COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	Sirs:
C00005 ENDMK
C⊗;
Sirs:

	Ansley Coale [The History of the Human Population, \F1Scientific
American\F0, September] misses some population control mechanisms
that may have been important in previous societies and may
become important in the future.  Both folk tales and 18th and 19th
century literature give the impression that a person could not marry
unless he inherited one of a fixed set of social slots or could get
one from someone else.
In such a society, the response to an upward fluctuation in births
would not necessarily be an increased death rate; it might simply be
a reduction in marriage rate.  Traditional society had many places for
people whom it didn't allow to marry:
dependents in families, most domestic servants,
many soldiers and sailors, monks, nuns, and priests.
This mechanism could control not merely the population as a whole
but also the numbers of people in particular occupations and stations
in life.  Most countries had laws that prevented
subdivision of landed property, and many occupations had rules designed to prevent
the number of workers from increasing.

	Industrialization made this population control mechanism
ineffective by creating a labor market.
Once there are many jobs for which there is free competition,
and once these occupations provide the cash to rent housing of however poor
quality, the population will start increasing.  This can explain why
population increase started before medicine had advanced appreciably.

John McCarthy
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, California