One plus one equals three; 11; The Powers and the Problem

One plus one you equals three for. Any gun you know and I wonder when it was made. Me being in town. The one thing that was not. Wanting. It is estimated that in 16:50 there were four hundred and seventy billion people in the world. It took two centuries for that figure to double. It took only one century to double again. Today there are well over three and a half billion of us sharing this planet. Demographers tell us that by the year 2000 the world population will swell to almost 7 billion. This series of programs is about this problem about what happens because one plus one equals three

or five. Two times two with O R few times four is a few times eight is 16 and the I already get like oh you're doubling up like a doubling of a lot of thinking of doubling in 30 Can we get either people going to have to get smaller. All the world's going to have to get bigger. Well there's a couple of a possibility and if you leave it do you figure out a lot I think you've got to look it up and look at the building but I'll take it up I think if you do you. Will only be a doubling in 32 years according to the best estimates of our world demographers. In other words by the year 2000 or shortly thereafter New York City may be twice as large. So maybe London Moscow Rome and all the other cities of the world. And there may be huge new cities.

Certainly there will be new problems facing all nations. Practical problems such as collecting taxes from twice as many people and problems of national goals and values and the almost overwhelming problems of making governments responsible to twice as many citizens for all the powers. The problem the population is becoming more and more critical. Well albeit doubling and doubling and doubling all think it's happening. The size of a nation's population is an important factor in international relations. It is by no means the only important factor but population size is significant. A large population means at least potentially a large market for goods and services. It can mean the availability of the human resources needed for a big US industrial economy a large population can also mean widespread misery in a nation you know prepared to handle the resulting problems a large population can also attract the power hungry nations are aware of these

things. And population size does influence international relations. When I ask for an assessment of the importance of population growth on world political activities Dr Norman writer suggested that a variety of myths are influential. My doctor a writer is the poet Stein Babyland professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said Well my impression of the situation with respect to population is that a number of people have that employed for whatever purposes. Notions about the relationship between population and other aspects of life with which they are concerned they have used these relationships perhaps to gain political power or perhaps to gather support for ends that they may have and that the relationships on which their

ideas are based have essentially no founding in fact. And not that we can disprove them. All we can say is that there is little evidence for them. I can remember from my youth the philosophies of Hitler. He was expounding a concept of Laban's around which is essentially the notion that. Because of Germany's large population size you needed more space within which to expand. This was a commonplace notion among people with a totalitarian and expansionist thrust of their thinking. And I find that the ideas that he expounded then had no credence then and do not now but they are still being very widely used. Somehow a notion that when a population size gets large that it somehow or other tends to overflow its boundaries. Now this is contradicted in very elementary ways by the quite evident

prosperity and decent quality of life from an economic and political standpoint in many European countries which are extremely densely populated indeed. There are people who believe that as the population size gets larger that somehow or other the people become animal like in their characteristics. That they are more prone to seek a violent solution to break out in riots. That somehow or other they lose the will to live. This I think is if it has any basis in evidence atol is based upon studies of lower forms of of animal life. And the analogies frankly don't seem to hold up. You can for instance point to densely populated ghettos in this country in which there are indeed high crime levels but on the other hand you can point to a country to a city like London England in which the level of public order is high indeed there. In short there just doesn't seem to

be a simple relationship between population density in the various kinds of political pathology. Violence crime rioting revolutionary overthrow of governments and the like that just doesn't seem to be any simple relationship at all. I would suspect that part of the problem is that there is a complex of changes going on in the world. These changes are as always accompanied by a great deal of disturbance. Upsetting of the status quo and there is a lot of pain and suffering associated with them. And I think that perhaps the population variable tends to be the simplest one for people to think about and leads to theories which I think can do more harm than good because the obvious Kate the situation. So then you would not put much credence to the idea that part of the problem behind the Soviet Union and China at the present time let's say would be a matter of population density not part of China's part in that particular area.

Well you really have to distinguish a couple of things. One is the reality in terms of the. Particular goals that the leaders of these two countries want to achieve and what they believe to be true. People act on what they believe to be true. And if the Soviet Union believes that the presence of a very large population in China is a threat to its borders with China then the Soviet Union will take actions based upon that belief. That doesn't make the situation any less real than it would be if demographers were able to point to an immediate an obvious relationship in other words the people who make policy make reality. In this particular sense. So I would say there are indeed activities going on in the world in high political circles which are very real in their consequences and which are

essentially governed by math. But in a sense the mists become truth. That's correct that's correct the presence of a large population may be one of the things that makes it Leader its leaders behave differently and makes others behave differently even though the link that they see between that population size and other important variables in the social system is unfounded in any kind of scientific sense. What about the matter of economic growth on a national level. The problem of developing nations I believe they're calling them now is the matter of a rapidly expanding population a significant factor for a nation that say trying to build itself up from an industrial point economic point of view. Yes there's no question about the very close relationship the relationship might be expressed in the following way that

any rapidly growing population is one that has a very large proportion of dependents in the young ages. And if the country for example is attempting to achieve a higher level of education it finds that not only is it starting from from rock bottom with regard to its educational system but it is facing rapidly increasing demands upon that system. Now in this country over the past 20 years we have faced growing demands on the educational system and I don't think we've coped with them very well and we are the richest country in the world. Well the same thing is happening all around the world with countries that have far fewer resources than we do. So that's one problem and that is that a society is very hard put to find the extra resources needed for capital investment. If so much is going into the provision for a. A very large dependency base in the young ages. Now there's a second problem one that is

coming on many of these countries right now and that is that these countries have had their period of rapid growth for some 20 or 25 years now. That means that the first wave of really large birth cohorts are coming into the ages of employment. And it is an exceptionally difficult thing for a country which is attempting to increase its supply of capital per worker to find the capital necessary to employ these new members of the labor force at the kind of level which will not depress the productivity of the nation rather than raise it. So for both these reasons you have a very immediate link between economic development and population growth. And I think that economic planners the world around are now highly sensitive to the role of the demographic variable and it's a very frustrating one. I would put it this way that it is not that these countries have a population problem so much as that they have many many other problems and the solution of every one of these problems is made somewhat more difficult by the circumstance of population

growth. Dr. Norman rider's comments point out that population growth influences economics as well as politics. Dr. Julian Simon professor of economics and marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Points out that while population may mean short term economic hardship. It may also mean significant long term in advances. Let's consider how the short run prospect for per person income in less developed countries with faster or with slower population growth. Then the very short run say next year it's unquestionable that per capita income will be lower if there are more children than otherwise. And the food situation just discussed is irrelevant to this question because even if there are more babies. Almost the same amount of food will be produced. But will be split among more mouths. Furthermore more babies mean greater demands on public resources more health care immediately and more schooling which means the resources will be pulled away from other possible uses that might otherwise help raise per capita income. The point is that babies consume but they don't produce

and the somewhat longer run more babies today mean that people will be added to the labor force in a few years. But land and capital will be no larger than otherwise at least at first so production per worker will be lower than otherwise with negative effects on income per person. Furthermore these effects accumulate more children. They also reduce household savings which may increase the cumulative effect as a snowball grows at compound interest. The lower birth rate case achieves an even greater advantage in per capita income over the higher birth rate case for a while anyway. Say 50 years. Now most people interpret this effect as grounds for wanting the lower birthrate to occur. But note that this does not necessarily follow logically for two reasons first whether to have more people with a given lower incomes. Whether this is better

or worse than the have fewer people are given higher incomes is strictly a matter of values. Second though the short run per capita income affected more babies in India is pretty surely negative. The long run effect after 50 or 100 or 200 years may be positive. So let's turn that next let's talk about the the longer run effect of population growth. In the long run effect of a higher birth rate in India and elsewhere is less. Knowable than the short run effect. Some of the most important effects of population growth have nothing whatsoever to do with physical and natural capital or even with the stock of educational capital. Rather they have to do with psychological and social changes. In the past 25 years economists have rediscovered that additions of capital and labor do not merely explain the growth of an economy and evidence on the one hand came from post-war Germany where a booming economy was built of rubble

in a short time. On the other hand considerable amounts of capital have been poured into some less developed countries without too much effect. Now one crucial factor is how inventive The people are and how responsive they are to change. Population size itself can affect inventiveness in at least three ways and one ways. Population growth can make invention more necessary just to keep the same standard of living at bay for. A second population growth can make inventiveness more profitable make more people more in bigger markets more potential profit for invention. And third and increased population can increase invention by simply there being more minds to think up inventions. Clearly we would not have asked any of the inventions which sustain our modern day US life. If population remains stationary ten thousand years ago. So the result of a growth in population the Course's invention. If it does

maybe that everyone is better off than they would have been if population had grown more slowly. Parents out of that. I know it is it's revealing to me that writers about population growth very frequently talk about up a greater number of them our lives coming into the world and more pairs of hands. But I've never read one talk about more brains arriving. This emphasis on physical consumption and production may be responsible for a lot of bad thinking about population. What about the nations that feel that Dr. Simon short term problems are important not to want population control measures. Can the government successfully limit population growth. Not to fill a pouncer. Professor sociology and director the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. Well that's a $64000 question that faces mankind and there's no one in my judgment that can give you an answer. I'm not qualified to answer the question. We don't know. We do know this. But there has never been a people who

having achieved education and higher levels of living did not reduce their birthrate Unfortunately the converse of this proposition my judgment still holds. We still have to see the first example of a nation. Mired in poverty and illiteracy in the traditional type of society that has managed to reduce the birth rate. So what India is trying to do or what 2030 other nations are now trying to do in the developing parts of the world to control or for Jeopardy and reduce their growth rates constitutes perhaps one of the most ambitious and significant experiments ever undertaken by man and certainly by any nation. Up to this point I don't think we are in a position to shout his saws about the success. Now having said that there are examples of government programs that have definitely reduced birth rates.

For example in Hong Kong in Singapore and Taiwan South Korea the government family planning programs have undoubtedly accelerated the decrease in the birth rate but in those cases every one of those cases the birth rate had begun to come down before there were government family planning programs that amounted to anything. And they began to come down for the very same reason of the birth rate came down and western civilization including the United States namely increased literacy and higher levels and there are things we do know in other words from experience that government family planning programs can take center rate the rate at which a birth rate can come down once it has started by reason of the basic changes in the social structure and organization and the attitudes of the people. We have yet to see the example of a government family planning program that has initiated a decrease in the birth rate. Now having said that I have returned from India only about six weeks ago and I spent about a month there looking into the

family planning problem. There is one experiment in NDA in which a route of a small population of about 100000 people. I tore a block down here going to ground. In which the population is still rural still essentially a traditional society is characterized by high rates of the literacy and low when I was a mother and which has reduced its birth rate through a program deliberately designed to bring this about. But. This birth rate reduction is the result of a program that has been underway for some 17 years. It has included not only birth control kinetics but it has concluded included a large number of institutions aimed at improving improving rural night aimed at improving health including not only a comprehensive health program but also on maternal and child health programs. It has included programs such as kitchens for the schools and the

trades for the schools and for part of the population. Seventeen years of such effort plus the importance in terms of personnel and in terms of expenditures for specific programs that are far beyond the ability of the government of India or any developing nation to adopt for the nation for the nation as a whole. So what I come out is I think with sufficient importance over a long enough period of time. I know the birth rate can come down but at the present time the kind of inputs that are possible for the Indian government for the other developing nations have not borne much for our success. And in consequence I would say that there is every reason to expect no dramatic decreases in the birth rate or the growth rate for the developing regions. What makes the rest of the century one other thought. With all the effort that the Indian government is put in a family

planning program since 1951 52 there is yet been no measurable decrease in her birth rate. To be sure there wasn't much in the way of import until our last few years. But even these imports as I've indicated around it have been a rout of the small. But even if you assume that India is family planning program has brought the birth rate down south and the forthcoming census in 71 will help answer the question. Even if this has been true it is almost certain that India's growth rate has increased during the 60s and will be higher than it was in the 50s. It is almost certain that India's growth rate will be greater in the 87 overbook turnout had been in the 70s and the reason for this is that even if the birth rate can come down for some time to come the death rate is going to come down even faster. And therefore the growth rate is going to continue to go up remain high. This I'm afraid is the prospect that faces the world.

Many nations are attempting or are about to attempt to limit their population growth rates. Can they put the effort into this the Dr. Hauser believes is necessary. They are trying. You know nation not to power like a professor of biology at Stanford University has become an angry politically oriented spokesman for population control. Here are some of his comments from the Northwestern University environmental teacher then held in Evanston in January 1070. I think her very trying to use the rest. So it's all right. I think this is the place to stop this or excuse me. Let me point out a couple of very fundamental things when you talk to people about population control in a certain number of people's minds as means control for somebody else. We're going to have the Indians have fewer kids where the blacks are going to have fewer kids. All the Indonesians are going to have fewer kids because that's where the problem really is. Why it is utter rubbish. The birth of the average white American child puts roughly 50 times the

stress on the environmental systems of this planet. As for the birth of the average child in Calcutta the birth of the average American child is roughly three hundred times the stress on the nonrenewable resources of this planet as the average baby born in Indonesia. Similarly within our own society the activities of the affluent in the white middle class although their birth rate happens to be slightly lower on the average just slightly than say the blacks the activities of the make their population growth much much more serious. As far as the environment of the world the condition of all humanity is concerned. The population control consists of passing out condoms because that is where it is. If people want for instance the blacks in this country to reproduce it exactly the same rate as the whites. They have a very simple mechanism by which they get their way. All we have to do is give the blacks exactly equal opportunity economically thanks.

What needs to be done is a very complex execution. Fundamentally of course we have to institute population control that is among our own among the whites in this country and then hopefully among other groups in this country and we in the United States are finally recognized as economist every economist has pointed out that population growth is a drag in every way that we are far beyond the economies of. Scale if we have an extra 500 billion euros of the GNP that our president is talking about it will be all assholes just yet to ever see so I can assure you. But we got to get our population under control and then we have got to switch from a cowboy economy to a spaceman. The solutions proposed by not doing are like him met with resistance and opposition. Not only among the public in the politicians but also among many population control

advocates as well. You would not then be the kind of thing that has been talking about in terms of taxes on baby foods and something I find like suggestions to be preposterous. A whole series of levels and it's very hard to know where to start. One thing I can say and that is that suggestions that people should be somehow or other rewarded for responsible behavior or penalized for irresponsible behavior. Founders on one unavoidable circumstance and that is that you cannot punish the irresponsible parent with without punishing the child who is the consequence of that irresponsibility. And I am. If I have to make some choices I want to make darn sure that that child is not disadvantaged by the actions of its parents I think that this is a very important part of a decent way of life

so that the idea of incentives and penalties I think is going to run directly contrary to our or at least my ambitions in the welfare area. Those observations from Dr. Norman Wright are. Politically population size and methods of population control. Are becoming hot topics even motherhood is becoming politically controversial. How this will influence peace for national and international policies is unclear. You know that long term unchecked population growth. With its resulting pressures on the earth and its resources is potentially suicidal. Not only for individual nations but also for the world. And as a whole. We know the political realities and cultural values of a great deal to do with how we handle this explosive problem. And we also know that governments alone cannot solve the problem. In a sense the whole nature of governments and their commitment to their citizens will be tested. Or alternately. The problem of population is a result of many millions of

individual decisions. And government policies favoring population control work. Indeed can governments take such a stand and survive. The next 30 years. Well answer this question. Next week at this time we'll be looking at the population problem on a local and individual level. I want some of the measures we've discussed today can mean to you and me. Join us then. You have been listening to one plus one equals three four. Five. A series of programs about the problems we face because of our growing population. Your host for this program has been Dennis Corrigan special music performed by Rhea Truscott engineering by Edna Haney. Here I am on day and night and I meet one man I like many a night. Meet me there and like many

meet meet and there is little. To eat. And. No one down. To eat. One plus one equals three four five was produced and directed by Luis Geissler. But wy allows the radio service of the University of Illinois in Urbana. This is the national educational radio network.