Demography

Demography is the study of the change in the size, density, distriibution and composition of human populations over time, and includes analysis of such factors as birth rates and death rates, marriage and fertility, as well as emigration and immigration. The “demographic perspective” is relating population factors (such as the size and growth of a population, or the location in urban and rural areas) to larger political, economic and social issues.

The term "demography" was coined in 1855 by a Belgian, Achille Guillard in his book, Elements de statistique humaine ou demographie comparee. In his terms the study included many aspects of humans including general movement and progress (including morals) in civilized countries. He used the vital statistics of birth, marriage, sickness and death from census and registration reports." Demography has come to have a wider meaning, and is now used for all statistical descriptions of human life conditions, including illnesses, socioeconomic indicators, and other aspects of living conditions - as long as the statistics refer to the numbers of individual people who exhibit the characteristic in question.

History of demography

Malthus and Malthusian models of overpopulation

Over the centuries many theorists have considered one or another aspect of population, usually to promote the policy of more people (“pronatalist.”) The early Christian tradition, however, was “antinatalist”, with the highest prestige going to priests, monks and nuns who were celibate.

In the 17th and 18th century the general belief, called "mercantilism" was that the larger the population the better for the nation. Larger population meant more farmers and more food, more people in church (and more prayers), and larger, more powerful armies for deterrence, defense and expansion. People equaled power. As Frederick the Great of Prussia put it, "The number of the people makes the wealth of states." The policy implications were clear: the state should help raise population through annexation of territory and pronatalist subsidies that encourage large families. After 1800, a rising spirit of nationalism called out for more people to make a bigger and more powerful nation.

English writer Reverend Thomas Malthus, in the first edition (1798) of his pamphlet, "An Essay on the Principle of Population" turned the received wisdom upside down. His stunning conclusion was that more people might make it worse for everyone--that overpopulation was bad and unless proper steps were taken, disaster was inevitable. Population growth was exceedingly dangerous, he warned, for it threatened overpopulation and soon we would all starve to death. The British were taking over India at this time, and could see first-hand the horrors associated with overpopulation.

Malthus’s writings had impact because he had a model of society simple enough for any well-educated person to understand. Food depends on the acreage of farm land. Through geographical expansion and more careful cultivation, the amount of farmland can be expanded. The law of diminishing returns states that additional effort is less and less successful--that is, you get your biggest gains at first then after that the gains get smaller and smaller. Because of the law of diminishing returns food production can only grow arithmetically: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. On the other hand, the population next year depends on the population this year, so it always expands exponentially: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. In other words, population expands faster than the food supply, and eventually people will starve. The first sign of overpopulation is an excess number of workers accompanied by falling wages and more poverty. Sooner or later the ratio of people to land will cause poverty to turn to starvation; periodic famines occur inevitably and slash the population to acceptable levels before it starts growing again.

Malthus saw two ways to keep population down, "positive" and "preventive" checks. Positive checks were nasty: famine, plague and warfare. Preventive checks included voluntary actions reasonable people could take. Malthus (a clergyman) identified two types of voluntary action, the moral one of deferring marriage, and a variety of "vices" or immoral steps that included birth control, abortion, infanticide, adultery, prostitution and homosexuality.

The Malthus model was unusually powerful: it immediately generated predictions about the fate of mankind. Demography suddenly moved from an abstraction to concrete reality and attracted the attention of scholars and politicians. Economists used the model to show that the more workers there are the lower there wages will be. Charles Darwin made the struggle for food into the centerpiece of his theory of evolution of species. Malthus was a political conservative; one of his goals was to prove that the utopian dreamers of the era of the French Revolution were too optimistic about the future. Malthus's conservative policy prescriptions set the terms of the debate for the entire 19th century. One immediate policy implication was that it was a bad idea for the government to give away food to the poor because poor people would respond by having more children and thus create even more misery. (What England in fact did was set up a relief system under the "Poor Law" that made it very unattractive to live on charity.)

According to Malthus, the cause of poverty was an excess number of mouths to feed, and the fault was with the lack of foresight by the parents. Malthus acknowledged that the unequal distribution of wealth did contribute to poverty but believed that redistributing wealth would only make poverty worse. Strong themes indeed--and ones that echoed in 1996 as the United States Congress sharply cut back on how long poor people could stay on welfare. On an optimistic note, Malthus emphasized that prudence and education could lead to an ever-increasing standard of living for the working class, a proposition that was widely accepted by the 1990s.

Two key assumptions Malthus made were that the lure of sex was so strong that people would have babies no matter what the consequences and that technology would grow slowly or not at all. Both assumptions were wrong. Agricultural productivity has increased faster than population growth, and 200 years after Malthus the per capita food consumption in (nearly) all the world is much higher than it was then. [The exception in recent decades has been sub-Sahara Africa, where Malthusian predictions of overpopulation and famine have come true.] Controversy also surrounds a third argument by Malthus, that only moral restraint should be used to control fertility, and not contraception. (This particular debate continues to rage among Roman Catholics, pitting the Pope who condemns contraception against the laity who insist on practicing it.)

Regarding Malthus’s first assumption, all societies have created mechanisms to control fertility (for example, by delaying marriage until the couple had enough land to feed themselves.) Malthus himself finally recognized this in his second edition of 1803. Everywhere family formation is a social and economic arrangement (not a sexual tryst) and is closely correlated with the supply of land, and jobs. Even before Malthus observers had noted that people delayed marriage if they thought their social status would decline. In the 1803 edition Malthus admitted the existence of what he called "preventive checks," especially the characteristic late marriage pattern of western Europe, which he called "moral restraint." The demographic historian John Hajnal has explored in detail the propensity in Europe in the 18th and 19th century to use delay of marriage as a population control device, tied to the shortage of farmland. (In America, with no shortage of good land, the age of marriage plunged to 18 for women and 20 for men by 1800).

There are two schools of thought that follow Malthus. The "Malthusians" and "Neo-Malthusians." Both see overpopulation as a serious threat to mankind, and both agree about the linkage between unrestrained fertility and poverty. The main difference is that the Neo-Malthusians favor birth control as the main solution and the Malthusians want delayed marriage.

Marx and Marxism

Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, argued that population depends, like everything else, on the ownership of the means of production. This implied there can be no independent laws of population, hence Malthus must be dead wrong. Since poverty could never be the fault of the workers, it had to be blamed on capitalism. Furthermore, if workers reduced their numbers (by having fewer children), they would be politically weakened. Marxism believed that class conflict would eventually cause the overthrow of capitalism. Socialism will ensue, they promised, and cure all evils.

From the 1840s through the 1980s the Marxists tried to counter the influence of the Malthusians. Marx set the tone by vehemently ridiculing Malthus as guilty of spreading a "vile and infamous doctrine, this repulsive blasphemy against man and nature." Marx said that overpopulation can only occur under capitalism, because the capitalists want a large surplus population of workers (the unemployed constituted a "reserve army of labor”) in order to keep wages low and profits high. Under socialism, Marx argued, there would be a perfect harmony of interests, and a population of any size could be supported. The reason was because the surplus product of labor, previously stolen by the capitalists, would be returned to its rightful owners, the workers, thereby eliminating the cause of poverty. (This was the sort of utopianism that Malthus was trying to undercut.)

Malthus and Marx shared a strong concern about the plight of the poor. For Malthus the solution was conservative; he called for individual responsibility--the delay of marriage and childbearing. For Marx the only solution was a revolution that would destroy capitalism and install socialism.

While the Marxists were loud in debate their population policies when they held power were ineffective or disastrous. Socialist economies had serious difficulty feeding their people, with periodic massive famines that killed millions of people (Soviet Union in the 1930s, China in 1960s, and North Korea in 1990s) as well as mismanagement of resources that caused severe undernourishment (Cuba and Vietnam in 1980s). With the collapse of the Soviet Unions in 1991, and the movement of China toward a market economy about the same time, the few remaining Marxists became quiet indeed on population issues. Most demographic thinkers on the left now emphasize environmental issues, rather than the failures of capitalism.

Demographics in Medicine and the allied health sciences

Demographic analysis is an integral part of epidemiology and in health policy. For example, currently there is a Global Burden of Disease project sponsored by the World Health Organization. (Projections of Global Mortality and Burden of Disease from 2002 to 2030 Mathers CD, Loncar D PLoS Medicine Vol. 3, No. 11, e442 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030442 [1]

Historical demography

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Bibliography

• David Coleman and Roger Schofield, eds., The State of Population Theory: Forward from Malathus (1986)

Textbooks

• Shryock, Henry S.; and Jacob S. Siegel. The Methods and Materials of Demography, 2 vol 1976
• John R. Weeks. Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues (10th ed. 2007)

History of Demography

• Susan Greenhalgh. "The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 38, Issue 1 (Jan., 1996), 26-66. in JSTOR
• Hauser, Philip M., and Otis Dudley Duncan, eds. The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. 1959. sumamry of field at mid-century
• Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed 1798) (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) ed by Donald Winch 1992 ISBN 9780521429726
• Spengler, Joseph J. France Faces Depopulation (2nd ed 1979)

Demographic history

• Ansley J. Coale and Susan C. Watkins, eds. The Decline of Fertility in Europe, (1986)
• Reed, James. From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830. 1978.

Demographic transition

• Davis, Kingsley. "The World Demographic Transition." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1945237: 1-11. in JSTOR, classic article that introduced concept of transition
• Gillis, John R.; Louise A. Tilly; and David Levine; eds. The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850-1970: The Quiet Revolution. 1992.
• Szreter, Simon. "The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility: A Critical Intellectual History." Population and Development Review, 1993. 19:4, pp659-701.

Demographic techniques

• Donald T. Rowland. Demographic Methods and Concepts 2003 ISBN 9780198752639

Journals

• Demography
• Population Studies
• American Demographics, popular; focus on market research
• Demographic Research
• European Journal of Population
• Asia-Pacific Population Journal

External resources

• Bibliographic Searchable Database (1986-2000) from Princeton University: Population Index
• Website of the Population Reference Bureau, USA: Population Reference Bureau