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ladies and gentlemen I'm delighted to have is my guest today the man whom I think has more statistical information in his head than any other person whom I know. And I speak of the director of the Bureau of the Census, Dick Scammon. I'd like to start off and get some of that information from him by asking them a question about world population.

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How is this, uh, population explosion that we read so much about lately? How's it going? Well, it's exploding. Fact is, of course, as you know, Senator, that with the great increase in health, the great increase in our ability to keep people from dying world population is soaring very, very rapidly.

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Now, a lot of this it depends upon the area you're in. If you have a country like ours which has got a lot of natural resources and people have to know how to build a good life for themselves, it isn't too important. But if you're in a backward country or you're just trying to get these things together, population can be a real problem.

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Let me ask you this question. Is the population going to exceed our capacity to feed those people, certainly not in the United States, at least not in our lifetime and not, I should say, in most of the developed parts of the world. But it might in some of the less developed areas.

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Yes, let's bring this question down to the United States. How is our United States population going now, and how do you foresee it in ten years from now? Well, we've got about one hundred eighty nine million people right now. We should have by nineteen seventy when we take the next national census, perhaps around two hundred ten or two hundred and fifteen million, and it's increasing.

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It's increasing rapidly at the rate of perhaps three million people a year more, of course, proportionately in your state of Florida than some other parts of the country. But it's going up and going up fast. Are all states having an increase in their population, or are some states suffering a loss?

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Almost all are increasing. One or two are having small losses. But the problem here, of course, for them is not so much whether they're gaining or losing, but many are not gaining very much. A few have had startling increases like Florida and California in one or two others.

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And you foresee that Florida and California will continue to have this great rate of growth, which we had in the last decade as far as we can see, Yes, tell us about the wealth of the United States. How how is that? Is it actually real purchasing power on the increase?

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Or is no no real purchasing power, that is, the actual things you can buy with your weekly or monthly salary is increasing tremendously. The amount of time that you have to work to buy a dryer, our washing machine or an electric iron or another one of the things you need in the house.

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This amount of time is decreasing. Your capacity to build a better life for your family is increasing rapidly over what it was even ten years ago, much less twenty five or thirty. We've heard it frequently said that let's return to the good old days. Go back.

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Things were better. What do you feel about? Oh no, they weren't the good old days. They were the bad old days. Child deaths from my way up the standard of living was much lower. It's true that beer might have cost only a Nicholas Stein, but the wages were twenty cents an hour, and they were usually for sixty or seventy hour week.

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No, the good old days exist in people's minds, and that's where they should stay. Let me ask you this further question. What about the age groups of people? How How is that being changed? Well, people are aging and growing younger at the same time. This sounds like a like a paradox, but actually what is happening is that we're getting more youngsters and our people are living longer.

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So we're getting more people at the end of the age spectrum. In a state like Florida, for example, it's interesting to see that, actually, the age average in Florida isn't much different than it is in the rest of the country. Because into Florida are coming old people, but also into Florida.

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Coming young people and young families. Well, I was under the impression I'm sure most people were that Florida was getting a higher, ever higher percentage of elderly people. You say that well, not more than the whole country is getting a higher percentage of elderly people well worth Florida is not becoming just a refuge for the elderly.

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There's some parts of Florida, of course, where the percentage of elderly people is very high. Some census tracts in ST Petersburg, where the average age will run around sixty five or seventy. But by and large for Florida, it's just about the national average. Because young people are coming into Tell us now very briefly.

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What does the Census Bureau do besides take the number every ten years to decide how many people we have? Well, every five years, we take a census of agriculture every five years. We take a census of manufacturing and mineral industries and transportation and business. There are a lot of these other censuses that, quite frankly, most people don't know about because they're not a house to house, um, operation except for agriculture.

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Thank you very much, Dick. And thank you very much, Ladies and gentlemen, for looking. And I hope you're looking again at the same time next week. Well, Mr Scammon, how often does the Bureau of the Census determine the level of education of our people in the United States?

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This particular question is developed only each ten years on the regular decennial census that indicates to us how many years the school have been completed by our fourteen year old population. Is fourteen year old and over. This is the only time we take it, except for samples in which we do a monthly survey, which tries to develop a number of other interesting things like the unemployment statistics.

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It's the Bureau of Labor Statistics develops for the Department of Labor things of this sort, but the actual count has taken only every ten years. What do you discover in the level of education? For example, in nineteen sixty or nineteen sixty three as compared to nineteen fifty three nineteen forty three?

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Well, it's gone up markedly, for example, with the non white population, and they have gone up as many as three grades in a period of only ten to fifteen years, with the total population perhaps one grade. I think the easiest way to point this out is to show that back in World War one grade school education was pretty normal in World War Two high school education, and now you're getting into an area in which college education becomes more and more normal.

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That's one of the reasons we're talking all the time of the bursting college population, as people want more and more education for their Children. So today's the years advance the amount of education each youngster gets increases. Is it your judgment? This is a little out of your line.

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But is it your judgment that with respect to the physical facilities of education that we're moving fast enough in that area to take care of our growing population and the needs for more education? Well, that's a hard question to answer, because this depends on how many youngsters you want to see in college.

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If you were going to see in college every youngster who could benefit from that education, whether he could afford to go or not, then obviously your physical plant isn't large enough now to take care of those people. But if you're going to apply some of the economic limitations that unfortunately we do have today, then it maybe this is just a judgment that has to be based on how many boys and girls are going to be in college, Mr Scammon to turn to another subject to another hat you wear for a moment.

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You're the president. You're the chairman of the President's Commission on registering and Voting. I wonder if you tell us what you think his first going to be the registration in nineteen hundred and sixty four and then how many? What percentage of our people will participate in the election?

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Senator Smith is in nineteen sixty. About sixty four percent of our total adult population voted for president. Now that includes, of course, in the total adult population. Some aliens, some people that couldn't have met the residency requirements and so on. So actually, the figure was a little higher.

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The main purpose of this commission is to inquire into ways in which legal obstacles and inhibitions can be removed. Perhaps the hours of voting increased after registration made a little more easy, so that we can get an even better turnout in nineteen sixty four. How many that?

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Maybe, of course, your guess is just as good as mine for us. Better do you believe that if we had the election date or make it election days, as they do in some countries where they permit people to vote not just on a Tuesday, will say, as we do in our state, but maybe vote for the period of a week.

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Do you think that would materially increase the numbers of people Who would it might be. Some suggestion has been made that we ought to vote on Sunday. The suggestion we ought to vote as you suggest as the Finns do, for example, is a Swiss do. On two days, Italians do the same thing, and later in this month, an election is going to be held in Italy, where they will vote on Sunday and Monday as well.

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This might help. Of course, this is a pretty big move from our present practice, and whether or not people would want to try that or not, I don't know. Of course, the fact that we have a federal system, the states can experiment a lot with these things.

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This is very helpful now. What is the purpose of your job as the chairman of this commission? Are you just to really get the statistics are are you to encourage people to register and vote? No. As I understand the charge which President Kennedy has laid upon the commission, we are to consider the present status of registration and voting participation we are to assemble statistics about it.

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We are to try to inquire into why it isn't higher. Make recommendations as to how it might be made higher. It's an ad hoc commission. We finish our work up in about six months and give our recommendations to the president about you. Very briefly. Give us now, without revealing any of your final findings.

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Can you tell us why it is that more people do not participate in the elections? Well, I can, speaking only for myself and not for the commission. But I would think that there are two basic reasons. One is institutional City, for example, closes the polls at five o'clock in the afternoon.

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A lot of people just don't get there. Uh, other places may cut off registration in April or May for an election that takes place in November. A lot of people don't get interested in the election until September October. They just don't bother to book residents is another matter.

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People move around a good deal. These are the big institutional problems. Lack of motivation, I suppose, is the biggest non institutional problems. You would agree that certainly everybody who is eligible to vote certainly should go vote. I'm certainly that I see that our time is up.

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Thank you very much. Mr Scammon, the director of the Bureau of the Census for being on the program with us. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for listening. And I hope you're listening again at the same time next week.