Room For How Many More?

In much of the work dealing with resources, as commodities or as environment, the number of people is one of the "givens." The Census Bureau tells us how many there are and how many there might be 10, 20, or 30 years from now. That figure then becomes the denominator of the resources per person ratio, and one shifts concern to whatever the numerator represents: copper, or lumber, or oil, or park space, or fresh air. Perhaps this is so because the numerator is believed to be more easily manipulated, and less surrounded by deep-seated moral, ethical, social, and political convictions and taboos. And so it has come about that for most economists population is the great denominator, but not much else.

In terms of population density, the United States stands near the center among the world's sovereign countries: 55 people per square mile. Compared with Australia with 5 people, the United States is crowded; compared with the Netherlands with 975, it is empty. But the meaning of such statistical comparison is limited. Space possesses different qualities and serves different functions. Much of Australia is not only uninhabited but uninhabitable; few if any parts of the Netherlands cannot, and do not, accommodate people. Nonetheless, such crude statistics do suggest that there is much space in this country on which there are no people. Trees, yes; cattle, yes; people, no. In addition, the birth rate has declined, in the short space of 12 years, from one of the highest to the lowest ever recorded in the United States, and the country's rate of population growth is the lowest in almost 30 years.

Against this background, the message on population that President Nixon sent to Congress in July of 1969 was the more surprising. It made him the first President to have addressed the nation's representatives on a subject long deemed politically off limits. Only 10 years earlier President Eisenhower stated that birth control was not the government's business. To President Nixon, "the Federal Government does have a special responsibility for defining these problems and for stimulating thoughtful responses.

Central among his concrete suggestions was the creation of a two-year Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to (1) inquire into the probable course of U.S. population growth through the end of the century, in the aggregate and in its regional composition; (2) estimate the demand that the increased population will make on the public sector of the economy (education, public works, highways, parks, etc.) and its effect on the quality of life; (3) investigate ways in which population growth will affect governmental activities at all levels, already strained with 200 million inhabitants but in need of capacity to deal with an extra 100 million within 30 years or less.

A bill to establish such a commission, made up of both presidential and congressional appointees, has passed the Senate. House clearance was expected soon after the end of the year. Meanwhile, a National Center for Family Planning Services has been established in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare which will centralize previously dispersed activities associated with information and delivery of family planning services. Both biomedical and social science research will remain with the Center for Population Research, established in 1968 as a component of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, itself one of the organizations making up the National Institutes of Health; and possible future changes include raising the status of Population Research from "Center" to "Institute."

Whether the momentum generated by the President's initiative will lead to the achievement of his objective to establish "as a national goal the provision of adequate family planning services within next five years to all who want them but cannot afford them" will largely depend on staffing and funding that are both adequate and specific.

More and more the debate in 1969 was shifting to problems beyond family planning. As was said in the report of the Ad Hoc Group on Population Research to the Federal Council for Science and Technology (July 1, 1969): ". . . we are only beginning to face the dilemmas which may result from the wide differences between the realization of individual goals as to family size and the requirements of the entire society." The latter embrace a liveable environment and social stability, both strained by added numbers. Unless society's values move in directions that render more acceptable what we now consider undesirable consequences, a shift of emphasis beyond family planning is indicated.

To be sure, family planning is playing an important role. Its rationale is that parents want fewer children than they now typically have and that, given the means to do so, they will have the number of children they want. Opinion polls, whatever their limitation, tend to support this assumption. So does the magnitude of abortions, estimated by some as not far short of one million in this country, performed mainly on married women. But whatever the number of children wanted is judged to be, it may still be undesirably high for society as a whole. Then the problem becomes one of reducing the number of children wanted. Here traditional family planning finds its limits.

In this and other high-income countries, pollution problems have reflected not only population growth, but also high per capita expenditures. Jean Mayer of the Harvard Center for Population Studies recently observed that it is the wealthier who contribute disproportionately to environmental pollution (they have three cars, scrap them frequently, throw away more durables and nondurables, crowd railways and airlines, etc.). Yet their access to birth control information and facilities has long been established and their behavior is unlikely to be modified by the expansion of family planning service that is now in process (a circumstance which, some contend, is true for the bulk of the population).

Early in 1969, Bernard Berelson, president of The Population Council described the many proposals for fertility control that have been made and appraised them in terms of several criteria. Not surprisingly, family planning rated high all around. But as Berelson put it: "In the last analysis, what will be scientifically available, politically acceptable, administratively feasible, economically justifiable, and morally tolerated, depends upon people's perceptions of consequences [of continuing population growth]."

The problem has all the earmarks of the standard pollution syndrome: a congestion brought about by the individual independent actions of a multitude of participants, none of whom perceives that his own action can really make any difference in the aggregate outcome. But much less than in pollution situations is it clear whether and to what extent incentives and deterrents are appropriate or effective in bringing about adequate response. Nonetheless, if one discounts reliance on "enlightened self-interest," one is forced to consider rewards and penalties beginning with tax measures, family allowances, and the like, and stretching to some that come close to regulation and coercion.

Not surprisingly, preferences vary widely. Those who foresee an impending "ecocatastrophe" advocate coercive and regulatory measures to bring about reproductive behavior to prevent it. Those who believe that we have not exhausted other means (including, for example, better distribution of population) shrink from imposition of controls, but would favor modification of various public policies and attitudes that seem to have an indirect pronatalist bias. Still others believe that education will eventually persuade parents of the advantages of small families and lead them to use one of the methods accessible to them; and some feel that the costs of coercion might be greater than the costs of adaptation to rising population, in other words, that the cure is worse than the disease.

While the President's message does not go beyond family planning, it does allude to the larger issue. "Perhaps the most dangerous element in the present situation is the fact that so few people are examining these questions from the viewpoint of the whole society," the President remarks. And while one must concede the logic of his comment that "the ecological system on which we now depend may seriously deteriorate if our efforts to conserve and enhance the environment do not match the growth of the population," the guiding thought for a U.S. population policy would seem to be in a reversal of that sentiment, namely, that the growth of our population should come to match our capacity to keep the ecosystem from deteriorating.

The timeliness of this thought is underlined by the likelihood that, unless the generation gap is even greater than one can judge from its public manifestations, we are at the threshold of an upswing in the birthrate. As the girls of the postwar baby boom move into the childbearing age brackets, there could be a loud and clear echo of that event.