ROBERTC.COOK 75 



Dr. Kingsley Davis, Professor of Sociology and Social Institutions 

 at the University of California and this country's representative on the 

 United Nations' Population Commission, has recently written: 



Poor people are more numerous today than ever before, because 

 population is skyrocketing in the poorer countries. If two-thirds of 

 the earth's population was impoverished a century ago and only 

 one-third today, there would still be more poor people now than 

 there were then. With many countries multiplying at a rate near 

 3 per cent per year, their economies must somehow move ahead 

 at 4 or 5 per cent per year if poverty is to be reduced. This is no 

 easy task when the ratio of people to resources is already excessive 

 and the poverty so great that capital can hardly be accumulated for 

 long-run industrial development.^ 



Many economists question emphatically Dr. Teller's inference that 

 the world's people are better off today than ever before or at least 

 have the hope that abundance is just around the corner. I will cite 

 only two: 



At the Industrial Development Conference held in San Francisco 

 in October, this observation was made by Dr. A. Eugene Staley, 

 Senior Economist of the Stanford Research Institute: 



Despite all the vaunted technological and economic progress of 

 modern times, there are probably more poverty-stricken people in 

 the world today than there were fifty years ago or a hundred years 

 ago. This is because economic progress has been slow or nonexist- 

 ent in most of the under-developed countries during this period, in 

 which their populations have been growing.^ 



A major problem in altering this situation for the better is that with 

 a very low level of living and with population doubling every genera- 

 tion, the difficulties of achieving an economic breakthrough are 

 almost insuperable. 



Another speaker at that conference, Dr. David McCord Wright of 

 McGill University, spelled out concisely the economic paradox that 

 stands athwart any easy solution of the world's hunger and misery : 



1 Kingsley Davis, "Analysis of the Population Explosion," New York Times 

 Magazine, September 22, 1957, pp. 15 ff. 



~2A. Eugene Staley, "The Revolution of Rising Expectations" (speech), In- 

 ternational Industrial Development Conference News, San Francisco, October 

 14-18, 1957, p. 3. 



