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How does illiteracy help to increase the population growth rate? Illiteracy as such is not a determinant of fertility. When people live in villages and grow food, regardless of whether they are literate or not, they have high fertility. Literacy does not make them wiser. One does not need to be literate to understand the choice between a small number versus a large number of children. In the village, having to do backbreaking hard manual labor in traditional agriculture, there is constant shortage of labor and there is no advantage to having a smaller number of children. The cost of raising a human child is often less than that of raising a calf and people have no reason to worry. The idea that had people chosen to raise fewer children, they would be better off is a serious error. The error comes from the idea that if the land is the same as before, and the labor is half, than the land gives the same crops with half the labor, and per worker amount of food is double. This is utterly nonsensical. If the labor is half, the output is half, because people just have to let half the land go to fallow. There is no reason for them to produce more food that they cannot eat. We will later show the evil consequences of overproduction of food. By not studying history, the idle thinker does not learn that food shortage was never a general problem, though it occurred sporadically and in localized areas. The big problem was the lack of effective medicine to fight of germs, bacteria and virus. Deaths owing to starvation are just nothing compared to deaths owing to diseases. When industrial revolution arrived, people moved out of villages and went to towns to produce industrial goods. Their quality of life dramatically improved. They got better medicine, better clothing, better housing and better transport, and incomparably better entertainment. But they saw that to take part in the urban professions, their children had to get vocational or professional education to learn the productive skills. Nobody needed education to get better ideas. That is, it is an elementary mistake to suppose that people need education to think better. Education makes one learn skills, not wisdom. A mechanic that can fix your car is not wiser than you are, he just has the skill you do not have. A doctor is not wiser than you are, he just has the skill to figure out the correct course of medical action. Now, with more productive skill, a man can earn more than without the skill. But learning the skill is very costly, and the parents are compelled to reduce the number of children if they want them to get costly education. Urban parents have fewer children than the rural ones, not because the urban ones are wiser or smarter, but because the urban parents face the cost of giving education to the children while the rural parents do not have to bother with education. Do girls need education to learn to cook and clean the house, wash the cloth, and sleep with the husband? No, of course not. But educated urban males want wives that can attend the theater or read a book and in general speak properly. And that is why they want the wife to be educated. But send the girls to college, and it compels the girls to delay their marriages, and the delay alone is responsible for roughly half of the fertility reduction. Just by sending girls to college and delaying marriage, you can reduce fertility rate from 6 to 3 per mother. So literacy works not by giving better ideas, but by forcing delayed marriage and the use of contraception is forced upon by the high cost of giving education to children. The high fertility is a feature of rural peasant life. And so is poverty. More than 90% of the world’s poor are poor for the simple reason: they produce too much food, push the price of food far below cost, and make themselves poorer. The idea that had there been fewer people, they would be richer is counter-factual in the rural context. You do not get richer by producing more food. You get richer by producing everything other than food. People make a big mistake when they focus only on food, and link food to land. To get richer, you do not produce more food and do not need more land, but you need to make a battery or a pen drive or a disc bearing songs or a book containing printed words. Mostly, you need to produce/provide services that require almost zero natural resource, such as by singing or teaching or inspiring or giving psychotherapy. Natural resource cannot make you richer, human resource can. So you want economic development? It means you want to sing more and dance more rather than eat more. And then you see why you have nothing to worry about land (natural resource) and food. And you do not need better ideas: you need the skills.

Mohammad Gani 

Professor at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) (2006–present)4yr

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