On Growth

[p. 414]

61. Frank W. Notestein

Frank W. Notestein was born at Alma, Michigan, in 1902. He studied at Wooster College and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1927.
For more than two decades Professor Notestein taught demography at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. He has also been director of the Office of Population Research. From 1946 to 1948 Professor Notestein organized and was the first director of the Population Division of the United Nations in New York. In 1959 he became president of the Population Council, also in New York.

Limits to Growth has expressed great alarm about the growing population of the globe. It predicts some seven billion people by the year 2000. Herman Kahn told me that the planet could easily carry twenty billion people at the per capita income of twenty thousand dollars per person. Edward Teller said in Berkeley that according to his information the planet could hold one hundred billion people. For the common man it is very difficult to make up his mind what the situation really is.

I think it is probable that the world will get to seven billion. It might get to six and a half by the end of this century. It is irrelevant to ask how much the globe can carry. This is not a meaningful question. If there were no intervening political, social, and economic frictions, so that man could do the best that man knows, then the carrying capacity becomes indefinite. But if there were no friction, there would be perpetual motion. What the carrying capacity of the world would be in some never-never land of a distant future is irrelevant. The problem is, Here we are, where are we going? What are going to be the constraints? What advances of civilization, of rationality, of compassion and of lowering of pain can be made, and how? What is the course, among the conceivable courses, that we want to take? People who see the problem only in terms of fifty billions or two hundred billions are talking arrant non-

[p. 415]

sense, even if you are citing great names. I think they have not given much attention to the problems of social process.

Do you feel that the computer study by the Club of Rome - did they take social interaction into account sufficiently?

No, I did not take that study seriously, except as a first slight academic exercise. Their variables were too limited. They did not have adequate data even for the variables under consideration. Any statistician knows that an unlimited projection of past trends without change runs into an impossible situation. I think this is an interesting beginning, but to suppose that it has practical reality is foolish. I do not think one approaches the problem in the present state of our ignorance by putting doubtful figures into a machine. You will get out precisely what you put in. I think that is exactly what the Club of Rome did.

Dangerous you would say?

Dangerous to take it seriously as a real forecast in a real world. But interesting and important as a first step in studying what is obviously a serious problem. Do not misunderstand me. I do think that the world has very serious problems of population growth, problems that involve the welfare of all our children for a very considerable time. But they do not come to a focus either on some ultimate limit in a never-never land or on putting into a machine a certain number of variables and getting out the horror that is put into that machine in the first place. This is not the way to attack the problems.

Do you expect positive results from the first Population Conference that is planned for '74?

Yes, the situation is much more favorable than it used to be. Many years ago I organized the Population Division of the United Nations as its first director. Then the constraints on what one could do were extraordinarily strong. One could publish scientific information and one could blandly summarize the literature. But the minute one talked about population policy, about action, there was trouble. With the neo-Malthusians on one side and the Soviets, Roman Catholics and Moslems on the other, we could get very little agreement on anything save that

[p. 416]

people should be healthy, wealthy and wise - as well as more numerous. Since then, the disagreements among students of population who represent the world's main ideological and religious positions have been very much reduced. Now we can discuss real issues constructively, as I hope we shall in the UN conference planned for 1974. It, by the way, is not the first but the third world conference on population sponsored by the United Nations.

Mr. McNamara made an interesting speech¹ in September, 1972. But Professor Revel of Harvard thought he was kidding himself when McNamara said that the money the World Bank was giving to Indonesia for population control would cut the population of Indonesia between now and the year 2000 by fifty million people.

Mr. McNamara did not mean that the population would be fifty millions smaller than it is today. What he meant was that it might reduce by fifty millions the population that would otherwise be there by the end of the century.

Of course, but would that be possible?

I do not know, but just possibly. It would require cutting the growth by less than fifty percent. Remember, if twenty-five years ago you had told most students of population that in the next twenty-five years the Taiwan Chinese population would reduce its birth rate by almost fifty percent, they would have told you it was impossible. There would have been much talk about the way in which ancestor worship and the familistic society supports high birth rates. Much the same would have been said about Korea. But they would have been wrong. Birth rates may fall even faster in the future as educational advances and family planning programs improve. Who knows? The year 2000 is still a generation away. If you will excuse me, Indonesia is a particularly difficult case. Its demographic troubles come in part from the fact that the Dutch colonial system was almost a laboratory case of economic development in the absence of social change. The Dutch did a magnificent job of running the terraces up the hills, of standardizing the specialized agricultural products of the tropics for the world market, and of protecting the health of the people - all with a minimum of change in the social structure. The Dutch did the modern part, the Indonesians did not have to.

We didn't take care of the basic education on any wide scale. The

1 Address to the Board of Governors, September 25, 1972, p. 4.

[p. 417]

result was lower death rates and more people, but a minimum impact of modernization on the social structures that supported high birth rates.

Professor McTurnan Kahin estimated that the Dutch East Indies in 1940, a nation of some 70 million, had 637 lads in college.²

Yes, and how many ladies? I visited there in 1948. One can only have admiration for the engineering accomplishments of the Dutch in their former colonies. They lifted the carrying capacity of the land, dropped mortality, and left intact the social structures that supported high birth rates. They, if you will, attained the maximum of imposed progress. They fostered the absorption of many modern techniques without resolving the kind of social contradictions that self-management requires, and today we have low mortality, high density, and high birth rates.

I found in your Population Council reports that the United States, if it has an average two-child family, will reach in the next hundred years three hundred fifty million people. If it has a three-child family on an average, it will reach in the next hundred years one billion people. As a demographer, would you say it is extremely important whether American families on an average will have a two- or a three-child family? The New York Times recently reported, by the way, that the US reached below zero population growth already.

Of course it is important whether we have two or three children on the average. That is a difference of one-half, and one-half is a substantial fraction! It matters by hundreds of millions! When they say that our fertility has dropped below the level that gives zero population growth, they are making a conventional, and not very real, statement. If we imagine that the rates of bearing and dying that took place in each age group this year were those of a birth class passing from birth to extinction through death, then such a cohort would not have replaced itself at the age-schedules of bearing and dying observed in 1972. It is a little like the speedometer of a car. When it reads 100 kilometers an hour, that does not tell you that you have gone 100 kilometers in the past hour, nor does it forecast that you will have gone that far at the end of the next hour. It tells you something interesting but highly conditional - how far you will go if you continue at the present speed for an hour.

If fertility and mortality were to continue at the levels of the year 1972 and there was no net migration, our population would begin to decline

2 Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, 1952), p. 32.

[p. 418]

gradually in about seventy years, after the proportions of people in the childbearing years and the older ages had adjusted to these schedules of bearing and dying. In short, we have a situation in which the population is actually growing by about .7 percent per year, on a balance of fertility and mortality that, if continued for three-quarters of a century, would yield a gradual decline. I will have to leave it to you whether we are below zero growth or not. Nevertheless, something very important has happened. The birth rate has dropped very rapidly in spite of a large increase in the proportion of the population in the young childbearing ages. Interestingly enough, it has happened at the same time that governmental support for extensive programs of family planning have been reaching all parts of the population for the first time. For the first time family planning is beginning to become a real possibility for the poor as well as for the well-to-do.

If the gap between the rich and the poor were not to grow wider, if we were to continue our limitless freedom, what to expect?

Indeed, to solve the world's ultimate problems, we need at least another half-hour. Of course, the world differences in income levels need to be reduced, not, I think, by taking from the rich, but by lifting the productivity of the poor, partly by permitting them to limit the number of their children if they choose, thereby enhancing the opportunities for healthy development and education. This talk about ending economic growth seems to me to be great nonsense. The world has not begun to exploit its productive potential, even in its more developed parts. And the rich countries have not begun to assist the less-developed regions and peoples to catch up with them. Let's not worry about constraining freedom of choice until we have given freedom a chance, as neither my country nor any other has thus far done. We hear a great deal about resources these days, but let's never forget that the only ultimate resources, apart from space and perhaps the plant and animal gene pools, are people, their health, their education, their skills and their organization. I think that until we, the prosperous of the world, are willing to make very substantial investments in fostering the development of these resources throughout the world, the problems of poverty will not be solved. The great wasters of resources are not the rich governments, the rich corporations or the rich people, unfortunate as some of their activities are. The great waster of resources in the world is poverty.