Poor people are more numerous today than ever before, because population is skyrocketing in the poorer countries. If two-thirds of the earth's population was impoverished a century ago and only one-third today, there would still be more poor people now than there were then. With many countries multiplying at a rate near 3 per cent per year, their economies must somehow move ahead at 4 or 5 per cent per year if poverty is to be reduced. This is no easy task when the ratio of people to resources is already excessive and the poverty so great that capital can hardly be accumulated for long-run industrial development.
In countries like India, Ceylon, Egypt, Pakistan and Haiti, to mention only a few, per capita income has risen little if at all, despite a rise in national income. An economist, writing recently about Ceylon, had this to say: "The issue is plain: Any check to population growth will make economic progress more likely or speed it up. Continued or accelerated population growth will make progress slow down or stop. In one meeting of Government officials I attended, the problem of development was put as that of keeping the standard of living from falling—not of raising it." A further consequence of tumbling death rates and surplus reproduction is the creation of the youngest populations ever known. The reason is that the greatest gains in saving lives are made among infants and children under 10 years of age. A swift drop in mortality therefore has the same effect as a sharp rise in fertility: It increases the proportion of children in relation to older age groups. In Algeria, for instance, 52 per cent of the Moslems are under 20 years of age, whereas in the United States only 37 per cent of the populace is under 20, and in France, 31 per cent.
Peasant-agrarian countries consequently have an excessive number of dependents for each person in his productive years. One of the ways of meeting this situation is to put children to work at an early age, a practice hardly conducive to education or to economic development. But in fact a great problem of these countries is to find jobs for the ever larger waves of youths that enter the working ages each year. If the young cannot find employment they naturally seek remedies for their plight. They are ready to follow any revolutionary leader who promises a quick, and preferably violent, way out.
A leader who rests his political career on the whims of these swollen cadres of youth is usually incapable of making solid economic improvements. He is driven to embrace the safest and most inflammatory of all issues—nationalism. He can persecute and expropriate the foreigners, the
Jews, or the Christians. He can threaten war on neighboring states. He can play the Communists against the free world to get emergency funds for staving off calamity or for buying weapons. He is the unstable political offspring produced by the monstrous marriage between rapid population growth and national destitution.
Fortunately, not all impoverished or overpopulated countries are in irresponsible hands. In some there is a genuine attempt to make economic progress. In such cases, a government may ignore the population trend, but this policy entails a gigantic risk; for it assumes, first, that economic improvement will be possible despite the population avalanche and, second, that the economic gains will ultimately bring a drop in fertility and stop the runaway population growth.
The second assumption is probably correct; for if a country achieves a high level of living and becomes heavily urbanized, its bettereducated people will plan their families and its birth rate will fall to something like a reasonable level. But the assumption that skyrocketing population growth will not obstruct economic development is so dubious that several governments have decided against the gamble of ignoring the population trend. They are striving to bring fertility control to their people in order to insure and hasten economic growth.
One industrial country that has officially decided to lower its birth rate is Japan. With a population that rose from 55,000,000 in 1920 to 91,000,000 today, with an area no bigger than Montana and with 617 persons per square mile, the Japanese do not think the number of people on their crowded islands has nothing to do with their economic future.
In 1948 the birth rate was 34 per 1,000, the death rate 12 per 1,000 and the resulting population growth sufficient to double the population in thirty-two years. In that year the Japanese Diet passed a law, backed by the five major political parties, legalizing abortions and sterilizations and setting up marriage-advice centers throughout the country. Subsequent liberalization and expansion of this law was accompanied by a semi-official nation-wide propaganda campaign for family planning, by the formation of a Population Problem Council under the Japanese Cabinet, and by the formation of private family-planning associations and publications. Increased emphasis was placed on contraception, with more than 800 Government-subsidized health centers and with some 30,000 birth control guidance officers.