POPULATION EXPLOSION: IS MAN REALLY DOOMED?

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Obviously, international migrations are not a likely prospect, but even within any one nation, crowding is generally a result of the drift from rural areas to the city. Taken as a whole, the U.S. still has only 58 people per sq. mi.-scarcely one-sixth the density of Switzerland, which does not seem terribly crowded. But about 70% of all Americans have jammed together onto 2% of the land, while half of the nation's counties lost population during the past decade.

The crowded parts of the world are, no doubt, destined to get somewhat more crowded. Nonetheless, statistics on the population explosion are something less than scientific. They are based largely on estimated birth rates in underdeveloped nations, where record keeping remains an underdeveloped art. In particular, there is the projected growth of China, which is often said to have 800 million people and to be increasing by 1,000,000 every month. The fact is, nobody really knows how many Chinese there are (the last announced census recorded 583 million back in 1953) or what the rate of increase is today. In recent years, Peking has encouraged late marriages, use of birth-control pills, sterilization and abortion. "Projections of future populations are admittedly fictions," says one of the more moderate prophets, Philip Hauser of the University of Chicago. "No one can actually predict future population, and anyone who claims he can is either a fool or a charlatan . . . The fact that man is able to consider [the] implications is one reason why the projected numbers will never be reached."

At the heart of the population problem is a paradoxical question: Is a growing population a social disaster or a social resource? Or, to put it another way, will a larger population produce more poets or just more heroin addicts? And which of the two will prevail?

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For poor, underdeveloped countries like India, more population surely means more poverty. But once a society has begun to industrialize, people themselves create wealth as they develop an increasingly elaborate exchange of goods and services. Thus both England and Germany prosper even though they have a population density greater than that of India. And the Japanese are demonstrating that the world's most thickly inhabited nation may also become its richest. Looking ahead, Professional Prophet Herman Kahn optimistically foresees a world population that will double by 2000 but a world economy that will grow fivefold.

This growing wealth is producing its own problems, of course. The U.S., with less than 6% of the world's people, already devours about 40% of its resources, and some critics blame the rich nations for the worst aspects of the population problem. Americans, for example, throw away more than 1,000,000 cars every year, plus 36 billion bottles and 58 million tons of paper. Aside from polluting the land and water, the critics say, this vast consumption threatens to strip the earth of its resources. In the rhetoric of Paul Ehrlich, "America's pride in her growing population may be compared to a cancer patient's pride in his expanding tumor."