25 



Sharp: 

 Revelle: 



I remember one thing about her. Most of the time she 

 was here, she and her children had some kind of respiratory 

 problem, colds or bronchitis and things like that. She used 

 to say that it was just as dangerous for an Egyptian to come 

 to the United States as it was for an American to go to 

 Egypt! They just got too many diseases. 



One of the things that Harold Thomas and I did was to 

 send one of his students, Walter Spofford, to Egypt to study 

 this problem of the Aswan High Dam. We wrote a paper on it 

 which was one of the first applications of linear 

 programming to this kind of water problem. 



The other major source of funding, besides the funding 

 that I've talked about so far — which was strictly for the 

 population problems per se, in the narrow sense of teaching 

 people about population problems and doing work in 

 demography and the social and economic aspects — [was for 

 consulting on economic and social problems.] 



One of the people we brought in was Bob Reppeto. He 

 was a Ph.D. from Harvard who had been on the staff of the 

 Harvard Center for International Development. Not the 

 center. I have forgotten exactly what it was called, but it 

 was basically a program where Harvard sent people out in the 

 field to consult on economic and social problems . My 

 son-in-law, Gary Hufbauer, did that for several years. 



I made myself a note that he went to India, I believe. 



Pakistan. Primarily in Lahore. His particular study was 

 the effect of income distribution on birthrates. He found, 

 and was able to demonstrate pretty well, that the more even 

 the income distribution, basically the higher the income of 

 the poor coir^ared to the rich, the lower the birthrate. 

 This was a purely empirical finding, but it can also be 

 explained in terms of the fact that if the income 

 distribution is fairly equal there's a lot of hope on the 

 part of poor people that they can get rich, and you can't 

 get rich if you have too many children. In other words, they 

 can achieve more economic mobility if there 're not too many 

 children. 



Then our other major field of work was really under 

 Peter Rogers and Dick Tabors, and that was the studies of 

 water resources development in the subcontinent. 



Sharp: Peter had done the preliminary study in the Lower Ganges 

 Basin. He had done that preliminary study in, I think, 

 1967, but I'm not really sure. It was basically on the 

 development of water resources. 



Revelle: That's right. 



Sharp: There's a lot on that in the papers, maybe because of all 

 the problems that were connected to trying to get that 

 project really going on. 



