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.