On Overpopulation Causing Poverty

From The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs, page 118:

Analogies of human population growth to animal population growth, based on the relation of population to current resources, are thus specious. The idea that, under sensible economic planning, population growth must be limited because natural resources are limited is profoundly reactionary. Indeed, that is not planning for economic development at all. It is planning for stagnation.

So little does this seem to be understood, that it is becoming conventional (especially among the very well-off) to assume that poor and unproductive people cause their own poverty by multiplying - that is, by their very numbers. But if it is true that poverty is indeed caused by overpopulation, then it follows that poor people ought to prosper wherever populations decline appreciably.

Things do not work out that way in the real world.

Entire sections of Sicily and Spain have become almost depopulated by emigration. Yet the people remaining do not prosper; they remain poor. In the United States, the poorest counties experience prolonged out-migration and absolute population drops, but the economic situation of the people who remain is not improved as a result. It often grows steadily worse.

McDowell County, West Virginia, once had a population of 97,000 persons living primarily - and poorly - upon the coal mines. By 1965, the population had fallen to 60,000 persons but they were worse off, according to the New York Times, than they had ever been before and were kept going by charity.

In Fauquier County, Virginia, which has, according to the Times, twelve millionaires and three thousand indigent black families, a free maternity clinic has been established which, upon request, sterilizes poverty-stricken women. At the time of the Times' report, in 1962, the operation had been performed upon sixty-three women. This service may improve the economic condition of the twelve millionaires by reducing the cost of welfare.

But anyone who thinks it is going to bring prosperity to the indigent black families is naive indeed. Ireland, before the potato famine, had almost nine million persons. They were very poor. From starvation, disease and emigration, they were swiftly reduced to less than three million. The fewer poor people were still poor.

Their marriage and birth rates became the lowest in the world but this did not make Ireland well off. One wonders how much a population is supposed to be reduced before prosperity ensues.