Volume 5, Number 7 · November 11, 1965
No Vacancies
By Dennis H. Wrong
Too Many Americans
by Lincoln H. Day, by Alice Taylor Day
Houghton Mifflin, 298 pp., $4.95
The Politics of Population
by William Petersen
Doubleday, 350 pp., $4.95
American demographers occupy a position of unchallenged respectability in the academic world despite the obvious connection between their subject and the unruly facts of sex and the political and religious controversies swirling about the question of birth control. Because they rarely stray beyond the careful, craftsmanlike recording of population trends, it is easy to forget that population is after all a consequence of copulation. There are, I am almost sure (though this is an impression, for I have not undertaken a demographic analysis to confirm it), proportionately fewer women, Jews, Negroes and, for obvious reasons, Catholics, in the ranks of demographers than among sociologists, the larger academic grouping to which demographers belong. The professional meetings of demographers tend to be stodgy and abstemious in contrast to the frantic and febrile atmosphere of sociology conventions.
Review, 2181 words
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