Kingsley Davis: Population Policy, Will Current Programs Succeed?

Kingsley Davis is listed prominently at the bottom of the Jaffe Memo table as one of the ‘primary’ sources consulted and tabulated.

Davis makes the point that population control advocates have felt compelled to resort to ‘family planning’ as their primary means of controlling the population, because its the only politically safe mechanism then (in 1967) available to them.  This is flawed because it still leaves reproduction in the hands of individual families, who may very well still want to have large families.  What is necessary is to create conditions that will prompt individuals to choose smaller families, which is not , he says, an issue for health departments, but rather “the ministries of economics and education.”

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Download and read Davis’ piece, Kingsley Davis:  Population Policy, Will Current Programs Succeed? as distributed by The Pathfinder Fund in 1967.