Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/152

 national self-sufficiency of life. This military purpose is associated with a pride of race and a policy of territorial expansion which calls for a higher birth-rate to give it validity, Germany, Italy, and Japan prize a growing population, partly as a pretext for, partly as an instrument of, territorial expansion. This pride of race must not, however, be regarded as a mere display of national egotism. It opens up the large new issue of qualitative population. That issue is obscured when a purely economic view of a population is taken. A good deal of attention has recently been given to the term “optimum” population interpreted as meaning that population which can make the fullest use of the productive resources of a given area of land, yielding the highest economic income. Equally distributed according to needs, such a maximum production would, it is maintained, imply the largest amount of economic welfare. If a world economy could be managed on this basis, by a distribution of productive population in accordance with the natural resources of each country, it would appear to some that the problem of population would be solved. And so it would, on two assumptions, that “economic goods” constituted the sole measure of human welfare, and that all stocks and races of men were equally desirable from the standpoint of human value.

But neither of these assumptions can be readily admitted. Average or maximum economic productivity cannot be taken as a sufficient criterion of a