Population : a population for democracy

AMERICA has the unique strategic advantage - if it could only be capitalized - that sev eral of its social and political problems are maturing to acuteness a couple of decades later than in some of the older democracies of northern and western Europe, among them my own country, Sweden. Certainly this is true of the problems dealt with in this book. America has still an aggregate fertility which nearly matches its mortality, even when corrected for the factor of age structure although it is now steadily declining and although during the decline there have de veloped within the nation reproduction differ ences between regions, racial groups, and classes of perhaps a still more alarming nature. And in America social policy is only in statu nascendi.

This being the situation, the professional social engineer is naturally tempted to indulge in wishful visions of how America might profit from the experiences of Europe. At least, it should not be necessary for America to remake all our mistakes. In the older countries re ferred to, social policy has been growing as some of the old cathedrals grew: chapels and towers were added in different periods and in different styles, walls were moved, windows opened, and the general plan, if there ever was one, was lost for long periods. We are now constantly searching for means of rationalizing and coordinating the historical outgrowth into some sort of integrated system. The naïve vision of the social engineer is that here in the New World a modern, rational, functionalistic structure of policy could be planned from the start, based on the final conclusions but not repeating all of the earlier experimentations in darkness.