Make Room! Make Room!

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

Soylent Green is.....?

Everyone knows the answer to that question.

What does “soylent” actually mean?

“Make Room! Make Room!” is the novel on which the Charlton Heston movie named, naturally, “Soylent Green” was based. As you will recall from the movie, in 2022, the world is overpopulated. New York has wall-to-wall people living on stairs and in the streets. Nothing works. Heston is a detective who, while investigating a murder - with an interlude for the death by euthanasia of Edward G. Robbins - learns that Soylent Green is, well, recycled people.

The book version is grimmer. It is 1999, and the world's population is 7 billion. The population of New York is 35 million. Nothing works, taxes are at 80%, the retirement age is 55, water is rationed, food is rationed, people live on the streets and in stairways, and you can find your rent-controlled one bedroom, which has no power, 20 hours a day, divided with a family of five because no one gives much of a rip about property rights. Most of the midwest is a dust bowl; farmers can't grow things because water is being diverted to the massively overpopulated cities, and no one but the very rich can get steak. Most people live off of ersatz plant-based meat analogs. (And, by the way, “soylent” stands for “soybean and lentil.”) In 1999, technology is still at the vacuum tube stage, slowly being replaced by solid-state circuits and transistors.

In other words, Make Room! is a projection of the time the book was written, namely 1966, projected into the future with the assumption that liberalism/leftism could predict the future.

The undermining of leftwing doctrines by how poorly this book compares to reality. For example, the one thing that Harrison got right is that the world's population would be more than the unthinkable high number of 7 billion. Right now, the world's population is over 8 billion. When I was born, the total world population was around 2 billion. That population explosion certainly seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

So, what did happen?

Well, capitalism happened. Between 2 billion and 8 billion, we got better fertilizers, energy sources, transportation sources, silicon chips, and the rest of modernity. We also became a global economy that could truly exploit the relative advantages of small differences factored over a global transportation network. It's been an amazing 60 years. People today live healthier and wealthier lives than they did in 1966.

Another interesting feature is the falling birth rate. Urbanization has led to crashing birth rates around the world just because raising kids is so much harder in urban apartments than on farms. The threat facing many countries today, such as Japan, is radical depopulation.

What was not the answer, though, was something that Harrison spent pages arguing, namely birth control. Harrison has the character, Sol, who I suspect is a fictionalized version of Harrison, angrily vents about stupid people still refusing in 1999 to legalize birth control. He particularly lays into Catholics who are still having tend child families. Sol shoots down arguments about the dangers of birth control and declares that if only birth control had been legalized, the dystopia of Make Room! could have been avoided.

Of course, this is unintentionally hilarious. Make Room! was written in 1966, the same year that the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut would discover a constitutional right to contraception.

Since we have seven billion people in the world, it doesn't seem that birth control saved us after all. On the other hand, if you note a whiff of hysteria in the air when Leftists claim that conservatives are about to take away birth control, this is the kind of place where it comes from.

When you read Make Room! from a perspective of 60 years, you can see other failures of socialism. Tax rate at 80%. Everyone is on welfare, even though there is obvious work that needs to be done. Price controls create scarcity and stifle innovation. Rent control and a system that awards rental space to those lucky enough to win a lottery mean the loss of housing supply.

The unemployed population living on the streets resembles mishandled Democrat cities in the 2020s. The idea of “soylent” food is something that our wealthy elites are trying to sell to the masses while they crookedly keep their supply of the real stuff, just like in the book.

There is a dystopia in this story, but it is one created by ideology.

As for the story, it holds together to present the dystopian world that main character, detective Andrew Rusch, lives in. There is a botched robbery that turns into a murder of a wealthy “fixer.” The murder story consumes most of the book but really is a red herring that frames Rusch's life. We get to see Rusch suit up for riot duty and deal with the problems of the city when water and food is cut off. Rusch meets a woman but loses her when he is forced to allow a family to move into his unit after his roommate Sol passes away.

There is no overarching mystery about where soylent comes from. The theme of the book is dystopian. All in all, though, it is a fascinating bit of cultural history.

Also, given how much the leftists seem to want this future for the masses, we may still see it.