Some Observations on the Political Economy of Population Growth

Located in the lobby of the Department of Commerce building in Washington is a large display showing the estimated size of population of the United States. Every few seconds, another addition is recorded; in the spring of 196o, the estimate reached i8o,oooooo, a number that, if borne out by the census, means that more than 30,000,000 people have been added in the past decade. On a planetary scale, the rise is even more spectacular: "In the last 20 years, the human race has increased by some 700 million. In the next 20 years, well over one billion people will be added if today's growth rates continue."' The implications of this surge in numbers of human beings for the American political economy and public law constitute the burden of this article. Its central thesis is the relatively simple, albeit heretofore strangely neglected, proposition that population growth will create the need for more organization, which, in turn, will result in the further enhancement of group (including societal), rather than individual, values. If continued, the tendency could result in such a diminution of personal freedoms as to approximate the conditions of totalitarianism. In setting out this thesis, the writer does not mean to imply that population growth is the sole cause of the trend toward greater control; rather, it is to be considered as one of the chief factors. While it might be possible to suggest an hypothesis running something like this: the balance between population and availability of resources determines the types of institutions that are erected to fulfill the demands of people,' such a proposition would be faulty simply because it is unilinear. Population growth is one of the several current visible trends that coalesce to produce the transformation of a society in which individual values are paramount to one in which