From: “POPULATION CONTROL: PAST DECISIONS AND FUTURE POLICY“
population_policy_-_will_current_programs_succeed.pdf – Kingsley Davis, demographer, 1971.
How governments might control the population – he didn’t mean this as a “how-to guide” but in many ways it seems like it may have been interpreted as a “how-to guide”.
Here, he lays out a set of steps that government policy might take to make having families difficult.
Hardships that seem particularly conducive to deliberate lowering of the birth rate are (in managed economies) scarcity of housing and other consumer goods despite full employment and required high participation of women in the labor force, or (in freer economies) a great deal of unemployment and economic insecurity. When conditions are good, any nation tends to have a growing population.
It follows that, in countries where contraception is used, a realistic proposal for a government policy of lowering the birth rate reads like a catalogue of horrors:
- squeeze consumers through taxation and inflation;
- make housing very scarce by limiting construction;
- force wives and mothers to work outside the home to offset the inadequacy of male wages,
- yet provide few child- care facilities;
- encourage migration to the city by paying low wages in the country and providing few rural jobs;
- increase congestion in cities by starving the transit system;
- increase personal insecurity by encouraging conditions that produce unemployment and by haphazard political arrests.
Davis did not encourage taking these steps but noted these actions were a possibility that governments might take.
