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Kevin's Reviews > Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
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by
Kevin's review
bookshelves: environment-geography, 1-how-the-world-works, environment-ecology, critique-liberalism
Dec 31, 2021
bookshelves: environment-geography, 1-how-the-world-works, environment-ecology, critique-liberalism
How Liberals fail at Environmentalism and succeed at Imperialism�
Preamble:
--In our paradigm of liberal capitalism, imperialism is the silent shadow cast by our prestigious, technocratic institutions. I’ve reviewed plenty of examples in economics:
i) The banal: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
ii) The silent: The New Economics: A Manifesto
iii) The brilliant:
-intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--Next up, environmentalism. This (brilliant) book targets the banal, the silent, and much worse! (lecture: )
Highlights:
1) Elitist roots:
--Let’s start with distinguishing Thomas Robert Malthus from his “overpopulation� legacy. Malthus was not a pioneering “environmentalist� concerned with an “overpopulation� crisis:
--Prior to Malthus, the British ruling class turned to conservative Edmund Burke’s reactionary “change = bad� moralism (see: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump).
---Malthus thus pioneered a naturalization of capitalism (seeking “natural laws�, like today’s technocracy hiding power). Conveniently, such laws dictated that poverty was inevitable as the poor are ignorant, so welfare and birth control are useless.
--Neo-Malthusians (now supporting birth control) came later in the 1820s. Both variations declined because, well, the real world intervened: Europe’s reforms improving living standards (i.e. watered-down socialism: public sanitation/health, education, women's rights, worker's safety, pensions, etc.) succeeded in driving down poverty for the masses, creating a “demographic transition� where birth rates also fell. This happened prior to modern birth control availability/legality.
2) Imperialist Assumptions:
--So, we arrive at the modern populationist obsession with “overpopulation�. The book traces this to Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, shortly after:
i) 1962 Silent Spring (warning against pesticides)
ii) the modern Western environmental movement during the Cold War’s nuclear arms race (which sadly disappeared despite modern risks: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner), and
iii) post-WWII’s “Great Acceleration� of human disturbance on the Earth Systems (i.e. “Anthropocene�: see the author's next book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
--I’m disappointed this book didn’t emphasize the other context: the height of decolonization (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), when the Global South masses challenged global capitalism’smarket colonial prices and division-of-labour (for big picture dive, see Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present). How convenient for Western scientists (mostly liberal technocrats) to respond with “overpopulation�!
--The tragedy: (liberal) science’s pathetic attempts to apply their physical scientific findings to the social world, given their undiagnosed liberalism obscures capitalist social structures of power/finance/production/distribution/ideology.
--The farce: thus, sciences� fixation on “population� in the abstract, from the famine scares of the 1960’s to today’s environmental degradation debates. If we let the real world intrude, it turns out population growth is negatively correlated with emissions. The G20 rich nations dominate emissions while having birth control and low birth rates. “In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.�
--Within rich nations is also great inequality. Furthermore, this “too many (Western) consumers� argument (ex. Clive Hamilton, Jared Diamond who wrote the dismal Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) is convenient for liberals who assume capitalism is driven by consumer demand (basically consumer democracy). This erases the actual structures of capitalist power: finance + production + distribution is driven by profit (private surplus) and competition:
i) Economic growth (endless private accumulation) = capitalism's economic health, i.e. the purpose of investments, rather than targeting social needs; thus GDP is not a driving “idea gone bad� but a reflection of capitalism’s needs: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
ii) Environment is a free gift, thus the necessity to exploit and pollute in order to survive competition: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power=
iii) Given the need for constant consumer demand to match economic growth, demand must be manufactured with the sprawling advertising industry + planned obsolescence. The vast majority of waste/pollution is hidden in the production process, well-hidden from individual consumers. Capitalism is “e´Ú´Ú¾±³¦¾±±ð²Ô³Ùâ€� in private accumulation; meanwhile, garbage is profitable: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
--“Too many consumers� confuses 2 types of consumption by:
i) obscuring the capitalist structural consumption (production + distribution), and attributing all this to...
ii) the surface-level individual/household consumer consumption of goods/services. End consumers have little visibility or say over what is beneath the tip of the iceberg:
--Thus, we have this appalling situation where the psychopathic pro-capitalists are using “merchants of doubt� tactics to spread denialism for their short-term gains (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming), while the “enlightened� ivory-tower pro-or-default-capitalist science community chase their tails in social application with abysmal modeling assumptions.
...A core example is IPAT: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. The appendix includes a 1995 article by the most progressive of the “Limits to Growth� (original report in 1972) systems scientists, Donella H. Meadows, where she concedes that directly applying IPAT’s abstraction erases real-world power relations. Meadows concludes with the off-the-cuff idea of Impact = Military + Large Business + Small Business + Gov + Luxury Consumption + Subsistence Consumption, each with its own P/A/T variables, before retreating to say this is very complex. This was in 1995; I’m reading the 2004 The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and I’ve yet to see much improvement.
3) Imperialist Consequences:
--The abstract farce gets uglier in the real world: Western environmentalism is sickened with:
a) Immigration control:
--Once you apply the fallacious “too many people� + “too many consumers�, you eventually end up with the repulsive “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor� and the “deep ecology� of “Defend climate oases�. The problem with blaming people is the hate gets turned on visible minorities/vulnerable rather than on the actual structural causes; yes, liberalism/imperialism breeds fascism (Discourse on Colonialism), in this case “eco-fascism�.
...Much of this book catalogs the range within Western environmentalism, from Garrett Hardin’s (popularized the “Tragedy of the Commons� myth: ) compulsory population reduction to the more subtle immigration controls (linked to a disturbing list of prominent Western environmentalists, ex. David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, James E. Lovelock).
b) Birth control (in the Global South):
--Even at its best (ex. Michelle Goldberg using “populationist� fallacies to get liberal aid for women’s reproductive rights), this entire “Western aid� mirage perpetuates imperialism: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Need to read Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (Revised Edition): The Global Politics of Population Control. And as reviewed, “too many people� is a distraction for environmentalism.
--This ecosocialist book is a great start for critical Western audiences, inspired by the best from the West (Eugene V. Debs, Barry Commoner). The next step is to move beyond listing Global South movements to considering theories from the anti-imperialist Global South: Vijay Prashad, Utsa Patnaik:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time.
Preamble:
--In our paradigm of liberal capitalism, imperialism is the silent shadow cast by our prestigious, technocratic institutions. I’ve reviewed plenty of examples in economics:
i) The banal: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
ii) The silent: The New Economics: A Manifesto
iii) The brilliant:
-intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--Next up, environmentalism. This (brilliant) book targets the banal, the silent, and much worse! (lecture: )
Highlights:
1) Elitist roots:
--Let’s start with distinguishing Thomas Robert Malthus from his “overpopulation� legacy. Malthus was not a pioneering “environmentalist� concerned with an “overpopulation� crisis:
His goal was very different: to prove that most people will always be poor and that no social or political change could ever alter that. Nearly two hundred years before Margaret Thatcher declared that there is no alternative to capitalism, Malthus won the British ruling class to that very idea.--This was the time of the US/French revolutions and class struggle/reforms, where Malthus directly attacked reformists William Godwin, Nicolas de Condorcet, and later Thomas Paine and Robert Owen. We should take a step further to note the forgotten “indigenous critique� (ex. Kondiaronk, see The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) that stirred European Enlightenment debates, and the Haitian Revolution.
--Prior to Malthus, the British ruling class turned to conservative Edmund Burke’s reactionary “change = bad� moralism (see: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump).
---Malthus thus pioneered a naturalization of capitalism (seeking “natural laws�, like today’s technocracy hiding power). Conveniently, such laws dictated that poverty was inevitable as the poor are ignorant, so welfare and birth control are useless.
--Neo-Malthusians (now supporting birth control) came later in the 1820s. Both variations declined because, well, the real world intervened: Europe’s reforms improving living standards (i.e. watered-down socialism: public sanitation/health, education, women's rights, worker's safety, pensions, etc.) succeeded in driving down poverty for the masses, creating a “demographic transition� where birth rates also fell. This happened prior to modern birth control availability/legality.
2) Imperialist Assumptions:
--So, we arrive at the modern populationist obsession with “overpopulation�. The book traces this to Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, shortly after:
i) 1962 Silent Spring (warning against pesticides)
ii) the modern Western environmental movement during the Cold War’s nuclear arms race (which sadly disappeared despite modern risks: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner), and
iii) post-WWII’s “Great Acceleration� of human disturbance on the Earth Systems (i.e. “Anthropocene�: see the author's next book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
--I’m disappointed this book didn’t emphasize the other context: the height of decolonization (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), when the Global South masses challenged global capitalism’s
--The tragedy: (liberal) science’s pathetic attempts to apply their physical scientific findings to the social world, given their undiagnosed liberalism obscures capitalist social structures of power/finance/production/distribution/ideology.
--The farce: thus, sciences� fixation on “population� in the abstract, from the famine scares of the 1960’s to today’s environmental degradation debates. If we let the real world intrude, it turns out population growth is negatively correlated with emissions. The G20 rich nations dominate emissions while having birth control and low birth rates. “In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.�
--Within rich nations is also great inequality. Furthermore, this “too many (Western) consumers� argument (ex. Clive Hamilton, Jared Diamond who wrote the dismal Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) is convenient for liberals who assume capitalism is driven by consumer demand (basically consumer democracy). This erases the actual structures of capitalist power: finance + production + distribution is driven by profit (private surplus) and competition:
i) Economic growth (endless private accumulation) = capitalism's economic health, i.e. the purpose of investments, rather than targeting social needs; thus GDP is not a driving “idea gone bad� but a reflection of capitalism’s needs: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
ii) Environment is a free gift, thus the necessity to exploit and pollute in order to survive competition: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power=
iii) Given the need for constant consumer demand to match economic growth, demand must be manufactured with the sprawling advertising industry + planned obsolescence. The vast majority of waste/pollution is hidden in the production process, well-hidden from individual consumers. Capitalism is “e´Ú´Ú¾±³¦¾±±ð²Ô³Ùâ€� in private accumulation; meanwhile, garbage is profitable: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
--“Too many consumers� confuses 2 types of consumption by:
i) obscuring the capitalist structural consumption (production + distribution), and attributing all this to...
ii) the surface-level individual/household consumer consumption of goods/services. End consumers have little visibility or say over what is beneath the tip of the iceberg:
The great majority of “consumption� (throughput) does not involve individual product users at all. For example, the average rate at which people produce waste, mentioned above by Diamond, is calculated by dividing the total population into the total waste. But since 99 percent of all solid waste in the United States today comes from industrial processes, eliminating all household waste would have little effect on per capita waste. Diamond’s “average rate� is meaningless. [Emphases added]...Furthermore, averaging out consumption as individual/household consumers completely obscures institutional consumers, with the US military industrial complex being the biggest outlier. Not even the most pro-gun American consumes such quantities of military vehicles (aircrafts/ships/tanks etc.), ammunition (bombs/missiles etc.), and supporting industries, i.e. not just Halliburton reconstruction, but all the service industries surrounding the military industrial complex (how crazy is it to “need more jobs� to destroy each other and the planet, just to survive capitalism's maldistribution of resources? Bullshit Jobs: A Theory); this complex is spread throughout the US to try and keep capitalism circulating (also, capitalism needs to plan for violence to prevent planning for social needs; And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future). Colonization remains at the center of ecological crises.
--Thus, we have this appalling situation where the psychopathic pro-capitalists are using “merchants of doubt� tactics to spread denialism for their short-term gains (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming), while the “enlightened� ivory-tower pro-or-default-capitalist science community chase their tails in social application with abysmal modeling assumptions.
...A core example is IPAT: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. The appendix includes a 1995 article by the most progressive of the “Limits to Growth� (original report in 1972) systems scientists, Donella H. Meadows, where she concedes that directly applying IPAT’s abstraction erases real-world power relations. Meadows concludes with the off-the-cuff idea of Impact = Military + Large Business + Small Business + Gov + Luxury Consumption + Subsistence Consumption, each with its own P/A/T variables, before retreating to say this is very complex. This was in 1995; I’m reading the 2004 The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and I’ve yet to see much improvement.
3) Imperialist Consequences:
--The abstract farce gets uglier in the real world: Western environmentalism is sickened with:
a) Immigration control:
--Once you apply the fallacious “too many people� + “too many consumers�, you eventually end up with the repulsive “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor� and the “deep ecology� of “Defend climate oases�. The problem with blaming people is the hate gets turned on visible minorities/vulnerable rather than on the actual structural causes; yes, liberalism/imperialism breeds fascism (Discourse on Colonialism), in this case “eco-fascism�.
...Much of this book catalogs the range within Western environmentalism, from Garrett Hardin’s (popularized the “Tragedy of the Commons� myth: ) compulsory population reduction to the more subtle immigration controls (linked to a disturbing list of prominent Western environmentalists, ex. David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, James E. Lovelock).
b) Birth control (in the Global South):
--Even at its best (ex. Michelle Goldberg using “populationist� fallacies to get liberal aid for women’s reproductive rights), this entire “Western aid� mirage perpetuates imperialism: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Need to read Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (Revised Edition): The Global Politics of Population Control. And as reviewed, “too many people� is a distraction for environmentalism.
--This ecosocialist book is a great start for critical Western audiences, inspired by the best from the West (Eugene V. Debs, Barry Commoner). The next step is to move beyond listing Global South movements to considering theories from the anti-imperialist Global South: Vijay Prashad, Utsa Patnaik:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time.
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Quotes Kevin Liked
“Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders.
Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
“The great majority of “consumptionâ€� (throughput) does not involve individual product users at all. For example, the average rate at which people produce waste, mentioned above by [Jared] Diamond, is calculated by dividing the total population into the total waste. But since 99 percent of all solid waste in the United States today comes from industrial processes, eliminating all household waste would have little effect on per capita waste. Diamond’s “average rateâ€� is meaningless.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
“But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
“The assumption that economic expansion is driven by consumer demand—more consumers equals more growth—is a fundamental part of the economic theories that underlie the model. In other words, their conclusions are predetermined by their assumptions.
What the model actually tries to do is to use neoclassical economic theory to predict how much economic growth will result from various levels of population growth, and then to estimate the emissions growth that would result. Unfortunately, as Yves Smith says about financial economics, any computer model based on mainstream economic theory “rests on a seemingly rigorous foundation and elaborate math, much like astrology.�
In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
What the model actually tries to do is to use neoclassical economic theory to predict how much economic growth will result from various levels of population growth, and then to estimate the emissions growth that would result. Unfortunately, as Yves Smith says about financial economics, any computer model based on mainstream economic theory “rests on a seemingly rigorous foundation and elaborate math, much like astrology.�
In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
― Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Reading Progress
August 20, 2018
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July 2, 2021
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Started Reading
December 31, 2021
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Abhirami
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Jan 01, 2022 11:15PM
Looking forward to your reviews on the environmentalism top 10! Thank you for these longform summaries. Happy New Year, Kevin!
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Abhirami wrote: "Looking forward to your reviews on the environmentalism top 10! Thank you for these longform summaries. Happy New Year, Kevin!"Happy New Year, Abhi! Can you remind me which "environmentalism top 10" you are referring to? What topics are you currently exploring?
Great to see liberal scientists always modeling individual and household consumption, as clearly the US military industrial complex fits in that.
John wrote: "Great to see liberal scientists always modeling individual and household consumption, as clearly the US military industrial complex fits in that."If focus must start with consumption because it's more accessible to conceptualize (where the production/distribution process is added on, "attributed", as a chain), then we definitely need to popularize "institutional consumers".
Models and stats are easily-manipulated abstractions and take so damn long to carefully unpacked (I've been stuck on several projects, including unpacking Limits to Growth). We need the time and attention to popularize this ("knowledge translation").
I’m not sure if it’s touched upon in this book Kevin, but I sympathize with the idea that perhaps it’s not OK to keep expanding the human population and that decreasing it might be the best course of action.Why is it preferable for world population to be 10 billion as opposed to 5? Are we able to achieve something that is not within our reach with more people? Will we miss some cultural or scientific progress if our population doesn’t continue to grow? Will our overall happiness or wellbeing increase as a species? I don’t think so.
Sorry if this is a comment that’s only tangentially related to the book, but I think population growth is worth discussing out of the shadow of Malthus.
Rodrigo wrote: "I’m not sure if it’s touched upon in this book Kevin, but I sympathize with the idea that perhaps it’s not OK to keep expanding the human population and that decreasing it might be the best course ..."Hi Rodrigo! I do agree that it is difficult to untangle your specific socioecological concerns with all the elitist/imperialist noise (the focus of this book) that I know you and I both disagree with ("out of the shadow of Malthus" :)
I guess what I want to unpack first is the messy connections that may still linger.
--RE: "perhaps it’s not OK to keep expanding the human population", I assume the premise is because (abstractly) each person's ecological footprint adds to the total that we collectively must manage.
...And we must prepare for a range of non-ideal situations (i.e. we cannot assume perfect radical resource distribution etc.), so why not chip away by integrating checks on population growth with progressive/radical social policies?
...Indeed, I'm currently finishing a review of a messy debate on this, where a couple Marxist-Leninist critique "degrowth" as Malthusian, using Hickel's Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World as a proxy (a book I really enjoy). Hickel's take on population [bold emphases added]:
Of course, we also have to think about the role of population going forward. The more the global population grows, the more difficult this challenge [reduce social consumption] will be. As we approach this question, it’s crucial � as always � that we focus on underlying structural drivers. Many women around the world do not have control over their bodies and the number of children they have. Even in liberal nations women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised. Poverty exacerbates these problems considerably. And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy: countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing.--Of course I think the progressive policies listed (child health/women's health and reproductive rights/girls' education/anti-poverty schemes in general) are important in their own rights, and if you want to conceptualize for yourself that "population regulation" is a theoretical component to these policies then we can debate that, but either way this is the obvious middle ground in terms of action.
It’s essential that we stabilise the size of the human population. The good news is that we know just how to do that: as the economist Kate Raworth [Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist] put it to me, ‘It’s one growth curve that the world actually knows how to flatten, so it’s not the one that keeps me awake at night.� What brings a nation’s birth rate down? Investing in child health, so that parents can be confident their children will survive; investing in women’s health and reproductive rights, so that women have greater control over their own bodies and family size; and investing in girls� education to expand their choices and opportunities. With these policies in place, population growth falls fast � even within a single generation. Gender justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.
But stabilising the global population would not cause ecological damage to automatically level off, in and of itself. In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, that has been the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population. Indeed, material use keeps rising even when populations stabilise and decline. This has been the case in every single historical example of population stability under capitalism.
--RE: "decreasing it might be the best course of action": by "best course of action", do you mean specifically regarding population, or in general (considering all ecological factors)? Obviously I do not agree with the latter; even for the progressive policies I agree with, I see population regulation as a lesser (and debatable) component.
--RE: "Why is it preferable for world population to be 10 billion as opposed to 5? Are we able to achieve something that is not within our reach with more people? Will we miss some cultural or scientific progress if our population doesn’t continue to grow? Will our overall happiness or wellbeing increase as a species? I don’t think so."
...This makes it sound like other people deciding to have children must conform to a utilitarian social regulation? It's not that I think such considerations should not be considered, just that we should carefully unpack the various connotations that may follow if it enters public debate.
...Even regarding taking action specifically on population as an issue, I find there's too much abstraction here for the (global) ecological crisis:
i) Since we already agreed we cannot expect perfect radical redistribution to easily render population completely trivial, we also cannot expect perfect radical regulation. So, certain Leftists may try their best to be careful of Malthusian notions, but we surely cannot guarantee this for all regulators. The "shadow of Malthus" is that of elitism (esp. using abstract utilitarian logic/quantification to rationalize devaluing others), and it will remain a constant threat.
ii) Currently, population growth is driven by global poverty. The Global North has a massive retirement population requiring care labour and I'm skeptical how much that can/should be automated. The Global South, the source of global population growth, following global poverty, are so trivial in terms of individual consumption compared to Global North individual consumption, let alone Global North institutional consumption.
...From just a technocratic labour logistics perspective, migration makes sense to balance this out.
iii) The next concern is that such vast migration would increase Global North population. So, assuming we've focused on addressing global poverty, thus redistributing population and reducing the need for high fertility rates, your concern starts to solidify here. Unfortunately, liberals/reactionaries have abused this concern into anti-immigration without addressing global poverty (which this book details), but this is where the debate would start imo.
