Introduction

By ‘resources’ is generally meant those things which are necessary for human life, for instance water, land – for the production of food – and some sort of housing shelter. Energy is also required: in primitive societies this is provided by the muscle-power of men and animals; in more advanced countries it may be derived from combustion, steam, wind-power, waterfalls, electricity, atomic furnaces or even tides. For the transition to these complex and more efficient forms of energy, scientific and technical knowledge is essential, and ‘know-how’ can be reckoned as a significant resource. In order to deploy his resources, man must carry on various kinds of economic activity, such as employment in industry or in agriculture, with their different occupations, trade, capital investment (requiring saving) and economic aid. The effectiveness of these activities depends on numerous subsidiary characteristics of population, such as people's physical fitness for work, their social structure, the urban or rural nature of their domicile, their migratory movements in pursuit of work, their literacy and education, and so on.

This chapter begins with an account in fuller detail of the principal types of resource, and of the associated characteristics of society, and then goes on to deal with the information about them which can be obtained from censuses and other demographic statistics. In the final sections, attention is paid to the effects on population growth and development which may be produced by an abundance or a shortage of various resources; and also to the stimulus or retardation which population increase may bring about in the production and use of resources.