(3 of 3)
The trouble is that though progress is being made, the pace seems glacial to those who need help. As Columbia University Sociologist Daniel Bell points out: "A desire for instant form or instant solutions is deeply ingrained in the American temper, both on the left and the right. The left wants, for example, an immediate end to poverty; the right an immediate victory in Viet Nam." As a result, both are vociferously—and at times quite violently —unhappy.
Within Reach. The population problem may well be of even greater significance to the future of the U.S. than poverty. It took the country nearly three centuries to reach the 100 million mark in 1915, and barely half a century to add the second 100 million.* The population could soar to 300 million as early as 1990, and some demographers see the possibility of half a billion Americans within 50 years. But they have been wrong in the past. In the 1930s, they predicted a decline in U.S. population; in the 1950s, they were talking about a population of 400 million before the end of the century. In the first case, their estimate was proved wrong by the baby boom that followed World War II; in the second, by the pill, the ever-increasing affluence and urbanization of the nation, and the forbidding cost of raising and educating even one or two children. If population growth is slowed and then stabilized, as Duke University Economist Joseph J. Spengler has noted, "the economy will really become opulent, and much of the population affluent."
Affluence for all does indeed seem within reach, despite the difficulty of rooting out the nation's poverty pockets As usual, it was De Tocqueville who put it best. In the U.S., he predicted more than a century ago, what the few have today, the many will demand tomorrow. What he could not have foreseen was that so many would get so much so soon.
* As it grew, the population moved steadiry west According to the 1940 census, the center of U S population was on the Indiana side of the Wabash River. By 1950, it had shifted to eastern Illinois. The admission of Hawaii and Alaska, plus the rush to California, helped move it to a point just outside Centralia, 111., about 55 miles east of the Mississippi River, by the 1960 census. Today the center is probably on the western shore of the Mis sissippi for the first time.