Are we too many? The population debate and policymaking in the twentieth-century United States.

摘要

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked that "there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are." But how many is too many? At any given moment, the prevailing answer to this question has reflected the interplay of politics and expertise.; Young America rejected the theories of the British pastor Thomas Malthus, who argued at the beginning of the eighteenth century that population growth would eventually overwhelm the food supply. However, the 1890 Census, which declared the frontier closed, led to a consensus among elites that the nation of 65 million was overpopulated. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the prevailing Keynesian economics reinforced the view that a smaller population would provide social-welfare and aesthetic "quality-of-life" benefits. The idea was that the state could manufacture economic growth more efficiently than the stork. In the 1960s, environmental concerns and the Baby Boom (the bulging cohort of Americans born from 1945 to 1964) produced the more radical, neo-Malthusian "zero population growth" movement. Yet at the same time, the new classical economics fostered an ascendant embrace of population growth.; Today, the United States has the highest population growth rate among industrialized nations. Its total population approaches 300 million and is projected to reach 570 million by the year 2100. A few experts fear the possible ecological and geopolitical consequences of this trajectory. Yet most economists and policymakers celebrate the nation's steady population growth. Indeed, perhaps the greatest demographic fear is that Americans are not having enough babies to fund the pending retirement of the Baby Boomers.; This dissertation recounts the modern American population debate among social scientists, interest groups, and policymakers. It argues that pessimism about the economic, cultural, and environmental consequences of population growth was more widespread and persisted longer into the twentieth century than scholars have recognized. In addition, it highlights the population debate's overlooked influence on America's political development. The population debate provides a new window into the rise and fall of Keynesianism from the 1930s to the 1970s and into the triumph of conservative economics thereafter.