The shadow of the world's future, or The earth's population possibilities & the consequences of the present rate of increase of the earth's inhabitants

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1775636852

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-164018

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Knibbs, George Handley http://d-nb.info/gnd/1045010944

Title:: The shadow of the world's future, or The earth's population possibilities & the consequences of the present rate of increase of the earth's inhabitants

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Ernest Benn Limited

Year of publication:: (1928)

Scope:: 131 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter X. New malthusianism and man's future

Collection:: Economics Books

104 THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD’S FUTURE suffice to say that some measure of the control of births, in some way or other, is inevitable. The diffi- culties, which necessarily present themselves in life, are accentuated by the fact that there is no limit to human desire, nor are there any abstract standards for human guidance. What satisfied us yesterday is inadequate to-day. The son believes that he must outdistance the father. The standards-of-living, of civilisation, elaborate themselves. Any one class of the people, in so-called democratic countries, imagines itself to be rightly entitled to what any other possesses. The scale of individual demand has no fixed limit, and the economic efficiency of the human race must keep on rapidly advancing in order to meet the double tax, viz., inereasing numbers and the more elaborated and luxurious living now characteristic. Already there are, of course, factors which tend to limit births. In all the higher grades of life the educational, the cultural, and the social demands tend to defer the age of marriage to a later period of life, and in this way operate to limit the family. They menace and restrict the reproductive impulse. The growing insistence that quality, and not only numbers, shall be taken into account, is also operative in the same direction. Anyone who surveys the tendencies of human development soon realises two things. One is that Man is commencing to ask: “ How can the standards attained be stabilised or even further elaborated?” the other is, “What are the general world-conditions, and how will they act on the general drift of things?” In facing these questions we bear in mind—as said previously—that while science has enormously advanced human powers of destruction, the ameliorative possibilities she has created are, relatively thereto, but slight. And we recognise also that modern finance, transport and communication have made the problem bristle with new difficulties.

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