Looking to the ZPGeneration

Worship Cupid, but Don't Be Stupid! advises a press release put out by Zero Population Growth, Inc. A Valentine received by some Americans last week, inscribed Love ... Carefully, was equipped with a red condom. But few young couples in the U.S. today need antinatalist exhortations or equipment. Since 1957 the fertility rate has dropped from a peak of 3.76 children per woman to a record low of 1.75 last year. Though it may rise in the next 30 years, it is highly improbable that Americans in the foreseeable future will again engage in the great procreational spree of the postwar years. The baby boom has become a bust.

The nation is seemingly on its way to the long-debated goal of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), the theoretical point at which deaths and births balance out. If present fertility and mortality rates remain constant, the U.S. population may stabilize around the year 2025 at between 260 million and 270 million (up from 216 million today).

A few--very few--demographers think that there will soon be a mini-boom in the U.S. birth rate, as couples who have deferred parenthood decide to start families. Most experts, however, discount an end to the birth dearth. With the exception of the aberrant twelve-year postwar fertility surge, they point out, the birth rate has been declining in the U.S. since 1800.

Pleasure Principle. In parts of the critically overpopulated Third World, birth rates are also tapering off. "Sometime near the beginning of this decade, the rate of world population growth reached an all-time high and then began to subside," notes Lester Brown, president of WorldWatch Institute, an international research organization. "In 1970 human numbers grew by an estimated 1.90%, an annual increase of 69 million. The most recent data show a marked decline since then, to 1.64%, an increase of 64 million a year."

Americans nowadays are painfully aware that resources may be increasingly short and expensive in coming years. Inflation has already made the cost of rearing a large family (now estimated at more than $250,000 for four children from cradle through college) all but prohibitive. The pleasure principle may be a factor too. Richard Brown, manager of population studies for a General Electric think tank in Washington, observes: "Children are competing with travel, the new house and professional standing. Once the checkbook is balanced and all other desires have been indulged, a couple will think of having a child--or, indeed, that child may have its place in the list of Wants & Goals."

The biggest, if least predictable, element in the fertility rate is the attitude of the American woman. As the economic, social and political status of women has improved, the desirability and mystique of motherhood has declined. Says Princeton's Charles West-off, a world-renowned demographer: "There is a very pronounced change in the attitude of women toward marriage, childbearing and working, and all these attitudes seem to lead in one direction: they don't want three or four children." As Berkeley Demographer Judith Blake Davis puts it succinctly: "You won't find those sacrificial mothers any more."

Thus--if the U.S. is indeed headed for ZPG--people will for the first time in history be consciously forging their own destiny.

Not all sociologists, demographers and economists agree that a stable population is necessarily desirable. Some worry about the social and cultural implications of a markedly older population. By the year 2020 there will be almost twice as many people over 65 (43 million) as there are today, exerting immense new pressures on the Social Security, pension and Medicare systems. To Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, "ZPG spells a decadent society, a la France in the '30s, a la Berlin in the early '30s. This means a less innovative society, a society in which fewer people will have to attend, care, feed, house and pay for a larger number."

Most futurists, however, agree that a better life is in store for a stabilized population. Among those who believe in the beneficial effects is Demographer Westoff: "ZPG will reduce pressures on the environment and on resources. It will probably increase per capita income. It will reduce pressure on governmental services. And it will give society an opportunity to invest more in the quality than the quantity of life."

Less Pollution. Other experts point out that with fewer children, families will have more discretionary income to spend on the pursuit of pleasure--and for better health care and education. Air, water and noise pollution should be reduced. With a drop in the number of youths in their teens and twenties, the segment responsible for most crime today, the cities may be safer.

With an older and less adventurous population, demographers predict, there will be less pressure on the nation's congested beaches, lakes, waterways, hiking trails, ski slopes and wilderness areas --while sales of art supplies, mah-jongg, backgammon, books and endless variations of electronic games should soar. The station wagon, the Patton tank of suburbia, may be replaced by smaller cars. The automakers expect to sell more of the handy vans that are already a part of the youth culture as well as more recreational vehicles: motor homes, campers, dune buggies, Jeeps, motorcycles and mopeds. Education may finally get better, as the teacher-student ratio improves. Says Economist Alan Sweezy of the California Institute of Technology: "I think ZPG is going to be a very good thing for higher education.

There will be an end to overcrowding." There will be a continuing increase in the demand for adult education, with the emphasis on practical skills and crafts rather than abstract knowledge. Says Vincent Ficcaglia, an economist at the Cambridge-based Arthur D. Little think tank: "What is changing is the type of learning people want. It's much less formal: they don't want or they already have a liberal arts degree. What they do want is to acquire skills to satisfy their own creative urges or help them survive--plant-growing and plumbing, for instance." Colleges and universities will have to adjust swiftly to this developing educational market --even if tenured professors of medieval English have to be retrained to teach ceramics and auto repair.

Smaller families of course can live in smaller houses. Experts also foresee a greater demand for town houses, condominiums and apartments as suburbanites move back into the cities to take advantage of the cultural opportunities clustered in urban centers.

All Americans will be affected by the new lifescape:

CHILDREN tend to be physically and psychologically healthier when there are fewer of them in a family--and when they are wanted. The University of Michigan's Robert Zajonc, a psychologist who studies educational trends closely, already notes a marked rise in the IQs of the ZPGeneration now in primary school. Verbal and linguistic skills, he finds, increase in inverse proportion to the size of the family; smaller families, as he puts it, are "more adult-oriented than sibling-oriented." Education may revert in part from classroom to living room. Children may again receive wisdom from respected, caring elders.

THE MIDDLE AGED will, more than ever, tote society's Sisyphean boulder. They will not need to spend as much time and money on so many offspring, but they will increasingly have new dependents--the old. By 2020, it is estimated that only one out of three Americans will be a taxpayer, and that liened group should be more heavily composed of the middle aged. In contrast to the whiz-kid executive syndrome of the '70s--a direct result of the baby boom--the reins of power will revert to older hands. For the middle-age, middle-management sector, there will be fewer shots at the top, though there will be more titular promotions and merit raises to reward the faithful. On the positive side, lessened competition may result in heightened creativity. People may concentrate on doing what they know best, rather than aspiring to levels at which they may prove incompetent, or be bored, or both.

THE ELDERLY, as a much bigger and therefore more influential segment of the population, with longer life expectancy, will almost certainly insist on filling a more productive role in society than they occupy today. With a smaller work force, the mandatory retirement age within the next quarter-century will have to be advanced to 70. Indeed, many social critics have long argued that the nation is spinning off an incalculably valuable resource by relegating robust, creative people to senior citizens' ghettos. The graying of America will offer new opportunities for the retired. There is already a crying need in the U.S. for day-care centers and kindergartens where working couples may safely leave their children; they could ideally be --and may have to be--staffed by older people. Some futurists have suggested that the elderly may form a class of "professional parents" for children of working couples. Some demographers, including Australia-based Lincoln Day, have proposed that retired couples be given state subsidies to take over abandoned small farms, where they could help increase the food supply. A report on the future of agriculture, published last week, strongly advocated a revival of small farms, located near cities, that could provide food more cheaply than agribusiness can in the face of the enduring, expensive energy shortage. Many retired people could find new and rewarding lives as small-scale producers of food.

One of the most heartening aspects of the new society, Stanford University Biologist Paul Ehrlich believes, is the speed with which it has come about. "It indicates that attitudes and customs are not so deeply ingrained that they cannot change rather quickly," he notes. "Ten years ago, we believed that the attitudes of women and the kinds of lives they lived would be something that had to change slowly, over decades. Actually there was a remarkably swift change between 1968 and 1970. It indicates that other attitudes we believe to be deeply held could also change quickly. Like the attitude that Americans must consume energy and other resources out of proportion to their needs."

Already, from Ithaca, N.Y., to Evanston, Ill., from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Livermore, Calif., empty elementary and now high schools are being converted to make room for shops, restaurants, arts workshops, Headstart programs, day-care centers, concert halls, studios, ballet schools, adult classes, seminars for unwed mothers, vocational training and housing for the elderly. Young doctors trained as pediatricians or gynecologists are increasingly transferring to the lamentably neglected area of public health. The transformation from growthmania to a less-is-more society will demand greater adjustments and some painful decisions. Nevertheless, demographers point out, a controlled population will allow the U.S. to reorder its priorities and reassess its values before they are dictated by scarcity.

Not least, the joy of having children may be enhanced.

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