This blog post is mostly an exercise to begin organizing my thoughts around population science and the economization of life. I start off discussing BMI to paint a picture of just how much complexity is flattened and compressed into the term, followed by a brief discussion of how GDP feels very much the same to me. My aim is to reflect on how these two "common sense" population-scale metrics play out when their logic is brought to the individual scale. I then consider abortion access and why the logic of reducing population as a strategy for raising household living standards (ie increasing GDP per capita at home) might not be as universally urgent as the Democrats had hoped.
I was in the best shape of my life in late 2019. I was training muay Thai five times a week, running at least ten miles a week, lifting weights twice a week, eating a high protein/high fiber diet, not drinking alcohol, and seeing a therapist weekly. In the fall of that year I went to my PCP for a physical before my first fight that was coming up in a few weeks. At 5’4″ tall, fully hydrated and wearing size 6 pants, I was an absolutely jacked 142lbs. The doctor came in, glanced at my numbers, and immediately let me know that my BMI was right on the border of being overweight (110-145 is considered healthy). Athletes don’t care about their BMI because it doesn’t account for high muscle mass so I just shrugged and said ok. The week of my fight I cut ten pounds of water and weighed in at 128lbs – ribs visible, noassatall, and six pack abs: healthy BMI at last!
Stay with me, I promise I’ll get around to abortion!
BMI (Body Mass Index) is a ratio of height to weight, not some magical variable that provides important insights into the wellness of a human being. Like anthropology, BMI can be traced back to a rich European man in the 1800s who was trying to give a scientific justification for colonialism. Most serious health and nutrition researchers (including the American Medical Association) agree that BMI is useless at the individual level, but old habits die hard (especially when insurance companies hunger for novel ways to deny life insurance claims).
It makes sense that intelligent people whose entire careers have been committed to the well-being of humans would reject this cartoonishly basic metric for describing the health of such a fantastically complex being as a human. It’s almost as if BMI persists for some other reason, perhaps to prop up a very lucrative market for products that promise to “solve” the problem of agricultural overproduction1 and create persistent demand by preying on our insecurity: the global weight loss services market size was valued at USD 36.31 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow 7.6% from 2024 to 2030. I’m not saying that this is damning evidence of a conspiracy, but capitalist common sense tells us that the core responsibility of a business is to make as much money as possible for its shareholders up to the point where the externalities grow bigger than the market. And as individual consumers – the generators of profitable data points – we have a “right” to choose to consume or not, which means that the obligation to convince each of us to override our reasons for saying no are existentially large from the viewpoint of the handful of processed food monopolies that dominate our food system.
Nobody makes billions of dollars if we believe we’re fine just as we are.
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is another relic of colonial population science that persists in the imagination of people whose religion is economic growth. GDP is simply one possible way of measuring the economic activity of a given country. It aggregates the monetary value of all goods and services sold in a given country for a specified amount of time. It was developed in the 1930s as a way for policymakers to measure the success of the economy in the wake of the Great Depression and was imposed on the rest of the world in 1944 via the creation of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank.
GDP is widely considered an incomplete measure of a country’s well-being, but it is still widely used by white house economists and NY Times journalists writing about the vibecession. GDP does not include unpaid labor such as childcare or volunteering, nor does it tell us anything about how growth is distributed. GDP also does not include the environment unless it is commodified and exploited as a “natural resource”. The GDP of the US in 2023 was 27.36 trillion, making GDP per capita $81,695 – not bad! Of course the top 1% of households in the US own 30% of the wealth, so “GDP per capita” is a calculated fiction that everyone knows does not reflect reality.
Like BMI, GDP is a metric with a mission. It motivates action in the form of economic policy and priorities, while projecting an air of empirical validity. I thought a lot about how GDP and BMI are similar while reading The Economization of Life by M. Murphy, which explodes the idea of population as a neutral concept that merely expresses a fact about the quantity of humans in a given container such as a prison or country. It took me more than a month to get through this book because it was so dense with ideas and history I had never encountered before, providing carefully-researched context for the “practices assigning value for the sake of the macroeconomy (148)” – specifically with regard to the intentional manipulation of women’s fertility in the postcolonial world.
I cannot remember when I first learned the “common sense” that the best way to keep young women from having unplanned pregnancies is education and birth control, but it’s an assumption I uncritically held until I read this book. I knew that forced sterilizations were on the list of Horrific Racist Shit the USA Has Done and I had heard that Margaret Sanger the liberal feminist icon was a bit of a eugenicist, but I carried around the potent idea that a woman’s bodily autonomy was most powerfully expressed in her choice to not have a child if she didn’t want to. It seemed like digging too deeply into eugenics would be playing into the hands of anti-abortion extremists, so I never pursued it. I easily absorbed all the female empowerment content put out by international NGOs who boasted that young black and brown girls in the “developing world” would become entrepreneurs and leaders with your generous donations.
Things are of course more complicated.
[I feel the need to emphasize that none of what I’m writing here is a disavowal of abortion care as a crucial part of reproductive justice. I am not in any way suggesting that abortions should be banned or limited in any capacity. I just don’t think access to abortion is the most important reproductive justice issue that women face. I also don’t think Margaret Sanger was an outlier, but actually pretty representative of the detached “scientific” way European-descended elites thought of poor and non-white human beings in the 19th and much of the 20th century. Keynes (the famous post-WWII economist) was the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937-1944 and there are examples of eugenicist population planning among socialist-leaning European countries as well. It’s a topic I’ve started exploring only recently, but one that resonates with contemporary ideas about surplus population and necropolitics. I’ll include a few links at the end to publicly accessible resources on my reading list.]
Much like in countries of the global majority (“developing countries”), the vast majority of wealth is redistributed to the very top of the very top and it’s only growing. In the US we continue to measure “GDP per capita” as a performance of some farcical distribution of national wealth that we should all feel proud of, but there is no viable plan to rein in the power of billionaires or increase our wages to match inflation or make housing affordable or forgive student debt. There is only endless, upward redistribution. This means that the GDP grows but GDP per capita shrinks as the population increases. If redistribution and equity are not on the table, the only way to “increase the GDP per capita” – that is, to raise the living standards of the masses – is to reduce the population. A reduction in population can only happen intentionally: via elimination of the living or the prevention of future births. This common sense trickles down from the population and into our individual households.
For some highly-educated women with interesting careers and a ladder to climb, not having children or only having one is a very easy way to increase their household GDP and therefore well-being. But this leaves out so many women who want to have children but cannot afford them. Or women trapped in poverty because childcare is so expensive that they cannot afford to work or train for a better-paying job that may not exist. A lot of women who cannot afford to have children and know that The Democrat Party won’t do anything to change the affordability piece probably voted for Harris, both in solidarity with other women and for their own individual protection. But a whole lot of women also decided to stay home or vote for Trump. Perhaps an unplanned pregnancy is not the worst fate that a lot of US American women can think of.
Ending here, adding a couple sources to further think about state intervention into reproduction, race science/eugenics, surplus population, disposability, and various strategies nation states have employed to create the pure populations they desire.
The Colonial Origins of Economics by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Surbhi Kesar and Devika Dutt
The New Artificial Intelligentsia by Ruha Benjamin
Michelle Murphy: Abduction, Reproduction, and Postcolonial Infrastructures of Data (video)
[Between Scarcity and Excess] Week 8 (video) by Luiza Prado
- The North American snack food industry generated $51.63 billion in 2024 and is growing at 3.25%, which is estimated to be about 20.8kg of snacks per capita per year. ↩︎
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