Formulation of Population Policy

FORMULATION OF POPULATION POLICY* BERNARD BERELSONt The children born in this country in 1972 will start school in 1977, and most of them will go to college in 1990. They will vote in the presidential election of 1992, get married in the mid-1990s, and enter the job market at about the same time. They will rent, buy, or build their own family housing before the end of the century. About half of their children will be born in the twentieth century, half in the twenty-first. From the time they become independent adults, they will make a major change in residence about five times, on balance toward the metropolitan centers where most Americans already live. Their children will start having children by 2020. They will retire and start receiving pension returns around 2035. They will die about 2045, halfway into the next century—just about the time their grandchildren start having children. The future, in short, is already with us. Population policy at bottom deals with the kind of life the children of 1972 will live. How many will they be? What effect will their numbers and their mobility have on the problems they will have to face? By population policy I mean governmental actions that are designed to alter population events in a nontrivial way, or that actually do alter them without the intent to do so. The definition could be stated more broadly or narrowly: an ethnic group could have a population policy of increasing fertility in order to achieve the political power thought to derive from having a larger proportion of the politically active citizenry; or the unintended policy could be disregarded , and only policies explicitly demographic in objective could be considered. But for our purposes here, perhaps the indicated definition will serve. What have governments done, or what might they do, to shape the growth and the distribution of their populations? * Presented at the dedication of the Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, May 8, 1972. t President, Population Council, 245 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017. 446 I Bernard Berelson · Formulation of Population Policy And, to anticipate a major theme of my exploration, why are such policies so difficult to formulate and then to implement? Let us look at a few examples for the United States, in order to test out the borders and thus locate the center. Since the intent and the consequences are by no means identical, what are we to consider appropriate policy measures? Some policies intended to effect population change have not demonstrably done so, for example, the pronatalist maternal and child-assistance programs of Western Europe and perhaps some of the antinatalist family-planning programs in the developing world. On the other hand, many policies not designed with population ends in mind have had major demographic consequences—for example, the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s that has moved people along its route (and, I am told, the equivalent of the highway system for the 1970s and 1980s will be the development of clean water systems ); perhaps the whole system of popular education; probably the postwar public housing policies of Japan, the USSR, Eastern Europe, and, for that matter, the United States, where the GI housing subsidies may have contributed to the baby boom by providing that extra bedroom (the lack of which may have held down family size elsewhere ; certainly the historic laws restricting various aspects of contraceptive practice (not so historic here in Massachusetts); the current laws restricting the practice of sterilization and induced abortion; the laws enforcing vaccination and other public health practices that directly affect mortality rates; and the laws on marital status and marriage age. Still, some policies have aimed at affecting population variables and have done so—for example, the great flow of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the reduction of that flow after World War I, the Homestead Act that stimulated the westward settlement, compulsory vaccination, and other public health measures. But note that such efforts have more readily affected distribution and mortality than fertility. It is likely that there has never before been such...