ABSTRACT
That the United States should and probably can achieve a condition of zero population growth at some time in the next hundred years is no longer a matter of much dispute. Most students of contemporary American problems seem to have agreed, at least, that the costs of long-continued population growth would considerably outweigh the benefits; and the achievement in 1972 of a total fertility rate slightly below replacement has convinced many that a spontaneous and fortuitous approach to a stationary population is already underway. Since the factors that have led to the decline in fertility have not been disentangled, however, it is difficult to be sure yet whether the recent experience represents a fluctuation or a trend. Against this backdrop of loose consensus on the long-term desirability of ZPG and uncertainty about the origins and persistence of recent levels of fertility, serious and controversial questions remain to be settled. Do the potential consequences of continued population growth in the United States justify systematic measures to hold fertility at replacement level if it should show any tendency to rise again? Should such measures be used to push fertility well below replacement, if it does not drop that far without them, in order to bring the attainment of ZPG closer than seventy years hence and to render the intervening population increment smaller than some 70 million? Is even the present U.S. population of 210 million too large? Should there be zero economic growth as well as zero population growth?
