I was just reading an article on the population and development. It summarized very well some of the history about the evolvement of population studies. I just want to do some summary of this article for public education as well as for my later review.
Population Council was founded as a result of the Williamsburg Conference in 1952. The first president was John D. Rockefeller.
Birth Control pioneer: Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
Malthus
1968, Paul R. Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb", warned of impending disaster of population explosion, arguing that the growth of population would contribute international tensions and linked the issue to fears of nuclear Armageddon. He was a strong advocate of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), the goal of which is to reduce fertility to the replacement level at the time.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth". This pioneer effort, using computer modeling, examined the interaction of five basic factors that affect growth on the planet: population, agriculture, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution. It affirmed that "If the present growth in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continues unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years." The outcome, they predicted, would be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity (Meadows et al. 1972: 22-23).
1974 First World Population Conference: The Bucharest Conference, in Romania