CHAPTER 24
                   DO HUMANS BREED LIKE FLIES?

                     OR LIKE NORWEGIAN RATS?
   
   If we breed like rabbits, in the long run we have to 
live and die like rabbits.  A. J. Carlson, "Science 
Versus Life," Journal of the American Medical 
Association, 147:1440.

"UNTRAMMELED COPULATION"
Chapter 24:  Table of Contents
Summary

   

   Many who worry about population growth in poor countries assert 
that people breed "naturally."  That is, poor people are assumed to 
have sexual intercourse without taking thought or doing anything 
about the possible consequences.
   In the words of environmentalist William Vogt, whose Road to 
Survival sold millions of copies, population growth in Asia is due 
to "untrammeled copulation" by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, and the rest 
of "the backward billion."  Biologist Karl Sax asserted that 
"nearly two thirds of the world's people still rely largely on 
positive checks [death by starvation and disease] to control 
excessive growth of populations."  Or as Robert C. Cook, the long-
time population activist and editor of Population Bulletin, put it 
more politely, "Over a billion adults in less developed countries 
live outside the realm of decision-making on this matter" of family 
size.  This idea goes hand in hand with the view that population 
growth will increase geometrically until starvation or famines halt 
it, in the ever-ascending curve shown in figure 22-1.
   The same view of human behavior underlies the assertion of 
Herman Daly and Clifford Cobb that "our current practice [is] 
allowing new human beings to be unintended by-products of the 
sexual fumblings of teenagers whose natural urges have been 
stimulated by drugs, alcohol, TV, and ill-constructed welfare 
incentives."
   The notion of "natural breeding," "natural fertility," 
and "untrammeled copulation" has been buttressed by the 
animal-ecology experiments that some biologists offer as 
analogies to human population growth. Their models 
include John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, 
hypothetical flies in a bottle or germs in a bucket, and 
meadow mice or cotton rats, which will indeed keep 
multiplying until they die for lack of sustenance.  
Daniel 0. Price, in The 99th Hour, gives a typical 
example of this view.
Assume there are two germs in the bottom of a bucket, and 
they double in number every hour. (If the reader does not 
wish to assume that it takes two germs to reproduce, he 
may start with one germ, one hour earlier.)  If it takes 
one-hundred hours for the bucket to be full of germs, at 
what point is the bucket one-half full of germs? A 
moment's thought will show that after ninety-nine hours 
the bucket is only half full. The title of this volume is 
not intended to imply that the United States is half full 
of people but to emphasize that it is possible to have 
"plenty of space left" and still be precariously near the 
upper limit.

   It is interesting that a similar analogy was suggested by 
Benjamin Franklin two centuries ago. In Malthus's words,

     It is observed by Dr. Franklin, that there is no bound to the 
prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their 
crowding and interfering with each others' means of substinence....  
This is incontrovertibly true....  In plants and animals the view 
of the subject is simple.  They are all impelled by a powerful 
instinct to the increase of their species and this instinct is 
interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for their 
offspring...the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by 
want of room and nourishment...and among animals, by their becoming 
the prey of each other.
   Perhaps the most nightmarish of the biological analogies came 
from Alan Gregg, the former director of the Rockefeller 
Foundation's Medical Division: "There is an alarming parallel 
between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the 
growth of human population in the earth's ecological economy." 
Gregg then asserts that "cancerous growths demand food; but so far 
as I know, they have never been cured by getting it....The 
analogies can be found in our plundered planet."  Gregg then goes 
on to observe "how nearly the slums of our great cities resemble 
the necrosis of tumors." And this "raises the whimsical query: 
Which is the more offensive to decency and beauty, slums or the 
fetid detritus of a growing tumor?"
   Some demographic facts suggest that humans will increase the 
number of children when conditions permit.  After food supplies and 
living conditions began to improve in European countries several 
centuries ago, the birthrate rose.  And the same effect has been 
observed in the poor countries in the twentieth century. "While the 
data are not so good as to give decisive evidence, it seems very 
likely that natality has risen over the past generation - certainly 
in the West Indies, very likely in tropical America, and probably 
in a number of countries of Africa and Asia."
   But we must recognize what Malthus eventually came to recognize. 
After he published the short simplistic theory in the first edition 
of his Essay on Population, he took the time to consider the facts 
as well as the theory.  He then concluded that human beings are 
very different from flies or rats. When faced with the limits of a 
bottle-like situation, people can alter their behavior in the short 
run so as to accommodate to that limit, and in the long run people 
usually alter the limit itself.  

   Unlike plants and animals, people are capable of foresight and 
may abstain from having children from "fear of misery." That is, 
people can choose a level of fertility that fits the resources that 
will be available. As Malthus put it in his later writing, 
"Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful 
instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may 
not bring beings into the world, for whom he cannot provide the 
means of support."     
   People can also alter the limit - expand the "bottle" or the 
"lily pond" - by consciously increasing the resources available.  
When the town's population has grown enough so that the school is 
full, the town builds an additional school - usually a better one 
than the old school.  The arithmetic about how many doublings it 
takes to fill the container is nothing but pretty arithmetic, 
wholly irrelevant to human issues.
   Malthus came to stress the difference between the breeding of 
animals and of humans, and he decisively rejected Benjamin 
Franklin's animal analogy: "The effects of this [preventive] check 
on man are more complicated.... The preventive check is peculiar to 
man, and arises from that distinctive superiority in his reasoning 
faculties, which enables him to calculate distant consequences.  
Human beings are different from the animals in that we have much 
more capacity to alter our behavior - including our fertility - to 
meet the demands of our environment.
   To control fertility in response to the conditions facing them, 
people must be capable of rational, self-conscious forethought that 
affects the course of sexual passion - the kind of planning 
capability that animals apparently do not possess. Therefore we 
must briefly ponder the extent to which reason and reasoning have 
guided the reproductive behavior of individual persons in various 
societies at different periods in their histories. To put the 
matter bluntly, we must inquire into the notion - often held by the 
highly educated - that uneducated people in poor countries tend to 
breed without foresight or conscious control.  

   For most couples in most parts of the world, marriage precedes 
childbearing. It is therefore relevant to a judgment about the 
amount of reasoning involved in "breeding" that marriages are 
contracted, in most primitive and poor societies, only after a 
great deal of careful thought, especially with reference to the 
economic effects of the marriage. How a marriage match is made in 
rural Ireland shows the importance of such calculations.

     The young lady's father asks the speaker what 
fortune do he want.  He asks him the place of how many 
cows, sheep, and horses is it?  He asks what makings of a 
garden are in it; is there plenty of water or spring 
wells?  Is it far from the road, he won't take it. 
Backward places don't grow big fortunes.  And he asks, 
too, is it near a chapel and the school or near town?
     The Inagh countryman could pause here; he had 
summarized a           very long and important 
negotiation.

     "Well," he went on, getting to the heart of the matter, if it 
is a nice place, near the road, and the place of eight cows, they 
are sure to ask 350 fortune [pounds dowry]."  Then the young lady's 
father offers 250.  Then maybe the boy's father throws off 50. If 
the young lad's father still has 250 on it, the speaker divides the 
50 between them.  So now it's 275.  Then the young man says he is 
not willing to marry without 300 - but if she's a nice girl and a 
good housekeeper, he'll think of it. So there's another drink by 
the young man, and then another by the young lady's father, and so 
on with every second drink till they're near drunk.  The speaker 
gets plenty and has a good day.
   An astute weighing of economic conditions is also seen 
to affect marriage in a Southern Italian town that was 
"as poor as any place in the western world." The young 
man whose account is given lived in a family of four 
whose total yearly cash and computed income amounted to 
$482 in 1955 dollars.  Edward Banfield described the 
courtship and marriage decision.
     In 1935 I was old enough to marry. My sisters wanted 
me      to take a wife because they had no time to do 
services for me.
     At that time there was a law that anyone who was 25 
years      old and not married had to pay a "celibacy" 
tax of 125      lire.  That amount was much, if we recall 
that to earn it you had to work 25 days. I thought it 
over and finally decided to marry.
My present wife was at that time working with relatives 
of my employer. Once I stopped her and asked her to marry 
me, and she liked the idea too, but I had to tell it 
before her father.  He was happy to accept me, and we 
talked about what she had to bring as dowry and what I 
had to do.
He asked me to bring my mother to call so that everything 
would be fine. The next time I brought my mother, and we 
had a nice feast.  When I wanted to meet my fiancee I had 
to ask the boss' permission.
In 1937 I asked the girl and her family to hasten the      
marriage before I was 25 years old.  The father told me      
that she was not ready with the dowry. I asked him if at 
least we couldn't have the civil ceremony on February 6, 
1938, two months late, so that I had to pay the tax for 
that year.
Once my mother and I went to Addo to visit my father-in-law in 
order to discuss and establish definitely what they were going to 
give us [in the dowry].  My mother wanted everything to be conveyed 
through a notary.  My father-in-law gave us one tomolo of land and 
my mother gave the little house, but she reserved for herself the 
right to use it.  Everything was written on official tax-stamp 
paper by the notary. As soon as my wife was ready with the dowry 
the church marriage was set for August 25, 1938.

   As to reason and self-control after marriage, there has been 
much debate among demographers in recent years about whether in 
pre-modern societies fertility is or is not "natural" - that is, at 
a rate equal to the biological limit.  As I read that literature, 
those who reject the "natural fertility" proposition have the 
better data and analyses,  but a conclusive answer is still to 
come. 
   In virtually no observed society (except, paradoxically, the 
very modern Hutterites in the U.S. and Canada, and a few other such 
groups) does actual fertility approach women's fecundity (potential 
fertility). And in many "primitive" societies, fertility is quite 
low.
   The anthropological evidence for fertility control within 
marriage also seems convincing.  Even among the most "primitive" 
and "backward" of people, fertility seems to be subject to both 
personal and social constraints. One example is the "primitive" (as 
of 1936) Polynesian island of Tikopia, where "strong social 
conventions enforce celibacy upon some people and cause others to 
limit the number of their offspring", and "the motive of a married 
pair is the avoidance of the extra economic liability which a child 
brings."  Another example is the effect of the size of the harvest 
on marriages in Sweden in the eighteenth century (a backward 
agricultural country then, but one that happened to keep good vital 
statistics). When the harvest was poor, people did not marry, as 
figure 24-1 shows. Birthrates were also responsive to the harvest, 
and even unmarried procreation was affected by objective economic 
conditions. This is clear evidence that poor people's sexual 
behavior is sensibly responsive to objective circumstances.

     FIGURE 24-1. Harvest Index and Marriage Rates in Sweden (old 
	12-1)
   After an extensive study of the anthropological literature, A. 
M. Carr-Saunders concluded, "The mechanism whereby numbers may be 
kept near to the desirable level is everywhere present", the 
particular mechanisms being "prolonged abstention from intercourse, 
abortion, and infanticide."  And as a result of a study of "data on 
200 societies from all over the world...from tropic to 
arctic...from sea level to altitudes of more than 10,000 feet," 
Clellan S. Ford concluded that "both abortion and infanticide are 
universally known....It is extremely common...to find a taboo on 
sexual intercourse during the period when the mother is 
nursing....In nearly every instance, the justification for this 
abstinence is the prevention of conception." He also found 
instances of many kinds of contraceptive practices. Some are 
"clearly magical." Others "are relatively effective mechanical 
devices [for example] inserting a pad of bark cloth or a rag in the 
vagina...[and] attempts to flush out the seminal fluid with water 
after intercourse...."
   In the 1960s there was a widely-reported estimate that 5 million 
U.S. women lacked access to contraception, but later analysis 
produced a more solid estimate of 1.2 million women.  Surveys 
document that perhaps 10 percent of children born in the United 
States in the 1980s were the result of lack of knowledge of or 
access to contraception and could be said to be "unwanted" by the 
mothers at the time of conception, and many of these mothers later 
became glad that they had the children.   If the definition of 
"unwanted" included both the mother and the father, the proportion 
of "unwanted" at conception would be much lower yet.  
   There continue to be some supposed experts and officials of 
anti-population-growth organizations who, on the basis of 
discredited anthropological accounts, assert that poor people do 
not know how babies are made - a notion so silly that it should not 
be necessary even to mention it.  For example, "not only are 
animals ignorant of the relation between mating and offspring, but 
even modern man until the last few thousand years was probably 
equally ignorant. In fact, there were recent reports of primitive 
tribes in Australia who are similarly unenlightened today."
   More to be believed are such stories as the one about a 
"primitive" tribesman who said to another, "Do you know what I told 
that white man? I told him I don't know how to make a baby. And - 
get this - he believed it!"  This joke has now been documented in 
astonishing fashion.  Ever since the 1920s, Margaret Mead's Coming 
of Age in Samoa has been considered as great a classic in 
anthropology as any other book, providing the foundation for an 
entire ruling theory of human behavior.  In 1983 Derek Freeman 
disproved her account, using a variety of materials.  But more 
recently there emerged incontrovertible evidence that Mead was not 
only wrong, but had been hoaxed. 

If Mead's conclusion of 1928 had been correct it      
would have been the most important conclusion of 
twentieth-century anthropology.  It is now known that      
Mead's long-influential conclusion was wholly false.       
In 1983 I was able to demonstrate in detail that Mead's      
extreme conclusion was very definitely not supported by      
the relevant ethnographic evidence.  And since then,      
there have been even more significant developments.

     It had long been a major mystery that Mead's      
account of Samoan sexual behavior, on which her 
conclusion rests, is radically at odds with the reports 
of all other ethnographers.  This mystery was solved in      
1987, when Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who is listed in Coming of      
Age in Samoa as one of her principal informants, came      
forward to confess that in March of 1926, as a prank,      
she and her friend Fofoa, had completely hoaxed Margaret 
Mead by telling her, when she questioned them, the 
antithesis of the truth about Samoan sexual behavior and 
values.

     In Samoa the playing of such pranks, which they      
call taufa'ase'e, is commonplace....when Mead put to      
Fa'apua'a, who was herself a taupou or ceremonial      
virgin, the supposition that she was promiscuous, she      
and Fafoa, with sidelong glances and pinching one      
another, set about hoaxing her.  They had no idea, says      
Fa'apua'a, that Margaret Mead was an author and that      
their wild untruths would be published as facts in an      
immensely influential book.

     After Fa'apua'a's testimony had been carefully      
checked by Leulu Felisi Va'a of the National University      
of Samoa... a sworn deposition by Fa'apua'a Fa'amu has      
been lodged with the American Anthropological      
Association in Washington, D.C.   

   What testimony, then, can we trust?  Clear evidence that poor 
people consider their incomes and economic circumstances when 
thinking about having children is found in their answers to 
questions about the disadvantages and advantages of large families.  
A variety of such surveys in various parts of Africa reveal that 
economic motivations are indeed important.
   Study after study shows that poor people do indeed think about 
economic circumstances in relationship to fertility. They do not 
practice "untrammeled copulation" or "breed without limit."
   People in developed countries, too, are accustomed to think 
about how family size fits their incomes.

     GRENOBLE, France - a 29-year-old grade school teacher gave      
birth yesterday to quintuplets, three boys and two      
girls....The children's grandfather, a tailor, said,      "This 
certainly creates a lot of problems and you can't      say it's 
really a joyous event because you've got to think about raising the 
little wolves."

   Lee Rainwater interviewed 409 Americans about "their 
family design."  In representative interviews with three 
pairs of husbands and wives, all mentioned economic 
factors predominantly, though many other factors were 
also mentioned, of course.
     "Husband 1: Would [I] prefer two or four children? I 
guess      two because you can give two more than four. 
You can send      them to college. The average family 
could not give four      very much.... Two is all we can 
support adequately.

     Wife 1: Two, but if I had loads of money I would 
want      loads of kids.... If I had lots of money, 
enough for full-     time help, and plenty of room I 
would like half-a-dozen or      more.

     Husband 2: I think two is ideal for the average 
American      family based on an average income of $5,000 
[1950      dollars]. I don't see how they could properly 
provide for      more children. Personally I'd take a 
dozen if I could      afford them. I wanted four when we 
got married or as many      as the family income could 
support.

     Wife 3: I think three is ideal because I feel this is all      
most people are equipped to raise, to give a good      education 
and send them through college.

   Another study asked a sample of U.S. wives why their intended 
family size was not bigger. The first reason given by more than 
half of the respondents was economic.
   In brief, even though income in rich countries is ample to 
provide a bare subsistence for many more children than the average 
family chooses to have, people say that their incomes constrain 
their family size. In all societies, rich or poor, people give much 
thought to sex, marriage, and childbearing. Fertility is everywhere 
subject to some rational control, though the degree to which 
achieved family sizes match the desired size varies from group to 
group. Couples in some countries plan their family size more 
carefully and are better able to carry such plans to fruition than 
are couples in other countries because of differences in 
contraceptive technology, infant mortality, and communication 
between husband and wife. But certainly there is strong evidence 
that people everywhere think rationally about fertility; hence 
income and other objective forces influence fertility behavior to a 
significant degree, everywhere and always.

   An interesting example of how home economics affects fertility 
occurred in East Germany following the introduction in 1976 of 
incentives to have more children.  Prior to that time fertility in 
East and West Germany had been much the same.  But the incentives 
raised marital fertility at least temporarily (perhaps just having 
some births occur earlier) and more permanently raised extra-
marital fertility, as figure 24-2 shows.

         Fig 24-2[Mon Fig 4 from Monnier in Population.]
   The fact that there are large families in some poor 
countries does not prove the absence of rational planning 
in matters of fertility.  Behavior that is reasonable in 
London or Tokyo may well be unreasonable in a Tibetan or 
African village. The costs of rearing children are 
relatively less, and the economic benefits of having 
children are relatively greater, in poor agricultural 
communities than in well-off urban places. Therefore, 
even though the primary motive for having children - in 
Nigeria as in France - surely is that couples want 
children for the satisfactions they give, the economic 
conditions may differ in such a manner that the same 
desire for children that sensibly implies a two- or 
three-child family in a city may imply a five- or six-
child family in a poor rural area. The economics of 
child-rearing involve the amounts of time and money that 
people spend on children, on the one hand, and the 
amounts of work that children perform and the old-age 
support they render after they grow up, on the other 
hand. It costs more time and money to rear children in 
urban than in rural areas, and children in rural areas of 
poor countries perform more work than children elsewhere. 
Hence the larger average size of rural families may 
reflect sound economic planning. We see this vividly in 
the following accounts from the period of very high 
population growth a decade or two ago.

     BABARPUR, India, May 24, 1976 - Munshi Ram, an 
illiterate      laborer who lives in a crude mud hut in 
this village 60      miles north of New Delhi, has no 
land and very little      money. But he has eight 
children, and he regards them as      his greatest 
wealth.

     "It's good to have a big family," Mr. Ram explained 
as he      stood in the shade of a leafy neem tree, in a 
hard dry      courtyard crowded with children, chickens 
and a dozing      cow.

     "They don't cost much, and when they get old enough 
to      work they bring in money. And when I am old, they 
will      take care of me...."

     Mr. Ram, who says he is not likely to have more 
children,      is aware that the Government is now 
campaigning hard with      the birth-control slogan, 
"Stop at two." But he has no      regrets.

     "Children are the gods' gift," he said, as several of his      
own clustered around him. "Who are we to say they should not be 
born?"
   Here are two more examples, this time through the eyes of an 
Indian writer.

     Let us take a few examples. Fakir Singh is a 
traditional water carrier.  After he lost his job, he 
remained as a messenger for those Jat families which used 
to be his Jajmans, barely earning a subsistence living.  
He has eleven children, ranging in age from twenty-five 
to four....Fakir Singh maintains that every one of his 
sons is an asset. The youngest one - aged five or six - 
collects hay for the cattle; the older ones tend to those 
same cattle.  Between the ages of six and sixteen, they 
earn 150 to 200 rupees a year, plus all their meals and 
necessary clothing. Those sons over sixteen earn 2,000 
rupees and meals every year. Fakir Singh smiles and adds, 
"To raise children may be difficult, but once they are 
older it is a sea of happiness."
     Another water carrier is Thaman Singh....He welcomed me      
inside his home, gave me a cup of tea (with milk and      "market" 
sugar, as he proudly pointed out later), and      said, "You were 
trying to convince me in 1960 that I      shouldn't have any more 
sons.  Now, you see, I have six        sons and two daughters and I 
sit at home in leisure. They are grown up and they bring me money.  
One even works outside the village as a laborer. You told me I was 
a poor man and couldn't support a large family. Now, you see, 
because of my large family, I am a rich man."

   Hand in hand with the short-run reduction in fertility when 
times worsen in a poor country is the short-run increase in 
fertility that accompanies a betterment of conditions. Consider, 
for example, this report about an Indian village:

     In the early 1950's, conditions were distinctly      
unfavorable. The large influx of refugees from Pakistan      was 
accompanied by severe disruption of economic and      social 
stability. We were repeatedly told by village      leaders on the 
panchayat, or elected village council, that      important as all 
of their other problems were, "the      biggest problem is that 
there are just too many of us."      By the end of the study period 
in 1960 a remarkable change      had occurred. With the 
introduction of more irrigation      canals and with rural 
electrification from the Bhakra      Nangal Dam, and with better 
roads to transport produce      to market, improved seed and other 
benefits of community development, and especially because there 
were increasing employment opportunities for Punjabi boys in the 
cities, a general feeling of optimism had developed.  A common 
response of the same village leaders now was, "Why should we limit 
our families? India needs all the Punjabis she can get."  During 
this transitional period an important reason for the failure of 
education in family planning was the favorable pace of economic 
development.  Children were no longer a handicap.

   Infant mortality is another influence that uneducated villagers 
take into account very rationally. In 1971 I asked a few men in 
Indian villages why they have as many or as few children as they 
do. A common answer came from a man with five children, "Two, maybe 
three will die, and I want to have at least two that live to become 
adults."  But by the 1990s villagers in most parts of the world 
know that the infant mortality rate has fallen very fast in recent 
decades, and they need not have many more babies than the number of 
children they want to raise to maturity.  This change in 
conditions, and in people's perception of the change, is part of 
the reason that fertility has fallen rapidly in so many countries, 
as seen in figure 23-5.
   Malthus's theory of population asserts that because fertility 
goes up if income goes up due to new technical knowledge of 
agriculture, the extra population eats up the additional income. 
That is, Malthus asserted a tendency for humankind to be squeezed 
down to a long-run equilibrium of living at bare subsistence; this 
is Malthus's "dismal theorem." But when we examine the facts about 
fertility and economic development (as Malthus himself finally did, 
after he quickly dashed off his first edition), we find that the 
story does not end with the short-run increase in the birthrate as 
income first rises. If income continues to rise, fertility later 
goes down.
   There are two main reasons for this long-run decline in 
fertility. First, as income rises in poor countries, child 
mortality falls because of better nutrition, better sanitation, and 
better health care (though, in the twentieth century, mortality may 
decline in poor countries even without a rise in income.)  As 
couples see that fewer births are necessary to achieve a given 
family size, they adjust fertility downward. Evidence on response 
of families to the death of a child buttresses the overall 
historical data.  Several careful researchers have shown that there 
is a strong relationship between the death of a child and 
subsequent births in a family. That is, couples produce additional 
children to "make up for" children who die. If we also consider 
that families decide to have additional children to allow for 
deaths that might occur in the future, the relationship between 
child mortality and fertility shows that childbearing is responsive 
to the family's circumstances.
   A rise in income also reduces fertility in the long run through 
a cluster of forces set in motion by increased income, including 
(a) increased education, which improves contraception, makes 
children more expensive to raise, and perhaps alters people's 
tastes about having children; and (b) a trend to city living, where 
children cost more and produce less income for the family than they 
do in the country.
   The decline in mortality and the other forces set in motion by 
economic development reduce fertility in the long run. This process 
is the famous "demographic transition."  We see it very clearly in 
the excellent historical data for Sweden shown in figure 23-6; 
notice how the death rate began to fall before the birthrate fell.  
And we can see the same relationship between income and birthrate 
in a cross-sectional look at various countries of the world (figure 
24-3).
    FIGURE 24-3[12-2]. Per Capita Gross Domestic Product Plotted         
Against the Crude Birthrate for Selected Nations
   From the 1930s through the 1950s, most demographers were 
convinced that the demographic transition would take place in 
developing countries in the twentieth century, just as it had 
earlier happened in Europe and North America. Then in the 1960s 
demographers began to worry that fertility would not fall in poor 
countries even after mortality fell. But in the 1970s, evidence 
showed that fertility was indeed falling in at least some 
developing countries.  By the time of the first edition of this 
book in 1981, I wrote that we could be reasonably sure that the 
European pattern of demographic transition will also appear in 
other parts of the world as mortality falls and income rises, 
though there were still many doubters, especially those who run 
anti-natalist organizations.  In the 1990s we can take out the 
qualifier "reasonably", because the fall has appeared almost 
everywhere, and in all the countries with large populations, as 
seen in figure 23-5.
   Worth mentioning because many persons believe that teen-age 
childbearing in the United States runs counter to the general 
pattern, fertility has fall among the 15-19 age group over the long 
run, as figure 24-4 shows, though the latter half of the 1980s 
showed an upturn too brief to be meaningful.
        Fig 24-4[teen from NCHS typed table 2, and disk.]
   So the foundation is gone from under Malthus's grand theory and 
his dismal theorem.  At the heart of Malthus's theory - quoting 
from his last edition - is the following: "(1) Population is 
necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. (2) Population 
always increases when the means of subsistence increases." The 
history of the demographic transition and the data in Figure 12-?** 
disprove the second proposition. The first proposition is shown to 
be false in chapters 5-8. 
   Contrary to Malthus, people respond to the two major influences 
on fertility - mortality and level of income - in an economically 
appropriate fashion. Of course there are delays, especially in the 
response of society as a whole to changes in the cost of a family's 
children to other people in the community. But overall, the 
fertility-adjustment system works in such a fashion that it leads 
to an optimistic outlook rather than the "dismal" view described by 
Malthus in the famous first edition of his book, before he changed 
that view in the second edition.
   How many children would families have if material resources 
presented no constraints at all? That is, what would be the level 
of fertility if child mortality were as low as in advanced 
countries now, and if income were very high - say, ten times the 
level in the U.S. now? We have little basis for predicting whether 
population would tend to increase, decrease, or stabilize in the 
long run in such a case, because there is no experience to learn 
from. It is clear, however, that where the material conditions of 
income and child mortality are harsh, fertility adjusts to meet 
those conditions, even among poor and uneducated people.
   But what about the costs that big families impose on society as 
a whole? Certainly this is a reasonable and important question, 
because any child does impose some monetary and non-monetary costs 
on persons other than the parents.  There are two parts to the 
answer:  

   1) An additional person causes not only costs but also benefits 
for others in a variety of ways that we shall discuss later.  The 
central question may be expressed quantitatively: Which are greater 
in various years following a child's birth, the costs or the 
benefits to others? Once we know whether these "external" effects 
are positive or negative in any given year, we must next ask: Are 
the external effects large or small compared with other costs and 
benefits in the economy?  These matters are discussed in chapters 
00 and 00. 

   2) The burden upon the community of an additional child depends 
very greatly upon the nature of the economic-political system.  In 
Chinese cities, where housing and transportation systems are owned 
by the government, an additional child imposes a much larger burden 
upon others than in the United States, where schooling is the only 
major cost of a child that the parents do not pay from their own 
pockets.  If the parents pay the full costs of a child, their 
individual child-bearing decisions are likely to be optimal for the 
community at large. 


                             SUMMARY

   At the heart of much of contemporary theorizing about population 
growth is the belief that, as one widely read author put it, "The 
Malthusian laws of population are as valid today  as when they were 
formulated" (in the first edition of his Essay). The core of those 
"laws" is that population increases faster than does the means of 
sustenance until the standard of living has fallen to bare 
subsistence.  Those who urge this proposition support it with 
analogies drawn from other forms of life. "The germs of existence 
contained in this earth, if they could freely develop themselves, 
would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand 
years. Necessity, that imperious, all-pervading law of nature, 
restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and 
the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law and men 
cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it."
page # \ultres\ tchar24 February 7, 1994