Tape 99 - The economics of zero population growth
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- | Welcome, once again, as MIT Professor Paul Samuelson | 0:02 |
discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
This bi-weekly series is produced | 0:07 | |
by Instructional Dynamics Incorporated | 0:09 | |
and was recorded April 10th, 1972. | 0:11 | |
- | One subject that is discussed very much | 0:15 |
these days in economics is the problem | 0:17 | |
of zero population growth. | 0:20 | |
It's part of the whole concern over ecology. | 0:23 | |
Just to tick off some items in the passing news | 0:28 | |
that are related to this, | 0:31 | |
a group of English scientists, Natural Scientists, | 0:33 | |
got together and put out a blueprint for survival | 0:39 | |
and some very sweeping predictions about the dismal future | 0:43 | |
for the world and some rather drastic | 0:47 | |
measures of therapy are recommended, | 0:51 | |
for example any product that doesn't | 0:53 | |
last a great number of years | 0:55 | |
should have a special tax on it, | 0:58 | |
a tax in other words upon obsolescence. | 0:59 | |
Still, another indication of the tremendous | 1:04 | |
interest in this matter is the work | 1:07 | |
of the so-called Club of Rome. | 1:10 | |
I have reference to my own colleague at MIT, | 1:12 | |
Dr. J. Forrester and one of his co-workers, | 1:17 | |
Professor Meadows who have put out a book | 1:22 | |
that has received a great deal of attention. | 1:26 | |
Forrester has a book of his own | 1:28 | |
on this subject and Meadows, with the group | 1:29 | |
for the Club of Rome, has put out a publication | 1:33 | |
which is very much under discussion now, | 1:37 | |
for example, the state department has had Meadows | 1:41 | |
addressing groups in other countries. | 1:44 | |
It's a subject in short which is fraught with interest. | 1:48 | |
Now, I did touch on this matter | 1:50 | |
in one of my earlier tapes a long time ago | 1:53 | |
but because I get so many letters on the subject | 1:56 | |
I'd like to speak about it. | 2:01 | |
I may say that my experience is not unique. | 2:03 | |
My colleague, as a Newsweek columnist, | 2:06 | |
Professor Henry Wallach, of Yale, | 2:10 | |
devoted a column in which he was kind of cold | 2:13 | |
towards zero population growth | 2:16 | |
and the heavens descended on him, | 2:18 | |
a real barrage of mail onslaughts. | 2:20 | |
He's a brave and determined man | 2:24 | |
and he came back with a second column, | 2:27 | |
I haven't heard but I suppose that | 2:29 | |
that hasn't pleased everybody. | 2:31 | |
I propose in the beginning to give a brief history | 2:35 | |
of population and notions about population | 2:38 | |
because this is not something entirely new | 2:41 | |
that we're talking about | 2:44 | |
and it'll give us some perspective | 2:45 | |
to go back a distance. | 2:47 | |
Let me go back just to the end of the 18th century | 2:50 | |
and recall for you that | 2:54 | |
there was a school of thought in England | 2:59 | |
that believed in progress, | 3:02 | |
in the perfection of man, | 3:04 | |
these were the perfectionists. | 3:06 | |
William Godwin was the leader of that, | 3:08 | |
very interesting man in the history of ideas | 3:12 | |
who has not been studied enough, I think, | 3:15 | |
and who will increasingly come under new study. | 3:18 | |
But, for this purpose, I need only mention | 3:23 | |
that the father of the economist Malthus | 3:26 | |
became a follower of Godwin and he believed | 3:32 | |
that every day, in every way, | 3:36 | |
things were getting better and better. | 3:38 | |
That the Earth could support any size population, | 3:40 | |
that man was, | 3:44 | |
after having sinned in Eden, | 3:47 | |
having gone through travail, | 3:49 | |
man was now finally coming out | 3:51 | |
at the other end of the tunnel | 3:54 | |
into perfection. | 3:56 | |
And | 3:59 | |
T. Robert Malthus, who was to become | 4:01 | |
a Church of England parson and economist, | 4:05 | |
listened to his father and, as so often happens, | 4:10 | |
father and son did not agree in every respect, | 4:13 | |
and in arguing with his father | 4:16 | |
Malthus, | 4:19 | |
Malthus, | 4:21 | |
M-A-L-T-H-U-S, | 4:23 | |
Malthus decided that Godwin was completely wrong | 4:26 | |
and he sat down and wrote a book about it, | 4:31 | |
this was in 1798. | 4:33 | |
Of course, that's a very famous book, | 4:35 | |
it's something that everybody | 4:36 | |
knows about. | 4:40 | |
I say everybody, not every modern computer | 4:43 | |
realizes that it is going through | 4:46 | |
some of the same paces | 4:48 | |
that T.R. Malthus went through at that time. | 4:49 | |
Now, what was it that Malthus said? | 4:53 | |
Malthus said | 4:56 | |
man | 4:57 | |
is not becoming perfect, | 4:59 | |
we are not moving towards Utopia. | 5:01 | |
Quite the contrary, there are some inevitable laws | 5:04 | |
and | 5:09 | |
as Thomas Carlyle came to say | 5:11 | |
these are dismal laws. | 5:14 | |
Economics as the dismal science | 5:15 | |
got that name from Thomas Carlyle | 5:18 | |
and it got that name in connection | 5:20 | |
with the dire predictions of Malthusian type | 5:23 | |
about the law of diminishing returns | 5:26 | |
and starvation around the corner. | 5:28 | |
Malthus puts his arguments in the form | 5:32 | |
of an irrefutable syllogism. | 5:34 | |
He started out by saying that in every species | 5:38 | |
and in mankind there is a tendency | 5:42 | |
for population to grow at compound interest. | 5:45 | |
If you have a hundred parents and you get | 5:50 | |
210 offspring, | 5:56 | |
that's one situation, | 5:59 | |
if you have 200 parents you get twice 210 offspring, | 6:01 | |
420, and this will happen through time. | 6:05 | |
So, his first law is the famous law | 6:09 | |
of the geometric progression. | 6:12 | |
A geometric progression is like, | 6:14 | |
1, 2, 4, | 6:17 | |
8, 16, | 6:18 | |
doubling every time. | 6:20 | |
Of course, to follow such a sequence, | 6:23 | |
geometric progression, with a positive rate of growth | 6:25 | |
for any little length of time | 6:29 | |
results in enormous numbers. | 6:32 | |
I will remind you of the old story | 6:34 | |
about how chess was discovered. | 6:36 | |
The Sultan was so pleased by the discovery | 6:39 | |
of this amusing game that he said to the inventor, | 6:42 | |
name your reward, and the inventor said, | 6:46 | |
I'm a modest man, I don't want anything. | 6:48 | |
Sultan said, nonsense, name it, and he said, | 6:50 | |
well if you really wanna give me something | 6:53 | |
just put one grain of wheat | 6:55 | |
on the first square of the chessboard | 6:58 | |
and two grains of wheat on the second | 7:00 | |
and just continue in this way | 7:02 | |
until you've filled the whole chessboard. | 7:04 | |
Well, there's not enough wheat in the world | 7:06 | |
to | 7:10 | |
provide that magnificent gift. | 7:13 | |
That's the way geometric progressions grow. | 7:16 | |
And Malthus was not the first, | 7:19 | |
and he had a great number of followers | 7:23 | |
who persued relentlessly the vision | 7:25 | |
down the trail of geometric growth. | 7:29 | |
It always fascinates classes in economics | 7:34 | |
if you discuss the fact that all the wealth in England | 7:36 | |
today could be traced back, as Keynes said, | 7:41 | |
to the gold that Sir Francis Drake | 7:45 | |
stole from the Spanish in the Golden Hind. | 7:50 | |
If you compound that forward at 6% or 8%, | 7:53 | |
some similar number, you will equal | 7:58 | |
the present wealth of England. | 8:01 | |
The American Indians sold the island of Manhattan | 8:03 | |
for $24, so it is said, for trinkets. | 8:07 | |
What if that $24 had have been put in the bank | 8:12 | |
at compound interest? | 8:14 | |
In early editions of my textbook | 8:16 | |
I said at 6% that would equal the value | 8:18 | |
of all the land in Manhattan today. | 8:21 | |
Somebody wrote in to me and said, | 8:26 | |
I think that only comes to 25 billion or 100 billion, | 8:28 | |
and I think that you couldn't buy all the land | 8:31 | |
in Manhattan for that price. | 8:33 | |
So, I asked my research assistant | 8:36 | |
to look in to the matter and she came back | 8:38 | |
and said well, boss, if 6% won't do it try 6.5%. | 8:40 | |
You just have to step up the rate a little bit | 8:45 | |
and you'll get some very large numbers. | 8:47 | |
Now, | 8:51 | |
Malthus based his argument | 8:52 | |
upon some casual amount of experience. | 8:54 | |
We had in the American colonies, | 8:58 | |
at the end of the 18th century, | 9:02 | |
some evidence that family-size was | 9:04 | |
eight. | 9:08 | |
Go to old New England cemeteries | 9:09 | |
and you'll see seven, eight women died of childbirth | 9:11 | |
the age of 35 then the man married again. | 9:14 | |
And, the natural rate of increase of population | 9:18 | |
the size of the rate of growth of the geometric progression, | 9:21 | |
Malthus estimated in a prosperous era, | 9:25 | |
epoch, where there was no limitation | 9:29 | |
of land and natural resources would be about | 9:32 | |
a doubling every generation. | 9:34 | |
Now, what is a generation? | 9:36 | |
In college student life a generation | 9:38 | |
can be measured in four years or eight years | 9:41 | |
but the technical term for a generation | 9:44 | |
is the age of a parent | 9:46 | |
in giving birth to a child, | 9:50 | |
and then when that child grows up and becomes a parent | 9:52 | |
then that gap is the length of a generation. | 9:56 | |
Of course we, as parents, have children | 9:59 | |
over a period of time so you must | 10:01 | |
take a certain average. | 10:03 | |
Let's call 25 years a generation. | 10:07 | |
A generation is longer in Sweden, | 10:09 | |
where the women have their babies at a later age, | 10:11 | |
then it would be in India, | 10:13 | |
where they have their babies at a younger age. | 10:14 | |
But a doubling of population every 25 years, | 10:18 | |
that's the rate of compound | 10:21 | |
interest that is a natural law according to Malthus, | 10:25 | |
unless something prevents that from happening. | 10:31 | |
Malthus had gone to Cambridge University. | 10:36 | |
He learned a smattering of mathematics, | 10:39 | |
he learned about geometric progressions. | 10:41 | |
Unfortunately, he learned of only one | 10:43 | |
other kind of progression. | 10:45 | |
Aside from a geometric progression | 10:48 | |
we're taught in high school algebra courses today | 10:50 | |
about an arithmetic progression. | 10:53 | |
Now an arithmetic progression, | 10:55 | |
instead of doubling each time, | 10:57 | |
each increment being a certain percent | 11:00 | |
of the previous base, an arithmetic progression | 11:02 | |
is not like compound interest, | 11:05 | |
it's like simple interest and the steps upward | 11:07 | |
are even steps, just like a stairway | 11:10 | |
that always has the same size of the steps | 11:13 | |
and it depends upon the step of the increment | 11:18 | |
how fast an arithmetic progression will grow. | 11:21 | |
You could have a very steep arithmetic progression | 11:24 | |
but it still has a straight line | 11:26 | |
if you plot it on a chart | 11:27 | |
whereas compound interest, if you plot it on a chart, | 11:29 | |
is always an accelerating curve | 11:31 | |
that looks convex from | 11:34 | |
below. | 11:37 | |
Well, Malthus said | 11:39 | |
America will soon be filled up with people, | 11:43 | |
England certainly is already | 11:46 | |
pretty much filled up with people. | 11:47 | |
Every geometric progression must in the end | 11:50 | |
fill up any limited amount of natural resources. | 11:53 | |
And so, he said, the limit is going to be | 11:58 | |
food production, essentially. | 12:00 | |
Food production, said Malthus, and here | 12:02 | |
we must watch his argument very closely, | 12:05 | |
food production grows at an arithmetic progression. | 12:07 | |
Population grows at a geometric progression. | 12:13 | |
Every geometric progression, given enough time, | 12:16 | |
will far exceed and infinitely exceed | 12:19 | |
any arithmetic progression, | 12:23 | |
no matter what the constants are. | 12:24 | |
Therefore, said Malthus, | 12:26 | |
there is only one destiny for mankind | 12:28 | |
and that destiny is that | 12:31 | |
the death rate will go up and that | 12:35 | |
man can only come in equilibrium | 12:38 | |
at the minimum level of subsistence. | 12:40 | |
When you're finally through disease, and starvation, | 12:43 | |
and malnutrition, and over crowding, | 12:47 | |
get so large a density of population | 12:50 | |
that the wage can be no more per man | 12:53 | |
than barely enough to keep him alive. | 12:57 | |
Keep him alive, by the way, and bearing | 13:00 | |
in his family | 13:04 | |
five, six, seven infants, | 13:06 | |
half of whom die at birth, | 13:10 | |
another half of whom die in infancy, | 13:13 | |
and enough must always die | 13:17 | |
so that each two people can only leave behind them | 13:19 | |
two people. | 13:22 | |
Well, I think you'll grant that, | 13:24 | |
if that is the destiny of mankind, | 13:25 | |
in every place, in every continent, in every time | 13:28 | |
then economics is a dismal science. | 13:33 | |
You mustn't, however, shoot the economist, | 13:36 | |
he's just the messenger who brings the bad news. | 13:38 | |
That's the way Malthus left his first edition. | 13:42 | |
By his second and later editions | 13:45 | |
he took pity on mankind. | 13:47 | |
Perhaps he learned a little, | 13:49 | |
in fact he began to study things more widely, | 13:50 | |
and so he said there is some hope. | 13:53 | |
What you can try to do is to change | 13:56 | |
the geometric progression | 13:59 | |
by late marriage. | 14:02 | |
He advocated chastity until you get married. | 14:05 | |
Once you were married you had a license | 14:09 | |
to produce children, | 14:12 | |
remember he was a Church of England clergyman, | 14:14 | |
he was not in favor of birth control at that time, | 14:16 | |
he says, | 14:19 | |
"I will not comment on those nefarious French devices" | 14:20 | |
showing us that, already, | 14:24 | |
France was known at the end of the 18th century | 14:26 | |
as a country which was beginning to practice | 14:28 | |
familial limitation. | 14:30 | |
As a matter of fact, as an aside, let me say | 14:32 | |
that anthropologists are now pretty sure | 14:33 | |
that in almost every culture there are certain | 14:37 | |
mechanisms for limiting population. | 14:39 | |
In 17th century Japan, for example, | 14:42 | |
the population was fairly stable | 14:44 | |
and there wasn't measure of prosperity | 14:46 | |
but it was maintained by infanticide. | 14:50 | |
You exposed children if you didn't want them, | 14:54 | |
particularly if they were girl children, | 14:56 | |
so that when a baby was born | 14:58 | |
the neighbors never congratulated you | 15:00 | |
until their ascertained for sure | 15:02 | |
that you intended to keep the baby, | 15:04 | |
otherwise you exposed the baby just as the Romans did. | 15:06 | |
This was abortion after the fact instead of abortion early | 15:10 | |
in the fact. | 15:16 | |
Well, let me assure you that although | 15:18 | |
the Malthus argument is extremely simple | 15:21 | |
it had great potency and it had great effect | 15:24 | |
upon the thinking of the governments of the world, | 15:27 | |
the poor law reform of 1832 | 15:32 | |
was guided in part by the principles of Malthus, | 15:35 | |
let's make poverty as uncomfortable as possible, | 15:39 | |
unemployment as uncomfortable as possible, | 15:41 | |
because if you coddle the poor they'll simply | 15:44 | |
have more children. | 15:47 | |
Even by the middle of the century, | 15:49 | |
by 1848, 1850 when John Stuart Mill, | 15:52 | |
the last really of the classical economists was writing, | 15:55 | |
Mill was living in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, | 15:59 | |
in the greatest period of Victorian England. | 16:03 | |
After the | 16:08 | |
steam engine had been invented and came in to use, | 16:11 | |
after the railroad had begun, | 16:15 | |
after the automatic spinning jenny, | 16:17 | |
after the automatic loom, | 16:21 | |
the most remarkable period of progress, | 16:24 | |
John Stuart Mill, who was a well informed and eclectic man | 16:28 | |
was able to write the naive words | 16:32 | |
that it's doubtful that science and invention | 16:35 | |
have lightened the burden of a single | 16:38 | |
typical average man anywhere in the world. | 16:41 | |
Showing you how little you can know your own times, | 16:45 | |
particularly in the days when statistics | 16:48 | |
were very hard to come by. | 16:51 | |
Well, what did Malthus forget? | 16:55 | |
Malthus forgot two things. | 16:59 | |
Most importantly, there was never a good basis | 17:02 | |
for his arithmetic progression. | 17:06 | |
He pulled that number out of a hat. | 17:09 | |
He said population's gonna grow | 17:12 | |
like one, two, four, eight. | 17:14 | |
What about food? | 17:17 | |
If we call present food one, | 17:19 | |
he said let's suppose you could cultivate | 17:21 | |
England like a garden, | 17:23 | |
you could double food production. | 17:24 | |
That's one, two. | 17:26 | |
But in an arithmetic progression | 17:28 | |
if we've only gone up one at each step, | 17:30 | |
the next time we're at three and we're already in trouble. | 17:32 | |
Even if he became more generous | 17:36 | |
in his arithmetic progression and let's say | 17:37 | |
we keep the geometric progression one, two, four, eight | 17:40 | |
but the arithmetic progression goes one, seven, | 17:43 | |
that's a jump of six, | 17:47 | |
and you're much better off in the second period. | 17:48 | |
Then another jump of six is 13. | 17:51 | |
We're beginning to not be so well off. | 17:55 | |
But, finally we go to 19. | 17:57 | |
We're still ahead of the food supply. | 18:00 | |
Then we're at 25 but, by this time, | 18:02 | |
the population's at 32. | 18:06 | |
There's just no beating the race. | 18:08 | |
Now, why do I labor this particular point? | 18:10 | |
I labor it because if you read the book | 18:12 | |
by Dr. Meadows you will see that what is speaking there | 18:15 | |
is the authoritative voice of the computer. | 18:20 | |
Mustn't we be impressed by the certitude and accuracy | 18:25 | |
of anything that comes authenticated by modern science, | 18:30 | |
and by that most wonderful tool of modern science, | 18:33 | |
the electronic computer. | 18:36 | |
That's how the argument goes implicitly. | 18:40 | |
I may say, by the way, that Professor Forrester | 18:44 | |
and Dr. Meadows do not themselves make such claims | 18:47 | |
but no matter how many times they cross themselves | 18:51 | |
and say we want our analysis to be judged | 18:55 | |
upon its merits we are making guesses, | 18:58 | |
people inevitably think if it came out of MIT | 19:00 | |
it must have a special degree of accuracy because | 19:04 | |
everybody knows that everything that comes out of MIT | 19:08 | |
in the field of thermal dynamics | 19:11 | |
is practically guaranteed | 19:13 | |
to be an agreed upon thing by all scientists. | 19:15 | |
Well, I think back of the days when | 19:20 | |
there was a machine that played chess | 19:25 | |
and all over Europe good chess players | 19:28 | |
played against the machine and were defeated, | 19:31 | |
and everybody thought this to be a marvel. | 19:35 | |
This, by the way, was before the age | 19:36 | |
of the electronic computer. | 19:37 | |
We now know that at chess a computer | 19:39 | |
can be programmed to play a pretty good | 19:42 | |
game of chess, can beat a kid, | 19:43 | |
but it can't yet beat a master. | 19:46 | |
Maybe in Chequers, by the way, | 19:48 | |
a machine may be the equivalent | 19:49 | |
of practically the best that there is. | 19:51 | |
Well, this was before that time, | 19:54 | |
and how marvelous it was, | 19:56 | |
but you know what they discovered? | 19:57 | |
They discovered a little dwarf | 19:58 | |
who would curl up, literally, inside the machine, | 20:01 | |
I've forgotten what his name was, | 20:03 | |
it was a fraud. | 20:06 | |
Well, I say to you that every time a message | 20:07 | |
comes our from a modern computer | 20:11 | |
there is no fraud, there is no little man curled up | 20:13 | |
inside the solid state transistors of the computer. | 20:16 | |
But, | 20:21 | |
behind the computer, feeding in the input to the computer | 20:22 | |
is a man | 20:26 | |
and he is a mortal man | 20:28 | |
with all the imperfections of man | 20:31 | |
and the output cannot be better than then input. | 20:33 | |
And so, although the voice is that of the computer | 20:38 | |
the message is essentially that of Malthus | 20:42 | |
because, although Meadows may be right | 20:45 | |
that the amount of resources which can be found | 20:50 | |
by geologists in the next half-century, or the next century | 20:52 | |
may only be double what we now have. | 20:58 | |
Or, if he said triple let's change that to that. | 21:00 | |
Or, whatever he said let's double that amount. | 21:04 | |
Nevertheless, because the differential equations | 21:08 | |
of the Forrester-Meadows model | 21:11 | |
are of the Malthusian type | 21:15 | |
they involve constant coefficience. | 21:17 | |
They essentially are generalized matrix, | 21:19 | |
non-linear, geometric progressions, | 21:22 | |
and because there are limitations | 21:26 | |
upon resources put in them | 21:28 | |
the Forresters and Meadows of the world | 21:30 | |
cannot be wrong if they simply cert the following. | 21:32 | |
That within my model, | 21:35 | |
if disaster does not come by the year 2000 | 21:37 | |
then it will be here by the year 2025. | 21:42 | |
And, if I'm wrong in that, that it doesn't come by 2025 | 21:45 | |
then it will be here by the year 3000. | 21:48 | |
It's a perfectly self-fulfilling tautology. | 21:51 | |
Some time, under their geometric progressions, | 21:56 | |
there wouldn't be standing room | 21:58 | |
for all the people in the world | 22:00 | |
and there certainly would not be resource allocations. | 22:02 | |
The result is that when you look at these charts | 22:05 | |
the print out of the computer, | 22:10 | |
which show the standard of living | 22:13 | |
of even the most advanced countries of the world, | 22:15 | |
some time in the next | 22:17 | |
century, reaching a peak and going down, | 22:20 | |
you must realize that this is not science fiction | 22:25 | |
but this is speculative social science. | 22:29 | |
The fact that there are interviews | 22:33 | |
in Playboy on the subject shows | 22:36 | |
what widespread interest, the fact | 22:39 | |
that every journal I pick up, | 22:41 | |
that Anthony Lewis, a very sophisticated columnist | 22:43 | |
on the op-ed page of The New York Times, | 22:47 | |
reports back from England approvingly on this, | 22:49 | |
still cannot belie the fact | 22:54 | |
that water cannot rise above its own source | 22:55 | |
and what you have here is certain assumptions. | 22:58 | |
Now, I don't want for a moment to argue | 23:02 | |
that the assumptions made in this case | 23:06 | |
are wrong | 23:09 | |
because that would take a very searching examination. | 23:11 | |
You wanna say this, | 23:15 | |
that if you are a sophisticated student of economics | 23:18 | |
and of the population problem | 23:21 | |
I do not think you will find much new | 23:23 | |
in the Club of Rome material | 23:27 | |
which will sharpen your knowledge on this subject, | 23:29 | |
which will enhance your understanding. | 23:32 | |
This is not to deny that many members of the public | 23:35 | |
may find their understanding of the whole problem | 23:38 | |
improved by reading | 23:41 | |
such | 23:43 | |
materials. | 23:45 | |
Moreover, it's a sad thought that sometimes | 23:46 | |
in order to sell you must oversell | 23:50 | |
and because the problem of pollution | 23:52 | |
is an important problem, | 23:54 | |
because the problem of the amenities of life | 23:56 | |
having to do with elbow room and privacy | 24:01 | |
are important it may be that I shouldn't | 24:04 | |
be saying what I'm saying. | 24:08 | |
Maybe I should, so-to-speak, | 24:09 | |
in a good cause be quiet and say | 24:12 | |
although this isn't quite right | 24:15 | |
and privately, with a few elder professors, | 24:16 | |
we can agree up on this, | 24:20 | |
there should be a conspiracy of silence because | 24:21 | |
it's good for the people to be alerted to this matter. | 24:23 | |
Well, I'm assuming that my audience here | 24:27 | |
is a fairly sophisticated audience | 24:31 | |
and that it isn't necessary for me to take that | 24:32 | |
particular position. | 24:36 | |
I believe that the truth can stand | 24:36 | |
being looked at and understood | 24:39 | |
if only we can once arrive at it. | 24:41 | |
I have only a few minutes. | 24:45 | |
Let me mention, in connection with zero population growth, | 24:47 | |
that Malthus was wrong because he didn't foresee how | 24:51 | |
powerful would be what he called is arithmetic progression | 24:58 | |
the actual progression was more powerful | 25:02 | |
than the geometric progression of population. | 25:04 | |
That's why, because of modern science, | 25:07 | |
there's been such a tremendous increase | 25:09 | |
in the standard of life. | 25:11 | |
Moreover, what Malthus would not | 25:14 | |
countenance later generations came to do, | 25:18 | |
namely, explicit birth control, | 25:20 | |
and after 1870 you could see not only in France | 25:24 | |
but in the vital statistics of the middle classes, | 25:27 | |
the more affluent classes all over western Europe, | 25:30 | |
and increasingly in the United States, | 25:33 | |
a decrease in the birth rate. | 25:35 | |
This became apparent to every eye after 1925 | 25:38 | |
and because people always want | 25:42 | |
to be excited in these matters | 25:43 | |
they go from one side of the ship, | 25:45 | |
tipping it in one direction, | 25:48 | |
all in an avalanche over to the other side | 25:50 | |
tipping it in the other direction, | 25:52 | |
and after 1925 there were a rash of books called | 25:53 | |
The End of the Human Race, | 25:59 | |
Sweden Faces Depopulation, | 26:03 | |
there was very excellent work done by Edwin Cannan | 26:06 | |
in demography showing that England's population | 26:08 | |
would reach a maximum, by the way a maximum | 26:11 | |
lower than the present population of England. | 26:14 | |
The logistic studies by Dr. Raymond Pearl | 26:18 | |
of Johns Hopkins biology department | 26:23 | |
in which he compared human populations | 26:26 | |
to fruit flies in a bottle and in his bottle | 26:28 | |
every colony of fruit flies finally leveled off | 26:32 | |
like an S-shaped curve, called the logistics curve, | 26:36 | |
by him. | 26:39 | |
We had calculations by A. J. Lotka and R. R. Kuczynski | 26:41 | |
which showed that the population was indeed | 26:45 | |
in the distant future going to decline | 26:49 | |
if the average number of children per family | 26:52 | |
who survived to be married, to be fertile, | 26:56 | |
to have children, was less than two. | 26:58 | |
So, there was ground for extrapolation | 27:04 | |
of a coming-in to population growth. | 27:07 | |
But, it doesn't pay to be too certain in this matter | 27:12 | |
because, as we all know, after 1939 | 27:16 | |
there was a whole change. | 27:20 | |
There was a baby boom and the population | 27:21 | |
turned very much the other way. | 27:24 | |
Well, now I leave the story in its present state | 27:26 | |
as it's well known after 1957 you have had | 27:31 | |
a very considerable decrease in the birth rate, | 27:35 | |
not only in the crude birth rate, | 27:39 | |
but, if you refine the birth rate, | 27:40 | |
it worked with the number of births | 27:42 | |
per mother of childbearing age | 27:45 | |
you find that the decline is even greater. | 27:48 | |
So, the rate of population growth is leveling off. | 27:51 | |
We will not have zero population growth | 27:55 | |
for a long, long time even if the tendency | 27:57 | |
was for a declining population | 28:00 | |
because of past baby booms. | 28:02 | |
How shall I sum up? | 28:06 | |
Let me sum up by saying that it's worth | 28:08 | |
another tape some time on the whole problem | 28:12 | |
of ecology, the whole problem of whether | 28:16 | |
we should be against science or whether | 28:20 | |
we should utilize science for the purpose | 28:22 | |
of cleaning up the atmosphere | 28:24 | |
and solving some of these other particular problems. | 28:27 | |
But, I think, I wouldn't do duty to the subject | 28:31 | |
and to science without saying candidly | 28:35 | |
that the hysteria such as it's represented | 28:40 | |
by Blueprint For Survival | 28:43 | |
is really not substantiated, | 28:46 | |
careful, sober analysis of the realistic facts. | 28:49 | |
- | If you have any comments or questions | 28:55 |
for Professor Samuelson address them to | 28:56 | |
Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 28:58 | |
166 East Superior Street, | 29:00 | |
Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 29:03 |
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