POPULATION: The Numbers Game

(See Cover) From the doorway of a tumble-down Singapore tenement one morning last week, the wife of a Chinese stevedore watched her five naked children scrambling in the teeming street and prayed that the baby she was soon to bear would be a boy. In a camp for Palestinian refugees outside the Jordanian city of Jericho, Mrs. Shamma Mohamed Sammour complacently accepted congratulations on the birth of her ninth child—a girl whom the Sammours decided to name Sariah, which in Arabic means rich. On his Brazilian ranch, lean, energetic Berlino de Andrade,...