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188 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1936)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0188 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction I T IS now more than ten years since the volume entitled Population Problems 1 appeared. At that time, the editor of the present collection of essays, as President of the American Statistical Association, endeavored to bring together a group of scholars qualified to write authoritatively upon various phases of this subject. His aim then, as now, was to arouse inter- est and to coordinate the investiga- tions of American demographers work- ing in a rapidly developing field. Since that date, even more radical changes have occurred. The number of students who recognize the prime importance of the subject has greatly increased, and among them they have produced a valuable body of scientific literature. Careful studies are now available on many separate phases of quantitative and qualitative demogra- phy, such as the true rate of natural increase, the various factors of differ- ential fertility, the extent and direc- tion of internal and international mi- gration, and many other aspects of the structure and movement of the world's population. RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONs FORMED Interest in this subject has, of course, not been limited to the United States. Indeed, one of the conse- quences of the World War was to focus attention on the supreme importance of the population problem and its rela- tion to world peace. This has led to many studies in the United States, England, Germany, Italy, and a num- 1 Population Problems in the United States and Canada, Publication No. 5 of the Pollak Foundation for Economic Research, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926. ber of other countries, each naturally having regard mainly to its own spe- cial interests. This general move- ment, in which each nation is inter- ested in its own way, crystallized in the organization of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. This body was formed in 1928 in Paris, following a world population congress that had been held in Geneva the preceding July. The objectives were primarily to lay down systematic plans of re- search and to coordinate the studies conducted by the individual members of the Union thus established. It was hoped at the time to make of the Union a clearing house for information about population, and to facilitate the establishment of common standards for the collection, tabulation, and analysis of scientific data bearing on the population problem. The activi- ties of the Union were projected en- tirely apart from any political, moral, or religious implications, and were to be concerned fundamentally with fact- finding. The American Committee affiliated with the International Union was from the very beginning one of its most active units. A little later the Popu- lation Association of America was or- ganized, and the American National Committee of the Union was absorbed by this Association as its Research Committee. The function of the Committee thus incorporated in the Association was conceived to be the encouragement and direction of in- vestigation in the field of population. As a basis for the systematic conduct of this function, the Committee has felt that one of its first tasks was to ix

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