98 MAN THE ANIMAL 



corner comprises just over 13 per cent of the whole land area, 

 and contains a little over a quarter of the total world popula- 

 tion living at the not too unreasonable average degree of crowd- 

 ing of about 86 persons per square mile. Finally, the little black 

 rectangle in the upper right corner comprises only just over 

 5 per cent of the total land area, but contains over one half of 

 the whole world population. This moiety of poor humanity 

 lives at an average density of 394 persons to the square mile. 

 All told we have in this diagram a picture of the net biological 

 result that human civilization had wrought by its efforts up to 

 the year of grace 1930. 



The average density of world population as a whole is nearly 

 41 persons per square mile, as we have seen. Yet the populations 

 on over 8 1 per cent of the total land area are living at densities 

 under 40. About 14 per cent of the population of the world — 

 roughly one person in seven — is living at densities of 600 or 

 above, that is with one acre or less per person, on an even 

 personal distribution of area. Now as a rough and round figure 

 it is estimated by Brown, a competent and conservative authority, 

 that 2.5 acres are needed to support a human being. Obviously 

 this implies good land, and all of it intensively cultivated. But 

 neglect these latter points for a moment, so as to put the best 

 case possible. If we take the 2.5 acre figure at its face value 

 and with the obviously too optimistic assumption that all land 

 functions at that scale, then in order to get the means of sub- 

 sistence to something over a half of the world's population 

 today will involve a significant problem of transportation and 

 distribution. Here one of the principal villains of the socio- 

 economic melodrama enters the scene. It is one of the commonest 

 of assertions that the faults and troubles connected with the 

 "distribution" of goods are chiefly to blame for the world's 

 woes, with the implication that if these faults could be elimi- 

 nated the world's economic troubles would largely disappear. 



But, faults or no faults, the present geographical arrange- 

 ment of world population makes it plain that without substantial 

 "distribution" of the means of subsistence from the places where 



