Volume 28, Number 15 · October 8, 1981
Destiny's Tots
By Christopher Jencks
Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
by Richard A. Easterlin
Basic Books, 205 pp., $11.95
Demographers have seldom been good prophets. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, the founder of modern demography, based his famous Essay on the principle of population on the fact that American experience showed that 'population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years.' Malthus was right about America in the eighteenth century, but by 1820 the American birth rate had begun to fall and by 1900 American women were having only half as many children as they had when Malthus wrote. American fertility did not decline because of food shortages, which Malthus had seen as the only effective check on population growth. The decline may have had something to do with 'moral restraint,' which was the other factor Malthus thought capable of curtailing population growth, but nothing Malthus wrote explains why Americans should have exercised more restraint in the nineteenth century than they had in the eighteenth. Nor were modern methods of contraception mainly responsible. Most Americans still relied on the same contraceptive techniques at the end of the nineteenth century as at the beginning, namely abstinence, withdrawal, and abortion.
Review, 4219 words
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