LOWER BIRTH-RATES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22215, 16 September 1935, Page 11

LOWER BIRTH-RATES

PEAK POPULATIONS NEAR NEW ECONOMIC FACTORS INFLUENCE TOWARD STABILITY The decline in the birth-rates of populations of the Western nations and America is being widely discussed. Writing from London to the New York Times Mr. Harold Callender says that Britain's population seems due to reach its peak about the year 1940, if not before. If the pre-slump rate of emigration should return, the decline would begin at once. (Population can be almost accurately predicted; the official forecast published after the 1921 census was shown by the 1931 figures to have erred by only 0.13 per cent.) In America the maximum population

(about 148,000,000) will be reached, it is predicted, between 1960 and 1970, and it will than decline to some 140,000,000 by the year 2000. Even . Germany—though the Nazis urge a high birth-rate—seems destined to follow a similar path, Ernest Kahn predicting the peak of population for 1940. The French population has been for several years approximately stationary. Stationary or Declining

Thus, either within the very near future or within less than a generation, the major Western nations seem likely to be confronted by virtually stationary or slightly declining populations. This will necessitate an entirely new outlook regarding public administration and all economic planning (whether by the State or by individuals).

The ingrained habit of counting upom expansion—of consumption, of markets, of building, of agriculture andl manufacturing—will, it seems, have tci be modified. We shall have to grow accustomed to populations that remain much the same year after year, or even diminish; to populations composed oi: fewer children and youths and raoro elderly persons. Miss Grace Leybourne, in the Sociological Review, recently estimated that in Britain the proportion of children under 15 would be reduced by half, while the proportion of persons over 65 would be two and one-half times as great as now; and for tha United States it has been computed that by 1980 those between 50 and 69 years of age will comprise 24 per cent of the total as against 13.9 per cent in 1930. (This trend has been statistically visible for a generation.)

Population Less Youthful "It will be," said Sir Josiah Stamp, "as though one-third of the children and adolescents of to-day were tranuformed overnight into men and women all past middle age." The population will be, on the whole, less 3'outhful and perhaps less optimistic and lens energetic; a more settled as well as a more stable population. The writer discusses the economic changes the population decline will bring about, its effect upon municipal services, educational requirements ard on sections of industry. There will be more wealth per capita, he holdj, and hence a rise in the standard of living, though employment dislocations will have their difficulties. Professor Robins contends that a continued increase in average income, as in England in the last century, is no proof that there is not over-population. "Over-population may be present long before real incomes begin to go down," he says. On the other hand, new inventions or economic changes may so alter the economic outlook that the desirable level of population varies.