Progress report

Population geography I: Surplus

populations
James A. Tyner
Kent State University, USA
Abstract
The subject of population is undergoing a renaissance in geography; this is seen, for example, in the voluminous
studies addressing marginalized populations, including but not limited to refugees, internally displaced
persons, and children. In short, scholarship has focused on those lives rendered wasted, precarious, or
superfluous. Population geographers have made substantial contributions; however, more can be done. In
this and the next two progress reports, I suggest that population geographers reflect more deeply on the
spatiality and survivability of vulnerable populations. More specifically, population geographers should con-
sider the politics of fertility, mortality, and mobility from the standpoint of a layered demographic question:
within any given place, who lives, who dies, and who decides? In this first report, I resituate the concept
surplus population within the broader domain of population geography. In subsequent reports, I consider
more closely population geographys association with related subject areas (i.e. biopolitics and necropolitics).
I maintain that, by addressing vulnerability and survivability, we join others in geography and allied fields who
are writing about populations not as biological, pre-given entities, but instead as political subjects at risk of
premature death.
Keywords
abandoned lives, disposable lives, surplus populations, survivability
I Introduction
The coordinates of population geography are
fairly well established, if not always agreed upon.
At a most basic level, population geography is
concerned with fertility, mortality, and migration
though certainly not in that order (Bailey, 2005;
Gober and Tyner, 2004; James, 1954; White
et al., 1989). Two dominant trends, one episte-
mological and the other topical, are readily
observable. On the one hand, population geogra-
phy has been largely grounded in an empiricist
epistemology. Population geography, as Bailey
(2005: 73) explains, has been dominated by
measures of and depictions of population con-
centration and dispersion; the relative size and
proximity of urban areas within a population;
density and overpopulation; [and] the decompo-
sition of population characteristics, including
flows of population. To this end, population
geographers continue to make important contri-
butions to the scientific study of demographic
events. On the other hand, population geography
has a long, productive relationship with the sub-
ject of migration (Collyer et al., 2012; Smith and
King, 2012), as population geographers continue
to make significant strides in the understanding
of human spatial mobility at a variety of scales.
Corresponding author:
Department of Geography, Kent State University, 413
McGilvrey Hall Kent, OH 44242, USA.
Email: jtyner@kent.edu
Progress in Human Geography
37(5) 701711
The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132512473924
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Parallel to these two strengths, however, has
been the repeated some might say tired call
for a (re)theorizedpopulationgeography(Findlay
and Boyle, 2007; Findlay and Graham, 1991;
Graham, 2000, 2004; Graham and Boyle,
2001; Tyner, 2009; White and Jackson,
1995). White and Jackson (1995: 111), for
example, argue that population geography has
paid insufficient attention to recent philoso-
phical and methodological discussions that
make their mark elsewhere in human geogra-
phy, and in the rest of the social sciences. Such
calls have sparked some flurry of activity for
example, population geographys engagement
with the work of Michel Foucault (Legg,
2005; Philo, 2001, 2005a; Tyner, 2009). Ironi-
cally, many of these debates over a (re)theor-
ized population geography often coalesce
around renewed interests in the study of migra-
tion. Environmental issues, such as climate
change (Bailey, 2010) and deforestation (Carr,
2009), for instance, are frequently contextua-
lized within the study of migration. So too are
discussions of other populations for exam-
ple, that of illegal migrants (Anderson and
Ruhs, 2010), detention (Kahn, 1996; Silverman
and Massa, 2012), transit migrants (Collyer
et al., 2012), domestic workers (Yeoh and
Huang, 2010), and migrant sex workers (Tyner,
2004). Indeed, even the recent call to bridge
childrens geographies with population geogra-
phy emphasizes the theme of spatial mobility
(Holt and Costello, 2011; see also McKendrick,
2001). Most of these studies highlight that, at a
certain level, the field has engaged with many
of the pressing issues of our time and demon-
strate ever more so the continued salience of
population geography both to the field of geo-
graphy and beyond.
In this and the next two progress reports, I
call population geographers to reflect more
directly on the spatiality and survivability of
vulnerable populations (Findlay, 2005; Hogan
and Marandola, 2005; Philo, 2001, 2005b) within
the context, broadly conceived, of biopolitics and
necropolitics (Coleman and Grove, 2009; Espo-
sito, 2008; Foucault, 1990; Hinchliffe and Bing-
ham, 2008; Legg, 2005; McIntyre and Nast,
2011; Mbembe, 2003; Mitchell, 2009; Nast,
2011; Rose, 2007). Biopolitics, for example, may
be understood as the political negotiation of life;
howlife, its existence and vitality, is linked to the
regulation and contestation of who has priority to
live and flourish, and who might be left to wither
and die. In particular, I am drawn to governmen-
tal policies and practices that impinge on fertility,
mortality, and mobility, those regulations that
impinge on the materiality of life and death from
the standpoint of a layered demographic ques-
tion: within any given place, who lives, who dies,
and who decides?
Consider the following trends. Two-thirds of
Americas total income gains from2002 to 2007
went to the top 1% of US households; indeed,
the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1% of
households grew more than 10 times faster than
the income of the bottom 90% of households.
The last time such a disproportionate share of
income gain went to the top 1%and such a small
proportion went to the bottom 90% was in the
1920s just prior to the Great Depression.
Whereas the bottom 90% of US households
increased by US$1,206 (adjusted for inflation),
the top 1%rose by US$520,127. The increase for
the top 0.1%of households was even more spec-
tacular, growing by US$3,455,384 during the
same period (Feller and Stone, no date). So
remarkable has been this growth among the
super-rich that the United States income equal-
ity gap is 39th in the world (at time of writing).
Indeed, the gap between the rich and the poor
was less pronounced in many countries of the
so-called Third World, including Burundi, Mali,
Tunisia, Tanzania, and even strife-torn Pakistan.
1
As the income chasm continues to widen, pov-
erty is deepening in the United States. In 2008,
39.8 million people lived in poverty, up from
37.3 million in 2007; the 2008 poverty rate
(13.2%) was the highest since 1997; and over
15 million Americans lived in extreme poverty,
702 Progress in Human Geography 37(5)
defined as having an income less than half of the
poverty line or, in other words, earning less than
US$10,000 a year for a family of four.
2
More-
over, such income inequalities have come at a
steep price. While the United States ranks first
in the world both in gross domestic product and
in health expenditures, the country is 18th in the
world in the percentage of children in poverty,
22nd in the world in low birthweight rates, and
25th in the world in infant mortality.
3
The
National Center for Children in Poverty calcu-
lated that approximately 21% of all children in
the United States lived in poor households
defined as income below 100% of the federal
poverty level which, in 2010, was set at
US$22,050 for a family of four. Of these chil-
dren, more than one-third lived in households
in which neither parent was employed.
4
Poverty translates directly into prospects for
life and death. In 2008, an estimated 17 million
households 14.6% of all households were
food insecure; moreover, about one-third of
these households exhibited very low food secu-
rity. Consequently, these households relied
extensively on government programs, such as
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP; formerly known as the Food Stamps
Program), the Special Supplemental Nutrition
Program for Women, Infants, and Children
(WIC), and the National School Lunch Pro-
gram.
5
In fact, for impoverished households,
these social programs literally meant the differ-
ence between life and death. Income inequality
and poverty are themselves unequally distrib-
uted throughout the American body-politic. A
recent study released by the Pew Research
Center found that the median wealth of white
households was 20 times that of African-
American households, and 18 times that of
Hispanic households. In addition, the dispari-
ties are increasing for Americas non-white
population. From 2005 to 2009, for instance,
inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66%
among Hispanic households and 53% among
African-American households, compared with
just 16% among white households.
6
These fig-
ures speak directly to life and death; a white
male infant born in the United States in 2009
has a life-expectancy of 76.2 years, whereas
an African-American male infant has a life-
expectancy of just 70.9 years.
7
Although these data are subject to debate,
and limited to the United States, they do, as a
whole, point to a rather bleak picture but a pic-
ture that brings into focus the continued impor-
tance and relevance of population geography.
Ones likelihood to escape premature death is
deeply, irrevocably spatial. For example, the
work of Danny Dorling and Amy Glasmeier,
among others, has empirically demonstrated
how social exclusion, geographic isolation,
rigid class-based institutions and political cro-
nyism contribute to povertys persistence and
hence, to premature death (Glasmeier et al.,
2008: 10; see also Day et al., 2008; Dorling and
Thomas, 2004; Glasmeier, 2005). Likewise, the
contributions to a recently themed issue of Anti-
pode (guest edited by Heidi Nast, 2011) bring to
light the salience of population geography. In an
introduction to that issue, McIntyre and Nast
(2011) call for:
[a] reexamination of Marxs notion of surplus
populations in light of contemporary capitalism
and a world marked by tremendous global shifts
in fertility rates, almost unprecedented rates of
outmigration to hegemonic nation-states and
enclaves, heightened levels of investment in (and
hyper-exploitation of) formerly colonized
nations, and massive degradation of the environ-
ment. (McIntyre and Nast, 2011: 1465)
Such global flux requires that we apply and
expand the insights of population geography
to consider those unwanted populations that
occupy the bottom rungs of the inequality pyra-
mid. To achieve this goal, we need to find ways
of addressing howcertain groups are considered
expendable, for today many lives have been ren-
dered disposable, wasted, or precarious. In this
initial report, I argue that population geography
Tyner 703
may benefit by engaging with Marxs concept
of surplus population; Marxs writings, I main-
tain, provide a powerful theoretical avenue from
which to explore vulnerability and, I would
add, survivability (cf. Heynen, 2006; Mitchell
and Heynen, 2009), both of which are insepar-
able from two of population geographys long-
standing concerns: biological reproduction and
mortality. In addressing vulnerability and sur-
vivability, we join others in geography and
allied fields who are writing about biopolitics,
biosecurity, and reproductive politics. In sub-
sequent reports, I consider more closely popu-
lation geographys association with these other
subject areas; in this report, I provide a frame-
work for a reconfigured (surplus) population
geography.
II (Surplus) Populations
It is somewhat curious that population geogra-
phers have not engaged in any sustained way
with the writings of Karl Marx that deal with
population issues (but see Jones, 1986; Rossini,
1984). For, whether one agrees or disagrees
with his analysis of capitalism, Marxs theory
of population provides a salient counterpoint
to Thomas Malthus an individual who figures
prominently in our research and teaching of
population geography (Robbins, 1998). Malthus
argued, in part, that, because populations grow
exponentially whereas agricultural production
increases geometrically, resource scarcity and
overpopulation would result. Marx countered
by arguing that capitalism reveals its own law
of population; that every particular historical
mode of production has its own special laws
of population (Marx, 1990: 784; see also
Harvey, 1974).
8
In Capital, Volume I, Marx argued that:
it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly
produces, and produces indeed in direct relation
with its own energy and extent, a relatively redun-
dant working population, i.e. a population which
is superfluous to capitals average requirements
for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus
population. (Marx, 1990: 782)
Marxs statement has received considerable
empirical attention over the years, and these
debates need not detain us at this point (cf.
McIntyre, 2011; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Nast,
2011). What is most relevant for my present
purposes is not the particularities regarding the
accumulation of capital, debates over rates of
growth, and the growth of a surplus population;
rather, it is the concept surplus population that
is important. For it is through the concept of sur-
plus population that we see (1) that population
geographers have written extensively on the
subject, but (2) this engagement has been some-
what scattered and unfocused.
So what is meant by the concept surplus
population? A good starting point is Marxs
own definition. Again, turning to Capital, Vol-
ume I, Marx (1990: 794) wrote that the relative
surplus population exists in all kinds of forms
and that every worker belongs to it during the
time when he [sic] is only partially employed
or wholly unemployed. In other words, any
population geography study that has addressed
unemployment has, indirectly, been writing a
(surplus) population geography. But for Marx
it is not the fact of surplus populations, but
rather the processes by which these populations
come into existence (cf. Merrill, 2011).
Marx (1990: 794 passim) classified surplus
populations into three categories: floating,
latent, and stagnant. The floating population
consists of those workers cycling in-and-out of
the labor force; the latent population includes
those with insecure employment; and the stag-
nant population is composed of those workers
who are only rarely employed. It is the stagnant
population, in particular, that forms the massive
ranks of the inexhaustible reservoir of disposable
labor-power (p. 796). To these three categories
of surplus populations Marx adds a fourth: the
lumpenproletariat.
9
Distinguished morally from
the working-class proletariat, this lowest
704 Progress in Human Geography 37(5)
sediment of society includes vagabonds, crim-
inals, and prostitutes (p. 797); those able to work
but do not (e.g. paupers); and those unable to
work because of particular incapacities (p. 797).
This latter subset was composed of people who
have lived beyond the workers average life-
span; and the victims of industry, whose number
increases with the growth of dangerous machin-
ery, or mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated,
the sickly, the widows, etc. (p. 797). The point,
again, is not necessarily to agree or disagree with
Marxs analysis; rather, the point is that Marxs
work addresses the economic vagaries of life
within capitalist society, a project in keeping with
many population geographers concerns to
explain the creation and migration of economi-
cally vulnerable populations.
How do surplus populations come into exis-
tence? This is a crucial question one that has
garnered considerable attention both within
and beyond geography in recent years. Fun-
damentally, a Marxist perspective begins from
the standpoint of primitive accumulation,
itself a term subject to much debate (Glassman,
2006; Hall, 2011; Harvey, 2003; Li, 2009;
Neocleous, 2011; McIntyre, 2011). In general,
however, following Marx, this entails the
historical process of separating workers from
the means of production; this primitive accu-
mulation may be accomplished via the usur-
pation of common property, enclosures of
common land, and the destruction of domes-
tic, artisanal production. An important and
growing body of empirical case studies within
population geography and beyond is addressing
these practices of displacement and dispossession
that are part-and-parcel of ongoing processes of
primitive accumulation (Hall, 2011; Li, 2009;
Rigg, 2007).
McIntyre (2011: 14981500) describes such
processes in ways that speak to the traditional
scholarly strengths of population geography.
Imagine, for example, the stalwart assumption
of an isomorphic plain in which space is fric-
tionless and labor is perfectly mobile. Presume
also (as Marx does initially) that all labor is
abstract; in other words, there is no possibility
of mismatch between skills because all laborers
are substitutable and there are no hierarchies
around race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual
orientation, and so on. In short, all people are
equal and space is rendered inconsequential.
In such a world, the unequal distribution
between employment and unemployment could
be readily resolved. People would migrate from
areas of high unemployment to areas of low
unemployment. Indeed, such an understanding
is embedded both in structural models of migra-
tion and neoclassical accounts of supply and
demand.
But what happens when such conditions do
not obtain? We know that space is not friction-
less (McIntyre, 2011: 1499), but is highly varie-
gated and intensely regulated, predicated in part
on the continued defense of the sovereign state,
as seen in the regulation of immigration (e.g.
Bauder, 2006; Merrill, 2011; Tirman, 2004).
Moreover, Doty (2011: 599) shows how states
have, by imposing restrictions meant to make
unauthorised border crossings difficult and dan-
gerous attempted to halt migration. Meanwhile,
the recent militarization of borders (Dunn, 1996)
has contributed to what Joseph Nevins (2008) has
described as a shifting geography of migrant
fatalities (see also Mitchell, 2007). Regulating
mobility has, likewise, resulted in the discursive
construction of surplus migrant population cate-
gories: unauthorized, undocumented, irregu-
lar, illegal (cf. Khalid, 2010). The work of
Anderson and Ruhs (2010), Drever and Blue
(2011), Merrill (2011), Mountz (2004), and Salt
and Stein (1997) is, here, notable to the degree
that it highlights the processes by which surplus
populations come into existence in the service
of the state.
Other population processes and practices,
including the operations of various state migra-
tory apparatuses (Lindio-McGovern, 2004;
Tyner, 2004; see also Rodriguez, 2010) and
social networks (Blue and Drever, 2011; Croes
Tyner 705
and Hooimeijer, 2010) feature prominently in
the variegated geographies of dispossession
topics that population geographers continue
to address. Lastly, we know that labor is
never truly abstract, but rather is segmented
into, for example, skilled or unskilled migra-
tion another body of scholarship that is rich
within the subfield of population geography
(Ho, 2011; Khoo et al., 2011; Riemsdijk,
2012; Scott, 2004). In short, embedded
within the concept of surplus population are
concerns that have, arguably, surprisingly,
shaped much of the scholarship within popu-
lation geography. To round out this report, I
consider more closely two concepts that have
emerged within the rubric of surplus popula-
tions, these being the ideas of abandonment
and disposability.
III Abandoned women,
disposable women
Throughout history, in a range of geographic
settings, the poor and destitute have been mar-
ginalized; so too have been prostitutes, the
homeless, and runaways (cf. Watts, 2011). In
the late 19th century, in the United States, for
example, numerous categories idiots, lunatics,
inebriates, paupers, tramps, vagrants, the aged,
the sick, the feebleminded, the disabled,
orphans, and criminals were constructed in the
service of the state as a means of providing or
declining social assistance (Dear and Wolch,
1987). Membership in one or the other often
meant the difference between (assisted) life or
(accelerated) death. While certain populations
in a place were frequently considered to be part
of an undifferentiated whole, a moral division
tied to economic success persisted and affected
(state) policy responses. Those who were
able-bodied but out-of-work, for instance, were
typically castigated as morally corrupt and unde-
serving of assistance, while lunatics, widows,
orphans, and the sick were deemed unfortunate
and worthy only of philanthropic aid.
In many societies, including the United
States, the egregious laws and punitive mea-
sures of the late 19th century remain in place,
albeit in different guises. Those persons deemed
outside of respectable society the lumpen-
proletariat continue to be marginalized and
represented as unworthy of assistance. Indeed,
as Wacquant (2009) writes, these:
castaway categories unemployed youth left
adrift, the beggars and the homeless, aimless
nomads and drug addicts, postcolonial immi-
grants without documents or support have
become salient in public space, their presence
undesirable and their doings intolerable, because
they are the living and threatening incarnation
of the generalized social insecurity produced by
the erosion of stable and homogenous wage work
and by the decomposition of the solidarities of
class and culture. (Wacquant, 2009: 4. Emphasis
in original)
To address those who have been excluded from
society, a number of geographers including
population geographers have turned to the the-
oretical insights of Giorgio Agamben and, in
particular, his formulation of homo sacer (Doty,
2011; Ek, 2006; Minca, 2006; Mitchell, 2009;
Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004; Tyner,
2012). For Agamben, homo sacer an obscure
figure of ancient Roman law is one who can
be killed with impunity, one whose death con-
stitutes neither homicide nor sacrifice. Homini
sacri, accordingly, are situated outside both
human and divine law; they are included in
society only through their exclusion. They
constitute, in Agambens (1998: 73) terminol-
ogy, bare life.
In an especially salient article, Geraldine
Pratt underscores the exploitation and oppres-
sion of migrant workers and prostitutes through
the context of bare life (cf. Pratt, 2005; see also
Lee and Pratt, 2012). However, of greater sig-
nificance is Pratts reworking of homo sacer
from a feminist standpoint. As Pratt (2005)
identifies, despite the prominence of public
706 Progress in Human Geography 37(5)
and private separations in Agambens work,
he makes little of gender. Yet, through a focus
on Filipina migrant domestic workers and mur-
dered female prostitutes in Vancouver, Canada,
Pratt (2005: 1058) argues that it is often women
who are cast into bare life. Rather than simply
acknowledging these womens plight, Pratt
takes an additional, political step, to explore
how violence and abandonment are articulated
in democratic practice. Specifically, Pratt (p.
1058) demonstrates that the ineffectiveness of
legislative victories for domestic workers sug-
gests the violence of exclusion through non-
citizenship while the case of the murdered
women tells domestic workers that citizenship,
in fact, guarantees no protection. We are not all
susceptible to being rendered to bare life; rather,
survivability results from the violent intersec-
tionality of gender, race, and sexual orienta-
tion, to name but three.
A similar example is found in Mexico. The
streets of Ciudad Juarez represent a particu-
larly grim and tragic geography of human
loss. In the early 1990s, an average of three
women were murdered each year; however,
by 1993 the death toll skyrocketed, with an
average of two women being murdered each
month. By 2001, there was at least one
woman found dead every week; and by
2003 Amnesty International estimated that
approximately 400 women at a minimum
had been murdered during the previous
decade. And the killings continue. For over
a decade, Melissa Wright (1999, 2001,
2004, 2006, 2011) has written on femicide
in Ciudad Juarez. She notes that there is a
profound publicness to the femicide: most
victims have been young women, many
apparently abducted between home and work;
and most of the victims corpses were found
in public places. Wright locates the brutal
violence within the ongoing and uneven
industrialization of Mexico. Associated in
part with Mexicos Border Industrialization
Program, multinational corporations
relocated to cities such as Ciudad Juarez to
take advantage of reductions in labor costs
through the (selective) employment of
women. These workers, in short, constituted
a highly vulnerable surplus population; and
it is the temporariness of their employment
that, according to Wright, merits some atten-
tion. Multinational firms benefit from the hir-
ing of temporary workers or, in other
words, from the deliberate promotion of high
labor turnover. For Wright, women represent
workers of declining value since their intrin-
sic value never appreciates into skill but
instead dissipates over time (1999: 455). She
concludes that women workers of the maqui-
ladoras personify waste in the making.
Beginning in 1995, in response to the contin-
ued death of young women, local community
organizers, including the feminist group Ocho
de Marzo, organized marches composed of
maquila workers, students, professionals, mid-
dle- and upper-class residents, labor activists,
and artists. These groups pressured local and fed-
eral politicians for action and demanded that the
police and the mayor dedicate more resources to
murder investigations. They also met with the
maquiladora association to discuss changes in
employment shifts that might help ensure
womens safety and other security measures
(Wright, 2001a: 556). According to Wright (p.
557) it was crucial to establish a connection
between the murders and the organization of pro-
duction within the maquiladoras. She argues that
the maquila system, which revolves around the
reproduction of disposable women, draws from
many of the same discourses that are utilized to
exculpate the maquila industry from the violence
against women that continues to pervade Ciudad
Juarez (p. 558); it is this connection, also, that
activists have made, arguing that the physical
violence was exacerbated by a social and eco-
nomic violence against women. The work of
Wright exemplifies what one possible (surplus)
population geography might look like as well
as providing a model for more engaged
Tyner 707
community-level participation. Crucial to the tra-
gic story of Ciudad Juarez are processes of rural
migration, land displacement, labor force partic-
ipation, gendered divisions of labor, and, bluntly
put, mortality. What connects these fundamental
processes so widely studied within population
geography is that of surplus population and
the accumulation of capital.
IV Conclusions
In a series of books, Giorgio Agamben (1998,
2002, 2005) expands upon the concept of
the state of exception, a conceptual advance-
ment that provides insight into the spatiality of
structural violence and, by extension, an under-
standing into the calculated valuation and man-
agement of life and death within contemporary
society (see also McIntyre and Nast, 2011, on
spatialities of exception). This concept calls
attention to the paradox of sovereignty, namely
that the sovereign is both outside and inside the
juridical order. Given that the sovereign has the
legal power to suspend the validity of law,
the sovereign may also situate itself outside of
law. This produces a state of exception whereby
law may be suspended in the name of societys
protection from internal or external threats.
Increasingly, these threats are embodied by (sur-
plus) populations whether defined by race,
sex, gender, class, or national origin. As Mitchell
(2009: 244) writes, once defined as at-risk
populations, these lives constitute a biosecurity
threat to society and, accordingly, individuals
and populations can be forcefully and, more
importantly, justifiably removed from com-
monly held spaces and resources in a contempo-
rary liberal form of sovereign dispossession.
Whether characterized as bare life (Agam-
ben, 1998), wasted lives (Bauman, 2004;
Neocleous, 2011), humans-as-waste (Yates,
2011), abandoned lives (Pratt, 2005), disposa-
ble lives (Chang, 2000; Wright, 1999, 2004,
2006), precarious lives (Butler, 2004), or any
of the other myriad terms currently being
introduced, the commonality is that some popula-
tions are legally relegated to the realm of surplus
and thus rendered expendable. As Evelyn
Ruppert (2011: 218) explains, people are not
governed in relation to their individuality but as
members of populations. The embodied individ-
ual is of interest to governments insofar as the
individual can be identified, categorised and
recognized as a member of a population.
Accordingly, we must critically interrogate those
calculated bodies that become the object the
target of governmental interference: surplus
populations.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are extended to Heidi Nast, Joshua Inwood,
and Chris Philo for critical and helpful comments
and suggestions on earlier drafts of this report.
Thanks also to Michael McIntyre, Heather Merrill,
Melissa Wright, Melissa Gilbert, and Nik Heynen for
discussions more broadly on the topics of surplus
populations and survivability.
Notes
1. CIAWorld Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/pub-
lications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html.
2. World Hunger Education Service, Hunger in America:
2011 United States Hunger and Poverty Facts, http://
www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.
htm.
3. Center for Family Policy and Research, The State of
Children and Families, 2011, http://CFPR.missouri.
edu.
4. National Center for Children in Poverty, Demographics
of Poor Children, http://nccp.org/profiles/US_profile_
7.html.
5. World Hunger Education Service, Hunger in America.
6. Kochhar R, Fry R and Taylor P, Twenty-to-One:
Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites,
Blacks and Hispanics, Pew Research Center, http://
www.pewresearch.org.
7. Kochanek KD, Xu JQ, Murphy SL. et al. Deaths: Pre-
liminary Data for 2009, National Vital Statistics
Reports, Volume 59, No. 4 (Hyattsville, MD: National
Center for Health Statistics, 2011), Table 6.
8. It would be interesting indeed to follow up this assertion
of Marx. Tomyknowledge, no(population) geographer
708 Progress in Human Geography 37(5)
or any other social scientist has undertaken such a
project.
9. As Denning (2010: 87) writes, Marx was no sympathi-
zer of the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, in his support of
the proletariat, the legitimate moral working class,
Marx viewed the lumpenproletariat as an unproductive,
parasitic layer of society.
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