Bubbling, Bungling Blague
PETERSEN, WILLIAM
Bubbling Bumbling Blague POPULATION AND WORLD POWER By Katherine and A. F. K. Organski Knopf. 263 pp. $4.75. Reviewed By WILLIAM PETERSEN Associate Professor of Sociology University of...
...The authors believe that industrialization brought about an improvement in "nutrition, sanitation, medical care, housing, and general living conditions...
...It would be difficult to name a single country that has not experienced a rise in fertility, either because of the postwar change in family-building habits, or because of improved health conditions that raised the biological potential...
...Never," too, is used quite often...
...Since any reader with the slightest sensitivity to language finds this exuberance irritating, the sacrifice of accuracy to liveliness is made to no purpose...
...Here are several of the worst: • Americans take their world leadership "for granted today as our national heritage and permanent possession...
...and Communist China is weaker, not stronger, because of its rapid population increase...
...But other things are seldom equal...
...Toward these new colonies in all but name the rulers perpetuate many of the old imperial attitudes...
...In a frenetic effort to engage the reader's attention, the meaning of a word or a phrase is seen as secondary...
...The tolerance of the French "is such that they have had little difficulty with aliens.' (Even before they look at France's naturalization laws, the authors might read Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth...
...There is no mention of sterilization, which has proved its efficacy in Puerto Rico and is being advocated more and more in India and elsewhere...
...They live in "economic dependencies," where the U.S...
...so they write that it "hit Europe like a tornado," and that the world today has gone "daft" over it...
...In the past, tiny powers such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal acquired vast empires...
...Policies designed to redistribute a nation's population have also been relatively rare...
...One of the Organskis' favorites is "already...
...it is inserted in the most unlikely contexts in order to suggest the inevitable march of history they are recording...
...Offhand, one thinks of population exchanges under League of Nations auspices, the forced migrations that the Nazis and the Communists engineered, the New Towns in Britain and the efforts in many other countries to reduce the size of metropolitan centers...
...Too much that the Organskis describe is pictured as all or nothing, black or white...
...Federal aid, honest local administration, a successful industrialization program— all presumably had no effect...
...today, so small an entity as Cuba successfully defies the United States...
...Fair enough, though many, including myself, disagree...
...Only" migration to the mainland has saved Puerto Rico from the consequences of her rapidly growing population...
...Abortions in Japan's state clinics are "dangerous...
...Overstatement is another favorite device...
...It may be more striking to assert that migration is "never," rather than "seldom," the major factor in population growth...
...Attempts to raise mortality have not played a major part in governmental population policies...
...If that is so, and if the ties are as objectionable as the Organskis picture them, how can it be that there are any left...
...but "seldom," while it seems to carry less authority, at least admits such exceptions as Israel and 19th century urbanization...
...In fact, they have demonstrated that, performed under optimum medical conditions, abortions are never fatal and apparently—though the evidence is not clear—seldom harmful...
...In at least one respect the latter have a great advantage: They are being industrialized, while the economic dependencies have developed "no important industry...
...When the United States set immigration restrictions in the 1920s, "the gates slammed shut...
...Reviewed By WILLIAM PETERSEN Associate Professor of Sociology University of California...
...The most reasonable and the most effective means of reducing high fertility is contraception...
...Some of these faults derive from the authors' lack of control over language...
...The book does note differences between "economic dependencies" and "satellites...
...This is perhaps the most preposterous statement of all...
...But this does not necessarily imply that opposition to Communism must be softened and antagonism to the West heightened...
...In a work dealing specifically with the relation between population and national power, this is as close as the Organskis come to analyzing genocide...
...It "controls the destinies" of some 281 million people outside its borders...
...maintains many of the economic advantages of colonialism without the responsibility of political rule...
...The Organskis believe that "the competition between the Communist bloc and the West will be decided by the third of the world that is presently uncommitted...
...author, "Population" Other things being equal, the larger the nation, the more powerful it is...
...Katherine and A. F. K. Organski have tried their hands at a popularization, and the result is a thoroughly bad book...
...The second largest imperial power for the Organskis is the United Kingdom, and the third is the Soviet Union, which holds sway over only 98 million in its satellites...
...According to the two authors the United States today is the leading imperialist nation...
...The bubbling style is matched, moreover, by a readiness, even an eagerness, to voice rash opinions...
...If the scholarly worth of this book is nil, its political line is even more objectionable...
...The book's workaday prose is intermittently enlivened by an unusual word used in a brand new sense, by metaphors that run wild, by half-paragraphs of purple prose...
...To attempt to analyze that relation in a work designed for a popular audience is obviously a perilous undertaking...
...India, with the largest steel plant in the world, "has yet to start" her industrialization...
...Population and World Power has no virtues to compensate for its amorphous organization, its indifference to factual accuracy, its mushy neutralist politics and its vulgarization of social theory...
...Neither "nation" nor "power" is a simple idea, and no simple statement of the relation between them can be adequate...
...Something rare in modem demographic history [is] an increase in the fertility...
...On the other hand, the West's "colonies in all but name" "can break their ties with comparative ease...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
