"Population" has become a dirty word in policy discussions.

I just finished reading the fascinating article by George Packer in the 11/10 New Yorker about the city of Lagos, Nigeria. The article give a feeling of hopelessness -- the situation is horrid there and steadily getting worse. Yet Lagos is comparatively a bright spot in Africa -- people continue to move there, want to live there, see it as their hope for the future.

I was born in Philadelphia. When I was born Lagos had a population of 200,000. That was about 10% of the population of Philadelphia, a manageable small-city size. At my projected death Lagos will have a projected population of 30,000,000 people. That will be 20 times the population of Philadelphia.

Surely this astonishing population growth has something to do with the problems of Lagos. Lagos is extreme, but population growth far above world standards characterize Nigeria and indeed Africa as a whole.

But Packer does not mention population growth as the cause of the misery. His focus is on corruption, pollution, slums, lack of municipal services, privatization, etc. He sees the new larger populations as a multiplier of the misery, rather than as a cause of the misery. I have gotten used to seeing "population" ignored -- not even mentioned -- in discussions of world problems. This is such an egregious example, I had to write this blog entry!

The one change that could offer real hope for the future of Africa would be the dramatic drop in birth rates. Resources channel into improving the lives of the people, rather than into making more people. This has been tried only once in the world, on a large scale. It worked. When I was little, in Philadelphia, my mother told me to eat up and think of all the starving people in China. Today, US farmers worry about food imports from China.