Mishlei and Government - Part Three
What's the ideal population from the perspective of good governance?
This is the third in my series exploring Shlomo Hamelech's insights into the nature of government through the thoughts of Rabbi S.R. Hirsch. Part one discussed the importance of transparency in the exercise of authority, and part two looked at the relationship between monarchies and Divine authority.
Here, we'll focus on population size.
For context, Hirsch was familiar with the work of the late 18th and early 19th Century economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who believed that caring for the poor and weak would lead to unsupportable population growth and widespread suffering. Instead, Malthus taught, measures should be taken to ensure that populations should remain low and "manageable."
The destructive role played by Malthusian thinking through later eugenics programs and various social movements (including Naziism) is well known. But Malthus was a major intellectual and public policy force for many decades. Such thinking contributed to influential predictions of imminent population-driven disasters - like those of Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Here's how Ehrlich began his book:
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate"
It doesn't take a Stanford professor to see that, with a world population that's more than doubled since Ehrlich's book appeared, that never happened. In fact, the history of the industrialized world over the past two centuries has clearly shown that quickly-rising populations can not only support themselves, but provide billions of people with an increasing standard of living unimagined previously.
Which brings us to our passage in Mishlei (14:28):
בְּרָב עָם הַדְרַת מֶלֶךְ וּבְאֶפֶס לְאֹם מְחִתַּת רָזוֹן
With a greater population the king finds glory, but with declining population there is fear of famine.
Hirsch understands this to mean that a government should seek the satisfaction of successfully providing the needs and happiness of as many people as possible. For what else could fully justify it’s existence? Indeed, millions of content and loyal citizens is a point of enormous pride for a nation.
But Hirsch also notes that, with the words “but with declining population there is fear of famine” Mishlei is suggesting that reducing your population doesn’t guarantee that existing threats to basic living supplies will disappear.
In fact, our experience strongly suggests that a growing industrialized population is better positioned to innovate its way to creative and effective solutions.