Too Many Babies?

Most businessmen assume that the rapidly rising U.S. population, expected to top 220 million by 1975, will progressively strengthen the nation's prosperity by creating more workers, new consumers, bigger markets, faster sales, greater industrial expansion. Last week Pittsburgh's influential Mellon National Bank & Trust Co. entered a mild dissent, warned that the growing population will produce as many problems as props for the economy. Said Senior Vice President James Neville Land, 62, in the bank's weekly newsletter: "Our rising population is creating pressures on natural resources which tend to retard further increases in material wellbeing. We must dig deeper oil wells and exploit less productive veins of coal and go farther afield for water supplies, all of which is a drag on prosperity."

Banker Land figures that the population boom will not boost general prosperity unless there is an "accompanying increase in real income and real productive capacity per person." And there is less chance for this now because "children and old people account for most of the expansion in our population. Consequently, the working force must run faster in order to stand still."

On the other hand, Banker Land sees compensating advantages when producers have more nonproducers to support. Business recessions may tend to be less severe. "Consumption by children and old people is relatively necessitous and nonpostponable; when they make up a greater segment of the total population, the downturns in total consumer buying may be less pronounced." And "population growth minimizes the effects of overexpansion made by business. It doesn't take as long to grow up to excess capacity when population is rising."

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