Demography as Diplomacy

Chapter 5 demonstrates how, in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S.-based philanthropic organizations invested in the growth of demography, the social science of human population dynamics, and used demography to convince heads of state of developing countries to integrate family planning programs into their nation-building and economic development agendas. The Population Council and the Ford Foundation established population research and training centers at major U.S. universities, to which they recruited graduate students from developing countries, with the understanding that they would return home after completing their education to advocate for the establishment of family planning programs. These organizations also funded fertility surveys by American demographers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that promoted small-family norms and the distribution of new systemic contraceptive technologies, specifically the intrauterine device and birth control pill, and documented the existence of what demographers termed “unmet need” for family planning services.

Family Planning

Chapter 2 documents the establishment of demography, the social science of human population dynamics, in the United States during the 1930s. It contends that this interdisciplinary field was able to build an institutional structure because of support from eugenicist Frederick Osborn, who saw in demography an ally for the creation of a postracial democratic version of eugenics. Osborn’s new brand of eugenics emphasized birth control rather than sterilization and worked through the private sector rather than the public sector. He fused birth control advocacy with eugenics in a strategy he termed “family planning,” which signaled reproductive autonomy in the context of social control. Osborn secured patronage for demography from the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Carnegie Corporation, and an audience for demographic research in the New Deal welfare state. He leveraged his influence to focus demography’s research program on producing support for his family planning–based eugenic project.

Detonating the Population Bomb

Chapter 6 documents the fragmentation of what had previously been a consensus regarding global population growth at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, resulting in the emergence of two separate factions. The population establishment continued to promote the position of the erstwhile consensus, which held that rapid population growth in developing countries was a barrier to economic development and could be adequately slowed through voluntary family planning programs. The population bombers contended that population growth anywhere in the world posed an immediate existential threat to the natural environment and American national security and needed to be halted through population control measures that demographers had previously rejected as coercive. These two positions went head-to-head at the UN World Population Conference in 1974, where both were rejected by leaders of developing countries.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly traces the history of population thought and policy from the 1974 UN World Population Conference to the present. It contends that the real problem with population is that it remains a prominent scapegoat for nearly all of the world’s ills and demonstrates that debates about how to control the growth of the world’s population have largely silenced and co-opted voices that refuse to attribute such pressing problems as poverty and climate change to expanding human numbers. The framing of the world’s complex issues as “the population problem” diverts resources from just and equitable solutions at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable people and of the planet itself.

Introduction

The introduction situates Building the Population Bomb’s historical narrative in the context of current debates over whether the world’s population is growing too quickly or not quickly enough, and over what should be done about it. It lays out two positions—moderate and extreme—and explains that, rather than taking one side or the other, the book tells the story of how these positions emerged in tandem between the 1920s and the 1970s. It contends that population growth has been unfairly blamed for many of the world’s problems, and promises to explain how this happened and who has benefited from it. The introduction describes how Building the Population Bomb contributes to the history of the social sciences, furthers our understanding of the role of the United States in promoting global development in the second half of the twentieth century, and advances the contemporary project of reproductive justice.

Population Consensus

Chapter 4 documents the creation after World War II of a consensus regarding human population growth that briefly united two different scientific perspectives. Natural scientists contended that the world’s human population had already exceeded the Earth’s capacity to support it and that continued growth presented an imminent threat to the natural environment and global peace. This Malthusian perspective was represented by the Population Reference Bureau. Social scientists contended that the world was in a process of demographic transition, whereby modernizing societies were breaking free of the Malthusian trap, though the transition had stalled out in developing countries and needed to be jump-started. This modernizationist perspective was represented by the Population Council. This chapter explains how the Population Reference Bureau and Population Council came together to produce and promote demographic research demonstrating that population growth posed a threat to economic development, thereby putting population control on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.

Global Population

Chapter 3 documents the way in which, after World War II, the United Nations Population Division and Population Commission statistically reorganized the world into a series of national populations that could be compared to national economies to promote economic development and that could be aggregated to represent the population of the world as a whole. It contends that this process was initially conceived of as a nation-building project that would promote democracy worldwide by fostering the development of governmental institutions that would simultaneously count populations and constitute self-governing subjects. This effort failed, however, as disputes over sovereignty at local, national, and international levels rendered population data either uncollectable or untrustworthy. Ultimately the UN turned to demographic theory and models to fill in persistent gaps in its data tables, rendering the populations of the world tractable to control by governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Quantity and Quality

Chapter 1 describes the emergence in the 1920s of two scientific approaches to human population. The first, rooted in the natural sciences, suggested that the world was headed for overpopulation, while the second, rooted in vital statistics, suggested that the countries of North America and Western Europe were instead facing imminent depopulation. It demonstrates that the two scientific perspectives supported opposing positions in debates over birth control legalization and immigration restriction. Natural scientists and statisticians from the Americas, Europe, and Asia nonetheless came together in 1928 to form the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP; today the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population or IUSSP). This chapter contends that, although the IUSIPP was unable to survive the rise of fascism in Europe, the political and scientific struggles that tore it apart also laid the foundation for demography in the United States.