The Declining Rate of Population Growth
The rate of population growth in the United States has long been declining but this fact has perhaps been obscured because of the size of the net increase decade by decade. Thus the increase from 1920 to 1930 was 17 millions as compared with 14 millions in the years 1910 to 1920, within which the World War occurred. Before the Civil War, however, the population was increasing at the rate of about 35 percent a decade. Between 1920 and 1930 it increased only 16 percent.
Experts on population have projected their curves into the future and the outlook is startling. Manufacturers who try to estimate future markets have been expecting a population of 140 million by 1940, but the calculations of our contributors, based on information not presented in the decennial censuses, show that the declining rate of increase has been particularly striking since 1923, and that hardly more than 132 or 133 millions are to be expected by 1940. This means that the markets for mine operators, farmers and manufacturers, whose plants may be over-equipped and whose problems are those of overproduction, will be considerably smaller than has been expected, unless foreign markets are expanded, or our domestic standards of consumption are raised.
As our statisticians look further into the future, they see possibilities of still greater declines in growth with the probability of a stationary population. They show that we shall probably attain a population between 145 and 190 million during the present century with the probability that the actual population will be nearer the lower figure than the higher. Such a prospect is radically different from that predicted a generation or even a decade ago.
Ideas regarding the domestic market will have to bee revised in the light of these estimates, not only by manufacturers and farmers but also by real estate owners, lawyers, doctors, teachers and many others. The problem will be to compensate for less rapidly growing numbers by endeavoring to raise standards of purchasing power and consumption.
America, with its rapidly expanding population and its exploitation of abundant natural resources, has been characterized by exceptional optimism and initiative. Will these traditional traits of the American character suffer by a declining rate of population growth and increasing difficulties in exploiting our national resources? It may be that this will prove to be the case, but we must make allowance for the highly dynamic factor of invention which is likely to develop new industries, stimulating optimism and energy through the creation of new commodities and new desires.
Source: Recent Social Trends in the United States, an examination of the social state of the United States at the end of the 1920s undertaken at the direction of President Herbert Hoover.