IN ITS massive struggle for a greater share of the world's wealth, mankind's underprivileged majority is on a collision course with the most violent explosion of population in world history. Its path was charted in San Francisco by the University of California's Sociologist Kingsley Davis, who is also U.S. delegate to the U.N. Population Commission. Warned Davis: "Any discussion of future economic development which ignores population growth is fallacious."
The world's 2.7 billion population has almost doubled in the past 70 years, is expected to redouble every 42 years hereafter, and is rapidly approaching the level (top estimate: 7 billion) beyond which scientists believe the earth can no longer sustain all its inhabitants. "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that human multiplication has gotten out of hand," said Sociologist Davis, "that this unanticipated situation cannot continue."
The Poor Get Poorer. The upsurge, Davis explained, was caused not by a rise in birth rates but by a drastic fall in death rates. Its most worrisome aspect is that the increase has occurred primarily in underdeveloped countries where U.S. and U.N. public health programs have warred on such diseases as malaria, endemic syphilis and yaws. In Ceylon, for example, the death rate has tumbled 34% in one year, 70% in ten years. Populations promptly shot up, since birth rates in most of these nations remain at their traditionally high level.
The profound economic and political significance of this runaway human inflation is that the two-thirds of mankind who live in the world's underdeveloped countries are now multiplying twice as fast as in industrialized societies. To support the extra population these countries are least able to afford, they are forced to consume less and produce more, and are falling ever lower in living standards. Said Dr. A. Eugene Staley, Stanford Research Institute's senior international economist: "Despite all the vaunted technological and economic progress of modern times, there are probably more poverty-stricken people in the world today than there were 50 years ago."
Pakistan to Peoria. While poverty is as old as mankind, a new and resentful awareness of poverty on the part of millions has become one of the most powerful forces in soth century society. This "revolution of rising expectations," as Economist Staley called it, has only intensified the struggle to seek a more abundant life. In India, for example, the market for bicycles is booming upward at 30% a year, while shoe sales are rising only 4%. Explained one village bicycle salesman: "The villagers are getting lazy. They don't want to walk any more; they want bicycles." While modern communications have whetted consumer appetites in Pakistan as in Peoria, the danger is that nations whose production continues to lag far behind their hopes of material progress will resort to political extremes that will plunge them deeper into want.