The World Population Conference

Abstract

THE head of a social research department, such as exist on the other side of the Atlantic, who was on the outlook for a subject for a student's thesis, might do worse than suggest the modern phenomenon of conference bolding as suitable as suitable for investigation. Attendanee at conferences and congresses threatens to consume an increasing proportion of the lifetime of scientific workers. If the laborious method of investigation which finds favour in certain places was followed in the department, we may suppose that the student would classify the motives for organising conferences and the methods of procedure followed, and would finally attempt to correlate different procedures with the ‘results’ attained. Such a student might find it difficult to fit the recent World Population Conference at Geneva into any well-defined category. On one hand, the programme was limited to the strictly scientific discussion of certain aspects of the population problem. On the other hand, it is probably correct to say that in the minds of most of those who attended was the conviction that the regulation of the quantity, quality, and distribution of population is a world problem which the organised communities of the world have to face at no distant date. It was a conference of biologists, statisticians, and economists, who did not trespass into the province of the politicians, but for the most part realised keenly the need for an agreed international policy if ordered progress is to be secured.