The Population Problem: An Unorthodox View

...THOSE of us wxo for years have been concerned, as students of population, with the increasing number of people on the earth feel some satisfaction, though not always of an unmixed kind, over the recent rise of interest in the problem...

...The Nixon administration, though hardly noted for its innovative tendencies, is the first to appoint a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, assigned to explore the consequences of future growth and distribution and the relevance of government policies in a variety of areas...

...The proclaimed quest of young people for a more simple and "natural," a less materialistic way of life, and the allied antitechnological animus of the young and of older ideologues of the New Left, have suddenly created a politics of protest over the "ecology issue" in which oldline conservationists have found new allies, and previously conservative or indifferent citizens have been moved to challenge the conventional goals and routines of our economic life...

...It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things...

...Kingsley Davis, however, pointed out in an influential 1967 article in Science that the same surveys suggest that even if all women in the underdeveloped areas had no more children than the number they desire, they would still produce families large enough to sustain a fairly high rate of population growth in view of continuing declines in mortality.* Zero population growth, he argued, must be the ultimate goal of population policy and it has not yet been attained even in the most developed countries, such as the United States, where family planning has been widely practiced for several generations...

...Moreover, the apocalyptic imagination of the times often leads to espousal of extreme and "radical" THE POPULATION PROBLEM: AN UNORTHODOX VIEW remedies with the result that less dramatic proposals that promise to be effective are made to appear "wishy-washy...

...no doubt Fitzgerald had in mind The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard), and goes on to assert: "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged...

...The much-cited statistic that one American consumes 50 times as much of the world's resources as a single Indian is roughly true, and the American's contribution to pollution is undoubtedly greater in about the same proportion...

...This was an understatement, for the problem of controlling population growth seemed to pose a challenge to basic, though conflicting, assumptions on both sides...

...When professional demographers in the past decade finally became active in antinatalist programs in the underdeveloped countries, they largely confined themselves to encouraging the spread of "family planning" by contraceptive means...

...Perhaps because there have been so many other startling reversals of attitude on the Left in recent years, the novelty of this new concern with population control has aroused little comment...

...If this increasingly noncontroversial goal were to be attained,6 how far would it take us toward zero population growth...

...The issue is even 44] adaptable to the ideological identification with the Third World so common nowadays on the Left, for the poverty of the underdeveloped countries can be attributed to the rising levels of demand in the United States, which is allegedly driven to step up its exploitation of their resources as its own population grows...

...E.g., Kirtley Mather, Enough and to Spare (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944...

...The Population Commission's charter includes the examination of trends in population distribution as well as overall growth...

...Scott Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, depicted as a representative irresponsible rich man of the period, asks, "Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard...

...When, at a symposium last year on "The Environment," I argued that population growth caused different and greater problems in the underdeveloped than in the developed countries, I was accused by a fellow panelist, a former editor of Ramparts, of "telling the other fellow that his end of the boat is sinking...

...Presumably, the much-praised new "tribal consciousness" of the young, combined with their alleged freedom from sexual repression and their repudiation of our "plastic" civilization, does not extend to rejection of contraceptive devices, even those made of plastic, nor does it involve, one supposes, acceptance of the high levels of infant mortality that kept population growth rates low in the tribal societies of the past...

...or they attacked the "illusion" that technological progress and social reform could make much difference...

...F ECOLOGICAL DISASTER truly looms beforeI the end of the century, the cessation now of population growth will hardly help to avert it...

...Even though the swollen birth cohorts of the mid-fifties will be becoming parents in the seventies, it is unlikely that their numbers will do more than slightly and temporarily increase the birth rate and the rate of population growth...

...This goes back, of course, to Malthus himself, who originally put forward his famous theory in 1798 as a refutation of the belief in progress and human perfectability, cherished by such ideologues of the Enlightenment as Godwin and Condorcet...

...Apocalyptic prophecies that millions of Americans will face imminent death through poisoning by air pollution if people don't stop reproducing tomorrow do a dangerous disservice...

...Women's Liberation advocates of "equal pay for equal work," daycare nurseries, and liberalized abortion laws, and proponents of the removal of all legal restrictions on homosexuality regularly invoke the need for population control...

...The population-ecology issue can thus be adapted to the familiar argument that the problems of the Third World are essentially the fault of the West, particularly the United States...

...This is the second largest intercensal increase in the history of the nation (the largest was in the 1950s), but in percentage terms it is the second smallest increase, amounting to about 13.5 percent as compared with an all-time low of 7.2 percent during the depression of the 1930s...

...Air and water pollution, traffic jams and transportation problems, housing shortages, the spread of suburbia into the countryside, the overcrowding of recreational facilities, even higher crime rates, are plausibly attributed to population growth and have undoubtedly influenced the downward trend in births and family-size preferences...

...Annie Besant, for example, whose famous trial with Charles Bradlaugh in 1876 did so much to popularize knowledge of contraception in England, was also one of the first Fabians and a contributor with Shaw and the Webbs to Fabian Essays...

...This new climate of opinion has rather suddenly placed an antinatalist population policy on the political agenda of the Left...

...It seems to be one of those rare instances in which the anxieties of specialists suddenly become converted into a public issue...

...In the 2 Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964...

...William Petersen, "Taiwan's Population Problem," in S. Chandrasekhar, ed., Asia's Population Problem (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp...

...The connection between population increase and environmental deterioration is stressed by those concerned with the ecology issue...

...Tax reforms removing extra benefits to large families and penalties for single and childless persons are probably the most obvious initial measures that would reverse the built-in, though by no means deliberately planned, pronatalist bias in present tax, welfare, and military exemption policies...

...Yet many of these retained the old eugenic concern over the "quality" of population that has always been unpalatable to the Left...

...If, to invert Keynes, we are unlikely all to be dead in the long run—that is, by the year 2000—and if it is an ideologically motivated exaggeration to blame the problems of the Third World on American population 'Davis, op...

...Thus decisions on family size may no longer be determined solely by the desires and adaptations to their particular social and economic situations of individual couples...

...189-210...

...There is, in any case, disagreement among experts as to whether population growth is in fact the major culprit in the deterioration of the environment...

...Banning automobiles rather than babies would be a more immediately effective response...

...Jacob Oser, Must Men Starve...

...But, except for a few visionaries and conservation or eugenics "cranks," scarcely anyone has bothered about American population growth until very recently...

...Even enthusiasts for communal living have pointed to the advantages of collective child-rearing DENNIS H. WRONG in encouraging lower fertility by enabling childless adults to maintain close contact with infants and children...

...But since roughly 1965, the ripple effect has favored higher fertility with the first cohorts of the postwar baby-boom years entering the parental ages...

...Davis has proposed that the government might today consider prohibiting couples from having more than four children, presumably by making sterilization compulsory for one or both parents who have already had that many...

...From the closing decades of the 19th century through the 1920s, concern over population growth was often linked to racist and social Darwinist doctrines and to support for imperialist expansion...

...Although the 1 percent average annual rate of increase achieved by 1969— less than half the world rate—is still well above zero growth, there has clearly been a considerable decline in the rate of American population growth since the peak of the baby boom in the fifties...

...Toward the end of the fifties and through the middle sixties, women born during the years of low fertility in the 1930s made up a larger proportion than either before or since of the total numbers of women in the childbearing years...

...The elimination of unwanted births made possible by the dissemination of contraceptive knowledge is no more than a first step toward population control...

...However, the fact that the birth rate continued to move downward at a time when the proportion of women in the reproductive ages had become favorable to higher rates, indicates a strong desire among contemporary women to have fewer children...

...But while some of the utopian socialists in the early part of the century had advocated birth control as a solution to the Malthusian dilemma, the parties of the Second International followed Marx's line on Malthus and were generally hostile to birth control propagandists, seeing them as diverting indignation away from capitalism, the real cause of mass poverty...

...Even the well-informed often favor population policies that are in line with their own sentiments and reject or ignore the case for more far-reaching and controversial policies...

...Yet the rhetoric of crisis so prevalent on the campus has led students to confront visiting politicians—and only liberal ones have shown their faces there in recent years—with the demand that they publicly support laws proscribing more than two children per couple...

...WHAT PUBLIC POLICIES, in addition to the extension and improvement of effective family planning services, might be adopted to accelerate this trend...

...Critics of neocolonialism in the Third World have not only called attention to the population explosion there, but have denounced the greater drain on the resources of underdeveloped countries resulting from continued population growth in America itself...

...The much-publicized figure of a population of 300 million by the year 2000 now seems too high and the 300 million figure is not expected to be reached until about 2110...

...People must be induced to want 4 Kingsley Davis, "Population Policy: Will CurrentPrograms Succeed...

...Undoubtedly, the very rapid dissemination of "the pill" and the widespread publicity attending it greatly increased general awareness of the degree to which family size is subject to personal choice...

...More than ten years ago, at the peak of the nuclear arms race, Nathan Glazer stated: `Because California needs missile contracts, American civilization may be destroyed...

...Nor were the Victorian feminists very sympathetic to the birth-control cause...

...Actually, the United States as a whole is not becoming more crowded: fully half our counties have lost population since 1950, most of them in the "heartland" rural belt, extending from the agricultural Midwest southward to Texas and Louisiana, and eastward across the South to Georgia and South Carolina...

...But action by the government to remove real or apparent official encouragement of large families may help sustain the present mood of concern, which has independently contributed to the recent decline in fertility...

...Marx was neither the first nor the last to pour invective on Malthus calling him a reactionary apologist for the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation, and his anti-Malthusian polemics in Capital have to this day inhibited full recognition of population pressure as a source of poverty in the Communist countries...

...government laws and policies aimed at discouraging childbearing would be needed, but before the publication in 1964 of Lincoln and Alice Day's Too Many Americans virtually no specialists in demography had advocated such a course to a wide nonprofessional audience...

...Yet these problems result primarily from a long-standing trend in the distribution of the population: the increasing concentration of people in metropolitan areas, which is only indirectly affected by total population increase...

...Even in the period since World War II, when alarm over the population explosion in at least the underdeveloped countries became conventional wisdom among demographers, the traditional hostility of the Left to population control was expressed in several books written for a popular audience,$ quite independently of official Communist attacks on the "reactionary Malthusianism" of American demographers...

...In 1960 I wrote in DISSENT that the population crisis was "resistant to the old terms of ideological debate between Left and Right...

...Such new policies might also set limits to a future resurgence of fertility—a second baby boom —even though this seems highly unlikely to occur and, if it did, more stringent measures would certainly be required to control and reverse it...

...The census shows a population increase of somewhat more than 24 million in the sixties, from a total population of about 180 million in 1960 to 204 million in 1970...

...Yet today population control has unmistakably become a cause of the Left...

...New York: Abelard-Schumann, 1957...

...The ambiguity inherent in the notion of an unwanted birth strongly suggests that this is an underestimate...

...The competition between regions for federal funds and contracts, the acute fiscal needs of the metropolitan areas, the dependence of so many areas on the military-industrial and aerospace establishments, and decisions as to the location of federally financed model cities and new towns—these merely begin to suggest the dimensions of the problem...

...All this contributed to the bad name of population control on the Left...

...DENNIS H. WRONG growth, or even on the American economy in general, it remains highly desirable that population growth in the United States should approach a zero rate and that we begin to plan both how to achieve this and how to cope with the new "stationary state" once it has been achieved...

...1177-82...

...Compulsory restrictions on childbearing by means of required abortions or sterilization, let alone such measures—still technically impossible—as placing steroids in public water supplies, are politically as well as administratively unfeasible, though it is a good thing that they are at least beingdiscussed as ultimate possibilities...

...The idea of la grPve des ventres, a "strike of bellies," to deny fresh cannon fodder to the war-makers was advanced by socialists before 1914...

...It was, of course, the spread of this practice that has successfully lowered fertility in the Western world since the late 19th century...

...A high proportion of increased illegitimate birth occurs with teen-agers, suggesting the need for more extensive sex education, including contraceptive information, in the schools...

...But there were countercurrents: the Swedish socialists in the thirties, influenced by the Myrdals, encouraged the working class to limit the size of families by birth control...

...If, however, fertility levels sufficient only for population replacement were reached by the end of the 1970s, the present age composition of the population is such that zero growth could not be actually achieved for another 65-70 years.' This is a short time according to the usual timetable of demographic change, but impossibly distant by the standards of the doomsday forecasters...

...The rapid drop in mortality since World War II in the underdeveloped countries is an exception which has, of course, precipitated their subsequent population explosions...

...for perhaps the first time in any large-scale society, they may be becoming responsive to public and official concern over the impact of total population size and growth on the general welfare...

...1 Social scientists concerned with the underdeveloped countries have long been aware of the need for a slowing-up and even termination of their population growth as a precondition for economic progress...

...The United States has undoubtedly become the most mass-media saturated country in the world...

...or, though not racist in tone, they at least seemed to disparage the cultures of the underdeveloped world, as in conservationist William Vogt's remark that sex was the "Indian national sport...

...And the corollary of racist fears of the expanding colored peoples was to encourage higher fertility at home, which the Nazis and Italian Fascists adopted as official policy in the twenties and thirties, thus aligning birth control and abortion advocates with the left-wing opposition to their regimes...

...It would be tragic if attention were to be diverted from the enormous task of economic development in the Third World, for which population control is so critical a necessity, by concentration on the lesser problems arising out of population growth in the United States...

...Most authoritative estimates place the proportion of 6 Not all aspects of this are uncontroversial...

...In the past, Malthusian and neo-Malthusian arguments were usually identified with the Right...

...In the era of imperialism, this argument was extended to whole peoples, and concern over the "Asiatic hordes" became widespread in the early part of the century...

...One is startled to find the identical argument turning up in discussions of "the pill" by some of the more militant contemporary supporters of Women's Liberation...

...Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb is a best-seller on the campus...

...The decline is entirely the result of a reduction in births, just as the post-World War II increases were largely owing to a rise in births...

...Population growth obviously increases total demand and thus accelerates the despoliation of the environment...

...Some demographers who have long specialized in the study of American fertility go so far as to foresee at least the possibility of widespread concern 20 years from now over the failure of the American population to produce enough children to replace itself...

...In addition to the volume of direct publicity on the population-ecology issue, the consequences of rapid urbanization and resulting higher population densities are all too visible...

...Nor are American cities themselves characterized by very high densities if compared with European, let alone Asian, cities...

...Resignation rather than strengthened determination to eliminate the evil is a possible response, and if the predicted disasters fail to materialize, apathy and complacency find renewed warrant...

...Yet the American birth rate began its decline some years before the mass marketing of the pill and even more years before intrauterine devices were available...

...5 Admittedly, past efforts by governments to encourage fewer births in both developed and underdeveloped countries have been modest by comparison with many proposals currently under discussion...

...730-39...

...Not that present tax or welfare policies have necessarily had a decisive effect on fertility, for, as we have seen, even deliberate 7 Larry Bumpass and Charles F. Westoff, "The'Perfect Contraceptive' Population," Science, (169) September 18, 1970, pp...

...all "unwanted" births in the United States at about one-fifth...

...The birth-control (or "neo-Malthusian" as it was often called) and the socialist movements developed at about the same time in the latter half of the nineteenth century...

...In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in England, capitalists and their spokesmen made crassly self-interested use of Malthus's arguments in order to oppose higher wages and social legislation, though Malthus himself has often been unjustly blamed for the use made of his ideas by others...

...It is to be hoped that all future government programs will be directly evaluated for their possible effects on fertility, which should rule out such antipoverty measures as the family allowances advocated by Daniel P. Moynihan...

...Official pronouncements on American population growth have not gone beyond the family-planning movement's traditional concern with eliminating unwanted births...

...Most surprising is the new concern over continuing population growth in the United States itself, which has created some popular demand for a national antinatalist population policy...

...The questions raised by policies of population redistribution, however, are a good deal more complex and politically knotty, and they fall outside the scope of the present discussion...

...Many of the alarmist books on population growth of the past quarter century were written by biological scientists with an ecological point of view, but only recently have their arguments been persuasive to a new and larger audience...

...But this applies to adult Americans—infants and children do not "consume" cars, jet plane trips, six-packs of beer, or even the products of the chemical industry in anything like the same amounts as adults, and most of the people who are going to raise levels of consumption in the seventies are already alive...

...More recently, claims have been made for the success of family planning programs in lowering fertility in such countries as Taiwan and South Korea, but Kingsley Davis and William Petersen have convincingly argued that a transition to lower birth rates was already under way in both countries when the new programs were introduced...

...Most of them, as J. A. and Olive Banks have recently shown,2 objected to birth control as depriving women of a valid excuse for refusing to submit to the brutish lusts of the male...

...Major shifts in population trends rarely take place within a few years unless they result from natural or man-made catastrophes...

...THE GREAT amount of ignorance of the facts of population, or their distortion and misuse for partisan purposes, is an obvious danger...

...But the Commission has been far more gingerly in considering policies aiming at population redistribution than those dealing with total growth...

...In spite of the association of population control with traditional sexual, moral, and religious values held with emotional fervor, policies designed to alter present population distribution and to slow-up or reverse current trends are likely to be even more politically explosive than those aiming at a reduction in fertility...

...The Nazis made large claims for reversing the decline of the German birth rate in the 1930s, but detailed analysis suggests that the achievement of full employment as a result of rearmament accounted for the upturn of the birth rate some years before the same thing happened for the same cause in other Western countries...

...The very rapid decline of fertility in the last few years and the sharply reduced family-size preferences expressed in surveys by college-age and slightly older women are consistent with this suggestion...

...The urban explosion of the last 30 years has taken place largely in the suburbs, creating the familiar problems of racial polarization between black central cities and white suburbs, the declining tax base of central cities, congested transportation arteries between residential suburbs and downtown business districts, and increasing residential segregation by class, race, and ethnic group within metropolitan areas...

...A few individuals were pioneers in both movements...

...DENNIS H. WRONG fewer children, and to achieve this may require the imposition of new and painful social controls interfering with sentiments and personal freedoms long cherished and taken for granted...

...DENNIS H. WRONG population policies in other countries have had little or no measurable impact...

...These problems, however, deserve consideration on their own, quite apart from ideological polemics on global issues...

...Greater exposure to the culture of the campus has undoubtedly had a similar effect...

...Some writers worried about the higher birth rates of the lower classes on the grounds that they were outbreeding the "genetically superior" middle and upper classes...

...This will continue to be the case through the seventies, and has already raised slightly the crude birth rates recorded in the last two years above that of 1968, which at 17.5 (per 1,000) was the lowest ever recorded, even lower than in the depths of the Depression...

...These are far-reaching proposals in light of the pronatalist bias of our existing policies...

...Paul Ehrlich thinks it is, others attach greater importance to rising levels of per capita demand, while still others, like Barry Commoner, blame changes in technology independently of higher levels of consumption...

...But though the risk of complacency is perennial, there is also a risk of overwhelming the public with doomsday forecasts, and we surely must have approached the saturation level in recent years --even of forecasts that the air and water are close to saturation level with noxious substances...

...In the last few years concern over pollution and environmental deterioration resulting from high and rising industrial production has focused attention on the population issue in the United States and the developed countries...

...Perhaps the present decline in fertility indicates the resumption of a deeply rooted trend toward small families and low fertility in industrial societies that was interrupted and temporarily reversed in response to the mass traumas of depression, war, and cold THE POPULATION PROBLEM: AN UNORTHODOX VIEW war in a period of uneasy prosperity permitting one last acting-out of traditional family values...

...Indians used to complain as recently as a decade or two ago that the main concern of Westerners seemed to be that there were so many of them, and one finds echoes of this attitude in the fears of "genocide" expressed today by some black militants and in their occasional condemnation of birth control as a white man's plot to eliminate American Negroes...

...A far larger number of popular books was published, however, in the late forties and fifties voicing alarm over world population growth...

...To give a concrete example: both Kingsley Davis and Paul Ehrlich have suggested that the American government might adopt a policy of eliminating tax deductions for more than two children and limiting free public education to the amount necessary to put no more than two children through high school...

...The major effort of family planning programs has, therefore, gone into the mass distribution of such new, simple, and effective contraceptive devices as intrauterine loops and coils on the assumption that, since surveys show family size to exceed the expressed desires of women in the underdeveloped countries, providing them with the means to control fertility will lead to its reduction and therefore to lower overall rates of population growth...

...The decline in births in the late sixties so exceeded expectations that in early 1970 the Bureau of the Census revised downward its population projections for the decades ahead...

...Demographers have maintained that the elimination in a decade of all unwanted births would bring the United States two-thirds to threequarters of the way toward zero population growth...

...This "ripple effect" contributed to the downturn from the high birth-rate levels of the late forties and early fifties...

...Demographers concerned with family planning programs have, Davis charged, been politically timid in failing to face up to this necessity...

...But no unambiguous evidence exists that any governmental population policies aimed at influencing fertility, whether pro- or antinatalist, have ever succeeded in doing more than hastening a trend already underway...

...While new demands and problems have emerged in the sixties, much of the discontent expressed by radical youth, by the women's movement, and by the blacks reflects a desire to complete several of the "compromised revolutions" to which Paul Goodman called our attention a decade ago in Growing Up Absurd (though, surprisingly, he failed to mention feminism) . Yet in the case of childbearing decisions there is a new element present...

...Thus the stress on population control as an immediately effective remedy to an imminent ecological Armageddon is misplaced...

...Josu6 de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952...

...Any proposal falling short of this is then viewed—and booed —as a "cop-out...

...Not the means but the motivation to have fewer children is the crucial consideration...

...The very title of Charles Reich's overadvertised book eulogizing the new youth culture is a metaphor based on a conservationist slogan: "the greening of America...

...S More recently, a similar—if less millennial —disproportion between cause and effect has been indicated in the case of the needs of the Seattle labor market and the noise and pollution effects of the SST...

...Such sociologist-demographers as Kingsley Davis, Judith Blake, and William Petersen argued that within a few decades 1 For my references to the President's Population Commission, as well as to several other matters dealing with the future trend in fertility, I am indebted to a seminar talk given at Princeton Uni versity by Professor Charles F. Westoff, executive director of the Commission and professor of soci ology at Princeton...

...As recently as the 1950s a vague antihumanitarian and reactionary aura still clung to advocacy of population control...

...Science, (158) November 10, 1967, pp...

...8 Nathan Glazer, "The Peace Movement in America, 1961," Commentary, (31) April 1961, p. 295...

...What are the present prospects for future American population growth according to the evidence of the 1970 census and recent demographic research...

...The enormous publicity recently given to environmental damage and to the asserted connection between it and population growth has helped convert childbearing decisions into a moral issue, a matter of conscience, for large numbers of people...

...THE POPULATION PROBLEM: AN UNORTHODOX VIEW debate over the immigration laws 50 years ago, leading American social scientists, even several of liberal persuasion, used racist and eugenic as well as neo-Malthusian arguments to urge the end of unrestricted immigration...

...The greater availability of newer methods of contraception, such as intrauterine devices, and of legal abortions are likely to counteract possible anxieties about the medical effects of the pill which have already somewhat curtailed its use...

...I realize that such prophecies are meant to be self-defeating, that they are part of a political strategy designed to jog people out of optimism or indifference...

...One may assert with total confidence that there is not a single problem of American society that will be reduced rather than aggravated by the addition of more people to the population...

...ZPG—"zero population growth"— clubs have been created on a number of campuses and in some liberal, upper-middleclass communities...