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THE LAW OF GROWTH

This paper addresses the conditions and implications of aggregating humans into ‘populations’ through statistical means. Engaging with statistical constructions of world population and population growth in the 20th century the paper discusses the ‘biological law of population growth’ which corroborated predictions of a ‘population explosion’ and demands for ‘population control’ after World War II. The biostatistical model and curve were developed in experimental animal population biology to describe the self-limiting growth of self-contained populations over time, and informed the human development studies of the 1960s and 1970s reckoning on a limited global ecological ‘carrying capacity’. The paper explores the economies inherent in the ‘law of growth’, arguing that the law structured and insinuated a biopolitical system of classification and allocation of human lives. The paper analyses the scientific strategies of abstraction, reduction, formalization, and visualization effective in the growth law and traces its increasing power to account for growth phenomena in general. Population issues, so the claim, were assigned to the realm of the life sciences, to the effect that sociopolitical approaches were overruled by bioeconomical: statistical accountability constructed populations as assessable and either valuable or dispensable on a global scale.