Two things should be noted about Mill's view: firstly, it is correctly rooted in Says law of markets; secondly, it makes clear that if the supply of labour exceeds the rate of capital accumulation living standards must fall. In addition, he assumes without just cause that without additional labour the invention would maximise incomes. Nevertheless, Mill was right to point out that so long as , "the progress of civilisation," i.e., technical advancement and capital accumulation, continues, living standards will continue to rise and the environment will improve.

What Coulter and the rest of the misanthropes that form the SPA do not realise is that Mill's stationary state describes a situation in which all technical progress had ceased and all profitable opportunities for investment had been exhausted. Not even the SPA or Dr Walters is silly enough to argue that we have reached that stage.

Fourteenth century England provides an excellent example of a country whose population growth drove income down below the maximum. A situation that was remedied in 1348 by the unwelcome arrival of the Black Death, which slashed the population from about 4.8 million to something like 2.8 million by 1477. Consequently real wages rose significantly. (Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, Pimlico, 1993, pp. 109-13). This is the grain of truth in the greens' argument that cutting population sometimes raises income.

England's medieval population had risen beyond the point that given the availability of suitable land, the level of capital² accumulation and the state of technology, real incomes fell. By savagely reducing the population. The Black Death created, in a sense, an additional amount of productive land which significantly raised the ratio of land to labour therefore increasing labour's marginal productivity and hence real incomes. All of which brings us to the present.

Obviously, then, a reduction in Australia's population would only cause incomes to rise if the country's population was suboptimal. In Australia's case this means that population has outstripped per capita investment or that capital consumption has been taking place. Whatever the case, the solution is to raise per capita investment, not cut the population. But this won't do for the likes of Dr Walters and his ilk because their real target is not the raising of incomes but cutting the size of the population. (I should point out that Paddy McGuinness — that great 'conservative' columnist — also thinks Australia's population should be cut).

To support his absurd contention that Australia has exceeded its 'carrying capacity' (as if it were a ship or a plane) Coulter called on the 1996 State of Environment Report chaired by Professor Ian Lowe. Now Ian Lowe is the genius who claimed he learnt how market processes work from playing poker (sic), the very same man who peddles the man-made global warming hoax, who still quotes from the 1972 discredited Club of Rome Report. Yet Coulter expected the public to accept his organisation's baseless assertion that

[t]here is no prospect — even in principle — of a sustained pattern of development unless we devise a socially acceptable way of stabilising the human population.

This statement will carry as much weight among informed opinion as his anti-nuclear prejudices. Coulter sought to bolster his anti-people views further by quoting from the Symposium of the Australian Academy of Science, 1994, Population 2040 — Australia's Choice, which concluded:

In our view [italics added] the quality of all aspects of our children's lives will be maximised if the population of Australia by the mid 21st century is kept to the low, stable end of the achievable range, [that is] to approximately 23 million.

I italicized view because that is basically what they were giving us — a personal view and not a scientific statement. Behind these views rests two hidden assumptions:

1. That current technology is insufficient to maintain a larger population at a higher standard of living without destroying the environment.

2. That current technology is basically fixed. The absurdity of these assumptions render their view worthless.

Coulter challenged Pyne to supply evidence that we could reduce our demand on the environment with a growing population. The global evidence is overwhelming. In 1960 world production of grain required 1,500 million acres. The massive rise in productivity during the past 40-odd years means that world grain production still only needs 1,500 million acres.

If this astonishing increase in productivity had not taken place the world would now need 2.5 billion acres for grain production. Writing in American Scientist (March-April 1996) J. H. Ausbel estimated that if world agricultural productivity increased on average by 5 tons per hectare (2.5 acres) then 75 per cent of today's farmland could supply 10 billion people with an American diet of 6,000 calories per day.

An area the size of Australia could be withdrawn from agricultural production if average agricultural productivity rose to 8 tons, which is the average for Irish wheat and American corn. Regardless of what the likes of Coulter would have us believe, this process of rising agricultural productivity is happening right now.

In other words, we are getting more and more for less and less. And this is entirely due to economic growth. Some will argue that only science and technology made this possible. Despite the essential truth of this statement it ignores the fundamental fact that science and technology have to be applied through investment.

Moreover, if there is a functional relationship between population growth and economic welfare, then the most densely populated countries would surely have the lowest living standards and most degraded environment. Instead, we find the opposite. For example, India has 328.6 persons per square kilometre, China has density 135.5, Indonesia 126.1, while Holland has 423, the UK 243.3, Japan 337. Australia comes in with a staggering 2.6 per square kilometre. (SBS World Guide). These figures make it abundantly clear that the SPA assertion that you cannot have economic growth without population control is utter bilge.

Before continuing, a couple of important points need to be clarified. We hear much about 'over population' without even being told what it is. A moment's reflection tells us that over-population is a relative concept in that we have to be over populated in relation to something. In the case of humans that means capital and land. Therefore, so long as there is sufficient available land (in the economic sense) and capital not merely to employ additional hands but also raise per capita incomes then there is no over population.

This brings us to environmental degradation. This is obviously a straightforward concept. Or is it? What is frequently degradation to a 'conservationist' turns out to be another's property. What we find is that 'conservationists' all too frequently define 'degradation' as transforming land from a lower-valued use into a higher-valued use. An example would be greens who oppose further development of an area, even though they have houses there, in order to preserve the local environment for their own personal consumption.

A less obvious example is the locking away of huge areas for the personal enjoyment of 'conservationists'. That these areas could still be enjoyed as consumption goods while being developed leads one to conclude that these 'conservationists'' prime motive is the destruction of economic growth. These tactics have resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the rest of the community to groups of green activists.

Environmental degradation only occurs when man-made changes to the environment are offset by a decrease in human welfare. (I have ignored natural changes as the so-called environmental debate is really about economic growth). It follows that exploiting free gifts of nature is not the cause of degradation. Where genuine degradation has occurred it has invariably been due to the absence of property rights or the failure of government to properly enforce such rights.

Of course, the exception could be community ignorance. But where such community ignorance prevails there can be no environmental laws anyway, as was the case with Aboriginal tribes. These, as we can see, are very important points. The SPA mob obviously believes that Australia with a population of about 20,000,000 occupying an island continent with masses of undeveloped resources is somehow over populated. (This view never stops puzzling my Asian friends.)

The SPA promotes the absurd concept "intergenerational equity" where resources are allegedly reserved for succeeding generations. But one does not need a Ph.D. in logic to realise that so-called 'intergenerational equity' means no resource would ever be used. (As if the SPA didn't know that). Any generation's claim to resources — including this generation — are just as worthy of consideration as those of any future generation.

Furthermore, resources are not just used up, they are transformed into higher valued goods. The consequence of using resources today instead of leaving them idle in the ground is to make future generations richer. How do the members of the SPA think they would be living today (if at all) if our ancestors had not exploited 'non-renewable' resources that they now want left undeveloped?

What is not understood by the mass of people — including a great many economists — is that economic growth means the expansion of a highly complex capital structure consisting of stages of production made up of heterogeneous capital goods. As the structure expands it raises the marginal productivity of labour and hence real wages. This is what really raises living standards, not totalitarian population controls. Because capital embodies technical knowledge it actually creates additional resources while continuing to expand existing reserves of natural resources, making many of them obsolete in the process. In other words, growth is a resource generating process.

As if he were delivering the coup de grace, Coulter smugly informed us that the January 1996 report (Having our say about the Future, by the Australian Science and Technology Council) stated that the views of 15-24-year-olds on environment and population should be given serious consideration because they are similar to his own. Ergo! They must be right. But this generation is only parroting the appalling lies that green propagandists have been feeding it for years.

I do not know what truly motivates Coulter and his green ilk, but I think his views on population control may supply a clue. When he led the Australian Democrats he publicly declared that no Australian family should have more than two children. In his opinion

every child more than their second impinges on every person's right to clean air, to clean water and to a decent environment.

In other words, 'excess children are threat to Coulter's living standards. This was a vile statement that does not contain a single grain of truth. Moreover, it slandered all of those decent families and their 'excess' children as enemies of the environment and every dedicated tree-hugging misanthropist. Having identified the enemy he then called for the immediate adoption of "population and social policies." And his organisation has got the gall to claim it does not believe in coercion. How in God's name can any government try to dictate population size, meaning women's fertility, without using coercion? No wonder that great humanitarian Dr Walters is a fellow-traveller.

"Population and social policies" is a weasel phrase for totalitarian controls over the most personal and intimate of human relations. Such controls have always involved the grossest violation of human rights. The pain, misery, humiliation and deaths that such policies caused in India and are still causing in China today are beyond dispute.

Let us not forget that it is always women who bear the savage brunt of these barbarous population policies, not men — and certainly not those men like Coulter and Walters who propose impose them on the rest of us. The implementation of these policies in China have seen women dragged from their homes to be forcefully sterilised or have their babies aborted. (Perhaps the good Dr Walters should emigrate to China considering how much he admires its ruthless population controls). Exposing the SPA's elitist view of itself and its contempt for ordinary Australians, Coulter sanctimoniously stated that

[t]his generation will be remembered, if It is remembered at all, as self-centred and greedy.

We are obviously a generation that deserves everything it gets, except, of course, the enlightened caring few like Coulter, Dr Walters, Sheila Newman³ and the rest of the would-be population controllers who would lord it over us.

The more I listen to them the more they remind me of those strange California cults that are forever predicting imminent disaster or imminent salvation. The fundamental difference between the two is that California cults, despite being weird, at least have the common decency not to foist their absurdities on the general public.

1. Under Malthus's influence Mill fretted about over-population. This led the inimitable Alexander Gray to paint a devastating picture of Mill's treatment of population growth:

In writing on the population question, his voice quivers with a righteous indignation which leads him to a violence of language nowhere to be found in Malthus. Excessive procreation is for Mill on the same level as drunkenness or any other physical excess, and those who are guilty should be discountenanced and despised accordingly. (Alexander Gray The Development of Economic Doctrine, Longmans, Green and Co., 1948, p. 283).

2. On capital in medieval times see Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce: Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 2, Phoenix Press, 2002, pp. 244-51).

3. Sheila Newman is president of Sustainable Population Australia and a real charmer. Her suggestion for keeping the untermenschen (the lower orders) out of areas that only the herrenvolk can really appreciate would be quite simple and effective. She recommended that this be done "by limiting building permits which will keep prices high" thus limiting desirable areas to the "stylish" (sic) who will also be wealthy enough to enjoy their pristine beauty.

Gerard Jackson is Brookesnews' economics editor

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