13 



else, not monetary. They use a lot of disincentives, like 

 they don't give free education for more than two children, 

 [brief tape interruption] They hold back food rations if a 

 family has more than two children. Housing in the cities. 

 In the cities particularly they can use a lot of 

 disincentive measures, not so much in the country. The 

 peasants are very resistant to reducing their family size, 

 but they've managed to do pretty well. Indonesia and 

 Thailand are doing pretty well too. Pakistan, Moslem 

 countries in general not at all well. 



Sharp: Is there a central reason why the Moslem countries have not 

 done so well? 



Reveller I think the central reason is the low status of women in 

 Moslem countries. They are really second-class citizens. 



Sharp: And that's not changing very much. 



Reveller Not very rapidly. 



But anyhow, what we talked about in this book was what 

 were the consequences, not what were the causes, of rapid 

 population growth. The causes are much more difficult to 

 understand. The consequences affect many aspects of human 

 life. You can't spend so much money on education per child 

 if you have a lot of children. You have a rapid growth of 

 the labor force of unskilled young people entering the labor 

 force, many more than those that are leaving it. You have 

 an imbalance of the generations. 



Here in this country, for example, the baby boom had 

 very unfortunate consequences in terms of just plain crime 

 because there were so many baby boomers, and crimes are 

 committed by young people. So there was much less control 

 simply because of the imbalance of the generations . 



It has effects on the environment of course because as 

 populations grow, the peasants are desperately looking for 

 more land, just to stay alive, for subsistence. And there 

 are many such specific consequences, which we spelled out in 

 this book. 



Most of the demographers in the country were involved 

 with writing chapters in this book, and then we had a 

 summary of about 100 pages which I wrote. I think it was 

 the first time people looked at it objectively, not in an 

 emotional, horrified way like Paul Erhlich and company. 



Faculty, Staff and Students 



Sharp: It would be interesting for you to talk about what the 



students' reactions were since your classes were very large. 



Revelle: Well, I taught essentially one course in the faculty of Arts 

 and Sciences. That was called Human Populations and Natural 

 Resources, and that began about 1966, as I remember it. 

 Jack said I just had to do more teaching, or do some 

 teaching. I agreed with him. This is what was called at 



