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Mind, Science, and the First- and Third-Person
1250 words
Science is concerned with studying physical processes and phenomena. So anything that isn’t physical (like the mind/consciousness) can’t studied by science. I have made many sound arguments for this conclusion. However, we can go deeper. Here is the argument:
(1) Mind is first-personal and subjective.
(2) But science is third-personal and objective.
So (3) it follows that science (a third-personal objective endeavor) can’t study mind (first-personal subjective states).
I will defend these both premises and the conclusion in this article.
Defending the premises
Premise (1) The existence of a first-person perspective (FPP) is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. It is this first-person perspective that we are experiencing, as I write this article and as you read it. A first-person view is subjective experience. Each human has their own special access to their own minds that is “private.” By “private”, I mean it is only accessible to them, the agent, and not accessible to anyone else. If it’s not accessible to anyone else, and another observer would be a third-person observer, then it isn’t accessible by the methods of science. Further, the pronoun “I” denotes an FPP. When we refer to ourselves, we say “I.” “I did that.” “I will do that.” “I have done that.” All of these considerations point to one thing: Consciousness is a subjective state in which agents experience sensations and feelings, and the world around them.
The FPP is the first person perspective of “I”—and by that I mean the experience that we all have every day of our lives. It’s how we ourselves experience the world around us. By “subjective” I mean simply that which belongs to the thinking subject. Subjective states can be said to be intentional states. Intentional states are normative and so irreducible to the physical. So subjective knowledge is—private—knowledge of one’s first-personal states, their beliefs, goals, and desires.
Premise (2) When I say “Science is third-personal”, I mean that there is an observer—on the outside, deliberating on things, viewing things. They are using their first-personal subjective experience to do science, which is in the third person. The mind, apparently, is just the electro-chemistry of the brain—basically the mind is what the brain does. However, mind isn’t identical to brain. Yes, scientists can study the brain since it is made up of physical parts, and neurophysiologists can study the states of the brain. Of course we use our first-personal subjective states to scientifically study what is third-personal. But this need not license the conclusion that since we can study the brain using neuroscience then we can study the mind using neuroscience since M and P are not identical. M is subjective, while P is objective. Lavazza and Robinson (2014) explain this perfectly:
Another set of arguments that present an apparently unanswerable objection to a materialist view is grounded in the fact that every item in an entirely material world would admit of third-person description. Every item would be accessible to the third-person viewpoint and would be amenable to description based on what is revealed to that viewpoint. The problem for the materialist view is that any such description will fail to capture what is accessible only to a first-person viewpoint and thus necessarily will omit the very centre of a person’s world; more specifically, it will omit the self, understood as the subject of conscious states as well as much of the intentional content of those states. As David Lund maintains, third-person information about oneself (knowledge of oneself by description) seems indeed to be neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness of oneself. It is not sufficient, for (in first-person terms) I would be unable to see that the third-person information is information about me unless I were already aware of myself in a first-person way. But in the materialist view, it would have to be sufficient.
Conclusion I have successfully defended both premises, and so the conclusion that science (third-personal) cannot study mind (first-personal) follows. Of course there is the field of neuroscience where we study the brain’s physiology. Neuroscience contains 2 assumptions—(1) that the mind is physical; and (2) that the brain (or some aspect of the CNS) is sufficient for the mind, that is, we are our brains. The goal, then, is to attempt to discover the sufficient conditions of consciousness; basically the brain produces the mind and there are parts of the mind which are reducible to or identical to parts of the brain. The physical enables conscious experience—that is, it is a dependency condition. But dependency conditions are not sufficient conditions. The ultimate claim, then, is that phenomenal experience is identical to, reducible to, or sufficient from neural activity. Neuroscience neither has the skills nor methods to study the mind—being a science and third-personal, it can only study the physical and so it studies the brain, and the CNS, not the mind. There are organs that have specific processes that we can study, like the stomach and digestion, or the lung and breathing, or the heart and blood circulation. So then it would follow that we study the brain for mind, as neuroscientists assume. But the claim clearly fails (Manzotti and Moderato, 2014).
Francis Crick—one of the discoverers of DNA along with James Watson and Rosalind Franklin— in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis said that humans are
“Just a bunch of neurons…You, your joys, and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Of course neurons and everything else that makes up the brain is necessary for the mind but necessariness isn’t sufficientness and it definitely isn’t identity, so Crick’s claim is false.
Richard Dawkins in 1976 argued that humans are mere gene-machines, that is, humans exist merely to propagate selfish genes. But selfishness is a property of organisms (so that’s a mereological fallacy), his idea isn’t even testable by Dawkins’ own admission and DNA can’t be regarded as separate from the cell (Noble, 2011, 2018).
The attempt from Crick to reduce human mental life to mere neurons and by Dawkins to reduce human social life to being for “selfish genes” clearly fail. The most important part, I think, is that they are reductive perspectives, and reductionism is false, so their claims are false. These two claims are attempts at using science to explain the mind and (what appear to be, for Dawkins) intentionality (from his selfish genes), and they obviously fail.
Conclusion
A similar argument is made by Lynne Rudder Baker, where she gives an argument she calls “the master argument”: (1) All phenomena can be explained by science. (2) All science is constructed exclusively from a third-personal view. So (3) All phenomena can be explained with a third-personal view. (Also see Baker, 2007.)
Obviously it’s valid, but is it sound? No, it isn’t, since the first premise is obviously false—mind cannot be explained by a third-personal perspective.
Scientific naturalism is clearly false, since it cannot explain all phenomena like the mind since the mind isn’t physically/ontologically reducible. So, again, as many other arguments have established and entailed, we are not fully physical and, due to this, science can’t explain all aspects of humans. Two substances exist, one first-personal, subjective and private, and the other objective and public. So we should accept that there is an irreducible aspect of human constitution that science simply cannot study, as hard as they try. Thus, the limits of science are clear—Science CANNOT explain everything.
Why Purely Physical Things Will Never Be Able to Think: The Irreducibility of Intentionality to Physical States
2600 words
What do “normativity” and “intentionality” mean?
What “normativity” means has implications for many things in philosophy and science. Normativity has been distinguished between “semantic normativity” and “conceptual normativity” (Skorupski, 2007). On the semantic version, “any normative predicate is definitionally reducible to a reason predicate” and on the conceptual version “the sole normative ingredient in any normative concept is the concept of a reason” (Skorupski, 2007). Skorupski rejects the semantic version and holds to the conceptual version. The conceptual version does hold value, so I will be operating on this definition in this article. “Intentionality” is the power of mental states to be “about” things. My mental state right now is to write this article on the normativity of psychological traits, so I have a desire to perform this action, making it normative.
Regarding the mind-body problem, the meaning of normativity entails that what is normative is not reducible to (physical) dispositions. Human psychology is intentional. What is intentional is normative. Intentions are done “on purpose”, that is, they’re done “for a reason.” If something is done for a reason, then there is a goal that the agent desired by performing their action. When someone performs an action, we ask “Why?”, and the answer is they performed the action for a reason. “Why did I go to work?”, because I wanted to make money. “Why did I write down my thoughts?”, because I wanted a written record of what I was thinking at a certain moment in time. So how the normativity of intentionality comes into play here is this—if agents perform actions for reasons, and reasons are due to beliefs, goals, and desires to bring about some end by an agent, then what explains why an agent performed an action is their reason TO perform the action.
When one “does something for a reason”, they intend to “do something”, that is they perform an action “on purpose”, meaning they have a desired outcome that the action they carried out will hopefully, for the agent, manifest in reality. The best example I can think of is murder. Murder is the intentional killing of an individual. For whatever reason, the agent that committed the act of murder has a reason they want the person they killed dead. Contrast this with manslaughter, which is “the unlawful killing of a human being without malice.” There are two kinds of manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter which would happen in the heat of the moment, think a passion killing. The other kind being the unintentional killing of a human being. This distinction between murder and manslaughter is, basically, down to what an agent INTENDS TO DO. Thus, one is a murderer if they set out one night to kill an individual, that is if they plan it out (have a goal to murder); and one commits manslaughter if they did not intend to kill the other individual, let’s say two people have a fight and one punches the other and the hit person hits their head on the curb and dies.
Now that I have successfully stated what normativity means, and have distinguished between intentional and unintentional action (murder and manslaughter), I must discuss the distinction between intentions and dispositions.
The normativity of psychological states
The problem of action is how to distinguish what an agent does for reasons, goals, or desires, and what merely happens to them (Paul, 2021). I have argued before that reasons, goals, beliefs, and desires (what an agent does) make the distinction between antecedent conditions which then cause an agent’s movement but were not consciously done (what happens to them).
We know what intentions are, but what are dispositions? Behavior is dispositional, so Katz’s considerations have value here:
a disposition [is] a pattern of behavior exhibited frequently … in the absence of coercion … constituting a habit of mind under some conscious and voluntary control … intentional and oriented to broad goals” (1993b, 16).
There is a wealth of philosophical literature which argues that intentions are irreducible to dispositions (e.g. Kripke, 1980; Bilgrami, 2005, 2006; also see Weber, 2008). Intentional states are, then, irreducible to physical or functional explanations. It then follows that intentional states can’t be explained/studied by science. If intentional states can’t be explained/studied by science, then intentional states are special, indeed they are unique to agents (minded beings).
In the conclusion to Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Akeel Bilgrami describes his pincer argument using a Fregean extension of Moore’s non-naturalism:
Via a discussion of an imaginary subject wholly lacking agency, it was shown how deeply the very notion of thought or intentionality turns on possessing the point of view of agency, of subjectivity, the point of view of the first, rather than third, person. And it was there shown via an argument owing to a Fregean extension of Moore’s anti-naturalism that such a picture of intentionality required ceasing to see intentional subjects in wholly dispositional terns and, indeed, requires seeing intentional states such as beliefs and desires as themselves normative states or commitments. When so viewed, intentional states are very different from how they appear to a range of philosophers who think of them along normative lines, such as [Donald] Davidson. When so viewed, they are not only irreducible to and non-identical with the physical and causal states of the subjects; they cannot even be clearly assessed to be dependent on such states in the specific ways that philosophers like to capture with such terms as ‘supervenience’. (There are of course all sorts of other dependencies that intentional states have on the states of the central nervous system, which do not amount to anything like the relations that go by the name of ‘supervenience’.) This is because when they are so viewed, they are essentially first-person phenomena, phenomena whose claims to supervenient dependence on third person states such as physical or causal properties are either stateable or deniable. (Therefore, not assesable.) (Bilgrami, 2006: 291-292)
Intentionality is a sufficient and necessary condition for mentality according to Brentano. And intentionality along with normativity are 2 out of 5 of the “marks of the mental” (Pernu, 2017). It can even be said to be the aboutedness of the mind to a thing other than itself. If I talk about something or state that I have a desire to do something, this is the aboutness of intentional states. So mental states that are directed at things are said to be intentional states. Intentionality requires goals, beliefs, and desires, so this designates the intentional stance as one of action, which is distinguished from behavior. Since the mental is normative (Zangwill, 2005), then, since we have the problem of normativity for physicalism, this is yet another reason to reject dualism and to accept some kind of dualism.
Goal-directedness is another mark of intentionality. When one acts intentionally, they act in order to bring about a goal they have in mind about something. Take the example of murder I gave above. Knowing that murder is the intentional killing of a human being, the murderer has the goal in mind to end the life of the other person. They act in accordance with their desired to bring about the goal they have in mind.
Since psychological states are intentional states, and intentional states are normative (Wedgewood, 2007; Kazemi, 2022), then psychological states are normative. Since mental states that have content are normative then we cannot reductively explain mind. Thus, Yoo’s (2004) discussion of the normativity of intentionality holds value:
Thus, the reason why thought and behavior cannot be explained in terms of non-intentional, physical, vocabulary comes down to a certain “normative element” constitutive of our interpretation and attributions of the propositional attitudes. Clearly this normative element plays a pivotal role. But in spite of its significance, it is highly obscure and insufficiently understood. Indeed, there have been no serious attempts to systematically examine what, exactly, the normative element amounts to.
…
As Davidson points out, the normative element ultimately has its roots in the object of the interpreter’s inquiry, which is another mind. Unlike black holes and quarks, which do not conform to norms, let alone the norms of rationality, a mind, by its very nature, has to conform to the norms of rationality. Otherwise, we are not dealing with a mind, should no or too few norms of rationality apply. Black holes and quarks certainly conform to laws – nomological principles – that support statements like “Light ought to bend in a black hole,” but such uses of “ought” have no normative implications (see Brandom 1994, ch. 1). The mental states that make up a mind, on the other hand, are such that they bear normative relations among each other, since their very contents are individuated by the norms of rationality (which is clearly stated in the third account). And the observer of a person’s mind must discern in the other’s bodily movements and vocal utterances a rational pattern that is itself a pattern to which the observer (attributor, appraiser) must subscribe. Hence, insofar as the norms of rationality are reflexive – they constrain both the mental states of the interpreted mind as well as the process of interpretation engaged by the interpreter herself – this aspect of the normative fully satisfies the third constraint.
Many arguments exist which conclude that the mental cannot be explained in terms of words that refer only to physical properties, and this is one of them. And since the mental is normative, this is yet another reason why there cannot—and indeed why their never will be—reductive explanations of the mental to the physical.
The irreducibility of intentionality
If physicalism is true, then intentionality would reduce, or be identical to, something physical. Then we should have an explanation of intentionality in physical terms. However, I would say this is not possible. (See Heikinheimo’s Rule-Following and the Irreducibility of Intentional States.) It’s not possible because physical systems can’t intend, that is they can’t act intentionally.
The argument is a simple one: Only beings with minds can intend. This is because mind allows a being to think. Since the mind isn’t physical, then it would follow that a physical system can’t intend to do something—since it wouldn’t have the capacity to think. Take an alarm system. The alarm system does not intend to sound alarms when the system is tripped. It’s merely doing what it was designed to do, it’s not intending to carry out the outcome. The alarm system is a physical thing made up of physical parts. So we can then liken this to, say, A.I.. A.I. is made up of physical parts. So A.I. (a computer, a machine) can’t think. However, individual physical parts are mindless and no collection of mindless things counts as a mind. Thus, a mind isn’t a collection of physical parts. Physical systems are ALWAYS a complicated system of parts but the mind isn’t. So it seems to follow that nothing physical can ever have a mind.
Physical parts of the natural world lack intentionality. That is, they aren’t “about” anything. It is impossible for an arrangement of physical particles to be “about” anything—meaning no arrangement of intentionality-less parts will ever count as having a mind. So a mind can’t be an arrangement of physical particles, since individual particles are mindless. Since mind is necessary for intentionality, it follows that whatever doesn’t have a mind cannot intend to do anything, like nonhuman animals. It is human psychology that is normative, and since the normative ingredient for any normative concept is the concept of reason, and only beings with minds can have reasons to act, then human psychology would thusly be irreducible to anything physical. Indeed, physicalism is incompatible with intentionality (Johns, 2020). The problem of intentionality is therefore yet another kill-shot for physicalism. It is therefore impossible for intentional states (i.e. cognition) to be reduced to, or explained by, physicalist theories/physical things.
This is similar to Lynn Baker’s (1981) argument in Why Computers Can’t Act (note how in her conclusion she talks about language—the same would therefore hold for nonhuman animals):
P1: In order to be an agent, an entity must be able to formulate intentions.
P2: In order to formulate intentions, an entity must have an irreducible first-person perspective.
P3: Machines lack an irreducible first-person perspective.
C: Therefore, machines are not agents.…
So machines cannot engage in intentional behavior of any kind. For example, they cannot tell lies, since lying involves the intent to deceive; they cannot try to avoid mistakes, since trying to avoid mistakes entails intending to conform to some normative rule. They cannot be malevolent, since having no intentions at all, they can hardly have wicked intentions. And, most significantly, computers cannot use language to make assertions, ask questions, or make promises, etc., since speech acts are but a species of intentional action. Thus, we may conclude that a computer can never have a will of its own.
So PP’s “depression” about ChatGPT “scoring” 11 points on his little (non-construct valid) test is irrelevant. It’s a machine and, as successfully argued, machines will NEVER have the capacity to think/act/intend.
What does this mean for a scientific explanation of human psychology?
The arguments made here point to one conclusion—since intentions don’t reduce to the physical and functional states of humans (like neurophysiology; Rose, 2005), then it is impossible for science to explain intentions, since what is normative isn’t reducible to, or identical with, physical properties. This is another arrow in the quiver of the anti-physicalist/dualist to show that there is something more than the physical—there is an irreducible SELF or MIND and we humans are the only minded beings. Science can’t explain the human mind and, along with it, the intentions that arrive from a deliberating mind. This is also an argument against Benjamin Libet’s experiments in which he concludes that the subjects’ brain activity preceded their actions, that is, it is the brain that initiates action. This view, however, is false, since the (minded) agent is what initiates action. Libet is therefore guilty of the mereological fallacy. Freely-willed processes are therefore not initiated by the brain (Radder and Meynen, 2012).
Elon Musk and Sam Harris have warned of a “robot rebellion” like what occurred in The Terminator. Though, since what I’ve argued here is true—that purely physical things lack minds, that is they can’t intend or think—then such worries should rightly stay in the realm of sci-fi. The implication is clear—since purely physical things cannot intend, and humans can intend, then there is an irreducible SELF or MIND which allows us to intend. The claim, then, that the human brain is a computer is clearly false. It then follows that humans aren’t purely physical; there is a mental and physical aspect to humans—that is, there are two substances that make us up, the mental and the physical, and it is clear that M (the mental) is irreducible to P (the physical). Sentient machines are, luckily, a myth. It’s just not possible for scientists to imbue a machine with a mind since machines are purely physical and minds aren’t. John Searle’ s Chinese Room Argument, too, is an argument against strong A.I.. Machines will never become conscious since consciousness isn’t physical.
This is yet another argument against the scientific study of the mind/self and, of course, against psychology and hereditarianism. This is then added to the articles that argue against the overall hereditarian program in psychology, and psychology more broadly: Conceptual Arguments Against Hereditarianism; Reductionism, Natural Selection, and Hereditarianism; and Why a Science of the Mind is Impossible. For if the main aspect of IQ test-taking is thinking, thinking is cognition, cognition is intentional and therefore psychological, it follows that since there can be no explanations of intentional states in terms of physical vocabulary, and if cognition—being a psychological trait—is normative, then the conclusion is, again, that hereditarianism and psychology fail their main goal. It is impossible.
Will Aid to Africa Increase the African Population?
2650 words
It has been commonly stated in hereditarian circles that by increasing aid to Africa, then we would be merely helping their demographic explosion. In 2020, the average adolescent fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rate was 98 births per 1000 girls. Birthrates in most African countries are very high, and to some, the claim is that if we give aid to these countries then they will continue to have more children as they have the means to do so. Though high birthrates in SSA are “concentrated among vulnerable groups where progress is often poorest” (Neal et al, 2020). This worry however, has no basis in reality. In this article, I will provide a few studies looking at the relationship between economic aid and decreasing birthrates. This, then, refutes the (racist) worries of people like Steve Sailer who warn that by increasing aid to Africa we are then helping their population explosion. However, what is borne out by data in countries where this has occurred, if there are sufficient family planning methods, the birthrate will decrease—not increase—with monetary aid to poor African countries.
What is hunger?
Hunger is a feeling of discomfort or weakness; having a desire or craving for food or having pain that is caused by lack of food. There is malnutrition (a condition caused by a diet that has insufficient nutrients for normal functioning), undernourishment (where the food one does eat does not give enough kcal for normal functioning), and starvation (a state of the body caused by long-term lack of food or nutrients). Hunger is a self-reported notion, and so, we would then need to indirectly measure physical variables that are associated with being well-fed or not. Like measuring one’s blood for the lack of certain nutrients, measuring the foods they do eat and ascertaining the macro-nutrient content of what they eat, measuring their height and weight and comparing it to a representative sample, checking to see if there are micro-nutrient deficiencies (Conway, 2012).
But what causes hunger? Inequality/inequities and poverty cause hunger. Indeed, we have enough food to feed 10 billion people—the world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the world population, but people making $2 a day cannot afford the food (Holt-Giminez et al, 2012) while 828 million people per day go hungry. About 14 million children suffer from acute malnutrition, 45 percent of child deaths around the world are due to hunger and it’s causes, and 700 children die per day due to dirty water, unhygienic water sources, and hunger. So we DO have the food to feed these people, what they DON’T have is the money to feed themselves and their families due to the pittance wages they receive. The year 2022 has been called “a year of unprecedented hunger” by the World Food Programme.
In The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the world 2021 published in mid-2021 it was reported by the UN that an:
estimated that between 720 and 811 million people went hungry in 2020. High costs and low affordability also mean billions cannot eat healthily or nutritiously. Considering the middle of the projected range (768 million), 118 million more people were facing hunger in 2020 than in 2019 – or as many as 161 million, considering the upper bound of the range.
In 1974, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) began reporting on the number of people that faced hunger issues. They define hunger as:
an uncomfortable or painful physical sensation caused by insufficient consumption of dietary energy. It becomes chronic when the person does not consume a sufficient amount of calories (dietary energy) on a regular basis to lead a normal, active and healthy life. For decades, FAO has used the Prevalence of Undernourishment indicator to estimate the extent of hunger in the world, thus “hunger” may also be referred to as undernourishment.
Hunger is related to food insecurity, where food insecurity is when one is unable to procure items for nourishment due either to availability or lack of monies to procure foodstuffs that would lead to normal development. The FAO also has a measure of food insecurity prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) along with the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in a population based on the food insecurity experience scale (FIES) which estimates how prevalent food insecurity is in a population down to the household or individual level which is ascertained through interviews with the populace.
Now that I have defined hunger, how we indirectly measure hunger (with its physical correlates) and the troubling future we have with hunger across the world, we can now turn to the claim that aid to poor countries will increase their birthrates. This claim has been made a lot by many different groups, and it certainly is a logical claim to make, but what does the data say in countries where such an intervention did occur? Did their population increase even after aid was given to them? Or did their population decrease as they got aid? The answer to this question will be the answer to the question in Africa as we continue to reach the fabled year of 2050 when their population is expected to reach 5 times its present size by the year 2050 in one 1988 estimate (Yanagishita, 1988) to 4 projections based on different assumptions (Haub, 1997), to certain African countries increasing even past 2100 (Ezeh, Kissling, and Singer, 2020). Africa is quickly urbanizing (Veary et al, 2019), and since urbanization decreases fertility rates (Yi and Vaupel, 1989; White et al, 2008; Martine, Alves, and Cavenaghi, 2013; Lerch, 2019), I would hedge my bet that the population growth in Africa—if ample aid is provided since aid to developing countries decreases, not increases, a country’s population—will be far lower than predicted, nevermind the fact that the assumption would be that the population would increase linearly.
Food security and population growth
In his 2010 book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?, Gordon Conway (2010) writes about the claim that aid to Africa will increase the African population. He cites a study stating that giving developing populations more food is a self-defeating policy since it will cause their population to increase. He writes:
Nevertheless, the fertility rate decline has not been universal. In many Sub-Saharan countries fertility rate declines have stalled at rates over 5.0 after gradually decreasing for several years.25 The reasons are complex, but a common feature appears to be the decreased funding for family planning programs. According to data from thirty-one countries, on average 30 percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa have an unmet need for modern family planning methods, a proportion that has not declined in the last decade.26 In nineteen of these countries, it is as high as nearly 50 percent. If fertility were to remain constant at current levels, the population of less-developed regions would increase to 9.8 billion in 2050 instead of the projected 7.9 billion.27
A popular misconception is that providing the developing countries with more food will serve to increase populations; in other words, it is a self-defeating policy.28 The more food women have, the more children they will have and the greater will be their children’s survival, leading to population growth, so goes the argument. However, the experience of the demographic transition described above suggests the opposite. As people become more prosperous, which includes being better fed and having lower child mortality, the fewer children women want. Providing they then have access to family planning methods, the fertility rates will drop and the population will cease to grow.29
Let’s take a look at these references in turn:
25 – Ezeh, A., Mberu, B., and Emina, J. 2009. Stall in fertility decline in Eastern African countries: regional analysis of patterns, determinants and implications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364:2991–3007.
In Kenya and Tanzania, fertility has declined for the most educated women and in certain other regions. In Uganda, while fertility levels remain at the pre-transition state, there is a decrease in fertility for specific demographics of women—the most educated and urbanized, along with those in the raster region of the country. In Zimbabwe, though fertility rates continue to fall, it isn’t falling for women with less than a secondary education and in certain regions. This is yet more data that speaks to the claim that as locals urbanize and get more educated, the fertility levels begin to decrease.
26 – Prata, N. 2009. Making family planning accessible in resource-poor settings. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364:3093–3099.
Since 30 percent of women in SSA have an unmet need for family planning, by educating them on the need for family planning along with readily accessible contraceptives, ensuring that contraceptives become a permanent part of family planning, and taking action to remove barriers that hinder family planning, we can then help those 30 percent of women plan for families and therefore birth rates will decrease. It is therefore imperative that we roll out programs that would teach people how to plan for families and that would mean educating them on contraceptive use and, as I will explain below, give aid to them, since when people become more prosperous, the birth rate will decrease since they have more children since their death rates are so high.
28 – Hopfenberg, R. and Pimental, D. 2001. Human population numbers as a function of food supply. Environment, Development and Sustainability. 3:1–15.
The authors claim in this paper that experimental and correlational data state that as food production increases, so too will the population that is receiving that food, as they will then be unfettered by the ravenous issues that affect their death rates. They would then be able to have as many children as they want, so the story goes. However, as I will go into below, this is not what we have seen when aid and family planning have been to countries that so sorely needed it.
29 – Foster, A., and Rosenzwieg, M. 2006. Does economic growth reduce fertility? Rural India 1971–1999. Delhi: NCAER India Policy Forum. (pg 179-205)
Foster and Rosenzwieg showed that although female literacy rose to 81 percent in India from 1981-1999, they found no evidence that the increase in female literacy had an effect on decreasing the birthrate in India. The Green Revolution in India led to increased growth and the ability to diversify their occupations. This, in turn, made child-rearing more expensive which then led to a subsequent decrease in the birthrate. Their results do show that the decrease in fertility was driven by an increase in wages for Indian women. They, furthermore, found evidence that health centers (like hospitals) were associated with a decrease in fertility. Foster and Rosenzwieg, thus, “have clearly demonstrated that economic incentives have mattered greatly for the decline in rural fertility in India” (Desai, 2006).
29 – Gertler, P., and Molyneaux, J. 1994. How economic development and family planning programs combine to reduce Indonesian fertility. Demography 31:33–63.
Gertler and Molyneux show that the dramatic decrease in fertility in Indonesia between 1982 to 1987 was due to the increased use in contraceptives along with the increased demand of contraceptives. They found that improvements in women’s education along with an increase in wages for both men and women were responsible for 45 to 60 percent of the decline, and this was driven by contraceptive use. Further, 75 percent of the decline was due to contraceptive use, while 87 percent of the use in contraceptives was due to increased wages and education. They therefore showed that increasing education and wages were responsible for 65 percent of the fertility decline.
29 – Poston, D. Jr, and Gu, B. 1987. Socioeconomic development, family planning and fertility in China. Demography 24:531–551.
Poston and Gu showed that structural development had strong negative effects on fertility, and that family planning has a negative effect on fertility. Basically, SES factors led to a decrease in the birthrate in China. In urban Chinese areas, family planning is higher than in rural areas where fertility is higher, which then licenses the conclusion that family planning decreases birthrates (Poston, 2008). Limieng, Shatalova, and Kalabikhina (2022) show that the higher the per capita GDP, the lower the fertility rate is.
Conclusion
The studies reviewed here show that as people become more well-off, given that they have access to family planning methods, their population will then begin to decrease. There is though, as is the case with China, a fine line to walk through where the population will get too old and not enough younger people will be around, as is the case in Asia already (Goh, 2005). SSA lies at one end of the spectrum—increased fertility due to lack of family planning, low education, low contraceptive use, and low income—while Asian countries like China represent the other side of the spectrum—decreased fertility, higher contraceptive use, and a higher GDP which then leads to a decrease in fertility. Very clearly, there is a middle-ground where a population can be well-off and sustain a population when they have the resources to do so.
In an article for The Conversation, Akinyemi, Dungumaro, and Salaam write:
Why are birthrates so high in five African countries?
The major factors driving population growth in these countries include low contraceptive use, high adolescent fertility rates and a prevalence of polygamous marriages. There’s also the low education status of women, low to poor investment in children’s education, and factors related to religion and ideas.
The use of modern contraceptives is generally low across sub-Saharan Africa. The overall prevalence is 22%. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, however, the uptake of short-acting contraceptives is at 8.1%. In Nigeria, it is at 10.5%. The uptake in Ethiopia is 25%, in Tanzania it’s 27.1% and in Egypt 43%.
For long-acting family planning methods, apart from Egypt with over 20% uptake, the other four countries driving population growth in the region recorded very poor uptake. This low uptake will logically lead to a population explosion.
Some of the factors associated with high contraceptive use in Africa are women’s education, exposure to news and mass media, good economic status and urban residency.
Investing in women’s health, furthermore, leads to “strong intergenerational spillover effects” which then encourages economic development, which would then further decrease the birthrate (Bloom, Kuhn, and Pretnner, 2018). This is borne out in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Botswana where women had higher levels of education and subsequent decreases in child mortality (Ramirez, Tania and Stewart, 1997). There is also evidence that declining fertility explained a bit less than one-third of the decrease in poverty in rural India in the years 1987 and 1988 and 1993 and 1994 (Dupta and Dubey, 2003). Reducing infant and child mortality also decreases fertility and increases schooling (Kalemli-Ozcan, 2000).
When locales are food secure, then they will have a lower child mortality rate, ceteris paribus and malnutrition is a large driver of this relationship (Bain et al, 2019). Household food insecurity along with dietary diversity is associated with “stunting” (low height for one’s expected age) in SSA (Gassara et al, 2021). So the claim that aid—whether it’s monetary or foodstuffs—will increase the population exponentially is obviously false.
So for people like Steve Sailer who look at current demographic trends using the UN’s data, calling it “the world’s most important graph“, the literature shows that, as Africa urbanizes, becomes more educated, has access to family planning and contraceptives, that their population will decrease. So, by giving aid and education, the population in Africa won’t increase, it will actually DECREASE. We have the means to feed the world on the basis of the food we already produce, it is we just need to educate propel, provide aid to them in all shapes and forms, and then people will have fewer children when they are food secure and have access to contraceptives along with education about them.
Thus, the answer to the question “Will aid to Africa increase the African population?” is a big “No.”
NotPoliticallyCorrect 