Of People & Plenty

An advertising-agency researcher, looking for material on the spending habits of the higher income brackets, asked a library for a book called People of Plenty.

The book she got seemed overfull of vital statistics. She took another look at the title: Plenty of People. Both books are timely--and closely connected.

At 1954's end the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the population was 163.9 million, up an amazing 2,800,000 in a year. Nearly all of this is natural increase, i.e., excess of births (rate: 25.2 per 1,000) over deaths (rate: 9.2 per 1,000). Immigration, which around 1910 increased the U.S. population by about i% a year, is now down to about a tenth of 1%.

Only a few years ago a rate of population increase as high as the present one would have brought howls of impending calamity. Malthus had "proved" that people tended to increase faster than their food supply. Actually, in the century before 1950 world food production increased slightly faster than numbers of people. In the U.S., food supply increased much faster. An 1870 U.S. farm family produced enough to feed itself and one other family; a 1954 farm family produced enough to feed seven other families. It now seems as if Malthus' opponent, William Godwin, was right in predicting the day when the world's food could be grown in a flowerpot. Last week University of California scientists announced that they had artificially performed nature's basic process of plant life, photosynthesis.

Very little is known about the subtle and important relationships between population growth and economics. But enough is known to discredit Malthus. Americans take present population figures as a promise of more prosperity. Gone, for the first time in history, is the worry over whether a society can produce enough goods to take care of its people. The lingering worry is whether it will have enough people to consume the goods. The population figures seem to insure that the U.S. will; the rate of growth is the strongest buttress of confidence in the continuation of unprecedented prosperity (see BUSINESS). Every recent prediction of a U.S. depression has proved wrong; the business indexes have turned up again, pushed by the population index.

In 1940 demographers estimated that the 1975 population would be 180 million. Now the Census Bureau believes that the 1975 population could be 221 million. Nobody is alarmed. At low and static levels of technology, more people bring misery and famine. In an advancing technology, more people mean more plenty.

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