“Population became a new kind of experimental concern in the work of Raymond Pearl, the prominent and prolific American biologist who claimed that his 1920s experiments with fruit flies in bottles captured a law of “population” that governed “how things grow,” and that could further be graphed as what he called “the logistic curve,” today more commonly called the growth curve or the S-curve. Pearl claimed this curve captured a law of life found in any aggregate of living-beings at any scale: bacteria in a petri dish, Drosophila in a bottle, and humans too, in a city, nation, class, or planet. The population growth curve, as a line tracing the balance of life and death in a finite container, was abstracted as a universal tendency, repeatable for all life, everywhere.
Pearl promoted his work redefining “population” at the inaugural World Population Conference of 1927 held in Geneva, an event designed to propel a new international focus on problems of population that was distinct from eugenics. Organized behind the scenes by feminist birth control advocate Margaret Sanger under Pearl’s supervision, the conference invited a select, mostly male, mostly American and European cohort of biologists and social scientists, along with a smattering of participants from Japan, China, Siam, India, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The event promoted an expert, quantitative, and experimentalist approach to questions of “population” that critically diverged from the era’s more popular eugenic orientation. Such eugenics work sought to redirect racialized heredity within evolutionary logics. In the early twentieth century, eugenics had spread across the globe in projects to govern life and death toward breeding better racial futures—more fit, more pure, more evolved, more uplifted races— projects variously embraced by progressives, fascists, socialists, racists and antiracists, feminists, scientists, and political reformers. Eugenics sought to manage evolutionary futures by virtue of encouraging or preventing the heredity of desirable and undesirable traits in a given population. Selective eugenic methods of directing racial futures ranged from voluntary birth control and coerced sterilization, to incarceration and segregation, to pronatalist policies and racial uplift projects, to euthanasia and mass murder. Eugenics plotted bodies, races, classes, and regions of the world on an evolutionary tree in which some bodies were more biologically progressed and forward in time (white bodies, elite bodies, male bodies, thinking bodies, able bodies), while other bodies were more primitive and pathological, and thus threatened to pull future evolution backward (colored bodies, female bodies, colonized bodies, working bodies, disabled bodies). Eugenics rested on racist claims of differential life worth based on biological difference and sought selective methods, often violent, to redirect racial futures. In contrast to eugenics, at stake for Pearl in how fruit flies changed over time were not racial evolutionary futures but economic futures — how to balance quantitative population with national production, bringing biology and state planning together through economy.
Pearl’s work marks a historic shift in the status of “population” as a problematic. Pearl was trained in biometrics at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, a pivotal crossroads for both statistics and eugenics as disciplines. His work signaled a distancing from questions of racial fitness and Darwinian logics (and hence concerns with the hereditary quality of life) to an embrace of questions of quantity and especially the rates of birth and death within populations relative to economic conditions. Thus, Pearl was innovating as a biologist within a Malthusian tradition that had long tied population to political economy. Importantly, his work turned “population” into an experimental object that could be tested and probed with the aid of fruit flies, bacteria, or chickens. Laboratory experiments could be done to populations of organisms in controlled settings. Experiments not only charted population dynamics but also sought to find ways of intervening in population’s tendencies over time. Moving beyond the lab, Pearl mobilized state-produced data from censuses, as well as then emergent measures of agricultural and manufacturing production, into the project of modeling human population as yet another iteration of experiment. In doing so, Pearl helped to transform “population” into a problem that needed to be both represented and intervened in at the intersection of economics and biology.
In Pearl’s translation from Drosophila to human, the physical limits of the glass “bottle” stood in for the larger unseeable scale of “national economic production,” a measure that was rapidly developing in early twentieth-century state social science. Drawing too on racialized anthropological visions of staged human progress, the purported economic container for human populations was broadly delineated as their national “stage” of economic productivity—primitive, agrarian, or mercantile, with industrial, mass-consumption capitalism as a pinnacle. In contrast, the old eighteenth-century Malthusian model of population had insisted on predetermined rates of food production (the arithmetic increase of 1, 2, 3) and population growth (the geometric increase of 2, 4, 8), such that population growth would inevitably become overpopulation, unrelentingly leading to war, famine, disease, and death. Unlike Malthus, Pearl’s model held that production rates were variable and adjustable depending on levels of civilization. Population was also adjustable as both death and birth rates could be altered with technologies and state policies. Contrary to the inevitable thrust toward crisis that concluded Malthus’s law of population, Pearl’s model was rife with possibilities for management.
Pearl’s “proof” that the S-curve applied to humans relied on colonial data collection: the so-called natural experiment of colonized Algeria, where French colonial machinery had kept impeccable records that supposedly recorded a full growth curve. According to Pearl, the “civilizing” of Algeria, and the purported improvement to agricultural productivity created by the “white man’s burden” of French colonization, sparked a new “swarm” of babies, a rapidly growing aggregate of Algerians. Paralleling aggregate humans with experimental insects, Pearl cited a colonial official to describe the middle phase of rapid population growth, when “the natives positively pullulate under our rule” and “babies swarm among them like cockchafers under a chestnut tree in the spring.” Seeing Algeria as a natural petri dish, Pearl argued that as the population grew it hit a new upper limit resulting in a “process akin to natural selection [in which a] good many natives had to be eliminated before the survivors were reasonably unanimous in their belief that the old days were gone forever.” For Pearl, the “business of conquest” in colonized Algeria wrought the S-curve in the births and deaths of Algerians. Here, the effect of the economic and colonial milieu on shaping human futures supplanted other “natural” processes.
This version of population crystallized in the period of the Cold War and decolonization into what I am calling the economization of life. The economization of life, I argue, was and is a historically specific regime of valuation hinged to the macrological figure of national “economy.” It names the practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their ability to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state, such as life’s ability to contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation. It is distinct from commodifying life or biocapital, or from the broader history of using quantification to monetize practices. It was not a mode that generated surplus value through labor but instead designated and managed surplus aggregate life. In this mode, value could be generated by optimizing aggregate life chances—including the reduction of future life quantity—relative to the horizon of the economy. The economization of life was performed through social science practices that continued the project of racializing life—that is, dividing life into categories of more and less worthy of living, reproducing, and being human—and reinscribed race as the problem of “population” hinged to the fostering of the economy. Thus, the history of the economization of life is part of the history of racism and the technoscientific practices of demarcating human worth and exploiting life chances. Traced in this book through “population control,” the economization of life was, and remains, a historically specific regime of valuation created with technoscientific practices (rather than markets) that used quantification and social science methods to calibrate and then exploit the differential worth of human life for the sake of the macrological figure of “economy.”
These epistemic infrastructures were assemblages of practices of quantification and intervention conducted by multidisciplinary and multisited experts that became consolidated as extensive arrangements of research and governance within state, transnational, and nonprofit organizations. I call them infrastructural to underline the ways knowledge-making can install material supports into the world—such as buildings, bureaucracies, standards, forms, technologies, funding flows, affective orientations, and power relations. By attending to epistemic infrastructures, this book tracks how the experimental practices for quantifying and intervening in aggregate life consolidated into the pervasive twentiethcentury infrastructures of family planning, development projects, global health, NGOs, and imperialism that were built in the name of monitoring and governing “economy” and “population.” Attending to the epistemic... “population” became a problem during a historical moment when neoliberalism was unfolding and the primary purpose of states was increasingly understood to be the fostering of “the economy,” itself a historicizable twentieth-century problematic. Attending to the affective, the book queries how imaginaries, feelings, futures, and phantasma are part of the work of quantification. Population and economy became massive material-semiotic-affective-infrastructural presences that can now be hard to imagine the world without. They became a way for capitalism to imagine and organize its own milieu, to conjure its own conditions of possibility.
Harnessed to the enhancement of the national economy, this new era of calculative practices designated both valuable and unvaluable human lives: lives worth living, lives worth not dying, lives worthy of investment, and lives not worth being born. The history of such designations is vital for understanding how the continued racialized and sexed devaluation of life inhabits ubiquitous policies, indices, calculations, and orientations that perform new kinds of racialization even as they reject biological race as such. Moreover, this history puts questions of reproduction at the center of how capitalism summons its world.”
- Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life. Duke University Press, 2017. pp. 1-7.
