5l8 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



there is now in operation a law recently passed which greatly 

 reduces the increase in our population from immigration. 



These broad facts suggest that it would be difficult to draw 

 up at this moment a definition of an optimum population 

 for any given area, to which everybody would agree. Par- 

 ticularly those people already inhabiting the area in question 

 are almost sure to have views about what is the best popula- 

 tion size for them, which will be different from those reached 

 by other groups, or by dispassionate students of population 

 problems in general. For after all to speak of an "optimum" 

 population implies a criterion of what is best. And tastes 

 do differ so. In a brilliant paper read before the World 

 Population Conference in Geneva in the summer of 1927 

 Prof. H. P. Fairchild took the position that the determining 

 element in discussing optimum size of population should 

 be "material well-being, or "standard of living." To this 

 it is difficult to urge any specific theoretical objection. 

 But there is a very considerable and real practical one, 

 and it is again simply that tastes do differ so. The radio, 

 the movie, the automobile, canned peaches, and Eskimo pie 

 are clearly evidences of a high standard of living, in the sense 

 of "material" well-being. But there are a great many people 

 in the world who do not care for these things, not in the very 

 least. On Professor Fairchild's definition, as on any other 

 conceivable one, what will seem to one group of people an 

 optimum population will not strike another group at all 

 that way. The point is beautifully illustrated in the attitude 

 of the city man and the country man towards each other's 

 dwelling places and standards of living. Each really thinks 

 the other a bit simple, not to say feebleminded, for living as 

 he does, when after all he does not have to. But the truth 

 merely is that each likes his own way of living better than 

 another way. Europe had more than twice as many persons 

 per square mile as Asia (roughly 127 as against 60). Perhaps 

 both have long since passed their optimum populations. 

 But this can hardly be true elsewhere because in all the rest 

 of the world taken together, except Europe and Asia (and the 

 Polar Regions), there are, on the average, only about 12 

 persons per scjuare mile. 



