Crisis in the Population Question

Crisis in the Population Question (Swedish: Kris i befolkningsfrågan) was a 1934 book by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, who discussed the declining birthrate in Sweden and proposed possible solutions. The book was influential in the debate that created the Swedish welfare model.

In the spring of 1931, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal wrote an article on Social Policy and Demography. The article was supposed to be published in the Swedish Social Democratic magazine Tiden, but it was never completed. The article, instead, became the cornerstone of the book Crisis in the Population Question which was to be published three years later (1934). The manuscript of the article as well as of the latter book is missing.

In early spring 1934, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal decided to return to this manuscript, to revise, update and expand it into book form. For this purpose, they rented a cottage in the Norwegian mountains. They worked out their theoretical differences and produced a manuscript originally titled Demography and Social Policy. Gunnar was responsible for the historical, theoretical, economic and statistical sections, while Alva drafted chapters on families, children, and specific programmatic proposals.

The book deals with the consequences of continued low fertility in Sweden. Sweden was threatened by population decline and thus reduced productivity and standard of living. The authors advocated a series of social reforms in order to overcome this problem.

A large chapter is devoted to Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism as they attack and criticize. They argued that less population growth was not needed but an increase of birth rate was and pointed out that if the fertility rate further decreased, "we would at the end of the 1970s have almost twice as many elderly people in relation to individuals in the working ages now", leading to serious supply problems. In this context, "a positive population policy should not focus on getting a few poor families to give birth to a very large number of children, but to persuade the majority to give birth to, say, for example, three children".

...
Wikipedia