This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 5th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Human Rights Records of China and India are driven at least in part by claims that overpopulation presents a unique

threat. But does it? And what rights get sacrificed in the name of population control?

Chelsea Follid is author of the new Cato paper Neomalthusianism and

coercive population control in China and India. We spoke last week. When we think

about Thomas Malthus, the economist, he's got a reputation perhaps undeserved for being pessimistic.

But of course he says, you know, naturally at some point our population will outstrip our productive capacity.

People will die and we will eventually return to subsistence level agriculture and that's just the steady state where humanity is stuck.

That hasn't been true for hundreds of years now.

First, in some places and then in others.

But we're seeing a resurgence in China and India of essentially an argument that takes

a page from Malthous's book. What do we see in India and China with respect to population?

So first of all, we actually see this resurgence of the Neomalthusian mindset,

not just in India and China, but even in the United States.

And in other countries in the West, we have seen public figures ranging from Prince Harry to Bill, Mayor, to Bill Nye, the science guy, all recently talking about the dangers of overpopulation and in some cases advocating government penalties to try to deal with that.

We have of course heard Congresswoman Alexandra Okejo Cortez famously last year question the morality of childbearing in the face of climate change and so many people are now worried about overpopulation.

It's not just India and China,

but the two countries where we've seen

the worst human rights abuses actually resulting

from this mindset arguably have been India and China and

while the worst of those abuses are hopefully in the past we do see some

...