Dynamics of Population: Social and Biological Significance of Changing Birth Rates in the United States

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THIS book consists of four parts, the first of which, entitled “Population Trends of American Groups”, discusses, in four chapters, first the trend of the national population, and then the three aspects of differential fertility, represented by the contrast between town and country, by racial differentiation, and by differences of social class. The writers realise that population growth in the United States will slow down, cease and change to population decline in the absence of any abrupt change in the trend of the birthrate, or in the possibility of attracting immigrants. They express a somewhat ostentatious indifference to the economic effects of this population tendency, which has already doomed the economic prospects of thousands of once hopeful small communities; and has forced the Federal authorities to consider a policy of deliberate depopulation of part of the vast area brought under cultivation by the enterprise of American farmers. The authors state truly that the theory of optimum population is at present still in the stage of preliminary definition and clarification, and add, somewhat vaguely, “It may be that a higher standard of living for individuals could be maintained in this country with a population very much greater or very much less than 150 million,” without reference to the fact that personal hopes, enterprise and investment, in addition to municipal, State and Federal policy, have in the past all been dominated and directed by the confident expectation that the resources of their territory were destined progressively to be more and more fully utilised. Dynamics of Population: Social and Biological Significance of Changing Birth Rates in the United States. By Frank Lorimer Frederick Osborn. Pp. xiii + 461. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1934.) 15s. net.