Natural Procreative Hygiene as an Excluded Variable in Neoclassical Growth Theory: Evidence and Accounting Implications

Orthodox growth economics has never contained a variable for Natural
Procreative Hygiene (NPH): the timing, spacing, and readiness conditions
of human procreation. This absence is treated as a neutral boundary of
the discipline. It is not neutral. When the discipline's own machinery
is examined, two facts emerge. First, the one variable the models do
carry for procreation, population growth, is uniformly and negatively
associated with income per capita across every pattern of economic
growth ever measured, including a 2014 University of Baghdad panel
study of ninety-five countries, 1980 to 2010, where the coefficient is
negative and statistically significant in all four country groups.
Second, the accounting framework in which these models report their
results counts the treatment of disease, incarceration, and remediation
as production, and counts health maintained as nothing. The combination
produces a standing paradox that the discipline cannot state without
dismantling its own metric: overpopulation generates poverty, while
disease and pain increase the economic statistics. The essay argues that
NPH is absent from education and growth models not because it was
measured and found insignificant, but because introducing it would
invert the ledger: it would raise human well-being and lower disease
and pain, and it would lower the recorded statistics of the
establishments that profit from human misery.