The Opinionator

300 Million Americans

Sometime this month the 300 millionth American will be born.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

When my mother was a school girl in the 1930’s, the number she heard cited was 110 million. In the 1950’s, when I was in high school I remember the number was 158 million.

Books have been written about overpopulation and the ultimate extinction of the human race. For a while in the late sixties there was quite a bit of concern about how we could injure the world by having too many babies. Then, probably with help from birth control and liberal abortion laws, the threat of over population seems to have disappeared.

Some countries pay families who have more than the minimal number of kids, other are contemplating plans to increase population and encourage immigration.

Many countries are realizing that in order to be competitive in the global economy, nations need growth populations. That is why the US’s present growth rate, one of the highest in the world, is good news.

Ben Wattenburg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, sounded very positive about America’s population growth. He posits that we will need a large population to continue to solve problems and bring about economic growth. Over-crowding will not be a problem. Today, there is room enough for the entire population of the Earth to be assigned one acre of Texas each.

Here are the top ten countries:

1. China:  1,378,827,643
2. India:  1,103,371,000
3. United States:  300,000,000
4. Indonesia:  232,850,493
5. Brazil:  187,287,330
6. Pakistan:  158,283,500
7. Bangladesh:  148,238,098
8. Russia:  141,895,047
9. Nigeria:  132,579,649
10. Japan:  127,417,000

The world contains 6.5 billion people. The US represents about 4½ percent of the world’s population and ranks third. Iran is 17^th, France is 20^th, Britain is 21^st, Afghanistan is 38^th and North Korea is 48th. Although North Korea is way down the list, it has the world’s largest army, about one million strong.

When George Washington was president, the US had about 4 million people. 100 years later it was 63 million. In the 40 years from 1870 to 1910, waves of immigrants saw our population more than double from 39 million to 82 million. Those waves contained most of our ancestors.

Future projections say that the world’s population will crest at fewer than 9 billion in the middle of this century. That is largely because of decreasing birth rates. For an interesting review of world population, check out www.wikepedia.com.