DOCSLIB.ORG

The World Bank, Population Control, and the Liberal Economic Order

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The World Bank, Population Control, and the Liberal Economic Order The World Bank, Population Control, and the Liberal Economic Order By Leah Kazar Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Professor Naoko Shibusawa April 7, 2017 Kazar 2 Kazar 3 Acknowledgments Above all, I would like to thank my thesis adviser, Professor Naoko Shibusawa, for guiding me through the thesis writing process. From helping me find a topic to her instrumental role in encouraging me to refine my arguments, Professor Shibusawa has been an invaluable resource and mentor. Indeed, I do not think I would have been able to write this without her. I would also like to thank the members of the K-Team writing group: Aditya Kumar, Mae Rochelle-Verano, Nicolas Montano, Patrick Chung, Ida Yalzadeh, Nicole Sintetos, and Marco McWilliams, whose feedback, encouragement, and snacks have kept me going and helped me write a much more considered and interesting thesis. Additionally, I’d like to thank Bertha at the World Bank Group Archives, who was an excellent resource and great help in finding materials on the World Bank’s population policy over the years. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, who let me talk through potential topics and arguments with them whenever I hit roadblocks in my work. My father also deserves special mention for spending countless hours working to retrieve my thesis notes from an external hard drive after it crashed this fall. The support of my parents in the writing of this thesis, and my education in general, is why I am where I am today. Kazar 4 Kazar 5 Introduction In April of 1977, Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, the director of the U.S. Government’s Office of Population, was in St. Louis to attend the annual meeting of the Population Association of America. While there, Ravenholt dropped a bombshell: in an interview with the St. Louis- Dispatch, he stated that as many as 100 million women worldwide would be sterilized if various U.S.-sponsored population programs met their goals. The Dispatch ran with the headline, “U.S. Goal: Sterilize Millions of World’s Women.”1 Indeed, some of these programs were being executed just down the road from the site of his interview, at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. There, the medical school hosted trainings on sterilizations as part of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics (PIEGO). PIEGO facilitated sterilization technique trainings for doctors from around the globe—even when those in their countries of origin rejected the practice.2 Through programs like PIEGO, the United States could work to meet Ravenholt’s lofty population control goals around the world. Ravenholt’s reasoning for why such goals were worthwhile was fourfold. The first was humanitarian: a reduction in the number of people in developing nations would allow their governments to better provide for those who were left, and an increase in the overall standard of living. After all, “Resources divided by population equals well being.”3 The second was the United States’ “moral responsibility” to help solve a problem it had abetted by creating the medical advances that bolstered population increases around the globe. The third was economic: 1 Paul Wagman, “U.S. Goal: Sterilize Millions of World’s Women.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 22, 1977; Box 3; Record Group 286: Records of the United States Agency for International Development; National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, 1. 2 Michael S. Burnhill and Thomas S. Moulding, “Evaluation of the Program for International Education in Gynecolog and Obstetrics,” USAID, September 17, 1976, available at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pdaaa502a1.pdf. 3 Paul Wagman, “U.S. Goal: Sterilize Millions of World’s Women,” 1. Kazar 6 population control was necessary in order to maintain “the normal operation of commercial interests around the world.”4 Without a reduction in idle hands whose discontent would otherwise urge them to “rebel against the strong U.S. commercial presence,” U.S. economic hegemony was not secure.5 The fourth reason built off of the third: a continuation of population explosions would result in horrific socioeconomic conditions conducive to revolutions that could be harmful to the United States.6 Using this reasoning as a justification, Ravenholt hoped that U.S. programs would make sterilization available to all of the world’s 570 million fertile women. If population control policies were effective, up to one quarter of them could be sterilized.7 Though Ravenholt’s comments represented how many Western elites viewed the population debate, his position was not met with uniform complacency. Students at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine objected to USAID’s use of their school to train doctors from around the world in techniques they claimed would be used on the poor and disenfranchised in developing countries. Ravenholt dismissed these dissenters as “radicals” who he believed wanted to promote the revolutions he so valiantly sought to prevent.8 These critics, who held that economic development would naturally limit population growth, in turn saw Ravenholt’s claims as outrageous. Highlighting the Cold War context of this debate, some of them countered with the Cuban example, drawing attention to the fact that the nation was deemed overpopulated until the radical reorganization of its economy finally gave resources and jobs to those formerly deemed extraneous. This played into the Cold War “us vs. them” logic of the day, and made it easy for Ravenholt and his ilk to dismiss protestors as “leftists.”9 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 6 8 9 Ibid. Kazar 7 Ravenholt ultimately denied that he had ever said such things to the Post Dispatch. He held that he never advocated for one-quarter of the world’s reproduction-age women be sterilized, and emphasized the voluntary nature of U.S. programs’ sterilization efforts.10 An internal USAID memo called the Dispatch article “a deliberate effort to distort the information” that was provided by Ravenholt in his interview, in which he did not speak to the commercial interests of the United States, nor to strict sterilization goals made by the United States government.11 Regardless of whether or not Ravenholt indeed made the statements alleged in the article, this incident highlights the conflicts expressed in the population control debate in the latter half of the 20th century. This thesis will address the themes suggested by this vignette, including those embodied in Ravenholt’s excuses, the ensuing debate, and the context in which this situation occurred. How could people like Ravenholt justify U.S. and Western-led intervention into the population policies of other nations? More specifically, I am interested in how nations like the United States that fashioned themselves as champions of free choice and free markets, and ostensibly abhorred top-down economic planning, could justify their promotion of top-down population policies. Wouldn’t such a position pose a fundamental contradiction? My answer lies in the broader context of the population debate, starting with a more informed definition of capitalism. Though freedom of choice is often the purported modus operandi of capitalism as held by its advocates, capitalism is at its core a system built on the private ownership of the means of production, or capital, that above all else seeks to amplify the gains accrued from capital investments. It is not a system that is built fundamentally on freedom 10 R. T. Ravenholt, Letters: As To Sterilization,St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 3, 1977; Box 3; Record Group 286: Records of the United States Agency for International Development; National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. 11 Douglas H. Huber, memo to Sander Levin, Assistant Administrator, PHA USAID, Department of State from Cholera Research Laboratory DACCA, Department of State, April 26, 1977; Box 3; Record Group 286: Records of the United States Agency for International Development; National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. Kazar 8 for all, nor does it necessarily lend itself to increased choice.12 By viewing the United States and largely U.S.-led institutions like the World Bank as agents of capitalism, rather than free markets, their involvement in promoting population policy can be made more legible. Specifically, they were acting in a way that saw excess population as a resource sink that prevented the capital accumulation that was required by their beliefs about development. I also hope to investigate how and why developing nations’ governments accepted such policies, with the answer lying in the nature of the embedded liberal institutions like the World Bank and internalized beliefs about the nature of modernity. Though dissent did arise to population policies, accompanied by a recognition of their place in agendas of Western- dominated capitalist expansion, it was ultimately ineffective. This failure arose from the unique positioning of embedded liberal institutions like the World Bank, which gave nations reliant on their funding the opportunity to present their grievances but ultimately dismissed them in the context of an overwhelmingly liberal economic ideology. Furthermore, this dominant liberal ideology allowed developing nations, even when rebelling against the excessive capitalism they saw in the West, to internalize onto liberal ideas about what modernity should look like. Consequently, they often implemented their own population programs and extractive economic systems in order to achieve the prosperity promised to them by the West. Overall, population control policies became commonplace because of their relationship to the overwhelming dominance of Western-dominated capitalism and liberalism. Personal Bias and Disclaimer 12 For example, as Thomas Piketty notes in Capital in the 21st Century, capitalism unimpeded naturally tends towards oligarchy and monopoly, leading to the concentration of wealth and a reduction of choices for the vast majority of people.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Does Foreign Aid Improve Gender Performance in Recipient Countries?
    Working Paper in Economics # 201811 December 2018 Does Foreign Aid Improve Gender Performance in Recipient Countries? Ranjula Bali Swain and Supriya Garikipati https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/management/people/economics/ © Does Foreign Aid Improve Gender Performance in Recipient Countries? Ranjula Bali Swain and Supriya Garikipati* Abstract An explicit goal of foreign aid is to promote female empowerment and gender equality in developing countries. The impact of foreign aid on these latent variables at the country level is not yet known because of various methodological impediments. We address these by using Structural Equation Models. We use data from the World Development Indicators, the World Governance Indicators and the OECDs Credit Reporting System to investigate if foreign aid has an impact on gender performance of recipient countries at the country level. Our results suggest that to observe improvement in gender performance at the macro-level, foreign aid must target the gender outcomes of interest in a clearly measurable ways. JEL classifications: O11, J16, C13 Keywords: foreign aid, gender performance, structural equation model. 1. Introduction Gender entered the development dialogue over the period 1975-85 which came to be marked by the United Nations as the UN Decade for Women. The accumulating evidence over this period suggests that economic and social developments are not gender-neutral and improving gender outcomes has important implications both at the household and country levels, especially for the prospect of intergenerational wellbeing (Floro, 1995; Klasen, 1999). Consequentially, gender equality came to be widely accepted as a goal of development, as evidenced particularly by its prominence in the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and, later on, in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
    [Show full text]
  • THE HISTORY of INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AID David
    1 THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AID David Williams Introduction The provision of aid to developing countries has become an increasingly important part of contemporary international relations. The number of aid donors has increased, and the total amount of aid given to developing countries has risen significantly, especially in the last 10 years or so. For many developing countries, relations with development agencies have become a central part of their international affairs, and for some of the most aid dependent states, foreign assistance has become central to their ability to provide services to their population. For western states, the provision of development aid has become an important instrument for achieving international objectives including the cultivating of political allies, opening markets, fighting terrorism, and constructing regimes of global governance. The provision of foreign aid has also been very controversial. There is an important (and very lively!) debate about how effective foreign aid has been in stimulating development, and thus about whether donor countries ought to be more generous in their aid provision. In addition, over the last ten years or so, there has been increasing pressure on western donors to provide aid in a more effective, coordinated and transparent manner. For all of these reasons, foreign aid is in important site of investigation into changing practices of global economic governance. Given the centrality of foreign aid to contemporary international politics, it is easy to forget that as an institutionalized activity it is a relatively recent phenomenon. While there are important precedents, the provision of foreign aid results largely from the newly dominant position of the United States at the end of World War Two.
    [Show full text]
  • Does Offshoring Asylum and Migration Actually Work? What Australia, Spain, Tunisia and the United States Can Teach the Eu
    POLICY BRIEF | September 2018 DOES OFFSHORING ASYLUM AND MIGRATION ACTUALLY WORK? WHAT AUSTRALIA, SPAIN, TUNISIA AND THE UNITED STATES CAN TEACH THE EU Giulia Laganà Senior Analyst, EU migration and asylum Open Society European Policy Institute POLICY BRIEF | September 2018 INTRODUCTION: IS OFFSHORING HERE TO STAY AND HOW IS ITS SUCCESS MEASURED? As the stalemate continues over a common set Refugee Convention and its Protocols. Others have of rules on asylum within the European Union, highlighted the fact that the route is not actually ‘externalising’, ‘offshoring’, ‘outsourcing’ and, closed as thousands continue to move through the most recently, ‘regionalising’ asylum and migration Western Balkans, where they are met by increasingly management in non-EU countries appear to be the harsh border enforcement, in a desperate bid to buzzwords of the moment. But is the idea of involving reach the EU. Despite this, the agreement with Turkey countries outside the bloc to stem arrivals really is still touted as a success, as measured by the new? As early as the mid-1990s, when Denmark and primary yardstick - arrivals are down dramatically the Netherlands proposed hosting asylum seekers compared to the peak period in 2015-2016. outside Europe, various forms of this concept have surfaced periodically in the European debate – only The third reason why the periodic recurrence of to be regularly discarded for a host of both legal and calls to offshore or externalise migration may be practical reasons. entering a new phase is that the crisis mentality has stuck despite a significant fall in the number The sustained arrivals in 2015-2016, however, of irregular migrants reaching the EU over the last changed this dynamic in a number of ways.
    [Show full text]
  • ARCHITECTS of INTELLIGENCE for Xiaoxiao, Elaine, Colin, and Tristan ARCHITECTS of INTELLIGENCE
    MARTIN FORD ARCHITECTS OF INTELLIGENCE For Xiaoxiao, Elaine, Colin, and Tristan ARCHITECTS OF INTELLIGENCE THE TRUTH ABOUT AI FROM THE PEOPLE BUILDING IT MARTIN FORD ARCHITECTS OF INTELLIGENCE Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. Acquisition Editors: Ben Renow-Clarke Project Editor: Radhika Atitkar Content Development Editor: Alex Sorrentino Proofreader: Safis Editing Presentation Designer: Sandip Tadge Cover Designer: Clare Bowyer Production Editor: Amit Ramadas Marketing Manager: Rajveer Samra Editorial Director: Dominic Shakeshaft First published: November 2018 Production reference: 2201118 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK ISBN 978-1-78913-151-2 www.packt.com Contents Introduction ........................................................................ 1 A Brief Introduction to the Vocabulary of Artificial Intelligence .......10 How AI Systems Learn ........................................................11 Yoshua Bengio .....................................................................17 Stuart J.
    [Show full text]
  • An Example of Development Aid
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Reuter, H.-Jochen Article — Digitized Version An example of development aid Intereconomics Suggested Citation: Reuter, H.-Jochen (1967) : An example of development aid, Intereconomics, ISSN 0020-5346, Verlag Weltarchiv, Hamburg, Vol. 02, Iss. 6/7, pp. 171-173, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02929850 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/137763 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu mic and social problems of Latin America. This is also development. However, it must gradually come to be the slant of the resolutions dealing with restricting realised that any type of economic integration is, in military expenditure; these are aimed at concentrat- the final analysis, a political act.
    [Show full text]
  • The Origins and Impact of Environmental Conflict Ideas
    STRATEGIC SCARCITY: THE ORIGINS AND IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT IDEAS Elizabeth Hartmann Development Studies Institute London School of Economics and Political Science Submitted for the degree of PhD 2002 1 UMI Number: U615457 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U615457 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 rM£ S£S F 20 ABSTRACT Strategic Scarcity: The Origins and Impact of Environmental Conflict Ideas Elizabeth Hartmann This thesis examines the origins and impact of environmental conflict ideas. It focuses on the work of Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose model of environmental conflict achieved considerable prominence in U.S. foreign policy circles in the 1990s. The thesis argues that this success was due in part to widely shared neo-Malthusian assumptions about the Third World, and to the support of private foundations and policymakers with a strategic interest in promoting these views. It analyzes how population control became an important feature of American foreign policy and environmentalism in the post-World War Two period. It then describes the role of the "degradation narrative" — the belief that population pressures and poverty precipitate environmental degradation, migration, and violent conflict — in the development of the environment and security field.
    [Show full text]
  • Hell on Earth
    Welcome to Hell on Earth Artificial Intelligence, Babies, Bitcoin, Cartels, China, Democracy, Diversity, Dysgenics, Equality, Hackers, Human Rights, Islam, Liberalism, Prosperity, The Web Michael Starks The saddest day in US history. President Johnson, with two Kennedy’s and ex-President Hoover, gives America to Mexico - Oct 3rd 1965 Reality Press Las Vegas Copyright © 2020 by Michael Starks All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without the express consent of the author. Printed and bound in the United States of America. ISBN 978-1-951440-81-7 “At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” Abraham Lincoln Heaven and Earth are inhumane--they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs TaoTe Ching This very body the Buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise Osho I can well imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, so that nothing is spoken. Clearly, then, the essence of religion can have nothing to do with what is sayable. Wittgenstein What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of man, not curiosities; however, but rather observations on facts which no one has doubted and which have only gone unremarked because they are always before our eyes. Wittgenstein RFM I p142 Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does.
    [Show full text]
  • The IMF and Gender Equality: a Compendium of Feminist Macroeconomic Critiques OCTOBER 2017
    The IMF and Gender Equality: A Compendium of Feminist Macroeconomic Critiques OCTOBER 2017 The gender dimensions of the IMF’s key fiscal policy advice on resource mobilisation in developing countries The IMF and Gender Equality Abbreviations APMDD Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development ARB Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá BWP Bretton Woods Project CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women CESR Center for Economic and Social Rights FAD Fiscal Affairs Department GEM Gender Equality and Macroeconomics ICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights IEO International Evaluation Office IFIs International Financial Institutions ILO International Labor Organization IMF International Monetary Fund INESC Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos ITUC International Trade Union Confederation LIC Low Income Country MDGs Millennium Development Goals SMSEs small and medium sized enterprises ODA Overseas Development Aid OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PWDs Persons with Disabilities SDGs Sustainable Development Goals TA Technical Assistance UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme VAT Value Added Tax VAWG Violence against Women and Girls WHO World Health Organization WIEGO Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Publisher: Bretton Woods Project October 2017 Copyright notice: This text may be freely used providing the source is credited 2 The IMF and Gender Equality Table of Contents Abbreviations 2 Executive summary 5 Acknowledgements 6 I. Positioning women’s rights and gender equality in the macroeconomic policy environment Emma Bürgisser and Sargon Nissan Bretton Woods Project 9 II. The gender dimensions of the IMF’s key fiscal policy advice on resource mobilisation in developing countries Mae Buenaventura and Claire Miranda Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development 16 III.
    [Show full text]
  • Making Development Aid More Effective the 2010 Brookings Blum Roundtable Policy Briefs Ccontentsontents
    SEPTEMBER 2010 Global Economy and Development at BROOKINGS MAKING DEVELOPMENT AID MORE EFFECTIVE THE 2010 BROOKINGS BLUM ROUNDTABLE POLICY BRIEFS CCONTENTSONTENTS Can Aid Catalyze Development? ...................................................................................................................3 Homi Kharas Brookings U.S. Government Support for Development Outcomes: Toward Systemic Reform ........................................10 Noam Unger Brookings The Private Sector and Aid Effectiveness: Toward New Models of Engagement .............................................20 Jane Nelson Harvard University and Brookings International NGOs and Foundations: Essential Partners in Creating an Effective Architecture for Aid ..........28 Samuel A. Worthington, InterAction and Tony Pipa, Independent consultant Responding to a Changing Climate: Challenges in Financing Climate-Resilient Development Assistance ....37 Kemal Derviş and Sarah Puritz Milsom Brookings Civilian-Military Cooperation in Achieving Aid Effectiveness: Lessons from Recent Stabilization Contexts ...48 Margaret L. Taylor Council on Foreign Relations Rethinking the Roles of Multilaterals in the Global Aid Architecture ............................................................55 Homi Kharas Brookings INTRODUCTION The upcoming United Nations High-Level Plenary From high-profile stabilization contexts like Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals will Afghanistan to global public health campaigns, and spotlight global efforts to reduce poverty, celebrat- from a renewed
    [Show full text]
  • Malthusianism, Capitalist Agriculture, and the Fate of Peasants in the Making of the Modern World Food System
    ARTICLE10.1177/0486613403257801Review of Radical Political EconomicsRoss / The /Making Fall 2003 of the Modern World Food System Malthusianism, Capitalist Agriculture, and the Fate of Peasants in the Making of the Modern World Food System ERIC B. ROSS Population and Development Program, Institute of Social Studies, P. O. Box 29776, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2502 LT Received Jan. 17, 2000; accepted July 18, 2002. Abstract This article describes the role of Malthusian thinking as a rationale for the commercial development of global agriculture at the expense of peasant-livelihood security. Focusing on the impact of the cold war, in an era of peasant insurgency, it explores how the Green Revolution reflected and reinforced the West’s conviction that technological innovation, rather than more equitable systems of production, should resolve the problem of world food security said to be due to “overpopulation.” JEL classification: N50; O13; Q18 Keywords: Malthusianism; capitalist agriculture; Green Revolution; cold war 1. Introduction Since the publication of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the dominant Malthusian discourse has argued that poverty, underdevelopment, and associated patterns of mortality and environmental degradation can all be regarded chiefly as products of human population pressure on the means of subsistence. This reflects the central argument of Malthus’s work, which sought to explain the nature and origin of pov- erty in a way that exonerated capitalist economy by suggesting that it was the reproductive and productive behaviors of the poor themselves that caused their material suffering. Equally appealing to the ruling class of his own time, and in the years to come, was the fact that Malthusian thinking stood firmly against the radical belief in human progress that was associated, first, with the French and, later, with the Russian revolution, by insisting that any efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of the poor would tend to only make matters Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 35, No.
    [Show full text]
  • Money, Work, and Mass Extinction: Transformational Degrowth and The
    MONEY, WORK, AND MASS EXTINCTION: TRANSFORMATIONAL DEGROWTH AND THE JOB GUARANTEE A DISSERTATION IN Economics and Social Sciences Consortium Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by BJ UNTI B.A., Portland State University, 2006 Kansas City, Missouri 2020 MONEY, WORK, AND MASS EXTINCTION TRANSFORMATIONAL DEGROWTH AND THE JOB GUARANTEE BJ Unti, Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2020 ABSTRACT This dissertation is composed of three independent essays. Each essay traces social and ecological crises to capitalist institutions and proposes how a job guarantee (JG) can be adapted to resolve them in the context of degrowth. The first essay focuses on the relationship between economic growth and ecological destruction. In a monetary production economy, there is a trade- off between employment and the environment. To reconcile social and ecological goals it is necessary to decouple employment from growth. A JG makes this possible. The outlines of a simple two-sector model show how a JG can be used to maintain full employment and facilitate a reduction in aggregate output. The JG offers individuals a way to opt out of monetary production and thus, presents a pathway to fundamentally transform the economy. The second essay considers the diverse variety of strategies and policies that have emerged in the degrowth movement. These are classified into two categories. Top-down approaches insist that centralized policies relying on government control are necessary. Bottom- up approaches insist that transformation must stem from the decentralization of power and the expansion of individual autonomy.
    [Show full text]
  • Carrying Capacity
    CarryingCapacity_Sayre.indd Page 54 12/22/11 7:31 PM user-f494 /203/BER00002/Enc82404_disk1of1/933782404/Enc82404_pagefiles Carrying Capacity Carrying capacity has been used to assess the limits of into a single defi nition probably would be “the maximum a wide variety of things, environments, and systems to or optimal amount of a substance or organism (X ) that convey or sustain other things, organisms, or popula- can or should be conveyed or supported by some encom- tions. Four major types of carrying capacity can be dis- passing thing or environment (Y ).” But the extraordinary tinguished; all but one have proved empirically and breadth of the concept so defi ned renders it extremely theoretically fl awed because the embedded assump- vague. As the repetitive use of the word or suggests, car- tions of carrying capacity limit its usefulness to rying capacity can be applied to almost any relationship, bounded, relatively small-scale systems with high at almost any scale; it can be a maximum or an optimum, degrees of human control. a normative or a positive concept, inductively or deduc- tively derived. Better, then, to examine its historical ori- gins and various uses, which can be organized into four he concept of carrying capacity predates and in many principal types: (1) shipping and engineering, beginning T ways prefi gures the concept of sustainability. It has in the 1840s; (2) livestock and game management, begin- been used in a wide variety of disciplines and applica- ning in the 1870s; (3) population biology, beginning in tions, although it is now most strongly associated with the 1950s; and (4) debates about human population and issues of global human population.
    [Show full text]