health interventions had reduced death rates dramatically in the absence of economic development. American businessmen began to worry that the resulting population growth would make these countries susceptible to communist revolution, threatening US-based corporations’ access to overseas materials, markets, and labour. In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III, who had just become chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, established the Population Council to channel money from Rockefeller sources and other American philanthropists towards efforts to slow population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Achieving this goal, however, was politically challenging. By defining and reporting on populations to the UN, governments exerted sovereignty over them. Governments had traditionally valued larger populations, viewing them as a source of economic dynamism and military strength. By publishing population data for every country worldwide, the UN made each country’s population legible to actors in other countries, but efforts on the part of US businessmen or philanthropists to use that legibility to intervene in population growth overseas could represent an act of aggression, imperialism, or even genocide. In the postwar period, the growth of populations could be legitimately controlled only by the governments that constituted those populations.

To encourage governments to exert control over the growth of populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Population Council and its allies took a three-pronged approach. First, they sponsored demographic research that framed high fertility rates as a barrier to economic development. The key study was Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries: A Case Study of India’s Prospects, funded by the World Bank and published in 1958 by the Princeton University demographer Ansley Coale and the CIA economist Edgar M. Hoover. The Coale-Hoover Report, as it was informally known, relied on simulation rather than direct observation. Coale projected population growth in India over the next thirty years under various fertility scenarios; Hoover then projected economic growth under each fertility scenario. The results were thus fully determined by Coale and Hoover’s starting assumptions, according to which lower fertility meant more household savings and therefore more capital investment and faster economic development, thus reversing the causal relationship between demographic transition and economic development. The Population Council ensured that the Coale-Hoover Report was widely circulated and its findings broadly accepted, particularly among leaders of rapidly growing developing countries, who increasingly viewed fertility reduction as critical to the success of their economic development and nation-building projects.

Second, the Population Council and its allies sponsored research into contraceptive technologies that could be used on a mass scale with minimal effort from users, leading to the development of new intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs). The Population Council held the patents on these IUDs and subsidised their production for countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In contrast to other forms of contraception, which represent birth control for individuals and couples, the science and technology studies scholar Chikako Takeshita has described the IUD as “birth control for a nation,” a technology designed to reduce a country’s birth rate rather than facilitate individual control over childbearing. IUDs could be inserted quickly by individuals with minimal training, making them impossible for users to remove at will. Their effects could be easily factored into a country’s population and economic projections.

Third, the Population Council and its allies provided consultation to governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that decided to implement family planning programmes. India became the first country to implement such a programme in 1952. By 1970, national family planning policies or programmes were also in place in China, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, and Turkey. However, some were more extensive than others. In many places these programmes were welcomed with considerable enthusiasm by existing local civil society birth control movements, often led by elite women, which had failed to achieve much traction prior to the rise of governmental concern with the effects of population growth on economic development. The Population Council assisted governments with mass communication campaigns aimed at promoting the uptake of family planning services and inculcating small family norms. Advertisements of various kinds depicted small families as happier, healthier, and wealthier than large families, and portrayed family planning as a means of promoting both national and individual prosperity. Yet the Population Council and governments undertaking family planning policies and programmes typically described their goals and evaluated their efficacy in terms of reductions in fertility rates, the number of IUDs inserted or sterilisations performed, rather than the expected benefits for individuals or nations.

In 1966, the Population Council drafted a resolution that John D. Rockefeller III presented to the UN on Human Rights Day, designating family planning a human right and therefore exerting additional moral pressure on governments to launch or expand family planning programmes. To be sure, the family planning programmes that proliferated worldwide from the 1960s onwards provided contraceptive options to many who sought them but otherwise lacked access. Yet that was not their primary goal. The Population Council’s resolution framed the individual right to family planning as a response to the perceived threat of rapid population growth to governments’ economic development and nation-building ambitions. For some supporters of international population control—such as Planned Parenthood and USAID, which began providing family planning assistance in 1965, and the UN Fund for Population Activities (today the UN Population Fund), which received most of its money from USAID—reducing fertility rates was the only objective. The Population Council, however, broadened its aims in the 1970s, when its demographic director indicated his approval of Romania’s extreme pronatalist policies, which included compulsory gynaecological exams as well as the complete outlawing of contraception and abortion. The Council’s goal, it seemed, was to empower governments to take control of their countries’ fertility rates as a means of promoting economic growth, whether that meant increasing or reducing fertility. If access to family planning could be taken away when it came to be seen as a drag on economic growth, it was hardly a human right.

Although some Americans recommended coercive and even murderous approaches to reducing population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Population Council advised governments that family planning should be voluntary. Its definition of voluntary was quite capacious, however, including just about anything short of limits on family size, compulsory sterilisation, or compulsory abortion. Some governments explicitly crossed this line-for example, India during its Emergency and China with its One-Child policy. Other governments used a variety of incentives and penalties to promote small families. Singapore, for example, raised hospital delivery fees and removed tax benefits for a woman’s fourth child and any thereafter, and gave those children lower priority for primary school admission. The harms perpetrated by overzealous government efforts to reduce fertility have been widely documented. While historical accounts of these programmes have generally described them as an excessive response to a real problem, economic research in the 1980s found no necessary or direct relationship between fertility and economic development. Whether high fertility hinders development or a reduction in fertility hastens it depends on numerous local social, political, and economic factors.

Some of the countries that made the strongest efforts in family planning—such as Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea—experienced dramatic economic growth, but their governments also made direct investments in economic development that far exceeded their investments in fertility decline. In South Korea, for example, family planning accounted for than 1% of the country’s economic development budget. While the Population Council’s analysis suggests that fertility in these countries declined at least somewhat more rapidly than it would have in the absence of government family planning programmes, it is not clear that these programmes made a tangible contribution to economic development. In 2024, these countries had some of the world’s lowest total fertility rates: 0.86 in Taiwan, 0.73 in South Korea, and 0.95 in Singapore, as compared to a replacement rate of approximately 2.1. Yet, these countries are not alone in experiencing low fertility. Of the 236 countries that the UN reported on in 2024, nearly half had fertility rates below replacement level.

Demographers and economists today point to dependency ratios—the number of people under 15 or over 64 divided by the number of people of working age—as the key metric linking populations to economies. Fertility above and below replacement both produce high dependency ratios, which is expected to hinder economic growth. If we are to rely on population as a lever to promote economic growth, a delicate balance must therefore be maintained. The scientists who continue to advise the governments of developing countries to reduce their fertility are seeking what is known as a demographic dividend—an increase in productivity and savings that is expected to occur when a decline in the fertility rate reduces the dependency ratio. Yet if fertility falls below replacement, the demographic dividend will be followed by a rapidly rising dependency ratio as each generation of workers is replaced by a smaller one.

The countries that once most enthusiastically and coercively promoted smaller families are today adopting the most enthusiastic and coercive policies to promote larger families. South Korea and Iran, for example, have restricted access to birth control and abortion. China has reconfigured its government family planning agencies, once responsible for enforcing the one-child policy, to promote a “new fertility culture.” Women there report being called by neighbourhood officials to inquire about their menstrual cycles and childbearing plans. Authoritarian regimes in Europe are also pushing hard on pronatalism, with Hungary exempting women from paying income tax if they have four or more children and Russia banning “child-free propaganda.” In the United States, the new Transportation Secretary vows to prioritise communities with above-average marriage and birth rates. The demographer Dennis Hodgson has warned that “over-ardent neo-Malthusian population controllers are no longer the greatest threat to women’s reproductive rights. That place has been assumed by over-ardent pronatalist population controllers in low-fertility countries.”

Today’s pronatalist policies, like the anti-natalist policies of the past that continue in many parts of the world, configure women’s (and men’s) bodies and lives in the abstract as policy tools while disregarding the actual lives and bodies of the women (and men) involved. Fertility change in either direction is, at best, a crude, indirect, and slow mechanism for achieving economic and other policy goals, while economic growth itself is a crude, indirect, and inefficient means of advancing human wellbeing. Just as the anti-natalist policies of the mid-twentieth century were motivated—at least in part—by the desire of American businessmen and philanthropists to control overseas populations and by the desire of governments to control unruly elements of their own populations, today’s pronatalist policies seem to be motivated primarily by xenophobic nationalism and patriarchal nostalgia. Both sets of policies scapegoat and target the most vulnerable members of society. Characterising either population growth or impending depopulation as a catastrophe, and focusing solely on fertility adjustments as the solution, absolves governments of their responsibility to use the full range of policy tools available to address the economic, environmental, or social issues currently attributed to excessive, insufficient, or negative population growth in just, equitable, and effective ways.