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Population experts still have no real idea what makes people decide to have more or fewer babies. The 19th century fall in the French birth rate is generally attributed to a Napoleonic law that required division of a man's land among his heirs and hence prompted French peasants to have fewer heirs; yet in Indonesia, where a similar law exists, the population goes on growing. Both in Japan, where doctors performed a million legal abortions last year, and in Puerto Rico, where women have become so enthusiastic about sterilization that it is known simply as "la operation," the slowdown in population increase is often attributed to a rising level of education and economic wellbeing. But to the confusion of the experts came the unforeseen baby boom in the postwar U.S.—at a time when education and incomes were at an alltime high. The boom shows no sign of abating.
Beaten by Baboons. If not by birth control, how are the poor nations to cope with the millions who lack enough food or adequate housing? The familiar answer used to be emigration. The 50,000 Puerto Ricans who migrate to the U.S. each year have helped to ease the strain on Puerto Rico's economy, and the 400,000 Algerians working in France contribute heavily to the meager living standards of the people back home. But racial barriers exclude a mass movement out of Asia. Besides, to keep Asia's population stable would require the emigration of 25 million people a year.
In nations whose population is badly distributed, internal migration is a possibility. In the lush valleys of eastern Bolivia, labor is so scarce that soldiers have to be called in to harvest the sugar crop; yet one-third of Bolivia's population continues to live in the Andes, scratching a barely human existence out of dwindling tin deposits. In Indonesia, three-quarters of the nation's close to 90 million people live in cheek-by-jowl squalor on the island of Java, while most of neighboring Sumatra is left in jungle. But habit and human contrariness being what it is, few Javanese will even consider moving to fertile Sumatra. And in Uganda, tribesmen from the overpopulated hills, hopefully resettled in the lowlands by the government, frequently trek back home after their new fields are raided by elephants or baboons.
The Labor Thieves. In nations with a high technology, there is literal truth in Ben Franklin's dictum: "We can never have too many People (nor too much Money)." In the 15 years since V-E day, West Germany has absorbed 12.8 million refugees from East Germany and Eastern Europe; yet thanks to soaring living standards and industrial production. West German employers today are so desperate for labor that they are reduced to stealing it from each other. In the U.S., most economists cite the baby boom as one of their reasons for business optimism: in the short run, the 4,400,000 infants to be born during 1960 mean $3 billion more in the till for manufacturers of baby food, clothing, furniture, toys, and accessories.