Noam
Noam
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Very interesting post — and thanks for the link to your post about completed fertility, which was also great. The two parts I object to are these:

When you list Africa’s problems, you shouldn’t list high fertility. You should list these other things. If a city is growing so fast the government can’t keep up with infrastructure needs, the problem is not “the existence of humans,” the problem is “bad governance.”

Your argument, if I understand it correctly, is that large growing populations in themselves are not a problem, because in combination with good governance they produce excellent results and positive spillovers(e.g. in the developed world). But the reality is that in most of Africa, most growing cities accumulate large slums which do not even raise the wages of migrants, adjusting for cognitive ability. There are exceptions with excellent guidance of strongmen like in Rwanda, but I think the best guess is that after Kagame loses power, Rwanda will experience some reversion. But assuming an army of “Kagames” doesn’t suddenly take power across the continent, I can’t see how overpopulation won’t add to the stresses of these already poorly governed countries.

Also, I’m not sure I understand this claim at all:

Africa’s greatest resource is not oil or metal or cotton, nor gold or ivory, nor cheap labor, nor expropriable land; it is the ingenuity and creativity of its people. In the decades to come, we will all have cause to be thankful for African fecundity.

What is your reasoning behind this bold claim? The truth is that the human capital is just not there for such ingenuity and creativity to bear any fruit: the average African pupil score over two standard deviations below the European/North American ones. Little progress has been made in the last several decades to close this gap. What new inventions are coming from these students, especially when they’re trapped in slums that don’t connect to cities and whose countries lack strong leadership?

    Noam

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    Noam