- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (4 Mar 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0674024230
- ISBN-13: 978-0674024236
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 4.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product Description
- Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 24/05/08
"As an investigative narrative of how individuals, NGOs, governments and UN
agencies colluded over decades to sideline the human rights of hundreds of millions
of the world's poorest citizens, this is a valuable and extremely readable work."
agencies colluded over decades to sideline the human rights of hundreds of millions
of the world's poorest citizens, this is a valuable and extremely readable work."
Review
This book provides the best historical record yet of how our culture was shaped by the acceptance of birth control.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I find "simon's" review (next to this one) frankly unfathomable. He states that Connelly's book is well researched and scholarly, but then refuses to acquiesce with Connelly's unexceptional conclusion on the grounds that there are too many people and we are causing environmental damage - this is what Connelly spent a good part of the book arguing against!
Connelly notes how a group of intellectuals, eugenicists and so-called "environmentalists" became terrified by the difference in population growth between the west and the other, 'darker' nations. Though this was to be expected as part of the demographic transition, and would level out eventually, they pushed, proselytized and published, inveighing for the idea that there were too many of "us" (read "them") and that "we" (read "us") needed to do something about it. Connelly shows this time and time again. The code-words that referred to poor, coloured people without actually specifically mentioning them, the latent racism that assumed that they were helplessly fecund and about to overrun "us". It's all here, and copiously referenced with unassailable primary sources from private papers and contemporary accounts.
Connelly realises that the argument that there are too many people is, essentially, a racist argument - after all, it's never *really* us who are at fault for over-breeding is it? Always some other group. This timely and scholarly work shows the dangers of thinking that it is an acceptable position - the MILLIONS of Indians forced into sterilisation, the women in China dragged off to abortion centres at up 7 months pregnant. Did you know that China's one child policy was a direct result of the early 1970's book "The Limits to Growth"? Connelly draws our attention to this disturbing fact, among others.
An interesting work and an important one. Highly recommended.
Connelly notes how a group of intellectuals, eugenicists and so-called "environmentalists" became terrified by the difference in population growth between the west and the other, 'darker' nations. Though this was to be expected as part of the demographic transition, and would level out eventually, they pushed, proselytized and published, inveighing for the idea that there were too many of "us" (read "them") and that "we" (read "us") needed to do something about it. Connelly shows this time and time again. The code-words that referred to poor, coloured people without actually specifically mentioning them, the latent racism that assumed that they were helplessly fecund and about to overrun "us". It's all here, and copiously referenced with unassailable primary sources from private papers and contemporary accounts.
Connelly realises that the argument that there are too many people is, essentially, a racist argument - after all, it's never *really* us who are at fault for over-breeding is it? Always some other group. This timely and scholarly work shows the dangers of thinking that it is an acceptable position - the MILLIONS of Indians forced into sterilisation, the women in China dragged off to abortion centres at up 7 months pregnant. Did you know that China's one child policy was a direct result of the early 1970's book "The Limits to Growth"? Connelly draws our attention to this disturbing fact, among others.
An interesting work and an important one. Highly recommended.
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Matthew Connolly has written a fascinating history of the population control movement during the 20th century. He illustrates the differing origins of the movement, from eugenics to the desire for racial dominance or national strength. He shows that limiting population growth became the priority as the world population doubled from 2bn in the mid 20's to 4bn just fifty years later. The fragmented movement achieved initial successes but lost its authority to the financial strength of the US government and the diktat of the Indian and Chinese governments. The population movement clearly shares some of the blame for the resulting paternalistic, over rapid and even coercive approaches to family planning. Connolly concedes that today's female focused family planning charities are very different but sums up the historical movement as both ineffective and unnecessary. This is a somewhat surprising conclusion given the generally accepted impact of humanity on the environment as the global population increases to 6bn today and a projected 9bn by 2050.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
29 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Thorough and Fair
13 April 2008
Format:Hardcover
Though science is a progressive activity, social policies defended as "scientific," when examined in hindsight, often reveal themselves to be based on little more than ephemeral cultural beliefs. Historical analyses of social policies 50 years on almost always uncover strong, sometimes fatal, nationalist, class, race, or gender-biases. Yet, our faith in progress drives us to believe that the mistakes of the past were due simply to inadequate data or poor modeling, not a general and unavoidable gulf between what is knowable scientifically and what is necessary to function communally and politically.
Nicolas D. Kristof, in his review of Matthew Connelly's "Fatal Misconception," (NYT: March 23, 2008) expresses this faith (and error) when he asserts, "The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide."
Connelly does not dispute that the ability to control fertility is a welcome and empowering development. However, he makes a strong case that it has been "the emancipation of women, not population control, that has remade humanity." Connelly ably defends his central thesis - "the great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think one could know people's interests better than they knew it themselves" - and alerts us to the continued universality and threat of this misconception. International population control efforts of the 1960s and 70s are often characterized today, particularly by feminist scholars, as extensions of imperialist policies. But Connelly's warning that "the spirit of empire lives on when people are unaccountable to those they claim to serve" is something I think we would all do well to contemplate.
Connelly's book is thoroughly researched and extremely well written. Highly recommended.
Nicolas D. Kristof, in his review of Matthew Connelly's "Fatal Misconception," (NYT: March 23, 2008) expresses this faith (and error) when he asserts, "The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide."
Connelly does not dispute that the ability to control fertility is a welcome and empowering development. However, he makes a strong case that it has been "the emancipation of women, not population control, that has remade humanity." Connelly ably defends his central thesis - "the great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think one could know people's interests better than they knew it themselves" - and alerts us to the continued universality and threat of this misconception. International population control efforts of the 1960s and 70s are often characterized today, particularly by feminist scholars, as extensions of imperialist policies. But Connelly's warning that "the spirit of empire lives on when people are unaccountable to those they claim to serve" is something I think we would all do well to contemplate.
Connelly's book is thoroughly researched and extremely well written. Highly recommended.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Lots of detai; not enough context
15 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a fine work of historical scholarship, but I have three problems with it. The first one is that it is too ideological, or, to put it another way, insufficiently dispassionate for a work of history. The second is that he is way too hard on the scholarly discipline of demography, the association of which with population control he overstates. Demography in the 20th-century achieved enormous triumphs in formal/mathematical theory, statistical methods, data collection, and (still incompletely developed) social science understanding of population processes. Connelly seems to suggest that any study or analysis at the population level denigrates individual liberty. I think that is an unreasonable assessment.
The third (and most important) problem is that it gets overly bogged down in the details of who said what to whom, bureaucratic squabbles, power struggles, etc. What gets lost in all these details are the grander historical contexts. For example, in the few decades after World War II, we entered the age of what I like to call "high modernism." The manifestations of this age ramified in music, art, architecture, and social/political theory. In the latter sphere we saw "modernization theory," "development economics," welfare state mixed economies, structuralism, and a general predilection toward management, planning, systems approaches, global governance, the sanctity of science, utopianism, and what would later be referred to as "metanarratives." Population control was one manifestation of this intellectual, political, and artistic movement, but the extent to which this context matters seems to escape Connelly's account. Is it a coincidence that the hey-day of population control was also the hey-day of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier?
The post-modernism of the 80s and 90s was characterized by skepticism about modernist metanarratives, and many of the grand theories of the previous decades began to be viewed as dangerously naive. The 1994 World Population Conference may have been a "Waterloo" of population control (a point that Connelly overstates), but the demise of population control had a far broader intellectual context that, again, Connelly does not sufficiently develop.
Is population control dead? Perhaps for now. But fatal misconceptions about human social life come and go. We may not see this one again, but our children and grandchildren very well might.
The third (and most important) problem is that it gets overly bogged down in the details of who said what to whom, bureaucratic squabbles, power struggles, etc. What gets lost in all these details are the grander historical contexts. For example, in the few decades after World War II, we entered the age of what I like to call "high modernism." The manifestations of this age ramified in music, art, architecture, and social/political theory. In the latter sphere we saw "modernization theory," "development economics," welfare state mixed economies, structuralism, and a general predilection toward management, planning, systems approaches, global governance, the sanctity of science, utopianism, and what would later be referred to as "metanarratives." Population control was one manifestation of this intellectual, political, and artistic movement, but the extent to which this context matters seems to escape Connelly's account. Is it a coincidence that the hey-day of population control was also the hey-day of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier?
The post-modernism of the 80s and 90s was characterized by skepticism about modernist metanarratives, and many of the grand theories of the previous decades began to be viewed as dangerously naive. The 1994 World Population Conference may have been a "Waterloo" of population control (a point that Connelly overstates), but the demise of population control had a far broader intellectual context that, again, Connelly does not sufficiently develop.
Is population control dead? Perhaps for now. But fatal misconceptions about human social life come and go. We may not see this one again, but our children and grandchildren very well might.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A strong rebuttal to the flawed logic of population control
10 Jun 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Matthew Connelly, an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, has written the first global history of population control by both governments and non-governmental organizations. He includes the histories of both pro-natal and anti-natal positions, and even touches on related issues such as eugenics and immigration. The book is largely critique of the neo-Malthusian "Population Bomb" mentality and the flawed (albeit well-intentioned) efforts of Westerners to limit population growth in their own countries and in the developing world.
As Connelly writes, "The idea of population control is at least as ancient as Plato's Republic, which described how a 'Guardian class' could be bred to rule, the unfit left to die, and everyone sold the same myth that political inequality reflected the natural order of things."
This harsh sentiment is reflected in policies ranging from today's One Child policy in China to the eugenics movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 1930s that attempted to limit the reproduction of the 'unfit.'
Of course, today many of the countries that attempted to limit population growth in the past are now desperately trying to foster it. Pro-natal policies abound in North America and Europe, with former president Vladimir Putin's offer to pay Russian women $10,000 for each baby being the most extreme example. In words that echo Phillip Longman (see THE EMPTY CRADLE: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What to Do About It), Connelly writes,
"Some have now declared a new population crisis...and we are told that we should fear too many elderly rather than too many children. Now most pronounced in Europe and Japan, the 'aging' of populations may proceed much and more rapidly in countries where fertility fell the fastest, such as China and Mexico, this time without the benefit of a societal safety net."
The world is now facing a slow-motion demographic crisis unlike any before in history. Past crises--be they plagues, wars, famines, etc.--tended to affect the population across the age spectrum equally, or perhaps hit the older and weaker harder. In the unfolding crisis, the elderly are the survivors. We are truly entering a brave new world.
As Connelly writes, "The idea of population control is at least as ancient as Plato's Republic, which described how a 'Guardian class' could be bred to rule, the unfit left to die, and everyone sold the same myth that political inequality reflected the natural order of things."
This harsh sentiment is reflected in policies ranging from today's One Child policy in China to the eugenics movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 1930s that attempted to limit the reproduction of the 'unfit.'
Of course, today many of the countries that attempted to limit population growth in the past are now desperately trying to foster it. Pro-natal policies abound in North America and Europe, with former president Vladimir Putin's offer to pay Russian women $10,000 for each baby being the most extreme example. In words that echo Phillip Longman (see THE EMPTY CRADLE: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What to Do About It), Connelly writes,
"Some have now declared a new population crisis...and we are told that we should fear too many elderly rather than too many children. Now most pronounced in Europe and Japan, the 'aging' of populations may proceed much and more rapidly in countries where fertility fell the fastest, such as China and Mexico, this time without the benefit of a societal safety net."
The world is now facing a slow-motion demographic crisis unlike any before in history. Past crises--be they plagues, wars, famines, etc.--tended to affect the population across the age spectrum equally, or perhaps hit the older and weaker harder. In the unfolding crisis, the elderly are the survivors. We are truly entering a brave new world.
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