Population (What is It Good For?)

We invoke the anti-Vietnam War song "War" because a spirit of urgency—not unlike the song's own—animates contemporary reflections on population as a global problem.¹ The spirit of defiance found in that song also appears in some of the books we review here: three slim volumes that raise questions about the uses and abuses of the notion of population. This notion does much work in contemporary economic and development policy, as well as in debates about migration to the EU and the US. It creeps up in nationalist ideas about safeguarding the imagined roots of many Euro-American societies, and it is the centerpiece of dystopic visions of out-of-control numbers that endanger the entire planet.

It is, of course, an old Foucauldian point that population is not simply a given or a natural kind, but an object brought into existence through the rise of modern institutions and their capacities to both aggregate and govern by masses of data. Yet, even while acknowledging the acts of abstraction and imagination involved in bringing population into being, it nonetheless seems hard to dispute the absolute numbers, their urgency, or the corresponding human impact on the planet. In 1800, the world's population was around 1 billion; in 1900, 1.5 billion; in 2000, 5 billion. Today there are 7.7 billion people, and this figure is expected to rise to a number somewhere between 11–19 billion by 2100. As all three books make clear, population entails thorny questions about the quantity of human lives but also raises questions of quality: what kind of lives can we have, what kind of lives are desirable, and what kinds of lives get dismissed as unwanted?

So population—what is it good for? Michelle Murphy's The Economization of Life goes a step beyond "absolutely nothing" (the punchline in the song "War"), boiling down to a clear answer: nothing good! We start with Murphy's book because it provides a magisterial narrative about population that synthesizes a great many interdisciplinary conversations from recent decades, including the afterlives of Foucault on biopolitics, science studies work on statistics and numerical reason, the anthropology of development, feminist reproductive politics, and intersectional analyses of race and health. Murphy's book draws all these threads together into a disturbing account of how "population" came to be not only a pressing concern at this moment but also part of the taken-for-granted cosmological background of human life—one that ultimately serves to justify racist differential valuations of human life and the unequal distribution of life-chances.

For Murphy, it is impossible to talk about population apart from "economy." These two "aggregate forms of life," she argues, have become central elements of "the shared firmament" all of us live under today (1, 140). They have become self-evident concerns for social and political life thanks to extensive "epistemic infrastructures" (6)—buildings, paperwork, bureaucracies, standards, funding, disciplines like biology, economics, and demography, and a range of other knowledge-making practices and technologies—defining what is thinkable and feelable in the present. Population and economy, Murphy argues, provide the affective "atmosphere" in which we all live (Chapter 1). Murphy's book is largely a genealogy of the present—an account of how all this came to be—generally told at the scale of the Foucauldian antecedent, with a historical focus on the 20th century, giving the analysis at once a greater degree of resolution and a shallower temporal horizon. The book opens with the suggestive image of American biologist Raymond Pearl's photographs of a bottle of drosophilia (fruit flies) at three points of time—from genesis to full maturity to mass death—a persuasive rendition of what Pearl claimed in the 1920s was the "law of population," a growth or...