ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews long-term fertility trends in the United States. Easterlin begins his demonstration that fertility adjusts to the social and economic environment by classifying geographic locations in terms of settlement pattern, from least to most densely settled. In the United States these are the frontier areas, settled agricultural areas, new urban areas, and old urban areas. In the long run, beliefs evolve from and must be renewed by experience with the real environment. The depleted fish stocks off the Georges Bank and the higher cost of energy, for instance, suggest that resources have absolute limits and that the evidence of it will increasingly impinge upon daily life. This optimist's view is that homeostatic mechanisms will operate before the apocalypse because it is sufficient to believe in scarcity. The chapter concludes with a speculative interpretation of patterns and their meaning in terms of the hypothesis that culture has the capacity for homeostatic response to population pressure.
