The new population debate.

Abstract

IN THE YEAR 1790 the Venetian monk Gianmaria Ortes reached the conclusion that a zero population growth would eventually prove necessary, since infinite expansion is impossible within a finite world. His demographic projections pointing to the likelihood of a doubling of human population within a generation of thirty years were concurred in by Thomas Malthus in 1798. In the latter's Essay on the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, Malthus maintained that whereas population increased by geometric proportion, food and economic output remained within the confines of arithmetic proportion. The two clergymen had entered into a debate whose beginnings trailed back to the mid-seventeenth century. The discussion involved a mercantilist populationism that favored large families and deplored celibacy as a principal check to population growth. The demographic debate continued down to the early 1950's at an academic pace, with occasional acerbic exchanges between pronatalist and antinatalist policy makers and religious leaders. At mid-century, however, a realization of the possibly disastrous proportions of the population increase in relation to local and world resources suddenly dawned upon a number of concerned individuals, voluntary organizations, and officials involved in government assistance programs. One result was a shift in objective to development rather than assistance projects on the part of foreign-aid organizations, including both international and governmental agencies and U.S. Catholic War Relief Services, Caritas Internationalis, and other ecclesiastical and private groups engaged in uplifting depressed populations in rural and slum areas of the