THE CRUCIAL VALUE PROBLEMS 



^ Philip M. Mauser 



As a demographer and statistician I should, I suppose, be expected to 

 comment on Professor Galbraith's paper by evaluating whatever pop- 

 ulation projections and possibly consumption functions he might 

 have used to quantify the magnitude of, and the rate — to some the 

 alarming rate — of increase in, consumption in the United States and 

 especially in respect of relatively scarce and nonrenewable materials. 

 But although Galbraith alludes to the great and increasing rate of 

 consumption, he has seen fit not to quantify anything. He thus has left 

 me in something of a fix : have slide rule with no place to travel. This 

 situation calls for the criticism of a philosopher concerned with the 

 normative rather than of a demographer or statistician. But having 

 been trained also as a sociologist, it is not too difficult a matter to 

 switch to philosophy in treating what Galbraith feels are the really 



PHILIP M. HAUSER, Professor of Sociology, and Chairman of that 

 department at the University of Chicago, is also Director of the University's 

 Population Research and Training Center. Previously he has served as Deputy 

 and Acting Director of the Bureau of the Census, Assistant to the Secretary 

 of Commerce, and United States representative to the United Nations Popula- 

 tion Commission. He is a former vice president of the American Statistical 

 Association and of the American Sociological Society and a former president 

 of the Population Association of America. Mr. Hauser is co-editor of The 

 Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal, and editor of Urbanization 

 in Asia and the Far East and Population and World Politics. He was born in 

 Chicago in 1909, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 

 1938. 



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