Dana Schmalz on the “population argument”

“For the sustainable habitation of our planet, the decisive thing is how we live and consume, not how many of us there are." – Dana Schmalz¹

Giant problems seem to call for giant solutions. And they are also a temptation to look for easy answers. But we also need frameworks to conceptualize big problems. The leading environmental activists, Bill McKibben, for instance, has stressed that the most important elements of environmental policies are batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels.² This is a good way of focusing the need for addressing climate change to understandable concepts for public policy that people can conceptualize without having to understand how to build a solar panel or being able to explain how exactly ocean temperature affects jet streams.

In her book The Population Argument: How the Concern Over Too Many People Influences Politics (my translation of the German title), Dana Schmalz looks at the ways since the 18^th century that concerns about population growth have affected popular and scientific understanding of social problems. One of the more toxic contemporary examples is “eco-fascism,” which is, yes, A Thing these days.

She cites several recent cases of far-right mass murderers who cited “eco-fascist” motives: the Christchurch, New Zealand case of 2019 (51 killed), El Paso TX in 2019 (23 killed), and Buffalo NY in 2022 (10 killed). The idea in all these cases was that minorities, Muslims, and/or immigrants were ruining the environment. This notion is often joined with xenophobic or racist ideologies like the far-right Great Replacement Theory.

As Schmalz’ historical account relates, the scientific and fact-based study of population issues have often been used as part of racist, eugenic, colonialist and ethnonationalist projects. The British economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) elaborated a demographic theory the human population grows geometrically while the world’s food supply can only grow arithmetically and therefore the food supply would not be able to support the growth rate of the world population, with starvation, mass misery, and recurrent social crises being the inevitable result. He argued for social policies to discourage and limit population growth.

Here social-scientific interest and social concern were thereby mixed with an apology for the better-off: the poverty of many workers could be explained by the fact that they had too many children - and not by the fact that wages were too low. The population argument instead of social redistribution. (Schmalz, p. 17; my emphasis)

This Malthusian notion that those people – not the respectable ones – have to be controlled and regulated for their own good, as well as to protect the affluent from them, has never lost its attraction for those who count themselves among the most worthy and deserving.

The concern for “overpopulation” would also figure in significant ways in the movement for women’s rights and reproductive freedom, sometimes in the form of seemingly unlikely alliances:

Equal reproductive freedom [became] repeatedly threatened from several sides: by conservative opponents of birth control such as the Catholic Church, by racist anti-feminists who only approve of births of certain people, and by representatives of neo-Malthusian approaches who want to regulate reproduction with a view to an alleged or actual common good.

The development of demographics in the 18^th and the following centuries did not first create notions of superior and inferior groups. But the beginning of the modern age, conventionally dated from 1492 with the European “discovery” of the New World and colonialism there and in Asia and Africa greatly encouraged the notion. The post-1492 sudden vast expansion of the Spanish colonial project coincided with the Spanish Inquisition and the accompanying notion of pure blood (limpieza), i.e., the quasi-racial notion of the superiority of Christians to Muslims and (especially) Jews.³

With the development of biological studies in the 18^th century, the use of classifications in zoological and botanical taxonomy based on the scheme propagated by Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) grew. And eventually a classification by race was applied to humanity, as well. This notion was then used by many to call some of the races superior to others. In practice, the human racial classifications were always more pseudoscience and ideology than anything scientific.⁴ These pseudo-scientific assumptions and biologically and racially superior groups were obviously convenient for European colonialism in the New World and elsewhere.

Schmalz provides an overview of these historical debates. For example, the philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), husband of the feminist and author Mary Wollstonecraft, argued from a democratically-oriented view that inequality and suppression of political rights were more important causes of social ills than the population numbers. And she reviews the even more radical-democratic criticism that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously made of Malthusianism, which among other things contested Malthus’ argument that population would automatically grow exponentially without systemic efforts to lower birth rates.

The callousness that the Malthusian view could promote was famously illustrated by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, when two gentlemen come into Ebenezer Scrooge’s office to ask for Christmas donations for the poor. Scrooge grumps that there are prisons and workhouses that provide for the destitute:

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. …”⁵ [my emphasis]

Since then, the argument over whether social ills are due to too many people or too little equality and economic justice has been a recurring one, albeit in evolving forms.

The plague of eugenics

The development of the theory of evolution of which Charles Darwin was the most important figure brought as a (toxic) biproduct the notion of eugenics, the notion that human reproduction should be regulated and restricted in such a way that “desirable” human characteristics should be promoted and less desirable ones eliminated.

Eugenic claims were used to bolster the remarkably racially discriminatory immigration in the United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Schmalz cites Harry Laughlin and Prescott Hall, the head of the Immigration Restriction League, as two prominent figures who used eugenic arguments to justify these extreme immigration-restriction laws. Those laws were particularly impressive to a young Austrian politician named Adolf Hitler. American race and immigration laws became important models for the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Hitler’s National Socialist movement became enthusiastic supporters of eugenic notion that helped justify gruesome genocidal policies.

But eugenic ideas were considered respectable in Britain and the US, as well. As an example, Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations is the direct successor to a journal published from 1910-1919 called The Journal of Race Development. The lead article in its inaugural issue was titled, “The Point of View toward Primitive Races.”

To be fair, its author was G. Stanley Hall, a leading American scholar who played a key role in introducing Sigmund Freud’s theories to the United States. And, as cringy as the vocabulary sounds today, he was making an argument that those who imagined themselves to be more “advanced” had an obligation to promote equality and improvement for all:

Whether the nations that now rule the world will be able to indefinitely wield the accumulated resources of civilization is by no means established. It may be that some stocks now obscure may a few centuries hence take up the torch that falls from our hand and develop other culture types very distinct from ours; and that to them and not to us will be appointed the task of ushering in the kingdom of the superman. [!!]⁶

But Schmalz notes that in the US and Europe at that time, “Overall, attention in these years was focused on issues the distribution of population in space: territory, territorial conflicts and migration.” (p. 94)

She cites the view of Hannah Arendt argument that the notion that overpopulation was a critical threat was an essential element of authoritarian movements in the 20^th century:

Arendt described the feeling of people's own superfluity as a basis of totalitarian systems of rule. The idea that a population had to be cultivated like a garden and subjected to selection also formed a basis of totalitarianism. Zygmunt Bauman has analyzed this "gardening state" as an aspect of modernity and as an essential step towards the destruction of the Holocaust. Looking at population as something to be ordered was generally linked to the modern view of the world as formable and made use of a scientific logic, even if the resulting racist classifications lacked any real scientific basis. Above all, such an approach, which "sorted" the population according to value, negated the fundamentally equal dignity of human beings. In extreme cases, it opened the door to arguments that even called for the destruction of life "for the good of the community". Such a eugenic and racist ideology of annihilation reached a climax under the National Socialists. (p. 55)

As Arendt put it, “Only where great masses [of people] are [held to be] superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.”⁷

We see this notion in the current far-right rhetoric against refugees and immigrants in the US and Europe: there are too many of them here, we don’t need them, they’re taking our jobs, and they’re taking our tax dollars!

Population concerns after 1945

Eugenics after the Second World War was generally discredited, not least by the horrors which racist ideology could generate with eugenic goals as the justification.

But population was still also a major consideration in the approaches to economic development that were a major focus in the decolonizing world after 1945. “Gradually, the theme of population growth was understood as an aspect of development, and the concept of development as such increasingly became a central concern.” (p. 62) In the 1960s, population growth became a more frequent consideration. And in the 1970s as the seriousness of environmental issues was becoming more obvious, it also figured in the debates over what role population played in ecological problems. As Schmalz relates, concepts like “population explosion” became more common.

UN Secretary General U Thant suggested in a 1966 speech that too many people could become a danger for individual rights. That theme was taken up 1968 by a major conference in Teheran on human rights, whose official declaration that hunger and poverty caused by population growth was a danger to those rights. But that view was also contested in subsequent years. Another aspect of this discussion involved women’s reproductive rights, both in terms of women having access to birth control and family planning services and in the context of population control measures that actively sought to limit the number of children per family, as China famously did for years with its one-child policy. India also undertook major sterilization campaigns starting in the 1960s. Schmalz writes, “China’s one-child policy [1979/80-2015] was an extremely oppressive measure and, as such, prompted international criticism.” (p. 78)

The world’s population has grown rapidly. Part of the challenge in understanding the issue was then and still is: “The underlying debates were based on complex bodies of knowledge – on statistical knowledge about the total population in a country, the distribution of age groups, average life expectancy, but also statistics on education and access to health services.” (p.82) It’s complicated, in other words, and that leaves plenty of room for demagogues to cherry-pick data to distract and confuse people. (Not a problem unique to demography, obviously.)

In more recent years, the issue of migration has also involved invocations of a threatening population growth. Africa currently has the world’s fastest-growing population and is also being hit hard by climate change. This has led to hair-raising projections of billions of people being on the move, with European countries supposedly the preferred goal for them. Germany’s Angela Merkel, who argued for more acceptance of refugees in the so-called refugee “crisis” of 2015-16, stated in mid-2016 that 1.2 billion people leaving Africa was a core problem for Europe. Schmalz cites a book, The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent (2019) by Stephen Smith of Duke University that promotes this notion, though she notes that not all of Smith’s analysis is as sleazy as some of the marketing for the book. But she also discusses how this scare talk about Africans flooding into Europe has produced some brutally bad measures to restrict immigration to Europe. She observes, “Population growth is already serving as an occasion and justification for massive migration control.” (p. 89)

This is a common theme in the European immigration debates today. And, like many of the arguments xenophobes and ethnonationalists use, it’s bogus. There are not a billion black and brown people flooding out of African towards Europe. Most of the shocking numbers of total refugees in the world are either internal refugees within their own countries or in a nearby country. That doesn’t mean they don’t have serious problems, they do. But they aren’t flooding into distant wealthy countries. But it’s an illustration of how the Malthusian idea of too many people still affects politics in significant ways.

She argues that, “Today, the dominant idea is that states must shape population growth politically in such a way that emigration is not necessary.” (p. 95) Not only is that view unrealistic in today’s world economy. But heavily ideological, ethnonationalist influences dominate that view of development even today.

The demographic and economic development of Europe is often seen as a model. It is claimed that other countries and regions must go through the same developments in this later time. But it is precisely the massive emigration [within and out of Europe] that accompanied the growth of the European population is left out of that concept. (p. 96)

The xenophobia that has been a key issue for far-right parties in Europe and the US lives on anecdotes and prejudices. Facts are powerful things. But facts alone won’t in themselves counter political demagoguery. It requires democratic parties to introject those facts into the political debate in a way that voters can understand and, yes, it requires stigmatizing the xenophobic claims. Rightwingers can and do sneer at such efforts as “woke.” But voters make much better and more practical decision when they are awake rather than asleep.

The scorn of the more affluent for those less materially fortunate that Adam Smith in the 18^th century lamented as a remarkably persistent prejudice, the kind of contempt that the German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer calls “respectable callousness” (rohe Bürgerlichkeit), still plays a large role in perception of “overpopulation.” Smith described it in 1759 this way:

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.⁸

Schmalz describes that kind of respectable callousness in the present-day debates over “migration” in Europe:

The poorer the people who migrate, the more likely their number will appear to be excessive. Even though planes land in Europe every minute, it is the overcrowded boats that represent immigration for many, and whose occupants are the subject of endless discussions. The fact that populations in poorer countries on average are growing reinforces the impression among many that an ever-increasing, poorer proportion of the world's population is incessantly pushing into the richer parts of the world. This gets combined with racist prejudices. It is always "the others" who are too many. Racism contributes to the fact that people are not seen as having their individual stories, but as a non-individualized group. (p. 98) [my emphasis]

She also devotes a chapter to the ways in which women’s rights become mixed with immigration issues and can be used to reinforce “traditional” women’s roles, as well as to incite fear and hatred against immigrants. She quotes the geographer and migration researcher Nancy Heimstra: “The fertility of immigrant women, or more precisely, of non-white immigrant women, has long been the subject of fear and anger in the USA." (2001)

And Schmalz elaborates:

This observation from the United States can be applied to other places. The reproduction of immigrant women is often viewed critically, with the support of racist stereotypes and nativist fear. The rightwing discourse about the "too many children" that immigrant women supposedly have is often paired with an anti-feminism that laments the "too few children" of the local population. (p. 104)

She closes the book with an account of the present day discussions on ecological sustainability and population, emphasizing that sustainability has to do with factors like CO2 fuels that generate global warming, the need to not sluff those problems off as being secondary or pointless by falsely framing the problem as too many people. “Whether with eight billion, ten billion or much fewer people - the next few decades will be about survival and the good life on a threatened planet.“ (p. 154)

She also notes that based on current projections, world population would be expected to peak in half a century or so and then decrease: “Worldwide, the average number of children has been falling for years, while humanity continues to grow. The current forecast is that in the 2084 the most people ever will live on earth, and the world population will decline from then on.” (p. 153)

And she expects that for the next few decades, the so-called overpopulation problem will be most heavily discussed in connection with migration issues. The sooner democratic political parties learn how to advocate humane and practical measures for managing immigration and defusing ethnonationalist demagoguery, the better off the world will be. But those parties will still have to find ways to push back and discredit the “too many people” arguments. Facts and good sense can beat fearmongering and hate in politics. But it doesn’t happen automatically. It takes effort and creativity.

1. „Für das nachhaltige Bewohnen unseres Planeten ist ausschlaggebend, wie wir leben und konsumieren, nicht, wie viele wir sind.“ Schmalz, Dana (2025): Das Bevölkerungsargument. Wie die Sorge vor zu vielen Menschen Politik beeinflusst, 148. Berlin: Suhrkamp. All translations from the German here are mine.

2. McKibben, Bill (2023): Yes in Our Backyards. Mother Jones May-June 2023. <https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/04/yimby-nimby-progressives-clean-energy-infrastructure-housing-development-wind-solar-bill-mckibben/> (Accessed : 2025-03-04).

3. The father of the current Israeli Prime Minister was the author of a book on this development: Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995).

4. Kolbert, Elizabeth (2018): There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label. National Geographic 03/12/2018. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/race-genetics-science-africa> (Accessed: 2025-03-04).

5. The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. (1843) <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46/pg46-images.html>

6. Hall, G. Stanley (1910): The Point of View toward Primitive Races. The Journal of Race Development 1:1. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/29737843?origin=crossref&seq=2> (Accessed: 2025-03-04).

7. Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Origins of Totalitarianism, 311. New York: Meridian Books.

8. Smith, Adam (2004 [1759]): The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Part 1, Section 3, Chapter 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.