Population : dynamics ethics and policy
- Washington American association for the advancement of science 1975
- 184p.
The decision by the United Nations to convene a world conference on population in Bucharest in August 1974 marked a turning point in population research in relation to population policy. A number of the preparations for the World Population Conference paved the way for an examination of the defective theoretical basis on which national and international action had been taken since World War II. But it was the Conference itself, a governmental conference in which population growth was faced as a political issue, that focused on the shift away from the advocacy of imposition on a world society of ethnocentric, inadequately based theories of population growth, to a recognition of the extraordinary complexity of the relationships between cul ture, nationhood, type of technological change, and ideological preoccupations.
The arguments at Bucharest, poorly reported as they were by the American press and neglectful as they were of the significance of such discussions even if not immediately implemented, nevertheless alerted the literate world to the change that had occurred. The type of discussion that had been taking place in the United States is vividly reflected in the papers in this volume which extend from 1966 to Michael Teitelbaum's article, written after Bucharest but still speaking of the "completion" of the demographic transition which his article calls into question. This type of discussion is essential to an understanding of where we are-and, to all intents and purposes, where most of the American scientific world is when worldwide population growth is viewed with justifiable alarm, but with extraordinary parochialism.