Population Theory and Politics

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1 The Political Definition of Optimum Population. Classical economics has generally assumed that population increases or decreases according to the means of subsistence and also that the growth of national populations shows a similarity due to the international division of labor and distribution of resources in an expanding world economy. In the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, however, no factor indirectly shaped international politics more than the unevenness of population increase among the great powers. The sudden spurt of population growth in Great Britain, the slow increase and stationary population of France, the expansion in Germany and Russia, and the disappearance of the old Hapsburg Empire, translated themselves into national foreign policies, diplomatic alliances, and armed conflicts. All nations in Europe today are faced with the falling birth rate in the upper social strata which seemed abnormal in France in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This has fostered a more equitable distribution of wealth, the development of social services especially intended for the poorest families which multiply most rapidly, and a eugenic program so that the quality of the population may not deteriorate. On the other side, the disparity of population rates of increase among the nations is seen to have governed their military and productive power as passions of nationalism have waxed stronger and stronger. The state accordingly becomes fundamentally interested in numbers for the sake of maintaining the quality of the race and the racial morale as well as for manning the economic and the military machine. In an age in which the individual voluntarily can and does limit the family size with reference to his income and scheme of personal values, it is no wonder that the state also deliberately adopts population stimulants such as marriage loans and family allowances for carrying out its programs of national defense and imperialistic expansion. The population optimum cannot be dissociated, especially in this epoch of disintegrating world economy, from the political optimum. Increase of population and the resulting economic stress in the nineteenth century called forth, especially in the democratic countries, a series of ameliorative social measures in the spheres of education, social insurance, health and labor welfare, which, therefore, naturally developed greater and continuous interest in both the numbers and quality of the population, especially of the working-class population. But the social service state of the present day encounters more serious and wider demographic problems. When political insecurity and social instability in the postwar period make national integration the primary concern even of economic policy, the solution of the population problem is no longer left to individuals, as was the case in the