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POPULATION

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Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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POPULATION An Introduction to Concepts and Issues Twelfth Edition

John R. Weeks San Diego State University

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Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, Twelfth Edition

John R. Weeks

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WCN: 02-200-203

To Deanna

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vii

BRIEF TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE A DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Demography 1 CHAPTER 2 Global Population Trends 25 CHAPTER 3 Demographic Perspectives 58 CHAPTER 4 Demographic Data 100

PART TWO POPULATION PROCESSES CHAPTER 5 The Health and Mortality Transition 139 CHAPTER 6 The Fertility Transition 189 CHAPTER 7 The Migration Transition 251

PART THREE POPULATION STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS CHAPTER 8 The Age Transition 298 CHAPTER 9 The Urban Transition 343 CHAPTER 10 The Family and Household Transition 384

PART FOUR USING THE DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE CHAPTER 11 Population and Sustainability 432 CHAPTER 12 What Lies Ahead? 481

GLOSSARY 505 BIBLIOGRAPHY 519 GEOGRAPHIC INDEX 549 SUBJECT INDEX 559

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DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

PRefAce xxi

PART ONE A DemOgRAPhIc PeRSPecTIve

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUcTION TO DemOgRAPhy 1

WHAT IS DEMOGRAPHY? 3

HOW DOES DEMOGRAPHY CONNECT THE DOTS? 5 The Relationship of Population to Resources 6 The Relationship of Population to Social and Political Dynamics 7 ESSAY: Demographic Contributions to the “Mess in the Middle East” 10 How Is the Book Organized? 21

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 22

MAIN POINTS 22

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 23

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 23

CHAPTER 2 gLObAL POPULATION TReNDS 25

WORLD POPULATION GROWTH 26 A Brief History 26 How Fast Is the World’s Population Growing Now? 29 The Power of Doubling—How Fast Can Populations Grow? 30 Why Was Early Growth So Slow? 31 Why Are More Recent Increases So Rapid? 32

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How Many People Have Ever Lived? 34 Redistribution of the World’s Population through Migration 34

GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION 37

GLOBAL vARIATION IN POPULATION SIzE AND GROWTH 39 North America 40 Mexico and Central America 42 South America 43 Europe 44 ESSAY: Implosion Or Invasion? The Choices Ahead For Low-Fertility Countries 46 Northern Africa and Western Asia 48 Sub-Saharan Africa 49 South and Southeast Asia 50 East Asia 52 Oceania 54

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 55

MAIN POINTS 55

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 56

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 57

CHAPTER 3 DemOgRAPhIc PeRSPecTIveS 58

PREMODERN POPULATION DOCTRINES 61

THE PRELUDE TO MALTHUS 66

THE MALTHUSIAN PERSPECTIvE 67 Causes of Population Growth 68 Consequences of Population Growth 70 Avoiding the Consequences 70 Critique of Malthus 71 Neo-Malthusians 73 ESSAY: Who are the Neo-Malthusians? 74

THE MARXIAN PERSPECTIvE 76 Causes of Population Growth 76 Consequences of Population Growth 76 Critique of Marx 77

THE PRELUDE TO THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION THEORY 79 Mill 79 Dumont 80 Durkheim 81

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xiDetailed Table of Contents

THE THEORY OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION 81 Critique of the Demographic Transition Theory 84 Reformulation of the Demographic Transition Theory 85 The Theory of Demographic Change and Response 88 Cohort Size Effects 90 Is There Something Beyond the Demographic Transition? 91

THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION IS REALLY A SET OF TRANSITIONS 92

The Health and Mortality Transition 93 The Fertility Transition 93 The Age Transition 94 The Migration Transition 94 The Urban Transition 95 The Family and Household Transition 95 Impact on Society 96

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 97

MAIN POINTS 98

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 98

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 99

CHAPTER 4 DemOgRAPhIc DATA 100

SOURCES OF DEMOGRAPHIC DATA 101 Population Censuses 101 The Census of the United States 105 Who Is Included in the Census? 110 Coverage Error 111 ESSAY: Demographics of Politics: Why the Census Matters 112 Measuring Coverage Error 116 Content Error 117 Sampling Error 118 Continuous Measurement—American Community Survey 118 The Census of Canada 119 The Census of Mexico 120 IPUMS—Warehouse of Global Census Data 121

REGISTRATION OF vITAL EvENTS 122

COMBINING THE CENSUS AND vITAL STATISTICS 125

ADMINISTRATIvE DATA 126

SAMPLE SURvEYS 127 Demographic Surveys in the United States 127 Canadian Surveys 128

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xii Detailed Table of Contents

Mexican Surveys 128 Demographic and Health Surveys 128 Demographic Surveillance Systems 129 European Surveys 129

HISTORICAL SOURCES 130

SPATIAL DEMOGRAPHY 131 Mapping Demographic Data 132 GIS and the Census 134

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 135

MAIN POINTS 136

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 137

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 137

PART TwO POPULATION PROceSSeS

CHAPTER 5 The heALTh AND mORTALITy TRANSITION 139

DEFINING THE HEALTH AND MORTALITY TRANSITION 140

HEALTH AND MORTALITY CHANGES OvER TIME 141 The Roman Era to the Industrial Revolution 142 The Industrial Revolution to the Twentieth Century 143 World War II as a Modern Turning Point 146 Postponing Death by Preventing and Curing Disease 148 The Nutrition Transition and Its Link to Obesity 149

LIFE SPAN AND LONGEvITY 150 Life Span 151 Longevity 151

DISEASE AND DEATH OvER THE LIFE CYCLE 153 Age Differentials in Mortality 153 Infant Mortality 154 Mortality at Older Ages 156 Sex and Gender Differentials in Mortality 158

CAUSES OF POOR HEALTH AND DEATH 159 Communicable Diseases 160 ESSAY: Mortality Control and the Environment 164 Noncommunicable Conditions 167 Injuries 168 The “Real” Causes of Death 168

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MEASURING MORTALITY 170 Crude Death Rate 171 Age/Sex-Specific Death Rates 171 Age-Adjusted Death Rates 172 Life Tables 173 Life Table Calculations 173 Disability-Adjusted Life Years 180

HEALTH AND MORTALITY INEQUALITIES 180 Urban and Rural Differentials 181 Neighborhood Inequalities 181 Educational and Socioeconomic Differentials in Mortality 182 Inequalities by Race and Ethnicity 183 Marital Status and Mortality 184

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 185

MAIN POINTS 186

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 187

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 187

CHAPTER 6 The feRTILITy TRANSITION 189

WHAT IS THE FERTILITY TRANSITION? 190

HOW HIGH COULD FERTILITY LEvELS BE? 191 The Biological Component 191 The Social Component 194

WHY WAS FERTILITY HIGH FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY? 196

Need to Replenish Society 196 Children as Security and Labor 198 Lower Status of Women in Traditional Societies 198

THE PRECONDITIONS FOR A DECLINE IN FERTILITY 200

IDEATIONAL CHANGES THAT MUST TAkE PLACE 201 ESSAY: Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Health, and the Fertility Transition 202

MOTIvATIONS FOR LOWER FERTILITY LEvELS 205 The Supply-Demand Framework 205 The Innovation/Diffusion and “Cultural” Perspective 209

HOW CAN FERTILITY BE CONTROLLED? 211 Proximate Determinants of Fertility 213 Proportion Married—Limiting Exposure to Intercourse 213

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xiv Detailed Table of Contents

Use of Contraceptives 215 Induced Abortion 219 Involuntary Infecundity from Breastfeeding 220 The Relative Importance of the Proximate Determinants 221

HOW DO WE MEASURE CHANGES IN FERTILITY? 223 Period Measures of Fertility 223 Cohort Measures of Fertility 229 Fertility Intentions 229

HOW IS THE FERTILITY TRANSITION ACCOMPLISHED? 230

GEOGRAPHIC vARIABILITY IN THE FERTILITY TRANSITION 232

CASE STUDIES IN THE FERTILITY TRANSITION 234 United kingdom and Other European Nations 234 China 238 The United States 241

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 247

MAIN POINTS 248

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 249

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 250

CHAPTER 7 The mIgRATION TRANSITION 251

WHAT IS THE MIGRATION TRANSITION? 252

DEFINING MIGRATION 253

INTERNAL AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRANTS 254

MEASURING MIGRATION 255 Stocks versus Flows 256 Migration Indices 258

THE MIGRATION TRANSITION WITHIN COUNTRIES 261 Why Do People Migrate? 262 Who Migrates? 266 Migration within the United States 267

MIGRATION BETWEEN COUNTRIES 268 Why Do People Migrate Internationally? 270 Who Migrates Internationally? 272

MIGRATION ORIGINS AND DESTINATIONS 274 Global Patterns of Migration 274 Migration into the United States 277

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Migration out of the United States 283 ESSAY: Is Migration A Crime? Illegal Immigration in Global Context 284 Migration into and out of Canada 286

FORCED MIGRATION 288 Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 288 Slavery 288

CONSEQUENCES OF MIGRATION 290 Consequences for Migrants 290 Children of Immigrants 292 Societal Consequences 292 Remittances 293

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 294

MAIN POINTS 296

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 296

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 297

PART THREE POPULATION STRUcTURe AND chARAcTeRISTIcS

CHAPTER 8 The Age TRANSITION 298

WHAT IS THE AGE TRANSITION? 299

THE CONCEPTS OF AGE AND SEX 299 Age Stratification 300 Age Cohorts and Cohort Flow 301 Gender and Sex Ratios 304 The Feminization of Old Age 306

DEMOGRAPHIC DRIvERS OF THE AGE TRANSITION 307 The Impact of Declining Mortality 309 The Impact of Declining Fertility 313 Where Does Migration Fit In? 315

AGE TRANSITIONS AT WORk 317 The Progression from a Young to an Old Age Structure 317 Youth Bulge—Dead End or Dividend? 317 China’s Demographic Dividend 318 What Happened to India’s Demographic Dividend? 320 Demographic Dividends in the United States and Mexico 322

POPULATION AGING AS PART OF THE AGE TRANSITION 324 What Is Old? 324 ESSAY: Who Will Pay for Baby Boomers to Retire in the Richer Countries? 326

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How Many Older People Are There? 328 Where are the Older Populations? 329 The Third Age (Young-Old) and Fourth Age (Old-Old) 332 Centenarians and Rectangularization—Is This the End of the Age Transition? 333

READING THE FUTURE FROM THE AGE STRUCTURE 334 Population Projections 334 Population Momentum 339

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 340

MAIN POINTS 341

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 342

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 342

CHAPTER 9 The URbAN TRANSITION 343

WHAT IS THE URBAN TRANSITION? 344 Defining Urban Places 345

WHAT ARE THE DRIvERS OF THE URBAN TRANSITION? 347 Precursors 347 Current Patterns 349 The Urban Hierarchy and City Systems 352 An Illustration from Mexico 354 An Illustration from China 355

THE PROXIMATE DETERMINANTS OF THE URBAN TRANSITION 357 Internal Rural-to-Urban Migration 357 Natural Increase 358 International Urbanward Migration 362 Reclassification 362 Defining the Metropolis 363 ESSAY: Nimby and Bnana—The Politics of Urban Sprawl in America 364

THE URBAN EvOLUTION THAT ACCOMPANIES THE URBAN TRANSITION 368

Urban Crowding 369 Slums 371 Suburbanization and Exurbanization 374 Residential Segregation 377

CITIES AS SUSTAINABLE ENvIRONMENTS 379

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 381

MAIN POINTS 382

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 383

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 383

CHAPTER 10 The fAmILy AND hOUSehOLD TRANSITION 384

WHAT IS THE FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD TRANSITION? 385 Defining Family Demography and Life Chances 386 The Growing Diversity in Household Composition and Family Structure 388 Gender Equity and the Empowerment of Women 392

PROXIMATE DETERMINANTS OF FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD CHANGES 393

Delayed Marriage Accompanied by Leaving the Parental Nest 393 Cohabitation 396 Nonmarital Childbearing 397 Childlessness 399 Divorce 399 Widowhood 400 The Combination of These Determinants 401

CHANGING LIFE CHANCES 401 Education 402 Labor Force Participation 406 Occupation 409 Income 410 Poverty 414 Wealth 416 ESSAY: Show Me the Money! Household Diversity and Wealth Among the Elderly 418 Race and Ethnicity 420 Religion 424

DOES MARRIAGE MATTER? 426

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 428

MAIN POINTS 429

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 430

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 431

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xviii Detailed Table of Contents

PART FOuR USINg The DemOgRAPhIc PeRSPecTIve

CHAPTER 11 POPULATION AND SUSTAINAbILITy 432

THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE EARTH’S RESOURCES 434 Economic Growth and Development 435 Measuring GNI and Purchasing Power Parity 436

HOW IS POPULATION RELATED TO ECONOMIC DEvELOPMENT? 439 Is Population Growth a Stimulus to Economic Development? 440 Is Population Growth Unrelated to Economic Development? 442 Is Population Growth Detrimental to Economic Development? 443

THE BOTTOM LINE FOR THE FUTURE: CAN BILLIONS MORE PEOPLE BE FED? 446

The Relationship between Economic Development and Food 446 Extensification—Increasing Farmland 449 Intensification—Increasing Per-Acre Yield 451 The Demand for Food Is Growing Faster Than the Population 456 How Many People Can Be Fed? 457

ENvIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION 461 Polluting the Ground 461 Polluting the Air 463 ESSAY: How Big is Your Ecological Footprint? 464 Damage to the Water Supply 468

HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF ENvIRONMENTAL CHANGE 469 Assessing the Damage Attributable to Population Growth 470 Environmental Disasters Lead to Death and Dispersion 471

SUSTAINABLE DEvELOPMENT—POSSIBILITY OR OXYMORON? 473 Are We Overshooting Our Carrying Capacity? 475

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 477

MAIN POINTS 478

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 479

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 480

CHAPTER 12 WhAT LIeS AheAD? 481

FROM REvOLUTION TO EvOLUTION 482 The Health and Mortality Evolution 484

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The Fertility Evolution 487 The Migration Evolution 488 ESSAY: A California Community Copes with the Migration Evolution 490 The Age Evolution 493 The Urban Evolution 495 The Family and Household Evolution 496

WHAT CAN COUNTRIES DO TO INFLUENCE WHAT LIES AHEAD? 498

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 501

MAIN POINTS 502

QUESTIONS FOR REvIEW 503

WEBSITES OF INTEREST 503

gLOSSARy 505 bIbLIOgRAPhy 519 geOgRAPhIc INDex 549 SUbJecT INDex 559

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xxi

PREFACE

Growth, transition, and evolution. These are the key demographic trends as we move through the twenty-first century, and they will have huge impacts on your life. When I think about population growth in the world, I conjure up an image of a bus hurtling down the highway toward what appears to be a cliff. The bus is semiautomatic and has no driver in charge of its progress. Some of the pas- sengers on the bus are ignorant of what seems to lie ahead and are more worried about whether the air conditioning is turned up high enough or wondering how many snacks they have left for the journey. Other more alert passengers are look- ing down the road, but some of them think that what seems like a cliff is really just an optical illusion and is nothing to worry about; some think it may just be a dip, not really a cliff. Those who think it is a cliff are trying to figure out how to apply the brakes, knowing that a big bus takes a long time to slow down even after the brakes are put on.

Are we headed toward a disastrous scenario? We don’t really know for sure, but we simply can’t afford the luxury of hoping for the best. The population bus is causing damage and creating vortexes of change as it charges down the highway, whether or not we are on the cliff route; and the better we understand its speed and direction, the better we will be at steering it and managing it successfully. No matter how many stories you have heard about the rate of population growth coming down or about the end of the population explosion (and those stories are true, up to a point), the world will continue to add billions more to the current 7 billion before it stops growing. Huge implications for the future lie in that growth in numbers.

The transitions represent the way in which population growth actually affects us. The world’s population is growing because death rates have declined over the past several decades at a much faster pace than have birth rates, and as we go from the historical pattern of high birth and death rates to the increasingly common pat- tern of low birth and death rates, we pass through the demographic transition. This is actually a whole set of transitions relating to changes in health and mortality, fer- tility, migration, age structure, urbanization, and family and household structure. Each of these separate, but interrelated, changes has serious consequences for the way societies and economies work, and for that reason they have big implications for you personally. Over time, these transitions have evolved in ways that vary from

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Prefacexxii

one part of the world to another, and so their path and progress are less predictable than we once thought, but we have good analytical tools for keeping track of them, and potentially influencing them.

The growth in numbers (the bus hurtling toward what we hope is not a cliff) and the transitions and evolutions created in the process (the vortex created by the passing bus) have to be dealt with simultaneously, and our success as a human civi- lization depends on how well we do in this project. A lot is at stake here and my goal in this book is to provide you with as much insight as possible into the ways in which these demographic trends of growth, transition, and evolution affect your life in small and large ways.

Over the years, I have found that most people are either blissfully unaware of the enormous impact of population growth and change on their lives, or they are nearly overwhelmed whenever they think of population growth because they have heard so many horror stories about impending doom, or, increasingly, they have heard that population growth is ending and thus assume that the story has a happy ending. This latter belief is in many ways the scariest, because the lethargy that develops from thinking that the impact of population growth is a thing of the past is exactly what will lead us to doom. My purpose in this book is to shake you out of your lethargy (if you are one of those types), without necessarily scaring you in the process. I will introduce you to the basic concepts of population studies and help you develop your own demographic perspective, enabling you to understand some of the most important issues confronting the world. My intention is to sharpen your perception of population growth and change, to increase your awareness of what is happening and why, and to help prepare you to cope with (and help shape) a future that will be shared with billions more people than there are today.

I wrote this book with a wide audience in mind because I find that students in my classes come from a wide range of academic disciplines and bring with them an incredible variety of viewpoints and backgrounds. No matter who you are, demo- graphic events are influencing your life, and the more you know about them, the better off you will be.

What Is New in This Twelfth Edition

Populations are constantly changing and evolving and each successive edition of this book has aimed to keep up with demographic trends and the explanations for them. Thus, every chapter of this twelfth edition has been revised for recency, rel- evancy, reliability, and readability.

●● Chapter 1 (Introduction to Demography) updates the way in which demog- raphy connects the dots in the world, including a substantially revised essay on the “Mess in the Middle East.”

●● Chapter 2 (Global Population Trends) has been completely updated with the latest numbers on population rates of growth and geographic variability in demographic trends. The essay updates the prospects for countries currently confronting below-replacement level fertility.

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●● Chapter 3 (Demographic Perspectives) brings in the latest thinking on demo- graphic theories, while at the same time emphasizing that the demographic transition is a whole suite of transitions, the discussion of which is really what the book is all about.

●● Chapter 4 (Demographic Data) brings you the latest information about cen- suses and surveys throughout the world, with a special focus on the United States, Canada, and Mexico. There is also a revised section on spatial demog- raphy, along with a new essay on “The Demographics of Politics: Why the Census Matters.”

●● Chapter 5 (The Health and Mortality Transition) has all the latest numbers on disease and mortality, including a new discussion on trends in obesity that are showing up all over the world.

●● Chapter 6 (The Fertility Transition) brings you new numbers and the latest thinking about how to accomplish low fertility, while at the same time avoid- ing fertility that some think is too low, with an emphasis in both instances on the role of women in society.

●● Chapter 7 (The Migration Transition) updates the trends throughout the world in the movement of people between and within countries, with renewed emphases on the tragedies of being a refugee or slave in the modern world, and a full discussion of the ways in societies and migrants adapt to each other.

●● Chapter 8 (The Age Transition) reviews the latest literature on the impact that changing age structures have on societies, and has updated data and pro- jections of the older population in different countries in the world.

●● Chapter 9 (The Urban Transition) includes the latest definitions of what con- stitutes an urban place, along with new data for cities, and a discussion of the sustainability of cities—one of the most pressing issues facing the future.

●● Chapter 10 (The Family and Household Transition) has the most recent cen- sus data on the changing structures of families and households, especially in the United States, and has updated information about all of the elements of life chances that form a key section of this chapter.

●● Chapter 11 (Population and Sustainability) has a new title and a new focus on sustainability instead of simply looking at environmental impacts of population growth and change. There is also an updated version of the very popular essay on the size of our ecological footprint, and a new focus on the question of whether population growth and our simultaneous quest for a higher standard of living are causing us to overshoot our carrying capacity.

●● Chapter 12 (What Lies Ahead?) also has a new title and an increased empha- sis on the likely future evolutions of population change in the world, along with a more tightly focused discussion of policy options available to us as we try to influence population trends and thus their impact on global change. The essay on the migration evolution in a local community also has a new surprise ending….

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Prefacexxiv

Special Features of the Book

To help increase your understanding of the basic concepts and issues of population studies, the book contains the following special features.

Short Essays Each chapter contains a short essay on a particular population concept, designed to help you better understand current demographic issues, such as Chapter 1’s “Demographic Contributions to the ‘Mess in the Middle East’” or Chapter 11’s “How Big is Your Ecological Footprint.” Each essay ends with two discussion questions to encourage you to think about the topic in greater depth.

Main Points A list of 10 main points appears at the end of each chapter, follow- ing the summary, to help you review chapter highlights.

Questions for Review A set of five questions are provided at the end of each chapter, designed to stimulate thinking and class discussion on topics covered in the chapter.

Websites of Interest At the end of each chapter, I have provided an annotated list of five websites that I have found to be particularly interesting and helpful to students.

Glossary A Glossary in the back of the book defines key population terms. These terms are in boldface type when introduced in the text to signal that they also appear in the Glossary.

Complete Bibliography This is a fully referenced book and all of the publica- tions and data sources I have used are included in the Bibliography at the end of the book.

A Thorough Index To help you find what you need in the book, I have built as complete an index as possible, divided into a Subject Index, and a Geographic Index.

Ancillary Course Material

An Instructor’s Manual and PowerPoint® lecture slides are available through the book’s companion website, which you can access at login.cengage.com. Contact your sales representative for more information.

I regularly update my blog, providing resources for instructors and students: http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/.

I also encourage you to download my Weeks Population app for your iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/app/weekspopulation/id491729979?mt=8

Personal Acknowledgments

Like most authors, I have an intellectual lineage that I feel is worth tracing. In par- ticular, I would like to acknowledge kingsley Davis, whose standards as a teacher and scholar will always keep me reaching; Eduardo Arriaga; Judith Blake; Thomas Burch; Carlo Cipolla; Murray Gendell; Nathan keyfitz; and Samuel Preston. Indi- vidually and collectively, they guided me in my quest to unravel the mysteries of how

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Preface xxv

the world operates demographically. Thanks are due also to Steve Rutter, formerly of Wadsworth Publishing Company, who first suggested that I write this book. Spe- cial thanks go to John, Gregory, Jennifer, Suzanne, Amy, and Jim for teaching me the costs and benefits of children and children-in-law. They have instructed me, in their various ways, in the advantages of being first-born, the coziness of the middle child, the joys that immigration can bring to a family, the wonderful gifts (including Andrew, Sophie, Benjamin, Julia, Elizabeth, kayla, and James) that daughters and daughters-in-law can bring, and the special place that a son-in-law has in a family.

However, the one person who is directly responsible for the fact that the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, updated fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, elev- enth and now the twelfth editions were written, and who deserves credit for the book’s strengths, is my wife, Deanna. Her creativity, good judgment, and hard work in reviewing and editing the manuscript benefited virtually every page, and I have dedicated the book to her.

Other Acknowledgments

I would also like to thank the users of the earlier editions, including professors, their students (many of whom are now professors), and my own students, for their comments and suggestions. Many, many other people have helped since the first edition came out almost 40 years ago, and I am naturally very grateful for all of their assistance.

For this edition, I want to acknowledge that Dennis Hodgson of Fairfield Uni- versity provided inspiration for parts of Chapter 3; Don kerr of king’s University College in Canada provided notes for Canada in Chapter 4; the essay in Chapter 7 was co-authored by Gregory B. Weeks, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Marta Jankowska made important contributions to the essay in Chapter 12; and Sean Taugher updated the cartogram that provides the cover art. Thanks also for the many useful reviews of the eleventh edition that helped to inspire changes in this edition: Theodore Fuller, virginia Tech, Blacksburg; Naomi Spence, Lehman College; Winfred Avogo, Illinois State University; Andrew Spivak, University of Nevada, Las vegas; Susan Stewart, Iowa State University; and Philip Yang, Texas Woman’s University.

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Demography

WHAT IS DEMOGRAPHY?

HOW DOES DEMOGRAPHY CONNECT THE DOTS?

The Relationship of Population to Resources Food Water Energy Housing and Infrastructure Environmental Degradation

The Relationship of Population to Social and Political Dynamics

Regional Conflict Globalization Immigration Riding the Age Wave The Relationship of Population to Rights of

Women How Is The Book Organized?

ESSAY: Demographic Contributions to the “Mess in the Middle East”

Figure 1.1 The World’s Population Distribution Defined by Nighttime Lights The nighttime light data are reversed on this map, so that the darker areas show where there are the most lights at night, suggestive of population density. Source: Image and data processing by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, DMPS data collected by the US Air Force Weather Agency: http://www.gdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/.

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2 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Population growth is an irresistible force. Indeed, every social, political, and eco- nomic problem facing the world today has demographic change as a root cause. What is more, I guarantee that it is a force that will increasingly affect you, person- ally, in ways both large and small throughout your life. Population change is not just something that happens to other people—it is taking place all around you, and you are making your own contribution to it.

The rise in life expectancy over the past two centuries, and most dramatically since the end of World War II, is the most important phenomenon in human his- tory. More people living longer has produced unprecedented population growth and previously unthinkable transformations in human society. What is perhaps even more interesting to you, personally, is that this past is definitely prologue to your own future, as the world’s population will continue to increase for the rest of your life. Though most of this growth will take place in developing countries (more specifically, in the cities of those countries), we will all experience the consequences: our own, as yet unthinkable, transformations.

Reports of declining birth rates in many parts of the world notwithstanding, it is a fact that the number of people added to the world each day is higher today than at any time in history. Moreover, we now live in a world crowded not only with people but also with contradictions. There are more highly educated people than ever before, yet also more illiterates; more rich people, but also more poor; more well-fed children, but also more hunger-ravaged babies whose images haunt us. We have better control over the environment than ever before, but we are damaging our living space in ways we are loath to imagine.

Our partial mastery of the environment is, indeed, key to understanding why the population is growing, because we have learned how to conquer more and more of the diseases that once routinely killed us. Although the rapid, dramatic drop in mortality all over the world is certainly one of humanity’s greatest triumphs, we are finding that no good deed goes unpunished, even such an altruistic one as conquer- ing (or at least delaying) death. Because the birth rate almost never goes down in tandem with the decline in the death rate, the result is rapid population growth. This relentless increase in numbers continues to fuel both environmental damage and social upheaval.

Demographic change isn’t all bad news, of course, but population growth does make implacable demands on natural and societal resources. A baby born this year won’t create much of an immediate stir outside her immediate family, but in a few years she will be eating more and needing clothes, an education, then a job and a place of her own. And, then, most likely, she will have babies of her own, and the cycle continues.

Understanding these and a wide range of related issues is the business of demog- raphy. Whether your concern with demography is personal or global or a combina- tion, unraveling the “whys” of population growth and change will provide you with a better perspective on the world and how it works.

Demography is defined as the scientific study of human populations. But, really, demography is destiny. This book is an odyssey to understand the component parts of this powerful force and how they operate.

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3Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

What Is Demography?

The term itself comes from the Greek root demos, which means people, and was coined in 1855 by Achille Guillard, who used it in the title of his book Elements de Statistique Humaine ou Démographie Comparée. Guillard defined demography as “the mathematical knowledge of populations, their general movements, and their physical, civil, intellectual and moral state” (Guillard 1855:xxvi). This is generally in tune with how we use the term today, in that modern demography is the study of the determinants and consequences of population change and is concerned with effectively everything that influences and can be influenced by:

●● population size (how many people there are in a given place)

●● population growth or decline (how the number of people in that place is changing over time)

●● population processes (the levels and trends in fertility, mortality, and migration that are determining population size and change and that can be thought of as capturing life’s three main moments: hatching, matching, and dispatching)

●● population spatial distribution (where people are located and why)

●● population structure (how many males and females there are of each age)

●● population characteristics (what people are like in a given place, in terms of variables such as education, income, occupation, family and household rela- tionships, immigrant and refugee status, and the many other characteristics that add up to who we are as individuals or groups).

It has been said that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” (Hartley 1967:3). Population change and all that goes with it is an integral part of creating a present that seems foreign by comparison to the past, and it will create a future that will make today seem strange to those who look back on it sev- eral decades from now. Table 1.1 illustrates this idea, comparing population data for the United States in the year 1910 with that of the year 2010. To begin with, the top line of the table reminds us that in 1910 there were fewer than 2 billion people on the planet, whereas by 2010 there were nearly 7 billion (we hit that num- ber in 2011). Although the U.S. population grew considerably during that century, from 92 million to 309 million, it did not keep pace with overall world population growth and so accounted for a slightly smaller fraction of the world’s population in 2010 than it had in 1910 (more on this in the next chapter). Mortality levels in the U.S. dropped substantially over the century, leading to a truly amazing 29-year rise in life expectancy for females, from 52 in 1910 to 81 in 2010, with men lagging behind just a bit (the reasons for this are laid out in Chapter 5). Keep in mind that the life expectancy of 52 in 1910 was itself a big improvement over the 40 years people could expect to live in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Fertility also declined over the century between 1910 and 2010, although by world standards fertility in the United States in 1910 was already fairly low

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4 Part One A Demographic Perspective

(3.5 children per woman), having dropped from an estimated 7 children per woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Still, the drop from 3.5 to 1.9 clearly makes a huge difference in the composition of families, with average household size going down from 4.4 to 2.6 persons, and I discuss this more in Chapters 6 and 10.

Americans rearranged themselves spatially within the country over that span of time, and the considerable westward movement is exemplified by the increase in the fraction of the population living in California. It went from only 3 percent in 1910 to 12 percent in 2010. Consider that in 1910 Los Angeles had fewer people than Buffalo, New York; whereas by 2010 the Los Angeles metropolitan area was home to 15 times the number of people in Buffalo. In the latter part of the twentieth century, much of that growth in Los Angeles was fueled by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but over the course of the century the composition of interna- tional immigrants had shifted substantially. In the decade preceding the 1910 census, there were about 123,000 Mexican immigrants to the United States, compared to 1.2 million Italian immigrants in the same time period. By contrast, in the decade leading up to the census in 2010, the numbers were essentially reversed, with 28,000 Italian immigrants and 1.7 million Mexican legal immigrants, in addition to a large number of undocumented immigrants. Yet, strange as it might seem in the current

Table 1.1 The Past Is a Foreign Country

1910 2010

World population (billions) 1.8 6.9 U.S. population (millions) 92 309 U.S. percent of world total 5.1% 4.5% Life expectancy (females) 52 81 Children per woman 3.5 1.9 Persons per household 4.4 2.6 % of U.S. population in California 3% 12% Population of Buffalo, NY,

compared to Los Angeles Buffalo was more populous

LA was 15 times more populous

Immigrants from Italy (1900–1910); (2000–2010)

1.2 million 28,000

Immigrants from Mexico (1900–1910); (2000–2010)

123,000 1.7 million (legal immigrants)

% foreign-born 14.7% 12.9% % urban 46% 81% % of population under 15 32.1% 19.8% % of population 651 4.3% 13.0% Passenger cars 450,000 190 million % high school graduates among those

25 and older ∙10% 87%

Source: Data for 1910 are from U.S. Census Bureau (1999); data for 2010 are from U.S. Census Bureau (2012) .U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

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5Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

era, when there is so much talk about immigrants, the data in Table 1.1 show that the foreign-born population actually represented a greater fraction of the nation in 1910 than it did a century later. We’ll explore the reasons for that in Chapter 7.

The past was young, with 32 percent under the age of 15 and only 4 percent aged 65 and older; whereas the present is older, with only 20 percent under 15 and 13 percent aged 65 and older (more on this in Chapter 8). The past was predomi- nantly rural, and the present is predominantly urban (as I discuss in Chapter 9); the past was predominantly pedestrian (there were only 450,000 passenger cars in 1910), and the present is heavily dependent on the automobile (with more than 190 million passenger cars being driven around the country). In the past, people were considerably less well educated than today, with only about 10 percent of those in 1910 achieving a high school education, compared to 87 percent now. These trends are discussed more in Chapter 10.

The world of 1910 was very different from the world of 2010, and the demograph- ics represent an important part of that difference. The future will be different, in its turn, partly because of demographic changes taking place even as you read this page. The study of demography is thus an integral part of understanding human society.

How Does Demography Connect the Dots?

It may sound presumptuous, even preposterous, to suggest that nearly everything is connected to demography, but it really is true. The demographic foundation of our lives is deep and broad. As you will see in this book, demography affects nearly every facet of your life in some way or another. Population change is one of the prime forces behind social and technological change all over the world. As population size and composition changes in an area—whether it be growth or decline—people have to adjust, and from those adjustments radiate innumerable alterations to the way society operates.

This is very different, however, from saying that demography determines everything. Demography is a force in the world that influences every improve- ment in human well-being that the world has witnessed over the past few hun- dred years. Children survive as never before, adults are healthier than ever before, women can limit their exposure to the health risks involved with pregnancy and still be nearly guaranteed that the one or two or three babies they have will thrive to adulthood. Having fewer pregnancies and babies in a world where most adults reach old age means that men and women have more “scope” in life: more time to develop their personal capacities and more time and incentive to build a future for themselves, their children, and everyone else. Longer lives and the societal need for less childbearing by women mean that the composition of families and house- holds becomes more diverse. The changes taking place all over the world in fam- ily structure are not the result of a breakdown of social norms so much as they are the natural consequence of societies adapting to the demographic changes of people living longer with fewer children in a world where urban living and migra- tion are vastly more common than ever before. These are all facets of demography affecting your life in important ways.

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6 Part One A Demographic Perspective

There is no guarantee, however, about how a society will react to demographic change. That is why it is impossible to be a demographic determinist. Demographic change does demand a societal response, but different societies will respond differ- ently, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Nonetheless, it turns out that popu- lation structures are sufficiently predictable that we can at least suggest the kinds of responses from which societies are going to have to choose. The population of the world is increasing by more than 200,000 people per day, as I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, but this growth is much more intense in some areas of the world than in others. In those places where societies have been unable to cope adequately, especially with increasing numbers of younger people, the fairly pre- dictable result has been social, economic, and political instability. At the other end of the spectrum, there is considerable angst in some of the richer countries in which very low fertility has pushed the population to the edge of a decline, if not already into decline.

Population change is obviously not the only source of trouble in the world, but its impact is often incendiary, igniting other dilemmas that face human society. Without knowledge of population dynamics, for example, we cannot fully under- stand why the world is globalizing at such a rapid pace, nor can we understand the roots of conflict from the Middle East to Southeast Asia; nor why there is a simul- taneous acceptance of and a backlash against immigrants in the United States and Europe. And we cannot begin to imagine our future without taking into account the fact that the population of the world at the middle of this century is expected to include 2 to 3 billion more people than it does now, since the health of the planet depends upon being able to sustain a much larger number of people than are cur- rently alive. Because so much that happens in your life will be influenced by the consequences of population change, it behooves you to understand the causes and mechanisms of those changes. Let’s look at some examples.

The Relationship of Population to Resources

Food None of the basic resources required to expand food output—land, water, energy, fertilizer—can be considered abundant today. This especially impacts less developed countries with rapidly rising food demands and small energy reserves. Even now in sub-Saharan Africa, food production is not keeping pace with popula- tion growth, and this raises the fear that the world may have surpassed its ability to sustain even current levels of food production, much less meet the demands of the nearly 3 billion additional people who will be in line for a seat at the dinner table over the next few decades. And the problem is not just on land. The annual catch of wild fish leveled off in the 1990s and has been declining since then, with an increasing frac- tion of fish coming from farms harvesting the few species amenable to aquaculture.

Water An estimated one in three humans already face water scarcity, as demand for water increases faster than the available supply of fresh water. In theory, we can convert salt water (which is most of the water on the planet) into fresh water, but the process requires a lot of energy.

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7Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

Energy Every person added to the world’s population requires energy to prepare food, provide clothing and shelter, and to fuel economic life in general. Our rising standard of living is directly tied to our increasing use of energy, yet every incre- ment in demand is another claim on those resources. We know that petroleum reserves are limited. Can we transition quickly enough to solar and/or wind energy to meet the needs of a growing population? No one knows. Will biofuels be the answer? Not likely, because they come from valuable crop land that we need for growing food.

Housing and Infrastructure All of the future population growth in the world is expected to show up in the cities, especially those in developing countries. The irony of growing more food is that it requires mechanization, rather than more labor- ers, so as the number of babies born in rural areas continues to exceed deaths, the “excess” population is forced to move to cities in hopes of finding a job there. This means building homes (which requires lumber, cement, and a lot of other resources) and providing urban infrastructure (water, sewerage, electricity, roads, telecommu- nications, etc.) for those 2 to 3 billion newcomers. This increasing “demographic overhead” is burdensome, particularly for those countries that already cannot ade- quately provide for their urban populations.

Environmental Degradation As the human population has increased, so has its potential for disrupting the earth’s biosphere. The very same explosion in scien- tific knowledge that has allowed us to push death back to ever older ages, thus unleashing population growth, has also taught us how to convert the earth’s natural resources into those things that comprise our higher standard of living. And it is not just that we are using up resources; waste accompanies use. The waste from fossil fuel use is carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, generating the well-known effect on global climate change, evidenced perhaps most dramatically by the melting glaciers. But we are also damaging the hydrosphere (the world of water) by con- taminating the fresh water supply, destroying coral reefs and fishing out the ocean, while also wreaking havoc on the lithosphere (the thin layer of the earth’s crust upon which we live) by degrading the land with toxic waste and permitting top soil loss, desertification, and deforestation.

The task we will confront in the future is to maintain our standard of living while using many fewer resources per person. Keep in mind that international agen- cies such as the United Nations and the World Bank have suggested, through the Millennium Development Goals, that long-term sustainability of the planet requires that we lift all people out of poverty so that everyone can be a better steward of the planet. This is not going to be a simple project.

The Relationship of Population to Social and Political Dynamics

Regional Conflict Books and movies have been created to exploit the conflict that could be imagined if humans reached a point of diminishing resources. Back in 1967, even before the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968),

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8 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Harry Harrison (1967) wrote a widely read book called Make Room!Make Room!, which in 1973 was made into a popular film called Soylent Green. This was a sci- ence fiction movie starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in which they confront life way in the future in 2022 (oops, that’s coming right up). This is a world suffering from overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect—where much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green,” which turns out to be “recycled” humans. A lot of similarly themed books and movies have come along since then, including one of my favorites, Dan Brown’s best-selling book, Inferno (2013). In this thriller, a “brilliant lunatic” geneticist buys completely into a Malthusian “mathematical” view of the world (see Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of Malthus) that humans will breed themselves into extinction, and so he unleashes a vector virus into the world to induce sterility.

Having thus far escaped these frightening scenarios, it is tempting to think that population growth has not really yet had much of an impact on civil society. That’s because the real impact is harder to see, even if very real. It sort of creeps up on us one age group at a time, forcing families, communities, and then societies to adjust in some way or another. One reaction to population growth is to accept or even embrace the change and then seek positive solutions to the dilemmas presented by an increasingly larger (or smaller, for that matter) younger population (or older population)—you get the idea. Another reaction, of course, is to reject change. This is what the Taliban has been trying to do for decades in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan—to prevent a society from modernizing by force and, in the process, keep- ing death rates higher than they might otherwise be (you will learn in Chapter 5 that Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, not to mention the deaths from the violence there), and maintaining women in an inferior status by withholding access to education, paid employment, health care, and the means of preventing pregnancy. The difficulty the Taliban (or any similar group) faces (besides active military intervention to stop them) is that it is very hard, if not impossible, to put the genie back in the bottle once people have been given access to a longer life and the freedoms that are inherently associated with that. Very few people in the world prefer to go back to the “traditional” life of harsh exposure to disease, oppression, and death.

The essay accompanying this chapter reviews the demographics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region of the world, where we can see with special clarity the crucial role that demography has played for several decades now. For example, the migration of poor rural peasants to the cities of Iran, especially Tehran, contributed to the political revolution in that country back in 1978 by creating a pool of young, unemployed men who were ready recruits to the cause of overthrowing the existing government (Kazemi 1980; Lutz et al. 2010), and this pattern has been repeated throughout the region. It has been said that the “dogs of war” (with no disrespect meant to dogs) are young and male (Mesquida and Wiener 1999), and this description applies especially to the MENA region, where large fractions of the population are young, increasingly well educated, and frus- trated by the lack of jobs, and where males are routinely accorded higher status than females.

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9Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

The basic characteristic of a youth bulge is that a large fraction of the total population falls into the age range of approximately 15 to 29—old enough to be considered a young adult, but still young enough not to necessarily have settled into a job and family. We might think of this as an “incendiary” age group. If a country or region has too many people in this age cohort relative to the rest of the popula- tion, and they have a reason to be unhappy, trouble might be around the corner—it just needs some spark to ignite it (Weeks and Fugate 2012). Nearly a half-century ago, Moller (1968:246) argued that “in non-western nations, the outlook for young revolutionaries appears brightest where the poverty and insecurity of an underde- veloped but changing economy coincides with a high proportion of adolescents and young adults.” This still seems like an accurate assessment of how demography and society interact to produce movements like Al-Qaeda.

Sub-Saharan Africa is another part of the world where population growth has been increasing faster than resources can be generated to support it—despite the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS—increasing the level of poverty and disease, and encouraging child labor, slavery, despair, and violent ethno-nationalist conflict (Wimmer et al. 2009). Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the large number of chil- dren enmeshed in poverty and often orphaned because their parents have died of AIDS provides recruits for rebel armies waging warfare against one government or another. Those children who resist the army recruiters may find themselves sold into slavery, which is part of a larger global problem of child trafficking (Interna- tional Labour Organization 2013). This kind of abuse of children is not caused by demographic trends, but the demographic structure of society contributes to the problem by creating a situation where disproportionate numbers of children are available to be exploited.

Globalization Regional conflict is one response to population growth, but a less violent, albeit still controversial, response has been globalization. Let me explain. Most broadly, globalization can be thought of as an increasing level of connected- ness among and between people and places all over the world, although the term has taken on a more politically charged dimension since many people interpret it to mean a penetration of less developed nations by multinational companies from the more developed nations. This trend is promoted by the removal of trade barriers that protect local industries and by the integration of local and regional economies into a larger world arena. The pros and cons of this process invite heated debate, but an important, yet generally ignored, element of globalization is that it is closely related to the enormous increase in worldwide population growth that took place after the end of World War II.

Control over mortality, which has permitted the growth of population, occurred first in the countries of Europe and North America, and it was there that popula- tion first began to grow rapidly in the modern world, gaining steam in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. However, after World War II, death control technology was spread globally, especially through the work of various UN agen- cies, funded by the governments of the richer countries. Since declines in mortality initially affect infants more than any other age group, there tends to be a somewhat delayed reaction in the realization of the effects of a mortality decline until those

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10 Part One A Demographic Perspective

DEMOGRAPHIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE “MESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST”

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region of the world refers to the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen (see accompanying map and data table). The popula- tion of the MENA is mostly, although not entirely, Arab, and has been in demographic and political flux for a very long time.

The long-simmering tensions flared dra- matically when a young Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, was humiliated one time too many by a corrupt system and set himself on fire in protest in December 2010. His act of self-immolation in Tunisia ignited a wild fire that spread throughout the entire region. Thus began the Arab Spring or Arab Awakening that brought down not only the government of Tunisia, but also Libya and Egypt, and sparked a long civil war in Syria.

The politics underpinning the uprising stretch back decades, with the region especially roiled by the creation of the state of Israel in the late 1940s. At the end of World War I, the British took control of Palestine, which included the territory of what is now modern Israel and Jordan, from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1917, under the Balfour Declaration, the British had already agreed to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, when European anti-Semitism encouraged the mass migration of Jews to Palestine, the resulting change in the demographics of the region led inexorably in the direction of a Jewish state. Not unexpectedly, this influx of European Jews was resisted, first by Palestinian Arabs and subsequently by virtually all Arab states.

In 1946, at the end of World War II, the modern state of Jordan was granted full inde- pendence, and Britain handed the decision about Palestine to the United Nations. Then, in 1947 the United Nations passed General Assem- bly Resolution 181, which “. . . provided for the creation of two states, one Arab and the other Jewish, in Palestine, and an international regime

for Jerusalem. The Zionists approved of the plan, but the Arabs, having already rejected an earlier, more favorable (for them) partition offer from Britain, stood firm in their demand for sovereignty over Palestine in full” (Oren 2002:4). The stage was thus set for the continuing struggle for con- trol of the region. The nascent state of Israel was immediately attacked by armies from all surrounding Arab nations but managed to pre- vail, and when hostilities ended in 1949 Israel had claimed more territory than originally allot- ted to it by the United Nations. Because as many as 750,000 of Palestine’s Arabs (who came to be known simply as Palestinians) had fled the area when fighting broke out, the Jewish population emerged as the demographic majority. The Pal- estinian population was effectively cordoned into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

During the more than half century that the cre- ation and continued existence of Israel has been a political issue on the world stage, the entire MENA region has been increasing dramatically in popula- tion size—always a powerful underlying force for change. The accompanying table shows that in 1950 MENA had a population of 81 million—almost exactly the same as the population of Japan in that year. But the estimated MENA population in 2015 will be 418 million—a 500 percent increase! By comparison, Japan had increased to only 126 million in 2015, only a 53 percent increase. The United Nations Population Division projects the MENA region to add nearly 200 million more people by 2050, to a whopping 604 million, while Japan is projected to decline down to 108 million.

As both populations and political tension explode, the region is also pushing hard against its environmental constraints—especially water. Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, produced a very cogent analysis of the situation: “All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies” (Friedman 2012).

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11Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

Population Data for MENA

Country

Population (millions) in: Ratio of:

% , 15 in 20151950 2015 2050

2015/ 1950

2050/ 2015

Algeria 9 41 55 4.6 1.3 28

Bahrain 0 1 2 14.0 1.3 22

Djibouti 0 1 1 15.0 1.3 34

Egypt 21 85 122 4.0 1.4 31

Iran 17 79 101 4.6 1.3 24

Iraq 6 36 71 6.0 2.0 39

Israel 1 8 12 8.0 1.5 28

Jordan 1 8 12 16.0 1.5 33

Kuwait 0 4 6 18.0 1.8 25

Lebanon 1 5 5 5.0 1.0 19

Libya 1 6 8 5.7 1.3 29

Malta 0 0 0 1.3 1.0 14

Morocco 9 34 43 3.8 1.3 28

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region Source: See data in accompanying table.

(Continued)

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12 Part One A Demographic Perspective

DEMOGRAPHIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE “MESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST” (CONTINUED)

The World Bank (2008) notes that MENA is the most water-scarce region in the world, and it is getting worse as the population grows.

The potential for political volatility can be seen in the age structure as shown in the accompanying table and map. In the region as a whole, nearly a third (29 percent) of the population is under the age of 15, but there is a spatial cluster of countries from Libya to the west all the way over to Iraq to the east in which 30 percent or more are under 15. As these young people emerge into adulthood, they will be confronting societies that likely will not have the resources to provide them with good jobs and a satisfactory life. That is a highly incendi- ary situation. Somewhat ominously, the two areas with the highest percent under 15 (39 percent) are Palestine (the combination of Gaza and the West Bank) and Iraq. Yemen, a country known to harbor terrorists, also has 39 percent of its

population under the age of 15. For perspective, in the United States, 19 percent are under 15, and in both Germany and Japan only 13 percent are that young.

The bottom line is that this region is on course to continue its extreme rate of population growth in the face of serious environmental con- straints. This suggests that regional stability may be a long way away, especially when you con- sider that four of the countries considered to be the world’s most corrupt (Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen) are in the region (Transparency Interna- tional 2013).

Discussion Questions: (1) What do you think is the relationship between population growth in the MENA region and armed conflict? (2) How do you think the status of women in the Middle East might be influencing both demographic and political trends?

Country

Population (millions) in: Ratio of:

% , 15 in 20151950 2015 2050

2015/ 1950

2050/ 2015

Oman 1 4 5 8.4 1.2 22

Qatar 0 2 3 80.0 1.3 14

Saudi Arabia 3 30 40 10.0 1.3 28

Syria 3 22 37 7.3 1.7 35

Tunisia 3 11 13 3.7 1.2 23

United Arab Emirates 0 10 16 137.1 1.6 16 West Bank and Gaza

(Palestine) 1 5 9 5.0 2.0 39

Yemen 5 26 43 5.4 1.7 39

MENA Region 81 418 604 5.1 1.4 29

United States 103 19 Germany 70 13 Japan 82 13

Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, 2012 Revision: http://www.un.org/en /development/desa/population/ (accessed 2013). Note that projections are based on the medium fertility assumptions.

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13Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

children who would otherwise have died reach an age where they must be educated, clothed, fed, and jobs and homes must be created for them on a scale never before imagined.

As huge new cohorts of young people have come of age and needed jobs in developing countries, their willingness to work for relatively low wages has not gone unnoticed by manufacturers in North America, Europe, and Japan. Nor have big companies failed to notice the growing number of potential consumers for prod- ucts, especially those aimed at younger people, who represent the bulk of the popu- lation in developing countries. Given the demographics, it should not be surprising to us that jobs have moved to the developing countries and that younger consumers in those countries have been encouraged to spend their new wages on products that are popular with younger people in the richer countries, including music, fast food, cars, mobile phones, and electronic games.

Globalization of the labor market exists, in essence, because of the nature of world demographic trends. At the same time, the sheer volume of population growth in less developed countries is not a guarantee that jobs will head their way from richer countries. The likelihood goes up with two other demographically related factors: (1) declining fertility; and (2) increasing education. If fertility falls swiftly after mortality has gone down, the age structure goes through a transition in which there is a bulge of young adults ready to work, but they are burdened neither by a lot of dependent younger siblings nor yet by a lot of dependent older people. As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 8, this “demographic dividend” can be used to good advantage, especially if a country (think China) has also spent societal resources educating its children so that the young people can readily step up to jobs that might be moved there from richer countries.

Immigration Globalization of the labor force has significantly broadened the ancient relationship between jobs and geography by bringing jobs to people in developing countries. For most of human history, a lack of jobs meant that young people moved to where the jobs were (or, at least, where they thought they were). That still happens. Even as some jobs are heading to developing countries, many young people in those countries are headed to the richer countries, facilitated by what I call the “demographic fit” between the young age structures of developing countries and the aging populations in richer countries.

The transition from higher to lower fertility in North America, Europe, and East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand, has created a situation in all of these parts of the world in which the younger population is declining as a fraction of the total, creating holes in the labor force and concerns about who will pay the taxes necessary to fund the pensions and health care needs of the elderly. For a variety of reasons that I will discuss in Chapter 6, women in the richer countries are choosing to have fewer children than are required to replace the population. On the other side of the coin are developing countries where, even if the birth rate is declining (as it is in most places), it hasn’t declined as fast as the death rate, and so the young population keeps getting larger year after year. Supply meets demand in this demographic fit scenario, as low fertility countries take in migrants from higher fertility nations.

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14 Part One A Demographic Perspective

The United States has been the most accepting of all countries in the world in terms of absolute numbers of immigrants, including both legal and undocumented, with Mexico leading the list of countries from which immigrants to the U.S. come. Canada has been most welcoming of any country in the world on the basis of immi- grants per resident population, with Asians being the largest group entering Canada (a pattern followed also in Australia).

Not to be overlooked, of course, is the fact that the countries sending migrants have their own demographic issues that complement those of the richer countries. For example, in Mexico, fertility decline for a long time had lagged behind the drop in mortality, and the resulting high rates of population growth made it impossi- ble for the Mexican economy to generate enough jobs for each year’s crop of new workers. The resulting underemployment in Mexico (people work, but there is not enough work to constitute a full-time job) naturally increased the attractiveness of migrating to where better jobs are. This happens especially to be the United States, not just because the United States is next door, but because low rates of popula- tion growth there have left many jobs open, particularly at the lower end of the economic ladder. These positions have provided foreign laborers with a higher stan- dard of living than they could have in Mexico. The demographic dynamics have been shifting, though, and it seems likely that the demographic fit between the U.S. and Mexico is diminishing (Weeks and Weeks 2010). Fertility has been declining in Mexico, thus lowering the number of young people looking for work. This has helped the Mexican economy recover from the Great Recession of the first decade of this century, with the result that the supply of people thinking about heading to the U.S. has gone down. At the same time, the recent cohorts of immigrants to the U.S. have been having children, bolstering the number of younger people, and this, in combination with the slow recovery from the Great Recession, has lowered the demand for immigrant labor.

Because of limits on the number of legal immigrants admitted each year from specific countries in the world (see Chapter 7 for more details), a large fraction of those migrating from Mexico to the U.S. do so without documentation. However, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, undocumented immigrants have found it more difficult to enter the United States. As a consequence, many Latin American migrants have been going to Europe instead, both legally and illegally. The open-border policy within the European Union (EU) means that once people enter Europe, they are free to travel to any of the other EU countries in search of a job. Not surprisingly, Spain is the largest recipient of predominantly Spanish- speaking immigrants, but Switzerland and Italy also include growing communities of Latin Americans. There is a certain amount of symmetry, one might say, in the fact that the migration of Spaniards to the New World created “Latin America” from the mixing of Europeans with the indigenous population; now, five centuries later, the current is reversing.

There is, in fact, a bigger vacuum of laborers in Europe than in North America, because European birth rates have been declining for several decades and are now considerably lower than in the United States. There is thus the “sucking sound” of people from developing nations, notably former European colonies, filling the jobs in Europe that would otherwise go begging. The United Kingdom has large

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15Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

immigrant populations from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean, whereas France has immigrants from Algeria and Senegal, Germany has immigrants from Turkey (not a former colony, but a sympathizer in both world wars), the Netherlands has immigrants from Indonesia, and Spain has immigrants from Morocco (along with those from Latin America). Europeans, however, are not necessarily in favor of this trend. Caldwell (2009) has documented the rise in anti-foreigner sentiment in Europe, aimed especially at Muslim immigrants, and politicians throughout Europe are increasingly being forced by voters to take a stand on immigration issues (Winter and Teitelbaum 2013).

Given the needs in European countries for laborers and the complementary sur- plus of laborers in developing countries, we can expect that immigration will quite literally change the face of Europe in your lifetime. The “demographic time bomb” of an aging European population (Kempe 2006) means that these countries could make good use of immigrants in place of the babies that aren’t being born, but the problem is always that immigrants tend to be different. They may look different, have a different language, a different religion, and differ in their expectations about how society operates. Furthermore, since the immigrants tend to be young adults, they will wind up contributing disproportionately to the birth rate in their new countries, leading to a rapid and profound shift in the ethnic composition of the younger population. These differences create problems for all societies and create situations of backlash against immigrants.

American history is replete with stories of discrimination against immigrant groups for one or more generations until the children and grandchildren of immi- grants finally are accepted as part of mainstream society. This process produces children who would not be recognizable to their ancestors and a society that is a foreign country relative to the past, as I discussed earlier in the chapter. Just as in the United States, European nations have highly visible anti-immigrant groups, but the immigrants have kept coming anyway because jobs were especially available in the run-up to the Great Recession, and are starting to come back again in the post-recession economic recovery.

By contrast, immigrants have not bolstered Japan’s rapidly aging population because the level of anti-foreign sentiment is so high. The Japanese simply take it for granted that people from other countries will not become permanent members of Japanese society. This means that Japan has had fewer immigrant workers per person than North America or Europe, and it is not unreasonable to think that the Japanese economy has been moribund for many years now because it has not been invigorated by immigration.

Riding the Age Wave Grappling with uncertainty in the world requires more than guesswork, warned the late business guru Peter Drucker. It requires looking at “what has already happened that will create the future. The first place to look,” said Drucker, “is in demographics” (quoted in Russell 1999:54). A key demo- graphic with which societies must cope is the changing age structure. For example, if we go back only a few decades, we find that the demographics of the baby boom helped fuel inflation in the United States during the 1970s as government policies in that period were oriented toward creating new jobs for the swelling numbers of

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16 Part One A Demographic Perspective

0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050

P o p

u la

tio n (

in m

ill io

n s)

B ir

th s

(i n m

ill io

n s)

Births 10–19 40–49 65–74

labor force entrants, directly contributing to inflation through government expen- ditures. This same bulge in the young adult male population also contributed to the ability of the United States to get as involved as it did in the Vietnam War—the “dogs of war” phenomenon mentioned earlier in connection with current issues in the Middle East.

The baby boom is still having an impact, but now the big question has become: How will the country finance the retirement and the health care needs of baby boomers as they age and retire? Most of the richest nations, but also China, are fac- ing similar issues as declining fertility and increased longevity have contributed to the prospect of substantial increases in both the number and percentage of the older population (see Figure 1.2). As the older cohorts begin to squeeze national systems of social insurance, legislative action will be required to make long-run changes in the financing and benefit structure of these systems if they are to survive. As noted above and as I will discuss later in the book, immigration is one solution, but it comes with a lot of other costs attached. Changes will be made, of course, even if their exact shape is difficult to forecast. Delaying retirement is probably the easiest change to make, at least in the abstract. At the individual level, of course, few peo- ple want to make that choice to keep working for a few more years after spending their working life thinking that they were going to retire at a relatively young age. Increased self-reliance is another proposed solution, requiring people when younger to save for their own retirement through mandatory contributions to mutual funds

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17Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

and other investment instruments. It may also be, when the time comes, that taxes will be raised on younger people in order to bail out older people who, in fact, did not save enough for their retirement.

The changing age structure also has an obvious impact on the educational sys- tem. Public elementary and secondary school districts cannot readily recruit stu- dents or market their services to new prospects; they rise and fall on demographic currents that determine enrollment and the characteristics of students, such as English proficiency, that can affect resource demands. Of course, not every com- munity experiences the wavy national trend shown in Figure 1.2; there is variation among and between individual school districts. All have a need for precise infor- mation about their particular area, because even within a district some geographic areas may be growing while others are diminishing in the number of school-aged children or children of one ethnic group or another. Demographic conditions can also affect a school district in ways that go beyond the numbers. Adult immigrants to the United States from Latin America, for example, tend to have low levels of education, so they may have relatively little experience with schools even in their native country, much less in the United States. When their children start attending

0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050

P e rc

e n t o f th

e p

o p

u la

tio n

% 10–19 % 40–49 % 65–74

Figure 1.2 Riding the Age Wave: Number (top panel) and percentage (bottom panel) of selected age groups in the United States. Source: Data for births 1960 to 1975 are from U.S. Census Bureau, 1996, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office); Table 90; births for 1980 to 2010 are from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics Vital Statistics Reports (various years); age data from 1960 to 2010 are from the United Nations Popula- tion Division; age and birth data from 2015 to 2050 are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Population Projections (updated 2012): http://www.census.gov/population/projections/data/national/2012.html

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18 Part One A Demographic Perspective

school, they may be generally unable to help them with schoolwork. Since parental involvement is a key ingredient in student success, school districts are faced with the need to create new policies and programs to educate immigrant parents about what their children are experiencing in school.

The same age structure changes that influence the educational system also have an impact on the health care industry. Over the years, hospitals and other health care providers have learned that they have to reposition themselves in a classic marketing sense to meet the needs of a society that is changing demographically (Beckett and Morrison 2010). In countries like the United States, health care is now less about birthing and coping with childhood illnesses, and more about treating the chronic diseases that beset an older population.

Crime, like health, is closely tied to the age and sex structure of a community. Young people, especially young males, are more likely to commit crimes than any- one else (yet more “dogs of war”). Given that fact, it is not a surprise that the crime rate in the United States has been declining roughly in tandem with the decline in the percentage of the population that is comprised of teenagers and young adults. Babies born in 1964 are the last of the baby boomers in the U.S. and as they reached their teens in the mid-1970s, there was both a peak in the number and percentage of people aged 10-19 and in the crime rate in the U.S., especially violent crime. The rate has continued to decline since then, with a bump in the 1990s as the baby boomlet kids hit the crime-prone years.

The vast majority of people of any age, of course, are not criminals. But, almost all are consumers, and people at different ages have different needs and tastes for products and differing amounts of money to spend. Companies catering to the youngest age group have to keep track of the number of births (their potential mar- ket) as well as the characteristics of the parents and grandparents (who spend the money on behalf of the babies). The baby market has seen some wild fluctuations in recent decades in the United States, as you can see in Figure 1.2. The number of babies being born each year plummeted during the 1960s and 1970s, rebounded in the 1980s, peaked in 1990, and slacked off in the early 1990s before rebound- ing again. The U.S. Census Bureau projects the number of births to continue rising steadily for the foreseeable future. It is a dangerous business, however, to be lulled into believing that every company dealing with baby products will necessarily live or die on the peaks and troughs of birth cycles. In 2012, there were 3.9 million births in the United States, not far below the number at the height of the baby boom in 1958. Yet, in 2012 there were 1.6 million first births, compared to only 1.1 million in 1958. If you have hung around new parents and new grandparents, you know that people react differently to first births than to others. In particular, they open their pocketbooks wider to pay for cribs, buggies, strollers, diapers, and every conceivable type of baby toy designed to stimulate and “improve the quality” of the baby’s life. Businesses that cater to these needs, then, are as sensitive to birth order as they are to the absolute volume of births.

The middle age group (represented in Figure 1.2 by people aged 40 to 49) was relatively unchanged in size since the 1960s and essentially unnoticed until the baby boom generation began moving into this category in the 1980s. Since then, serving them has become a new “boom” industry. Laser eye surgery surged, as did sales

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19Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

of walking shoes (running shoe sales slowed to a walk for boomers). When not walking, the aging baby boomers have been driving their luxury or near-luxury sport utility vehicles (and are now snapping up hybrid cars). It was the baby boom reaching middle age that helped to fatten the nonfat market, although younger people rather than baby boomers have led the movement toward vegetarian meals (Stahler 2012). They will probably carry those food preferences into their middle ages at a time when the number of people 40 to 49 will dip, as the baby boomers are replaced by the smaller cohort of Generation X.

The young-old population (ages 65 to 74) has been steadily increasing in num- bers over time and, as you will learn in Chapter 8, has also become increasingly affluent. This segment of the population creates a market for a variety of things, from leisure travel to appliances with larger print, to door handles that are shaped to be used more easily by arthritic fingers. Perhaps most importantly, the aging of the population in North America has spurred the marketing of health services and products aimed at that age group, and the targeting of their wares to neighborhoods where people are aging in place (so-called naturally occurring retire- ment communities—NORC) (Morrison and Bryan 2010).

Johnson & Johnson provides a good example of a company that has kept its eye on the changing demographics not only of the United States but of the world in general. The company got its start in the 1880s when Robert Wood Johnson began selling sterile bandages and surgical products—innovations built on Lister’s germ theory that helped to lower death rates in hospitals. Later on, during the years of the baby boom, Johnson & Johnson flourished by selling baby products. As the baby boom waned, the company continued to diversify its product line in a demo- graphically relevant way, including acquiring ownership of both Ortho Pharmaceu- ticals (the largest U.S. manufacturer of contraceptives—helping to keep the birth rate low—and a large manufacturer of drugs to treat chronic diseases associated with aging) and Tylenol (one of the world’s most popular pain relievers).

Basically, making sound investment decisions (as opposed to lucky ones) involves peering into the future, forecasting likely scenarios, and then acting on the basis of what seems likely to happen. After reading this book, you should have a good feel for the shape of things to come demographically. Most people do not, but those who do have an edge in life. A group of financial investors in the United Kingdom, for example, has established the Life and Longevity Markets Association in an attempt to spur the development of ways to make money from the pension funds into which an increasingly older population is pouring money. If people die sooner than expected, insurance companies lose money; whereas if they live longer than expected, the insurance companies reap a profit. The flip side of this is that if people live longer than expected, pension funds may be underfunded; whereas the pension funds profit if people die sooner, rather than later. You can see that people are betting one way or the other on your demo- graphic future.

What else do the demographics suggest about future economic opportuni- ties? The fact that 90 percent of the world’s population growth in the foreseeable future will occur in the less developed nations is, as already noted, an important reason for the globalization of business and the internationalization of investment.

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20 Part One A Demographic Perspective

In 2012 two financial analysts in California put together a demographic-economic model of 176 countries of the world. Their conclusion was that age structures with a disproportionate share of people of working age are good for economic growth (economies with a demographic tailwind), and age structures with lots of kids or lots of older people are not so good (economies with a headwind). They summarize the situation as follows (Arnott and Chaves 2012:42):

Children are not immediately helpful to GDP. They do not contribute to it, nor do they help stock and bond market returns in any meaningful way; their parents are likely disinvesting to pay their support. Young adults are the driving force in GDP growth; they are the sources of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. But they are not yet invest- ing; they are overspending against their future human capital. Middle-aged adults are the engine for capital market returns; they are in their prime for income, savings, and investments. And senior citizens contribute to neither GDP growth nor stock and bond market returns; they disinvest to buy goods and services that they no longer produce.

All is not lost, however, in those countries with lots of kids, because each one needs some kind of diaper. Procter & Gamble, maker of Pampers disposable diapers, has found a huge market out there. Babies grow up to be teenagers and young adults (trends that we will examine in detail throughout the book). From Malaysia to Argentina, young adults are buying iPads, cell phones, handheld elec- tronic games, satellite dishes, and the perennial favorites, blue jeans and Coca-Cola. Companies selling in these markets are bound to make money.

International investors have been particularly intrigued by the world’s two most populous countries, China and India. General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford all have invested in car manufacturing in China, as have Volkswagen and Peugeot Citroën from Europe. The problem, of course, is that a huge population does not necessarily mean a huge market if most people are poor. Starbucks serves coffee and Pizza Hut and McDonald’s serve up fast food in China, but the average Chinese consumer cannot afford very many expensive goods. Enter Wal-Mart, which opened its first store in China in the mid-1990s and had 390 stores there as of 2013 (Walmart Stores 2013).

India, which is almost as populous, but is less well-off than China, does not yet allow full foreign ownership of retail businesses, except in very limited cases, but the so-called “consuming class” in India (those with at least some discretion- ary income, although it may be as low as $2 per day) is estimated to comprise about 300 million people (Mustafi 2013). This is about 25 percent of the popula- tion, yet it is a big market and thus represents an opportunity for some people to make money. Yum Brands, Inc., based in Louisville, Kentucky, which owns Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell (among other fast-food franchises), decided in 2010 that the growing young adult population (the youth bulge) in India represented a good market for Mexican food, and so they opened a Taco Bell in Bangalore focusing on the vegetarian aspects of their menu (Sharma 2013). Though we will return repeatedly to this paradox that many people (the “street”) have a gut feeling that population growth is a good thing, we have no idea if we can sustain it, and if we can’t, then what?

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21Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

The Relationship of Population to Rights of Women There is probably no more important demographic issue than the rights of women. As I discuss in Chapter 5, women inherently have higher life expectancy than men, unless society intervenes to undermine that biological advantage. The other biological issue—reproduction— rears its head when society seeks to prevent women from controlling their own reproductive behavior, as I discuss in Chapter 6. In social terms, all evidence shows that men and women are equally able to be good or bad parents, equally able to become educated and succeed (or not) occupationally and economically, equally able to lead societies politically. Any group that oppresses women and suppresses their contributions will have a distinctively unfavorable demographic profile and will almost certainly suffer in terms of overall well-being. This theme will emerge regularly in subsequent chapters.

How Is the Book Organized?

In order to help you understand how the world works demographically in more detail, I have organized the book into four parts, each building on the previ- ous one. This first chapter obviously is designed to introduce you to the field of population studies and illustrate why this is such an important topic. The second chapter reviews world population trends so that you have a good idea of what is happening in the world demographically, how we got to this point, and where we seem to be heading. The third chapter introduces you to the major perspectives or ways of thinking about population growth and change, and the fourth chapter reviews the sources of data that form the basis of our understanding of demo- graphic trends.

In Part Two, “Population Processes,” I discuss the three basic demographic processes whose transitions are transforming the world—the health and mortality transition (Chapter 5), the fertility transition (Chapter 6), and the migration transi- tion (Chapter 7). Knowledge of these three population processes and transitions provides you with the foundation you need to understand why changes occur and what might be done about them.

Part Three, “Population Structure and Characteristics,” is devoted to study- ing the interaction of the population processes and societal change that occur as fertility, mortality, and migration change. These include the age transition (Chapter 8), the urban transition (Chapter 9), and the family and household tran- sition (Chapter 10). The fourth and final part of the book, “Using the Demo- graphic Perspective,” first explores the relationship between population and sustainability (Chapter 11): Can economic growth and development be sustained in the face of continued population growth? There are no simple answers, but we are faced with a future in which we will have to deal with the global and local consequences of a larger and constantly changing population. In Chapter 12, I review what lies ahead demographically and discuss the ways in which the global community is trying to cope politically with these changes as they alter the fabric of human society.

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22 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Summary and Conclusion

It is an often-repeated phrase that “demography is destiny,” and the goal of this book is to help you to cope with the demographic part of your own destiny and that of your community, and to better understand the changes occurring all over the world. Demographic analysis helps you do this by seeking out both the causes and the consequences of population change. The absolute size of population change is very important, as is the rate of change, and of course, the direction (growth or decline).

The past 200 years have witnessed almost nonstop growth in most places in the world, but the rate is slowing down, even though we are continuing to add nearly 9,000 people to the world’s total every hour of every day. You may not realize it, but everything happening around you is influenced by demographic events close to you as well as in faraway places. I refer not just to the big things like regional conflict, globalization, climate change, exhaustion of resources, and massive migration move- ments, but even to little things that affect you directly, like the kinds of stores that operate in your neighborhood, the goods that are stocked on your local supermarket shelf, the availability of a hospital emergency room, and the jobs aimed at college graduates in your community. Influential decision makers in government agencies, social and health organizations, and business firms now routinely base their actions at least partly on their assessment of the changing demographics of an area. So, both locally and globally, demographic forces are at work to change and challenge your future. The more you know about this, the better prepared you will be to deal with it (and perhaps even influence what the future will be). In the next chapter, I get you started on this by outlining the basic facts of the global demographic picture.

Main Points

1. Demography is concerned with everything that influences or can be influenced by population size, growth or decline, processes, spatial distribution, structure, and characteristics.

2. Almost everything in your life has demographic underpinnings that you should understand.

3. Demography is a force in the world that influences every improvement in human well-being that the world has witnessed over the past few hundred years.

4. The past was very different from the present in large part because of demo- graphic changes taking place all over the globe; and the future will be different for the same reasons.

5. The cornerstones of population studies are the processes of mortality (a deadly subject), fertility (a well-conceived topic), and migration (a moving experience).

6. Demographic change demands that societies adjust, thus forcing social change, but different societies will respond differently to these challenges, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

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23Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography

7. Examples of global issues that have deep and important demographic compo- nents include the relationship of population to food, water, and energy resources, as well as housing and infrastructure, and environmental degradation.

8. Population is also connected to social and political dynamics such as regional conflict, often exacerbated by youth bulges, as well as globalization, the need for immigrants created by the phenomenon of “demographic fit” and then the backlash against those immigrants.

9. Changes in the age structure are the most obvious ways in which demography forces societal change and, at the same time, creates business opportunities— exemplified by the idea of “riding the age wave.”

10. A key to all demographic trends in the world is the status of women.

Questions for Review

1. When did you first become aware of demography or population issues more broadly, and what were the things that initially seemed to be important to you?

2. Why is the idea that nearly everything is connected to demography, or the companion idea that demography is destiny, not the same as demographic determinism?

3. How do you think the politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) will be influenced in the long term by the changing demographics of the region?

4. Discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of a youth bulge for a society to deal with.

5. Because globalization has an underlying demographic component, how might that affect the investing patterns of someone who uses demography as one of their investment criteria?

Websites of Interest

Remember that websites are not as permanent as books and journals, so I cannot guarantee that each of the following websites still exists at the moment you are reading this. You may have to Google the name of the organization to find the current web address.

1. http://www.census.gov The website of the U.S. Census Bureau has many useful features, including U.S. and world population information and U.S. and world population clocks (where you can check the latest estimate of the total U.S. and world populations).

2. http://www.prb.org The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) in Washington, D.C., is a world leader in devel- oping and distributing population information. The site includes regularly updated information about PRB’s own activities, as well as links to a wide range of other population-related websites all over the world.

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24 Part One A Demographic Perspective

3. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/ The Population Division of the United Nations is the single most important producer of global demographic information, which can be accessed at this site. Closely related United Nations data can be accessed through http://data.un.org.

4. http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/worldclock/ This website keeps track of a wide range of demographic data from various official sources and then produces estimates that are constantly being updated (thus, they are called “clocks”) by extrapolation models.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/Introduction%20to%20Demography Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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CHAPTER 2 Global Population Trends

WORLD POPULATION GROWTH A Brief History How Fast Is the World’s Population Growing Now? The Power of Doubling—How Fast Can

Populations Grow? Why Was Early Growth So Slow? Why Are More Recent Increases So Rapid? How Many People Have Ever Lived? Redistribution of the World’s Population through

Migration European Expansion “South” To “North” Migration The Urban Revolution

GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION

GLOBAL VARIATION IN POPULATION SIZE AND GROWTH

North America

United States Canada

Mexico and Central America South America Europe North Africa and Western Asia Sub-Saharan Africa South and Southeast Asia

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh Indonesia and the Philippines Vietnam and Thailand Iran

East Asia China Japan

Oceania

ESSAY: Implosion or Invasion? The Choices Ahead for the Low-Fertility Countries

Figure 2.1 Cartogram of Countries of the World by Population Size Note: The map shows the size of each country of the world according to its population. Each square represents approxi- mately 2 million persons.

Source: Prepared by John Weeks and Sean Taugher using data from the United Nations Population Division 2013, World Population Prospects 2012; data refer to medium projections for 2015.

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26 Part One A Demographic Perspective

At this moment you are sharing the planet and vying for resources with more than 7 billion others, and before the year 2050 yet another 2 to 3 billion souls will have joined you at the world’s table, as I noted in the previous chapter. This in and of itself is pretty impressive, but it becomes truly alarming when you realize what a huge leap up it is from the “only” 2.5 billion in residence as recently as 1950. This phenomenon is obviously without precedent, so we are sailing in uncharted ter- ritory. In order to deal intelligently with a future that will be shared with several billion more people than today, we have to understand why the populations of so many countries are still growing (and why others are not) and what happens to societies as their patterns of birth, death, or migration change. In this chapter, I trace the history of population growth in the world to give you a clue as to how we got ourselves into the current situation. Then I will take you on a brief guided tour through each of the world’s major regions, highlighting current patterns of popu- lation size and rates of growth, with a special emphasis on the world’s 10 most populous nations.

World Population Growth

A Brief History

Modern human beings have been around for at least 200,000 years (Cann and Wilson 2003; McHenry 2009), yet our presence on the earth was scarcely notice- able until very recently. For almost all of that time, humans were hunter-gatherers living a primitive existence marked by high fertility, high mortality, and at best only very slow population growth. Given the very difficult exigencies for sur- vival in these early societies, it is no surprise that the population of the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution (also known as the Neolithic Agrarian Revolution) about 10,000 years ago is estimated to have been only 4 million people (see Figure 2.2).

Many people argue that the Agricultural Revolution occurred slowly but per- vasively across the face of the earth precisely because the hunting-gathering pop- ulations were growing just enough to push the limit of the carrying capacity of their way of life (Boserup 1965; Cohen 1977; Harris and Ross 1987; Sanderson 1995). Carrying capacity refers to the number of people that can be supported indefinitely in an area given the available physical resources and the way in which people use those resources (Miller and Spoolman 2012). Since hunting and gather- ing use resources extensively rather than intensively, it was natural that over tens of thousands of years humans would move inexorably into the remote corners of the earth in search of sustenance. Eventually, people in most of those corners began to use the environment more intensively, leading to the more sedentary, agricultural way of life that has characterized most of human society for the past 10,000 years, starting first in what is now the Middle East, and then in what is now the eastern part of China.

The population began to grow more noticeably after the Agricultural Revolu- tion. Between 8000 b.c. and 5000 b.c., about 333 people on average (births minus

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27Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

deaths) were being added to the world’s total population each year, but by 500 b.c., as major civilizations were being established in China, India, and Greece, the world was adding 100,000 people each year to the total. By the time of Christ (the Roman Period, a.d. 1) there may well have been more than 200 million people on the planet, increasing by nearly 300,000 each year.

There was some backsliding in the third through fifth centuries a.d., when increases in mortality, probably due to the plague, led to declining population size in the Medi- terranean area as the Roman Empire collapsed, and in China as the Han Empire col- lapsed from a combination of flood, famine, and rebellion (McEvedy and Jones 1978). Population growth recovered its momentum only to be swatted down by yet another plague, the Black Death, that arrived in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century and didn’t leave until the middle of the seventeenth century (Cantor 2001).

After that, during the period from about 1650 to 1850, Europe as a whole experienced rather dramatic population growth as a result of the disappearance of the plague, the introduction of the potato from the Americas, and evolutionary (although not revolutionary) changes in agricultural practice—probably a response

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Figure 2.2 The World’s Population Has Exploded in Size Sources: The population data through 1940 are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau, International Programs Center “Historical Estimates of the World Population,” (http://www.census.gov/population /international/data/worldpop/table_history.php), accessed 2014. The numbers reflect the average of the estimates shown in that table. Population figures for 1950 through 2100 are from the United Nations Population Division, 2013, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision (http://esa.un.org/unpd /wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm), accessed 2014.

Note: Time is not to scale

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28 Part One A Demographic Perspective

to the receding of the Little Ice Age (Fagan 2000)—that preceded (and almost cer- tainly stimulated) the Industrial Revolution (Cohen 1995). The rate of growth began clearly to increase after that, especially in Europe, and on the eve of the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century (about 1750), the population of the world was approaching one billion people and was increasing by more than 2 million every year.

It is quite likely that the Industrial Revolution occurred in part because of this population growth. It is theorized that the Europe of 300 or 400 years ago was reaching the carrying capacity of its agricultural society, so Europeans first spread out looking for more room and then began to invent more intensive uses of their resources to meet the needs of a growing population (Harrison 1993), building on the scientific discoveries inspired by the European Enlightenment. The major resource was energy, which, with the discovery of fossil fuels (first coal, then oil, and more recently natural gas), helped to light the fire under industrialization.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution approximately 250 years ago, the size of the world’s population has increased even more dramatically, as you can visualize in Figure 2.2. For tens of thousands of years the population of the world grew slowly, and then within scarcely more than 200 years, the number of people mushroomed to more than 7 billion, and is still going strong. There can be little question why the term population explosion was coined to describe these historically recent demographic events. As you can see in Table 2.1, the world’s population did not reach 1 billion until after the American Revolution—the United Nations fixes the year at 1804 (United Nations Population Division 1999)—but since then we have been adding each additional billion people at an accelerating pace. The 2 billion mark was hit in 1927, just before the Great Depression and

Year Population in

billions Annual rate of

growth Annual increase

in millions

1804 1 0.4 4 1927 2 1.1 22 1960 3 1.3 52 1974 4 2.0 75 1987 5 1.6 82 2000 6 1.4 77 2011 7 1.2 80 2024 8 0.9 73 2040 9 0.7 59 2061 10 0.4 38

Sources: The population data through 1940 are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau, International Programs Center “Historical Estimates of the World Population,” (http://www.census.gov/population /international/data/worldpop/table_history.php), accessed 2014. The numbers reflect the average of the estimates shown in that table. Population figures for 1950 through 2100 are from the United Nations Population Division, 2013, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision (http://esa.un.org/unpd /wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm), accessed 2014.

Table 2.1 The Billion People Progression

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29Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

123 years after the first billion. In 1960, only 33 years later, came 3 billion; and 4 billion came along only 14 years after that, in 1974. We then hit 5 billion 13 years later, in 1987; we passed the 6 billion milestone 12 years later, in 1999; and in another 12 years, in 2011, we reached the seventh billion. The United Nations expects that we will reach 8 billion in 2023, 9 billion in 2040, 10 billion in 2061, and we could be very close to 11 billion by 2100—an incredible eleven- fold increase in only three centuries (based on projections by the United Nations Population Division 2013).

I will discuss the methods of population projections in Chapter 8 and the implications of population projections in Chapter 12, but let me note that nearly everyone agrees that global population growth is likely to come to an end some time late in this century or early in the next century, even if we are not sure exactly when, nor exactly how many of us there will be when that time comes. The right side of Figure 2.2 shows the spread of options as calculated by the United Nations Population Division out to the end of this century. The middle projection, which the UN demographers think is the most likely, reaches 10.9 billion in 2100, as mentioned above, and assumes that the average number of births per woman in the world will eventually reach replacement level of just slightly more than two. The high projection of 16.6 billion in 2100 assumes that fertility levels decline but will not drop to replacement and so the world population keeps growing; whereas the low projection of 6.8 billion in 2100 assumes that fertility drops well below replacement, which of course would lead to eventual extinction if nothing changed.

How Fast Is the World’s Population Growing Now?

The rate of population growth is obviously important (it is the “explosive” part), yet the numbers are what we actually cope with. In Figure 2.3, I have graphed the rate of population growth for the world over time. You can see that it peaked around 1970 and has been declining since then. This is good news, of course, but is tempered by the fact that as we continue to build on an ever larger base of peo- ple, the lower rates of growth are still producing very large absolute increases in the human population. When you have a base of more than 7 billion (our current population), the seemingly slow rate of growth of about 1.15 percent per year for the world as a whole still translates into the annual addition of 84 million people; whereas “only” 76 million were being added annually when the rate of growth peaked in 1970, and there were fewer than 30 million per year being added when the world was last growing at about 1 percent per year, at the end of World War II. Put another way, during the next 12 months, approximately 142 million babies will be born in the world, while 58 million people of all ages will die, resulting in a net addition of more than 84 million people. In the two seconds that it took you to read that sentence, nine babies were born while four people died, and so the world’s population increased by five.

You can see a drop in the rate of population growth in the 1950–60 period. This was due to a terrible famine in China in 1959–60, which was produced by

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30 Part One A Demographic Perspective

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Figure 2.3 Tens of Millions of People Are Still Being Added to the World’s Total Population Each Year, Despite the Drop in the Growth Rate Sources: The population data through 1940 are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau, International Programs Center “Historical Estimates of the World Population,” (http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table _history.php), accessed 2014. The numbers reflect the average of the estimates shown in that table. Population figures for 1950 through 2100 are from the United Nations Population Division, 2013, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision (http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm), accessed 2014.

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward program of 1958, in which the Chinese government “leapt forward” into industrialization by selling “surplus” grain to finance industrial growth. Unfortunately, the grain was not surplus, and the con- fiscation of food amounted to a self-imposed disaster that led to the deaths of 30 million Chinese in the following two years (1959 and 1960) (Becker 1997). Yet even though the Chinese famine was undoubtedly one of the largest disasters in human history, world population growth quickly rebounded, and the growth rate hit its record high shortly after that.

The Power of Doubling—How Fast Can Populations Grow?

Human populations, like all living things, have the capacity for exponential increase, which can be expressed nicely by the time it takes to double in population size. The

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31Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

incredible power of doubling is illustrated by the tale of the Persian chessboard. The story is told that the clever inventor of the game of chess was called in by the King of Persia to be rewarded for this marvelous new game. When asked what he would like his reward to be, his answer was that he was a humble man and deserved only a humble reward. Gesturing to the board of 64 squares that he had devised for the game, he asked that he be given a single grain of wheat on the first square, twice that on the second square, twice that on the third square, and so on, until each square had its complement of wheat. The king protested that this was far too modest a prize, but the inventor persisted and the king finally relented. When the Overseer of the Royal Granary began counting out the wheat, it started out small enough: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 . . . but by the time the 64th square was reached, the num- ber was staggering—nearly 18.5 quintillion grains of wheat (about 75 billion metric tons!) (Sagan 1989). This, of course, exceeded the “carrying capacity” of the royal granary in the same way that successive doublings of the human population over the past 200 years threaten to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.

Early on in human history it took several thousand years for the population to double to a size eventually reaching 14 million. From there it took a thousand years to nearly double to 27 million and another thousand to nearly double to 50 million, but less than 500 years to double from 50 to 100 million (about 500 years b.c.). Another thousand years later, in a.d. 500, it had doubled again. After yet another thousand years, in 1500, in the middle of the European Renaissance, the world’s population had doubled again. About 400 years elapsed between the European Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and the world’s population doubled in size during that time. But from 1750, it took only a little more than 100 years to double again, and the next doubling occurred in less than 100 years. The most recent doubling (from 3.5 to 7.0 billion) took only about 44 years.

Will we double again in the future? Probably not. Indeed we should hope not because we don’t really know at this point how we will feed, clothe, educate, and find jobs for the 7 billion alive now, much less the additional 2 billion or more who are expected between now and later in this century. Once you realize how rapidly a population can grow, it is reasonable to wonder why early growth of the human population was so slow.

Why Was Early Growth So Slow?

The reason the population grew so slowly during the first 99 percent of human history was that death rates were very high. During the hunting-gathering phase of human history (hundreds of thousands of years), it is likely that life expectancy at birth averaged about 20 years (Petersen 1975; Livi-Bacci 2001). At this level of mortality, more than half of all children born will die before age five, and the aver- age woman who survives to the reproductive years will have to bear nearly seven children in order to assure that two will survive to adulthood.

Research in the twentieth century on the last of the hunting-gathering popula- tions in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that a premodern woman might have delib- erately limited the number of children born by spacing them a few years apart to

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32 Part One A Demographic Perspective

make it easier to nurse and carry her youngest child and to permit her to do her work (Dumond 1975). She may have accomplished this by abstinence, abortion, or possibly even infanticide (Howell 1979; Lee 1972). Similarly, sick and infirm mem- bers of society were at risk of abandonment once they were no longer able to fend for themselves. Not everyone agrees that there was any deliberate population con- trol among early human populations, believing more simply that societies struggled to give birth to enough children to overcome the obstacle faced by the routinely high death rates among children (Caldwell and Caldwell 2003).

As humans settled into agricultural communities, population began to increase at a slightly higher rate than during the hunting-gathering era, and Bocquet- Appel (2008) has called this the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Initially it was thought that birth rates remained high but death rates declined slightly because of the more steady supply of food, and thus the population grew. However, archaeo- logical evidence combined with studies of extant hunter-gatherer groups has offered a somewhat more complicated explanation for growth during this period (Spooner 1972). Fertility rates did, indeed, rise as new diets improved the ability of women to conceive and bear children (see Chapter 6). Also, it became easier to wean children from the breast earlier because of the greater availability of soft foods, which are easily eaten by babies. This would have shortened the birth intervals, and the birth rate could have risen on that account alone, and to a level higher than the death rate, thus promoting population growth. However, the sedentary life and the higher-density living associated with farming probably also raised death rates by creating sanitation problems and heightening exposure to communicable diseases. Nonetheless, growth rates increased even in the face of higher mortality as fertility rates rose to a level slightly higher than the death rate.

It should be kept in mind, of course, that only a small difference between birth and death rates is required to account for the slow growth achieved after the Agri- cultural Revolution. Between 8000 b.c. and 1750 a.d., the world was adding an average of only 67,000 people each year to the population. Right now, as you read this, that many people are being added every seven hours.

Why Are More Recent Increases So Rapid?

The acceleration in population growth after 1750 was due largely to the declines in the death rate that came about as part of the scientific revolution that accom- panied the Industrial Revolution. First in Europe and North America and more recently in the rest of the world, death rates have decreased sooner and much more rapidly than have fertility rates. The result has been that many fewer people die than are born each year. In the more developed countries, declines in mortal- ity at first were due to the effects of economic development and a rising stan- dard of living—people were eating better, wearing warmer clothes, living in better houses, bathing more often, drinking cleaner water, and so on (McKeown 1976). These improvements in the human condition helped to lower exposure to disease and also to build up resistance to illness. Later, especially after 1900, much of the decline in mortality was due to improvements in public health and medical

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33Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

technology, including sanitation and especially vaccination against infectious dis- eases (Preston and Haines 1991).

Declines in the death rates first occurred only in those countries experiencing economic development. In each of these areas, primarily Europe and North America, fertility also began to decline within at least one or two generations after the death rate began its drop. However, since World War II, medical and public health tech- nology has been available to virtually all countries of the world regardless of their level of economic development. In the less developed countries, although the risk of death has been lowered dramatically, birth rates have gone down less quickly, and the result is continuing population growth. As you can see in Figure 2.4, almost all the growth of the world’s population is originating in less developed nations. I say “originating” because some of that growth then spills into the more developed countries through migration.

Between 2015 and 2050, the medium projections of the United Nations sug- gest that the world will add 2.2 billion people. Only 2 percent of this increase is expected to occur in the more developed nations. The less developed nations (excluding the least developed) will account for 59 percent of the increase, and the least developed will account for 39 percent. The least developed will be growing most quickly, increasing from 13 percent of the world’s total in 2015 to 19 percent in 2050. On the other hand, the more developed nations will drop from 17 percent of the total in 2015 to less than 13 percent in 2050. These projections assume an actual decline in the size of the European population, where countries currently

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Figure 2.4 Less (and Least) Developed Regions Are the Sites of Future Population Growth Source: Adapted by the author from Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, http://esa .un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm

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34 Part One A Demographic Perspective

have very low fertility alongside restrictive immigration laws. As I discuss in the essay accompanying this chapter, the aging of the European population and the threat of depopulation may well result in a loosening of the immigration laws.

How Many People Have Ever Lived?

The fact that we have gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in little more than 200 years has led some people to speculate that a majority of people ever born must surely still be alive. Let me burst that idea before it can take root in your mind. In fact, our current contribution to history’s total represents only a relatively small fraction of all people who have ever lived. The most analytical of the estimates has been made by Nathan Keyfitz (Keyfitz 1966; Keyfitz and Caswell 2005), and I have used Keyfitz’s formulas to estimate the number of people who have ever lived, assuming conservatively that we started with two people (call them “Adam and Eve” if you’d like) 200,000 years ago. The results of these calculations suggest that a total of 62.6 billion people have been born, of whom the 7.3 billion estimated to be alive in 2015 constitute 11.7 percent.

You can appreciate that the number of people ever born is influenced by the length of time you believe humans have been around, and by the estimate of the birth rate. There is no reasonable calculation, however, that generates a value much higher than 11.7, so we can safely assume that only a small fraction of humans ever born are now alive, although the percentage is constantly getting higher because of our ever larger population size. Furthermore, no matter how you calculate it, the dramatic drop in infant and childhood mortality over the last two centuries means that babies are now far more likely than ever to grow up to be adults. Thus, the adults alive today actually do represent a considerable fraction of all people who have ever lived to adulthood.

The vast increase in numbers is not the only important demographic change to occur in the past few hundred years. There has also been a massive redistribution of population.

Redistribution of the World’s Population through Migration

As populations have grown unevenly in different areas of the world, the pressures or desires to migrate have also grown. This pattern is predictable enough that we label it the migration transition component of the overall demographic transition (which I will discuss in the next chapter). Migration streams generally flow from areas where there are too few jobs to areas where there is more opportunity. Thus we have migration from Latin America and Asia to the United States, from Asia to Canada, from Africa and Asia to Europe, and within Europe from the east to the west.

In earlier decades, the shortage of jobs generally occurred when the popula- tion grew dense in a particular region, and people then felt pressured to migrate to some other less populated area, much as high-pressure storm fronts move into

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35Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

low-pressure weather systems. This is precisely the pattern of migration that characterized the expansion of European populations into other parts of the world, as European farmers sought land in less densely settled areas. This phe- nomenon of European expansion is, of course, critically important because as Europeans moved around the world, they altered patterns of life, including their own, wherever they went.

European Expansion Beginning in the fourteenth century, migration out of Europe began gaining momentum, revolutionizing the entire human population in the pro- cess. With their gun (and germ)-laden sailboats, Europeans began to stake out the less-developed areas of the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and this was only the beginning. Migration of Europeans to other parts of the world on a massive scale took hold in the nineteenth century, when the European nations began to industrialize and swell in numbers due to the decline in mortality. As Kingsley Davis has put it:

Although the continent was already crowded, the death rate began to drop and the pop- ulation began to expand rapidly. Simultaneous urbanization, new occupations, finan- cial panics, and unrestrained competition gave rise to status instability on a scale never known before. Many a bruised or disappointed European was ready to seek his fortune abroad, particularly since the new lands, tamed by the pioneers, no longer seemed wild and remote but rather like paradises where one could own land and start a new life. The invention of the steamship (the first one crossed the Atlantic in 1827) made the decision less irrevocable. (Davis 1974:98)

Before the great expansion of European people and culture, Europeans rep- resented about 18 percent of the world’s population, with almost 90 percent of them living in Europe itself. By the 1930s, at the peak of European domi- nance in the world, people of European origin in Europe, North America, and Oceania accounted for 35 percent of the world’s population (Durand 1967). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the percentage had declined to 16, and it is projected to drop below 13 percent by the middle of the century (United Nations Population Division 2013). However, even that may be a bit of an exag- geration, since the rate of growth in North American and European countries is increasingly influenced by immigrants and births to immigrants from developing nations.

“South” to “North” Migration Since the 1930s, the outward expansion of Europeans has ceased. Until then, European populations had been growing more rapidly than the populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but since World War II that trend has been reversed. The less developed areas now have by far the most rapidly growing populations, as we saw in Figure 2.4. It has been said that “population growth used to be a reward for doing well; now it’s a scourge for doing badly” (Blake 1979). This change in the pattern of population has resulted in a shift in the direction of migration. For the past several decades there has been far more migration from less developed countries (the “South”) to developed areas

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36 Part One A Demographic Perspective

(the “North”) than the reverse. Furthermore, since migrants are generally young adults of reproductive age, and since migrants from less developed areas generally have higher family size expectations than natives of the developed regions, their migration makes a disproportionate contribution over time to the overall popula- tion increase in the developed area to which they have migrated. As a result, the pro- portion of the population whose origin is one of the modern world’s less developed nations tends to be on the rise in nearly every developed country. Within the United States, for example, non-Hispanic whites (the European-origin population) are no longer the majority in the state of California, and it is likely that the Hispanic-origin population (largely of Mexican ancestry) will represent the majority of Californians by the middle of this century since the majority of all births in California (as in all southwestern states) are now to Hispanic mothers. Note that I use “Hispanic” rather than the often-used “Latino” only because the former term is most often found in government statistics.

When Europeans migrated, they were generally filling up territory that had very few people, because they tended to be moving in on land used by hunter-gatherers who, as noted above, use land extensively rather than intensively. Those seemingly empty lands or frontiers have essentially disappeared today, and as a consequence migration into a country now results in more noticeable increases in population density. And, just as the migration of Europeans was typically greeted with violence from the indigenous population upon whose land they were encroaching, migrants today routinely meet prejudice, discrimination, and violence in the places to which they have moved. These days migrants are most likely to be moving to cities, because that’s where the jobs are.

The Urban Revolution Until very recently in world history, almost everyone lived in basically rural areas. Large cities were few and far between. For example, Rome’s population of 650,000 in a.d. 100 was probably the largest in the ancient world (Chandler and Fox 1974). It is estimated that as recently as 1800, less than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in cities of 100,000 or more. Nearly half of all humans now live in cities of that size.

The redistribution of people from rural to urban areas occurred earliest and most markedly in the industrialized nations. For example, in 1800 about 10 percent of the English population lived in urban areas, primarily London. Now, 90 percent of the British live in cities. Similar patterns of urbanization have been experienced in other European countries, the United States, Canada, and Japan as they have industrialized. In the less developed areas of the world, urbanization was initially associated with a commercial response to industrialization in Europe, America, and Japan. In other words, in many areas where industrialization was not occurring, Europeans had established colonies or trade relationships. The principal economic activities in these areas were not industrial but commercial in nature, associated with buying and selling. The wealth acquired by people engaged in these activities naturally attracted attention and urban centers sprang up all over the world.

During the second half of the twentieth century, when the world began to urban- ize in earnest, the underlying cause was the rapid growth of the rural population

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37Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

(I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 9). The rural population in every less devel- oped nation has outstripped the ability of the agricultural economy to absorb it. Paradoxically, in order to grow enough food for an increasing population, people have had to be replaced by machines in agriculture (as I will discuss in Chapter 11), and that has sent the redundant rural population off to the cities in search of work. Herein lie the roots of many of the problems confronting the world in the twenty- first century.

Geographic Distribution of the World’s Population

The five largest countries in the world account for nearly half the world’s population (an estimated 47 percent in 2015) but only 21 percent of the world’s land surface. These countries include China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil, as you can see in Table 2.2. Rounding out the top 10 are Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Japan. Within these 10 most populous nations reside 58 percent of all people. You can see that you have to visit only the top 20 countries in order to shake hands with more than two out of very three people (69 percent) in the world. In doing so, you would travel across 40 percent of the earth’s land surface. The rest of the population is spread out among 175 or so other countries that account for the remaining 60 percent of the earth’s terrain.

If you set a goal to be as efficient as possible in maximizing the number of people you visit while minimizing the distance you travel, your best bet would be to schedule a trip to China and the Indian subcontinent. Four out of every ten people live in those two contiguous regions of Asia, and you can see how these areas stand out in the map of the world drawn with country size proportionate to population (see Figure 2.1, at the beginning of this chapter). Population growth in Asia is not a new story. In 1500, as Europeans were venturing beyond their shores, China and India (or more technically the Indian subcontinent, including the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) were already the most populous places on earth, and all of Asia accounted for 53 percent of the world’s 461 million people. Five centuries later, the population in Asian countries accounts for 61 percent of all the people on earth, although it is projected to drop back to 58 percent by the year 2050 because of their recent dramatic drop in fertility.

Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, had about as many people as Europe did in 1500, comprising 17 percent of the world’s population at that time. However, contact with Europeans tended to be deadly for Africans because of disease, vio- lence, and especially slavery. It has been estimated that the export slave trade actu- ally reversed African population growth from 1730 to 1850 (Manning and Griffith 1988). By the twentieth century, however, sub-Saharan Africa had rebounded in population size, comprising 13 percent of the total world population in 2015, and projected to be 22 percent of the total by 2050—even beyond where it had been in percentage terms in the year 1500, and with more than twice as many people as are projected to be in Europe in that year.

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39Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

Global Variation in Population Size and Growth

World population is currently growing at a rate of 1.15 percent annually, imply- ing a net addition of 84 million people per year, but there is a lot of variability underlying those global numbers. Germany and Russia, along with most countries in southern and eastern Europe, are expected to have fewer people in 2050 than in 2015. That is also the expectation for both China and Japan. Growth will take place largely in the less developed nations, as already shown in Figure 2.4, and in Figure 2.5 you can see where countries with the highest and lowest rates of growth are geographically. The most rapidly growing regions in the world tend to be in the mid-latitudes, and these are nations that are least developed economically—the “global south”; whereas the slowest growing are the richer nations, which tend to be more northerly and southerly (even though we label them as the “global north.” It has not always been that way, however.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, the populations of Europe and, especially, North America were the most rapidly growing in the world. During the decade of the 1930s, growth rates declined in those two areas to match approxi- mately those of most of the rest of the world, which was about 0.75 percent per year—a doubling time of 93 years. Since the end of World War II, the situation has changed again, and now Europe is on the verge of depopulation, while rapid growth is occurring in the less developed countries of Africa, Asia, and to lesser extent Latin America, which are now responsible for almost all of the world’s population increase.

Figure 2.5 Rates of population growth are highest in the middle latitudes Source: Adapted by the author from Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

Note: I defined close to world average as 0.95 to 1.35 percent per year; lower than world average was thus less than 0.95, and higher than world average was above 1.35.

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40 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Let’s examine these trends in more detail, focusing particular attention on the 20 most populous nations, with a few other countries included to help illustrate the variability of demographic situations in which countries find themselves.

North America

The United States and Canada—North America—have a combined population of 361 million as of 2015, representing just under 5 percent of the world’s total. The United States, with 325 million (third largest in the world), has 90 percent of North America’s population, with Canada’s 36 million people accounting for the remaining 10 percent. The demographic trajectories of the two countries are inter- twined but are not identical.

United States It does not take a demographer to notice that the population of the United States has undergone a total transformation since John Cabot (an Italian hired by the British to search the new world) landed in Newfoundland in 1497 and claimed North America for the British. As was true throughout the western hemi- sphere, European guns and diseases rather quickly decimated the native American Indian population, making it easier to establish a new culture. Europeans had dis- eases and weapons that had never been seen by the indigenous populations, but the indigenous population had nothing that was new and dangerous to the Europeans, save perhaps for syphilis (Crosby 2004).

No one knows the size of the indigenous population in North America when the Europeans arrived, which of course leads to a lot of speculation (Mann 2011). After reviewing the evidence, Snipp (1989) concluded that in 1492 the number might have been anywhere between 2 and 5 million (keep in mind that Central and South America had much larger populations). We are more certain that by 1850, disease and warfare had reduced the native population to perhaps as few as 250,000, while the European population had increased to 25 million. Indeed, it was widely assumed that the American Indian population was on the verge of disappearing (Snipp 1989).

Early America was a model of demographic decimation for the indigenous population, while being a model of rapid population growth for the European-ori- gin population. Yet even among the latter it was a land of substantial demographic contrasts. Among the colonies existing in the seventeenth century, for example, those in New England seem to have been characterized by very high birth rates (women had an average of seven to nine children) yet relatively low mortality rates (infant mortality rates in Plymouth Colony may have been as low or even lower than in some of today’s less developed nations, apparently a result of the fairly good health of Americans even during that era) (Demos 1965; Wells 1971, 1982). Demos notes that “the popular impression today that colonial families were extremely large finds the strongest possible confirmation in the case of Plymouth. A sample of some ninety families, about whom there is fairly reliable information, suggests that there was an average of seven to eight children per family who actu- ally grew to adulthood” (1965:270). In the southern colonies during the same time

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41Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

period, however, life was apparently much harsher, probably because the envi- ronment was more amenable to the spread of disease, including yellow fever and malaria. In the Chesapeake Bay colony of Charles Parish, higher mortality meant that few parents had more than two or three living children at the time of their death (Smith 1978).

Despite the regional diversity, the American population grew rather steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and though some of the increase in the number of Europeans in America was attributable to in-migration, the greater percentage actually was due to natural increase (the excess of births over deaths). The nation’s first census, taken in 1790, shortly after the American Revolution, counted 3.9 million Americans, and although the population was increasing by nearly 120,000 a year, only about 3 percent of the increase was a result of immi- gration. With a crude birth rate of about 55 births per thousand population (comparable to the highest national birth rates in the world today) and a crude death rate of about 28 deaths per thousand (close to the highest in the world today), there were twice as many people being born each year as were dying. At this rate, the population was doubling in size every 25 years.

Though Americans may picture foreigners pouring in seeking freedom or for- tune, it was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that migration became a substantial factor in American population growth. In fact, during the first half of the nineteenth century, immigration accounted for less than 5 percent of the popu- lation increase in each decade, whereas in every decade from the 1850s through the 1920s immigration accounted for at least 20 percent of the growth of population.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the birth rate in the United States was falling. There is evidence that fertility among American Quakers began to be limited at about the time of the American Revolution (Wells 1971; Leasure 1989), and the rest of the nation was only a few decades behind their pace. By the 1930s, fertility actually dropped below replacement level (as I discuss more thoroughly in Chapter 6). Furthermore, since restrictions on immigration had all but halted the influx of foreigners during the Great Depression, Americans were facing the prospect of potential depopulation.

The early post–World War II era upset forecasts of population decline to be replaced by the realities of a population explosion. The result was the period from 1946 to 1964 generally known as the “baby boom” era. It was a time when the United States experienced a rapid rate of increase in population accomplished almost entirely by increases in fertility. The baby boom, in turn, was followed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a “baby bust” (now widely known as Generation X, as I noted in the previous chapter). The birth rate bottomed out in 1976 and has been higher ever since, although not by very much (Martin et al. 2013). An echo of the baby boom was experienced as the “baby boomlet” of the 1980s, due largely to an increase in births by children of the baby boom, rather than an increase in the birth rate per woman.

Since the 1980s, fertility in the United States has remained at or just below the replacement level. Despite this low fertility, however, population growth has continued to be the order of the day largely because in the 1960s and then again in the 1990s adjustments of the nation’s immigration laws opened the doors wider. Indeed, the 1 million immigrants (legal and estimated undocumented) being added

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42 Part One A Demographic Perspective

each year account for nearly 40 percent of the annual increase in population. More importantly, from a demographic perspective, immigrants are primarily people of reproductive age and they are having children at a rate that is above replacement level. Indeed, variations in fertility levels in the United States are increasingly deter- mined by fertility differences among the various racial and ethnic groups.

Canada The French were the first Europeans to settle the area that has become Canada, but in 1763 the French government ceded control of the region to the British, and a century later the British North America Act of 1867 united all of the provinces of Canada into the Dominion of Canada, and every census since then has asked about “origins” as a way of keeping track of the numerical balance between the historically rival French-speaking and English-speaking groups (Boyd et al. 2000).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the high fertility of French speakers in Canada was legendary and they maintained higher-than-average levels of fertility until the 1960s (Beaujot 1978), probably due to the strong influence of the Catholic Church in Québec (McQuillan 2004). In the rest of Canada, fertility began to drop in the nineteenth century and, as in the United States, reached very low levels in the 1930s before rebounding after World War II in a baby boom that was similar in its impact on Canadian society to that experienced in the United States. This boom was similarly followed by a baby bust and then a small echo of the baby boom (Foot 1996). Canada (including the province of Québec) now has a fertility level that is well below replacement (1.6 children per woman).

Just as fertility is lower in Canada than in the United States, so is mortality, with life expectancy in Canada about two years longer than in the United States. In both of these respects the demographic profile of Canada is more like that of Europe than of the United States. However, when it comes to immigration, Canada more closely reflects the Northern American history of being a receiving ground for people from other nations. Despite its lower fertility, Canada’s overall rate of population growth exceeds that of the United States because it accepts more immigrants per person than the United States does (though the U. S. accepts a higher total number).

Mexico and Central America

Mexico and the countries of Central America have also been growing since the end of World War II as a result of rapidly dropping death rates and birth rates that have only more recently begun to drop. With a population in 2015 of 125 million (eleventh most populous in the world), Mexico accounts for about three-fourths of the population of the region, with the remainder distributed among (in order of size) Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Belize. The combined regional population of 170 million as estimated for the year 2015 is a little more than 2 percent of the world’s total.

Indigenous populations in Mexico and Central America had developed more advanced agricultural societies than had those in North America at the time of European contact. The Aztec civilization in central Mexico and the remnants of the Mayan civilization farther south centered near Guatemala encompassed many millions

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43Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

more people than lived on the northern side of what is now the United States–Mexico border. This fact, combined with the Spanish goal of extracting resources (a polite term for plundering) from the New World rather than colonizing it, produced a very different demographic legacy from what we find in Canada and the United States.

Mexico was the site of a series of agricultural civilizations as far back as 2,500 years before the invasion by the Spanish in 1519. Within a relatively short time after Europeans arrived, however, the population of several million was cut by as much as 80 percent due to disease and violence. This population collapse (a true implosion) was precipitated by contact with European diseases, but it reflects the fact that mortality was already very high before the arrival of the Europeans, and it did not take much to upset the demographic balance (Alchon 1997). By the begin- ning of the twentieth century, life expectancy was still very low in Mexico, less than 30 years (Morelos 1994), and fertility was very high in response to the high death rate. However, since the 1930s the death rate has dropped dramatically, and life expectancy in Mexico is now 79 years for women, six years above the world aver- age and only two years less than in the United States.

For several decades, this decline in mortality was not accompanied by a change in the birth rate, and the result was a massive explosion in the size of the Mexican population. In 1920, before the death rate began to drop, there were 14 million people in Mexico (Mier y Terán 1991). By 1950 that had nearly doubled to 26 million, and by 1970, it had nearly doubled again to 49 million. In the 1970s, the birth rate finally began to decline in Mexico, encouraged by a change in govern- ment policy that began promoting small families and the provision of family plan- ning. Mexican women had been bearing an average of six children each for many decades (if not centuries), but by 2015 this figure had dropped to 2.2 children per woman for the country, and in the capital of Mexico City fertility has dropped below replacement level to 1.8 children per woman (INEGI 2013). Nonetheless, until very recently the massive buildup of young people strained every ounce of the Mexican economy, encouraging outmigration, especially to the United States.

The other countries of Central America have experienced similar patterns of rapidly declining mortality, leading to population growth and its attendant pres- sures for migration to other countries where the opportunities might be better. Not every country in the region has experienced the same fertility decline as Mexico, however. In particular, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras are countries in which a high proportion of the population is indigenous (rather than being of mixed native and European origin), and they have birth rates that are well above the world average. Indeed, the average woman in Guatemala is having 3.9 children. However, Costa Rica has a more European pattern, with fertility that is below replacement, life expectancy that is the same as in the United States, and the need to import workers from its neighboring countries.

South America

The 415 million inhabitants of South America as of 2015 represent about 6 percent of the world’s total population, with Brazil alone accounting for half of that. Its

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44 Part One A Demographic Perspective

population of 204 million makes it the fifth most populous nation in the world. The modern history of Brazil began when Portuguese explorers found an indigenous hunter-gatherer population in that region and tried to enslave them to work on plan- tations. These attempts were unsuccessful, and the Portuguese wound up populating the colony largely with African slaves. The 4 million slaves taken to Brazil represent more than one-third of all slaves transported from Africa to the western hemisphere between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Thomas 1997). The Napoleonic Wars in Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century allowed Brazil, like most Latin American countries, to gain independence from Europe, and the economic development that followed ultimately led to substantial migration into Brazil from Europe during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The result is a society that is now about half European-origin and half African-origin or mixed race. Brazil also attracted Japanese immigrants early in the twentieth century and again after World War II.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Brazil experienced a reduction in fertility described as “nothing short of spectacular” (Martine 1996:47). In 1960, the aver- age Brazilian woman was giving birth to more than 6 children, but it had dropped to 2.5 by 1995 and it has since declined even further to 1.8—below replacement level. For many years, the influence of the Catholic Church was strong enough to cause the government to forbid the dissemination of contraceptive information or devices, but economic development beginning in the1960s seems clearly to have encouraged a decline in fertility, even if that drop was spatially uneven—starting first in the south and southeast and then spreading north and northeast from there (Schmertmann et al. 2008). The infant mortality rate of 21 deaths per 1,000 live births in Brazil is half the world average, and female life expectancy of 78 years is well above the world average.

The other countries of South America can be loosely divided into those three most southerly nations (including Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) in which the pop- ulations are predominantly of European origin, and the remaining countries with higher proportions of indigenous and mixed (mestizo) populations. The former tend to have lower fertility and higher life expectancy—levels very similar to Brazil’s. The other countries tend to have higher fertility, somewhat higher mortality, and higher rates of population growth.

Europe

The combined population of western, southern, northern (including Scandinavia), cen- tral, and eastern Europe (including Russia) is about 743 million, or about 11 percent of the world’s total. Russia is currently the most populous, accounting for 19 percent of Europe’s population. With 142 million, it is the ninth most populous country in the world. The next most populous countries in Europe are, in order, Germany (sixteenth most populous in the world), the United Kingdom, France, and Italy and they, along with Russia, comprise more than half (56 percent) of all Europeans.

Europe as a region is on the verge of depopulating. This is largely because its two largest nations, Russia and Germany, currently have more deaths than births and neither

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45Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

country is taking in enough immigrants to compensate for that fact. But the threat of depopulation actually extends to every country in eastern and southern Europe. No country in that part of Europe is projected to have more people in 2050 than they cur- rently have, whereas nearly every one of the northern and western European countries is expected to have the same number or slightly more people by mid-century.

It is not a coincidence that German demographics look more like eastern than western Europe. When East Germany was reunited with West Germany, the combined Germany inherited the East’s dismal demographics and that largely explains why Germany teeters on depopulation. Russia’s situation is especially noteworthy because depopulation is not just a result of below replacement fertility. Until very recently, life expectancy for males was actually declining, signaling major societal stresses. In fact, researchers have argued that the breakup of the Soviet Union was foreshadowed by its rise in death rates (Feshbach and Friendly 1992; Shkolnikov et al. 1996). The birth rate was already low in Russia before the breakup, and since then the average number of children being born per woman has remained well below replacement level.

The rest of Europe has experienced very low birth rates without the drop in life expectancy that has plagued Russia. Where population growth is occurring, such as in France, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, it is largely attributable to the immi- gration of people from less developed nations as well as from eastern Europe.

It should not be a surprise that fertility and mortality are both low in Europe, since that is the part of the world where mortality first began its worldwide decline approximately 250 years ago and where fertility began its worldwide decline about 150 years ago. What is surprising, however, is how low the birth rate has fallen. It is especially low in the Mediterranean countries of Italy and Spain, where fertility has dropped well below replacement level—in predominantly Catholic societies where fertility for most of history has been higher than in the rest of Europe. Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries have emerged with fertility rates that are now among the highest in Europe, although still below the replacement level, and as I discuss in both Chapters 6 and 10, it is likely that an improvement in the status of women may be required to push fertility levels in Europe back up to the replacement level. Through- out eastern and southern Europe women have been given the opportunity for educa- tion and a career, but traditional attitudes remain in terms of their domestic role. Combining a career with family-building is generally frowned upon and, in response, women have tended to choose a career and either a small family or no family at all.

I have already mentioned that a major consequence of the low birth rate is an aging of the population that has left Europe with too few young people to take jobs and pay taxes. Into this void have swept millions of immigrants, many of them illegal, and Europeans are very divided in their reaction to this phenomenon, as I note in the essay accompanying this chapter. Some see the immigrants as the neces- sary resource that will keep the economy running and pension checks flowing for aging Europeans. Others see the immigrants as a very real threat to the European way of life, coming as they mainly do from Africa and Asia.

The changing demographic fortunes of the global population is demonstrated by the fact that, as you can see in Table 2.2, in 1950 there were seven European countries in the world’s top 20; by 2015 there were only two; and by 2050 it is pro- jected that there will only be one.

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46 Part One A Demographic Perspective

IMPLOSION OR INVASION? THE CHOICES AHEAD FOR LOW-FERTILITY COUNTRIES

The world’s population as a whole is in no danger of imploding anytime soon—quite the opposite. But the same cannot be said for much of Europe and parts of East Asia. Several countries in these areas are either already declining in population or are on the verge of doing so. The populations in Europe and East Asia all have birth rates that are below replacement level and have been that way for some time now, leading to a declining num- ber of people at the younger ages. Further, it ap- pears that the low fertility in these countries is not just a temporary phenomenon (Basten et al. 2013). Rather, it seems that the motivation to have large families has disappeared, at least for the time be- ing, and has been replaced by a propensity to try to improve the family’s standard of living by limiting the number of children. Russia has the added complication of having lost a few years of life expectancy over the past couple of decades, especially among men, further accelerating its population implosion. Most of the other Eastern European nations combine low fertility with the de- mographic complication that people are leaving to go elsewhere, primarily to Western Europe, but also to North America.

According to data from the United Nations Population Division, there are 17 countries esti- mated to have fewer people in 2015 than they had in 2010. Of these, 14 are in Eastern Europe, led by Russia and several of its former members of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It is probably safe to say that the former Soviet Union has imploded. Germany is the only non–Eastern European country on the list, although as I note in this chapter its demograph- ics are heavily influenced by having absorbed East Germany. The two other countries among these 17 are Japan and Cuba.

The most controversial issue surrounding cur- rent or impending population decline is that it is associated with an aging population. I will discuss the “mechanics” of population aging in Chapter 8, but the important point here is that the older popu- lation is increasing faster than the younger popula- tion and that has obvious economic implications. This is due partly to increasing life expectancy at

the older ages (except in Russia), but mainly it is due to the very low birth rates in these countries. Furthermore, even if a nation’s population is not yet declining numerically, the shift in numbers to an increasingly older population is still problematic to the extent that older people are generally “takers” rather than “contributors” to the economy.

One reaction to this situation is to suggest that this is a good thing for the planet as a whole, if not necessarily for countries involved. Residents of Europe (and Japan) are among the highest per-person consumers of the earth’s resources, and if the populations eventually decline in size, their impact on the environment will be lower and the chance of global collapse thereby lessened (Diamond 2005). Within most of these countries, however, there is a concern about the economic impact of what many people are calling a “silver tsunami.” Who will earn the money that is to be paid to retirees as pensions? Who will pay for the health care and social needs of the elderly? Who will keep the economy going so that the standard of living does not drop even as the expenses asso- ciated with population aging go up?

Several solutions to this dilemma have been proposed, and they relate to (1) raising the birth rate; (2) increasing labor force participation; and (3) possibly replacing the “missing” population with immigrants. In Chapter 6, I will discuss the fer- tility situation in some detail, but here we can note that countries with the lowest fertility rates are, in fact, those in which the least accommodation has been made to permit women to have a job and a family simultaneously. The availability of child care, programs for maternity leave and family leave, and societal pressure for men to help with child rearing and housework all increase the ability of women to participate in the labor force and still have children. Men have always had that ability, of course, but many countries, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe and East Asia, have opened up the labor market to women without making it easy to com- bine a woman’s participation in the labor force with a family, and that has depressed birth rates below what they might otherwise be. Research- ers have also noted that the effect of a low birth rate would be a little less troublesome if women

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47Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

simply had children at a younger age, even if they had the same number as they are currently having (Lutz et al. 2003). This adjustment would shorten the time between generations and would actually increase the growth rate by a slight amount.

The impact of an aging population on a nation’s economy is exacerbated by an early age at retirement. For most of human history people sim- ply worked until they were physically no longer able to do so. Retirement has been widely available for scarcely more than the past half century, but ever since that option was offered, people have been grabbing it. Guess what? Most people prefer retire- ment to work. Thus, we have witnessed the situa- tion in which even as life expectancy has increased, people have been choosing to retire earlier. This wouldn’t be a problem if all of these people had actually saved up enough money to live comfortably during a protracted retirement, but this is largely not the case. For the most part, people have been promised a retirement pension that is based on the transfer of money (through taxation) from people currently in the labor force to people who are retired (the so-called “pay-as-you-go” or PAYGO scheme). As long as the population was growing and the economy was improving, these promises were easy to keep (almost like a Ponzi scheme), but when these very same people who now want to collect a pension have not had enough children to supply the needs of the labor force, there is a problem.

One of the solutions involves raising the age at retirement. This has several benefits. It post- pones the day when people will make a claim to a retirement pension, while at the same time keeping them in the labor force where they are economi- cally productive and are continuing to pay taxes to help support those who are no longer working. This idea makes sense for at least two reasons: (1) with increasing education, people are enter- ing the full-time labor force at older ages than pre- vailed when most old-age security schemes were put into place; and (2) life expectancy at the older ages is increasing, at the same time that physically exhausting jobs are on the decline, so most people are better able physically to stay in the labor force at older ages (Rau et al. 2013).

But the possibilities are even broader in scope. Vaupel and Kitowski (2008:255) note that “[w]ork hours must be spread more evenly over a longer life span. In this way, individuals will have the time necessary to bear and rear children and will be able to offer their expertise later in life. With such a policy, the elderly population would be occupied and supportive of society and youth would have the opportunity to conceive and care for children during those years in which they are physically able to do so.” You can see that the beauty of this plan is that it addresses not only the problem of retiring at too young an age, but it also is designed to promote higher levels of child- bearing among young couples by institutionalizing flexibility into the labor market.

Thus far, several European countries, includ- ing Germany and France, have raised the official retirement age, so there is some progress on this front, at least. The strongest motivation for govern- ments to think about the broader changes to the work life course is largely to avoid the only other viable solution—import labor. This is, for example, the history of England, Germany, France, and sev- eral other European countries who needed labor to rebuild their economies after World War II. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, European nations allowed migration from former colonies, and they instituted guest worker programs, in which people contract to work for a few years and then go home again. The rub is that many workers choose not to go home. They stay and build families and become part of the fabric of their adopted society.

If workers came for a while, worked, and then left as they got older and were replaced by younger people, immigration wouldn’t be too much of an issue. The Gulf States in the Middle East have managed to accomplish this largely by prohibiting workers from having families with them, and by forcing the deportation of workers who overstay their contract (Castles and Miller 2009). But Europeans have rarely been willing to take those extreme measures, so guest workers are likely to stay past the end of their contract to become undocumented immigrants. The real- ity, then, is that replacement migration in Europe

(continued)

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48 Part One A Demographic Perspective

means the immigration of not just workers but also their families, and within a generation or two the children of immigrants can become a major force in the demographic makeup of the receiv- ing countries. In the meantime, many of these immigrants are not in the labor force, and thus are neither working nor paying taxes, so they are not exactly “replacing” the missing young adults (Bijak et al. 2008).

France and the United Kingdom have both taken in significant numbers of permanent immi- grants from former colonies and, as a result, nei- ther one is projected to decline in population over the next several decades. But the fact that an estimated 10 percent of France’s population is now Muslim has created a variety of political and social dilemmas for that country. Data from the European Social Survey indicate that immi- gration is viewed negatively throughout Europe, mostly because of the perception that immigrants

undermine European culture. There is little bias against migrants from elsewhere in the European Union (EU). Rather, it is non-EU immigrants that create anxiety (Markaki and Longhi 2013).

Outside of Europe, we find that Japan, like other Asian countries, has an extremely restrictive immigration policy because of an explicit desire to preserve the country’s ethnic homogeneity. Although Japan does tolerate a small number of immigrants, it is unlikely that they will soon allow an invasion to prevent their impending implosion, despite concerns that declining population may significantly harm the nation’s economy.

Discussion Questions: (1) Do you think it is appropriate or even possible for Europeans to increase their birth rate in order to stave off depop- ulation? Why or why not? (2) Why do you think Europe is more worried about immigration than the United States, but at the same time less concerned than Japan?

Northern Africa and Western Asia

The areas of the world usually described as Northern Africa and Western Asia are very similar to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region which I discussed in some detail in the essay in Chapter 1. However, though Iran is part of MENA, it is technically in South Asia, not Western Asia, and there are a few countries north of MENA that were once part of the former Soviet Union, but are technically in Western Asia. Overall, Northern Africa and Western Asia have a combined popu- lation of 471 million as of 2015, which is projected to increase to 692 million by 2050. The region is characterized especially by the presence of Islam (with the obvi- ous notable exception of Israel), and by being one of the more rapidly growing areas of the world, in which violence and conflict have all too often gone hand in hand with rapid growth and youth bulges.

Egypt is the most populous of the countries in Northern Africa and Western Asia, with 85 million people (fifteenth most populous in the world), followed closely by Turkey with 77 million (eighteenth most populous). Together they account for more than one-third of the region’s total population. Egyptians are crowded into the narrow Nile Valley. With its rate of growth of 1.9 percent per year, Egypt’s population would double in 36 years without a significant drop in the birth rate, and this rapid growth constantly hampers even the most ambitious strategies for economic growth and development. Indeed, this is almost certainly a key reason for the political turmoil in Egypt. As is true for nearly all countries in this region of the world, the explosive growth in numbers is due to the dramatic drop in mortality

IMPLOSION OR INVASION? THE CHOICES AHEAD FOR LOW-FERTILITY COUNTRIES (CONTINUED)

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since the end of World War II. In 1937, the life expectancy at birth in Egypt was less than 40 years (Omran and Roudi 1993), whereas by now it has risen to 70. Even with such an improvement in mortality, however, death rates are just at the world average, while the number of children born to women (3.0) is well above the world average (2.5). Because of this high fertility, a very high proportion (31 percent) of the population is under age 15, and that is part of the recipe for the problems that beset Egypt.

It is the size and rate of increase in the youthful population that has been espe- cially explosive throughout northern Africa and the Arab societies of western Asia, as I alluded to in the previous chapter. Somewhat presciently, prior to the Arab Spring, The Economist (2009:8) put it succinctly: “By far the biggest difficulty fac- ing the Arabs—and the main item in the catalogue of socio-economic woes submit- ted as evidence of looming upheaval—is demography.” The rapid drop in mortality after World War II, followed by a long delay in the start of fertility decline, pro- duced a very large population of young people in need of jobs. They have spread throughout the region looking for work, and many have gone to Europe and North and South America. The economies within the region have not been able to keep up with the demand for jobs, and this has produced a generation of young people who, despite being better educated than their parents, face an uncertain future in an increasingly crowded world. The demographic situation has fueled discontent and has almost certainly contributed to the rise of radical Islam and terrorism.

Turkey has fared better demographically than most of the Arab nations that were once in its orbit when Turkey was the political center of the Ottoman Empire. Its fertility has recently dropped to replacement level and life expectancy is five years above the global average. The percentage of the population under 15 is steadily declining, and the overall rate of growth is sufficiently slow that the United Nations projects that by 2050 it will no longer be on the top 20 list. Its demography is edging closer to a European pattern, consistent with its push to join the European Union. At the same time, the western part of the Turkey (closer to Europe) is demo- graphically more European than the eastern part of the country, where fertility is much higher and female literacy much lower (Isik and Pinarcioglu 2006; Courbage and Todd 2011). It is notable that Turkey’s southeastern neighbors —Iraq and Syria—have high birth rates, high growth rates, high fractions under age 15, and high levels of conflict and violence. Unfortunately, these countries seem more typical of the region than does Turkey.

Sub-Saharan Africa

According to most evidence, Sub-Saharan Africa is the place from which all human life originated (see, for example, Wilson and Cann 1992), and the 949 million people living there now comprise 13 percent of the world’s total. Nigeria, with 183 million (seventh most populous in the world) accounts for nearly 1 in 5 of those 949 million, followed by Ethiopia (thirteenth most populous) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—nineteenth most populous in the world. Note that there are two countries with Congo in the name: the most populous (the Democratic

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50 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Republic) has Kinshasa as its capital, and the other less populous Republic of Congo has Brazzaville as its capital.

All three of these countries (as well as their neighbors) have incredibly high lev- els of fertility, especially considering the fact that death rates are much lower than they used to be. In both Nigeria and the Congo the average woman is currently hav- ing 6 children, while in Ethiopia the average is 4.5 children. Not surprisingly, these high birth rates, in combination with declining infant and child mortality, produce young populations. All three of these countries have very close to 45 percent of the population under age 15. This means rapid population growth, and Nigeria is projected to vault over the United States as the third most populous country by the middle of this century. Ethiopia is projected to move into the top 10, and the Congo will be close behind. Their neighbors, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, are also pro- jected to move into the top 20 by 2050.

South and Southeast Asia

South and Southeast Asia as a region is home to 2.4 billion people, one-third of the world’s total. The Indian subcontinent dominates this area demographically— India (the world’s second most populous nation), Pakistan (sixth), and Bangladesh (eighth) encompass two-thirds of the region’s population. But Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation (and the one with the largest Muslim population in the world), is also part of Southeast Asia, as are three other countries on the top 20 list—the Philippines (twelfth), Vietnam (fourteenth), and Thailand (twentieth). And we cannot forget that Iran, the world’s seventeenth most populous nation, is technically in South Asia, even though also in MENA, as I noted previously.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh Second to China in population size, at least for the moment, is India, with the current population estimated to be 1.3 billion, but projected to be 1.6 billion (more populous than China) by the middle of this century (see Table 2.2). Mortality is somewhat higher in India than in China, and the birth rate is quite a bit higher. Indian females have a life expectancy at birth of 68 years— five years below the world average, but a substantial improvement over the 27 years that prevailed back in the 1920s (Adlahka and Banister 1995). The infant mortality rate of 44 per 1,000 is higher than the world average, but it is also far lower than it was just a few decades ago. Women are bearing children at a rate of 2.4 each, and most children in India now survive to adulthood. With an annual growth rate of 1.5 percent, the Indian population is increasing by 19 million people each year. Thus, nearly one in four people being added to the world’s population annually is from India. The population of the Indian subcontinent is already more populous than mainland China, and that does not take into account the millions of people of Indian and Pakistani origin who are living elsewhere in the world.

India’s population is culturally diverse, and this is reflected in rather dra- matic geographic differences in fertility and rates of population growth within the country. In the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, fertility had dropped below the replacement level by the mid-1990s and has stayed there since. However,

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51Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

in the four most populous states in the north (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh), where 40 percent of the Indian population lives, the average woman was bearing more than three children, according to fertility survey data (Measure DHS 2014).

At the end of World War II, when India was granted its independence from British rule, the country was divided into predominantly Hindu India and pre- dominantly Muslim Pakistan, with the latter having territory divided between West Pakistan and East Pakistan. In 1971, a civil war erupted between the two discon- nected Pakistans, and, with the help of India, East Pakistan won the war and became Bangladesh. Although Pakistan and Bangladesh are both Muslim, Bangladesh has a demographic profile that now looks more like India than Pakistan. The average woman in Bangladesh now gives birth to 2.3 children (slightly fewer than in India), whereas fertility in Pakistan has remained much higher (currently 3.8 children per woman). The overall rate of population growth in Bangladesh is 1.5 percent per year (exactly the same as India’s), but it is 2.3 percent per year in Pakistan. Still, both Pakistan and Bangladesh have grown so much since independence in 1947 that, were they still one country, they would be the third most populous nation in the world.

Indonesia and the Philippines Indonesia is a string of nearly 18,000 islands in Southeast Asia, with an estimated 256 million people spread out among nearly 1,000 of those islands. A former Dutch colony, it has experienced a substantial decline in fertility in recent years, but Indonesian women nonetheless are bearing an above-average level of 2.6 children each. Given the increasing life expectancy, now just a year below the world average, the population is growing at 1.5 percent per year—similar to India and Bangladesh. For several decades, Indonesia has dealt with population growth through a program of transmigration, in which people have been sent from the more populous to the less populous islands. These largely for- ested outer islands have suffered environmentally from the human encroachment, without necessarily dealing successfully with Indonesia’s basic dilemma, which is how to raise its burgeoning young adult population out of poverty. This dilemma has contributed to increased political instability, as well as a rise in the level of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

The Philippines is a set of more than 7,000 islands to the north of Indonesia. About 2,000 of those islands are inhabited. It has even higher fertility than Indonesia (an average of 3.0 children per woman), but also experiences more outmigration than does Indonesia. This may relieve some of the pressure felt in the Philippines by the fact of having a large youth population, but the country is still struggling under the weight of its demographic growth. Although the country is predominantly Catholic, concentrated especially in the northern Luzon islands, there have long been clashes with Muslims in the southern group of islands comprising Mindanao. These ethno-religious differences are reflected in the demographic trends, with lower fertility and child mortality in the Luzon region than in the Mindanao region.

Vietnam and Thailand Back on the Asian mainland, we find that Vietnam and Thailand have both boomed demographically since the days when the United States was involved in this region’s conflict. Vietnam, in particular, has nearly doubled

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52 Part One A Demographic Perspective

in population since the Vietnam War ended in 1975. That was largely a result of a swift drop in mortality unaccompanied immediately by a decline in fertility, thus leading to a huge youth bulge. Recognizing the threat to development, Vietnam introduced a national family planning policy in 1988 encouraging (although not forcing) couples to have only one or two children (Goodkind 1995). That policy, in concert with Chinese-style free-market economic reforms, led to a swift drop in the number of children per woman—from an average of 6 each in 1975 to replacement level in 2000, where it has stayed. The result has been the same kind of “demo- graphic dividend” that China has experienced, as I note below.

Fertility and mortality both dropped sooner in Thailand than in Vietnam. As early as the 1990s, fertility levels were below replacement in the capital of Bangkok, and the rest of the country quickly followed suit. However, as in Vietnam, the swift decline in fertility meant that there was a huge youth bulge that swelled the popu- lation, even though at an individual level women were not bearing many children. Now, however, the country is aging and is expected to have fewer people in 2050 than now, thereby dropping off the top 20 list by mid-century.

Iran With 79 million people, Iran is the most populous Shia-majority Muslim country in the world (followed by Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain—the only other Shia-majority countries). Like Vietnam and Thailand, it has experienced a very rapid fertility decline—from an average of 6 children per woman as recently as 1985 to below replacement level today (Lutz et al. 2010; Courbage and Todd 2011). This has gone hand in hand with a rise in female literacy and other forms of moderniza- tion taking place in the country, despite the generally conservative attitude of the government. Here again we see a population that now has low fertility and high life expectancy but which is still experiencing fairly rapid population growth because of the momentum built into the large youth bulge created by the high fertility of the recent past. I will return to the theme of population momentum in Chapter 8 in the discussion of the age transition.

East Asia

East Asia has 1.6 billion people, with the region dominated demographically by China, the most populous country in the world with 1.4 billion people, and Japan, the tenth most populous even though its 127 million is less than ten percent of China’s size. Overall, East Asia includes more than 20 percent of the world’s total population, but its share is diminishing as China continues to brake its popula- tion growth and as Japan teeters on the edge of depopulation. Indeed, these two countries, along with South Korea and Taiwan (the other major countries in the region) are projected to have fewer people in 2050 than they do now.

China With one-fifth of all human beings, The People’s Republic of China dominates the map of the world drawn to scale according to population size (see Figure 2.1). If we add in the Chinese in Taiwan (which the government of mainland China still claims as its own), Singapore, and the overseas Chinese elsewhere in

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53Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

the world, closer to one out of every four people is of Chinese origin. Nonetheless, China’s share of the world’s total population actually peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1850, more than one in three people were living in China, and that fraction has steadily declined over time, even as China’s population contin- ued to grow in absolute numbers, fueled by high birth rates that tended to compen- sate for the high death rates.

After the communist overthrow of China in 1949, the government at first tried to ignore the country’s demographic bulk, partly for Marxist ideological reasons that I will discuss in the next chapter. However, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China began to take stock of the magnitude of its problem. In 1982 it con- ducted its first national census since 1964 (which had been taken shortly after the terrible famine that I mentioned earlier). Fertility had begun to decline in earnest by then, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, but nonetheless the census counted more than 1 billion people. The general government attitude was summed up in the mid-1990s as follows:

Despite the outstanding achievements made in population and development, China still confronts a series of basic problems including a large population base, insufficient cul- tivated land, under-development, inadequate resources on a per capita basis and an un- even social and economic development among regions. . . . Too many people has [sic] impeded seriously the speed of social and economic development of the country and the rise of the standard of living of the people. Many difficulties encountered in the course of social and economic development are directly attributable to population problems. (Peng 1996:7)

Fertility decline actually began in China’s cities in the 1960s and spread rapidly throughout the rest of the country in the 1970s, when the government introduced the family planning program known as wan xi shao, meaning “later” (marriage), “longer” (birth interval), “fewer” (children) (Goldstein and Feng 1996). In 1979, this was transformed into the now famous (if not infamous) one-child policy, but fertility was already on its way down by that time (Riley 2004). Indeed, it dropped to replacement level in the 1990s and has stayed there since.

Although China’s birthrate has now dropped to 1.5 children per woman, that does not yet mean that the population has stopped growing—population momentum again rears its head. Despite its low birth rate, the number of births each year in China is nearly twice the number of deaths just because China is paying for its previous high birth rate. There are so many young women of reproductive age (women born 25 to 45 years ago when birth rates were still above replacement level) that their babies still outnumber the people who are dying each year. As a result, the rate of natural increase in China is essentially the same as in the United States, despite the lower fertility rate.

China has famously used its “demographic dividend” (a bulge of adults unen- cumbered by a lot of children due to the rapid decline in fertility) to create jobs and grow its economy. But this is just a transition period for China between its formerly very young population and its quickly aging population. Thus, population growth remains a serious concern in China, but the concern is now turning from the young population to the rapidly increasing number and proportion of older Chinese—the

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54 Part One A Demographic Perspective

inevitable consequence of a rapid decline in fertility in a nation where mortality is also low. China may be unique in the world in “getting old” before it has gotten rich. Despite a loosening of the one-child policy by the government in 2013, no one anticipates a huge increase in China’s birth rate, and it is projected to decline in population between now and the middle of the century, yielding its long-held posi- tion of most populous to India.

Japan Population size probably peaked in Japan in 2010 and is now slowly on the way down. The decline is actually slower than it might be due to the fact Japan has the lowest level of mortality in the world, with a female life expectancy at birth of 86 years. Japan’s health (accompanied by its wealth) translates demographically into very high probabilities of survival to old age—indeed, more than half of all Japanese born this year will likely still be alive at age 80. This very low mortality rate is accompanied by very low fertility. Japanese women are bearing an average of 1.4 children each, leading some pundits to suggest that Japan has its own “one-child policy.” Japan’s low mortality and low fertility have produced a population in which only 13 percent are under age 15, whereas 26 percent are 65 or older. The United Nations forecasts that by 2050 the percent under 15 will have dropped still slightly to 12 percent, while the percent 65 and older will have jumped to 37. This will be associated with a projected population decline from the current 127 million down to 108 million, although it will still be in the top 20 in 2050, as you can see in Table 2.2.

Oceania

None of the countries in Oceania is populous enough to be on the top 20 list. It is home to a wide range of indigenous populations, including Melanesian and Polynesian, but European influence has been very strong, and the region is generally thought of as being “overseas European.” Its population of 39 million is just slightly more than Canada’s, and is less than 1 percent of the world’s total. Australia accounts for two- thirds of the region’s population, followed by Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.

In a pattern repeated elsewhere in the world, the lowest birth rates and lowest death rates (and thus the lowest rates of population growth) are found in countries whose populations are largely European-origin (Australia and New Zealand, in this case); whereas the countries with a higher fraction of the population of indigenous origin have higher birth rates, higher mortality, and substantially higher rates of popu- lation growth (exemplified in Oceania by Papua New Guinea). Much of Australia’s population growth is fueled by immigration, especially from Asia, and this is leading to a situation not unlike that in the United States, where an increasingly older European- origin population is supported by a younger generation of children of immigrants.

This whirlwind global tour highlights the tremendous demographic contrasts that exist in the modern world. In the less developed nations, the population contin- ues to grow quickly, especially in absolute terms, not just in terms of rates of growth. In sub-Saharan Africa this is happening even in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Yet, in the more developed countries population growth has slowed, stopped, or in some places even started to decline. As we look around the world, we see that the

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more rapidly growing countries tend to have high proportions of people who are young, poor, prone to disease, and susceptible to political instability. The countries that are growing slowly or not at all tend to have populations that are older, richer, and healthier, and these are the nations that are politically more stable.

There is almost certainly something to the idea that “demography is destiny”— a country cannot readily escape the demographic changes put into motion by the universally sought-after decline in mortality. Each country has to learn how to read its own demographic situation and cope as well as it can with the inevitable changes that will take place as it evolves through all phases of the demographic transition.

Summary and Conclusion

High death rates kept the number of people in the world from growing rapidly until approximately the time of the Industrial Revolution. Then improved living condi- tions, public health measures, and, more recently, medical advances dramatically accelerated the pace of growth. As populations have grown, the pressure or desire to migrate has also increased. The vast European expansion into less developed areas of the world, which began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but acceler- ated in the nineteenth century, is a notable illustration of massive migration and population redistribution. Today migration patterns have shifted, and people are mainly moving from less developed to more developed nations. Closely associated with migration and population density is the urban revolution—that is, the move- ment from rural to urban areas.

The current world situation finds China and India to be the most populous countries, followed by the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Everywhere popula- tion is growing we find that death rates have declined more rapidly than have birth rates, but there is considerable global and regional variability in both the birth and death rates and thus in the rate of population growth. Dealing with the pressure of an expanding young population is the task of developing countries; whereas more developed countries, along with China, have aging populations and are coping with the fact that the demand for labor in their economies may have to be met by immi- grants from more rapidly growing countries.

Demographic dynamics represent the leading edge of social change in the mod- ern world. It is a world of more than 7 billion people, heading to more than 9 billion by the middle of this century and probably even more beyond that.

In order to cope with these demographic underpinnings of our lives, we need to have a demographic perspective that allows us to sort out the causes and conse- quences of population change. We turn to that in the next chapter.

Main Points

1. During the first 90 percent of human existence, the population of the world had grown only to the size of today’s New York City.

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56 Part One A Demographic Perspective

2. Between 1750 and 1950, the world’s population mushroomed from 800 million to 2.5 billion, and since 1950 it has expanded to more than 7 billion.

3. Despite the fact that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, more than one in ten people ever born is currently alive.

4. Early population growth was slow not because birth rates were low but because death rates were high; on the other hand, continuing population increases are due to dramatic declines in mortality without a matching decline in fertility.

5. World population growth has been accompanied by migration from rapidly growing areas into less rapidly growing regions. Initially, that meant an out- ward expansion of the European population, but more recently it has meant migration from less developed to more developed nations.

6. Migration has also involved the shift of people from rural to urban areas, and urban regions on average are currently growing more rapidly than ever before in history.

7. Although migration is crucial to the demographic history of the United States and Canada, both countries have grown largely as a result of natural increase— the excess of births over deaths—after the migrants arrived.

8. At the time of the American Revolution, fertility levels in North America were among the highest in the world. Now they are low, although not as low as in Europe.

9. The world’s 10 most populous countries are the People’s Republic of China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Japan. Together they account for 59 percent of the world’s population.

10. Almost all of the population growth in the world today is occurring in the less developed nations, leading to an increase in the global demographic contrasts among countries.

Questions for Review

1. Describe what you think might be the typical day in the life of a person living in a world where death rates and birth rates are both very high. How might those demographic imperatives influence everyday life? How would “culture” be dif- ferent from today as a result?

2. The media in the United States and Europe regularly have stories about the impact of low fertility slowing down population growth in these countries. If you were asked to be on a TV talk show commenting on such a story, how would you respond?

3. Migration of people into other countries is a major part of the demography of the modern world. How do you think the world of 2050 will look demographi- cally as a consequence of the trends currently in place?

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57Chapter 2 Global Population Trends

4. Even without migration, the world will look very different in 2050 than it did in 1950. Analyze Table 2.2 in terms of the idea that “the past is a foreign country.”

5. How would you explain the regional patterns that are very observable with re- spect to global demography? Are European countries more like each other than they are like Asian countries? Is Africa unique demographically? Are national boundaries therefore meaningless when it comes to population trends?

Websites of Interest

1. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/ Hans Rosling is a Swedish academic—Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute in Sweden and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation (gapminder.org). In this program prepared for BBC in 2013, he talks about the current world population situation. Check out his other population-related talks because he does a nice job of explaining things visually.

2. http://censusindia.gov.in You don’t have to take anybody else’s word for what’s happening demographically in India. This Indian census website is in English and has lots of data for the country and its regions.

3. http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v3 The Gridded Population of the World is a database created from censuses, surveys, satellite imagery, and other sources, producing a very realistic picture of population density and other characteristics at the global level. Regional maps and data are also available at this website.

4. http://www.worldpop.org.uk The WorldPop project was initiated in October 2013 to combine the AfriPop, AsiaPop, and AmeriPop population mapping projects. It aims to provide an open access archive of spatial demographic datasets for Central and South America, Africa and Asia to support development and health applications. The methods used are designed with full open access and operational application in mind, using transparent, fully documented and shareable methods to produce easily updatable maps with accompanying metadata.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/Global%20Population%20Trends Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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CHAPTER 3 Demographic Perspectives

PREMODERN POPULATION DOCTRINES

THE PRELUDE TO MALTHUS

THE MALTHUSIAN PERSPECTIVE Causes of Population Growth Consequences of Population Growth Avoiding the Consequences Critique of Malthus Neo-Malthusians

THE MARXIAN PERSPECTIVE Causes of Population Growth Consequences of Population Growth Critique of Marx

THE PRELUDE TO THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION THEORY

Mill Dumont Durkheim

THE THEORY OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

Critique of the Demographic Transition Theory Reformulation of the Demographic Transition

Theory The Theory of Demographic Change and Response Cohort Size Effects Is There Something Beyond the Demographic

Transition?

Figure 3.1 Population Density of the World Source: Adapted by the author from Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University, and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical - CIAT. 2005. Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): Population Density Grid, Future Estimates. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v3-population-density-future-estimates. Accessed 2014. Data are based on United Nations Population Division projections for the year 2015.

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59Chapter 3 Demographic Perspectives

THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION IS REALLY A SET OF TRANSITIONS

The Health and Mortality Transition The Fertility Transition The Age Transition

The Migration Transition The Urban Transition The Family and Household Transition Impact on Society

ESSAY: Who Are the Neo-Malthusians?

To get a handle on population problems and issues, you have to put the facts of population together with the “whys” and “wherefores.” In other words, you need a demographic perspective—a way of relating basic information to theories about how the world operates demographically. A demographic perspective will guide you through the sometimes tangled relationships between population factors (such as size and growth, geographic distribution, age structure, and other sociodemo- graphic characteristics) and the rest of what is going on in society. As you develop your demographic perspective, you will acquire a new awareness about your own community, as well as about national and world political, economic, and social is- sues. You will be able to understand the influences that demographic changes have had (or might have had), and you will consider the demographic consequences of events, which historically have been huge and transformative.

In this chapter, I discuss several theories of how population processes are entwined with general social processes. There are actually two levels of population theory. At the core of demographic analysis is the technical side of the field—the mathematical and biomedical theories that predict the kinds of changes taking place in the biological components of demography: fertility, mortality, and the distribution of a population by age and sex. Demography, for example, has played a central role in the develop- ment of the fields of probability, statistics, and sampling (Kreager 1993). This hard core is crucial to our understanding of human populations, but there is a “softer” (although no less important) outer wrapping of theory that relates demographic pro- cesses to the real events of the social world (Schofield and Coleman 1986). The link- age of the core with its outer wrapping is what produces a demographic perspective.

Two questions have to be answered before you will be able to develop your own perspective: (1) What are the causes of population change; and (2) What are the consequences of population change? In this chapter, I discuss several perspec- tives that provide broad answers to these questions and that also introduce the major lines of demographic theory. The purpose of this review is to give you a start in developing your own demographic perspective by taking advantage of what oth- ers have learned and passed on to us.

I begin this chapter with a brief review of premodern thinking on the subject of population. Most of these ideas are what we call doctrine, as opposed to the- ory. Early thinkers were certain they had the answers and certain that their proc- lamations represented the truth about population growth and its implications for society. By contrast, the essence of modern scientific thought is to assume that you do not have the answer and to acknowledge that you are willing to consider evi- dence regardless of the conclusion to which it points. In the process of sorting out

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60 Part One A Demographic Perspective

the evidence, we develop tentative explanations (hypotheses and then theories) that help guide our thinking and our search for understanding. In demography, as in all of the sciences, theories replace doctrine when new, systematically collected infor- mation (censuses and other sources discussed in the next chapter) becomes avail- able, allowing people to question old ideas and formulate new ones. Table 3.1 summarizes the doctrines and theories discussed in the chapter.

Date Demographic Perspective

Examples of Premodern Doctrines

~1300 b.c. Book of Genesis—“Be fruitful and multiply.” ~500 b.c. Confucius—Population growth is good, but

governments should maintain a balance between population and resources.

360 b.c. Plato—Population quality more important than quantity; emphasis on population stability.

340 b.c. Aristotle—Population size should be limited and the use of abortion might be appropriate.

~50 b.c. Cicero—Population growth necessary to main- tain Roman influence

a.d. 400 St. Augustine—Abstinence is the preferred way to deal with human sexuality; the second best is to marry and procreate.

a.d. 1280 St. Thomas Aquinas—Celibacy is not better than marriage and procreation.

a.d. 1380 Ibn Khaldun—Population growth is inherent- ly good because it increases occupational specialization and raises incomes.

1500–1800 Mercantilism—Increasing national wealth depends on a growing population that can stimulate export trade

1700–1800 Physiocrats—Wealth of a nation is in land, not people; therefore population size depends on the wealth of the land, which is stimulated by free trade (laissez-faire).

Modern Theories 1798 Malthus—Population grows exponentially while food supply grows arithmetically, with misery (poverty) being the result in the absence of moral restraint

~1800 Neo-Malthusian—Accepting the basic Malthu- sian premise that population growth tends to outstrip resources, but unlike Malthus believing that birth control measures are ap- propriate checks to population growth.

~1844 Marxian—Each society at each point in his- tory has its own law of population that determines the consequences of population growth; poverty is not the natural result of population growth.

Table 3.1 Demographic Perspectives over Time

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Premodern Population Doctrines

Until about 2,500 years ago, human societies probably shared a common concern about population: They valued reproduction as a means of replacing people lost through universally high mortality. Ancient Judaism, for example, provided the pre- scription to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Indeed, reproductive power was often deified, as in ancient Greece, where it was the job of a variety of goddesses to help mortals successfully bring children into the world and raise those children to adulthood. In two of the more developed areas of the world 2,500 years ago, however, awareness of the potential for populations to grow beyond their resources prompted comment by well-known philosophers. In the fifth century b.c., the writ- ings of the school of Confucius in China discussed the relationship between popula- tion and resources (Sauvy 1969), and it was suggested that the government should move people from overpopulated to underpopulated areas (an idea embraced in the twentieth century by the Indonesian government). Nonetheless, the idea of promot- ing population growth was clear in the doctrine of Confucius (Keyfitz 1973).

Plato, writing in The Laws in 360 b.c., emphasized the importance of popu- lation stability rather than growth. Specifically, Plato proposed keeping the ideal

Table 3.1 (continued)

Date Demographic Perspective

~1873 to 1929

Prelude to the demographic transition, includ- ing Mill, Dumont, Durkheim, and Thompson

1945 Demographic transition in its original for- mulation—The process whereby a country moves from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates with an interstitial spurt in population growth. Explanations based originally on modernization theory.

1962 Earliest studies suggesting the need to refor- mulate the demographic transition theory.

1963 Theory of demographic change and re- sponse—Demographic response made by individuals to population pressures is determined by the means available to them to respond; causes and consequences of population change are intertwined.

1968 Easterlin relative cohort size hypothesis— Successively larger young cohorts put pres- sure on young men’s relative wages, forcing them to make a tradeoff between family size and overall well-being.

1971–present Decomposition of the demographic transition into its separate transitions—Health and mortality, fertility, age, migration, urbaniza- tion, and family and household.

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62 Part One A Demographic Perspective

community of free citizens (as differentiated from indentured laborers or slaves who had few civil rights) at a constant 5,040. Charbit (2002:216) suggests that “what inspired Plato in his choice of 5,040 is above all the fact that it is divisible by twelve, a number with a decisive sacred dimension,” a legacy carried on in the 12 months of the year, among dozens (pun intended) of other aspects of modern life. The num- ber of people desired by Plato was still moderately small, because Plato felt that too many people led to anonymity, which would undermine democracy, whereas too few people would prevent an adequate division of labor and would not allow a community to be properly defended. Population size would be controlled by late marriage, infanticide, and migration (in or out as the situation demanded) (Plato 360 b.c. [1960]). Plato was an early proponent of the doctrine that quality in humans is more important than quantity.

In the Roman Empire, the reigns of Julius and Augustus Caesar were marked by clearly pronatalist doctrines—a necessity, given the very high mortality that char- acterized the Roman era (Frier 1999). In approximately 50 b.c., Cicero noted that population growth was seen by the leaders of Rome as a necessary means of replac- ing war casualties and of ensuring enough people to help colonize new lands. Sev- eral scholars have speculated, however, that by the second century a.d., as the old, pagan Roman empire was waning in power, the birth rate in Rome may have been declining (Stangeland 1904; Veyne 1987). In a thoroughly modern sentiment, Pliny (“the younger”) complained that “. . . in our time most people hold that an only son is already a heavy burden and that it is advantageous not to be overburdened with posterity” (quoted in Veyne 1987:13).

The Middle Ages in Europe, which followed the decline of Rome and its trans- formation from a pagan to a Christian society, were characterized by a combination of both pronatalist and antinatalist Christian doctrines. Christianity condemned polygamy, divorce, abortion, and infanticide—practices that had kept earlier Roman growth rates lower than they otherwise might have been. The early and highly influential Christian leader, mystic, and writer Augustine (a.d. 354–430) interpreted the message of Paul in the New Testament to mean that virgins were the highest form of human existence. Human sexuality was, in Augustine’s view, a supernaturally good thing but also an important cause of sin (because most peo- ple are unable or unwilling to control their desires) (O’Donnell 2006). He believed that abstinence was the best way to deal with sexuality (an antinatalist view), but the second-best state was marriage, which existed for the purpose of procreation (a pronatalist view). This duality shows up most clearly in the Roman Catholic Church where priests take a vow of abstinence while urging their parishioners to have as many children as possible.

The time between the end of the Roman Empire (fifth century a.d.) and the Renaissance (fifteenth century a.d.) was an economically stagnant, fatalistic period of European history. While Europe muddled through the Middle Ages, Islam (which had emerged in the seventh century a.d.) was expanding through- out the Mediterranean. Muslims took control of southern Italy and the Iberian peninsula and, under the Ottoman Empire, controlled the Balkans and the rest of southeastern Europe. Europe’s reaction to this situation was the Crusades, a series of wars launched by Christians to wrestle control away from Muslims. These

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expeditions were largely unsuccessful from a military perspective, but they did put Europeans into contact with the Muslim world, which ultimately led to the Renaissance—the rebirth of Europe:

The Islamic contribution to Europe is enormous, both of its own creations and of its borrowings—reworked and adapted—from the ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean and from the remoter cultures of Asia. Greek science and philosophy, preserved and improved by the Muslims but forgotten in Europe; Indian numbers and Chinese paper; oranges and lemons, cotton and sugar, and a whole series of other plants along with the methods of cultivating them—all these are but a few of the many things that medieval Europe learned or acquired from the vastly more advanced and more sophisticated civilization of the Mediterranean Islamic world. (Lewis 1995:274)

By the fourteenth century, one of the great Arab historians and philosophers, Ibn Khaldun, was in Tunis writing about the benefits of a growing population. In particular, he argued that population growth creates the need for specialization of occupations, which in turn leads to higher incomes, concentrated especially in cities: “Thus, the inhabitants of a more populous city are more prosperous than their counterparts in a less populous one. . . . The fundamental cause of this is the dif- ference in the nature of the occupations carried on in the different places. For each town is a market for different kinds of labour, and each market absorbs a total expenditure proportionate to its size” (quoted in Issawi 1987:268). Ibn Khaldun was not a utopian. His philosophy was that societies evolved and were transformed as part of natural and normal processes. One of these processes was that “pro- creation is stimulated by high hopes and resulting heightening of animal energies” (quoted in Issawi 1987:268).

To be sure, the cultural reawakening of Europe took place in the context of a growing population, as I noted in the previous chapter. Not surprisingly, then, new murmurings were heard about the place of population growth in the human scheme of things. The Renaissance began with the Venetians, who had established trade with Muslims and others as the eastern Mediterranean ceased to be a Crusade war zone in the thirteenth century. In that century, an influential Dominican monk, Thomas Aquinas, argued that marriage and family building were not inferior to celibacy, thus implicitly promoting the idea that population growth is an inherently good thing.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the plague had receded from Europe; by the sixteenth century, Muslims (and Jews) had been expelled from southern Spain, and Europeans had begun their discovery and exploitation of Africa, the Americas, and south Asia. Cities began to grow noticeably, and Giovanni Botero, a sixteenth- century Italian statesman, wrote that “the powers of generation are the same now as one thousand years ago, and, if they had no impediment, the propagation of man would grow without limit and the growth of cities would never stop” (quoted in Hutchinson 1967:111). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an his- torically unprecedented trade (the so-called Columbian Exchange) of food, manu- factured goods, people, and disease between the Americas and most of the rest of the world (Crosby 1972), undertaken largely by European merchants, who had the best ships and the deadliest weapons in the world (Cipolla 1965; Diamond 1997).

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64 Part One A Demographic Perspective

This rise in trade, prompted at least in part by population growth, generated the doctrine of Mercantilism among the new nation-states of Europe. Mercantilism maintained that a nation’s wealth was determined by the amount of precious metals it had in its possession, which were acquired by exporting more goods than were imported, with the difference (the profit) being stored in precious metals. The catch here was that a nation had to have things to produce to sell to others, and the idea was that the more workers you had, the more you could produce. Further- more, if you could populate the new colonies, you would have a ready-made mar- ket for your products. Thus population growth was seen as essential to an increase in national revenue, and Mercantilist writers sought to encourage it by a number of means, including penalties for non-marriage, encouragements to get married, lessening penalties for illegitimate births, limiting out-migration (except to their own colonies), and promoting immigration of productive laborers. It is important to keep in mind that these doctrines were concerned with the wealth and welfare of a specific country, not all of human society. “The underlying doctrine was, either tacitly or explicitly, that the nation which became the strongest in material goods and in men would survive; the nations which lost in the economic struggle would have their populations reduced by want, or they would be forced to resort to war, in which their chances of success would be small” (Stangeland 1904:183).

Mercantilist doctrines were supported by the emerging demographic analyses of people like John Graunt, William Petty, and Edmund Halley (all English) in the seventeenth century, and Johann Peter Süssmilch, an eighteenth-century chaplain in the army of Frederick the Great of Prussia (now Germany). In 1662, John Graunt, a Londoner who is sometimes called the father of demography, analyzed the series of Bills of Mortality in the first known statistical analysis of demographic data (Sutherland 1963). Although he was a haberdasher by trade, Graunt used his spare moments to conduct studies that were truly remarkable for his time. He discovered that for every 100 people born in London, only 16 were still alive at age 36 and only 3 at age 66 (Graunt 1662 [1939]; Dublin et al. 1949)—suggesting very high levels of mortality. With these data he uncovered the high incidence of infant mor- tality in London and found, somewhat to the amazement of people at the time, that there were regular patterns of death in different parts of London. Graunt “opened the way both for the later discovery of uniformities in many social or volitional phenomena like marriage, suicide, and crime, and for a study of these uniformities, their nature and their limits; thus he, more than any other man, was the founder of statistics” (Willcox 1936:xiii). Indeed, Harrison and Carroll (2005) note that Graunt’s studies are thought by many people to mark the beginning of social science as we know it today, not just statistics or demography.

One of Graunt’s close friends (and probably the person who coaxed him into this work) was William Petty, a member of the Royal Society in London (Kreager 1988) and arguably the man who invented the field of economics (The Economist 2013). Petty circulated Graunt’s work to the Society (which would not have otherwise paid much attention to a “tradesman”), and this brought it to the attention of the emerging scientific world of seventeenth-century Europe. Several years later, in 1693, Edmund Halley (of Halley’s comet fame) became the first scientist to elaborate on the probabilities of death. Although Halley, like Graunt,

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65Chapter 3 Demographic Perspectives

was a Londoner, he came across a list of births and deaths kept for the city of Breslau in Silesia (now Poland). From these data, Halley used the life-table tech- nique (discussed in Chapter 5) to determine that the expectation of life in Breslau between 1687 and 1691 was 33.5 years (Dublin et al. 1949).

Then, in the eighteenth century, Süssmilch built on the work of Graunt and others and added his own analyses to the observation of the regular patterns of marriage, birth, and death in Prussia and believed that he saw in these the divine hand of God ruling human society (Hecht 1987), in much the same way that people are fascinated by patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence. His view, widely dis- seminated throughout Europe, was that a larger population was always better than a smaller one, and, in direct contradistinction to Plato, he valued quantity over quality. He believed that indefinite improvements in agriculture and industry would postpone overpopulation so far into the future that it wouldn’t matter.

The issue of population growth was more than idle speculation, because we know with a fair amount of certainty that the population of England, for example, doubled during the eighteenth century (Petersen 1979), and as I discussed in the previous chapter, Europe as a whole was increasing in population. The rising inter- est in population encouraged the publication of two important essays on population size, one by David Hume (1752 [1963]) and the other by Robert Wallace (1761 [1969]), which were then to influence Malthus, whom I discuss later.

These essays sparked considerable debate and controversy, because there were big issues at stake: “Was a large and rapidly growing population a sure sign of a society’s good health? On balance, were the growth of industry and cities, the move- ment of larger numbers from one social class to another—in short, all of what we now term ‘modernization’—a boon to the people or the contrary? And in society’s efforts to resolve such dilemmas, could it depend on the sum of individuals’ self- interest or was considerable state control called for?” (Petersen 1979:139). These are questions we are still dealing with 250 years later.

The population had, in fact, increased during the Mercantilist era, although prob- ably not as a result of any of the policies put forth by its adherents. However, it was less obvious that the population was better off. Rather, the Mercantilist period had become associated with a rising level of poverty (Keyfitz 1972). Mercantilism relied on a state-sponsored system of promoting foreign trade, while inhibiting imports and thus competition. This generated wealth for a small elite but not for most people.

One of the more famous reactions against Mercantilism was that mounted in the middle of the eighteenth century by François Quesnay, a physician in the court of King Louis XV of France (and an economist when not “on duty”). Whereas Mercantilists argued that wealth depends on the number of people, Quesnay turned that around and argued that the number of people depends on the means of subsis- tence (a general term for level of living). The essence of this view, called physiocratic thought, was that land, not people, is the real source of wealth of a nation. In other words, population went from being an independent variable, causing change in society, to a dependent variable, being altered by societal change. As you will see throughout this book, both perspectives have their merits.

Physiocrats also believed that free trade (rather than the import restrictions demanded by Mercantilists) was essential to economic prosperity. This concept

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66 Part One A Demographic Perspective

of “laissez-faire” (let people do as they choose) was picked up by Adam Smith, a Scotsman and one of the first modern economic theorists. Central to Smith’s view of the world was the idea that, if left to their own devices, people acting in their own self-interest would produce what was best for the community as a whole (Smith 1776). Smith differed slightly from the physiocrats, however, on the idea of what led to wealth in a society. Smith believed that wealth sprang from the labor applied to the land (we might now say the “value added” to the land by labor), rather than it being just in the land itself. From this idea sprang the belief that there is a natural harmony between economic growth and population growth, with the latter depending always on the former. Thus, Smith felt that population size is determined by the demand for labor, which is, in turn, determined by the productivity of the land. These ideas are important to us because Smith’s work served as an inspiration for the Malthusian theory of population, as Malthus himself acknowledges (see the preface to the sixth edition of Malthus 1872) and as I discuss later.

The Prelude to Malthus

The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a time when the goodness of the common person was championed. This perspective, that the rights of individuals superseded the demands of a monarchy, inspired the American and French Revolutions and was generally very optimistic and utopian, characterized by a great deal of enthusiasm for life and a belief in the perfectibility of humans. It ushered in an era of critically questioning traditional ideas and authority that is still reverberating around the world.

In France, these ideas were well expressed by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, a member of the French aristocracy who forsook a military career to pursue a life devoted to mathematics and philosophy. His ideas helped to shape the French Revolution, although despite his inspiration for and sympa- thy with that cause, he died in prison at the hands of revolutionaries. In hiding before his arrest, Condorcet wrote a Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet 1795 [1955]). He was a visionary who “saw the outlines of liberal democracy more than a century in advance of his time: universal education; uni- versal suffrage; equality before the law; freedom of thought and expression; the right to freedom and self-determination of colonial peoples; the redistribution of wealth; a sys- tem of national insurance and pensions; equal rights for women” (Hampshire 1955:x).

Condorcet’s optimism was based on his belief that technological progress has no limits: “With all this progress in industry and welfare which establishes a happier proportion between men’s talents and their needs, each successive genera- tion will have larger possessions, either as a result of this progress or through the preservation of the products of industry, and so, as a consequence of the physical constitution of the human race, the number of people will increase” (Condorcet 1795 [1955]:188; emphasis added). He then asked whether it might not happen that eventually the happiness of the population would reach a limit. If that happens, Condorcet concluded, “we can assume that by then men will know that . . . their aim should be to promote the general welfare of the human race or of the society

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67Chapter 3 Demographic Perspectives

in which they live or of the family to which they belong, rather than foolishly to encumber the world with useless and wretched beings” (p. 189). Condorcet thus saw prosperity and population growth increasing hand in hand, and if the limits to growth were ever reached, the final solution would be birth control.

On the other side of the English Channel, similar ideas were being expressed by William Godwin (father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and father-in-law of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley). Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influences on Morals and Happiness appeared in its first edition in 1793, revealing his ideas that scientific progress would enable the food supply to grow far beyond the levels of his day, and that such prosperity would not lead to overpopulation because people would deliberately limit their sexual expres- sion and procreation. Furthermore, he believed that most of the problems of the poor were due not to overpopulation but to the inequities of the social institutions, especially greed and accumulation of property (Godwin 1793 [1946]).

Thomas Robert Malthus had recently graduated from Jesus College at Cambridge and was a country curate and a nonresident fellow of Cambridge as he read and contemplated the works of Godwin, Condorcet, and others who shared the utopian view of the perfectibility of human society. Although he wanted to be able to embrace such an openly optimistic philosophy of life, he felt that intellectu- ally he had to reject it. In doing so, he unleashed a controversy about population growth and its consequences that rages to this very day.

The Malthusian Perspective

The Malthusian perspective derives from the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus (“Robert” to his family and friends), an English clergyman and subsequently a college professor. His first Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the future improvement of society; with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers was published anonymously in 1798. Malthus’s original intention was not to carve out a career in population studies, but only to show that the unbounded optimism of the physiocrats and utopian philosophers was misplaced. He introduced his essay by commenting that “I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and society, with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my under- standing, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them” (Malthus 1798 [1965]:7).

These “difficulties,” of course, are the problems posed by his now famous principle of population. He derived his theory as follows:

I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state. . . . Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. . . . By the law of our nature which makes food necessary to

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the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.

This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large por- tion of mankind. . . . Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind. (Malthus 1798 [1965]:11)

Malthus believed that he had demolished the utopian optimism by suggesting that the laws of nature, operating through the principle of population, essentially prescribed poverty for a certain segment of humanity. Malthus was a shy person by nature (James 1979; Petersen 1979), and he seemed ill prepared for the notoriety created by his essay. Nonetheless, after owning up to its authorship, he proceeded to document his population principles and to respond to critics by publishing a substantially revised version in 1803, slightly but importantly retitled to read An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which It occasions. In all, he published six editions of the book during his lifetime, followed by a seventh edition published posthumously (Malthus 1872 [1971]), and as a whole they have undoubtedly been the single most influential work relating population growth to its social consequences. Although Malthus initially relied on earlier writers such as David Hume (1752 [1963]) and Robert Wallace (1761 [1969]), he was the first to draw a picture that links the con- sequences of growth to its causes in a systematic way.

Causes of Population Growth

Malthus believed that human beings, like plants and nonrational animals, are “impelled” to increase the population of the species by what he called a powerful “instinct,” the urge to reproduce. Further, if there were no checks on population growth, human beings would multiply to an “incalculable” number, filling “millions of worlds in a few thousand years” (Malthus 1872 [1971]:6). We humans, though, have not accomplished anything nearly so impressive. Why not? Because of the checks to growth that Malthus pointed out—factors that have kept population growth from reaching its biological potential for covering the earth with human bodies.

According to Malthus, the ultimate check to growth is lack of food (the “means of subsistence”). In turn, the means of subsistence are limited by the amount of land available, the “arts” or technology that could be applied to the land, and “social organization” or land ownership patterns. A cornerstone of his argument is that populations tend to grow more rapidly than the food supply does, since population has the potential for growing geometrically—two parents could have four children, sixteen grandchildren, and so on—while he believed (incorrectly, as Darwin later pointed out) that food production could be increased only arithmetically, by add- ing one acre at a time. This led to his conclusion that in the natural order of things, population growth will outstrip the food supply, and the lack of food will ulti- mately put a stop to the increase of people (see Figure 3.2).

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69Chapter 3 Demographic Perspectives

Of course, Malthus was aware that starvation rarely operates directly to kill people, since something else usually intervenes to kill them before they actually die of starvation. This “something else” represents what Malthus calls positive checks, primarily those measures “whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend pre- maturely to weaken and destroy the human frame” (Malthus 1872 [1971]:12). Today we would call these the causes of death. There are also preventive checks— limits to birth. In theory, the preventive checks would include all possible means of birth control, including abstinence, contraception, and abortion. However, to Malthus the only acceptable means of preventing a birth was to exercise moral restraint; that is, to postpone marriage, remaining chaste in the meantime, until a man feels “secure that, should he have a large family, his utmost exertions can save them from rags and squalid poverty, and their consequent degradation in the community” (1872 [1971]:13). Any other means of birth control, including contra- ception (either before or after marriage), abortion, infanticide, or any “improper means,” was viewed as a vice that would “lower, in a marked manner, the dig- nity of human nature.” Moral restraint was a very important point with Malthus, because he believed that if people were allowed to prevent births by “improper means” (that is, prostitution, contraception, abortion, or sterilization), then they would expend their energies in ways that are, so to speak, not economically productive.

As a scientific theory, the Malthusian perspective leaves much to be desired, since he was wrong about how quickly the food supply could increase, as I note below, and because he constantly confuses moralistic and scientific thinking (Davis 1955). Despite its shortcomings, however, which were evident even in his time,

10 20 30 40 50

Time in years

60 70 80 90 100

Acres under

cultiva tion

Po pu

lat ion

si ze

Food deficit

Food surplus

Figure 3.2 Over Time, Geometric Growth Overtakes Arithmetic Growth Note: If we start with 100 acres supporting a population of 100 people and then add 100 acres of cultivated land per decade (arithmetic growth) while the population is increasing by 3 percent per year (geometric growth), the result is a few decades of food surplus before population growth overtakes the increase in the acres under cultivation, producing a food deficit, or “misery,” as Malthus called it.

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70 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Malthus’s reasoning led him to draw some important conclusions about the conse- quences of population growth that are still relevant to us.

Consequences of Population Growth

Malthus believed that a natural consequence of population growth was poverty. This is the logical end result of his arguments that (1) people have a natural urge to reproduce, and (2) the increase in the food supply cannot keep up with population growth. In his analysis, Malthus turned the argument of Adam Smith upside down. Instead of population growth depending on the demand for labor, as Smith (and the physiocrats) argued, Malthus believed that the urge to reproduce always forces population pressure to precede the demand for labor. Thus, “overpopulation” (as measured by the level of unemployment) would force wages down to the point where people could not afford to marry and raise a family. At such low wages, with a surplus of labor and the need for each person to work harder just to earn a subsistence wage, cultivators could employ more labor, put more acres into produc- tion, and thus increase the means of subsistence. Malthus believed that this cycle of increased food resources, leading to population growth, leading to too many people for available resources, leading then back to poverty, was part of a natural law of population. Each increase in the food supply only meant that eventually more people would live in poverty.

As you can see, Malthus did not have an altogether high opinion of his fellow creatures. He figured that most of them were too “inert, sluggish, and averse from labor” (1798 [1965]:363) to try to harness the urge to reproduce and avoid the increase in numbers that would lead back to poverty whenever more resources were available. In this way, he essentially blamed poverty on the poor themselves. There remained only one improbable way to avoid this dreary situation.

Avoiding the Consequences

Borrowing from John Locke, Malthus argued that “the endeavor to avoid pain rather than the pursuit of pleasure is the great stimulus to action in life” (1798 [1965]:359). Pleasure will not stimulate activity until its absence is defined as being painful. Malthus suggested that the well-educated, rational person would perceive in advance the pain of having hungry children or being in debt and would postpone marriage and sexual intercourse until he was sure that he could avoid that pain. If that motivation existed and the preventive check was operating, then the miserable consequences of popula- tion growth could be avoided. You will recall that Condorcet had suggested the possi- bility of birth control as a preventive check, but Malthus objected to this solution: “To remove the difficulty in this way, will, surely in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue, and purity of manners, which the advocates of equality, and of the perfect- ibility of man, profess to be the end and object of their views” (1798:154). So the only way to break the cycle is to change human nature. Malthus felt that if everyone shared middle-class values, the problem would solve itself. He saw that as impossible, though,

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since not everyone has the talent to be a virtuous, industrious, middle-class success story, but if most people at least tried, poverty would be reduced considerably.

To Malthus, material success is a consequence of the human ability to plan rationally—to be educated about future consequences of current behavior—and he was a man who practiced what he preached. He planned his family ratio- nally, waiting to marry and have children until he was 39, shortly after getting a secure job in 1805 as a professor of history and political economy at East India College in Haileybury, England (north of London). Also, although Marx thought that Malthus had taken the “monastic vows of celibacy” whereas other detractors attributed 11 children to him, Malthus and his wife, 11 years his junior, had only three children (Nickerson 1975; Petersen 1979).

To summarize, the major consequence of population growth, according to Malthus, is poverty. Within that poverty, though, is the stimulus for action that can lift people out of misery. So, if people remain poor, it is their own fault for not try- ing to do something about it. For that reason, Malthus was opposed to the English Poor Laws (welfare benefits for the poor), because he felt they would actually serve to perpetuate misery. They permitted poor people to be supported by others and thus not feel that great pain, the avoidance of which might lead to birth preven- tion. Malthus argued that if every man had to provide for his own children, he would be more prudent about getting married and raising a family. In his own time, this particular conclusion of Malthus brought him the greatest notoriety, because the number of people on welfare had been increasing and English parliamentarians were trying to decide what to do about the problem. Although the Poor Laws were not abolished, they were reformed largely because Malthus had given legitimacy to public criticism of the entire concept of welfare payments (Himmelfarb 1984). The Malthusian perspective that blamed the poor for their own poverty endures, con- trasted with the equally enduring view of Godwin and Condorcet that poverty is the creation of unjust human institutions. Two hundred additional years of debate have only sharpened the edges of the controversy.

Critique of Malthus

The single most obvious measure of Malthus’s importance is the number of books and articles that have attacked him, beginning virtually the moment his first essay appeared in 1798 and continuing to the present (see, for example, Lee and Wang Feng 1999; Huzel 2006; Sabin 2013). Hodgson (2009) quotes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 discussing the fact that he had just read Malthus’s book and that he (Jefferson) was sure the principle of population did not apply to the United States, where the amount of available land meant that population growth could readily be absorbed. But Hodgson notes that later in the nineteenth century both sides in the debate over ending slavery in the United States called upon Malthusian arguments to bolster their case, even though Malthus himself was vocif- erously opposed to slavery.

The three most strongly criticized aspects of his theory have been (1) the assertion that food production could not keep up with population growth, (2) the conclusion

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that poverty was an inevitable result of population growth, and (3) the belief that moral restraint was the only acceptable preventive check. Malthus was not a firm believer in progress; rather, he accepted the notion that each society had a fixed set of institutions that established a stationary level of living. He was aware, of course, of the Industrial Revolution, but he was skeptical of its long-run value and agreed with the physiocrats that real wealth was in agricultural land. He was convinced that the increase in manufacturing wages that accompanied industrialization would promote population growth without increasing the agricultural production necessary to feed those additional mouths. Although it is clear that he was a voracious reader (Petersen 1999) and was a founder of the Statistical Society of London (Starr 1987), it is also clear that Malthus paid scant attention to the economic statistics that were available to him. “There is no sign that even at the end of his life he knew anything in detail about industrialization. His thesis was based on the life of an island agricul- tural nation, and so it remained long after the exports of manufacturers had begun to pay for the imports of large quantities of raw materials” (Eversley 1959:256). Thus, Malthus either failed to see or refused to acknowledge that technological progress was possible, and that its end result was a higher standard of living, not a lower one.

The crucial part of Malthus’s ratio of population growth to food increase was that food (including both plants and nonhuman animals) would not grow exponentially, whereas humans could grow like that. Yet when Charles Darwin acknowledged that his concept of the survival of the fittest was inspired by Malthus’s essay, he implicitly rejected this central tenet of Malthus’s argument. In Chapter Three of On the Origin of Species, Darwin described his own theory as “the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increas- ing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them” (Darwin 1872 [1991]:47).

Malthus’s argument that poverty is an inevitable result of population growth is also open to scrutiny. For one thing, his writing reveals a certain circularity in logic. In Malthus’s view, a laborer could achieve a higher standard of living only by being prudent and refraining from marriage until he could afford it, but Malthus also believed that you could not expect prudence from a laborer until he had attained a higher standard of living. Thus, our hypothetical laborer seems squarely enmeshed in a catch-22. Even if we were to ignore this logical incon- sistency, there are problems with Malthus’s belief that the Poor Laws contrib- uted to the misery of the poor by discouraging them from exercising prudence. Historical evidence has revealed that between 1801 and 1835 those English parishes that administered Poor Law allowances did not have higher birth, mar- riage, or total population growth rates than those in which Poor Law assistance was not available (Huzel 1969, 1980, 1984). Clearly, problems with the logic of Malthus’s argument seem to be compounded by his apparent inability to see the social world accurately: “The results of the 1831 Census were out before he died, yet he never came to interpret them. Statistics apart, the main charge against him must be that he was a bad observer of his fellow human beings” (Eversley 1959:256).

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I noted in Chapter 1 that the term “demography” was first used by a French scientist, Achille Guillard, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Schweber (2006) has argued that one of Guillard’s motivations in trying to develop a new discipline of demography was to pressure French academics to see that statistical analyses of births and deaths would show that Malthus was wrong about his claim that population growth inevitably led to poverty. Once again, the power of Malthusian thought lies partly in the strength of opposition that he aroused.

Neo-Malthusians

Those who criticize Malthus’s insistence on the value of moral restraint, while accepting many of his other conclusions, are typically known as neo-Malthusians (see the essay in this chapter for more discussion). Specifically, neo-Malthusians favor contraception rather than simple reliance on moral restraint. During his lifetime, Malthus was constantly defending moral restraint against critics (many of whom were his friends) who encouraged him to deal more favorably with other means of birth control. In the fifth edition of his Essay, he did discuss the concept of prudential restraint, which meant the delay of marriage until a family could be afforded without necessarily refraining from premarital sexual intercourse in the meantime. He never fully embraced the idea, however, nor did he ever bow to pressure to accept anything but moral restraint as a viable preventive check.

Ironically, the open controversy actually helped to spread knowledge of birth control among people in nineteenth-century England and America. This was aided materially by the trial and conviction (later overturned on a technicality) in 1877–78 of two neo-Malthusians, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, for pub- lishing a birth control handbook (Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, written by Charles Knowlton, a physician in Massachu- setts, and originally published in 1832). The publicity surrounding the trial enabled the English public to become more widely knowledgeable about those techniques (Chandrasekhar 1979). Eventually, the widespread adoption of birth control meant that fertility could be controlled within marriage, allowing couples to respond to economic changes in ways that were not anticipated by Malthus’s principle of population.

Criticisms of Malthus do not, however, diminish the importance of his work:

There are good reasons for using Malthus as a point of departure in the discussion of population theory. These are the reasons that made his work influential in his day and make it influential now. But they have little to do with whether his views are right or wrong. . . . Malthus’ theories are not now and never were empirically valid, but they nevertheless were theoretically significant. (Davis 1955b:541)

As I noted earlier, part of Malthus’s significance lies in the storm of controversy his theories stimulated. Particularly vigorous in their attacks on Malthus were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

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WHO ARE THE NEO-MALTHUSIANS?

“Picture a tropical island with luscious breadfruits [a Polynesian plant similar to a fig tree] hanging from every branch, toasting in the sun. It is a small island, but there are only 400 of us on it so there are more breadfruits than we know what to do with. We’re rich. Now picture 4,000 people on the same island, reaching for the same breadfruits: Number one, there are fewer to go around; number two, you’ve got to build ladders to reach most of them; number three, the island is becoming littered with breadfruit crumbs. Things get worse and worse as the population gradually expands to 40,000. Wel- come to a poor, littered tropical paradise” (Tobias 1979:49). This scenario would probably have drawn a nod of understanding from Malthus himself, and even though written a few decades ago, it typifies the modern neo-Malthusian view of the world.

One of the most influential neo-Malthusians of the twentieth century was the University of California, Santa Barbara biologist Garrett Hardin. In 1968, he published an article that raised the level of consciousness about population growth in the minds of professional scientists. Hardin’s theme was simple and had been made by Kingsley Davis (1963) as he developed the theory of demographic change and response: Personal goals are not necessarily consistent with societal goals when it comes to population growth—Adam Smith was not completely correct to believe in laissez-faire. Hardin’s metaphor is “the tragedy of the commons.” He asks us to imagine an open field, available as a common ground for herdsmen to graze their cattle: “As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, ‘What is the utility to me of adding one more ani- mal to my herd?’” (Hardin 1968:1244). The benefit, of course, is the net proceeds from the eventual sale of each additional animal, whereas the cost lies in the chance that an additional animal may result in overgrazing of the common ground. Since the ground is shared by many people, the cost is spread out over all, so for the individual

herdsman, the benefit of another animal exceeds its cost. “But,” notes Hardin, “this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited” (1968:1244). The moral, as Hardin puts it, is that “ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the com- mons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (1968:1244).

Hardin reminds us that most societies are committed to a social welfare ideal. Families are not completely on their own. We share numerous things in common: education, public health, and police protection, and in all of the richer nations of the world people are guaranteed a minimum amount of food and income at the public expense. This leads to a moral dilemma that is at the heart of Hardin’s message: “To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action” (Hardin 1968:1246). He was referring, of course, to the ultimate Malthusian clash of population and re- sources, and Hardin was no more optimistic than Malthus about the likelihood of people voluntarily limiting their fertility before it is too late.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s the world was becom- ing keenly aware of the population crisis through the writings of the person who is arguably the most famous of all neo-Malthusians, Paul Ehrlich. Like Hardin, Ehrlich is a biologist (at Stanford University), not a professional demographer. His Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) was an immediate sensation when it came out in 1968 and to this day often sets the tone for public debate about population issues. In the second edition of his book, Ehrlich (1971) phrased the situation in three parts: “too many people,” “too little food,” and, adding a wrinkle not foreseen directly by Malthus, “environmental deg- radation” (Ehrlich called earth “a dying planet”).

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In 1990, Ehrlich, in collaboration with his wife, Anne, followed with an update titled The Population Explosion (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990), reflecting their view that the bomb they worried about in 1968 had detonated in the meantime. The level of concern about the destruction of the environment has grown tremendously since 1968. Ehrlich’s book had inspired the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970 (an annual event ever since in most communities across the United States and elsewhere in the world), yet in their 1990 book Ehrlich and Ehrlich rightly question why, in the face of the serious environmental degradation that had concerned them for so long, had peo- ple regularly failed to grasp its primary cause as being rapid population growth? “Arresting popula- tion growth should be second in importance only to avoiding nuclear war on humanity’s agenda. Overpopulation and rapid population growth are intimately connected with most aspects of the cur- rent human predicament, including rapid deple- tion of nonrenewable resources, deterioration of the environment (including rapid climate change), and increasing international tensions” (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990:18).

Ehrlich thus argues that Malthus was right— dead right. But the death struggle is more compli- cated than that foreseen by Malthus. To Ehrlich, the poor are dying of hunger, while rich and poor alike are dying from the by-products of affluence— pollution and ecological disaster. Indeed, this is part of the “commons” problem. A few benefit; all suffer. What does the future hold? Ehrlich sug- gested that there are only two solutions to the pop- ulation problem: the birth rate solution (lowering the birth rate) and the death rate solution (a rise in the death rate). He viewed the death rate solu- tion as being the most likely to happen, because, like Malthus, he has had little faith in the ability of humankind to pull its act together. The only way to avoid that scenario, he argued, was to bring the birth rate under control, perhaps even by force. That idea generated death threats against him and

his wife, but of course over time the world has re- sponded with lower birth rates.

A major part of Ehrlich’s contribution has been to encourage people to take some action them- selves, to spread the word and practice what they preach. Ehrlich has long felt that population growth is outstripping resources and ruining the environ- ment. If we sit back and wait for people to react to this situation, disaster will occur. Therefore, we need to act swiftly to push people to bring fertil- ity down to replacement level by whatever means possible.

Neo-Malthusians thus differ from Malthus because they reject moral restraint as the only ac- ceptable means of birth control and because they see population growth as leading not simply to poverty but also to widespread calamity. For neo- Malthusians, the “evil arising from the redundancy of population” that Malthus worried about has broadened in scope, and the remedies proposed are thus more dramatic.

Gloomy they certainly are, but the messages of Ehrlich and Hardin are important and impressive and have brought population issues to the atten- tion of the entire globe. One of the ironies of neo- Malthusianism is that if the world’s population does avoid future calamity, people will likely claim that the neo-Malthusians were wrong. In fact, however, much of the stimulus to bring down birth rates (including emphasis on the reproductive rights of women as the alternative to coercive means) and to find new ways to feed people and protect the environment has come as a reaction to the con- cerns they very publicly have raised.

Discussion Questions: (1) Discuss the trag- edy of the commons in relation to global climate change and to the quality of water throughout the world, and relate that to population growth; (2) If Malthus was wrong in his idea that the food sup- ply could not grow as quickly as population, as Darwin seemed to suggest, do you think that the neo-Malthusians are also wrong in their analysis of how the world works? Why or why not?

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The Marxian Perspective

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were both teenagers in Germany when Malthus died in England in 1834, and by the time they had met and independently moved to England, Malthus’s ideas already were politically influential in their native land, not just in England. Several German states and Austria had responded to what they believed was overly rapid growth in the number of poor people by legislating against marriages in which the applicant could not guarantee that his family would not wind up on welfare (Glass 1953). As it turned out, that scheme backfired on the German states, because people continued to have children, but out of wedlock. Thus, the welfare rolls grew as the illegitimate children had to be cared for by the state (Knodel 1970). The laws were eventually repealed, but they had an impact on Marx and Engels, who saw the Malthusian point of view as an outrage against humanity. Their demographic perspective thus arose in reaction to Malthus.

Causes of Population Growth

Neither Marx nor Engels ever directly addressed the issue of why and how pop- ulations grew. They seem to have had little quarrel with Malthus on this point, although they were in favor of equal rights for men and women and saw no harm in preventing birth. Nonetheless, they were skeptical of the eternal or natural laws of nature as stated by Malthus (that population tends to outstrip resources), preferring instead to view human activity as the product of a particular social and economic environment. The basic Marxian perspective is that each society at each point in history has its own law of population that determines the consequences of popu- lation growth. For capitalism, the consequences are overpopulation and poverty, whereas for socialism, population growth is readily absorbed by the economy with no side effects. This line of reasoning led to Marx’s vehement rejection of Malthus, because if Malthus was right about his “pretended ‘natural law of population’” (Marx 1890 [1906]:680), then Marx’s theory would be wrong.

Consequences of Population Growth

Marx and Engels especially quarreled with the Malthusian idea that resources could not grow as rapidly as population, since they saw no reason to suspect that science and technology could not increase the availability of food and other goods at least as quickly as the population grew. Engels argued in 1865 that whatever popula- tion pressure existed in society was really pressure against the means of employment rather than against the means of subsistence (Meek 1971). Thus, they flatly rejected the notion that poverty can be blamed on the poor. Instead, they said, poverty is the result of a poorly organized society, especially a capitalist society. Implicit in the writings of Marx and Engels is the idea that the normal consequence of population growth should be a significant increase in production. After all, each worker obviously was producing more than he or she required—how else would all the dependents

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(including the wealthy manufacturers) survive? In a well-ordered society, if there were more people, there ought to be more wealth, not more poverty (Engels 1844 [1953]).

Not only did Marx and Engels feel that poverty, in general, was not the end result of population growth, they argued specifically that even in England at that time there was enough wealth to eliminate poverty. Engels had himself managed a textile plant owned by his father’s firm in Manchester, and he believed that in England more people had meant more wealth for the capitalists rather than for the workers because the capitalists were skimming off some of the workers’ wages as profits for themselves. Marx argued that they did that by stripping the workers of their tools and then, in essence, charging the workers for being able to come to the factory to work. For example, if you do not have the tools to make a car but want a job making cars, you could get hired at the factory and work eight hours a day. But, according to Marx, you might get paid for only four hours, the capitalist (owner of the factory) keeping part of your wages as payment for the tools you were using. The more the capitalist keeps, of course, the lower your wages and the poorer you will be.

Furthermore, Marx argued that capitalism worked by using the labor of the working classes to earn profits to buy machines that would replace the laborers, which, in turn, would lead to unemployment and poverty. Thus, the poor were not poor because they overran the food supply, but only because capitalists had first taken away part of their wages and then taken away their very jobs and replaced them with machines. Thus, the consequences of population growth that Malthus dis- cussed were really the consequences of capitalist society, not of population growth per se. Overpopulation in a capitalist society was thought to be a result of the capital- ists’ desire for an industrial reserve army that would keep wages low through compe- tition for jobs and, at the same time, would force workers to be more productive in order to keep their jobs. To Marx, the logical extension of this was that the growing population would bear the seeds of destruction for capitalism, because unemploy- ment would lead to disaffection and revolution. If society could be reorganized in a more equitable (that is, socialist) way, then population problems would disappear.

It is noteworthy that Marx, like Malthus, practiced what he preached. Marx was adamantly opposed to the notion of moral restraint, and his life repudiated that concept. He married at the relatively young age (compared with Malthus) of 25, proceeded to father eight children, including one illegitimate son, and was on intimate terms with poverty for much of his life.

In its original formulation, the Marxian (as well as the Malthusian) perspective was somewhat provincial, in the sense that its primary concern was England in the nineteenth century. Marx was an intense scholar who focused especially on the his- torical analysis of economics as applied to England, which he considered to be the classic example of capitalism. However, as his writings have found favor in other places and times, revisions have been forced upon the Marxian view of population.

Critique of Marx

Not all who have adopted a Marxian worldview fully share the original Marx– Engels demographic perspective. Socialist countries have had trouble because of

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the lack of political direction offered by the Marxian notion that different stages of social development produce different relationships between population growth and economic development. Indeed, much of what we call the Marxian thought on population is in fact attributable to Lenin, one of the most prolific interpret- ers of Marx. For Marx, the Malthusian principle operated under capitalism only, whereas under pure socialism there would be no population problem. Unfortu- nately, he offered no guidelines for the transition period. At best, Marx implied that the socialist law of population should be the antithesis of the capitalist law. If the birth rate were low under capitalism, then the assumption was that it should be high under socialism; if abortion seemed bad for a capitalist society, it must be good for a socialistic society.

Thus, it was difficult for Russian demographers to reconcile the fact that demographic trends in the former Soviet Union were remarkably similar to trends in other developed nations. Furthermore, Soviet socialism was unable to alleviate one of the worst evils that Marx attributed to capitalism, higher death rates among people in the working class than among those in the higher classes (Brackett 1968). Moreover, birth rates dropped to such low levels throughout Marxist Eastern Europe in the years leading up to the breakup of the Soviet Union that it was no longer possible to claim (as Marx had done) that low birth rates were bourgeois.

In China, the empirical reality of having to deal with the world’s largest national population led to a radical departure from Marxian ideology. As early as 1953, the Chinese government organized efforts to control population by relaxing regulations concerning contraception and abortion. Ironically, after the terrible demographic disaster that followed the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 (see Chapter 2), a Chinese official quoted Chairman Mao as having said, “A large population in China is a good thing. With a population increase of several fold we still have an adequate solution. The solution lies in production” (Ta-k’un 1960:704). Yet by the 1970s production no longer seemed to be a panacea, and with the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, the inter- pretation of Marx took an about-face as another Chinese official wrote that under Marxism the law of production “demands not only a planned production of natural goods, but also the planned reproduction of human beings” (Muhua 1979:724).

Thus, despite Marx’s denial of a population problem in a socialist society, the Marxist government in China dealt with one by rejecting its Marxist–Leninist roots and embracing instead one of the most aggressive and coercive government programs ever launched to reduce fertility through restraints on marriage (the Malthusian solution), the promotion of contraception (the neo-Malthusian solution), and the use of abortion (a remnant of the Leninist approach) (Teitelbaum and Winter 1988). In a formulation such as this, Marxism was revised in the light of new scientific evidence about how people behave, in the same way that Malthusian thought has been revised. Bear in mind that although the Marxian and Malthusian perspectives are often seen as antithetical, they both originated in the midst of a particular milieu of economic, social, and demographic change in nineteenth-century Europe.

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The Prelude to the Demographic Transition Theory

The population-growth controversy, initiated by Malthus and fueled by Marx, emerged into a series of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century reformula- tions that have led directly to prevailing theories in demography. In this section, I briefly discuss three individuals who made important contributions to those refor- mulations: John Stuart Mill, Arsène Dumont, and Émile Durkheim.

Mill

The English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill was an extremely influen- tial writer of the nineteenth century. Mill was not as quarrelsome about Malthus as Marx and Engels had been; his scientific insights were greater than those of Malthus at the same time that his politics were less radical than those of Marx and Engels. Mill accepted the Malthusian calculations about the potential for population growth to outstrip food production as being axiomatic (a self-truth), but he was more optimistic about human nature than Malthus was. Mill believed that although your character is formed by circumstances, one’s own desires can do much to shape circumstances and modify future habits (Mill 1873 [1924]).

Mill’s basic thesis was that the standard of living is a major determinant of fer- tility levels: “In proportion as mankind rises above the condition of the beast, popu- lation is restrained by the fear of want, rather than by want itself. Even where there is no question of starvation, many are similarly acted upon by the apprehension of losing what have come to be regarded as the decencies of their situation in life” (Mill 1848 [1929]:Book I, Chap 10). The belief that people could be and should be free to pursue their own goals in life led him to reject the idea that poverty is inevitable (as Malthus implied) or that it is the creation of capitalist society (as Marx argued). One of Mill’s most famous comments is that “the niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is the cause of the penalty attached to overpopulation” (1848 [1929]:Book I, Chap. 13). This is a point of view conditioned by Mill’s read- ing of Malthus, but Mill denies the Malthusian inevitability of a population grow- ing beyond its available resources. Mill believed that people do not “propagate like swine, but are capable, though in very unequal degrees, of being withheld by pru- dence, or by the social affections, from giving existence to beings born only to misery and premature death” (1848 [1929]: Book I, Chap. 7). In the event that population ever did overrun the food supply, however, Mill felt that it would likely be a tem- porary situation with at least two possible solutions: import food or export people.

The ideal state from Mill’s point of view is that in which all members of a soci- ety are economically comfortable. At that point he felt (as Plato had centuries earlier) that the population would stabilize and people would try to progress culturally, mor- ally, and socially instead of attempting continually to get ahead economically. It does sound good, but how do we get to that point? It was Mill’s belief that before reaching the point at which both population and production are stable, there is essentially a race between the two. What is required to settle the issue is a dramatic improvement in the living conditions of the poor. If social and economic development are to occur,

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there must be a sudden increase in income, which could give rise to a new standard of living for a whole generation, thus allowing productivity to outdistance popula- tion growth. According to Mill, this was the situation in France after the Revolution:

During the generation which the Revolution raised from the extremes of hopeless wretch- edness to sudden abundance, a great increase of population took place. But a generation has grown up, which, having been born in improved circumstances, has not learnt to be miserable; and upon them the spirit of thrift operates most conspicuously, in keeping the increase of population within the increase of national wealth. (1848 [1929]: Book II, Chap. 7)

Mill was convinced that an important ingredient in the transformation to a non-growing population is that women do not want as many children as men do, and if they are allowed to voice their opinions, the birth rate will decline. Mill, like Marx, was a champion of equal rights for both sexes, and one of Mill’s more notable essays, On Liberty, was co-authored with his wife. He reasoned further that a system of national education for poor children would provide them with the “common sense” (as Mill put it) to refrain from having too many children.

Overall, Mill’s perspective on population growth was significant enough that we find his arguments surviving today in the writings of many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century demographers whose names appear in the pages that fol- low. However, before getting to those people and their ideas, it is important to acknowledge at least two other nineteenth-century individuals whose thinking has an amazingly modern sound: Arsène Dumont and Émile Durkheim.

Dumont

Arsène Dumont was a late-nineteenth-century French demographer who felt he had discovered a new principle of population that he called “social capillarity” (Dumont 1890). Social capillarity refers to the desire of people to rise on the social scale, to increase their individuality as well as their personal wealth. The concept is drawn from an analogy to a liquid rising into the narrow neck of a laboratory flask. The flask is like the hierarchical structure of most societies, broad at the bottom and narrowing as you near the top. To ascend the social hierarchy often requires that sacrifices be made, and Dumont argued that having few or no children was the price many people paid to get ahead. Dumont recognized that such ambitions were not possible in every society. In a highly stratified aristocracy, few people outside of the aristocracy could aspire to a career beyond subsistence. However, in a democ- racy (such as late-nineteenth-century France), opportunities to succeed existed at all social levels. Spengler (1979) has succinctly summarized Dumont’s thesis: “The bulk of the population, therefore, not only strove to ascend politically, economi- cally, socially, and intellectually, but experienced an imperative urge to climb and a palsying fear of descent. Consequently, since children impeded individual and familial ascension, their number was limited” (p. 158).

Notice that Dumont added an important ingredient to Mill’s recipe for fertility control. Mill argued that it was fear of social slippage that motivated people to limit

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fertility below the level that Malthus had expected. Dumont went beyond that to suggest that social aspiration was a root cause of a slowdown in population growth. Dumont was not happy with this situation, by the way. He was upset by the low level of French fertility and used the concept of social capillarity to propose policies to undermine it. He believed that socialism would undercut the desire for upward social mobility and would thus stimulate the birth rate. History, of course, has suggested otherwise, which would lead us back to the importance of Mill’s view of the world.

Durkheim

While Dumont was concerned primarily with the causes of population growth, focusing mainly on the birth rate, another late-nineteenth-century French soci- ologist, Émile Durkheim, based an entire social theory on the consequences of population growth. In discussing the increasing complexity of modern societies, characterized particularly by increasing divisions of labor, Durkheim proposed that “the division of labor varies in direct ratio with the volume and density of societies, and, if it progresses in a continuous manner in the course of social development, it is because societies become regularly denser and more voluminous” (Durkheim 1893 [1933]:262). Durkheim proceeded to explain that population growth leads to greater societal specialization because the struggle for existence is more acute when there are more people. If you compare a primitive society with an industrialized society, the primitive society is not very specialized. By contrast, in industrialized societies there is a lot of differentiation; that is, there is an increasingly long list of occupations and social classes. Why is this? The answer is in the volume and density of the population. Growth creates competition for society’s resources, and in order to improve their advantage in the struggle, people specialize.

Durkheim’s thesis that population growth leads to specialization was derived (he himself acknowledged) from Darwin’s theory of evolution. In turn, Darwin acknowledged his own debt to Malthus. You will notice that Durkheim also clearly echoes the words of Ibn Khaldun, although it is uncertain whether Durkheim knew of the latter’s work.

The critical theorizing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for a more systematic collection of data to test aspects of those theories and to exam- ine more carefully those that might be valid and those that should be discarded. As population studies became more quantitative in the twentieth century, a phenomenon called the demographic transition took shape and took the attention of demographers.

The Theory of the Demographic Transition

Although it has dominated demographic thinking for the past half century, and is now almost routinely included in introductory texts in the social and environmental sciences, the demographic transition theory actually began as only a description of the demographic changes that had taken place in the advanced nations over time. In particular, it described the transition from high birth and death rates to low birth

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and death rates, with an interstitial spurt in growth rates leading to a larger popula- tion at the end of the transition than there had been at the start. The idea emerged as early as 1929, when Warren Thompson gathered data from “certain countries” for the period 1908–27 and showed that the countries fell into three main groups, according to their patterns of population growth:

Group A (northern and western Europe and the United States): From the latter part of the nineteenth century to 1927, these countries had moved from having very high rates of natural increase to having very low rates of increase “and will shortly become station- ary and start to decline in numbers.” (Thompson 1929:968)

Group B (Italy, Spain, and the “Slavic” peoples of central Europe): Thompson saw evi- dence of a decline in both birth rates and death rates but suggested that “it appears prob- able that the death rate will decline as rapidly or even more rapidly than the birth rate for some time yet. The condition in these Group B countries is much the same as existed in the Group A countries thirty to fifty years ago.” (p. 968)

Group C (the rest of the world): In the rest of the world, Thompson saw little evidence of control over either births or deaths.

As a consequence of this relative lack of voluntary control over births and deaths (a concept we will question later), Thompson felt that the Group C countries (which included about 70–75 percent of the population of the world at the time) would continue to have their growth “determined largely by the opportunities they have to increase their means of subsistence. Malthus described their processes of growth quite accurately when he said ‘that population does invariably increase, where there are means of subsistence. . . .’” (Thompson, 1929:971).

Thompson’s work, however, came at a time when there was little concern about overpopulation. The “Group C” countries had relatively low rates of growth because of high mortality and, at the same time, by 1936, birth rates in the United States and Europe were so low that Enid Charles published a widely read book called The Twilight of Parenthood, which was introduced with the comment that “in place of the Malthusian menace of overpopulation there is now real danger of underpopulation” (Charles 1936:v). Furthermore, Thompson’s labels for his categories had little charisma. It is difficult to build a compelling theory around categories called A, B, and C.

Sixteen years after Thompson’s work, Frank Notestein (1945) picked up the threads of his thesis and provided labels for the three types of growth patterns that Thompson had simply called A, B, and C. Notestein called the Group A pattern incip- ient decline, the Group B pattern transitional growth, and the Group C pattern high growth potential. That same year, Kingsley Davis (1945) edited a volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences titled “World Population in Transition,” and in the lead article (titled “The Demographic Transition”) he noted that “viewed in the long-run, earth’s population has been like a long, thin powder fuse that burns slowly and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge and explodes” (Davis 1945:1). The term population explosion, alluded to by Davis, refers to the phase that Notestein called transitional growth. Thus was born the term demographic transition.

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It is that process of moving from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates, from high growth potential to incipient decline (see Figure 3.3).

At this point in the 1940s, however, the demographic transition was merely a picture of demographic change, not a theory. But each new country studied fit into the picture, and it seemed as though some new universal law of population growth—an evolutionary scheme—was being developed. The apparent historical uniqueness of the demographic transition (all known cases have occurred within the last 200 years) has spawned a host of alternative names, such as the “vital revo- lution” and the “demographic revolution.” Between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, rapid population growth became a worldwide concern, and demographers devoted a great deal of time to the demographic transition perspective. By 1964, George Stolnitz was able to report that “demographic transitions rank among the most sweeping and best-documented trends of modern times . . . based upon hundreds of investigations, covering a host of specific places, periods and events” (Stolnitz 1964:20). As the pattern of change took shape, explanations were devel- oped for why and how countries pass through the transition. These explanations tended to be cobbled together in a somewhat piecemeal fashion from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers I discussed earlier in this chapter, but overall they were derived from the concept of modernization.

Modernization theory is based on the idea that in premodern times human society was generally governed by “tradition,” and that the massive economic changes wrought by industrialization forced societies to alter traditional institu- tions: “In traditional societies fertility and mortality are high. In modern societ- ies fertility and mortality are low. In between, there is demographic transition”

Time

I II III Birth rate Death rate

Population size

10 40

P o p

u la

tio n size

(in b

illio n s)

V ita

l r a te

s p

e r

1 ,0

0 0 p

e rs

o n s

Figure 3.3 The Demographic Transition Note: The original model of the demographic transition is divided roughly into three stages. In the first stage there is high growth potential because both birth and death rates are high. The second stage is the transition from high to low birth and death rates. During this stage the growth potential is realized as the death rate drops before the birth rate drops, resulting in rapid population growth. Finally, the last stage is a time when death rates are as low as they are likely to go, while fertility may continue to decline to the point that the population might eventually decline in numbers.

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(Demeny 1968:502). In the process, behavior has changed and the world has been permanently transformed. It is a macro-level theory that sees human actors as being buffeted by changing social institutions. Individuals did not deliberately lower their risk of death to precipitate the modern decline in mortality. Rather, society- wide increases in the standard of living and improved public health infrastructure brought about this change. Similarly, people did not just decide to move from the farm to town to take a job in a factory. Economic changes took place that created those higher-wage urban jobs while eliminating many agricultural jobs. These same economic forces improved transportation and communication and made it possible for individuals to migrate in previously unheard of numbers.

Modernization theory provided the vehicle that moved the demographic transi- tion from a mere description of events to a demographic perspective. In its initial formulations, this perspective was perhaps best expressed by the sentiments “take care of the people and population will take care of itself” or “development is the best contraceptive” (Teitelbaum 1975). These were views that were derivable from Karl Marx, who was in fact one of the early exponents of the modernization the- ory (Inglehart and Baker 2000). The theory drew on the available data for most countries that had gone through the transition. Death rates declined as the standard of living improved, and birth rates almost always declined a few decades later, even- tually dropping to low levels, although rarely as low as the death rate. It was argued that the decline in the birth rate typically lagged behind the decline in the death rate because it takes time for a population to adjust to the fact that mortality really is lower, and because the social and economic institutions that favored high fertility require time to adjust to new norms of lower fertility that are more consistent with the lower levels of mortality. Since most people value the prolongation of life, it is not hard to lower mortality, but the reduction of fertility is contrary to the estab- lished norms of societies that have required high birth rates to keep pace with high death rates. Such norms are not easily changed, even in the face of poverty.

Birth rates eventually declined, it was argued, as the importance of family life was diminished by industrial and urban life, thus weakening the pressure for large families. Large families are presumed to have been desired because they provided parents with a built-in labor pool, and because children provided old-age security for parents. The same economic development that lowered mortality is theorized to transform a society into an urban industrial state in which compulsory education lowers the value of children by removing them from the labor force, and people come to realize that lower infant mortality means that fewer children need to be born to achieve a certain number of surviving children. Finally, as a consequence of the many alterations in social institutions, “the pressures for high fertility weaken and the idea of conscious control of fertility gradually gains strength” (Teitelbaum 1975:421).

Critique of the Demographic Transition Theory

It has been argued that the concept underlying the demographic transition is that population stability, also known as homeostasis (Lee 1987) is the normal state of affairs in human societies and that change (the “transition”) is what requires

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explanation (Kreager 1986). Not everyone agrees. Harbison and Robinson (2002) argue that transitions are the natural state of human affairs, and that each transi- tion is followed by another one, a theme we will return to later in the chapter. In its original formulation, the demographic transition theory explained high fertility as a reaction to high mortality. As mortality declines, the need for high fertility lessens, and so birth rates go down. There is a spurt of growth in that transition period, but presumably the consequences will not be serious if the decline in mortality was pro- duced by a rise in the standard of living, which, in its turn, produces a motivation for smaller families. But what will be the consequences if mortality declines and fertility does not? That situation presumably is precluded by the theory of demo- graphic transition, but the demographic transition theory has not been capable of predicting levels of mortality or fertility or the timing of the fertility decline. This is because the initial explanation for the demographic behavior during the transition tended to be ethnocentric. It relied almost exclusively on the sentiment that “what is good for the goose is good for the gander.” In other words, if this is what hap- pened to the developed countries, why should it not also happen to other countries that are not so advanced? One reason might be that the preconditions for the demo- graphic transition are considerably different now from what they were when the industrialized countries began their transition.

For example, prior to undergoing the demographic transition, few of the cur- rently industrialized countries had birth rates as high as those of most currently less-developed countries, nor indeed were their levels of mortality so high. Yet when mortality did decline, it did so as a consequence of internal economic development, not as a result of a foreign country bringing in sophisticated techniques of disease prevention, as is the case today. A second reason might be that the factors lead- ing to the demographic transition were actually different from what for years had been accepted as true. Likely it is not just change that requires explanation but also differences in the starting and ending points of the transition. Perhaps, then, the modernization theory, in and of itself, did not provide an appropriate picture of historical development. These problems with the original explanations of the demo- graphic transition led to new research and a reformulation of the perspective.

Reformulation of the Demographic Transition Theory

One of the most important social scientific endeavors to cast doubt on the clas- sic explanation was the European Fertility Project, directed by Ansley Coale at Princeton University. In the early 1960s, J. William Leasure, then a graduate stu- dent in economics at Princeton, was writing a doctoral dissertation on the fertility decline in Spain, using data for each of that nation’s 49 provinces. Surprisingly, his thesis revealed that the history of fertility change in Spain was not explained by a simple version of the demographic transition theory. Fertility in Spain declined in contiguous areas that were culturally similar, even though the levels of urbaniza- tion and economic development might be different (Leasure 1962). At about the same time, other students began to uncover similarly puzzling historical patterns in European data (Coale 1986). A systematic review of the demographic histories

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of Europe was thus begun in order to establish exactly how and why the transition occurred. The focus was on the decline in fertility, because it is the most problem- atic aspect of the classic explanation. These new findings have been used to help revise the theory of the demographic transition.

With the discovery that the decline of fertility in Europe occurred in the context of widely differing social, economic, and demographic conditions, it became appar- ent that economic development may be a sufficient cause of fertility decline, but not a necessary one (Coale 1973). For example, many provinces in Europe experi- enced a rapid drop in their birth rate even though they were not very urban, infant mortality rates were high, and a low percentage of the population was employed in industrial occupations. The data suggest that one of the more common simi- larities in those areas that have undergone fertility declines is the rapid spread of secularization. Secularization is an attitude of autonomy from otherworldly powers and a sense of responsibility for one’s own well-being (Lesthaeghe 1977; Leasure 1982; Norris and Inglehart 2004). It is associated with an enlightened view of the world—a break from traditional ways of thinking and behaving.

It is difficult to know exactly why such attitudes arise when and where they do, but we do know that industrialization and economic development are virtually always accompanied by secularization. Secularization, however, can occur indepen- dently of industrialization. It might be thought of as a modernization of thought, distinct from a modernization of social institutions. Some theorists have sug- gested that secularization is part of the process of westernization (see, for example, Caldwell 1982). In all events, when it pops up, secularization often spreads quickly, being diffused through social networks as people imitate the behavior of others to whom they look for clues to proper and appropriate conduct.

Education has been identified as one (indeed, probably the most important) potential stimulant to such altered attitudes, especially mass education, which tends to emphasize modernization and secular concepts. Education facilitates the rapid spread of new ideas and information, which would perhaps help explain another of the important findings from the Princeton European Fertility Project, that the onset of long-term fertility decline tended to be concentrated in a relatively short period of time (van de Walle and Knodel 1980). The data from Europe suggest that once marital fertility had dropped by as little as 10 percent in a region, the decline spread rapidly. This “tipping point” occurred whether or not infant mortality had already declined (Watkins 1986).

Some areas of Europe that were similar with respect to socioeconomic develop- ment did not experience a fertility decline at the same time, whereas other provinces that were less similar socioeconomically experienced nearly identical drops in fer- tility. The data suggest that this riddle is solved by examining cultural factors, not just socioeconomic ones. Building on the concept of spatial demography (which I will discuss in Chapter 4), it was found that areas sharing a similar culture (same language, common ethnic background, similar lifestyle) were more likely to share a decline in fertility than areas that were culturally less similar (Watkins 1991). The principal reason for this is that the idea of family planning seemed to spread quickly until it ran into a barrier to its communication. Language is one such barrier (Leasure 1962; Lesthaeghe 1977), and social and economic inequality in a region is

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another (Lengyel-Cook and Repetto 1982). Social distance between people turns out to inhibit communication of new ideas and attitudes.

What kinds of ideas and attitudes might encourage people to rethink how many children they ought to have? To answer this kind of question we must shift our focus from the macro (societal) level to the micro (individual) level and ask how people actually respond to the social and economic changes taking place around them. A popular individual-level perspective is that of rational choice theory (sometimes referred to as RAT) (Coleman and Fararo 1992). The essence of rational choice the- ory is that human behavior is the result of individuals making calculated cost-benefit analyses about how to act and what to do. For example, Caldwell (1976:331) has suggested that “there is no ceiling in primitive and traditional societies to the num- ber of children who would be economically beneficial.” Children are a source of income and support for parents throughout life, and they produce far more than they cost in such societies. The wealth flow, as Caldwell calls it, is from children to parents.

The process of modernization (the macro-level changes) eventually results in the tearing apart of large, extended family units into smaller, nuclear units that are economically and emotionally self-sufficient (micro-level changes). As that hap- pens, children begin to cost parents more (including the cost of educating them as demanded by a modernizing society), and the amount of support that parents get from children begins to decline (starting with the income lost because children are in school rather than working). As the wealth flow reverses and parents begin to spend their income on children, rather than deriving income from them, the eco- nomic value of children vanishes. Economic rationality would now seem to dictate having zero children, but in reality, of course, people continue having children for a variety of social reasons that I detail in Chapter 6.

Rational choice theory is not just about economics, but even when it comes to economic issues, there has been a lot of research over the past few decades suggesting that we humans are not as rational as we might have thought. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on how we think, and he summarized his research in a best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2011). The key point is that most of our thinking is “fast” (intuitive and emotional), whereas only a small fraction is “slow” (deliberate and rational). This is what allows us to believe many things, regardless of their objective truth (Schermer 2012). It helps to explain why people do not always behave “rationally” and we have to take these ideas into account as we explain both the causes and consequences of demographic behavior. In 2002, Princeton demographer Douglas Massey suggested that people may generally be rational (with the capacity for “slow” thinking), but much of human behavior is still powered by emotional responses (the “fast” thinking) that supersede rationality (Massey 2002). We are animals, and though we may have vastly greater intellectual capacities than other species, we are still influenced by a variety of non-rational forces, including our hormones (Udry 1994, 2000).

Overall, then, the principal ingredient in the reformulation of the demographic transition perspective is to add “ideational” factors to “demand” factors as the likely causes of demographic change, especially changes in fertility. The original

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version of the theory suggested that modernization reduces the demand for children and so fertility falls—if people are rational economic creatures, then this is what should happen. But the real world is more complex, and the diffusion of ideas can shape fertility (and other demographic) behavior along with, or even in the absence of, the usual signs of modernization.

This does not necessarily mean that Wallerstein (1976) was correct when he declared that modernization theory was dead. On the contrary, there is evidence from around the world that “industrialization leads to occupational specialization, rising educational levels, rising income levels, and eventually brings unforeseen changes—changes in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics” (Inglehart and Baker 2000:21). This is not a linear path, however. “Economic development tends to push societies in a common direction, but rather than converg- ing, they seem to move on parallel trajectories shaped by their cultural heritages” (Inglehart and Baker 2000:49).

One strength of reformulating the demographic transition is that nearly all other perspectives can find a home here. Malthusians note with satisfaction that fertility first declined in Europe primarily as a result of a delay in marriage, much as Malthus would have preferred. Neo-Malthusians can take heart from the fact that rapid and sustained declines occurred simultaneously with the spread of knowledge about fam- ily planning practices. Marxists also find a place for themselves in the reformulated demographic transition perspective, because its basic tenet is that a change in the social structure (modernization of thought, if not also of the economy) is necessary to bring about a decline in fertility. This is only a short step away from agreeing with Marx that there is no universal law of population, but rather that each stage of devel- opment and social organization has its own law, and that cultural patterns will influ- ence the timing and tempo of the demographic transition—when it starts and how it progresses. Furthermore, the macro-level changes are never sufficient to explain what happens—we must also pay attention to what is going on at the individual level.

The Theory of Demographic Change and Response

The work of the European Fertility Project focused on explaining regional differences in fertility declines. This was a very important theoretical development, but not a comprehensive one, because it only partially dealt with a central issue of the demo- graphic transition theory: How (and under what conditions) can a mortality decline lead to a fertility decline? To answer that question, Kingsley Davis (1963) asked what happens to individuals when mortality declines. The answer is that more children survive through adulthood, putting greater pressure on family resources, and people have to reorganize their lives in an attempt to relieve that pressure; that is, people respond to the demographic change. But note that their response will be in terms of personal goals, not national goals. It rarely matters what a government wants. If individual members of a society do not stand to gain economically or socially by behaving in a particular way, they probably will not behave that way. Indeed, that was a major argument made by the neo-Malthusians against moral restraint. Why

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advocate postponement of marriage and sexual gratification rather than contracep- tion when you know that few people who postpone marriage are actually going to postpone sexual intercourse, too? In fact, Ludwig Brentano (1910) quite forthrightly suggested that Malthus was insane to think that abstinence was the cure for the poor.

Davis argued that the response that individuals make to the population pressure created by more members joining their ranks is determined by the means available to them. A first response, nondemographic in nature, is to try to increase resources by working harder—longer hours perhaps, a second job, and so on. If that is not sufficient or there are no such opportunities, then migration of some family mem- bers (typically unmarried sons or daughters) is the easiest demographic response. This is, of course, the option that people have been using forever, undoubtedly explaining in large part why human beings have spread out over the planet.

In the early eighteenth century, Richard Cantillon, an Irish–French economist, was pointing out what happened in Europe when families grew too large (and this was even before mortality began markedly to decline):

If all the labourers in a village breed up several sons to the same work, there will be too many labourers to cultivate the lands belonging to the village, and the surplus adults must go to seek a livelihood elsewhere, which they generally do in cities. . . . If a tai- lor makes all the clothes there and breeds up three sons to the same, yet there is work enough for but one successor to him, the two others must go to seek their livelihood elsewhere; if they do not find enough employment in the neighboring town they must go further afield or change their occupation to get a living. (Cantillon 1755 [1964]:23)

But what will be the response of that second generation, the children who now have survived when previously they would not have, and who have thus put the pressure on resources? Davis argues that if there is in fact a chance for social or eco- nomic improvement, then people will try to take advantage of those opportunities by avoiding the large families that caused problems for their parents. Davis suggests that the most powerful motive for family limitation is not fear of poverty or avoid- ance of pain as Malthus argued; rather, it is the prospect of rising prosperity that will most often motivate people to find the means to limit the number of children they have (I discuss these means in Chapter 6). Davis here echoes the themes of Mill and Dumont, but adds that, at the very least, the desire to maintain one’s relative status in society may lead to an active desire to prevent too many children from draining away one’s resources. Of course, that assumes the individuals in question have already attained some status worth maintaining.

One of Davis’s most important contributions to our demographic perspective is, as Cicourel put it, that he “seems to rely on an implicit model of the actor who makes everyday interpretations of perceived environmental changes” (Cicourel 1974:8). For example, people will respond to a decline in mortality only if they notice it, and then their response will be determined by the social situation in which they find themselves. Davis’s analysis is important in reminding us of the crucial link between the everyday lives of individuals and the kinds of population changes that take place in society. Another demographer who extended the scope of the demographic transition with this kind of analysis is Richard Easterlin.

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Cohort Size Effects

People who share something in common represent a cohort and in population studies we usually focus especially on people who share the same age (or at least age range) in common. As I alluded to in Chapter 1, cohorts represent a potential force for change. This idea was first popularized by Norman Ryder several decades ago (Ryder 1965) with the concept of demographic metabolism. This refers to the ongoing replace- ment of people at each age in every society. Today’s young people will be tomorrow’s middle-aged people, and the latter will eventually replace the older population, and so on. To the extent that each cohort is different from the one that preceded it, soci- ety will change over time. Of course, people have recognized this possibility forever, which helps to explain the strict rules guiding the rearing of in most societies—tamp down innovative behavior among the young before it upsets the social order.

Societies have more trouble “tamping down” the effect of demographic metabolism when it involves a change in the size of successive cohorts, which hap- pens as birth and or death rates (and to a lesser extent migration rates) change over time. The youth bulge, discussed in Chapter 1, is one example of that. Indeed, the impact of changing cohort size on human society is a nearly constant theme in this book. It turns out, however, that this is not just a one-way street in which, for example, changes in the birth rate alter the size of cohorts, which in turn produces social change. Richard Easterlin has shown that relative cohort size can then feed back to influence the birth rate itself.

The Easterlin relative cohort size hypothesis (also sometimes known as the rela- tive income hypothesis) is based on the idea that the birth rate does not necessarily respond to absolute levels of economic well-being but rather to levels that are rela- tive to those to which one is accustomed (Easterlin 1968, 1978). Easterlin assumes that the standard of living you experience in late childhood is the base from which you evaluate your chances as an adult. If you can easily improve your income as an adult compared to your late childhood level, then you will be more likely to marry early and have several children. If young people are relatively scarce in soci- ety and business is good, they will be in relatively high demand. In nearly classic Malthusian fashion, they will be able to command high wages and thus be more likely to feel comfortable about getting married and starting a family—the “lucky few” as Carlson (2008) has called them.

On the other hand, if young people are in relatively abundant supply, then even if business is good, the competition for jobs will be stiff and it will be difficult for people to maintain their accustomed level of living, much less marry and start a family. This is yet an another example of the youth bulge issue.

Easterlin’s thesis presents a model of society in which demographic change and economic change are closely interrelated. Economic changes produce demographic changes, which in turn produce economic changes, and so on. The idea of a demo- graphic feedback cycle, which is at the core of Easterlin’s thinking, is compelling, and relative cohort size is certainly a factor that will influence various kinds of social change. But what about the situation that prevails in an increasing number of countries with relatively small cohorts of young adults who are not responding as the Easterlin hypothesis would suggest? Rather than marrying earlier and having

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more children, they are postponing marriage and having even fewer children. Demographers didn’t see this coming, and one reaction to these unexpected trends is to suggest that parts of the world are experiencing something that goes beyond our ordinary ideas about the demographic transition.

Is There Something Beyond the Demographic Transition?

In its original formulation, the demographic transition was simply a move- ment from a demographic regime characterized by high birth and death rates to one characterized by low birth and death rates. When the latter was achieved, presumably the transition was over and things would stabilize demographically (homeostasis) and a country would enter a post-transitional era. However, the dra- matic changes taking place in family and household structure since World War II, especially in Europe, led Dirk van de Kaa (1987) to talk about the “second demo- graphic transition” as something that goes beyond a stable post-transitional period. A demographic centerpiece of this change in the richer countries (he focused on Europe) has been a fall in fertility to below-replacement levels, but van de Kaa sug- gested that the change was less about not having babies than it was about the per- sonal freedom to do what one wanted, especially among women. So, rather than the pattern of grow up, marry, and have children, this transition is associated with a postponement of marriage, a rise in single living, cohabitation, and prolonged resi- dence in the parental household (Lesthaeghe and Neels 2002; McLanahan 2004).

Chris Wilson (2013) notes that “it seems fair to conclude that the assumption of long-term convergence to replacement-level fertility has little or no basis in either empirical evidence or in demonstrably relevant theory” (p. 1375). This is in accord with van de Kaa’s view that we need to revisit the notion that the end result of the “first” demographic transition is homeostasis, or population stability, replacing it with the broader view that young people increasingly make decisions about hav- ing children on the basis of self-fulfillment, without concerning themselves about biological replacement (van de Kaa 2004). We will return to this idea several times in the coming chapters, while at the same broadening the scope to include not just fertility, but also the evolving changes in mortality and migration, which are con- stantly churning the age structure and altering cohorts, among many other things.

The idea that change, not homeostasis, is the natural state of affairs is sup- ported as well by the discussion in Chapter 2 about the Neolithic Demographic Transition (Bocquet-Appel 2008), which would actually represent the first demo- graphic transition (an increase in both birth and death rates). That was followed by the more famous demographic transition of the past 200 years or so (a decrease in both birth and death rates), followed by what we would then call not the second, but rather the third demographic transition (an unexpected further decline in birth rates). We humans may have experienced not one, but a sequence of transitions, and through it all the population has generally been increasing, as shown back in Table 2.1, rather than standing still. We might more properly refer to these changes as demographic evolution, and I discuss this more thoroughly in Chapter 12 as I examine what the future might hold demographically.

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The Demographic Transition Is Really a Set of Transitions

The reformulation driven by the European Fertility Project, the theory of demo- graphic change and response, the cohort size effects, the second demographic transition, and other research all have generated the insight that the demographic transition (by which I mean the one that started a couple of hundred years ago) is actually a set of interrelated transitions. Taken together, they help us understand not just the causes but the consequences of population change. Indeed, when we view the world from this perspective, it becomes clearer why we should talk about demographic evolution, not just transition.

Usually (but not always) the first transition to occur is the health and mortality transition (the shift from deaths at younger ages due to communicable disease to deaths at older ages due to degenerative diseases). This transition is followed by the fertility transition—the shift from natural (and high) to controlled (and low) fertility, typically in a delayed response to the health and mortality transition. The predictable changes in the age structure (the age transition) brought about by the mortality and fertility transitions produce social and economic reactions as societies adjust to constantly changing age distributions. The rapid growth of the population occasioned by the pattern of mortality declining sooner and more rapidly than fer- tility almost always leads to overpopulation of rural areas, producing the migration transition, especially toward urban areas, creating the urban transition. The family and household transition is occasioned by the massive structural changes that accompany longer life, lower fertility, an older age structure, and urban instead of rural residence—all of which are part and parcel of the demographic transition. The interrelationships among these transitions are shown in Figure 3.4.

Health and mortality transition

Fertility transition

Urban transition

Age transition

Family and household transition

Impact on society

Migration transition

Figure 3.4 The Transitions that Comprise the Demographic Transition’s Impact on Society Note: Each box has its own set of theories that serve as explanations for the phenomenon under consideration.

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The Health and Mortality Transition

The transition process almost always begins with a decline in mortality, which is brought about by changes in society that improve the health of people and thus their ability to resist disease, and by scientific advances that prevent pre- mature death. However, death rates do not decline evenly by age; rather it is the very youngest and the very oldest—but especially the youngest—whose lives are most likely to be saved by improved life expectancy. Thus, the initial impact of the health and mortality transition is to increase the number of young people who are alive, ballooning the bottom end of the age structure in a manner that looks just like an increase in the birth rate. This sets all the other transitions in motion.

The Fertility Transition

The fertility transition can begin without a decline in mortality (as happened in France), but in most places it is the decline in mortality, leading to greater survival of children, that eventually motivates people to think about limiting the number of children they are having. Throughout most of human history, the average woman had two children who survived to adulthood. The decline in mortality, however, obviously increases that number and thereby threatens the very foundation of the household economy. At the community or societal level, the increasing number of young people creates all sorts of pressures to change, often leading to peer pres- sure to conform to new standards of behavior, including the deliberate control of reproduction.

Another set of extremely important changes that occur in the context of the health and mortality transition is that the scope of life expands for women as they, too, live longer. They are increasingly empowered to delay childbearing and to have fewer children because they begin to realize that most of their children will survive to adulthood and they, themselves, will survive beyond the reproduc- tive ages, beyond their children’s arrival into adulthood. This new freedom gives them vastly more opportunities than ever before in human history to do some- thing with their lives besides bearing and raising children. This realization may be a genuine tipping point in the fertility transition, leading to an almost irreversible decline.

As fertility declines, the health and mortality transition is itself pushed along, because the survival of children is enhanced when a woman has fewer children among whom to share resources. Also affected by the fertility decline is the age structure, which begins to cave in at the younger ages as fewer children are being born, and as most are now surviving through childhood. In its turn, that shift in the age transition to an increasingly older age structure has the potential to divert soci- etal resources away from dealing primarily with the impact of children to dealing with broader social concerns, including raising the standard of living. A higher stan- dard of living can then redound to the benefit of health levels throughout society, adding fuel to the fire of increasing life expectancy.

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The Age Transition

In many respects, the age transition is the “master” transition in that the changing number of people at each age that occurs with the decline of mortality, and then the decline in fertility, presents the most obvious demographic pressure for social change. When both mortality and fertility are high, the age structure is quite young, but the decline in mortality makes it even younger by disproportionately increasing the num- ber of young people. Then, as fertility declines, the youngest ages are again affected first, since births occur only at age zero, so a fertility decline shows up first as simply fewer young children than before. However, as the bulge of young people born prior to the fertility decline pushes into the older ages while fertility begins to decline, the age structure moves into a stage that can be very beneficial to economic development in a society—a large fraction of the population is composed of young adults of working age who are having fewer children as dependents at the same time that the older popu- lation has not yet increased in size enough to create problems of dependency in old age. As we will see, this phase in the age transition is often associated with a golden age of advancement in the standard of living—the leap forward that Mill was advocating.

That golden age can be transitory, however, if a society has not planned for the next phase of the age transition, when the older population begins to increase more rapidly than the younger population. The baby bulge created by the initial declines in mortality reaches old age at a time when fertility has likely declined, and so the age structure has a much greater number and a higher fraction of older people than ever before. We are only now learning how societies will respond to this challenge of an increasingly older population.

The Migration Transition

Meanwhile, back at the very young age structure put into motion by declining mortal- ity, the theory of demographic change and response suggests that in rural areas, where most of the population lived for most of human history, the growth in the number of young people will lead to an oversupply of young people looking for jobs, which will encourage people to go elsewhere in search of economic opportunity. The Europeans who experienced the first wave of population growth, because they experienced the health and mortality transition first, still lived in a world where there was “empty” land. Of course, it wasn’t really empty, as the Americas and the islands of the South Pacific (largely Australia and New Zealand) were populated mainly by hunter-gather- ers who used the land extensively, rather than intensively, as I mentioned in Chapter 2.

As Europeans arrived in the Americas, they perceived land as being not used and so claimed it for themselves. We all know the consequences of this for the indig- enous populations, as all of the land was eventually claimed for intensive human use. So, whereas the Europeans could initially spread out from rural Europe to rural areas in the Americas and the South Pacific, migrants from rural areas today no longer have that option.

Notice in Figure 3.4 that there is a double-arrow connecting the age and migration transitions. This is because migration takes people (mainly young adults)

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out of one area and puts them in another area, thus affecting the age structure in both places. As I have already mentioned, this difference in age structure between two places contributes to current migration patterns of people from younger societ- ies filling in the “empty” places in the age structure of older societies.

The Urban Transition

With empty lands filling up, migrants from the countryside in the world today have no place to go but to cities, and cities have historically tended to flourish by absorb- ing labor from rural areas. A majority of people in the world now live in cities, and by the end of the twenty-first century, almost all of us will be there. The urban tran- sition thus begins with migration from rural to urban areas but then morphs into the urban “evolution” as most humans wind up being born in, living in, and dying in cities. The complexity of human existence is played out in cities, leading us to expect a constant dynamism of urban places for most of the rest of human history. Because urban places are historically associated with lower levels of fertility than rural areas, as the world’s population becomes increasingly urban we can anticipate that this will be a major factor in bringing and keeping fertility levels down all over the world.

The Family and Household Transition

It is reasonable to think that the transition in family and household structure, noted above with respect to the second demographic transition, is not so much a second transition as it is another set of transitions within the broader framework of the demographic transition. As I show in Figure 3.4, the family and household transition is influenced by all the previously mentioned transitions. The health and mortality transition is pivotal because it gives women (and men, too, of course) a dramatically greater number of years to live in general, and more specifically a greater number of years that do not need to be devoted to children. Low mortality reduces the pressure for a woman to marry early and start bearing children while she is young enough for her body to handle that stress. Furthermore, when mortality was high, marriages had a high probability of ending in widowhood when one of the partners was still reasonably young, and families routinely were reconstituted as widows and widowers remarried. But low mortality leads to a much longer time that married couples will be alive together before one partner dies, and this alone is related to part of the increase in divorce rates.

The age transition plays a role at the societal level, as well, because over time the increasingly similar number of people at all ages—as opposed to a majority of people being very young—means that any society is bound to be composed of a greater array of family and household arrangements. Diversity in families and households is also encouraged by migration (which breaks up and reconstitutes families) and by the urban transition, especially since urban places tend to be more tolerant of diversity than are smaller rural communities.

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The rest of this book is devoted to more detailed examinations of each of these transitions, and you will discover that a variety of theoretical approaches have developed over time to explain the causes and consequences of each set of transi- tions. Your own demographic perspective will be honed by looking for similarities and patterns in the transitions that link them together and, more importantly, link them to their potential impact on society.

Impact on Society

The modern field of population studies came about largely to encourage and inspire deeper insight into the causes of changes in fertility, mortality, migration, age and sex structure, and population characteristics and distribution. Demographers spent most of the twentieth century doing that, but always with an eye toward new things that could be learned about what demographic change meant for human society. Unlike in Malthus’s day, population growth is no longer viewed as being caused by one set of factors nor as having a simple prescribed set of consequences.

Perhaps the closest we can come at present to “big” theories are those that try to place demographic events and behavior in the context of other global change, espe- cially political change, economic development, and westernization. One of the more ambitious and influential of these theorists is Jack Goldstone (1991), whose work incorporates population growth as a precursor of change in the “early modern world” (defined by him as 1500 to 1800). He argues that population growth in the presence of rigid social structures produced dramatic political change in England and France, in the Ottoman Empire, and in China. Population growth led to increased government expenditures, which led to inflation, which led to fiscal crisis. In these societies with no real opportunities for social mobility, population growth (which initially increases the number of younger persons) led to disaffection and popular unrest and created a new cohort of young people receptive to new ideas. The result in the four case stud- ies he analyzes was rebellion and revolution. This hearkens back to the discussion in Chapter 1 about the role of the “youth bulge” in conflict in the Middle East, an issue that Goldstone has examined as well (Goldstone 2002; Goldstone et al. 2011).

Stephen Sanderson has promoted the idea that population growth has been an important stimulus to change throughout human history, but especially since the Agricultural Revolution. Thus, his time frame is much longer than that of Goldstone: “Had Paleolithic hunter-gatherers been able to keep their populations from growing, the whole world would likely still be surviving entirely by hunting and gathering” (Sanderson 1995:49). Instead, population growth generated the Agricultural Revolu- tion and then the Industrial Revolution. The sedentary life associated with the Agri- cultural Revolution increased social complexity (a very Durkheimian idea), which led to the rise of civilization (cities) and the state (city-states and then nation-states).

Population change may seem largely imperceptible as it is occurring, so if we can look back and see that there were momentous historical consequences of popu- lation growth and change in the past, can we look forward into the future and project similar kinds of influences? Many people (including me) would say yes, and the rest of this book will show you why.

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Summary and Conclusion

A lot of thinking about population issues has taken place over a very long period, and in this chapter I have traced the progression of demographic thinking from ancient doctrines to contemporary systematic perspectives. Malthus was not the first but he was certainly the most influential of the early modern writers. Malthus believed that a biological urge to reproduce was the cause of population growth and that its natural consequence was poverty. Marx, on the other hand, did not openly argue with the Malthusian causes of growth, but he vehemently disagreed with the idea that poverty is the natural consequence of population growth. Marx denied that population growth was a problem per se—it only appeared that way in capitalist society. It may have seemed peculiar that I discuss a person who denied the importance of a demographic perspective in a chapter dedicated to that very importance. However, the Marxian point of view is sufficiently prevalent today among political leaders and intellectuals in enough countries that this attitude becomes in itself a demographic perspective of some significance. Furthermore, his perspective on the world finds its way into many aspects of current mainstream thinking, including modernization theory, that underlie aspects of the demographic transition theory.

The perspective of Mill, who seems very contemporary in many of his ideas, was somewhere between that of Malthus and Marx. He believed that increased productivity could lead to a motivation for having smaller families, especially if the influence of women was allowed to be felt and if people were educated about the possible consequences of having a large family. Dumont took these kinds of indi- vidual motivations a step further and suggested in greater detail the reasons why prosperity and ambition, operating through the principle of social capillarity, gener- ally lead to a decline in the birth rate. Durkheim’s perspective emphasized the con- sequences more than the causes of population growth. He was convinced that the complexity of modern societies is due almost entirely to the social responses to pop- ulation growth—more people lead to higher levels of innovation and specialization.

More recently developed demographic perspectives have implicitly assumed that the consequences of population growth are serious and problematic, and they move directly to explanations of the causes of population growth. The original theory of the demographic transition suggested that growth is an intermediate stage between the more stable conditions of high birth and death rates to a new balance of low birth and death rates. Reformulations of the demographic transition perspective have emphasized its evolutionary character and have shown that the demographic transition is not one monolithic change, but rather that it encompasses several inter- related transitions: A decline in mortality will almost necessarily be followed by a decline in fertility, and by subsequent transitions in migration, urbanization, the age structure, and the family and household structure in society.

As I explore with you the causes and consequences of population growth and the uses to which such knowledge can be applied, you will need to know about the sources of demographic data. What is the empirical base of our understanding of the relationship between population and society? We turn to that topic in the next chapter.

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Main Points

1. A demographic perspective is a way of relating basic population information to theories about how the world operates demographically.

2. Population doctrines and theories prior to Malthus vacillated between pronatalist and antinatalist and were often utopian.

3. According to Malthus, population growth is generated by the urge to repro- duce, although growth is checked ultimately by the means of subsistence.

4. The natural consequences of population growth according to Malthus are misery and poverty because of the tendency for populations to grow faster than the food supply. Nonetheless, he believed that misery could be avoided if people practiced moral restraint—a simple formula of chastity before marriage and a delay in marriage until one can afford all the children that God might provide.

5. Marx and Engels strenuously objected to the Malthusian population perspec- tive because it blamed poverty on the poor rather than on the evils of social organization.

6. Mill argued that the standard of living is a major determinant of fertility levels, but he also felt that people could influence their own demographic destinies.

7. Dumont argued that personal ambition generated a process of social capillarity that induced people to limit their number of children in order to get ahead socially and economically, while another French writer, Durkheim, built an entire theory of social structure on his conception of the consequences of population growth.

8. The demographic transition theory is a perspective that emphasizes the impor- tance of economic and social development, which leads first to a decline in mortality and then, after some time lag, to a commensurate decline in fertility. It is based on the experience of the developed nations, and is derived from the modernization theory.

9. Davis’s theory of demographic change and response emphasizes that people must perceive a personal need to change behavior before a decline in fertility will take place, and that the kind of response they make will depend on what means are available to them.

10. The demographic transition is really a set of transitions, including the health and mortality, fertility, age, migration, urban, and family/household transitions.

Questions for Review

1. What lessons exist within the ideas of pre-Malthusian thinkers on population that can be applied conceptually to the demographic situations we currently confront in the world?

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2. It was obvious even in Malthus’s lifetime that his theory had numerous defects. Describe those defects and discuss why, given them, we are still talking about Malthus.

3. Based on the information provided in this chapter, which writer—Malthus or Marx—would sound most modern and relevant to twenty-first-century demog- raphers? Defend your answer.

4. Using the material in Chapter 2 and on the Internet as resources, reflect on the different demographic circumstances that gave rise to the Malthusian and Marxian views on population, compared to Mill, Dumont, and Durkheim. To what extent do demographic theories follow the times?

5. Review the basic premises of the theory of demographic change and response and discuss how it served to expand the concept of the demographic transition into the idea of a larger suite of transitions.

Websites of Interest

1. http://turnbull.mcs.stand.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Condorcet.html The Marquis de Condorcet, who helped to inspire Malthus’s essay, is the subject of this website, located at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It includes biographical information and a list of his publications.

2. http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/malthus/popu.txt The beauty of this website, located in the Department of Economics at the University of Bristol in England, is that it contains the full text of Malthus’s first (1798) Essay on Population.

3. http://www.ined.fr/en/lexicon/ French demographers have played key roles in developing population studies, and the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris carries on that tradition. At this part of the INED website, you can find a very useful glossary of demographic terms (in English), as well as data for most countries of the world.

4. http://www.popcouncil.org The Population Council is a policy-oriented research center in New York City founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller III. It originated the journal Population and Development Review, whose articles tend to focus on issues that directly or indirectly test demographic theories and perspectives. At this website you can, among other things, peruse abstracts of articles published in the journal to stay up to date on recent research.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/demographic%20perspectives Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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100

CHAPTER 4 Demographic Data

SOURCES OF DEMOGRAPHIC DATA Population Censuses The Census of the United States Who Is Included in the Census? Coverage Error Measuring Coverage Error Content Error Sampling Error

Continuous Measurement—American Community Survey

The Census of Canada The Census of Mexico IPUMS—Warehouse of Global Census Data

REGISTRATION OF VITAL EVENTS

Figure 4.1 Population Center of the United States Based on Data from the Decennial Censuses Source: U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/pdfs/ cenpop2010/centerpop_mean2010.pdf (accessed 2014).

ARKANSAS

MISSOURI

ILLINOIS

IOWA

INDIANA

MICHIGAN

OHIO

PENNSYLVANIA

TENNESSEE

KENTUCKY

Mean Center of Population for the United States: 1790 to 2010

WEST VIRGINIA

VIRGINIA

NORTH CAROLINA

SOUTH CAROLINA

GEORGIAALABAMA

2010 2000

1990 1980

1970

1960 1950

1940 1930

1920

1900

1910

1890 1880 1870

1860 1850 1840 1830

1820 1810 1800 1790

2010 mean center of population located near plato, MO Mean center of population

Kent County of center of population State or state equivalent

County or county equivalent

100 Kilometers

100 Miles

MARYLAND

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COMBINING THE CENSUS AND VITAL STATISTICS

ADMINISTRATIVE DATA

SAMPLE SURVEYS Demographic Surveys in the United States Canadian Surveys Mexican Surveys Demographic and Health Surveys

Demographic Surveillance Systems European Surveys

HISTORICAL SOURCES

SPATIAL DEMOGRAPHY Mapping Demographic Data GIS and the Census

ESSAY: Demographics of Politics: Why the Census Matters

Thus far, I have offered you a variety of facts as I described the history of population growth and provided you with an overview of the world’s population situation. I do not just make up these numbers, of course, so in this chapter I discuss the various kinds of demographic data we draw on to know what is happening in the world. To analyze the demography of a particular society, we need to know how many people live there, how they are distributed geographically, how many are being born, how many are dying, how many are moving in, and how many are moving out. That, of course, is only the beginning. If we want to unravel the mysteries of why things are as they are and not just describe what they are, we have to know about the social, psychological, economic, and even physical characteristics of the people and places being studied. Furthermore, we need to know these things not just for the present but for the past as well. Let me begin the discussion, however, with sources of basic information about the numbers of living people, births, deaths, and migrants.

Sources of Demographic Data

The primary source of data on population size and distribution, as well as on demo- graphic structure and characteristics, is the census of population. After an overview of the history of population censuses, I will take a closer look at how censuses are taken in the United States and its neighbors, Canada and Mexico. The major source of information on the population processes of births and deaths is the registration of vital statistics, although in a few countries this task is accomplished by population registers, and in most developing nations vital events are estimated from sample sur- veys. Administrative data and historical data provide much of the information about population changes at the local level and about geographic mobility and migration. Indeed, the spatial component of demography is central to our understanding of population change, and I conclude the chapter by discussing key spatial concepts.

Population Censuses

For centuries, governments have wanted to know how many people were under their rule. Rarely has their curiosity been piqued by scientific concern, but rather

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governments wanted to know who the taxpayers were, or they wanted to identify potential laborers and soldiers. The most direct way to find out how many people there are is to count them, and when you do that you are conducting a population census—a complete enumeration of the population. The United Nations Statistics Division (2008) notes that “the traditional census is among the most complex and massive peacetime exercises a nation undertakes. It requires mapping the entire country, mobilizing and training an army of enumerators, conducting a massive public campaign, canvassing all households, collecting individual information, com- piling vast amounts of completed questionnaires, and analysing and disseminating the data” (p. 1).

In practice, this does not mean that every person is actually seen and interviewed by a census taker. In most countries, it means that one adult in a household answers questions about all the people living in that household. These answers may be verbal responses to questions asked in person by the census taker, but they also may be written responses to a questionnaire sent by mail, or even questions answered online.

The term census comes from the Latin for “assessing” or “taxing.” For Romans, it meant a register of adult male citizens and their property for purposes of taxation, the distribution of military obligations, and the determination of political status (Starr 1987). Thus, in a.d. 119 a person named Horos from the village of Bacchias left behind a letter on papyrus in which he states: “I register myself and those of my household for the house-by-house census of the past second year of Hadrian Caesar our Lord. I am Horos, the aforesaid, a cultivator of state land, forty-eight years old, with a scar on my left eyebrow, and I register my wife Tapekusis, daughter of Horos, forty-five years old. . . .” (Winter 1936:187).

As far as we know, the earliest governments to undertake censuses of their populations were those in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, China, Palestine, and Rome (Bryan 2004). For several hundreds of years, citizens of Rome were counted periodically for tax and military purposes, and this enumeration of Roman subjects was extended to the entire empire, including Roman Egypt, in 5 b.c. The Bible records this event as follows: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city” (Luke 2:1–3). You can, of course, imagine the deficiencies of a census that required people to show up at their birthplaces rather than paying census takers to go out and do the counting. And, in fact, all that was actually required was that the head of each household provide government officials with a list of every household member (Horsley 1987).

In the seventh century a.d., the Prophet Mohammed led his followers from Mecca to Medina (in Saudi Arabia), and after establishing a city-state there, one of his first activities was to conduct a written census of the entire Muslim popula- tion in the city (the returns showed a total of 1,500) (Nu’Man 1992). William of Normandy used a similar strategy in 1086, twenty years after having conquered England. William ordered an enumeration of all the landed wealth in the newly acquired territory in order to determine how much revenue the landowners owed the government. Data were recorded in the Domesday Book, domesday being the

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word in Middle English for doomsday, which is the day of final judgment. The census document was so named because it was the final proof of legal title to land. The Domesday Book was not really what we think of today as a census, because it was an enumeration of “hearths,” or household heads and their wealth, rather than of people. In order to calculate the total population of England in 1086 from the Domesday Book, you would have to multiply the number of “hearths” by some estimate of household size. More than 300,000 households were included, and researchers estimate they averaged five persons per household. Therefore, the population the area enumerated by William at the time was approximately 1.5 million (Hinde 1998). The population of what is now modern England and Wales actually was larger than that at the time because, in fact, the Domesday Book does not cover London, Winchester, Northumberland, Durham, or much of northwest England, and the only parts of Wales included are certain border areas (U.K. National Archives 2014).

On the continent, the European renaissance began in northern Italy in the fourteenth century, and the Venetians and then the Florentines were interested in counting the wealth of their region, as William had been after conquering England. They developed a catasto that combined a count of the hearth and individuals. Thus, unlike the Domesday Book, the Florentine catasto of 1427 recorded not only the wealth of households but also data about each member of the household. In fact, so much information was collected that most of it went unexamined until the modern advent of computers (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985). The value of a census was well known to François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, who was a very influential French political philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He was the tutor to the Duke of Burgundy and much of his writing was intended as a primer of government for the young duke:

Do you know the number of men who compose your nation? How many men, and how many women, how many farmers, how many artisans, how many lawyers, how many tradespeople, how many priests and monks, how many nobles and soldiers? What would you say of a shepherd who did not know the size of his flock? . . . A king not knowing all these things is only half a king. (quoted in Jones 2002:110)

By that description, Louis XIV (the “Sun King”) and his grandson Louis XV were only partial kings, because the demographic evidence now suggests that the French population was growing in the eighteenth century, rather than declining, as the royal advisors (including the physiocrat Quesnay) believed at the time. Fénelon’s books and essays were widely read in the early eighteenth century, which ushered in the modern era of nation-states, in turn giving rise to a genuine quest for accurate population information (Hollingsworth 1969). Indeed the term statistic is derived from the German word meaning “facts about a state.” Sweden was one of the first of the European nations to keep track of its population regularly with the establish- ment in 1749 of a combined population register and census administered in each diocese by the local clergy (Statistika Centralbyran [Sweden] 1983). Denmark and several Italian states (before the uniting of Italy in the late nineteenth century) also conducted censuses during the eighteenth century (Carr-Saunders 1936), as did the

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104 Part One A Demographic Perspective

United States (where the first census was conducted in 1790). England launched its first modern census in 1801.

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the statistical approach to under- standing business and government affairs had started to take root in the Western world. The population census began to be viewed as a potential tool for finding out more than just how many people there were and where they lived. Governments began to ask questions about age, marital status, whether and how people were employed, literacy, and so forth. Census data (in combination with other statistics) have become the “lenses through which we form images of our society.” Frederick Jackson Turner announced this famous view on the significance of the closing of the frontier on the basis of data from the 1890 census. Our national self-image today is confirmed or challenged by numbers that tell of drastic changes in the family, the increase in ethnic diversity, and many other trends. Winston Churchill observed that “first we shape our buildings and then they shape us. The same may be said of our statistics” (Alonso and Starr 1982:30).

The potential power behind the numbers that censuses produce can be gauged by public reaction to a census. In Germany, the enumeration of 1983 was postponed to 1987 because of public concern that the census was prying unduly into private lives. Germany did not conduct another census until 2002, well after reunification, and even then it was a sample census, not a complete enumeration. In the past few decades, protests have occurred in England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, as well. In the Netherlands case, the census scheduled for the 1980s was actually canceled after a survey indicating that the majority of the urban population would not cooperate (Robey 1983). The Dutch have since used what they call a “virtual census” in which they generate population data from administrative sources, especially population registers.

In 2008, the European Union passed a set of regulations encouraging its member states to undertake census enumerations in 2011, and Germany stepped up to do that. Even before the census, German officials were concerned that they were overestimat- ing Germany’s population, and the 2011 census data confirmed that fact. Although administrative data had been capturing people moving in, out-migrants were being missed, and that became clear once the complete enumeration was undertaken.

Since the end of World War II, the United Nations has encouraged all coun- tries to enumerate their populations in censuses, often providing financial as well as technical aid to less developed nations. The world’s two largest nations, China and India, each regularly conduct censuses, with the most recent being China in 2010 and India in 2011. India is, in fact, well into its second 100 years of census taking, the first census having been taken in 1881 under the supervision of the British.

In contrast to India’s regular census–taking, another of England’s former colonies, Nigeria (the world’s seventh most populous nation), has had more trouble with these efforts. Nigeria’s population is divided among three broad ethnic groups: the Hausa-Fulani in the north, who are predominately Muslim; the Yoruba in the southwest, who are of various religious faiths; and the largely Christian Igbo in the southeast. The 1952 census of Nigeria indicated that the Hausa-Fulani had the larg- est share of the population, and so they dominated the first postcolonial government set up after independence in 1960. The newly independent nation ordered a census

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105Chapter 4 Demographic Data

to be taken in 1962, but the results showed that northerners accounted for only 30 percent of the population. A “recount” in 1963 led somewhat suspiciously to the north accounting for 67 percent of the population. This exacerbated underly- ing ethnic tensions, culminating in the Igbo declaring independence. The resulting Biafran War (1967–70) saw at least 3 million people lose their lives before the Igbo rejoined the rest of Nigeria. A census in 1973 was never accepted by the govern- ment, and it was not until 1991 that the nation felt stable enough to try its hand again at enumeration, after agreeing that there would be no questions about ethnic group, language, or religion, and that population numbers would not be used as a basis for government expenditures. The official census count was 88.5 million people, well below the 110 million that many population experts had been guessing in the absence of any real data (Okolo 1999).

In March 2006, Nigeria completed its first census since 1991, but not with- out protests, boycotts, rows over payments to officials, and at least 15 deaths (Lalasz 2006). The final count from the 2006 census was about 140 million and, given the history of census-taking in the country, there was a lot of skepticism sur- rounding the numbers. The census had steered clear of questions about religion, but the 2008 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (see later in this chapter for a discussion of these surveys) suggests that 54 percent of women and men aged 15–49 are Christian, while about 45 percent are Muslim, and one percent practice some other religion (National Population Commission [Nigeria] and ICF Macro 2009).

Lebanon has not been enumerated since 1932, when the country was under French colonial rule (Domschke and Goyer 1986). At the time, the country’s population was divided nearly equally between Christians and Muslims, and that, combined with the political strife between those groups, made taking a census a very sensitive political issue. Before the nation was literally torn apart by civil war between 1975 and 1990, the Christians had held a slight majority with respect to political representation. But Muslims almost certainly now hold a demographic majority, due both to the lower level of fertility and higher level of outmigration among Christians (Courbage and Todd 2011). Nonetheless, what we know about Lebanon comes from sources other than census data.

I should note that censuses historically have been unpopular in that part of the world. The Old Testament of the Bible tells us that in ancient times King David ordered a census of Israel in which his enumerators counted “one million, one hun- dred thousand men who drew the sword. . . . But God was displeased with this thing [the census], and he smote Israel. . . . So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel; and there fell seventy thousand men of Israel” (1 Chronicles 21). Fortunately, in modern times, the advantages of census taking seem more clearly to outweigh the disadvantages. This has been especially true in the United States, where records indicate that no census has been followed directly by a pestilence.

The Census of the United States

Population censuses were part of colonial life prior to the creation of the United States. A census had been conducted in Virginia in the early 1600s, and most of

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106 Part One A Demographic Perspective

the northern colonies had conducted a census prior to the Revolution (U.S. Census Bureau 1978). As I discuss in the essay accompanying this chapter, a population census has been taken every 10 years since 1790 in the United States as part of the constitutional mandate that seats in the House of Representatives be apportioned on the basis of population size and distribution. Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution directs that “representatives. . . . shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers. . . . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.” Even in 1790 the government used the census to find out more than just how many people there were. The census asked for the names of the following: head of family, free white males aged 16 years and older, free white females, slaves, and other persons. The census questions were reflections of the social importance of those categories.

For the first 100 years of census taking in the United States, the population was enumerated by U.S. marshals. In 1880, special census agents were hired for the first time, and finally in 1902 the Census Bureau became a permanent part of the govern- ment bureaucracy (Hobbs and Stoops 2002). Beyond a core of inquiries designed to elicit demographic and housing information, the questions asked on the census have fluctuated according to the concerns of the time. Interest in international migration, for example, rose in 1920 just before the passage of a restrictive immigration law, and the census in that year added a battery of questions about the foreign-born pop- ulation. In 2000, a question was added about grandparents as caregivers, replacing a question on fertility, and providing insight into the shift in focus from how many children women were having to the issue of who is taking care of those children. Questions are added and deleted by the Census Bureau through a process of consul- tation with Congress, other government officials, and census statistics users.

One of the more controversial items for the Census 2000 questionnaire was the question about race and ethnicity. The growing racial and ethnic diversity of the United States has led to a larger number of interracial/interethnic marriages and relationships producing children of mixed origin (also called “multiracial”). Pre- vious censuses had asked people to choose a single category of race to describe themselves, but there was a considerable public sentiment that people should be able to identify themselves as being of mixed or multiple origins if, in fact, they per- ceived themselves in that way (Harris and Sim 2002). Late in 1997, the government accepted the recommendation from a federally appointed committee that people of mixed racial heritage be able to choose more than one race category when filling out the Census 2000 questionnaire. This was carried over into the 2010 Census, as well as incorporated into other government surveys. Thus, a person whose mother is white and whose father is African American can check both “White” and “Black or African American,” whereas in the past the choice would have had to be made between the two.

There was still a separate question on “Hispanic/Latino/Spanish Origin” iden- tity on the 2010 census, as you can see in Figure 4.2, reflecting a deep controversy that concerns the question of whether “race” is even an appropriate category to ask about. In response to a variety of concerns raised by social scientists, the Census

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107Chapter 4 Demographic Data

Bureau conducted a test of the 2010 census questions using both the “standard” two questions (one on race and another on Hispanic origin) compared to a ques- tion that combined those into a single concept of “origin.” The results were similar, suggesting that the single question might be a viable option (U.S. Census Bureau 2012b), although at this writing the Census Bureau has not made a decision about which version to use in the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, an article in The Economist (2013) nicely summarized a very complex situation:

Such a change, say officials, would not mean that “Hispanic” is now to be considered a new racial category. Still, the widespread reporting of Hispanic-specific data, acknowl- edges Roberto Ramirez at the Census Bureau, means that in some respects “Hispanic” has become a de facto race.

Some are sceptical about the proposal. Rubén Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, accepts the need for good data but says the bureau is thinking about

Figure 4.2 First Page of Questionnaire for United States Census 2010

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108 Part One A Demographic Perspective

race in 18th-century terms. Hispanic identity in America, he adds, is a “Frankenstein’s monster” that has taken on a life of its own.

The ethnic origins of some previous waves of immigrants have evaporated over time: Italians, Germans and Russians, dismissed by Benjamin Franklin in 1751 as of “swarthy complexion”, are now, for the most part, just white. Similar forces may be at play today: last year the Pew Hispanic Centre found that among Hispanics of the third generation or above, almost half preferred to call themselves “American.”

The census is designed as a complete enumeration of the population, but in the United States only a few of the questions are actually asked of everyone. For reasons of economy, most items in the census questionnaire have been administered to a sample of households in the last several censuses. From 1790 through 1930, all questions were asked of all applicable persons, but as the American population grew and Congress kept adding new questions to the census, the savings involved in sampling grew, and in 1940 the Census Bureau began its practice of asking only a small number of items of all households (the “short form”), and using a sample of one out of every six households to gather more detailed data (the “long form”). This was the procedure up through the 2000 census. A major change for the 2010 census in the United States was that it included only the short form, with the detailed data being collected not as part of the decennial census, but rather through the ongoing American Community Survey, which I discuss later in the chapter. Note that the short form information represents everything necessary to meet the Constitutional requirements for Congressional Redistricting. Everything else is really useful, but not Constitutionally necessary.

The questionnaire for Census 2010 is reproduced as Figure 4.2. The first page asks for a count of everyone in the household, including people who may not be there at the moment, and those who may be homeless but are nonetheless there in the housing unit. The first person listed is supposed to be someone in the household who owns, is buying, or rents this housing unit. This person used to be known as the “head of household” (and there is still a tax category in the United States for such a person), but the Census Bureau now refers to him or her on the census form simply as “Person 1.” Starting then with Person 1 (which is all I show in Figure 4.2) informa- tion is requested for each person in the household regarding his or her relationship to “Person 1,” sex, age and date of birth, whether the person is of Hispanic origin, and separately what the person’s race is. Finally there is a specific question about whether or not this person sometimes lives or stays elsewhere. This is to help the Census Bureau eliminate duplicates, such as college students living away from home.

Table 4.1 lists the items included on the U.S. Census 2010 questionnaire (the short form) and the American Community Survey (from which “long form” data are collected), compared with a list of information obtained by the 2011 census of Canada and the 2010 census of Mexico, both of which countries are discussed later in this chapter. The table indicates which items are asked of every household and which are asked of a sample of households.

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109Chapter 4 Demographic Data

Census Item U.S. Census 2010

and ACS Canada 2011 Mexico 2010

Population Characteristics:

Age XX XX XX

Sex XX XX XX

Relationship to householder (family structure) XX XX XX

Race XX X

Ethnicity XX X

Marital status X XX XX

Fertility X XX

Child mortality XX

Income X X XX

Sources of income X X X

Health insurance X XX

Job benefits X

Unpaid household activities X

Labor force status X X XX

Industry, occupation, and class of worker X X XX

Work status last year X

Veteran status X

Grandparents as caregivers X

Place of work and journey to work X X XX

Journey to work X X

Vehicles available X

Ancestry X X

Place of birth X X XX

Birthplace of parents X

Citizenship X X

Year of entry if not born in this country X X

Language spoken at home X XX XX

Language spoken at work X

Religion X XX

Educational attainment X X XX

School enrollment X X XX

Residence one year ago (migration) X X

Residence five years ago (migration) X XX

International migration of family members X

Disability (activities of daily living) X X XX

Table 4.1 Comparison of Items Included in the U.S. Census 2010 Questionnaire and the American Community Survey, the 2011 Censuses of Canada, and the 2010 Census of Mexico

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110 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Census Item U.S. Census 2010

and ACS Canada 2011 Mexico 2010

Housing Characteristics:

Tenure (rent or own) XX XX XX

Type of housing XX XX XX

Agricultural use of property X XX

Acreage of property X

Business use of property X

Material used for construction of walls XX

Material used for construction of roof XX

Material used for construction of floors XX

Repairs needed on structure X

Year structure built X X X

Units in structure X

Rooms in unit X X XX

Bedrooms X X XX

Kitchen facilities X XX

Electricity in house XX

Water source XX

Toilet facilities X XX

Sewerage XX

Material possessions (TV, radio, etc.) X XX

House heating fuel X XX

Year moved into unit X

Value of property X X

Selected housing costs X X

Rent or mortgage payment X X

Note: XX 5 Included and asked of every household; X 5 Included but asked of only a sample of households. Questions asked on each census may be different; similar categories of questions asked do not necessarily mean strict comparability of data.

In theory, a census obtains accurate information from everyone. But in practice that turns out to be more difficult than it may seem. For example, who is supposed to be included in the census? Are visitors to the country to be included? Are people who are absent from the country on census day to be excluded?

Who Is Included in the Census?

There are several ways to answer that question, and each produces a poten- tially different total number of people. At one extreme is the concept of the

Table 4.1 (continued)

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111Chapter 4 Demographic Data

de facto population, which counts people who are in a given territory on the census day. At the other extreme is the de jure population, which represents people who legally “belong” to a given area in some way or another, regardless of whether they were there on the day of the census. For countries with few foreign workers and where working in another area is rare, the distinction makes little difference. But many countries, including nearly all of the Gulf states in the Middle East, have large numbers of guest workers from other countries and thus have a larger de facto than de jure population. On the other hand, a country such as Mexico, from which migrants regularly leave temporarily to go to the United States, has a de jure popu- lation that is larger than the de facto population.

Most countries (including the United States, Canada, and Mexico) have now adopted a concept that lies somewhere between the extremes of de facto and de jure, and they include people in the census on the basis of usual residence, which is roughly defined as the place where a person usually sleeps. College students who live away from home, for example, are included at their college address rather than being counted in their parents’ household. People with no usual residence (the homeless, including migratory workers, vagrants, and “street people”) are counted where they are found. On the other hand, visitors and tourists from other countries who “belong” somewhere else are not included, even though they may be in the country when the census is being conducted. At the same time, the concept of usual residence means that undocumented immigrants (who legally do not “belong” where they are found) will be included in the census along with everyone else.

Where you belong became a court issue following Census 2000 in the United States. The census includes members of the military and the federal government who are stationed abroad. They are counted as belonging to the state in the United States that was their normal domicile, and in 2000 this turned out especially to benefit North Carolina, which is home to several military bases. However, Utah filed suit in federal court, objecting that Mormon missionaries from Utah who were serv- ing abroad should also be counted as residents of Utah, rather than being excluded because they were living outside the United States. In 2001, the U.S. District Court ruled against that idea, and so North Carolina gained a seat in Congress on the basis of its “overseas residents,” while Utah did not. Utah pushed the idea again for the 2010 census, but again the plan was rejected by the Census Bureau, which pointed out that an estimated 6 million Americans live abroad who are not on the U.S. gov- ernment payroll and there is no reliable way to count them (Associated Press 2009).

Knowing who should be included in the census does not, however, guarantee that they will all be found and accurately counted. There are several possible errors that can creep into the enumeration process. We can divide these into the two broad categories of nonsampling error (which includes coverage error and content error and sampling error.

Coverage Error

The two most common sources of error in a census are coverage error and content error. A census is designed to count everyone, but there are always people who are

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112 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Demographics of politics: Why the census matters

Demographics are central to the political process in the United States. The constitutional basis of the Census of Population is to provide data for the apportionment of seats in the House of Repre- sentatives, and this process reaches down to the local level. After each enumeration, which histori- cally takes place every ten years in the month of April, the U.S. Census Bureau is required by law to deliver total population counts for all 50 states to the president on or before December 31 of that year. These data are then sent to the House of Representatives for use in determining the num- ber of representatives to which each state is entitled.

As the population of the United States grew and new states were added, the number of Representatives kept going up. However, since the 1910 census, the total number of House seats has been fixed at 435, and the Constitu- tion requires that every state get at least one seat. The first 50 House seats are thus used up, taking into account the four states added subsequent to

the 1910 census. The question remains of how to apportion the remaining 385 seats, remember- ing that congressional districts cannot cross state boundaries and there can be neither partial dis- tricts nor sharing of seats. Since 1940, the number of seats assigned to each state has been based on a formula called the method of equal propor- tions, which rank-orders a state’s priority for each of those 385 seats based on the total population of a state compared with all other states. The calculations themselves are cumbersome, but they produce an allocation of House seats that is now accepted without much criticism or contro- versy, except for the issue of whether and how to count overseas Americans, as I noted elsewhere in this chapter.

The results of the 2010 census determined the number of seats for each state in the United States House of Representatives starting with the 2012 elections. This also affected the number of votes each state has in the Electoral College for the 2012 through 2020 presidential elections, since each

Source: Prepared by the author from U.S. Census data.

Note: The map shows only the continental states, but neither Alaska nor Hawaii lost or gained a seat as of the 2010 Census.

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113Chapter 4 Demographic Data

state’s total number of electoral votes is equal to its members of Congress (Representatives and Senators combined). Because of population changes, eighteen states had changes in their number of seats following the 2010 census. Eight states gained at least one seat, and ten states lost at least one seat. The accompanying map shows where the gains and losses occurred. Texas gained the most—four seats—almost entirely on the basis on net in-migration, including many undocumented immigrants from Mexico. New York and Ohio both lost two seats, almost entirely on the basis of out-migration to southern or western states. Indeed, all but one of the states that lost at least one seat in the House of Representatives are in the northern half of the country. The lone excep- tion is Louisiana, which lost a substantial number of people who went especially to Texas follow- ing Hurricane Katrina and have not returned. The only state for which migration was not the major contributor to population growth between 2000 and 2010 is Utah, which has the country’s highest birth rate.

Once the number of seats per state has been reapportioned, the real fight begins. This involves redistricting, the spatial reconfiguration of congressional districts (geographic areas) that each seat will represent. The U.S. Constitution addressed the issue by requiring that “ . . . The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one representative” (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2, Para 3). Thus, the framers of the Constitution were most worried about there being too few constituents per House member. This was in response to what in England at the time were known as “rotten” or “pocket” boroughs, which had plagued Parliament in England, and which were finally abolished by the Reform Act of 1832. These were boroughs in which a very small number of voters existed who could thus collude to (or be bribed to) elect a particular person to Parliament.

The framers of the Constitution decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that each Congressional District had to have a minimum of 30,000 peo- ple in order to have enough voters so that this

kind of corruption would be avoided. Note that originally, those 30,000 people would have been “. . . determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons” (U.S. Constitu- tion, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3). The refer- ence to “free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons” was deleted by Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, passed in 1868 after the Civil War, and following the 13th Amendment in 1865 which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude.

In the 1960s, a series of Supreme Court deci- sions extended to the state and local levels the requirement that legislative districts be drawn in such a way as to ensure roughly the same number of constituents in each district (“one person, one vote”). In order to facilitate this, Public Law 94-171 mandates that the Census Bureau provide popula- tion counts by age (under 18 and 18 and over) and by race and ethnicity down to the block level for local communities (and, as noted in this chapter, these were the only data collected from everyone in the 2010 Census). These data are then used to redefine Congressional district boundaries, as well as state and local legislative boundaries.

There are very few rules that govern the forma- tion of a district beyond the requirement that, after the census is complete, each state must change its political boundaries to make sure each congres- sional district is equally populated. By law, newly drawn districts do not have to take into account existing political boundaries, such as cities and counties, nor do they have to take into account natural geographic boundaries, such as mountains and rivers. They need only be equally populated. When political boundaries are drawn solely for par- tisan gain, the process is called “gerrymandering,” after early-nineteenth-century Massachusetts gov- ernor (and later vice president of the United States under James Madison) Elbridge Gerry. Gerry attempted to draw political districts to favor his own Federalist Party over the opposing Democratic– Republicans. These districts looked like salaman- ders and so were dubbed “gerrymanders.” Since that time, this mix of demography, geography, and politics has become a common weapon used by a

(Continued)

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114 Part One A Demographic Perspective

majority party to increase its chance of winning an election by spatially clustering supportive voters together.

In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that once the lines are drawn they can be challenged only if racial discrimination is involved. This means, in particular, that any other demographic characteristic such as political party affiliation can be used to create “safe” seats for members of Congress. If district boundaries are drawn so that one party has a clear majority within the district, then it becomes very hard for the other party to challenge the incumbent. By contrast, a “swing” district is one in which there is roughly an equal number of voters in each political party, sug- gesting that an incumbent could more readily be challenged. An analysis by Nate Silver following the 2012 elections in the U.S. indicated that the number of members elected from swing districts was only 35, compared to 103 members 20 years earlier. This increase in members coming from safe districts has been implicated in the increased polarization of Congress, and one of the underly- ing reasons for this surge in safe seats has been the uptick in gerrymandered districts (Silver 2012).

Gerrymandering is now much easier to accomplish than it used to be because GIS allows demographic data to be mapped readily, allow- ing an almost infinite number of possible dis- trict boundaries to be drawn and compared with one another. In most states this work is overseen by the state legislature. So, the political party in power in that state as the census data come out will make those decisions, unless the legislature has designated some other agency to do the job. Currently, non-partisan commissions undertake this task in nine states. In 2010, for example, vot- ers in California approved Proposition 20, which added congressional redistricting to the tasks of the Redistricting Commission that already existed to redraw state legislative boundaries.

The Constitutional mandate to use the cen- sus for Congressional redistricting did not explic- itly anticipate partisan politics. Over time, however, people creating boundaries of these districts have been more concerned about the demographics of voters than about the total population being served

by each member of the House of Representatives. The demographic characteristics of who vote is a huge political issue partly because the definition of who can vote has shifted substantially over time. The U.S. Constitution did not set a national standard for voter eligibility, leaving that decision to the states. Most states adopted the principle that only white male landowners were eligible to vote, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that land ownership requirements were removed in all states, expanding the electorate to all white males.

The assumption is that you must be a citizen to vote and all states do require that, although it is not explicitly stated in the Constitution. This became an issue after the Civil War when southern states wanted to exclude former slaves from being able to vote by claiming that they were not U.S. citizens. So, just who is a citizen? That issue was settled by the 14th Amendment to the Constitu- tion in 1868, which in Section 1 says that: “All per- sons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This was followed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment, which provides that a per- son is eligible to vote regardless of race (and this was further reinforced by the Voting Rights Act of 1965). It was not until 1920 that women were given the vote by the passage of the 19th Amendment, and not until 1924 that all American Indians were granted the right to vote. Most recently, in 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age throughout the U.S. from 21 to 18. You can see, then, that over time there has been a dramatic convergence between the number of people liv- ing in a Congressional District (which determines how the boundaries of a District are defined) and the number of potential voters in that District (the people who will actually elect the Representative from that District).

Discussion Questions: (1) Discuss how the purpose for which a census is taken may influence the kinds of questions asked, and the methodology used to collect those data; (2) What are some ways in which the redistricting procedures called “ger- rymandering” could be limited? What might be the unintended consequences of your suggested changes?

Demographics of politics: Why the census matters (continueD)

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115Chapter 4 Demographic Data

missed, as well as some who are counted more than once. The combination of the undercount and the overcount is called coverage error, or net census undercount (the difference between the undercount and the overcount). There are several ways to measure and adjust for undercount, but it becomes more complicated (and politi- cal) when there is a differential undercount, in which some groups are more likely to be underenumerated than others.

In the United States, the differential undercount has meant that racial/ethnic minority groups (especially African Americans) have been less likely to be included in the census count than whites. Table 4.2 shows estimates of the net undercount in the last several censuses, along with the differential undercount of the black popu- lation. The overall undercount in the 1940 census was 5.6 percent, and you can see that it has been steadily declining since then as the Census Bureau institutes ever more sophisticated procedures. But you can also see that in 1940 more than 10 percent of African Americans in the country were missed by the census. This was the year that the differential undercount was discovered as a result of a “some- what serendipitous natural experiment” (Anderson and Fienberg 1999:29). Because of World War II, men were registering for the draft when that census was taken, providing demographers with a chance to compare census returns with counts of men registering for the draft. It turned out that 229,000 more black men signed up for the draft than would have been expected based on census data (Price 1947), signaling some real problems with the completeness of the census coverage in 1940. Since then, a great deal of time, effort, and controversy have gone into attempts to reduce both the overall undercount and the differential undercount. The numbers

Year

Net undercount for

total population (%)

Undercount of black

population (%)

Undercount of white

population (%)

Differential undercount (percentage point difference

between black and white undercount)

1940 5.6 10.3 5.1 5.2 1950 4.4 9.6 3.8 5.8 1960 3.3 8.3 2.7 5.6 1970 2.9 8.0 2.2 5.8 1980 1.4 5.9 0.7 5.2 1990 1.8 5.7 1.3 4.4 2000 (0.5) 1.8 (1.1) 2.9 2010 0.0 2.1 (0.8) 2.9

Sources: Data for 1940 through 1980 are from Anderson and Fienberg (1999: Table 4.1); data for 1990 are from Robinson, West, and Adlakha (2002: Table 6), and data for 2000 and 2010 are from the U.S. Census Bureau (2012a). The undercounts for 1940 through 1990 are based on demographic analysis, and the undercounts for 2000 and 2010 are based on Post-Enumeration Surveys.

Note: Numbers in parentheses indicate a net overcount; for 2000 and 2010 the white population refers to the non- Hispanic white only population.

Table 4.2 Net Undercount and Differential Undercount in U.S. Censuses

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116 Part One A Demographic Perspective

in Table 4.2 show that Census 2010 appears to have been more successful than any previous census in this regard, with the undercount of some groups being balanced by overcount in others. Thus, blacks were still slightly undercounted while non- Hispanic whites were slightly overcounted.

Coverage is improved in the census by a variety of measures, such as having better address identification so that every household receives a questionnaire and having a high-profile advertising campaign designed to encourage a high response to the mail-out questionnaire. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of households responded to the mailed questionnaire in 2010, and the rest were contacted by the Census Bureau in the Non-Response Follow-Up (NRFU) phase of data collection. The Census Bureau sends staff members into the field to interview people who do not complete the forms, and, in some cases, to find out about people whom they were unable to contact. When you combine this with the fact that one member of a household may have filled in the information for all household members, it is easy to see why so many people routinely think they have not been counted in the census—someone else answered for them.

In China, coverage error has focused not on racial/ethnic groups but on chil- dren. Goodkind (2011) estimates that there were nearly 37 million children under the age of ten who were not counted in the 2000 census in China. The reason for this was not that the census takers could not find them, but rather that they were being hidden. Acknowledging them would have provided evidence that the gov- ernment-mandated birth quotas had been exceeded. Since local officials, not just parents, were held responsible for failure to keep the birth rate down, everybody at the local level had an interest in suppressing information about these children. A related issue with coverage error is that it is dependent upon the definition of who should be counted. In 2000, the Chinese census enumerated only those people with Chinese citizenship, whereas in 2010 the Chinese shifted to counting people who usually reside in China—thus including immigrants (Feng 2012).

Measuring Coverage Error

Right now you are probably asking yourself how a country’s Census Bureau could ever begin to estimate the number of people missed in a census. This is not an easy task, and statisticians in the United States and other countries have experimented with a number of methods over the years. The two principal methods used are (1) demographic analysis (DA), and (2) dual-system estimation (DSE) (which typi- cally involves a post-enumeration survey).

The demographic analysis approach uses the demographic balancing equation to estimate what the population at the latest census should have been, and then compares that number to the actual count. The demographic balancing equation says that the population at time 2 is equal to the population at time 1 plus the births between time 1 and 2, minus the deaths between time 1 and 2, plus the in-migrants between time 1 and 2, minus the out-migrants between time 1 and 2. Thus, if we know the number of people from the previous census, we can add the number of births since then, subtract the number of deaths since then, add the number of

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in-migrants since then, and subtract the number of out-migrants since then to estimate what the total population count should have been. A comparison of this number with the actual census count provides a clue as to the accuracy of the census. Using these methods, the Census Bureau is able to piece together a com- posite rendering of what the population “should” look like. Differences from that picture and the one painted by the census can be used as estimates of under- or over-enumeration. By making these calculations for all age, sex, and racial/ethnic groups, we can arrive at an estimate of the possible undercount among various groups in the population. This, for example, was the basis for deciding that China’s 2000 census had missed 37 million children.

Of course, if we do not have an accurate count of births, deaths, and migrants, then our demographic-analysis estimate may itself be wrong, so this method requires careful attention to the quality of the non-census data. And, you say, why should we even take a census if we think we can estimate the number of people more accu- rately without it? The answer is that the demographic-analysis approach usually only produces an estimate of the total number of people in any age, sex, racial/ ethnic group, without providing a way of knowing the details of the population— which is what we obtain from the census questionnaire.

The dual-system estimation method involves comparing the census results with some other source of information about the people counted. For example, after Census 2010 in the United States, the Census Bureau implemented its Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation (A.C.E.) Survey, which was similar to, albeit somewhat more complex than, the post-enumeration A.C.E survey conducted after the 2000 census, because it incorporated a variety of innovations suggested by a committee of the National Research Council (Bell and Cohen 2008). The process involves taking a carefully constructed sample survey right after the census is finished and then matching people in the sample survey with their responses in the census. This pro- cess can determine whether households and individuals within the households were counted in both the census and the survey (the ideal situation); in the census but not in the survey (possible but not likely); or in the survey but not in the census (the usual measure of underenumeration), or counted in the wrong place. Obviously, some people may be missed by both the census and the survey, but the logic under- lying the method is analogous to the capture-recapture method used by biologists tracking wildlife (Choldin 1994). That strategy is to capture a sample of animals, mark them, and release them. Later, another sample is captured, and some of the marked animals will wind up being recaptured. The ratio of recaptured animals to all animals caught in the second sample is assumed to represent the ratio of the first group captured to the whole population, and on this basis the wildlife population can be estimated. Although some humans are certainly “wild,” a few adjustments are required to apply the method to human populations.

Content Error

Coverage error is a concern in any census, but there can also be problems with the accuracy of the data obtained in the census (content error). Content error includes

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nonresponses to particular questions on the census or inaccurate responses if peo- ple do not understand the question. Errors can also occur if information is inac- curately recorded on the form or if there is some glitch in the processing (coding, data entry, or editing) of the census return. By and large, content error seems not to be a problem in the U.S. census, although the data are certainly not 100 percent accurate. There is always the potential for misunderstanding the mean- ing of a question, and these problems appear to be greater for people with lower literacy skills (Iversen et al. 1999). In general, data from the United Nations sug- gest that the more highly developed a country is, the more accurate the content of its census data will be, and this is probably accounted for largely by higher levels of education.

In less developed countries, content error may be more problematic because interviewers may not be sufficiently trained or motivated to press respondents for accurate information. Over the years, a seemingly simple question such as age has been prone to error because of “age-heaping” in which people round their age to the nearest zero or five instead of giving a precise answer. This is why the U.S. Census asks about birth date (see Figure 4.2), not simply your age.

Sampling Error

If any of the data in a census are collected on a sample basis (as is done, for exam- ple, in the United States, Canada, and Mexico), then sampling error is introduced into the results. With any sample, scientifically selected or not, differences are likely to exist between the characteristics of the sampled population and the larger group from which the sample was chosen. However, in a scientific sample, such as that used in most census operations, sampling error is readily measured based on the mathematics of probability. To a certain extent, sampling error can be controlled— samples can be designed to ensure comparable levels of error across groups or across geographic areas. Furthermore, if the sample is very large, then sampling error will be relatively small. Nonsampling error and the biases it introduces throughout the census process probably reduce the quality of results more than sampling error (Schneider 2003).

Continuous Measurement—American Community Survey

Almost all the detailed data about population characteristics obtained from the decennial censuses in the United States come from the “long form,” which for several decades was administered to about one in six households. The success of survey sampling in obtaining reliable demographic data led the U.S. Census Bureau in 1996 to initiate a process of “continuous measurement” designed to replace the long form in subsequent decennial censuses, beginning with the 2010 census (Torrieri 2007). The vehicle for this is the monthly American Community Survey (ACS), which is a “rolling survey” of approximately 3 million American households each year, designed to collect enough data over a ten-year period to

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provide detailed information down to the census block level, and in the process provide updated information on an annual basis, rather than having to wait for data at ten-year intervals. Just as with the census, questionnaires are mailed out to the households selected for the sample, and if they are not returned, the data are collected by phone, or by a personal visit from the Census Bureau (Griffin and Waite 2006).

The first data from the American Community Survey were made available on the Internet for the 2005 round of data, and data for the nation, states, and large populations within states are now updated annually online at http://factfinder2 .census.gov. By 2010 enough surveys had been collected to produce five-year esti- mates for areas with populations less than 20,000. There are about 115 million households in the United States, and 3 million of those are surveyed each year, so over the course of its ten years between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the ACS encompassed about 30 million households, representing slightly more than one in four households that wound up providing the detailed data no longer collected in the decennial census. The five-year estimates from the ACS produce data similar to that generated by Canada’s five-year census cycle.

The Census of Canada

The first census in Canada was taken in 1666 when the French colony of New France was counted on the order of King Louis XIV (perhaps under Fénelon’s influence, as I mentioned earlier). This turned out to be a door-to-door enumera- tion of all 3,215 settlers in Canada at that time. A series of wars between England and France ended with France ceding Canada to England in 1763, and the British undertook censuses on an irregular but fairly consistent basis. The several regions of Canada were united under the British North America Act of 1867, which speci- fied that censuses were to be taken regularly to establish the number of representa- tives that each province would send to the House of Commons. The first of these was taken in 1871, although similar censuses had been taken in 1851 and 1861. In 1905, the census bureau became a permanent government agency, now known as Statistics Canada.

Canada began using sampling in 1941, the year after the United States experi- mented with it. In 1956, Canada conducted its first quinquennial census (every five years, as opposed to every ten years—the decennial census), and in 1971 Canada mandated that the census be conducted every five years. The U.S. Congress passed similar legislation in the 1970s but never funded those efforts, so the United States stayed with the decennial census until the implementation of continuous measure- ment provided by the American Community Survey.

As in the U.S., two census forms had been used in Canada from 1941 through the 2006 census—a short form for all households with just a few key items (see Table 4.1) and a more detailed long form that went to a sample of 20 percent of Canadian households. However, for the 2011 Census, Statistics Canada dropped the mandatory long form and instead implemented the National Household Survey. This was sent out to 30 percent of households with the caveat that responding was

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voluntary, rather than compulsory. The Director of Statistics Canada resigned after the government made that decision, and there is concern that the high nonresponse rate (26 percent nationally but higher in some provinces) may make these data very difficult to interpret (Hulchanski et al. 2013).

Canada’s population is even more diverse than that of the United States and so the mandatory short form asks several questions about language—indeed, the split between English and French speakers nearly tore the country apart in the 1990s. The National Household Survey includes detailed questions about race/ethnicity, place of birth, citizenship, and ancestry.

Statistics Canada estimates coverage error by comparing census results with population estimates (the demographic analysis approach) and by conduct- ing a Reverse Record Check study to measure the undercoverage errors and also an Overcoverage Study designed to investigate overcoverage errors. The Reverse Record Check is the most important part of this, and involves taking a sample of records from other sources such as birth records and immigration records and then looking for those people in the census returns. An analysis of people not found who should have been there is a key component of estimating coverage error. The results of the Reverse Record Check and the Overcoverage Study are then com- bined to provide an estimate of net undercoverage, which was 2.3 percent in the 2011 census, compared to 2.8 percent in 2006 (Statistics Canada 2013a).

The Census of Mexico

Like Canada and the United States, Mexico has a long history of census taking. There are records of a census in the Valley of Mexico taken in the year 1116, and the subsequent Aztec empire also kept count of the population for tax purposes. Spain conducted several censuses in Mexico during the colonial years, including a general census of New Spain (Nueva España, as they knew it) in 1790. Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, but it was not until 1895 that the first of the modern series of national censuses was undertaken. A second enumeration was done in 1900, and since then censuses have been taken every 10 years (with the exception of the one in 1921, which was one year out of sequence because of the Mexican civil war—aka Mexican Revolution—between 1910 and 1920). From 1895 through the 1970s, the census activities were carried out by the General Directorate of Statistics (Dirección General de Estadística), and there were no per- manent census employees. However, the bureaucracy was reorganized for the 1980 census, and in 1983 the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI) became the permanent government agency in charge of the census and other government data collection.

A somewhat different set of questions is asked in Mexican censuses than in those of the United States and Canada, as you can see in Table 4.1. The 2000 census was the first in Mexico to use a combination of a basic questionnaire administered to most households, plus a lengthier questionnaire administered to a sample of households, and this was replicated in the 2010 census. Furthermore, the sampling strategy was a bit different than in the United States and Canada. Most of the

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questions are asked of all households, and the sample involves asking 10 percent of households to respond to a set of more detailed questions about topics included in the basic questionnaire. Especially noteworthy is a set of questions seeking informa- tion about family members who had been international migrants at any time during the previous five years. In 1995 and again in 2005, Mexico conducted a mid-decade census, which it calls a “Conteo,” to distinguish it from the decennial censuses. The Conteo uses only the basic questionnaire, and does not include a sample to receive the extended questionnaire. In Mexico, all census forms are administered in person by census takers hired by INEGI. Neither mail-back nor Internet forms are yet available.

Less income detail is obtained in Mexico than in Canada or the United States, and socioeconomic categories are more often derived from outward manifestations of income, such as housing quality, and material possessions owned by members of the household, about which there are several detailed questions. Because most Mexicans are mestizos (Spanish for mixed race, in this case mainly European and indigenous), no questions are asked about race or ethnicity. The only allusion to diversity within Mexico on the basic questionnaire is found in the question about language, in which people are asked if they speak an Indian language. If so, they are also asked if they speak Spanish. On the long form administered to a sample of households, a question is also asked specifically about whether or not they belong to an indigenous group.

In Mexico, the evaluation of coverage error in the census has generally been made using the method of demographic analysis. On this basis, Corona Vásquez (1991) estimated that underenumeration in the 1990 Mexican census was some- where between 2.3 and 7.3 percent. No analysis has been published of the accuracy of subsequent censuses, which, in all events, would be difficult to establish because of the large number of Mexican nationals living outside of the country, especially in the United States. Perhaps more important is the fact that post-enumeration surveys and other types of coverage error analyses are expensive and, as it was, budget cuts forced INEGI to trim several questions from the extended questionnaire adminis- tered in the 2010 census.

IPUMS—Warehouse of Global Census Data

It is taken for granted in North America that census data can be downloaded for free from the Internet. The United States, Canada, and Mexico all provide such access, as do an increasing number of countries around the world. In all cases, how- ever, the data are already tabulated for you by the statistical agencies. For research- ers interested in uncovering trends and patterns in the data, it is vastly preferable to have access to data from the individual census records so that detailed statistical analysis can be undertaken, as long you have the requisite statistical software such as SPSS, SAS, or STATA. Census agencies provide these kinds of data by creating what are known as Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). A small sample of all census records, typically 5 to 10 percent, is randomly selected. These records are stripped of all personally identifying information, but with a geographic code left in

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place so that a person’s general location can be determined, and then this data set is made available to researchers for analysis.

Over the past two decades, the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota has been creating a genuinely amazing resource of pub- lic use microdata samples from the censuses of the United States (1850 to the present), the American Community Survey from 2001 to the present, the Current Population Survey of the United States (discussed later in the chapter) from 1962 to the present, and an ever-growing library of data from censuses all over the globe. The files are harmonized so that variable definitions are similar from one census to another, and they are provided in standard statistical software formats, along with links to digital maps for those countries. The Minnesota Population Center also hosts the National Historical Geographic Information System which includes georeferenced aggregated (not individual level) U.S. census data from 1790 to the present, all linked to digital maps that you can download and ana- lyze yourself. They have several other related projects, and overall these are the kinds of data that truly move us forward in our understanding of what’s going on in the world. I encourage you to go to www.ipums.org to investigate this resource.

Registration of Vital Events

If you were born in the United States, a birth certificate was filled out for you, prob- ably by a clerk or volunteer staff person in the hospital where you were born. When you die, someone (again, typically a hospital clerk) will fill out a death certificate on your behalf. Standard birth and death certificates used in the United States are shown in Figure 4.3. Births and deaths, as well as marriages, divorces, and abor- tions, are known as vital events, and when they are recorded by the government and compiled for use they become vital statistics. These statistics are the major source of data on births and deaths in most countries, and they are most useful when com- bined with census data.

Registration of vital events in Europe actually began as a chore of the church. Priests often recorded baptisms, marriages, and deaths, and historical demographers have used the surviving records to reconstruct the demographic history of parts of Europe (Wrigley 1974; Wrigley and Schofield 1981; Wall et al. 1983; Landers 1993). Among the more demographically important tasks that befell the clergy was that of recording burials that occurred in England during the many years of the plague. In the early sixteenth century, the city of London ordered that the number of people dying be recorded in each parish, along with the number of christenings. Beginning in 1592, these records (or “bills”) were printed and circulated on a weekly basis during particularly rough years, and so they were called the London Bills of Mortality (Laxton 1987). Between 1603 and 1849, these records were published weekly (on Thursdays, with an annual summary on the Thursday before Christmas) in what amounts to one of the most important sets of vital statistics prior to the nineteenth-century establishment of official government bureaucracies to collect and analyze such data.

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124 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Figure 4.3 (continued)

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125Chapter 4 Demographic Data

Initially, the information collected about deaths indicated only the cause (since one goal was to keep track of the deadly plague), but starting in the eighteenth century the age of those dying was also noted. Yet despite the inter- est in these data created by the analyses of Graunt, Petty, Halley, and others mentioned in Chapter 3, people remained skeptical about the quality of the data and unsure of what could be done with them (Starr 1987). So it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that civil registration of births and deaths became compulsory and an office of vital statistics was officially established by the English government, mirroring events in much of Europe and North America. It was not until 1900 that birth and death certificates were standardized in the United States.

Today, we find the most complete vital registration systems in the most highly developed countries and the least complete (often nonexistent) systems in the least developed countries. Such systems seem to be tied to literacy (there must be someone in each area to record events), adequate communication, and the cost of the bureaucracy required for such record keeping, all of which is associated with economic development. Among countries where systems of vital registration do exist, there is wide variation in the completeness with which events are recorded. Even in the United States, the registration of births is not 100 percent complete, yet the public so takes for granted the existence of vital statistics that the National Research Council was asked to convene a panel in 2009 to lay out the case for why continued funding is so vital (no pun intended) to our knowledge about the health of the nation (Siri and Cork 2009).

Although most nations have a system of birth and death registration that is separate from census activities, dozens of countries, mostly in Europe, maintain population registers, which are lists of all people in the country, and which can be used as a substitute for a census, as I mentioned earlier. Alongside each name are recorded the vital events for that individual, typically birth, death, marriage, divorce, and change of residence. Such registers are kept primarily for administra- tive (that is, social control) purposes, such as legal identification of people, election rolls, and calls for military service, but they are also extremely valuable for demo- graphic purposes, since they provide a demographic life history for each individual. Even though registers are expensive to maintain, many countries that could afford them, such as the United States, tend to avoid them because of the perceived threat to personal freedom that can be inherent in a system that compiles and centralizes personally identifying information.

Combining the Census and Vital Statistics

Although recording vital events provides information about the number of births and deaths (along with other events) according to such characteristics as age and sex, we also need to know how many people are at risk of these events. Thus, vital statistics data are typically teamed up with census data, which do include that information. For example, you may know from the vital statistics that there

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were 4.0 million births in the United States in 2012 (the most recent year for which data are available at this writing), but that number tells you nothing about whether the birth rate was high or low. In order to draw any conclusion, you must relate those births to the 314 million people residing in the United States as of mid-2012, and only then do you discover a relatively low birth rate of 12.7 births per 1,000 population, down from 16.7 in 1990.

Since in 2012 no census had been taken since 2010, you may wonder how an estimate of the population could have been produced for an intercensal year such as 2012. The answer is that once again census data are combined with vital statis- tics data (and migration estimates) using the demographic balancing equation that I discussed earlier in the chapter: the population in 2012 is equal to the popula- tion as of the 2010 census, plus the births, minus the deaths, plus the in-migrants, minus the out-migrants between 2010 and 2012. Naturally, deficiencies in any of these data sources will lead to inaccuracies in the estimate of the number of people alive at any time, but we typically won’t know that until we conduct the next census.

Administrative Data

Knowing that censuses and the collection of vital statistics were not originally designed to provide data for demographic analysis has alerted demographers every- where to keep their collective eyes open for any data source that might yield useful information. For example, an important source of information about immigration to the United States is the compilation of administrative records filled out for each person entering the country from abroad. These forms are collected and tabulated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) within the U.S. Depart- ment of Homeland Security. Of course, we need other means to estimate the num- ber of people who enter without documents and avoid detection by the government, and I discuss that more in Chapter 7.

Data are not routinely gathered on people who permanently leave the United States, but the administrative records of the U.S. Social Security Administration provide some clues about the number and destination of such individuals because many people who leave the country have their Social Security checks follow them. An administrative source of information on migration within the United States used by the Census Bureau is a set of data provided to them by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Although no personal information is ever divulged, the IRS can match Social Security numbers of taxpayers each year and see if their address has changed, thus providing a clue about geographic mobility, at least among those people who file income tax returns. At the local level, a variety of administrative data can be tapped to determine demographic patterns. School enrollment data provide clues to patterns of population growth and migration. Utility data on connections and disconnections can also be used to discern local popula- tion trends, as can the number of people signing up for government-sponsored health programs (Medicaid and Medicare) and income assistance (various forms of welfare).

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Sample Surveys

There are two major difficulties with using data collected in the census, by the vital statistics registration system, or derived from administrative records: (1) They are usually collected for purposes other than demographic analysis and thus do not necessarily reflect the theoretical concerns of demography; and (2) they are col- lected by many different people using many different methods and may be prone to numerous kinds of error. For these two reasons, in addition to the cost of big data– collection schemes, sample surveys are frequently used to gather demographic data. Sample surveys may provide the social, psychological, economic, and even physical data I referred to earlier as being necessary to an understanding of why things are as they are. Their principal limitation is that they provide less extensive geographic coverage than a census or system of vital registration.

By using a carefully selected sample of even a few thousand people, demogra- phers have been able to ask questions about births, deaths, migration, and other subjects that reveal aspects of the “why” of demographic events rather than just the “what.” In some poor or remote areas of the world, sample surveys can also provide good estimates of the levels of fertility, mortality, and migration in the absence of census or vital registration data.

Demographic Surveys in the United States

I have already mentioned the American Community Survey (ACS), which is now a critically important part of the census itself. It is modeled after the Current Popula- tion Survey (CPS) conducted monthly by the U.S. Census Bureau in collaboration with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and which for many decades has been one of the country’s most important sample surveys. Since 1943, thousands of households (currently more than 50,000) have been queried each month about a variety of things, although a major thrust of the survey is to gather information on the labor force. Each March, detailed demographic questions are also asked about fertility and migration and such characteristics as education, income, marital status, and living arrangements. These data have been an important source of demographic information about the U.S. population, filling in the gap between censuses, and pro- viding the Census Bureau with the experience necessary to launch the more ambi- tious ACS.

Since 1983, the Census Bureau has also been conducting the Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which is a companion to the Cur- rent Population Survey. Using a rotating panel of more than 40,000 households that are queried several times over a two- to four-year period, the SIPP gath- ers detailed data on sources of income and wealth, disability, and the extent to which household members participate in government assistance programs. The Census Bureau also regularly conducts the American Housing Survey for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and this survey generates important data on mobility and migration patterns in the United States. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) within the U.S. Centers for Disease

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Control and Prevention (CDC) generates data about fertility and reproductive health in the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which it conducts every five years or so, and also obtains data on health and disability from the annual National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). These latter data are now available for each year from 1963 to the present from the Minnesota Population Center’s IPUMS website.

Canadian Surveys

Canada has a monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS), initiated in 1945 to track employment trends after the end of World War II. Similar to the CPS in the United States, it is a rotating panel of 56,000 households, and although its major purpose is to produce data on the labor force (hence the name), it gathers data on most of the core sociodemographic characteristics of people in each sampled household, so it provides a continuous measure of population trends in Canada.

Since 1985, Statistics Canada has also conducted an annual General Social Sur- vey, a sample of about 25,000 respondents. Each survey has a different set of in- depth topics designed to elicit detailed data about various aspects of life in Canada, such as health and social support, families, and time use. Like the National House- hold Survey, this is a voluntary survey and as the response rate from the random digit dialing sample dropped below 65 percent in 2010, an online questionnaire was added in order to boost participation (Statistics Canada 2013b).

Mexican Surveys

Mexico conducts several regular national household surveys, one of which in particular is comparable to the CPS and the LFS. The National Survey of Occu- pation and Employment (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo [ENOE]) is a large (120,000 household) sample of households undertaken three times a year by INEGI and is designed to be representative of the entire country. As with the CPS and LFS, the goal is to provide a way of regularly measuring and monitor- ing the social and economic characteristics of the population beyond just data on current employment. Some of the population questions asked in the census (see Table 4.1) are also asked in the ENOE, along with a detailed set of questions about the labor force activity of everyone in the household who is 12 years of age or older.

Demographic and Health Surveys

As I noted above, most developing countries do not have good systems of vital registration, without which it is difficult to track changes in mortality and fertility. Into this breach have stepped the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). This is the largest and globally most important set of demographic surveys and they are technically part of the Measure DHS project of ICF International in Maryland,

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conducted with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The DHS is actually the successor to the World Fertility Survey, which was conducted between 1972 and 1982 under the auspices of the International Statisti- cal Institute in the Netherlands. Concurrent with the World Fertility Survey was a series of Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys, conducted in Latin America, Asia, and Africa with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In 1984, the work of the World Fertility Survey and the Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys was combined into the Demographic and Health Surveys. The focus is on fertility, reproductive health, and child health and nutrition, but the data provide national estimates of basic demographic processes, structure, and characteristics, since a few questions are asked about all members of each household in the sample. More than 300 surveys have been conducted in more than 90 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is a rich source of information, as you will see in subsequent chapters.

A complementary set of surveys has been conducted in poorer countries that, for a variety of reasons, have not had a Demographic and Health Survey. Known as the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), they were developed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and are funded by a variety of international agencies. These surveys collect data that are similar to those in the DHS.

Demographic Surveillance Systems

In Africa, many people are born, live, and die without a single written record of their existence because of the poor coverage of censuses and vital registration systems. The INDEPTH Network was created in 1998 to provide a way of track- ing the lives of people in specific “sentinel” areas of sub-Saharan Africa (and to a lesser extent south Asia) by working with individual countries to select one or two defined geographic regions that are representative of a larger population. A census is conducted in that region, and then subsequent demographic changes are continuously measured by keeping track of all births, deaths, migration, and related characteristics of the population. There are currently 42 surveillance sites in 20 different countries of Africa and Asia. INDEPTH was funded initially by governmental organizations, especially the Canadian government, and is now funded largely through private foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

European Surveys

Declining fertility and the concomitant aging of the population in Europe has gener- ated a renewed interest in the continent’s demography, and there are now several surveys in Europe that capture useful demographic information. The Population Unit of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe funded the Family and Fertility Surveys (FFS) in 23 European nations during the 1990s. Since 2000,

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they have funded the “Generations and Gender Program,” which is a longitudinal survey of 18 to 79-year-olds in 19 countries gathering data on a broad array of top- ics including fertility, partnership, the transition to adulthood, economic activity, care duties and attitudes.

The European Social Survey (ESS) is a cross-national survey that has been con- ducted every two years across Europe since 2001 by researchers at City University London. The survey measures attitudes, beliefs and behavior patterns, along with the demographics of populations in more than thirty European nations. It is funded by the European Commission and the European Science Foundation.

Historical Sources

Our understanding of population processes is shaped not only by our perception of current trends but also by our understanding of historical events. Historical demography requires that we almost literally dig up information about the pat- terns of mortality, fertility, and migration in past generations—to reconstruct “the world we have lost,” as Peter Laslett (1971) once called it. You may prefer to whistle past the graveyard, but researchers at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in the Department of Geography and the Faculty of History at Cambridge University (U.K.) have spent the past several decades developing ways to recreate history by reading dates on tombstones and organizing information contained in parish church registers and other local docu- ments (Wrigley and Schofield 1981; Reher and Schofield 1993), extending meth- ods developed especially by the great French historical demographer Louis Henry (1967; Rosental 2003).

Historical sources of demographic information include censuses and vital statistics, but the general lack of good historical vital statistics is what typically necessitates special detective work to locate birth records in church registers and death records in graveyards. Even in the absence of a census, a complete set of good local records for a small village may allow a researcher to reconstruct the demographic profile of families by matching entries of births, marriages, and deaths in the community over a period of several years. Yet another source of such information is family genealogies, the compilation of which has become increasingly common in recent years throughout the world. Detailed genealo- gies in China, for example, have allowed researchers at Cambridge University to develop simulation models of what the demographic structure of China must have been like in the past (Zhao 2001).

The results of these labors can be of considerable importance in testing our notions about how the world used to work. For example, through historical demo- graphic research we now know that the conjugal family (parents and their chil- dren) is not a product of industrialization and urbanization, as was once thought (Wrigley 1974). In fact, such small family units were quite common throughout Europe for several centuries before the Industrial Revolution and may actually have contributed to the process of industrialization by allowing the family more flexibility to meet the needs of the changing economy. In subsequent chapters,

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131Chapter 4 Demographic Data

we will also have numerous occasions to draw on the results of the Princeton European Fertility Project, which gathered and analyzed data on marriage and reproduction throughout nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, as I dis- cussed in Chapter 3.

By quantifying (and thereby clarifying) our knowledge of past patterns of demographic events, we are also better able to interpret historical events in a mean- ingful fashion. In the United States extended families may have been more common prior to the nineteenth century than has generally been thought (Ruggles 1994). Indeed, Wells (1982) has reminded us that the history of the struggle of American colonists to survive, marry, and bear children may tell us more about the determi- nation to forge a union of states than does a detailed recounting of the actions of British officials.

Spatial Demography

Spatial demography represents the application of spatial concepts and statistics to demographic phenomena (Weeks 2004; Voss 2007; Matthews and Parker 2013). It recognizes that demography is, by its very nature, concerned with people in places. Since people tend to do things differently in different places, demogra- phy is inherently spatial. Where you live is an important determinant of who you are, and social scientists are increasingly aware that spatial variation is a universal principle of human society. For example, the innovation of the early fertility declines in Europe, which I discussed in Chapter 3, provides a nearly classic example of Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things (Tobler 1970, 2004). This is a concept known as spatial autocorrelation. Thus, in Europe, had it not been for spatial autocorrelation, fertility might have declined in isolated settings, but the decline would not have spread as it did. It turns out that all three demographic processes—mortality, fertility, and migration—exhibit spatial autocorrelation.

Because culture underlies most aspects of demography, understanding why some places have different cultures than others helps us to understand spatially varying levels of mortality, fertility, and migration. Recognizing and studying this spatial variability has been greatly enhanced by the technologies and tools that are wrapped into the overall field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). As a result of these new methods of analysis and of viewing the world, demography is evolving from being a primarily spatially aware science (which it has always been) to an increasingly more spatially analytic science (facilitated by the methods of GIScience). The advent of high-powered personal computers has revolutionized our ability to analyze massive demographic data sets, and this has allowed the spatial component of demographic analysis to come into its own and further improve our knowledge of how the world works. The first uses of these concepts and methods actually occurred in business and government planning, and then migrated, if you will, to academic research. Let me provide you with one of the best examples of this from cluster marketing.

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132 Part One A Demographic Perspective

We often talk about the numbers and characteristics of people (their “demographic”) in terms of the likelihood that they will buy certain kinds of products, watch certain kinds of movies, or vote for particular candidates. But where are those people? Where should you concentrate your resources in order to get their attention. The fact that “birds of a feather flock together” (i.e., that spatial autocorrelation is a regular feature of the world) means that neighbor- hoods can be identified on the basis of a whole set of shared sociodemographic characteristics. This greatly facilitates the process of marketing to particular groups in a process known as cluster marketing. This takes us back to the 1970s when . . .

. . . a computer scientist turned entrepreneur named Jonathan Robbin devised a wildly popular target-marketing system by matching zip codes with census data and consumer surveys. Christening his creation PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), he programmed computers to sort the nation’s 36,000 zips into forty “lifestyle clusters.” Zip 85254 in Northeast Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, belongs to what he called the Furs and Station Wagons cluster, where surveys indicate that residents tend to buy lots of vermouth, belong to a country club, read Gourmet and vote the GOP ticket. In 02151, a Revere Beach, Massachusetts, zip designated Old Yankee Rows, tastes lean toward beer, fraternal clubs, Lakeland Boating and whoever the Democrats are supporting. (Weiss 1988:xii)

The PRIZM system made Robbin’s company, Claritas Corporation (now part of Nielsen), one of the largest and most successful spatial demographics (aka geodemographics) firms in the world. A core principle is that where you live is a good predictor of how you live (Weiss 2000; Harris et al. 2005). It combines demographic characteristics with lifestyle variables and permits a business to home in on the specific neighborhoods where its products can be most profitably mar- keted. In keeping with the changing demographics of America, Neilsen Claritas adds new clusters as neighborhoods evolve.

Mapping Demographic Data

Demographers have been using maps as a tool for analysis for a long time, and some of the earliest analyses of disease and death relied heavily on maps that showed, for example, where people were dying from particular causes. In the middle of the nineteenth century, London physician John Snow used maps to trace a local cholera epidemic. In research that established the modern field of epidemiology, Snow was able to show that cholera occurred much more frequently among customers of a water company that drew its water from the lower Thames River (downstream from the city), where it had become contaminated with London sewage. How- ever, neighborhoods drawing water from another company were associated with far fewer cases of cholera because that company obtained water from the upper Thames—prior to its passing through London, before sewage was dumped in the river (Snow 1936).

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133Chapter 4 Demographic Data

Today a far more sophisticated version of this same idea is available to demog- raphers through geographic information systems (GIS), which form the major part of the field of GIScience. A GIS is a computer-based system that allows us to com- bine maps with data that refer to particular places on those maps and then to ana- lyze those data using spatial statistics (part of GIScience) and display the results as thematic maps or some other graphic format. The computer allows us to transform a map into a set of areas (such as a country, state, or census tract), lines (such as streets, highways, or rivers), and points (such as a house, school, or a health clinic). Our demographic data must then be geo-referenced (associated with some geographic identification such as precise latitude-longitude coordinates, a street address, ZIP code, census tract, county, state, or country) so the computer will link them to the correct area, line, or point. Demographic data are virtually always ref- erenced to a geographic area, and in the United States the Geography Division of the U.S. Census Bureau works closely with the Population Division to make sure that data are identified for appropriate levels of “census geography,” as shown in Figure 4.4.

NATION AIANNH Areas*

REGIONS

(American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian Areas)

Urban Areas

Places

Congressional Districts

School Districts

ZIP Code Tabulation Areas DIVISIONS

STATES

Counties

Census Tracts

Block Groups

Census Blocks

County Subdivisions

Traffic Analysis Zones

Subminor Civil Divisions

Public Use Microdata Areas

State Legislative Districts

Urban Growth Areas

Core Based Statistical Areas

Voting Districts

Figure 4.4 The U.S. Census Provides Geographically Referenced Data for a Wide Range of Geographic Areas Source: (U.S. Census Bureau 2010)

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134 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Geo-referencing data to places on the map means we can combine different types of data (such as census and survey data) for the same place, and we can do it for more than one time (such as data for 2000 and 2010). Spatial demography thus improves and enhances our ability to visualize and analyze the kinds of demo- graphic changes taking place over time and space. Since 1997, for example, most of the Demographic and Health Surveys in less developed countries have used global positioning system (GPS) devices (another geospatial technique) to record the loca- tion of (geo-reference) each household in the sample in order to allow for more sophisticated spatial demographic analysis of the survey data. An increasing num- ber of surveys are doing the same thing, thus exponentially increasing our ability to understand demographic change.

GIS and the Census

It is a gross understatement to say that the computer has vastly expanded our capacity to process and analyze data. It is no coincidence that census data are so readily amenable to being “crunched” by the computer; the histories of the computer and the U.S. Census Bureau go back a long way together. Before the 1890 census, the U.S. government held a contest to see who could come up with the best machine for counting the data from that census. The winner was Herman Hollerith, who had worked on the 1880 census right after graduating from Columbia University. His method of feeding a punched card through a tabulating machine proved to be very successful, and in 1886 he organized the Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 was merged with two other companies and became the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation (Kaplan and Van Valey 1980).

Then, after World War II, the Census Bureau sponsored the development of the first computer designed for mass data processing—the UNIVAC-I—which was used to help with the 1950 census and led the world into the computer age. Photo-optical scanning, which we now heavily rely on for entering data from printed documents into the computer (not to mention scanning the price of everything you buy at stores), was also a by-product of the Census Bureau’s need for a device to tabulate data from census forms. FOSIDC (film optical sensing device for input to comput- ers) was first used for the 1960 census.

Another useful innovation was the creation for the 1980 U.S. census of the DIME (Dual Independent Map Encoding) files. This was the first step toward computer mapping, in which each piece of data was coded in a way that could be matched electronically to a place on a map. In the 1980s, several private firms latched onto this technology, improved it, and made it available to other companies for their own business uses.

By the early 1990s, the pieces of the puzzle had come together. The data from the 1990 U.S. census were made available for the first time on CD-ROM and at prices affordable to a wide range of users. Furthermore, the Census Bureau reconfigured its geographic coding of data, creating what it calls TIGER

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135Chapter 4 Demographic Data

(Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) files, which are digital boundary files that allow us to map the census data. At the same time, and certainly in response to increased demand, personal computers came along that were powerful enough and had enough memory to store and manipu- late huge census files, including both the geographic database and the actual population and housing data. Not far behind was the software to run those computers, and several firms now make software for desktop computers that allow interactive spatial analysis of census and other kinds of data and then the production of high-quality color maps of the analysis results. Two of these firms—Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and Geographic Data Technology (GDT—now Tele Atlas)—have been working with the Census Bureau since before Census 2000 to help update the Census Bureau’s comput- erized Master Address File (the information used to continuously update the TIGER files) in order to improve census coverage and geographic accuracy. In a very real sense, the census and the TIGER files, more specifically, helped to spawn the now-booming GIS industry. By the time the 2010 census rolled around, it had become possible to map census data online through the Census Bureau’s website and to download digital boundary files for use on your own computer.

Knowledge and understanding are based on information, and our information base grows by being able to tap more deeply into rich data sources such as cen- suses and surveys. GIS is an effective tool for doing this, and you will see numerous examples of GIS at work in the remaining chapters. You can also see it at work on the Internet. Virtually all of the data from recent censuses and the American Com- munity Survey are available on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, where you can create thematic maps on the fly.

Summary and Conclusion

The working bases of any science are facts and theory. In this chapter, I have discussed the major sources of demographic information, the wells from which population data are drawn. Censuses are the most widely known and used sources of data on populations, and humans have been counting themselves in this way for a long time. However, the modern series of more scientific censuses dates only from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The high cost of censuses, combined with the increasing knowledge we have about the value of surveys, has meant that even so-called complete enumerations often include some kind of sampling. That is certainly true in North America, as the United States, Canada, and Mexico all use sampling techniques in their censuses. Even vital statistics can be estimated using sample surveys, especially in developing countries, although the usual pattern is for births and deaths (and often mar- riages, divorces, and abortions) to be registered with the civil authorities. Some countries take this a step further and maintain a complete register of life events for everybody.

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136 Part One A Demographic Perspective

Knowledge can also be gleaned from administrative data gathered for non- demographic purposes. These are particularly important in helping us measure migration. It is not just the present that we attempt to measure; historical sources of information can add much to our understanding of current trends in popula- tion growth and change. Our ability to know how the world works is increasingly enhanced by incorporating our demographic data into a geographic information system, permitting us to ask questions that were not really answerable before the advent of the computer. Spatial demography expands our demographic perspective into a geographic realm about which demographers have long been aware, but only recently have been able to analyze.

In this and the preceding three chapters, I have laid out for you the basic ele- ments of a demographic perspective. With this in hand (and hopefully in your head as well), we are now ready to probe more deeply into the analysis of population processes; to come to an appreciation of how important the decline in the death rate is, yet why it is still so much higher in some places than in others, why birth rates are still high in some places yet very low in others, and why some people move and others do not.

Main Points

1. In order to study population processes and change, you need to know how many people are alive, how many are being born, how many are dying, how many are moving in and out, and why these things are happening.

2. A basic source of demographic information is the population census, in which information is obtained about all people in a given area at a specific time.

3. Not all countries regularly conduct censuses, but most of the population of the world has been enumerated since 2000.

4. Errors in the census typically come about as a result of nonsampling errors (the most important source of error, including coverage error and content error) or sampling errors.

5. It has been said that censuses are important because if you aren’t counted, you don’t count.

6. Information about births and deaths usually comes from vital registration records—data recorded and compiled by government agencies. The most com- plete vital registration systems are found in the most highly developed nations, while they are often nonexistent in less developed areas.

7. Most of the estimates of the magnitude of population growth and change are derived by combining census data with vital registration data (as well as admin- istrative data), using the demographic balancing equation.

8. Sample surveys are sources of information for places in which census or vital registration data do not exist or where reliable information can be obtained less expensively by sampling than by conducting a census.

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137Chapter 4 Demographic Data

9. Parish records and old census data are important sources of historical informa- tion about population changes in the past.

10. Spatial demography involves using geographic information systems to analyze demographic data from a spatial perspective, thus contributing substantially to our understanding of how the world works.

Questions for Review:

1. In the United States, data are already collected from nearly everyone for Social Security cards and drivers’ licenses. Why then does the country not have a population register that would eliminate the need for the census?

2. Survey data are never available at the same geographic detail as are census data. What are the disadvantages associated with demographic data that are not provided at a fine geographic scale?

3. Virtually all of the demographic surveys and surveillance systems administered in developing countries are paid for by governments in richer countries. What is the advantage to richer countries of helping less-rich countries to collect demographic data?

4. What is the value to us in the twenty-first century of having an accurate demographic picture of earlier centuries?

5. Provide an example of spatial autocorrelation from your own personal experi- ence. How might this concept influence your demographic perspective?

Websites of Interest

1. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/sources/census/censusdates.htm The United Nations Statistics Division facilitates census-taking throughout the world, and at this site you can see the current status of censuses undertaken or planned for each country.

2. http://www.census.gov The home page of the U.S. Census Bureau. From here you can locate an amazing vari- ety of information, including the latest releases of census data, the American Community Survey, and all of the surveys conducted by the Census Bureau. This is one of the most accessed websites in the world.

3. http://www.statcan.gc.ca The home page of Statistics Canada, the government organization that conducts the censuses and surveys in Canada. From here you can obtain census data and track other demographically related information about Canada, including vital statistics and survey data, and you can do so in either English or French.

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138 Part One A Demographic Perspective

4. http://www.inegi.gob.mx The home page of INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, y Informática), which is the government agency in Mexico that conducts the censuses and related demo- graphic surveys, as well as compiling the vital statistics for Mexico. You can obtain all of the latest census and survey information from this site, although you will need to be able to read Spanish to do so.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/demographic%20data Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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139

CHAPTER 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

DEFINING THE HEALTH AND MORTALITY TRANSITION

HEALTH AND MORTALITY CHANGES OVER TIME

The Roman Era to the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution to the Twentieth Century World War II as a Modern Turning Point Postponing Death by Preventing and Curing Disease The Nutrition Transition and Its Link to Obesity

LIFE SPAN AND LONGEVITY Life Span Longevity

DISEASE AND DEATH OVER THE LIFE CYCLE Age Differentials in Mortality Infant Mortality Mortality at Older Ages

Sex and Gender Differentials in Mortality

CAUSES OF POOR HEALTH AND DEATH Communicable Diseases HIV/AIDS Emerging Infectious Diseases Maternal Mortality Noncommunicable Conditions Injuries The “Real” Causes of Death

MEASURING MORTALITY Crude Death Rate Age/Sex-Specific Death Rates Age-Adjusted Death Rates Life Tables Life Table Calculations Disability-Adjusted Life Years

Figure 5.1 Global Variability in Female Life Expectancy at Birth Source: Adapted by the author from data in United Nations Population Division (United Nations Population Division 2013).

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140 Part Two Population Processes

HEALTH AND MORTALITY INEQUALITIES

Urban and Rural Differentials Neighborhood Inequalities Educational and Socioeconomic

Differentials in Mortality

Inequalities by Race and Ethnicity Marital Status and Mortality

ESSAY: Mortality Control and the Environment

It isn’t that people now breed like rabbits; it’s that we no longer die like flies— declining mortality, not rising fertility, is the root cause of the revolutionary increase in the world’s population size and growth over the past two centuries. Only within that time has mortality been brought under control to the point that most of us are now able to take a long life pretty much for granted. Human triumph over disease and early death represents one of, if not the single, most significant improvements ever made in the condition of human life, and it is tightly bound up in all other aspects of the vastly higher standard of living that we now enjoy. Nevertheless, an important unintended by-product of declining mortality is the mushrooming of the human pop- ulation from just 1 billion two hundred years ago to an expected 9 to 10 billion by the middle of this century. This increase has literally changed everything in the world, and you cannot fully understand the world in which you live without knowing how the health and mortality transition came about and what this means for the future.

I begin the chapter with a brief description of the health and mortality transition and then illustrate its impact by reviewing the changes in health and mortality over time, up to the present. The transition is by no means over, however, so I next con- sider how far it can go, given what we know about human life span and longevity, and about the things that can and do kill us and what we are doing about them. We will measure the progress of the transition using a variety of indices that I review in the chapter, and I employ some of those tools in the last part of the chapter to exam- ine important inequalities that exist in the world with respect to health and mortality.

Defining the Health and Mortality Transition

Health and death are typically thought of as two sides of the same coin—morbidity and mortality, respectively—with morbidity referring to the prevalence of disease in a population and mortality the pattern of death. The link is a familiar one to most people—the healthier you are, the longer you are likely to live. At the societal level, this means that populations with high morbidity are those with high mor- tality; therefore, as health levels improve, so does life expectancy. Most of us in the richer countries take our long life expectancy for granted. Yet scarcely a cen- tury ago, and for virtually all of human history before that, death rates were very high and early death was commonplace. Within the past 200 years, and especially during the twentieth century, country after country has experienced a transition to better health and lower death rates—a long-term shift in health and disease pat- terns that has brought death rates down from very high levels in which people die

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141Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

young, primarily from communicable diseases, to low levels, with deaths concen- trated among the elderly, who die from degenerative diseases. This phenomenon was originally defined by Abdel Omran (1971, 1977) as the “epidemiological tran- sition,” but since the term “epidemiology” technically refers only to disease and not to death, I have chosen to broaden the term to the health and mortality transition.

As a result of this transition, the variability by age in mortality is reduced or compressed, leading to an increased rectangularization of mortality. This means that most people survive to advanced ages and then die pretty quickly (as I will dis- cuss in more detail later in the chapter). The vast changes in society brought about as more people survive to ever older ages represent important contributions to the overall demographic transition. We can begin to understand this most readily by examining how health and mortality have changed dramatically during the course of human history, especially European history, for which we tend to have better data than for the rest of the world.

Health and Mortality Changes Over Time

In much of the world and for most of human history, life expectancy probably fluc- tuated between 20 and 30 years (United Nations 1973; Weiss 1973; Riley 2005). At this level of mortality, only about two-thirds of babies survived to their first birthday, and only about one-half were still alive at age five, as seen in Table 5.1. This means that one-half of all deaths occurred before age five. At the other end of

Period Life Expectancy

for Females

Percentage Surviving to Age:

Percentage of Deaths:

Number of Births Required

for ZPG1 5 25 65 <5 651

Premodern 20 63 47 34 8 53 8 6.1 30 74 61 50 17 39 17 4.2

US and Europe in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

40 82 73 63 29 27 29 3.3

Lowest in sub-Saharan African

46 89 82 75 34 18 34 2.7

World average circa 2015

73 98 98 97 77 2 77 2.1

Mexico 78 99 99 98 84 1 84 2.1 United States 81 99 99 99 88 <1 88 2.1 Canada 84 99 99 99 91 <1 91 2.1 Japan (highest in world) 86 99 99 99 93 <1 93 2.1

Sources: Life expectancies less than 69 are based on stable population models in Ansley Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); other life table are from World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory Data Repository, http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node .main.692?lang=en, accessed 2014.

Table 5.1 The Meaning of Improvements in Life Expectancy

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142 Part Two Population Processes

the age continuum, around 10 percent of people made it to age 65 in a premodern society. Thus, in the premodern world, about one-half the deaths were to children under age five and only about one in 10 were to a person aged 65 or older.

In hunter-gatherer societies, it is likely that the principal cause of death was poor nutrition—people literally starving to death—combined perhaps with selective infanticide and geronticide (the killing of older people) (McKeown 1988), although there is too little evidence to do more than speculate about this (Bocquet-Appel 2008). As humans gained more control over the environment by domesticating plants and animals (the Agricultural Revolution), both birth and death rates prob- ably went up, as I mentioned in Chapter 2. It was perhaps in the sedentary, more densely settled villages common after the Agricultural Revolution that infectious diseases became a more prevalent cause of death. People were almost certainly bet- ter fed, but closer contact with one another, with animals, and with human and animal waste encouraged the spread of disease, with especially disastrous results for infants, a situation that prevailed for thousands of years.

The Roman Era to the Industrial Revolution

Life expectancy in the Roman era is estimated to have been 22 years (Petersen 1975). Keep in mind that this does not mean that everybody dropped dead at age 22. Look- ing at Table 5.1 you can see that it means the majority of children born did not sur- vive to adulthood. People who reached adulthood were not too likely to reach a very advanced age, but of course some did. The major characteristic of high mortality societies was that there was a lot more variability in the ages at which people died than is true today, but in general people died at a younger, rather than an older, age.

The Roman empire began to break up by the third century, and the period from about the fifth to the fifteenth centuries represents the Middle Ages. Nutrition in Europe during this period probably improved enough to raise life expectancy to more than 30 years. The plague, or Black Death, hit Europe in the fourteenth century, having spread west from Asia (Cantor 2001; Christakos et al. 2005). It is estimated that one-third of the population of Europe may have perished from the disease between 1346 and 1350. The plague then made a home for itself in Europe and, as Cipolla says, “For more than three centuries epidemics of plague kept flar- ing up in one area after another. The recurrent outbreaks of the disease deeply affected European life at all levels—the demographic as well as the economic, the social as well as the political, the artistic as well as the religious” (Cipolla 1981:3). The constant uncertainty about life could crush you, but it could also encourage you to take risks, as some Europeans did, spreading out around the world.

I mentioned in Chapter 2 that Europe’s increasing dominance in oceanic shipping and weapons gave it an unrivaled ability not only to trade goods with the rest of the world but to trade diseases as well. The most famous of these disease transfers was the so-called Columbian Exchange, involving the diseases that Columbus and other European explorers took to the Americas (and a few that they took back to Europe). Their relative immunity to the diseases they brought with them, at least in compari- son with the devastation those diseases wrought on the indigenous populations, is

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143Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

one explanation for the relative ease with which Spain was able to dominate much of Latin America after arriving there around 1500. The populations in Middle America at the time of European conquest were already living under conditions of “severe nutritional stress and extremely high mortality” (McCaa 1994:7), but contact with the Spaniards turned a bad situation into what Robert McCaa (1994) has called a “demographic hell,” with high rates of orphanhood and with life expectancy prob- ably dipping below 20 years. Spain itself was hit by at least three major plague out- breaks between 1596 and 1685, and William McNeill (1976) suggests that this may have been a significant factor in Spain’s decline as an economic and political power.

The Industrial Revolution to the Twentieth Century

The plague had been more prevalent in the Mediterranean area (where it is too warm for the fleas to die during the winter) than farther north or east, and the last major sighting of the plague in Europe was in the south of France, in Marseilles, in 1720. It is no coincidence that this was the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The plague retreated (rather than disappeared) probably as a result of “changes in hous- ing, shipping, sanitary practices, and similar factors affecting the way rats, fleas, and humans encountered one another” (McNeill 1976:174), and other causes of poor health were diminished by the receding of the little ice age in Europe (Fagan 2000).

At the end of eighteenth century, after the plague had receded and as increasing income improved nutrition, housing, and sanitation, life expectancy in Europe and the United States was approximately 40 years (Vallin and Meslé 2009). As Table 5.1 shows, this was a transitional stage at which there were just about as many deaths to children under age 5 as there were deaths at age 65 and over. Infectious diseases (including influenza, acute respiratory infections, enteric fever, malaria, cholera, and smallpox) were still the dominant reasons for death, but their ability to kill was diminishing. Analyses of recently created sets of mortality data have shown, however, that the highest life expectancy recorded anywhere in the world began to go up almost without interruption beginning in about 1800 (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002; Vallin and Meslé 2009). This was led almost exclusively by Scandinavian countries until the 1980s when Japan took over the lead.

Although death rates began to decline in the nineteenth century, improvements were at first fairly slow to develop for various reasons. Famines were frequent in Europe as late as the middle of the nineteenth century—the Irish potato famine of the late 1840s and Swedish harvest failures of the early 1860s are prominent exam- ples. These crop failures were widespread, and it was common for local regions to suffer greatly from the effects of a bad harvest because poor transportation made relief very difficult. Epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases, including the 1918 influenza pandemic, helped to keep death rates high even into the twentieth century. In August 1918, as World War I was ending, a particularly virulent form of the flu apparently mutated almost spontaneously in West Africa (Sierra Leone), although it was later called “Spanish Influenza.” For the next year, it spread quickly around the world, killing more than 20 million people in its path, including more than 500,000 in the United States and Canada (Crosby 1989).

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Until recently, then, increases in longevity were primarily due to environmental changes that improved health levels, especially better nutrition and increasing stan- dards of living, not to better medical care:

Soap production seems to have increased considerably in England, and the availability of cheap cotton goods brought more frequent change of clothing within the economic feasi- bility of ordinary people. Better communication within and between European countries promoted dissemination of knowledge, including knowledge of disease and the ways to avoid it, and may help to explain the decline of mortality in areas which had neither an industrial nor an agricultural revolution at the time. (Boserup 1981:124–125)

McKeown and Record (1962), who did the pioneering research in this area, and more recently Fogel (2004), argue that the factors most responsible for nineteenth-century mortality declines were improved diet and hygienic changes, with medical improvements largely restricted to smallpox vaccinations. Preston and Haines (1991), though noting the importance of nutrition, have also highlighted the role that knowledge about public health plays in controlling infectious disease:

In 1900, the United States was, as it is now, the richest country in the world (Cole and Deane 1965:Table IV). Its population was also highly literate and exceptionally well-fed. On the scale of per capita income, literacy, and food consumption, it would rank in the top quarter of countries were it somehow transplanted to the present. Yet 18 percent of its children were dying before age 5, a figure that would rank in the bottom quarter of the contemporary countries. Why couldn’t the United States translate its economic and social advantages into better levels of child survival? Our explanation is that infectious disease processes . . . were still poorly understood . . . .(Preston and Haines 1991:208)

Clean water, toilets, bathing facilities, systems of sewerage, and buildings secure from rodents and other disease-carrying animals are all public ingredients for better health. We now accept the importance of washing our hands as common sense, but the important work of Semmelweis in Vienna, Lister in Glasgow, and Pasteur in Paris in validating the germ theory all took place in the mid-nineteenth century—just a heartbeat away from us in the overall timeline of human history. Public health is largely a matter of preventing the spread of disease, and these kinds of measures have been critical in the worldwide decline in mortality. The medical model of curing disease gets much more attention in the modern world, but its use- fulness is predicated on the underlying foundation of good public health (Meade and Emch 2010). Cutler and Miller (2005) point to the particularly important role played by the introduction of clean water technology (chlorination and filtration) in cities of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the time period when life expectancy made its single biggest jump in U.S. history. This was, of course, a direct application of the germ theory.

Public health improvements, as implied by their name, are viewed as public goods that are paid for societally, rather than individually. Medical care, on the other hand, is still viewed in many parts of the world as an individual responsibility, not a public one. It was not until the early twentieth century in the United States that the health of children came to be seen as a responsibility of the community, rather

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145Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

than just a private family matter (Preston and Haines 1991). Working especially with the school system, this created an atmosphere in which, for example, vaccina- tions for childhood diseases became widespread. Later on, especially in Europe and Canada, the idea emerged strongly that all aspects of health care, including medical care, should be treated as a public good rather than as an individual affair.

Life expectancy has increased enormously since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1851 in England, the life expectancy for males was only 40 years, and it was 44 for women. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it had increased to 45 for men and 49 for women. But, early in the twenty-first century, life expectancy in the United Kingdom is 80 for men and 84 for women. As you can see in Figure 5.2, this pattern has been closely followed in the United States. In 1850, the numbers in the United States were 38.3 years for males and 40.5 years for females. Referring to Table 5.1, this meant that about 73 babies out of 100 would survive to age 5 and about 29 percent of people born would still be alive at age 65. Figure 5.2 also shows that life expectancy began to increase more rapidly as we moved into the twentieth century and public health measures, in particular, started to have a positive impact. Data for Canada are available only since 1920, but you can see that Canada has always had a slightly higher life expectancy than has the United States.

Looking at Latin America, we can see that prior to the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century, the area was dotted with primitive civilizations in which medicine

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Figure 5.2 Life Expectancy Has Improved Substantially in the United States, Canada, and Mexico (Data for Females) Sources: Data for the United States 1850 through 1970 are from the U.S. Census Bureau, 1975, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to the 1970 Bicentennial Edition, Part I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office); Tables B107-115 and B126-135 (data for 1850 through 1880 refer only to Massachusetts); data for Mexico 1900 to 1950 are from Martha Mier y Terán, 1991, “El Gran Cambio Demográfico,” Demos 5:4-5; Data for Canada 1920 to 1970 are from Statistics Canada, Catalogue no. 82-221-XDE; all other data are from the World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory Data Repository, http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.692?lang=en, accessed 2014.

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was practiced as a magic, religious, and healing art. In an interesting reconstruc- tion of history, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano (1975) conducted chemical tests on herbs used and claimed to have particular healing powers by the Aztecs in Mexico. He found that a majority of the remedies he was able to replicate were, in fact, effective. Most of the remedies were for problems very similar to those for which Americans spend billions of dollars a year on over-the-counter drugs: coughs, sores, nausea, and diarrhea. Unfortunately, these remedies were not sufficient to combat most diseases and mortality remained very high (life expectancy less than 30 years) in Mexico until the 1920s, when things started to improve at an accelerating rate. Since the 1920s, death rates have been declining so rapidly that Mexico has reduced mortality to the level that the United States achieved in the 1980s. Thus, in 1920, life expectancy for females in Mexico was 23 years less than in the United States, whereas by 2010 that difference had been cut to 3 years.

World War II as a Modern Turning Point

As mortality has declined throughout the world, the control of communicable diseases has been the major reason, although improved control of degenerative disease has played an increasingly important part. This is true for the less-developed nations of the world today, just as it was for Europe and North America before them. However, there is a big difference between the more developed and less devel- oped countries in what precipitated the drop in death rates. Whereas socioeconomic development was a precursor to improving health in the developed societies, the less developed nations have been the lucky recipients of the transfer of public health knowledge and medical technology from the developed world. Much of this has taken place since World War II.

World War II conjures up images of German bombing raids on London, desert battles in Egypt, D-Day, and the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima. It was a devastat- ing war costing more lives than any previous combat in history. Yet it was also the staging ground for the most amazing resurgence in human numbers ever witnessed. To keep their own soldiers alive, each side in that war spent huge sums of money figuring out how to prevent the spread of disease among troops, including ways to clean up water supplies and deal with human waste, and at the same to work on new ways to cure disease and heal sick and wounded soldiers. Very importantly, for example, World War II brought us penicillin, the world’s first “miracle drug” (Hager 2006).

All of this knowledge and technology was transferred to the rest of the world at the war’s end, leading immediately to significant declines in the death rate. Thus, it took only half a century in Latin America for mortality to fall to a point that had taken at least five centuries in European countries, as I noted above with respect to Mexico. Countries no longer have to develop economically to improve their health levels if public health facilities can be emulated and medical care imported from richer countries. As Arriaga (1970) noted during the time that this phenomenon was first becoming obvious: “Because public health programs in backward countries depend largely on other countries, we can expect that the later in historical time a

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147Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

massive public health program is applied in an underdeveloped country previously lacking public health programs, the higher the rate of mortality decline will be.” As you can see in Figure 5.3 this applies especially to Latin America and Asia, where improvements in life expectancy have been nothing short of remarkable since the end of World War II.

Progress is not, however, automatic. Sub-Saharan Africa was generally expe- riencing a rise in life expectancy until being devastated by HIV/AIDS over the past decades, as I will discuss later in the chapter. Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet era experienced a mortality backslide (Carlson and Watson 1990), which pushed life expectancy for Europe as a region below that of North America, as can be seen in Figure 5.3. Data for Russia and Ukraine reveal that life expectancy for males in 2010 was lower than it had been in 1960. Life expectancy had been falling behind other Western nations since at least the 1970s (Vishnevsky and Shkolnikov 1999), and it has been suggested that Russia’s health system was unable to move beyond the control of communicable disease to the control of the degenerative diseases, especially related to alcoholism among males, that kill people in the later stages of the epidemiological transition. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the health of Russians undoubtedly was further threatened by “political instability and human turmoil” (Chen et al. 1996:526). Life expectancy seems now to have stopped its decline in Russia, but it is not yet clear how quickly (or even, if) it will begin to climb to the levels of western Europe.

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Figure 5.3 Regional Changes in Life Expectancy since the End of World War II Source: Adapted from data in United Nations Population Division 2013, World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision http://esa.un.org/unpp/ (accessed 2014).

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Postponing Death by Preventing and Curing Disease

Improvements in health and medical care can only postpone death to increasingly older ages; we are obviously not yet able to prevent death altogether. There are two basic ways to accomplish the goal of postponing death to the oldest pos- sible ages: (1) preventing diseases from occurring or from spreading when they do occur; and (2) curing people of disease when they are sick. Not getting sick in the first place is clearly the ideal route to travel, a route with both commu- nal (public) and individual elements. Prevention of disease is aided by improved nutrition, both in terms of calories and in terms of vitamin and mineral content; clean water to prevent the spread of water-borne disease and to encourage good personal hygiene; piped sewers to eliminate contact with human waste; treatment of sewage so that it does not come back around to “bite” you; adequate clothing and shoes to prevent parasites from invading the body; adequate shelter to keep people dry and warm; eradication of or at least protection against disease-carrying rodents and insects; vaccinations against childhood diseases; use of disinfectants to clean living and eating areas; sterilization of dishes, bed linen, and clothes of sick people; and the use of gloves and masks to prevent the spread of disease from one person to another.

Smallpox has been eliminated as a disease from the world (although there are reportedly still vials in laboratories) as a result of massive vaccination cam- paigns, and polio is close to being eradicated after a nearly three-decade campaign of worldwide vaccination by the World Health Organization (WHO). Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are the only places in the world that still record signifi- cant numbers of polio victims each year. In 2013, more than a dozen children were crippled by polio in the civil war-torn country of Syria, and WHO concluded that the infection had originated with someone from Pakistan who had brought it with them to Syria. It is probable that if all 7 billion of us wore sterile face masks for just a few days in succession, we could eliminate several important diseases on a worldwide basis.

Cures for disease range from relatively simple but incredibly effective treat- ments such as oral rehydration therapy for infants (widely available only since the 1970s), and antibiotics used in the treatment of bacterial infections (widely avail- able only since the 1940s), to the more complex and technology-oriented treatments for cancer, heart disease, and other degenerative diseases, even including organ transplants and stem cell therapies. These high-tech measures include combinations of drug therapy, radiation therapy, and surgery.

This wide range of options available for pushing back death reveals the complexity of mortality decline in any particular population. As Schofield and Reher (1991) noted in a review of the European mortality decline, “There is no simple or unilateral road to low mortality, but rather a combination of many dif- ferent elements ranging from improved nutrition to improved education” (p. 17). Nonetheless, Caldwell (1986) pointed out that although a high level of national income is nearly always associated with higher life expectancies, the bigger question is whether it is possible for poorer countries to lower their mortality levels. Global experience shows the answer to be yes, and there are several ways to do it.

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China offers an example of a country that was very poor and had a low life expectancy no higher than 40 years at the time of the communist revolution after the end of World War II. A combination of public health measures and the imple- mentation of a very basic health care system (the “barefoot doctors”) increased life expectancy to more than 60 years by the mid-1970s. Increasing incomes in China have helped life expectancy rise to 77 for females since then. Geography also makes some difference. Caldwell (1986) notes that islands and other countries with very limited territories have been able to lower their mortality more readily than territo- rially larger nations. Being “in the path” of European expansion has also been for- tuitously beneficial to some countries (such as Costa Rica and Sri Lanka) because it increased the opportunities for the transfer of death control technology.

The Nutrition Transition and Its Link to Obesity

It used to be axiomatic that the poor were skinny and only the rich could afford to be fat. That’s no longer true, even in poorer countries where obesity is rapidly becoming a health problem. This is bound up in a phenomenon that Barry Popkin (1993; 2002; Popkin and Gordon-Larsen 2004; Popkin 2009) calls the nutrition transition—a marked worldwide shift toward a diet high in fat and processed foods and low in fiber, accompanied by lower levels of physical exercise, leading to cor- responding increases in degenerative diseases.

Hunting and gathering populations had a pattern of collecting food; early agri- culturalists had a pattern related to avoiding famine; then as time progressed and the economy improved, the pattern evolved to what Popkin and his associates call “receding famine.” More recently, especially in Western nations, the diet associated with industrialization has shifted to one high in fat, cholesterol, and sugar (and often accompanied by a sedentary lifestyle) that they call the “degenerative disease pattern.” There is ample evidence that people living in the wealthier societies of the world are larger in size than ever before in history (Pray 2014). More importantly, modern society, even in poorer nations, is increasingly associated with obesity and with less active lifestyles than ever before, and these factors threaten to limit our ability to push life expectancy to higher levels.

We have bodies that are built to live on the edge of famine in a physically active world (the human condition until recently), but the majority of humans now have a relatively secure food supply and the ability to avoid at least some of the manual labor of the past. The proliferation of motorized transportation also means that we are walking far less than ever before. All these things add up to the finding reported in 2010 that more than 25 percent of children (ages 2 through 14) in the United States have at least one chronic health condition, especially obesity and/or asthma (Van Cleave et al. 2010). The evidence seems clear that obesity is likely to shorten a person’s life expectancy in rich and not-so-rich countries alike (Monteverde et al. 2010; Lieberman 2013).

Over the course of history, our body’s ability to store fat is what saved us when the food ran out for a while. Especially in the richer nations, we no longer face such periodic shortages, and so that fat isn’t used up unless we consciously limit its

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intake and/or engage in regular physical exercise. If we are going to reduce the bur- den of degenerative disease and prolong our health, we are almost certainly going to have to restructure our everyday life to reduce the consumption of fat and sugar (and processed foods more generally) while increasing our level of exercise.

Life Span and Longevity

Could you live forever if you were able to avoid fatal accidents and fatal commu- nicable diseases, and if you were scrupulous about lifestyle choices? The answer is almost certainly no (Olshansky et al. 2002). Biologists suggest that as we move past the reproductive years (past our biological “usefulness”), we undergo a set of con- current processes know as senescence: a decline in physical viability accompanied by a rise in vulnerability to disease. Several theories are in vogue as to why peo- ple become susceptible to disease and death as age increases. These can be roughly divided into theories of “wear and tear” and “planned obsolescence.” Wear and tear is one of the most popularly appealing theories of aging and likens humans to machines that eventually wear out due to the stresses and strains of constant use. But which biological mechanisms might actually account for the wearing out? One possibility is that errors occur in the synthesis of new proteins within the body. Pro- tein synthesis involves a long and complex series of events, beginning with the DNA in the nucleus and ending with the production of new proteins. At several steps in this delicate process, it seems possible that molecular errors can occur that lead to irreversible damage (and thus aging) of a cell. Of special concern is the possibil- ity that errors may occur in the body’s immune system so that the body begins to attack its own normal cells rather than just foreign invaders. This process is called autoimmunity. Alternatively, the immune system may lose its ability to attack the outside invaders, leading to a situation in which the body no longer can fight off disease. The planned obsolescence theories revolve around the idea that each of us has a built-in biological time clock that ticks for a predetermined length of time and then is still. It essentially proposes that you will die “when your number is up,” because each cell in your body will regenerate only a certain number of times and no more.

Which of these theories makes the most sense? Good question. If you had a solid answer, you could bottle it and retire, although given the emerging advances in human genome analysis and regenerative therapies based on stem cells, we may approach some answers to these questions in your lifetime (Olshansky 2008). Until that time comes, let me remind you that current evidence points to two basic con- clusions: (1) aging is much more complex than we have previously assumed, and different theories fill in only part of the puzzle; and (2) we have not yet discovered the basic, underlying mechanism of aging that (if it exists) would explain every- thing. The planned obsolescence theory could explain why animal species each have a different life span, whereas the various aspects of wear and tear seem bet- ter able to explain why members of the same species show so much variability in the actual aging process. Olshansky and Carnes (1997) have offered their opinion that “although there is probably not a genetic program for death, the basic biology

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of our species, shaped by the forces of evolution acting on us since our inception, places inherent limits on human longevity” (p. 76).

Life Span

The previous paragraph uses the terms “life span” and “longevity” as though they were interchangeable. There is, however, a subtle difference. Demographers define life span as referring to the oldest age to which human beings can survive; whereas longevity refers to the ability to remain alive from one year to the next—the ability to resist death. We do not yet have a good theory about aging to help us to predict how long humans could live, so we must be content to assume that the oldest age to which a human actually has lived (a figure that may change from day to day) is the oldest age to which it is possible to live. Claims of long human life span are widespread, but confirmation of those claims is more difficult to find. As of this writing, the oldest authenticated age to which a human has ever lived is 122 years and 164 days, an age achieved by a French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in August 1997. Her authenticated birth date was February 21, 1875, and on her 120th birthday in 1995, she was asked what kind of future she expected. “A very short one,” she replied (Wallis 1995:85). You can stay up-to-date by visiting the following website: http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/oldest.html.

So, humans can live to at least age 122, yet very few people come close to achieving that age. Most, in fact, can expect to live scarcely more than half that long (life expectancy at birth for the world as a whole is estimated to be about 70 years for both sexes combined). It is this latter concept, the age to which people actually survive, their demonstrated ability to stay alive, as opposed to the theoreti- cal maximum, that we refer to as longevity.

Longevity

Longevity is usually measured by life expectancy, the statistically average length of life (or average expected age at death, which I will discuss in greater detail later in the chapter). This is greatly influenced by the society in which we live because of the variability in public health and medical care systems, as I discussed above. The very same person born into a poorer country such as Nigeria will have a lower life expectancy than if she had been born in the United States. Your own longevity is also influenced by the genetic characteristics with which you are born. The strength of vital organs, predisposition to particular diseases, metabolism rate, and so on are biological factors over which we presently have little control. Studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised in different environments show that their aver- age age at death is more similar than non-identical twins, and that both groups of twins have life expectancies that are more similar than you would expect by chance (see, for example, Herskind et al. 1996). Nonetheless, the available evidence sug- gests that no more than 35 percent of the variability in longevity is due to inherited characteristics (Carey and Judge 2001). The remaining differences in mortality are

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due to social, economic, environmental, and even political factors that influence when and why death occurs.

The social world influences the risk of death in a variety of ways that can be reasonably reduced to two broad categories: (1) the social, economic, and political infrastructure (how much control we exercise over nature) and (2) lifestyle (how much control we exercise over ourselves). The infrastructure of society refers to the way in which wealth is generated and distributed, reflecting the extent to which water and milk are purified, diseases are vaccinated against, rodents and other pests are controlled, waste is eliminated, and food, shelter, clothing, and acute medical care and long-term assistance are made available to members of society. Within any particular social setting, however, death rates may also be influenced by lifestyle. An increasing body of evidence has implicated smoking, drug use, excessive alcohol use, exposure to environmental toxins, eating fatty and processed foods, and too little exercise as lifestyle factors that may shorten longevity.

Although one key to a long life may be your “choice” of long-lived parents, prescriptions for a long life are most often a brew of lifestyle choices. A typical list of ways to maximize longevity includes regular exercise, daily breakfast, nor- mal weight, no smoking, only moderate drinking, seven to eight hours of sleep daily, regular meal-taking, and an optimistic outlook on life. Note that the lat- ter idea of “don’t worry, be happy, you’ll live longer” has the backing of medical research (Davidson et al. 2010). These suggestions, by the way, are not unique to the Western world, nor are they particularly modern. A group of medical workers studying older people in southern China concluded that the important factors for long life are fresh air, moderate drinking and eating, regular exercise, and an opti- mistic attitude (Associated Press 1980). Similarly, note the words of a Dr. Weber, who was 83 in 1904 when he published an article in the British Medical Journal outlining his prescriptions for a long life:

Be moderate in food and drink and in all physical pleasures; take exercise daily, regard- less of the weather; go to bed early, rise early, sleep for no more than 6–7 hours; bathe daily; work and occupy yourself mentally on a regular basis—stimulate the enjoyment of life so that the mind may be tranquil and full of hope; control the passions; be resolute about preserving health; and avoid alcohol, narcotics, and soothing drugs. (quoted in Metchnikoff 1908:102)

Other fascinating examples of how social and psychological processes can apparently influence death have been given by David Phillips. In the first of a series of studies, Phillips (1974) found that mortality from suicide tends to increase right after a famous person commits a well-publicized suicide (see also Wasserman 1984; Stack 1987). Thus, some people seem to “follow the leader” when it comes to dying. Further, people do so in more insidious ways than just simple suicide. In follow- up studies, Phillips found that the number of fatal automobile crashes (especially single-car, single-person crashes) goes up after publicized suicides (Phillips 1977) and (incredibly enough) that private airplane accident fatalities also increase just after newspaper stories about a murder-suicide. It appears “that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane

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153Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

accidents” (Phillips 1978:748). In another study, Phillips demonstrated that mass- media violence can also trigger homicides. He discovered that in the United States between 1973 and 1978, homicides regularly increased right after championship prizefights. Furthermore, the more heavily publicized the fight, the greater the rise in homicides (Phillips 1983).

The mind is a wondrous thing, illustrated by the intriguing finding that Chinese- Americans who are born in a year that Chinese astrology considers ill-fated and who have a disease that Chinese medicine considers to be ill-fated, have significantly lower life expectancy than normal (Phillips 1993). It may be, of course, that Chinese astrology and medicine are correct about the fates, but Phillips thinks it is more likely that people succumb to an earlier death because of psychosomatic processes— their belief that they are fated to die. Even your name might affect your longevity. Christenfeld, Phillips, and Glynn (1999) examined 27 years of death certificates in California and concluded that males with “positive” initials such as A.C.E. or W.I.N. or G.O.D. lived 4.5 years longer on average than a control group with neutral or ambiguous initials (such as J.R.W. or D.J.H.). Conversely, men with “negative” ini- tials just as P.I.G. or D.U.D. or B.U.M. died an average of 2.8 years earlier than the control group. Effects were less strong for females, though still present, and the findings could not be explained by race, socioeconomic status, or any other vari- ables available on the death certificate. There is no clear explanation for this except that somehow the impact of your initials on health must be psychosocial in nature, although as one critic put it, we have to remember that this is only an “initial” study.

It is easier, of course, to die than to resist death, adding interest to another angle of Phillips’s research. He has found that there is a tendency for people who are near death to postpone dying until after a special event, especially a birthday. The story is often told that Thomas Jefferson lingered on his deathbed late on the evening of July 3, 1826, until his physician assured him that it was past midnight and was now the fourth of July, whereupon Jefferson died. Phillips and Smith (1990) found in two large samples of nearly 3 million people that women, especially, are indeed more likely to die in the week right after their birthday than in any other week of the year, suggesting the deliberate prolongation of life. Men, on the other hand, show a peak mortality just before their birthday, suggesting a “deadline” for death.

Disease and Death over the Life Cycle

Age Differentials in Mortality

Disease and death are not randomly distributed across the life cycle. Humans are like most other animals with respect to the general pattern of death by age—the very young and the old are most vulnerable, whereas young adults are least likely to die. In Figure 5.4, you can see that the pattern of death by age is similar whether the actual death rates are high or low. After the initial five year of life, there is a period of time, usually lasting at least until middle age, when risks of death are rela- tively low. Beyond middle age, mortality increases, although at a decelerating rate (Manton and Land 2000).

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The genetic or biological aspects of longevity have led many theorists over time to believe that the age patterns of longevity shown in Figure 5.4 could be explained by a simple mathematical formula similar perhaps to the law of gravity and other laws of nature. The most famous of these was put forward in 1825 by Benjamin Gompertz and describes a simple geometric relationship between age and death rates from the point of sexual maturity to the extreme old ages (Olshansky and Carnes 1997). These mathematical models are interesting, but they have so far not been able to cap- ture the actual variability in the human experience with death. Part of the problem, as we are reminded by Carey and Judge (2001), is that we may know what kills us, but we are less certain about what it is that allows us to survive. This is why, even if we were able to rid ourselves of all diseases, we do not know how long we might live. We do know, however, that since our susceptibility to disease and death varies over the life cycle, it is important to look at those differences in more detail.

Infant Mortality

There are few things in the world more frightening and awesome than the responsibility for a newborn child, fragile and completely dependent on others

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Figure 5.4 The Very Young and the Old Have the Highest Death Rates Note: Nigeria has among the highest death rates in the world, Japan is among the lowest, and Guatemala is near the world average. Yet all three countries exhibit the universal age pattern of mortality—high at both ends and lowest in the middle. Data are for females, but the pattern is the same for males. Data refer to 2011.

Source: Adapted from data in World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory Data Reposi- tory, http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.692?lang=en, accessed 2014.

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155Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

for survival. In many societies, the fragility and dependency are translated into high infant mortality rates (the number of deaths during the first year of life per 1,000 live births). Infant death rates are closely correlated with life expectancy, and Figure 5.5 shows the infant mortality rates for a sample of countries around the world. Japan and Sweden have had the world’s lowest rates of infant mortality among the more populous countries for a number of years, and both have rates that are slightly above three deaths per 1,000 live births. All northern and western European countries have rates that are below four per 1,000. Canada’s rate is just above 4 per 1,000, whereas the United States has a slightly higher rate of just over 6 per 1,000. Mexico’s level of 14 per 1,000 is obviously higher, but it is still well below the world average of 37 per 1,000. By contrast, in some of the less developed nations, especially in equatorial Africa, infant death rates are at or above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births. This is a region of the world that has some of the highest mor- tality rates ever recorded for a human population (McDaniel 1992).

Why are babies so vulnerable? One of the most important causes of death among infants is dehydration, which can be caused by almost any disease or dietary imbalance, with polluted water being a common source of trouble for babies. How can dehydration and other causes of death among infants be avoided? In the broad- est sense, the answer can be summed up by two characteristics common to people in places where infant death rates are low—high levels of education and income.

Sierra Leone Chad

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China Russia

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Figure 5.5 Variations in Infant Mortality around the World Circa 2015 Source: Adapted by the author from data in United Nations Population Division (United Nations Population Division 2013).

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156 Part Two Population Processes

These are key ingredients at both the societal level and the individual level. In general, those countries with the highest levels of income and education are those with enough money to provide the population with clean water, adequate sanita- tion, food and shelter, and, very importantly, access to health care services.

Higher incomes increase the chance that babies will have a nutritious, sanitary diet that prevents diarrhea. Nursing mothers can best provide this service if their diet is adequate in amount and quality. Income is also frequently associated with the ability of a nation to provide, or an individual to buy, adequate medical protec- tion from disease. In places where infant death rates are high, communicable dis- eases are a major cause of death, and most of those deaths could be prevented with medical assistance. We know, for example, that between 1861 and 1960 the infant death rate in England and Wales dropped from 160 to 20 and more than two-thirds of that decline was due to the control of communicable diseases.

Throughout the world, infant health has been aided especially by the fact that the World Health Organization of the United Nations has promoted the use of oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which involves administering an inexpensive glucose and electrolyte solution to replenish bodily fluids. Oral rehydration therapy was first shown to be effective in clinical trials in Bangladesh in 1968 (Nalin, Cash, and Islam 1968), and it has proven to be very effective in controlling diarrhea and dehydration among infants (and adults as well—think Gatorade) all over the world.

When infant mortality drops to low levels, such as in advanced nations like the United States and Canada, prematurity becomes the single most important reason for deaths among infants, and in many cases prematurity results from lack of proper care of the mother during pregnancy. Pregnant women who do not maintain an adequate diet—who smoke, take drugs, or in general do not care for themselves— have an elevated chance of giving birth prematurely, thus putting their baby at a distinct disadvantage in terms of survival after birth.

Throughout the world, the infant mortality rate is a fairly sensitive indicator of societal development because as the standard of living goes up, so does the average level of health in a population, and the health of babies typically improves earlier and faster than that of people at other ages. This greater ability to resist death past infancy gener- ally holds up throughout the reproductive years (with the exception of maternal mor- tality, which I discuss below), but beyond that time of life, death rates start to increase.

Mortality at Older Ages

It has been said that in the past parents buried their children; now, children bury their parents. This describes the health and mortality transition in a nutshell. The postponement of death until the older ages means that the number of deaths among friends and relatives in your own age group is small in the early years and then accu- mulates more rapidly in the later decades of life. But even at the older ages, there are revolutionary changes taking place in death rates. In the more developed countries of the world, the risk of death has been steadily going down even at the very oldest ages. We have not yet unlocked the key to living beyond age 122, but we are pushing toward the day when a large fraction of people will approach that age before they die.

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157Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

As life expectancy has increased and people survive in greater proportions to older ages, societies experience less variability in the ages at which their members die. Instead of people being likely to die at almost any age (even if most at risk when young or old), death gets compressed into a narrow range of ages. Wilmoth and Horiuchi (1999) calculated, for example, that the variability in ages at death in Sweden in the 1950s was only about one-fourth of what it had been 100 years before that. The result of this compression of death into a narrow range at the older ages is called rectangularization. This means that the curve of the proportion of people surviving to any given age begins to square off, rather than dropping off smoothly. Figure 5.6 gives you an example of this using data for females in the United States.

Going back to 1901–10, when life expectancy in the United States was 52 years, Figure 5.6 shows that the proportion surviving drops off fairly quickly at the younger ages because of high infant and child mortality, and then it drops off fairly smoothly after that until everybody has died off at around 100. By the middle of the twentieth century, in 1951–60, when life expectancy had increased rather dramati- cally to 72 years, the proportions alive at each successive age are noticeably larger than they were at the beginning of that century, and the trend continued into the twenty-first century when, in the year 2011, life expectancy at birth for females had reached 81. An almost totally rectangular situation is shown as the extreme case in Figure 5.6. If everyone survived to age 100, and then died increasingly quickly after that, mortality would be compressed into a very short time period, with an

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Figure 5.6 The Rectangularization of Mortality in the United States Sources: Data for 1901-10 and 1951-60 are from the Berkeley Mortality Database (http://demog.berkeley.edu/wilmoth /mortality), based on life tables prepared by the Office of the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration. Data for 2011 are based on life tables prepared by the World Health Organization, and the “Alive to 100” data were generated by the author. Data are for females.

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158 Part Two Population Processes

estimated life expectancy of 108 years, and the survival curve would be squared off at the oldest ages, as you can see. In general, the limited data available seem to support the idea that compression and rectangularization are occurring (Wilmoth and Horiuchi 1999; Kannisto 2007), although not everybody agrees (Lynch and Brown 2001). The principal argument against it is that it assumes a fixed human life span of around 120 years. If we are somehow able to crack that barrier, then people could live to increasingly older ages, which might “decompress” mortality and smooth out the mortality curve at the older ages (Caselli and Vallin 2001).

Even if we are never able to crack the 120-year barrier, one of the most dra- matic changes in mortality in richer countries over the past few decades has been the drop in death rates at the older ages. It is not simply that deaths are being compressed into a relatively short period in old age; that age has been getting pro- gressively older. Consider that in 1900 a woman who reached age 65 in the United States could expect to live another 12 years. At the time of World War II that had increased a bit to 14 years, but by 2011 (the latest data available at this writing) it was up to 20 years. These things may not matter much to you now, but as you approach old age, you’ll start to give them more thought.

Sex and Gender Differentials in Mortality

Although the age pattern of death is the most obvious way in which biology affects our lives, it is also true that at every age there are differences between males and females in the likelihood of death. Some of these differentials seem to be strictly bio- logical in origin (the “sex” differences), whereas others are induced by society (the “gender” differences)—although it is not always easy to tell the difference between the biological and social influences.

The most basic health difference between males and females is that males have higher death rates than females from conception to the very oldest ages. Seem- ingly to compensate for this, more males are conceived than females (as I discuss in Chapter 8). Fetal mortality is higher for boys than girls, but there are still typi- cally more males born than females. Infant and childhood mortality rates are higher for males, with a roughly equal number of males and females being reached, quite conveniently from an evolutionary perspective, in the prime reproductive ages of the late teens and early twenties. After that, the only bump in the road for females compared to males is high maternal mortality (which only happens in high fertility societies), and by the older ages we can almost always expect to find more women than men.

The difference in life expectancy between males and females has attracted curi- osity for a long time, and it has been suggested facetiously that the early death of men is nature’s way of repaying those women who have spent a lifetime with demanding, difficult husbands. However, the situation has been more thoroughly investigated by a variety of researchers. It appears that a real biological superior- ity exists for women in the form of an immune function, probably imparted by the hormone estrogen, although it is not easy to measure this biological advantage. It may be, for example, that the XY chromosome combination that males have is

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159Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

biologically less robust than the XX combination of females (Shabecoff 2014). In general, biological interpretations of the difference are supported by studies showing that throughout the animal kingdom females survive longer than males (Retherford 1975; Kohler et al. 2006), suggesting some kind of basic biological superiority in the ability of females to survive relative to males (biologists refer to this as an aspect of sexual dimorphism).

In human populations, the survival advantage of women is widespread, but it is not quite universal. Until very recently there were still several countries—notably Afghanistan and a few nations in sub-Saharan Africa—where life expectancy for females was actually lower than for males. This implies that there are social factors at work when it comes to mortality, especially related to the status of women. It is in those countries where women are most dominated by men that women have been least likely to outlive men (Cardenas and Obermeyer 1997). In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, this has shown up in the victimization of women by men who have HIV but force women to have unprotected sex with them. In south Asia, it has been noticeable at the younger ages, when girls may be fed less well than boys, and parents may be less likely to seek health care for sick girls than for sick boys (Muhuri and Preston 1991; Yount 2003; Oster 2009).

The social aspect of mortality also shows up in what is certainly an important part of the explanation for the fact that over much of the twentieth century life expectancy was increasing faster for females than for males, whereas in the past two to three decades the gap has narrowed. For example, in 1900, women could expect to live an average of two years longer than men in the United States, and by 1975, the difference had peaked at 7.8 years. Since then, however, the difference has dropped to 4.8 years as of 2011. The solution to this mystery is smoking. Since 1900, males have smoked cigarettes much more than have females, and this helped to elevate male risks of death from cancer, degenerative lung diseases (such as chronic bronchi- tis and emphysema), and cardiovascular diseases (Preston 1970). However, cigarette smoking by women increased after World War II, and by now women are nearly as likely as men to be smokers (the smoking version of gender equality), although over- all levels of smoking are lower than they used to be. Deaths associated with smoking tend to occur many years after smoking begins, so the result of women’s post–World War II smoking habits has been a predictable recent rise in death rates from lung cancer, which has helped to narrow the gap in male-female mortality (Preston and Wang 2006). Rogers and Powell-Griner (1991) calculated that males and females who smoke heavily have similar (and lower-than-average) life expectancies, but non- smoking males still have lower life expectancies than nonsmoking females (although still higher than smokers). Overall, Rogers and his colleagues (Rogers et al. 2000) estimate that smoking accounts for 25 percent of the gender gap.

Causes of Poor Health and Death

The things that make us sick and can kill us have been wrapped into nearly every paragraph in this chapter up to this point, but it is useful to discuss them in a more systematic fashion, keeping in mind that this is only a brief review of an incredibly

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160 Part Two Population Processes

complex field of study. The World Health Organization puts deaths into one of three major categories: (1) communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritional con- ditions (which I will just abbreviate to “communicable”); (2) noncommunicable diseases; and (3) injuries. Each of these includes a long list of causes of death, and Table 5.2 summarizes the most important, in terms of numbers and rates, com- paring data across the World Bank’s four major income groupings of the world’s countries.

Of the 58 million people who died anywhere in the world in 2011, the World Health Organization estimates that 13 million died of cardiovascular disease, almost evenly divided between ischemic heart disease (7 million) and stroke (6.2 million). This is very new in human history, though, because until recently, communicable diseases have been the major cause of death, killing people before they had a chance to die of something else, and they are still among the big threats in low income countries, as can be seen in Table 5.2. In those countries, where life expectancy averages only 60 years, eight of the top ten death rates are from communicable diseases. By contrast, in the high income countries, where life expectancy averages 80 years, only one of the top ten is a communicable disease.

Communicable Diseases

Communicable (or infectious) diseases include bacterial (such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and the plague), viral (such as influenza and measles), and protozoan (such as malaria and diarrhea). They are spread in different ways (by different vectors) and have varying degrees of severity. Tuberculosis is an example of a bacte- rial infection that still kills nearly one million people each year, despite the known treatments for it, and it is estimated that several times that number of people are infected with the disease worldwide but do not show symptoms. The World Health Organization has a “Stop TB Strategy” and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has a “Division of TB Elimination,” but the disease remains untreated in many parts of the world. Sierra Leone is actually the country that has the highest death rate from TB, and eight of the top ten countries with respect to TB are in sub-Saharan Africa. Some drug-resistant strains of TB have emerged, and preventing the spread of these forms of the disease is clearly an important issue in the world. China, for example, has discovered that many migrants from the countryside to cities are infected with tuberculosis and have stopped taking the months-long treatment course. The sur- viving germs from these uncompleted treatments are the ones that are strongest and most resistant to drugs and it is their spread that is particularly worrisome (Zamiska 2006; He et al. 2011).

Measles is an example of an acute viral disease that is severe in infancy and adulthood but less so in childhood. It is usually spread by droplets passed through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. If left untreated in an infant or adult, the chance of death is 5–10 percent. Vaccinations now protect most people in the developed world from measles, and the United Nations has been work- ing to increase immunization elsewhere, helping to lower the global number of deaths from measles dramatically to only about 130,000 per year (World Health

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162 Part Two Population Processes

Organization 2013), dropping it off the top ten lists. All of the top ten countries in terms of measles death rates are in sub-Saharan Africa. If we look at the number of reported measles cases, regardless of whether or not a death occurred, by far the highest number of cases is in the Congo, followed by India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Somalia, and France. In all cases, including France, the explanation is that not all parents are vaccinating their children.

Malaria is an example of a complex protozoan disease typically spread by female mosquitoes first biting an infected person. Then the blood from the malarial person spends a week or more in the mosquito’s stomach, where the malarial spores develop and enter the mosquito’s salivary gland. The disease is passed along with the mosquito’s next bite to a human. There are two major types of malaria: (1) Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly, and it is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is less commonly found elsewhere, probably because it requires con- sistently high temperatures; and (2) Plasmodium vivax, which is the most com- mon form of malaria and is found especially in Latin America and south Asia. It is less deadly (albeit still serious) than p. falciparum, but is less sensitive to low temperature and was once endemic in southern Europe, as well as the southern United States (until the 1940s).

Children and pregnant women are most at risk of dying from malaria, and in areas where the disease is endemic (constantly present), such as sub-Saharan Africa, people who survive to adulthood may have built up an immunity as a result of repeated infections—a variation on the theme of “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Malaria has been around for thousands of years, and it is likely that Egyptian King Tut died of malaria 33 centuries ago (Hawass et al. 2010). How- ever, it was not until the late nineteenth century that it was proven that mosquito bites were how the disease was transmitted, rather than it having something to do with bad air (mal aria in Italian). The first effective treatments, dating from the nineteenth century, were quinine, followed by chloroquine, and more recently arte- misinin. Because of the complexity of the disease, no vaccines have been perfected as of this writing, although a great deal of work is under way.

HIV/AIDS

An estimated 1.6 million people died of HIV/AIDS in 2011, making it the eighth most important cause of death in the world, as you can see in Table 5.2. As recently as 2002, it was devastating to several southern African countries, such as Botswana, where life expectancy had dropped to only 40 years in 2002—a level that Europeans haven’t seen in more than 200 years. It has since bounced back a bit to just under 50 years, but Botswana and other countries in that region have struggled with the disease. The disease is so perverse that it has upset the usual pattern in which the very young and the very old are more vulnerable to death than are young adults, and the pattern is even emerging that women are more at risk than are men.

HIV/AIDS exploded on the scene in the early 1980s to become a worldwide pandemic. UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) estimates that as of 2012 there were 35 million people of all ages in the world who have

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163Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

HIV/AIDS. That number has been rising, but largely because new treatment options are keeping people alive longer once the disease is contracted. In 2012 there were 2.3 million new infections to accompany the 1.6 million deaths (UNAIDS 2013), but those numbers are down from previous years, and it now appears that new infections peaked in 1996 and have been dropping slowly since then, while the annual number of deaths peaked in 2004 and has been going down ever since.

The disease appears to have the potential to kill virtually everyone who devel- ops its symptoms, unless an infected person is treated with antiretroviral drugs that slow down the progression of HIV to AIDS. Treatment is expensive, however, underlining the importance of prevention. The spread of HIV can be prevented, as you undoubtedly know, especially by using condoms during intercourse and by not sharing needles to inject drugs. These relatively simple control measures have been very effective in North America and Europe, but they have been slow to catch on in sub-Saharan Africa, where prevalence rates and new infection rates are by far the highest in the world. Although HIV prevalence rates are still fairly low in Asia and North Africa, they are nonetheless rising in those areas of the world because governments have been slow to recognize and respond to local risks of transmission among injection-drug users, prostitutes, and men having sex with men. Probably the most disturbing aspect of AIDS in Africa was, until recently, the widespread denial of the disease’s existence, and the general lack of political support for putting pre- vention programs into place. In particular, condom use in Africa has been slowed down by suspicions that condoms themselves carried the disease, and by cultural norms that associate the use of condoms with prostitution, thus limiting their use within marriage, even though one or both partners in a marriage may have been at risk for HIV due to their own extramarital sexual activity. Added to this was the belief of the previous president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, that AIDS was not caused by HIV, and whose health minister had proposed garlic, lemon juice, and beetroot as AIDS remedies (Chigwedere et al. 2008). This slowed down the government response in that country until 2003, when a report by former president Nelson Mandela finally forced Mbeki to change his position and respond to the serious problem of HIV/AIDS.

Emerging Infectious Diseases

Controlling disease has often meant altering our environment, as I discuss in the essay that accompanies this chapter. Sometimes these environmental changes wind up putting us unintentionally in the path of new diseases. Historically, for example, malaria may have emerged when humans cleared forests and settled into Neolithic agricultural villages thousands of years ago (Pennisi 2001). More recently, the desire of humans to add more animal protein to their diet may be creating oppor- tunities for coronaviruses (animal viruses) to be spread to humans. It is generally believed that HIV crossed to humans from monkeys and/or chimpanzees (Gao et al. 1999; de Groot et al. 2002), and the evidence suggests that SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) may have come from animals captured for food in China (Lingappa et al. 2004).

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164 Part Two Population Processes

MORTALITY CONTROL AND THE ENVIRONMENT

“Live long and prosper.” Every newborn child should have such a toast offered on her or his be- half. For most of human history, children could look forward neither to a long life nor a prosperous one, and the achievement of both has required that we bring the environment under our control. We do this, for example, by growing a greater abundance of nutritious food than nature would otherwise pro- vide, by killing the bacteria in our water supply, by protecting ourselves from disease-carrying insects and rodents, by using herbs and chemicals to create medications that kill the parasites that at- tack our bodies, and by employing other devices and concoctions that help to repair or replace failing body parts. We control nature by draining swamps, clearing forests, plowing land, build- ing roads and bridges, constructing water and sewerage systems, building dams and levies, and so forth. Then we protect ourselves from nature by building houses that keep predators at bay, keep the rain and snow outside, and adjusting the in- door atmosphere so we don’t get too hot or too cold, using large amounts of generated energy in the process.

Controlling nature and protecting ourselves from its ravages are not accomplished without a cost, of course. In the process we rearrange our relationship to nature and risk degrading the en- vironment to the point of unsustainability. This is all because of the natural linkage between living long and prospering—the two go together, as you can see in the accompanying diagram. The obvi- ous impact of a declining death rate on the envi- ronment is that more people mean more resources used. This is the classical Malthusian view— population growth means that more people are trying to live at the same standard of living. That model simply says that we live long, but don’t pros- per. The prosperity comes from our greater per- person productivity as we become more clever and efficient in using environmental resources for our personal and collective improvement. Two important components of this are linked to the de- cline in mortality. The lower death rate is a result of our being healthier, and healthy people can work

harder and longer and thus be more productive. But there is also a psychosocial aspect, which I have labeled an increase in the “scope” of life. The prospect of a long life, unburdened by the threat of imminent death, means that we can think about life in the long term, making plans and implement- ing changes and improvements that would have been unimaginable in the days when life was so uncertain.

This greater scope means that each of us has the potential to be more creative and pro- ductive in each year that we live. So, on the one hand, declining mortality increases the size of the population and increases the de- mand for resources. But, at the same time, the demand for resources is increasing more quickly than the growth of population, because a healthier, longer-living population has the po- tential to prosper—to improve per-person pro- ductivity, which also increases per-person use of resources. One of the most elemental of these impacts is on the food supply. As we have be- come healthier, we have become bigger people, causing the demand for food to increase at a faster pace even than the population is growing (Fogel and Helmchen 2002). Consider this—in 1969, each of the 3.6 billion people then alive consumed an average of 2,343 calories of food per day; but 40 years later, in 2009 (the most re- cent estimates currently available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), the 6.8 billion people alive were consuming food at the rate of 2,831 calories per day. Population had increased by 89 percent—nearly doubling in that time—but the total amount of food de- manded (population times daily calories) had in- creased by 128 percent!

Can we go on this way? I will consider that question in more detail in Chapter 11, but let me give you an example from Brazil, which in that same period from 1969 to 2009 increased from 93 million to 192 million people. This was a re- sult of a death rate that was declining much more quickly than the birth rate—Brazilians added 15 years to their life expectancy during that

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165Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

Control over environment

Decline in mortality

People are healthier in adulthood

More survive to adulthood

Greater longevity increases the “scope” of life

Higher per-person demand for resources (“prosperity”)

Increase in resource use=environmental impact

Increased productivity per person because of improved

health and lower labor force turnover

Increased demand for resources—

even without an increase in

per-person income

Greater creativity and productivity per year lived

40-year period. Brazilians, like many others in the world, were healthier at least partly because they were eating better, increasing their per-day calorie consumption from 2,438 in 1969 to 3,173 in 2009. Thus, Brazil experienced a 106 percent increase in population—more than a doubling—and an as- tonishing 169 percent increase in food consumed. How did the country manage this? As I noted in Chapter 2, this was a period of rapid economic development in Brazil, which allowed people bet- ter nutrition and better health—these things all go together.

Our greater productivity—that which makes us prosper—depends heavily on the use of energy, and the by-products of energy use include the emission of greenhouse gases, which have con- tributed to global climate change. Mosquitoes and

other disease-carrying insects flourish in warmer weather, and there is a real concern that the re- emergence of infectious diseases will be among the many undesirable consequences of climate change. We are thus running the risk that by living longer and prospering, we have created a heap of other troubles with which we will have to cope. As Robert Louis Stevenson once famously said: “Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a ban- quet of consequences.”

Discussion Questions: (1) How do you think your life would be different if you were not pretty certain that you would survive to an old age? (2) The more rapid increase of the food supply than of population is contrary to what Malthus thought would happen—how might Malthus try to explain this?

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166 Part Two Population Processes

Birds can also be sources of disease. Although West Nile virus has existed in Africa and the Middle East for decades, it was brought to New York City in 1999, apparently by an imported infected bird that was bitten by a mosquito, which then bit a human who became sick and died. It has since spread to other com- munities all over the country. In 2003, a new H5N1 avian influenza (popularly called “bird flu”) was reported in Asia, originating in poultry farms, especially in Indonesia and Vietnam, and then crossed over to humans, spread especially by migratory birds. In 2009 yet another new strain of influenza, H1N1 (popularly known as “swine” flu), emerged as a worldwide pandemic. Because of the increas- ing ease of travel and greater global connectivity, the potential for new diseases to emerge is very high and the World Health Organization leads a coalition of groups that monitors these threats (Morens and Fauci 2013).

Maternal Mortality

A very special category of “communicable” diseases, as defined by WHO, is that associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Birth can be a traumatic and dangerous time not only for the infant, as discussed above, but for the mother as well. To be sure, until very recently, getting pregnant was probably one of the most danger- ous things that a woman could do. Although global campaigns to reduce maternal death have been very effective, it is still true that nearly 300,000 women die each year (the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing each day and killing all passengers), with 99 percent of those deaths occurring in developing nations (World Health Organization 2012).

These deaths leave a trail of tragedy throughout the world, and there are three factors, in particular, that increase a woman’s risk of death when she becomes pregnant: (1) lack of prenatal care that might otherwise identify problems with the pregnancy before the problems become too risky; (2) delivering the baby somewhere besides a hospital, where problems can be dealt with immediately; and (3) seeking an unsafe abortion because the pregnancy is not wanted.

Women are obviously only at risk of a maternal death if they become pregnant, and maternal death rates attempt to take that risk into account. We do not have good data on the number of pregnancies worldwide, however, so we must use the number of live births as an estimate of how many pregnancies have occurred within a group of women. Thus, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) measures the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Estimates by the World Health Organization (2012) indicate that the world average is 210 deaths to women per 100,000 live births, which translates into a lifetime risk of death associated with pregnancy of 1 in 180.

Rates are very low in developed nations (MMR of 16 per 100,000; or a lifetime risk of 1 in 3,800). By contrast, rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa (MMR of 500; or a lifetime risk of 1 in 39). Looked at another way, if you line up 39 young African women, statistically one of them will wind up dying of maternal-related causes. The highest risk is in Chad (1 in 15), compared to only 1 in 5,200 in Canada; 1 in 2,400 in the United States; and 1 in 1,000 in Mexico.

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167Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

Noncommunicable Conditions

As you already know, as we move through the health and mortality transition, non- communicable diseases take precedence over communicable diseases as the impor- tant causes of death. As you can see looking back at Table 5.2, noncommunicable diseases account for nine out of ten of the top killers in the high income countries, eight of ten in upper middle income countries, four of ten in lower middle income countries, and only two of the top ten in low income countries.

Deaths from heart disease occur as a result of a reduced blood supply to the heart muscle, most often caused by a narrowing of the coronary arteries, which can be a consequence of atherosclerosis, “a slowly progressing condition in which the inner layer of the artery walls become thick and irregular because of plaque— deposits of fat, cholesterol, and other substances. As the plaque builds up, the arter- ies narrow, the blood flow is decreased, and the likelihood of a blood clot increases” (Smith and Pratt 1993). Stroke is also part of the family of cardiovascular diseases, but whereas heart disease produces death by the failure to get enough blood to the heart muscle, stroke is the result of the rupture or clogging of an artery in the brain. This causes a loss of blood supply to nerve cells in the affected part of the brain, and these cells die within minutes.

Malignant neoplasms represent a group of diseases that kill by generating uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells. These cells, if untreated, may then metastasize (invade neighboring tissue and organs) and cause dysfunction and death by replacing the normal tissue in your vital organs. In the United States, lung cancer is responsible for more cancer deaths than any other type, almost certainly reflecting the fact that as recently as 45 years ago more than 50 percent of men and nearly one-third of women were regular cigarette smokers. If a person is going to smoke, they will probably start as a teenager, a time when they are healthy enough not yet to be negatively affected by smoking. The ill effects of smoking take time to catch up with you, so lung cancer rates are high in the United States despite the rapid decline in smoking over the past few decades. China is currently con- fronting the fact that its smoking-related diseases and deaths are on the rise and there are now more smokers in China than there are people in the United States, not to mention an additional 700 million people exposed to second-hand smoke (Ng et al. 2014).

Closely related to smoking is another noncommunicable condition that is an important cause of death—chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This is a family of problems, including bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma. The underly- ing functional problem is difficulty breathing, symptomatic of inadequate oxygen delivery. Also on the list of deadly noncommunicable diseases is diabetes mellitus, a disease that inhibits the body’s production of insulin, a hormone needed to convert glucose into energy. Like most of the other degenerative diseases, diabetes is part of a group of related diseases, all of which can lead to further health complications such as heart disease, blindness, and renal failure. Finally, let me note that as popu- lations age in the high income countries, Alzheimer’s disease has made its way to the top ten list. This involves a change in the brain’s neurons, producing memory loss and behavioral shifts in its victims. This is a major cause of organic brain disorder

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168 Part Two Population Processes

among older people, although it turns out to be a more important cause of death in the United States than in Japan, which has an older population than the United States does. In Japan, on the other hand, respiratory diseases are more important than in the United States. This comparison cautions us to remember, as I pointed out earlier, that there are many routes to low mortality.

Injuries

Despite the widespread desire of humans to live as long as possible, we have devised myriad ways to put ourselves at risk of accidental or unintentional death as a result of the way in which we organize our lives and deal with products of our technology. Furthermore, we are the only known species of animal that routinely kills other members of the same species (homicide) for reasons beyond pure survival, and we seem to be alone in deliberately killing ourselves intentionally (suicide). The latter is one of the top ten causes of death in the United States. Throughout the world, sui- cide rates rise through the teen years (a phenomenon that has always received con- siderable publicity), peak in the young adult ages, plateau in the middle years, and then rise in the older ages. Almost universally among human societies, the suicide rate is higher for males than for females. Beyond these general patterns, however, the actual difference from one country to another in the suicide rate seems to be a cultural phenomenon (Cutright and Fernquist 2000).

Men are not only more successful at killing themselves, they are also more likely to be killed by someone else. Homicide rates (as both victims and perpetrators) are highest for young adult males in virtually every country for which data are avail- able (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014). Homicide death rates in the United States are higher than for any other industrialized nation except Russia, possibly reflecting the cultural acceptance of violence as a response to conflict (Straus 1983) combined with the ready availability of guns (which are used in two- thirds of homicides in the United States). The remarkably higher rate of homicide among African Americans within the United States has existed for decades and appears to be most readily explained by the proposition that “economic stress resulting from the inadequate or unequal distribution of resources is a major con- tribution to high rates of interpersonal violence” (Gartner 1990:95). Put another way, a “subculture of exasperation” (Harvey 1986) promotes a “masculine way of violence” (Staples 1986), especially in a society where guns are readily available.

The “Real” Causes of Death

The causes of death discussed above reflect those items listed on a person’s death certificate. The World Health Organization has worked diligently over the years to try to standardize those causes under a set of guidelines called the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), so that the pathological conditions leading to death will be identified consistently from one person to the next and from one country to the next. This enhances comparability, but it ignores the actual things going on

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169Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

that contribute to that death. Thus, when public concern first arose over the role of alcohol in traffic fatalities, there were no data available to suggest whether a person who died in an accident was a victim of his or her own alcohol use or the alcohol use of someone else. Similarly, a person who dies of lung cancer or heart disease may really be dying of smoking, no matter what the actual pathological condition that led immediately to death.

There is a vast amount of literature in the health sciences tracing the etiology (origins) of the diseases listed on death certificates, and in a path-breaking analysis, McGinnis and Foege (1993) culled those studies in order to estimate the “real” or “actual” causes of death in the United States in 1990, in comparison with the ten leading causes of death as shown in vital statistics data. This study was so widely cited, and so important to our understanding of health risks, that it was later updated to reflect deaths as of 2000 (Mokdad et al. 2004). The actual causes of death, as traced by both studies, offer a different picture than is shown in a sum- mary such as Table 5.2. The winner in the actual-cause-of-death sweepstakes was— tobacco. For example, of the 2,403,351 people who died in the United States in 2000, 435,000 (18 percent) died as a result of tobacco use. Tobacco has been traced to cancer deaths (especially cancers of the lung, esophagus, oral cavity, pancreas, kidney, and bladder), cardiovascular deaths (coronary heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure), chronic lung disease, low birth weight, and other problems of infancy as a result of mothers who smoke, and to accidental deaths from burning cigarettes. Smoking has emerged as an increasingly important real cause of death throughout the world. Many countries, especially in North America and western Europe, have addressed this issue head on and have substantially lowered cigarette consumption. The burden of smoking has shifted to parts of southern and eastern Europe (especially Russia), China, and countries throughout south and southeast Asia (Ng et al. 2014).

The second most important “real” cause of death in the United States relates to the diet and activity patterns of the U.S. population, accounting for 365,000 deaths or 15 percent of the total in 2000, a noticeable increase from the results for 1990. Most of these deaths are due to obesity, according to Mokdad and associates (2004). Being overweight is associated with, among other things, major dietary abuses including high consumption of cholesterol, sodium, and animal fat. The principal activity pattern of concern is the lack thereof—a couch potato lifestyle. Poor diet and inactivity can lead to obesity, which then contributes to heart disease and stroke, cancers (especially colon, breast, and prostate), and diabetes mellitus. Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics in the United States, reveal that “Overall, there have been no significant changes in obesity prevalence in youth or adults between 2003–2004 and 2011–2012. Obesity prevalence remains high and thus it is important to continue surveillance” (Ogden et al. 2014:813).

Alcohol misuse was found to be the third (albeit a distant third) real cause of death in the United States, although the consequences of alcohol misuse extend well beyond death and include the ruination of lives due to alcohol dependency. Alcohol contributes to death from cirrhosis, vehicle accidents, injuries in the home, drown- ing, fire fatalities, job injuries, murder, mayhem, and some cancers. I have already

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170 Part Two Population Processes

mentioned the important role that alcohol has played in Russia (and Ukraine, as well) in lowering male life expectancy below what it used to be, and well below that of women, who are much less likely to drink alcohol in excess.

Number four on the list is death by microbial agents—infectious diseases (beyond HIV or infections associated with tobacco, alcohol, or drug use). In theory, at least, these 75,000 deaths could have been largely preventable through appropri- ate vaccination and sanitation. Next on the list are toxic agents, which are respon- sible for an estimated 55,000 deaths annually in the United States. These agents include occupational hazards, environmental pollutants, contaminants of food and water supplies, and components of commercial products. Toxins are known to con- tribute to cancer and to diseases of the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, bladder, and the neurological system.

Motor vehicles were the direct cause of death of 43,000 people in the United States in 2000, which was a decline from 1990. This is probably attributable to the improved safety of vehicles, greater attention to making sure that children and adults are properly belted in, and high publicity campaigns to reduce drunk driv- ing. However, road deaths (including pedestrians and bicyclists killed by motor vehicles) have become so increasingly common in developing countries that the World Health Organization has separated them out as a cause of death, and the World Bank issued a special report in 2013 focusing on the problem of road deaths in sub-Saharan Africa (Marquez and Farrington 2013).

Firearms contributed to an estimated 29,000 deaths as of 2000, which was a smaller number (and percentage) than in 1990, but less than the 32,000 in 2010 (Murphy et al. 2013). The United States is unique in the world in the number of deaths from firearms, and the most pressing problem is that of guns in the hands of teenagers and young adults, who disproportionately use the weapons to kill— including themselves. Guns are meant to be lethal, of course, but sex can kill you, as well. In 2000, there were another 20,000 deaths calculated as being the result of sexual behavior, including 15,000 from sexually acquired HIV infection. Illicit use of drugs rounded out the top ten real killers in 2000. It is estimated to have caused 17,000 deaths in 2000 by contributing to infant deaths (through the mother’s use of drugs), as well as to drug overdose, suicide, homicide, motor vehicle deaths, HIV infection, pneumonia, hepatitis, and heart disease.

Thus far I have discussed life expectancy and death rates in some detail, but I have not actually defined those rates for you, because I didn’t want to scare you away from a topic that is vitally important to our understanding of what’s happening in the world. Nonetheless, in order to evaluate data on health and mortality, it is important to have a background on the rates and measures that are being used.

Measuring Mortality

In measuring mortality, we are attempting to estimate the force of mortality, the extent to which people are unable to live to their biological maximum age. The abil- ity to measure accurately varies according to the amount of information available,

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171Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

and as a consequence, the measures of mortality differ considerably in their level of sophistication. The least sophisticated and most often quoted measure of mortality is the crude death rate.

Crude Death Rate

The crude death rate (CDR) is the total number of deaths in a year divided by the average total population. In general form:

CDR 5 d p

3 1,000

where d represents the total number of deaths occurring in a population during any given year, and p is the total average (midyear) population in that year. It is called crude because it does not take into account the differences by age and sex in the likelihood of death. Nonetheless, it is frequently used because it requires only two pieces of information, total deaths and total population, which often can be estimated with reasonable accuracy even in developing countries where the cost of censuses and vital registration systems may limit the availability of more detailed data.

Differences in the CDR between two countries could be due entirely to differ- ences in the distribution of the population by age, even though the force of mor- tality is actually the same. Thus, if one population has a high proportion of old people, its crude death rate will be higher than that of a population with a high proportion of young adults, even if at each age the probabilities of death are identi- cal. For example, in 2013, Mexico had a crude death rate of 4 per 1,000, or less than half of the 10 per 1,000 in Poland in that year. Yet, in that year both countries had an identical life expectancy at birth for both sexes combined of 77 years. The difference in crude death rates was accounted for by the fact that only 6 percent of Mexico’s population was aged 65 and older, whereas the elderly accounted for 14 percent of the Polish population. Mexico’s crude death rate was also lower than the level in the United States (8 per 1,000 in 2013). Yet in Mexico a baby at birth could expect to live two years less than a baby in the United States. The somewhat younger age structure in Mexico puts a smaller fraction of the population at risk of dying each year, even though the actual probability of death at each age is higher in Mexico than in the United States (although the gap has been steadily closing over the years). In order to account for the differences in dying by age and sex, we can calculate age/sex-specific death rates.

Age/Sex-Specific Death Rates

To measure mortality at each age and for each sex we must have a vital registra- tion system (or a large survey) in which deaths by age and sex are reported, along with census or other data that provide estimates of the number of people in each

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172 Part Two Population Processes

age and sex category. The age/sex-specific death rate (nMx or ASDR) is measured as follows:

nMx 5 ndx npx

3 100,000

where ndx is the number of deaths in a year of people of a particular age group in the interval x to x 1 n (typically a five-year age group, where x will be the lower limit of the age interval and n represents the width of the interval in years of age) divided by the average number of people of that age, npx, in the population (again, usually defined as the midyear population). It is typically multiplied by 100,000 to get rid of the decimal point.

In the United States in 2010, the ASDR for males aged 65 to 69 was 1,871 per 100,000, while for females it was 1,527 (Murphy et al. 2013). In 1900, the ASDR for males aged 65 to 69 was 5,000 per 100,000, and for females 5,500. Thus, we can see that over the course of the twentieth century, the death rate for males aged 65 to 69 dropped by 59 percent, while for females the decline was 76 percent. To be sure, in 1900, the death rate for females was actually a bit higher than for males (likely for “social” reasons, not biological ones), whereas by 1990 it was well below that for males.

Age-Adjusted Death Rates

It is possible to compare crude death rates for different years or different regions, but it is analytically more informative if the data are adjusted for differences in the age structure of the populations prior to making those comparisons. The usual method is to calculate age-specific death rates for two different populations and then apply those rates to a standard population. For this reason, this method is also known as standardization. The formula for the age-adjusted death rate (AADR) is as follows:

AADR 5 o nwsx 3 nMx

where nwsx is the standard weight representing this age group’s proportion in the total population and nMx is the age-specific death rate as calculated in the previ- ous section. We can apply this methodology to compare the crude death rate in Egypt in 2011 (5 deaths per 1,000 population) with that in the United States in that same year (8 deaths per 1,000 population). Could it be that mortality was really higher in the United States than in Egypt? We use the U.S. population as the standard weights and apply the age-specific death rates for Egypt (as estimated by the World Health Organization) to the United States age/sex structure in 2011 (as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau) to see what the crude death rate would be in Egypt if its age-sex structure were identical to that of the United States. The result is that the age-adjusted death rate for Egypt in 2011 was 12 deaths per 1,000 population—50 percent higher than that of the United States.

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173Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

Life Tables

Although the age-adjusted death rate takes the age differences in mortality into account, it does not provide an intuitively appealing measure of the overall mortal- ity experience of a population. We would like to have a single index that sums that up, and so we turn to a frequently used index called expectation of life at birth, or more generally life expectancy. This measure is derived from a life table, which is part of a whole statistical family of “survival analysis,” and even though it is complicated, it is so widely used that I have included a brief discussion of it here for you. You will recall from Chapter 3 that the life table has a long history, hav- ing been first used in 1662 by John Graunt to uncover the patterns of mortality in London.

Life expectancy can be summarized as the average age at death for a hypo- thetical group of people born in a particular year and being subjected to the risks of death experienced by people of all ages in that year. The expectation of life at birth for U.S. females in 2010 of 81.0 years (see Table 5.3) does not mean that the average age at death in that year for females was 81.0. What it does mean is that if all the females born in the United States in the year 2010 had the same risks of dying throughout their lives as those indicated by the age-specific death rates in 2010, then their average age at death would be 81.0. Of course, some of them would have died in infancy while others might live to be 120, but the age-specific death rates for females in 2010 implied an average of 81.0.

Note that life expectancy is based on a hypothetical population, so the actual longevity of a population would be measured by the average age at death. Since it is undesirable to have to wait decades to find out how long people are actually going to live, the hypothetical situation set up by life expectancy provides a useful, quick comparison between populations.

One of the limitations of basing the life table on rates for a given year, however, is that in most instances the death rates of older people in that year will almost certainly be higher than will be experienced by today’s babies when they reach that age. This will especially be true for a country that is in the midst of a rapid decline in mortality, but even in the United States in the twenty-first century, life tables are assumed to underestimate the actual life expectancy of people at all ages (Bongaarts and Feeney 2003; Schoen and Canudas-Romo 2005).

Life Table Calculations

Life table calculations, as shown in Table 5.3 for U.S. females for 2010 and in Table 5.4 for U.S. males in 2010, begin with a set of age/sex-specific death rates, and the first step is to find the probabilities of dying during any given age interval. Tables 5.3 and 5.4 are called abridged life tables because they group ages into five- year categories, rather than using single years of age. The probability of dying (nqx) between ages x and x 1 n is obtained by converting age/sex-specific death rates (nMx) to probabilities. A probability of death relates the number of deaths during any given number of years (that is, between any given exact ages) to the number

94505_ch05_ptg01.indd 173 04/09/14 6:25 PM

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175

94505_ch05_ptg01.indd 175 04/09/14 6:25 PM

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94505_ch05_ptg01.indd 176 04/09/14 6:25 PM

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177

94505_ch05_ptg01.indd 177 04/09/14 6:25 PM

178 Part Two Population Processes

of people who started out being alive and at risk of dying. For most age groups, except the very youngest (less than five) and oldest (100 and older), for which spe- cial adjustments are made, death rates (nMx) for a given sex for ages x to x 1 n may be converted to probabilities of dying according to the following formula:

n q

x 5 sndsnMxd

11sadsndsnMxd

This formula is only an estimate of the actual probability of death, because the researcher rarely has the data that would permit an exact calculation, but the dif- ference between the estimation and the “true” number will seldom be significant. The principal difference between reality and estimation is the fraction a, where a is usually 0.5. This fraction implies that deaths are distributed evenly over an age interval, and thus the average death occurs halfway through that interval. This is a reasonable estimate for every age from 5 through 100, regardless of race or sex (Arias et al. 2010). At the very youngest ages, however, death tends to occur earlier in the age interval, whereas at the oldest ages the rate of increase in the probability of death actually slows down and so deaths occur slightly later in the age interval. The more appropriate fraction for ages zero to one is 0.85 and for ages one to four is 0.60. Note that since the interval 1001 is open-ended, going to the highest age at which people might die, the probability of death in this interval is 1.0000—death is certain.

In Table 5.3, the age-specific death rates for females in 2010 in the United States are given in column (4). In column (5), they have been converted to prob- abilities of death from exact age x to exact age x 1 n. Once the probabilities of death have been calculated, the number of deaths that would occur to the hypothet- ical life table population is calculated. The life table assumes an initial population of 100,000 live births, which is then subjected to the specific mortality schedule. These 100,000 babies represent what is called the radix (l0). During the first year, the number of babies dying is equal to the radix (100,000) times the probability of death. Subtracting the babies who died (1d0) gives the number of people still alive at the beginning of the next age interval (l1). These calculations are shown in columns (7) and (6) of Table 5.3. In general:

ndx 5 snqxdslxd

and

lx1n 5 lx 2 ndx

The next two columns that lead to the calculation of life expectancy are related to the concept of number of years lived. During the five-year period, for example, between the fifth and the tenth birthdays, each person lives five years. If there were 99,267 girls sharing their tenth birthdays, then they all would have lived a total of 5 3 99,267 5 496,335 years between their fifth and tenth birthdays. Of course, if a person died after the fifth but before the tenth birthday, then only those years that

94505_ch05_ptg01.indd 178 04/09/14 6:25 PM

179Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

were lived prior to dying would be added in. The lower the death rates, the more people there are who will survive through an entire age interval and thus the greater the number of years lived will be. The number of years lived (nLx) can be estimated as follows:

nLx 5 nslx 2 andxd

The fraction a is 0.50 for all age groups except zero to one (for which 0.85 is often used) and one to five (for which 0.60 is often used). Furthermore, this formula will not work for the oldest, open-age interval (1001 in Table 5.3), since there are no survivors at the end of that age interval and the table provides no information about how many years each person will live before finally dying. The number of years lived in this group is estimated by dividing the number of survivors to that oldest age (l100) by the death rate at the oldest age (M100):

L1001 5 l100

M100

The results of these calculations are shown in column (8) of Table 5.3. The years lived are then added up, cumulating from the oldest to the youngest ages. These calculations are shown in column (9) and represent Tx, the total number of years lived in a given age interval and all older age intervals. At the oldest age (1001), Tx is just equal to nLx. But at each successively younger age (e.g., 95 to 99), Tx is equal to Tx at all older ages (e.g., 1001, which is T100), plus the number of person-years lived between ages x and x 1 n (e.g., between ages 95 and 99, which is

5L95). Thus at any given age:

Tx 5 Tx1n 1 nLx

The final calculation is the expectation of life (ex), or average remaining life- time. It is the total years remaining to be lived at exact age x and is found by divid- ing Tx by the number of people alive at that exact age (lx):

ex 5 Tx lx

Thus, for U.S. females in 2010, the expectation of life at birth (e0) was 8,098,622 / 100,000 5 81.0, while at age 25 a female could expect to live an additional 56.9 years. For males (Table 5.4), the comparable numbers are a life expectancy at birth of 76.1 and at age 25 of an additional 52.5 years.

Although it has required some work, we now have a sophisticated single index that summarizes the level of mortality prevailing in a given population at a particu- lar time. I should warn you that the formulas I have provided to generate the data in Tables 5.3 and 5.4 are very close, but not identical, to those produced by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) (see Murphy et al. 2013), because the NCHS uses single year of age data and slightly more complex formulas for its

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180 Part Two Population Processes

calculations at the youngest and oldest ages. The resulting differences in life table values are, however, very small.

Disability-Adjusted Life Years

If increasing life expectancy meant simply that we spent more years at the end of our life being bedridden and/or mentally incompetent, few people would be interested in pursuing that goal. In the early 1990s the World Bank initiated a joint project between the World Health Organization and the Harvard School of Public Health (with subsequent funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun- dation and now led by a consortium headquartered at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington) designed to measure this aspect of health and mortality. The result has been the very influential Global Bur- den of Disease project that is designed to look at the economic downside of poor health by asking how many years of productivity in a society are lost to its mem- bers because of poor health (Murray and Lopez 1996; Salomon et al. 2012). This is a powerful argument that has been made strongly by labor unions and other groups that have argued for many years that if governments and/or employers will pay for health care, they will more than get their money back in increased productivity—healthy workers do more work than sick ones. It is the flip side of the idea that a high standard of living promotes good health; it suggests that good health promotes a high standard of living. It is likely that both sides of the argu- ment are correct.

The important statistical index derived from the Global Burden of Disease project is the disability-adjusted life year (DALY): “The DALY is a health gap mea- sure that extends the concept of potential years of life lost due to premature death to include equivalent years of healthy life lost by virtue of individuals being in states of poor health or disability. One DALY can be thought of as one lost year of healthy life and the burden of disease as a measure of the gap between current health status and an ideal situation where everyone lives into old age free from disease and dis- ability” (Lopez et al. 2006:1). How close we are to the latter situation can then be calculated for the more “positive” side of things to show what the healthy life expectancy (HALE) is in each country.

Health and Mortality Inequalities

The regional differences in mortality that have emerged repeatedly in the chapter are clear reminders that cultural and economic features of societies have a major impact on human well-being. Our health is very dependent on massive infrastruc- ture developments such as piped clean water, piped sewerage, transportation and communications systems that deliver food and other goods, and a health care sys- tem that is affordable and available. Regions in the world vary considerably in their access to these resources, and within the same regions and countries some people are more advantaged than others in these respects.

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181Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

Urban and Rural Differentials

Until the twentieth century, cities were deadly places in which to live. Mortality levels were invariably higher there than in surrounding areas, since the crowding of people into small spaces, along with poor sanitation and contact with travel- ers who might be carrying disease, helped maintain fairly high levels of commu- nicable diseases. For example, life expectancy in 1841 was 40 years for native English males and 42 years for females, but in London it was five years less than that (Landers 1993). In Liverpool, the port city for the burgeoning coal regions of Manchester, life expectancy was only 25 years for males and 27 years for females. In probability terms, a female child born in the city of Liverpool in 1841 had less than a 25 percent chance of living to her fifty-fifth birthday, while a rural female had nearly a 50 percent chance of surviving to age 55. Sanitation in Liverpool at that time was atrociously bad. Pumphrey notes that “pits and deep open channels, from which solid material (human wastes) had to be cleared periodically, often ran the whole length of streets. From June to October, cesspools were never emptied, for it was found that any disturbance was inevitably followed by an outbreak of disease” (Pumphrey 1940:141).

In general, we can conclude that the early differences in urban and rural mor- tality were due less to favorable conditions in the countryside than to decidedly unfavorable conditions in the cities (Alter and Oris 2005). Over time, however, medical advances and environmental improvements have benefited the urban popu- lation more than the rural, leading to the current situation of the worst mortality conditions existing in poor rural areas and the best mortality conditions existing in the richest urban areas (Murray et al. 2006). As the world continues to urbanize (see Chapter 9), a greater fraction of the population in each country will be in closer contact with systems of prevention and cure. At the same time, the sprawling slums of many third world cities blur the distinction between urban and rural and may produce their own unhealthy environments (Montgomery and Hewett 2005; Weeks et al. 2013).

Neighborhood Inequalities

In the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, death rates were clearly highest in the poorer neighborhoods. The recognition of these differences was, in fact, a motivating force behind many of the public health measures that we now take for granted in cities of richer countries. There have been renewed concerns, however, about the disproportionate risks (often referred to as environmental injustice or inequality) that poorer residents of cities now face from the location of hazardous materials near their neighborhoods (Crowder and Downey 2010). At the same time, there are emerging health issues in disadvantaged neighborhoods with regard to risks of obesity and diabetes, that follow from reliance on packaged and fast foods. This is exacerbated by the general lack of availability of grocery stores that stock fresh food in such neighborhoods—the so-called “food desert” phenomenon (Whitacre and Tsai 2009).

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182 Part Two Population Processes

Cities in less developed countries have gotten a later start on the health and mortality transition, and we are now beginning to realize that there may be impor- tant neighborhood differences in health in these cities in which much of the future population growth of the world will show up. Child mortality, for example, is still a major issue throughout the developing world, and although child mortality rates in a city like Accra, the capital of Ghana, are lower than in rural areas, there are still important differences from one part of the city to another (Jankowska et al. 2013). Among adults, the nutrition transition that is associated with urban life has led to noticeable increases in hypertension and obesity in Accra (Benkeser et al. 2012)— the same health issues that are arising in poorer neighborhoods in richer countries.

Educational and Socioeconomic Differentials in Mortality

One of the strongest predictors of all demographic phenomena is education. It influ- ences the number of children you will likely have, if and where you will migrate, and when and from what you might die. Indeed, your educational level may well influence the health levels of other family members, not just your own (Zimmer et al. 2007). Death data for the United States in 2010 show that the age-adjusted death rate for people with at least some college was one-third the level of people whose educational level was high school or less (Murphy et al. 2013). This is con- sistent with an earlier pioneering study by Kitagawa and Hauser (1973), in which they found that a white male in 1960 with an eighth grade education had a 6 percent chance of dying between the ages of 25 and 45, whereas for a college graduate the probability was only half as high. A number of subsequent studies in the United States and elsewhere confirm this finding that education is good for your health (Miech et al. 2011).

Closely associated with education in all societies is socioeconomic status, as I discuss in Chapter 10. In general, higher levels of education lead to higher lev- els of occupation and income, all of which define socioeconomic status (SES). Of course, growing up in a higher SES family also increases the likelihood of reach- ing the higher levels of education. The linkages to health and mortality are pretty obvious: education to know the means whereby disease and occupational risks can be minimized, and income to buy protection against and cures for diseases.

Differences in mortality by social status are among the most pervasive inequali- ties in modern society, and the connection between income and health has been noticeable for a long time. In the nineteenth century, for example, Marx attributed the higher death rate in the working classes to the evils of capitalism and argued that mortality differentials would disappear in a socialist society. That may have been overly optimistic, but data do clearly suggest that by nearly every index of sta- tus, the higher your position in society, the longer you are likely to live. In England, researchers followed a group of 12,000 civil servants in London who were first interviewed in 1967–69, when they were aged 40 to 64. They were tracked for the next 10 years, and it was clear that even after adjusting for age and sex, the higher the pay grade, the lower the death rate. Furthermore, within each pay grade, those who owned a car (a more significant index of status in England than in the

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183Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

United States) had lower death rates than those without a car (Smith et al. 1990). An update of this study revealed that even as life expectancy has improved in the United Kingdom, the social class differences have remained very stable (Hattersly 2005). The importance of these studies is that they relate to a country that has a highly egalitarian national health service. Even so, equal access to health services does not necessarily lead to equal health outcomes.

Inequalities by Race and Ethnicity

In most societies in which more than one racial or ethnic group exists, one group tends to dominate the others. This generally leads to social and economic disad- vantages for the subordinate groups, and such disadvantages frequently result in lower life expectancies for the racial or ethnic minority group members. Some of the disadvantages are the obvious ones in which prejudice and discrimination lead to lower levels of education, occupation, and income and thus to higher death rates. A large body of evidence suggests that there is a psychosocial component to health and mortality, causing marginalized peoples in societies to have lower life expectan- cies than you might otherwise expect (Ross and Wu 1995; Barr 2008).

If we combine data for education and race, the result is a striking differential in life expectancy in the United States, as described by Olshansky and his collaborators (Olshansky et al. 2012:1803):

We found that in 2008 US adult men and women with fewer than twelve years of edu- cation had life expectancies not much better than those of all adults in the 1950s and 1960s. When race and education are combined, the disparity is even more striking. In 2008 white US men and women with 16 years or more of schooling had life expectancies far greater than black Americans with fewer than 12 years of education—14.2 years more for white men than black men, and 10.3 years more for white women than black women.

Looking back at Table 5.2, you can see that this difference in life expectancy translates into a comparison between someone living in a high income country (where life expectancy is 80 years) and someone living in a low-middle income country (where life expectancy is 66 years). One person is living (in life expectancy terms) in the United States, while the other is living, metaphorically, in Tajikistan.

Even if we ignore the educational differences, U.S. data for 2010 from the National Center for Health Statistics show that at every age up to 85, African American mortality rates are significantly higher than for the white population (Murphy et al. 2013). In 1900, African Americans in the United States had a life expectancy that was 15.6 years less than for whites. Though that differential had been reduced to 3.8 years by 2010, that is still a larger gap than exists, for example, between the United States as a whole and the population of Mexico.

African Americans have higher risks of death from almost every major cause of death than do whites. However, there are three causes of death, in particular, that play the most significant roles in explaining the overall difference—cardiovascular disease, malignant neoplasms, and cerebrovascular disease. Most important is the

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higher rate of heart disease for African Americans of both sexes (Murphy et al. 2013), which may be explained partly by the stress associated with higher rates of unem- ployment among African Americans (Guest et al. 1998). There is also a spatial component, since African Americans tend to have the highest levels of residential seg- regation of any group in the United States (which I discuss more in Chapter 9), and this has been shown to affect health levels negatively (Williams et al. 2003; Pearlman et al. 2006). Wrapped into these disadvantages are behaviors that are specifically high risk. Age-adjusted death rates from homicides, especially from firearms, are an astonishing six times higher for blacks than for whites in the United States. Blacks (especially males) also are more likely to smoke than whites, which may account for as much as 20 percent of the difference in black-white mortality in the United States (Ho and Elo 2013).

If we look at what is now the largest ethnic minority in the United States— Hispanics—we find that the income and social status gap has narrowed between them and “Anglos” (non-Hispanic whites). As this happened, differences in death rates between the groups disappeared and more recently have crossed over, so that age-adjusted death rates among both males and females are lower for Hispanics in the United States than for non-Hispanic whites (Murphy et al. 2013). Some of this difference may be due to differences in how Hispanic identity is coded in the vital statistics data (the numerator of the death rate) and how it is coded in the census (the denominator of the rate). Smith and Bradshaw (2005) think that similar cod- ing would eliminate the “Hispanic Paradox,” but other research using data sets that were not affected by the coding of Hispanic identity do consistently show this lower mortality for Hispanics, so it cannot yet be dismissed (Peak and Weeks 2002; Hummer et al. 2007). In all events, even if Hispanic mortality were simply the same as that for non-Hispanic whites, it still highlights the tremendous disparity between blacks and others in the United States.

As immigrants have once again become more numerous in the United States, where you were born has reemerged as a characteristic of importance. Hummer and his associates (1999) used data from the National Health Interview Survey to cal- culate the probabilities of survival for different groups. They found that U.S.-born young adult blacks had the highest odds of dying after controlling for socioeco- nomic status, whereas older foreign-born blacks and Asians had the lowest likeli- hood of dying in comparison to other groups—Americanization isn’t necessarily good for your health!

Marital Status and Mortality

It has long been observed that married people tend to live longer than unmarried people. This is true not only in the United States but in other countries as well (Hu and Goldman 1990; Kaplan and Kronick 2006). A long-standing explanation for this phenomenon is that marriage is selective of healthy people; that is, people who are in ill health may have both a lower chance of marrying and a higher risk of death. At least some of the difference in mortality by marital status certainly is due to this.

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185Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

Another explanation is that marriage is good for your health: protective, not just selective. Marriage may be associated with social and psychological support that keeps men, in particular, from committing suicide or from abusing themselves with alcohol and cigarettes, and that also provides a more nurturing environment when a person is ill. It is probably also protective in economic terms. Married women are healthier than unmarried women partly because they have higher incomes (as I discuss in Chapter 10), and unmarried men are especially more likely to die than married men if they are living below the poverty line (Smith and Waitzman 1994). The flip side of marriage being good for you is that the ending of a marriage elevates the risk of death. In the United States, people who are divorced have the same age- adjusted death rate as people who never married, which is nearly twice the death rate of people who are currently married (Murphy et al. 2103).

Summary and Conclusion

The control of disease has vastly improved the human condition and has, in the process, revolutionized life. Yet there are still wide variations between nations with respect to both the probabilities of dying and the causes of those deaths. The differ- ences between nations exist because countries are at different stages of the health and mortality transition, the shift from high mortality (largely from infectious dis- eases, with most deaths occurring at young ages) to low mortality (with most deaths occurring at older ages and largely caused by degenerative diseases). The different timing is due to a complex combination of political, economic, and cultural factors. There are many routes to low mortality, some of them involving genuine bumps in the road, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has been gripping sub-Saharan Africa.

In general, females have a survival advantage over males at every age in most of the world, and a gender gap in mortality that favors women seems to be a feature of the health and mortality transition. We have been most successful at controlling communicable diseases, which are largely dealt with through public health mea- sures, but medical technology has become increasingly good at limiting disability and postponing death from noncommunicable diseases, as well. This has helped to slow down the death rates at the older ages. It is ironic, however, that our very success at creating a life that is relatively free of communicable disease and that is built on a secure food supply has produced in its wake a transition in our pattern of nutrition that threatens to increase our risk of noncommunicable disease.

Differences in mortality within a society tend to be due to social status inequali- ties. As status and prestige (indexed especially by education, occupation, income, and wealth) go up, death rates go down. The social and economic disadvantages felt by minority groups, such as among blacks in the United States, often lead to lower life expectancies. Marital status is also an important variable, with married people tending to live longer than unmarried people.

Although mortality rates are low in the more developed nations and are declin- ing in most less developed nations, diseases that can kill us still exist if we relax our vigilance. The explosion of HIV/AIDS onto the world stage was a reminder of that, as has been the emergence of new strains of influenza. Worldwide efforts have

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186 Part Two Population Processes

been put into malaria and tuberculosis control because those deadly diseases have been around forever and seem constantly to be on the verge of a resurgence in many regions of the world. This is a reminder that death control cannot be achieved and then taken for granted, for as Zinsser (1935:13) so aptly put it:

However secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses. And even in nor- mal times they prey on the weak, the very young, and the very old, living along with us, in mysterious obscurity waiting their opportunities.

If the thought of those lurking diseases scares you to death, then I suppose that too is part of the health and mortality transition. Also lurking around the corner is Chapter 6, in which we examine fertility concepts, measurements, and trends.

Main Points

1. The changes over time in death rates and life expectancy are captured by the perspective of the health and mortality transition.

2. Significant widespread improvements in the probability of survival date back only to the nineteenth century and have been especially impressive since the end of World War II. The drop in mortality, of course, precipitated the massive growth in the size of the human population.

3. The role played by public health preventive measures in bringing down death rates is exemplified by the saying a century ago that the amount of soap used could be taken as an index of the degree of civilization of a people.

4. World War II was a turning point in the transition because it led to new med- icines and to a transfer of public health and medical technology all over the world, creating rapid declines in the death rate.

5. The things that can kill us are broadly categorized as communicable diseases, noncommunicable conditions, and injuries, whereas the most important “real” cause of death in the United States (and increasingly in the world as a whole) is the use of tobacco.

6. Life span refers to the oldest age to which members of a species can survive, whereas longevity is the ability to resist death from year to year.

7. Although biological factors affect each individual’s chance of survival, social factors are also important overall determinants of longevity.

8. Among the important biological determinants of death are age and sex, with the very young and the very old being at greatest risk, and with males generally hav- ing higher death rates than females.

9. Mortality is measured with tools such as the crude death rate, the age-specific death rate, and life expectancy.

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187Chapter 5 The Health and Mortality Transition

10. Living in a city used to verge on being a form of latent suicide, but now cities tend to have lower death rates than rural areas, and rich people live longer than poor people on average.

Questions for Review

1. Discuss how different the world of the twenty-first century would be if (a) death rates had not declined as they did in the first part of the twentieth century; and (b) if World War II had not happened.

2. What are the ways in which society is going to have to change in order to ward off the potentially fatal side effects of the nutrition transition?

3. What are the possible explanations for the apparent biological regularity that women live longer than men? How is the social world affected by this difference?

4. Although causes of death are neatly categorized, we know that there are com- plex reasons for many deaths. Discuss some of those complexities and what they reveal about the many different routes to low mortality for a population as a whole.

5. What changes do you think would have to be made in American society to eliminate the racial differences in disease and mortality that we currently ob- serve? Would universal health coverage make a difference? Why or why not?

Websites of Interest

1. http://www.who.int The World Health Organization of the United Nations, located in Geneva, Switzerland, is the first place to go for updates on disease outbreaks, as well as for global statistics of mortality and morbidity.

2. http://www.yourdiseaserisk.wustl.ed This site, hosted by the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, allows you to evaluate your risk of several important noncommunicable diseases; then you can augment that with respect to heart attack risk by going to http://www.americanheart.org and searching for “heart attack and stroke warning signs.” If you are a woman, you may wish to visit http://www.cancer.gov/bcrisktool to calculate your risk of breast cancer.

3. http://www.northwesternmutual.com/learning-center/the-longevity-game.aspx How long can you expect to live? Play the Longevity Game and calculate your life expec- tancy. This innovative “game” from Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company lets you calculate your own expected age at death, given the data that you enter about your- self, your health, and your lifestyle characteristics. When you are finished with that, you can go to http://www.realage.com and take the “Real Age Test” and record your “real”

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age; then go to http://www.livingto100.com/ for another opinion about your life expec- tancy. Finally, go to http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html for the life calculator created by Dean P. Foster, Choong Tze Chua, and Lyle H. Ungar, at the University of Pennsylvania. Consider why each site gives you a different life expectancy.

4. Diseases are often spread by contact with “bodily fluids,” especially fecal matter—which is why washing up is so important. Visit the following website to remind yourself of the details (and spread the word): http://globalhandwashing.org/ghw-dayhttp://www .biochemist.org/news/page.htm?item=8607

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/health%20and%20mortality%20 transition Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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189

CHAPTER 6 The Fertility Transition

WHAT IS THE FERTILITY TRANSITION?

HOW HIGH COULD FERTILITY LEVELS BE? The Biological Component The Social Component

WHY WAS FERTILITY HIGH FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY?

Need to Replenish Society Children as Security and Labor Lower Status of Women in Traditional Societies

THE PRECONDITIONS FOR A DECLINE IN FERTILITY

IDEATIONAL CHANGES THAT MUST TAKE PLACE

MOTIVATIONS FOR LOWER FERTILITY LEVELS

The Supply-Demand Framework The Innovation/Diffusion and “Cultural”

Perspective

HOW CAN FERTILITY BE CONTROLLED? Proximate Determinants of Fertility Proportion Married—Limiting Exposure to

Intercourse Use of Contraceptives Induced Abortion Involuntary Infecundity from Breastfeeding The Relative Importance of the Proximate

Determinants

Figure 6.1 Total Fertility Rates Estimated for 2015 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013c); based on the medium fertility projection.

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190 Part Two Population Processes

HOW DO WE MEASURE CHANGES IN FERTILITY?

Period Measures of Fertility Cohort Measures of Fertility Fertility Intentions

HOW IS THE FERTILITY TRANSITION ACCOMPLISHED?

GEOGRAPHIC VARIABILITY IN THE FERTILITY TRANSITION

CASE STUDIES IN THE FERTILITY TRANSITION

United Kingdom and Other European Nations Historical Background Current Fertility Patterns

China The United States

Historical Background The Baby Boom The Baby Bust, Baby Boomlet, and

Beyond

ESSAY: Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Health, and the Fertility Transition

I am inclined to think that the most important of Western values is the habit of a low birth-rate. If this can be spread throughout the world, the rest of what is good in Western life can also be spread. There can be not only prosperity, but peace. But if the West con- tinues to monopolize the benefits of low birth-rate(s), war, pestilence, and famine must continue, and our brief emergence from those ancient evils must be swallowed in a new flood of ignorance, destitution and war.

When Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher and historian whose words these are (Russell 1951:49), died in 1970 at age 97, he had witnessed almost the entire demographic transition in the Western nations; birth rates in many less developed areas, however, seemed stubbornly high and few people predicted much of a drop. Yet drop they did in many places, and here in the twenty-first century we are witnessing a remarkable, yet incomplete, fertility transition. This represents a revolution in the control of human reproduction comparable in many ways to the unprecedented progress in postponing death discussed in the previous chapter.

What Is the Fertility Transition?

The fertility transition is the shift from high fertility, characterized by only minimal individual deliberate control, to low—perhaps very low—fertility, which is entirely under a woman’s (or more generally a couple’s) control. The phenomenon has been summarized by Lloyd and Ivanov (1988) as the shift from “family building by fate” to “family building by design.” The transition almost always involves a delay in childbearing to older ages (at least beyond the teen years) and also an earlier end to childbearing. This process helps to free women and men alike from the bondage of unwanted parenthood and helps to time and space those children who are desired, which has the desirable side effect of improving the health of mothers and their children.

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191Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

To control fertility does not necessarily mean to limit it, yet almost everywhere you go in the world, the two concepts are nearly synonymous. This suggests, of course, that as mortality declines and the survival of children and their parents is assured, people generally want smaller families, and the wider the range of means available to accomplish that goal, the greater the chance of success.

The central questions of the fertility transition are why, when, and how does fertility decline from high to low levels? This means that we have to start with an understanding of why fertility has been high for all the previous millennia of human history and then proceed to explanations for its decline. In that process, we will also need to define some concepts related to human reproduction and review how we measure it, so that we can talk more intelligently about trends in fertility over time and across the globe.

How High Could Fertility Levels Be?

When demographers speak of fertility, we are referring to the number of children born to women. This can be confusing, because physicians and agriculturalists routinely use the term to refer to reproductive potential—how fertile a woman is, or how fertile the soil might be. This measures the capacity to grow things (humans in the first instance, crops in the second). But in population studies fertility means the actual reproductive performance of women or men—how many children have they parented? Note that although our concern lies primarily with the total impact of childbearing on a society, we must recognize that the birth rate is the accumulation of millions of individual deci- sions to have or not have children. Thus, when we refer to a “high-fertility society,” we are referring to a population in which most women have several children; whereas a “low-fertility society” is one in which most women have few children. Naturally, some women in high-fertility societies have few children, and vice versa.

Fertility, like mortality, is composed of two parts, one biological and one social. The biological component refers to the capacity to reproduce, and though obvi- ously a necessary condition for parenthood, it is not sufficient. Whether children will actually be born and, if so, how many, is largely a result of the social environ- ment in which people live.

The Biological Component

The physical ability to reproduce is usually called fecundity by demographers. A fecund person can produce children; an infecund (sterile) person cannot. However, since people are rarely tested in the laboratory to determine their level of fecundity, most estimates of fecundity are actually based on levels of fertility (by which we mean the number of children a person has had). Couples who have tried unsuccess- fully for at least 12 months to conceive a child are usually called “infertile” by physi- cians (demographers would say “infecund”). The 2006–2010 round of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) in the United States showed that 6.0 percent of American couples (where the wife was aged 15 to 44) are infecund/infertile by that

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criterion—a decline from 8.5 in 1982 (Chandra et al. 2013). A more general con- cept is the idea of impaired fecundity (also known as subfecundity), measured by a woman’s response to survey questions about her fecundity status. A woman is classified as having impaired fecundity if she believes it is impossible for her to have a baby; if a physician has told her not to become pregnant because the pregnancy would pose a health risk for her or her baby; or if she has been continuously mar- ried for at least 36 months, has not used contraception, and yet has not gotten preg- nant. In 2006–2010, 12.1 percent of American women fell into that category—an increase from 10.8 percent in 1982 (Chandra et al. 2013).

For most people, fecundity is not an all-or-none proposition and varies accord- ing to age. Among women it usually increases from menarche (the onset of men- struation, which usually occurs in the early teens), peaks in the twenties, and then declines to menopause (the end of menstruation). Male fecundity increases from puberty to young adulthood, and then gradually declines, though men are generally fecund to a much older age than are women.

At the individual level, very young girls occasionally become mothers. In 2012, there were 3,672 babies born to mothers under 15 years of age in the United States, whereas at the other end of the age continuum, there were 600 mothers in that year whose age was listed as 50–54 (Martin et al. 2013). Until the mid- 1990s, the oldest verified mother in the world had been an American named Ruth Kistler, who gave birth to a child in Los Angeles, California, in 1956 at the age of 57 years, 129 days (McFarlan et al. 1991). Now, however, hormone treatment of postmenopausal women suggests that a woman of almost any age might be able to bear a child by implantation of an embryo created from a donated egg impreg- nated with sperm, and this has been done successfully for several women over the age of 50, including a 66-year-old unmarried Spanish woman, who was success- fully impregnated in 2006 at a clinic in Los Angeles (what is it with Los Angeles?) and gave birth to twins in Spain before dying of cancer shortly thereafter (Tremlett and Walker 2009).

Guinness World Records claims that the world’s verified most prolific mother was a Russian woman in the eighteenth century who gave birth to 69 children. She actually had “only” 27 pregnancies, but experienced several multiple births (Guinness World Records 2014). But putting the extremes of individual variation aside and assuming that most couples are normally fecund, how many babies could be born to women in a population that uses no method of fertility control? If we assume that an average woman can bear a child during a 35-year span between the ages of 15 and 49; that each pregnancy lasts a little less than nine months (account- ing for some pregnancy losses such as miscarriages); and that, in the absence of fertility limitation, there would be an average of about 18 months between the end of one pregnancy and the beginning of the next, then the average woman could bear a child every 2.2 years for a potential total of 16 children per woman (see Bongaarts 1978). This can be thought of as the maximum level of reproduction for an entire group of people.

No known society has ever averaged as many as 16 births per woman, how- ever, and there are biological reasons why such high fertility is unlikely. For one thing, pregnancy is dangerous (in the previous chapter, I noted the high rates of

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193Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

maternal mortality in many parts of the world), and many women in the real world would die before (if not while) delivering their sixteenth child, assuming they had not died from other disease in a high-mortality society. Another problem with the calculation is the assumption that all couples are “normally” fecund. The principal control a woman has over her fecundity is to provide herself with a good diet and physical care. Without such good care, of course, the result will probably be lower fertility. In some sub-Saharan African countries nearly one in four women of repro- ductive age may be subfecund (Larsen 2000). Studies of fertility rates of U.S. blacks also suggest that the drop in fertility between the late 1880s and early 1930s was due in part to the deteriorating health conditions of black women, and that part of the post–World War II baby boom among blacks was due to improved health con- ditions, especially the eradication of venereal disease and tuberculosis (Farley 1970; McFalls and McFall 1984; Tolnay 1989).

Naturally, disease is not the only factor that can lower the level of fecundity in a population. Nutrition also plays a role, and Rose Frisch (1978, 2002) was among the first to suggest that a certain amount of fat must be stored as energy before menstruation and ovulation can occur on a regular basis. Thus, if a woman’s level of nutrition is too low to permit fat accumulation, she may experience amenorrhea (a temporary absence or suppression of menstruation) and/or anovulatory cycles, in which no egg is released. For younger women, the onset of puberty may be delayed until an undernourished girl reaches a certain critical weight (Komlos 1989). Con- versely, improved nutrition has been linked to girls beginning menstruation at ear- lier ages than their less well-fed counterparts. Increased levels of fat among girls in the United States appear to have stimulated hormonal change and induced puberty in an increasing proportion of preteens.

Frisch (2002) reports that in 1800 the average age at menarche in the United States was 16.0, dropping to 14.7 by 1880, and to 12.7 in the post–World War II era. The nutrition transition, discussed in the previous chapter, thus has the effect of making it easier for younger women to conceive, even though it is paradox- ically associated with the lower mortality that would reduce the need for women to bear children at a young age.

Since the maximum level of fertility described above would require modern levels of health and nutrition, it is not the level that we would expect to find in premodern societies. A slightly different concept, natural fertility, has historically been defined as the level of reproduction that exists in the absence of deliberate fertility control (Henry 1961; Coale and Trussell 1974). This seems to be closer to an average of six or seven live births per woman. This is clearly lower than the maximum possible level of fertility, and it may be that the secret of human suc- cess lies in the very fact that as a species we have not actually been content to let nature take its course (Potts and Short 1999); that rather than there being some “natural” level of fertility, humans have always tried to exercise some control over reproduction. The clear implication is that the social component of human repro- ductive behavior is at least as important than the biological capacity to reproduce. Rodgers and his associates (2001) used data from Denmark on twins to conclude that “slightly more than one-quarter of the variance in completed fertility is attrib- utable to genetic influence” (p. 39). Perhaps it is only a coincidence that this is very

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194 Part Two Population Processes

nearly the same proportion that has been assigned to the biological component of mortality (as I discussed in Chapter 5).

The Social Component

Opportunities and motivations for childbearing vary considerably from one social environment to another, and the result is great variability in the average number of children born to women. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, hunter-gatherer societ- ies may have been motivated to space children several years apart, thus keeping fertility lower than it might otherwise have been. It would be difficult to be preg- nant and have other small children and be on the move. It may also have been, of course, that women in hunter-gatherer societies had sufficiently little body fat that their risk of conception was low enough to provide adequate spacing between chil- dren. Agricultural societies provide an environment in which more children may be advantageous, and where improved nutrition might well have improved a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant more often. On the other hand, the low mortality and high standard of living of rich modern urban societies reduce the demand for children well below anything previously imagined in human existence, yet paradox- ically the biological capacity to reproduce is probably the highest it has ever been because people are healthier than they have ever been in human history.

It was the combination of modern medical science and a prosperous agricultural community that produced the world’s most famous high-fertility group. The Hut- terites are an Anabaptist (Christians who believe in adult baptism) religious group who live in agrarian communes in the northern plains states of the United States and the western provinces of Canada. In the late nineteenth century, about 400 Hutterites migrated to the United States from Russia, having originally fled there from eastern Europe (Kephart 1982), and in the span of about 100 years they have doubled their population more than seven times to a current total of more than 45,000. In the 1930s, the average Hutterite woman who survived her reproductive years could expect to give birth to at least 11 children (Eaton and Mayer 1954). The secret to high Hutterite fertility has been a fairly early age at marriage, a good diet, good medical care, and a passion to follow the biblical prescription to “be fruitful and multiply.” Also, of course, they engage regularly in sexual intercourse without using contraception or abortion, believing as they do that any form of birth control is a sin.

Each Hutterite farming colony typically grows to a size of about 130 people. Then, in a manner reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, the division of labor becomes unwieldy and part of the colony branches off to form a new group. Branching requires that additional land be purchased to establish the new colony, and the gobbling up of vacant land by Hutterites has caused considerable alarm, espe- cially in Canada, where the majority of Hutterites now live. Laws were passed in Canada—although subsequently repealed—restricting the Hutterites’ ability to buy land and, at the same time, new technological changes in farming methods (which the Hutterites tend to keep up with) have changed the pattern of work in the col- onies. These social dynamics have apparently had the effect of raising Hutterite

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195Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

women’s average age at marriage by as many as four or five years. Furthermore, access to modern health care has led women at the other end of their reproduc- tive years to agree to sterilization for “health reasons” (Peter 1987; White 2002). Overall fertility levels among Hutterites in 1980 were only half what they had been in 1930 (Nonaka et al. 1994), and this downward trend continued into the twenty- first century as Hutterites confront the scarcity of new land for the expansion of their colonies (White 2002).

In Figure 6.2, you can see the fertility rates by age that produced the Hutterites’ 11 children per woman only a few decades ago (from Robinson 1986). For com- parison, the figure also offers you the age pattern of fertility for women as estimated for 2010 by the United Nations Population Division for Mexico (2.2 children per woman), the United States (2.0 children per woman), and Canada (1.7 children per woman).

500

400

300

200

100

B ir

th s

p e r

1 ,0

0 0 w

o m

e n

15–19

250 63 31 15

Hutterite “Natural” Mexico 2010

US 2010 Canada 2010

20–24

460 121 88 47

25–29

431 123 115 102

30–34

396 80 99

110

35–39

321 42 50 51

40–44

167 9

10 8

45–49

24 2 1 0

Hutterite “Natural” Mexico 2010 US 2010 Canada 2010

Figure 6.2 Hutterite Fertility Compared with Fertility Levels in Contemporary Mexico, the United States, and Canada Sources: Hutterite data are from Robinson (1986), Table 6, and the data for Canada, Mexico and the United States are from United Nations Population Division (2013).

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196 Part Two Population Processes

Why Was Fertility High for Most of Human History?

You will recall that for the first 99 percent of human history, mortality was very high. Only those societies with sufficiently high fertility managed to survive over the years. There may have been lower-fertility societies in the past, but we know noth- ing about them because they did not produce enough offspring to make the grade. Societies that did survive probably did not take for granted that people would have enough children to keep the population going. They instituted multiple induce- ments—pronatalist pressures—to encourage the appropriate level of reproduction: high enough to maintain society, but not so high as to threaten its existence, as discussed above. It is the undoing of those social pressures to have children, and the replacing of them with different kinds of pressures to keep fertility low, that we have to understand if we are to explain the fertility transition. So, let me now discuss the general idea of the need to replenish society and then review the major inducements used by high-mortality societies, including the value of children as security and labor and the desire for sons, especially as it relates to the lower status of women in traditional societies.

Need to Replenish Society

A crucial aspect of high mortality is that a baby’s chances of surviving to adult- hood are not very good. Yet if a society is going to replace itself, an average of at least two children for every woman must survive long enough to be able to produce more children. So, under adverse conditions, any person who limited fer- tility might threaten the very existence of society. In this light, it is not surprising that societies have generally been unwilling to leave it strictly up to the individual or to chance to have the required number of children. Societies everywhere have developed social institutions to encourage childbearing and reward parenthood in various ways. For example, among the Kgatla people of South Africa, mortality was very high during the 1930s when they were being studied by Schapera. He discov- ered that “to them it is inconceivable that a married couple should for economic or personal reasons deliberately seek to restrict the number of its offspring” (Schapera 1941:213). Several social factors encouraged the Kgatla to desire children, as noted by Nag (1962:29):

A woman with many children is honored. Married couples acquire new dignity after the birth of their first child. Since the Kgatla have a patrilineal descent system (inheritance passes through the sons), the birth of a son makes the father the founder of a line that will perpetuate his name and memory . . . [and the mother’s] kin are pleased because the birth saves them from shame.

In a 1973 study of another African society, the Yoruba of western Nigeria, families with fewer than four children were (and still are) looked upon with horror. Ware reports that “even if it could be guaranteed that two children would survive to adulthood, Yoruban parents would find such a family very lonely, for many of

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the features of the large family which have come to be negatively valued in the West, such as noise and bustle, are positively valued by them” (Ware 1975:284). The 2008 Demographic and Health Survey in Nigeria revealed that in western Nigeria women had an ideal family size of 4.6 children and were having an average of 4.5 each. This is, however, the low fertility region of the country. In northern Nigeria the average woman thinks that 8.1 children is the ideal family size (no, I’m not making this up), but they are having “only” 7.2 on average.

Social encouragements to fertility have been discussed in a more general form by Kingsley Davis (1949:561):

We often find for example that the permissive enjoyment of sexual intercourse, the own- ership of land, the admission to certain offices, the claim to respect, and the attainment of blessedness are made contingent upon marriage. Marriage accomplished, the more specific encouragements to fertility apply. In familistic societies where kinship forms the chief basis of social organization, reproduction is a necessary means to nearly every ma- jor goal in life. The salvation of the soul, the security of old age, the production of goods, the protection of the hearth, and the assurance of affection may depend upon the pres- ence, help, and comfort of progeny. . . . This articulation of the parental status with the rest of one’s statuses is the supreme encouragement to fertility.

You may notice from these examples that social pressures are not actually defined in terms of the need to replace society, and an individual would likely not recognize them for what they are. By and large, the social institutions and norms that encourage high fertility are so taken for granted by the members of a premod- ern, high-mortality society that anyone who consciously said, “I am having a baby in order to continue the existence of my society” would be viewed as a bit weird. Further, if people really acted solely on the basis that they had to replace society, then higher-fertility societies such as Nigeria would now actually have much lower levels of fertility, since in all such countries the birth rates exceed the death rates by a substantial margin; whereas the very low fertility societies would have higher fertility, since in many of those countries the birth rate is now lower than the death rate.

The societal disconnection between infant and child mortality and reproductive behavior probably explains why at the individual level there is not much evidence of a relationship between infant deaths in a family and the number of children born to those parents (Preston 1978; Montgomery and Cohen 1998). Thus, the more culturally oriented perspectives on fertility begin with the assumption that fertility is maintained at a high level in the premodern setting by institutional arrangements that bear no logical relationship to mortality. Premodern groups accepted high mortality, especially among children, as a given, and so they devised various ways to ensure that fertility would be high enough to ensure group survival. Pronatalist pressures encourage family members to bring power and prestige to themselves and to their group by having children, and this may have no particular relationship to the level of mortality within a family.

This is not to say, however, that there is not a long-term relationship between mortality and fertility. It is just that the generation of parents who experience the

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improvement in their children’s chances of survival is unlikely to be the generation that responds to that change with a decline in fertility. It will be their children or even grandchildren who become aware that lower mortality is changing the way society works, and thus they respond by lowering the number of children they have relative to their parents or grandparents.

Children as Security and Labor

In a premodern society, human beings were the principal economic resource. Even youngsters were helpful in many tasks, and as people matured into young adult- hood they provided the bulk of the labor force that supported those, such as the aged, who were no longer able to support themselves. More broadly speaking, chil- dren can be viewed as a form of insurance that rural parents, in particular, have against a variety of risks, such as a drought or a poor harvest. Though at first blush it may seem as though children would be a burden under such adverse conditions, many parents view a large family as providing a safety net—at least one or two of the adult children may be able to bail them out of a bad situation. One important way in which this may happen in the modern world is that one or more children may migrate elsewhere and send money home. Although children may clearly pro- vide a source of income for parents until they themselves become adults (and par- ents), it is less certain that children will actually provide for parents in their old age.

In a high mortality society, parents were probably aware of two things: (1) each child born has only a limited chance of surviving to adulthood; and (2) the chances are very good that they (the parents) will themselves die before needing assistance in old age. It is most noteworthy that in a premodern setting, the quantity of children may matter more than the quality, and the nature of parenting is more to bear chil- dren than to rear them (Gillis et al. 1992). Still, the noneconomic, nonrational part of society (the sexist part) intrudes by often suggesting that male children are more desirable than female children.

Lower Status of Women in Traditional Societies

Although it is obvious that in many less developed countries the status of women is steadily improving, it is nonetheless still true that in many societies around the world desired social goals can be achieved only by the birth and survival of a son— indeed, most known societies throughout human history have been dominated by men. Since in most societies males have been valued more highly than females, it is easy to understand why many families would continue to have children until they have at least one son. Furthermore, if babies are likely to die, a family may have at least two sons in order to increase the likelihood that one of them will survive to adulthood (an “heir and a spare”). For example, given the level of mortality in Nigeria, the total fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman in 2010 was the level of fertility required to ensure an average of slightly more than two surviving sons per woman.

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India is a country where the desire for a surviving son is strong, since the Hindu religion requires that parents be buried by their son (Mandelbaum 1974). Malthus was very aware of this stimulus to fertility in India and, in his Essay on Population, quoted an Indian legislator who wrote that under Hindu law a male heir is “an object of the first importance. ‘By a son a man obtains victory over all people; by a son’s son he enjoys immortality; and afterwards by the son of that grandson he reaches the solar abode’” (Malthus 1872 [1971]:116). Such beliefs, of course, also serve to ensure that society will be replaced in the face of high mortality. Yet, as Fred Arnold and associates (Arnold et al. 1998) remind us, the desire for sons can- not alone account for continuing high birth rates. Note that in Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam, Asian societies with very strong male preferences, the drop in fertility has been rapid.

The major impact of son preference in the midst of a fertility decline is to increase the chance that a female fetus may be aborted, leading to the phenomenon of the “missing females” in China (Coale and Banister 1994)—fewer girls enumer- ated in censuses at younger ages than you would expect, given the number of boys enumerated. In the 1980s, there was a great deal of speculation and concern that the missing females were victims of female infanticide. Since female infanticide had been fairly common during the pre-communist era, the probability seemed great that the one-child policy in China would lead a couple to kill or abandon a new- born female infant, reserving their one-child quota for the birth of a boy (Mosher 1983). But further analyses of data in both China and Korea (where a similar pat- tern of fertility decline has occurred without a coercive one-child policy) suggest that sex-selective abortion, combined with the nonregistration of some female births, accounts for almost all of the “missing” females, and that the role of infanti- cide probably was exaggerated (Banister 2004).

An important reason for a rural Chinese couple to want a son is the belief that a son is their most viable form of old-age support, since daughters marry and move in with (and wind up caring for) their husband’s family. Indeed, Ebenstein and Leung (2010) found that in rural Chinese counties where government pension plans were put in place in the 1990s, the sex ratio at birth has become less skewed toward boys because parents no longer have to worry about having a son to care for them in old age.

Male preference was also an indelible part of European patterns of primogeni- ture, which were designed to maintain a family’s wealth by passing it on only to the oldest son. Over time, however, the preference for sons in North America and Europe has abated as a consequence of increasing gender equity, and data from the Fertility and Family Surveys in 17 European countries suggest a strong tendency for a mixed-sex composition, with some countries exhibiting a slight preference for males and others a slight preference for females (Hank and Kohler 2000).

Remember that for most women in most of human history it was easier to have several children than to limit the number to one or two, regardless of the level of motivation. For the average person, a high level of desire and access to the means of fertility control are required to keep families small. Thus, the fertility transition was by no means automatically assured just because mortality declined. Certain precon- ditions need to be in place before birth rates will drop.

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The Preconditions for a Decline in Fertility

In 1973, in response to the findings emerging from the Princeton European Fertility Project (which I discussed in Chapter 3), Ansley Coale tried to deduce how an indi- vidual would have to perceive the world on a daily basis if fertility were to be con- sciously limited. In this revised approach to the demographic transition, he argued that there are three preconditions for a substantial fertility decline: (1) the accep- tance of calculated choice as a valid element in marital fertility, (2) the perception of advantages from reduced fertility, and (3) knowledge and mastery of effective techniques of control (Coale 1973). Although the societal changes that produced mortality declines may also induce fertility change, they will do so, Coale argued, only if the three preconditions exist. As a type of shorthand, these three precondi- tions are sometimes summarized as the ready, willing, and able (RWA) model.

Coale’s first precondition goes to the very philosophical foundation of individ- ual and group life: Who is in control? If a supernatural power is believed to control reproduction, then it is unlikely that people will run the risk of offending that deity by impudently trying to limit fertility. On the other hand, the more secular people are (even if still religious), the more likely it is that they will believe that they and other humans have the right to control important aspects of life, including repro- duction. Control need not be in the hands of a god for a person not to be empow- ered. If a woman’s life is controlled by her husband or other family members, then she is not going to run the risk of insult or injury by doing things that she knows are disapproved of by those who dominate her (Bledsoe and Hill 1998). The status of women, not just secularization, is an important part of this first, basic precondition for a decline in fertility.

The second precondition recognizes that more is required than just the belief that you can control your reproduction. You must have some reason to want to limit fertility. Otherwise, the natural attraction between males and females will lead to unprotected intercourse and, eventually, to numerous children. What kinds of changes in society might motivate people to want fewer children? Davis (1963, 1967) suggested that people will be motivated to delay marriage and limit births within marriage if economic and social opportunities make it advantageous for them to do so. Since having children is generally a means to some other end, if the important goals change, then the desire to have children may change.

Coale’s third precondition involves the knowledge and mastery of effective means of fertility control. Specific methods of fertility control may be thought of as technological innovations, the spread of which is an example of diffusion. Women in the United States and Canada now typically use the pill to space children and then use surgical contraception to end reproduction after the desired number of children are born. This is a different set of techniques than prevailed 30 years ago, and 30 years from now the mix will doubtless be different still. At the same time that knowledge of methods is being diffused, part of the decision about what method of fertility regulation to use is based on the individual’s cost-benefit calcula- tion about the “costs of fertility regulation.” The economic and psychosocial costs of various methods may well change over time and cause people to change their fertility behavior accordingly, although we must keep in mind that not all possible

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avenues of fertility control are open to all people. Abortion is a good example. Although it is a legal method of birth control in the United States, it is not “avail- able” to people who object to it for religious or personal reasons, or who live in a state where access has been limited.

The remainder of the chapter uses these three preconditions for a fertility decline as an organizing framework to understand the fertility transition. First, I briefly review the changes in social structure that may be associated with the way in which humans view their role in reproduction (the first precondition) and that also influence the motivations to limit childbearing (the second precondition), which lead people to seek the means whereby they can do so (the third precondition). During this discussion you should keep in mind that the three preconditions do not necessarily operate in a strictly linear fashion. In particular, it is possible that the availability of a particular type of contraceptive method (e.g., sterilization becom- ing available to Hutterite women) can encourage people to think in different ways about their control over reproduction and to reassess the number of children they want or intend to have.

Ideational Changes That Must Take Place

Tradition is, by definition, the enemy of change, so it is not surprising that so- called traditional societies are those that are most resistant to the idea that women, or couples working as a team, should be in charge when it comes to reproduc- tion. Among the earliest nations to undergo a change in this regard were those that first experienced the Enlightenment, as I discussed in Chapter 3. The Enlightenment allowed people to break free from traditional ideas about the role of humans in the universe and, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, this was the opening door to science, which has provided us with the long lives that we now very nearly take for granted. The acceptance of secular ideas, associated especially with nonreligious education, occurred first in Europe and among overseas European countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Thus, it is not surprising that it was these countries that first experienced the fertility transition and now have among the low- est levels of fertility in the world.

An essential element in this process is a rise in the status of women, as I detail in the essay that accompanies this chapter, but historically this has been a slow and sometimes painful set of changes. Most people view the acceptance of ways to stay healthier and alive longer as much less controversial than how women are treated, and death control has been the Trojan horse, so to speak, for major ide- ational changes in societies that weren’t otherwise interested in breaking away from tradition. The decline in mortality that has spread around the globe leads to an increase in child survival that forces people to think differently about the world than they did before. Having more children survive than ever imagined demands attention from everyone in a group. It is a wonderful prospect in the abstract, but it forces a new balance to be struck between people and resources. This is, of course, the basic point that Malthus—an early product of the Enlightenment—was making more than 200 years ago. But Malthus was pessimistic that people would or could

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REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, AND THE FERTILITY TRANSITION

The ability of women to control their own repro- duction and the overall level of their reproductive health are closely related to the changes that occur in the context of the fertility transition. By now you are familiar with the fact that pronatalist pressures have always been strong in societies character- ized by high mortality and high fertility, especially agricultural societies. In those areas, several chil- dren must be born just to ensure that enough will survive to replace the adult membership. Thus, one component of the social status of women is that with a regime of high mortality, women are busy with pregnancy, nursing, and child care, and men, who are biologically removed from the first two of these activities, are able to manipulate and exploit women by tying the status of women to their performance in reproduction and the rearing of children. Furthermore, high mortality means that childbearing must begin at an early age, because the risk of death even as an adult may be high enough that those younger, prime reproductive years cannot afford to be “wasted” on activities other than family building. In a premodern society with a life expectancy of about 30 years, fully one- third of women age 20 died before reaching age 45, making it imperative that childbearing begin as soon as possible. Of course, the catch in all of this is that pregnancy and childbirth are major causes of death for women between the ages of 20 and 45. This means that reducing fertility is a major cause of the improvement in women’s reproduc- tive health, an idea captured by the phrase “family planning saves lives” (Smith et al. 2009).

Women who marry young and begin having children may be “twice cursed”—having more years to be burdened with children and also being in a more vulnerable position to be dominated by a husband. Men need not marry as young as women, since they are not the child-bearers, and they also remain fecund longer. The older and more socially experienced a husband is com- pared to his wife, the easier it may be for him to dominate her. It is no coincidence that in Africa, western Asia, and southern Asia, where women are probably less free than anywhere in the world (and where fertility is higher than anywhere else),

men are consistently several years older than their wives. In the Gambia, husbands are nine years older than their wives, in Afghanistan they are eight years older, and in Egypt they are almost six years older (United Nations Population Division 2013a). In India and Afghanistan, among other countries, a large percentage of young women are forced into marriage before the legal minimum age of 18 and 16 respectively, and there has been a grow- ing international backlash against these practices. By contrast, in most European countries as in the United States, the difference in age of husband and wife averages only two to three years.

Among the uglier aspects of traditional approaches to reproductive “health” is the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), sometimes known as female circumcision, which involves practices that are technically clitoridectomy and infibulation. Clitoridectomy is the more common practice and involves the total removal of the clito- ris, whereas infibulation involves cutting the clitoris, the labia minora, and adjacent parts of the labia majora and then stitching up the two sides of the vulva. These are useless and dangerous practices to which an estimated 3 million girls and women in at least 28 countries in northern and sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia are subjected annually (United Nations Population Fund 2013). The effect is to dramatically lower a woman’s enjoyment of sexual intercourse, but as was true for foot bind- ing in an earlier era in China, the real purpose is to “control access to females and ensure female chastity and fidelity” (Mackie 1996). The migra- tion of refugees from African countries such as Somalia, where the practice is common, to North America and Europe helped to ignite worldwide knowledge of and outrage about FGM, and there are now international movements in place bringing pressure on governments to make it illegal.

Three demographic processes—a decline in mortality, a drop in fertility, and increasing urbanization—have importantly influenced the ability of women to expand their social roles and improve their life chances. A major factor influenc- ing the rise in the status of women has been the more general liberation of people from early death.

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The decline in mortality does not mean that pres- sures to have children have evaporated. That is far from the case, but there is a greater chance that the pressures will be less; indeed, remaining single and/or childless is more acceptable for a woman now than at any time in history.

In North America, Europe, and much of Latin America and Asia, most of a woman’s adult life is now spent doing something besides bearing and rearing children, because she is having fewer children than in previous generations and she is also living longer. An average American woman, for example, bearing two children in her late 20s and early 30s would, at most, spend about 20 years bearing and rearing them. Of course, she will actually have far more than 20 years of relative (indeed increasing) independence from

child-rearing obligations, since if her two children are spaced two years apart and the first child is born when she is 30, by age 38 her youngest child will be in school all day, and she will still have 44 more years of expected life, as you can see by looking back at Table 5.3. Is it any won- der, then, that women have searched for alterna- tives to family building and have been recruited for their labor by the formal economic sector? In a sociocultural setting in which the reproduction of children consumes a great deal of societal energy, the domestic labor of women is integral to the functioning of the economy. With a slacken- ing in demand for that type of activity, it is only natural that a woman’s time and energy would be employed elsewhere, and elsewhere is increas- ingly likely to be in a city.

Increased longevity

Higher levels of education

Lower fertility

Less pressure to marry early Greater freedom

before marriage and childbearing

Less time spent bearing and rearing children

Higher levels of reproductive control and improved reproductive health

Urbanization

Greater availability of paid employment

Increased likelihood of financial independence

Public policy that promotes gender equity and reproductive rights

The Demographic Linkage Between the Fertility Transition and Reproductive Health

(continued)

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Cities are more likely than rural areas to pro- vide occupational pursuits for both women and men that encourage a delay in marriage (thus potentially lowering fertility) and lead to a smaller desired number of children within marriage. Furthermore, since urbanization involves migra- tion from rural to urban areas, this has meant that women, as they migrate, are distanced a bit from the pressures to marry and have children that may have existed for them while living in their parents’ homes. Thus migration may lead to a greater ability to respond independently to the social environment of urban areas, which tend to value children less than rural areas. Young adults are especially prone to migration and every adult who moves may well be leaving a mother and her immediate influence behind. This means the migrant will have more freedom to look for alternatives and question the social norms that prescribe greater submissiveness, a lower sta- tus, and fewer out-of-the-home opportunities for women than for men.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. For one thing, the process of urbanization in the Western world initially led to an increase in the dependency of women before promoting increased gender equity (Nielsen 1978). Urbanization is typically associated with a transfer of the workplace from the home to an outside location—a severing of the household economy and the establishment of what Kingsley Davis (1984) called the “breadwinner sys- tem,” in which a member of the family (traditionally the male) leaves home each day to earn income to be shared with other family members. In pre- modern societies, and still in most rural settings, women generally made a substantial contribution to the family economy through agricultural work and the marketing of produce (Boserup 1970), but the city changed all that. Men were expected to be breadwinners (a task that women had previously shared), while women were charged with domes- tic responsibility (tasks that men had previously shared). From our vantage point in history, the breadwinner system seems “traditional,” but from a longer historical view, it is really an anomaly. Thus, the idea of men and women sharing economic

responsibility for the family is a return to the way in which most human societies have been organized for most of human history.

As the life expectancy of the urban woman increased and as her childbearing activity declined, the lack of alternative activities was bound to create pressures for change, and over time the urban opportunities for women have mul- tiplied. In the figure accompanying this essay, I have diagrammed the major paths by which mor- tality, fertility, and urbanization influence the sta- tus of women and lead to more egalitarian gender roles and improved reproductive health. Increased longevity eventually lessens the pressure for high fertility and lessens the pressure to marry early. These changes permit a woman greater freedom for alternative activities before marrying and hav- ing children, as well as providing more years of life beyond childbearing. Women are left to search for the alternatives, which are importantly wrapped up in higher levels of education. Society is then offered a “new” resource—nondomestic female labor. This creates new opportunities for a woman’s economic independence, which is key to controlling her life, including her reproduction.

Having greater control over her own life, enhanced by lower fertility, also improves a wom- an’s health in the process, even without govern- ment programs designed to increase reproductive health. Keep in mind, however, that public policy supporting gender equity, reproductive rights, and reproductive health can go a long way toward accelerating these changes in society. For its part, the fertility transition can be viewed as a key ele- ment in the broader pattern of changes involved in the demographic transition associated with women being able to take control of their lives and their bodies.

Discussion Questions: (1) Discuss the dif- ferent kinds of decisions that couples are likely to make about having children if an older man marries a teenage girl, compared to a man in his late 20s marrying a woman in her late 20s; (2) Why is the status of women in society so intimately bound up with the number of children women have?

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, AND THE FERTILITY TRANSITION (CONTINUED)

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change their ways and work out methods to limit the number of children born in order to prevent resources from being overrun and pushing everyone into perpetual poverty. History has, fortunately, generally proven him wrong on that point. Most people, though not all, do recognize that one way to cope with declining mortality is to limit fertility as well.

Motivations for Lower Fertility Levels

The motivational and ideational aspects of the fertility transition are most often explained as some combination of rational factors embodied in the supply-demand framework, and sociocultural influences captured by the innovation/diffusion per- spective. Let me discuss each of these complementary perspectives in turn.

The Supply-Demand Framework

The original formulation of the demographic transition envisioned a world in which the normal state of affairs is a balance between births and deaths (homeostasis). Mortality is assumed to decline for reasons that are often beyond the control of the average person (exogenous factors), but a person’s reproductive behavior is dominated by a rational calculation of the costs and benefits to himself or herself (endogenous factors) of maintaining high fertility in the face of declining mortality. The idea is that people will eventually perceive that lower mortality has produced a situation in which more children are going to survive than can be afforded and, at that point, fertility will decline.

The economist Richard Easterlin (mentioned earlier in Chapter 3) is especially notable for his work in this regard, and the resulting perspective is somewhat clum- sily called “the theory of supply, demand, and the costs of regulation,” or, in short- hand, “the supply-demand framework.” It is also known as “the new household economics” because the household, rather than the individual or the couple, is often taken as the unit of analysis. High fertility, for example, may help households avoid risk in the context of low economic development and weak institutional stabil- ity, especially when children generate a positive net flow of income to the parents. Under those conditions, it is rational to want to produce a large number of children.

The supply-demand framework draws its concepts largely from the field of neoclassical economics, which assumes that people make rational choices about what they want and how to go about getting it. The essence of the theory is that the level of fertility in a society is determined by the choices made by individual couples within their cultural (and household) context (Easterlin 1978; Bulatao and Lee 1983; Easterlin and Crimmins 1985; Bongaarts 1993; McDonald 1993; Robinson 1997; McDonald 2000).

Couples strive to maintain a balance between the potential supply of children (which is essentially a biological phenomenon determined especially by fecundity) and the demand for children (which refers to a couple’s ideal number of surviving children). If mortality is high, the number of surviving children may be small, and the

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supply may approximate the demand. In such a situation, there is no need for fertil- ity regulation. However, if the supply begins to exceed the demand, either because infant and child survival has increased, or because the opportunity costs of children are rising, then couples may adjust the situation by using some method of fertility regulation. The decision to regulate fertility will be based on the couple’s percep- tion of the costs of doing so, which include the financial costs of the method and the social costs (such as stigmas attached to the use of methods of fertility control).

What are the opportunity costs of children? Let us assume that people are rational and that they make choices based on what they perceive to be in their best self-interest. The idea that children might be thought of as “commodities” was introduced in 1960 by University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, whose work on the economic analysis of households and fertility earned him a Nobel Prize in 1992. Becker’s theory treated children as though they were consumer goods that require both time and money for parents to acquire. Then he drew on classic micro- economic theory to argue that for each individual a utility function could be found that would express the relationship between a couple’s desire for children and all other goods or activities that compete with children for time and money (Becker 1960). It is important to note that time as well as money is being considered, for if money were the only criterion, then one would expect (in a society where there are social pressures to have children) that the more money a person had, the more children he or she would want to have. Yet we know that in virtually every richer nation, those who are less well-off financially tend to have more children than do those who are more well off.

With the introduction of time into the calculations, along with an implicit recognition that social class determines a person’s tastes and lifestyle, Becker’s eco- nomic theory turns into a trade-off between quantity and quality of children. For the less well-off, the expectations that exist for children are presumed to be low and thus the cost is at its minimum. In the higher economic strata, the expectations for children are presumed to be greater, both in terms of money and especially in terms of time spent on each child. The theory asserts that parents in the higher strata are also exposed to a greater number of opportunities to buy goods and engage in time- consuming activities. Thus, to produce the kind of child desired, the number must be limited.

When an advanced education, a prestigious career, and a good income were not generally available to women, the lack of such things was not perceived as a cost of having children. But when those advantages are available, reducing or forego- ing them for the sake of raising a family may be perceived as a sacrifice. Again, the reflexive nature of the connection between fertility and women’s status is apparent. As fertility has gone down, more time has become available for women to pursue alternate lifestyles; and as the alternatives grow in number and attractiveness, the costs of having children have gone up. The benefits of having children are less tan- gible, though no less important, than the costs. They include psychological satisfac- tion and proof of adulthood, not to mention being more integrated into the family and community.

The latter reasons reflect a broad category of reward that society offers for parenthood—social approval. In addition, most people are most comfortable in

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207Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

families with children, since by definition everyone was raised in a situation involv- ing at least one child. Thus, having children may allow you vicariously to relive (and perhaps revamp) your own childhood, helping to recreate the past and take the sting out of any failures you may experience as an adult. In a more instrumental way, children tend to provide a means for establishing a network of social rela- tionships in a community through school, organized sports, and activity groups. The rewards of childbearing thus are greatest in terms of the personal and social satisfaction derived from them, since in richer nations there is certainly little, if any, economic advantage derived from having children.

The fertility transition is not something that occurs in a vacuum—it occurs because other changes are taking place in society to which individual couples or people within households are responding. The health and mortality transition actu- ally increases the potential supply of children because healthier women are better able to successfully conceive and bear a child. But the changes in society that are generating that improved health are assumed by the supply-demand framework to be largely economic in nature, and it is the changing economic circumstances, not the decline in mortality per se, that couples are believed to respond to as they choose to lower their demand for children.

An improved economy generates other things in life that compete with children. Other sources of income are higher than what child labor can produce, and there are other ways to spend one’s time and money besides just on children. Thus, if the means for fertility regulation are sufficiently effective, the lowered demand for children will lower fertility. In 1938, an Englishman put it rather succinctly: “In our existing economic system, apart from luck, there are two ways of rising in the economic system; one is by ability, and the other by infertility. It is clear that of two equally able men—the one with a single child, and the other with eight children— the one with a single child will be more likely to rise in the social scale” (quoted in Daly 1971:33).

As I have already mentioned, education is the best clue to a person’s atti- tude toward reproduction. An increase in education is strongly associated with the kind of rational decision making implied in the supply-demand framework. Furthermore, the better-educated members of society are most likely to be the secu- lar agents of change who will encourage the diffusion of an innovation such as fertility limitation.

It is nearly axiomatic that better-educated women have lower fertility than less-educated women in any given society. It is the identification of this kind of fertility differential that helps to build our understanding of reproductive dynam- ics in human societies, because it causes us to ask what it is about education that makes reproduction so sensitive to it. In general terms, the answer is that education offers to people (men and women) a view of the world that expands their horizon beyond the boundaries of traditional society and causes them to reassess the value of children and reevaluate the role of women in society. Education also increases the opportunity for social mobility, which, in turn, sharpens the likelihood that people will be in the path of innovative behavior, such as fertility limitation, that they may try themselves. Indeed, the role of education is so important that demogra- phers at the Vienna Institute of Demography have created a whole set of population

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208 Part Two Population Processes

projections incorporating trends in educational attainment as a predictor of fertility levels (Samir et al. 2010).

In Figure 6.3, I have summarized data from Demographic and Health Surveys in several less developed nations, along with data from the United States and Denmark, showing the relationship between fertility and education. With the exception of Denmark (for which data refer to women of all ages), the data are for women aged 40–49, so the number of children ever born approximates the com- pleted fertility rate—the total number of children these women will ever have. The countries are arranged by the fertility level of women with no education (except in the United States and Denmark, where it refers to women with less than a high school education), representing the situation in virtually all human societies prior to the fertility transition. Below that is the bar showing the completed fertility rate for women with secondary education (the equivalent of high school) or higher— representing the kind of structural change in a society that is likely to change the relationship between the supply and demand for children.

There are several important lessons to draw from Figure 6.3: (1) education leads to fertility differentials within each of these populations; (2) the fertility differ- ential is greater in some countries (e.g., Ethiopia) than in others (e.g., Congo); and

Completed fertility rate 0 2 4 6 8

Nigeria 2008

Ethiopia 2011

Nicaragua 2007

Congo (Kinshasa) 2007

Ghana 2008

Pakistan 2013

Colombia 2010

Egypt 2008

India 2006

Indonesia 2012

United States 2010

Denmark 2011

Low education High education

Figure 6.3 The Education of Women Is an Important Part of the Fertility Transition Source: Data for developing countries are from Measure DHS; U.S. data are derived from the Current Population Survey (U.S. Census Bureau 2010a); Data for Denmark (which are based on period data for women 15-44) are derived from Eurostat (Lanzieri 2013).

Notes: For the U.S. the low education category refers to women who did not complete high school, and the higher education refer to women with a bachelor’s degree or higher; For Denmark the low education category refers to ISCED codes 0-2 (on a six-point scale of educational attainment), and the higher edu- cation category refers to ISCED codes 5-6.

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209Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

(3) the differential is reversed in some countries, such as Denmark, that have below replacement level fertility.

Some of the variability in the differential may be economic: Education will buy you more in some societies than in others, and the more it will buy you, the higher the opportunity costs of children may be. Another reason may be cultural— education is not necessarily comparable from one country to another, and the means available to limit fertility may be different from one place to the next, no matter what your level of education. All the same, education is such a critical fac- tor that fertility is unlikely to decline without an improvement in educational levels, especially among women, even if we cannot exactly predict how much of a decline in the birth rate will accompany each higher level of educational attainment.

Once fertility has dropped to very low levels, however, its relationship to edu- cation appears to get more complicated, as we are now learning from case studies in Europe. Figure 6.3 shows data for Denmark, in which better educated women are having more children each (albeit still at less than replacement level) than women with the lowest levels of education. Data from Europe show that this pattern also exists in Finland and Portugal (Lanzieri 2013). The explanation probably lies at least in part in the greater economic advantages among better-educated women and men in low-fertility societies, who are in a better position to have a slightly larger family than those with lower levels of income and wealth. This situation should be true throughout Europe, though, not just in a few countries, yet in the majority of European nations it is still true that more education leads to fewer children born.

It is likely that higher fertility in low-fertility nations is encouraged by family- friendly public policies, especially daycare provision for pre-school children (Testa 2013). These are also likely to be countries in which the gender equality is greater than in other places, thus providing an environment in which it is easier for women to combine a family (even if a small one) with a career, rather than having to make a choice between the two.

One must also recognize that motivations for specific family size (lower or higher) do not appear magically just because one aspires to wealth, or has received a college education. Motivations for low fertility arise out of our communication with other people and other ideas. Fertility behavior, like all behavior, is in large part determined by the information we receive, process, and then act on. The people with whom, and the ideas with which, we interact in our everyday lives shape our existence as social creatures.

The Innovation/Diffusion and “Cultural” Perspective

Most social scientists would agree that human behavior is not fully described by rational neoclassical economic theory. Rather, they are also drawn to the idea that many changes in society are the result of the diffusion of innovations (Brown 1981; Rogers 1995), which spread through our various social networks (Bernardi and Klärner 2014). We know, for example, that much of human behavior is driven by fads and fashions. Last year’s style of clothing will go unworn by some people this year, even though the clothes may be in very good repair, just because that is not

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210 Part Two Population Processes

what “people” are wearing—it is so five minutes ago. These “people” are impor- tant agents of change in society—those who, for reasons that may have nothing to do with money or economic factors, are able to set trends.

You may call it charisma, or karma, or just plain influence, but there are those who set trends and those who do not—some people are just cool. We see it happen many times in our lives. Often these change agents are members of the upper strata of society. They may not be the inventors of the innovation, but when they adopt it, others follow suit. Notice, too, that the innovation may be technological, such as the cell phone, or it may be attitudinal and behavioral, such as deciding that two children is the ideal family size and then using the most popular means to achieve that number of children.

In Chapter 3, I mentioned that the fertility history of Europe suggests a pattern of geographic diffusion of the innovation of fertility limitation within marriage. The practice seemed to spread quickly across regions that shared a common lan- guage and ethnic origin, despite varying levels of mortality and economic develop- ment (Watkins 1991). This finding led to speculation that fertility decline could be induced in a society, even in the absence of major structural changes such as economic development, if the innovation could be properly packaged and adopted by the appropriately influential change agents. However, this is where the concept of “culture” comes into play, because some societies are more prone to accept inno- vations than are others (Pollack and Watkins 1993).

To accept an innovation and change your behavior accordingly, you must be “empowered” (to use an overworked term) to believe that it is within your control to alter your behavior. Not all members of all societies necessarily feel this way. In many, if not most, “traditional” societies (or groups within a society), people accept the idea that their behavior is governed by God, or multiple gods, or more generally by “fate,” or more concretely by their older family members (dead or alive). In such a situation, an innovation is likely to be seen as an evil intrusion and is not apt to be tolerated, which gets us back to the first precondition for a fertility decline—the ideational shift.

You can perhaps appreciate, then, that the diffusion of an innovation requires that people believe that they have some control over their life, which is the essence of the rational-choice model that underlies the economic approach to the fertility transition. In other words, the supply-demand model and the innovation-diffusion model tend to be complementary to one another, not opposed to one another. Both approaches can be helpful in explaining why fertility declines. In any social situa- tion in which influential couples are able to improve their own or their children’s economic and social success by concentrating resources on a relatively smaller num- ber of children, other parents may feel called upon to follow suit if they and their offspring are to be socially competitive.

The importance of “influential couples” is sometimes ignored by North Americans who prefer the ideal of a classless society. European demographers offer the reminder that two enduring theories of social stratification have strong impli- cations for fertility behavior: (1) cultural innovation typically takes place in higher social strata as a result of privilege, education, and concentration of resources, whereas lower social strata adopt new preferences through imitation; and (2) rigid

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211Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

social stratification or closure of class or caste inhibits such downward cultural innovation (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). Thus, the innovative behavior of influ- ential people will be diffused downward through the social structure, as long as there are effective means of communication among and between social strata. From our perspective, the innovation of importance is the preference for smaller families, implemented through delayed marriage/sexual partnership and/or fertility limitation.

It is in the modern world of nation-states that the fertility transition has taken place, and so we cannot ignore the role that public policy may play as a force for implementing or attempting to thwart cultural innovations that effect levels of reproduction. In particular, governments can make it more or less difficult for women to become educated, avoid early marriage, seek a divorce, enter the labor force, and have access to a wide range of fertility limitation methods. I will discuss some of these policy issues later in the chapter.

How Can Fertility Be Controlled?

Assuming that people feel that they can control their fertility, and they have a desire to do so, how can they accomplish this? What means are available to them? The answers have varied across both time and space. Earlier in the chapter, I mentioned that “natural” fertility is rarely as high as the maximum level that would be pos- sible. In most societies, families are trying (or at least hoping) to have the num- ber of surviving children that will be most beneficial to them. But people for most of human history have lived close to the subsistence level and in the shadow of high death rates. Thus, it is not surprising that in such circumstances, couples are unlikely to have a preference for a specific number of children (van de Walle 1992). The vagaries of both child mortality and the food supply were apt to cause people to “play things by ear” rather than plan in advance the number of children desired. With high mortality, how many children are born is less important than how many survive.

When we realize that it is net reproduction (surviving children, not just chil- dren ever born) that is of importance, we can see that human beings have been very clever at dealing with family size by controlling the family, rather than by controlling fertility. These societal interconnections are diagrammed in Figure 6.4. For example, higher-than-desired fertility in terms of live births can be responded to after a child is born by what Skinner (1997) has called “child control,” or by what Mason (1997) has labeled “postnatal control.” There are at least three ways of dealing with a child who is not wanted or cannot be cared for by his or her par- ents after birth: (1) infanticide (known to have been practiced in much of Asia), or a less dramatic general neglect of or selective inattention to an unwanted child that leads to early death because she is not properly nourished or cared for; (2) fosterage (sending, or even selling, an “excess” child to another family that needs or can afford it—a relatively common practice in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, and not uncommon in pre-transition Europe); and (3) orphanage, which involves abandoning a child in such a way that she or he is likely to be found and cared for

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212 Part Two Population Processes

by strangers. This was a pre-transition practice in much of Europe, where children were abandoned on the steps of a church (Kertzer 1993).

Family control does not end at that point, of course. As more children sur- vive through childhood, the child-control options become more difficult because the number of children who can no longer be afforded may stretch the limits of what families can get away with in terms of infanticide, fosterage, and orphanage. This hearkens back to the theory of demographic change and response, which I discussed in Chapter 3. As declining infant and child mortality impinges on familial resources, the family’s reaction may be to work harder, especially if “child control” is not available to them. Then, as children become teenagers (sometimes even before that), they may be sent elsewhere in search of work, either to reduce the current burden on the family or more specifically to earn wages to send back to the parents. These decisions are typically made by the family, not by the individual young person, and they are made in direct, albeit belated, response to the drop in the death rate that permitted these “excess” children to survive to adulthood.

Families have also exercised important control over fertility by determining the age at which their daughters will be allowed to marry, and by heavily supervising the premarital activities of young female family members to ensure that they are not exposed to the risk of pregnancy prior to marriage. The practice of chaperoning

Contextual structural

(economic/ cultural)

determinants

Fertility control (contraception,

including breast-

feeding)

Contextual social

pressure (diffusion)

determinants

Family structure

Infant/child mortality

Net reproduction

Family control (over

marriage) Pregnancy wastage/ maternal mortality

Child control (infanticide, fosterage,

orphanage)

Father of baby characteristics

Mother characteristics

Live births

Figure 6.4 The Interconnecting Influences on the Fertility Transition

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213Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

teenagers and other unmarried young adults was very common in much of the world until fairly recently, but it requires that there be a substantial system of surveillance in place within a household, and that is generally inconsistent with a world in which both parents work and where the older generation (the grandparents) may reside separately from the parents and their children. These family and household changes have gone hand in hand with major advances in the variety and effectiveness of methods of controlling fertility by directly influencing its proximate determinants.

Proximate Determinants of Fertility

The means for regulating fertility have been popularly labeled (popular, at least, in population studies) the intermediate variables (Davis and Blake 1955). These rep- resent 11 variables through which any social factor influencing the level of fertility will operate. Davis and Blake point out that there are actually three phases to fertil- ity: intercourse, conception, and gestation. Intercourse is required if conception is to occur; if conception occurs, successful gestation is required if a baby is to be born alive. Table 6.1 lists the 11 intermediate variables according to whether they influ- ence the likelihood of intercourse, conception, or gestation. Although each of the 11 intermediate variables plays a role in determining the overall level of fertility in a society, the relative importance of each varies considerably.

Bongaarts (1978, 1982) has been instrumental in refining our understanding of fertility control first by calling these variables the proximate determinants of fertility instead of intermediate variables, and second by suggesting that differences in fertility from one population to the next are largely accounted for by only four of those variables: proportion married, use of contraceptives, incidence of abor- tion, and involuntary infecundity (especially postpartum infecundity as affected by breastfeeding practices). These variables are noted with a checkmark in Table 6.1. Bongaarts does not mean to imply, however, that the other intermediate or proxi- mate determinants are irrelevant to our understanding of fertility among humans, only that they are relatively less important. I will focus attention on the most impor- tant determinants—those checked in Table 6.1. As we review these determinants, you will discover, by the way, that there is heavier emphasis on the behavior of women than of men. That is simply because if a woman never has intercourse, she will never have a child (aside from the still relatively rare cases of in vitro fertiliza- tion in a woman who is not otherwise having intercourse with a man), whereas a man will never have a child no matter what he does. Of course, preventing concep- tion by sterilization or contraceptives can be done by either sex, but if conception occurs, it is obviously only the woman who bears the burden and the risk of either pregnancy or abortion.

Proportion Married—Limiting Exposure to Intercourse

Permanent virginity is obviously very rare, but the longer past puberty a woman waits to begin engaging in sexual unions, the fewer children she will probably have

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214 Part Two Population Processes

Table 6.1 The Proximate Determinants of Fertility—Intermediate Variables through which Social Factors Influence Fertility

Most Important of the Proximate Determinants Proximate Determinants or Intermediate Variables

I. Factors affecting exposure to intercourse (“intercourse variables”). A. Those governing the formation and dissolution of unions in the

reproductive period. ✔ 1. Age of entry into sexual unions 2. Permanent celibacy: proportion of women never entering sexual

unions. 3. Amount of reproductive period spent after or between unions. a. When unions are broken by divorce, separation, or desertion. b. When unions are broken by death of husband. B. Those governing the exposure to intercourse within unions. 4. Voluntary abstinence. 5. Involuntary abstinence (from impotence, illness, unavoidable but

temporary separations). 6. Coital frequency (excluding periods of abstinence). II. Factors affecting exposure to conception (“conception variables”) ✔ 7. Fecundity or infecundity, as affected by involuntary causes, but

including breastfeeding. ✔ 8. Use or nonuse of contraception. a. By mechanical and chemical means. b. By other means. 9. Fecundity or infecundity, as affected by voluntary causes (steriliza-

tion, medical treatment, and so on). III. Factors affecting gestation and successful parturition (“gestation variables”). 10. Fetal mortality from involuntary causes (miscarriage). ✔ 11. Fetal mortality from voluntary causes (induced abortion).

Sources: Adapted from Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake (1955); and John Bongaarts (1982).

because of the shorter time she will be at risk of bearing children (Variable 1 in Table 6.1). According to data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth in the United States, 27 percent of never-married females aged 15 to 17 reported ever having had sexual intercourse, rising to 63 percent for those aged 18 to 19 (Martinez et al. 2011). Not surprisingly, the likelihood that a teenager will have had sex is lower if she is in a family with both a mother and father (probably related to closer surveillance of her activities), and if her mother is well-educated (probably related to her awareness of the potential costs to her of an unintended pregnancy). Modern contraception has altered the relationship between inter- course and having a baby, but it remains true that an effective way to postpone

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215Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

childbearing is to postpone engaging in sexual activity, particularly on the regu- lar basis implied in marriage. Historically, those societies with a later age at mar- riage have been the ones in which fertility was lower, and it is still true that more traditional populations in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia are characterized by early marriage for women and consequent higher-than-average levels of fertility. At the other extreme, the very low fertility in Europe is accomplished by a substantial delay in marriage for both men and women, and then a severe limitation of child- bearing within marriage.

Use of Contraceptives

It is probable that at least some people in most societies throughout human his- tory have pondered ways to prevent conception (Himes 1976). Abstinence, with- drawal, and the douche are the most ancient of such premodern means, but there is some historical evidence that various plants were used in earlier centuries to pro- duce “oral contraceptives” and early-stage abortifacients (Riddle 1992). We do not know much about the actual effectiveness of such methods, but they were almost certainly far less effective in preventing conception or birth and far riskier for a woman’s health than are modern methods. The lack of effectiveness of the premod- ern methods meant that a badly unwanted pregnancy was more likely to end in an attempted abortion (and perhaps the woman’s death) or the woman trying to con- ceal her pregnancy and then abandoning the baby (probably leading to the infant’s death) after a secret delivery (van de Walle 2000).

There have been references to douching throughout recorded history, stretch- ing back to ancient Egypt (Baird et al. 1996), and it is one of the principal means of contraception mentioned by Charles Knowlton in his famous Fruits of Philosophy in the nineteenth century (which I mentioned in Chapter 3). Over time, it has been recommended as a means of treating specific gynecological conditions and also as a contraceptive, on the theory that washing sperm out of the vagina right after intercourse (the “dash for the douche”) might prevent conception. Unfortunately, for the one doing the douching, the sperm take only about 15 seconds to travel through the vagina into the cervical canal, so the effectiveness of douching is very limited.

Withdrawal is an essentially (although not exclusively) male method of birth control. It has a long history (it is, in fact, referenced in the Bible). It is actually a form of incomplete intercourse (thus its formal name “coitus interruptus”) because it requires removal of the erect penis from the vagina just before male ejaculation. The method leaves a little room for error, especially since there may be an emission of semen just before ejaculation, but it is one of the more popular methods histori- cally for trying to control fertility. Indeed, even today in the United States it is used fairly often, as you can see in Table 6.2, which lists the major forms of contracep- tion by the proportion of women at each age who use them, and by their effective- ness, based on the most recent data available at this writing.

The importance of any kind of contraception can be gauged by the likelihood of getting pregnant if no method is used. The right-hand column of Table 6.2 illustrates

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216 Part Two Population Processes

the number of pregnancies per 100 women during the first year of use of any given method. This is a rate of use-effectiveness that approximates the chances of getting pregnant when using any method. Thus, a sexually active woman who is using no method at all has an 85 percent chance of getting pregnant over the course of a year. Even though withdrawal is one of the least reliable methods on the list, you can see that its use reduces the chance of pregnancy to 22 percent. This is not very good by modern standards, but it is a large improvement on doing nothing. Data from a variety of surveys also have shown clearly that the more highly motivated

Age Group

Number of pregnancies per

100 women during first year of use

15–44 15–19 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44

Currently NOT using contraception:

37.8 69.5 41.7 34.7 30.3 25.4 24.7 85.0

Method used by those currently using a method: Female sterilization 26.5 0.0 2.6 16.4 30.0 37.4 50.6 0.5 Male sterilization 10.0 0.0 0.9 4.1 9.5 16.6 20.1 0.2 Pill 27.5 53.1 47.0 32.9 25.4 17.0 9.8 9.0 Implant, Lunelle, or

contraceptive patch 1.4 2.3 1.9 2.3 1.3 0.7 0.0 0.1

3-month injectable (Depo-Provera)

3.7 11.5 5.7 5.2 2.4 1.3 0.8 6.0

Contraceptive ring 2.1 2.3 4.6 3.7 2.0 0.7 0.5 9.0 Intrauterine device

(IUD) 5.6 2.6 5.7 7.2 7.0 6.4 3.2 0.8

Male condom 16.4 20.0 25.6 20.8 15.5 12.1 9.0 18.0 Periodic abstinence—

fertility awareness methods

1.2 0.0 0.3 0.8 1.7 1.3 1.5 24.0

Withdrawal 5.1 6.9 5.7 6.3 4.6 5.5 3.5 22.0 Other methods

(including emergency contraception and sponge)

0.5 0.7 0.0 0.5 1.7 0.8 0.5

Sources: Contraceptive use data are from Jones et al. (2012:Table 1); use-effectiveness data are from U.S. Centers for Disease Control (2014).

Table 6.2 Contraceptive Methods—Use by Age among U.S. Women, 2006–2010, and Use-Effectiveness

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217Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

couples (that is, those who do not want any more pregnancies, as opposed to those merely spacing their children) have higher use-effectiveness rates than less moti- vated couples, regardless of the method chosen.

It can be seen in Table 6.2 that the methods are listed in an order that roughly approximates their use-effectiveness. Thus surgical contraception tends to be the most effective, and from ages 30 up it is the most common method of contracep- tion in the United States. It is, for all intents and purposes, a method of permanent contraception. For females, these procedures largely involve tubal ligation, although there are other, more extreme surgical techniques such as a hysterectomy (the removal of the uterus) that are normally done for health reasons, rather than con- traceptive reasons (although the result is the same). For males there are also drastic as well as simple means of sterilization. The drastic means is castration, which is removal or destruction of the testes. This generally eliminates sexual responsiveness in the male, causing him to be impotent (incapable of having an erection). Eunuchs (males who have been castrated) have an interesting place in history, but castra- tion is practiced now mainly in the case of life-threatening disease. Vasectomy is the more popular male surgical contraceptive, and like a tubal ligation, it does not alter a person’s sexual response. A vasectomy involves cutting and tying off the vas deferens, which are the tubes leading from each testicle to the penis. The male con- tinues to generate sperm, but they are unable to leave the testicle and are absorbed into the body. Vasectomy is quite popular in the United States, as you can see in Table 6.2. In fact, it is the second most common method of fertility control among older American couples, trailing only female sterilization.

A close inspection of Table 6.2 will show you that there are only four methods that account for at least 70 percent of contraception at every age group: female ster- ilization, male sterilization, the pill, and the male condom. At the younger ages, the pill and condom are most important, but at ages 30 and older—when most women have had all the children they are likely to want—surgical methods take over as most popular.

The oral contraceptive, or “the pill” as it is popularly known, has revolution- ized birth prevention for millions of women all over the world. The pill is a com- pound of synthetic hormones that suppress ovulation by keeping the estrogen level high in a female. This prevents the pituitary gland from sending a signal to the ova- ries to release an egg. In addition, the progestin content of the pill makes the cervical mucus hostile to implantation of the egg if it is indeed released and may block the passage of sperm as well. In the 1960s and 1970s, the pill was the method of choice for women of all ages in the United States, and it continues to be the most popular nonsurgical method of birth control in the United States. You can see in Table 6.2 that about one-half of women under age 25 who are using a contraceptive are using the pill, but that fraction declines at ages 25 and older as more women (and men) employ sterilization as a method of surgical contraception. Instead of a pill, these ovulation-suppressing hormones can also be administered by means of an implant, a patch, a contraceptive ring, or a three-month injection.

The male condom is a rubber or latex sheath inserted over the erect penis just prior to intercourse. During ejaculation, the sperm are trapped inside the

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218 Part Two Population Processes

condom, which is then removed immediately after intercourse while the penis is still erect, to avoid spillage. The condom is very effective, and when used prop- erly in conjunction with a spermicidal foam, it is virtually 100 percent effective. The condom is of course also useful in preventing the spread of sexually trans- mitted diseases, including venereal disease and HIV/AIDS. Although use of the condom dropped off considerably during the 1960s and 1970s, by 2006–2010 it had regained its place just after the pill in popularity among younger Americans, as you can see in Table 6.2. The condom is a method that is associated with the decline in the birth rate in the United States and Europe, having been around in Europe since at least the seventeenth century, when it was made of ani- mal intestines. The modern type, made of rubber, dates to the mid-nineteenth century—the time that fertility was clearly beginning to drop in Europe and North America.

The intrauterine device (IUD) was first designed in 1909, but it was not widely manufactured and distributed until the 1960s. At that time, it was the contraceptive technique that many family planners believed would bring an end to the world’s population explosion. Its success, however, has been much less spectacular than was hoped, although it may be the most widely used nonsurgical contraceptive method used by women outside of the United States, due mainly to its popularity in China. Although different IUDs may work in slightly different ways, the IUD appears to operate largely as a barrier method, preventing the sperm from reaching the egg.

The principal method of contraception that requires couple cooperation is the calendar rhythm method, more formally known as periodic abstinence. Though users of this technique are jokingly referred to as parents, you can see that the use-effectiveness is still an improvement over using no method at all. Periodic absti- nence may seem old-fashioned, but it is actually a reasonably new technique because the timing of ovulation in the menstrual cycle (which is central to the method) was unknown until the 1930s when Kyusako Ogino and Herman Knaus independently discovered the fact that peak fecundity in women occurs at the approximate midpoint between menses and that, despite the variability in the amount of time between the onset of menses and ovulation, the interval between ovulation and the next menses is fairly constant at about 14 days.

Other methods of couple-oriented contraception represent non-vaginal sexual activity, such as mutual masturbation and oral-genital sex. In Davis and Blake’s 1955 article, these forms of incomplete intercourse were listed as “perversions,” but in more recent decades, with a significant change in openness about sex, they have become more widely acceptable techniques for engaging in sexual activity with limited risk of pregnancy.

If unprotected intercourse has taken place, it may still be possible for a woman to prevent conception, if she acts immediately—and I don’t mean by douching. Emergency contraception (or postcoital contraception) is meant to avert preg- nancy within a few days after intercourse. There are two principal means to do this: (1) emergency contraceptive pills—“the morning after pill“ or “Plan B”—and (2) the Copper-T Intrauterine device (IUD) (Princeton University Office of Popu- lation Research 2013). The IUD method tends to be more effective than the pill

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219Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

method, but needs to be fitted by a physician, whereas the pill is available at drug stores without a prescription.

Induced Abortion

Assuming that conception has occurred, a live birth may still be prevented. This could happen as a result of involuntary fetal mortality (Variable 10 among the intermediate variables shown in Table 6.1), which is either a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) or a stillbirth. More important for our discussion, though, is volun- tary fetal mortality, or induced abortion (Variable 11). Induced abortions became legal in Canada in 1969 and in the United States in 1973, and they are legal in all three of the world’s most populous nations (China, India, and the United States), as well as in Japan and virtually all of Europe, except Ireland where it is forbidden by the country’s constitution, although a law passed in 2014 does allow abortion in certain medical emergencies, and Irish women also may travel to England for an abortion.

Back in the 1970s, abortion in many countries “changed from a largely disrepu- table practice into an accepted medical one, from a subject of gossip into an openly debated public issue” (Tietze and Lewit 1977:21). Worldwide, the demand for abortion has been dropping, but it is still high, even in places where it is not legal, and it is estimated that one of five pregnancies in the world may end in abortion (World Health Organization 2012), with eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa leading the list in terms of abortions per women of childbearing age. Developing countries are the most restrictive concerning abortion, yet these are the very places where the greatest number of abortions are occurring, almost all of which are thus unsafe abortions. The World Health Organization (2012) estimates that half of all abortions in the world are illegal (and thus have a high probability of being unsafe), with most occurring in Africa and Asia. The number of abortions per woman is inversely related to the use of other contraceptive methods, clearly suggesting that the best way to reduce the abortion rate is to increase the availability of other forms of fertility limitation.

Abortion is probably the single most often used form of birth control in the world, and abortions have played a major role in fertility declines around the world. The number of legally induced abortions reported in the United States increased steadily from 1974 to 1981, peaking in that year, and has been declin- ing since then (Guttmacher Institute 2014). It is estimated that nearly half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and four in ten of these pregnan- cies end in abortion. Abortion rates are higher for unmarried women than for married, higher for African Americans than for other racial/ethnic groups, and higher for teenagers than for older women. This profile has not changed much over time.

Canadian women are less likely than women in the United States to use abortion, and since the fertility rate in Canada is slightly lower than in the United States, the implication is that Canadian women are also more efficient users of other methods of contraception. Abortions have played a role in Mexico’s fertility decline

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220 Part Two Population Processes

as well, despite the fact that elective abortion is not legally available to most women in that country. Each state makes its own law in this regard, and although Mexico City (the state of Distrito Federal) legalized abortion in 2007, no other state has followed suit as of this writing.

Involuntary Infecundity from Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding prolongs the period of postpartum amenorrhea and suppresses ovu- lation, thus producing in most women the effect of temporarily impaired fecun- dity. In fact, nature provides the average new mother with a brief respite from the risk of conception after the birth of a baby whether she breastfeeds or not; how- ever, the period of infecundity is typically only about two months among women who do not nurse their babies, compared with 10–18 months among lactating mothers (Konner and Worthman 1980). Research suggests that stimulation of the nipple during nursing sets up a neuroendocrine reflex that reduces the secretion of the luteinizing hormone (LH) and thus suppresses ovulation. A study in Indonesia found that women whose babies nurse intensively (several nursing bouts per day of fairly long duration) delay the return of menses by an average of 21 months, nearly twice the delay of those women who breastfeed with low intensity (Jones 1988). On the other hand, the cessation of lactation signals a prompt return of menstruation and the concomitant risk of conception in most women (Guz and Hobcraft 1991).

Over the past few decades, there has been concern that women in less developed nations were abandoning breastfeeding in favor of bottle-feeding. In the absence of some method of contraception, a decline in breastfeeding would, of course, increase fertility by spacing children closer to one another. Closer spacing poses a threat to the health of both mother and child, and bottle-feeding is also likely to raise the infant death rate, since in less developed nations bottle-feeding may be accompa- nied by watered-down formulas that are less nutritious than a mother’s milk, and/ or the water used may be unsafe. Bacteria growing in unsterilized bottles and reused plastic liners can also lead to disease, especially diarrhea, which is often fatal to infants. In response to these concerns, UNICEF and the World Health Organiza- tion approved a voluntary code in 1981 to regulate the advertising and marketing of infant formula. However, it was not until ten years later that that the giant Swiss firm Nestlé finally decided to limit its supply of free baby formula to third world hospitals, and other baby formula suppliers quickly followed suit.

The women most likely to lead the movement back to breastfeeding in any given country are, somewhat ironically, the better educated (Hirschman and Butler 1981), the very same women whose fertility is apt to be kept low by deliberate use of other means of contraception rather than by the influence of lactation. In the United States in 2006, 86 percent of women with a college degree had breastfed at least one of their babies, compared with 66 percent among those with only a high school edu- cation or less (U.S. Centers for Disease Control 2010), although the biggest differen- tial in breastfeeding in 2008 was by race, with 80 percent of Hispanic mothers and

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221Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

75 percent of non-Hispanic white mothers, but only 59 percent of Black mothers having breastfed their babies (U.S. Centers for Disease Control 2013).

The Relative Importance of the Proximate Determinants

Bongaarts (1978) helped us to narrow down the original list of intermediate vari- ables to the most important group of four proximate determinants. But even these four are not equally important, and their importance varies across time and space. In the now developed countries, delayed marriage (without much premarital inter- course) and the use within marriage of whatever contraceptive methods were avail- able, along with abortion, were almost certainly the paths to low fertility. Although from eastern Europe to China and Japan, induced abortion has been a major factor in bringing fertility to low levels, it is reasonable to say that of all the proximate determinants of fertility, modern contraception has been by far the most important, at least since the 1960s. Without modern contraception, fertility can be maintained at levels below the biological maximum, perhaps even as low as three children per woman (especially through abstinence once the desired number of children has been born), but it is very difficult to achieve low levels of fertility without a substantial fraction of reproductive-age couples using some form of modern fertility control.

Contraceptive use is usually measured by calculating the rate of contraceptive prevalence, which is the percentage of “at-risk” women who are using a method of contraception. Being at risk of a pregnancy means that a woman is in a sexual union and is fecund, but is not currently pregnant. That is very difficult to estimate, and so the number of at-risk women is usually estimated by referring more simply to the number of women of reproductive age (15–49). There are approximately 1.9 billion women in the world right now who are of reproductive age and thus presumably at risk of pregnancy, and about 64 percent of them are using some con- traceptive method (United Nations Population Division 2012), an improvement on 52 percent back in 1990.

Contraceptive methods tend to be lumped into two broad categories: mod- ern and traditional. The modern methods include the methods listed in Table 6.2, whereas traditional methods include things such as douching or taking herbal teas. Estimates from Demographic and Health Surveys and related sources suggest that about 58 percent of “at-risk” women in the world are using a modern contraceptive (United Nations Population Division 2012).

In Figure 6.5, I have charted the percentage of married women using mod- ern contraception, as estimated for 2015, against the total fertility rate (TFR, an index similar to the total number of children born to women, as I discuss below), also estimated for 2015. Each point on the graph represents a country in terms of its total fertility rate and contraceptive prevalence. Thus Niger, in the upper left of the graph, has a very high fertility rate (more than seven children per woman) and a very low 10 percent of married women using any method of contraception. All of the countries with high birth rates and low contraceptive utilization are in sub-Saharan Africa.

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222 Part Two Population Processes

At the other extreme is Hong Kong, with a total fertility rate of 1.1, accom- plished in part because 75 percent of women are using some modern form of con- traception. In the middle of the graph is India, with a TFR of 2.5 and 53 percent of women using contraception. Mexico is farther down the line with a TFR of 2.2 and a fairly high 67 percent of women using contraception. Toward the lower right- hand side of the graph are the United States (TFR of 2.0 and 71 percent using con- traception) and Canada (TFR of 1.7 and 71 percent using contraception).

You do not need a degree in statistics to see that there is a close relationship between these two variables, and the correlation coefficient (r) of .76 confirms that fact for those of you familiar with statistics. This is not a perfect relationship, how- ever, and you can see in the graph that not every country is exactly on the line (which would represent a perfect relationship between fertility and contraceptive prevalence). Some countries have very high fertility, even though they appear to have reasonably high levels of contraceptive prevalence. In general, the explanation is that in these countries couples are using relatively less effective methods of con- traception, although in some cases it is also true that couples have not been using contraception long enough for it to yet have a significant impact on the birth rate.

Some of the countries shown in Figure 6.5 have low levels of fertility, even though the rate of contraceptive prevalence seems quite modest. In these cases, induced abortion (whether legal or not) rather than contraception is the probable cause of the low fertility rate. Most central and eastern European nations fall into this category with respect to legal abortions, as do several east and west Asian nations. As noted above, in many African and Asian countries, the evidence suggests that illegal induced abortions play an important auxiliary role in limiting fertility.

1 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

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Note: Data are estimates for 2015

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223Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

If contraceptive effectiveness were increased generally, and in particular if effective contraceptive use replaced abortion, the fit between fertility and contraceptive prev- alence would likely approach a perfect relationship (Bongaarts and Westoff 2000; Guengant and May 2013).

How Do We Measure Changes in Fertility?

How do we know that fertility has changed over time? The measures of fertility used by demographers attempt generally to gauge the rate at which women of reproduc- tive age are bearing live children. As I have noted before, this is partly a function of how healthy a woman is. Since poor health can lead to lower levels of conception and higher rates of pregnancy “wastage” (spontaneous abortions and stillbirths), improved health associated with declining mortality can actually increase fertility rates by increasing the likelihood that a woman who has intercourse will eventually have a live birth. Most rates are based on period data, which refer to a particular calendar year and represent a cross section of the population at one specific time. Cohort measures of fertility, on the other hand, follow the reproductive behavior of specific birth-year groups (cohorts) of women as they proceed through the child- bearing years. Some calculations are based on a synthetic cohort that treats period data as though they referred to a cohort. Thus, data for women aged 20–24 and 25–29 in the year 2005 represent the period data for two different cohorts. If it is assumed that the women who are now 20–24 will have just the same experience five years from now as the women who are currently 25–29, then a synthetic cohort has been constructed from the period data.

Period Measures of Fertility

A number of period measures of fertility are commonly used in population studies, including the crude birth rate, the general fertility rate, the child-woman ratio, the age-specific fertility rate, the total fertility rate, the gross reproduction rate, and the net reproduction rate. Each one tells a little different story because each is based on a slightly different set of data. I will discuss the one that requires the least data first. Then each successive measure requires a bit more information (or at least harder-to- get information) for its calculation.

The crude birth rate (CBR) is the number of live births (b) in a year divided by the total midyear population (p). It is usually multiplied by 1,000 to reduce the number of decimals:

CBR 5 b p

3 1,000

The CBR is “crude” because (1) it does not take into account which people in the population were actually at risk of having the births, and (2) it ignores the age structure of the population, which can greatly affect how many live births can be

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224 Part Two Population Processes

expected in a given year. Thus, the CBR (which is sometimes called simply “the birth rate”) can mask significant differences in actual reproductive behavior between two populations and, on the other hand, can imply differences that do not really exist.

For example, if a population of 1,000 people contained 300 women who were of childbearing age and 10 percent of them (30) had a baby in a particular year, the CBR would be (30 births/1,000 total people) 5 30 births per 1,000 population. However, in another population, 10 percent of all women may also have had a child that year. Yet, if out of 1,000 people there were only 150 women of childbear- ing age, then only 15 babies would be born, and the CBR would be 15 per 1,000. Crude birth rates in the world in 2013, for example, ranged from a low of eight per 1,000 (in Germany and Japan—all of the lowest rates are in Europe and East Asia) to a high of 51 per 1,000 in Chad (all of the highest rates are in sub-Saharan Africa). The CBR in Canada was 11, compared with 13 in the United States, and 19 in Mexico (Population Reference Bureau 2013).

Despite its shortcomings, the CBR is often used because it requires only two pieces of information: the number of births in a year and the total population size. If, in addition, a distribution of the population by age and sex is available, usually obtained from a census (but also obtainable from a large survey, especially in less developed nations), then more sophisticated rates can be calculated.

The general fertility rate (GFR) uses information about the age and sex struc- ture of a population to be more specific about who actually has been at risk of hav- ing the births recorded in a given year. As you can see in Table 6.3, the GFR (which is sometimes simply called “the fertility rate”) is the total number of births in a year (b) divided by the number of women in the childbearing ages (30F15—denoting females starting at age 15 with an interval width of 30, i.e., women aged 15–44):

GFR 5 b

3 0F1 5 3 1,000

Smith (1992) has noted that the GFR tends to be equal to about 4.5 times the CBR. Thus, in 2012, the GFR in the United States of 63.0 (see Table 6.3) was just slightly more than 4.5 times the CBR of 12.6 that year.

If vital statistics data are not available, it is still possible to estimate fertility levels from the age and sex data in a census or large survey. The child–woman ratio (CWR) provides an index of fertility that is conceptually similar to the GFR but relies solely on census data. The CWR is measured by the ratio of young children (aged 0 to 4) enumerated in the census to the number of women of childbearing ages (15 to 49):

CWR 5 4p0

35F15 3 1,000

Notice that an older upper limit on the age of women is typically used with the CWR than with the GFR, because some of the children aged 0 to 4 will have been born up to five years prior to the census date. In the United States in 2010 there were 21,965,000 children aged 0 to 4 and 75,894,000 women aged 15 to 49;

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225

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226 Part Two Population Processes

thus, the CWR was 289 children aged 0 to 4 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. By contrast, in Mexico in 2010 there were 10,042,000 children aged 0 to 4 and 30,593,000 women aged 15–49, for a CWR of 328.

The CWR can be affected by the underenumeration of infants, by infant and childhood mortality (some of the children born will have died before being counted), and by the age distribution of women within the childbearing years, and researchers have devised various ways to adjust for each of these potential defi- ciencies (Smith 1992; Weeks et al. 2004). Furthermore, just as the GFR is roughly 4.5 times the CBR, the CWR is approximately 4.5 times the GFR. The CWR for the United States in 2010, as noted above, was 289, which was almost exactly 4.5 times the GFR in 2010 of 64.1.

As part of the Princeton European Fertility Project, a fertility index was pro- duced that has been useful in making historical comparisons of fertility levels. The overall index of fertility (If) is the product of the proportion of the female popula- tion that is married (Im) and the index of marital fertility (Ig). Thus:

If 5 Im 3 Ig

Marital fertility (Ig) is calculated as the ratio of marital fertility (live births per 1,000 married women) in a particular population to the marital fertility rates of the Hutterites in the 1930s. Since they were presumed to have had the highest overall level of “natural” fertility, any other group might come close to, but not likely exceed, that level. Thus, the Hutterites represent a good benchmark for the upper limit of fertility. An Ig of 1.0 would mean that a population’s marital fertility was equal to that of the Hutterites, whereas an Ig of 0.5 would represent a level of childbearing only half that. Calculating marital fertility as a proportion, rather than as a rate, allows the researcher to readily estimate how much of a change in fertility over time is due to the proportion of women who are married and how much is due to a shift in reproduction within marriage.

One of the more precise ways of measuring fertility using period data is the age-specific fertility rate (ASFR). This requires a rather complete set of information: births according to the age of the mother and a distribution of the total population by age and sex. The ASFR is the number of births (b) occurring in a year to mothers aged x to x + n (nbx) per 1,000 women (pf or F) of that age (usually given in five- year age groups):

ASFR 5 nbx nFx

3 1,000

As you can see in Table 6.3, in 2012 in the United States there were 83 births per 1,000 women aged 20 to 24. However, in 1955 in the United States, in the mid- dle of the baby boom, childbearing activity for women aged 20 to 24 had been three times as high, reflected in an ASFR of 242. In 2012, the ASFR for women aged 25 to 29 was 107, nearly half the ASFR of 191 in 1955. Thus, we can conclude that between 1955 and 2012 fertility dropped more for women aged 20 to 24 (a 66 percent decline) than for women aged 25 to 29 (a 44 percent drop). This is

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227Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

consistent with the rise in the age at marriage and the subsequent delay in child- bearing during that time span.

ASFRs require that comparisons of fertility be done on an age-by-age basis. Demographers have also devised a method for combining ASFRs into a single fertil- ity index covering all ages. This is called the total fertility rate (TFR), which I have mentioned several times up to this point without giving you a precise definition. The TFR uses the synthetic cohort approach and approximates knowing how many children women have had when they are all through with childbearing by using the age-specific fertility rates at a particular date to project what could happen in the future if all women went through their lives bearing children at the same rate as women at that given date. For example, as noted above (and in Table 6.3), in 2012 American women aged 25 to 29 were bearing children at a rate of 107 births per 1,000 women per year. Thus, over a five-year span (from ages 25 through 29), for every 1,000 women we could expect 535 (5 5 3 107) births for every thousand women if everything else remained the same. By applying that logic to all ages, we can calculate the TFR as the sum of the ASFRs over all ages:

TFR 5 oASFR 3 5 As shown in Table 6.3, the ASFR for each age group is multiplied by five only

if the ages are grouped into five-year intervals. If data by single year of age are available, that adjustment is not required. The TFR can be readily compared from one population to another because it takes into account the differences in age struc- ture, and its interpretation is simple and straightforward. The TFR is an estimate of the average number of children born to each woman, assuming that current birth rates remain constant and that none of the women dies before reaching the end of the childbearing years. In 2012, the TFR in the United States was 1,880 children per 1,000 woman, or 1.88 children per woman, which was almost half the 1955 figure of 3.60 children per woman. A rough estimate of the TFR (measured per 1,000 women) can be obtained by multiplying the GFR by 30 or, or by multi- plying the CBR by 4.5 and then again by 30. Thus, in the United States in 2012 the TFR of 1,880 per 1,000 women was almost exactly 30 times the GFR of 63.0.

A further refinement of the TFR is to look at female births only (since it is only the female babies who eventually bear children), producing a measure called the gross reproduction rate (GRR). The most precise way to do this is to calculate age- specific birth rates using only female babies (ASFRf), and then the calculation of the TFR for females represents the GRR, as shown in Table 6.3:

GRR 5 oASFRf 3 5

Note that in this case we did not multiply the ASFRf by 1,000, since we wanted the result to be in terms of individual women, not on a per 1,000 woman basis. The GRR is interpreted as the number of female children that a female just born may expect to have during her lifetime, assuming that birth rates stay the same and ignoring her chances of survival through her reproductive years. A value of one

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228 Part Two Population Processes

indicates that women will just replace themselves, whereas a number less than one indicates that women will not quite replace themselves, and a value greater than one indicates that the next generation of women will be more numerous than the present one. In the United States in 2012, the value of 0.918 suggests that if fertility levels in that year persisted into the future, the next generation of women would be only about 92 percent as large as in 2012.

The GRR is called “gross” because it assumes that a woman will survive through all her reproductive years. Actually, some women will die before reach- ing the oldest age at which they might bear children. The risk of dying is taken into account by the net reproduction rate (NRR). The NRR represents the number of female children that a female child just born can expect to bear, taking into account her risk of dying before the end of her reproductive years. It is calculated as follows:

NRR 5 o1ASFRf 3 nLx500,000 2 where ASFRf is the female-only age-specific fertility rate that we just calculated as part of the formula for the GRR. Each ASFRf is then multiplied by the probability that a woman will survive to the midpoint of the age interval, which is found from the life table by dividing nLx (the number of women surviving to the age interval x to x 1 n) by 500,000 (which is the radix multiplied by 500,000). Note that if single-year-of-age data were used, the denominator would be 100,000 rather than 500,000. For the calculations in Table 6.3, I have used the life table data for females that are found in Table 5.3.

The NRR is always less than the GRR, since some women always die before the end of the reproductive period. How much before, of course, depends on death rates. In a low-mortality society such as the United States, the NRR is only slightly less than the GRR—the GRR of 0.918 is associated with a NRR of 0.905, whereas in a high- mortality society, the GRR may be considerably higher than the NRR. As an index of generational replacement, an NRR of one indicates that each generation of females has the potential to just replace itself. This indicates a population that will eventu- ally stop growing if fertility and mortality do not change. A value less than one indicates a potential decline in numbers, and a value greater than one indicates the potential for growth, unless fertility and mortality change. It must be emphasized that the NRR is not equivalent to the rate of population growth in most societies. For example, in the United States, the NRR in 2012 was below replacement level, yet the population was still increasing by more than 2.3 million people each year. The NRR represents the future potential for growth inherent in a population’s fer- tility and mortality regimes. However, peculiarities in the age structure (such as large numbers of women of childbearing age), as well as migration, affect the actual rate of growth at any point in time.

By adding one more column to Table 6.3, we are able to provide another use- ful index called the mean length of generation, or the average age at childbearing. Column 10 illustrates the calculation. You multiply the midpoint of each age interval (column 2) by the surviving daughters per woman for that age interval (column 9),

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229Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

and then you divide the sum of those calculations by the net reproduction rate (the sum of column 9), yielding a figure for 2012 in the United States of 28.6 years.

Cohort Measures of Fertility

Cohort data follow people through time as they age, rather than taking snapshots of different people at regular intervals, which is what period data do. Thus, the basic measure of cohort fertility is births to date, measured as the cumulated cohort fertility rate (CCFR), or the total number of children ever born (CEB) to women.

For example, women born in 1915 began their childbearing during the Depres- sion. By the time those women had reached age 25 in 1940, they had given birth to 890 babies per 1,000 women (Heuser 1976). By age 44 (in 1959), those women had finished their childbearing in the baby boom years with a completed fertility rate of 2,429 births per 1,000 women. We can compare those women with another cohort of women who were born during the Depression and began their childbearing right after World War II. The cohort born in 1930 had borne a total of 1,415 children per 1,000 women by the time they were age 25 in 1955. This level is 60 percent greater than the 1915 cohort. By age 44 (in 1974), the 1930 cohort had borne 3,153 children per 1,000 women, 30 percent higher than the 1915 cohort. Indeed, examining cohort data for the United States, it turns out that the women born in 1933 were the most fertile of any group of American women since the cohort born in 1881. By contrast, the women who had just completed their childbearing in 2010 represented the baby bust generation, as I note later in the chapter. They reached age 44 with an average of only 1,907 births per 1,000 women (U.S. Census Bureau 2010b).

Cohort information is obviously very illuminating, but since we cannot always wait for women to go through their childbearing years to estimate their level of fer- tility, we typically use the synthetic cohort approach to calculate the TFR. If fertility has not changed much over time, however, as is true in the United States, then com- pleted fertility of women in 2010 (1,907) is, as you can see, very similar to the TFR calculated from synthetic cohort data in 2012 (1,880).

Fertility Intentions

Our understanding of the fertility transition in the world has been quietly, but importantly, influenced by research on fertility intentions. These are data on what the women who are presently of childbearing age say they intend to do in the future in terms of having children. The idea for collecting this kind of information was inspired by demographers who had failed to forecast the baby boom that occurred after World War II. They realized after the fact that many couples had been post- poning having babies before the war (because of the Depression) and during the war (because of the uncertainty and disruptions caused by the war), but they still intended to have more babies. The eventual fulfillment of these intentions helped to fuel the baby boom, as I will discuss later.

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230 Part Two Population Processes

Period rates are prone to this problem of being influenced by the timing or tempo of births (when births occur), which may distort the underlying quantum of births (how many babies are actually born at a given time) (Bongaarts and Feeney 1998; Rodriguez 2006). Data on lifetime births expected by women can provide a clue to the number of births that will eventually be produced, even if the timing cannot be well predicted. For example, between 1976 and 1998, the TFR increased from 1.7 to 2.1 births per woman in the United States, seeming to show that fertility was on the rise during that 22-year period of time. However, data on lifetime births expected by women who were ages 30 to 34 actually went down from 2.4 in 1976 to 2.1 in 1998, while the number of lifetime births expected by women ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 29 remained virtually the same, at 2.1 and 2.0 respectively. This tells us that the TFR in 1976 was lower than it should have been because, as mentioned above, women were just postponing births to a later date. Although the timing had changed, young women in 1998 had exactly the same family size in mind (an aver- age of 2.1 children) as did young women back in 1976.

Westoff (1990) used data from 134 different fertility surveys conducted in 84 different countries to conclude that “the proportion of women reporting that they want no more children has high predictive validity and is therefore a useful tool for short-term fertility forecasting” (p. 84). An exhaustive review of the literature a decade later led Morgan (2001:160) to conclude that “the evidence is clear: inten- tions strongly predict subsequent behavior.” However, Quesnel-Vallée and Morgan (2003) found that this strong relationship holds for groups or societies, but not so much for individuals. In other words, you can get a good idea about the direction of fertility trends in a country or a group within a country by knowing fertility inten- tions, but you are much less likely to predict an individual woman’s completed fam- ily size from her specific intentions, because some women have more than intended, and some have fewer than intended (Morgan and Rackin 2010).

You can see that measures of fertility are no less complex than the fertility tran- sition itself. With this set of measuring tools in hand, we can now return to the questions that I raised earlier in the chapter: What is it that eventually convinces people that they should want to have a small family, given that people seemed to want large families until very recently in human history? And what is the global variation in these patterns?

How Is the Fertility Transition Accomplished?

There is no single straight path that a population is likely to take to get from high fertility to low fertility, but there are some patterns that show up more regularly than others. Keep in mind that Coale’s three preconditions for a fertility decline suggest that nothing will happen as long as women do not feel that they are in control of their own reproduction, so the first part of the transition is ideational in nature. Even assuming such an ideational change in society, fertility will only decline if people are motivated to break the old rules of life’s game that funneled women into a world of having children early and often. Finally, women or couples must decide how they are going try to limit the children born.

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231Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

One of the first signs of a fertility decline in a population is an increase in the age at which a woman has her first birth. You might call this the transition from chil- dren having children to women having children, and it is part and parcel of the ris- ing status of women in society. This may be accomplished more through abstinence than anything else, but in societies where girls are sexually active prior to marriage this will obviously require either an effective contraceptive or the availability of abortion. At older ages, women who already have children may decide not to have an additional one, and completed family size becomes five children born instead of six, or four instead of five. Thus, during the fertility transition birth rates are apt to drop noticeably at the two age extremes of a woman’s reproductive career.

Research suggests that even when couples have an ideal family size in mind, they make decisions about children one at a time. This information is captured by what demographers call parity progression ratios, which represent the proportion of women with a given number of children (parity refers to how many children have already been born) who “progress” to having another child. Thus, as fertil- ity declines, parity progression ratios will decline at the higher parities. The conse- quence is a “compression” of reproduction (to borrow the term I used in Chapter 5 in discussing mortality) into a shorter number of years. Instead of women routinely having babies between the ages of 15 and 44, most women will have all of their chil- dren in their 20s and early 30s. If you look at the data in Table 6.3 you can see that more than three-fourths of all babies born in the United States in 2012 had mothers between the ages of 20 and 34. The decline in parity progression ratios at the older ages may be accomplished especially with surgical contraception, although as I have suggested, the time-honored method was abstinence. In between the younger and older ages, the use of effective temporary contraception or the availability of abor- tion or emergency contraception provides couples with the opportunity to space children as they see most appropriate. In that process, they may decide, for exam- ple, not to have a third child now that they have two—making their own personal contribution to the fertility transition.

In Figure 6.6, I provide some examples of how age-specific fertility rates change over time in the context of the fertility transition, using illustrations from Latin America (Mexico), south Asia (India), west Asia (Iran), and Africa (Nigeria). All four countries had very high fertility back in 1975, ranging from 5.3 in India to 6.6 in Nigeria. You can see that three of these four countries had a variation on the same theme—the percentage decline in the age-specific fertility rates between 1975 and 2015 tended to be most extreme at the older and younger ages, and less dramatic in the young adult years. This was true even in Nigeria, where the decline in fertility was minimal. In Mexico, by contrast, each successively higher age had a steeper decline in fertility, suggesting very clearly that reproductive decisions were being made at each successive parity.

All of the perspectives on the fertility transition discussed above assume that fertility will not decline until people see limiting fertility as being in their interest. The supply-demand framework assumes that people are making rational economic choices between the quantity and quality of children, whereas the innovation- diffusion perspective argues that social pressure is the motivation, regardless of the underlying economic circumstances. Coale’s three preconditions do not specify

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232 Part Two Population Processes

what the motivating factors might be, leaving open the possibility of some mix of economic and social motivations, sometimes stimulated or retarded by public pol- icy decisions that make it easier or harder for people interested in controlling their reproduction actually to do so. You can appreciate, then, that a combination of forces produces the observed fertility transitions, and these forces operate in differ- ent ways and speeds depending upon where you are in the world.

Geographic Variability in the Fertility Transition

It is fair to say that by the early part of the twenty-first century, there is no region of the world that has not experienced at least the early stages of the fertility tran- sition. In 1950, Europe had the lowest fertility levels in the world, followed by the predominantly “overseas European” regions of North America and Oceania (dominated by Australia and New Zealand). In Europe, especially, fertility has now dropped to below replacement and the major question being asked is whether or not it will ever rise, or indeed if it might even drop to a lower level.

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Figure 6.6 Changes in ASFRs in the Context of the Fertility Transition Source: Data for the graphs are from United Nations Population Division (2013c)

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233Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

You can see in Figure 6.7 that the UN’s medium projections (typically the ones they think are most likely) suggest that fertility might go up again in Europe and, in fact, the evidence suggests that this may already be happening (Bongaarts and Sobotka 2012).

The most dramatic declines in fertility have been in Latin America and Asia, where the average total fertility rate in 1950 was nearly 6 children each (essentially at “natural” fertility levels). By 2015 fertility in both regions is estimated to be just slightly above replacement level, and both regions are projected to be below replacement level by the middle of the century.

Africa had the highest regional fertility in 1950, as it does now, and as it is projected to have in the middle of the century. I have, however, separated out north Africa from sub-Saharan Africa because the former has experienced a substantial decline in fertility, even if it remains well above replacement level, whereas the lat- ter has been much slower in its transition. The United Nations expects that at the middle of this century, sub-Saharan Africa will still have by far the highest fertility levels in the world, even if significantly lower than current levels. Desired family size remains very high in western and middle sub-Saharan Africa, where women prefer to have six children and men have an even higher preference (Westoff 2010).

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Figure 6.7 Regional Differences in the Fertility Transition, 1950–2050 Source: Data are from United Nations Population Division (2013); Total fertility rates for 2015 and 2050 are based on the medium projections.

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234 Part Two Population Processes

However, north Africa, where fertility still remains well above replacement level, is expected to continue its decline over this century.

These regional trends give us a feel for what is happening, but not necessarily for why it’s happening. It helps to take a look at a few countries in more detail to understand the fertility transition better.

Case Studies in the Fertility Transition

There are as many interesting stories of the fertility transition as there are countries and even subregions within countries, but for illustrative purposes I am going to choose first a country that has had low fertility for a long time and is now well below replacement level—the United Kingdom (while also commenting on some other European nations). Then I will review the situation in two of the world’s most populous nations—China and the United States—each of which has taken a differ- ent path through the fertility transition.

United Kingdom and Other European Nations

Historical Background In England and other parts of Europe, the beginnings of a potential fertility decline may well have existed even before the Industrial Revo- lution touched off the dramatic rise in the standard of living. In English parishes, there is evidence that withdrawal (coitus interruptus) was used to reduce marital fertility during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and it was appar- ently also a major reason for a steady decline in marital fertility in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, it has been suggested that the root cause of France’s fertility decline was that after the French Revolu- tion the government, in 1793, introduced a change in inheritance from everything going only to the oldest son (primogeniture) to a system where property was to be divided among all sons (or daughters, if there were no sons)—a system known as partible inheritance. The French responded by deliberately limiting family size in order to restrict the number of heirs among whom the property would have to be divided (Jones 2002). The birth rate fell and has never recovered. The higher preindustrial birth rates in the European colonies of America than in Europe also point to the fact that fertility limitation in Europe was widely accepted and prac- ticed, especially through the mechanism of deliberately delayed marriage (meaning abstinence, not cohabitation), as well as the other, more direct means, including abortion (Wrigley 1974).

The evidence for the use of some means of fertility control as far back as the eighteenth century in Europe is circumstantial, to be sure, but powerful nonethe- less. Consider the comment by the great Scottish economist Adam Smith, writing in 1776, that “barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station” (Smith 1776:I.viii.37).

The enormous economic and social upheaval of industrialization took place ear- lier in England than anywhere else, and by the first part of the nineteenth century,

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235Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

England was well into the Machine Age. For the average worker, however, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that sustained increases in real wages actually occurred. During the first part of that century, the Napoleonic Wars were tripling the national debt in England, increasing prices by as much as 90 percent without an increase in production. Thus, during most of Malthus’s pro- fessional life, his country was experiencing substantial inflation and job insecurity. These relatively adverse conditions undoubtedly contributed to a general decline in the birth rate during the first half of the nineteenth century, brought about largely by delayed marriage (Wrigley 1987). After about 1850, economic conditions improved considerably, and the first response was a rise in the birth rate (as the marriage rate increased), followed by a long-run decline. This was a period in which all of Ansley Coale’s preconditions for a fertility decline existed: (1) People had appar- ently accepted calculated choice as a valid element, (2) people perceived advantages from lowered fertility, and (3) people were aware of at least reasonably effective means of birth control. As I already mentioned, the British were accustomed to thinking in terms of family limitation, and delayed marriage, abstinence, and coitus interruptus within marriage were known to be effective means to reduce fertility. In the second half of the nineteenth century, then, motivation to limit family size came in the form of larger numbers of surviving children combined with aspiration for higher standards of living.

It is important to remember that the restriction of fertility was in many ways a return to preindustrial family patterns, in which an average of about two chil- dren survived to adulthood in each generation (remember the concept of the net reproduction rate). Thus, as I mentioned earlier, mortality declines produced changes in the lives of people to which they had to respond. The English reacted in ways consistent with the theory of demographic change and response. They responded to population growth by migrating (to America, especially) and by delaying marriage, and then, only when those options were played out, did mari- tal fertility clearly decline (Friedlander 1983). In a world now characterized by very open sexuality, it is sometimes hard to believe that large numbers of people were willing to suppress their sexuality in order to achieve some measure of eco- nomic success, but Szreter and Garrett (2000) remind us that “the available his- torical evidence suggests that the late marriage regime of early modern Britain entailed systematic sexual restraint among young adults up to their mid-20s, the point at which marriage could be realistically anticipated. A sexual culture of this sort might lend itself to restraint after marriage, as well, if and when the need arose” (p. 70).

The best-known explanation of the fertility decline in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century is that offered by J. A. Banks (1954) in Prosperity and Parenthood and its sequel, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Banks and Banks 1964). Banks’s thesis is by now a familiar one: The rising stan- dard of living in England, especially among the middle classes, gave rise to a decline in fertility by (1) raising expectations of upward social mobility, (2) creating fears of social slippage (you had to “keep up with the Joneses”), and (3) redefining the status of women (in this case from that of housewife to a fragile luxury of a middle- class man).

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236 Part Two Population Processes

Though it is true that birth rates dropped more quickly in the upper social strata of English society than in the lower social strata, by 1880 all segments of English society were experiencing fertility declines. From about 1880 to 1910, England shared with much of continental Europe in what Knodel and van de Walle (1979) called “the momentous revolution of family limitation.” Fertility has continued on a slow downward trend since then, albeit interrupted by a post- war baby boom, which peaked in the mid-1960s. After that, however, birth rates resumed their downward trend—England’s baby bust (Hobcraft 1996)—and England has settled into a consistent pattern of just below-replacement-level fer- tility, with a TFR of only 2.0 children per woman, accomplished by widespread use of contraceptives (especially the pill), delayed marriage, delayed childbear- ing, and the use of surgical contraception when the desired family size has been achieved.

Figure 6.8 shows the change in fertility that has taken place in England over the course of the past 200 years. As dramatic as the change has been, you can see that it follows the same pattern as the more recent declines in less developed countries, as shown in Figure 6.6. In 1800, the TFR in England is estimated to have been 5.6 children per woman (Livi Bacci 2000), which was still lower than the TFR in India or China as recently as 1950. The transition down to a TFR of 2.0 means that contraception is used by 84 percent of sexually active couples (Population Refer- ence Bureau 2013) and that, along with abortion, means that women do not have to delay sexual activity even though they delay marriage and/or having children.

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Figure 6.8 The Fertility Transition in England Sources: Data for 1800 are from Livi-Bacci (2000); data for 2015 are from United Nations Population Division (2013)

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237Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

And surgical contraception means that when they decide to stop having children, it is a permanent decision.

Current Fertility Patterns England mirrors other European nations, all of which currently have below-replacement-level fertility. There has been a good deal of hand-wringing over this in Europe because the low fertility, especially when com- bined with increasing life expectancy, is producing an increasingly older popu- lation with a shrinking base in the younger ages. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, governments are worried about how old-age pensions will be funded and how economic growth will be maintained if there are too few young people to carry the load. However, this low fertility should not be too surprising because it can be explained in terms of both the supply-demand framework and the diffusion of innovations.

Europeans grow up knowing that they and any children they have will almost certainly survive to a rather old age. They also know that highly effective contra- ceptives make it possible to engage in sexual activity without fear of pregnancy (and of course the use of condoms will protect them as well from sexually trans- mitted diseases, including HIV). Should the contraceptive fail, either emergency contraception or abortion is available. Thus, European women are in almost total control over the supply of children. The important question is how large is the demand for children? Surveys throughout Europe suggest that most Europeans would prefer two children (Testa 2013), but at the same time women are invest- ing heavily in their own education and are seeking jobs and careers comparable to those of men. Though gender equity may be approachable on those two fronts, it is harder to attain within marriage. Women are still expected to be the principal providers of care to children and to their husbands, not to mention their aging parents, and this extra burden placed on women has created a climate of caution about settling into a relationship and having those two children. Women know that they most likely will bear a disproportionate share of the burden of child- rearing and household labor, while suffering substantial opportunity costs from delayed careers and lost wages.

The movement toward gender equity in education and in the labor force has thus not been matched by gender equity in domestic relationships, and so the demand for children has dropped to what we might think of as female replacement—a woman having a child (whether male or female) that allows her to experience reproduction and replacement, but not much more than that. This mismatch seems to be great- est in southern and eastern Europe, where attitudes about the woman’s role in the family are more traditional than in the rest of Europe (Kertzer et al. 2009). Over time, demographers have been drawn to the idea that in highly developed countries, a rise in the status of women within family-oriented institutions may be necessary to bring fertility back up to, or at least closer to, replacement level (Chesnais 1996; McDonald 2000). Consistent with this view, a study in Spain has shown that fer- tility is higher in that country in those regions where child care is more readily available (Baizan 2009). At the same time, the persistence of low fertility in Europe (and East Asia, as well), suggests to some researchers that fertility may never go back up to replacement level (Basten et al. 2013)

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238 Part Two Population Processes

China

At the time of the communist revolution in 1949, the average woman in China was bearing 6.2 children and the population, which was already more than half a billion, was growing rapidly. The government of the People’s Republic of China realized decades ago that the population problem was enormous, and it imple- mented the largest, most ambitious, most significant, and certainly the most contro- versial policy to slow population growth ever undertaken in the world. The 1978 constitution of the People’s Republic of China declared that “the state advocates and encourages birth planning” and the reasons for this were that (1) too rapid an increase in population is detrimental to the acceleration of capital accumulation, (2) rapid population increase hinders the efforts to raise the scientific and cultural level of the whole nation quickly, and (3) rapid population growth is detrimental to the improvement of the standard of living (Muhua 1979).

The goal of the Chinese government at that time was, incredibly enough, to achieve zero population growth (ZPG) by the year 2000, with the population sta- bilizing at 1.2 billion people. To accomplish this meant that at least one generation of Chinese parents had to limit their fertility to only one child, because the youth- ful age structure in China in the 1970s meant a high proportion of people were in their childbearing years. If all of those women had two children, the population would still be growing too fast. How did they go about trying to achieve this goal? The first step was to suggest that people should delay marriage and childbearing, while also trying to convince women not to have a third child (third or higher- order births accounted for 30 percent of all births in 1979). The second step was to promote the one-child family. These goals have been accomplished partly by increased social pressure (propaganda, party worker activism, and almost cer- tainly coercion as well), partly by the increased manufacture and distribution of contraceptives, especially the IUD, the wide availability of sterilization, and, of course, abortion.

The heart of the policy as originally formulated, though, was a carefully drawn system of economic incentives (rewards) for one-child families and disincentives (punishments) for larger families. However, the one-child policy is directed by the central government, but implemented at the local level in ways that vary from place in place (Gu Baochang et al. 2007), with the Han majority finding themselves under greater pressure to conform (and thus having lower fertility) than minority group members, who comprise about 10 percent of the Chinese population (Poston et al. 2006).

In general, the policy has been that in cities couples with only one child who pledge that they will have no more children can apply for a one-child certificate. The certificate entitles the couple to a monthly allowance to help with the cost of child-rearing until the child reaches age 14. Furthermore, one-child couples receive preference over others in obtaining housing and are allotted the same amount of space as a two-child family; their child is given preference in school admissions and job applications; and the parents with a one-child certificate are promised a larger-than-average pension when they retire. Some local areas do

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239Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

allow a second child if the first is a girl (the so-called 1.5 rule) and some allow a second child only if the couple agrees to space the children by five or six years (Gu Baochang et al. 2007).

In the countryside, the incentives were designed to be a bit different. Depending upon the local area, one-child rural families might receive addi- tional monthly work points (which determine the rural payments in cash and in kind) until the child reaches age 14. These one-child families also get the same grain ration as a two-child family. In addition, all rural families receive the same-sized plot for private cultivation, regardless of family size, thus indirectly rewarding the small family. Although each province and prefecture in China has been encouraged by the central government to tailor specific policies to meet the particular needs of its residents, some of the more widely implemented poli- cies have included an increasingly heavy tax on each child after the first and the expectation that for each child after the second, parents will pay full mater- nity costs as well as full medical and educational costs. The decentralization of the policy, however, has had negative local side-effects, as Jing (2013:396) has noted: “Fines collected on unplanned births since 1980 are estimated to be RMB 1.5 to 2 trillion [250 to 330 million USD] and have become a major rev- enue source for some poor local governments. The collection and spending of fines is not fiscally disciplined, lacking standards, transparency, and monitoring. Local officials have developed a keen economic interest in collecting unplanned birth fines.” Furthermore, the fact that local officials are held accountable if the birth rate is too high has led to the widely publicized abuses, especially forced abortions.

In 1971, the government had instituted the wan xi shao (later, longer, fewer) campaign that helped to accelerate fertility decline in China prior to the imple- mentation of the one-child policy. Figure 6.9 reveals that the total fertility rate was, indeed, already declining in China at the time the government implemented the one-child policy, and it may well be argued that the government policy merely reinforced changes in reproduction that were already well under way. Furthermore, fertility fell not only in urban areas where the motivation for small families might be greatest, but in rural areas as well (Attané 2001).

The one-child policy in China was initially intended to be only an interim measure that would finally put the brake on population growth in that coun- try (Greenhalgh 1986). The plan had been to ease back to a two-child family after hitting the 1.2 billion level of population size. The government periodically reviews the policy and in 2013 there was a slight loosening of the rules. Couples in which either or both are themselves only children can now apply to have a second child. Thus far, however, there is little evidence that many couples will take up this option, so there is no expectation that a baby boom is imminent in China.

Although China’s leaders seem convinced that the one-child policy is necessary to maintain low fertility, it is intriguing to note the cultural similarities between mainland China and Taiwan (which, as you know, is actually claimed by China as part of its territory) and the coincidence of rapid fertility declines in the two

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240 Part Two Population Processes

countries—one with a clearly defined set of incentives and disincentives (China), and the other with a more normal voluntary family planning program (Taiwan), but both with rapidly expanding economies during the latter part of the twentieth century. The overall comparisons are shown in Figure 6.9, where you can see that Taiwan now has a self-imposed one-child level of fertility—one of the lowest fertil- ity levels in the world.

I should note that there is universal agreement that fertility in China is well below replacement level, but there is not agreement on precisely what the level is, because of concerns over data quality as well as the belief that some children may be hidden from official counts (Morgan et al. 2009). Furthermore, despite the intense publicity given to forced abortions, the United Nations estimates that 90 percent of married women of reproductive age are using a modern contracep- tive in China, with the IUD being the most popular “temporary” method, backed up by abortion (United Nations Population Division 2012). Surgical contracep- tion (voluntary sterilization) is the method of choice once a couple has completed childbearing.

0 1960 1965 19701950 1955 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 20152010

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Figure 6.9 The Fertility Transition in China and Taiwan Source: Data for China are from United Nations Population Division (2013); data for Taiwan from 1955 to 1990 are from Freedman, Chang and Sun (1994) and for more recent dates from U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base (accessed 2014).

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241Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

The United States

Historical Background Around 1800, when Malthus was writing his Essay on Population, he found the growth rate in America to be remarkably high and com- mented on the large frontier families about which he had read. Indeed, it is esti- mated that the average number of children born per woman in colonial America was about eight. It is probably no exaggeration to say that early in the history of the United States, American fertility was higher than any European population had ever experienced. Early data are not very reliable, but Coale and Zelnick (1963) made estimates of crude birth rates in the United States going back as far as 1800; these indicate that the crude birth rate of nearly 55 per 1,000 population would have been higher than in any country today. Even in 1855, the crude birth rate in America was 43 per 1,000, comparable to levels in much of sub-Saharan Africa. The American Civil War seems to have been a turning point in marital fertility, and fertility declined unabated from about 1870 until the Great Depression of the 1930s (Hacker 2003), during which time it bottomed out at a low level only recently reap- proached. Why the precipitous drop?

Almost all voluntary migrants to the North American continent up to the late nineteenth century were western Europeans. The people who made up much of the population of the early United States came from a social environment in which fer- tility limitation was known and practiced. Despite the frontier movement westward, America in the century after the Revolution was urbanizing and commercializing rapidly. Furthermore, the United States was experiencing the process of seculariza- tion, and people’s lives were increasingly loosened from the control of both the church and state. Malthus had commented that, with respect to all aspects of life, including reproduction, “despotism, ignorance, and oppression produced irrespon- sibility; civil and political liberty and an informed public gave grounds for expecting prudence and restraint” (quoted by Wrigley 1988:39). Bolton and Leasure (1979) have shown that throughout Europe, the early decline in fertility occurred near the time of revolution, democratic reform, or the growth of a nationalist movement. Analogously, Leasure (1989) found that the decline in fertility in the United States in the nineteenth century was closely associated with a rise in what he calls the “spirit of autonomy,” measured early in the century by the proportion of the popu- lation in an area belonging to the more tolerant Protestant denominations (Congre- gational, Presbyterian, Quaker, Unitarian, and Universalist) and measured later in the century by educational level.

Lower fertility was accomplished by a rise in the average age at marriage and by various means of birth control within marriage, including coitus interruptus, abortion (even though it was illegal), and extended breastfeeding (Sanderson 1995). Nineteenth-century America also witnessed the secret spread of knowledge about douching and periodic abstinence, neither of which is necessarily very effec- tive on the face of it, but the fact that women were searching for ways to prevent pregnancy is clear evidence of the motivation that women had to limit fertility (Brodie 1994).

New immigrants arriving in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came especially from southern and eastern Europe, where ideas of

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242 Part Two Population Processes

contraception were less well known than in western Europe. As a nurse in New York City working among immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century, Margaret Sanger witnessed firsthand the tragic health consequences for mothers and their babies of having too many children. Sanger herself decided to have only three children after watching her own Irish Catholic mother die prematurely as a result of having 11 children. Her patients kept asking her about the secrets that middle- class women must know that allowed them to keep their families small. But the secrets she did have at that time, including coitus interruptus and abstinence, were dismissed by women as being impossible without a husband’s cooperation, which they knew they would never get. In 1912, after helplessly watching a young mother with several children die from a botched self-inflicted abortion, she “resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miser- ies were vast as the sky” (Sanger 1938:92).

Sanger immersed herself in finding out all she could about contraception and began to write on the subject, landing herself in continuing legal difficulty for publishing “pornographic” material. In 1915, she was introduced to a newly designed diaphragm developed in the Netherlands. It required a health profes- sional to fit a woman for the right size, but it was far more effective than anything else that existed at that time and it was probably the most effective contraceptive in the world until the pill came along in the 1960s (Douglas 1970). The next year, in 1916, Sanger opened her notorious birth control clinic in Brooklyn. She spent the remainder of her life trying to legalize the publication of information about family planning, and to legalize the distribution and use of contraceptives themselves.

Sanger, then, played a very critical role in the contraceptive revolution; she was the founder in 1939 of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and in 1952 helped to create the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Astound- ingly, until 1965, it was technically illegal in the United States for even a married couple to use any method of birth control. In that year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples had a right to privacy that extended to the use of contraceptives. The Court granted that same right to unmar- ried couples in 1972, and the following year extended the same argument to the legalization of abortion.

After World War I, the use of condoms became widespread in the United States (and in Europe as well) and, along with withdrawal and abstinence (and the clan- destine use of the diaphragm), contributed to very low levels of fertility during the Depression (Himes 1976). The condom was available for sale not because it was a contraceptive (that use was illegal) but rather because it was a “prophylactic” that prevented the spread of sexually transmitted disease. During the Depression, fertility fell to levels below generational replacement. Though the United States was not unique in this respect, that bottoming out in the United States did cap the most sustained drop in fertility the world had seen up to that time. It was undoubtedly a response to the economic insecurity of the period, especially since that insecurity had come about as a quick reversal of increasing prosperity. Fear of social slip- page was thus a very likely motive for keeping families small. The American demo- graphic response for many couples was to defer marriage and to postpone having

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243Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

children, hoping to marry later on and have a larger family. Gallup polls starting in 1936 indicate that the average ideal family size was three children, and that most people felt that somewhere between two and four was what they would like. Thus, people were apparently having fewer children than they would have liked to have under ideal circumstances.

In 1933, the birth rate hit rock bottom because women of all ages, regardless of how many children they already had, lowered their level of reproduction. This was, however, mainly a matter of timing (the “tempo” of fertility, as discussed earlier). From 1934 on, the birth rates for first and second children rose steadily (reflecting people getting married and having small families), while birth rates for third and later children continued to decline (reflecting the postponement of larger families) until about 1940 (Grabill et al. 1958). Just as the United States was entering World War II in late 1941 and 1942, there was a momentary rise in the birth rate as husbands went off to war, followed by a lull during the war. However, the end of World War II signaled one of the most dramatic demographic phenomena in North American history—the baby boom.

The Baby Boom Most of you can probably appreciate that immediately after the end of a war, families and lovers are reunited and the birth rate goes up temporarily as people make up for lost time. This occurred in the United States as well as in Eng- land and Canada and several of the European countries actively involved in World War II. Surprisingly, these baby booms lasted not for one or two years, but for several years after the war. Birth rates in the United States continued to rise through the 1950s, as the total fertility rate went from 2.19 in 1940 to 3.58 in 1957, an increase of nearly 1.5 children per woman. Note that in the United States the term “baby boomers” is usually applied to people born between 1946 and 1964, but the “boom” peaked in 1957—12 years after the war ended.

An important contribution to the baby boom was the fact that after the war women started marrying earlier and having their children sooner after marriage. For example, in 1940, the average first child was born when the mother was 23.2 years old, whereas by 1960, the average age had dropped to 21.8. This had the effect of bunching up the births of babies, which in earlier times would have been more spread out. Further, not only were young women having children at younger ages, but older women were having babies at older-than-usual ages, due at least in part to their having postponed births during the Depression and the war. After the war, many women stopped postponing and added to the crop of babies each year. These somewhat mechanical aspects of a “catching up” process explain only the early part of the baby boom. What accounts for its prolongation?

We do not have a definitive answer to this question (and remember that it occurred in other countries besides just the United States), but a widely discussed explanation is offered by Easterlin (1968, 1978), which I mentioned in Chapter 3 as the relative cohort size hypothesis—a spin-off of the supply-demand perspec- tive. Easterlin begins his analysis by noting that the long-term decline in the birth rate in the United States was uneven, sometimes happening more rapidly than at other times. In particular, the birth rate declined less rapidly during times of greater economic growth. If a young man could easily find a well-paying job, he could get

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244 Part Two Population Processes

married and have children; if job hunting was more difficult, marriage (and children within marriage) would be postponed.

Thus, it was natural that the postwar baby boom occurred, because the econ- omy was growing rapidly during that time. What was unusual was that economic growth was more rapid than in previous decades, and the resultant demand for labor was less easily met by large numbers of immigrants, because in the 1920s the United States had passed very restrictive immigration laws. Furthermore, the number of young people looking for work was rather small because of the low birth rates in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, the demand for labor was not easily met by females, since there was a distinct bias against married women working in the United States, particularly a woman who had any children. Some states passed legislation that actually restricted married women from working in certain occupa- tions. To be sure, women did work, especially single women, but their opportuni- ties were limited. Thus, economic expansion, restricted immigration, a small labor force, and discrimination against women in the labor force meant that young men looking for jobs could find relatively well-paying positions, marry early, and have children. Indeed, income was rising so rapidly after the war and on into the 1950s that it was relatively easy for couples to achieve the lifestyle to which they were accustomed, or even to which they might modestly aspire, and still have enough money left over to have several children.

In 1958, age-specific birth rates and the total fertility rate in the United States registered clear declines—a downward change that carried into the late 1970s—as you can see in Figure 6.10. In the early 1960s surveys indicated there was still no

TFR ASFR 20–24 ASFR 25–29 ASFR 30–34

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Figure 6.10 The U.S. Baby Boom, Baby Bust, Baby Boomlet, and Beyond Source: Data are from National Center for Health Statistics (1994) and Martin et al. (2013).

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245Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

discernible trend toward smaller intended family size. The ideal family size among Americans had remained quite stable between 1952 and 1966, ranging only between 3.3 and 3.6 children. But in 1967, Blake discovered in a national sample taken the year before that “young women (those under age 30) gave ‘two’ children as their ideal more frequently than they had in any surveys since the early nineteen-fifties” (Blake 1967:20). This was the first solid evidence that fertility intentions might be on the way down—that the baby bust period had arrived.

The Baby Bust, Baby Boomlet, and Beyond Social and economic factors in the late 1960s suggested that fertility might continue to decline for a while. The rate of economic growth had slackened off, and there was no longer a labor shortage. As Norman Ryder (Ryder 1965:845) very presciently noted:

In the United States today the cohorts entering adulthood are much larger than their predecessors. In consequence they were raised in crowded housing, crammed together in schools, and are now threatening to be a glut on the labor market. Perhaps they will have to delay marriage, because of too few jobs or houses, and have fewer children. It is not entirely coincidental that the American cohorts whose fertility levels appear to be the highest in this century were those with the smallest number.

This was, of course, the kernel of Easterlin’s relative cohort hypothesis, and younger couples did indeed alter their fertility behavior. Almost all of the fertility decline was due to a drop in marital fertility, rather than delayed marriage, mainly as a result of more efficient use of contraception, and to a rise in the use of abor- tion. As fertility dropped, family size ideals dropped as well. Gallup surveys showed that the proportion of white women under age 30 saying that two children was an ideal number rose dramatically from a low of 16 percent in 1957 to 57 percent in 1971 (Blake 1974). The decline in fertility following the baby boom peak thus seemed to signal a major shift in the norms surrounding parenthood in American society: “Motherhood is becoming a legitimate question of preferences. Women are now entitled to seek rewards from the pursuit of activities other than childrearing” (Ryder 1990:477; emphasis added).

The baby bust troughed in the mid-1970s and was followed by a baby boomlet, as you can see in Figure 6.10. The total fertility rate pushed upward from about 2000 to the Great Recession in 2008, when it dropped off again. Estimates for 2015 suggest that it will return to a slightly higher level, even though still below replace- ment. These general trends hide a great deal of complexity in American fertility patterns over the past three decades, including: (1) a rise in out-of-wedlock births; (2) an increasing variability in family size; and (3) an increase in the proportion births to racial/ethnic minority groups, especially Hispanics.

In 1980, 18 percent of births in the United States were out-of-wedlock, but by 2012 that had more than doubled to 47 percent (Martin et al. 2013). The gen- eral explanation for this rise seems to be that women are postponing marriage, but not sexual activity, in an environment where out-of-wedlock births have become socially acceptable. Thus, the sexually active time before marriage is increasing, and it would be unusual under these circumstances if out-of-wedlock births did not go

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246 Part Two Population Processes

up, since fertility control is rarely perfect. In 1980 the birth rate for married women was three times higher than for unmarried women, and it was especially teenagers who were having the babies without being married. In 2012, the birth rate for mar- ried women was not even twice that of unmarried women, and it was women in their 20s who had the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births. Indeed, teenage birth rates have been declining since the early 1990s.

At the same time that teenage birth rates are going down, the rates for women 30 and older have been going up, shifting the average age at motherhood (the mean length of generation, as I discussed earlier) into the late 20s. Although most women do eventually have a child, the percentage of voluntarily childless women is higher than it used to be, yet there is also an increase in the number of women having their third or fourth child.

One of the important underlying causes of this increasing variability in birth patterns is, as you might suspect, the increasing diversity of the American popula- tion. Figure 6.11 shows the levels and trends in the total fertility rate for major racial/ethnic groups in the United States. The overall TFR for the country was lower in 2012 than it had been 22 years earlier in 1990, and each of the major racial/ ethnic groups had contributed to that decline, although there were clear differences among groups in the patterns. Non-Hispanic whites lowered their fertility a bit,

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Figure 6.11 Changes over Time in Fertility by Ethnic Group, United States Source: Data are from Martin et al. (2013).

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247Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

albeit at a level still well below replacement, very similar in fact to the TFRs in France and the United Kingdom. Non-Hispanic blacks experienced a substantial drop from 2.5 children per woman to 1.9 per woman. Asians and Pacific Islanders experienced a small drop, although as with non-Hispanic whites, it was just dipping to a level slightly more below replacement than before. The Native American popu- lation experienced the biggest absolute decline. In 1990 their TFR was just above replacement level, but in 2012 it had dropped to the lowest level of any group—to a level similar to Taiwan—a trend pushed along largely by substantial declines in fertility at the younger ages. The Hispanic population experienced nearly the same absolute decline as Native Americans, although starting and ending at higher levels. In 1990, the TFR had been nearly 3 children each, and it dropped to scarcely more than 2 children each by 2012. The decline was led by Hispanics of Mexican origin, as you can see in Figure 6.11.

The high Hispanic fertility noted in 1990, and which persisted into the first half decade of the twenty-first century, seemed to be due especially to the influx of immigrants from Mexico since the 1980s who brought with them views of the world that place a higher value on the number of children in a family than is generally true of the native-born non-Hispanic population (Bean et al. 2000). Fertility has been declining steadily in Mexico since the 1970s, but it is still slightly higher than in the United States, so immigrants have generally been coming from a culture with expectations for a larger family size than is the norm in the United States. However, current estimates of fertility in Mexico indicate a TFR of 2.2, as noted in Figure 6.7, almost identical to the level to which the TFR has dropped for the Mexican-origin population in the United States. This suggests that the same forces operating to lower fertility in Mexico are having a similar effect in the United States

Summary and Conclusion

Fertility has both a biological and a social component. The capacity to reproduce is biological (although it can certainly be influenced by the environment), but we have to look to the social environment to find out why women are having a particular number of children. For most of human history, fertility was high and “natural” because every group had to overcome high mortality if it was to survive and not disappear. But, the confluence of increasing standards of living and lower mortality has changed those dynamics and has led to the fertility transition.

Ansley Coale’s three preconditions for a fertility decline (the ready, willing, and able model) offer a useful framework for conceptualizing the kinds of changes that must occur in a society if reproduction is going to drop to significantly lower levels. These include the acceptance of calculated choice about reproductive behavior, a motivation to limit fertility, and the availability of means by which fertility can be limited. The fertility transition is viewed by many as having an essentially economic interpretation, emphasizing the relationship between the supply of children (which is driven by biological factors) and the demand for children (based on a couple’s calculations about the costs and benefits of children), given the costs (monetary

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248 Part Two Population Processes

and psychosocial) of fertility regulation. This is the supply-demand framework. It is complemented by those who argue that fertility limitation is an innovation that is diffused through societies across social strata and over distances in ways that may be independent of economic factors. Once motivated to limit fertility, people must have some means available to do so. These are generally referred to as the proxi- mate determinants of fertility, and include especially the age at which regular inter- course begins, the use of contraception, breastfeeding, and abortion.

In order to know how fertility levels are changing, we must have ways to mea- sure fertility. Demographers employ a range of statistical techniques, drawing upon vital statistics, censuses, and survey data. These methods use period data (from one point in time), cohort data (following women born at the same time through their reproductive life span), and synthetic cohort data (treating period data for women of different ages as though they represented a cohort). From the latter approach are derived two of the most widely used measurement tools—the total fertility rate and the net reproduction rate.

Theories of the fertility transition emphasize the role of wealth and economic development in lowering levels of fertility, although it is clear that these are suf- ficient but not necessary reasons for fertility to decline. You must also assess the overall social environment in which change is occurring. When there are desired and scarce resources, wealth, prestige, status, education, and other related fac- tors often help to lower fertility because they change the way people perceive and think about the social world and their place in it. Human beings are amazingly adaptable when they want to be. When people believe that having no children or only a few children is in their best interest, they behave accordingly. Sophisticated contraceptive techniques make it easier, but they are not necessary, as the histo- ries of fertility decline in places like the United Kingdom and the United States illustrate.

One of the most important ways in which societies change in the modern world is through migration. Migrants bring not only their bodies but also their ideas with them when they move, and as communication and transportation get increasingly easier, they are more apt to diffuse ideas and innovations back to their place of ori- gin. In the following chapter, we turn our attention, then, to this next aspect of the demographic transition: the migration transition.

Main Points

1. The fertility transition represents the shift from “natural fertility” to more delib- erate fertility limitation, and is associated with a drop in fertility at all ages, but especially at the older ages (beyond the 30s) and younger ages (under 20).

2. Fertility refers to the number of children born to women (or fathered by men), whereas fecundity refers to the biological capacity to produce children.

3. For most of human history, high mortality meant that societies were more concerned with maintaining reasonably high fertility levels, rather than con- templating a decline in fertility—surviving children, not children ever born, was the goal.

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249Chapter 6 The Fertility Transition

4. Ansley Coale’s three preconditions for a fertility decline include: (1) acceptance of calculated choice in reproductive decision making (“ready”); (2) motivations to limit fertility (“willing”); and (3) the availability of means by which fertility can be regulated (“able”).

5. The supply-demand perspective on the fertility transition suggests that cou- ples strive to maintain a balance between the potential supply of children and the demand (desired number of surviving children), given the cost of fertility regulation.

6. The innovation-diffusion model of fertility draws on sociological and anthro- pological evidence that much of human behavior is driven by the diffusion of new innovations—both technological and attitudinal—that may have little to do with a rational calculus of costs and benefits.

7. Fertility is measured in a variety of ways using period data (crude birth rate, general fertility rate, child-woman ratio, age-specific birth rates), synthetic cohorts (total fertility rate, gross reproduction rate, net reproduction rate), and cohort data (children ever born and birth intentions).

8. The fertility transition is typically accomplished through a later age at marriage, through older women deciding not to have that additional child, and through women in their prime reproductive years using effective means of fertility con- trol, including especially contraception and abortion.

9. Virtually all wealthy societies now have below-replacement fertility levels, and in almost all less developed nations in the world today there are genuine stir- rings of a fertility decline, as high-fertility norms and behavior give way to low- fertility preferences.

10. The level of fertility in the world is such that a woman gives birth to more than four children every second (we’ve got to find this woman and stop her!).

Questions for Review

1. How have the three preconditions for a fertility decline played out thus far in your own life?

2. Do you agree that the supply-demand framework and the innovation/diffusion theories seem like complementary perspectives on the fertility transition, rather than competing with each other? Defend your answer.

3. How do you think your perspective on the number of children you want to have in your lifetime would differ if you lived in western Europe as compared to living in sub-Saharan Africa?

4. What are the arguments for and against the idea that fertility control is a moral dilemma rather than preventive medicine?

5. Why is it that different racial/ethnic groups in the United States have such dif- ferent levels and trends in fertility? How do the perspectives on the fertility transition help us to understand these differences?

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250 Part Two Population Processes

Websites of Interest

1. http://www.measuredhs.com Most of the information that we have about fertility and reproductive health in develop- ing countries comes from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), conducted by ICF Macro as part of the Measure project. At their website you can produce your own sum- mary of results by using the DHS STATcompiler, which is available under the “Data” category.

2. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/dataset/contraception /wcu2012.shtml The United Nations Population Division has put together an Excel spreadsheet summariz- ing information about contraceptive utilization for most developing countries in the world. Of course, much of this information is drawn from Demographic and Health Surveys.

3. http://www.unfpa.org/ The UNFPA is the United Nations Population Fund—the population “outreach” arm of the UN. They publish an informative annual report that is available at this website and recent volumes have all focused on issues of reproductive rights and gender equity and their relationship (implied or explicit) to the fertility transition.

4. http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/prh/prh-intro.html The Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project at Smith College includes interviews with key people throughout the world who have been instrumental in imple- menting the dramatic fertility transition that occurred in the twentieth century.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/fertility%20transition Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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251

CHAPTER 7 The Migration Transition

What Is the MIgratIon transItIon?

DefInIng MIgratIon

Internal anD InternatIonal MIgrants

MeasurIng MIgratIon stocks versus flows Migration Indices

the MIgratIon transItIon WIthIn CountrIes

Why Do People Migrate? Who Migrates?

selectivity by age selectivity by gender

Migration within the united states

MIgratIon betWeen CountrIes Why Do People Migrate Internationally?

the neoclassical economics approach the new household economics of Migration Dual labor Market theory World systems theory network theory Institutional theory Cumulative Causation Which theories are best?

Who Migrates Internationally?

MIgratIon orIgIns anD DestInatIons global Patterns of Migration Migration into the united states Migration out of the united states Migration into and out of Canada

Figure 7.1 Map of the World according to the Percent that Is foreign stock Source: adapted from data in united nations Population Division (2013b).

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252 Part Two Population Processes

forCeD MIgratIon refugees and Internally Displaced Persons slavery

ConsequenCes of MIgratIon Consequences for Migrants

Children of Immigrants societal Consequences remittances

essaY: Is Migration a Crime? Illegal Immigration in global Context

“the sole cause of man’s unhappiness,” quipped Pascal in the seventeenth century, “is that he does not know to stay quietly in his room.” If this is so, unhappiness is enjoying unprecedented popularity as people are choosing to leave their rooms, so to speak, in record numbers. sometimes they are fleeing from unhappiness; some- times they are producing it. always they are responding to and, in their turn, creat- ing change. because migration brings together people who have probably grown up with quite different views of the world, ways of approaching life, attitudes, and behavior patterns, it contributes to many of the tensions that confront the world, leading Kingsley Davis many years ago to comment that “so dubious are the advan- tages of immigration that one wonders why the governments of industrial nations favor it.” (1974:105)

even if a country tried to slam its doors to immigrants, however, would it stop people from migrating? More than 75 million people are being added to the world’s population each year, and there is still a youth bulge in many less developed coun- tries that strains local economic resources because there just aren’t enough jobs to go around. What are these people to do? as it becomes ever more complex to find a niche in the world economy, a would-be worker is often compelled to move. an old Mexican saying goes, “Don’t ask god to give it to you, ask him to put you where it is.” “Where it is” for many in Mexico is the united states. today’s pilgrims are from places such as Jalisco, sinaloa, and Michoacán. they look to their northern neighbor for economic advancement in life and, although entrants from Mexico often cross the border with every intention of returning home, many never do. similar tales are told of algerians migrating to france, Moroccans to spain, and turks to germany.

What Is the Migration Transition?

this vast transnational migration is part of the migration transition that is a com- ponent of the broader demographic transition, as I discussed earlier. Population growth changes the ratio of people to resources, and this forces various kinds of local adjustment. one such adjustment is to move somewhere else—to “get out of town” or to “head west, young person.” humans have been migrating throughout history (or else we would not be found in every nook and cranny of the globe), but the advent of relatively inexpensive and quick ground, water, and air transportation has given migration a new dimension at the very same time (and for many of the same reasons) that rapidly declining mortality has accelerated population growth. Migration may occur within the same country (internal migration) or between

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countries (international migration). In either case, migration within the context of the demographic transition often involves people moving from rural to urban areas—an important enough topic on its own that I have devoted the entirety of Chapter 9 to the urban transition.

Migration has no biological components in the way that mortality and fertil- ity do. as far as we know, humans as a species are by nature neither sedentary (prone to staying in one place) nor inherently mobile (prone to moving from place to place). at the same time, the fact that we study migration rather than immobility means we assume that most people prefer not to move and that it is the moving that requires explanation. We accept the idea that humans have an innate sense of and attachment to place that may transcend rational decision-making about the desir- ability of staying in one place or moving to another.

the relationship of migration to the demographic transition arises from the fact that control of mortality and fertility has historically occurred within the con- text of urban places and then been diffused to rural areas. the population growth resulting from the decline in mortality in rural areas creates the paradoxical situ- ation in which many of the people working in agriculture need to be replaced by machines so that enough food can be grown for a burgeoning population. thus, people become less useful in agriculture as the population grows. fortunately, the same forces creating this situation typically are creating employment opportunities in cities, and together these changes in both rural and urban economies help to spur the movement of the population from rural to urban places.

however, even if there were no demographic transition, migration still has the potential to profoundly alter a community or an entire country within a short time. In-migration and out-migration can increase or decrease population size, respec- tively, far more quickly than either mortality or fertility. and even if the number of in-migrants just equals the number of out-migrants, the flow of people in and out will affect the social and economic structure of a community.

Migration, then, is a huge topic of tremendous importance for all human societ- ies, regardless of levels of fertility and mortality. at the same time, however, migra- tion is influenced by relative levels of mortality and fertility, and migration has its own influence on mortality and fertility, not just in the places to which migrants go, but also in the places from which they came. the topic of migration is far too huge for one chapter in a book, and so my relatively limited purpose in this chapter is to provide you with an overview of the ways in which we define, measure, and con- ceptualize the migration process and understand the migration transition, looking separately at the situation within and between countries. I also examine migration that occurs forcibly, including slavery and refugee movements.

Defining Migration

Migration is defined as any permanent change in residence. It involves the “detach- ment from the organization of activities at one place and the movement of the total round of activities to another” (goldscheider 1971:64). thus the most important aspect of migration is that it is spatial by definition. You cannot be a migrant unless

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you “leave your room.” however, just because you leave your room, you are not necessarily a migrant. You may be a traveler or perhaps a daily commuter from your home to work. these activities represent mobility, but not migration. You might be a temporary resident elsewhere (such as a construction worker on a job away from home for a few weeks or even months), or a seasonal worker (returning regularly to a permanent home), or a sojourner (typically an international migrant seeking temporary paid employment in another country). again, such people are mobile, but they are not migrants because they have not changed their residence permanently.

of course, even when you change your permanent residence, if your new home is only a short distance away and you do not have to alter your round of activities (you still go to the same school, have the same job, shop at the same stores), then you are a mover (and maybe even a shaker), but not a migrant. all migrants are movers, but not all movers are migrants. less clear conceptually are transients and nomads. technically, you could say that because they are constantly changing their residence and round of activities, they should be thought of as migrants. however, the lack of a permanent residence creates a problem in defining them as migrants. Most demographers deal with this by simply ignoring transients and nomads, and I do much the same, since they represent a very small part of most contemporary human populations.

Internal and International Migrants

Internal migration, that which occurs within a country, has traditionally been thought of as “free” or voluntary in the sense that people are choosing to migrate or not, often basing that decision on economic factors. this is not to say that, within a country, people are never forced to move. as I discuss later in the chapter, internally displaced persons (IDPs) account for a very large proportion of the world’s refugee population. especially in developing nations whose boundaries may have been cre- ated without due regard to ethnic and religious differences among inhabitants, civil strife can force people out of their homes to seek safety and refuge somewhere else in their own country, as happened infamously in Darfur, sudan, and more recently, in syria, among many other places. environmental disasters can have the same effect, as we saw in the united states in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, because of which tens of thousands were forced to flee the flooding in new orleans, with many of them relocating permanently. We witnessed people heading back to the countryside in haiti after the massive earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, and many of them may never return to the city.

People have also been forcibly moved within a country by government- led efforts in response to political and ideological factors. Witness the migration of hundreds of thousands of Chinese who were forced to relocate so that the three gorges Dam could be built, or the massive transmigration that Indonesia periodically attempts—moving people from the crowded island of Java to other, less populous islands. this kind of internal migration, although forced, is usually planned. People’s needs are anticipated in advance and, presumably, the migration

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is expected (or, at least, advertised) to improve the lives of the people involved, although the associated trauma often has the opposite effect.

Migration across international boundaries is usually voluntary, but it typi- cally means that a person has met fairly stringent entrance requirements, or is entering without documents (which carries a load of stress with it), or is being granted refugee status, fleeing from a political, social, or military conflict. You can easily imagine that most kinds of international migration are apt to be more stressful than internal migration. on top of the move itself is heaped the bur- den of accommodating to a new culture and often a new language, being domi- nated perhaps by a different religion, being provided different types and levels of government services, and adjusting to different sets of social expectations and obligations.

With reference to your area of origin (the place you left behind), you are an out-migrant, whereas you become an in-migrant with respect to your destination. If you move from one country to another, you become an international migrant— an emigrant in terms of the area of origin and an immigrant in terms of the area of destination. because commuters and sojourners also may cross international boundaries, the united nations has tried to tighten the definition of an interna- tional migrant by developing the concept of a long-term immigrant, which includes all persons who arrive in a country during a year and whose length of stay in the country of arrival is more than one year (Kraly and Warren 1992).

as noted above, international migration can be differentiated further between legal immigrants, illegal (or undocumented) immigrants, refugees, and asylees. legal immigrants are those who have governmental permission to live in the place to which they are migrating, whereas illegal or undocumented migrants do not. a refugee is defined by the united nations (and by most countries of the world) as a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (unhCr 2010). asylees are refugees—with a geographic twist: they are already in the country to which they are applying for admission, whereas refugees are outside the country at the time of application.

You can see that the definition of migration is confounded by the fact that migration is an activity (changing residence permanently—however we define that) carried out by people (the migrants) under varying legal and sociopolitical circum- stances, and between different kinds of geographic entities. If we have this much trouble defining migration, you can be sure that it is hard to measure.

Measuring Migration

Defining migration as a permanent change of residence still leaves several impor- tant questions open that have to be answered before we can measure the phe- nomenon and know who is a migrant and who is not. for example, how far does a person have to move to be considered a migrant instead of just a mover? that

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is fairly straightforward in the case of international migrants, but not so easily determined for internal migrants. as a rule of thumb, people moving within a country are classified as migrants if they move across administrative boundaries. for example, the u.s. Census bureau usually defines a migrant as a person who has moved to a different county within the united states. note, however, that from the standpoint of a city within a county, a migrant would be anyone mov- ing into or out of the city limits. from the standpoint of a local school district, a migrant would be anyone moving into or out of the school district’s boundar- ies. this issue of geographic scale is one that must be dealt with in all migra- tion research. a birth is a birth, and a death is a death, but whether or not you are considered a migrant when you move varies according to who is asking the question.

another question that has to be asked is: What do we mean by permanent? Most people who move tend to move more than once in their life, so we have to decide how long you must stay at the new place before your move is considered permanent. as noted above, the united nations has somewhat arbitrarily decided that anyone who spends at least one year in the new locale is a migrant. It is some- times the case that the data you are dealing with will determine what your defini- tion of permanent will be. the decennial census in the united states up through Census 2000 routinely asked people a question about where they lived five years prior to the census. so, a migrant is defined from these census data as someone who lived in a different county (or a different state or a different country) five years prior to the census, regardless of how many times they may have moved in between. of course, such a definition fails to capture the migration of some- one who moved out and then back to the point of origin within that five-year time period. the Current Population survey, by contrast, has asked a question in each year’s March demographic supplement about where a respondent lived a year prior to the survey. this one-year time frame has also been incorporated into the american Community survey, which as you know replaced the census long form in the 2010 Census.

to tangle the situation further, migration may involve more than a single individual—a family or even an entire village may migrate together. a ghost town, it has been suggested, does not necessarily signal the end of a community, only its relocation.

Stocks versus Flows

one of the more important things to keep in mind as we discuss the migration transition is that it involves both a process and a transformation. the process is that people move from one place to another, and this represents the migration flow. the transformation is that the migrant stock—those people living in a different place than where they were born—changes as people move into and out of a given place. the fact that an average of one million legal immigrants per year were admit- ted to the united states between 2000 and 2010 represents a measure of the flow

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of people from other places into the country. those people were added to the stock of immigrants (the foreign-born population) already residing in the united states at the time. the total stock of foreign-born persons in 2010 was 40 million, account- ing for nearly 13 percent of the population. the contrasts between stocks and the flows are illustrated by the idea that if a million previous migrants had left the country just as a million new migrants were entering, the in- and out-flows would have been pretty large, but the stock itself would not have changed numerically. on the other hand, the demographic composition of the stock of migrants (e.g., their places of origin) could have been changed by the flows, even if the stock did not change numerically.

Information about the migrant stock comes largely from censuses and surveys where everybody is asked a question about whether or not they used to live in a dif- ferent place. If they did (and they meet the criteria for being a migrant rather than just a mover), then they are part of the stock of migrants. If one additional question is asked about where they came from, then we can infer something about migration flows, as well, since we can then measure the number of people in the stock who flowed from point a to point b. Migration flow data can come from a variety of other sources, such as the Department of homeland security, which keeps track of people entering the united states. figure 7.2 combines a map showing the flow of legal migrants into each state in the continental u.s. during the decade 2003 to 2012, with a map from the Census bureau’s american Community survey for 2012 showing the percent of the population in each of those states that is foreign-born. as you would expect, there is considerable overlap between the two. note that the

Figure 7.2 flows and stocks of Immigrants to u.s. states Flow data refer to the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. between 2003 and 2012 living in each state; stock data represent the proportion of the population in each state that is foreign-born as of 2012, based on the American Community Survey 2012 three-year data set. Sources: Prepared by the author from data provided by u.s. Department of homeland security (2014:table 4); and u.s. Census bureau, american factfinder (factfinder2.census.gov).

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flows of undocumented immigrants have to be estimated from arrests by the Depart- ment of homeland security and by various surveys that attempt to assess the legal status of immigrants through indirect means, and so they are not shown in the flow data in figure 7.2. nonetheless, undocumented immigrants will be reflected in the stock data because they are routinely included along with everybody else in census and survey counts.

We also do not have a good source of data on migration flows out of the united states and so must rely on outside estimates, such as the number of social security checks sent to people living outside the country. the same can be said for Canada, where Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) records the arrival of immigrants but has no data on people who leave the country. this problem arises even in the european nations that, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, maintain population regis- ters. after germany conducted a census in 2011, it discovered that the population was slightly smaller than estimated from population register data because people were leaving the country without telling the authorities. Most countries have little available information on emigration, and we either do not know what is happen- ing or have to rely on sample surveys or other indirect evidence (such as the stock of foreign-born people from a given country counted in censuses of destination nations) to infer patterns of emigration flow.

With respect to internal migration, data for the united states are obtained from the Current Population survey and the american Community survey, as noted above. the u.s. Census bureau also conducts the american housing survey every other year, which tracks changes in the nation’s housing stock and thereby generates data on residential mobility (changing residence regardless of how long or short the distance) within the country. furthermore, the Census bureau has an arrangement with the Internal revenue service that allows the bureau to periodi- cally examine the address changes reported by people on tax returns, and that drill provides yet another way of tracking migration flows within the country. Con- fused? Don’t worry, you’re in good company, but do remember the definitions and distinctions we have just discussed as we sort through the major ways by which we index migration.

Migration Indices

When data are available, migration is measured with rates similar to those con- structed for fertility and mortality. these rates can be used to measure internal or international migration, depending on the focus of your analysis and the data you have at your disposal.

gross or total out-migration represents the flow of all people who leave a particular region (OM) during a given time period (usually a year), and the crude or gross rate of out-migration (OMigR) relates those people to the total midyear population (p) in the region (and then we multiply by 1,000):

OMigR 5 OM

p 3 1,000

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similarly, the crude or gross rate of in-migration (IMigr) is the ratio of all people who moved into the region (the flow) during a given year relative to the total mid- year population in that region:

IMigR 5 IM p

3 1,000

the gross rate of in-migration is a little misleading because the midyear population refers to the people living in the area of destination, which is not the group of peo- ple at risk of moving in (indeed, they are precisely the people who are not at risk of moving in because they are already there). nonetheless, the in-migration rate does provide a sense of the impact that in-migration has on the region in question, so it is useful for that reason alone.

the numerical difference between those who move in and those who move out is called net migration. If these numbers are the same, then net migration is zero, even if there has been a lot of migration activity. If there are more in-migrants than out-migrants, net migration is positive; and if the out-migrants exceed the in- migrants, net migration is negative. the crude net migration rate (CNMigR) is thus the net number of migrants in a year per 1,000 people in a population, and it is the difference between the net in- and out-migration rates, calculated as follows:

CNMigR 5 IMigR 2 OMigR

the total volume (flow) of migration also may be of interest to people because it can have a substantial impact on a community even if the net rate is low. this is mea- sured as the total or gross migration rate (TMigR)—also sometimes called the migration turnover rate—which is the sum of in-migrants and out-migrants divided by the mid- year population, or more simply the in-migration rate plus the out-migration rate:

TMigR 5 IMigR1OMigR

another way of viewing migration is through the concept of migration effectiveness (E), which measures how “effective” the total volume of migration is in redistributing the population (Plane and rogerson 1994; Manson and groop 2000). for example, if there were a total of 10 migrants in a region in a year and all 10 were in-migrants, the “effectiveness” of migration would be 10/10, or 100 percent; whereas if four were in-migrants and six were out-migrants, the effectiveness would be much lower: (4 – 6)/10, or –20 percent. In general, the rate of effectiveness (E) is as follows:

E 5 CNMigR

TmigR 3 100

there is no universally agreed-upon measure of migration that summarizes the overall levels in the same way that the total fertility rate summarizes fertility and life expectancy summarizes mortality. however, one way of measuring the contribution

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that migration makes to population growth is to calculate the ratio of net migra- tion to natural increase (the difference between births and deaths); this is called the migration ratio (MigRatio):

MigRatio 5 IM 2 OM

b 2 d

for example, between July 1, 2012, and July 1, 2013, the u.s. Census bureau estimates that there was a net migration of 843,145 people into the country (the difference between immigrants and emigrants). During that same one-year period there were 3,952,937 births in the united states and 2,540,928 deaths, so the nat- ural increase was 1,412,009. the ratio of the net migrants to natural increase was thus 843,145 to 1,412,009 or .60, indicating that migration was only 60 percent as important as natural increase in its contribution to that year’s population growth in the united states. If we rearrange that equation a little, we can calculate the percentage of growth attributable to migration (MigPct), which in this case is 37 percent:

MigPct 5 IM 2 OM

sIM 2 OMd 1 sb 2 dd 3 100

because we often do not have complete sets of data on the number of in- and out-migrants, we can “back into” the migration rate by solving the demographic balancing equation (which I discussed in Chapter 4) for migration. this is known as the components of change (or residual) method of estimating migration. the demographic balancing equation states that population growth between two dates is a result of the addition of births, the subtraction of deaths, and the net effect of migration (the number of in-migrants minus the number of out-migrants). If we know the amount of population growth between two dates (e.g., from consecutive censuses), and we also know the number of births and deaths (typically from a system of vital statistics), then by subtraction we can estimate the amount of net migration. let me give you an example. based on the 2000 census of the united states, we know that on april 1, 2000, there were 281,424,600 residents counted in the country. between that date and april 1, 2010, there were 41,406,971 births and 24,316,206 deaths in the country. thus on april 1, 2010, we should have expected the census to find 298,515,365 residents if no migration had occurred. however, the 2010 census counted 308,745,538 people. that difference of (10,230,173) people was estimated to be the result of migration (note that a small fraction of the difference could also be the result of differences in coverage error between the two censuses, as discussed in Chapter 4). since the difference is equiv- alent to about one million net immigrants per year, we can see that the numbers make sense.

In an analogous way, we can also calculate intercensal net migration rates for specific age groups by gender. If we know the number of people at ages 15–24 in 2000, for example, and if we can estimate how many of them died between 2000 and 2010, then we know how many people aged 25–34 there should have been

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in 2010 in the absence of migration. any difference between the observed and the expected number in 2010 can be attributed to migration. typically, we use a life table (see Chapter 5) to calculate the proportion of people who will die between two different ages, and we call this whole procedure the forward survival (or residual) method of migration estimation. for example, in 2000 in the united states, there were 19,105,073 females aged 15–24. life table values suggest that 99.6 percent of those women (or 19,031,697) should still have been alive at ages 25–34 in 2010 (the forward survival). In fact, Census 2010 counted 21,308,500 women in that age group, or 2,276,803 more than expected. We assume, then, that those “extra” women (the residual) were immigrants, so this is a measure of net migration.

once again, we note that this assumption ignores any part of that difference that may have been due to differences in the coverage error in the two censuses. If one census undercounted the population more or less than the next census, this could account for at least part of the residual that is otherwise being attributed to migration. Conversely, if we knew the number of migrants, then the difference between the actual and expected number of migrants would tell us something about the accuracy of the census (and that is one of the ways of evaluating the census, as I discussed in Chapter 4).

the residual method is also the key to estimating the undocumented immigrant population in the united states. the Current Population survey and the american Community survey ask people in large random samples of households questions about their place of birth, and these survey results provide estimates for the entire country. the assumption is made that everyone who entered the country prior to 1980 is now a legal resident, given the opportunities afforded to them (hoefer et al. 2012). We know how many people have been granted legal permanent resi- dence in the united states since 1980 and can create estimates of how many of them may have subsequently left the country. the difference between the total number of foreign-born people estimated to be in the country and our estimate of how many of them are legal residents leaves us with an estimate of how many of the foreign- born are in the country without documentation. In 2012, the estimate was that there were 11.7 million such persons, slightly lower than the peak of 11.8 million in 2007, just before the economic downturn (hoefer et al. 2012).

now, having worn you out trying to measure the nearly unmeasurable, let us move on to yet another difficult (but inherently more interesting) task: explaining the migration transition. We will do this first in the context of migration within countries, and then we will turn our attention to international migration.

The Migration Transition within Countries

In the premodern world, rates of migration typically were fairly low, just as birth and death rates were generally high. the decline in mortality, in particular, helped to unleash migration, and a migration transition has occurred virtually everywhere in concert with the fertility and mortality transitions discussed in earlier chapters. the theory of demographic change and response (see Chapter 3) suggested that migration is a ready adaptation that humans (or other animals, for that matter) can

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make to the pressure on local resources generated by population increase. how- ever, people do not generally move at random—they tend to go where they believe opportunity exists. because the demographic transition occurred historically in the context of economic development, which involves the centralization of economic functions in cities, migrants have been drawn to cities, and the urban transition is a central part of the migration transition, as will be discussed more fully in Chapter 9. Yet the mere existence of a migration transition does not explain why people move, who moves, and where they go. We need to dig deeper for those explanations.

Why Do People Migrate?

over time, the most frequently heard explanation for migration has been the so-called push-pull theory, which echoes common sense by saying that some people move because they are pushed out of their former location, whereas others move because they have been pulled or attracted to someplace else. this idea was first put forward by ravenstein (1889), who analyzed migration in england using data from the 1881 census of england and Wales. he concluded that pull factors were more important than push factors: “bad or oppressive laws, heavy taxation, an unattractive climate, uncongenial social surroundings, and even compulsion (slave trade, transportation), all have produced and are still producing currents of migration, but none of these currents can compare in volume with that which arises from the desire inherent in most men to ‘better’ themselves in material respects” (p. 286). thus, ravenstein is saying that it is the desire to get ahead more than the desire to escape an unpleasant situation that is most responsible for the voluntary migration of people, at least in late-nineteenth-century england. this theme should sound familiar to you. Is it not the same point made by Davis (1963) in discussing personal motivation for having small families (see Chapter 6)? Davis argued that it is the pursuit of pleasure or the fear of social slippage, not the desire to escape from poverty, that motivates people to limit their fertility.

In everyday language, we could label the factors that might push a person to migrate as stress or strain. however, it is probably rare for people to respond to stress by voluntarily migrating unless they feel there is some reasonably attractive alternative, which we could call a pull factor. the social science model conjures up an image of the rational decision maker computing a cost-benefit analysis of the sit- uation. the potential migrant weighs the push and pull factors and moves if the ben- efits of doing so exceed the costs. for example, if you lost your job, it could benefit you to move if there are no other jobs available where you live now, unemployment compensation and welfare benefits have expired, and there is a possibility of a job at another location. or, to be more sanguine about your employability, the process may start, for example, when you are offered an excellent executive spot in a large firm in another city. Will the added income and prestige exceed the costs of uproot- ing the family and leaving the familiar house, community, and friends behind?

In truth, whether or not you migrate will likely depend on a more compli- cated set of circumstances than this simple example might suggest. the decision to move usually develops over a fairly long period of time, proceeding from a desire

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to move, to the expectation of moving, to the actual fact of migrating (rossi 1955). In rossi’s longitudinal sample of families in the 1950s, half of those interviewed expressed a desire to move, but only about 20 percent of them actually did so. sell and De Jong (1983) produced a set of longitudinal data for the 1970s that rein- forced rossi’s findings—migration rates reflect a whole spectrum of attitudes, rang- ing from people who are “entrenched nonmovers” (who have no desire to move and no expectation of moving and who do not migrate) to “consistent decision-maker movers” (who desire to, expect to, and do migrate). between these extremes are a variety of inconsistencies, however. some people intend to move, but do not; while others move unexpectedly. lu (1999) used data from the american housing survey to conclude that “renters are more likely to translate moving intentions into action than homeowners, young people have a higher probability of translating intentions into action than their older counterparts, but renters and young people are also more likely to engage in unexpected moves” (p. 486).

between the desire to move and the actual decision to do so there also may be inter- vening obstacles (lee 1966). the distance of the expected destination, the cost of getting there, poor health, and other such factors may inhibit migration. these obstacles are hard to predict on any wide scale, however, and so we tend to lump them together with the overall “costs” of moving and concentrate our attention on explaining the desire to move. economic variables dominate most explanations of why people migrate.

Migration associated with career advancement, as happens so often in the mili- tary, academics, and large companies, illustrates the hypothesis that migration deci- sions “arise from a system of strategies adopted by the individual in the course of passing through the life cycle” (stone 1975:97). If it is assumed that people spend much of their life pursuing various goals, then migration may be seen as a possible means—an implementing strategy—whereby goals associated with different stages in the life cycle (such as more education, a better job, a nicer house, a more pleasant environment, and so on) might be attained.

although this is not a startling new hypothesis (it is little more than a modern restatement of ravenstein’s nineteenth-century conclusions), it is nonetheless a very reasonable one. Indeed, lee (1966) has observed that two of the more enduring generalizations that can be made about migration are:

1. Migration is selective (that is, not everyone migrates, only a selected portion of the population).

2. the heightened propensity to migrate at certain stages of the life cycle is important in the selection of migrants.

one particular stage of life disproportionately associated with migration is that of reaching maturity. this is the age at which the demand or desire for obtaining more education tends to peak, along with the process of finding a job or establish- ing a career, and getting married. furthermore, as you know from the discussion about the health and mortality transition, it is also the time of life when people are most healthy and thus capable of moving. the idea that young adults are more likely to migrate than anyone else is about as close as we can get to a biological component to migration.

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agreement is nearly universal on the general ideas about migration I have out- lined above, but the devil, as they say, is in the details. there are so many different aspects to the process of migration that no one has yet produced an all-encompassing theory of migration. figure 7.3 provides an overview of the major aspects of the migration process that require explanation, adapted from a conceptual model devised by De Jong and fawcett (1981) and revised by De Jong (2000). these are analogous in certain respects to the three preconditions for a fertility decline. the migration process can be thought of as having three major stages (not unlike “ready,” “will- ing,” and “able”) including (1) the propensity to migrate in general, (2) the motiva- tion to migrate to a specific location, and (3) the actual decision to migrate.

the migration process begins with individuals and household members in the context of a given culture and society, represented by the community in which they live. the decision about who will migrate and when and to where may often be part of a household strategy for improving the group’s quality of life—consistent with the perspective of demographic change and response. furthermore, the household decision is not made in a vacuum; it is influenced by the sociocultural environment in which the household members live. Individual and household characteristics are important because of the selectivity of migrants—households with no young adults

Individual human capital attributes

Individual risk-taking traits

Benefits (goals) of migration

Migration intentions

Migration behavior

Costs/constraints of migration

Household characteristics and resources

Household/family migration norms

Community characteristics

Community migration networks

Propensity to migrate Motivation to migrate Decision to migrate

Figure 7.3 a Conceptual Model of Migration Decision Making. Source: adapted by the author from gordon De Jong and James fawcett, 1981, “Motivations for Migration: an assessment and a Value-expectancy research Model,” in g. De Jong and r. gardner (eds.), Migration Decision Making (new York: Pergamon Press), figure 2.2; and gordon De Jong, 2000, “expectations, gender, and norms in Migration Decision-Making,” Population Studies 54: 307–319, figure 1.

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265Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

are less likely to contemplate migration. social and cultural norms are important because they provide the context in which people might think consciously of migra- tion as a necessary or desirable thing to do. social norms can play a role in discour- aging migration by emphasizing the importance of place and community or, on the other hand, political and economic instability may cause people to rethink their commitment to an area.

Personal traits are important because some people are greater risk takers than others. In the united states, the “average” person can expect to move 11.7 times in his or her lifetime (u.s. Census bureau 2012b). nonetheless, an average like that hides a lot of variability. some people account for a disproportionate amount of migration by migrating frequently, whereas others rarely or never move. this may be an application of the famous “80-20 rule.” In criminology, it refers to the idea that 80 percent of crime may be committed by 20 percent of the criminals. In the case of migration, it may be that 80 percent of all migration is undertaken by 20 percent of the movers (although be forewarned that I have not yet found a study that puts this idea to the test).

Part of the explanation for the propensity to move may be cultural, of course. long (1991) examined rates of residential mobility (which are highly correlated to migration rates) for a number of developed nations and found that the “over- seas european” nations, including the united states, Canada, australia, and new Zealand—populated by descendents of migrants who supplanted the indigenous population—are the countries with the highest rates of mobility.

Demographic characteristics combine with societal and cultural norms about migration to shape the values people hold with respect to migration—the benefits they hope to gain by migrating. such benefits represent clusters of motivations to move, including the desires for wealth, status, comfort (better living or working conditions), stimulation (including entertainment and recreation), autonomy (per- sonal freedom), affiliation (joining family or friends), and morality (especially reli- gious beliefs). at the same time, personal traits (such as being a risk-taking person) combine with the opportunity structure within the household and within the com- munity to affect the costs and constraints that might keep a person from migrating. all of these personal and social environmental factors combine to affect a person’s expectation of actually achieving the goals they have in mind that might be facili- tated by migration.

the amount of information a person has about the comparative advantages of moving also contributes to the expectation of attaining migration values or goals— that balancing of the likelihood of obtaining the benefits with the perceived costs involved in migrating. If the benefits appear to outweigh the costs, then the person may decide to migrate. given the intention to move, a person may discover that, by making adjustments in his or her current situation, personal or family goals can be achieved without having to move: “such adjustments might include a change in occupation, alterations to the physical structure of the house, a change in daily and friendship patterns, or lifestyle changes” (De Jong and fawcett 1981:56). finally, the intention to move (or to stay) leads ultimately to the act of moving (or stay- ing) itself, although unanticipated events may still affect that decision. Indeed, events may overtake a person in something akin to the diffusion model, so that even

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though there was no original intention to migrate, the person migrates anyway. We have all been swept up in situations and done things that we wouldn’t necessarily have done had we given them more thought.

Who Migrates?

Selectivity by Age In virtually every human society, young adults are far more likely to migrate than people at any other age. If there is such a thing as a “law of migration,” this is it. as an example of this, the data in figure 7.4 show the age pattern of intercounty migrants in the united states between 2011 and 2012, using data from the Current Population survey. as you can see, young adults were much more mobile than people of other ages, and this same pattern has existed in the united states in the past and holds true in other countries as well.

the young adult ages, 20–29, are clearly those at which migration predomi- nates, and this is true for internal and international migration. from there the per- centage of people who migrate drops off steeply, with a few little bumps at the older ages as people are having to move into an assisted living situation. at ages younger than 20, children typically are just following their parents around, so it is not sur- prising that younger children (who have the youngest parents) move more than older children. We can see, then, that age is an important determinant of migration because it is related to life-cycle changes that affect most humans in most societies.

P e rc

e n t in

te rc

o u

n ty

m ig

ra n ts

Age group

1– 4

5– 9

10 –1

4 15

–1 9

20 –2

4 25

–2 9

30 –3

4 35

–3 9

40 –4

4 45

–4 9

50 –5

4 55

–5 9

60 –6

4 65

–6 9

70 –7

4 75

–7 9

80 –8

4 85

10.0

8.0

6.0

4.0

2.0

0.0

Figure 7.4 Young adults are Most likely to be Migrants Source: adapted from data in u.s. Census bureau (2012c); data refer to Intercounty Migrants between 2011 and 2012, based on data from the Current Population survey.

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267Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

Selectivity by Gender older models of household decision making about migra- tion took for granted that it is the male of the household who will be making the migration decision (Cerrutti and Massey 2001). any generalization about gender and migration is likely to be misleading, however. like almost all aspects of migra- tion, this one is complicated by cultural norms about the role of women in society. In the united states, for example, women have virtually the same rates of internal migration as do men, with an identical age pattern, and there are actually more female than male legal immigrants to the united states, reflecting the general rise in gender equity. Women are increasingly apt to migrate on their own, rather than to move only because they are trailing a husband.

In so-called traditional societies, the role of women is assumed to be at home caring for children and other family members, and under such circumstances migra- tion will likely be undertaken more by males than by females. thus, men are more likely to outnumber women among migrants in those areas of the world where the status of women is lowest—africa and asia—whereas women are as likely or even more likely to be migrants in europe, north america, latin america, and the Caribbean (united nations Population Division 2013b).

Migration within the United States

the decision about whether you are going to move cannot be divorced from where you might be going. Data from the american housing surveys and the more recent Current Population surveys suggest that about one in five internal migrants in the united states is involved in a job transfer, implying that the choice of destination may have been in someone else’s hands. an additional one in ten migrants was mov- ing closer to relatives, and obviously their location fixes the migrant’s destination, but the fact that they had to move to be near relatives is itself a function of some- body having previously moved—otherwise the relatives would still all be together.

the migration transition within countries is essentially the story of population growth in rural areas leading to a redundancy of that population, so that people look elsewhere for jobs and a livelihood. With few new agricultural areas left in the world to be taken over by migrants, the city is now almost always where the jobs are, and so the migration transition is, as I have already noted, largely an urban transition. Initially, then, the movement of people within a country is from rural to urban areas. eventually, of course, the size of the rural population stabilizes at the relatively low fraction of the total population that is required to grow and process the food and harvest any other natural resources (coal, oil, gold, diamonds, etc.) required by the nation’s economy. at that point, it may no longer be appropriate to speak of a migration transition, but rather to refer to a migration evolution, which implies that the population is largely urban-based, and people are moving between and within urban places (Pumain 2004).

We know that every country in the world has experienced a migration transition as part of the overall demographic transition, but some countries experience a larger migration evolution than others. the united states, for example, is quite literally a nation on the move, and it always has been. Data from the Current Population

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survey show that 36 million americans (12 percent of the population) aged one and older in 2013 were living in a different house than in the year before. some of these people had undoubtedly moved more than once during that period, so that repre- sents a probable minimum level of mobility. of those movers, 13 million crossed county lines and would thus be considered migrants. an additional 1 million per- sons moved in from outside the united states during the previous year, including u.s. citizens returning from abroad (about one-third of that total) and immigrants.

Population movements are part and parcel of american life, and so the coun- try continues to evolve demographically as a consequence of emerging patterns of migration in and between urban areas. there were several decades when migration was in the direction of the industrializing centers in the northeastern and north central states and to the rich farmland and industry in the Midwest. the stron- gest of these movements was the one westward. at first this meant that the moun- tain valley areas west of the atlantic seacoast were migration destinations; then the plains states were settled; and after the end of World War II, the Pacific Coast states became popular destinations.

from World War I through the 1960s, white and black migrants had also been heading out of the southern states and into the northeastern and north central states, a phenomenon that has been called the Great Migration (tolnay et al. 2005; eichenlaub et al. 2010). this generally represented rural-to-urban migration out of the economi- cally depressed south into the industrialized cities of the north. In the 1970s, this pattern of net out-migration from the south reversed itself and the northeastern and north central states found themselves increasingly to be migration origins rather than destinations, as migrants headed not only west, but also back to the south, the “new great Migration,” as frey (2004) has called it. this pattern has continued into the twenty-first century, as americans have moved from the “rust belt” or “snow belt” states into the “sun belt” states, especially in the south and southeast.

the pattern was not quite that simple, however. Indeed, frey (2009) called the first decade of the twenty-first century a “rollercoaster decade” for migration within the united states. In 2005, hurricane Katrina led to a substantial forced out- migration from the new orleans area. at the same time, the housing bubble was encouraging migration to more inland areas of the West and southeast, in particu- lar, where new homes were being built that were affordable largely because of the now infamous sub-prime lending practices of major banks. the ensuing bursting of that housing bubble and the great recession that followed in its wake rather dra- matically slowed migration throughout the country (as well as into the country, as I discuss later). but even as migration slowed, texas and north Carolina, where hous- ing is relatively less expensive, were taking in more people than other states, while new York and California (with high housing costs) were the country’s biggest losers.

Migration between Countries

Immigration may be the sincerest form of flattery, but few countries encourage it. Migration between countries is fraught with the potential for conflict among peo- ple of different cultural backgrounds and, as technology has eased the constraints

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269Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

of transportation and communication, migration has become easier than ever. this has brought the issues surrounding international migration into sharper focus. this is certainly nowhere more true than in the united states, where international immigration has been a way of life since the country’s founding and toward which a substantial fraction of the annual volume of the world’s international migrants still heads.

referring back to figure 7.3, we can make the general statement that inter- nal migration is more strongly influenced by individual characteristics of people; whereas international migrants are more apt to be influenced by the social and political climate and by the opportunity structure (especially barriers to migration, or lack thereof, that influence the costs and constraints of migration). the kinds of migration goals that internal migrants have are also likely to differ somewhat from those of international migrants. Massey and his associates (Massey et al. 1993; Massey and espinosa 1997; Massey et al. 2002; Massey 2008) have reviewed and evaluated various theories that try to explain contemporary patterns of interna- tional migration, as I discuss below.

although the migration transition originally referred to the mobility of peo- ple within a nation, it has expanded its scope to become an international global phenomenon of movement between countries as well. of the factors laid out in figure 7.3, the most important elements in explaining migration in the modern world appear to be: (1) the creation of new opportunity structures for migra- tion, which raise the benefit of migrating (pull factors) partly by undermining existing local relationships between people and resources (push factors); while (2) cheaper and quicker transportation and communication can (a) increase the information that people have about a potential new location (lowering the risks associated with migration by closing the gap between the anticipated benefits and the perceived likelihood of attaining those goals) and (b) make it easier to migrate and to return home if things do not work out.

Step migration and chain migration, two migration strategies that have stood out over time, help determine where migrants go. step migration is a pro- cess whereby migrants attempt to reduce the risk of their decision by sort of inching away from home. the rural resident may go to a nearby city, and from there to a larger city, and perhaps eventually to a huge megalopolis. Chain migration reduces risk because it involves migrants in an established flow from a common origin to a predetermined destination where earlier migrants have already scoped out the situation and laid the groundwork for the new arrivals.

Chain migration also has a built-in multiplier effect that is the underlying source of the dramatic way in which immigration is changing the face of north america and europe. the “pioneer” immigrant arrives in the new country and becomes established and then sends for other family members—family reunifica- tion. once the family is in place, the second generation is born and one immigrant has created a group (bin Yu 2008). this is a pattern that especially characterizes migration from Mexico and the Philippines to the united states, and it reminds us that the choice of where to move is a large component of why people decide to migrate internationally.

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Why Do People Migrate Internationally?

the major theories that exist to help explain various aspects of international migra- tion, as originally outlined by Massey and his associates (1993, 1994), include first those that focus on the initiation of migration patterns: (1) neoclassical economics; (2) the new household economics of migration; (3) dual labor market theory; and (4) world systems theory. then there are three perspectives that help to explain the perpetuation of migration, once started: (1) network theory; (2) institutional theory; and (3) cumulative causation. all of these perspectives are aimed at explaining the flow of migrants between countries, although of course they may also be applicable in some instances to internal migration, especially in developing nations.

The Neoclassical Economics Approach by applying the classic supply-and- demand paradigm to migration, this theory argues that migration is a process of labor adjustment caused by geographic differences in the supply of and demand for labor. Countries with a growing economy and a scarce labor force have higher wages than a region with a less developed economy and a larger labor force. the differential in wages causes people to move from the lower-wage to the higher- wage region. this continues until the gap in wages is reduced merely to the costs of migration (both monetary and psychosocial). at the individual level, migration is viewed as an investment in human capital (investments in individuals that can improve their economic productivity and thus their overall standard of living).

this theory suggests that people choose to migrate to places where the great- est opportunities exist. this may not be where the average wages are currently the highest, but rather where the individual migrant believes that, in the long run, his or her own skills will earn the greatest income. these skills include educa- tion, experience, training, and language capabilities. this approach has been used to explain internal as well as international migration. It is also the principle that underlies ravenstein’s conceptualization of push factors (especially low wages in the region of origin) and pull factors (especially high wages in the destination region).

The New Household Economics of Migration the neoclassical approach assumes that the individual is the appropriate unit of analysis, but the new household eco- nomics of migration approach argues that decisions about migration are often made in the context of what is best for an entire family or household. this approach accepts the idea that people act collectively not only to maximize their expected income, but also to minimize risk. thus migration is not just a way to get rid of people; it is also a way to diversify the family’s sources of income. Migrating mem- bers of the household have their journey subsidized and then remit portions of their earnings back home. this cushions households against the risk inherent in societ- ies with weak institutions. If there is no unemployment insurance, no welfare, no bank from which to borrow money or even in which to invest money safely, then the remittances from migrant family members can be cornerstones of a household’s economic well-being. this has become a huge part of the international migration story and I will return to it at the end of the chapter.

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271Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

Dual Labor Market Theory this theory offers a reason for the creation of opportu- nities for migration. It suggests that in developed regions of the world there are essen- tially two kinds of job markets: the primary sector, which employs well-educated people, pays them well, and offers them security and benefits; and the secondary labor market, characterized by low wages, unstable working conditions, and lack of reasonable prospects for advancement. It is easy enough to recruit people into the primary sector, but the secondary sector is not so attractive. historically, women, teenagers, and racial and ethnic minorities in the richer countries were recruited into these jobs, but in the past few decades women and racial and ethnic minority groups have succeeded in moving increasingly into the primary sector, at the same time that the low birth rate has diminished the supply of teenagers available to work. Yet the lower echelon of jobs still needs to be filled, and so immigrants from developing countries are recruited—either actively (as in the case of agricultural workers) or passively (the diffusion of information that such jobs are available).

World Systems Theory this theory offers a different perspective on the emerging opportunity structure for migration in the contemporary world. the argument is that, since the sixteenth century (and as part of the Industrial revolution in europe), the world market has been developing and expanding into a set of core nations (those with capital and other forms of material wealth) and a set of periph- eral countries (in essence, the rest of the world) that have become dependent on the core, as the core countries have entered the peripheral countries in search of land, raw materials, labor, and new consumer markets.

according to world systems theory, migration is a natural outgrowth of dis- ruptions and dislocations that inevitably occur in the process of capitalist develop- ment. as capitalism has expanded outward from its core in western europe, north america, oceania, and Japan, ever-larger portions of the globe and growing shares of the human population have been incorporated into the world market economy. as land, raw material, and labor within peripheral regions come under the influence and control of markets, migration flows are inevitably generated. Migration flows do not tend to be random, however. In particular, peripheral countries are most likely to send migrants (including refugees and asylees) to those core nations with which they have had the greatest contact, whether economic, political, or military.

Network Theory once migration has begun, it may well take on a life of its own, quite separate from the forces that got it going in the first place, in a process that is part of the chain migration concept that I mentioned above. network theory argues that migrants establish interpersonal ties that “connect migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through ties of kinship, friendship, and shared community origin. they increase the likelihood of international move- ment because they lower the costs and risks of movement and increase the expected net returns to migration” (Massey et al. 1993:449). once started, migration sus- tains itself through the process of diffusion until everyone who wishes to migrate can do so. In developing countries, such migration eventually may become a rite of passage into adulthood for community members, having little to do with economic supply and demand.

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Institutional Theory once started, migration also may be perpetuated by institu- tions that develop precisely to facilitate (and profit from) the continued flow of immigrants (agunias 2009). these organizations may provide a range of services, from humanitarian protection of exploited persons to more illicit operations such as smuggling people across borders and providing counterfeit documents, and might include more benign services such as arranging for lodging or credit in the receiving country. these organizations help perpetuate migration in the face of government attempts to limit the flow of migrants.

Cumulative Causation this perspective recognizes that each act of migration changes the likelihood of subsequent decisions about migration because migration has an impact on the social environments in both the sending and receiving regions. the sending back of remittances increases the income levels of migrants’ families relative to others in the community of origin, and in this way may contribute to an increase in the motivation of other households to send migrants. Migrants them- selves may become part of a culture of migration and be more likely to move again, increasing the overall volume of migration. In the receiving country, the entry of immigrants into certain occupational sectors may label them as “immigrant” jobs, which reinforces the demand for immigrants to fill those jobs continually.

Data from Massey’s Mexican Migration Project suggest that migration streams are much easier to start than to stop, because migration cumulatively begets more migration as community members in and from the sending area derive a real benefit (human capital) from migration and as expanded networks (social capital) make it increasingly easier to migrate (Massey and espinosa 1997). In this context, human capital refers to the benefits derived by the migrants who have been to the united states, whereas social capital refers to the links with friends and relatives already abroad.

Which Theories Are Best? Massey and his associates (1994) attempted to evalu- ate the adequacy of each of the just-discussed theories in explaining contemporary patterns of international migration. their conclusion was that each of the theories is supported in some way or another by the available evidence and, in particular, none of the theories is specifically refuted. Most of the research on migration since the mid-1990s has specifically tested one or another of these theories, with the same conclusion that each of them helps explain an important part of this complex phe- nomenon. no single theory seems able to capture all of its nuances, but all of the previous perspectives add something to our understanding of migration. recogniz- ing now that the reasons for migrating are numerous and complex, we also must bear in mind that when people migrate, the impact is felt deeply at both individual and societal levels.

Who Migrates Internationally?

You can appreciate from the theories of international migration that it is domi- nated by a combination of economic and familial incentives. People migrate for

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273Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

job-related reasons and then, very often, their family members follow them in a pat- tern of chain migration that involves family reunification. the flow of labor ought to be explained by a simple supply-and-demand model, with people moving from places where there aren’t enough jobs to places where there are jobs. and, to a certain extent, that model does shape the “big picture” in the world right now. Improved communication and transportation technology have greatly facilitated a time-honored way of solving short-term labor shortages—the importation of work- ers from elsewhere. Population growth in less developed nations has put incredible pressure on their resources, while the declining rate of population growth in the more developed nations has, in many instances, heightened the demand for lower- cost workers. this is the “demographic fit” that I have mentioned before.

labor shortages in northern and western europe, in the united states and Canada, and in Japan and australia—the more developed societies with aging populations—have created opportunities for workers from africa, western and southern asia, latin america and, within europe, from eastern europe. at the same time, the regional ebb and flow of economies stimulates movements of large numbers of people among the less developed nations themselves.

the problem for the receiving societies is that it is not a simple process to import labor. If you call the plumber in your neighborhood to come work on your house, he or she will come over and do the work, get paid, and go back home. but if you call a plumber from another country, they are apt to bring not just themselves, but also family members, and they are likely to have children, and the arrival of these people will create both a new supply of labor and a rising demand for goods and services, both public and private. this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it raises a bigger and broader set of issues with which not just you, but the entire community, must deal.

guest labor programs helped to spark the migration from Mexico to the united states, as I discuss in the essay accompanying this chapter. they also flourished in post–World War II europe, and they have been very popular in the Middle east and north africa (Castles et al. 2013). the arab oil-producing nations became cen- ters of rapid immigration in the late 1970s and early 1980s as they benefited eco- nomically from the rise in oil prices. libya and saudi arabia, in particular, became attractive destinations for egyptian and Jordanian migrants, along with substantial numbers of Indians and Pakistanis. the idea behind guest labor programs has been that people would come to the host country, work under contract for a certain period of time, and then go back to their country of origin. however, like the pro- verbial brother-in-law sleeping on your living room couch, they do not necessarily leave willingly when their time is up.

a common way to deal with guest laborers who become permanent residents is a variation on the segmented assimilation model, which I will discuss below. Many countries (including virtually all of the oil-producing gulf states, for example) deny citizenship to those people who were not born in the country, and then deny it to their children because the children were not born to citizens. thus, the workers and their offspring may have the legal right to live and work in their adopted country, but they will never be fully participating citizens. this also means that it is easier to get rid of them if they are not wanted, as saudi arabia did in 2013 when it expelled hundreds of thousands of workers.

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In several european countries immigrants from africa and asia have evolved into ethnic minority groups who then suffer discrimination as a result of that labeling. this kind of discrimination probably has the unintended consequence of encouraging the immigrants and their children to maintain close ties with relatives in the country of origin, in which case they may be less likely to become fully inte- grated and assimilated into the country in which they are living.

Migration Origins and Destinations

Global Patterns of Migration

there are currently an estimated 231 million people who are living in a country different from where they were born (united nations Population Division 2013b)— the global stock of migrants. that number, though large, is only 3 percent of the world’s total population, but as I have noted, migrants have social, economic, polit- ical, and demographic impacts that are far larger than these numbers suggest.

how did we get to this point? the massive waves of international migration that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily repre- sented the voluntary movement of people out of europe into the “new” worlds of north and south america and oceania. restrictive immigration laws throughout the world (not just in the united states) and the worldwide economic depression between World Wars I and II severely limited international migration in the 1920s and 1930s. however, World War II unleashed a new cycle of european and asian migration—this time a forced push of people out of war-torn countries as boundar- ies were realigned and ethnic groups were transferred between countries. shortly after the end of the war, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan led to the transfer of more than 15 million people—Muslims into east and West Pakistan and hindus into India. Meanwhile, in the Middle east, the par- titioning of Palestine to create the new state of Israel produced 700,000 Palestinian out-migrants and an influx of a large proportion of the north african and Middle eastern Jewish population into that area. substantial migration into Israel from europe, the soviet union, and other areas continued well into the 1960s. In the 1980s, the flow of migrants into Israel began to dry up, replaced by a small but steady stream of out-migrants, but this trend was quickly turned around in the early 1990s following the soviet union’s decision to allow soviet Jews to emigrate. those choosing to leave headed primarily for Israel and the united states.

another unexpected, albeit related, political event in eastern europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the collapse of the berlin Wall and the amazingly rapid reunification of germany. stimulated by gorbachev’s policy of openness in the soviet union (and by the former soviet union’s economic inability to continue sub- sidizing other communist nations), the reunification of germany turned the migra- tion spigot back on. between 1950 and 1988, more than 3 million east germans had fled to the West, but most of those had done so before the berlin Wall went up in 1961. then, in 1989, east germany relaxed its visa policies, allowing east germans to visit West germany, and hungary relaxed the patrol of its border with

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275Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

austria, allowing vacationing east germans to escape to the West. Within weeks, migration from east to west was transformed from a trickle into a flash flood.

this east-west migration in europe is in many respects a continuation of a pat- tern that has evolved over centuries. between 1850 and 1913 (the start of World War I), more than 40 million europeans moved from east to west to populate north america (hatton and Williamson 1994), but as that was occurring Polish, slavic, and ukrainian workers were also migrating west to germany and france. the Cold War, which cut off much of that flow, was simply a temporary aberration in a long- term trend. the collapse of the soviet union also led to the formation and then expansion of the european union, allowing europeans to travel and work freely in other european union countries. this migrant flow has, as you might expect, largely been an east to west movement. russia itself has a large immigrant popula- tion, but most of these are people in Central asian countries that were previously part of the soviet union (Migration Policy Centre 2013). nonetheless, this main- tains the east to west pattern of migration.

to this trend has been added a mixture of other patterns: (1) south-north migration (particularly of migrant laborers from developing countries of the south to developed countries of the north); (2) a flow of migrant laborers from some of the poorer developing countries to some of the “emerging” economies, especially in south and southeast asia; (3) a flow of workers into the Persian gulf region from the non–oil-producing to the oil-producing nations; and (4) a flow of refugees within africa and western asia (especially syria). We are surely in what Castles, de haas, and Miller (2013) call “the age of migration.” sassen (2001) has argued that the globalization of migration is, in part at least, a consequence of economic globalization—economic connections lead inevitably to flows of people. Income dif- ferences between regions attract migrants from lower- to higher-income places, and globalization has helped both to increase the income differences and increase the chance that people will migrate in hopes of improving their economic situation.

figure 7.5 shows united nations estimates of the annual net migration (includ- ing refugees) for countries of the world that were either receiving or sending an estimated 100,000 migrants per year during the 2010 to 2015 period, as estimated by the united nations Population Division. You can see that the united states is the top receiving country (genuinely a nation of immigrants). for a long time Mexico was the top sending nation in the world, and it is still high on the list, but it has been overtaken by five other countries. syria is a special case, because in the 2005– 2010 period it was a net receiver of migrants as it accepted refugees from the war in Iraq. however, in 2011 protests turned violent in that country and a lengthy civil war ensued which, as of this writing, has produced 3.6 million refugees, one million of whom have arrived in lebanon, thus putting that country in the top group of receiving nations.

low fertility in europe is fueling immigration especially to the united Kingdom, Italy, france, spain, and germany. these immigrants come from developing coun- tries, but also from the less economically developed regions of central and eastern europe—part of the western drift of the human population. Canada and australia also have low birth rates and good economies that attract immigrants, especially from asia. Indeed, you can see in figure 7.5 that asia accounts for six of the top

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276 Part Two Population Processes

sending countries. russia is tied with Canada for second in terms of receiving migrants, although as noted above it appears that most of these are people who were part of the former soviet union and may be ethnic russians.

the oil-producing gulf states of the united arab emirates and qatar have huge guest worker programs, receiving migrants from other arab countries, as well as from asia. India and China, as the world’s two most populous nations—but not the richest ones—also contribute a large number of emigrants each year, in what amounts to the Chinese and Indian Diasporas. bangladesh and Pakistan are also major contributors to the world’s migrant stream. both countries have large num- bers of young people that are not readily absorbed into their respective nation’s economy.

the global picture in terms of the stock of immigrants, expressed as the percentage of the population that is foreign-born, is shown in figure 7.1 at the beginning of the chapter. the united states, Canada, and australia have always had among the highest fractions of foreign-born in the world, but european nations are now included. the gulf states have many guest workers, as I have mentioned. the other, less wealthy countries with high percentages of foreign- born are either sharing labor with neighbors or are sheltering refugees from their neighbors.

United States of America

Canada Russia

South Sudan

Oman Lebanon

United Kingdom Italy

Spain Germany

United Arab Emirates Qatar

Indonesia Philippines

Australia France

Sudan

China Mexico

Bangladesh Pakistan

India Syria

Annual Net Migrants 2010–2015 (thousands)

2720

2140 2160

2240 2300

2327 2408

2459

2140

180 180

173 150 130 120

220

1,000 220

206 200

110 103 100

Figure 7.5 the united states takes in More Immigrants (net) than any other Country, and India sends More emigrants than any other Country (syria is a special Case) Source: adapted from data in united nations Population Division (2013a); refugee data for lebanon and syria were adjusted by the author.

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277Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

to date, the success of attempts to limit immigration has been highly variable at best, consistent with what Massey (1996) has called his “perverse laws of inter- national migration”:

1. Immigration is a lot easier to start than it is to stop.

2. actions taken to restrict immigration often have the opposite effect.

3. the fundamental causes of immigration may be outside the control of policy makers.

4. Immigrants understand immigration better than do politicians and academicians.

5. because they understand immigration better than policy makers, immi- grants are often able to circumvent policies aimed at stopping them.

In the final analysis, most attempts to limit immigration are motivated less by a desire to limit population growth in general, and more by a desire to limit the entry of certain kinds of people into the country. no matter what country we are talking about, xenophobia—the fear of strangers, is at work. the greater the social and cultural differences between receiving and sending societies, the more likely it is that attempts will be made to slow down the pace of immigration. this is certainly what has happened over time in the united states.

Migration into the United States

Prior to World War I, there were few restrictions on migration into the united states and Canada, so the number of immigrants was determined more by the desire of people to move than anything else. Particularly important as a stimulus to migra- tion, of course, was the drop in the death rate in europe during the nineteenth century, which launched a long period of population growth, with its attendant pressure on europe’s economic resources. economic opportunities in america looked very attractive to young europeans who were competing with increasing numbers of other young people for jobs. Voluntary migration from europe to the temperate zones of the world—especially the united states—represents one of the most significant movements of people across international boundaries in history. the social, cultural, economic, and demographic impacts of this migration have been truly enormous.

Immigration to the united states in most of the nineteenth century was domi- nated by people arriving from northern and western europe (beginning with england, Ireland, scotland, and sweden, then stretching to the south and east to draw immigrants from germany, especially), as seen in table 7.1. there was a lull during the american Civil War, but after the war the pace of immigration resumed. the opening up of new land in the united states in the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with a variety of political and economic problems in europe, and that helped to generate a great deal of labor migration to the united states, par- ticularly after the end of the Civil War. the united states responded in the spring

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279Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

of 1882 with its first immigration restrictions. the first of these was the Chinese exclusion act of 1882. the discovery of gold in California had prompted a demand for labor—for railroad building and farming—that had been met in part by the migration of indentured Chinese laborers. however, in 1869, after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, american workers moved west more readily and the Chinese showed up in the east on several occasions as strikebreakers. resent- ment against the Chinese built to the point that in 1882 Congress was willing to break a recently signed treaty with China and suspend Chinese immigration for 10 years (stephenson 1964). but Congress was not through for the year. the 1882 Immigration act levied a head tax of 50 cents on each immigrant and blocked the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become public charges (u.s. Immigration and naturalization service 1991).

the Chinese exclusion act was challenged unsuccessfully in the courts and, over time, restrictions on the Chinese, even those residing in the united states, were tightened (indeed, the Chinese exclusion acts passed in 1882 were not repealed until 1943). the exclusion of the Chinese led to an increase in Japanese immigra- tion in the 1880s and 1890s, but by the turn of the century hostility was building against them, too (the Japanese exclusion act was passed in 1924), and against several other immigrant groups.

by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the immigrants from north- ern and western europe were being augmented by people from southern and east- ern europe (spain and Italy, then stretching farther east to Poland and russia). In 1890, 86 percent of all foreign-born persons in the united states were of european origin, but only 2 percent were from southern europe—almost exclusively Italy. only 30 years later, in 1920, it was still true that 86 percent of the foreign-born were europeans, but 14 percent were southern europeans—a sevenfold increase.

the immigrant processing center in new York City was moved to ellis Island in 1892 to help screen people entering the united states from foreign countries, since the changing mix of ethnicity had led to public demands for greater control over who could enter the country. In 1891, Congress legislated that aliens were not to be allowed into the country if they suffered from “a loathsome or dangerous conta- gious disease” (auerbach 1961:5) or if they were criminals. tuberculosis was added to the unacceptable list in 1907, and then in 1917, a highly controversial provision was passed that established a literacy requirement, thus excluding aliens over age 16 who were unable to read.

Despite the new set of requirements, immigration to the united states (and Canada) reached a peak in the first decade of the twentieth century, when 1.6 million entered Canada and nearly 9 million entered the united states, account- ing for more than one in ten of all americans at that time: “they came thinking the streets were paved with gold, but found that the streets weren’t paved at all and that they were expected to do the paving” (leroux 1984).

this represents one of the most massive population shifts in history, and all of the theories of international migration discussed earlier have something to offer by way of explanation. Compared to the united states, european wages were low and unemployment rates high. Capital markets were beginning to have a disruptive effect in some of the less developed areas of southern and eastern europe. eastern

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280 Part Two Population Processes

europe was also undergoing tremendous social and political instability, and the russian pogrom against Jews caused many people to flee the region.

nor was all this emigration from europe aimed at north america. Millions of Italians and spaniards, as well as austrians, germans, and other europeans, settled throughout latin america during this period. Most notable among the destina- tions were brazil and argentina (sanchez-albornoz 1988). the migration peaked at about the time of World War I, and europe has never since experienced emigra- tion of this magnitude, partly because wages rose in europe, helping to keep people there (and encouraging some return migration from the americas), compounded by the great Depression of the 1930s (which also encouraged return migration to one’s “roots”).

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the percentage of the population enumerated in the u.s. Census as foreign–born hovered near 14 percent, as seen in table 7.2. never since has it reached that level, although it was getting close (13 percent) by 2010. I mention this as a reminder that the rapid increase in the for- eign-born population at the end of the twentieth century in the united states and Canada, which I will discuss below, is something that both countries have seen before.

recognition of the problems created by still relatively free migration led to a new era of restrictions right after World War I, fueled by the belief that “millions of war-torn europeans were about to descend on the united states—a veritable flood which would completely subvert the traditional american way of life” (Divine 1957:6). the united states and Canada both passed restrictive legislation in step with the eugenics movement that had gained popularity throughout europe and north america in the 1920s (boyd 1976). as it was applied to migration, the ideol- ogy was ethnic purity, and the sentiment of the time about migrants is perhaps best expressed as: not too tired, not too poor, and not too many.

In 1921, Congress passed the first act in american history to put a numeric limit on immigrants. the quota law of 1921 “limited the number of aliens of any nationality to three percent of foreign-born persons of that nationality who lived in the u.s. in 1910” (auerbach 1961:9). for example, in 1910, 11,498 people in the united states had been born in bulgaria (u.s. Census bureau 1975), so 3 percent of that number, or 345, would be permitted to enter each year from bulgaria. under the law, about 350,000 people could enter the united states each year as quota immigrants, although close relatives of american citizens and people in certain pro- fessions (for example, artists, nurses, professors, and domestic servants) were not affected by the quotas. the law of 1921 remained in effect only until 1924, when it was replaced by the Immigration quota act.

the 1924 law was even more restrictive than that of 1921, because public debate over immigration had unfortunately led to a popularization of racist theories claiming that “nordics [people from northwestern europe] were genetically supe- rior to others” (Divine 1957:14). to avoid the charge that the immigration law was deliberately discriminatory, though, a new quota system—the national origins quota—was adopted in 1929. this was a complex scheme in which a special quota board took the percentage of each nationality group in the united states in 1790 (the first u.s. Census) and then traced “the additions to that number of subsequent immigration” (Divine 1957:28). the task was not an easy one, since by and large

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281Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

the necessary data did not exist, so a lot of arbitrary assumptions and questionable estimates were made in the process.

once the national origins restriction had been established, the actual number of immigrants allowed from each country each year was calculated as a propor- tion of 150,000, which was established as the maximum number of all immigrants. thus if 60 percent of the population was of english origin, then 60 percent of the 150,000 immigrants, or 90,000, could be from england. the number turned out to be slightly more than 150,000, because every country was allowed a minimum of 100 visas. furthermore, close relatives of american citizens continued to be exempt from the quotas, under the philosophy of family unification.

Congress, of course, retained the ability to override those quotas if the need arose, as it did during and after World War II, when refugees from europe were accommodated. In 1952, in the middle of the anti-communist McCarthy era, another attempt was made in the united states to control immigration by increasing the “compatibility” of migrants with established u.s. society. the McCarran- Walter act (the Immigration and naturalization act of 1952) retained the system of national origin quotas while adding to it a system of preferences based largely on occupation (Keely 1971). the McCarran-Walter act permitted up to 50 percent of the visas from each country to be taken by highly skilled persons whose services were urgently needed. relatives of american citizens were ranked next, followed by people with no salable skills and no relatives who were citizens of the united states. thus, the freedom of migration into the united states was severely restricted, even from those countries with an advantage according to the national origins quota system.

Canada passed similar legislation in the same year, just as it had previously enacted a national origins quota system (boyd 1976). Canada had at least two reasons for echoing the immigration policies of the united states. In the first place, it shares much of the sociocultural heritage of the united states, and, second, of course, it shares a border with the united states. this cultural similarity and close proximity would have left Canada inundated with migrants excluded from the united states had Canada not passed its own restrictive laws.

these restrictive laws, coupled with the great Depression and then World War II, effectively slowed migration to the united states and Canada to a trickle during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, there was a brief post–World War II upsurge in migration from northern and western europe, but the 1950s represented a transition time to a new set of “origins and destinies” for immigrants to north america (rumbaut 1994).

In the 1960s, the ethnically discriminatory aspects of north america’s immi- gration policy ended, but its restrictive aspects were maintained. the Immigration act of 1965 ended the nearly half century of national origins as the principal deter- minant of who could enter this country from non–Western hemisphere nations. related changes had occurred in Canada ahead of this, in 1962. although the crite- rion of national origins is gone, restrictions on the numbers of immigrants remain, including a limit on immigrants from Western hemisphere as well as non–Western hemisphere nations. a system of preference was retained, but modified to give first crack at immigration to relatives of american citizens. Parents of u.s. citizens

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282 Part Two Population Processes

could migrate regardless of the quota. In addition, a certification by the u.s. labor Department is now required for occupational preference applicants to establish that their skills are required in the united states.

In 1976, the immigration law was amended so that parents of u.s. citizens had highest priority only if their child was at least 21 years old. the intent of that change was to eliminate what many people believed to be a fairly frequent ploy of a preg- nant woman entering the country illegally, bearing her child in the united states (the child then being a u.s. citizen), and then applying for citizenship on the basis of being a parent of a u.s. citizen. although there is little evidence to suggest that pregnant women now routinely cross the border illegally to have babies, there are many undocumented immigrant women in the united states who get pregnant and have a baby. these children are sometimes referred to as “anchor babies” because they provide an “anchor” for the family in the united states.

since the change in immigration legislation in the 1960s, european immigrants to the united states have been replaced almost totally by those from latin america (especially Mexico, but also Dominican republic, Cuba, el salvador, Colombia, and haiti), asia (especially China, India, and the Philippines, as well as Vietnam and south Korea), and increasingly from africa, as well (see table 7.1). the annual number of legal permanent immigrants peaked in 2006, at 1.2 million, not coin- cidentally at the same time that the housing bubble was peaking. With the deep recession that followed the burst in that bubble, the annual number of immigrants dropped back to about 1 million per year.

although only one person is recorded as having migrated from Mexico to the united states in 1820, the number of Mexican and other latin american immi- grants has increased so tremendously since then that census data now show that immigrants from Mexico account for nearly one in three of all foreigners now living the united states. between 1820 and 2012, more than 8 million Mexicans migrated legally into the united states, with more than half of them arriving just since 1990 (u.s. Department of homeland security 2014). a nearly equal number of undocu- mented immigrants have entered the country, probably permanently, and almost all of them have arrived since 1980 (hoefer et al. 2012). Migration between Mexico and the united states is the largest sustained flow of migrant workers in the con- temporary world, although it also took a hit with the global recession starting in 2007 and is likely to diminish in the future, given Mexico’s declining birth rate.

the second most sustained flow of immigrants to the united states since the liberalization of immigration in 1965 has come from the Philippines. In 1898, the united states gained control of the Philippines from spain as a result of the spanish- american War. from that date until 1936, immigrants from the Philippines were routinely excluded from the united states, as the Chinese and Japanese had been (tyner 2009). since filipinos were technically u.s. nationals, they were not subject to the usual immigration laws, but their entry was generally restricted, and by 1930 only 45,000 filipinos lived in the united states, almost all of them male. the major- ity of these men came without families, and either returned home or stayed and married non-filipino women.

the united states granted the Philippines its independence in 1936 and that immediately brought filipinos under federal immigration law, which effectively

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283Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

excluded them altogether from entering the country until after the end of World War II. at the time, there was an influx of filipino veterans who had served in the u.s. military during the war. however, the biggest boon to filipino immigration was the change in the law in the 1960s that gave highest immigration preference to family members. americans of filipino origin began to sponsor the immigration of their relatives (especially parents and siblings). thus, since 1980, about three- fourths of the 40,000 to 60,000 immigrants each year from the Philippines have been relatives of u.s. citizens (u.s. Department of homeland security 2014).

Migration out of the United States

the u.s. government does not keep track of people who emigrate from the country, but that doesn’t mean that people are not leaving. using data from the Current Pop- ulation surveys and other sources, Woodrow-lafield (1996) estimated that there were approximately 220,000 emigrants from the united states each year as of the mid-1990s, of whom a majority were foreign-born persons (probably returning to their country of origin). the rest were native-born u.s. citizens leaving the country for a variety of personal reasons (many of whom later return). since most emigrants are people who had immigrated at an earlier time, you can see that the overall level of emigration is heavily dependent on the size of the foreign-born population, which has been steadily increasing, as shown in table 7.1.

the u.s. Census bureau uses a residual method to calculate emigration from the united states, based on census and survey questions about when people arrived in the country, and assuming that most emigrants are, in fact, foreign-born. their middle series projection assumes that the number of foreign-born emigrants will increase from 281,000 in 2011 to 753,000 in 2060. they also assume that 45,000 native-born u.s. citizens will leave the country each year (u.s. Census bureau 2012a). using a different methodology, Van hook and her associates (2006) matched persons in households that respond to the Current Population survey, esti- mating that 2.9 percent of foreign-born persons are leaving the united states and that the rate is more than twice as high (4.3 percent) for people who arrived within the prior 10 years than for those who have been in the united states for 10 years or longer (2.0 percent).

the evidence suggests that there are two main patterns of return migration, accounting for most emigration from the united states. the first pattern is for some people who migrate into the country to quickly become discouraged or dis- enchanted, or perhaps to reach a short-term goal, and then to return home, having stayed in the united states for only a short while. the other pattern is for people to migrate to the united states when young, and then retire back to their country of origin. We know, for example, that each month the social security administra- tion sends more than a half million checks to foreign addresses (u.s. social security administration 2010), and it is likely that most of these are being sent to people who migrated to the united states to work, and then when they reached retirement age went back from whence they came—where their retirement check in dollars is likely to go farther than in the united states.

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IS MIGRATION A CRIME? ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Migration should be the most easily controlled of the three population processes, at least in theory. You cannot legislate against death (except for laws prohibiting homicide or suicide), and few countries outside China have dared try to legislate directly against babies. But you can set up legal and even physical barriers to migration—keeping people in (as in the former Soviet Union) or out (as prac- ticed by most countries in the world). In reality, of course, controlling migration can be very difficult if people are highly motivated to move. Undocu- mented migration from Mexico to the United States is a leading example, although illegal or undocu- mented immigration is not a problem peculiar to the United States.

All over the globe, people without papers are moving in the millions. Is that a crime? Actually, that question could get us into a huge philosophi- cal discussion, since different cultures define crime in different ways, but in general if a government passes a law and you violate that law, you have committed a crime. If a government says that only people with official permission may enter a country and reside permanently with full legal rights, and you enter that country without permission, then you have violated the law and, in that sense, you may have committed a crime. On the other hand, we could as easily call this a semantic problem—it’s a matter of words. If you show up without docu- ments, then you are simply undocumented (and that term is increasingly preferred to the word “ille- gal”), not a criminal. After all, the usual penalty for being caught as an undocumented immigrant is to be returned to your country of origin, rather than serving time in jail (though, of course, you might temporarily be detained in a jail of some sort).

In fact, being undocumented (in legal terms, having a “lack of legal status”) in the United States is a civil, not a criminal offense, which entails a completely different (and less severe) set of conse- quences (Seghetti et al. 2005). On the other hand, the penalty for being an illegal immigrant if you are not caught is that you may be exploited because unscrupulous employers know they can turn you in to authorities for deportation if you dare to com- plain. This can lead to people being forced to work in sweatshops, under near-slavery conditions, with

little dignity and few legal rights (Appleyard and Taran 2000).

The reason for the rise in undocumented immi- gration throughout the world is straightforward— there are more people who want to get into the more developed countries than the governments of more developed countries are willing to let in; so people sneak in. Some people want to get a better job; some want to join family members who are already there (with or without documents); some are fleeing for their lives from an awful situ- ation and are seeking asylum. In the United States this amounted to an estimated 11.7 million undocu- mented immigrants (the U.S. government uses “undocumented,” “unauthorized,” and “illegal” to describe this population) as of 2012, although the recession has pushed that number down from its peak of 11.8 million in 2007 (Hoefer et al. 2012).

Migration from Mexico to the United States began in earnest early in the twentieth century as a reaction to the Mexican Revolution, which started in 1910 and ended in the creation of the modern United Mexican States (the official name of the Republic of Mexico). The migration northward from Mexico began to increase in the 1920s and 1930s. That flow was then halted by a combination of the Great Depression, which raised unemployment levels in the United States, and the concomitant discrimination against immigrants that surfaced during this period, leading to massive deportations of many immigrants (legal and otherwise), includ- ing many from Mexico.

Labor shortages in agriculture during World War II, however, led to a renewed invitation for Mexican workers to migrate to the United States. In 1942, the United States signed a treaty with the government of Mexico to create a system of con- tract labor whereby Mexican laborers (braceros— literally those who work with their arms, which are brazos in Spanish) would enter the United States for a specified period of time to work. After the war ended, the bracero program remained in place, but it was not until the early 1950s that the num- ber of Mexican contract workers began to increase noticeably (Garcia y Griego et al. 1990). By the mid-1950s, the contract workers had been joined by many undocumented immigrants from Mexico,

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and the United States reacted in 1954 by deport- ing more than a million Mexicans (some later found to be U.S. citizens) in what was called “Operation Wetback.”

The bracero program was ended formally in 1964, and in 1965 the new immigration act, which ended the national origins quota system, also put a numerical limit on the number of legal immigrants to the United States from countries in the Western Hemisphere. Neither action notice- ably slowed the migration from Mexico, which was by then well entrenched because there was and still is a demand for immigrant labor. However, both of these government actions did jointly con- spire to increase the number of immigrants classi- fied as illegal or undocumented (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 1991). This is a critical point with respect to undocumented immigration from Mexico: The flow from Mexico to the United States began because workers were needed and the government agreed to provide them with tem- porary work visas. More recently, however, the labor supply is still needed, but the government has been less willing to provide documentation for the immigrants, so they “enter without inspection” (EWI—another way of describing people in this category). In other words, the same flow has con- tinued, but now much of it is defined as illegal.

I should point out that there are two primary ways by which a person becomes an undocu- mented immigrant. A person may enter the coun- try with a tourist or other visa and then overstay the visa. For example, you may arrive with a stu- dent visa, attend college in the United States, but then decide not to return home, at which point you become an illegal immigrant. The more dra- matic way is to cross the border without papers. People may try to do this on their own, but espe- cially after 9/11 and the ensuing increase in border security efforts, people are likely to pay a smug- gler to assist them. Most of the crossings into the United States are by land, and by building massive fences along the border at the two historically most popular entry places—San Diego and El Paso— the United States has made it increasingly more challenging for people to cross illegally. Unfortu- nately, the fences have largely served just to divert

migrants to cross the border in other areas that are either rugged mountains or barren deserts, and in both cases the risk of death from dehydration, freezing, or injury is not inconsequential. In 2001, the U.S. Border Patrol responded to an increase in the number of injuries and deaths of people cross- ing the border by launching a publicity campaign in Mexico aimed at describing the potential dan- gers of trying to cross into the United States.

The greater difficulty and thus cost of cross- ing the border, combined with the Great Recession and the lower birth rate in Mexico, have meant that the number of people apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border has been declining since reaching a peak of 1.5 million persons in 2000. By 2012 that number had dropped to 365,000 (Simanski and Sapp 2013). Even that number is likely too high since about 40 percent of those are people who are apprehended more than once (Weeks et al. 2011). When the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends “UDAs” (undocumented aliens), most are returned to Mexico and of course most of them will keep trying to cross until they are success- ful, as most eventually are (Cornelius et al. 2008). People are motivated not only by the lure of a bet- ter job, but also because they may already have a job and without papers the only way they can go between their home in Mexico and their job in the United States is by crossing the border someplace other than a legal checkpoint. Border Patrol statis- tics on apprehensions, for example, always show a seasonal pattern that drops off throughout the year to a low point just before Christmas, and then spikes to a high after Christmas. The clear impli- cation is that people working illegally in the United States have gone home to celebrate the holidays in Mexico, but then attempt to return after the holi- days are over.

In the wake of 9/11 the number of agents patrolling the border has increased significantly and new technologies have been employed, such as land sensors, cameras, and even drone aircraft with cameras, to alert agents to the presence of people crossing the border so that they can be apprehended. In line with Massey’s “perverse laws of international migration” that I mention in this chapter, it is likely that the greater restrictions

(continued)

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on entering the United States have encouraged people to stay, rather than leave even temporar- ily to go back home, because once in they realize that it will be hard to re-enter the country should they leave. Thus, the stricter border controls have had the “perverse” effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the population of unauthorized per- sons living in the United States.

People trying to enter the European Union (EU) without papers will often use the Mediterranean or the Adriatic Seas to do so. Only eight miles sepa- rate Africa from Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar— the western end of the Mediterranean where it meets the Atlantic—and Africans are willing to pay considerable sums of money for a seat in a small boat for a rough nighttime journey from Morocco to Spain, across what is sometimes called the “Sea of Death” (Simons 2000). They may choose the longer and even more dangerous passage from Libya to Italy, or across the Mediterranean to the Aegean Sea to access Europe through Greece (UNHCR 2014). If they survive the journey and make it past Frontex (the EU’s border control agency), they can move within the EU because countries within the EU no longer have border controls. This big econ- omy is, of course, attractive to workers outside of the EU. Since legal migration into EU countries is still quite limited, undocumented immigration has increased over time, pushed along by politi- cal unrest and economic uncertainty in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region after the Arab Spring.

Undocumented immigration represents a true conundrum because it is a problem with no easy solution that everyone can agree to. There are those in the United States and Europe who argue that the solution is simple—fortify the borders and

do not let anyone in who has not been preap- proved; immediately deport anyone who is found inside the country without papers; and do a better job of punishing those who knowingly hire undocu- mented immigrants (Simcox 2013). The latter issue was supposed to have been taken care of in the United States by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, but over time the continued demand for labor in the United States has not been met by legal immigrants, and in seeming recognition of this, the U.S. government has devoted very few resources to tracking down and fining these employers. This changing emphasis was reflected in the 1996 passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), the main thrust of which was to focus Border Patrol attention on deterring, finding, and deporting ille- gal immigrants, rather than on penalizing employ- ers of those immigrants.

Consensus in the United States is so difficult to achieve on this issue that, despite a variety of bills having been introduced in Congress to deal with immigration issues, nothing has been passed, at least not as of this writing. Inaction at the federal level has led many states and local governments to pass their own legislation aimed at punishing employers, arresting undocumented immigrants, or even penalizing landlords who rent to them. Since immigration policy has historically been the sole responsibility of the federal government, these initiatives are always challenged in federal courts.

So, the reality is that people continue to enter the United States without valid papers—once again, a civil offense—and this “crime” begets other genuinely serious crimes related to exploita- tion of the immigrants. The Mexican government

IS MIGRATION A CRIME? ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN GLOBAL CONTEXT (CONTINuEd)

Migration into and out of Canada

Canada’s immigration experience has been similar, but not identical, to the pattern in the united states, as I have already highlighted. although Canada has histori- cally had a high level of immigration, it also experienced considerable emigration (people leaving to return home, or entering the united states from Canada) until after World War II. net migration jumped in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a

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employs troops to patrol its northern border with the United States, not to prevent people from crossing, but to keep them from being robbed by their countrymen who know that these people have money to pay a smuggler. The smugglers then take advantage of the immigrants by failing to warn them of the dangers of crossing the desert without water, or of going into the mountains in winter with- out a jacket, and of course the smugglers will leave the immigrants to fend for themselves at the first sign of trouble, sometimes simply leaving them to die. Once in the United States, the immigrants are, as I mentioned earlier, susceptible to many kinds of abuses from employers and others who know that the immigrants have few resources, legal or otherwise, to fight back. This set of circumstances leads many people to believe that illegal immi- grants need to have some type of amnesty or “reg- ularization” granted as soon as possible in order to provide a status that will protect their human rights. Immigrants understand this idea, of course, and a common route to amnesty is to become legal by marrying a U.S. citizen, although the gov- ernment tends to be suspicious of this route to a “green card” and no one is safe from deportation until becoming a U.S. citizen. Another wrinkle on the illegal immigration crime issue is that if you are apprehended in the United States and deported, but then re-apprehended on a subsequent attempt to enter the country (within certain time limits that may vary from person to person), that second apprehension is considered to be a more serious crime than the first one.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, in 2008 the European Council (the governing body of the European Union) approved the “European Immi- gration and Asylum Pact,” designed to provide

guidance to member nations, who ultimately retain the power to decide for themselves how they wish to deal with immigrants. The pact was agreed to by the heads of state of all 27 members, so there is some high-level consensus, and the key element with respect to undocumented immigration is what might be called a zero-tolerance policy. The pact calls for all undocumented immigrants to be forced out of Europe, and it explicitly rejects the idea of a general amnesty for undocumented immigrants currently living in Europe.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the idea of completely shutting down the border and throwing out all undocumented immigrants is that of an open border, which would allow people to come and go in quick response to changes in demand for their services. This idea gener- ally appeals more to prospective employers, who would like to hire cheaper labor, though it has relatively little appeal to the currently employed, who do not relish the thought of increased com- petition for their jobs. This idea is not likely to be implemented in the near future because there is still a fair amount of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and in Europe. In the post-9/11 era, the idea of open borders has become even less popular, given the fact that terrorists could mingle with legitimate workers.

discussion Questions: (1) If you lived in a developing country and thought you could have a better life by migrating to the United States even though you did not have U.S. government permis- sion to do so, would you do it? Why or why not? (2) Do you think that richer countries should be less restrictive about legal immigration, more restric- tive, or do you think the current situation does not require any change in policy? Explain your answer.

result of immigration policy changes, but has slackened some since then. however, it is still at historically high levels.

the 2011 census data for Canada show that the number of people reporting a mother tongue other than english or french totals more than 6 million of Canada’s 33 million residents. Chinese is the most common language spoken at home other than english or french, followed by Punjabi, spanish, german, Italian, and arabic (statistics Canada 2012). this is a clear transition from the 1971 census when

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german, Italian, and ukrainian were the leading nonofficial languages (Migration news 1998). as in the united states, recent immigrants to Canada are far less likely to have come from europe than was true in the past. In 2012, for example, more than one third of immigrants were from just three countries—China, the Philip- pines, and India (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2013).

Forced Migration

sitting on the sidelines of the migration transition are people who may not have origi- nally intended to move but wound up being forced to do so anyway. a forced migrant is, as you might expect, someone who has been forced to leave his or her home because of a real or perceived threat to life and well-being (reed et al. 1998). there are tens of millions of people alive at this moment who have been forced to migrate. Many are internally displaced—still in their original country but not in their original residence. Many more have been forced into another country and so are refugees. a third category, and a historically important one, is the worst one of all—slavery.

Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons

there are more than 32 million “uprooted” people in the world, according to the united nations high Commissioner for refugees (2013). about 10 million of these are refugees, 1 million are asylum seekers, and 21 million are internally displaced people. about 80 percent of the world’s refugees are in developing countries, and as I noted above, the country currently generating the greatest number of refugees is syria, having replaced afghanistan and Iraq in that category. It falls dispropor- tionately on neighbors to shelter refugees, and so lebanon, Jordan, and egypt are hosting the majority of syrian refugees. however, in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran are hosting more refugees than any other countries in the world. among the rich countries, the united states hosts the great- est number of refugees (about 250,000).

there are essentially three solutions to the problem of refugee populations, including (1) repatriation to the country of origin; (2) resettlement in the country to which they have fled; and (3) resettlement in a third country. none of these is easy to accomplish, and the situation is complicated by the fact that birth rates tend to be high among refugee groups, and therefore many of these refugees are children who have been born outside their parents’ country of origin.

Slavery

there can be no doubt that the most hideous of migratory movements are those endured by slaves. slavery has existed within various human societies for millennia, and McDaniel (1995:11) has summarized the early historical situation as follows:

the international slave trade in africans began with the arab conquests in northern and eastern africa and the Mediterranean coast in the seventh century. from the seventh

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to the eleventh century, arabs and africans brought large numbers of european slaves into the north african ports of tangier, algiers, tunis, tripoli, and fez. In fact, most of the slaves traded throughout the Mediterranean before the fall of Constantinople were european.

between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries africans, along with turks, russians, bulgarians, and greeks, were slaves on the plantations of Cyprus. how- ever, the most massive migration of slaves was that of the atlantic slave trade, which transported an estimated 11 million african slaves to the western hemi- sphere between the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century (thomas 1997). the slaves came largely from the west coast of sub-saha- ran africa, from countries that now comprise senegal, sierra leone, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, benin, Cameroon, gabon, ghana, the Congo, and nigeria, the northern part of the latter having been described as one of the largest slave soci- eties in modern times (lovejoy and hogendorn 1993). according to McDaniel, “the preponderance of africans who were sold into slavery were taken by force. some were taken directly by arab or european slave traders, but most were sold into slavery by the elite africans who had captured them in warfare or who were holding them either for their own use as slaves or to be traded as slaves later” (McDaniel 1995:14).

the destinations were largely the sugar and coffee plantations of the Caribbean and brazil, but hundreds of thousands were also sold in the united states to serve as laborers on cotton and tobacco plantations. the slave trad- ers themselves were initially Portuguese and spanish, but the french, Dutch, and especially the british were active later on. It was eventually the british, however, who pushed for a worldwide abolition of slavery. slavery was abolished through- out the british empire, including Canada, in 1833, although Canada had never tolerated slavery, and the impact of slavery on Canada was primarily that it was a place of refuge for those seeking to escape the united states. similarly there is little history of slavery in Mexico, which in 1827 declared that no person could be born a slave in Mexico. In the united states, it was not until 1865 (in the con- text of the Civil War) that the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution finally abolished slavery.

actually, though, slavery has not been abolished globally. In 2013 the Walk free foundation in australia published a global slavery Index (Walk free foun- dation 2013). they define slavery as the following: “Modern slavery includes slavery, slavery-like practices (such as debt bondage, forced marriage and sale or exploitation of children), human trafficking and forced labour, and other practices described in key international treaties, voluntarily ratified by nearly every country in the world.” by this definition, they estimated that there were 30 million slaves in the world as of 2013.

they scored countries on two criteria: (1) the prevalence of slavery (percent of a population that is enslaved); and (2) the absolute number of slaves. the top ten in terms of prevalence are, in order from the worst, Mauritania, haiti, Pakistan, India, nepal, Moldova, benin, Côte d’Ivoire, the gambia, and gabon. the top ten in absolute terms, again in order from the worst, are India, China, Pakistan, nigeria,

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ethiopia, russia, thailand, Democratic republic of the Congo, Myanmar (burma), and bangladesh. they estimate that these ten countries account for three-fourths of the people held in slavery.

Consequences of Migration

Why does migration matter? by now you know the drill: It has the potential to influence the lives of the people who move, whether forced or not, the people they leave behind, and the new people with whom they interact after making the move. and, depending on the size of the migration flow over time, migration has the potential to alter the demographic structure of a community in dramatic ways and within a very short period of time. It can also alter the social structure subtly, but importantly, over the long term as the immigrant stock adds its children to the soci- etal recipe, and the stock changes its flavor, so to speak.

Consequences for Migrants

although migrants typically move in order to improve their lives, we must recog- nize that for the individual migrant relocation may nonetheless produce anxiety and stress as a new social environment has to be negotiated. Part of that negotia- tion process may be to deal with discrimination (possibly including violence) that is often the result of xenophobia—fear and mistrust of strangers on the part of people already residing in the place to which the migrant has moved. one of the ways in which migrants cope with a new environment is to seek out others who share their cultural and geographic backgrounds (sometimes called co-ethnics). this is often aided or even forced by the existence of an enclave (a place in a larger community within which members of a particular subgroup tend to concentrate) of recent and former migrants from the same or similar areas. In fact, the development of an enclave may facilitate migration, since a potential migrant need not be too fearful of the unknown, as discussed above in the network theory of migration. the enclave in the host area has guides to the new environment—former migrants who have made the adaptation and stand ready to aid in the social adjustment and integra- tion of new migrants. ethnic ties may also provide entrepreneurial newcomers with access to working capital, protected markets, and a pool of labor to help get a busi- ness started (Portes and rumbaut 2006).

although finding people of similar background may ease the coping burden for a new migrant, there is some evidence to suggest that the long-run social con- sequences of “flocking together” (especially among relatives) in a closed society of other immigrants will retard the migrant’s adjustment to and assimilation into the new setting. John f. Kennedy’s comment that “the way out of the ghetto lies not with muscle, but with the mastery of english” is more than a facile phrase. It points to a key to educational success and labor force entry (Portes and rumbaut 2001), especially for the children of immigrants (Kasinitz et al. 2008).

on arrival in the host area, an immigrant may go through a brief period of euphoria and hopefulness—a sort of honeymoon. however, that may be followed

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by a period of shock and depression, especially for refugees. rumbaut (1995:260) quotes a Cambodian refugee to the united states he interviewed:

I was feeling great the first few months. but then, after that, I started to face all kinds of worries and sadness. I started to see the real thing of the united states, and I missed home more and more. I missed everything about our country: people, family, relatives and friends, way of life, everything. then, my spirit started to go down; I lost sleep; my physical health weakened; and there started the stressful and depressing times. by now [almost 3 years after arrival] I feel kind of better, a lot better! Knowing my sons are in school as their father would have wanted [she was widowed], and doing well, makes me feel more secure.

Immigrants undergo a process of adaptation to the new environment, in which they adjust to the new physical and social environment and learn how best to nego- tiate everyday life. some immigrants never go beyond this, but most proceed to some level of acculturation, in which they adopt the host language, bring their diet more in line with the host culture, listen to the music and read the newspapers, mag- azines, and books of the host culture, and make friends outside of their immigrant group. this may be more likely to happen if the immigrant has children, because children often are exposed to the new culture more intensively than are adults. lan- guage use is frequently employed as an indicator of acculturation, and the united states has been called a “graveyard” for languages because an immigrant’s native language is unlikely to last much beyond his or her own generation (rumbaut et al. 2006). Many migrants never go beyond linguistic acculturation, but some migrants (and especially their children raised in the host culture) assimilate, meaning that they take on not just the outer trappings of the host culture, but also assume the behaviors and attitudes of members of the host culture (rumbaut 1997; alba and nee 1997). Intermarriage with a member of the host society is often used as an index of assimilation.

these individual adjustments to a receiving society assume an open society and assume that immigrants are considered on an individual basis. In fact, nations rarely are open with regard to immigrants, and because immigration occurs regularly in clumps (with groups of refugees, or new guest workers arriving nearly en masse), immigrants often are treated categorically. although assimilation is one model by which a society might incorporate immigrants into its midst, there are at least three other types of incorporation: integration (mutual accommodation); exclusion (in which immigrants are kept separate from most members of the host society and are maintained in separate enclaves or ghettos); and multiculturalism or pluralism (in which immigrants retain their ethnic communities but share the same legal rights as other members of the host society).

Multiculturalism, in particular, is enhanced by the transnational migrant, who sets roots in the host society while still maintaining strong linkages to the donor society. such individuals have also been called “skilled transients” (findlay 1995)— relatively skilled workers moving internationally on assignment and, in the process, having an impact on the area of destination while always intending to return to the area of origin. In parts of sub-saharan africa, a type of transnationalism has been

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institutionalized into the social structure among migratory laborers, and there is evidence that elsewhere in the world less skilled workers are adopting this strategy of living dual lives—working in one environment but maintaining familial ties in another (levitt et al. 2003).

Children of Immigrants

Most of the explanations about how immigrants deal with their new society focus on adult immigrants who were raised in one country and are now adapting and adjusting to another. the children born to them in the new country (the second gen- eration) will have the task of growing up mainly (or only) knowing the new coun- try, but having to deal with immigrant parents. note, however, that the youngest immigrants (those who are prepubescent, approximately 12 or younger) are actu- ally in that same situation—too young for the country of origin to have had a strong impact on their own development, and growing up in the new country almost as though they had been born there. this is sometimes known as the 1.5 generation— halfway between the first generation (the immigrants), and the second generation (the children of immigrants) (rumbaut 1997; Perlmann 2005).

the path that receiving societies often have in mind for the children of immi- grants is a straight-line process of assimilation from the country of their parents’ origin into the country of their own birth. You are already primed for the idea, however, that when it comes to migration, life is never going to be so simple. In europe, and increasingly in the americas, the second generation may fall into one of two possible patterns of segmented assimilation (Portes 1995), in which the chil- dren of immigrants (1) adopt the host language and behavior, but find themselves identified with a racial/ethnic minority group that effectively limits their full par- ticipation in society, or (2) assimilate economically into the new society, but retain strong attachments to the ethnic group of origin. these variations in the path of assimilation are occasioned especially by the fact that immigrants to europe and to north america are likely to come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds than prevail in the host country, but this can obviously happen anywhere in the world.

Societal Consequences

although the consequences of migration for the individual are of considerable interest (especially to the one uprooted), a more pervasive aspect of the social con- sequences of migration is the impact on the demographic composition and social structure of both the donor and host areas. the demographic composition is influ- enced by the selective nature of migration, particularly selectivity by age. the donor area typically loses people from its young adult population, as those people are then added to the host area. Many small towns in latin america, for example, are left with older adults and children whose parents are abroad, a situation that carries with it a host of economic and psychological challenges. further, because it is at the

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young adults ages that the bulk of reproduction occurs, the host area has its level of natural increase augmented at the expense of the donor area. this natural-increase effect of migration is further enhanced by the relatively low probability of death of young adults compared with the higher probability in the older portion of a popula- tion. this is the story of the demise of rural villages throughout the world.

the selective nature of migration, when combined with its high volume, such as in the united states and Canada, helps to alter the patterns of social relationships and social organization in both the host and donor communities. extended kinship relations are weakened, although not destroyed, and local economic, political, and educational institutions have to adjust to shifts in the number and characteristics of people serviced by each.

Remittances

nearly hidden from view is the tremendous economic benefit that less developed sending countries receive when their citizens go off to work in the more devel- oped nations. oded stark and his associates (see, for example, stark and lucas 1988) were among the first researchers to investigate the fact that many, if not most, immigrant workers send part of their pay back home, thereby raising the standard of living of the family members who stayed behind, and encouraging a certain dependence on the income being earned by the migrating family members. to be sure, the promise of remittances is part of the household strategy for sending a family member abroad.

since foreign travel is expensive, including for many the cost of a smuggler, families “invest” in young people who will send back “migradollars,” as they are sometimes called (Kanaiaupuni and Donato 1999). this money can finance the pur- chase of homes and consumer durables in the country of origin, provide startup money for new businesses, and even provide enough resources in poor communities of Mexico, for example, to lower the infant death rate.

so important have remittances become that the World bank monitors the flow between countries in order to better understand the impact on both send- ing and receiving economies. the World bank estimates that in 2013 (the most recent year available at this writing) 414 billion dollars in remittances were sent around the world, mostly from richer to poorer countries (but also between less developed nations) (World bank 2013). looking back at figure 7.5 showing the top migrant sending countries, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that in terms of total officially recorded dollars (there may be other money transferred covertly), the top recipients in 2013 were, in order of remittances received, India, China, the Philippines, Mexico, nigeria, and egypt, as well as Pakistan, bangladesh, Vietnam, and ukraine.

In terms of the impact on economies, remittances account for less than 1 percent of the world’s estimated gross domestic product, but they are extremely important for some developing countries. World bank data suggest that in 2013 the top recipients of remittances as a percentage of gDP were tajikistan (48 percent), Kyrgyz republic (31 percent), lesotho and nepal (25 percent each), and Moldova

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294 Part Two Population Processes

(24 percent). note that three of these top five were former republics of the soviet union, so we can see why migration from these countries to russia is so impor- tant for them. on the other hand, the 22 billion dollars going to Mexico in 2013 accounted for only 2 percent of Mexico’s national economy, but remittances have had a huge impact on those communities that have participated most heavily in the migration to the united states (Weeks and Weeks 2010).

remittances may be one way out of poverty, but they are not received without a cost. there is the real possibility that family members in the sending countries will become dependent on the remittances as a source of income, and will be vulnerable to economic changes not just in their own country, but also in the country to which their remitting relatives have moved. this is not something that people are going to think about in their initial cost-benefit analysis, but it is something they may have to deal with later on. for example, it is clear that the flow of remittances slowed down measurably after the great recession hit in 2008, especially to latin america, thus contributing to harder times throughout the regions from which migrants had come (World bank 2013).

overall, then, migration has the greatest short-run impact on society of any of the three demographic processes. It is a selective process that always requires changes and adjustments on the part of the individual migrant. More importantly, when migration occurs with any appreciable volume, it may have significant con- sequences for the social, cultural, and economic structure of both donor and host regions. because of these potential consequences, patterns of migration are harbin- gers of social change in a society.

Summary and Conclusion

Migration is any permanent change of residence of sufficient distance to change your whole round of daily activities. It is the most complex of the three popu- lation processes because we have to account for the wide variety in the number of times people may move, the vast array of places migrants may go, and the incredible diversity of reasons there may be for who goes where, and when. of importance to demographers is the fact that the migration transition is an inevitable consequence of the mortality transition, which lowers the death rate prior to the initiation of the fertility transition. this unleashes population growth in rural areas that cannot be accommodated by agricultural economies, pushing people (usually young adults) to migrate to where the jobs are—usually cities within their own country, but sometimes to other countries.

for decades, migration theory advanced little beyond the basic idea of push and pull factors operating in the context of migration selectivity. More recently, con- ceptual models have developed that are very reminiscent of the explanations of the fertility transition. to begin with, we need a model of how the migration decision is arrived at (not unlike the first precondition for a fertility decline—the acceptance of the idea that you are empowered to act). then, most importantly for the study of migration, we need to understand what might motivate a person to migrate. a vari- ety of theoretical perspectives has been offered, including the neoclassical approach,

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295Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

the new household economics of migration approach, the theory of the dual labor market, and world systems theory. finally, the means available to migrate represent those things that “grease the skids,” making it easy to migrate once a person is motivated to do so. these include not only improved transportation and commu- nication but also the development of social networks and institutions that facilitate the migration process.

Voluntary migration on a massive global scale did not begin in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century, and it was primarily a movement of europeans to the americas. as the volume increased and the cultural mix changed, the united states began to put up hurdles to slow things down. this led in the 1920s to a set of very restrictive immigration policies that effectively choked off immigration for more than a generation. In the 1960s the immigration laws were liberalized, and when President lyndon Johnson signed the new bill into law he argued that it was largely symbolic and would not really have an impact on immigration levels. he could not have been more wrong, and the united states has been adjusting to a new reality of immigration ever since.

throughout the world, population growth has induced an increase in the vol- ume of migration, both legal and undocumented. “temporary” labor migration has also increased throughout the world as jobs have become more available in the aging, more developed societies for the burgeoning number of younger workers from less developed countries. understandably, guest workers are often reluctant to leave higher-income countries, even when the economies in those places slow down and pressure builds for foreigners to go home. such people are only a few steps away from the unhappily large fraction of the world’s migrants who are refugees, seeking residence in other countries after being forced out of their own.

Migration has dynamic consequences for the migrants themselves, for the areas from which they came, and for the places to which they go. some of these con- sequences are fairly predictable if we know the characteristics of the migrants. If immigrants are well-educated young adults, for example, they will be looking for well-paying jobs, they may add to the economic prosperity of an area, and they will probably be establishing families, which will further add to the area’s population and increase the demand for services.

although it is not always apparent, the quality of our everyday life is greatly affected by the process of migration, for even if we ourselves never move, we will spend a good part of our lifetime adjusting to people who have migrated into our lives and to the loss of people who have moved away. each new person coming into our life greatly expands our social capital by increasing the potential size of our social network, especially since many people who move away do so physically but not symbolically; that is, we remain in communication.

In the next chapter, I put the dynamics of migration together with those of mortality and fertility to show you how they collectively influence the age/sex struc- ture. that may not sound very interesting, but in fact it is through the changing age structure that population growth makes itself felt, making the age structure one of the most important drivers of social change in the world. for that reason, it is like a stealth bomber—without a really good radar system (in this case, the tools of demography), you may not see it until it’s too late to do anything about it.

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296 Part Two Population Processes

Main Points

1. Migration is the process of changing residence and moving your whole round of social activities from one place to another.

2. the migration transition initially referred to internal migration occurring as a result of population growth, which created a redundant rural population.

3. Migration can be assessed in terms of flows (the movement of people) or stocks (the characteristics of people according to their migration status).

4. explanations of why people move typically begin with the push-pull theory, first formulated in the late nineteenth century.

5. Migration is selective and is associated especially with age, giving rise to the idea that migration is an implementing strategy—a means to a desired end asso- ciated especially with stages in the life cycle.

6. Migration within countries tends to be for economic reasons, but housing- related moves are especially common in the united states.

7. Major theories offered to explain international migration include neoclassical economics, the new household economics of migration, the dual labor market theory, world systems theory, network theory, institutional theory, and cumula- tive causation.

8. the united states accepts more migrants (legal and undocumented) than any other country in the world, and for more than a century the u.s. government has implemented numerous complex efforts to control the number and charac- teristics of people entering the country.

9. Migration of all kinds, whether forced or voluntary, demands adjustment to a new environment on the part of the migrant, and sets in motion a societal response to the immigrant on the part of the receiving society.

10. ross baker once suggested that the “first law of Demographic Directionality” is that a body that has headed west remains at west, and that is still generally an accurate statement for the world.

Questions for Review

1. Discuss the way in which the theory of demographic change and response (introduced in Chapter 3) provides a conceptual framework for understanding the migration transition. how does that framework help us understand future demographic changes in the developing nations?

2. Discuss the differences between migration stocks and flows, and then show how the two are interrelated in terms of their impact on both receiving and sending societies.

3. Describe your own lifetime experiences with migration, and relate them to the decision-making model shown in figure 7.3.

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297Chapter 7 The Migration Transition

4. What do you think the migration policy of the united states should be? Defend your answer and explain what would be the consequences, intended and unin- tended, of your proposed policy.

5. evaluate the way in which the timing of demographic transitions in other parts of the world has helped to explain the patterns of migration to the united states over the past two hundred years.

Websites of Interest

remember that websites are not as permanent as books and journals, so I cannot guarantee that each of the following websites still exists at the moment you are reading this. You may have to google the name of the organization to find the current web address.

1. http://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics this is the immigration statistics page of the website for the u.s. Department of homeland security. the site provides access to immigration and border enforcement statistics. In Canada, the immigration agency is known as Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), and its website includes information on government policy, as well as links to research on immigration: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/index.asp

2. http://www.migrationpolicy.org the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC, offers an extensive, and constantly growing, range of articles and resources useful to policy makers and people in academia.

3. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/ Migration news was developed by Philip Martin at the university of California–Davis, and is a tremendous resource, especially because it summarizes and comments on migra- tion related news stories from all over the globe.

4. http://www.refugees.org the united states Committee for refugees (usCr) is a private, nonprofit organization working to help refugees throughout the world. this site includes information about ref- ugees, asylees, and internally displaced persons for almost every country of the world. because the estimation of refugees is as much an art as it is a science, you should also visit the site of the united nations high Commissioner for refugees (unhCr) at http://www .unhcr.org for comparisons.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/migration%20transition Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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298

CHAPTER 8 The Age Transition

What Is the age transItIon?

the ConCepts of age and sex age stratification age Cohorts and Cohort flow gender and sex ratios the feminization of old age

demographIC drIvers of the age transItIon

the Impact of declining mortality the Impact of declining fertility Where does migration fit In?

age transItIons at Work the progression from a Young to an old age

structure Youth Bulge—dead end or dividend?

China’s demographic dividend What happened to India’s demographic dividend? demographic dividends in the United states and

mexico

popUlatIon agIng as part of the age transItIon

What Is old? how many older people are there? Where are the older populations? the third age (Young-old) and fourth age

(old-old) Centenarians and rectangularization—Is this the

end of the age transition?

readIng the fUtUre from the age strUCtUre

Figure 8.1 percent of the population that Is 65 or older

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299Chapter 8 The Age Transition

population projections extrapolation Components of growth Cohort Component method Backward or Inverse projection

population momentum

essaY: Who Will pay for Baby Boomers to retire in the richer Countries?

discussions of population growth often make it seem (to those less well informed than you now are) as though population increases the same way your bathtub fills up with water—evenly all over. You know from previous chapters, however, that the issues of age and sex rear their heads over and over again, confounding every- thing. mortality differs by age and sex; fertility differs by age and sex; migration differs by age, if not always by sex. It is time, then, to deal more explicitly with the concepts of age and sex, because population growth takes place age by age and somewhat differently for males than for females. It matters not just how fast the population is growing, but which age and sex groups are growing and which ones are growing faster or slower than others. In particular, predictable changes occur in the distribution of a population by age and sex as a society goes through the demo- graphic transition.

What Is the Age Transition?

the age transition represents a shift from a very young population in which there are slightly more males than females to an older population in which there are more females than males. In between, bumps and dents in the age and sex structure rep- resent powerful forces for social, economic, and political change. In general, it is the interaction of fertility, mortality, and migration that produces the age and sex structure, which can be viewed as a key to the life of a social group—a record of past history and a portent of the future. population processes not only produce the age and sex structure but are, in turn, affected by it—yet another example of the complexity of the world when seen through your demographic “eye.” It would not, in fact, be an exaggeration to say that changes in the age and sex structure affect all social institutions. In this chapter, I escort you through that complexity by first defining the concepts of age and sex as they relate to population dynamics, and then by examining the dynamics of the age transition.

The Concepts of Age and Sex

age and sex influence the working of society in important ways because society assigns social roles and frequently organizes people into groups on the basis of their age and gender (the social component of sex). age is a biological characteristic, but it is constantly changing; whereas sex is biological in nature, but does not change (except by human intervention in rare cases). gender roles can and do change,

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300 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

however, so the social side of sex (you know what I mean here!) is clearly dynamic. the changing nature of age imposes itself on society because younger people are treated differently from older people, and different kinds of behavior are expected of people as they move through different ages. at the same time, biological changes inherent in the life course influence what societies expect of people which, in turn, influences how people behave.

Age Stratification

the idea that societies have separate sets of expected roles and obligations for people of different ages is captured by the concept of age stratification. kingsley davis noted in 1949 that “all societies recognize age as a basis of status, but some of them empha- size it more than others” (davis 1949:104). the age stratification theory begins with the proposition that age is a basis of social differentiation in a manner analogous to stratification by social class. the term stratification implies a set of inequalities, and in this case it refers to the fact that societies distribute resources unequally by age. these resources include not only economic goods but also such crucial intangibles as social approval, acceptance, and respect. this theory is not a mere description of sta- tus, however; it introduces a dynamic element by recognizing that aging is a process of social mobility. foner (1975) notes that as we age we are actually moving within a social hierarchy, going from one set of age-related social roles to another. each of these different roles comes with its own set of rights and obligations. Contrasted to other forms of social mobility, however, which may rely on merit, luck, or accident of birth, social mobility in the age hierarchy is “inevitable, universal and unidirec- tional in that the individual can never grow younger” (p. 156).

What aspects of life are influenced by age (and in some instances by sex or gen- der as well)? In table 8.1 I have listed just a few of the important things that vary by age in most human societies. as the number and percentage of people at each age and sex change, the distribution of these characteristics will therefore also change, and this is the force for social, economic, and political change. for example, a very young population will have a relatively small fraction of its population in the labor force unless, as happens in poorer countries, children are put to work at a young age. however, in such a society, those younger workers will have lower-status occupations. It typically takes time and experience (including education and other training) to reach the higher occupational strata. since income is closely related to occupation, it is the older adults who tend to have the highest incomes, and it is the maintenance of higher incomes for several years that increases the chance that people will accumulate wealth. thus, all other things being equal, we would expect that a population with a high proportion of middle-aged adults would have more people in the labor force with higher incomes and more wealth than a population with a high proportion of children.

age strata, though identifiable, are not viewed as fixed and unchanging. the assumption is that the number of age strata, and the prestige and power associated with each, are influenced by the needs of society and by characteristics of people at each age (their numbers and sociodemographic characteristics). european society

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301Chapter 8 The Age Transition

of a few hundred years ago seems to have been characterized by three age strata— infancy, adulthood, and old age (aries 1962); and power (highest status) seems to have been concentrated in the hands of older people (simmons 1960). modern Western societies appear to have at least seven strata—infancy, childhood, adoles- cence, young adulthood, middle age, young-old, and old-old, with power typically concentrated in the hands of the middle-aged and the young-old.

as we age from birth to death, we are allocated to social statuses (your relative position or standing in society) and social roles (the set of obligations and expecta- tions that characterize your particular position in society) considered appropriate to your age. thus, children and adolescents are typically allocated to appropriate educational statuses, adults to appropriate positions of power and prestige, and the older population to positions of retirement and waning influence. We all learn the roles that society deems appropriate to our age, and we reward each other for fulfilling those roles and tend to cast disapproval on those who do not fulfill the societal expectation. But neither the allocation process nor the overall socialization process (learning the behavior appropriate to particular social roles) is static. they are in constant flux as changing cohorts alter social conditions and as social condi- tions, in turn, alter the characteristics of age cohorts. this leads us to the concept of cohort flow.

Age Cohorts and Cohort Flow

In population studies, a cohort refers to a group of people born during the same time period, and cohort flow captures the notion that at each age we are influenced

Category Characteristic or activity

demographic Being sick and having restricted activities of daily living dying Being sexually active having a baby moving or migrating

social getting married/divorced Being involved in religious organizations and activity Being involved in political organizations and activity school enrollment level of educational attainment Being involved in criminal or other socially disapproved behavior

economic Being in the labor force occupation within the labor force Current income level of accumulated wealth

Table 8.1 aspects of human society that vary by age and sex (or gender)

en ga

ge L

ea rn

in g®

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302 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

by the historical circumstances that similarly affect other people who are the same age. as riley (1976:194–195) points out:

each cohort starts out with a given size which, save for additions from immigration, is the maximum size it can ever attain. over the life course of the cohort, some portion of its members survive, while others move away or die until the entire cohort is destroyed.

each cohort starts out also with a given composition; it consists of members born with certain characteristics and dispositions. over the life course of the individual, some of these characteristics are relatively stable (a person’s sex, color, genetic makeup, country of birth, or—at entry into adulthood in our society—the level of educational attainment are unlikely to change). . . . When successive cohorts are compared, they resemble each other in certain respects, but differ markedly in other respects: in initial size and com- position, in age-specific patterns of survival (or longevity), and in the period of history covered by their respective life span.

at any given moment, a cross section of all cohorts defines the current age strata in a society. figure 8.2 displays a lexis diagram, a tool often used in population studies to help us discern the difference between period data (the cross-sectional

(P)

(A)

(C)

Time (moment of birth in years)

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

A g

Figure 8.2 a lexis diagram visualizes the relationship Between Cohorts and period data Source: adapted from samuel h. preston, patrick heuveline, and michel guillot, 2001, Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes (oxford: Blackwell publishers), figure 2.1; and Christophe vandeschrick, 2001, “the lexis diagram, a misnomer,” Demographic Research 4(3), figure 10.

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303Chapter 8 The Age Transition

snapshot of all ages at one time) and cohorts (of which there are many at any point in time). the diagram is named for a german demographer, Wilhelm lexis (1875), who helped develop it in the nineteenth century as an aid for analyzing life table data (vandeschrick 2001). age is shown on the vertical axis, and time (the moment of birth in units of years) is shown along the horizontal axis. the cohort of people born in 2015 (starting at 2015 and ending just at 2016) “advance through life along a 45° line” (preston et al. 2001:31), which is represented by the area (C) in figure 8.2.

the period data, crosscutting many cohorts, are illustrated by the shaded area (P), whereas comparing people at the same age across many cohorts over time would be done with data shaded as (A) in figure 8.2. researchers use the lexis diagram to calculate age-period-cohort (APC) rates that disentangle the combined influences of things specific to a particular age (the age effect), things unique to a time in history (the period effect), and things unique to specific birth cohorts (the cohort flow effect). lung cancer, for example, is most likely to kill people at older ages (the age effect), but death rates from it will depend partly on when a person was diagnosed (the period effect influenced by the timing of new treatments for the disease), and partly on cohort effects (cohorts born from the 1920s through the 1940s were more heavily into cigarette smoking than earlier or later cohorts).

as cohorts flow through time, their respective sizes and characteristics may alter the allocation of status and thus their socialization into various age-related roles because members of each cohort are moving through history together, whereas each separate cohort moves through moments in history at a different age (and thus with a different potential effect) than every other cohort. as cohorts move through time, their characteristics may change in response to changing social and economic conditions (such as wars, famines, and economic prosperity), and those changing conditions will influence the formation of new cohorts. this continual feedback between the dynamics of successive cohorts and the dynamics of other changes in society produces a constant shifting in the status and meaning attached to each age stratum, providing an evolutionary link between the age structure and the social structure (gordon and longino 2000).

an excellent example of the way in which we can better understand society by knowing about cohort flow is the analysis of the “lucky few” by elwood Carlson (2008). he builds on easterlin’s relative cohort size hypothesis (discussed in Chapter 3) to show how the fortunes of people born in the United states between 1929 and 1945 were influenced by being sandwiched historically between the “greatest generation”—that cohort that fought and won World War II (Brokaw 1998), and the baby boomers. drawing on microdata samples from past censuses (using data from IpUms, as discussed in Chapter 4), Carlson shows that the lucky few were too young to fight in World War II, but were then ideally situated in the age structure to be propelled forward by the demand for labor that followed the war. Indeed, they have spent their lives being pushed along by the younger baby boomers, the generation to which they as parents gave birth. furthermore, as easterlin (2008) has noted, the lucky few cohort grew up in the great depression, at a time of dramatically lowered expectations in life. thus, they were more readily able to achieve their own goals in life, both in terms of family size and economic well-being, than either the prior or subsequent cohorts. they have also managed to

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304 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

move into the retirement years just ahead of the fiscal crisis that looms as the baby boomers retire, as I discuss in the essay accompanying this chapter.

Gender and Sex Ratios

one of the important trends in the modern world has been increasing gender equity, first in the richer nations, and now progressing, albeit unevenly, on a global scale. note that I use the term sex when referring to the biological differences between males and females, reserving the term gender for the social aspects of behavior. there is enough overlap between biology and the social world, however, that this distinction is often pretty fuzzy. sorting out which is which is still important, though, because while we may not be able to do very much about biological differ- ences, we can do something about the fact that women are still treated differently from men in most societies and different kinds of behavior are often expected from each sex. Women have been what simone de Beauvoir (1953) called “the second sex” in a book that helped to spark feminism in the twentieth century (quoted by Clarke 2000:v):

one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. no biological, psychological, or eco- nomic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civiliza- tion as a whole that determines this creature.

In the more than half century since de Beauvoir made these comments, there has been a considerable amount of research that somewhat tempers her claim that civilization is the sole cause of gendered behavior. I mentioned sex dimor- phism in Chapter 5 in connection with the apparent superiority of females with respect to longevity. the same concept has been applied to various aspects of human and other primate behavior in which hormones do seem to underlie cer- tain kinds of behavior (for a review, see Udry 2000). the social environment is clearly the strongest influence on gendered behavior, but the biological differ- ences between males and females cannot be ignored, partly because they have a direct effect on both fertility and mortality, and because of that they affect the age structure as well.

It is a common assumption, for example, that there are the same numbers of males and females at each age—actually, this is rarely the case. migration, mortal- ity, and fertility operate differently to create inequalities in the ratio of males to females (known as the sex ratio):

sex ratio 5 number of males

number of females 3 100

a sex ratio greater than 100 thus means that there are more males than females, whereas a value of less than 100 indicates there are more females than males. the ratio can obviously be calculated for the entire population or for specific age groups.

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305Chapter 8 The Age Transition

fertility has the most predictable impact on the sex ratio because in virtually every known human society more boys are born than girls. sex ratios at birth are typically between 103 and 110. the United states tends to be on the low end of that range and asian societies tend to be on the high end. India and China, in particular, have high sex ratios that appear to be increasing, not decreasing. It is generally believed that the high sex ratio is indicative of discrimination against girls, both before and after birth. oster (2009) has estimated that sex differences in vaccinations, malnutrition, and treatment when sick can account for about half of the sex ratio imbalance in India, but the recent increases in the sex ratio around the world are due especially to selective abortion, which is now possible because of ultrasound technology that can identify the sex of a fetus (attané and guilmoto 2007). many years ago, Westoff and rindfuss (1974) argued that if these methods ever enjoyed widespread acceptance, there would be a short-run rise in the sex ratio at birth, since a preference for sons as first children (and for more total sons than daughters) is fairly common throughout the world, as discussed in Chapter 6. Indeed, it appears that the highest sex ratios in asia are among third children (guilmoto 2009), suggesting that the motivation to have a boy at this stage of family-building is very strong.

Westoff and rindfuss also concluded that after an initial transition period, the sex ratio at birth would probably revert to the natural level of about 105 males per 100 females, because the disadvantage of too many or too few of either sex would be controlled by a shift to the other sex. China, however, seems to be pushing the envelope on this concept, because it has been wrapped into the one-child policy, which creates an extreme situation when people are having only one child and they prefer that child to be a male. thus, China’s sex ratio at birth is one of, if not the, highest in the world, and there has been a concern raised that too many young men relative to women could lead to increased risks of violence and conflict. “the mas- culinization of asia’s sex ratios in one of the overlooked ‘megatrends’ of our time, a phenomenon that may very likely influence the course of national and perhaps even international politics in the twenty-first century” (hudson and den Boer 2004:4).

despite the concern about the high and even increasing sex ratio in some countries, there is still the underlying question of why the “normal” sex ratio is not simply 100. the answer is that no one really knows (Clarke 2000). this is per- haps a biological adaptation to compensate partially for higher male death rates (or vice versa, since we also are not sure why death rates are higher for males, as I mentioned in Chapter 5). In fact, data on miscarriages and fetal deaths suggest that more males are conceived than females, and that death rates are higher for males from the very moment of conception. thus, some of the variability in the sex ratio at birth could be due to differences in fetal mortality. But we aren’t sure why those differences exist, either. research done as part of the human genome project suggests a role played by the x chromosome, but that is still just a guess (gunter 2005).

despite these societal differences in the sex ratio at birth, there is still a fairly predictable pattern in the sex ratio by age as a population moves through the demo- graphic transition. these patterns are observable in figure 8.3, where I have plotted the sex ratios at each age group for three countries representing different cultural

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306 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

patterns with respect to the sex ratio: ghana, the United states, and China. all three countries show the general pattern that the sex ratio declines with increasing age, but in ghana the sex ratio is lower at birth and the younger ages and then declines a little more slowly than in the other countries because women are dying at a higher rate relative to men than in the other countries. China has the highest sex ratio at birth among these three countries (as among virtually all countries), and that differ- ence is maintained until the older ages.

The Feminization of Old Age

Women live longer than men in almost every human society, which means they disproportionately populate the older ages, as you can see from the three examples in figure 8.3. as recently as 1930 in the United states, there were equal numbers of males and females at age 65 and older (partly a result of the earlier influx of immigrant males) (siegel 1993), but by 2010 there were only 73 males for every 100 females at the older ages. In the United states, the ratio of males to females aged 65–74 declined steeply between 1950 and 1970, leveled off, and has risen a bit since 1980 as men have begun to close the gender gap in life expectancy. Both United nations and U.s. Census Bureau projections assume that life expectancy gains will be greater for males than females (a reversal of historical trends, probably due to the effects of smoking catching up with women, rather than a lot of positive things

100

110

120

M a le

s p

e r

1 0 0 f e m

a le

0– 4

5– 9

10 –1

4 15

–1 9 20

–2 4 25

–2 9 30

–3 4 35

–3 9 40

–4 4 45

–4 9 50

–5 4 55

–5 9 60

–6 4 65

–6 9 70

–7 4 75

–7 9 80

–8 4 85

–8 9 90

–9 4 95

–9 9 10

China Ghana USA

Figure 8.3 Comparing sex ratios by age Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data are estimates for 2015.

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307Chapter 8 The Age Transition

happening to men), and that will help push up the ratio of men to women in this generation as time goes by, changing the social dynamics at older ages.

at age 75 and older, the higher mortality of males really has taken its toll: In 1950, there were 83 males per 100 females at that age in the United states, but this declined to only 54 males per 100 females by the 1990 census, with a rise since then to 62 in 2010. that means that at age 75 and older, nearly two-thirds of the people alive in the United states are women.

the general pattern in the sex ratio at older ages has been similar in Canada and the United states, but the actual level of the sex ratio is consistently higher (albeit not by much) in Canada. this is probably due to the joint effects of immigration (immigrants account for a higher fraction of the Canadian than of the U.s. popula- tion), and the fact that the gender difference in life expectancy has been slightly less in Canada than in the United states. In mexico, the feminization of old age is clearly under way, especially in urban areas where death rates are lowest. projections for mexico suggest that by the year 2025, the ratio of males to females at ages 65–74 in mexico will actually be lower than in the United states, no doubt due in part to the disproportionate loss of males to migration out of mexico and into the United states.

the data for pakistan tell a different story. pakistan is one of several countries in the world where there are still more men than women at the oldest ages (indeed, at every age). this is a result of the lower status of women, which increases their mortality rates compared to men over the entire life course. In 1950 in pakistan, there were 142 men aged 65–74 for every 100 women that age, although by 2015 the ratio had dropped to 103, so there has been considerable improvement. prog- ress has been made on a cohort-by-cohort basis to improve the status of women, and each new group of people moving into the older ages in pakistan is increasingly gender-balanced.

Demographic Drivers of the Age Transition

for most of human history, populations were very young. they had a high pro- portion of people in the younger ages, a modest fraction in the middle adult ages, and very few older people. reaching an advanced age was truly an exceptional cir- cumstance, and it is easy to see why the elderly would be revered and maybe even feared. the demographic transitions have changed all that in complex, but still deci- pherable ways. the end of the demographic transition, if there really is an end, is assumed in the ideal to be a population with essentially the same number of people at each age until the very older ages when people die off fairly quickly, as I dis- cussed in Chapter 5 in the context of the compression of mortality.

In between the historical pattern and this expected future pattern is where it gets messy, and that’s where we are in the world. figure 8.4 illustrates this with exam- ples from four different countries—nigeria, mexico, the United states, and Italy, estimated for 2015. the graphs themselves are called population (or age) pyramids. they are called pyramids because the “classic” picture is of a high-fertility, high-mortality society with a broad base built of numerous births, rapidly taper- ing to the top (the older ages) because of high death rates in combination with

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308 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

the high birth rate. nigeria’s age and sex structure still reflects the classic look of the population pyramids, as you can see in figure 8.4. Until very recently, mexico also looked like that, but the decline in fertility in mexico since the 1970s has nar- rowed the base of the pyramid rather noticeably. a country such as the United states where fertility is still at replacement level has an age and sex distribution that tends toward being rectangular, whereas Italy is somewhat barrel-shaped because of its very low fertility. no matter the shape, we still call the graph a population (or age) pyramid.

A g

e g

ro u p

0–4 5–9

10–14 15–19 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49 50–54 55–59 60–64 65–69 70–74 75–79 80–84 85–89 90–94 95–99 1001

USA

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16141216 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10 Males (millions) Females (millions)

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10.5 1.5 2 2.51 0.51.522.5

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Mexico

67 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 Males (millions) Females (millions)

Figure 8.4 Illustrative population pyramids Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data are estimates for 2015.

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309Chapter 8 The Age Transition

the population pyramids shown in figure 8.4 do not happen by chance. each of the three population processes has predictable impacts on the age structure. I have alluded to them before, but now let me be more systematic, looking at the impact of each population process in the order in which I introduced them to you in the previous chapters.

The Impact of Declining Mortality

mortality declines affect every age and both sexes, but in every society the very youngest and the very oldest ages are most susceptible to death, and in modern soci- eties (where maternal mortality is fairly low), males are more likely than females to die at any given age. as I discussed in Chapter 5, however, the early stages of the health and mortality transition are characterized by bringing communicable dis- eases under control. this tends to affect infants and children more than any other age. as a result, the early drop in mortality increases the proportion of children who survive and thus serves to increase the fraction of the population at the younger ages. furthermore, as I discussed above, the decline in mortality is also apt to affect male children slightly more than females, thus slightly increasing the sex ratio at the younger ages.

We can use data from stable population models to demonstrate the impact on an age structure as life expectancy increases. a stable population is a formal demographic model in which neither the age-specific birth rates nor the age-specific death rates have changed for a long time. thus, a stable population is stable in the sense that the percentages of people at each age and sex do not change over time. a stable population could be growing at a constant rate (that is, the birth rate is higher than the death rate), it could be declining at a constant rate (the birth rate is lower than the death rate), or it could be unchanging (the birth rate equals the death rate). the latter is the case of zero population growth (ZPG), and if this pre- vails, we call it a stationary population. thus, a stationary population is a special case of a stable population—all stationary populations are stable, but not all stable populations are stationary. the life table (discussed in Chapter 5) is one type of stationary population model. for analytical purposes, a stable population is usually assumed to be closed to migration. since 1760, when leonhard euler first devised the idea of a stable population, demographers have used the concept to explore the exact influence of differing levels of mortality and fertility on the age/sex structure. such analyses are possible using a stable population model because it smoothes out those dents and bumps in the age structure created by migration and by shifts in the death rate or the birth rate. thus, if demographers were forced to study only real populations, we would be unable to ferret out all of the kinds of relationships we are interested in.

In this example, we want to see what would happen to a population’s age-sex structure as life expectancy increased from 20 years for females (the premodern era) to 50 years for females (near the lower levels in the world today). note that the life expectancy for males is just a bit lower than for females in each case. In order to see the impact only of mortality, we assume that fertility does not change (remaining

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310 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

at the tfr of 6.2 required for replacement with a life expectancy of 20 years) and that there is no migration. the results are shown in figure 8.5, which has pyramids drawn as line graphs rather than bar graphs to better visualize the overlap of the age patterns.

as mortality declines without any change in fertility, you can see in figure 8.5-a (the top panel) that the age structure actually becomes more pyramidal than it was before, as a result of the greater survivability of children, which means that the younger population is growing faster than the population at the older ages. In fact, as mortality declines, the average age of females in this population drops from 25.5 to 21.8.

though the average age is one way to summarize an age structure, another index commonly used to measure the social and economic impact of different age structures is the dependency ratio—the ratio of the dependent-age population (the young and the old) to the working-age population. the higher this ratio, the more people each potential worker has to support; conversely, the lower it is, the fewer the people dependent on each worker:

dependency ratio 5 spopulation 0214d 1 spopulatiom 651d

population 15264

In the age structure shown in the top panel of figure 8.5, the dependency ratio increases from 0.71 to 0.99 as life expectancy increases from 20 to 50. the percentage of the population under age 15 increases from 36 to 45, whereas the percentage aged 65 and older increases from just under 3 percent to just over 3 percent. and, of course, because of the decline in mortality, this population is now growing much faster than it was before. Indeed, in this example, the con- trol of mortality, unmatched by a drop in fertility, causes the rate of population growth to jump from 0 to 3 percent per year, which implies a population doubling every 23 years.

the age pyramids in figure 8.5-a do not fully capture the impact of the decline in mortality, because careful study of that picture shows that the change in the percentage of the population at each age is not very dramatic, despite the tremendous difference that it makes to have a life expectancy of 50, compared to 20. this is because when mortality levels change, all ages tend to be affected in some way or another, even though some, especially the very young, are affected more than others. It is not so much the change in the percentage at each age that makes the drop in mortality important; rather, it is the differing num- bers and rates of growth by age caused by the absolute increase in population. thus, the bottom panel (B) of figure 8.5 shows the age structure in terms of the absolute number of people rather than the percent at each age. I have assumed that the population began with 100,000 people and then doubled to 200,000, as implied by the rate of growth, as mortality declined. In this view, it is more obvious that there is a huge increase at the younger ages. this is what families and communities have to deal with as mortality declines—a huge increase in the number of young people. It looks like a baby boom, but in reality it’s a survival boom.

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311Chapter 8 The Age Transition

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15 10 5 0 5 10 Percent males at each age Percent females at each age

A. Percent at each age as mortality declines

15 2020

Life exp males 5 18 Life exp females 5 20 Life exp males 5 47 Life exp females 5 50

Figure 8.5 the Impact of a decline in mortality on the age structure early in the health and mortality transition Source: Calculations by the author.

B. Number and rate of growth at each age as mortality declines

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(and annual percent rate of growth) % females at each age (thousands) (and annual percent rate of growth)

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Life exp males 5 18 Life exp females 5 20 Life exp males 5 47 Life exp females 5 50 Male growth rate Female growth rate

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312 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

the broader gray lines show you the average annual rate of increase for each age group, based on the overall growth rate of 3 percent per year. even though the population as a whole may be increasing at a rate of 3 percent, there is consider- able variability age-by-age, as you can see in figure 8.5-B. the rate is highest at the youngest and oldest ages and lowest in the adult ages. It is no coincidence, of course, that the pattern of growth rates by age looks exactly like the pattern of age- specific death rates. In this example, the drop in death rates is the only thing influ- encing population change, so you can see graphically what that means from one age to the next. the high growth rates at the very oldest ages are, of course, building on a very small base of older people.

In the short run, then, a decrease in mortality levels in all but already low- mortality societies will substantially increase the number of young people, and one of the best studies of this effect is by eduardo arriaga (1970) in his analysis of latin american countries. arriaga examined data from 11 countries for which informa- tion was available on the mortality decline from 1930 to the 1960s. he discovered that “of the 27 million people alive in all the eleven countries in the 1960s who would not have been alive if there had not been a mortality decline since the 1930s, 16 million—59 percent—were under 15” (1970:103). In relative terms, a lowering of mortality in latin america noticeably raised the proportion of people at young ages, slightly elevated the proportion at old ages, and lowered the proportion at the middle ages (14–64). however, in absolute terms, the number of people at all ages increased.

declining mortality had an impact similar to that of a rise in fertility, while also making a contribution to higher fertility. the appearance of higher fertility is, of course, produced by the greater proportion of children surviving through each age of childhood. It is as though women were bearing more children, thereby broaden- ing the base of the age structure. the actual contribution to higher fertility is gen- erated by the higher probabilities of women (and their spouses) surviving through the reproductive ages, since under conditions of high mortality, a certain percent- age of women will die before giving birth to as many children as they might have. When death rates go down, a higher percentage of women live to give birth to more children, assuming that social changes are not producing motivations for limiting fertility.

note that the only time a change in mortality generates a change in the percentage of the population at each age is when the mortality shifts are differ- ent at different ages. If there is a change in the probability of survival from one age to the next that is exactly equal for all ages and for both sexes, then the age and sex structure will remain unchanged in percentage terms. on the other hand, in a low-mortality society such as the United states, where the vast majority of all deaths occur at ages 65 or older, a drop in mortality will age the population largely because the death rates are now so low at the younger ages that it is very hard to improve on them. so, at the later stages of the health and mortality transition, con- tinued declines in mortality will age the population, assuming there is no change in fertility or migration. this effect will be relatively small, however, and it is when we turn to the influence of declining fertility that we see the more dramatic drivers of the age transition.

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313Chapter 8 The Age Transition

The Impact of Declining Fertility

Both migration and mortality can affect all ages and differentially affect each sex. however, the impact of fertility is not quite the same as that of mortality or migration, and tends to have the most dramatic long-term impact on the age structure (migration has the biggest short-term impact, as I discuss below). fer- tility obviously adds people only at age zero to begin with, but that effect stays with the population age after age. thus if the birth rate were to drop suddenly in one year, then as those people get older, there will always be fewer of them than there are people of surrounding ages. one example of this is the “lucky few” discussed above. another famous example is what happens during Japan’s Year of “hinoeuma,” the fiery horse, which occurs every 60 years. the last one occurred in 1966 and in that year the birth rate made a sudden one-year dip. according to a widely held Japanese superstition, girls born in the Year of the fiery horse will have troublesome characters, such as a propensity to murder their husbands (no, I’m not making this up!). thus, girls born in that year are hard to marry off, and many couples avoided having children in 1966, creating a permanent dent in the Japanese age structure.

In figure 8.6, I have used stable population models to show how different fer- tility levels can affect the shape of the age structure if everything else is held con- stant. the top panel (a) of figure 8.6 assumes that no migration is occurring. It also assumes that mortality is constant, with a female life expectancy of 40 years, representing a typical population in the world until about 100 years ago, on the verge of the demographic transition. the high fertility level is equivalent to a total fertility rate of 7.1 (about the same as present-day Chad). all other things being equal, a high-fertility, high-mortality society will have a very youthful age distri- bution. Indeed, the average age in this hypothetical population is 22 years, with 44 percent of the population under age 15, and 2 percent 65 or older; the depen- dency ratio is 0.95.

the middle fertility level as shown in figure 8.6 is equivalent to a total fertil- ity rate of 4.3 children per woman (about the same as Iraq). this level of fertility still produces a youthful age structure, although less so than that associated with the higher fertility level. this population has an average age of 30 years, and with 31 percent of the population under age 15 and 6 percent 65 or older, the depen- dency ratio is 0.68. at the low fertility level, we are talking about a total fertility rate of 2.1, which is exact replacement when mortality is low, but at this high mortality level it means that women are not reproducing themselves and the population will soon implode. this population has an average age of 36 years, and only 21 percent of the population is under age 15, while 12 percent is 65 or older; the dependency ratio is 0.61. You can see then that at high fertility levels, the age pyramid is a pyramid; at middle levels, it is still a pyramid, but not so dramatically; and at low fertility levels, the age structure takes on a barrel shape.

now examine the lower panel (B) of figure 8.6, in which the age pyramids represent the same three levels of fertility, but this time they are paired up with a high life expectancy of 80 years for females, representing a population nearing the end of the demographic transition. You can see that despite a doubling of female

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314 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

1001 95–99 90–94 85–89 80–84 75–79 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14

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A. Percent at each age when life expectancy for females is 40 years

5 10 15 205101520 2525

TFR 5 7.1 (males) TFR 5 7.1 (females) TFR 5 4.3 (males) TFR 5 4.3 (females) TFR 5 2.1 (males) TFR 5 2.1 (females)

B. Percent at each age when life expectancy for females is 80 years

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0 5 10 15 205101520 Percent males at each age Percent females at each age

2525

TFR 5 7.1 (males) TFR 5 7.1 (females) TFR 5 4.3 (males) TFR 5 4.3 (females) TFR 5 2.1 (males) TFR 5 2.1 (females)

Figure 8.6 Using stable population models shows that different levels of fertility have dramatically different effects on the age structure Source: Calculations by the author.

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315Chapter 8 The Age Transition

life expectancy, the age structures at each of the three fertility levels are very nearly identical to those in the upper panel of figure 8.6, regardless of mortality level. the only real difference is that at the higher life expectancy, the extremes are more noticeable. at the fertility level of 7.1 children, the average age is 20 and 51 percent of the population is under age 15, while only 3 percent is 65 or older; the depen- dency ratio is a whopping 1.20. this is the kind of age structure that is bound to cause problems for a country and helps to account for the previous high levels of out-migration of young people from parts of asia and the middle east. at the lower level of 4.3 children, the average age is 28 with 36 percent under 15 and 7 percent 65 or older, and a dependency ratio of 0.87. finally, replacement-level fertility produces an average age of 41 with 19 percent of the population under 15 and 20 percent aged 65 or older; the dependency ratio is 0.80.

In general, the impact of fertility levels is so important that with exactly the same level of mortality, just altering the level of fertility can produce age struc- tures that run the gamut from those that might characterize primitive to highly developed populations. the data I have shown you come from stable population models rather than the real world, but they help us know what to look for. for example, let us suppose we are looking at two countries with reasonably high female life expectancies of 77 years (such as algeria and romania). however, one country (algeria) still has higher than average fertility—a total fertility rate (tfr) of 3.0 in 2013—whereas the other has very low fertility (a tfr of only 1.4 in 2013). the respective age distributions of these two nations are already very different, because algeria has had high fertility for a long time, whereas romania has had low fertility for some time now. In algeria, 28 percent of the popula- tion was under age 15 in 2013, compared with only 15 percent of the romanian population. By contrast, in algeria, only 6 percent of the population was 65 or older, compared to 15 percent in romania. What you now know, however, is that when fertility drops in algeria to below replacement level, such as it currently is in romania, the age structure will automatically assume the barrel shape that cur- rently characterizes romania, its average age will rise, and the young will decline as a fraction of the total, while the old increase as a fraction. this is the age transi- tion at work in conjunction with the fertility transition component of the demo- graphic transition.

Where Does Migration Fit In?

a population experiencing net in- or out-migration (and virtually all populations except the world as a whole experience one or the other) will almost certainly have its age and sex structure altered as a consequence. since immigration has been espe- cially important in the United states, it provides a good beginning for our analysis. We can assess the potential impact of international migrants into the United states by looking at the age and sex distribution of legal permanent immigrants into the country in 2012 as compiled by the U.s. department of homeland security (2014). You can see in figure 8.7 that men outnumber women only at the youngest ages, and then, from age 25 on, there are more female than male legal immigrants at each

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316 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

age. however, the most significant part of the picture is that both male and female migrants are most likely to be younger adults.

estimates of the undocumented immigrants entering the United states sug- gest that there are fewer younger and older people who enter without inspection than is true among legal immigrants, and that males are a much higher fraction of undocumented than of legal immigrants (passel and Cohn 2009; Weeks et al. 2011). remember, too, that in the United states there are many more in-migrants than out- migrants, but out-migrants are generally older than in-migrants, so that could have at least a small impact on the age structure.

In the short run, immigration adds people directly into the young adult ages, in particular, in the host area, and of course those people have been taken out of the age structure in the donor area. In the long run, the impact of migra- tion is also felt indirectly through its influence on reproduction, because these young adult immigrants are of prime reproductive ages. for example, it is esti- mated that there were 197,000 legal immigrants to the state of California dur- ing 2012 (California department of finance 2013), but these people represented less than one percent of the total population of California (38 million) in that year. so, the arrival of immigrants in any given year is nearly undetectable in California’s overall demographic structure. on the other hand, the american Community survey data show that 25 percent of California’s population was foreign-born in 2010 (higher than in Canada) and half of them were of repro- ductive age. It is therefore not too surprising to see that among 510,000 births in California in 2010 (the most recent date available as of this writing), 41 percent were to women born outside the United states (California department of public health 2014).

having discussed the way in which the age and sex structure is built on the foundation of mortality, fertility, and migration rates, it is time now to see how the changing age structure influences life in human societies.

0–4 5–9

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80 8070 7060 6050 5040 4030 3020 2010 100 Males (thousands)

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Figure 8.7 the age structure of legal Immigrants to the United states Source: adapted from data in U.s. department of homeland security (2014): table 8.

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317Chapter 8 The Age Transition

Age Transitions at Work

the dynamics of the age and sex structure translate all demographic changes into a force to be reckoned with. a high birth rate does not simply mean more people: It means more kids entering school in a few years; more new job hopefuls and college freshmen 18 years down the road. at the other end of the spectrum, the very low birth rates in europe and east asia, for example, do not imply just that there will be fewer people in the future: they mean that schools will be closing, jobs will go begging, busi- nesses will close, houses will be vacant, and life will be very different than it once was.

The Progression from a Young to an Old Age Structure

at the beginning of the demographic transition, every population had a young age structure with a characteristic pyramidal shape, as shown earlier in panel a of figure 8.6, or as exemplified even now by nigeria, as shown in figure 8.4. If the end of the demographic transition is associated with homeostasis (a stationary population), every population will have an old age structure, with a characteristic barrel shape, as shown in panel B of figure 8.6. In between those extremes, the age structure will undergo a period of time when it caves in at the younger ages as fertil- ity declines, and there will be a bulge in the younger adult ages. Indeed, as I noted in Chapter 3, it may be that there will be no real end to the demographic transition—it will continue to evolve in new cycles of change, especially of fertility and migration, to which society must constantly adapt.

Youth Bulge—Dead End or Dividend?

I mentioned youth bulges in Chapter 1 as a potentially incendiary demographic phe- nomenon, especially today in the middle east. the size and timing of such bulges— of which there are many in the world today—along with society’s response to them, will help tell the tale of how dramatic the changes are in the context of the age tran- sition and whether those changes will be used for good or evil. the “good” reaction relates especially to the use of the young population to spur economic development and lift people out of poverty. the “evil” reaction relates to the use of young people to promote violence and terrorism.

a quick drop in fertility that occurs early in the mortality transition has the most dramatic and potentially positive impact on a society, increasing the economic productivity of the adult population, with few children to deal with and also few older people to worry about. a slower transition to an older age, though socially and economically less disruptive than a very sudden change, may not be as con- ducive to the kind of positive evolutionary change a struggling economy needs in the face of the population growth that ensues as mortality declines and the demo- graphic transition takes hold.

edward Crenshaw and his associates (1997) examined the pattern of age- specific growth rates and economic development for the period 1965–90 and

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318 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

concluded that an increase in the child population (the impact of declining mortal- ity in a high-fertility society) did indeed hinder economic progress in less devel- oped nations. on the other hand, an increase in the adult population relative to other ages (the delayed effect of a decline in fertility) fosters economic development, producing what they call a “demographic windfall effect whereby the demographic transition allows a massive, one-time boost in economic development as rapid labor force growth occurs in the absence of burgeoning youth dependency” (p. 974). the demographic “windfall” has also been called the “demographic dividend” (Bloom et al. 2003), the “demographic bonus” and the “window of opportunity” (adioetomo et al. 2005), and China has been the poster child.

China’s Demographic Dividend

In 1960, China had a population of 650 million, plagued by high mortality (a life expectancy around 45 years) and high fertility (a total fertility rate of more than five children per woman), although fertility was starting to decline, as you know from Chapter 6. Its age structure exhibited the classic pyramidal shape, reflecting a high proportion of the population in the very young ages, as you can see in figure 8.8. By 2000, China had transformed itself. Its population had doubled to 1.3 billion, due especially to declining mortality, but fertility had also declined dramatically. most noteworthy about the age structure in 2000 was the big bulge in the young adult ages, combined with the still small number of older people and the small num- ber of young children.

Figure 8.8 China’s demographic dividend Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data for 2040 are from the medium projections.

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319Chapter 8 The Age Transition

Figure 8.8 (continued)

the bulge at ages 10–14 in 2000 was due to the births to the huge cohort of women born just before the big fertility decline in China—the births that prompted the one-Child policy in 1979, and who were in their prime repro- ductive ages in 2000. overall, though, this was a very good age structure for an economy trying to take off, because it was loaded with people of working age, and was not burdened by a lot of old and young people. this was the age

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320 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

structure that helped accelerate the economic reforms that created the east asian economic miracle, not only in China, but also in taiwan and south korea, fol- lowing the experience of Japan which had enjoyed an earlier such demographic dividend.

all good things must come to an end, however, and the demographic momentum of the age transition in China will increasingly act as a brake on economic growth in that country. this is certainly one of the reasons why the Japanese economy has been in the doldrums for a long time, but Japan grew rich before it grew old, whereas China probably will not. the Chinese gov- ernment knows this and understands that it needs to maximize its advantage from this window of opportunity provided by the age transition, which helps to explain the aggressiveness with which China is pursuing its current global economic expansion.

the United nations projects that by 2040 the population of China will have peaked at about 1.4 billion and will be on the verge of decline. By this time, the bulge in the age structure will have moved into the middle adult ages, where productivity gains may be less than at the younger ages, but where con- sumption patterns tend to peak (see figure 8.8). overall, by 2040 the popula- tion of China will be heavily weighted toward the older ages and the country will face important policy issues arising from a rapidly aging population. China is already facing internal pressures to increase the birth rate in order to create a pool of new workers whose infusion of resources into the population at younger ages will keep the economy growing and will help to support the older population. as I noted in Chapter 6, the government has taken steps to relax the one-child policy a bit, and in 2014 it began an effort to raise the average age at retirement.

What Happened to India’s Demographic Dividend?

In 1960 India had a population of 448 million, and by 2040 the United nations projects that it will have nearly 1.6 billion—more people than China. In between, however, it has not experienced the same kind of demographic windfall that has helped catapult China to economic power. an important difference, of course, is that India’s fertility decline has been much more gradual than China’s, so its age structure has not delivered that “tipping point” into rapid economic change. a con- venient way to compare the age transitions in India and China is by examining the differing rates of growth at each age. In figure 8.9, I provide an illustration of these kinds of comparisons, contrasting the changes in age structure in China and India during the critical period between 1980 and 2000 when China was taking off and India was not.

during that 20-year interval, the average income per person in China went from $311 per year to $932 per year—a 200 percent increase; whereas in India it went from $264 to $449—a 70 percent increase (United nations statis- tics division 2014). Income changes such as this are normally an indicator of increases in per-person productivity in the labor force, and this is enhanced by

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321Chapter 8 The Age Transition

favorable changes in the age structure. In figure 8.9, you can see that between 1980 and 2000, the rate of growth in the youngest ages in China was negative, whereas it was positive in India. there were actually fewer people each year at ages under 20 in China during this period. In India, by contrast, each of those age groups was increasing by 1–2 percent each year. It was true in India that the rate of growth was lower at the younger ages than at the older ages, reflecting the slow decline in fertility, but there was no demographic windfall as there was in China from the delayed effect of that country’s rapid drop in fertility during the 1960s and 1970s. these differences in age structure are important reasons why by 2012 the average per person income in China had increased to $6,070 (an 1,848 percent increase over 1980), compared to only $1,516 in India (a 474 percent increase over 1980). to be sure, China’s economic success also depended on other things, such as educating its younger population and implementing a governmen- tally-sponsored program of capitalism. But in the absence of the demographic dividend, those efforts would not have generated the kind of growth in income that China has experienced.

In both countries, you can see that the highest rates of growth are occurring at ages 80 and above. this is the result of the improved survival in each successive cohort and is the signal that increased old-age dependency will be an issue for both countries over the next few decades. China, with its improving income and declin- ing number of children, will be in the better position to deal with that.

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Figure 8.9 Comparison of the annual rates of growth by age group in India and China, 1980 to 2000 Source: Calculated from data in United nations population division (2013)

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322 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

Demographic Dividends in the United States and Mexico

the United states also had a youth bulge in the 1960s, as you well know. the U.s. population was 186 million people in 1960, and the age structure for that year is noticeable for the effect of the baby boom generation at the younger ages, as seen in figure 8.10, where I have graphed the age distribution for the total population, rather than as an age pyramid (simply to make the comparisons more obvious). of course, another way of viewing the age distribution in 1960 is to see the baby boom as the continuation of trends that existed prior to the depression, and to view the low fertility of the depression as an aberration, rather than thinking of the baby boom as the aberrant case. seen in this way, the United states in 1960 had a clear pyramidal age structure with a heavy burden coming from the young population. Between 1960 and 2000, the population grew from 186 million to 288 million, but fertility levels declined significantly (even if not as dramatically as in China)—the total fertility rate dropping from 3.6 children per woman in 1960 down to 2.0 chil- dren per woman in 2000, where it has stayed since then.

Just as I noted above for China, the rapid drop in fertility produced a demographic windfall in the age structure that coincided nicely with the economic expansion of the 1990s and the first half decade of the twenty-first century. the U.s. age structure in 2000 bulged at the young adult ages, without the burden of huge numbers of either older or younger people. the picture for 2040 in the United states, however, is not quite like that for China. China’s age structure begins to cave

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Figure 8.10 the age transition in the United states Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data for 2040 are from the medium projections.

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323Chapter 8 The Age Transition

in at the young ages from the continuation of very low fertility, but the U.s. popula- tion begins to straighten out a bit. even though the U.s. population is expected to increase to 383 million and the big bulge in the age structure will be transitioning toward the older, higher-consuming years, the number of younger people will be leveling off, rather than declining as in China. this is due to continued immigration into the United states and, as noted above, to the children of those immigrants.

many of those current and future immigrants to the United states will be from mexico. In 1960, mexico had 39 million people and a classic pyramidal age struc- ture, and fertility in mexico was higher that year than in either the United states or China (see figure 8.11). mortality has been steadily declining over time in mexico, and since the mid-1970s so has fertility, as I discussed in Chapter 6. You can see in the graph for mexico that by 2000, the younger ages had been truncated by the fertility decline. But you can also see that the slowness of the fertility decline and its more recent start in mexico than in either China or the United states meant that there was no bulge of population in the young adult ages—no demographic wind- fall to spur on an economy that was trying hard to grow but was being weighed down by the demographic burden of its youth bulge.

United nations projections for the year 2040 in mexico suggest that fertil- ity will continue its slow drop, and mexico will transition gradually to an older, barrel-shaped age structure, never having experienced the windfall that comes with a rapid drop in fertility. thus, mexico’s economy will likely never receive the boost that the age structure provided at the end of the twentieth century for both China

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Figure 8.11 the age transition in mexico Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data for 2040 are from the medium projections.

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324 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

and the United states. mexico’s muddling toward low fertility has deprived it of a golden chance to use the age dividend to leap ahead economically.

Population Aging as Part of the Age Transition

the natural consequence of the demographic transition is for the population to age—for there to be both higher numbers of older people (due to a decline in mor- tality) and a greater fraction of the population that is older (due to a decline in fertility). population aging produces changes in the organization of society that are partly the result of the process of individual aging. people change biologically with age and societies react differently to older than to younger people, generating the social changes that we see accompanying population aging.

I have outlined these concepts in figure 8.12, where I point out that the nature of the social changes will depend partly on the social context, including aspects of society such as cohort-specific historical events that have affected different cohorts throughout the life course, but also societal levels of sexism, ageism, and racism. the impact of population aging will also differ according to the proportion of peo- ple who are young-old (the “third” age of life—in which the impact of aging on society is more social), compared with the proportion who are old-old (the “fourth” age of life—in which society must cope more with the individual biological aspects of aging).

What Is Old?

an aging population doesn’t mean that everyone is old. It really only means that the average age of the population is getting older. But the end game here is a popula- tion that includes a lot more older people than ever before in human history, and it is this fact that attracts our attention. old age as we usually think of it is a social

Population aging Increase in number of

older people, caused by a decline in mortality

Increase in proportion of older people, caused by a decline in fertility, in combination with migration (especially urbanization)

Individual aging Physiological changes

with age Social aspect of aging

- age-graded activities - stereotyping of

older people - status of older people

Social context of aging Cohort-specific

historical events and demographic characteristics

Sexism Ageism Racism

The sex and age structure of the older population

Third Age Retirement, income,

and resources Ethnic differences Living arrangements

and family relationships

Fourth Age Disease Disability Death

Social impact of population aging

Physical dependency

Economic dependency

Control of societal resources

Figure 8.12 population aging and Individual aging Combine to produce Change in society

en ga

ge L

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325Chapter 8 The Age Transition

construct—something we talk about, define, and redefine on the basis of social cat- egories, not purely biological ones. a good way to visualize this concept is to con- template satchel paige’s famous question: “how old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you was?”, which illustrates the point that age takes on its meaning from our interaction with other people in the social world. If we are defined by oth- ers as being old, we may be treated like an old person regardless of our own feelings about whether or not we are, in fact, old.

We humans depend heavily on visual clues to assess the age of other people, and we learn quickly that there are certain kinds of outward physical changes typi- cally associated with aging—graying hair, wrinkling skin, muscle tone decline, and the changing body shape caused by the redistribution of fat. these are taken as signs of physical decline, and it is fair to say that most of us are, at best, ambiva- lent about the aging process—an attitude that is itself probably as old as human society (Warren 1998). In what might be thought of as a form of denial, research has shown that americans are more prone than germans, for example, to think of themselves as being younger than their biological age and that the discrepancy increases with age, especially among healthier older people (Westerhof et al. 2003). there is even a commercial website—www.realage.com—devoted to this concept.

among women, the physical symptoms of aging may be associated with the end of reproduction. Indeed, humans are among the few species that have a substan- tial post-reproductive existence (albert and Cattell 1994). still, these changes do not follow a rigid time schedule, and some can be successfully hidden or disguised (think of dyed hair, hair implants, Botox injections, face lifts, and liposuction).

In general, then, there is no inherent chronological threshold to old age. despite this, in the United states and much of the world, old age has come to be defined as beginning at age 65. the number 65 assumes its almost mystical quality in the United states because that is the age at which important government- funded benefits such as social security (at least until recently) and medicare become fully available. In 1935, when the present social security benefits were designed in the United states, the eligibility age was set at 65, “more because of custom than deliberate design. that age had become the normal retirement age under the few american pension plans then in existence and under the social insurance system in germany” (viscusi 1979:96). keep in mind, however, that Congress has increased the flexibility of the social security system over time. for example, every person not yet 65 at the time you read this will have to be older than 65 to get “full” social security benefits. If you were born in 1960 or more recently, you cannot start collecting full social security until age 67. everybody can start collecting as young as age 62, but your benefit will be permanently reduced. on the other hand, if you wait until after your “full” retirement age, your benefit will be permanently higher. despite this tweaking of the system, we still think of 65 as somehow magical with respect to old age. remember, though, that the number is arbitrary, and people obviously will not fit neatly into any senior citizen mold on reaching their sixty-fifth birthday. In fact, most people in low-mortality societies do not think of themselves as being old until well beyond that age, whereas most people in high-mortality societies would probably think of themselves as old well before age 65.

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326 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

WHO WILL PAY FOR BABY BOOMERS TO RETIRE IN THE RICHER COUNTRIES?

In industrialized societies, old age is now stereotypically a time of retirement from labor force activity. Indeed, when the Social Security Act was passed in the United States in the middle of the Great Depression in the 1930s, it was designed quite literally to encourage people to leave the labor force. At the time, the idea was to remove older workers from the workforce in order to replace them with younger workers and thus lower the rate of unemployment among younger people. Most companies and government entities alike then turned age 65 into a mandatory age of retirement, forcing people out of the labor force whether or not they wanted to retire. People became increas- ingly interested in retiring before reaching age 65 if they could afford to do so, and the U.S. Congress facilitated this in the 1950s and 1960s by allowing reduced Social Security benefits to be available at age 62, which has been a popular option ever since.

In the 1950s the average man in the United States was almost 69 years old when he retired. By 2000, that had dropped down close to 62 (Gendell 2001), and it has stayed there since, but with a new wrinkle. In 1983, amendments to the Social Security law raised the age at which full retirement was avail- able, beginning with the baby boomers, and at the same time it reduced the percentage of the full retire- ment check that early retirees could receive. Thus far, however, it appears that some people are gaming the system by applying for disability, rather than retire- ment, because the disability benefits were not cut (Duggan et al. 2007). People are retiring earlier than they used to, but living longer. Can we afford that?

Back in 1935, when President Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security was putting the finishing touches on the Social Security legisla- tion in the United States, two committee members met to discuss the projections that had been made for Social Security expenditures for 1935 through 1980. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Harry Hopkins, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, were aware of possible prob- lems ahead, as is evidenced by their comments at the meeting (quoted in Graebner 1980:256):

Hopkins: Well, there are going to be twice as many old people thirty years from now, Henry, than there are now.

Morgenthau: Well, I’ve gotten a very good analysis of this thing . . . and I want to show them [other members of the committee] the bad curves.

Hopkins: That old age thing is a bad curve.

That “bad curve” referred to the ratio of work- ers to retirees, which, although quite favorable in the early years of Social Security, could be fore- seen to worsen over the years as the small birth cohorts of the early 1930s tried to support the numerically larger older cohorts. Despite the fact that reference is often made to the term “trust fund,” you are probably aware that old age Social Security systems in most countries, including the United States, were never designed to have the government actually deposit money in an account with your name on it and have the money accrue principal and interest until you retire and start withdrawing your pension. Rather, almost every system is “pay as you go” (PAYGO)—current benefits are paid from current revenue. The age curve looked bad in 1935, but in truth it has turned out to be even worse than expected in all of the wealthier countries of the world: Life expectancy has increased, and then the unexpected baby boom in Europe and North America has injected large cohorts that will soon have to be dealt with in retirement (but that, in the meantime, have helped delay the funding crisis because of their mem- bers’ payroll tax contributions). On top of all that, the U.S. Congress considerably expanded Social Security coverage and raised benefits after the legislation was passed in 1935.

The demographic impact on the U.S. Social Security system was felt keenly through the 1980s as the older population grew more rapidly than the number of younger workers. In 1990, for example, there were 10 percent more people aged 60 to 69 (people moving into retirement) in the United States than in 1980, yet there were 3 percent fewer people aged 20 to 29 (people moving into the labor force). These changes, of course, had been projected for some time, and in the mid-1970s (and again in the 1980s), Congress made adjustments to increase payroll taxes and cut back on the annual allow- able increase in Social Security payments. These measures (along with a little borrowing from the

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327Chapter 8 The Age Transition

disability and Medicare trust funds) allowed the system to survive the 1980s and early 1990s. The late 1990s saw a hiatus in the Social Security cri- sis because of the slowdown in the increase of new retirees as the Depression-era cohorts (the “lucky few”) reached old age. For example, between 1990 and 2000, the number of people aged 60 to 69 in the United States declined by 6 percent. This eased the pressure of expenditures while revenues rose— the calm before a storm that promises to bring rain for the foreseeable future.

The baby boomers are now starting to retire in large numbers, and as you know, they repre- sent a far larger older population than ever before in American history. The confluence of this demo- graphic phenomenon and a bad economy meant that beginning in 2010 Social Security starting pay- ing out more than it brought in, and under current tax and benefit policies there is no end in sight to this deficit, even with an improved economy (Social Security Administration 2014).

As we look at the huge influx of baby boom retirees, we need to keep in mind that when the baby boomers were younger, Congress felt gen- erous about retirement benefits because the baby boom cohort was supplying an influx of new workers to pay taxes, and inflation was shower- ing Social Security with unexpected revenue. In 1972, Congress boosted retirement benefits by 20 percent and built in an automatic adjustment to keep benefits increasing each year along with inflation. Back in the early 1980s, Robert Myers, former chief actuary of the Social Secu- rity Administration, worried that Congress would use the growing surplus of the 1990s to increase benefits, lower taxes, or pay off the national debt. Such a course of action could be disastrous, he felt, because around 2010, the baby boom gen- eration would really crunch the pension system. In fact, in 2001, the surplus was used to lower taxes. Will that result in disaster? Quite pos- sibly. Between the years 2000 and 2010, there was nearly a 50 percent increase in the popu- lation aged 60 to 69—an unprecedented rise in the number of people who might be retiring—and this increase will continue until 2030.

In the 1960s, there were nearly four workers for every Social Security retiree, but by 2030 that

will have dropped to only two. The burden on the younger generation will obviously be intense. As a result, there may be considerable pressure on the elderly to be more self-sufficient—not only to work longer (retire later) but also to become involved in mutual self-help organizations that could relieve some of the burden on public agen- cies. It is ironic indeed that the Social Security system, which was designed in large part to encourage older people to leave the workforce, may in the future be bailed out because people stay in the labor force longer.

Congress has already thought of this, of course, and, as I mention in this chapter, people born after 1959 in the United States will have to wait until age 67 before receiving full Social Secu- rity benefits. (They will still be able to retire as early as age 62, but only at a lower benefit level than currently prevails.) Another hedge is for the economy to grow fairly rapidly in the decade that the baby boom generation reaches retirement age. The kind of structural mobility (when every- one’s economic situation is improving) that has typically accompanied rapid economic growth in the United States would make the transfer of money from the younger to the older generation a little less painful.

The experience of countries such as the United States has pushed less developed coun- tries to think of different ways of attempting to finance retirement for their own aging popula- tions. The model popularized in the 1990s was the “Chile” model, crafted for that country by econ- omists trained at the University of Chicago. The concept is that people must save for their own retirement, but they must be forced to do so by the government (or else the temptation is to spend the money on other things), while at the same time having a reasonably low level of risk of losing their money. In Chile (and now in many other countries as well), workers are required to put a certain fraction of their earnings into a governmentally regulated (but privately managed) set of mutual funds. The savings provide a pool of investment funds that is supposed to help the national econ- omy develop, thus ensuring that the workers will have a nice pension benefit when they retire. The program in Chile has fallen somewhat short of

(continued)

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328 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

covering everyone that was intended to be cov- ered, forcing the government in 2010 to increase its subsidy of the program (James et al. 2010). And, of course, the Great Recession has served as a cautionary tale about relying too heavily on private investment instead of the largesse of taxpayers.

Part of the problem in the United States and in most European nations is that people are already paying Social Security taxes, so if they are allowed to lower their tax payment to invest in the stock market, the Social Security system will be even worse off in the future. The only real way to implement a system of this kind is to force one generation of workers to pay double, to keep pay- ing taxes to finance Social Security payments to the currently retired population while at the same time saving more money than ever before for their own retirement. Very few politicians are willing to propose this to voters, yet something will have to give (National Research Council 2012). Bear in mind that, as critical as the situation is in the United States, it is even worse in most European nations. Throughout Europe, the benefit levels for retirees are higher than in the United States, while the retirement age is younger, and the more rapid drop in fertility has created an even greater imbal- ance between workers and retirees. It is indeed a bad curve.

Europeans are now facing up to the fact that the bad curve can be dealt with only by making some fundamental changes in society. Proposals for “replacement migration,” which would bring in younger people from other countries to fill in the

gaps created by the European baby bust, would not necessarily solve the problem in the long run unless it could be guaranteed that they were going to have above replacement level fertility (United Nations 2000). In the short term, even the current smaller numbers of immigrants have cre- ated political issues for societies trying to cope with the inevitable cultural differences between older Europeans and younger immigrants who, by and large, are not from Europe. The fundamental changes now being discussed in Europe include especially the ideas that (1) workers are going to have to stay in the labor force longer, although this wouldn’t necessarily imply a shorter retirement if, for example, retirement age increased in tandem with increases in life expectancy; (2) an even larger fraction of women in the labor force would help to increase the number of people paying into the system; (3) reducing unemployment among young people will get them into the labor force and paying into the system; (4) increasing produc- tivity per person could raise wages and thus the payments into the system; and (5) pension plans will have to be restructured (Nyce and Schreiber 2005). And why do we have to think about all of these societal changes? The answer is simple: The age transition has forced us into it.

Discussion Questions: (1) Explain how a pay as you go system is affected both positively and negatively by the changing age structure; (2) One solution to the problem of dependency in old age would be to give up on the concept of retirement— would you be in favor of that or oppose it? Explain your answer.

WHO WILL PAY FOR BABY BOOMERS TO RETIRE IN THE RICHER COUNTRIES? (CONTINUED)

How Many Older People Are There?

there are currently more than 600 million people in the world aged 65 and older, according to United nations estimates (United nations population division 2013). If they all lived together under one flag, they would represent the third largest nation in the world. as a fraction of the total world population, the older popula- tion accounts for 8 percent, but this percentage varies considerably from one part of the world to another, as is illustrated in figure 8.1 at the beginning of the chapter. for example, only about 17 percent of the total population of the world lives in

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329Chapter 8 The Age Transition

the more developed nations, yet 36 percent of the world’s population aged 65 or older is there, accounting for 18 percent of the total population of these wealthier countries. still, that leaves the other 64 percent of people in the world aged 65 and older living in developing countries, even though the older generation represents only 6 percent of those populations.

since the end of World War II the fraction of the world population aged 65 and older has increased uninterruptedly. however, in the less developed nations, the percentage aged 65 and older actually went down between 1950 and 1970 before starting a sustained rise in 1980. In the period right after World War II, the death rate was declining, but the birth rate was not, and, as I have mentioned before, the earlier declines in the death rate tend to favor the young, so that had the early effect of increasing the youthful population at the proportionate expense of the elderly. In 1950, only 5 percent of the world’s population was aged 65 and older, and by 2000 that had climbed a bit to 7 percent. however, that was the lull before the storm, since the huge batch of babies born all over the world after World War II is now moving into the older ages. By 2025 the percentage aged 65 and over is projected to rise to 10 percent, and then by 2050 it may be up to 16 percent. By that time it is anticipated that there will be 1.5 billion older people in the world—more than the entire current population of China.

Where Are the Older Populations?

You can perhaps appreciate the fact that there are different answers to two seem- ingly similar questions, one dealing with the percentage of the population that is old, and the other dealing with the absolute number of older people. If the question is: “Where are the nations that have the highest percentage of older people?” then we point to the richer countries, especially those in europe, for the answer. as of the year 2015, it is estimated that 17 percent of europe’s population was 65 and older, and it is projected that by 2050 the number will rise to 27 percent. north america and oceania were both in the double digits by 2015, and by 2050 we can expect that at least 10 percent of the population in every region of the world except sub-saharan africa will be aged 65 and older.

I noted earlier in the chapter that declining mortality will always lead, eventu- ally, to an increase in the number of older people, but the percentage age 65 and older will only increase noticeably if fertility declines. In table 8.2, I have calculated the percentage of the population that would be aged 65 and older if a population maintained over time the various combinations of mortality and fertility that I have shown in the table. for example, a country whose life expectancy was only 30 years would have 3.9 percent of the population aged 65 and older if the total fertility rate (tfr) were five children per woman, and it would drop to 2.8 percent if the tfr went up to six (note that at a tfr of four or below, the country would be depopulating, so the percentage aged 65 and older would be temporarily high until everybody died off).

let us stay focused for the moment on the total fertility rate of five children. You can see that as life expectancy increases from 30 to 60 years, the percentage

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330 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

aged 65 and older actually goes down slightly. this happened in mexico, where mortality was declining between 1950 and 1970, but fertility had not begun to decline, so the older population was declining as a percentage of the total popula- tion. however, you can also see in table 8.2 that, as mortality continues to decline, eventually it gets low enough that the percentage representing the elderly begins to increase even if fertility does not change. of course, a population with a life expec- tancy of 75 years and a total fertility rate of five children would be doubling in size every 20 years, and the number of older people eventually would be very large, even if they represented only 4 percent of the total.

If you look at any given level of life expectancy in table 8.2, you can see clearly that at each lower level of fertility, the percentage of the population aged 65 and older is higher. now, finally, if you go down the diagonal of this table from the top right (low life expectancy and high fertility) to the bottom left (high life expectancy and low fertility), you can trace the typical path of the percentage aged 65 and older as a country passes through the demographic transition.

a high proportion of the population in the older ages thus means that we are talking about a low-fertility society, most of which are the richer ones in the world today. If, however, the question is, “Where are the people who are 65 and older?”, we point to the less developed countries. this is a result of where the world is with respect to the age transition. even though europe currently has more than 100 million older people, eastern asia (especially China, Japan, and south korea) had a combined total that is considerably higher than europe’s. By 2050, when europe’s older population could be approaching 200 million, there are projected to be more than 400 million in eastern asia, and more than 300 million in south Central asia (which includes India).

If we look at the older population in individual countries instead of regions, you can see in table 8.3 the estimates for the year 2015 of the population (both percentage and absolute number) aged 65 and older. looking at the percentage of the population aged 65 and older as the index to an older population, only one of

Total Fertility Rate (TFR)

life expectancy at Birth 2 3 4 5 6

30 a a a 3.9 2.8 40 a a 5.6 3.8 2.7 50 a 8.8 5.5 3.7 2.6 60 15.0 8.8 5.4 3.6 2.5 70 16.5 9.2 5.7 3.7 2.6 75 18.0 9.9 6.1 4.0 2.8

Source: data are based on Coale–demeny “West” stable population models. ano calculation made because this represents a situation of depopulation.

Table 8.2 the percentage of the population 65 and older Is determined more by fertility than by mortality

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331Chapter 8 The Age Transition

the top ten countries—Japan—was not in europe. You can see that the list is led by Japan (26 percent), followed by Italy (22 percent), and germany (21 percent). the United states, by the way, is way down on this list, with “only” 15 percent of its population aged 65 and older, as you can see in the bottom panel of table 8.3. When it comes to the total number of people aged 65 and older, the top 10 list looks more like the list you have seen earlier in terms of total population size: China had the largest number of older people as of 2015, followed by India and the United states. only four countries show up on both of the top ten lists: Japan, germany, Italy, and france.

Top 10 Countries in Terms of Percentage Aged 65 and Older:

rank Country number 651 (thousands) percent 651

1 Japan 33,533 26.4 2 Italy 13,292 21.7 3 germany 17,706 21.4 4 finland 1,112 20.4 5 greece 2,251 20.2 6 sweden 1,935 20.0 7 Bulgaria 1,414 19.9 8 portugal 2,055 19.4 9 Croatia 808 19.0 10 france 12,171 18.7

Top 10 Countries in Terms of Number of People Aged 65 and Older:

rank Country number 651 (thousands) percent 651

1 China 132,457 9.5 2 India 70,059 5.5 3 United states 47,692 14.7 4 Japan 33,533 26.4 5 russia 18,762 13.2 6 germany 17,706 21.4 7 Brazil 16,330 8.0 8 Indonesia 13,875 5.4 9 Italy 13,292 21.7 10 france 12,171 18.7

Source: adapted from United nations population division (2013); data are based on medium projections.

Table 8.3 the top ten Countries in terms of percentage aged 65 and older and in terms of number of people aged 65 and older as of 2015

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332 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

If we zoom in on data within individual countries, we typically find spatial con- centrations of the elderly in different parts of a country. Within the United states, for example, the state of florida exceeds all others in its percentage of the popula- tion that is 65 or older (18 percent), according to the 2010 census, followed by pennsylvania (16 percent), West virginia (15 percent), and Iowa (15 percent). at the other extreme, the states with the lowest percentage of people aged 65 and older are, in order, alaska, Utah, georgia, Colorado, and texas. Canada’s provinces are much less variable than the states in the United states, but nova scotia and new Brunswick lead with 16 percent of the population aged 65 or older, according to the 2011 census, with all of the other provinces except alberta close behind. Canada’s territories, however, which are populated especially by indigenous groups, have much lower fractions of older people, with nunavut having the lowest at 3 percent.

the comparison of U.s. states with Canadian provinces is interesting because florida has the highest percentage aged 65 and older largely as a result of the in- migration of retirees. By contrast, most of the other U.s. states with a high percent- age of older people, as with nova scotia and new Brunswick in Canada, have the high percentage largely as a result of the out-migration of young adults to other parts of their respective countries. In mexico, we find from the 2010 census data that for the country as a whole, less than 7 percent of the population was 65 and older, with minimal variability among the states. mexico City (distrito federal) was highest at just under 9 percent, followed by oaxaca, Zacatecas, veracruz, michoacán, nayarit, and morelos all tied at 8 percent. the lowest was in Quintana roo (3 percent), a state with a young historically mayan-origin population, but most famous for its resort town of Cancún.

The Third Age (Young-Old) and Fourth Age (Old-Old)

throughout most of human history, and still today in many less developed societ- ies, old age was implicitly that age at which a person could no longer make a full economic contribution to the household economy due to one or more disabilities that would eventually (and sooner rather than later, in most cases) lead to death. the same wealth in the modern world that has lowered death rates has also made it possible to separate the decline in economic productivity from a decline in physical functioning.

since you are reading this book, you are probably one of the lucky humans liv- ing in a place and time (e.g., twenty-first-century america) when you can take for granted both a long life and a comfortable income. You have grown up expecting, and almost certainly looking forward to, a time interval between the end of your work career and death—a time of leisurely retirement. this is a very recent inven- tion. less than one hundred years ago, the older population in the United states was concentrated in the ages 65–74. high mortality meant that people at that age were pretty close to death, and most worked for as long as they were physically able. as health has improved and mortality has declined, a greater fraction of people have survived into older ages, thus creating a new period between the traditional entrance into old age (approximately age 65, as I discussed above) and the time when death

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333Chapter 8 The Age Transition

begins to stalk us. We have taken advantage of this in society and have been able to act on the old adage that “youth is wasted on the young” by giving ourselves a youth-like carefree period toward the end of life. this is the so-called third age (laslett 1991), a time when we are still healthy enough to engage in all of the nor- mal activities of daily life, but are able to be free of regular economic activity.

We then transition to the “fourth age”—when the rest of our life will be increasingly consumed by coping with the health effects of old age. the distinguish- ing characteristic of this stage of life is an increasing susceptibility to senescence— increases in the incidence of chronic disease and associated disabilities, and, of course, death. there is no clear age that defines the entrance to the fourth age, although 80 or even 85 are probably the ages in most demographers’ mind when they think about this concept. fortunately, this age keeps being pushed back to later in life. for the past several decades each group of people moving into old age has been healthier than the previous one, so if you have a few decades to go before you reach your 80s, you may well be healthier than today’s octogenarians. You will have to work at it, though, because as I noted in Chapter 5, there are troubling signs that today’s middle-aged population in both richer and poorer countries may move into old age with a new set of degenerative diseases associated especially with obesity and hypertension. the old mantra of watch your diet and keep exercising is still an important one, it seems.

Centenarians and Rectangularization—Is This the End of the Age Transition?

early in the twenty-first century, it has to be recognized that most people do not survive to be 100 years old. nonetheless, this is one of the fastest-growing ages in the population, reminding us that the life course in the future is going to be very different from what it was just a few decades ago. In 1911 there were only 100 centenarians (people who are least 100 years old) in england and Wales, and that had increased to only a few hundred by the end of World War II; now there are more than 13,000, almost all of whom are women (thatcher 2001; U.k. office for national statistics 2014).

as the most populous low mortality country in the world, the United states has led in the number of probable centenarians. there were an estimated 2,300 centenarians in 1950, after adjusting for likely age exaggeration (krach and velkoff 1999). there were more than 53,000 counted in Census 2010, most of whom were women. projections from the United nations population division suggest that by 2050 China’s population of centenarians will catch up with that of the United states, although at present there are only about half as many centenarians in China as in the United states.

the numbers for the present are still pretty small, but you can see the trend: It looks like the end of the age transition is associated with increasing numbers of people at the highest ages. thus far, then, we have not seen a clear pattern of rectangularization, which, as I discussed in Chapter 5, would mean that people essentially live to an advanced age and then quickly die off. the emerging pattern is that we are continuing to push the envelope of old age. this is, in reality, one way in

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334 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

which population growth can be maintained even in the face of below-replacement fertility. or, put more accurately, if people live to ever older ages, we will have to redefine what below-replacement-level fertility really is, because additional years lived at old age essentially compensate for some of the babies who are not being born—at least in terms of the total population size.

Reading the Future from the Age Structure

In a very real sense, the age and sex structure of a population forms a concise pic- ture of its demographic history. knowing what you do about the way in which mor- tality, fertility, and migration impact the age and sex structure, you should be able to look at a population pyramid and know what the past was like, and what the future portends. We are, in fact, able to put all of the pieces together—mortality, fertility, migration, and the age-sex structure—to model the future course of a pop- ulation. We do this with a very useful set of tools called population projections.

Population Projections

a population projection is the calculation of the number of persons we can expect to be alive at a future date given the number now alive and given reasonable assump- tions about age-specific mortality, fertility, and migration rates (keyfitz 1968). By enabling us to see what the future size and composition of the population might be under varying assumptions about demographic trends, we can intelligently evaluate what the likely course of events will be many years from now. also, by project- ing the population forward through time from some point in history, we are able to determine the sources of change in the population over time. a word of cau- tion, however, is in order. population projections are always based on a conditional future—this is what will happen if a certain set of conditions are met.

demographic theory is not now, nor is it likely ever to be, sophisticated enough to be able to predict future shifts in demographic processes, especially fertility and migration, over which we as individuals exercise considerable control. thus we must distinguish projections from forecasts. a population forecast is a statement about what you expect the future population to be. this is different from a projec- tion, which is a statement about what the future population could be under a given set of assumptions. as keyfitz (1982:746) has observed, “forecasts of weather and earthquakes, where the next few hours are the subject of interest, and of unemploy- ment, where the next year or two is what counts, are difficult enough. population forecasts, where one peers a generation or two ahead, are even more difficult.”

population projections are rarely right on the money, but in comparing past projections with subsequent censuses, the panel on population projections of the national research Council concluded that our ability to guess the future correctly is better over the short term than the long term, better for larger than for smaller countries, and better for more developed than for less developed nations (Bongaarts and Bulatao 2000). the U.s. Census Bureau has concluded that its projections are

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335Chapter 8 The Age Transition

limited mainly by demographers’ (and almost everybody else’s) inability to pre- dict turning points—those events, such as the baby boom, or the massive increase in immigration—that are nearly impossible to foresee but which have long term impacts on population growth and change (mulder 2001). this is a reminder that we will do well to keep in mind the old Chinese proverb: “prediction is very difficult—especially with regard to the future.”

there are several ways in which a demographer might project the population. these include: (1) extrapolation methods, (2) the components-of-growth method, and (3) the cohort component method. In addition, some of these methods can be used to project backward, not just into the future. as you will see, given the impor- tance of the age structure, the best method is the cohort component approach, which follows age cohorts through time, but it is important to have a quick over- view of all the usual methods of projection in order to see why we usually prefer to use a method that incorporates information about the age distribution.

Extrapolation

the easiest way to project a population is to extrapolate past trends into the future. this can be done using either a linear (straight-line) extrapolation or a logarithmic (curved-line) method. Both methods assume that we have total population counts or estimates at two different dates. If we know the rate of growth between two past dates, and if we assume that rate will continue into the future, then we can project what the population size will be at a future date. In the year 2000, for example, 281,421,906 people were enumerated in the U.s. Census, and in 2010 the census counted 308,745,538. the average annual linear rate of growth (rlin) between those two dates was 0.0097 or approximately 9.7 per thousand per year, which we can calculate using the following formula:

rlin 5 population at time 2 2 population at time 1

population at time 1 /n

In this example, the population at time 1 is the census count in 2000, which we call the base year; the population at time 2 is the census count in 2010, which we call the launch year, and n is the number of years (10) between the two censuses. You can plug in the above numbers to see that the average annual linear rate of growth turns out to be 0.0097.

now, we use that rate of growth to extrapolate the population forward, for example, from our launch year (the beginning year of a population projection) of 2010 to a target year (the year to which we project a population forward in time) of 2050, using the following formula:

target year population 5 launch year population 3 [1 1 srlin 3 nd]

In this formula, rlin is the average annual linear rate of growth just calculated (0.0097) and n is the number of years (in this case, 40) between the launch year

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336 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

(2010) and the target year (2050). so, plugging in the numbers from above, the pro- jected population in the year 2050 is:

308,745,538 3 [1 1 s.0097340d] 5 428,538,807

You may recall from Chapter 2 that populations are typically thought to grow exponentially, not in a straight-line fashion. the formula that expresses the loga- rithmic growth of a population, assuming a constant rate of growth, is as follows:

target year population 5 launch year population 3 ern

In this case, r represents the geometric or exponential rate of increase (rexp) which is calculated with the following formula:

rexp 5 F ln 1launch year populationbase year population 2 G /n the term ln represents the natural logarithm of the ratio of the population at

Time 2 (the launch year) to the population at Time 1 (the base year). It is one of the function buttons on most handheld calculators (including the one that comes with the iphone and most other smart phones). once again, n is the time between censuses. so, to calculate the exponential average annual rate of population growth between 2000 and 2010, we first find that the ratio of the population at those two dates (308,745,538/281,421,906) is 1.097. then we find that the natural logarithm of that number is 0.0927, which is then divided by 10 to find that the rate of increase is 0.00927 (or 9.3 per thousand per year). next, we plug this rate of growth (0.00927) back into the formula for exponential or logarithmic growth (above) in order to project the popu- lation forward from the launch year of 2010 to the target year of 2050. the answer is:

308,748,538 3 es.00927340d 5 447,339,331

this is of course a higher number than we found with the linear method of extrapolation, reminding us of the power of geometric growth (the power of dou- bling as discussed in Chapter 2). But is this really what the future holds for the United states? Is the United states really expecting a huge increase in population between 2010 and 2050? notice that these extrapolation methods of projection refer simply to total population size without taking into consideration the combina- tion of births, deaths, or migration that would produce the projected population. If we have a way of projecting those details, then we can project the population to a target year using the components of growth method.

Components of Growth

the components of growth projection method is an adaptation of the demo- graphic balancing equation mentioned earlier in the book. the population of the

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337Chapter 8 The Age Transition

United states in the year 2050 will be equal to the population in 2010 plus all the births between 2010 and 2050, minus the deaths, plus the net migration between those two dates. But how will we figure out the number of births, deaths, and migrants that we might expect over those 40 years? We know that all of these popu- lation processes differ by age and sex, and we also know that as the population grows we cannot expect that the number of births and deaths will remain constant over time. a simple components of growth approach will work reasonably well for a short time period, but it is not very useful for a long time period such as that from 2010 to 2050. What is needed is a more sophisticated approach to figuring out what those components of growth are likely to be, since they are apt to change over time, especially as the age structure changes. this requires a method that takes the age structure into account, and we call this the cohort component method.

Cohort Component Method

to make a population projection using the cohort component method, we begin with a distribution of the population by age and sex (in absolute frequencies, not percentages) for a specific base year, which in this projection method will be the same as the launch year. Usually a base year is a year for which we have the most complete and accurate data—typically a census year. Besides the age and sex distri- butions, you need to have base-year age-specific mortality rates (that is, a base-year life table), base-year age-specific fertility rates, and, if possible, age-specific rates of in- and out-migration. Cohorts are usually arranged in five-year groups, such as ages 0 to 4, 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and so on, which facilitates projecting a population forward in time in five-year intervals.

for example, if we are making projections from a base year of 2010 to a target year of 2050, we would make intermediate projections for 2015, 2020, 2025, and so forth. With the base-year data in hand and a target year in mind, we must next make some assumptions about the future course of each component of population growth between the base year and the target year. Will mortality continue to drop? If so, which ages will be more or less affected and how big will the changes be? Will fertility decline, remain stable, or possibly rise at some ages while dropping at others? If there is an expected change, how big will it be? Can we expect rates of in- and out-migration to change? note that if our population is an entire country, our concern will be with international migration only, whereas if we are projecting the population of an area such as a state, county, or city, we will have to consider both internal and international migration.

the actual process of projecting a population involves several steps and is carried out for each five-year cohort between the base and target years. first, the age-specific mortality data are applied to each five-year age group in the base- year population to estimate the number of survivors in each cohort five years into the future. since there were 10,571,823 females aged 20–24 in the United states in 2010 and the probability of a female surviving from age 20–24 to age 25–29 (derived from the life table, as discussed in Chapter 5) is 0.9977, then in 2015 we would have expected there to be 10,548,020 women surviving to age 25–29, before

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338 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

we make any adjustment for migration. this process of “surviving” a population forward through time is carried out for all age groups in the base-year population. the probabilities of migration (assuming that such data are available) are applied in the same way as are mortality data.

fertility estimation is complicated by the fact that only women are at risk of having children, and of course those children are added into the population only at age zero. the tasks include (1) calculating the number of children likely to be born during the five-year intervals, and (2) calculating how many of those born will also die during those intervals. the number to be born is estimated by multiplying the appropriate age-specific fertility rate by the number of women in each of the childbearing ages. then we add up the total number of children and apply to that number the probability of survival from birth to the end of the five-year interval.

experience suggests that fertility behavior often changes more rapidly (both up and down) than demographers may expect, so population projectionists hedge their bets by producing a range of estimates from high to low, with a middle or medium projection that incorporates what the demographer thinks is the most likely sce- nario. the highest estimate reflects the demographer’s estimate of the highest fertil- ity trend possible in the future, along with the highest decline likely in mortality, and the likely maximum net immigration. Conversely, the lowest projection incor- porates the most rapid decline in fertility, the least rapid drop in mortality, and the lowest probably level of net immigration. more sophisticated projection methods use statistical modeling to assign probabilities to the likelihood of one or another future course of demographic events (lutz et al. 2008; raftery et al. 2013).

the cohort component method is the most-often used projection technique and the U.s. Census Bureau uses it in preparing its series of population projections for the United states (U.s. Census Bureau 2012). notice that demographers at the Bureau, as at the United nations, regularly revise their projections because new information comes along that alters some of the previous assumptions. the Census Bureau also uses single year of age cohorts, rather than five-year age groups, in order to produce as much detailed information as possible. their projections are also done separately by race/ethnicity since different groups have somewhat differ- ent patterns of fertility, mortality, and migration. for example, the Census Bureau’s projections made in 2012 (the latest available at this writing), assume that the total fertility rates for non-hispanic whites will remain constant at its current below replacement level, while all other groups will experience a decline to replacement level or below. the projection for the United states also assumes that life expec- tancy will rise by a few years between now and the middle of the century, and that net international migration will increase over time from its current level of just less than a million persons per year to slightly more than one million persons per year by 2050. the Census Bureau also produces alternative scenarios of higher immigra- tion, lower immigration, and no immigration, so that comparisons can be made among these different future possibilities.

the projection begins with the age and sex structure as enumerated in the latest census. to this age structure are applied the age-specific birth rates among women, the age-sex-specific death rates for everyone, and the age-sex specific rates of net international migration. the process is repeated for each race/ethnic group for

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339Chapter 8 The Age Transition

each year up to 2050. the total population projected with this method for 2050 is 400 million, which is lower than the figures obtained by either of the extrapolation methods.

Backward or Inverse Projection

population data are projected into the future in order to estimate what could hap- pen down the road. similar methods can be used to work backward to try to under- stand what happened in the past (smith 1992; oeppen 1993). the basic idea is to begin with census data that provide a reasonably accurate age and sex distribution for a given base year. then, making various assumptions about the historical trends in fertility, mortality, and migration, you work back through time to “project” what earlier populations must have been like in terms of the number of people by age and sex. Wrigley and schofield (1981) used this method to work backward from the 1871 census of england and Wales to reconstruct that region’s population history. Whitmore (1992) used a complex backward projection model to show how it was possible for european contact to have led to a 90 percent depopulation of the indigenous peoples living in the Basin of mexico at the time Cortés arrived.

Population Momentum

one of the important lessons to take away from population projections is that age structures carry with them the potential for substantial momentum of population growth. this is a concept not unlike the idea that a heavy freight train takes longer to stop than a light commuter train does, or that a Boeing 747 requires a longer runway for landing than a 737 does. the amount of momentum built into an age structure is determined by answering the following question: how much larger would the population eventually be, compared to now, if replacement fertility were instituted in the population right now? put another way, how much larger would the stable population be based on replacement-level fertility compared to the cur- rent population? (kim and schoen 1997). of course, we can turn this around, as europeans are increasingly having to do, and ask about the momentum toward depopulation built into an older age structure.

You can probably see intuitively that if a population has a large fraction of women in their reproductive years, before the population stops growing, these women will contribute many additional babies to the future population even at replacement level; whereas an older population, with fewer women in their reproductive ages contributing fewer babies, will stop growing. most popula- tions that now have above-replacement-level fertility will not immediately drop to replacement level. You know from Chapter 6 that the fertility transition does not normally work like that. so, researchers have devised formulas to calculate the momentum built into more gradual declines in fertility (schoen and kim 1998; li and tuljapurkar 1999; espenshade et al. 2011). for example, a population that was growing at a rate of 3 percent per year (similar to guatemala) would be

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340 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

1.7 times larger when it stopped growing if replacement-level fertility were achieved immediately. that would require the tfr to drop instantaneously from 4.4 to 2.1, which is very unlikely. more probable would be a decline over several decades. If the drop from 4.4 to 2.1 took 28 years, then the population would be 3.9 times larger when it stopped growing, and if it took as long as 56 years, the population would be 7.7 times larger when replacement level was finally reached (schoen and kim 1998).

Understanding population momentum allows you to appreciate that slowing down the rate of population growth requires both forethought and patience. the payoff, which is the “window of opportunity” that I discussed earlier in the chapter, is apt to be at least two decades down the road from the time that fertility begins to decline in earnest. the flip side is that if you are worried about the depopulat- ing influence of an aging population, you cannot wait until it is happening to start doing something about it, because it also takes a while to rebuild momentum once you lose it.

Summary and Conclusion

the age and sex structure of a society is a subtle, commonly overlooked aspect of the social structure, yet it is one of the most influential drivers of social change in human society. the number of people at each age and of each sex is a very important factor in how a society is organized and how it operates, and for this reason the age transition that accompanies the mortality, fertility, and migration transitions is a critical force for change. age composition is determined completely by the interaction of the three demographic processes. mortality has the smallest short-run impact on the age distribution, but when mortality declines suddenly (as in the less developed nations), it makes the population more youthful. at the same time, a decline in mortality influences the sex structure at the older ages by producing increasingly greater numbers of females than males. Changes in fertility generally produce the biggest changes in a society’s age structure, regardless of the level of mortality. falling fertility, for example, is the single biggest driver of the increase in the proportion of the population that is in the older ages. migration can have a sizable impact, because migrants tend to be concentrated among young adults, and are thus likely to contribute not only themselves, but also their children to a shifting age structure.

In all of the more developed societies in the world today, the fertility rate has been low for long enough that we may be approaching the end of the age transi- tion, and population aging has become a major societal concern—not because we are afraid of old people, but rather because the demands on societal resources are very different for an older than for a younger population: “life in an era of declining and ageing populations will be totally different from life in an era of rising and youthful populations. a new age calls for a new mind-set” (Wallace 2001:220).

Creating that mind-set is aided by the use of population projections, which allow us to chart the course of change implied by different age structures. there

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341Chapter 8 The Age Transition

are some fairly predictable changes that occur to a population in the context of the age transition from a younger population at the beginning of the demographic transition to an older population at the end of the demographic transition. the critical question is how quickly that transition occurs, because the distortions in the age structure that are part of the age transition can lead to changes in economic organization, political dominance, and social stability that must be dealt with by society—and they have the potential to be either positive or negative in their impact, depending on how society responds. another important change in human society that is taking place simultaneously—and intimately bound up with the age transition—is the broad scale transfer of human existence into urban places. the next chapter looks at this transition.

Main Points

1. the age transition is a predictable shift from a predominantly younger popula- tion when fertility is high (usually when mortality is high) to a predominantly older population when fertility is low (usually when mortality is also low).

2. the age composition of a society is a powerful stimulant to social change.

3. more male babies than females are generally born, but the age structure is fur- ther influenced by the fact that at almost every age more males than females die, and the sex ratio drops dramatically in the older ages.

4. mortality has very little long-run impact on the age structure, but in the short run a decline in mortality typically makes the population younger in medium- to high-mortality societies and a little older in lower-mortality societies; declining mortality mainly operates to increase population size, rather than dramatically affecting the age and sex structure.

5. fertility is the most important determinant of the shape of the age/sex structure—high fertility produces a young age structure, whereas low fertility produces an older age structure.

6. migration can have a very dramatic short-run impact on the age and sex structure of a society, especially in local areas.

7. age transitions can provide a demographic dividend for countries experiencing a rapid fertility decline.

8. the end result of the age transition is a population with a higher fraction of people in the older ages.

9. the percentage of the population 65 and older is greatest in more developed countries because its increase largely depends on a decline in the birth rate, but the majority of the world’s older population lives in developing countries.

10. population projections provide a way of using the age structure to read the future and are developed from applying the age and sex distribution for a base year to sets of age-specific mortality, fertility, and migration rates for the inter- val between the base year and the target year.

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342 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

Questions for Review

1. It seems backward that fertility levels affect the age structure more than mor- tality levels, especially given the importance of declining mortality to all of the transitions. discuss this seeming paradox and show why it makes sense after all.

2. the U.s. baby boom generation has sometimes been called “a pig in a python.” describe how that metaphor might help us to understand the age transitions associated with cohort flows.

3. the demographic dividend has been heralded as one of the more positive aspects of the age transition. discuss exactly what that means, and what a society has to do in order to cash in on this dividend.

4. discuss the way in which the health and mortality transition has helped to dif- ferentiate the older population into the third and fourth ages. What changes do you foresee in the older population by the time you get there, compared to the current situation?

5. discuss how the changing age structure of the United states as shown in figure 8.10 has altered american society. What changes do you foresee if the age structure changes in the way suggested by the projection to 2040 in that graph? What might cause the actual age structure in 2040 to be different than projected?

Websites of Interest

1. http://www.pewresearch.org/next-america/ the pew research Center has created set of age pyramid animations to take you through the changing age transition in the United states.

2. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-209-x/2011001/article/11511/figures/fig-eng.htm#a1 statistics Canada provides age pyramids for the country along with other age structure visualization tools.

3. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/interactive/theme-pages-1-2/age-interactive-map.html Watch the age structure of places in the United kingdom change over time in this interactive map of aging (or “ageing” as they say) in the United kingdom.

4. http://esa.un.org/wpp/ this online resource lets you create your own summary tables of data from the United nations population division’s latest revisions of world population projections, includ- ing population data by age and sex. Compare their projections with those of the U.s. Census Bureau. then go to http://populationpyramid.net/world/2050/ where age pyra- mids based on the Un data can be visualized.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/Age%20Transition keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my Weekspopulation website.

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343

CHAPTER 9 The Urban Transition

What Is the Urban transItIon? Defining Urban Places

What are the DrIvers of the Urban transItIon?

Precursors Current Patterns the Urban hierarchy and City systems an Illustration from Mexico an Illustration from China

the ProxIMate DeterMInants of the Urban transItIon

Internal rural-to-Urban Migration natural Increase

Mortality fertility

International Urbanward Migration reclassification Defining the Metropolis

the Urban evolUtIon that aCCoMPa- nIes the Urban transItIon

Urban Crowding slums suburbanization and exurbanization residential segregation

CItIes as sUstaInable envIronMents

essaY: nIMbY and bnana—the Politics of Urban sprawl in america

Figure 9.1 Map of the World according to Percentage of Urban Population Source: United nations Population Division (2012b); data are estimates for 2015 based on the medium projection.

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344 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

the world is rapidly becoming urban. Consider that as recently as 1800 only 3 percent of the entire population of the world lived in cities. by 1900, that figure had edged up to 14 percent, and in 2007 we crossed the threshold into becoming an urban majority (United nations Population fund 2007). so for most of human his- tory almost no one had lived in cities—they were small islands in a sea of rurality. then, in an historical blink of the eye, more than half of us live in urban places. by the middle of this century, that fraction is projected to increase to more than two- thirds (United nations Population Division 2012b).

the present historical epoch, then, is marked by population redistribution as well as by population increase. this redistribution is represented generally by the migra- tion transition, as I mentioned in Chapter 7. at that time I also mentioned that the migration transition has increasingly morphed into the urban transition, although as you will see in this chapter the urban transition is not solely a product of migration.

What Is the Urban Transition?

the urban transition represents the reorganization of human society from being predominantly rural and agricultural to being predominantly urban and nonagricul- tural. It is no exaggeration to suggest that this is a genuinely revolutionary shift in society. leonard reissman (1964:154) described it this way:

Urbanization is social change on a vast scale. It means deep and irrevocable changes that alter all sectors of a society. In our own history [the United states] the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society has altered every aspect of social life . . . the whole institutional structure was affected as a consequence of our urban development. appar- ently, the process is irreversible once begun. the impetus of urbanization upon society is such that society gives way to urban institutions, urban values, and urban demands.

the vast majority of americans live in—indeed were born in—cities, and almost everyone in the richer countries of the world shares that urban experience, as do an increasing fraction of people in developing nations. Most of us take the city for granted, some curse it, some find its attractions irresistible, but no one denies that urban life is the center of modern civilization. Cities, of course, are nothing new, and their influence on society is not a uniquely modern feature of life. however, the widespread emergence of urban life—the explosive growth of the urban population—is very much a recent feature of human existence. this urban transition is one of the most significant demographic movements in world history, and it is intimately tied to population growth and all aspects of the demographic transition. We can reasonably say that in the world today, population growth is originating in the countryside but showing up in the cities.

Cities are implicated in a wide range of problems, issues, and triumphs in all societies, but my intention here is not to review what life is like in a city. that is increasingly the story of human life in general and it is well beyond the scope of this book. rather, I want to provide you with a demographic perspective on the urban transition. first I examine the drivers of the urban transition—the reasons

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345Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

why urban places have become so popular. from there we will examine the more proximate determinants of the urban transition—the demographic mechanisms by which the transition is accomplished. then we look at some of the more important ways in which the urban transition becomes an evolutionary process, as people con- stantly readjust to life in urban places. finally, I examine the extent to which cities are sustainable. What is it that allows most humans to effectively disassociate them- selves from living on the land, growing food, and being close to nature?

Defining Urban Places

What exactly is an urban place, you might well ask. We tend to know it when we see it, but how do we define it? an urban place can be thought of as a spatial con- centration of people whose lives are organized around nonagricultural activities. the essential characteristic here is that urban means high density and nonagricul- tural, whereas rural means any place that is not urban. a farming village of 5,000 people should not be called urban, whereas a tourist spa or an artist colony of 2,500 people may well be correctly designated as an urban place. You can appreci- ate, then, that “urban” is a fairly complex concept. It is a function of (1) population size, (2) space (land area), (3) the ratio of population to space (density or concentra- tion), and (4) economic and social organization.

as the number and fraction of people living in urban places has increased, the impact of urban life obviously becomes more important. the study of human soci- ety is increasingly the study of urban society, and the variability across space and time in the urban environment is a crucial part of the changes occurring in every society. the urban environment, however, is a combination of social and built environments. the concept of urban is, at root, a place-based idea (Weeks 2004b). the definitions of urban used in most demographic research, unfortunately, rarely encompass the more complex ingredients. Due to limitations in available data and sometimes simply for expediency, researchers (and government bureaucrats as well) typically define urban places on the basis of population size alone, implying that density is the major criterion. thus, all places with a population of 2,000; 5,000; 10,000 or more (the lower limit varies) might be considered urban for research pur- poses. the United nations Population Division, for example, has to deal with this national variability in urban definitions as it regularly puts together the estimates and projections of the urban and rural populations throughout the world that I will be discussing throughout this chapter (United nations Population Division 2012a).

although the difference between rural and urban areas may at first appear to be a dichotomy, it is really a continuum in which we might find an aboriginal hunter- gatherer near one end and an apartment dweller in Manhattan near the other. In between will be varying shades of difference, what we can call an urban gradient (Weeks 2004a, 2010). the next time you drive from the city to the country (or the other way around), you might ask yourself where you would arbitrarily make a dividing line between the two. In the United states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rural turned into urban when you reached streets laid out in a grid. today, such clearly defined transitions are rare, and besides, even living in a

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346 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

rural area in richer countries does not preclude your participation in urban life. the flexibility of the automobile combined with the power of telecommunications puts most people in touch with as much of urban life (and what is left of rural life) as they might want. even in the most remote areas of developing countries, radio and satellite-relayed television broadcasts and mobile phones can make rural villagers knowledgeable about urban life, even if they have never seen it in person.

beginning with Census 2000, the U.s. Census bureau has used the power of geographic information systems (GIs) to create a more flexible definition than ever before of what is urban. to be called urban in the United states, a place must be part of an urban area (UA) or an urban cluster (UC). a Ua consists of contiguous, densely settled census block groups (bGs) and census blocks that meet minimum population density requirements, typically 1,000 persons per square mile, along with adjacent densely settled census blocks, typically with at least 500 persons per square mile, that together encompass a population of at least 50,000 people. a UC consists of contiguous, densely settled census bGs and census blocks that meet those minimum population density requirements, along with adjacent densely settled cen- sus blocks that together encompass a population of at least 2,500 people, but fewer than 50,000 people (U.s. Census bureau 2010a).

thus, to be urban, you start with a core census block or block group (an area that is part of a census tract) that has a population density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile, and then add any contiguous areas that have at least 500 persons per square mile. as long as the total population of this combined area is at least 2,500 peo- ple, the area is defined as urban, and any smaller place within that urban area is called urban. any place that is not within an urban area or urban cluster is defined as rural.

Canada defines an urban place in a similar but not identical fashion. an urban place or urban area, as defined by statistics Canada, has a population of at least 1,000 concentrated within a continuously built-up area, at a density of at least 400 per square kilometer (equivalent to about 1,000 persons per square mile). however, starting with the 2011 census, statistics Canada has implemented its own version of the urban gradient by dividing urban areas into three classes of popula- tion centers (or centres, as they call them), based on population size: (1) small population centres, with a population of between 1,000 and 29,999; (2) medium population centres, with a population of between 30,000 and 99,999; and (3) large urban population centres, consisting of a population of 100,000 and over (statistics Canada 2011a). Mexico has traditionally defined urban as being any locality that has at least 2,500 inhabitants (IneGI 2010), although Mexico, like Canada, typi- cally defines a city (i.e., large urban population centre in Canadian terms) as a place that has at least 100,000 inhabitants.

You can see that the United states and Canada use a combination of population size and density to define urban, whereas Mexico relies largely on population size. none of the three give consideration to the economic and social characteristics of a place. Yet an essential ingredient of being urban is economic and social life organized around nonagricultural activities. You should thus keep in mind that there is a dis- continuity between the concept of urban and the definition of urban as I turn now to a discussion of the demographic aspects of the process whereby a society is trans- formed from rural to urban—the urban transition, or the process of urbanization.

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347Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

What Are the Drivers of the Urban Transition?

In its most basic form, the urban transition is the same concept as urbanization and refers to the change in the proportion of a population living in urban places; it is a relative measure ranging from 0 percent, if a population is entirely rural or agricultural, to 100 percent, if a population is entirely urban. the earliest cities were not very large because most of them were not demographically self-sustaining. the ancient city of babylon (about 50 miles south of modern baghdad, Iraq) might have had 50,000 people, athens possibly 80,000, and rome as many as 500,000; but they represented a tiny fragment of the total population of the region in which they were located. they were symbols of civilization, visible centers that were writ- ten about, discussed by travelers, and densely enough settled to be dug up later by archaeologists. our view of ancient history is colored by the fact that our knowl- edge of societal detail is limited primarily to the cities, although we can be sure that most people actually lived in the countryside.

Precursors

early cities had to be constantly replenished by migrants from the hinterlands, because they had higher death rates and lower birth rates than the countryside did, which usually resulted in an annual excess of deaths over births. the economically self-sustaining character of modern urban areas began with the transformation of economies based on agriculture (produced in the countryside) to those based on manufactured goods (produced in the city) and has expanded to those based on servicing the rest of the economy (and often located in the suburbs). Control of the economy made it far easier for cities to dominate rural areas politically and thus ensure their own continued existence in economic terms.

a crucial transition in this process came between about 1500 and 1800 with the european discovery of “new” lands, the rise of mercantilistic states (that is, based on goods rather than landholdings, as I discussed in Chapter 3), and the inception of the Industrial revolution. these events were inextricably intertwined, and they added up to a diversity of trade that gave a powerful stimulus to the european economy. this was a period of building a base for subsequent industrialization, but it was still a pre-industrial and largely pre-urban era. During this time, for example, cities in england were growing at only a slightly higher rate than the total population, and thus the urban population was rising only very slowly as a pro- portion of the total. between 1600 and 1800, london grew from about 200,000 people to slightly less than a million (Wrigley 1987)—an average rate of growth considerably less than 1 percent per year. During this same span of 200 years, london’s population increased from 2 percent of the total population of england to 10 percent—significant, but not necessarily remarkable, especially considering that in 1800 london was the largest city in europe. In 1801, only 18 percent of the pop- ulation in england lived in cities of 30,000 people or more, and nearly two-thirds of those urban residents were concentrated in london. thus, on the eve of the Indus- trial revolution, europe (like the rest of the world) was predominantly agrarian.

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348 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

neither england nor any other country was urbanizing with any speed at that time because industry had not yet grown sufficiently to demand a sizable urban population, and because cities could not yet sustain their populations through natu- ral increase. early competitive, laissez-faire capitalism characterized the economies of europe and north america from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, and cities were still largely commercial in nature, with many of the newly emerging manufacturing businesses located originally in the countryside close to the source of materials and the labor supply.

It was in the nineteenth century that urbanization began in earnest, its timing closely tied to industrialization and the decline in mortality that triggered popula- tion growth. believe it or not, there is evidence that the potato was a key factor in both the decline in mortality in europe (as I mentioned in Chapter 2) and, at the same time, in the urban transition. the potato not only improved nutrition and thus lowered the death rate, it was also more productive than other crops, allowing more food to be grown with fewer workers—exactly what is required to free up labor to move to the cities (nunn and Qian 2011).

Urban factory jobs were the classic magnets sucking young people out of the countryside in the nineteenth century. this happened earliest in england, and in figure 9.2 you can see the rapid rise in urbanization in the United Kingdom in response to early industrialization. Japan and russia entered the industrial world later than the United Kingdom or the United states, and you can see in figure 9.2

1800 1825 1850 1875 1900 1925 1950 1975 2000 20502025

P e rc

e n t in

u rb

a n a

re a s

100

United Kingdom United States Japan Russia

Figure 9.2 Industrialized nations have Passed through Most of the Urban transition Sources: Prepared by the author using data for 1800 through 1925 from Davis (1965); and data for 1950–2050 from United nations Population Division (United nations Population Division 2012b)

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349Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

that their patterns of urbanization were therefore delayed. once started, however, you can see that urbanization proceeded quickly in Japan and russia.

Current Patterns

In the contemporary post-industrial world characterized by what is often called advanced capitalism, the function of cities is changing again. In the developed, already urbanized part of the world, cities are losing their industrial base and are increasingly service centers to economic activities occurring in the hinterlands of the same country, or in another country altogether, essentially reversing the trends of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In less developed countries, espe- cially the so-called emerging nations, commercial and industrial activities com- bine with historically unprecedented rates of city growth to generate patterns of urbanization somewhat different from those that occurred in the now-developed nations. but even in the poorest countries of the world, city growth is occurring at a rapid pace.

figure 9.1 at the beginning of the chapter maps the countries of the world according to the percentage of the population living in urban places at the begin- ning of the twenty-first century, keeping in mind that the definition of urban varies somewhat from country to country. Globally, 54 percent of the popula- tion now lives in a place defined as urban. as a species, then, we are now an urban majority. however, as of 2015 there were still 56 countries with popula- tions of one million or more that were not yet urban-majority nations. Prominent among them, as you can from figure 9.1 are India, Pakistan, bangladesh, and sri lanka, as well as several other south asian countries. sub-saharan africa actually encompasses the places with the lowest percent urban, led by burundi with only 12 percent. looked at another way, though, almost every country in the world today has a higher percent urban than england did at the start of the Industrial revolution.

the pace of urbanization at the global level can be seen graphically in figure 9.3. In 1950, more than half of the population (55 percent) in more developed regions of the world were already living in urban places, but less than one in five people (19 percent) in the lesser developed nations was urban, and not even one in ten (7 percent) in least developed nations was then urban. to be sure, even a glance at figure 9.3 suggests that “urban” and “developed” are nearly synonymous. by 2015, more than three-fourths (79 percent) of the population in more developed regions was estimated to be urban, compared to 52 percent in the lesser developed regions, and only 30 percent in the least developed countries. not until 2050 is the latter group expected to hit 50 percent, at which time the lesser developed are expected to be 68 percent urban, and the more developed will be 86 percent urban.

Impressive as they are, the data in figure 9.3 nonetheless understate the real growth in the urban population. Most of the world’s population growth since 1950 has occurred in less developed nations, so the increase in the percentage that is urban hides a staggering rise in the number of people living in urban places of those

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350 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

countries. table 9.1 summarizes the United nations’ estimates of the size of the urban and rural populations by major geographic region of the world. especially noteworthy is asia, which in 1950 had 244 million people in urban areas, increas- ing to more than 2 billion by 2015, with an expected 3.3 billion by 2050. In africa, the urban population in 2015 was 14 times the size it had been in 1950. In latin america and the Caribbean, the urban population in 2015 was more than 7 times what it had been in 1950. on the other hand, the United nations expects that the world’s rural population in 2050 will be slightly lower in number than in 2015 (3.1 billion in 2050 compared to 3.4 billion people in 2015), although that will still represent nearly twice as many rural people as there were in 1950 (1.8 billion). however, the urban population of the world in 2050 (6.4 billion) will be 60 percent larger than it was in 2015 (4 billion), and that will be nearly a nine-fold increase over the world’s urban population of 1950 (which was 743 million).

as economic development occurred, cities grew because they were economi- cally efficient places. Commercial centers bring together in one place the buyers and sellers of goods and services. likewise, industrial centers bring together raw materials, laborers, and the financial capital necessary for the profitable production of goods. they are efficient politically because they centralize power and thus make the administrative activities of the power base that supports them more efficient. In sum, cities perform most functions of society more efficiently than is possible when people are spatially spread out. the great urban historian lewis Mumford said it well: “there is indeed no single urban activity that has not been performed success- fully in isolated units in the open country. but there is one function that the city

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 20502040

P e rc

e n t in

u rb

a n a

re a s

100

Least Developed

Lesser Developed

More Developed

Figure 9.3 the World has Urbanized at a rapid Pace since 1950 Sources: adapted from data in United nations Population Division (2012b).

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351Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

alone can perform, namely the synthesis and synergy of the many separate parts by continually bringing them together in a common meeting place where direct face-to- face intercourse is possible. the office of the city, then, is to increase the variety, the velocity, the extent, and the continuity of human intercourse” (1968:447).

Cities are efficient partly because they reduce costs by congregating together both producers and consumers of a variety of goods and services. by reducing costs, urban places increase the benefits accruing to business—meaning, naturally, higher profits. those profits translate into higher standards of living, and that is why cities have flourished in the modern world. they are part and parcel of the modern rise of capitalism.

the theory of the demographic transition was derived originally from the mod- ernization theory, which focused on the role played by cities. the basic thesis of

1950 2015 2050

Urban population (thousands) World 742,579 3,948,057 6,418,235 northern america 109,662 300,097 395,334 europe 281,659 548,425 562,290 oceania 7,909 27,866 41,518 latin america and the Caribbean 69,498 505,331 676,836 asia 244,256 2,087,186 3,325,655 africa 32,951 479,324 1,380,862

Rural population (thousands) World 1,783,200 3,376,725 3,132,710 northern america 61,953 61,031 50,867 europe 267,384 194,698 146,777 oceania 4,766 11,493 15,356 latin america and the Caribbean 98,371 124,758 104,730 asia 1,151,493 2,297,658 1,838,406 africa 195,876 686,915 1,012,313

Percent Urban World 29 54 67 northern america 64 83 89 europe 51 74 79 oceania 62 71 73 latin america and the Caribbean 41 80 87 asia 18 48 64 africa 14 41 58

Sources: adapted from data in United nations Population Division (2012b)

Table 9.1 asian, african, and latin american Urban Populations have Increased at a staggering rate since 1950

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352 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

modernization theory was that economic development is built on the efficiencies of cities. Cities are the engines of growth because of the concentration of capital (to build industry), labor (to perform the industrial tasks), and the financial, govern- mental, and administrative services necessary to manufacture, distribute, sell, and regulate the goods that comprise the essence of economic development. once eco- nomic growth begins, the principle of cumulative causation (discussed in Chapter 7 with reference to migration) kicks in to promote further local development, often at the expense of other regions.

Modernization theory focused attention on individual nations, examining the role that cities played in the development process in a particular country. the fact that cities are crucial to modernization led many developing nations such as Chile, Kenya, Malaysia, and Mexico to establish industrial cities precisely to mimic the process of modernization that occurred in the more developed nations (Potter 1992). the results of those experiments have been mixed at best.

Modernization theory offers a generally good explanation of what happened in the now-developed countries, especially in the period up to World War II, as indi- vidual nation building was taking place but transportation and communication still limited the amount of direct interaction between countries. Most of the still-quoted theories of modernization were developed in the 1950s (such as those of Myrdal 1957; and hirschman 1958), when urbanization in developing countries was still in its early stages. Patterns of urbanization in different parts of the world may reflect when a country entered the modern economic system, which adds globalization to the process of urbanization (sassen 2012), creating new types of city systems and urban hierarchies.

The Urban Hierarchy and City Systems

In virtually every nation of the world there is one city that stands out as the leading urban center and is noticeably more populous than other cities in the region. such a place is called a primate city—a disproportionately large leading city holding a central place in the economy of the country. In the 1930s, Walter Christaller (1966) devel- oped the concept of central place theory to describe why and how some cities were territorially central and thus in a position to control markets and the regional econ- omy. other cities are less important, although they may have their own pecking order.

early empirical studies of city systems within countries suggested that a com- mon pattern of cities by size could be expressed by the rank-size rule. as set out by George Zipf (1949), this says that the population size of a given city (Pi) within a country will be approximately equal to the population of the largest city (P1) divided by the rank of city i by population size (Ri). thus, the rank-size rule is:

Pi 5 P1/Ri

so, if the largest city in a country has a population of five million, then the sec- ond largest city should have a population size of approximately 5/2 or 2.5 million, whereas the third largest city should have a population of 5/3 or 1.7 million people.

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353Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

the only problem with the rank-size rule is that very few countries actually follow the formula very closely. In the United states, for example, the largest met- ropolitan area (new York-newark) had a population in 2015 of 21.3 million. the second city, los angeles, should then have had a population of about 10.7 million, and the third city, Chicago, should have been around 7 million. Instead, they were at 14 and 10 million, respectively. thus, the U.s. cities are closer in population than predicted by the rank-size rule. on the other hand, in Mexico, the largest city (Mexico City) has a population of 21.7 million people, so the rank-size rule would predict a population of 10.9 million, for the second largest city (Guadalajara) and a population of 7.2 million, for the third largest city (Monterrey). however, the esti- mated actual sizes of Guadalajara and Monterrey in 2015 were “only” 4.9 million and 4.7 million, respectively. Clearly, the urban hierarchy in Mexico also follows a different pattern than that expressed by the rank-size rule. nonetheless, so compel- ling is the idea of the rank-size rule that people keep working to improve upon it by adding greater complexity (see, for example, Zengwang xu and harriss 2010).

even though an empirical generalization such as the rank-size rule does not fit all countries, the importance of such ideas is that they led to the realization among scholars that most countries had a somewhat predictable system of cities that might be amenable to a consistent theoretical interpretation. an important set of such theoretical perspectives was the core-periphery model put forth by John friedmann (1966). Prior to economic development, a series of independent cities may exist in a region, but development tends to begin in, and will be concentrated in, one major site (the primate city). this is especially apt to happen in less devel- oped countries that have a history of colonial domination, in which colonial func- tions were centralized in one city. over time, the development process diffuses to other cities, but this happens unequally because the primate city (the core) controls the resources, and the smaller cities (the periphery) are dependent on the larger city. It was only a small step to apply these ideas of the core and periphery to a world system of countries and cities.

the world systems theory (which I discussed in Chapter 7 in relation to driv- ers of international migration) is based on the notion that inequality is part of the global economic structure and has been since at least the rise of capitalism 500 years ago (Wallerstein 1974). “Core” countries are defined as the highly devel- oped nations that dominate the world economy and that were the former colonizers of much of the rest of the world. the “periphery” is composed of those countries that, in order to become a part of the global economic system (the alternative to which is to remain isolated and undeveloped), have been forced to be dependent on the core nations, which control the basic resources required for development and a higher standard of living.

because countries tend to be dominated by cities, the world systems theory predicts that cities of core countries (“core cities”) will control global resources, operating especially through multinational corporations headquartered in core cit- ies (Chase-Dunn 2006); and cities in peripheral countries will be dependent on the core cities for their own growth and development (and, of course, that will filter down from the primate city to the other cities in a nation’s own city system). these models suggest that the core cities are networked globally and emphasize services

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354 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

over manufacturing, whereas peripheral cities tend to be linked to more local mar- kets and emphasize manufacturing over services.

as is so often the case, no single model seems capable of explaining all of the complexity in the process of the urban transition. several tests of modernization and world systems theories have suggested that variations of both contribute to our understanding of the real-world experience of urbanization (firebaugh 2003). Part of the complexity is created by the fact that the sheer size of a city does not guarantee its importance in the system of world cities. to be a global city means to have economic power, which is often characterized by the presence of headquar- ters or major subsidiary locations of multinational corporations (sassen 2012). sheer size will be less important at the global scale than at the national or regional level, where the larger the city, the greater the economic opportunity is likely to be for its residents and the greater the attraction will be to potential migrants from other parts of the country. empirical data show that cities in the United states are indeed rank-ordered with respect to the income of workers. In general, the more global a city, the higher the income, whereas the lower down in the ranking a city is, the higher the likelihood that its residents will be involved in low-income work (elliott 1999). Keep these complexities in mind as I illustrate the urban transition with examples from Mexico and China.

An Illustration from Mexico

the impact of population processes on the urban transition is illustrated from the perspective of rural areas by what happened over time to people in one village in Mexico—tzintzuntzan (which in the indigenous language means “the place of hummingbirds”), situated midway between Guadalajara and Mexico City in the state of Michoacán. historically, the site was the capital of the tarascan empire (brandes 1990), but today it is a village of artisans, farmers, merchants, and teach- ers. for nearly 400 years, the population of tzintzuntzan stayed right at about 1,000 people (foster 1967). In the mid-1940s, as George foster began studying the village, the population size was starting to climb slowly because death rates had started to decline in the late 1930s at about the time a government project gave the village electricity, running water, and a hard-surfaced highway connecting it to the outside world (Kemper and foster 1975).

In 1940, the population was 1,077 and the death rate was about 30 per 1,000, while the birth rate of 47 per 1,000 was leading to a rate of natural increase of 17 per 1,000 (an implied doubling time of 40 years). for some time, there had been small-scale, local out-migration from the village to keep its population in balance with the limited local resources, but by 1950 the death rate was down to 17 per 1,000 and the birth rate had risen. better medical care had reduced the incidence of miscarriage and stillbirth, and in 1950 the village had 1,336 people (foster 1967). by 1970 the population had reached about 2,200 (twice the 1940 size); however, were it not for out-migration draining away virtually all of the natural increase of tzintzuntzan, the population would again have doubled in about 20 years (Kemper and foster 1975).

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What, you ask, does growth in a small Mexican village have to do with the urban transition? the answer, of course, is that population growth meant that the local population was larger than the local economy could handle, and so some of these villagers were forced to migrate out in search of work. the migrants headed for the cities, and therein lies the tale of the urban transition. Poverty is extensive in rural Mexico, and almost all of those people who leave tzintzuntzan go to urban places where better opportunities exist—with Mexico City (230 miles away) having been the most popular destination (Kemper and foster 1975). one of the easiest demographic responses that people can make to population pressure is migration, and in Mexico, as in most countries of the world, the city has been the receiving ground. furthermore, the demographic characteristics of those who went to the city were what you would expect; they tended to be younger, slightly better educated, of higher occupational status, and more innovative than nonmigrants (Kemper 1977).

for tzintzuntzeños, migration to Mexico City raised the standard of living of migrant families, altered the world view of both adults and their children toward greater independence and achievement, and, indirectly, “urbanized” the village they left behind. this last effect is due to the fact that having friends and relatives in Mexico City was one factor that led the villagers to become aware of their partici- pation in a wider world. this made it easier for each successive generation to make the move to Mexico City, because they knew what to expect when they arrived and they knew people who could help them.

tzintzuntzeños have also been attracted to the United states, initially recruited through the bracero program (which I mentioned in Chapter 7), and the same pat- terns of mutual assistance encouraged the flow of money and ideas from cities in the United states to this small village in the interior of Mexico (Kemper 1996; Kemper and adkins 2006). International migration can be an extremely important source of income in rural Mexico (Cornelius et al. 2008), and over time migrants have sent or brought back to the village many of the accoutrements of urban life, from new stoves and sewing machines to stereos, television sets, and mobile phones, in effect urbanizing what was once a remote village.

from a theoretical perspective, we can see that modernization was the key to the transformation of the lives of tzintzuntzeños. however, the process of mod- ernization was not endogenous—it sought the villagers out, rather than the other way around. In a very literal sense, the modernization of the village and its inhabit- ants depended on what was happening elsewhere. Government leaders in Mexico City (the core) made the decision to provide rural areas (the periphery) with health care, electricity, and paved highways. the rest, as they say, is history, because few villagers, when given the choice, turn down the opportunity for a higher standard of living (Critchfield 1994).

An Illustration from China

China is a very interesting case of urbanization because it is one of the few coun- tries in the world where the government fairly successfully “kept them down on the farm.” the Chinese Communist Party officially adopted an anti-urban policy when

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it came to power in 1949, believing that cities were a negative “Western” influence, and Chinese government policies in the 1960s and 1970s were designed to counter- act the urban transition occurring in most of the rest of the world. these policies attempted to “promote wider income distribution, reduce regional inequalities, and create a more balanced urban hierarchy, which would lead to a greater decentral- ization of economic activities. In doing so, the intention was to slow population growth in the largest cities, while allowing continued increases in medium-sized and smaller urban centers” (Goldstein 1988; as quoted in bradshaw and fraser 1989:989).

as idyllic as that may sound, the basic policy has been enforced by a rigid system of household registration initiated in 1958 called hukou, which created a type of occu- pational apartheid in China. “anyone in a rural county is automatically registered as a farmer, anyone in a city as a non-farmer; and the distinction is near rigid. a city- dwelling woman (though not a man) who marries a farmer loses the right to urban life” (The Economist 1998:42). Your status as rural or urban in 1958 was essentially passed on to children and grandchildren, and has been very difficult to change.

the problem with this system is that economic development in China has cre- ated a nearly classic demand for urban workers that has been met in part by “tempo- rary” migrants from rural areas (sun and fan 2011). the rigidities of the household registration system, though, have created a situation whereby millions of Chinese are “illegal immigrants” in cities within their own country: “even migrants who have lived in cities for many years, or the urban-born children of such migrants, are given far less access to government-funded health care and education than other city dwell- ers. this is because their rural hukou is often impossible to change” (The Economist 2014:30). the government announced in 2014 that it was loosening the policy and was beginning to grant urban status to some of the rural migrants to the cities. there are costs associated with this, however, because urban status then gives the migrants and their children access to government-funded schools and health care.

Government policies in China thus prevented (or at least delayed) the high rate of natural increase in the rural areas from spilling over disproportionately into migration to urban areas, and the government located heavy industry in rural areas to help soak up the rural labor force (hsu 1994). of course, that did not mean that the urban population was not growing. Quite the contrary. between 1953 and 1990, 326 new cities were created in China, and urban growth occurred especially in small to medium-sized places (han and Wong 1994), just as the government had planned. since, then, however, the economic changes that came about in con- junction with China’s demographic dividend have pulled people into cities at an increasing rate (friedmann 2005). at the time of the communist revolution, China was just 12 percent urban, and by 1990 it had climbed to 26 percent, but by 2015 that had jumped to 56 percent, and the United nations projects that China will be 77 percent urban by 2050.

the hukou system allowed China administratively to create a much flatter urban hierarchy than exists in most modern nations (fan 2000, 2008). the obvious examples are that beijing is the politically most important city, shanghai the most populous city, and hong Kong the richest city (although it was already that way when China annexed it in 1997). shanghai had an estimated 23 million people in

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2015, while beijing had 15.6 million, and an additional nine cities, including hong Kong, had at least 7 million residents each.

The Proximate Determinants of the Urban Transition

as you watch the number and percentage of the population that is urban climb over time, you may assume that the explanation is very easy—people move out of rural areas into urban areas. that is a major part of the story, of course, but not the whole story. the urban transition occurs not only as a result of internal rural-to-urban migration, but also through natural increase, international urban migration, reclassification of places from rural to urban, and combinations of these processes. another important thing to keep in mind is that the urban tran- sition may end when nearly everybody is living in an urban area, but the urban evolution—changes taking place within urban areas—may continue forever, as I discuss later in the chapter.

Internal Rural-to-Urban Migration

the migration of people within a country from rural to urban places represents the classic definition of the urban transition because it is intuitively the most obvious way by which a population can be shifted from countryside to curbside. there is no question that in the developed countries, rural-to-urban migration was a major force in the process of urbanization. over time, the agricultural population of these countries has tended to decline in absolute numbers, as well as in relative terms, even in the face of overall population growth. In less developed countries, though, rural-to-urban migration has been occurring in large absolute terms, but without a consequent depopulation of rural areas—although such a depopulation is projected for later in this century in most areas of the world, as you can see by looking back at table 9.1. the reason, of course, is the difference in the rates of natural increase in less developed countries compared with rates in developed nations at a similar stage in the demographic transition.

had it not been for migration, cities of the nineteenth century and before could not have grown in population size. In fact, in the absence of migration, the excess of deaths over births would actually have produced deurbanization. of course, migra- tion did occur, because economic development created a demand for an urban pop- ulation that was largely met by migrants from rural areas. Industrial cities drew the largest crowds, but commercial cities, even in nonindustrial countries, also gener- ated a demand for jobs and created opportunities for people to move from agrarian to urban areas. the cities of most previously colonized countries bear witness to this fact. for example, migration accounted for 75–100 percent of the total growth of nineteenth-century cities in latin america (Weller et al. 1971).

naturally, in the richer, highly urbanized countries, the agricultural population is now so small that cities (also nations) depend on the natural increase of urban areas, or immigrants from other countries, rather than migration from their own

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rural areas, for population growth. this helps to explain why europe—one of the world’s most urban regions—is facing depopulation: the low birth rate can no lon- ger be compensated for by migrants coming in from the countryside, because the countryside is emptied out of young people.

Natural Increase

the underlying source of urbanization throughout the world is the rate of natural increase of the rural population. the decline in death rates in rural places, without a commensurate drop in the birth rate, has led to overpopulation in rural areas (too many people for the available number of jobs) and causes people to seek employ- ment elsewhere (the now-familiar tale of demographic change and response). If there were no opportunities for rural-to-urban migration, then the result might simply be that the death rate would eventually rise again in rural areas to achieve a balance between population and resources (the “Malthusian” solution). however, opportunities typically have existed elsewhere in urban places precisely because the innovations that led to a drop in the rural death rate have originated in the cities—the site of technological and material progress and the source of economic development.

the speed of the urban transition—the number of years it takes to go from low- percentage urban to high-percentage urban—depends partly on the difference in the rates of natural increase between urban and rural areas. the rapid urban transition in China, for example, was made possible partly by the rapidly declining birth rate in cities, which meant that migrants from the countryside were making a larger pro- portionate contribution to the shift in the percent urban. In turn, the rate of natural increase depends on trends in both mortality and fertility, and these patterns have changed dramatically over time, as I have already discussed at length in general terms, but let me now put them into the context of urban places.

Mortality Kingsley Davis (1973) estimated that in the city of stockholm, sweden, in 1861–70, the average life expectancy at birth was only 28 years, whereas for the country as a whole at that time, life expectancy was 45 years. I discussed in Chapter 5 that the ability to resist death has been passed to the rest of the world by the industrialized nations, and the diffusion of death control has usually started in the cities and spread from there to the countryside. this phenomenon, though, actu- ally required a crucial reversal in the original urban-rural difference in mortality. When the now-industrialized nations were urbanizing, death rates were higher in the city than in the countryside (Williams and Galley 1995; szreter 2005), and this helped keep the rate of natural increase in the city lower than in rural areas. In turn, that meant that rural-to-urban migration was a more important factor influencing the urban percentage in a country.

for the past several decades, however, death rates have been lower in the city than in the countryside in nearly every part of the world. We can see this from the calculation of child mortality rates derived from the Demographic and health surveys taken in developing countries around the world. table 9.2 shows the

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359Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

Child mortality (5q0) tfr

Urban rural Urban rural

Sub-Saharan Africa benin 2012 62 83 4.3 5.4 burkina faso 2010 104 156 3.9 6.7 burundi 2010 79 131 4.8 6.6 Cameroon 2011 93 153 4.0 6.4 Congo (brazzaville) 2005 108 136 3.8 6.1 Congo Democratic republic 2007 122 177 5.4 7.0 Cote d’Ivoire 2012 100 125 3.7 6.3 ethiopia 2011 83 114 2.6 5.5 Gabon 2012 61 77 3.9 6.1 Ghana 2008 75 90 3.1 4.9 Guinea 2012 87 148 3.8 5.8 Kenya 2009 74 86 2.9 5.2 lesotho 2009 89 110 2.1 4.0 liberia 2009 138 170 4.2 7.5 Madagascar 2009 63 84 2.9 5.2 Malawi 2010 113 130 4.0 6.1 Mali 2006 158 234 5.4 7.2 Mozambique 2011 100 111 4.5 6.6 namibia 2007 60 76 2.8 4.3 niger 2012 83 163 5.6 8.1 nigeria 2008 121 191 4.7 6.3 rwanda 2010 81 105 3.4 4.8 senegal 2011 62 102 3.9 6.0 sierra leone 2008 167 168 3.8 5.8 swaziland 2007 107 105 3.0 4.2 tanzania 2010 94 92 3.7 6.1 Uganda 2011 77 111 3.8 6.8 Zambia 2007 132 139 4.3 7.5 Zimbabwe 2011 77 78 3.1 4.8 North Africa/West Asia/Europe albania 2009 13 28 1.3 1.8 armenia 2010 18 26 1.6 1.8 azerbaijan 2006 52 64 1.8 2.3 egypt 2008 29 36 2.7 3.2 Georgia 2005 27 38 1.5 1.7 Jordan 2012 21 19 3.4 3.9

Table 9.2 Urban-rural Mortality and fertility Differences are still Pronounced in Most Developing Countries

(continued)

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360 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

death rate to children under the age of five per 1,000 births for urban and rural places, according to all Dhs surveys taken from 2005 through 2012. You can see, for example, that the highest child mortality rate in the table is in rural areas of Mali in 2006, where the 234 means that 23.4 percent of children born died before their fifth birthday. Despite high mortality, it was at least a bit lower in urban areas in Mali (15.8 percent of children dying before age 5). this pattern holds in a majority of countries, but these data suggest the troubling trend that death rates in some urban areas are not always much lower than in rural areas, especially in high mortality countries in sub-saharan africa. My research team working in Ghana, for example, has found that there are neighborhoods in accra, the capital

Child mortality (5q0) tfr

Urban rural Urban rural

Moldova 2005 20 30 1.5 1.8 Ukraine 2007 18 20 1.0 1.5 Kyrgyz republic 2012 33 33 3.0 4.0 tajikistan 2012 42 50 3.3 3.9 South & Southeast Asia bangladesh 2011 55 66 2.0 2.5 Cambodia 2010 29 75 2.2 3.3 India 2006 61 94 2.1 3.0 Indonesia 2012 34 52 2.4 2.8 Maldives 2009 23 28 2.1 2.8 nepal 2011 45 64 1.6 2.8 Pakistan 2012 74 106 3.2 4.2 Philippines 2008 28 46 2.8 3.8 timor-leste 2010 61 87 4.9 6.0 Latin America & Caribbean bolivia 2008 55 99 2.8 4.9 Colombia 2010 21 25 2.0 2.8 Dominican republic 2007 37 37 2.3 2.8 Guatemala 2009 34 51 2.9 4.2 Guyana 2009 46 37 2.1 3.0 haiti 2012 99 88 2.6 4.4 honduras 2012 29 30 2.5 3.5 Jamaica 2009 20 23 2.2 2.7 nicaragua 2007 35 47 2.2 3.5 Paraguay 2008 29 27 2.2 3.0 Peru 2012 21 33 2.3 3.5

Source: adapted from data in the Dhs stat compiler (ICf International 2014)

Table 9.2 (continued)

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361Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

city of that country, where child mortality is as high as that experienced in rural areas (Jankowska et al. 2013). this may well be due to the very poor environmen- tal conditions in the urban slums in some of these countries, as I discuss later in the chapter.

as a consequence of generally lower urban mortality, the process of urbaniza- tion in less developed countries is taking place in the context of historically high rates of urban natural increase. furthermore, when mortality declines as a response to economic development, structural changes also take place that tend to reduce fertility; but when death control is introduced independently of economic devel- opment, mortality and fertility declines lose their common source, and mortality decreases whereas fertility takes quite a while to respond. this results in fertility levels being higher today in less developed countries (urban and rural places alike) than they were at a comparable stage of mortality decline in the currently advanced countries.

Fertility We can usually anticipate that people residing in urban areas will have fairly distinctive ways of behaving compared with rural dwellers. so important and obvious are these differences demographically that urban and rural differen- tials in fertility are among the most well documented in the literature of demo- graphic research. John Graunt, the seventeenth-century english demographer whom I first mentioned in Chapter 3, concluded that london marriages were less fruitful than those in the countryside because of “the intemperance in feeding, and especially the adulteries and fornications, supposed more frequent in london than elsewhere . . . and . . . the minds of men in london are more thoughtful and full of business than in the Country” (quoted by eversley 1959:38). In rural areas, large families may be useful (for the labor power), but even if they are not, a family can “take care of” too many members by encouraging migration to the city. once in the city, people have to cope more immediately with the problems that large families might create for them. at the same time, the importance of the large family is challenged by the many alternatives to family life that cities offer compared to rural areas.

It is nearly axiomatic that urban fertility levels are lower than rural levels (indeed, there are no exceptions to this rule in table 9.2); it is also true, of course, that fertility is higher in less developed than in developed nations. Putting these two generalizations together, you can conclude that urban fertility in less devel- oped nations will be lower than rural fertility but still higher than the urban fertility of cities in the industrialized nations. Cities in developing countries, especially in africa and western asia, have fertility levels that are probably higher than those ever experienced in european cities. Data from Demographic and health surveys in table 9.2 show total fertility rates (tfrs) in urban areas in 12 countries that are at or above 4.0 children per woman and an additional 17 countries in which urban areas have tfrs between 3.0 and 3.9.

You can also see in table 9.2 that sub-saharan africa is especially notewor- thy for high urban fertility rates—which are nonetheless lower than the very high rural rates. In niger in 2012, the total fertility rate (tfr) among urban women was 5.6 children each, although that was lower than the 8.1 children per woman in rural

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areas. near the lower end of fertility within sub-saharan africa was Ghana in 2008, with an urban tfr of 3.1 children, compared to the rural rate of 4.9 children. even when you look at the below replacement fertility nations of the former soviet Union (Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine), the fertility is very low in rural areas, yet lower still in urban areas.

the emphasis in table 9.2 is on developing countries because they are the places in the world where both mortality and fertility tend to be high—in some cases still very high. furthermore, the richer countries have very few people still residing in rural areas. by the early 1990s, fewer than 2 percent of women in the United states of reproductive age were living on farms, and their fertility was only slightly higher than the other 98 percent of the population (bachu 1993). since the late 1990s, farm residence has not even been reported in the fertility data for the United states.

Urban fertility levels are also related to migration, since migrants tend to be young adults of reproductive ages. furthermore, migrants from rural areas typi- cally wind up having levels of fertility lower than people in the rural areas they left, but they still have higher fertility levels than those in the urban areas to which they have moved (Kulu 2005). Migration rarely involves a simple move of people out of a rural area into the city and, as a result, lower fertility in urban areas may diffuse back to the countryside. the new urban dwellers are likely to go back for visits, bringing money and other things that aren’t widely available in the countryside. they also bring back new ideas, new ambitions, and new motivations that can pro- duce behavioral changes in the rural areas, including new ways of thinking about family size.

International Urbanward Migration

International migration also operates to increase the level of urbanization, because most international migrants move to cities in the host area regardless of where they lived in the donor area. from the standpoint of the host area, then, the impact of international migration is to add to the urban population without adding signifi- cantly to the rural population, thereby shifting a greater proportion of the total to urban places. More than 95 percent of immigrants to the United states wind up as urban residents in big cities or their suburbs (U.s. Department of homeland security 2014), a fact driven home by data from the U.s. Census bureau showing that several cities in the United states would have lost population between 2000 and 2009 had it not been for the influx of international migrants (U.s. Census bureau 2010b).

Reclassification

It is also possible for the urban transition to occur “in-place.” this happens when the absolute size of a place grows so large, whether by migration, natural increase, or both, that it reaches or exceeds the minimum size criterion used to distinguish urban from rural places. note that reclassification is more of an administrative

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phenomenon than anything else and is based on a unidimensional (size-only) defini- tion of urban places, rather than also incorporating any concept of economic and social activity. of course, it is quite probable that as a place grows in absolute size it will at the same time diversify economically and socially, probably away from agricultural activities into more urban enterprises. this tends to be part of the social change that occurs everywhere in response to an increase in population size; an agri- cultural population can quickly become redundant and the lure of urban activities (such as industry, commerce, and services) may be strong under those conditions.

another administrative trick that can lead to rapid city growth is annexation, either formally or simply through the spread of a city outward from its center. Urban growth rates can thus be misleading. for example, “the city of houston grew 29 percent during the 1970s—one of the most rapidly growing large cities in the country. but the city also annexed a quarter of a million people. Without the annexation, the city would have grown only modestly” (Miller 2004:31). through- out the world, this kind of phenomenon is associated with urban sprawl, which I discuss in the essay that accompanies this chapter. In developing countries, reclassi- fication is apt to be less formal but no less important. the greater metropolitan area of Cairo, for example, encompasses a population of more than 11 million people. It has been swallowing up rural villages in its hinterland for several decades. as people move to Cairo they seek affordable housing, and existing villages near Cairo represent one set of opportunities. In the process, these villages become unintention- ally, but inextricably, connected to Cairo (rodenbeck 1999; Weeks et al. 2005).

Defining the Metropolis

anywhere you go in the world you will find cities that have grown so large and their influence extended so far that a distinction is often made between metropoli- tan and nonmetropolitan areas, definitions developed to refine the more traditional terms of urban and rural. this happened first in the richer countries such as the United states, and back in 1949 the U.s. Census bureau developed the concept of a standard metropolitan area (sMa), consisting of a county with a core city of at least 50,000 people and a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile. the concept proved useful in conjunction with the 1950 census and was subsequently renamed the standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA), later shortened to be just an Msa (metropolitan statistical area). the basic idea of a metropolitan statistical area “is that of an area containing a recognized population nucleus and adjacent communities that have a high degree of integration with that nucleus” (U.s. office of Management and budget 2000:82228).

over time, modifications have been made to the definition and calculation of metropolitan areas, ordered always by the U.s. office of Management and budget (oMb), which uses these classifications for a variety of government purposes (U.s. office of Management and budget 2013). the current set of definitions con- tinues to use counties as the building blocks of a Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) classification scheme (fitzsimmons and ratcliffe 2004), which includes both metropolitan areas and the more recently added category of micropolitan areas.

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to be a metropolitan area, a Cbsa must have a core urban area of at least 50,000 people, whereas a micropolitan area is an urban cluster of at least 10,000 people, but less than 50,000. Contiguous counties are then added to the Cbsa if they meet spe- cific criteria of connectivity: either 25 percent or more of the employed residents of the county work in the central county of the Cbsa or at least 25 percent of employ- ment in the county is accounted for by workers who reside in the central county of the Cbsa. I agree with you that this seems a bit confusing, but remember that “urban” is not an easy concept to define in the first place, and in this case we are try- ing to refine the concept of urban to apply specifically to the most urban areas—the top end of the urban gradient.

NIMBY AND BNANA—THE POLITICS OF URBAN SPRAWL IN AMERICA

Where will suburbanization end? How far away from a city’s center are people willing to live? Does the concept of a city center even mean much any- more? These are the kinds of questions that are inspired by urban sprawl—“the straggling expan- sion of an urban area into the adjoining countryside” (Brown 1993:3002). Urban lives are increasingly complicated by multiple-earner households and by greater movement of people from job to job within the same area, often leading to long commutes (Mckenzie and Rapino 2011). But the underlying cause of urban sprawl is almost certainly the desire of people to live in a low-density area yet be part of the urban scene. Trying to have it both ways has produced the phenomena of NIMBY and BNANA.

NIMBY, which stands for Not In My Back Yard, refers to the idea that whatever is proposed to be built should be built somewhere else besides your neighborhood. You do not mind that it (whatever it is) is built (you understand that urban places need these things), you just don’t want it near you. BNANA, which stands for Build Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone, is more extreme. This represents a generalized antigrowth attitude expressed by people who essentially want to close the urban door behind them and let nothing and no one else in. The problem with both attitudes is that there is worldwide pressure for an increase in urban areas—the urban transition is an inevitable con- sequence of population growth everywhere in the world. So, if new homes and businesses are not built near you, they will nonetheless be built some- where else near the urban area, in a rural area that will soon become part of the urban area (no matter

how hard the BNANAs may protest) and that will contribute to urban sprawl, which contributes to the demise of the countryside, widespread traffic grid- lock, and a lowering of the perceived quality of life.

Since sprawl occurs especially in the absence of regional planning, even in the presence of protests, planning movements have arisen in metropolitan areas around the world to create “smart growth,” the basic principles of which are as follows: (1) Mix land uses; (2) Take advantage of compact building design; (3) Create a range of housing opportunities and choices; (4) Create walkable neighborhoods; (5) Foster distinc- tive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place; (6) Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas; (7) Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities; (8) Provide a variety of transportation choices; (9) Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective; and (10) Encourage community and stakeholder col- laboration in development decisions (U.S. Environ- mental Protection Agency 2014).

Smart growth is especially about containing growth spatially. This implies higher population densities, but within a context in which communi- ties are rethought and well thought out. Higher, but smarter, densities might mean improved pub- lic transportation, more small but well-planned urban open spaces, and the creation of urban vil- lages that attempt to recreate the (largely mythical) atmosphere of small towns in the past.

Two important aspects of American public policy have contributed to urban sprawl and are

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In Canada, the definition of metropolitan is very similar, although not identi- cal, to that in the United states. “a census metropolitan area (CMA) or a census agglomeration (Ca) is formed by one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a population centre (known as the core). a CMa must have a total population of at least 100,000 of which 50,000 or more must live in the core. a Ca must have a core population of at least 10,000. to be included in the CMa or Ca, other adjacent municipalities must have a high degree of integration with the core, as measured by commuting flows derived from previous census place of work data” (statistics Canada 2011b). In Mexico, by contrast, government agencies have never defined metropolitan areas quite as precisely as have those in Canada and the United states.

addressed by smart growth policies: (1) massive public spending on highways, and (2) local gov- ernment authority over land use and taxation. If the government is willing to help subsidize the building of highways, then people can keep living farther from the central city without a huge jump in commute time. Of course, they can only do that if there are places to live farther out. The building of homes in the exurbs is aided by the ability and willingness of local govern- ments to zone land for urban-residential uses, often as a way of increasing local tax revenue—which may then be used to improve local infrastructure (water, sewerage, electricity, communications, etc.), which of course stimulates even more urban development. However, if a state or other regional authority is able to draw an urban boundary line, beyond which urban uses are not permitted no matter what local govern- ments might otherwise be willing to tolerate, then smart growth might have a chance—although the issues are extremely complex (Handy 2005; Fillion and McSpurren 2007; Barnett 2007).

A prevailing view of sprawl is that it was induced by public policies that inadvertently encouraged it, so other kinds of public policies are necessary to cope with it successfully (Wolch et al. 2004). An example of a state that has passed a smart growth initiative is Maryland, which did so in 2000 under a Democratic governor, although smart growth pro- grams had actually been in place in the state since 1992. That initiative created the Maryland Office of Smart Growth, which was transferred to the Depart- ment of Planning by the next governor (a Repub- lican). Subsequent legislation has continued to push smart growth projects in that state (Maryland

Department of Planning 2014). Voters in the states of Arizona and Colorado have rejected similar kinds of smart growth plans, so the concept has not got- ten the full traction that its supporters had hoped for at the state level. Nonetheless, many communi- ties have embraced the ideas for themselves, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency hosts an online map of local projects.

As is true with any movement, there is apt to be a counter movement. In the case of urban sprawl, the argument has been made that sprawl is part of the long history of people wanting to be part of the city without having to endure its crowds, crime, and crud. Thus, rather than being a policy failure, sprawl is an inevitable part of urban life, at least in some places, and not neces- sarily a bad part. Bruegmann (2005) argues that sprawl provides opportunity, mobility, and new choices for people who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of the better life that cities offer. Smart growth for some areas may refer to the creation of densely settled, amenity-rich, and very walkable urban neighborhoods, but many people have been voting with their automobiles, so to speak, in the opposite direction, and the exurbs are currently the fastest-growing places in the large metropolitan areas of the United States (Berube et al. 2006).

Discussion Questions: (1) Do you think that urban sprawl is a threat to the quality of life or an opportunity for a better life? Defend your answer; (2) Provide one example each of a NIMBY and a BNANA situation that has arisen or could possibly arise where you live.

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another level of aggregation is the urban agglomeration, a term used largely by the United nations, and defined as “the de facto population contained within the contours of a contiguous territory inhabited at urban density levels without regard to administrative boundaries. It usually incorporates the population in a city or town plus that in the suburban areas lying outside of but being adjacent to the city boundaries” (United nations Population Division 2012c). the con- cept accepts a country’s own definition of what is urban, and then puts together (agglomerates) all of the contiguous urban areas. If the total population is at least 750,000, then it is an urban agglomeration. It has the advantage of provid- ing international comparisons. as of 2015, the United nations counted 633 such urban agglomerations in the world, and I’ll bet that you can’t name most of them. the larger ones that you haven’t heard of actually have the highest rates of population growth in the world. they have been called “black holes”—cities that are not part of a global network but are absorbing large numbers of people (short 2004).

In general, the United nations’ definitions of urban agglomerations are slightly more limited geographically than the metropolitan areas defined for the United states by the Census bureau, but are nearly identical to those of the Canadian defi- nitions. by Un definitions, Mexico City, with 21.7 million people, is just slightly more populous than the new York–newark urban agglomeration (21.3 million). toronto is Canada’s most populous urban agglomeration with 5.9 million people, and its size would make it the sixth largest metro area in the United states and the second largest in Mexico.

as a further “refinement,” the United nations refers to any urban agglomer- ation with more than 10 million people as a mega-city. by this definition, there were 29 mega-cities in the world in 2015, as you can see in table 9.3, and that number is projected to increase to 41 by 2030 (the end date of current projections), In 1950 there were only two mega-cities in the world—new York and tokyo. by 1980 osaka-Kobe, Mexico City and são Paulo had joined that list, but since then there has been a veritable explosion of mega-cities (a result of the global popula- tion explosion), almost all of them emerging in developing nations. note that in 2015, only 7 of the 29 mega-cities—tokyo, new York, los angeles, Moscow, osaka-Kobe, Paris, and london—were in the world’s richer countries.

all of the definitions I have given you so far rely on varying measures of urban- ness and, as importantly, do not provide an index of the economic impact of the metropolitan areas that we are defining. researchers have increasingly relied upon satellite imagery to help us in this task, using what Paul sutton and colleagues (sutton et al. 2001) once called a “census from heaven.” by measuring the spatial extent and intensity of night-time lights collected from satellite sensors, it is possible to estimate both the size of population in a metropolis, and its likely wealth, which can serve as a proxy for the city’s global impact. richard florida and his colleagues (2012:184) did just that, identifying “. . . 681 global metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people. these global metropolitan regions house 24 percent of the world’s population but produce 60 percent of global output. We further find that asia leads the way in global economic urbanization, followed by north america, the emerging economies, and europe.”

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367Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

1950 1980 2015

City Population (millions) City

Population (millions) City

Population (millions)

new York- newark

12.3 tokyo 28.5 tokyo 38,001

osaka-Kobe 17.0 tokyo 11.3 new York-

newark 15.6 Delhi 25,703

Mexico City 13.0 shanghai 23,740 são Paulo 12.1 sao Paulo 21,066

Mumbai (bombay) 21,043 Mexico City 20,999 beijing 20,384 Kinki M.M.a. (osaka) 20,238 al-Qahirah (Cairo) 18,772 new York-newark 18,593 Dhaka 17,598 Karachi 16,618 buenos aires 15,180 Kolkata (Calcutta) 14,865 Istanbul 14,164 Chongqing 13,332 lagos 13,123 Manila 12,946 rio de Janeiro 12,902 Guangzhou,

Guangdong 12,458

los angeles-long beach-santa ana

12,310

Moskva (Moscow) 12,166 Kinshasa 11,587 tianjin 11,210 Paris 10,843 shenzhen 10,749 Jakarta 10,323 london 10,313 bangalore 10,087

Sources: adapted from data in United nations Population Division (2014)

Table 9.3 the World’s largest Urban agglomerations (Mega-Cities) have Changed Dramatically over time

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368 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

the rapid growth of cities in the context of continuing population growth in developing countries deserves considerable scrutiny on your part because it repre- sents a potent source of social change with which each of these nations must cope. how they cope will almost certainly affect the rest of the world. on the positive side, successful coping will mean an increase in the standard of living of people in cities of developing nations, which would indirectly benefit the whole world through the increased potential for profitable interactions. the negative impacts have to do with the potential for the implosion of urban infrastructure under the weight of more people than can be sustained in these cities, leading perhaps to the need for humanitarian relief measures, possibly even in the context of urban vio- lence. In between these extremes lies an almost unlimited range of possibilities for cities, and neighborhoods within cities.

The Urban Evolution that Accompanies the Urban Transition

as the richer countries approach a situation where almost everybody lives in urban places, it is important to remember that the end of the urban transition does not necessarily signal the end of the process of urban evolution (Pumain 2004). the mere fact that people are increasingly likely to live in places defined as urban does not mean that the urban environment itself stops changing and evolving across time and space. Indeed, there is probably more variability among urban places, and within the populations in urban places, than ever before in human history (batty 2008). this is, of course, precisely why the definition of metropolitan areas keeps changing in the United states and elsewhere—it has to keep up with the evolution of those places.

Within cities, people do not just live anywhere—they sort themselves into neigh- borhoods in such a way that people who are more similar to one another socially and economically are more likely to live closer to one another than are people who are not so alike. neighborhoods differ also with respect to the built environment— the physical transformation of the physical and natural environment that humans undertake in order to create a place where they can and want to live. It includes the infrastructure for piped water and sewerage, electricity and other types of energy, roads, buildings, parks, and everything else that physically represents what we think of as a city. these neighborhoods represent the context in which much of life will be played out for its residents, and this is an interactive process in which the people help to shape the social and physical fabric of a neighborhood and, at the same time, the nature of the neighborhood promotes or constrains the options that peo- ple have in life. this is an organic process—sometimes improving neighborhoods and the lives of its residents, and sometimes not. It is why “you can’t go home again.” home is constantly evolving.

the benefits of cities, of course, are what make them attractive, and they at least partially explain the massive transformation of countries like the United states and Canada from predominantly rural to primarily urban nations within a few gen- erations. but there are also costs involved in living in cities, and the evolution of cities is partly a result of people trying to mitigate the downside of city life. Indeed,

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most of the demographically oriented changes that I discuss below—slums, sub- urbs and exurbs, and residential segregation—deal in one way or another with the impact of crowding, which most humans find distasteful in some way or another. We are a social species, but we also like our space.

Urban Crowding

for centuries, the crowding of people into cities was doubtless harmful to existence. Packing people together in unsanitary houses in dirty cities raised death rates. fur- thermore, as is so often the case, as cities grew to unprecedented sizes in nineteenth- century europe, death struck unevenly within the population. Mortality went down faster for the better off, leaving the slums as the places where lower-income people were crowded into areas “with their sickening odor of disease, vice and crime” (Weber 1899:414).

When early students of the effects of urbanization such as adna Weber and Jacques bertillon discussed crowding and overcrowding, they had in mind a rela- tively simple concept of density—the number of people per room, per block, or per square mile. thus Weber quotes the 1891 census of england, “regarding as overcrowded all the ‘ordinary tenements that had more than two occupants to a room, bedrooms and sitting rooms included’” (1899:416). the prescription for the ill effects (literally) of overcrowding was fairly straightforward as far as Weber was concerned: “the requirement of a definite amount of air space to each occupant of a room will prevent some of the worst evils of overcrowding; plenty of water, good paving, drainage, etc. will render the sanitary conditions good.” Crime and vice are also often believed to be linked to urban life and, as a matter of fact, crime rates are almost always higher in cities than in the countryside. but what is it about crowding that might lead to differences in social behavior between urban and rural people? to examine that question, you have to ask more specifically what crowding is.

the simplest definition of crowding is essentially demographic and refers to density—the ratio of people to physical space. as more and more people occupy a given area, the density increases and it therefore becomes relatively more crowded. Under these conditions, what changes in behavior can you expect? In a 1905 essay, Georg simmel suggested that the result of crowding was an “intensification of ner- vous stimulation” (simmel 1905:408), which produced stress and, in turn, was adapted to by people reacting with their heads rather than their hearts. “this means that urban dwellers tend to become intellectual, rational, calculating, and emotion- ally distant from one another” (fischer 1976:30). here were the early murmurs of the urbanism concept—that the crowding of people into cities changes behavior—a concept often expressed with negative overtones.

Perhaps the most famous expression of the negative consequences of the city is louis Wirth’s paper “Urbanism as a Way of life” (1938), in which he argued that urbanism will result in isolation and the disorganization of social life. Density, Wirth argued, encourages impersonality and leads to people exploiting each other. for two decades, there was little questioning of Wirth’s thesis and, as amos hawley put it, “In one short paper, Wirth determined the interpretation of density for an

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370 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

entire generation of social scientists” (hawley 1972:524). the idea that increased population density had harmful side effects lay idle for a while, but it was revived with considerable enthusiasm in the 1960s following a report by John Calhoun on the behavior of rats under crowded conditions.

although he initiated his studies of crowding among rats in 1947, it was not until 1958 that Calhoun began his most famous experiments (which later helped inspire the popular stories and a movie about the rats of nIMh). In a barn in rockville, Maryland, he designed a series of experiments in which rat populations could build up freely under conditions that would permit detailed observations without humans influencing the behavior of the rats relating to each other (Calhoun 1962). he built four pens, each with all the accoutrements for normal rat life and divided by electrified partitions. Initially, eight infant rats were placed in each pen, and when they reached maturity, Calhoun installed ramps between each pen. at that point, the experiment took its own course in terms of the effects of population growth in a limited area.

normally, rats have a fairly simple form of social organization, characterized by groups of 10 to 12 hierarchically ranked rats defending their common terri- tory. there is usually one male dominating the group, and status is indicated by the amount of territory open to an individual. as Calhoun’s rat population grew from the original 32 to 60, one dominant male took over each of the two end pens and established harems of eight to 10 females. the remaining rats were congregated in the two middle pens, where problems developed over congestion at the feeding hop- pers. as the population grew from 60 to 80, behavior patterns developed into what Calhoun called a “behavioral sink”—gross distortions of behavior resulting from animal crowding. behavior remained fairly normal in the two end pens, where each dominant male defended his territory by sleeping at the end of the ramp, but in the two middle pens there were severe changes in sexual, nesting, and territorial behav- ior. some of the males became sexually passive; others became sexually hyperactive, chasing females mercilessly; and still another group of males was observed mounting other males, as well as females. females became disorganized in their nesting habits, building very poor nests, getting litters mixed up, and losing track of their young. Infant mortality rose significantly. finally, males appeared to alter their concept of territoriality. With no space to defend, the males in the two middle pens substituted time for territory, and three times a day, the males fought at the eating bin.

Calhoun’s study can be summarized by noting that, among his rats, crowd- ing (an increase in the number of rats within a fixed amount of space) led to the disruption of important social functions and to social disorganization. related to these changes in social behavior were signs of physiological stress, such as changes in their hormonal systems that made it difficult for females to bring pregnancies to term and care for their young. other studies have shown that not only rats but also monkeys, hares, shrews, fish, elephants, and house mice tend to respond to higher density by reducing their fertility (Galle et al. 1972).

although the severe distortions of behavior that Calhoun witnessed among rats have never been replicated among humans, research has suggested that at the macro (group) level, there may be some fairly predictable consequences of increasing pop- ulation density (mainly as a result of increases in population size). for example,

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371Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

it has been argued that violent interaction can be expected to increase as popula- tion size increases: “the opportunity structure for murder, robbery, and aggravated assault increases at an increasing rate with aggregate size” (Mayhew and levinger 1976:98). there are more people with whom to have conflict, and an increasingly small proportion of people over whom we exercise direct social control (which would lessen the likelihood of conflict leading to violence). Increasing size leads to greater superficiality and to more transitory human interaction—that is, greater anonymity. Mayhew and levinger point out that “since humans are by nature finite organisms with a finite amount of time to devote to the total stream of incoming signals, it is necessarily the case that the average amount of time they can devote to the increasing volume of contacts . . . is a decreasing function of aggregate size. this will occur by chance alone” (1976:100).

because no person has the time to develop deeply personal relationships (pri- mary relations) with more than a few people, the more people there are entering a person’s life, the smaller the proportion one can deal with in depth. this leads to the appearance that people in cities are more estranged from each other than in rural settings, but Claude fischer (1981) offered evidence that in all settings, people are distrustful of strangers (xenophobia)—we just encounter more of them in the city. this may lead to personal stress as people try to sort out the vast array of human contacts, since the more people there are, the greater the variety of both expectations others have of you and obligations you have toward others. the prob- lems of not enough time to go around and of contradictory expectations lead to “role strain”—a perceived difficulty in fulfilling role obligations. on a more posi- tive note, data from the General social survey of the national opinion research Center have been used to suggest that moving to a big city increases your tolerance for other human beings, rather than the other way around (Wilson 1991). Indeed, subsequent research by fischer (2011) shows that family and friends are just as important as ever in the United states, despite the fact that americans are now pre- dominantly city dwellers.

It might be fair to say that the most reasonable reaction to the negative aspects of city life is to figure out how best to cope with them and minimize them. the most common response has been to get as far away from high-density city life as possible, while also staying close enough to it so that you can participate in its benefits. this is probably the underlying reason for the evolution in urban places I have been dis- cussing in this chapter. Most people do not really prefer to be packed together with others, and the increasing sophistication of transportation and information tech- nologies has made it increasingly easy to spread out, at least in the richer countries. In cities in poorer countries, however, many people are struggling just to get by and find themselves living in densely settled slums because they have no other choice.

Slums

european and american cities dealt with slums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as cities bulged with migrants who overran the local infrastruc- ture. that process of rapid growth is now taking place in the cities of developing

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countries, so it is not surprising that the world’s slums tend to be concentrated there. the United nations human settlements Programme known as Un-habitat defines slums as places that lack one or more of the following: (1) access to potable water, (2) access to piped sewerage, (3) housing of adequate space, (4) housing of adequate durability, and (5) security of tenure (Un-habitat 2014c)—a definition that is not very different from Weber’s ideas about london slums in the nineteenth century.

nearly one in six human beings is estimated by the Un to be living in a slum, and nearly one in three urban residents lives in one. figure 9.4 lists the countries in the world that have at least 25 percent of their urban population living in slums. the countries are arranged by region and you can see clearly that sub-saharan africa dominates the list—nearly three in four urban dwellers in that part of the world live in a slum. Mike Davis (2007) describes the area in West africa between lagos, nigeria, and accra, Ghana, as a conurbation that may have “the single big- gest footprint of poverty in the world” (p. 6). furthermore, there is no immediate sign of relief, as evidenced by the Un-habitat’s report on african cities in 2014 (Un-habitat 2014b:7):

Ubiquitous urban poverty and urban slum proliferation, so characteristic of africa’s large cities, is likely to become an even more widespread phenomenon under current ur- ban development trajectories, especially given the continuing and significant shortfalls in urban institutional capacities. since the bulk of the urban population increases are now being absorbed by africa’s secondary and smaller cities, the sheer lack of urban gover- nance capacities in these settlements is likely to cause slum proliferation processes that replicate those of africa’s larger cities.

Unfortunately, slums exist in many other places outside of africa. there are huge slum populations throughout asia. Un-habitat estimates that more than three-fourths of urban dwellers in laos and Cambodia are living in slums, and even in China and India nearly one-third are in that category. In latin america and the Caribbean, the data show that the majority of urban haitians and Jamaicans are in slums, and the percentages are high throughout latin america in countries with high proportions of indigenous people. brazil is famous for its favelas, although less than a third of brazilians in cities live in slums.

the existence of slums signals that the urban population is growing more quickly than the local government can afford to build urban infrastructure. If peo- ple are poor, and governments themselves have little money, then urban residents are forced to deal with life informally. these informal settlements are not likely to be the healthiest environments in which to live (Montgomery 2009), but at the same time the health of residents in these places may still be better, or at least no worse, than if they were living in the countryside.

there is no better example of this than access to clean water. even in rural areas of many developing countries, the streams and underground aquifers from which water is drawn may be polluted, and unless people have proper water treat- ment and storage capabilities, they will not have a good supply of drinking water. this can lead to diarrhea and other digestive problems, not to mention the threat

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373Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

Sub-Saharan Africa Sierra Leone

0 20 28

29 34 35

38 39

43 45 46 47

53 55

57 57

60 62 63 64 64 65 66

68 68

71 74

76 78 79 80

82 83

87 90

94 95

31 32

41 44

46 48

29 32

34 35 36

41 46 47

49 61

61 71

79 79

40 60 Percent of urban population living in slums

80 100

53 53

Sudan Chad

Angola Guinea-Bissau

Central African Republic

Niger Mozambique

Ethiopia Madagascar

Congo (Kinshasha) Somalia

Benin Rwanda

Malawi Mali

Tanzania Burundi Nigeria

Uganda Togo

Burkina Faso Zambia

Côte d’lvoire Kenya

Congo (Brazzaville) Cameroon

Guinea Gambia Ghana Gabon

Senegal Lesotho Namibia

South Africa Middle East/Western Asia

South and East Asia Laos

Cambodia Bangladesh

Nepal Mongolia Pakistan

Myanmar Philippines

Viet Nam India

China Thailand

Yemen Lebanon

Iraq Iran

Latin America & Caribbean Haiti

Jamaica Bolivia Belize

Nicaragua Guatemala

Peru Honduras

Guyana Venezuela

EI Salvador Brazil

Figure 9.4 Percent of the Urban Population living in slums, by Countries Within regions of the World Source: adapted from data downloaded from Un-habitat (2014a); data refer to estimates for 2005 or more recent.

Note: only countries with 25 percent or more in slums are shown in the graph.

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of cholera and other water-born diseases. In urban areas, the problem is increas- ingly being dealt with by packaged water. bottled water is too expensive for most residents, so a cheaper solution has been to package clean water in plastic sleeves (called “sachets” in West africa) that are sold by street vendors. Use of this source of water has been shown to be associated with better health among children in slum neighborhoods (stoler et al. 2011). there is, to be sure, a downside to this source of water, since the proliferation of discarded plastic sleeves clogs the city’s system of open drains and generally increases the amount of non-degradable waste on the planet.

If there is such a thing as a positive aspect to the perspective that urban slums may not be any worse than life in rural areas, it is that in moving into the city people bring their poverty with them to a place where it is exposed to public view. as a consequence, is more likely to be acted upon by governments and nGos (non-governmental organizations). this is likely to be small comfort to the people involved, however.

Suburbanization and Exurbanization

being crowded into a slum is probably the worst aspect of city life. this and other negative impacts of the urban transition on the human condition represent the set of unintended consequences that may prevent the city from being as attractive as it might otherwise be. the efficiencies of the city have generally been translated into higher incomes for city dwellers than for farmers and, as I mentioned earlier, the larger the city, the higher the wages tend to be. Wage differentials undoubtedly have been and continue to be prime motivation for individuals to move to cities and stay there. but so-called “urban amenities” are also important, especially for the young adults who represent the majority of rural-to-urban migrants in cities of developing nations. Cities offer not only opportunity, but also entertainment and excitement that are rarely present in the countryside.

throughout american history, the sins and foibles of urban life have been decried, and life in the city is often compared unfavorably with a pastoral existence. fuguitt and Zuiches (1975) found that public opinion polls in the 1950s and 60s showed consistently that a vast majority of americans had a preference for living in rural areas or small cities and towns. however, in the 1970s, when for the first time they asked a survey question about the desire to be near a large city, those rural preferences became geographically more specific. their data showed that among people who preferred living in rural areas or in small cities, 61 percent also wanted to be within 30 miles of a central city. a replication of the survey twenty years later revealed a remarkable consistency over time in those residential preferences (fuguitt and brown 1990)—rural, but not too rural.

People thus like it both ways. they aspire to the freedom of space in the coun- try but also prefer the economic and social advantages of the city. the compromise, of course, is the suburb. More than a century has passed since adna Weber (1899) noted that american cities were beginning to suburbanize—to grow in the outlying rings of the city. It was not until the 1920s, however, that suburbanization really

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took off. hawley (1972) calculated that between 1900 and 1920 people were still concentrating in the centers of cities, but after 1920 the suburbs began regularly to grow in population at a faster pace than the central cities. two factors related to suburbanization are people’s desire to live in the less-crowded environment of the outlying areas and their ability to do so—a result of increasing wealth and the avail- ability of transportation, especially automobiles. such transportation has added an element of geographic flexibility not possible when the early suburbanites depended on fixed-rail trolleys to transport them between home in the suburbs and work in the central city.

from the 1920s through the 1960s, the process of suburbanization continued almost unabated in the United states (as indeed in most cities of the world). admit- tedly, the process was hurried along by automobile manufacturers and tire compa- nies that bought local trolley lines in order to dismantle them and force people to rely on gasoline-powered buses (Kunstler 1993). nonetheless, the advantages of the automobile are numerous and it was inevitable that cars would influence the shape of urban areas. according to the 2012 american Community survey, 76 percent of all workers get to work by driving alone in their automobile (car, truck, or van)— a higher fraction than in 1990—and an additional 10 percent carpooled to work in an automobile, meaning that altogether 86 percent of american workers get to work by driving. only a small fraction of americans (5 percent) use public trans- portation, and the remaining 8 percent walk or bike to work or work at home.

furthermore, the commute may not be the classic suburb-to-city drive, but rather from one suburb to another because as the population has suburbanized, so have businesses, and this has led to a fading of the original distinction between urban and suburban (frey 2004). the rest of the world is generally headed in the same direction. tourists to Paris, london, or tokyo may spend most of their time near the older “cultural” center of the city, but most of the people in these global cities now live and work out in the suburbs.

suburbanization is also associated with three other trends worth comment- ing on: (1) the western and southern tilt to urbanization in the United states has facilitated suburbanization through the creation of new places, as people migrate out of the older industrial cities of the northeast and upper midwest; (2) many of those new places are edge cities within the suburbs, replacing the functions of the old central city; and (3) older parts of cities have been gentrified. let us examine each of these in a bit more detail, remembering that, although my comments are directed primarily at the United states, many of these same trends are being seen all over the world.

the western United states, the land of open spaces, had become the most highly metropolitanized area of the country by the 1980s and a higher fraction of residents now lives in metropolitan areas in the West than in any other part of the country. this has happened because the flow of migration in the United states has been consistently westward, especially since the end of World War II, as you will recall from Chapter 7, and migration in the modern world is almost always toward or between urban places. People and jobs have been moving west, and increasingly south as well—definitely toward the warmer climates (although climate is not nec- essarily the most important factor). In 1960, 25 percent of all fortune 500 firms

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were headquartered in new York City, but by 1990 that had declined to 8 percent (Kasarda 1995), where it has stayed since (CnnMoney 2014). Many companies are now in sunbelt cities, led by houston, Dallas, atlanta, san francisco, and Charlotte, but not necessarily in the central parts of those cities. the suburbs have become the new sites of company headquarters, congregating near major highways and regional airports. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the richest person in the United states (bill Gates) founded a company (Microsoft) located in the suburbs (redmond, Washington) of a western city (seattle).

Increasing suburbanization has meant greater metropolitan complexity, as new areas spring up on the edges of cities, competing with each other for jobs and ame- nities (frey 2004). Joel Garreau (1991) coined the term “edge city” to describe the suburban entities that have emerged in the rings and beltways of metropolitan areas and are replicating, if not replacing, the functions of older central cities. some of the edge cities are actually within the same city limits as the central city, but are distinct from it. furthermore, larger metropolitan areas may have several edge cit- ies, each with its own pattern of dominance over specific economic functions (such as high technology or financial services) in conjunction with a full range of retail shops and dining and entertainment establishments. Peter Muller (1997) argues, in fact, that it is precisely in these edge cities that the globalization of american cities has taken place.

the growth of edge cities and the increasing economic and social complexity of the suburbs help to explain the shift in commuting patterns in the United states. In essence, the flexibility of the automobile allows people to live and work almost anywhere within the same general area. the number of commuters going from one suburban area to another far exceeds the number of commuters going from the sub- urbs to the central city. as noted above, those cars on the freeway in the morning are not all headed downtown—they are headed every which way.

suburbanization and the edge cities phenomenon have tended to leave the cen- tral cities with a daytime population of “suits” who commute downtown to work at various service companies (especially government administration and financial ser- vices industries) that have remained in the central city. at the same time, shopping centers, corporate headquarters, many new high-technology industries, and traffic gridlock have all relocated to the suburbs, leaving a void in the old central cities.

Into that void have come some of the baby boomers. they grew up in the sub- urbs to a greater extent than any previous cohort, but as they reached an age to buy homes, baby boomers found themselves caught in the midst of spiraling housing costs amid increasing density in the suburbs. an alternative for some people has been to reverse the suburbanization trend and move back into the central city, where gentrification of buildings and of whole neighborhoods has been taking place in some, although not all, older cities of developed nations. this process has the con- troversial potential to remove the lower-income population that had settled into the areas previously abandoned by higher-income households, and may dramatically alter the social structure of the surrounding area, although this is not an inevitable result of gentrification (McKinnish et al. 2010). because these innovative renovators tend to be white and upwardly mobile (and often without children), they have been likened to the gentry moving back into the city, and thus the term gentrification is

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377Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

applied, referring to the restoration and habitation of older homes in central city areas by urban or suburban elites.

the popularity of downtown living has expanded the scope of renovation in an increasing number of cities to include tearing down entire blocks of older buildings and erecting new high-rise, high-priced condominiums (ford 2003), in what has been called “new-build gentrification” (rérat et al. 2009). some of this develop- ment immediately preceded the burst in the housing bubble and so progress has slowed since 2007.

another alternative to the increasingly dense suburbanization has been to head even farther out of town, to what sometimes are called the exurbs—the suburbs of the suburbs. another term for this is the peri-urban region—the periphery of the urban zone that looks rural to the naked eye but houses people who are essentially urban: “the peri-urban region is a distinctive zone that spans the landscape between contiguous urban development and the rural countryside” (ford 1999:298).

as the urban population sprawls deeper into the countryside, those who are unable to leave the older sections of urban, and even suburban, places may find themselves residentially segregated and left out of the mainstream.

Residential Segregation

although suburbia has become a legendary part of american society and is a major force of urban evolution, suburbanization can be viewed as an innovation that started with some people and then diffused to others. In particular, it is a residen- tial transformation that disproportionately involved whites in the United states until the 1970s. for example, in 1970 in 15 large metropolitan areas studied by reynolds farley (1976), 58 percent of whites lived in the suburbs compared with 17 percent of nonwhites. beginning in the 1930s, the proportion of whites living in central cities declined steadily and the proportion of african americans rose steeply (schnore et al. 1976); the african american population was undergoing a very rapid urbanization (the Great Migration that I mentioned in Chapter 7) at the same time that whites were suburbanizing.

During the period 1910–30, there was a substantial movement of african americans out of the south headed for the cities of the north and the West. the urban population of blacks grew by more than 3 percent per year during that 20-year period, whereas the rural population declined not only relatively but in absolute terms as well. the reasons for migration out of rural areas were primar- ily economic. the decline in the world demand for southern agricultural products providing the push out of the south, and there were concurrent pull factors as well in the form of demands in northern and western cities for labor, which could be met cheaply by blacks moving from the south (farley 1970; tolnay et al. 2005). the Depression brought a slowdown in the urbanization of african americans, but by the beginning of World War II half of the nation’s blacks lived in cities, reaching that level 30 years later than whites had.

after World War II, the urban transition of blacks resumed at an even higher level than after World War I, and by 1960 the african american population

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378 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

was 58 percent urban in the south and 95 percent urban in the north and West. Urbanization was associated not only with the economic recovery after the war but also with severely restricted international migration, which, until the law was changed in 1965, meant that foreigners no longer were entering the labor force to take newly created jobs, thus providing a market for african american labor. an important consequence of the urban transition of blacks, accompanied by sub- urbanization of whites, has been the segregation of black and white populations within metropolitan areas (Massey and Denton 1993; Massey 1996).

the segregation of people into different neighborhoods on the basis of differ- ent social characteristics (such as ethnicity, occupation, or income) is a fairly com- mon feature of human society. however, in the United states residential segregation by race is much more intense than segregation by any other measurable category. residential segregation of blacks in the United states has been called an “american apartheid system” (Massey and Denton 1993), and the maintenance of this pattern over time has been due especially to the following factors: (1) Mortgage lending policies were discriminatory; (2) suburbs developed strategies for keeping african americans out; and (3) federally sponsored public housing encouraged segregation in many cities (farley and frey 1994; Iceland and nelson 2008).

specific action has been taken over time to try to mitigate the most egregious causes of residential segregation while, at the same time, patterns of residential seg- regation have been impacted by the 1965 changes in the Immigration act. Immi- grants have diversified the ethnic structure of the country, and data suggest that asians and hispanics have a greater propensity or ability to suburbanize than do blacks, who remain residentially more segregated than other groups (logan et al. 2002; Iceland and nelson 2008).

from the standpoint of demographic characteristics, the suburbs and exurbs are composed especially of higher-education, higher-income, married-couple fami- lies (berube and thacher 2004; berube et al. 2006)—a pattern that disproportion- ately works against blacks who have lower levels of education, lower incomes, and lower marriage rates than whites. but demographic components of suburbanization do not explain residential segregation; they merely point to its existence. the explanations are essentially social in nature, and one of the long-standing ideas that “status rankings are operationalized in society through the imposition of social dis- tance” (berry et al. 1976:249). In race relations, the social status of blacks has been historically lower than that of whites. that status ranking used to be maintained symbolically by such devices as uniforms, separate facilities, and so forth, which were obvious enough to allow social distance even though blacks and whites lived in close proximity to each other. however, as african americans left the south and moved into industrial urban settings, many of those negative status symbols were also left behind. as a result, spatial segregation has served as a means of main- taining social distance. thus as blacks have improved in education, income, and occupational status, whites have maintained social distance by means of residential segregation facilitated by suburbanization.

Differential suburbanization by race has done more than just keep whites sepa- rate from blacks. It has also separated blacks from job opportunities. Jobs have followed the population to the suburbs, making it increasingly difficult for people

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379Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

living in the central city—who may have inadequate access to transportation—to find employment. this “spatial mismatch” has been shown to be associated with higher unemployment rates for blacks living in Detroit and Chicago (Mouw 2000), as well as in other american cities (Wagmiller 2007).

however, there is some evidence that a trend toward desegregation does exist. as you know, immigration to the United states has increasingly involved people from latin america and asia, and almost all immigrants are in cities, as I discussed above. this increasing diversity of the U.s. population has combined with increas- ing suburbanization to create a more variegated and integrated suburban popu- lation, and blacks have been incorporated into these increasingly complex trends (Crowder et al. 2012; holloway et al. 2012). this process has been encouraged by the spreading out of asians from the Pacific Coast, hispanics out of the south- west, and by the flow of many blacks to a “new” south whose economy is based on growth in higher-income service industries rather than agriculture (frey 2006). nonetheless, census data suggest that blacks are still segregated more from whites than are either asians or hispanics (Iceland and nelson 2008).

european cities are also characterized by a certain amount of residential segregation, largely with respect to the ethnic minority groups that have comprised the immigrant populations. however, in many parts of europe a large segment of the housing market for working-class families is subsidized and controlled by the government, and this has limited the scope of residential segregation compared to the United states (bulpett 2002; Maloutas 2004; agnew 2010 ).

Cities as Sustainable Environments

for better or worse, human existence is increasingly tied to the city, which raises the key question of whether cities are sustainable places for humans to live. the answer seems to be that we have to make them so, because we do not really have another acceptable choice (low et al. 2005). Un-habitat is devoted to this task, and it has held two global gatherings on housing and sustainable Urban Develop- ment: habitat I in 1976 in vancouver, british Columbia; and habitat II in Istanbul, turkey, in 1996; with habitat III scheduled for 2016, once again in turkey. In between these official Un conferences, Un-habitat hosts a World Urban forum every two years, with the most recent as of this writing having been held in Medellin, Colombia in 2014. the goal of these meetings is largely to assess progress in dealing with each country’s burgeoning urban population and to share best practices.

the opportunities that cities offer to rural peasants in less developed nations may seem meager to those of us raised in a wealthier society. Most third-world cities have long since outgrown their infrastructure and, as a result, drinkable water may be scarce (or available only in plastic sleeves sold by street vendors), sewage is prob- ably not properly disposed of, housing is hard to find, transportation is inadequate, and electricity may be only sporadically available. this is not a pretty picture, but it is still an improvement on the average rural village. thus, “despite these problems, the flood of migrants to the cities continues apace. Why? the answer lies in the natural population increase in rural areas, limited rural economic development, and

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380 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

the decision-making calculus of urban migrants. . . . What this all means, of course, is that the primary cause of what some have termed ‘overurbanization’ (more urban residents than the economies of cities can sustain) is increasingly severe ‘overru- ralization’ (more rural residents than the economies of rural areas can sustain)” (Dogan and Kasarda 1988:19).

In the 1980s, Mexico City was the fourth most populous city in the world (see table 9.3) and many people projected it to continue growing almost forever. however, the serious environmental problems in the valley of Mexico created by population growth convinced the Mexican government to undertake a concerted effort to move industry out of the area and divert migrants to other metropolitan areas. the effort clearly paid off, because the 1990 census counted fewer people than anticipated and, on that basis, the United nations demographers revised their projections of population growth in Mexico City downward. still, the 21.0 million people living in Mexico City in 2015 was a huge increase from the 3.1 million in 1950, and the United nations projects that the population of Mexico City will be approaching 24 million by the year 2030, as it sprawls well beyond the older cen- tral city. terrible smog, a dwindling water supply, and an increase in crime rates are all features of modern Mexico City—yet it offers more opportunity for the average rural peasant of Mexico than does the countryside, so people continue to move there.

evaluations of the quality of life in the largest cities of the world reveal, not sur- prisingly, that the metropolitan areas of the richer countries are the preferred places to live. every year, the economist Intelligence Unit, based in london, creates a list of the most and least livable cities in the world. as of this writing, the most recent list ranked Melbourne, australia, as the world’s “most livable city,” followed by vienna, austria, and vancouver, Canada. eight of the top ten most livable cities were in either Canada or australia (the other two were in europe—none was in the United states). at the other end of the scale, Damascus, syria, was the least livable city in the world as a result of several years of sectarian violence in that country. Indeed, cities with the greatest threat of conflict (e.g., algiers, algeria, tripoli, libya, and Karachi, Pakistan) and those with deepest levels of poverty (e.g., lagos, nigeria and harare, Zimbabwe) were the candidates to be on the least livable list.

I keep coming back to the same theme, however, that, as dismal as urban life is in developing countries, it is typically (although of course not always) a step up from life in rural areas. Cities are where economic development is occurring in the world, and it is where infrastructure and housing will continue to be built. the demand for housing itself is a function of the relationship between the population of young adults wanting to form their own family household and the number of people who are dying and thus presumably freeing up existing housing. the high rates of growth and attendant youthful age structures of the developing countries tell us that the worldwide demand for housing will be predominantly in the cities of less developed nations.

along with that housing infrastructure improvements will also be needed— water, sewers, electricity, roads, and public transportation. this is a daunting task, considering that the volume of housing needed is unprecedented in world history and, of course, we have not come even close to sheltering the current generation

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381Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

of people adequately. furthermore, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 11, if the world is going to grow enough food for the 9 or more billion people that we expect by the middle of this century, we need machines to replace people on the world’s farms. large volumes of food need more “horsepower” than humans (or horses) can generate, so people are increasingly incidental to the main activities tak- ing place in agriculture. the only other place for them is in the city, although of course, improving life for billions of people living in cities will use a tremendous amount of resources.

a related and very important cost of the urban transition is that, as we gather ourselves into cities, we lose perspective about where our resources come from, and where our waste goes. It seems like magic on both ends, but of course it is not. It is dangerous to forget our link to nature, because there is a very real possibility that we have already overshot our capacity to sustain life for everybody in the world at a level even approaching that of the average urban resident of the United states, Canada, or australia. We must learn how to deal successfully with the earth’s limited resources, because there are, in fact, no viable alternatives to the urban transition.

Summary and Conclusion

the urban transition describes the process whereby a society shifts from being largely bound to the country to being bound by the city. It is a process that histori- cally has been the close companion of economic development, which, of itself, sug- gests the close theoretical connection of the urban transition with the other facets of the demographic transition. the urban transition is associated with increasing differentiation among cities, leading to identifiable urban hierarchies throughout the world. every country has its own rank-ordering of cities, but there is also a world ranking, leading to the designation of some cities as being world or global cities. these are generally thought of as being core cities; the other peripheral cities depend on the core for their place in the global economic scheme of things.

More than half of the human population now resides in urban places, and that percentage is climbing steadily. although rural-to-urban migration is a major con- tributor to the urban transition, mortality and fertility are importantly associated as well, as both cause and consequence. Population pressures created by declining mortality in rural areas, combined with the economic opportunities offered by cit- ies, have been historically linked to urbanization. on the other hand, mortality is now almost always lower in cities than in rural areas, which permits higher rates of urban natural increase than in the past.

the development of industrialized countries is replete with examples of how urban life helps generate or ignite the first two of ansley Coale’s three precondi- tions for a fertility decline—the acceptance of calculated choice as an element in personal family size decisions and the perception of advantages to small families (see Chapter 6). nonetheless, in the cities of less developed nations, urban fertility, even though lower than rural fertility, is still typically much higher than in cities of the developed world. as a result, cities in less developed nations are the most rap- idly growing places on earth.

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382 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

as richer countries reach the point where almost everyone is residing in urban places (which we might define as the end of the urban transition), a new set of urban evolution processes takes place. Most of these changes are attempts to deal somehow or another with the effects of crowding in urban places—the worst example of which is found in slums. solutions to the crowding problem include especially suburbaniza- tion, which is now a worldwide phenomenon, but other trends such as exurbaniza- tion and gentrification are all part of the process as well. other aspects of the urban evolution relate to the city’s ability to support diversity among humans. the com- plexity of life in urban places is part and parcel of the overall demographic complex- ity of life in the modern world. Urban places are where mortality is lowest, fertility is lowest, the age structure is the most variable, and people of all different kinds of backgrounds can mingle together with deliberate anonymity or closeness. this com- bination of transitions has been especially noticeable in its effects on the family and household structure of humans, and we turn to that transition in the next chapter.

Main Points

1. the world is at the point at which one of every two people lives in an urban area; by the middle of this century, nearly two out of three will be there.

2. the urban transition reflects the process whereby human society moves (quite literally) from being predominantly rural to being largely urban.

3. one of the most striking features of urbanization is its recency in world history, because it depends heavily on all of the other changes that comprise the demographic transition: highly urban nations like england and the United states were almost entirely agricultural at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

4. Cities are centerpieces of the development process associated with demographic transitions because they are centers of economic efficiency.

5. Cities throughout the world are arranged in urban hierarchies that are often described in terms of the core and periphery model.

6. Until the twentieth century, death rates in cities were so high and fertility was low enough that cities could not have grown had it not been for migration of people from the countryside, but that is no longer true.

7. In virtually every society, fertility levels are lower in cities than in rural areas, yet cities in less developed nations almost always have higher fertility levels than cities in developed nations.

8. the urban transition is morphing into the urban evolution, as urban places become increasingly spread out and complex.

9. Urbanization in the United states has now turned into suburbanization, with most americans living in suburbs—a trend that is spreading to the rest of the world.

10. Population growth in cities has given rise to fears about the potential harmful effects of crowding, and especially to concerns about the environmental sustain- ability of cities.

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383Chapter 9 The Urban Transition

Questions for Review

1. Compare the positive and negative qualities of urban places with the positive and negative qualities of rural places. Which do you prefer and why?

2. What are the characteristics of a city that would make it a global city, rather than just a city?

3. Discuss the ways in which the different levels of mortality and fertility between urban and rural places wind up making an important contribution to the urban transition.

4. how does the long-time concern with the ill effects of urban crowding square with the movement for smart growth that aims to increase urban density?

5. are slums an inevitable part of the urban transition? Why or why not?

Websites of Interest

remember that websites are not as permanent as books and journals, so I cannot guarantee that each of the following websites still exists at the moment you are reading this. You may have to Google the name of the organization to find the current web address.

1. http://www.unhabitat.org Un-habitat, more formally the United nations human settlements Programme, monitors the cities of the world, with a focus on those in developing countries.

2. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/urbanization/index.shtml this website has information on the United nations Population Division’s latest estimates and projections of the world’s urban and rural populations.

3. http://www.iied.org/human-settlements/home the International Institute for environment and Development, based in london, has a human settlements program that has been very influential in the area of environment and health in cities.

4. http://www.smartgrowth.org Do you want to help slow down urban sprawl? learn more about smart growth at this website.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/Urban%20Transition Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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384

CHAPTER 10 The Family and Household Transition

WHAT IS THE FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD TRANSITION?

Defining Family Demography and Life Chances The Growing Diversity in Household Composition

and Family Structure Gender Equity and the Empowerment of Women

PROXIMATE DETERMINANTS OF FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD CHANGES

Delayed Marriage Accompanied by Leaving the Parental Nest

Cohabitation Nonmarital Childbearing Childlessness Divorce Widowhood The Combination of These Determinants

CHANGING LIFE CHANCES Education Labor Force Participation Occupation Income Poverty Wealth Race and Ethnicity

Race and Ethnicity in the United States Ethnicity in Canada and Mexico

Religion

DOES MARRIAGE MATTER?

ESSAY: Show Me the Money! Household Diversity and Wealth Among the Elderly

Figure 10.1 Percent of Women 15–19 Who Are Married Source: Adapted by the author from data in United Nations Population Division (2013).

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385Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

Households used to be created by marriage and dissolved by death—in between there were children. Throughout the world this pattern has been transformed by what some have called the “second demographic transition,” which I will discuss as the “family and household transition” in the context of the broader demo- graphic transition: “The demographic transition is in essence a transition in family strategies: the reactive, largely biological family-building decision rules appropriate to highly uncertain environments come eventually to be supplanted by more delib- erate and forward-looking strategies that require longer time horizons” (Cohen and Montgomery 1998:6). Put another way, the transition is from “family building by fate” to “family building by design” (Lloyd and Ivanov 1988:141).

What Is the Family and Household Transition?

In general terms, we can describe the family and household transition as the increas- ing diversity all over the world in family and household structure occasioned by people living longer, with fewer children born, increasingly in urban settings, and subject to higher standards of living. Households no longer depend on marriage for their creation, nor do they depend on death to dissolve them, and children are encountered in a wide array of household and living arrangements.

“The family is in crisis, as witnessed by increasing instability of unions, fluidity of the ‘marital’ home and the economic stress experienced by women and children of disrupted marriages.” Although this is a description that could certainly pertain to the United States, the author of that quote was referring to sub-Saharan Africa (Makinwa-Adebusoye 1994:48). “Marriage is becoming rarer and the age at first marriage is increasing; the number of couples who cohabit before and without mar- rying is rapidly increasing; and so as a consequence, are births out of wedlock” (Blossfeld and de Rose 1992:73). That, too, could be a description of life in the United States, but in this instance the authors were talking about Italy.

All over the world, changes in household formation and living arrangements are regularly discussed and discoursed. Curiously, these debates rarely include a review of the underlying demographic changes that helped spawn this massive social shift, and so my purpose in this chapter is to rectify that deficiency for you. The changes we see occurring all over the world are the inevitable result of powerful social forces unleashed by the demographic transition. I am not going to go so far as to suggest that we can predict exactly which changes will take place at a given time in a given society, but I will suggest to you that no social system could remain unchanged in the face of massive declines in mortality, followed by massive declines in fertil- ity, and accompanied by massive migration, especially to urban areas, along with the dramatic transition in the age structure occasioned especially by the decline in fertility—all of the changes we have discussed in the previous chapters.

The demographic transition promotes a diversity of family and household types because: (1) people are living longer, which means that they are more likely to be widowed, more likely to tire of the current spouse and seek a divorce, and less likely to feel pressure to marry early and begin childbearing; (2) the latter pressure is relieved by the decline in both mortality and fertility, which means that women,

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386 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

in particular, do not need to begin childbearing at such a young age, and both men and women have many years of life after the children are grown; and (3) an increas- ingly urban population is presented with many acceptable lifestyle options besides marriage and family-building. I will discuss these drivers of diversity in more detail later in the chapter.

I begin the chapter with a discussion of exactly how the structure of households and living arrangements have, in fact, changed over time—how big is this transi- tion in the United States and elsewhere? Particularly noteworthy is the change in the status of women. I have referred to that repeatedly in previous chapters, but we need to keep reminding ourselves that gender equity is central to the well-being of any society. Next I turn to the specific demographic changes that have contributed to the increasing diversity in household structure. A critical element is the changing set of life chances that people are experiencing in the United States and all over the world—changes in the population (or demographic) characteristics that influence how your life will turn out. These include especially education, labor force partici- pation, occupation, and income, which in turn affect gender roles (the social roles considered appropriate for males or females) and marital status. All of these things have influenced the changing family and household structure, although differently for some cultural groups than others. Indeed, race and ethnicity, along with religion, mediate the impact of life chances in every human society. The intersection of your population characteristics and family and household structure is a crucial determi- nant of what life will be like for you. Similarly, at the societal level, the distribution of the population by different characteristics and by family and household structure will be influenced by where a society is in the demographic transition: thus, we are in a position to say something about the future by fitting all of these pieces together.

Defining Family Demography and Life Chances

In virtually every human society ever studied, people have organized their lives around a family unit. In a general sense, a family is any group of people who are related to one another by marriage, birth, or adoption. The nature of the family, then, is that it is a kinship unit. But it is also a mini-society, a micro-population that experiences births, deaths, and migration, as well as changing age structures as it goes through its own life course. The changes that occur in the broader population—the subject of this book in general—mainly occur within the context of the family unit, so the study of population necessitates that we study the family.

Implicit in the definition of a family is the fact that its members share a sense of social bonding: the mutual acceptance of reciprocal rights and obligations, and of responsibility for each other’s well-being. We usually make a distinction between the nuclear family (at least one parent and their/his/her children) and the extended family, which can extend upward to other generations (add in grandparents and maybe even great-grandparents) and can also extend laterally to other people within each generation (aunts and uncles, cousins, and so forth).

The next question of interest to us is, Where do these people live? People live in a housing unit, which is the physical space used as separate living quarters for

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387Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

people. It may be a house, an apartment, a mobile home or trailer, or even a single room or group of rooms. People who share a housing unit are said to have formed a household. The household is thus a residential unit, and a family household is a housing or residential unit occupied by people who are all related to one another. More specifically, we can say that a family household is a household in which the householder (defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the person in whose name the house is owned or rented) is living with one or more persons related to him or her by birth, marriage, or adoption. On the other hand, a nonfamily household is con- sidered by the Census Bureau to be a housing unit that includes only a person who lives alone, or consists of people living with nonfamily co-residents, such as friends living together, a single householder who rents out rooms, or cohabiting couples. Note that many people would consider cohabiting couples to be a family, and I adopt that approach in this chapter to the extent that data permit.

Especially important to the concept of the family household is that the family part of it makes it a kinship unit, as noted above, while the household part of it makes it a consumption unit. This means that when family members live in the same household some or all of them will be responsible for producing goods and services that are shared by, and for the mutual benefit of, the family members who live together. In sum, family members do not necessarily share a household, and household members are not necessarily family members. But when family members are sharing a housing unit, we have the most powerful kinship and consumer unit that we are likely to find in any society.

Family demography is concerned largely with the study and analysis of family households: their formation, their change over time, and their dissolution. Families represent the fusion of people who were born into other families, and long before a family household dissolves, it is likely to have fissured into yet other families, as children born into the family grow up and leave the family household of their parents to create (fuse) their own households. All humans grow up in and typically live for all of their lives in social groups that represent some sort of family, and our lives are shaped and bounded by our membership in the group. Clearly, we cannot understand the changes taking place elsewhere in society unless we connect those changes to what is happening to the family.

We can additionally describe a family in terms of its geographic location because where you are in the world will influence the kinds of social, cultural, economic, and physical resources that will be available to the family. We can also describe a family in terms of its social location (where it is positioned in the local social system) because that standing will influence the family’s access to whatever local resources exist on which the family can draw. And we can describe the family in terms of its own social structure, which refers to the number of people within the family, their age and gender, and their relationship to each other.

Each of these characteristics will influence the life chances of family members. Your own life chances refer, for example, to your probability of having a particu- lar set of demographic characteristics, such as having a high-prestige job, lots of money, a stable marriage or not marrying at all, and a small family or no family at all. These differences in life chances, of course, are not necessarily a reflection of your worth as an individual, but they are reflections of the social and economic

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388 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

makeup of society—indicators of the demographic characteristics that help define what a society and its members are like.

We are born with certain ascribed characteristics, such as sex or gender and race and ethnicity, over which we have essentially no control (except in extreme cases). These characteristics affect life chances in very important ways because virtually every society uses such identifiable human attributes to the advantage of some people and the disadvantage of others. Religion is not exactly an ascribed characteristic, but worldwide it is typically a function of race or ethnicity and, as with ascribed characteristics, it is often a focal point for prejudice and discrimina- tion, which influence life chances.

Life chances are also directly related to achieved characteristics or your per- sonal human capital, those sociodemographic characteristics, such as education, occupation, labor force participation, income, and marital status, over which you do exercise some degree of control. For example, the better educated you are, the higher your occupational status is apt to be, and thus the higher your level of income will likely be. Indeed, income is a crass, but widely accepted, index of how your life is turning out. Ascribed characteristics affect your life chances primarily by affecting your access to achieved characteristics, which then become major ingredi- ents of social status—education, occupation, and income. Population characteristics affect your own demographic behavior, especially family formation and fertility, although they also influence mortality and migration, as I have already discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, respectively.

The demographics of your family, in turn, affect life chances through the pos- session or acquisition of social capital—the ability to facilitate or retard your access to opportunities for higher education, a higher status occupation, or a better-paying job. All of these aspects of population characteristics and their influence on life chances converge to affect the kind of family we choose to create and the type of household we form.

The Growing Diversity in Household Composition and Family Structure

The “traditional” family household of a married couple and their children is no longer the statistical norm in North America and in many other parts of the world, even if it remains the ideal type of household in the minds of many people. Fami- lies headed by females, especially with no husband present, are common, as are “nontraditional” households inhabited by unmarried people (including never- married, divorced, widowed, and cohabiting couples, who may represent opposite sex or same-sex couples), by older adults raising their grandchildren, or by married couples with no children. You are almost certainly aware of these societal shifts through personal experience or the mass media. What may be less obvious is that these changes are closely linked to demographic trends.

The total number of households in the United States nearly doubled from 63 million in 1970 to 117 million in 2010, but within that increase was a dramatic change in the composition of the American household, as Figure 10.2 illustrates. In 1970, the classic “married with children” households already accounted for only

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389Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

40 percent of all households in the United States. Married couples without children (either before building a family or after the kids were grown) accounted for another 30 percent. The “other” families included male- and, disproportionately, female- headed households in which other family members (usually children) were living with the householder. In Figure 10.2, you can see that the light shading represents all family households (a household in which the householder is living with one or more persons related to her or him by birth, adoption, or marriage). In 1970, they comprised 81 percent of all households—a drop from 90 percent in 1940, when the Census Bureau first began to compile these data (Fields 2001). By 2010, it had dropped even further to 66 percent, and by then scarcely one in five households included a married couple with children.

The phrase that best describes the changes in household composition as shown in Figure 10.2 is increased diversity or “pluralization” (meaning that no single cate- gory captures a majority of households). Although I focus here on the United States, all of the other richer countries have also experienced similar declines in the relative importance of households composed of a married couple with children. What is par- ticularly noteworthy in Figure 10.2, though, is the shift in household composition

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

6.8

26.725.8 24.6

22.7

17.1

5.6

5.0

30.3

29.9 29.8

28.1 28.2

9.6 9.3

8.3

7.5

5.4 6.5

7.2 8.5

40.3

Percent of total households

Married couples with children

Married couples without children

Other families with children (includes female-headed households)

Other families without children (includes female-headed households)

Other non-familiy households (includes cohabiting couples)

Persons living alone

30.9 26.3 23.5

20.2

6.14.63.6 1.7

Figure 10.2 Households Have Become Increasingly Diverse in the United States Sources: Data for 1970 through 1990 are from Fields (2001) Figure 1; data for 2000 and 2010 are from Lofquist et al. (2012), Table 2.

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in which children are involved. In 1970, 45 percent of households in the United States were families with children, among which 89 percent were married-couple households. By 2010, only 30 percent of households were families with children, but among them, only 69 percent were married-couples. Nearly a third were single parents, especially mother-only families. Even those numbers hide the true scope of the transformation, because a married-couple family in 2010 was more likely than in 1970 to be a recombined family, involving previously married spouses and children from other unions. At the end of this chapter, I discuss the social impact of these transformations, but my goal at present is to describe the changes themselves.

Widely discussed in public debate is the fact that substantial racial/ethnic dif- ferences exist with respect to female-headed households, especially among families with children, as shown in Figure 10.3. Although the rise in mother-only families has been experienced by all groups in American society, African American families in 1970 were already more apt to be headed by a female than were white or Hispanic households at any time between 1970 and 2000. Ruggles (1994) found that, since at least 1880, African American children have been far more likely to reside with only their mothers (or with neither parent) than white children. Nonetheless, the data in Figure 10.3 show that the percentage of African American mother-only families has increased considerably just in the past few decades, although it too declined a bit between 1990 and 2000 before bouncing back in 2010. Since 1990 more than half of all black households with children in the United States have been headed by a female.

60.0

50.0

40.0

30.0

20.0

10.0

0.0

11 .5

24 .2

21 .9 2

4. 2

All Groups White Black Hispanic

P e rc

e n t o f fa

m ily

h o u se

h o ld

s w

ith c

h ild

re n

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

8. 9

15 .1

18 .8

16 .2 18

33 .0

24 .0

29 .3

23 .8 25

48 .7

56.2

50 .0 5

2. 6

19 .4

Figure 10.3 Racial/Ethnic Differences in the Percentage of Family Households with Children that Are Mother-Only Families, United States Sources: Data for 1970 through 1990 are from Rawlings (1994), Table F; data for 2000 are from Fields (2001), Table F; and 2010 data are from Lofquist et al. (2012), Table 3.

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391Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

In 2010, one in three households in the United States was a nonfamily house- hold, as you can see looking back at Figure 10.2. This is part of the trend away from what is often thought of as the traditional family, enshrined by old TV sitcoms—a family in which a married couple live together with their children and the husband works full-time while the wife cares for the children and attends to domestic chores. In fact, this type of Leave It to Beaver family (after the 1950s and 1960s TV show of that name) is a relatively new phenomenon historically—itself a product of the demographic transition. High mortality alone (but especially when combined with high fertility and an agrarian economic environment) prevented this type of house- hold from being the norm for most of human history. Let me explain.

Human beings are by nature social animals. We prefer to live with others, and nearly all human economic activities are based on cooperation and collaboration with other humans. Our identity as individuals paradoxically depends on our inter- action with other people. We only know who we are by measuring the reaction of other people to us, and we depend on others to teach us how to behave and how to negotiate the physical and social worlds. Furthermore, humans are completely dependent creatures at birth, and every known society has organized itself into social units (households/families) to ensure the survival of children and the repro- duction of society. In high-mortality societies, the rules about who can and should be part of that social unit must be a bit flexible because death can take a mother, father, or any important household member at almost any time.

I referred in Chapter 5 to the Nahuatl-speaking Mexican families in Morelos in the sixteenth century, who lived in a “demographic hell” where high mortality pro- duced high rates of orphan- and widowhood. In response to these “vagaries of severe mortality,” they developed a complex household structure that was “extremely fluid and in constant flux. Headship and household composition shifted rapidly because marriages and death occurred at what must have been a dizzying pace” (McCaa 1994:10). Similarly, data from Chinese genealogies show that from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries high mortality kept most Chinese from actually living in a multigenerational family at any particular time (Zhao 1994). As in Mexico, the high death rate produced a complex form of the family because of shifting membership.

The bottom line here is that what we think of as the “traditional” family depends on low mortality, which is an historically recent phenomenon, in combi- nation with a fairly young age structure, characterized by young adults with their children. This combination of demographic processes is found largely in the middle phase of the demographic transition, when mortality has dropped but fertility is still above replacement level. Over time, as mortality remains low and fertility drops to low levels, the population ages (as I discussed in Chapter 8), older married cou- ples are left without children any longer in the household, and then women are left without husbands in the household. But, at younger ages, people are still marrying and having children, marrying and not having children, not marrying but having children, and neither marrying nor having children. All of those things are possible in a low-mortality, low-fertility society with a barrel-shaped age structure.

Given the fact that societies have historically changed in response to demo- graphic conditions, it should be no surprise to you that since the end of World War II,

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with demographic conditions undergoing tremendous change all over the globe, the status of women has been one of the facets of social organization undergoing a significant transition.

Gender Equity and the Empowerment of Women

The demographic transition does not inherently produce gender equity and the empowerment of women, but it creates the conditions under which they are much more likely to happen. The combination of longer life and lower fertility, even if achieved in an environment in which women are still oppressed, opens the eyes of society—including women themselves—to the fact that women are in a posi- tion to contribute in the same way that men do when not burdened by full-time parenting responsibility. And, as I have already mentioned (see especially the essay in Chapter 6), the fact that this combination of low mortality and low fertility typi- cally occurs in an urban setting means that women have many more opportunities than would exist in rural areas to achieve the same kind of economic and social independence that has been largely the province of men for much of human history.

Let me suggest to you that at no time in human history has there been a good justification for the domination of women by men, but the demographic conditions that prevailed for most of human history did at least facilitate that domination. Demographic conditions no longer provide that prop, and in most of the world the impediment to full social, economic, and political empowerment of women is simply the attitude of men, often aided by women who have grown up as “co-dependents” in the system of male domination. Thus, an important part of the demographic divide in the world is the gender divide or, as Inglehart and Norris (2003) have called it—“the true clash of civilizations.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it would have been unthinkable for a woman in America to go out to dinner without being accompanied by a man, and equally unthinkable for her to drive one of the cars that were making their first appearance at that time. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, those things are still unthinkable to most women in Saudi Arabia (one of the world’s most gender-segregated societies), but just as demographic changes were occurring in the United States 100 years ago, so they are occurring in Saudi Arabia today, where the principal battlefield has been described as the battle of the sexes (Lacey 2009).

The changes under way in much of the world mean that the life chances for women are beginning to equal those of men, and thus women are in a position to voluntarily head their own household if they want to, or to do so successfully even if forced into that position. It is certainly no coincidence that those countries still in the early to middle stages of the demographic transition are also those where the rights of women are most trampled. In much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, women’s access to economic resources is restricted by severe limitations on their ability to inherit property and own land. India represents a classic example of country where women’s access to the formal labor market is much more limited than men’s, so women disproportionately wind up in the informal sector, where they are far more likely to be economically exploited (Dunlop and Velkoff 1999;

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393Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

International Labour Organization 2013b). In Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa, women are just as likely as men to be in the labor force, but nearly three- fourths of those women are in the informal sector, compared to about half of men (Weeks 2010).

Countries at the later stages of the demographic transition have generally discovered the benefits of unleashing the resources of the half of the population that had previously been excluded from full societal participation. Since 1979, the United Nations has been encouraging all countries to sign on to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and as of 2014, it had been ratified by 186 out of 194 countries. Only seven countries have not yet ratified CEDAW: the United States, Iran, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and two small Pacific Island nations (Palau and Tonga). The fact that the United States is among these seven is hardly a point of pride for a world leader that has made important strides in the empowerment of women.

The empowerment of women contributes to further change in society by expanding women’s life chances, which, in turn, expand economic opportunity and enrich society and households. All of these transformations contribute to the diversity of family and household structure. Let us now examine some of the direct proximate causes of the household structure transformation societies have been experiencing.

Proximate Determinants of Family and Household Changes

The increasing diversity in household structure is a result of several interdependent trends taking place in society, including especially delays in marriage, accompanied by young people leaving their parents’ home (which in most more developed nations has increased the incidence of cohabitation), and an increase in divorce (which also contributes to cohabitation); whereas at the older ages, the greater survivability of women over men has increased the incidence of widowhood, which has an obvious impact on family and household structure. In between the younger and older ages, the smaller number of children in each family means that a much shorter period of time in each parent’s life is devoted to activities directly related to childbearing. The life course of the family has thus been revolutionized.

Delayed Marriage Accompanied by Leaving the Parental Nest

One of the most important mechanisms preventing women from achieving equality with men is early marriage. When a girl is encouraged or even forced to marry at a young age, she is likely to be immediately drawn into a life of childbearing and family-building that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for her to contem- plate other options in life. This is one of the principal reasons why high fertility is so closely associated with low status for women. The map in Figure 10.1 at the beginning of this chapter shows the world pattern in the percentage of women who

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are already married by the time they reach their twentieth birthday. You will not be surprised to notice that the highest percentage married at young ages occurs in those countries where fertility is highest and where the status of women is known to be low. By contrast, it is no coincidence that in the low-fertility regions of North America, Europe, Oceania, and East Asia, the percentage of women who marry at young ages is very low and the status of women is higher than in other places in the world.

Even though women typically marry at young ages in high-fertility societies, men tend to be under less constraint on that score. This means that in those places where women are young when they marry, the chance is good that their husband is several years older. This further contributes to the ability of a man to dominate his spouse: “A girl with minimal education, raised to be submissive and subservient, married to an older man, has little ability to negotiate sexual activity, the number of children she will bear or how she spends her time” (Gupta 1998:22).

Table 10.1 shows that as the percentage of women who are married at ages 15–19 goes up, the difference in age between husband and wife also increases. Thus, in those countries where less than 10 percent of women are married at ages 15–19, a man is on average 2.8 years older than the woman he marries. At the other end of the continuum, in those countries where 40 percent or more of women are married at ages 15–19, the average difference between bride and groom is 6.2 years. Although husbands tend to be older than their wives in the United States, data from the National Survey of Family Growth for the 2006–2010 period show that the average age at first marriage for men is 28.3, which is only 2.5 years older than for women (Copen et al. 2012). Demographic and Health Survey data also indicate that the age at marriage has been on the rise in most developing countries, signaling a potential change in fertility, female empowerment, and family change throughout the world (Westoff 2003). For example, the average age at first mar- riage among women interviewed in the 1987 Indonesia DHS was 17.2, and that had climbed to 20.4 in the 2012 survey. Even in Niger, one of the highest fertility countries, the average age at first marriage has gone from 14.9 in 1992 to 15.7 in 2012—still very low, but moving in the right direction.

% of women married at ages 15–19

Average difference in age between bride and groom Number of countries

40 or higher 6.2 5 30–39 5.4 3 20–29 4.8 21 10–19 3.6 41 Less than 10 2.8 92 Total 3.4 162

Source: Calculated from data in United Nations Population Division (2013).

Table 10.1 The Average Difference in Age of Brides and Grooms Declines as The Percent of Women Married at Ages 15–19 Goes Down

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395Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

In the United States, as in many northern and western European countries, the early decline in fertility more than 100 years ago was accomplished especially by a delay in marriage. It is thus easy to understand that it was in these countries that some of the early feminist movements were able to take root. At a time when very few effective contraceptives were available, and when it was extremely difficult to get a divorce, postponement of marriage (and postponement of sexual intercourse, as well) was the principal route by which women were able to increase their options in life. In 1890 in the United States, more than one-third of all women aged 14 and older (34 percent) and close to one-half of all men (44 percent) were single.

The age at marriage stayed relatively high for both males and females until World War II and the post-war baby boom, when it dropped quickly and bottomed out between 1950 and 1960 (Elliott et al. 2012). Since then, people have once again been delaying marriage. By 1990 the age at marriage for both males and females in the United States had finally gone back up to the level of 1890. The difference this time around, of course, it that people can now more readily delay marriage without having also to delay sexual intercourse.

Thus, since the 1960s, the contraceptive revolution, especially the birth control pill, has allowed people to disconnect marriage from sexual intercourse, and it is not a coincidence that the rise in marriage age after 1960 was especially noticeable among women who reached maturity just as the pill was coming onto the market. Of course, people have known about and used birth control methods for a long time (refer to Chapter 6 if you need a review), but the failure rate of all of those pre-pill methods was significantly higher than that of the pill, and a couple engag- ing in intercourse ran a clear risk of an unintended pregnancy. Prior to 1973 and the legalization of abortion in the United States, an American woman could end an unintended pregnancy only by flying to a country such as Sweden, where abortion was legal, or by seeking an illegal (and often dangerous) abortion. These unsafe abortions were often done in Mexico, even though abortion was illegal there.

In more traditional societies (including the United States and Canada until the 1960s), an unintended pregnancy was most apt to lead to marriage, although a woman might also bear the child quietly and give it up for adoption. Illegitimacy was widely stigmatized, and having a child out of wedlock was the course of last resort. Marriage was the only genuinely acceptable route to regular sexual activ- ity, and only married couples were routinely granted access to available methods of birth control. That situation still prevails in most of the world’s predominantly Muslim nations.

In the late nineteenth century, the older age at marriage already alluded to in North America and Europe had been accompanied by a delay in the onset of regu- lar sexual activity—the Malthusian approach to life. Intercourse was delayed until marriage, and in this way nuptiality was the main determinant of the birth rate: Early marriage meant a higher birth rate, and delayed marriage meant a lower one. A variety of social and economic conditions might discourage an early mar- riage. The societal expectation that a man should be able to provide economic support for his wife and children tended to delay marriage for men until those expectations could be met. Under conditions of rising material expectations, as was the case in the late nineteenth century, marriage had to be delayed even a bit

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longer than in previous generations because the economic bar had been raised higher than before.

Delayed marriage typically meant that young people stayed with their parents in order to save enough money to get ahead financially and thus be able to afford marriage. Staying with parents also minimized the opportunities for younger people to be able to engage in premarital sexual intercourse, which might lead to an unin- tended pregnancy and destroy plans for the future. Thus, prior to the latter half of the twentieth century, delayed marriage did not typically lead younger people to leave home and set up their own independent household prior to marriage.

In the early post–World War II period, economic robustness meant that jobs were readily available for young people, allowing them to leave the parental home at an earlier age without an economic penalty and, since the risk of preg- nancy meant that intercourse was still tied closely to marriage, the age at marriage reached historic lows in the United States and Europe. In discussing the situation in Germany, Blossfeld and de Rose (1992) suggest that from the end of World War II through the late 1960s, “the opportunity for children to leave their parental home had increased remarkably because of the improvement of economic conditions. But the social norm requiring that they be married if they wanted to live together with a partner of the opposite sex was still valid, so that age at entry into mar- riage was decreasing until the end of the 1960s” (p. 75). Similar arguments apply to the United States and other European countries, even for a country like Spain, where out-of-wedlock births accounted for only 2 percent of births in 1975, but had jumped to 30 percent by 2007 (Castro-Martín 2010).

Modern contraception has allowed sex to be disconnected from marriage, and this has encouraged young people to leave their parental home before marriage, even while delaying marriage. Data from the 2012 Current Population Survey in the United States show that among people aged 18–24, only 12 percent had been mar- ried (and 72 percent of those were living with their spouse). Slightly more than half (54 percent) were living with their parents, leaving more than one-third (34 percent) living on their own, usually with one or more other non-family members, including cohabiting couples (U.S. Census Bureau 2013f).

Cohabitation

The delay in marriage has not necessarily meant that young people have been avoid- ing a family-like situation, nor that they have necessarily avoided having children out of wedlock, as I have already mentioned. When leaving the parental home, young people may set up an independent household either by living alone (a very small percentage); they may move into nonhousehold group quarters such as a college dormitory; or they may share a household with nonfamily members. Within the latter group is the option of cohabitation, which can be defined as the sharing of a household by unmarried persons who have a sexual relationship (Cherlin 2013). As this trend was unfolding in the 1970s, the Census Bureau created estimates of its extent in the United States from data on household composition. The resulting measure was “partners of the opposite sex sharing living quarters,” which became

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widely known as POSSLQ (pronounced “PAH-sul-cue”). Over time the Census Bureau began asking more direct questions about unmarried partners and now has a good measure of cohabitation.

In 1970, when 64 percent of women aged 20–24 had been married at least once (Fields and Casper 2001), there were about 500,000 cohabiting couples in the United States, representing a ratio of about 1 cohabiting couple per 100 married couples. By 2012, when only 19 percent of women that age had ever been mar- ried, the number of cohabiting couples had increased to 7.8 million and the ratio of cohabiting to married couples had climbed to 14 per 100 (U.S. Census Bureau 2013h). Snapshot numbers like these almost certainly underestimate the importance of cohabitation, however, because it has become a widely accepted part of the life course in many low-fertility societies. Rather than being an alternative to marriage (a “poor person’s marriage”), it has become a stepping-stone to mar- riage for many, as well as a step back from marriage after a divorce for others. Although a relatively small, yet obviously growing, fraction of couples are cohab- iting at any one time, the data for the United States suggest that more than half of women between the ages of 19 and 44 have cohabited at least once, and that about 40 percent of children have experienced time in a cohabiting family by the time they are 12 years old (Kennedy and Bumpass 2008). Similar rapid increases have been observed elsewhere. For example, survey data from France suggest that in 1965 only 8 percent of couples cohabited before marriage, but by 1995 that figure had jumped to 90 percent (Toulemon 1997), where it has stayed since (Perelli-Harris et al. 2012).

Nonmarital Childbearing

The delay in marriage accompanied by high rates of premarital sexual activity (aided by the fact that many young people have been getting out of the parental home before marriage) means that the United States and some of the other low- fertility nations have been experiencing an increase in the proportion of non- marital births. This is an event, of course, that immediately transforms a woman living alone, or an unmarried couple, from a nonfamily to a family household. In France, the percentage of first births occurring outside of marriage increased from 20 percent in 1974–1985 to 51 percent in 1995–2004 (Perelli-Harris et al. 2012). Between 1970 and 2012, the proportion of babies in the United States who were born outside of marriage increased from 11 percent to 41 percent (Martin et al. 2003; Martin et al. 2013).

Data from the American Community Survey provide a broader portrait of the women who are bearing a child outside of marriage. There are two ways to look at these data. The first perspective is to ask about the percentage of births in a given demographic category (e.g., age or educational level) that are taking place outside of marriage, whereas the second perspective asks which groups of women are hav- ing the greatest number of nonmarital births. With respect to the first perspective, certain groups have stood out for many years: (1) nearly 90 percent of births to girls under age 20 and nearly two-thirds of births to women aged 20–24 are nonmarital;

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and (2) more than two-thirds of births to African American women of all ages are outside of marriage.

Among younger women, the non-use of contraception and the increasing lack of local access to abortion may push up the likelihood of young women getting pregnant and bearing a child. The United States is more restrictive than most low- fertility societies in providing teenagers with easy and inexpensive access to meth- ods of fertility limitation. Prior to the 1970s, most young women conceiving out of wedlock would have married prior to the baby’s birth (Bachu 1999), so the ratio of nonmarital births to all births would have been much lower, even with the same level of premarital conceptions. Of course, the odds were also very high that the marriage would have ended in divorce after only a few years, so neither scenario— marriage or nonmarriage—is particularly rosy for a teenage mother and her baby.

A disproportionate share of younger women bearing children outside of mar- riage are African American. It is not clear why this pattern exists, but even in the 1930s, when only 6 percent of white women in the United States were having a baby out of wedlock, the percentage among blacks was 31 (Bachu 1999). Since birth rates overall are nearly as low for blacks as they are for whites in the United States, the proportion of nonmarital births represents a different pattern of parent- ing, not a different overall level of childbearing. The pattern is to have children at a younger age than the rest of the population does, and then to stop having them at a younger age as well. Thus, in 2012, the age-specific birth rates for black women were quite a bit higher than for whites at ages younger than 25, but then lower than for whites at ages 25 and higher (Martin et al. 2013).

Furthermore, it is not just that the children are born outside of marriage; they are likely to grow up outside of a two-parent family which may, in turn nega- tively affect their life chances, as I noted previously. For example, data from the 1968–1996 Panel Study of Income Dynamics as analyzed by Michael Rendall (1999), revealed that during that period only 15 percent of black mothers raised their chil- dren in an intact two-parent family, compared with 60 percent of non-Hispanic white mothers.

Data such as these have fueled enormous public debate about the social cost of nonmarital births (measured monetarily by welfare benefits and socioculturally by the deprivations suffered by fatherless children) and they have been interpreted as signs of imminent cultural decay. But, as McLanahan and Cooper (1995) pointed out, the situation is not quite what it seems, and this gets us to the second perspec- tive on nonmarital childbearing—which groups of women account for the greatest number of such births. Of 1.6 million U.S. nonmarital births in 2012, 39 percent were to non-Hispanic white women, 30 percent to Hispanics, and 26 percent to blacks. Thus, blacks accounted for scarcely one in four nonmarital births, despite the much higher fraction of black babies born outside of marriage than is true for the other groups. We can also note that 61 percent of nonmarital births were to women aged 20–29 in 2012, while only 17 percent were to teenagers, despite the much higher percentage of teenage births that are outside of marriage.

Finally, we can note that a significant fraction of children born to unmarried women are nonetheless in a two-parent family, albeit in one in which the parents are cohabiting, not married. Data from the 2006–2010 round of the National

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399Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

Survey of Family Growth suggest that 57 percent of births to unmarried women are to cohabiting women, accounting for about one in four children born overall in the United States (Payne et al. 2012).

Childlessness

In the 1970s, data from the Current Population Survey suggested that about 10 percent of women were reaching ages 40–44 without having had a child. This is probably the level of impaired fecundity among American women, as I noted in Chapter 6. However, childlessness has slowly but steadily been increasing, reach- ing 19 percent by 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau 2013c), one of the highest levels on the world (Livingston 2014). Once we get above 10 percent, the assumption is that women/couples are deliberately choosing to be childless. Some may have “drifted” toward childlessness by continually postponing the first child, which may also involve postponing marriage, until finally a woman is past her ability to conceive and bear a child. But many almost certainly made the conscious decision not to have children (Hayford 2013).

An important consequence of gender equality is that there is less pressure on a woman to have children, even if she is married, particularly if she has a rewarding career that she doesn’t want to interrupt or, as certainly happens in some cases, she and her husband simply prefer a life without children. In its turn, childless- ness promotes household diversity by increasing the percentage of households rep- resented either by someone living alone, or a married couple with no children of their own, or a cohabiting couple with no children, or a multiple-person nonfamily adult-only household.

Divorce

Not only has marriage been increasingly pushed to a later age, but once accom- plished, marriages are also more likely to end in divorce than at any previous time in history. This trend reflects many things. An obvious reason is that changes in divorce laws since the 1970s have made it easier for either partner to end the mar- riage at any time for any reason (Waite 2000). Friedberg (1998) concluded that divorce laws alone might explain about 17 percent of divorces in the United States. For the other 83 percent of the explanation, we can start by asking ourselves why legislators were motivated to make those changes. For answers, we can look to the loosening hold of men over women and the longer lives we are leading, both of which may produce greater conflict within marriage. In 1867 in the United States, there was only a 27 percent chance that a husband aged 25 and a wife aged 22 would both still be alive when the wife reached 65, but for couples marrying in the early twenty-first century, the chances have rocketed to 60 percent. Conversely, only about 5 percent of marriages contracted in 1867 ended in divorce (Ruggles 1997), whereas it has been estimated that about half of the marriages contracted since the 1970s will end in divorce (Kreider and Fields 2002; Raley and Bumpass 2003). That

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probability seems to have stabilized since the 1990s, suggesting that we may have passed the period of rising divorce rates (Schoen and Standish 2001; Lundberg and Pollak 2013).

The United States is certainly not unique in having experienced an increase in divorce probabilities. William Goode (1993) compiled data showing that through- out Europe the percentage of marriages ending in divorce doubled between 1970 and the mid-1980s. For example, in Germany in 1970, it was estimated that 16 percent of marriages would end in divorce, increasing to 30 percent in 1985. In France, the increase went from 12 percent to 31 percent during that same time period. After that rapid rise, the divorce rate appears more recently to have plateaued in Europe, just as happened in the United States.

Andrew Cherlin (2013) summarizes the major risk factors for divorce as including low income for the couple (which causes stresses and tension), early age at marriage (which often means a poorer job of choosing a spouse), spouses’ lack of similarity (this kind of similarity is known as homogamy, referring to the fact that people who are more similar to one another are more likely to get along with each other or, conversely, those who are less similar will be more likely to divorce), parental divorce (the copycat phenomenon, in which people whose parents divorced are more likely themselves to divorce), and cohabitation.

Given the previous discussion of cohabitation, it is of some interest to note that, contrary to popular belief in the value of “trial” marriage, cohabitation before marriage appears to be one of the factors that increases the odds of a marriage ending in divorce, at least in North America. However, a significant number of studies have shown that cohabitation is selective of people who are mistrustful of marriage, probably because of their own “social inheritance of divorce” (Diekmann and Englehardt 1999:783). Thus, people who are at greatest risk of dissolving a marriage are more likely to cohabit than marry directly and that self-selection effect seems to explain the difference in divorce among those marrying directly and those marrying after cohabitation (Kulu and Boyle 2010).

Another key to the rise in divorce is that many marriages that in earlier days would have been dissolved by death are now dissolved by divorce. This seems apparent from the fact that the annual combined rate of marital dissolution from both the death of one spouse and divorce remained remarkably constant for more than a century—essentially unchanged between 1860 and 1970 (Davis 1972). As widowhood declined, divorce rose proportionately. Only with the rapid increase in divorce during the 1970s did that pattern begin to diverge. So dramatic was the rise in divorce in the 1970s that in the mid-1960s the elimination of divorce would have added an additional 6.7 years to the average marriage, whereas by the mid–1970s its elimination would have added 17.2 years (Goldman 1984).

Widowhood

As death has receded to older ages, the incidence of widowhood has steadily been pushed to the older years as well. Divorce is a more important cause of not being married than is widowhood up to age 65, beyond which widowhood increases

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geometrically because of the higher death rate of men, undoubtedly compounded by the tendency of divorced women to change their status to widow upon the death of a former husband. As is true with so many social facts in the United States, African American women are disadvantaged compared to whites in terms of marital status. At every age, blacks are more likely to be either divorced or widowed than are other racial/ethnic groups.

The Combination of These Determinants

As the demographic transition unfolds, then, we are finding that people are wait- ing longer to marry, although often cohabiting in the meantime, and when they do marry, their marriage is more likely to end in divorce than in widowhood. Schoen and Standish (2001) used life table methodology to try to quantify the relative importance of these changes in family demography. Their results showed that between 1970 and 1995, for example, the proportion of women who could expect ever to marry declined from 96 percent to 89 percent. At the same time, the average age at marriage was increasing, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce was increasing, and the percentage of marriages ending in widowhood was declining. Furthermore, as life expectancy increases while the average dura- tion of a marriage shortens, and the percentage of divorced people remarrying goes down, the percentage of a person’s life spent being married declines, thus adding to the individual diversity of household types in which a person might live during an entire lifetime.

Cherlin (2009) argues that family life in the United States, even more than in other nations, is characterized by frequent transitions. I argue, of course, that these transitions—whether you like them or not—have come about only because of the other transitions that make up the overall demographic transition, including the drop in the death rate and birth rate, the resulting changing age structure, and the migration and urban transitions.

Having described the principal features of the transformation of families and households, let us see how they have been influenced by changing life chances and how, in turn, life chances interact with family formation and household structure.

Changing Life Chances

The leading explanations for the shift in household structure in Western nations combine elements of the demographic transition perspective with the life course perspective. The demographic transition perspective relates changing demographic conditions (especially declining mortality, declining fertility, and urbanization) to the rise in women’s status. This is aided especially by delayed marriage, which encourages higher levels of educational attainment. In turn, this has increased a woman’s ability to enter the labor force and earn sufficient income to have the eco- nomic and social freedom to choose her own pattern of living. As these changes have unfolded, women’s differing life chances have contributed to the transformation of

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402 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

families and households. Again, I emphasize that these demographic conditions are probably necessary, but not sufficient, to initiate the current rise in the status of women in industrialized societies. What is also required is some change in circum- stance to act as a catalyst for the underlying demographic factors. This is where the life course perspective comes in, because women who have grown up in a different demographic and social milieu, and thus see the world differently than did earlier generations of women, have the potential to generate change in society. It is easy to know where to begin the discussion of changes in life chances, because nothing is more important than education.

Education

Becoming educated is probably the most dramatic and significant change you can introduce into your life. It is the locomotive that drives much of the world’s eco- nomic development, and it is a vehicle for personal success used by generation after generation of people in the highly developed nations of the world. Still, the relative recency with which advanced education has taken root in American society can be seen in Table 10.2. In 1940, less than one in four Americans aged 25 or older had graduated from high school, although women were more likely than men to have done so. Slightly more than 5 percent of men and less than 4 percent of women were college graduates. An historically short six decades later, in 2000, 84 percent of both men and women were high school graduates and about one in four Americans had graduated from college—with men still being more likely than women to have accomplished that milestone. By 2013, women had surpassed men in terms of high

Males Females

Year

% High School

Graduate Or More

% College

Graduate

% High School

Graduate Or More

% College

Graduate

2013 87.6 32.0 88.6 31.4 2000 84.2 27.8 84.0 23.6 1990 77.7 24.4 77.5 18.4 1980 69.2 20.9 68.1 13.6 1970 55.0 14.1 55.4 8.2 1960 39.4 9.6 42.5 5.8 1950 31.5 7.1 35.1 5.0 1940 22.3 5.4 25.9 3.7

Sources: Data for 1940 to 1990 are from U.S. Census Bureau (2010), Table 1; data for 2013 are from U.S. Census Bureau (2013a), Table 2.

Table 10.2 U.S. Educational Attainment Has Increased Significantly Over Time in the Population Ages 25 and Older

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403Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

school graduation and had nearly closed the gap with respect to college education. But that number is deceiving because it includes women aged 60 and older who were significantly less likely to have gone to college than men. At each successively younger age below 60, the percentage of college graduates among women was pro- gressively higher than for men. Thus, the percentage of women aged 25–29 with a college degree was 37 percent, compared with 30 percent for men.

The world as a whole has been experiencing an increasing equalization of edu- cation among males and females—an important component in raising the global status of women and, in its turn, encouraging smaller family sizes (Courbage and Todd 2011). The ratio of females per males attending secondary school has been steadily increasing worldwide since at least the 1970s, according to World Bank estimates. In some areas of the world, such as the United States, Canada, and most countries of western Europe, women are not just more likely than men to be in school, but also have higher college completion rates than men.

In sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, as well as in northern Africa and western Asia—all areas where the status of women has been notably low and where education for girls continues to lag behind that of boys—there have nonetheless been notable improvements in the ratio of girls to boys attending school. Philippe Fargues (1995) has noted that in the middle of the twentieth century most of the countries of northern Africa and western Asia had gender equity with respect to education in the sense that most people—males and females alike—were illiterate. Education was extended first to young men, creating for a while both a gender and a generation gap in education. Now, as more generations of children have been edu- cated, and as education has been offered to girls as well as boys, both of those gaps are closing, and this will certainly help accelerate the process of social and economic development (Grant and Behrman 2010).

The comments about closing the gap should not be taken to mean that we are galloping toward gender equity in education everywhere on the planet. Table 10.3 lists the 24 countries in the world (representing 29 percent of the world’s popula- tion) as of 2012 in which illiteracy among young women (aged 15–24) was at least 10 percentage points higher than that for males in the same age range. Note that the sub-Saharan African country of Niger gets the “honor” of having the low- est level of gender equity with respect to literacy. Nineteen of the 24 countries are on the African continent, but India and Pakistan in South Asia are very large contributors.

Our interest in education lies especially in the fact that by altering your world- view, education tends to influence nearly every aspect of your demographic behav- ior, as I have discussed to varying degrees in the previous chapters. Data from censuses and from sources such as the Demographic and Health Surveys show that nearly anywhere you go in the world, the more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have. Not that education is inherently antinatalist; rather, it opens up new vistas—new opportunities and alternative approaches to life, other than simply building a family—and in so doing it delays the onset of childbearing, which is a crucial factor in setting the tone for subsequent fertility. So, education tends to lower fertility, or to keep it lower than it might otherwise be, and this contributes to the variety of household and family structures we will see.

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404 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

Country Region Male

illiteracy Female

illiteracy

Excess of female over

male illiteracy

Niger Sub-Saharan Africa 48 77 29

Benin Sub-Saharan Africa 41 67 26

Guinea Sub-Saharan Africa 41 66 25

Mozambique Sub-Saharan Africa 20 43 23

Yemen Western Asia 4 24 20

Sierra Leone Sub-Saharan Africa 30 48 18

Senegal Sub-Saharan Africa 26 44 18

Pakistan South Asia 21 39 18

Angola Sub-Saharan Africa 16 34 18

Nigeria Sub-Saharan Africa 22 39 18

Mali Sub-Saharan Africa 44 61 18

Ethiopia Sub-Saharan Africa 37 53 16

Congo, Dem. Rep. Sub-Saharan Africa 21 37 16

Morocco North Africa 11 26 15

India South Asia 12 26 14

Burkina Faso Sub-Saharan Africa 53 67 14

Chad Sub-Saharan Africa 44 58 13

Central African Republic Sub-Saharan Africa 27 41 13

Togo Sub-Saharan Africa 12 25 13

Guinea-Bissau Sub-Saharan Africa 21 33 12

Bhutan South Asia 20 32 12

Nepal South Asia 11 23 12

Cameroon Sub-Saharan Africa 11 22 11

Zambia Sub-Saharan Africa 22 34 11 Laos Southeast Asia 11 21 10

Source: Adapted from data in World Bank (2014b), Table 2.13.

Table 10.3 World Educational “Hot Spots”: Countries Where the Illiteracy Rate Among Young (Aged 15–24) Women Is at Least 10 Percentage Points Higher Than for Young Men, circa 2012

The fact that education alters the way you view the world also has implica- tions for the marriage market in the United States. For much of American history, a major concern in choosing a marriage partner was to pick someone who shared your religious background (social scientists call this “religious homogamy”). Over time, however, the salience of religion has given way to “educational homog- amy”—people want to marry someone with similar levels of education; thus, education has been replacing religion as an especially important factor in spouse

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405Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

selection (Schwartz and Mare 2005). This trend is almost certainly related to gender equity. When men were generally more educated than women—a difference aris- ing from the more traditional kind of society that also places a higher emphasis on religion—well-educated men, in particular, were less likely to find women with a level of education similar to their own. But as women caught up with men in terms of education—due to the modernization of society—men and women began to sort themselves into marriage with a similarly educated mate.

Gender equity, combined with the greater proportion of people going to college, has altered the lifestyles of many young Americans. It has been accompanied by delayed marriage, delayed and diminished childbearing, and consequently, higher per-person income among young adult householders. Table 10.4 uses data from the 2012 Current Population Survey to show that although women consistently earned less than men, for both men and women the more education you have, the higher your income will likely be. These data are for full-time, year-round workers, so we have controlled for the possibility that some people might be unemployed or only working part-time. In 2012 people with a graduate or professional degree were earning more than twice as much per year as those who were only high school

Males Females Ratio of female

income to male income

People Aged 25 and Over Who are Full-Time Year-Round Workers

Total $50,955 $39,977 0.78

Not high school graduate $30,329 $21,387 0.71

High school graduate $40,351 $30,406 0.75

Some college or associate’s degree $48,608 $36,035 0.74

Bachelor’s degree $66,153 $50,173 0.76

Graduate or professional degree $94,319 $66,498 0.71

People Aged 35–44 Who are Full-Time Year-Round Workers

Total $51,990 $40,759 0.78

Not high school graduate $30,821 $21,306 0.69

High school graduate $40,450 $30,289 0.75

Some college or associate’s degree $50,694 $36,667 0.72

Bachelor’s degree $80,226 $51,654 0.64

Graduate or professional degree $96,827 $68,567 0.71

Source: Adapted from U.S. Census Bureau (2013b), Table PINC-03.

Table 10.4 Better-Educated Workers in the United States Had Higher Median Incomes in 2012, but Women Lagged Behind in Pay

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406 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

graduates. This has become known as the “college premium,” and its existence has almost certainly contributed to increased education (investment in human capital) and increased economic productivity.

Although the college premium is the same for males and females in relative terms, you can also see that at each educational level women are earning only about two-thirds to three-fourths of what men earn. This is true even for the age group 35–44, that is, the relatively younger age group that might have been thought to be less influenced by past practices of pay discrimination. We may be headed toward gender equity, but we are not there yet.

Labor Force Participation

As education increases, so does the chance of being in the labor force. Among both males and females in the United States, the higher the level of education attainment among people aged 25–64, the higher the percentage of people who were currently in the labor force. Women are less likely than men to be in the labor force at any given level of education, but it is nonetheless true that the pat- tern over time has been for women to be working more and men to be working less. Prior to the 1970s, for example, women who worked typically did so only before they married or became pregnant. Thus, the labor force participation rates by age peaked in the early 20s and declined after that. That is still a common pat- tern in many less developed countries, but it no longer characterizes women in the richer nations, where labor force participation rates by age are now very similar for males and females.

Keep in mind as we talk about labor force participation rates that most countries include unemployed persons as being in the labor force. Thus, if you are looking for work, even though you are not actually working or even if you have never before held a job, you are considered to be in the labor force. Unemployment rates are strongly related to age—the older the age, the lower the rate. At younger ages, con- siderable numbers of people are looking for work even if they haven’t found it yet, whereas at older ages, people are more likely to give up on employment and seek a retirement pension as soon as it is available if they experience difficulty finding a job. Women also tend to have lower unemployment rates than men do.

By far the biggest gain in employment over the past half century has been the movement of baby boom women, especially married women, into the labor market. They literally burst their way into the workforce in the 1970s. In 1960, just before the baby boomers came of age, the labor force participation rate among married women aged 35–44 in the United States was 37 percent—well below the 83 percent for single women that year (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). By the mid 1990s, as the baby boomers had reached those ages, the participation rates for married women hit 75 percent, where they have stayed since.

Working, as I have mentioned before, cuts down on fertility under normal cir- cumstances, and this is one of the ways in which working has an effect on the fam- ily and household structure. It is certainly no coincidence that the birth rate in the United States began to drop at about the same time that labor force participation

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407Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

rates for married women began to rise. Overall, the highest levels of fertility in the United States are found among poor women who do not work, whereas the lowest levels of fertility are among those who do work and are well paid.

The ability of married women to work helps bring fertility down and main- tain it at low levels, but, as I mentioned in Chapter 6, it can also help keep fertil- ity from dropping to below-replacement levels. When women are able to combine having a family, even if small, with a career, they are more likely to choose both. In European countries such as Italy and Spain, where family values discourage that combination, women seem to choose career over family, contributing to very low levels of fertility. The pattern that has emerged in the richer countries is that a high proportion of women work before marriage, remain working after marriage, and adjust their fertility downward to accommodate their working. How far down they adjust may depend on how much familial and societal support they receive in mak- ing that accommodation. If child care is readily available and if husbands share domestic chores, we may well expect that fertility will be closer to replacement level, rather than well below it. The data generally suggest that the higher the level of education a woman has, the more likely it is that her husband will share in child care and household chores (Grossbard and Stancenelli 2010).

We have already discussed the new household economics as an approach to explaining why fertility is kept low in developed societies and why households might encourage family members to migrate. Now, we can call on it again to explain why the rise in the status of women and increased female labor force participation might generate the household transformations we have been reviewing in this chapter. One idea is that “the rises in women’s employment opportunities and earning power have reduced the benefits of marriage and made divorce and single life more attractive. Though marriage still offers women the benefits associated with sharing income and household costs with spouses, for some women these benefits do not outweigh other costs, whatever these may be” (McLanahan and Casper 1995:33). Yet another perspective is that the benefits of marriage for women have shifted from being largely economic to be more related to the investment in children: “Marriage is the commitment mechanism that supports high levels of investment in children and is hence more valuable for parents adopting a high-investment strategy for their children” (Lundberg and Pollak 2013:1). Regardless of the reasons for deciding to marry or not, the key element is that women increasingly are in a position to make that choice for themselves.

In most social systems, people who can take care of themselves and have enough money to be self-reliant have higher status and greater freedom than those who depend economically on others. Further, a pecking order tends to exist among those who are economically independent, with higher incomes being associated with higher status. Being independent, though, is definitely the starting point, and an increasing number of women in the world are arriving at that point. How- ever much you might take for granted the fact that in a rich nation women are as readily employable in the paid labor force as men, it is actually a rather recent phenomenon.

Although mortality and fertility have been declining since the nineteenth cen- tury in the United States, and urbanization has been occurring throughout that

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408 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

time, it was during World War II that the particular combination of demographic and economic circumstances arose to provide the leading edge of a shift toward labor force equality of males and females. The demand for armaments and other goods of war in the early 1940s came at the same time that men were moving out of civilian jobs into the military, and there was an increasing demand for civilian labor of almost every type.

Earlier in American history, the demand for labor would have been met by foreign workers migrating into the country, but the Immigration Act passed in the 1920s (see Chapter 7) had set up national quotas that severely limited immigra- tion. The only quotas large enough to have made a difference were those for immi- grants from countries also involved in the war and thus not a potential source of labor. With neither males nor immigrants to meet the labor demand, women were called into the labor force. Indeed, not just women per se, but more significantly married women, and even more specifically married women with children. Single women had been consistently employable and employed since at least the beginning of the century, as each year 45–50 percent of them had been economically active, as I pointed out earlier. But in the early 1940s there were not enough young single women to meet labor needs, partly because the improved economy was also making it easier for young couples to get married and start a family. It was older women, past their childbearing years, who were particularly responsive to making up the deficit in the labor force (Oppenheimer 1967, 1994).

These were the women who broke new ground in female employment in America, with the biggest increase in labor force participation between 1940 and 1950 coming from women aged 45 to 54, and because more than 92 percent of those women were married, this obviously represented a break with the past. Who were these women? They were the mothers of the Depression, mothers who had sacrificed the larger families they wanted (as I noted in Chapter 6) to scrape by dur- ing one of America’s worst economic crises. They were women who had smaller families than their mothers and thus were more easily able to participate in the labor force. However, the ideal family size remained more than three children, and the improved economy permitted the low fertility of the 1930s to give way to higher levels in the 1940s and 1950s. Women with small families from the Depression opened the door to employment for married women, but younger women were not ready to respond to those opportunities in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, after the end of World War II the labor force activity rates of women aged 25 to 34 actually declined.

Things changed, as you know, and since 1950 the number and proportion of American women in the labor force and earning independent incomes has increased substantially. In 1950, for example, there were 29 female, year-round, full-time workers for every 100 males in that category; by 2012, there were 75 females work- ing full-time, year-round per 100 male workers. This increase in labor force activ- ity was accomplished initially by younger women, especially those aged 25 to 34, whose children tended to be in school.

Getting a job is one thing, of course, but the kind of job you get—your occupation—depends heavily on education and is also influenced by factors such as gender and race/ethnicity.

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409Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

Occupation

Occupation is without question one of the most defining aspects of a person’s social identity in an industrialized society. It is a clue to education, income, and residence—in general, a clue to lifestyle and an indicator of social status, pointing to a person’s position in the social hierarchy. From a social point of view, occupa- tion is so important that it is often the first (and occasionally the only) question a stranger may ask about you. It provides information about what kind of behavior can be expected from you, as well as how others will be expected to behave toward you. Although such a comment may offend you if you believe that “people are people,” it is nonetheless true that there is no society in which all people are actu- ally treated equally.

Since there are literally thousands of different occupations in every country, we need a way of fitting occupations into a few slots. Organizations like the U.S. Census Bureau and the International Labour Organization (ILO, a specialized agency within the United Nations) have devised classification schemes to divide occupations into several mutually exclusive categories. In Table 10.5, I have listed the occupational distribution of employed males and females in the United States as measured in the Current Population Survey in 2013. These categories form a rough status ranking, with the higher status occupations at the top of the table, and the lower status occupations on the bottom. You can see that women are nearly as likely as men to be in the top category of management occupations, with a clearly higher percentage in the professions. This may seem a little confusing, given the lower pay among women. The problem here is that women are more likely to be in the lower rungs of these positions—more likely to be a middle man- ager than the boss; more likely to a nurse than a physician. Women are also more likely to be in service and sales occupations, which tend to be “white collar,” but

Employed civilians 16 and older

Percentage Distribution by Occupational Category—2013

Males Females

TOTAL 100 100 Management, business, and financial occupations 17 15 Professional and related occupations 18 28 Service occupations 14 21 Sales and office occupations 16 30 Natural resources, construction, and maintenance

occupations 16 1

Production, transportation, and material moving occupations

18 5

Source: Adapted from data in U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014), Table 9.

Table 10.5 U.S. Occupational Distributions Are Different for Males and Females

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410 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

not necessarily high paying. Almost no one works in farming any more and that is now subsumed under the category of natural resources, construction, and main- tenance occupations. Almost all workers in this category are men. Similarly, men are much more likely than women to be in the other set of “blue-collar” occupa- tions of production, transportation, and material moving.

As different as these occupational distributions look for men and women, they are considerably less different than they used to be. The index of dissimilarity (sometimes also known as the Gini coefficient) for the data in Table 10.5 is 30, but it was 43 in 1970. We would interpret that to mean that, in 2013, you would had to have moved 30 percent of women into other occupational categories to achieve exactly the same distribution as for men, compared to having to move 43 percent of women back in 1970.

There is a global tendency for women not to be in the best jobs, and there are three important issues that the International Labour Organization sees as still need- ing considerable improvement in order to achieve gender equality in the workplace: (1) the “global glass ceiling” (women being less likely than men to make it to top management) (Coleman 2010); (2) the gender pay gap (worldwide, women earn an average of about two-thirds what men earn); and (3) the “sticky floor” (women tend to get stuck in the lowest-paid jobs) (International Labour Organization 2013a).

People holding the higher status occupations are more likely to think of them- selves as having a career as opposed to just a job, and they are apt to derive more intrinsic satisfaction from their work. They are also less likely to be working in what Kalleberg (2011) has labeled as “bad jobs”—those with low pay and no health or pension benefits. Nearly one in seven jobs in the United States is in this category, and they are the types of jobs more likely to be held by women than by men, especially if the woman is not a college graduate. The kind of job you have, and the income you earn from it, will be your key to economic and social independence.

Income

Even after the disastrous Great Recession of 2007–2008, the average CEO (chief executive officer) at the 500 biggest companies in the United States made $8 million in 2009, including salary, bonuses, and stock gains (DeCarlo 2010). This works out to about $30,000 per workday, so if we assume a normal work- day, this average CEO has already made $7,000 by the time the bagels and cream cheese arrive for his (yes, “his”) morning coffee break (only 3 percent of those CEOs are women). The CEO’s average daily salary, by the way, was equivalent to more than half the entire annual income for the average American household ($52,029 in 2008). There is a good deal of controversy about whether the average CEO is worth that kind of money, but there is no doubt that income is at least partially a consequence of the way in which we have parlayed a good education into a good job. Occupation may be the primary clue that people have about our social standing, yet our well-being is thought by most people to be a product of our income level.

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411Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

People are too polite to ask you how much you make, but by knowing your occupation, they will have important clues about your income level. Little has changed since the late 1970s, when Coleman and Rainwater concluded that “money, far more than anything else, is what Americans associate with the idea of social class” (Coleman and Rainwater 1978:29). It is not just having the money; rather it is how you spend it that signals to others where you stand in society. The principal indicators of having money include the kind of house you live in, the way your home is furnished, the car or cars you drive, the clothes you wear, the vacations and recreations (the “toys”) you can afford, and even the charities you support.

It is no mystery that there is an uneven distribution of income in virtually every human society, including the United States, and rising inequality in richer countries has become a topic of considerable debate. One of the key pieces of data igniting controversy was the revelation that the 85 richest people in the world are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world’s 7 billion people (Oxfam International 2014). This is a staggering statistic, but inequality is becoming increasingly pervasive in richer countries (see, for example, Piketty 2014).

Data from the 2012 Current Population Survey show that in the United States, the richest 20 percent of families earned 51 percent of the nation’s total income (in fact, the top 5 percent brought in 22 percent of the nation’s total income), while the poorest 20 percent earned only 3 percent (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2013). There has clearly been a deterioration of the income distribution that had prevailed in the late 1960s, when the top 20 percent commanded “only” 43 percent, while the bot- tom 20 percent shared a little more than 4 percent of the nation’s income. In fact, the trend toward inequality is perhaps even more stark than those numbers might suggest. Economist Emmanuel Saez suggests, for example, that the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1 percent) of people in the U.S. earn 22 percent of the nation’s income, while the bottom 90 percent bring in less than half of the income. This is, sadly, not the first time we have had this kind of inequality—we last saw it in 1928, just before the Great Depression (Saez 2013).

The increase in inequality is argued to be at the root of the decline of the middle class in the United States. A report by the Luxembourg Institute for Statistics in 2014 found that Canada’s middle class has replaced the United States as the rich- est middle class in the world (Leonhardt and Quealy 2014). How did this happen? Three broad explanations have been offered for the increasing inequality: (1) pub- lic policy changes, such as tax “reforms” (largely tax breaks for the very wealthy) that benefit some groups more than others, coupled with a low minimum wage and diminished public support for education; (2) labor market changes (occurring throughout the world, not just in the United States), such as an increasing mismatch between the demands of jobs and the skills of the labor force, or a polarization of jobs into those that require high skills and those that require few skills, with little in between; and (3) changes in demographic structure, such as the increasing fraction of households headed by females.

This latter point would not be an issue if females earned as much as men, but as you can see above in Table 10.4, in 2012, the average female wage earner, work- ing year-round, full-time, earned less than 80 percent of the income garnered by

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412 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

males, as noted above. This was an improvement from 1977, however, when pay for women was 58 percent of that for men. Some of this difference is due to the fact that women are likely to have been in the labor force less time than men and in their current job for a shorter period of time, and that women are more likely than men to delay the completion of their education (which delays their reaching better-paid occupational levels). Yet, these “compositional” differences between males and females are unable to account fully for the gender gap.

Why is there a differential in income by gender? The obvious answer is that there has been a history of discriminating against women in the labor market in terms of what kinds of jobs they are hired for and what pay they receive (Marini and Fan 1997). This is true almost everywhere you go in the world. It has been quipped that “Japan is the land of the rising sun, but only the son rises.” In East Germany right up to the period before the Berlin Wall collapsed, communism was supposed to guarantee gender equality. Yet women with the same education as men, working at the same jobs as men, were receiving less pay than men (Sörenson and Trappe 1995).

The good news is that in the United States the data suggest that the gap in status between men and women may be narrowing, at least for younger people, as younger women’s wages have been rising more quickly than those for younger men (Bianchi et al. 2006). The U.S. economy, for example, had to swallow a “Big Gulp” to find employment for the baby boomers, since not only were there a lot of boomers, but a larger proportion of females than ever before were looking for jobs. Although the economy did eventually absorb these people, it did so without offer- ing much improvement in earnings over previous generations. This is partly because male wages were bound to suffer somewhat from the competition with women for spots in the labor force (Waite 2000). Economic improvement for households has required that two-earner households become the norm, and this has certainly con- tributed to the delay in marriage and the rise in divorce—all of which will tend to lower middle-class incomes.

Family income rose steadily for American families during the 1950s and 1960s, leveled off a bit in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then rose, albeit unevenly, between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, peaking just before the Great Reces- sion and dropping after that. These patterns can be seen in Figure 10.4, which plots median family income, not the mean, thereby avoiding being affected by the very high top-end incomes. In 1947 (the first year for which such data are available from the Current Population Survey), a white family in the United States had an income equivalent to $27,046 at 2012 prices; and it was 2.6 times that—$71,478—even in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Black families have experienced more than a tripling of income since the end of World War II, from the equivalent of $12,498 in 1947 to $40,517 in 2012.

In relative terms, income for black families has grown slightly faster than that for white families. Thus “the ratio” in Figure 10.4 shows that in 1947, African American family income was less than half that of whites (a ratio of 0.46). By 2000, that ratio had gone up to nearly two-thirds (0.64), although there has been some backsliding since then to a ratio of 0.57 in 2012. Yet, despite the rise in family income and a general narrowing of the income gap with whites in relative terms,

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413Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

blacks were actually losing ground to white families in absolute terms. In 1947, the “dollar gap” between black and white families (the difference between the two shaded areas in Figure 10.4) had been $14,548, but by 2012 it had more than doubled to $30,961.

Blacks have thus been in the peculiar position of having their incomes rise faster in percentage terms than whites, but in dollar terms (the actual money available to spend on family members) they are falling further behind. This is one of the para- doxes that results from structural mobility—that situation in which an entire society is improving its situation economically, even though some groups may be gaining at a faster rate than others. That is the only time in which one group can improve itself socially or economically without forcing an absolute sacrifice from another group. Indeed, you can see in Figure 10.4 that most of the gains made by blacks relative to whites came during the 1960s and 1970s after the passage of major civil rights legislation during the Johnson administration. Progress has been slow since then.

In comparing family incomes of whites and blacks in the United States, we need to be aware of the differences in family structure that I have already noted. Blacks have slightly fewer earners per family than do whites, which will reduce

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Figure 10.4 The Gap in Family Income of Whites and African Americans Has Widened over Time Sources: Adapted from data in U.S. Bureau of the Census (1991), Table B-22; DeNavas-Walt et al. (2003b), Table 6; and U.S. Census Bureau (2013d), Table FINC-01.

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414 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

family income, all other things being equal. Furthermore, a much larger proportion of black families are headed by a female than is true for whites, and since females in the United States tend to earn less than men (see Table 10.4), that too lowers black family income compared to whites. We can control for these factors by look- ing at specific family types. For example, in 2012, an African American married couple family in which the wife and husband both worked had a median income of $76,628, which was 79 percent of the median income of similar white fami- lies ($97,062), a substantial improvement over the 57 percent for blacks compared to whites when looking at data for all families. Thus, we can explain some, but certainly not all, of the gap on the basis of family composition.

Poverty

If you have several children, the odds increase that your income will be below aver- age, and if, on top of that, you are a single mother, the chance skyrockets that you will be living below the poverty level. In 2012, 41 percent of people living in U.S. families headed by a woman with no husband present but with children under 18 were living below the poverty level, compared to the 15 percent of the total popula- tion that was living below the poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau 2013e).

To imagine the struggle it is to manage successfully in the United States on so little money, it is necessary only to review the definition of the poverty level. The poverty index was devised initially in 1964 by Mollie Orshansky of the U.S. Social Security Administration. It was a measure of need based on the finding of a 1955 Department of Agriculture study showing that approximately one-third of a poor family’s income was spent on food, and on a 1961 Department of Agriculture estimate of the cost of an “economy food plan”—a plan defined as a minimally nutritious diet for emergency or temporary use (Orshansky 1969). By calculating the cost of an economy food plan and multiplying it by three, the poverty level was born. It has been revised along the way, but the idea has remained the same, and since 1964 it has been raised at the same rate as the consumer price index.

The poverty threshold for a single person under the age of 65 was $11,945 as of 2012. This was the equivalent of earning $5.74 an hour if you were a year-round, full-time worker, but keep in mind that the federal minimum wage in that year was $7.25. A single parent with two children under the age of 18 could be earning $18,498 (the equivalent of $8.89 per hour for a year-round, full-time worker) and still be right at the poverty-level threshold. Between 1960 and 1973, the percent- age of Americans living below the poverty level was cut in half, from 22 percent to 11 percent, and it remained that low until the Great Recession, after which it has climbed to 15 percent as of 2012, as noted above.

Canada has adopted a strategy similar to that of the United States for measur- ing the lower end of the income scale, but the Canadian government has tried to avoid controversy by not officially defining a poverty threshold. Rather, Statistics Canada produces what are labeled “low income before tax cut-offs.” As of 2010, 15 percent of Canadians lived below that cut-off (Statistics Canada 2014), essen- tially the same level of poverty as in the United States.

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415Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

On the basis of global comparisons, it might be argued that very few people in North America are poor in absolute terms—it is the relative deprivation that is socially and morally degrading. Organizations such as the International Labour Organization and the World Bank have adopted an international standard that defines poverty as an income of less than $1.25 per day—an astonishingly small amount of money on which to try to survive. If $1.25 seems like an odd number, it is only because the index started years ago at $1 per day and has since been adjusted upward for inflation. Using this definition, data from the World Bank produce the estimate that about one in five humans lives in poverty, as shown in Table 10.6.

If we stretch the poverty line to $2.00 a day, we find that two in five humans are living at this level of income. The numbers are especially striking for South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as you can see in Table 10.6. “We live not as we wish, but as we can” is how a southern Indian peasant described life in a country where in 2010 it was estimated that 69 percent of the population lived on less than $2.00 per day (quoted by Hockings 1999:213). To put that number in perspective, remember that the poverty line in the United States in 2012 for a single person

Region Selected Countries within the Region

Poverty Rate (% below)

$1.25/day $2.00/day

East Asia and the Pacific 12 30 China 12 27 Indonesia 18 46

Europe and Central Asia 1 2 Armenia 2 20 Georgia 18 36

Latin America and Caribbean 6 10 Mexico 1 5 Haiti 65 8

Middle East and North Africa 2 12 Egypt 1 11 Yemen 17 46

South Asia 31 67 India 33 69 Pakistan 13 51

Sub-Saharan Africa 49 70 Ghana 22 43 Congo (Kinshasa) 85 94

Total 21 41

Source: Adapted from data in World Bank (World Bank 2014a); data are circa 2009–2013.

Table 10.6 A Huge Percentage of People in Developing Countries Live on Less than $2 Per Day

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416 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

under the age of 65 was $11,945, which works out to be more than $33 per day—a fortune for a huge percentage of the world’s population.

Wealth

Poverty implies not only the lack of adequate income from any and all sources, but also the lack of any other assets from which a person might draw sustenance. As people obtain and build assets, they create wealth. An asset is something that retains value or has the potential to increase in value over time. Every generation produces its share of self-made people like Bill Gates of Microsoft, but his three children will inherit that wealth, rather than have to produce it for themselves. Wealth and its attendant high income are essentially ascribed characteristics for those born into families that own huge homes, large amounts of real estate, and tremendous interests in stocks and bonds or other business assets. For most people, a home is the most important asset they will acquire in a lifetime, but assets can also include personal property such as jewelry or other collectibles, stock in companies or mutual funds, savings accounts in banks, rental property, or ownership in a business venture.

Typically, wealth is measured as net worth—the difference between the value of assets and the money owed on those assets. If your only asset is the house you just bought for $290,000 (the median sales price of a home in the United States in 2014), you are in the process of building wealth, but your net worth may be close to zero because you still may owe as much on the mortgage as the house is worth. There are three basic ways to generate wealth: (1) inherit assets from your parents or other relatives (the easiest way), (2) save part of your income to purchase assets (the hardest way), and (3) borrow money to purchase assets (the riskiest way).

Since most of us do not have fabulously wealthy parents, our ability to inherit enough from our parents (assuming that they have been able to accumulate some wealth) to build on to create our own wealth will, in fact, be determined impor- tantly by two basic demographic characteristics: (1) how many siblings we have; and (2) how long our parents can expect to live. The fewer people with whom we have to share our parents’ inheritance, the more there is for us to use ourselves, so those groups with the lowest fertility are likely to have a higher proportion of peo- ple who are able to accumulate wealth. The age of our parents, especially relative to our own age, will influence the likelihood that they will die and leave us something while we are still young enough to do something with it. In fact, as life expectancy continues to increase, the older generation has been hanging on to its money, as I discuss in the essay that accompanies this chapter.

The principal sources of data on the wealth of Americans are household sur- veys, such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. At this writing the most recent data are from 2011. These data show that net worth among Americans (including equity in homes) averages $69,000 per household (based on the median), but almost one in five households has zero or negative net worth (U.S. Census Bureau 2013g).

Marriage is an important ingredient in accumulating wealth (as long as the couple stays married), and thus we find that the highest level of net worth occurs

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417Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

among older (65 and older) married-couple households, whose net worth in 2011 of $285,000 was more than twice the net worth of unmarried male householders ($130,000) or unmarried female householders ($104,000) of that age (and notice that female net worth is only 80 percent of male net worth). Figure 10.5 shows addi- tional detail that should remind you of the value of a college education. Household- ers with a graduate or professional degree had a net worth $241,000, which was more than five times the level of householders who had not gone beyond high school.

However, there can be little question that one of the most striking compar- isons is by race and ethnicity. Figure 10.5 shows that the average non-Hispanic white household had a net worth in 2011 of $110,500, with Asians not far behind at $89,339. However, the figures were only $7,683 for Hispanics and $6,314 for blacks. Some of this difference is due to differences in the age structure, especially among Hispanics who are relatively young, and some is due to differences in mari- tal status, especially among blacks; but much of it is due to the greater difficulty that Hispanic and black household members have in generating enough income for long enough to be able to acquire higher levels of wealth. Note that Asians gener- ally have high levels of education, high rates of marriage but low levels of fertility, almost no teenage pregnancies, and the nation’s lowest level of nonmarital births. They essentially represent the model for succeeding in American society.

Type of Household Married-couple households

Less than 35 years 35 to 54 years 55 to 64 years

65 years and over Male householder

Less than 35 years 35 to 54 years 55 to 64 years

65 years and over Female householder

Less than 35 years 35 to 54 years 55 to 64 years

65 years and over Education

No high school diploma High school graduate only Some college, no degree

Associate’s degree

Race/Ethnicity Non-Hispanic White

Asian Hispanic

Black

Bachelor’s degree Graduate or professional degree

0 300280120100 140 160 180 200 220 240 260806040

Median net worth (in thousands of dollars)

Figure 10.5 Median Net Worth Is Highest for Older Married Couples in the United States Source: Adapted from data in U.S. Census Bureau (2013g), Table 1.

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418 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

SHOW ME THE MONEY! HOUSEHOLD DIVERSITY AND WEALTH AMONG THE ELDERLY

In the past, and still today in many less developed countries, the higher status of the elderly has been tied partly to the fact that as old age approached, they were situated in their own housing unit. Even if they lived with their children, it was likely that the children (typically a son with his wife and children) were actually living in the parental home, rather than the other way around (Kertzer 1995; United Nations Population Division 2005). The concept of filial piety, of respect for one’s parents, has been a traditional value in most cultures, encouraging chil- dren to take care of their parents when the need arises, and this is facilitated by the children never leaving the parental home.

Of course, in high-mortality societies, the probability that parents would survive to old age (and the probability that their children would sur- vive to help them) was low enough that relatively few people ever had to make good on that prom- ise. For example, under a constant mortality regime of 40 years of life expectancy, a person aged 30 has less than one chance in four of having both parents still alive, and there is about one chance in two that one parent will still be alive. However, at a life expectancy of 70 years, nearly two out of every three adults aged 30 can expect to have both par- ents still alive, and nearly eight in 10 people aged 30 can expect to have at least one parent still alive. On the other hand, a high level of mortality increases the odds that a younger person will be able to inherit the family farm or business or will be able to move into some other position in soci- ety being vacated by the relatively early deaths of other people.

In the modern world, society after society has bemoaned the fact that the multigenerational family has been a victim of “the movement toward smaller families, the expansion of the female labor market, the geographic mobility of villagers, and the ten- dency of the young toward more individualistic life styles” (Sung 1995:240). That particular descrip- tion was applied to South Korea, but it is echoed in many other places. Older people are no longer assured that they will live out their days nestled in the bosom of their family. To be sure, not all older people necessarily want to live with their children,

especially if they are forced to be dependent on the children. A worldwide phenomenon has been emerging of older people wanting “intimacy at a distance.” Older people who co-reside with chil- dren increasingly do so out of necessity, not nec- essarily because they prefer that arrangement.

In Europe and North America it is reason- able to say that diversity in living arrangements is as much a part of the lives of older people as it is among the young. Living arrangements among the elderly are compounded by patterns of marriage, widowhood, divorce, cohabitation, and remar- riage in combination with differences in mortality between males and females and migration pat- terns that separate children from their parents.

The unbalanced sex ratio at older ages in most societies reminds us that women are much more likely to experience a change in marital status, which in turn means a change in living arrange- ments for them as they grow older. Males, of course, are less likely to experience this because they are more likely to be outlived by their wives and more likely than older women to remarry if they are the surviving spouse. The United Nations Pop- ulation Division has assembled data from all over the globe to summarize the living arrangements of the older population (defined by them as people 60 and older), so we are able to compare differ- ent regions of the world in this regard. In Asia and Africa, older people are most likely to be living with a spouse or other family member, whereas those in Latin America are in between the Asian and North American extremes (United Nations Population Division 2005). Culture and demography almost certainly interact to create these regional patterns.

The cultural part is obvious in that some soci- eties place a greater emphasis on respect for the elderly than do others. The demographic part of this is that the forces driving the living arrangements for the older population are the same ones that have put all of the elements of the demographic transition into motion—people living longer with fewer chil- dren, located in urban areas, with higher incomes than at any previous time in history. This latter ele- ment is a key one, because throughout human history it was economically most advantageous

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419Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

for family members to live together as protection against demographic and economic uncertainty. As incomes have risen throughout the world, but espe- cially in the richer nations, the economic and demo- graphic necessity of co-residence drops away and we are left only with the cultural preferences.

Remember that for men, in particular, being old and living with your children was likely to mean that you were the one who owned the home and economic necessity encouraged your children to be with you. The longer a person lives, the greater the chance to acquire whatever resources might exist to help the family economy. So, an older per- son was likely to be relatively rare but also relatively rich (with an emphasis on “relatively,” rather than on “rich”). For women the situation has tended to be different because they historically have not had automatic rights of inheritance of their husband’s

property, and so when their spouse dies they may become dependent on their children. They may live in exactly the same house with the same chil- dren, but now the eldest son in the house will be householder, not his mother.

The decline in mortality tends to throw a mon- key wrench into these kinds of arrangements. Increasing survivability of people to old age increases the likelihood that a young or middle- aged adult will have surviving parents, and that these parents will be heading up the family house- hold (Ruggles and Heggeness 2008). This pattern essentially clogs up familial and societal mobility, because it means that family assets are not turned over as rapidly as would otherwise be the case. It also means, of course, that enough people are liv- ing long enough to accumulate a substantial por- tion of any society’s resources.

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The 400 Wealthiest People in the United States Are Disproportionately Older Source: Adapted from data in Forbes (2014).

(continued)

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420 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

The upshot of all this is that the older house- holds in the United States are those in which net worth now tends to be the greatest. More specifi- cally, we can find out who holds the wealth in the United States by looking at the Forbes Magazine list of the 400 richest Americans to see what their ages are. The accompanying figure shows the data for the year 2013; it is very clear that the elderly are far more likely to be very wealthy than are younger people. Of the wealthiest 400 (actually there were only 397 individuals in 2013 because of ties), you can see that 228, or 57 percent, were age 65 or older, and they commanded 60 percent of the wealth among the richest Americans, despite the fact that the elderly comprise only 14 percent of the population, as I discussed in Chapter 8.

The wealthy are disproportionately old, and among the wealthy, it is the oldest members who tend to have the greatest wealth. This would be more clear in the accompanying figure were it not for Bill Gates, who is the world’s richest person, but was only 58 in 2013. His net worth is $72 billion, and the only American close to him is his good friend Warren Buffet (net worth of $58 billion), who was 83 in that year. If we focus on the ten wealthi- est persons in 2013, seven of the ten are 65 or older. Besides Bill Gates, the other two people who are under 65 (albeit not by much) are both mem- bers of the Walton family, which founded Wal-Mart. The cohort of people now aged 65 and older in the United States is better off than any that came before, and as they die, there will be a huge inter- generational transfer of wealth, probably the larg- est that the world has ever seen (Piketty 2014). However, because people are living longer, the children who inherit that wealth will probably be fairly old themselves when they come into their

money, so the wealth will stay among the elderly, complicating life along the way as people decide when and how to share the wealth (Angel 2007).

Rising life expectancy in the absence of sub- stantial wealth can be a different story, of course, because the younger generation may build up some resentment to older people. An anecdotal, but perhaps significant, bit of evidence about the status of the elderly in developing countries emerged in the People’s Republic of China in 1997 when the government passed a law protecting the rights and interests of the elderly. In a nation that made famous the concept of filial piety, a law now exists that forbids discrimination against the aged by “insulting, mistreating, or forsaking them,” and the law calls for appropriate measures to be taken against anyone committing such abuse (Global Aging Report 1997). The result was an explosion of lawsuits by parents against their children (Chang 2000). In 2012, yet another law was passed in China that required adult children to visit their parents or risk being sued. The law is a bit vague about details, but “state media say the new clause will allow elderly parents who feel neglected by their children to take them to court. The move comes as reports abound of elderly parents being abandoned or ignored by their chil- dren” (Associated Press 2012).

Discussion Questions: (1) Do you think that respect for older people has eroded in last sev- eral decades, despite the clear fact that much of the wealth is held by older people? Defend your answer. (2) What are the underlying demographic reasons for the fact that 60 percent of the wealthi- est people in America are 65 and older even though only 14 percent of the population is 65 and older?

SHOW ME THE MONEY! HOUSEHOLD DIVERSITY AND WEALTH AMONG THE ELDERLY (cONTINUED)

Race and Ethnicity

The assimilation model of immigration, which I discussed in Chapter 7, assumes that a nation is a melting pot where everyone eventually shares cultural values and norms, and ultimately every person becomes pretty much like everyone else. This is sometimes referred to as the “North American Model” of race and ethnic

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421Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

relations, which is aimed at combating racial discrimination and ethnic inequality (Haug 2000). The multicultural model, on the other hand, assumes a salad bowl where everybody stays different but gets along just fine. European nations, with the notable exception of France, have tended to prefer this approach, and it has actu- ally been adopted as the main U.S. model in the past two decades, encouraged by a positive governmental emphasis on diversity. The assimilation model assumes that distinctions of race and ethnicity will eventually be wiped out by intermarriage, whereas the multicultural model assumes not only that things won’t work like that, but that people prefer to remain separate. The United States has historically fluctu- ated somewhere between those two extremes, but from the moment of the country’s creation more than 200 years ago, the issue of race was on the table. It has been there ever since.

Recognizing that race and ethnicity are important issues in a society does not necessarily mean that they will be easy to measure (see, for example, Glenn 2009). They are not easy to measure, of course, because they are not easy to define and so measurement becomes more of an art than a science. Indeed, the “science” part is scary because it can too easily lead us back to the eugenics movement at the begin- ning of the twentieth century in which people were trying to measure genetic dif- ferences among people who, in fact, only looked different without having any other distinguishing characteristics. Our cultural heritage, not our genetic heritage, distin- guishes us, and that is not easy to measure.

Race and ethnicity represent human differences with some type of physical manifestation that allows people to identify and be identified with a particular group. The characteristics may be physical in nature such as skin pigmentation, hair texture, shape of the eyes or nose (these would normally fall under the category of race), or they may be more behavioral, such as language or identification with a particular ancestry and geographic place (these would normally fall under the cat- egory of ethnicity).

The history of racism in the world suggests that anything that distinguishes you can, and probably will, be used against you. Therefore, to be a member of a subor- dinate (not in political control) racial, ethnic, or religious group in any society is to be in jeopardy of impaired life chances. African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians in the United States are well aware of this, as are indigenous peo- ple in Mexico, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Muslims in Israel or India, Indians in Malaysia, and virtually any foreigner in Japan or China.

Race and Ethnicity in the United States In the 2010 Census, 97 percent of the population indicated that they belonged to only one racial category. Those who chose white, and indicated furthermore that they were not Hispanic, accounted for 64 percent of the population. This was, of course, a rather dramatic change from fifty years prior to that, when 89 percent of the population was white— when white was not yet thought of as an ethnic category (Perry 2001). By the twenty-first century, the racial and ethnic changes have been so substantial that Perez and Hirschman (2009) refer to the phenomenon of “emerging American identities.”

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422 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

I mentioned in Chapter 4 that beginning with Census 2000 people could choose more than one racial category for themselves. The underlying purpose was to be able to capture more accurate information about multiracial individuals. If you accept the assimilation theory, then you would expect an increasing fraction of the population to identify with more than one racial/ethnic group, whereas the multi- cultural perspective would not expect this to be happening. A comparison of 2000 and 2010 census data suggests that there was, in fact, a very small increase in the percent of people indicating more than one race on the census form—going from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 2.9 percent in 2010 (Humes et al. 2011).

In the United States, the major racial categories are defined as “White,” “Black or African American,” “Native American or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” and “Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.” You will also see tables from the census that include a number of people in the “some other race” category, but almost all of them turn out to be Hispanic, which represents the principal ethnic (as opposed to race) category asked about in the census. A person of “Hispanic or Latino” origin is defined as one who is “of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Cen- tral American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” The relatively “indeterminate” concept of Hispanic (Idler 2007) is often confusing to those arriv- ing in the United States from those origin countries, because it is not used anywhere outside of the United States. Immigrants from Nicaragua, for example, will find themselves identified officially as Hispanic, while having a high probability of being thought of unofficially as Mexican.

The majority of Hispanics in the United States are indeed from Mexico, and despite the discrimination that they have faced over time, they are less discrimi- nated against than blacks: “Mexican Americans intermarry much more than do blacks, live in less segregated areas, and face less labor market discrimination. . . . In this sense, racial boundaries for Mexican Americans are clearly less rigid than for African Americans” (Telles and Ortiz 2008:264).

In the United States, blacks were the largest minority group for all of the nation’s history—until recently. By 2005 the Hispanic or Latino population (15 percent of the population) had passed the black population (13 percent of the population) in size, as I mentioned in Chapter 2. No longer being the numeri- cally largest minority group in the country does not necessarily make life easier. Being of African origin in the United States is associated with higher probabili- ties of death, lower levels of education, lower levels of occupational status, lower incomes, and higher levels of marital disruption than for the non-Hispanic white population. Tufuku Zuberi (2001) has argued that the different life chances of whites and blacks in American society are due to racial stratification, which he defines as a socially constructed system that characterizes one or more groups as being distinctly different. Your membership in a group defined as different from the others then creates, in essence, a different social world for you than for those who are in other groups, and this affects your behavior and your life chances in society, because there is no genuine societal expectation that you will be assimi- lated into the rest of the society: “The ability of a group to be assimilated depends on whether it is considered an ethnic or racial group. . . . For example, immi- grants from Nigeria and Ghana assimilate into the African American race, and

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423Chapter 10 The Family and Household Transition

immigrants from Sweden and Ireland assimilate into the European American race” (McDaniel 1996:139).

For better or worse, official statistics in the United States make extensive use of the racial and ethnic categories I have just discussed, but on an everyday basis peo- ple are also conscious of ethnicity in a broader context, as measured by the question about ancestry that has appeared in the last several U.S. censuses and is incorpo- rated into the American Community Survey. Overall, the most-often-recorded ancestry in the 2010 American Community Survey was German (15 percent of the U.S. population—48 million people). Next most often listed was Irish (11 percent, or 35 million people), which is pretty remarkable when you consider that there are fewer than 5 million people living in Ireland, and not even all of them are Irish! English, American, and Italian round out the top five ancestries.

Ethnicity in Canada and Mexico The United States does not have a corner on the racial and ethnic minority market, nor are demographic differences by race and ethnicity peculiar to the United States (see, for example, Reitz 2005). As befits a multiracial, multiethnic, officially bilingual society, Canada has several ways to measure diversity. What would be called “racial minority” in the United States is labeled “visible minority” in Canada. The visible minority accounted for 19 percent of Canada’s population in the 2011 census, up from 11 percent in 1996. The most populous group was South Asians (largely from India), followed closely by Chinese and then African-origin blacks (albeit coming largely from the Caribbean). Ethnicity is essentially a geographic concept, based on a place with which you identify, similar to the concept of “ancestry” as measured by the U.S. Census. The single biggest ethnic group in Canada is—guess what—Canadian. However, the largest non-Canadian origin identified was the British Isles. Another identifier in Canada is whether or not you are a member of the aboriginal popu- lation, which accounts for just less than 4 percent of the country’s total popula- tion and coincides with the U.S. ethnic identification of North American Indian. Language is the other major identifier in Canadian society, with English being listed most often as the language spoken at home (58 percent of the population), followed by French (18 percent, with the vast majority of French-speakers living in the province of Québec).

Language is a divisive-enough issue in Canada that in the 1990s it led the fran- cophone (French-speaking) population in the eastern edge of the country (Québec) to attempt to secede from the anglophone (English-speaking) remainder of the country. Demographics played a role in defeating the referendum on separation held in 1995, however, because the traditionally Catholic francophone population now has very low levels of fertility—among the lowest anywhere in North America. French Canadians are not replacing themselves, and non-francophones (especially recent immigrants) generally did not support separation, leading Canadian demog- raphers correctly to predict that separation would not be approved by the voters (Kaplan 1994; Samuel 1994). Still, the controversy over language in Canada, which continues to this day, underscores the power of society to turn any population characteristic into a sign of difference, from which prejudice and discrimination often follow.

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424 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

Language is also an issue in Mexico, where the lowest stratum of society tends to be occupied by those who speak an indigenous language (linguistically related to Aztec and Mayan languages), rather than Spanish. According to the 2010 census, 7 percent of Mexicans speak an indigenous language, but in Oaxaca it is 34 percent; followed by 30 percent in the Yucatán; and 27 percent in Chiapas. These are also the Mexican states where people are poorest and fertility is highest. Language minorities thus represent both the geographic and demographic extremes in North America, from francophone Québec in the northeast, with very low fertil- ity, to Mayan-language Chiapas in the south, with very high fertility.

Religion

Virtually everyone is born into some kind of religious context, which is why I have likened religion to an ascribed characteristic, closely affiliated with ethnicity. Yet people can willingly change their religious preference during their lifetime, so it is also akin to an achieved status. Despite the appearance of choice, however, most people do not alter religious affiliation, so it is a nearly permanent feature of their social world. People may become more or less religious within their particular group, but they are unlikely to change the major affiliation. Like race and ethnic- ity, religion sets people apart from one another and has historically been a common source of intergroup conflict throughout the world. Because it is an often-discussed sociodemographic characteristic, religion has regularly come under the demogra- pher’s microscope, with particular attention being paid to its potential influence on fertility, which is bound up with factors including gender equity and family and household structure.

America’s history of religious pluralism, in which a wide variety of religious preferences have existed side-by-side, perhaps sensitized American demographers to the role of religion in influencing people’s lives. A good deal of attention was focused over the years on the comparison between Protestants and Catholics. Until the late twentieth century, Catholics routinely had more children than Protes- tants in the United States, and internationally it has been true that predominantly Protestant areas (such as the United States and northern Europe) experienced low fertility sooner than did predominantly Catholic areas (such as southern and east- ern Europe). However, analyses of data from the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth revealed that in the mid-1960s, as the baby boom was ending, it was par- ticularly noticeable that Catholics were increasing their use of modern contracep- tion, even as the papal encyclical was trying to push them in the opposite direction (Westoff and Westoff 1971). This turned into a genuine revolution in birth con- trol practices of U.S. Roman Catholics (Westoff and Rindfuss 1973), which shortly thereafter led to the end of “Catholic” fertility in the United States (Westoff and Jones 1979).

In the middle of the twentieth century, no one could have imagined that Catholic fertility would ever drop to the level of non-Catholics in the United States, much less dip below those levels. Indeed, fertility is now lowest in Europe precisely in the most Catholic countries of Spain and Italy, as I have already discussed, and it is even

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below replacement level in predominantly Catholic Mexico City (INEGI 2013), as I have noted. Does this mean that religion is less important demographically than it used to be? Obviously, the relationship between religion and demographic behavior is not a simple one, but there are two major themes that run through the literature: (1) religion plays its most important role in the middle stage of the demographic transition; and (2) religiosity (how intensely you practice your religion) may be more important than religious belief.

Looking first at differences in religion, we find a classic study by Joseph Chamie (1981) of differentials in Lebanese fertility, in which he concluded that a major effect of religion may be to retard the adoption of more modern, lower-fertility attitudes during the transitional phase of the demographic revolution. Adherents to religious beliefs that have been traditionally associated with high fertility will be slower to give ground than will people whose religious beliefs are more flexible with respect to fertility. In the United States, for example, Jews have generally had lower fertility levels than the rest of the population. Trends in Jewish fertility have followed the American pattern (a decline in the Depression, a rise with the baby boom, a drop with the baby bust), but at a consistently lower level. Why? “Wide- spread secularization processes, upward social mobility, a value system emphasizing individual achievement, and awareness of minority status have all been indicated as factors that are both typical of American Jews and conducive to low fertility” (DellaPergola 1980:261). Indeed, it is not just Jews in America whose fertility has been low for a long time. Jewish communities in central and western Europe were characterized by low fertility as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, largely because contraception is readily accepted in the Jewish normative system (at least among non-Orthodox Jews) (DellaPergola 1980). As I noted in Chapter 6, fertility in the United States declined earliest in those areas dominated by more secu- larized religious groups (Leasure 1982). People who are more traditional in their religious beliefs tend to be less educated and have less income, and they are thus more prone to higher fertility.

Although Jews in Europe and the United States tend to be relatively secular and have low fertility, the ultra-orthodox (i.e., highly religious) Jewish population (the Israeli haredim) has one of the highest levels of fertility of any group in the world, at about 7 births per woman (DellaPergola et al. 2014). This young and rapidly growing population within Israel is bound to shape the country’s demographic and political future.

In the twenty-first century, Islam has emerged as the religion that is most often characterized by above-average levels of fertility. There are now an esti- mated 1.7 billion Muslims in the world, representing more than one in five people globally, and nations that are growing in population at rates above the world average are disproportionately those in which a majority of the population is Muslim (Pew Research Center 2011). Between 2010 and 2030 it is projected that the Muslim population in the world will be growing at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, compared to 0.7 percent for non-Muslims. However, there is con- siderable variability in fertility among the Muslim-majority countries, ranging from Iran at below replacement level (1.7 births per woman) to Niger at nearly 7 children per woman.

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426 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

Will Muslims follow the pattern of Catholics and quickly lower fertility levels to replacement or below? If secularization is a key to low fertility, then it is not religion per se that matters, but how strongly one holds any given set of religious beliefs, which we call religiosity. Regardless of the religion to which one adheres, research has consistently shown that higher levels of religiosity are associated with higher fertility, either directly by intention or indirectly through the non-use of methods to prevent pregnancy.

In terms of doctrine, Islam may not be any more pronatalist (expressing an atti- tude that favors high fertility) than other religions (McQuillan 2004), but the way in which Islam structures societies may generate a type of religiosity that lowers status for women relative to men and indirectly promotes pronatalism. At the same time, the extent to which communities are structured like this may well be region- ally variable, reflecting underlying cultural attributes shared by all populations in a region, whether Muslim or not. Thus, Muslims in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa tend to have higher fertility than Muslims in North Africa or Europe, at least partly because fertility levels are higher for everyone in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Weeks and Westoff 2010).

Westoff and Frejka (2007) have shown that even in Europe fertility is positively associated with religiosity; yet among the most religious, Muslim fertility is still higher, suggesting an interaction between religion and religiosity. Their analysis is consistent with other research showing that in general the strength of one’s reli- gious beliefs is predictive of fertility because the greater the level of religiousness, the more traditional are family values and the more oppressed are women, and it is these factors that are especially influential in determining family size (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004). This may be particularly impor- tant among Muslims because “Islam is not merely a religion of worship, but is also a pervasive social system” (Rashad and Eltigani 2005:186). Similarly, Calvin Goldscheider (2006), in discussing high fertility among Muslims in Israel, argues that “values that emphasize the subordinate role of women within households and gender hierarchies appear to be critical in sustaining high fertility levels” (p. 46). Courbage and Todd (2011) argue, however, that the critical change in Muslim societies, as elsewhere, is education. As educational levels rise for both males and females, they foresee a convergence of low fertility levels among Muslim and non- Muslim countries.

Does Marriage Matter?

At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that the family is usually thought of as both a kinship and an economic unit. The kinship part provides its members with social capital (the connection to networks of people who may be in a position to help you out in life), and the economic part provides its members with human capital (access to resources such as education). These familial resources play a role throughout each person’s life, but they are especially crucial when you are a child. Thus, societ- ies tend to pay particular attention to the type of household in which children are growing up, no matter how diverse the household structure may be in society as a

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whole. Are children being raised in a household environment that maximizes their opportunities to acquire human and social capital, and thus to increase the odds of success in the next generation? This is how family and household structures inter- sect with life chances.

Charles Westoff (1978) suggested that the institutions of marriage and the family were showing signs of change back in the 1970s because “the economic transforma- tion of society has been accomplished by a decline in traditional and religious author- ity, the diffusion of an ethos of rationality and individualism, the universal education of both sexes, the increasing equality of women, the increasing survival of children and the emergence of a consumer-oriented culture that is increasingly aimed at maxi- mizing personal gratification” (p. 53). It has been argued that many of these cultural changes have followed, rather than preceded, the changes in household structure. They may not have initiated the trends, but they have reinforced the transformations and ensured their spread within each country and from one country to another.

The cultural model prevalent for the past few decades in the richer nations has been that self-fulfillment and individual autonomy are the most important values in life and serve to justify scrapping a marriage. If women are approaching the level of economic independence previously reserved for men, perhaps the value of marriage has been permanently eroded, and marriage will (or has) become only one option among many from which people may reasonably choose. One of the complaints about marriage often registered by women is that the move toward gender equality in the division of labor in the formal marketplace has not necessarily been trans- lated into equity in the division of labor within the household. Women in the West- ern world are able to operate in society independently of a husband or other male patriarch or protector, but they may not have the same ability to have an equal relationship at home with a husband. Nonetheless, an international comparison of data for 31 countries revealed that there was more within-marriage task-sharing in countries that have a longer history of maternal employment (Treas and Tai 2012). These changes do not take place overnight.

So, does marriage matter? A substantial body of evidence suggests that marriage matters very much even in a rich modern society—it enhances household income and wealth and promotes the well-being of spouses and children, while adding to sexual gratification in the bargain. Waite and Gallagher (2000) reviewed the litera- ture and analyzed numerous data sets in order to draw the following conclusions about the benefits of marriage: (1) married couples have higher household income than the unmarried; (2) married couples save more of their income than the unmar- ried; and therefore (3) married couples have more wealth than the unmarried; (4) married men and women live longer than the unmarried, and engage in fewer high- risk behaviors; (5) children in a married-couple family are better off financially than those in a one-parent family; (6) children in a married-couple family are less likely to drop out of school, less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, and less likely to be “idle” (out of both school and work) as a young adult than children in a one-parent family; and (7) married couples have sex more often and derive greater satisfaction from it than the unmarried do.

The social impact of marriage derives from these personal benefits. Perhaps most compelling is the fact that the family remains the primary social unit in which

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society is reproduced—in which children are taught the rights and reciprocal obli- gations of membership in human society. The evidence seems to suggest that this is accomplished most efficiently in a household/family unit that includes both parents of the children in question. The evidence is persuasive that children derive few, if any, positive benefits from growing up without a father and, indeed, tend to suffer both short- and long-term ill effects if fatherless (Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Wagmiller et al. 2006; Cherlin 2009). The same is probably true for motherless families, although we have fewer studies of such family settings.

It appears that the diversification of households in the richer countries has lev- eled off, at the same time that family and household change is well under way in developing nations. Smaller families and longer lives lived out in predominantly urban areas seem inevitably to lead to diversification in the household and family structure of a society. There is little controversy in that proposition. The contro- versy arises largely when children are involved, because some family situations and household structures seem more likely to offer children the social and human capi- tal resources most societies believe to be important for children as they grow up. These were some of the uncharted waters that more developed countries wandered into in the course of the demographic transition, and family demographers have been working hard to map the territory for you.

Summary and Conclusion

The past few decades have witnessed a fundamental shift in household structure in the United States and other richer nations, and these changes are beginning to evolve all over the world as the family and household transition accompanies the health and mortality, fertility, migration, urban, and age transitions. Married- couple households with children have become less common, being replaced by a combination of married couples without children, cohabiting couples with and without children, lone parents with children, people living alone, people living with nonfamily members, and just about anything else that you can think of. This greater diversity in household structure is a direct result of the trends in marriage and divorce, which are themselves influenced by trends in mortality and fertility and urban living. Marriage has been increasingly delayed (although most people do eventually marry), but people are leaving the parental nest to live independently by themselves, with friends, or in a cohabiting relationship prior to marriage, a pattern greatly facilitated by access to effective methods of contraception. Once married, there is an increased tendency to dissolve the marriage. Some of this is due to the fact that spouses are far less likely to die than in earlier times, and some is due to the fact that divorce laws have accommodated the changing relationships between men and women. Accompanying these trends has been a rise in the proportion of children born outside of marriage, contributing to the increased percentage of chil- dren who are living with only one parent.

Less directly, but no less importantly, the transformation of family and house- hold structure has been a result of changing population characteristics, especially

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the improvement in women’s life chances. Women have become less dependent on men as they have begun to live longer and spend more of their lives without children in an urban environment, where there are alternatives to childbearing and family life. Throughout the world, women are closing the education gap between themselves and men, entering the paid labor force, and moving up the occupa- tional ladder.

These new opportunities to be more fully engaged in all aspects of social, eco- nomic, and political life have been simultaneously the cause and consequence of declining fertility and improved life expectancy. They have enabled women to delay marriage while becoming educated and establishing a career, choose marriage or not (most do), choose children or not (most choose at least one), and, if married, to choose to stay married (only about half do). Therein lie the principal explanations for the increased diversity of families and households.

Not all people have equal access to societal resources such as advanced educa- tion, a well-paying job, and other assets with which to build wealth. In the United States, blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians are less likely than others to be highly educated, and this without doubt contributes to their relative social and eco- nomic disadvantage in American society, although racial prejudice and discrimina- tion continue to play a role. On the other hand, Asians tend to have higher levels of education than other groups, which helps account for their higher levels of income and wealth (as well as higher life expectancies). In most countries of the world we find one or more groups who, for reasons of discrimination beyond their control, are disadvantaged compared to the dominant group.

The impact of the trends toward greater family and household diversity falls disproportionately on children. Growing up in a household that is not a two-parent family means lower household income and increased odds of health and social problems in childhood and young adulthood, and it generally increases the risk that your their life chances may be limited. However, another group also bears the brunt of dissolved marriages. Today’s divorced or otherwise not married women could become the biggest group of elderly poor in the future. This is a trend we will have to watch over time, but it will be easier to track than in previous generations because most households with older people in industrialized nations are now in urban areas, where they may be more visible than the elderly poor in rural areas of less developed nations.

Another trend we are watching with great trepidation is the overall degrada- tion of our environment. As we try to improve the lives of a larger and increasingly diverse population in the world, our efforts have created serious questions about the sustainability of life as we have come to know it over the past two centuries, and we take a look at these issues in the next chapter.

Main Points

1. Married-couple households with children are declining as a fraction of all households, being replaced by a variety of other family and nonfamily household types.

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430 Part Three Population Structure and Characteristics

2. The direct causes of these changes in household composition are a delay in mar- riage, an increase in cohabitation and nonmarital births, a rise in the propensity to divorce, and, to a lesser extent, widowhood in the older population.

3. The underlying indirect causes of these changes are the several other transitions associated with the overall demographic transition, including declining mortal- ity, declining fertility, migration to urban areas, and the underlying age struc- ture changes brought about over time by demographic change.

4. The transformation of families and households has accompanied improved life chances for women, including higher levels of education, labor force participa- tion, occupation, and income.

5. Average educational attainment has increased substantially over time in most countries, and, especially in industrialized nations, women appear now to have closed the gender gap in education.

6. In the United States during World War II, a combination of demand for labor and too few traditional labor force entrants created an opening for married women to move into jobs previously denied them, and since 1940, the rates of labor force participation have risen for women, especially married women, while declining for men.

7. Over time in the United States, poverty has declined while at the same time Americans of almost all statuses have become wealthier in real absolute terms, but there have been only minor changes in the relative status of most groups.

8. Race may be just “a pigment of your imagination,” but blacks, in particular, tend to be disadvantaged compared to whites in American society.

9. The diversity of households seems to have plateaued in richer nations but is on the rise in most of the rest of the world.

10. Family demographers can prove that the average person in Miami, Florida, is born Cuban and dies Jewish.

Questions for Review

1. What is the difference between a kinship unit and a consumption unit, and why is the difference important to an understanding of the family and household transition?

2. Discuss the ways in which each of the other components of the demographic transition lead up to and help explain the family and household transition.

3. How do the differences in, or changes in, life chances for an individual affect the proximate determinants of his or her own family and household living arrange- ment? Pick one demographic characteristic such as education and discuss how different levels of that characteristic could affect the living arrangement choices that a person might make.

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4. Why do you think that race and ethnicity affect life chances in so many different societies?

5. What is/are the most important reason(s) why we should care about the increasing diversity in family and household structure?

Websites of Interest

1. http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/ The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which began in 1968 at the University of Michigan, is a longitudinal study emphasizing the dynamic (changing) aspects of demo- graphic and economic behavior in American society. A similar project has been underway for a number of years in the United Kingdom: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk

2. http://crcw.princeton.edu/ The Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University is associated with Princeton’s Office of Population Research and it aims to combine research with advocacy to promote the well-being of children. It is home to the influential “Fragile Families” project.

3. http://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/center-for-family-demographic-research.html The Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio is devoted to the study of demographic trends in the United States that are central to many of the topics discussed in this chapter.

4. http://www.unicef.org/statistics/ The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) maintains a database for all countries in which you can obtain a profile of the basic indicators of the life chances of the average child. Combine that with a visit to the World Bank’s website (http://www.worldbank .org/en/topic/poverty), where you can obtain poverty level data for each country.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/family%20and%20household %20transition Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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432

CHAPTER 11 Population and Sustainability

THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE EARTH’S RESOURCES

Economic Growth and Development Measuring GNI and Purchasing Power Parity

HOW IS POPULATION RELATED TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

Is Population Growth a Stimulus to Economic Development?

Is Population Growth Unrelated to Economic Development?

Is Population Growth Detrimental to Economic Development? Taking the Age Structure Into Account Summarizing the Connections

THE BOTTOM LINE FOR THE FUTURE: CAN BILLIONS MORE PEOPLE BE FED?

The Relationship between Economic Development and Food

Extensification—Increasing Farmland Intensification—Increasing Per-Acre Yield

Need for Irrigation Fertilizer, Mechanization and Pesticide Use Has the Green Revolution Run Its Course? Reducing Waste Dietary Changes

The Demand for Food Is Growing Faster Than the Population

How Many People Can Be Fed? The Impact of Weather and Climate Change

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION Polluting the Ground Polluting the Air Damage to the Water Supply

Figure 11.1 The Highest Per Capita Incomes Are Found in the Global North Source: Adapted from data in World Bank (2014b)

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433Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Assessing the Damage Attributable to Population Growth

Environmental Disasters Lead to Death and Dispersion

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT—POSSIBILITY OR OXYMORON?

Are We Overshooting Our Carrying Capacity?

ESSAY: How Big Is Your Ecological Footprint?

It is elementary, my dear Watsons: Humans cannot survive without food and water. Those favored few of us in the world who can rely on water from the tap and groceries from the supermarket deal with this principle pretty much on a theo- retical level. We know intellectually that some areas of the world have regularly been faced with the prospect of famine and drought. We also know that more than 200 years ago Malthus was already stewing about population growth outstripping the food supply. Although it is certainly a tragedy that all people cannot find a seat on the gravy train, the fact is that Malthus was wrong. Right? After all, it is a fact food production has actually outpaced population growth over the past 200 years, and there are boomsters who believe that population growth stimulates economic development and that the food record speaks for itself—we can grow it as we need it (in this context the boomsters are known as cornucopians). The logical extension of this perspective is the idea that somehow we will be able to find the magical formula whereby everybody is better off in the future and we can all live hap- pily ever after—that is the promise of the obviously popular concept of sustainable development.

However, look a little closer—the picture is less rosy, even for people fortunate enough to live in wealthier nations. The clues increasingly point to the grim reality that we will all be paying a very heavy price for coaxing ever-higher yields of food and other resources from our increasingly overburdened planet. In trying not only to feed but also to improve the lives of an ever-larger population, we are polluting the land, changing our global climate, and using up our supply of fresh water. The plot of our mystery has taken a turn. Maybe Malthus and the doomsters are right. Although the formula for ultimate disaster was more complicated than Malthus knew, critical resources such as land and water are finite. At some point, we may exhaust the earth’s capacity to produce—then, everybody loses.

These issues juxtapose the views of the doomsters with those of the boomsters. Doomsters are the neo-Malthusians, exemplified most famously by Paul Ehrlich, who, as I discussed in Chapter 3, has argued for decades that continued popula- tion growth will lead to certain economic and environmental collapse in a world- wide tragedy of the commons (Ehrlich 1968, 1971; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1972, 1990; Ehrlich et al. 1997; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2004). For Ehrlich, the policy choices have always been clear—population limitation must be a part of any development or sus- tainability strategy, or that strategy will fail.

The boomsters have been most famously influenced by the late Julian Simon, who argued for decades that population growth stimulates development, rather than

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434 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

slowing it down (Simon 1981; 1992). For Simon, the policy choices were also clear— development strategies should not deliberately slow down population growth because such growth is both a cause and a symptom of economic development. The boomster view recognizes that population cannot grow indefinitely, but argues that people will lower their fertility when they see an advantage from doing so, which means lifting them out of poverty through free trade and globalization (World Bank 2000). These have been the central ingredients in the idea of sustainable development, which is a concept adopted by nearly all influential international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

A related perspective often put forth is a neo-Marxian view that population growth has nothing to do with economic development at all. Economic development, where it lags, is held back by the injustice of the world system that creates depen- dency by the periphery on the dominant core countries. Like the boomster view, this perspective recognizes that population cannot grow indefinitely, and similarly argues that people will lower their fertility when they see an advantage from doing so, which means lifting them out of poverty. The difference (and it is a huge one) is that the neo-Marxian policy perspective is that this should be accomplished by dismantling multinational corporations and putting the money into the hands of local popula- tions, where it can be distributed equitably to relieve poverty and improve the human condition.

Which perspective provides the best set of policy prescriptions for achieving re- source sustainability in the face of population growth? To answer that question, we first need to review some key concepts.

The Use and Abuse of the Earth’s Resources

Economic development represents a growth in average income—a higher standard of living—usually defined as per capita (per person) income. A closely related idea is that economic development occurs when the output per worker is increasing. Since more output should lead to higher incomes, you can appreciate that they are really two sides of the same coin. Of course, if you are holding down two jobs this year just to keep afloat financially, you know that producing more will not neces- sarily improve your economic situation. Rather, it may only keep it from getting worse. Thus, a more meaningful definition of economic development refers to a rise in real income—an increase in the amount of goods and services you can actually buy.

An important aspect of development, more broadly defined, is that it is con- cerned with improving the welfare of human beings. It includes more than just increased productivity; it includes the resulting rise in the ability of people to consume (either buy or have available to them) the things they need to improve their level of living and, presumably, their enjoyment of life. Included in the list of improvements might be higher income, stable employment, more educa- tion, better health, consumption of more and healthier food, better housing, and increased public services such as water, sewerage, power, transportation, entertainment, and police and fire protection. Naturally, these improvements in

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human welfare, in turn, help increase economic productivity because the relation- ship is synergistic.

The starting point of economic development is the investment of financial capi- tal. Capital represents a stock of goods used for the production of other things rather than for immediate enjoyment. Although capital may be money spent on heavy machinery or on an assembly line or on infrastructure such as highways and telecommunication, it can better be thought of as anything we invest today to yield income tomorrow. In Chapter 10 I discussed this in terms of creating wealth at the personal level. Here, however, we are talking not just about individuals, but more generally about the community or society.

Investments can be made in infrastructure (roads and bridges, communication networks, etc.) that make the economy more productive, as well as in things that make individuals more productive—more education, better health, and, in general, the accumulation and application of knowledge. For an economy to grow, the level of capital investment of all kinds must grow.

Where the rubber meets the road demographically, though, is that the higher the rate of population growth, the higher the rate of investment must be; this is what Harvey Leibenstein (1957) called the “population hurdle.” If a population is growing so fast that it overreaches the rate of investment, then it will be stuck in a vicious Malthusian cycle of poverty; the economic growth will have been enough to feed more mouths, but not enough to escape from poverty. Many of the countries at the lower end of the per capita income level as shown in the map (Figure 11.1) at the beginning of the chapter are in this situation.

Crucial to our understanding of economic development and rising incomes is the fact that an increase in well-being typically requires that we use more of the earth’s resources—especially more energy and more water, not to mention more minerals and timber. How efficiently we are able to use these resources influences how widely they can be spread out among the entire (and still growing) popula- tion. At the same time, the use of every resource leads to waste products, and our efficiency in reducing waste and dealing with it effectively influences the extent to which we can minimize damage to the environment and thus sustain a larger popu- lation at a desired level of living. Exactly what level of living that should be is a matter of debate, as I discuss later in the chapter.

Economic Growth and Development

Economic growth refers to an increase in the total amount of productivity or income in a nation (or whatever your geographic unit of analysis might be) without regard to the total number of people, whereas economic development relates that amount of income to the number of people. But how do we measure that income? The most commonly used index of a nation’s income is the gross national income, or GNI (the term now preferred by the World Bank), replacing the previously used concept of gross national product, or GNP. The World Bank somewhat obscurely defines GNI as “the sum of value added by all resident producers plus any product taxes (less subsidies) not included in the valuation of output plus net receipts of primary

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income (compensation of employees and property income) from abroad” (World Bank 2014a). Got it?

Basically, if you add up the value of all of the paid work that goes on in a country, and then add in the money received from other countries, you have the measure of gross national income. If you exclude the money from abroad and just include the income generated within a country’s own geographic boundar- ies, you have gross domestic product (GDP). However, in today’s world, the income from foreign companies, and remittances sent back home from interna- tional migrants can be a substantial part of a nation’s income, so it is important to include that.

Measuring GNI and Purchasing Power Parity

Gross national income is the most widely used measure of economic well-being in the world, but it is important to keep in mind the things that GNI does not mea- sure: (1) it does not take into account the depletion and degradation of natural resources (which is obviously a key issue when we start thinking about sustain- ability), so it may overstate how well the economy is doing; (2) it does not make any deduction for depreciation of manufactured assets such as infrastructure (i.e., future maintenance costs that will be required to keep the economy at its current level), again with the potential to overstate the economy’s performance; (3) it does not measure the value of unpaid domestic labor such as that generated especially by women in developing nations (which, if assigned a value for its productivity, would raise the measure of income); and (4) it does not necessarily account for regional or national differences in purchasing power (which means the numbers might not be comparable from one place to the next).

This latter limitation is one in which the World Bank has been particularly interested, at least partly because it is the easiest to deal with. Although GNI figures are usually expressed in terms of U.S. dollars, a dollar may go further in Ghana than it will in England, even when exchange rates have been taken into account. The United Nations and the World Bank have sponsored a number of household expenditure surveys in developing countries to try to estimate actual differences in the standard of living, in order to produce more meaningful income comparisons. The wealthier nations have also been encouraged to conduct such surveys, along the lines of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey.

The product of these efforts is a measure called purchasing power parity (PPP), defined as “a price which measures the number of units of country B’s currency that are needed in country B to purchase the same quantity of an individual good or service as 1 unit of country A’s currency will purchase in A” (World Bank 2014a). One way of expressing this concept is through the use of what The Economist calls its “Big Mac Index.” McDonald’s sells its hamburgers in nearly 120 countries, and in each country, the sandwich must conform to essentially the same standards of ingredients and preparation. If the Big Mac costs $4.62 in the United States (as it did in 2014), then it should cost the same in real terms anywhere else in the world. So, if you go to China and discover that you’re paying only $2.74 at market

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437Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

exchange rates, that tells you that the yuan was undervalued by 41 percent at that time (The Economist 2014).

By expressing gross national income in terms of purchasing power parity (rather than official exchange rates), the result is the gross national income in PPP (GNI PPP). These are the numbers I used to create Figure 11.1 and in Figure 11.2 they are summarized for the world’s 20 largest economies in 2012. In that year, the gross national income in the United States was $16.5 trillion. The U.S. economy is so big that it accounts for 20 percent of the world’s entire income, despite the fact that the U.S. population is less than 5 percent of the world total. The other two most popu- lous countries of the world, China and India, are also in the top five economies. To be sure, China’s economy is projected to exceed that of the United States by the time you are reading this. In 2012, China’s economy accounted for 15 percent of the world’s total, while its population accounted for almost 20 percent of the world’s total. The top five economies (which also include Japan and Germany) represent almost exactly 50 percent of the entire economic product of the world and 44 percent of the world’s population. The 20 countries shown in Figure 11.2 account for 80 percent of the world’s economic output, but only 62 percent of the world’s total population.

If we divide total national income by the number of people, we obtain a mea- sure of per capita income, which gives a sense of the relative well-being of people in one country compared to another. In Table 11.1, I have listed the per person income for selected countries according to GNI based on purchasing power parity.

GNI PPP (trillions of USD) 0.0

0.9 1.0 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 1.8 1.8

2.4 2.5 2.7 2.8 3.0

3.9 4.2

5.7 5.7

14.7 19.9

5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0

United States of America China India

Japan Germany

Russia France

Brazil United Kingdom

Italy Mexico

South Korea Spain

Canada Turkey

Indonesia Australia

Poland Saudi Arabia Netherlands

Figure 11.2 The 20 Largest Economies of the World, Based on Gross National Income (GNI) Measured in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) as of 2012 Source: Adapted by the author from World Bank (2014b)

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438 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

Table 11.1 The Top Ten and Bottom Ten Countries and Other Selected Countries in Terms of Per Person Gross National Income at Purchasing Power Parity (GNI PPP), 2012

Per Person GNI PPP

($U.S.) 2012 Ratio to

United States

Top Ten Countries Qatar 88,350 1.68 Norway 67,450 1.28 Luxembourg 60,950 1.16 Singapore 60,110 1.14 Switzerland 55,000 1.05 United States 52,610 1.00 Kuwait 47,750 0.91 Denmark 44,070 0.84 Sweden 43,960 0.84 Austria 43,850 0.83

Other Selected Countries France 37,420 0.71 Japan 36,750 0.70 Russia 22,800 0.43 Chile 20,450 0.39 Mexico 16,140 0.31 China 9,040 0.17 Indonesia 4,730 0.09 India 3,820 0.07

Bottom Ten Countries Mozambique 1,000 0.02 Guinea 970 0.02 Madagascar 930 0.02 Togo 900 0.02 Niger 760 0.01 Malawi 730 0.01 Liberia 580 0.01 Burundi 550 0.01 Eritrea 550 0.01 Congo (Kinshasa) 390 0.01

Source: Adapted by the author from World Bank (2014a).

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439Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

China may have one of the largest economies in the world, but its huge popula- tion means that per person income is only a fraction of that in the United States. On a per capita basis, the Chinese have only 17 percent of the average American’s income—or, put another way, the average American is about six times better off than the average person in China, and almost 14 times better off than the aver- age person in India. All of the countries at the bottom of the income ladder are in Africa, and you can see that the average person in those countries has only about 1 to 2 percent of the average American’s income.

What are the sources of income that go into these measures? Much of it comes from the transformation of natural resources into things that are more useful to us—converting a tree into a house and furniture; converting the “fruit” of cotton plants into shirts and dresses; converting minerals found in rocks into the steel body of an automobile; transforming a hidden pool of underground oil into fuel used by machines. Then these products must be packaged, delivered, and sold; people have to coordinate all of that and make sure that the infrastructure exists to do every- thing that needs to be done.

We can divide the resources that go into producing income into two broad categories—natural resources (what is given to us on the planet), and human resources (how clever and successful we are in making something of those natural resources). Together, this combination of resources can be thought of as the wealth of a nation (Dixon and Hamilton 1996). Measuring these things is not easy, as you can imagine, although researchers at the World Bank have worked on it (apply- ing their human resources to this issue, as it were) and their results suggest, for example, that the value of human resources in the United States exceeds the natural resources wealth of the country. More importantly, their analysis suggests that natural resources are distributed fairly evenly around the inhabitable portions of the globe, so the variable factors in global economic well-being tend to be the level of human resources in one area compared with another, and the number of humans in one area compared with another, among whom these resources are shared (Bravo- Ortega and De Gregoria 2005). Demography is obviously playing a role.

How Is Population Related to Economic Development?

There is a nearly indisputable, albeit somewhat complex, statistical association between economic development and population growth; when one changes, the other also tends to change. As you no doubt already know, though, two things may be related to each other without one causing the other. Furthermore, the pat- terns of cause and effect can conceivably change over time. Does population growth promote economic development? Are population growth and economic develop- ment only coincidentally associated with each other? Or is population growth a hindrance to economic development? The problem is that the data presently avail- able lend themselves to a variety of interpretations.

If we look at the global pattern of per person income (measured with per capita GNI based on PPP), we can see in Figure 11.1 at the beginning of this chapter, and from Table 11.1, that the poorest countries are in sub-Saharan Africa

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440 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

and South Asia, whereas the richest countries are the European and “overseas” European countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), as well as Japan. The rest of the world generally falls in between, and includes most of Latin American, northern Africa, western and eastern Asia, and eastern Europe.

Note that the geographic pattern shown in Figure 11.1 is similar to maps show- ing the components of the demographic transition. Those places in the world where incomes are highest also tend to have the lowest levels of fertility, the lowest mor- tality levels, the lowest overall rates of population growth, the oldest age structures, the highest rates of immigration, the highest levels of urbanization, and the greatest diversity in family and household structure.

Clearly, a low rate of population growth is no assurance of a high income, but that point is obvious, since for most of human history the rate of population growth was low and so was the overall standard of living. Furthermore, in the short run at least, countries with sufficient resources (especially oil) can achieve high levels of income even in the face of rapid population growth. Like most things in life, the connection between population growth and economic development is complicated. Think of it this way: At the beginning of the demographic transition, most popu- lations had a low rate of growth and low income. At the end of the demographic transition, the goal would be for all nations to have a low rate of growth and high income. But in the meantime, every country has experienced a time of increased population growth as a consequence of the decline in mortality. Has that popula- tion growth helped them (as the boomsters would suggest), been a hindrance (as the doomsters would argue), or hasn’t it mattered (as the neo-Marxists would posit)? Let’s find out.

Is Population Growth a Stimulus to Economic Development?

An early proponent of the idea that population growth could be the trigger of eco- nomic development was the Danish economist Ester Boserup. In a set of extremely influential writings (see, especially, Boserup 1965, 1981), she advanced the idea that, in the long run, a growing population is more likely than either a non-growing or a declining population to lead to economic development. The history of Europe shows that the Industrial Revolution and the increase in agricultural production were accompanied almost universally by population growth. Boserup’s argument is based on the thesis that population growth is the motivating force that brings about the clearing of uncultivated land, the draining of swamps, and the development of new crops, fertilizers, and irrigation techniques, all of which are linked to revolu- tions in agriculture. The kernel of the argument has been well stated by British agri- cultural economist Colin Clark (1967:Preface):

[Population growth] is the only force powerful enough to make such communities change their methods, and in the long run transforms them into much more advanced and productive societies. The world has immense physical resources for agriculture and mineral production still unused. In industrial communities, the beneficial economic effects of large and expanding markets are abundantly clear. The principal problems

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441Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

created by population growth are not those of poverty, but of exceptionally rapid in- crease of wealth in certain favoured regions of growing population, their attraction of further population by migration, and the unmanageable spread of their cities.

The thesis that population growth is beneficial to economic development looks to Europe and the United States for evidence, where development was taking place in the context of population increase, whether caused by it or not. To be sure, some historians regard preindustrial declines in death rates in Europe, associated partly with the disappearance of the plague and the introduction of the potato as the spark that set off the Industrial Revolution. The reasoning goes that the lowered death rates created a rise in the rate of population growth, which then created a demand for more resources (see Clark 1967 for a review).

The only problem with this line of reasoning is that it makes a big leap from population growth stimulated by an increase in agricultural productivity to the idea that population growth stimulated industrialization. In Chapter 3 I suggested that both phenomena were almost certainly the twin products of the Enlightenment, a point of view that embraced science and the innovations that can emerge from a less traditional way of viewing the world. On its own—outside of the context of a cultural change such as the Enlightenment—population growth may just as easily promote warfare as industrialization.

Although history may show that population growth was associated with devel- opment in the now highly industrialized nations (whether causally or not), statistics also reveal very important differences between the European/American experience and that of modern, less developed nations. The less developed countries today are not, in general, retracing the steps of the currently developed nations. In particu- lar, less developed nations are building from a base of much lower levels of living than those that prevailed in either Europe or the United States in the early phases of economic development. Furthermore, although the rate of economic growth in many low-income countries has recently been higher than at comparable periods in the history of developed nations, population growth is also significantly higher. Less developed countries have experienced higher rates of population growth than European or American countries did, with the possible exception of America dur- ing the colonial period. In fact, over the past half century, the rates of popula- tion growth in the low income world almost certainly have been unparalleled in human history.

Furthermore, today’s less developed nations do not seem to require any kind of internal stimulation to be innovative. They can see in the world around them the fruits of economic development, and quite naturally they want to share in as many of those goodies as possible—a situation often referred to as “the revolution of rising expectations.” People in less developed nations today know what economic development is, and by studying the history of the highly industrialized nations, they can see at least how it used to be achievable.

It seems unlikely that a spark such as population growth is necessary any longer to stimulate economic development, if it ever was, but nonetheless in the 1980s, Julian Simon popularized his still widely cited thesis that a growing human popula- tion is the “ultimate resource” in the search for economic improvement. Eschewing

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442 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

the Malthusian idea that resources are finite, Simon suggested that resources are limited only by our ability to invent them and that, in essence, such inventiveness increases in proportion to the number of brains trying to solve problems. Coal replaced wood as a source of energy only to be replaced by oil, which may ulti- mately be replaced by solar and other renewable sources of energy—if we can figure out how to do it properly.

From Simon’s vantage point, innovation goes hand in hand with population growth, although he was quick to point out that moderate, rather than fast (or very slow) population growth is most conducive to an improvement in human welfare (Simon 1981). Simon made another crucial assumption: To be beneficial, popula- tion growth must occur in an environment in which people are free to be expressive and creative. To him, that meant a free market or capitalist system.

There is, in fact, no direct evidence of a causal relationship between population growth and innovation. As Nathan Keyfitz pointed out, “the England that pro- duced Shakespeare and shortly after that Newton held in all 5 million people, and probably not more than one million of these could read or write. . . . The thought that with more people there will be more talent for politics, for administration, for enterprise, for technological advance, is best dismissed. . . . For the most part, inno- vation comes from those who are comfortably located and have plenty of resources at their disposal” (quoted in United Nations Population Fund 1987:16). Perhaps in response to this criticism, Simon later moved toward the position that population growth is far less important an issue in economic development than is the market- place itself. He suggested that “the key factor in a country’s economic development is its economic and political system. . . . Misplaced attention to population growth has resulted in disastrously unsound economic advice being given to developing nations” (Simon 1992:xiii).

Promoting a free market as a way of stimulating the economy is still a major theme in international affairs. The demographic link is that the resulting economic development is expected then automatically to lead to a decline in the birth rate. Thus, the policy prescription is to take care of the economy, and population will take care of itself.

Ironically, the idea that the key element in economic development is the prevail- ing type of economic system, with population growth being largely incidental to that, draws Simon into the same theoretical perspective on population growth and economic development as that shared by Marxists and neo-Marxists. The only dif- ference is how they view the economy itself.

Is Population Growth Unrelated to Economic Development?

The classic Marxist view is that population problems will disappear when social and economic equality is achieved in the context of a socialist society. Marx (and Engels) believed that each country at each historical period has its own law of population, and that economic development is related to the political-economic structure of society, not at all to population growth. Indeed, Marx seemed to be arguing that whether or not population grew as a nation advanced economically

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443Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

was due entirely to the nature of social organization. In an exploitive capital- ist society, the government would encourage population increase to keep wages low, whereas in a socialist state there would be no such encouragement. Social- ists argue that every member of society is born with the means to provide his or her own subsistence; thus economic development should proportionately benefit every person. The only reason why it might not is if society is organized to exploit workers by letting capitalists take large profits, thereby depriving laborers of a full share of their earnings.

It is increasingly difficult to find economists who believe that socialism is a more successful route to economic development than capitalism is, but neo-Marxists share many ideas in common with the world systems approach to understanding the global economic situation. The world system, it is argued, works much as Marx described capitalism—except that the scope is global, not country-specific. The developed nations of the West “are charged with buying raw materials cheap from developing countries and selling manufactured goods dear, thus putting developing countries permanently in the role of debtors and dependents” (Walsh 1974:1144).

That assessment, published in the very prestigious journal Science, was made, of course, long before China’s communist-yet-capitalist manufacturing success rearranged some of the economic relationships between developed and develop- ing nations. The idea is that if the economic power of developed nations could be reduced and that of developing nations enhanced, the boost to developing nations would dissipate problems such as hunger and poverty that are believed to be a result of too many people. At such time, the population problem will disappear because, it is argued, it is not really a problem after all. When all other social prob- lems (primarily economic in origin) are taken care of, people will deal easily with any population problem if, indeed, one occurs. This was obviously the attitude of Friedrich Engels, who wrote in a letter in 1881, “If at some stage communist soci- ety finds itself obligated to regulate the production of human beings . . . it will be precisely this and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty” (Hansen 1970:47).

The evidence from countries such as Russia, Cuba, and, indeed, China suggests that a revolution may alter the demographic picture of a nation, but the relationship to economic development is somewhat cloudy. In the previously Marxist, centrally planned economies of eastern Europe and Russia, low rates of population growth did not translate into commensurately high levels of living. On the contrary, there is widespread speculation that low birth rates in those countries were a response to the economic limits placed on the family—especially scarce housing and limited consumer goods—although female education and labor force participation were being promoted at the same time.

Is Population Growth Detrimental to Economic Development?

The neo-Malthusian position that economic development is hindered by rapid pop- ulation growth is a simple proposition in its basic form. Regardless of the reason for an economy starting to grow, that growth will not be translated into development

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unless the population is growing slower than the economy. An analogy can be made to business. A storekeeper will make a profit only if expenses (overhead) add up to less than gross sales. For an economy, the addition of people involves expenses (demographic overhead) in terms of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and providing education and other goods and services for those people, and if demographic over- head equals or exceeds national income, there will be no improvement (profit) in the overall standard of living. If overhead exceeds income, then a business (or a country) can avert disaster for a while by borrowing money, but eventually that money has to be repaid and if the loan is used simply to pay expenses, rather than being invested in human capital, it is unlikely that there will be money available to pay the loan when it comes due. So the loan is extended or refinanced, and disaster is averted for just a little while longer.

Taking the Age Structure Into Account Another complication is that the demo- graphic overhead varies according to where a society happens to be in terms of its age transition. As I noted in Chapter 8, the age transition can provide a demo- graphic dividend for countries by creating a period of time when an increasingly larger fraction of the population is in the economically productive ages. Since this is a function largely of declining fertility, in the context of declining mortality, it is also usually accompanied by a delay in marriage and childbearing among women (part of the family and household transition) that, as I discussed in Chapter 10, can lead to increased levels of education and labor force participation for women. The movement of women into the paid labor force may then have the effect of notice- ably increasing the overall level of productivity, which contributes to economic development. This is the path to higher incomes taken by the successful east Asian societies of Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

Overall, then, the most important part of the discussion about population growth and the improvements in societal well-being is that the rate of total population growth is less important than is the rate of growth of different age groups (Headey and Hodge 2009). As I discussed in Chapter 8 in comparing the economic trajectories of China and India, China has benefited economically from rapid growth in the young to middle adult ages at the same time that it was experiencing declining rates at the younger ages, and only slow increases at the older ages. Indeed, the nominally Marxist government of China has found that there are three ingredients to economic development: (1) a rapid decline in fertility and thus in the rate of population growth; (2) implementing capitalism as the economic model; and (3) improving human capital, especially in terms of education.

However, as countries move through the health and mortality transition, and then the fertility transition, the age structure inevitably becomes older and, as Andrew Mason (1988) has pointed out, an older age structure may also be condu- cive to lower levels of saving, since in retirement people may be taking money out rather than putting it in. More importantly, as people leave the labor force at the older ages without being replaced by equal or greater numbers of younger people, economic productivity may suffer, potentially lowering the overall standard of liv- ing. This implies that the end of the age transition (if there is such a thing—after

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445Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

all, fertility could rise again) may be associated with lower levels of economic productivity than the middle stages of the transition. This is, of course, the situa- tion in the now richer countries, as they struggle to improve levels of living for the average person.

It is in between the young and the old age structures—in the middle of the age transition—that the age structure helps promote economic development, but there is no guarantee that this development can be maintained. All of this suggests that there is a complicated curvilinear, rather than a straight-line, relationship between the demographic transition and economic development.

Summarizing the Connections It was once thought that declining death rates depended upon economic development. Now we know that the two are related, but not necessarily in a causal direction. The very conditions from the Enlightenment that created a new way of looking at the economy and thus raised the standard of living—first in Europe and America, and then more recently in other parts of the world—were the same conditions that created the scientific breakthroughs that taught us how to control disease. However, as mentioned above, once people in the more developed regions figured them out they were spread quite rapidly to other parts of the world, regardless of the level of economic development in the receiving societies. This means that the single most important underlying cause of population growth (declining mortality) is now much less dependent on the level of economic development in a country. For example, consider that life expectancy in the United States is currently just two years higher than in Mexico; yet the average person in the United States has an income more than three times greater than that of the aver- age Mexican, as you can see in Table 11.1.

Why do some countries have a higher level of living than others? The answer is that humans have become increasingly skillful at transforming natural resources into things that separate us from nature. This latter point is important because a majority of people now live in cities, and in the rich countries almost all of us do. Most importantly, we have figured out how to harness energy for our needs. Energy mobilizes us physically, connects us electronically, and creates all sorts of new ways of turning natural resources into things that we didn’t know we needed, the possession and use of which we interpret as raising our standard of living. Western Europeans and Americans figured these things out first, beginning in the nineteenth century, and the Japanese borrowed the ideas later in the nineteenth century. Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese were then able to use that head start to exploit people and resources in the rest of the world, leaving all other parts of the world to play catch-up as best as they can (and some have done better than others).

No matter where a country currently stands in terms of the economic well-being of its population, the natural resources required to achieve a higher level of living continue to remind us of the underlying Malthusian dilemma: Are there enough resources in the world to sustain a larger population even if the standard of living is not increasing, much less for more people at a higher level? We look first at the same basic issue that bedeviled Malthus more than two hundred years ago. Can we feed the world?

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The Bottom Line for the Future: Can Billions More People Be Fed?

The problem with raising our standard of living is that every transformation of nat- ural resources has a cost associated with it. There will be waste products associated with it (pollution of various kinds), along with the costs of restoring the resource itself, or of discovering replacements for that particular resource when it is gone. It should be intuitively obvious that more people consuming resources and leaving behind the detritus of the industrial world are detrimental to the long-term health of the planet. There has to be a balance between resources and people—that bal- ance represents the earth’s carrying capacity, which refers to the number of people that can be supported in an area given the available physical resources and the way people use those resources.

For most of human history people used resources extensively since hunting and gathering rely on nature’s bounty without much human intervention. But a rise in our standard of living means using resources intensively, beginning slowly with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, and ramping up quickly with the indus- trial and post-industrial revolutions of the past two centuries.

Despite our concern with the overall standard of living, the issue of just having enough food to sustain a large and growing population is still a huge problem for the world, and we cannot simply assume that there will always be enough food to go around. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that more than 800 million people in the world experience chronic hunger (Food and Agriculture Organization 2013a)—nearly the number of all people alive when Malthus first wrote his Essay on Population in 1798. During the next minute, as you read this page, 6 children under the age of five will die of diseases related to malnutrition, although their places will be more than taken by the 255 babies who will be born during that same minute.

The good news is that the current number of undernourished humans (842 million) is less than it was in the 1990, when it was one billion. But the ques- tion is: Can we increase the food supply enough to feed the 84 million additional people on the planet every year while also improving everyone’s diet in the pro- cess? Doubtful, but we don’t know for sure (Diouf 2009). Do we have enough fresh water to support all those people? Probably not. How did we get to this point and what can we learn from the past that might help us in the future?

The Relationship between Economic Development and Food

Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans began seriously to domesticate plants and animals, thereby making it possible to grow food and settle down in permanent villages. The domestication of plants, of course, hinged on the use of tools to work the ground near the settlement site, and the invention of those tools and their appli- cation to farming can be traced to many different areas of the world. Some of the earliest known sites are in the Dead Sea region of the Middle East (Cipolla 1965; Diamond 1997), where the Agricultural Revolution apparently took place around

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447Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

8000 b.c. From the eastern end of the Mediterranean, agricultural innovations spread slowly westward through Europe (being picked up in the British Isles around 3000 b.c.) and east through Asia. Plants and animals were also domesticated in the western hemisphere several thousand years ago, resulting in an increase in the amount of food that could be produced per person.

The classic Malthusian view, of course, is that cultivating land caused popu- lation increase by lowering mortality and possibly raising fertility. This perspec- tive suggests that the Agricultural Revolution “created an economy which, by . . . giving men a more reliable supply of food, permitted them to multiply to a hitherto unknown degree” (Sanchez-Albornoz 1974:24). By contrast, the Boserupian view is that independent increases in population size among hunter-gatherers, perhaps through a long-run excess of births over deaths, led to a need for more innovative ways of obtaining food, and so, of necessity, the revolution in agriculture gradu- ally occurred. Seen from this perspective, the Agricultural Revolution was the result of a “resource crisis,” in which population growth, slow though it may have been 10,000 years ago, generated more people than could be fed just by hunting and gathering. The crisis led to a revolution in human control over the environment— humans began to produce food deliberately, rather than just take what nature pro- vided. In turn, this had the cumulative effect of sustaining slow but fairly steady population growth in most areas of the world for several thousand years preceding the Industrial Revolution.

Even in the modern world we can appreciate that there is a feedback loop, rather than a straight-line relationship, between the food supply and population growth. Increasing the food supply can lower the death rate and lead to population growth, but continued population growth depends upon growing more food. Fur- thermore, even when the population stabilizes at a particular size, we have to con- tinue growing enough food to keep the death rate from going back up. Needless to say, the huge increase in population over just the past two hundred years has been associated with an equally gigantic rise in food production. That has consumed a lot of the earth’s resources.

Industrialization and economic development in general require a massive increase in energy use. If everyone is consuming more, it is because production per person has increased, and that comes about by applying nonhuman energy to tasks previously done less efficiently by people, or not done at all because people could not do them. Wood served as the major energy source for most of human history, but in Europe a few hundred years ago, population growth and the beginnings of indus- trialization led inexorably to deforestation, producing an “energy crisis” (Harrison 1993). That crisis forced a new way of thinking about energy sources—a new way of controlling the environment that helped to spawn the Industrial Revolution.

Keep in mind that the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions are inextrica- bly linked. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century was associated with important changes in agriculture that significantly improved output. Throughout most of human history, including still in the time that Malthus was developing his view of the world, increases in the food supply depended largely on extensification of agriculture—putting more land under production. However, over time we have essentially run out of new land that can be farmed without great difficulty. Thus,

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the modern rise in agricultural output has come about through intensification of agriculture—getting more out of the land than we used to. In Europe and North America, the factors helping to increase agricultural productivity in a relatively short time included the mechanization of cultivating and harvesting processes, increased use of fertilizers and irrigation, and the reorganization of land holdings so that farming could be more efficient.

The Industrial Revolution generated a host of mechanical devices, especially mechanical reapers, to greatly speed up harvesting. Drawn first by horses or oxen, reapers were pulled later by an even more efficient energy converter—the tractor. Like most early engines of industrialization, tractors were driven by steam. Their thirst for fuel was quenched by wood as long as it lasted, but the use of coal became necessary as a result of deforestation. The idea behind the steam engine, by the way, has been around for a long time, just waiting for the right moment to be adapted to something dramatically useful. In the ancient world, “Greek mechanics invented amusing steam-operated automata but never developed the steam engine; the crank- shaft and connecting rod were not invented until the middle ages, and without a crankshaft it is impossible to transform longitudinal into circular motion” (Veyne 1987:137). Overall, the mechanization of agriculture vastly increased the number of acres that one or a few people could farm, and also increased the amount of land that could be devoted to more than one crop per growing season, since land could be cultivated and harvested so much more easily.

Although mechanization was certainly a prime mover of increased productiv- ity in agriculture, especially in North America where land was plentiful in relation to people, it is not an absolute requirement. In North America, where population density was low and labor was scarce, the increase in energy needed to intensify agriculture came from mechanical devices. In Japan, on the other hand, where labor was at a surplus even at the beginning of industrialization and land is scarce, the initial increase in energy came from people—people working harder and more effi- ciently on the land. Still, there is a limit to human power, which is why as Japan’s population grew to its current size, the country has been forced to import a signifi- cant fraction of its food.

Many agricultural innovations have also been made possible by reorganizing agricultural land and developing better policies for land use (Dyson 1996). Collect- ing farms into large units and using meadows and pastures for cultivation rather than extensive grazing have increased production, particularly in the United States and Europe, since large farms introduce economies of scale that permit investment in expensive tractors, harvesters, fertilizers, irrigation systems, and the like. In the United States, this process has a long history and is still continuing; for example, between 1950 and 2007, the number of small farms (less than 180 acres) in the United States decreased from 4.1 million to 1.5 million, a 63 percent decline (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). In the 1990s, the total number of farms in the United States dropped below 2 million for the first time since 1850, after reaching a peak of 6.8 million in 1935, although it has since risen back up to slightly more than 2 million as of 2007 (the latest data currently available). This does not mean that the number of acres under cultivation has declined much (it has changed very little), but rather that there is a trend toward large commercial farms and away from small family farms.

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Although it may be intuitively obvious, it bears repeating that industrial expan- sion cannot occur unless agricultural production increases proportionately. Indus- trialization is typically associated with people migrating out of rural and into urban areas, naturally resulting in a shift of workers out of agriculture and into industry. Therefore, those workers left behind must be able to produce more—enough for themselves and also for the nonagricultural sector of the population. The flip side of that scenario is that as both the population and demand for food grow, the need to mechanize agriculture to increase production leads to a declining demand for agricultural workers. Thus you can see that the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible if agricultural production had not increased—and vice versa. Adam Smith, the classical economist, once remarked that “when by the improvement and cultivation of land . . . the labor of half the society becomes sufficient to provide food for the whole, the other half . . . can be employed . . . in satisfying the other wants and fancies of mankind” (quoted in Nicholls 1970:296).

So let us ask ourselves, how can food production be increased? There are two aspects to feeding the world’s growing population. The first is the technical prob- lem of growing enough food, and the second is the organizational problem of get- ting it to the people who need it. As I have already mentioned, food production can be increased through either extensification or intensification of agriculture. Let us examine each approach.

Extensification—Increasing Farmland

Water covers about 71 percent of the earth’s surface, leaving the remaining 29 percent for us to scratch out our respective livings. Only 12 percent of the world’s land surface is readily suitable for crop production, and an additional 26 percent is devoted to permanent pasture. Forests and woodlands cover about 32 percent of the land surface, and the remaining 31 percent is too hot or too cold for any of those things, or is used for other purposes (such as cities and highways). Most of the land that could be fairly readily cultivated is already cultivated; the rest is covered by ice, or is too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold, too steep, or has soil unsuitable for growing crops (Bruinsma 2003). Of course, as Lester Brown once commented, “If you are willing to pay the price, you can farm the slope of Mt. Everest” (Newsweek 1974:62).

In 1860, there were an estimated 572 million hectares (1.4 billion acres) of land in the world that had been cleared for agricultural use (Revelle 1984). As the populations of Europe and North America expanded in the late nineteenth century, the amount of farmland in these regions doubled. More recently, the population pressure in developing countries has been accompanied by an expan- sion of farmland in those parts of the world, often generated by slash-and-burn techniques in relatively fragile ecosystems such as the forests of the Amazon. All of this adds up to a total of 1.6 billion hectares (4.0 billion acres) of farmland in the world today—nearly three times that of 1860. This seems to be the real limit of decent-quality farmland. Table 11.2 compares the data on population and agri- culture for the world between 1961 and 2011. You can see that the amount of

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agricultural land in use in the world increased slightly from 1.4 billion hectares in 1961 to 1.6 billion in 2011. However, the population increased from 3.1 billion in 1961 to 7.0 billion in 2011, so the amount of farmland per person in 2011 was only half what it was in 1961. The amount of agricultural land that is equipped for irrigation has also been increasing over time, but it too has failed to keep pace with population growth.

In reaching the limits of readily cultivable land, we have been encroaching on land that supports plant and animal habitats that we really cannot do without, because we are dependent on biological diversity to a much greater extent than most people appreciate (Miller and Spoolman 2012). We threaten our environment as we search for more land on which to grow food and then modify that land in order to increase its productivity.

At the same time, it turns out that the amount of good farmland is actually shrinking. In some parts of the world this is a result of soil erosion or desertifica- tion, whereas in many other places it is a consequence of urban sprawl. Most major cities are in abundant agricultural regions that can provide fresh food daily to the city populations; only recently have transportation and refrigeration lessened (but not eliminated) that need. As cities have grown in size, nearby agricultural land has been increasingly graded and paved over to make room for higher-profit resi- dential or business uses. Urban areas use up about 3 percent of the earth’s surface (CIESIN 2005) which may sound like a small amount, but it looms large next to the 12 percent that is devoted to crops, because of the fact that so much cropland is in the vicinity of cities.

The allure of farmland to the developer is clear: It is generally flat and well drained, thus good for building. It is probably outside town limits and therefore taxed at cheaper county rates. And the land may be family owned, with the poten- tial that nonfarming family members will pressure their other family members to sell it as a means of converting the property to other assets. Such conversion is extremely difficult to reverse: “When farmland goes, food goes. Asphalt is the land’s last crop” (The Environmental Fund 1981:1).

Soil erosion is a major problem throughout the world, as more topsoil is washed or blown away each year, a result of overplowing, overgrazing, and deforestation,

Year

1961 2011 1961 2011

Total population (1,000) 3,082,829 6,997,991 Per 1,000 persons Arable and permanent

cropland (1,000ha) 1,370,584 1,552,977 445 222

Area equipped for irrigation (1,000ha)

160,994 318,290 52 45

Source: Adapted from data in Food and Agricultural Organization (2014)

Table 11.2 The Amount of Agricultural Land Is Not Keeping Pace with Population Growth

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all of which leave the ground unprotected from rain and wind. In the world as a whole, it appears that we are losing soil to erosion faster than nature can rebuild the supply. Thus we are losing ground (quite literally) at the same time that few places in the world still await the plow.

It has also been suggested that a viable source of “land” is the sea—aquaculture. Farming the sea includes both fishing and harvesting kelp and algae for human con- sumption. The expense of growing kelp and other plants is so great that it does not yet appear to be an economically viable alternative to cultivating land. On the other hand, farming fish (including shellfish) has been steadily increasing as a source of fish for food. It appears that we have reached the level of the ocean’s sustainable fish catch, so any increase in fish production will of necessity be through aquacul- ture. Just in the years between 1994 and 2011, aquaculture increased as a percent- age of fish production for human consumption from less than 19 percent to more than 40 percent (Food and Agriculture Organization 2012).

Overall, it seems very doubtful that either extending agricultural land or farm- ing the ocean will produce the amount of food needed by the world in the next century, given current world population projections. The output per acre of land under production must continue to increase if we are to feed billions more.

Intensification—Increasing Per-Acre Yield

There are several different ways to increase output from the land, and methods typically must be combined if substantial success is to be realized. Those methods include plant breeding, increased irrigation, and the use of pesticides and fertilizers. In combination, they add up to the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution is a term coined by the U.S. Agency for International Development back in the 1960s, but it began quietly in the 1940s in Mexico at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Inter- national Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. The goal was to provide a means to increase grain production, and under the direction of Norman Borlaug (who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work), new high-yield varieties (HYV) of wheat were developed. Known as dwarf types, they have shorter stems that produce more stalks than do most traditional varieties.

In the mid-1960s, these varieties of wheat were introduced into a number of countries, notably India and Pakistan, with spectacular early success—a result that had been anticipated after what the researchers had seen in Mexico (Chandler 1971). In 1954, the best wheat yields in Mexico had been about three metric tons per hectare, but the introduction of the HYV wheat (now used in almost all of Mexico’s wheat land) raised yields to six or even eight tons per hectare if crops were carefully managed. A major difference was that more traditional vari- eties were too tall and tended to lodge (fall over) prior to harvest, thus raising the loss per acre, whereas the dwarf varieties (being shorter) prevented lodging. This is critical, because lodging can be devastating; it destroys some ears of grain and damages others. Furthermore, and very importantly, resistance to lodging makes it easier to apply the heavy fertilization and irrigation that are necessary for high yields.

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The Green Revolution was not restricted to high-yield wheat and maize. In 1962, the Ford Foundation began a research program of rice breeding at the Inter- national Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. In a few short years, a high-yield variety of dwarf rice had been developed that, like HYV wheat, dramatically raised per-acre yields. Rice production increased in India and Pakistan, as well as in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and several other less developed countries. China and India both have embraced the Green Revolution as a means for ensuring the food security of their people. Food security, by the way, is a United Nations term meaning that people have physical and economic access to the basic food they need in order to work and function normally; that is, the food is there, and they can afford to buy it.

There is, however, a huge set of costs attached to the Green Revolution—success requires more than simply planting a new type of seed. These plants require fertil- izers, pesticides, and irrigation in rather large amounts, a problem compounded by the fact that fertilizer and pesticides are normally petroleum-based and the irri- gation systems require fuel for pumping. These are expensive items and usually demand that large amounts of adjacent land be devoted to the same crops and the same methods of farming, which in turn often means using tractors and other farm machinery in place of less-efficient human labor. This is the true meaning of the revolution.

The plants involved in the Green Revolution have principally been wheat, maize, and rice, but considerable research has also gone into the development of HYV soybeans, peanuts, and many other high-protein plants. Considerable atten- tion has also been devoted to the spread of nutritious plants native to specific regions. There is certainly no better example of this than quinoa. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations designated 2013 as the Interna- tional Year of Quinoa, noting that: “Like the potato, quinoa was one of the main foods of the Andean peoples before the Incas. Traditionally, quinoa grains are roasted and then made into flour, with which different types of breads are baked. It can also be cooked, added to soups, used as a cereal, made into pasta and even fermented to make beer or chicha, the traditional drink of the Andes” (Food and Agriculture Organization 2013b).

Another candidate for continued development is the winged bean (or goa bean), sometimes known as “a supermarket on a stalk” because the plant com- bines the desirable nutritional characteristics of the green bean, garden pea, spinach, mushroom, soybean, bean sprout, and potato—all in one plant that is almost entirely edible, save the stalk. It is becoming a staple in poorer regions of Africa and South Asia because it grows quickly in tropical areas, is disease resistant and high in protein.

At least as important as the nutritional aspect of plant breeding is the develop- ment of disease and pest resistance. The rapid change in pest populations requires constant surveillance and alteration of seed strains. Insects are very much our com- petitors for the world food supply, and are a problem both before and after crops are harvested. Efforts to control pest damage have focused on designing seed vari- eties that are resistant to pests, or that are hardy enough to tolerate pesticides and herbicides, so that these chemicals can be used on plants without destroying the

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plant itself. However, in the United States and Europe there has been a consumer backlash against these kinds of genetically modified seeds, so food manufacturers have become cautious about using them, and instead have chosen to charge pre- mium prices for organic foods that have not had chemicals applied to them, but which, as a consequence, will have lower average yields per acre. Organic foods, then, are becoming the equivalent of luxury goods in the food department.

Need for Irrigation High-yield seeds generally require substantial amounts of water to be successful, and irrigation is the only way to ensure that they get it (nature is a bit too fickle, complicated by global climate change). This is because they, like all crops, grow best with a controlled supply of water, and also because irrigation can increase the opportunities for multiple-cropping (growing more than one crop per year on the same plot of land). In 2011, only 20 percent of the world’s cropland was fitted for irrigation, as you can calculate from the data in Table 11.2, but irrigated land has been estimated to account for 40 percent of all the world’s food (Food and Agriculture Organization 2009), so this is a very important input to agriculture.

Irrigation obviously requires a water source (typically a reservoir created by damming a river), an initial capital investment to dig canals and install pipes, and energy to drive the pumps. Each of these elements represents an expensive resource: “There is widespread agreement that the future supply of water for agriculture rep- resents a much more significant constraint to raising food production than do any likely foreseeable difficulties relating to soil or land” (Dyson 1996:149).

Remember that we humans need clean water for our own health, and yet we compete with agriculture for that limited supply. This is such an important issue that targets for improving the availability of safe water for human consumption are built into the Millennium Development Goals (which I discuss below), and in 2003 the United Nations created an initiative called UN-Water, coordinated by FAO, which focuses on this specific topic. To give you some sense of the magnitude of the water issue, it takes about half a million gallons of water to grow an acre of rice, and irrigated agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of the water consumed worldwide (Food and Agriculture Organization 2009a). The tremendous expense of providing irrigation imposes serious limits to any sizable future increase in the amount of land being irrigated in developing nations.

As I mentioned above, only 20 percent of the world’s cropland is irrigated (the remainder is fed by rain), but that was a major increase from 12 percent in 1961, and there is also considerable variability in the world. As a country, Egypt leads the world in having virtually all of its cropland irrigated, but regionally the highest overall levels of irrigation are in Asia. Europe can get by with very little irrigation because the growing season is associated with considerable rainfall. That is not the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa, however, where nonetheless only a small frac- tion of cropland is irrigated.

Fertilizer, Mechanization and Pesticide Use In order to maximize yields, plants must be fed (fertilized) and farm machinery used. These are key ingredients in the success of the Green Revolution, and both of these inputs have increased

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substantially over time. The application of fertilizers and mechanization has been especially rapid in Asia—representing major investments in agriculture in both China and India. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Asia led the major regions of the world in terms of fertilizer use per 1,000 hectares, and it had sur- passed Latin America in mechanization per hectare. Europe continues to be the most mechanized agricultural region of the world.

Pesticides represent another important input to the Green Revolution, but their use is decidedly a double-edged sword. I noted above that one aspect of genetically modifying seeds is to make plants resistant to pests and, at the same time, tolerant of pesticides. There are many nasty side effects of dumping chemi- cals on plants. Although heavy use of pesticides initially kills insects and thus increases per-acre yield, pesticides can also kill beneficial predators of insects and diseases that feed off the crops. Pesticide production has increased steadily worldwide, but its use has become more judicious—too much pesticide in the short term actually lowers crop productivity in the long term. There has also been growing concern that our rising use of toxins in the environment, includ- ing the application of fertilizer and pesticides to crops, may be responsible for the rise in otherwise unexplained health issues, such as the increase in autism among children in countries like the United States (see, for example, Shabecoff and Shabecoff 2010).

Has the Green Revolution Run Its Course? The Green Revolution, to be effec- tive in all parts of the world, requires major changes in the way social life is orga- nized in rural areas, not just a change in the plants grown or the fertilizers used. This is because the Green Revolution is based on Western (especially American and Canadian) methods of farming, in which the emphasis is on using expensive supplies and equipment and on the high-risk, high-profit principle of economies of scale—plant one crop in high volume and do it well.

Reorganizing society like this is not an easy thing to do and it takes time, assuming that people who own the land are willing to go that route. The lure of large sums of money will often change people’s minds and so we find that in sev- eral parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, farmers are being tempted by foreign companies to give over the rights to large tracts of land. The production from that land is then not aimed at the local population, but rather at the global market. This has been called the “land grab” in which small farmers are essen- tially dispossessed of their land in order for outsiders to come in and make the land agriculturally more efficient (McMichael 2012). This is obviously a politi- cally sensitive issue, and there is considerable backlash against it. At the same time, it is not clear where the investment would otherwise come from to improve agricultural productivity in these regions, so the farms may remain in a state of relatively low output.

The whole concept of genetically modified foods is politically sensitive, but in its 2001 Human Development Report, the United Nations argued strongly that the world’s richest nations must get over the fear of genetically modified foods if pov- erty and food insecurity are to be eradicated in poorer nations. Producing these kinds of foods is the only known way to keep increasing yield per acre in a world

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that has essentially run out of agricultural acreage (United Nations 2001). The Green Revolution’s “founder,” Norman Borlaug, put it this way:

I’ve spent the past 20 years trying to bring the Green Revolution to Africa—where the farmers use traditional seeds and the organic farming systems that some call “sustain- able.” But low-yield farming is only sustainable for people with high death rates, and thanks to better medical care, more babies are surviving. . . . Africa desperately needs the simple, effective high-yield farming systems that have made the First World’s food supply safe and secure. (Borlaug 2002:A16)

Reducing Waste Africa almost certainly needs a major investment in agriculture to overcome its food insecurity problem, but elsewhere in the world a subtle, yet effective, way of getting more out of each acre of food production is to waste less. Governments that help farmers use water and fertilizer more efficiently will clearly have more of those resources to spread around. A great deal of waste occurs once food is grown, both in its storage (where it may become spoiled or eaten by other creatures) and in the hands of consumers. One way of wasting less food is to use some form of preservative. Especially in developed nations, chemical substances are added to food to protect its nutritional value, to lengthen its shelf life (preserva- tives), and to change or enhance flavors and colors. Additives can greatly aid the process of feeding people by keeping food from spoiling and helping preserve its value. This has aided in the mass distribution of food and has made it possible for people to live considerable distances from food sources. Of course, since food is coming from strangers, it’s important to remember to practice safe eating—always use condiments.

The use of preservatives is one means of deterring food spoilage by microor- ganisms, and more widespread use of preservatives could at least partially alleviate worldwide food shortages. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that about 20 percent of the world’s food supply is lost to microorganism spoilage. Nonetheless, preservatives have increasingly been attacked as potential cancer agents. Sodium nitrate, used for centuries in curing meat to prevent botulism, is now suspected of being a carcinogen, at least in some dietary combinations. In 1984, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of low doses of irradiation as a form of food preservation, and data suggest that it is about as safe as food pre- pared in a microwave oven. Currently, spices, vegetables, fruit, poultry, eggs, and meat can be irradiated. The World Health Organization and the American Medical Association endorse the practice. Nonetheless, U.S. consumers have been far more suspicious of so-called nuked food than have people in most of the rest of the world, so its use is somewhat limited in the United States.

Dietary Changes With respect to consumption, it is certainly true that most people could eat less meat and still be well nourished, and there is increasing pressure in that direction. It takes several pounds of grain to produce one pound of red meat, and there are other, more efficient ways to get protein (such as soybeans, peanuts, peas, and beans). Cutting back on animal protein could then free up the production of grain for human rather than animal consumption. Of course, most Americans do

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not welcome the suggestion that they should eat less meat, since eating beef, espe- cially, is as much a part of American culture as not eating meat is in India. Thus, in the United States there is resistance (though much less than there used to be) to the idea of meatless meals, just as in India many people resist killing cows, monkeys, and even rats, in the belief that all living things are sacred. But, then, who would have guessed 50 years ago that Catholics would today have among the lowest levels of fertility in North America and Europe?

The Demand for Food Is Growing Faster Than the Population

The Green Revolution and the other changes in agricultural productivity have worked the miracle of not only providing food for an ever-growing population, but of providing enough so that, despite continued malnutrition in some areas, the average human is consuming more food than ever before in history. Improving diets is one of the elements of the increase in life expectancy in developing countries, but this has gotten us into a vicious circle from which it will not be easy to disentangle ourselves. Up to a point, at least, more food per person contributes to longer lives, which in turn increases the demand for food.

And there is another twist to the story. Improved nutrition brings with it not only healthier people, but also an increase in the size of the average human, and in the number of daily calories used per person (Fogel and Helmchen 2002; Fogel 2004). Table 11.3 shows the change in daily caloric intake in the world in the years between 1961 and 2009. You can see that there was a 25 percent increase in the world as a whole, with a higher percent increase in calories from animal products (mainly meat) than from vegetable products. So, the food capacity of the world was obviously outpacing population growth during this time period, because the aver- age person was consuming more in 2009 than in 1961. Some of this caloric increase is excessive, as you almost certainly know, and contributes to the evidence I cited in Chapter 5 about people becoming potentially less healthy as we grow older in richer countries.

You can see in Table 11.3 that there is considerable regional variability in the overall intake of food per day, and in the change over time. Europe and North America are the best-fed places on earth, although Europeans were increasing their meat intake while North Americans were increasing the non-meat portion of their diet. Most noteworthy in the table is the increase in Asia. In 1961, Asia as a region had the poorest diet on the planet, but caloric intake there had increased substan- tially by 2009 at which point Asia exceeded Africa in terms of its diet. But that did not mean that the African diet was not improving in terms of caloric intake, because it was, as you can see. Even among the least developed nations, encompass- ing a bit more than 10 percent of the global population, people were getting more calories on average in 2009 than they were in 1961.

More food, especially when young, means bigger people. The increase in body mass, at least up to a point, is a good thing for economic productivity— bigger, healthier people work better than smaller, sicklier people. However, the slowdown in the last part of the twentieth century and into this century in inputs

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Calories per day per person Percent of calories

from meat1961 2009 Percent increase

World—all food products 2,255 2,830 25% 18% From vegetable products 1,916 2,330 22% From animals products 338 501 48% North America—all food products 2,877 3,659 27% 27% From vegetable products 1,861 2,568 38% From animals products 1,017 1,001 22% Europe—all food products 3,052 3,362 10% 28% From vegetable products 2,287 2,437 7% From animals products 765 925 21% Central America—all food products 2,226 2,974 34% 19% From vegetable products 1,951 2,399 23% From animals products 275 575 109% Asia—all food products 1,803 2,706 50% 16% From vegetable products 1,694 2,277 34% From animals products 109 429 294% Africa—all food products 2,061 2,560 24% 8% From vegetable products 1,909 2,353 23% From animals products 152 207 36% Least developed countries—all

food products 1,893 2,353 24% 7%

From vegetable products 1,761 2,183 24% From animals products 132 170 29%

Source: Adapted from data in Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2014)

Table 11.3 Differences in Per Person Daily Caloric Intake over Time

to agriculture raises the obvious question of whether or not it will be possible to grow enough food for a population that is increasing both in number and in body mass.

How Many People Can Be Fed?

Though we are approaching the limits of exploitable land and water, per-acre yield can still be increased in parts of the world, and we can reduce waste. Could this combina- tion produce enough food to meet the needs of the more than 9 billion people we antic- ipate will inhabit the planet by the middle of this century? We know how dangerous it is to try to predict the future, but the value of doing so is that we may be able to invent a future that is more to our liking. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb

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that the world population situation “boils down to a few elementary facts. There is not enough food today. How much there will be tomorrow is open to debate. If the opti- mists are correct, today’s level of misery will be perpetuated for perhaps two decades into the future. If the pessimists are correct, massive famines will occur soon, possibly in the early 1970’s, certainly by the early 1980’s” (Ehrlich 1968:44).

Over the years, many people have derided Ehrlich for being so wrong. How- ever, he noted in the final chapter of his book that this is a situation in which the “penalty” for being wrong is that fewer people will be starving than expected, and that perhaps the dire warnings about the problems of population growth and food will have helped to spur action to avoid that consequence.

Bearing these things in mind, others step forward periodically to assess the world’s potential for feeding itself. Vaclav Smil, a Canadian geographer, did so a few years ago (Smil 2000). He began by reviewing estimates made during the past 100 years that range from Ehrlich’s low estimate of 2 billion people being sustain- able from the world’s food supply (Ehrlich 1968) to Simon’s conclusion that the food supply has no upper limit (Simon 1981). Most other estimates are between 6 billion and 40 billion (see also Cohen 1995). Smil then reminded us that no rea- sonable calculation of the earth’s capacity for growing food generates an estimate even close to the idea that the more than 7 billion alive today would have a diet similar to that of the average American. We have, for all intents and purposes, exceeded the carrying capacity with respect to the average American diet. Smil goes on to say that this is not as big a problem as it might seem, because Americans are overfed and very wasteful (Smil 2000).

The world should not aim for the average American diet, but rather all people should aim for a better diet, in line with the discussion about the nutrition transi- tion that I reviewed in Chapter 5. Throughout the world there is tremendous slack (“recoverable inefficiencies”) in the way food is produced and eaten. Smil calculated that by improving agricultural practices, reducing waste, and promoting a healthier diet (limiting fat intake to 30 percent of total energy, especially by reducing meat intake), the world in 1990 could have had a 60 percent gain in the efficiency of food production without putting a single additional acre under production. This would have fed an additional 3.1 billion in 1990, raising the supportable total in 1990 to 8.4 billion rather than the actual 5.3 billion in that year.

Supportability back in 1990, however, does not necessarily imply sustainability down the road. Smil introduced a series of conservative assumptions to suggest how a population of 10–11 billion could be supported during the next century, even without assuming some kind of magical technological fix. Applying the same logic of reducing inefficiencies, he calculated that the biggest gains (47 percent) could come from increasing the per-acre yield, followed by a continued extension of cul- tivated land, cultivating idle land, using high-efficiency irrigation, reducing beef production, irrigating some crops with salt water, and farming the sea. Underly- ing these estimates are assumptions that all populations will have a healthier (not necessarily a higher-calorie) diet, and that the food will be grown where it can be and distributed to where the demand is. These are huge assumptions, and they tell us only that in the best of circumstances it might be possible to feed a much larger population than we currently have. This is hopeful, but not very reassuring.

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The assumptions of changing diets and food distribution take us from the realm of technology to social organization and culture. People are remarkably adaptable if they want to be, but “culture” often intervenes to prevent the “rational” response to situa- tions. For example, the idea that nations need to be self-sufficient with respect to food (which underlies the idea of food security) may wind up wasting a nation’s resources that could be used to produce something else that can be sold in order to buy food.

Most of us living in developed nations are not personally self-sufficient with respect to either food or water. We rely on the good faith of strangers to provide us with what we need because we are willing to pay for it. The billions of people who will be sharing the planet with us later in this century will be properly fed only if the entire world adopts that same trading principle. Trade and a surplus for aid are nec- essary antidotes to the maldistribution of the physical and social resources required for growing food. At the same time, we must remember that trade implies trust, and the world is not always a trustworthy place, so countries that depend on others for food resources are naturally going to be anxious about the producers of that food “blackmailing” them.

Over the past decade a new trend has appeared in agriculture that unintention- ally threatens the long-term supply of food. I am referring to the significant increase in grain production that is being diverted away from food and towards biofuel. There is no question that we need alternatives to fossil fuel as an energy source and biofuel is one such alternative, although it is always mixed with fossil fuel, so it reduces, but does not eliminate dependence. Furthermore, the increased demand for corn to be converted into ethanol has driven up the price of food, which is espe- cially hard on the poor.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal that between 2005 and 2011, the grain used to produce fuel for cars climbed from 41 million to 127 million tons—nearly a third of the U.S. grain harvest (Brown 2012). But is that an efficient use of this resource? Lester Brown, Director of the Earth Policy Institute, estimates that “the grain required to fill a 25-gallon fuel tank of a sport utility vehicle with ethanol just once would feed one person for a whole year. The grain turned into ethanol in the United States in 2011 could have fed, at average world consump- tion levels, some 400 million people. But even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were turned into ethanol, it would only satisfy 18 percent of current gasoline demand” (Brown 2012:37–38). You get the point.

The Impact of Weather and Climate Change Keep in mind that since much of the world depends on rain-fed agriculture, the weather is still an important issue in our food supply. Historical data for China and Europe suggest that, much as you would expect, bad weather contributes to poor harvests, higher mortality, and slower pop- ulation growth, whereas good weather has the opposite effect (Galloway 1984). In the African Sahel south of the Sahara, drought (a prolonged period of less-than- average rainfall) occurs with devastating predictability, and for the thousands of years that people have lived there, they have learned to combat the high mortality that drought exacerbates by having large families.

Drought is only one of several adverse weather conditions that can lead to a famine—a situation of “complete lack of food access and/or other basic needs

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where mass starvation, death, and displacement are evident” (IPC Global Partners 2008:19). Famine periodically hits South Asia either as a result of a drought caused by the lack of monsoon rains or by flooding caused by over-heavy rains. Either extreme can devastate crops and lead to an increase in the death rate. As in Africa, the high death rates are typically compensated for by high birth rates, and the famine-struck regions of the world continue to increase in population size. That maintains the pressure on the agricultural sector to improve productivity all it can. Still, we always have to come back to the fact that in the long run, the only solution is to halt population growth; at some point, the finite limit to resources will close the gate on population growth.

Worldwide dependence on the weather is all the more troubling given the evi- dence that human-induced climate change is altering food production throughout the world. The United Nations Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in 2014 that was very explicit: “Human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems” (IPCC 2014:3). A warming planet is melting polar ice and the subsequent rise in sea level could devastate coastal areas in general and do tremendous damage to a country like Bangladesh. To be sure, the United Nations Population Division projections suggest that Bangladesh will lead the world in out- migration between 2015 and 2050. This is not a pleasant prospect for the country and its citizens, nor for the countries that will wind up making room for these envi- ronmental migrants.

Shortly after the IPCC report was released, a related report was published by the U.S. government-sponsored National Climate Assessment Committee tasked to figure out how climate change might affect the United States (National Cli- mate Assessment Committee 2014). The conclusion was stark: Climate change is already happening in the United States and the goal is not just to try to stop it, but to adjust to its reality. The most negative side is the increased volatility of the weather—more rain, higher heat. There are some potential short-term benefits—a longer growing season in the Midwest, and a longer shipping season on the Great Lakes. But, in the long term, volatile weather is likely to diminish the value of those benefits.

Rich country residents have greater resilience to deal with effects of climate change than do those in less developed nations, but everyone on the planet is being affected in some way or another. David López-Carr and his associates (2014) found that in sub-Saharan Africa there are hot spots (literally and figuratively) where lev- els of precipitation declined over the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010. Yet, these also tend to be areas where the population is growing quickly and incomes are very low. They concluded, in particular, that the densely populated Lake Victoria basin, encompassing parts of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania, is an area with a dual population–climate burden exacerbated by recurrent droughts and flood- ing associated not only with a drop in precipitation, but at the same time increas- ing rainfall variability. This will almost certainly lead to a combination of higher death rates, especially among children due to malaria and diarrhea, and increased migration out of the area.

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461Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

The irony is that a significant fraction (10 to 12 percent) of the greenhouse emissions causing climate change is induced by our shift in agricultural prac- tices designed to feed a growing population (Smith et al. 2007), and the 2014 IPCC report projects that between now and 2050 this could be one of the fastest growing contributors to global emissions. However, much of this is due to the increase in methane gas associated with the increasingly industrialized methods of raising animals for food. Tony Weis (2013) has called this our “ecological hoofprint.”

Some of the techniques that have seemed to offer the greatest hope for increas- ing the food supply and improving standards of living may be changing the very ecosystem upon which food production depends. This raises the question: If we stay on our current course of environmental degradation, will we permanently lower the sustainable level of living on the planet? The answer is almost certainly yes. We are in the midst of what Paul Harrison (1993) many years ago called “the pollution crisis,” and we will either work our way through this on a global scale or be faced with a major ecocatastrophe that could greatly diminish the quality of life for all of us. This is not a new issue, but we have been very slow to respond.

Environmental Degradation

All living organisms require three basic things: (1) resources (food, water, and energy); (2) space to live; and (3) space to “dump waste.” It behooves us to respect nature’s limits in all three categories, because if the population exceeds an ecosys- tem’s carrying capacity in any one of them, disaster looms.

Polluting the Ground

We survive on the thin crust of the earth’s surface. Actually, as you know, we live on only 29 percent of the surface. The rest is covered with water, especially the oceans, which we tend to treat as open sewers, but we also exploit resources that are in the ground under that water. The land surface of the earth is where most things we humans are interested in grow, and the damage we do to this part of the environment has the potential to lower the ability of plants and animals to survive. We have been busy doing damage such as: (1) soil erosion; (2) soil degradation from excess salts and water; (3) desertification; (4) deforestation; (5) loss of biodiversity; (6) strip mining for energy resources; and (7) dumping hazardous waste.

If not carefully managed, farming can lead to an actual destruction of the land (think of the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s). For example, improper irrigation is one of several causes of soil erosion to which valuable farmland is lost every year. Even if cropland is not ruined, its productivity is lowered by erosion, because few good chemical additives exist that can adequately replace the nutrition of natural topsoil. Unfortunately, the push for greater yield per acre may lead a

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farmer to achieve short-term gains in productivity with little concern for the longer- term ability of the land to remain productive.

In many human cultures, agriculture is practiced as an extractive industry, in which the nutrition in the soil is sucked out by the repeated growing of crops, and soils are routinely degraded throughout the world. The conversion of land to agricultural purposes alters the entire ecosystem, and the resulting impact on soil structure and fertility, quality and quantity of both surface and groundwater, and the biodiversity of both terrestrial and aquatic communities diminishes present and future productivity. Crop rotation and the application of livestock manure help to reduce soil erosion, but in some parts of the world the land is robbed of even cow dung by the need of growing populations for something to burn as fuel for cooking and staying warm. The eroded soil has to go somewhere, of course, and its usual destinations are riverbeds and lake bottoms, where it often causes secondary prob- lems by choking reservoirs.

Desertification and deforestation are ecological crises associated with the pres- sure of population growth on the environment. At the dawn of human civiliza- tion, forests covered about half of the earth’s land surface (excepting Greenland and Antarctica). Only about half of that forest is left. Most, if not all, of that deforesta- tion can be attributed to the impact of population growth, either directly through people moving into areas and clearing forests for their own use or indirectly through the economic demands for more resources made by growing populations elsewhere in the world.

Forests are also susceptible to the effects of air pollution, which can damage the vegetation and lessen plants’ resistance to disease. In their turn, fewer trees and less healthy trees may alter the climate because the forests play a key role in the hydrologic cycle as well as in the carbon cycle. In the hydrologic cycle, water is being continuously converted from one status to another as it rotates from the ocean, the air, the land, through living organisms, and then back to the ocean. Solar energy causes evaporation of water from the oceans and from land, and it condenses into liquid as clouds, from whence come rain, sleet, and snow to return water to the ground. Trees are important in this cycle both directly, because water transpires through the plants and is evaporated into the air, and indirectly, because the trees slow down the runoff and heighten the local land’s absorption of the water. More than half of the moisture in the air above a forest comes from the for- est itself (Miller and Spoolman 2012), so when the forest is gone, the local climate will become drier. These changes can mean that an area once covered by a lush and biologically diverse tropical forest can be converted into sparse grassland or even a desert.

The carbon cycle is that process through which carbons, central to life on the planet, are exchanged between living organisms and inanimate matter. Plants play an important role in this cycle through photosynthesis, and forests are sometimes called the earth’s “lungs.” Deforestation thus has the effect of reducing the planet’s lung capacity, so to speak, and that contributes to global warming because it increases the amount of greenhouse gases that, in the right number, otherwise keep us at just the right temperature for normal existence.

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463Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

Polluting the Air

The atmosphere is the mixture of gases surrounding the planet, and it is a layered affair (each layer being a “sphere”). We spend our life in the troposphere, that part of the atmosphere near the surface, where all the weather takes place. But other layers are of importance as well, such as the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Most famous of the gases are the greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide and water vapor, but also ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons), which allow light and infrared radiation from the sun to pass through the troposphere and warm the earth’s surface, from which it then rises back into the troposphere. Some of this heat just escapes back into space, but some of it is trapped by the greenhouse gases, and this has the effect of warming the air, which radiates the heat back to the earth (Drake 2000). In general, the greenhouse effect is a good thing, because without it the average temperature on the planet would be 0°F (–18°C) and life would not exist in its present form, but too many greenhouse gases have the effect of global warming—an increase in the global temperature.

As you probably know, global warming has the potential to change climatic zones, warm up and expand the oceans, and melt ice caps. The result will be a rise in average sea level—inundating coastal areas (where a disproportionate share of humans live), and a shift in the zones of the world where agriculture is most pro- ductive. One estimate suggests that 20 million people in the United States could be affected by sea-level rise by 2030 (Curtis and Schneider 2011). The number goes beyond coastal counties that are directly impacted and extends inland because of the migration networks that will influence where people will go in response to this change.

Population growth, the intensification of agriculture, and the overall increase in people’s standard of living have all been made possible by substantial increases in the amount of energy we use. John Holdren, science advisor to President Obama, estimated that in 1890, when the world’s population was 1.5 billion, the annual world energy use was 1.0 terawatts. (A terawatt is equal to five billion barrels of oil.) One hundred years later, in 1990, when the world’s population was at 5.3 billion, total world energy use had rocketed to 13.7 terawatts. This is an important number because “energy supply accounts for a major share of human impact on the global environment” (Holdren 1990:159, emphasis added).

By 2013 the world’s energy use was estimated to have gone up still more to 16 terawatts (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2013), while the population had increased to 7.1 billion, which would mean (assuming these energy estimates are correct) that less energy was used per person in 2013 than in 1990. This would be good news if it meant that we were moving to higher levels of conservation and beginning to use renewable sources, as well. However, there is no clear evidence that either of these is happening. Rather, we are getting more desperate to find additional sources of fossil fuels because we can’t keep up with the demand. Indeed, the vast majority of energy used in the world is based on fossil fuels, which is why BP was drilling for oil in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. You know how well that worked out . . . .

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HOW BIG IS YOUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT?

Demographers are sometimes at a loss to explain why the relationship between population growth and economic change does not show up more clearly in the statistics of world development. It is intuitively obvious that more people consuming resources and leaving behind the detritus of the industrial world are detrimental to the long-term health of the planet. But it is maddeningly difficult to show that population growth in Mexico, for ex- ample, is more or less damaging to the earth than population growth in Indonesia. One of the prob- lems is that those of us in the highly industrialized countries don’t always make the biggest mess where we live—we are able to get someone else somewhere else to make our mess for us, which means that they (usually in less developed nations) in turn have an environmental impact that really should not be directly attributed to them. The best way to visualize this is with the concept of the eco- logical footprint.

An ecological footprint has been defined as the land and water area required to support indefinitely the material standard of living of a given human or human population, using prevail- ing technology (quoted in United Nations Popula- tion Fund 1987:16). For most of human history, this was easy to figure out. If you farmed two hectares (about five acres) and all of your needs were met from the resources within those two hectares and all of your waste products were deposited within that acreage, then you did not influence life out- side that zone in any demonstrable way. Your eco- logical footprint was 2.0 hectares. But urbanization changed all that because, as I noted in Chapter 9, an urban population requires that someone else in the countryside grow their food, cut their wood, gather their sources of energy, get their water for them, and stow their trash and other waste. Thus, it is not easy to determine how big an impact an urban resident has on the resources of the earth, since the resources are drawn from multiple sources and the waste is spread out in multiple directions.

Urban areas are not sustainable on their own, as I discussed in Chapter 9; they must borrow their carrying capacity from elsewhere, and this is why

it has been so important historically for cities to establish political and economic dominance over the countryside. Who are city residents borrowing from, and how much are they borrowing? Those are questions that William Rees of the University of British Columbia sought to answer back in the 1990s, in collaboration with Mathis Wackernagel, then one of his graduate students. They devised a set of calculations to estimate the total land and water required to generate the materials used by humans (including materials for food, shelter, consumer goods, energy, and so forth) and the land and water needed by each human to deposit the waste products generated by consump- tion of those materials. Those numbers are then compared to estimates of people’s actual use of resources.

The wealth of cities ensures that they will exceed the world average footprint. Rees cal- culated that the 472,000 residents of his home city of Vancouver, British Columbia, as of 1991 (it was 604,000 as of 2011), generated an average ecological footprint of more than four hectares per person, which meant that the city had a footprint of more than 2 million hectares. Vancouver itself comprises only 11,400 hectares, so Rees points out that “the ecological locations of cities no lon- ger coincide with their locations on the map” (Rees 1996:2). A city like Tokyo, for example, has an ecological footprint that would cover a large sec- tion of Southeast Asia if it were aggregated all in one place. The same analysis can be applied to countries.

Many wealthy countries exceed their own car- rying capacity by borrowing ecological resources from other parts of the globe. In the long run, sus- tainability means that those countries that are run- ning an ecological deficit (we might call them the “exploiters”) must be offset by those who have an ecological surplus. The numbers in the accompa- nying table summarize data for selected countries of the world. It probably will not surprise you to learn that the average resident of the United States has one of the largest ecological footprints in the world, at 7.19 hectares per person, which is equiv- alent to about 18 football fields per person used

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465Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

up to sustain the lifestyle of the average American. The vastness of the country’s size and resources offers the average American an ecological capac- ity of 3.86 hectares per person—more than twice the world average of 1.78. Yet, Americans still exceed that capacity by 3.33 hectares per person.

The highest footprints in the world belong to the oil-producing nations of Qatar (11.68), Kuwait (9.72), and United Arab Emirates (8.44). They are all living well beyond their ecological means. There are, however, rich countries that have

an ecological surplus. Canadians, for example, have an ecological footprint of 6.43 hectares—a bit less than people living in the United States—but a biocapacity of 14.92 hectares, so they have one of the highest reserves in the world. Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Finland are other rich countries with substantial reserves. Of course those reserves are essentially being “used” by oth- ers, i.e., those with a deficit. At the very bottom in terms of ecological footprint is Afghanistan, with a value of only 0.54 hectares per person. Yet, even

Country

Ecological footprint

per person within the nation

Available biocapacity per person

within the nation

Ecological reserve or deficit (if negative) in

hectares per capita

Qatar 11.68 2.05 29.63 Denmark 8.25 4.81 23.44 New Zealand 7.70 14.10 6.40 United States 7.19 3.86 23.33 Australia 6.68 14.57 7.89 Canada 6.43 14.92 8.49 Switzerland 5.01 1.20 23.81 France 4.91 2.99 21.92 Norway 4.77 5.40 0.63 United Kingdom 4.71 1.34 23.37 Germany 4.57 1.95 22.62 Russia 4.40 6.62 2.22 Japan 4.17 0.59 23.58 Mexico 3.30 1.42 21.88 China 2.13 0.87 21.26 Nigeria 1.44 1.12 20.32 Indonesia 1.13 1.32 0.19 India 0.87 0.48 20.39 Afghanistan 0.54 0.40 20.14 WORLD 2.70 1.78 20.92

Source: Adapted from data in WWF (Rees 1996; Wackernagel and Rees 1996; Wackernagel et al. 2002; WWF 2012), Table 2. Data refer to 2008. Note: A hectare is 10,000m2, or approximately 2.5 acres as measured in the U.S.; one acre is approximately the size of an American football field.

Ecological Footprints of Selected Nations

(continued)

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466 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

Afghanistan is running a deficit, since its estimated biocapacity is only 0.40 hectares per person.

The richer countries in the world are that way partly because of their resources—both natural and human. The accompanying figure shows that the high-income countries (based on World Bank definitions) have the highest per person bioca- pacity. The middle-income countries have less biocapacity, and the low-income group has the

least biocapacity per person. As a group, only the low-income countries are living within their means, and the deficit increases as the biocapacity and income increases.

The bottom line of these data is that the aver- age person in the world in 2008 (latest estimates as of this writing) required the constant production of 2.70 hectares (the global ecological footprint) in order to maintain his or her standard of living,

HOW BIG IS YOUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT? (CONTINUED)

8.00

Low-income countries

1.14 1.14

1.92

Ecological Footprints by Income Group

20.20

22.55

Middle-income countries High-income countries

6.00

4.00

2.00

0.00

22.00

24.00

H e c ta

re s

p e r

p e rs

o n

Ecological footprint Biocapacity Reserve\Deficit

0.00

1.72

3.05

5.60

Source: Adapted from data in WWF (2012), Table 2. Data refer to 2008.

The by-products of our energy use (especially carbon dioxide and methane) wind up disproportionately in the atmosphere. As you can see from Table 11.4, we have met the enemy who is pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, and the enemy is us. Well, the United States is second to China as of 2010 on the list of CO2 producers in absolute terms only because China now manufactures many of the products sold in the United States (and elsewhere). We have off-loaded that portion of our ecological footprint (see the essay accompanying this chapter) onto China.

The right-hand side of Table 11.4 lists the top 20 countries in terms of per per- son CO2 emissions. You can see that four of the top five are small oil-producing and

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467Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

whereas only 1.78 hectares were estimated to be available on a sustainable basis. If these data rep- resent the real impact of humans on the environ- ment, then we have already overshot our carrying capacity, not unlike people who continue to charge things on their credit card without knowing if or how they will pay back that indebtedness. Another way to think of this is to consider jumping off a 100- story building and at the fiftieth floor saying to your- self: So far so good!

Not everyone agrees with the concept of eco- logical footprints, since the calculations require assumptions that are not easily quantifiable. How- ever, the principal argument against the implica- tions of the ecological footprint is the belief by many people that somehow human ingenuity will solve the problem of our current overuse of resources, so someone may think that the world has exceeded its global carrying capacity, but we really have not. Put another way: Maybe something will turn up before we hit the ground after jumping off that building. For example, we hope to employ new sources of energy that are renewable and less harmful to the environment than our current reliance on fossil fuels. Solar and wind power are the obvious candi- dates to create electricity, and hydrogen has been offered as a substitute for gasoline to power motors for cars, trucks, boats, and planes. The problem is not technology. The problem beyond sticky politics is the cost of creating the infrastructure for these new power sources all over the world. One or two generations (or more) will pay vastly higher prices for energy than we are currently paying in order to

put these systems in place—thus effectively lower- ing everyone’s standard of living.

We also consume a lot of energy by creat- ing and using consumer products that are asso- ciated in most people’s minds with a high stan- dard of living: cars, iPads, video games, designer clothes—you can make your own list. A lot of labor also goes into the production of these goods. But we can afford them all in a way that previous gen- erations could not because they are increasingly produced in developing countries using low-wage labor and employing energy sources for which the cost of reducing pollution is unlikely to be factored into the price of the product. If all these consumer products were made in the United States by well- paid workers working for companies that were minimizing the polluting effects of production, we couldn’t afford nearly so many of them. Everyone’s material standard of living would arguably thus be lower. Now ask yourself, what happens when all of those workers in the rest of the world are receiving high wages and working for companies that are trying to minimize the impact on the environment? For the most part, world leaders seem to prefer to pretend this is not happening, but down the road something will have to give.

Discussion Questions: (1) How could you lower your personal ecological footprint, in order to increase the chances of sustainability? (2) Given the large populations of both China and India, dis- cuss the global consequences of those countries lowering the percentage of their population living on less than $2 per day.

exporting countries in the Middle East. Their high emissions, of course, represent the effect of the richer nations’ demand for oil. Of the more populous industrialized countries, the United States, Australia, and Canada are high on the list with respect to per person carbon emissions. Russia and several other countries that were members of the Soviet Union are also high on the pollution list, a reminder that those countries have tried to increase their standard of living with little concern for the environment.

The list of countries ranked by total CO2 emissions is very similar to the list of the largest economies of the world, which I showed you earlier in Figure 11.1 and Table 11.1. This is no coincidence, of course, since emissions are directly related to energy use, which is directly related to levels of income. Indeed, the United States has

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Table 11.4 Emissions of Carbon Dioxide by Country

Top 20 countries by

total emissions

Total CO2 emissions in metric tons

Top 20 countries by per person emissions

Per capita CO2

emissions (metric tons per person)

China 8,286,892 Qatar 40.3 United States 5,433,057 Kuwait 31.3 India 2,008,823 Bahrain 28.6 Russia 1,740,776 Luxembourg 21.4 Japan 1,170,715 Oman 20.4 Germany 745,384 United Arab Emirates 19.9 Iran, Islamic Rep. 571,612 United States 17.6 Korea, Rep. 567,567 Saudi Arabia 17.0 Canada 499,137 Australia 16.9 United Kingdom 493,505 Kazakhstan 15.2 Saudi Arabia 464,481 Canada 14.7 South Africa 460,124 Estonia 13.7 Mexico 443,674 Russia 12.2 Indonesia 433,989 Norway 11.7 Brazil 419,754 Finland 11.5 Italy 406,307 Korea, Rep. 11.5 Australia 373,081 Netherlands 11.0 France 361,273 Czech Republic 10.7 Poland 317,254 Turkmenistan 10.5 Ukraine 304,805 Belgium 10.0

Source: Adapted from data in World Bank (2014b). Data are for 2010.

20 percent of the total income in the world and produces 16 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. The top five countries on the list in Table 11.4 of total emissions (China, United States, Russia, India, and Japan) account for 46 percent of the world’s popu- lation and 55 percent of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. It is fair to say that the economically and demographically biggest countries make the biggest mess.

Damage to the Water Supply

Water is amazing. It covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface, including most of the southern hemisphere and nearly half of the northern hemisphere. You are full of it—about 65 percent of your weight is water. Despite all that water everywhere, only a small fraction—3 percent—is the fresh water that humans, other animals, and plants need. Furthermore, most of that 3 percent is locked up as ice in the poles and glaciers or in extremely deep groundwater. So, only a very small fraction of the

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469Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

total volume of water is fresh water readily available to us in lakes, soil moisture, exploitable groundwater, atmospheric water vapor, and streams. Although fixed in amount, the water supply is constantly renewed in the hydrologic cycle of evapora- tion, condensation, and precipitation. The principal issues with respect to water have to do with its management (distributing it where it is needed), purity from disease (in order to be drinkable), and pollution. Since the amount of fresh water is fixed, but the population has been growing, it is obvious that the amount of water per person is steadily declining.

Within the ecosphere, salt water is converted to fresh water through the hydro- logic cycle, but it is very expensive to mimic nature. In fact, it has been joked that the two most difficult things to get out of water are politics and salt. Most desali- nation plants are based on a process of distillation that imitates the water cycle by heating water to produce vapor that is then condensed to produce fresh, potable (drinkable) water. The problem is that it is very costly to heat the water and, as a result, desalinated water is typically several times more expensive than drinkable local water, and the resulting salt brine waste is environmentally damaging, as well. For this reason, the major producer of desalted water is Saudi Arabia, which is, for all intents and purposes, turning oil into water. Reverse osmosis as a desalination process may hold some promise, but unless there is a technological breakthrough it seems unlikely that anything but naturally generated fresh water will be able to supply human needs for the foreseeable future, and we will have to survive by using that resource more efficiently than in the past. Thus, even if it is now widely recog- nized that the world is facing severe water shortages, not everyone realizes that “a future of water shortages will also be a future of food shortages” (Brown 2012:59).

Ironically, among the main sources of water pollution are the chemicals we add to the soil to improve agricultural productivity, and this is aggravated by using irrigation, which increases the amount of water exposed to the chemicals. Irriga- tion requires dams, of course, and there has been a worldwide movement to stop the construction of dams as we learn more about the ecological damage caused upstream, downstream, and on the cropland itself by dams and the irrigation water, not to mention the displacement of millions of people around the world because their home was going to be underwater in the reservoir behind the dam. Most of the choice dam sites have already been taken, but not all. Asia has a higher percentage of its land under irrigation than any other area of the world, and China, in par- ticular, is adding to the total. China built three major dams in the early 2000s, the largest and most famous of which is the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which was designed to supply irrigation water and generate hydroelectric power (estimated at more than 10 percent of China’s total), and forced the migration/relo- cation of an estimated 1.3 million people.

Human Dimensions of Environmental Change

Humans are clearly implicated in the degradation of the environment, although our impact varies from place to place. Furthermore, for most of us the greatest concern about the implications of environmental damage is: What does this mean for me?

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Assessing the Damage Attributable to Population Growth

The role of population in environmental degradation differs from place to place, from time to time, and depends on what type of degradation we are discussing. In general terms, however, environmental degradation can be seen as the combined result of population growth, the growth in production (transformation of products of the natural environment for human use) that we call economic development, and the technology applied to that transformation process. Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990) summarized this relationship in their now-famous impact (IPAT) equation:

Impact (I) = Population (P) × Affluence (A) × Technology (T).

Impact refers to the amount of a particular kind of environmental degrada- tion; population refers to the absolute size of the population; affluence refers to per person income; and technology refers to the environmentally damaging proper- ties of the particular techniques by which goods are produced (measured per unit of a good produced): “Technology is double-edged. An increase in the technical armoury sometimes increases environmental impact, sometimes decreases it. When throwaway cans replaced reusable bottles, technology change increased environ- mental impact. When fuel efficiency in cars was increased, impact was reduced” (Harrison 1993:237).

A major limitation of the IPAT formula is that it treats population size as a simple driver of environmental change. As you now know, some age groups have a different impact than others, so the age structure matters. Furthermore, urban populations use resources disproportionately, because they are the wealthier peo- ple and have different household structures that influence energy use (O’Neill and Chen 2002). Everything is more complicated than it appears at first glance, but we can say that although those of us living in developed nations still consume a vastly disproportionate share of the earth’s resources and thus contribute disproportion- ately to the pollution crisis, the rates of population growth and economic develop- ment in developing countries mean that the global impact is shifting increasingly in that direction. For example, the data in Table 11.4 show that China and India are among the five biggest CO2 polluters in the world, despite very low per person rates in those two countries. Second, notice that technological improvements (such as the use of solar power) are already operating to dampen the environmentally degrading impact of consumption, but population growth has been exerting continual upward pressure on degradation.

You can see the dilemma here: Just to maintain the current impact on the envi- ronment, technology must completely counteract the impact of population growth and increasing affluence. Much of the affluence in developed nations has come at the expense of the rest of the world—we have used resources without paying for them because the price of goods we purchased did not typically include the environ- mental costs associated with their production and consumption.

We cannot continue to draw down the “capital” of nature indefinitely to sup- plement our income. The price of goods will have to increasingly include some mea- sure of the cost of dealing with the environmental impact of making that product

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(the pollution from the manufacturing process) and the cost of getting rid of the product when it is used up (the pollution from waste). Measuring the cost of goods in this way may slow down the rate of economic development, measured in a purely economic way, but it should increase overall human well-being by balancing eco- nomic growth with its environmental impact.

Nowhere in this set of equations can it be concluded, however, that increased population is beneficial. Population growth is something that must be coped with at the same time that we continue to try to slow it down, because “rational people do not pursue collective doom; they organize to avoid it” (Stephen Sandford, quoted by Harrison 1993:264). In the world as a whole we expect there to be more than 9 billion people by the middle of this century—all of whom will likely be hoping for a good diet and a reasonably high standard of living. Is it possible not only to provide that kind of development, but to sustain it? History is not very hopeful on this score.

Environmental Disasters Lead to Death and Dispersion

History is replete with examples of how humans have had to respond to catastro- phes of one kind or another. Take, for example, the great Mesopotamian civiliza- tions of Sumeria and Babylon that flourished in western Asia nearly 9,000 years ago. The region at the time was covered with productive forests and grasslands, but each generation over time made greater and greater modifications to the environment—deforesting the area and building great irrigation canals. Around 1900 b.c., it appears that the population peaked at a level that greatly exceeded the ecosystem’s carrying capacity (Simmons 1993). A combination of environmental degradation, climate change, drought, and a series of invading armies led to a long- term decline in population in the region (Miller and Spoolman 2012), and the area became the barren desert that today makes up parts of Iran and Iraq.

In more recent history, the Mayan civilization in Central America reached a peak of population size about the year a.d. 800, and the civilization then collapsed as the population overshot the region’s agricultural capacities, perhaps aggravated by a severe drought (Hodell et al. 1995). These are only a few stories among many of premodern humans exceeding the carrying capacity of a region. Human life has survived these catastrophes, but the way of life has not.

Earlier in the book I reminded you of the Irish potato famine, in which the Irish put themselves at risk by developing a dietary dependency on one type of potato, which then was wiped out by a rogue imported fungus in the middle of the nineteenth century. The result was a permanent change in Irish society, and a concomitant change in the ethnic makeup of the United States. Many of the Irish died during the famine, but the long-term consequence was a dispersal of the Irish population, mainly to America.

The recent several year conflict in Syria has taken place in an environmentally stressed environment (to be sure, in the same general area as ancient Mesopotamia). Thomas Friedman (2013) has argued that the severe drought that preceded Syria’s violence was, in fact, one of the causes of violence because it unleashed a wave of refugees heading to cities and the government did not intervene to assist them,

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leading to a revolution: “This Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what hap- pens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival out- side powers—Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies—all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved” (p. 1).

Within the United States there have been multiple disasters to which the popu- lation has responded largely by dispersing to other parts of the country, including famously the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the Katrina Hurricane disaster that hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, killing 1,800 people and displacing hundreds of thousands (Gutmann and Field 2010).

Earthquakes represent another type of natural disaster that affects the popu- lation directly through mortality and migration and then indirectly through the adjustments that have to be made in the aftermath of the disaster. Furthermore, the size of the impact is directly related to how well protected the population is, since earthquake damage is largely driven by how well people are able to get out of harm’s way, and on the resources that they have (their resilience) to bounce back after the disaster (Cutter et al. 2000; Rashed and Weeks 2003; Rashed et al. 2007). In 2004 an under-ocean earthquake triggered a tsunami tidal wave that killed 130,000 people in Aceh, Indonesia, who, unable to reach high ground, were thus drowned or crushed by the water. In 2010 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and killed an estimated 230,000 people—nearly 10 percent of the city’s population—many of whom were crushed by falling buildings (Over and McCarthy 2010). Yet a few months later an even stronger 7.2 magnitude earth- quake hit Mexicali, Mexico, but killed only two of its one million residents. The difference in the death toll between Port-au-Prince and Mexicali lay largely in how buildings were constructed in the two places.

In Chapter 2 I discussed the terrible governmentally imposed famine in China in 1959–60 that led to the deaths of 30 million Chinese peasants. In that chapter I also mentioned the enormous consequences for Europe of the plague (“Black Death”) over a several-century period. The major consequence was a rise in the death rate that essentially restructured European society. Earlier in European history, in a.d. 79, Italy had experienced the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which wiped out the city of Pompeii and, in the process, buried alive a large fraction of its population. Note, by the way, that Mt. Vesuvius is still an active volcano and there are today an estimated 2 to 3 million people living in its vicinity.

I mention all of these examples mainly to remind you of the two major direct human responses to specific environmental and other natural disasters—an increase in mortality, and a high out-migration rate (Hunter 2005; Lutz 2009). The threat of death or at least poor health from environmental degradation is a common concern in the literature, and that is consistent with the importance of the health and mor- tality transition to our entire existence. Having gained better health and a longer life expectancy than ever previously imagined in human society, we are loath to give those things up. Yet there is widespread worry that crowding people into cities, as

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we are doing, is still potentially harmful to health and that this could erase some of the gains made over the past century in the health of urban residents.

Air pollution in cities is generally worse than elsewhere and it is especially bad in cities of less developed nations. At the macro-level we worry about the effect of the emissions into the atmosphere from cities on climate change (a clear example of the human dimension of global environmental change), and then we worry about the vicious circle of that climate change coming back to affect the cities (Krellenberg et al. 2010), but at the local level we are mainly concerned about the negative health effects of that air pollution on residents (National Research Council 2008). For example, in cities of developing countries, households often cook with wood or charcoal and thus are subjected to intense local air pollution from that cooking source (Ezzati and Kammen 2001; Ezzati and Lopez 2003).

The migration of people vulnerable to ecological disasters may tell the entire story of why the earth is now covered with humans. We have spent millennia try- ing to find better and/or safer places to live, and the most widely anticipated reac- tion that demographers foresee from climate change is the need for people to move out of affected areas into other places where they are less exposed to the risks of loss of livelihood or even death. But the political side of the world now enters into that equation because we have spent the last 200 years fencing the planet off into nation-states. This limits the range of options readily open for people to respond to changes in the local environment. To deal with global climate change will mean reckoning as well with global social change (Chase-Dunn and Babones 2006), as people from different cultural groups reorganize themselves spatially. This is unlikely to go smoothly.

Sustainable Development—Possibility or Oxymoron?

In 1987, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Devel- opment issued its extremely influential report “Our Common Future” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). This is usually called the report of the Brundtland Commission, named for its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was then Prime Minister of Norway and later became Director of the World Health Organization. The Commission defined the now-popular term sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without com- promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 43). At the same time, and for the first time in the world arena, the issue of environment and equity was laid on the table. It was made clear that part of the environmental prob- lem is that some (rich) nations are consuming too much, while at the other end of the continuum, environmental problems are caused by people living in poverty who use the environment unsustainably because their own survival is otherwise at stake. Within the concept of sustainable development, the Commission recommended that “overriding priority” should be given to the essential needs of the world’s poor.

The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development in a deliberately vague way. That has had the advantage of building a worldwide constituency for the concept, with the attendant disadvantage that everybody defines it the way they

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want to. One of the most popular ways to define sustainable development is to trans- late it to mean “let’s sustain development,” implying that economic growth is the best solution to all of the world’s problems (Chambers et al. 2002; Daly 2008). In par- ticular, economic growth is viewed as the way to salvation for the world’s poor. The World Bank and the United Nations have taken up the theme of eliminating poverty as one of the world’s important missions. The World Bank’s Development Report for 2000/2001 was subtitled Attacking Poverty (World Bank 2000), and the World Bank and the United Nations collaborated to design a set of subsequently very influential Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are listed for you in Table 11.5.

The goal of reducing poverty in developing nations is without question an important one, but it sidesteps the issue that continues to drive poverty in developing nations—population growth and its aftermath (which is the impact of the age transi- tion). Indeed, four of the eight MDGs shown in the table (1, 4, 5, and 6) are aimed directly at improving health. To the extent that they succeed, the death rate will drop and the rate of population growth will be pushed up. At the same time, two of the MDGs (2 and 3) should indirectly help to push the birth rate down, but there is no assurance that those forces will counteract the anticipated drop in the death rate. Even as you read this, MDGs are being revised and updated, but it is not clear that population growth, per se, will be a central issue, since it has not been thus far.

The Brundtland Commission report led directly to the first Earth Summit—the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with a series of follow-up meetings, especially the one in Kyoto in 1997 at which a framework was established for a worldwide treaty to limit long-term carbon emissions (a treaty the Bush administration refused to sign when it came into power in the United States in 2001, and as of this writing the Obama administration has not signed it, either). The UN meetings regarding sustainability have focused espe- cially on climate change, continuing the concern over the polluting aspect of resource consumption, and on poverty. Still, these meetings have generally sidestepped the connection between growing populations aspiring to a higher standard of living and the environmental degradation that we trying to bring under control. Will the com- bination of population growth for another several decades and our continuing quest for higher standards of living push us beyond the point of sustainability?

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and empower women 4. Reduce child mortality 5. Improve maternal health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases 7. Ensure environmental sustainability 8. Develop a global partnership for development

Source: United Nations (2014)

Table 11.5 Millennium Development Goals for the World Community

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475Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

Are We Overshooting Our Carrying Capacity?

In animal populations, overshoot occurs with a certain regularity in some eco- systems, and the consequence is a die-back of animals to a level consistent with resources, or at the extreme, a complete die-off in that area. A good rain one winter may produce an abundance of food for one species, creating an abundance of food for its predators, and so on. In classic Malthusian fashion, each well-fed species breeds beyond the region’s carrying capacity, and when normal rainfall returns the following season there is not enough food to go around, and the death rate goes up from one end of the food chain to the other. Biologists have been documenting such stories for a long time.

Premodern humans were susceptible to the same phenomena, as I mentioned above in reference to Mesopotamia and the Mayans. The apocryphal story is told of the goat that destroyed a civilization. A civilization existed that depended heavily on goats for meat and milk: “The goat population thrived, vegetation disappeared, erosion destroyed the arable land, sedimentation clogged what once had been a highly efficient irrigation system. The final result was no water to drink or food to eat. It did not happen overnight, but gradually the people had to leave to survive and the civilization perished” (Freeman 1992:3).

Carrying capacity is, to be sure, a moving target. We know that the carry- ing capacity of the earth is greater than Malthus thought because we have dis- covered that certain kinds of technological and organizational improvements can increase the productivity of the land. Cornucopians (the boomsters in farmer attire) assume that human ingenuity will permit a continued expansion of carrying capac- ity up to the point at which the world’s population stops growing of its own accord, which we expect to happen sometime this century, with a population somewhere in excess of 9 billion.

Let us assume that for all of human history up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the carrying capacity of the globe was essentially fixed (even if it fluctuated over time from region to region) and was greater than the existing global population, but that the gap between population and sustainable resources had been narrowing—the perception of which spurred Malthus to write his Essay on Population. The Industrial Revolution was associated with increasing popula- tion growth, of course, but also with innovations in agriculture that allowed food production to stay ahead of that population growth, as I discussed earlier, and at least some of these innovations in growing food are certainly sustainable, so it is reasonable to assume (even if it cannot be proven) that the carrying capacity is greater today than it has ever been in history. Thus, the assumption is that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, both population size and the global carrying capacity have increased.

The problem is that we don’t know whether or not we have now already exceeded the new and improved carrying capacity. This is partly because the global carrying capacity is a somewhat elusive concept (Sayre 2008). It is easy to know if a ship has exceeded its carrying capacity because it sinks. But we don’t know for sure how big a load the earth can carry. If we have exceeded carrying capacity, then we are in a period of global overshoot and will face a catastrophe down the road.

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There is strong evidence that we have, indeed, exceeded the global carrying capacity for sustaining more than about 2 billion people at the current North American standard of living (Cohen 1995; Pimentel et al. 1997; Chambers et al. 2002). If you and everyone else in the world were content to live at the level of the typical South Asian peasant, then the number of humans the world could carry would be considerably larger than if everyone were trying to live like the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Indeed, it is improbable that the world has enough resources for 7 billion people (much less 9 or 10 billion) ever to approach the standard of living of a successful business executive (much less the CEO). That implies that we are doomed to global inequality with respect to the consumption of resources, unless we in the highly developed world are willing (or are forced) to lower our standard of living dramatically. Christopher Chase-Dunn (1998) put it this way: “If the Chinese try to eat as much meat and eggs and drive as many cars (per capita) as the Americans the biosphere will fry” (p. xxi).

But even if we assume that we have not yet exceeded the global carrying capac- ity, how much additional room do we have before we do? Are we headed in the same direction as Mesopotamia and the Mayans? One of the most elaborate and best-known empirical investigations to examine this question was the “Club of Rome study,” Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972; Meadows 1974), which addressed the population size that would enable the earth to maximize the socio- economic well-being of its citizens. After building a computer model simulating var- ious paths of population growth and capital investment in resource development, this team of social scientists came to the conclusion that the world’s population was already so large in the 1970s and was consuming resources at such a prodigious rate that by the year 2100 resources will be exhausted, the world economy will col- lapse, and the world’s population size will plummet. After introducing their most optimistic assumptions into the model, the Meadows team described the potential result in the following way:

Resources are fully exploited, and 75 percent of those used are recycled. Pollution gen- eration is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value. Land yields are doubled, and effective methods of birth control are made available to the world population. The result is a tem- porary achievement of a constant population with a world average income per capita that reaches nearly the present U.S. level. Finally, though, industrial growth is halted, and the death rate rises as resources are depleted, pollution accumulates, and food produc- tion declines. (1972:147)

The authors freely acknowledged that their models did not replicate the complexi- ties of the real world, nor were they attempting to predict the future. Nonetheless, the study demonstrated the possibility that, for the world as a whole, the optimum population was perhaps no larger than the level of the 1970s (much less the level of the early 2000s).

Meadows and associates discussed the need for “dynamic equilibrium” in which population and capital remain constant, while other “desirable and satisfying activities of man—education, art, music, religion, basic scientific research, athletics, and social institutions . . .” also flourish (1972:180). These same ideas (which

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477Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

in fact hearken back to the nineteenth-century writings of John Stuart Mill—see Chapter 3) have been put forth by Herman Daly (1996), who argues that when we think of sustainable development, we must think of development in qualitative, not quantitative terms. We need to think about improving the quality of our life in ways that put less burden on the earth’s resources, rather than in ways that just use and abuse the earth.

Summary and Conclusion

Although most people seem to share the view that too much population growth is not good, it has been frustratingly difficult to prove a cause-and-effect relation- ship. Into this void of conclusions have leapt several competing perspectives. The doomsters are neo-Malthusians who argue that population growth must slow down or the economic well-being of the planet will deteriorate over time. Boomsters are those who believe that population growth is a good thing—it stimulates develop- ment and is a sign of, rather than a threat to, well-being. A third perspective is shared by Marxists, neo-Marxists, and adherents (whether Marxist or not) to the world systems perspective. This position argues that population growth is irrelevant to economic development. It is the relationships among national economies, and a nation’s place in the global economic system, that determine the pace and pattern of economic development.

There can be little question that population growth creates long-term pressures on societal resources that must be dealt with. In the final analysis, each of the several perspectives of the relationship between population growth and economic develop- ment has some merit—it is just that each is describing a different part of a compli- cated process, one that is unfolding differently for today’s developing or emerging nations than it did historically for the already richer countries. A major difference is the experience with much more rapid rates of population growth among develop- ing countries over the past few decades than were ever encountered in the history of wealthier nations. This creates more opportunities for commerce than might other- wise exist (more feet to be shod, more food to be processed, more people to buy cell phones and iPads), but it also means that we have been consuming resources at an historically unprecedented rate. Early capitalists were accustomed to saving to build up capital (hence the name), which was crucial as the building block for future suc- cess. However, rapid population growth has meant that we have been dipping into our capital—not just the financial capital, but the resource base of the planet. We have been using up our environmental resources and changing the very nature of human life in the process, and that raises some very legitimate concerns about how long we can sustain both development and increasing population size.

Overall, it seems reasonable to conclude that in order to reach a high level of economic development a country must bring its rate of population growth down to a very low level, and that must happen much more quickly for peripheral nations than it did in the history of the core nations, because the less developed nations have experienced economic development in the context of much more rapid rates of population growth than the now-developed countries did.

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The world’s still increasing population naturally requires an increase in food production, unless we dramatically alter what we eat, and how we waste food once produced. Since the world is almost out of land that can be readily culti- vated, increases in yield per acre seem to offer the principal hope for the future. Indeed, that is what the Green Revolution has been all about—combining plant genetics with pesticides, fertilizer, irrigation, crop rotation, land reorganization, and multiple cropping to get more food out of each acre. At current levels of tech- nology, it may be reasonable to suppose that the world’s population could be fed for many years to come if food can be properly distributed, if farmers in less devel- oped nations are able to reach their potential for production, and if environmental degradation and the consequent global climate change do not intervene to limit productivity. Whether that happens is more a political, social, and economic ques- tion than anything else. What does seem clear is that it is almost inconceivable that all of the world’s people will ever be able to eat or even more generally to live as Americans currently do. We have almost certainly exceeded the carrying capacity for that level of living.

Demographers, of course, cannot provide direct solutions to the problems of feeding the population or of halting environmental degradation, but they have wres- tled mightily with what lies ahead for us as a consequence of population change. I continue the discussion of these issues in the next, and final, chapter.

Main Points

1. Economic development represents a growth in average income—a rise in the material well-being of people in a society.

2. Data for the world indicate that higher levels of average income typically are associated with lower rates of population growth; whereas higher rates of popu- lation growth generally are accompanied by lower levels of average income.

3. Ester Boserup and Julian Simon led the “boomster” argument that popula- tion growth serves as a stimulus for technological development and economic advancement; whereas neo-Malthusians express the “doomster” view that pop- ulation growth is detrimental to economic development.

4. Those concerned about international economic relationships (such as propo- nents of the world systems theory) argue that population growth is irrelevant to the process of economic development, and that no meaningful relationship exists.

5. Food production can be increased by increasing farmland or per-acre yield. The latter can be accomplished by continued plant breeding and increased use of irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides, along with new patterns of land tenure.

6. It is often said that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

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479Chapter 11 Population and Sustainability

7. It is estimated that the world could not grow enough food for the entire popu- lation to eat an average American diet, yet it is perhaps within the realm of possibility that 11 to 12 billion people could be sustained at current levels of agricultural technology if food production and distribution worked far more efficiently and if environmental degradation did not intervene to lower agricul- tural productivity. Of course, those are big “ifs.”

8. In trying to feed ever more people and attempting to elevate world stan- dards of living, we have managed to do a great deal of damage to the envi- ronment, the immediate or proximate causes of which are population growth, economic development, and technology. The relative contribution of each varies from place to place, from time to time, and according to the specific type of degradation.

9. Environmental disasters are not new to human history, and they almost always end in some demographic combination of death and migration.

10. Achieving sustainable development will almost certainly require either a differ- ent definition of a desirable standard of living and/or acceptance of permanent inequalities in levels of living around the world. The latter seems more likely than the former.

Questions for Review

1. How would you describe economic development as it applies to your own life? Do you aspire to more material goods? Do you aspire to more cultural goods that use human rather than natural resources?

2. Thinking about the community in which you grew up, would you say that pop- ulation growth was positively or negatively related to the local economy, or not related at all? Defend your answer.

3. How would you reconcile the concern in rich countries for organic foods and the banning of genetically modified foods with the demand in the rest of the world for more food for more people? Can we have it both ways? Would you be willing to give up meat in order to feed the planet and limit environmental damage?

4. Given the strong evidence that human-induced global climate change is occur- ring, what do you think might be the long-term consequences for the choices (voluntary or forced) that people will make about where to live in response to climate changes, especially in places where the population is continuing to increase? How will these choices impact the world community?

5. What is your perception of the strengths and weaknesses of the ecological foot- print concept? How useful is the concept to you in helping you to understand your own impact on the earth?

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Websites of Interest

1. http://www.myfootprint.org/ Calculate your own ecological footprint at this website, and estimate your impact on the earth’s resources.

2. http://www.wri.org/ The World Resources Institute provides a valuable set of resources for examining the rela- tionships among development, poverty, and a host of environmental issues.

3. http://www.worldbank.org Over the years, the World Bank has devoted considerable resources to compiling in one place a set of comparative world data that relate to topics such as population growth and economic development. This website summarizes the most recent World Develop- ment Indicators (WDI), and contains multiple tables of data that can be viewed online or downloaded and analyzed on your own computer.

4. http://www.fao.org The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is the principal source of data on land use and agricultural production. Its FAOSTATS online database at this website lets you choose the information you want and the format you want it in. Search the site carefully because there are a lot of other things there.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/Population%20and%20Sustainability? Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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481

CHAPTER 12 What Lies Ahead?

FROM REVOLUTION TO EVOLUTION The Health and Mortality Evolution The Fertility Evolution The Migration Evolution The Age Evolution The Urban Evolution The Family and Household Evolution

WHAT CAN COUNTRIES DO TO INFLUENCE WHAT LIES AHEAD?

ESSAY: A California Community Copes with the Migration Evolution

Figure 12.1 Projected Population Increase Between 2015 and 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium projection.

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The demographic revolution of the past two centuries has wrought a world where people everywhere live longer than they used to; women are having fewer children than they used to; people are more likely to migrate; and the overall scope in life is vastly greater than it has ever been. So, is the population problem over? That’s a trick question, of course. I was checking to see if you have been paying attention. Though we may be near the end of the population revolution in most societies, we are not approaching the end of demographic change. Societies continue to be al- tered in important ways due especially to the ongoing evolutions in health and mor- tality, fertility, migration, the age structure, urban living, and family and household diversity. Furthermore, not all societies are yet on the road to low growth rates, and all of us must cope with the consequences.

The goal of this chapter is to use the tools you have mastered in the preced- ing chapters to scope out where we think we might be heading, demographically speaking, between now and the middle of this century. Remember, though, that our projections about the future are not predictions. If we don’t like what we see, we may still be able to change course, at least a bit. This can be helped along by deliberate policy making at both the country and global levels, aimed at influencing popula- tion change and thereby reshaping the future. Pay attention!! Dealing with our demo- graphic future will require vigilance and commitment.

From Revolution to Evolution

Societies evolve over time as they are impacted by demographic processes. Then, the feedback loop continues as the resulting societal changes in turn influence their future demographic trends. The regular patterns inherent in demographic phenom- ena allow us to make reasonable assessments about the nature of the changes we can expect from one place to another, and then map out what likely lies ahead.

Figure 12.1 maps countries of the world by the projected increase in their total population size between 2015 and 2050, according to the medium projec- tions of the United Nations population division; whereas Figure 12.2 maps the world according to the rate of population increase between those two dates. Let’s consider absolute numbers first. India is projected to be the single most important source of population increase between now and the middle of the century in terms of the number of people being added. It takes the prize by being on a trajectory to add 340 million people (more than currently reside in the United States) to its current population. When you recall that nearly seven out of every ten residents of India currently live on less than $2 per day, you can appreciate the struggle ahead for that country. Furthermore, it will share that struggle with its neighbors of Pakistan and Bangladesh, who will together grow by about 125 million people. This scenario assures that the region will undoubtedly remain a subcontinent in continuing turmoil.

The southeast Asian nations of Indonesia and the Philippines are both expected to add tens of millions more people. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to contrib- ute more than one billion additional people to the world’s total between 2015 and 2050, with nearly half of those coming from just four countries (in order of

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483Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

their numerical contribution): Nigeria, Ethiopia, Congo (Kinshasa), and Uganda. The countries in western Asia—regionally between sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—are also projected to grow by tens of millions of people. In all cases, the main driver of population growth is a birth rate that is not expected to drop as fast as the death rate.

The United States is the only rich country in the top ten in terms of expected growth between now and 2050, with the United Nations (and also the U.S. Census Bureau) projecting the country will grow from 325 million in 2015 to 400 million by 2050. That growth will be fueled almost entirely by immigrants and their chil- dren. On these grounds alone, it is perhaps understandable that immigration is both a hot topic and an issue that cannot easily be resolved. As you can see in Figure 12.1, Brazil and Mexico are also expected to be major contributors of people in the Americas, many of whom will likely make their way to the United States.

All the other rich countries of the world are expected either to decline in pop- ulation size or grow only slightly in absolute terms. Though not a rich country, China is nonetheless included in the group of countries expected to have fewer peo- ple in 2050 than in 2015. It experienced its huge increase (three-quarters of a billion people) during the second half of the twentieth century, but is expected soon to have reached its government’s goal of halting population growth.

The growth hot spots of the world in terms of rates of growth are shown in Figure 12.2, which maps the percentage increase in projected population between 2015 and 2050, regardless of the total size of the population. Africa and the Middle East jump out as the places that are anticipated to be growing most quickly in the world—places where local communities will certainly be under enormous stress to cope. Take note, however, that it is inconceivable that rapid growth in these places will not forcefully impact the richer, slower (or non-) growing nations as well.

Figure 12.2 Projected Percentage Increase in Population Size Between 2015 and 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium projection.

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484 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

The Health and Mortality Evolution

The health and mortality transition has been the single most revolutionary trans- formation in human existence, as well as the root cause of population growth. So, despite the angst you are bound to feel as you contemplate the expansion of the world population between now and 2050, remember that most everyone in the world is quite happy to be able to live a longer, healthier life than ever before. Where populations are increasing rapidly, the reason is that mortality has been declining more quickly than fertility. The trick is to bring fertility rates down suf- ficiently to counter the lowered mortality and thus avoid rampant population growth.

Infant and child mortality rates are, as you know, key indicators of overall health and well-being. In Figure 12.3 you can see that sub-Saharan Africa, west- ern Asia (especially Afghanistan), and south Asia are the regions of the world in which child mortality rates are expected to remain the highest in the world in 2050. And, yet, these are the same places that show up as growing most quickly between 2015 and 2050 because their fertility rates are expected still to outpace their death rates. They are countries where the status of women and children is lower than else- where, and where death rates have always been among the highest in the world. The United Nations Population Division notes that in the 1950–1955 period, 21 percent of all children born worldwide did not reach their fifth birthday (United Nations Population Division 2013c). By 2005–2010, this rate had fallen to 6 percent, although remaining above 10 percent in the least developed regions. Figure 12.3 shows that United Nations demographers expect child mortality in 2050 to still be very high in parts of Africa and Asia, even accounting for anticipated programs to lower mortality.

Figure 12.3 Child Mortality Rate (Deaths Before Age 5 Per 1,000 Live Births) Projected for 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium fertility projection.

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485Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

One of the still evolving health issues in the same parts of the world with high infant mortality rates is HIV/AIDS, as I discussed in Chapter 5. The epidemic has already altered the social fabric of sub-Saharan Africa, continues to threaten much of Southeast Asia, and is an emerging issue in China, India, and Russia, where gov- ernments have been slow to acknowledge the potential for a major spread of HIV. Globally, however, it appears that the adult HIV prevalence rate peaked in the first decade of this century, and the dissemination of antiretroviral medications has helped to slow the progression of HIV to AIDS. This has lowered mortality from the disease, while at the same time lowering the risk of transmitting it to others. As resources continue to pour into this effort, it is just possible that by 2050 HIV/AIDS could be a thing of the past.

A growing health concern is the changing diets of people around the globe that may lead to greater obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and other risks of death in adulthood. This new scourge may at least partially counteract efforts to lower death rates from malaria and other parasitic and infectious diseases, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. This disturbing news emanates from the Global Burden of Dis- ease research, which I discussed in Chapter 5. In late 2012 an entire issue of the medical journal The Lancet was devoted to the latest round of estimates (Murray et al. 2012). In 1990, the top health issue in the world was child nourishment. In 2010 high blood pressure, smoking and drinking alcohol were the highest risk fac- tors for ill health. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, led the work, and he sum- marized the research findings as follows: “There’s been a progressive shift from early death to chronic disability . . . What ails you isn’t necessarily what kills you” (Dreaper 2012:1).

This represents a new and potentially very important twist on the health and mortality transition. Up to this point, we have routinely assumed that health and mortality tracked each other very closely, so that an increase in life expectancy would automatically be associated with improvements in overall health. Indeed, the idea was that improved health was an important cause of higher life expectancy. These new findings suggest that the linkage may not be as strong as we thought. Efforts put into improving health among children have been key contributors to higher life expectancy in many developing countries, but adult health levels are actually getting worse. For example, the data show that two-thirds of American adults are overweight, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more, where BMI is defined as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters (kg/m2). More alarmingly, 36 percent of adults in the U.S. and 17 percent of children are not just overweight but obese, with a BMI of at least 30. It is estimated that if current trends continue, by 2030 nearly half of American adults, and nearly one-third of all adults in the world, could be obese. Figure 12.4 shows the world distribution of obesity according to data from the World Health Organization for 2008. By the time you read this, those numbers are likely to be higher for every country in the world.

Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina has been pointing out for years that the nutrition transition in the world is leading us to increasingly unhealthy diets, as we eat more food (especially processed food) and exercise less

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(Popkin 1993; Popkin and Gordon-Larsen 2004; Popkin 2009; Lieberman 2013). The frustrating part is that most people know what to do to stay healthy, but pay no attention, which is why we see in Figure 12.4 the high percentage of adults in the world who are obese.

A report by the National Institute of Medicine in 2014 concluded that label- ing food, including restaurant menu calorie counts, has little impact on behavior (Pray 2014). Taxes and other punitive measures are unlikely to be enacted. So, some middle road measures may be required—extending meatless Mondays to meatless weekdays, for example. It was pointed out that food producers respond to their shareholders, not to the needs of consumers, but they would have to respond if demand changed sufficiently. In other words, the impetus for diets that are healthy for people and the planet at the same time may have to come from the bottom up, through the classic diffusion of innovations. Don’t feel shy about getting this started.

Just as a combination of safe sex (i.e., using condoms) and new drugs is turn- ing the tide against HIV/AIDS, many researchers and health planners are thinking that a combination of better eating habits (and food production methods), along with new stem cell research, may eventually reverse the trend toward obesity as well as cardiovascular and other degenerative diseases. Innovative methods of regenera- tive medicine are being tested with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are derived from adult cells, rather than embryos. The technology to do this is just emerging and, though there are many legal questions to be answered, there is the hope, if not the expectation, that science might be able to alter our health trajecto- ries by rejuvenating our cells. If this does pan out, however, it will be only the well- off who will be able to take advantage of it, at least initially, due to the high cost. This could lead to yet another evolution in which the life expectancy gap between richer and poorer countries widens again, rather than continuing down the current path toward convergence.

Figure 12.4 Percent of Adults Who are Obese (BMI > 30) by Country, 2008 Source: Prepared by the author using data from the World Health Organization (2014).

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The Fertility Evolution

I have repeatedly emphasized in this book that as death rates are gradually brought under control, everything else in life is changed in the process. The resulting very different view of life puts into focus both the increasing certainty of child survival and the consequences of having too many children survive. In most societies these are the triggers that lead eventually to a decline in fertility. As you know, the trend around the globe is for birth rates to be on their way down, transitioning to replace- ment level or below in many parts of the world. They are already below replace- ment level in most of Europe, and in much of the rest of the world outside of Africa they are projected to reach replacement level by 2050, as you can see in Figure 12.5, which maps the projected total fertility rates as of that year. Keep in mind, though, that these projections assume that we will keep the pedal to the metal in terms of providing women everywhere with the means to achieve their desired family size, and that desired family size will continue to decline in those places where it is cur- rently well above replacement.

The map also shows that the highest fertility levels are anticipated especially in sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous regions of Latin America, and a few other scat- tered places such as Iraq. Interestingly, the United States is projected to have fertil- ity levels slightly higher than Mexico’s by the middle of this century—a genuine turnaround from the situation that prevailed at the middle of the twentieth century.

As I discussed in Chapters 6 and 10, the status of women is a key ingredi- ent both in lowering fertility and in explaining why fertility currently remains well above replacement level in so many countries. Lifting the penalties for antinatalist behavior is notably dependent upon redefining gender roles, including a more posi- tive evaluation of single or childless persons, as well as believing that a small family is a good thing. Historically, the socialist centrally planned societies taught us that

Figure 12.5 Total Fertility Rates Projected for 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium fertility projection.

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fertility can be indirectly influenced to decline through a combination of the fol- lowing factors: (1) educating women; (2) providing women with access to the paid labor force; (3) legalizing the equality in status of males and females; (4) legalizing abortion and/or making contraceptives freely available; and (5) raising the standard of living, while at the same time making housing and major consumer items diffi- cult to obtain, forcing a couple to ask themselves: “Kicsi or kosci?” (as they say in Hungarian—“A child or a car?”).

In Chapter 6, I discussed the situation in China, which has brought its level of fertility down to below replacement level through a coercive policy that was layered over an underlying fertility transition already under way. Indeed, the younger gen- eration, having been brought up under this policy, has seemingly bought into the idea of very low fertility. There is evidence that Chinese couples who would now be legally allowed to have more than one child, because one or both partners are them- selves only children, typically do not exercise that option (Cai Yong et al. 2010; Wang Feng 2013).

By contrast, it is not clear that India will actually be able to achieve the below replacement fertility that is built into the United Nations’ projections. In 1952, long before China started thinking of fertility limitation, India began experiment- ing with family planning programs to keep the population “at a level consistent with requirements of the economy” (Samuel 1966:54). The road to low fertility has been a long and bumpy one, however, and the journey is not ended yet. The most recent National Population Policy, implemented in 2000, laid the framework for a broad program of reproductive health aimed at improving the lives of women and children, although the emphasis is now on tubal ligation for women rather than earlier emphases on male vasectomies. Other contraceptive methods represent only a small fraction of family planning efforts in India. This is unfortunate for several reasons, including the point made by Mathews and colleagues (2009) that relying on sterilization and not focusing on delayed marriage and contraception shortens the generations in India and may add 50 million more to the population by 2050 compared to a “later, longer, and fewer” approach (like China’s policy in the 1970s before the one-child policy). The lack of method mix and the checkered history of family planning in India are certainly obstacles to long-term success, and the projec- tion of a decline in fertility down to replacement level may be wishful thinking. We do need to keep wishing for this, however, because India and the world will be very different places depending on the rate at which fertility declines.

The Migration Evolution

As you know from Chapter 7, migration is the most volatile of the demographic processes, so our projections about migration patterns out to 2050 depend on edu- cated guesswork, based almost entirely on what is happening now. As you can see from Figure 12.6, the receiving countries are expected to be the richer countries, especially western Europe and Russia (although not the rest of eastern Europe), North America, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia. The countries sending the largest

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number of migrants out to other places between 2015 and 2050 are the usual sus- pects, with Bangladesh leading the list (potentially a victim of sea-level rise, as noted in Chapter 11), followed by China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

The United States, Canada, and Australia were actually created by successive waves of immigrants, and as difficult as it may be for any country to absorb new people today, they at least have more experience in doing it. Even so, xenophobia emerges on a regularly basis, including in the United States, as the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants resist the entry of new migrants. Until recently Europe was the quintessential source of migrants to the United States, Canada, and Australia, and had very little experience with immigrants of their own until the end of World War II. Many European nations are struggling to adapt themselves to the cultural changes that are involved as immigrant communities alter their pattern of business as usual (Coleman 2009). The Spanish are absorbing families from the Gambia (Bledsoe et al. 2007); Italians are coping with Senegalese and other West Africans (Riccio 2008); and throughout Europe there is stress over the integration of Muslim immigrants (Caldwell 2009) even though the youth bulge in the predom- inantly Muslim Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region represents a nearly perfect demographic fit (a ready supply of young workers) for Europe’s aging popu- lation (Fargues 2008).

The phenomenon of migration has an evolutionary impact in both biological and cultural terms. Biologically, it leads to intermarriage among people of different back- grounds and thus is part of the evolution of humans as a species. Culturally, it blends the patterns of everyday life of the native population with those of the immigrants. In Chapter 1 I discussed the fact that the past is a foreign country. If we look at the 1910 census data for the United States (made available through the IPUMS project at

Figure 12.6 Total Net Number of Migrants Projected to be Added or Subtracted From Each Country Over the Period From 2015 to 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium fertility projection.

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490 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

A CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COPES WITH THE MIGRATION EVOLUTION

In early 2008 the United States Congress passed the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act and the face of El Cajon, California was changed forever. For it is at the local level that the migration evolution has its most dramatic impact, and in this essay I offer a ground-level example of this phenomenon featur- ing Iraqi immigrants suddenly becoming a large fraction of the population in a suburban community in San Diego County.

By way of background, the ethnic mix of California neighborhoods has been evolving con- tinuously since the mid-1960s due especially to the influx of Latin Americans (mainly from Mexico) and southeast Asians (especially from the Philip- pines, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), creating what William A.V. Clark (1998) calls the “California Cauldron.” This has turned California, the most populous state in the country, into a “minority- majority” state in which non-Hispanic whites now represent less than 50 percent of the population.

In line with California’s changing demo- graphics, San Diego County is a minority-majority county. According to the 2012 American Com- munity Survey, fully 25 percent of the total popu- lation of San Diego County was born outside the United States. The list of donor countries was led by Mexico (11 percent) and the Philippines (3 percent). People of Iraqi origin do not represent a large proportion of the county’s population as a whole, but when nearly 20,000 people of the same immigrant group congregate in a small area within the county, and as new refugees are being con- tinuously added, the local impact is a force to be reckoned with.

Data from the American Community Survey show that there were about 176,000 residents in the United States in 2012 who had been born in Iraq—an increase from the 100,000 just five years earlier. Zooming in for a closer look reveals that 45 percent of these residents lived either in Michigan (25 percent) or California (20 percent). Coming in even closer, we see that the Iraqi- origin population is spatially concentrated in or near just a few communities within Michigan and California—Southfield, Michigan (in metropolitan Detroit), and El Cajon, California (in metropolitan

San Diego). El Cajon is ethnically less diverse than is San Diego County as a whole, and the rather abrupt arrival of large numbers of refugees from Iraq has added new spice to the mix and stirred its cauldron. If we follow the U.S. race/ethnic cat- egories, these immigrants are technically “non- Hispanic whites,” but of course they are Arabic- speaking people with cultural patterns that are quite foreign to the residents of El Cajon. Some of the newcomers are Muslim, but the majority are Chaldean Christian Catholics, with ethnic roots tracing back to early Mesopotamian empires, long before the rise of Islam (Bazzi 2009).

Although no definitive numbers exist to tell us exactly how many Chaldeans there are among the Iraqis in the United States, we can use the American Community Survey Public Use Micro- data Sample (PUMS) data, available from the Minnesota Population Center (Ruggles et al. 2014), to create estimates based on questions asked about birthplace and ancestry. The ACS question- naire includes ancestry codes for Chaldean and Assyrian, the latter referring to people who identify themselves with the neo-Aramaic language spo- ken by Chaldeans in religious services. From these data we can estimate that in 2012, 39 percent of all Iraqi-born residents of the United States were Chaldean, a number 20 times what we would expect if immigrants from Iraq were a random sample from that country, since it is estimated that only 2 percent of the population of Iraq is Christian.

According to local historians in El Cajon, the first Chaldean immigrant arrived in 1951 (Bazzi, 2009). Every year or so after that a few new fami- lies arrived, usually originating in Baghdad but arriving in California by way of Detroit, where they had gone because Detroit has been home to one of the larger Arab-speaking communities in the United States for a long time. By 1973 there were an estimated 70 Chaldean families living prosper- ously in San Diego County, a large enough criti- cal mass to motivate them to pool their money, buy land, and build a Chaldean church and con- vent in El Cajon, a site chosen because there was a large tract of land that they could readily afford. Ten years later that church had become

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the St. Peter Chaldean Catholic Cathedral, one of only two Chaldean churches in America that is headed by a bishop. The other one, of course, is in Detroit.

In the accompanying graph, I have traced the growth of the Iraqi-origin population in San Diego County since 1960, based on the PUMS data for each census (Ruggles et al. 2014). Although these numbers include all persons from Iraq, the 2012 ACS data show that nearly half of Iraqi-origin per- sons in San Diego County are Chaldean. There were about 100 people in 1960 and about 300 in 1970—the latter number consistent with the esti- mated 70 families who sparked the building of the church. That number increased a bit as Saddam Hussein took over in Iraq in 1979 and almost immediately launched a lengthy war with Iran that lasted until 1988.

There was a noticeable increase in immigrant numbers after the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the Iraqi- origin population in San Diego County approached 10,000 by the time of the Iraq War that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 2003 led to a flood of refugees out of Iraq, most were initially settled in neighboring Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria (Tavernise 2006). The U.S. government’s perspective at the time was that the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime would lead to a democratically elected govern- ment that would improve personal safety for all Iraqis. For Chaldeans, however, the result was exactly the opposite, as the Muslim population began to persecute local Christians. In response, the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act was introduced into

(continued) Growth of the Iraqi-Origin Population in San Diego County, 1960 to 2012

1 9 6 0

1 9 7 0

1 9 8 0

1 9 9 0

2 0 0 0

First Gulf War

2 0 1 2

2 0 1 0

2 0 0 8

2 0 0 6

T h o u sa

n d

Year

Saddam Hussein and Iran–Iraq War

Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act

of 2007

War in Iraq

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492 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

Congress in 2007 (although it was not signed into law until January 2008), and the State Department immediately began processing Iraqi applications for refugee status. The number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States exploded after that, especially from 2008 through 2010, when Iraqis represented the greatest number of refugees from any one country into the United States. The numbers have slowed somewhat since then, but are still well above levels prior to the passage of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act (Office of Refugee Resettlement 2014).

Since a disproportionate share of the refu- gees headed for El Cajon, that city of 100,000 saw its demographics change quite dramati- cally after 2007. New cafés with signs in Arabic showed up along Main Street, schools were inun- dated with new children who were often behind their grade level and were not fluent in English, and the local county welfare office added ser- vices specifically for Arabic-speakers. Local immigrants from Mexico were quickly outnum- bered by those from Iraq.

R e f u g e e r e c o r d s i n d i c a t e t h a t n e a r l y 75 percent of Iraqi-origin refugees arriving in San Diego County since October 2008 have settled in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District and the Grossmont Union High School District service areas. One of the first signals that this was creating a challenge was when these high school and community college districts discovered that they could not afford to offer as many English as a Second Language (ESL) classes as were all of a sudden being sought by the refugees. In order to receive their monthly stipends from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, each adult refugee had to show that they were attending ESL classes, but the local resources were overwhelmed by the demand.

Adding to the predicament, the initial wave of refugees arrived in the United States during the Great Recession, when local jobs were already very scarce. Data from the American Commu- nity Survey show that people arriving since 2007

have limited proficiency in English and have very high unemployment rates (although many may be employed in the informal economy). Anecdotal evi- dence suggests that the local residents who may be most affected by the influx of new refugees are, in fact, the longer-term Iraqi-origin residents. This group has achieved economic success, is politi- cally active in the community, and tends to live very close to the Chaldean church, which is located in a neighborhood where housing values are above average for the region. The new immigrants have, in essence, raised the profile of the Chaldean com- munity in ways that are not viewed by longer-term immigrants as entirely beneficial, especially at a time when they perceive that there is discrimina- tion against people of Middle Eastern origin. There is also concern that because the new immigrants are living in close proximity to one another and to the longer-term Chaldean residents, a closed com- munity of non-English-speaking households may develop. This is perceived locally as having poten- tially negative consequences for those families and for their neighbors. On that score, we will have to wait and see.

More immediately, the rapid increase of people with unfamiliar cultural patterns has had political ramifications. The mayor of El Cajon, who was first elected to office when there were few people of Iraqi-origin in the area, took the view that they have subsequently grown to the point that they are causing “white flight” out of El Cajon (Gupta 2013). That and other more inflamma- tory comments in 2013 caused such a backlash that the mayor decided to resign (Los Angeles Times 2013).

Discussion Questions: (1) Describe two possible future scenarios for the way in which the immigrants discussed in this essay might adapt and/or assimilate to the local community. (2) Dis- cuss the concept of xenophobia as it applies to this influx of immigrants. Do you think that there might be a tipping point beyond which commu- nity concern escalates regarding newly arrived immigrants?

A CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COPES WITH THE MIGRATION EVOLUTION (CONTINUED)

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493Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

the University of Minnesota), we find that 88 percent of the population was what we would today call “non-Hispanic white,” 9 percent was black, and another 2 percent “mulatto.” That left only one percent of the population that was American Indian, Asian, or Latin American. That did not mean that there was little diversity, however, at least as defined in those days. If we use origins as a proxy for culture, we find that the United States in 1910 had large groups of immigrants from Germany (the largest group), Russia, Ireland, Italy, Canada, Austria, England, Sweden, Hungary, and Norway. The eastern and southern Europeans were new to the ethnic mix of the United States, and you will recall from Chapter 7 that the backlash against them led directly to the very restrictive immigration laws passed in the late 1920s.

A whole generation of Americans grew up in an era of relatively low levels of immigration until the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act that opened the doors to the rest of the world. The result of that legislation was that by 2010 non-Hispanic whites were down to 65 percent of the population, while Hispanics accounted for 16 percent, non-Hispanic blacks for 13 percent, Asians for 5 percent, and American Indians for 1 percent. This breakdown alone suggests a new pattern of diversity, and in 2010 the largest groups of immigrants were from Mexico (the most numer- ous group), the Philippines, India, China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Germany (a hold- over on the top ten list), South Korea, Cuba, and Canada (the only other holdover on the top ten list). It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how different the country is now because of migration, and then to project forward a few decades to contemplate yet another “foreign country” in the future. These scenarios are, of course, being played out all over the world by the evolving addition and subtraction of migrants, including both voluntary migrants and refugees.

Although the migration evolution is most visibly and controversially played out by international migrants, most migration is and will likely remain internal migra- tion. People have more flexibility to move about in their own country, even when there are some restrictions, as is true in China (see Chapter 9 for a discussion of the household registration system in that country). By far the largest part of this move- ment is people leaving rural areas and heading to cities to find work. This is how the migration evolution morphs into the urban evolution, as I note later in the chap- ter. Migration out of rural areas also speeds up the aging process in the countryside, since migrants tend to be young adults of reproductive age who head to the cities to work and start their families.

The Age Evolution

The demographic fit between slower growing countries (e.g., those in Europe) and faster growing countries (e.g., those in the Middle East and North Africa) is tied to a reality that will be resonating around the world for the rest of your life—the evo- lution of very different age structures from one group and region to another. We are coping with a world in which the haves and have-nots—the developed and devel- oping countries—are divided not only by income and rates of population growth, but by distinctly different population structures. The legacy of several decades of low fertility and low mortality in the developed countries is an increasingly older

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population, whereas a much later start to the fertility decline, combined with ever lower mortality, produces populations in developing areas (countries “in transi- tion,” as they are sometimes called) with significantly younger (yet constantly chang- ing) age structures, as fertility and mortality continue their downward trajectories.

In Figure 12.7, you can see that the map of the world by projected median age in 2050 is nearly the flip side of Figure 12.5, which shows the pattern of fertil- ity rates. Higher fertility rates produce younger populations, whereas lower rates produce older populations. Since fertility has long been lower in Europe than any- where else, Europe is naturally projected to have the oldest populations in 2050, especially southern and eastern Europe. China, Japan, and Korea are also projected to have very old populations. By contrast, the youngest populations will still be in sub-Saharan Africa, western Asia, and parts of southern Asia, as well as the more indigenous regions of Latin America, just as is true today. The large and youthful populations in these areas in 2050 will be both “challenges and opportunities,” to borrow a phrase from a European Commission report on the future of Europe (Commission of the European Communities 2006). Meanwhile, in Europe the chal- lenges and opportunities focus on an aging and potentially declining population. It is change that is problematic, no matter what its direction.

The United States is not facing depopulation in the way that Europe is, largely as a result of several decades of strong immigration, which has produced higher fertility than in Europe and has meant a slower slide to an older population. At the other extreme, you can readily imagine that the less-developed nations, especially in Africa and parts of Asia, will still be struggling to meet the payroll, so to speak, in 2050—trying to find jobs for the crowds of young people in their midst.

If migration is not an option as a demographic safety valve, young age structures can present societies with real problems (Weeks and Fugate 2012). Hagan and Foster (2001:874) remind us that “adolescence is a time of expanding vulnerabilities and

Figure 12.7 Median Age Projected for 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium fertility projection.

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495Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

exposures to violence that can be self-destructive as well as destructive of others.” You might have that in mind as you read that Central American countries, for exam- ple, have faced a wave of gang activity exacerbated by a very young age structure in an environment where there are not enough jobs to go around. These age structure strains have also helped to produce the spread of terrorism in the Middle East, western Asia, and South Asia, as young people grow up in an increasingly crowded urban set- ting where there are too many of them for the available economic and social resources.

Figure 12.8 illustrates where some of the potential hot spots for age changes may be in the future. As I discussed in Chapter 8, the median age is a fairly crude compar- ative measure because a lot of different things can be going on to change where the middle of the age distribution happens to be. Nonetheless, if the median age is shift- ing noticeably, you can be sure that there will noticeable effects on that society. The least amount of change is expected in North America, most of Europe, and Australia, where fertility and mortality levels are already low and the populations will be slowly aging. There are also countries in sub-Saharan Africa where the age transition is slowed down by the persistence of high fertility. The major hot spots for change are in Latin America, which is expected to experience rapid population aging (pushed along by outmigration to the United States and Europe), along with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and most of Asia. As noted above, the aging of India is dependent upon a forecasted drop in fertility that may be overly optimistic.

The Urban Evolution

By the middle of this century, projections show only a handful of countries in which less than a majority of people live in urban areas. As you can see in Figure 12.9, those countries are mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Afghanistan and a

Figure 12.8 Projected Increase in Median Age Between 2015 and 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d); based on the medium fertility projection.

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496 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

few of the smaller South Asian countries. Those places projected to have the highest percentages of the population living in urban areas include the countries in Europe, North America, most of Latin America, and Australia and New Zealand, along with the desert nations of western Asia (such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates).

Despite the increase in urbanization, few rural areas in the world are projected to decline in population; rather, they are projected to send their excess population to the cities. Throughout the developing world, the number of cities itself is rapidly growing, and the new and old cities alike are swelling with unprecedented num- bers of new inhabitants, often with grossly inadequate infrastructure and highly uncertain economic prospects for the residents. Here are yet more “challenges and opportunities.” Overall, though, the urban evolution is really the key to the future of human society, for good or evil, because it is within cities that new ideas are most often born and quickly diffused. These can be good or bad ideas, of course, but the urban environment assures their quick spread. It is not a coincidence that the amaz- ing societal changes taking place within the past 200 years have occurred at a time when the world has evolved from being primarily rural to primarily urban.

The Family and Household Evolution

Families and households will obviously also evolve in the wake of the previously discussed evolutions as we move toward the middle of this century. There are no projections of these characteristics out to 2050, but as a kind of a proxy in Figure 12.10, I have mapped the current average age at marriage for females in each country. This is a very good index of the status of women, of the number of children they will likely have, and of the overall level of modernity in their country.

Figure 12.9 Projected Percent of the Population Living in Urban Places in 2050 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013d).

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497Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

Women who never marry are not included in this calculation, but in general a higher fraction of women never marrying is correlated with a later age at marriage among those who do marry. We can anticipate that the lower the age at marriage, the more traditional the society, and the less diverse the family and household struc- tures. By contrast, the higher the age at marriage, the more options women (and men, as well) are apt to have in society, as they live longer with fewer children in an urban area with a higher standard of living. The picture is a familiar one, as you can see in Figure 12.10.

The highest ages at marriage are in northwestern Europe and Scandinavia. Sev- eral countries tie for the top at 32 years of age—Ireland, Norway, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. At the other extreme are three sub-Saharan African countries in which the average age at marriage is 18 years or less—Niger, Mali, and Chad, all former French colonies.

In the richer, aging nations, the very changes in family size and household structure that produced such a high fraction of older people has led also to the near disappearance of the traditional family structure that in earlier generations might have taken care of the elderly. The elderly in more developed nations will have fewer children to call upon for support. Furthermore, the trend toward equality in labor force participation among men and women means that there will be fewer daughters and daughters-in-law available to care for their aging parents, or their aged in-laws. Unfair or not, daughters typically bear the brunt of elder care. And, of course, the migration and urban evolutions mean that children are less likely than at any time in history to live near their parents. Most people age in place, and that place is not likely to be where their children are.

The increasing life expectancy among older people also means that by the time they get to the “Fourth Age,” as discussed in Chapter 8, when they may be in genuine need of assistance, their own children may already be moving into the

Figure 12.10 Average Age at Marriage Among Women (Latest Year Available) Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013a)

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498 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

“Third Age” and be less inclined or able to help because they too are growing old. Younger service providers will be the answer for many older people, probably paid for partly by government subsidies and partly by the older persons themselves, who are aging with unprecedentedly high levels of living (Gaymu et al. 2007).

So, we know that the world in 2050 will be more urban and populated by peo- ple with a longer life expectancy and a smaller expected number of children than prevail today. Also, you will recall from Chapter 10 that we can surmise from this likely combination of trends that families and households will continue to evolve toward greater diversity everywhere in the world. This portends social upheaval that will create intergenerational tension all over the world, as it did earlier in the richer countries, and so will almost certainly not happen without a struggle.

What Can Countries Do to Influence What Lies Ahead?

As you look around the world and consider the demographic change taking place everywhere, it is important to understand that countries are not operating in a vacuum—people have strategized about population growth for a long time. Indeed, that is why Malthus is still relevant. Nearly a hundred years after his death—and with numerous references to him—the very first World Population Conference was held in Geneva in 1927, organized by Margaret Sanger who, as I noted in Chapter 6, was a pioneer in the family-planning movement. In the aftermath of that conference, the early ideas about the demographic transition began to take shape, although global concern about population waned as the Great Depression of the 1930s led to a rapid decline in fertility in the more developed countries, and high mortality continued to constrain population growth in the less developed nations.

After the end of World War II it became evident that population growth was going to be back on the global agenda, and in 1954 the United Nations organized a World Population Conference in Rome—the conference generally credited with alerting the world community to the very high rates of growth in less-developed nations (Harkavy 1995). This was followed by subsequent conferences in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1965, after which the United Nations responded in 1969 with the cre- ation of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA—now known more simply as the United Nations Population Fund). The UNFPA coordinates a wide range of population-related activities around the world, primarily in developing countries. Additional World Population Conferences were organized by the United Nations in Bucharest, Romania, in 1974, Mexico City in 1984, and Cairo, Egypt, in 1994. The latter conference was officially known as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and it generated a “Programme of Action” that continues to guide international efforts to manage demographic change through- out the world, especially in rapidly growing, less developed nations.

The United Nations provides policy advice to nations regarding their demo- graphic trends, along with financial assistance to implement policy initiatives, and most nations now have a government agency devoted to gathering and analyzing population data and putting policies into action. These activities are often accom- plished with the help of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The value of

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499Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

NGOs is that they are not burdened by a government bureaucracy, and they have well-developed policy initiatives that can help set the agenda for a nation’s pop- ulation program. They also provide technical assistance that government person- nel might otherwise lack, and they can fund demonstration projects to convince government leaders of the value of population programs. In some cases NGOs are operating with their own philanthropic sources of money (e.g., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), but many NGOs (e.g., John Snow, Inc.) receive funding from governments of richer countries, including the United States.

The government of the United States has, in fact, played a key role in explicitly encouraging governments of developing nations to slow down their rate of popula- tion growth, and it has provided a great deal of money to establish and maintain family planning programs all over the world. Donaldson (1990) has chronicled the growing American consciousness from the 1940s through the 1960s that rapid pop- ulation growth in less developed nations might not be good either for those nations specifically or for the United States more generally.

When President Kennedy established the Agency for International Devel- opment (USAID) within the State Department in 1961, there was an early recogni- tion that population was an important factor in development. By 1967, Congress had earmarked USAID funds for the purpose of providing population assistance along with economic assistance. For the next 18 years, the United States played a crucial part in helping to slow down the rate of population growth in the world—an effort that may have reduced the world population by nearly half a billion people compared to the growth that would have occurred in its absence (Bongaarts et al. 1990). Even now, USAID remains one of the largest sources of international support for family planning programs, with most of the funding being provided to NGOs working in less developed nations. Other countries, especially Germany, Japan, and Norway, have also provided important sources of funding for these efforts.

Governments know that they do not have to “go it alone” when it comes to population policy and the United Nations regularly queries national governments about their plans for trying to influence fertility, mortality, and migration, in order to achieve national goals for improving the lives of their citizens. This is an impor- tant source of information because it helps demographers at the United Nations (and other institutions) make decisions about the possible future trends in demo- graphic change, given a government’s apparent commitment to a particular course of action. If a country currently has above replacement level fertility, but the gov- ernment is interested in actively working to lower fertility, we can infer that lower fertility may be more apt to lie ahead than if the government has no interest in policy interventions.

Figure 12.11 shows results from the 2013 round of questionnaires administered by the UN Population Division, in which governments were asked what their overall approach was with respect to population growth, with the possible answers being to lower it, raise it, maintain it, or to not intervene. They found that several countries in the world would like to raise their rate of growth, primarily through higher fertility. Prominent among these, as you can see from Figure 12.11, are nearly all the countries of eastern and southern Europe, with Russia being the most obvious. Outside of Europe we find that Japan and South Korea both would prefer to raise the rate of

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500 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

population growth, as would both Iran and Israel. Unique among Latin American nations, Uruguay would also like to raise its rate of growth (it currently has the lowest population growth rate of any country in the region). Unique among African countries is Gabon, which wants to raise its rate of growth despite already having a high birth rate and life expectancy that is well above the world average. It has a small population (less than 2 million), but large oil reserves may give the government some confidence that a larger population can be afforded, at least for a while.

Governments that seek to lower their rate of growth are heavily concentrated in Africa, western Asia, and south and southeast Asia, though several of the predomi- nantly indigenous countries of Latin America are also in this group. Included in this category of wanting slower growth are some of the world’s most populous nations, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, the Congo, and Indonesia.

Governments that seek to maintain the current rate of growth are typically those like China that have actively sought to lower the rate of population growth and wish to keep it that way, although some countries such as Saudi Arabia want to maintain their current fairly high rate of growth. Finally, the countries that do not seek to intervene in current trends include countries that have low rates of growth and expect them to stay that way without intervention (such as the United States and Canada), but also a few countries such as Somalia with high rates of growth that the government seems unconcerned about (partly because the government itself is weak).

Table 12.1 compares current governmental policies toward fertility with the estimated total fertility rate (TFR) in 2015. You can see that in 54 of 60 countries (90 percent) with a current TFR of three children or more, the government is seek- ing to lower the birth rate. Bolivia, Equatorial Guinea, and Kyrgyzstan all prefer to maintain their very high fertility; Cameroon and Somalia do not want to intervene with their very high fertility; and as noted above, the government of Gabon actually wants to increase its TFR above its current level of 4.1 children per woman.

Figure 12.11 Government Views of Appropriate Policy Toward Population Growth, as of 2013 Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013b)

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501Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

At the other extreme, the governments in a majority of countries with fertility that is currently at or below replacement would like to see fertility go up. Bahrain and Tunisia are the two countries that would like fertility to be even lower, although they are both right at replacement level. The other countries with currently low fer- tility are either seeking to maintain the birth rate where it is (e.g., China, as noted above with regard to overall policy), or the government is not planning to intervene (e.g., Canada and the United States).

The situation is a little more mixed in the group of countries that have above replacement level fertility that is still less than three children per woman. Slightly less than half of those countries are pursuing policies to lower the birth rate. India is one of them, and this is one reason why the United Nations projections (see Figure 12.5) suggest that the birth rate could fall there to replacement level by 2050. Obviously, the countries in this group that would like to raise their birth rates are among those whose overall population policy is to increase the rate of growth—Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Mongolia.

Summary and Conclusion

The early versions of demographic transition theory postulated that each country, and eventually the whole world, would pass through a period of rapid population growth due to the lag between the mortality and fertility declines. After that, popu- lation growth would stabilize and the problems would end. Not quite! We now realize that the world is vastly more complicated than that. The demographic tran- sition is not, in fact, a single set of relationships between mortality and fertility, but rather a far more complex suite of transitions—and evolutions.

We can be pretty sure that we are in for some rough times over the next few decades, as countries evolve demographically at different speeds and in somewhat different directions. Throughout this book, I have tried to help you build a demo- graphic perspective—a comprehension of how the causes of population change are related to the consequences—that will allow you to understand the future as it

Government fertility policy

TFR in 2015

2.1 or less 2.11–2.99 3 1 Total

Lower 2 19 54 75

Maintain 16 10 3 29

No intervention 13 7 2 22 Raise 45 4 1 50

Total 76 40 60 176

Source: Created by the author using data from United Nations Population Division (2013b)

Table 12.1 Government Policy Toward Fertility Levels Compared to Total Fertility Rates in 2015

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502 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

unfolds. This is one of the major uses of demographic science. It is a tool for compre- hending and shaping the future, for trying to improve the conditions, both social and material, of human existence. Throughout the previous 11 chapters, I have explored the ins and outs of demographic causes and consequences: how and why mortality, fertility, and migration change; how they affect the age and sex structure of society and the urban environment; how households and families change as a consequence of demographic shifts; and how population growth affects economic development, food resources, and our environmental sustainability. Implicit in all those discus- sions is the idea that knowing what has happened in the past and what is happening now will provide us with insights about the future, which is, of course, the first step toward advocating or promoting a local, regional, or global population policy, and toward managing your own personal demographic transitions and evolutions.

In the first chapter of this book I emphasized that the past is a “foreign country” because of all the changes that have taken place over time that have been related in one way or another to population growth and change. On the basis of what you now know about population change, you have the resources to make some reckon- ing of what the future may be and to recognize that the future will also be a foreign country. If what you see concerns you, then I have provided you with ideas about what can be done to cope with and even influence the population changes put into play by demographic transitions and evolutions all over the world. If what you see does not worry you, then perhaps you should reread the book.

Main Points

1. Projections of the population out to 2050 suggest that India will be the single biggest contributor to population growth, along with its neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh; as well as the African nations of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Congo, and Uganda.

2. The regions of the world projected to grow most quickly in terms of the rate of population growth, as opposed to total population size, are sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

3. In the middle of this century, all countries are expected to have lower fertility and higher life expectancies, but Europe and East Asia are projected still to have the lowest fertility and highest life expectancy, while sub-Saharan Africa will still have the highest fertility and lowest life expectancy.

4. Even as we increase life expectancy by lowering infant and child mortality, adults may become less healthy from obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other degenerative diseases associated with changing diet and exercise patterns.

5. We are fortunately on the road to important reductions in the impact of HIV/ AIDS on demographic trends.

6. We can anticipate that North America and Europe will absorb immigrants at the highest rates over the next few decades, and that the sending countries will continue to be developing nations, led numerically by Bangladesh, China, India, and Mexico.

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503Chapter 12 What Lies Ahead?

7. Internal migration will also be part of the evolution, with people heading to the cities of developing nations, where much of the future demographic evolutions will take place.

8. The demographically divided world in terms of the age evolution will persist, with Europe and East Asia aging most quickly, but with continued youth bulges projected for Africa and the Middle East.

9. An increasingly urban population characterized by lower fertility, lower mor- tality, and a higher status for women portends an evolution toward increasing family and household diversity throughout the world—though almost certainly not without protest.

10. The next time someone says that the population problem is “solved,” remind them that more than 200,000 people are added to the world’s population every 24 hours. That is the equivalent of nearly 500 full flights per day on a Boeing 747. Even if they are not landing near you, you will know about them soon enough.

Questions for Review

1. Describe the different demographic evolutions discussed in this chapter in terms of how each is related to the others. Why are these interrelationships important, and what do they tell us about what lies ahead?

2. Is it likely that policies aimed at raising birth rates would work in Europe (or Japan)? Why or why not?

3. Describe the kinds of changes that will have to occur within India in order for its birth rate to evolve to a level that is below replacement.

4. The United States is one of the countries reporting that there is no governmental policy to intervene with demographic trends. The United States nonetheless has what might be thought of as implicit population policies. Describe them and their likely impact on future demographic trends in the United States.

5. What do you believe will be the single most important demographic issue with which the world must cope over the next half century, and how do you think this issue should be dealt with?

Websites of Interest

1. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm Keep track of all the latest updates on population projections prepared regularly by the United Nations Population Division. You can view data online or download spreadsheets for your own analysis.

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504 Part Four Using the Demographic Perspective

2. http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/informationGateway.php The International Programs office of the U.S. Census Bureau also makes its own popula- tion projections for each country in the world. Compare these projections with those from the United Nations.

3. http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/research/r_populationdynamics.shtml Researchers at the Vienna Institute for Demography have a program of population projec- tions emphasizing probabilistic projections and multistate models. At this website you can search for more nuanced views of what might lie ahead.

4. http://www.unfpa.org/public/ The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) helps to coordinate population-related activities throughout the world.

5. http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/search/label/What%20Lies%20Ahead? Keep track of the latest news related to this chapter by visiting my WeeksPopulation website.

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505

GLOSSARY

This glossary contains words or terms that appeared in boldface type in the text. I have tried to include terms that are central to an understanding of the study of population. The chapter notation in parentheses refers to the chapter(s) in which the term is discussed in detail, not necessarily the first time it is used in the text.

abortion the induced or spontaneous premature expulsion of a fetus (Chapter 6).

abridged life table a life table (see definition) in which ages are grouped into categories (usually five-year age groupings) (Chapter 5).

accidental or unintentional death loss of life unrelated to disease but attributable to the physical, social, or economic environment (Chapter 5).

acculturation a process undergone by immigrants in which they adopt the host language, bring their diet more into line with the host culture’s diet, and participate in cultural activities of the host society (Chapter 7).

achieved characteristics those sociodemographic characteristics such as education, occupation, income, marital status, and labor force participation over which we have some degree of control (Chapter 10).

adaptation a process undergone by immigrants in which they adjust to the new physical and social environment of the host society (Chapter 7).

administrative data demographic information derived from administrative records, including tax returns, utility records, school enrollment, and participation in government programs (Chapter 4).

administrative records with respect to migra- tion, this refers to forms filled out for each person entering the U.S. from abroad that are then collected

and tabulated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigra- tion Service (Chapter 4).

age and sex structure the number (or percentage) of people in a population distributed by age and sex (Chapter 8).

age pyramid graph of the number (or percentage) of people in a population distributed by age and sex (Chapter 8).

age-sex-specific death rate (ASDR) the number of people of a given age and sex who died in a given year divided by the total (average midyear) number of people of that age and sex (Chapter 5).

age-specific fertility rate (ASFR) the number of children born to women of a given age divided by the total number of women that age (Chapter 6).

age stratification the assignment of social roles and social status on the basis of age (Chapter 8).

age structure the distribution of people in a popu- lation by age (Chapter 8).

age transition the shift from a predominantly younger to a predominantly older population as a society moves through the demographic transition (Chapters 3 and 8).

Agricultural Revolution change that took place roughly 10,000 years ago when humans first began to domesticate plants and animals, thereby making it easier to live in permanent settlements (Chapter 2).

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506 Glossary

Alzheimer’s disease a disease involving a change in the brain’s neurons, producing behavioral shifts; a major cause of organic brain disorder among older persons (Chapter 5).

amenorrhea temporary absence or suppression of menstruation (Chapter 6).

American Community Survey an ongoing “con- tinuous measurement” survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau to track the detailed population char- acteristics of every American community; designed to allow the long form to be dropped from the decennial census in 2010 (Chapter 4).

anovulatory pertaining to a menstrual cycle in which no ovum (egg) is released (Chapter 6).

antinatalist based on an ideological position that discourages childbearing (Chapters 3, 10 and 12).

applied demography see demographics (Chapter 1).

apportionment the use of census data to determine the number of seats in the U.S. Congress that will be allocated to each state (Chapter 4).

aquaculture farming fish (including shellfish); a steadily increasing source of fish for food (Chapter 11).

arable land that is suitable for agricultural pur- poses (Chapter 11).

ascribed characteristics sociodemographic charac- teristics such as sex or gender, race, and ethnicity that we are born with and over which we have essentially no control (Chapter 10).

assimilate what immigrants do as they not only accept the outer trappings of the host culture, but also assume the behaviors and attitudes of the host culture (Chapter 7).

asylee a person who has been forced out of his or her country of nationality and who is seeking legal refuge (permanent residency) in the country to which he or she has moved (Chapter 7).

baby boom the dramatic rise in the birth rate following World War II. In the United States it refers to people born between 1946 and 1964; in Canada it refers to people born between 1947 and 1966 (Chapter 6).

boomsters a nickname given to people who believe that population growth stimulates economic development (Chapter 11).

built environment the physical transformation of the physical and natural environment that humans

undertake in order to create a place where they can and want to live (Chapter 9).

capitalism an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth are maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, as contrasted to government owner- ship (Chapter 3).

carbon cycle that process through which carbons, central to life on the planet, are exchanged between living organisms and inanimate matter (Chapter 11).

cardiovascular disease a disease of the heart or blood vessels (Chapter 5).

carrying capacity the size of population that could theoretically be maintained indefinitely at a given level of living with a given type of economic system (Chapters 2 and 11).

census metropolitan area (CMA) metropolitan areas as defined in Canada, including a core urban area of at least 100,000 and adjacent urban and rural areas that have a high degree of economic and social inte- gration with that core urban area (Chapter 9).

census of population an official enumeration of an entire population, usually with details as to age, sex, occupation, and other population character- istics; defined by the United Nations as “the total process of collecting, compiling and publishing demographic, economic and social data pertaining, at a specified time or times, to all persons in a coun- try or delimited territory” (Chapter 4).

chain migration the process whereby migrants are part of an established flow from a common origin to a prepared destination where others have previously migrated (Chapter 7).

checks to growth factors that, according to Malthus, keep population from growing in size, including positive checks and preventive checks (Chapter 3).

child control the practice of controlling family size after the birth of children (postnatally), through the mechanisms of infanticide, fosterage, and orphanage (Chapter 6).

child–woman ratio a census-based measure of fertility, calculated as the ratio of children aged 0–4 to the number of women aged 15–49 (Chapter 6).

children ever born (CEB) births to date for a particular cohort of women at a particular point in time (Chapter 6).

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507Glossary

co-ethnic a person who shares your ethnic heritage (Chapter 7).

cohabitation the sharing of a household by unmarried people who have a sexual relationship (Chapter 10).

cohort people who share something in common; in demography, this is most often the year (or grouped years) of birth (Chapters 3 and 6).

cohort component method of population projection a population projection made by applying age- specific survival rates, age-specific fertility rates, and agespecific measures of migration to the base year population in order to project the population to the target year (Chapter 8).

cohort flow the movement through time of a group of people born in the same year (Chapter 8).

cohort measures of fertility following the fertility of groups of women as they proceed through their childbearing years (Chapter 6).

Columbian Exchange the exchange of food, prod- ucts, people, and diseases between Europe and the Americas as a result of explorations by Columbus and others (Chapters 3 and 5).

communicable disease (also called infectious dis- ease) a disease capable of being communicated or transmitted from person to person (Chapter 5).

completed fertility rate (CFR) the cohort measure of fertility, calculated as the number of children ever born to women who have reached the end of their reproductive career (Chapter 6).

components of change or residual method of migration estimation a method of measuring net migration between two dates by comparing the estimate of total population with that which would have resulted solely from the components of birth and death, with the residual attributable to migration (Chapter 7).

components of growth a method of estimating and/ or projecting population size by adding births, sub- tracting deaths, and adding net migration occurring in an interval of time, then adding the result to the popu- lation at the beginning of the interval (Chapter 8).

condom See male condom (Chapter 6).

consolidated metropolitan statistical areas (CMSAs) groupings of the very largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States (Chapter 9).

content error an inaccuracy in the data obtained in a census; possibly an error in reporting, editing, or tabulating (Chapter 4).

contraception the prevention of conception or impregnation by any of various techniques or devices (Chapter 6).

contraceptive device mechanical or chemical means of preventing conception (Chapter 6).

contraceptive prevalence the percentage of “at risk” women of reproductive age (15 to 44 or 15 to 49) who are using a method of contraception (Chapter 6).

Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) a method for identifying metropolitan areas adopted by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in 2000 and implemented by the U.S. Census Bureau in connec- tion with Census 2000 data (Chapter 9).

core-periphery model a model of city systems in which the primate city (the core) controls the resources, and the smaller cities (the periphery) depend on the larger city (Chapter 9).

cornucopians “boomsters” who believe that we can always grow enough food to feed whatever size population we have (Chapter 11).

coverage error the combination of undercount (the percentage of a particular group or total population that is inadvertently not counted in a census) and overcount (people who are counted more than once in the census) (Chapter 4).

crowding the gathering of a large number of peo- ple closely together; the number of people per space per unit of time (Chapter 9).

crude birth rate (CBR) the number of births in a given year divided by the total midyear population in that year (Chapter 6).

crude death rate (CDR) the number of deaths in a given year divided by the total midyear population in that year (Chapter 5).

crude net migration rate (CNMR) a measure of migration calculated as the number of in-migrants minus the number of out-migrants divided by the total midyear population (Chapter 7).

cumulated cohort fertility rate (CCFR) see children ever born (Chapter 6).

de facto population the people actually in a given territory on the census day (Chapter 4).

de jure population the people who legally “belong” in a given area whether or not they are there on cen- sus day (Chapter 4).

degeneration the biological deterioration of a body (Chapter 5).

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508 Glossary

demographic analysis (DA) a method of evaluating the accuracy of a census by estimating the demographic components of change since the previous census and comparing it with the new census count (Chapter 4).

demographic balancing equation the formula that shows that the population at time 2 is equal to the population at time 1, plus the births between time 1 and 2, minus the deaths between time 1 and 2, plus the in-migrants between time 1 and 2, minus the out-migrants between time 1 and 2 (Chapter 4).

demographic change and response the theory that the response made by individuals to population pres- sures is determined by the means available to them (Chapter 3).

demographic characteristics see population charac- teristics (Chapter 10).

demographic metabolism the ongoing replacement of people at each age in every society (Chapter 3).

demographic overhead the general cost of adding people to a population caused by the necessity of providing goods and services (Chapter 11).

demographic perspective a way of relating basic information to theories about how the world oper- ates demographically (Chapter 3).

demographic processes see population processes (Chapter 1).

demographic transition the process whereby a country moves from high birth and high death rates to low birth and low death rates with an interstitial spurt in population growth, accompanied by a set of other transitions, including the migration transi- tion, age transition, urban transition, and family and household transition (Chapter 3).

demographics the application of demographic sci- ence to practical problems; any applied use of popu- lation statistics (Chapter 4).

demography the scientific study of human popula- tions (Chapter 1).

density the ratio of people to physical space (Chapter 9).

dependency ratio the ratio of people of dependent age (usually considered to be 0–14 and 651) to peo- ple of economically active ages (15–64) (Chapter 8).

diaphragm a barrier method of fertility control— a thin, dome-shaped device, usually of rubber, inserted in the vagina and worn over the uterine cer- vix to prevent conception during sexual intercourse (Chapter 6).

differential undercount the situation that occurs in a census when some groups of people are more likely to be underenumerated than other groups (Chapter 4).

disability-adjusted life year (DALY) a summary measure of the burden of disease that incorporates the number of years of life lost to a premature death plus the number of unhealthy years lived because of a specific cause of death (Chapter 5).

doctrine a principle laid down as true and beyond dispute (Chapter 3).

donor area the area from which migrants come (Chapter 7).

doomster a nickname given to people who believe that population growth retards economic develop- ment (Chapter 11).

doubling time the number of years required for a population to double in number if the current rate of growth continues (Chapter 2).

douche (as a contraceptive) washing of the vagi- nal area after intercourse to prevent conception (Chapter 6).

drought a prolonged period of less-than-average rainfall (Chapter 11).

dual-system estimation (DSE) a method of evaluat- ing a census by comparing respondents in the census with respondents in a carefully selected postenu- meration survey or through a matching with other records (Chapter 4).

Easterlin relative cohort size hypothesis the per- spective that fertility is influenced less by absolute levels of income than by relative levels of well-being produced by generational changes in cohort size (Chapter 3).

ecological footprint the total area of productive land and water required to produce the resources for and assimilate the waste from a given population (Chapter 11).

economic development a rise in the average stan- dard of living associated with economic growth; a rise in per capita income (Chapter 11).

economic growth an increase in the total amount of income produced by a nation or region without regard to the total number of people (Chapter 11).

ecosystem communities of species interacting with one another and with the inanimate world (Chapter 11).

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509Glossary

edge cities cities that have been created in suburban, often unincorporated, areas and that replicate most of the functions of the older central city (Chapter 9).

emergency contraception (postcoital contracep- tion) a means of averting pregnancy within a few days after intercourse, usually by taking a large dosage of the same hormones contained in the contraceptive pill (“Plan B”), or using the Copper- T Intrauterine Device (IUD) (see also intrauterine device) (Chapter 6).

emigrant a person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another; an international out- migrant (Chapter 7).

enclave a place within a larger community within which members of a particular subgroup tend to concentrate (Chapter 7).

endogenous factors those things that are within the scope of (internal to) one’s own control (Chapter 6).

epidemiologic transition the pattern of long-term shifts in health and disease patterns as mortality moves from high levels (dominated by death at young ages from communicable diseases) to low levels (dominated by death at older ages from degenerative diseases)— part of the health and mortality transition (Chapter 5).

ethnic group a group of people of the same race or nationality who share a common and distinctive cul- ture while living within a larger society (Chapter 10).

ethnicity the ancestral origins of a particular group, typically manifested in certain kinds of atti- tudes and behaviors (Chapter 10).

ethnocentric characterized by a belief in the inher- ent superiority of one’s own group and culture accompanied by a feeling of contempt for other groups and cultures (Chapter 3).

exclusion dealing with immigrants to an area by keeping them separate from most members of the host society, forcing them into separate enclaves or ghettos (Chapter 7).

exogenous factors those things that are beyond the control of (external to) the average person (Chapter 6).

expectation of life at birth see life expectancy (Chapter 5).

extended family family members beyond the nuclear family (Chapter 10).

extensification of agriculture increasing agricul- tural output by putting more land into production (Chapter 11).

exurbs nonrural population beyond the suburbs (Chapter 9).

family a group of people who are related to each other by birth, marriage, or adoption (Chapter 10).

family and household transition the shift in fam- ily and household structure occasioned in societies by people living longer, with fewer children born, increasingly in urban settings, and subject to higher standards of living, all as part of the demographic transition (Chapters 3 and 10).

family control ways of limiting family size after the birth of children (Chapter 6).

family demography the study and analysis of fam- ily households: their formation, their change over time, and their dissolution (Chapter 10).

family household a household in which the house- holder is living with one or more persons related to her or him by birth, marriage, or adoption (Chapter 10).

famine food shortage accompanied by a significant increase in deaths (Chapter 11).

fecundity the physical capacity to reproduce (Chapter 6).

female genital mutilation (FGM) sometimes known as female circumcision, which typically involves removing a woman’s clitoris, thus lessening her enjoyment of sexual intercourse (Chapter 6).

fertility reproductive performance rather than the mere capacity to reproduce; one of the three basic demographic processes (Chapter 6).

fertility differential a variable in which people show clear differences in fertility according to their categorization by that variable (Chapter 6).

fertility rate see general fertility rate (Chapter 6).

fertility transition the shift from “natural” fertil- ity (high levels of fertility) to fertility limitation (low levels of fertility) (Chapters 3 and 6).

food security a term meaning that people have physical and economic access to the basic food they need in order to work and function normally (Chapter 11).

force of mortality the factors that prevent people from living to their biological maximum age (Chapter 5).

forced migrant someone who has been forced to leave his or her home because of a real or perceived threat to life and well-being (Chapter 7).

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510 Glossary

forward survival (or residual) method of migration estimation a method of estimating migration between two censuses by combining census data with life table probabilities of survival between the two censuses (Chapter 7).

fosterage the practice of placing an “excess” child in someone else’s home (Chapter 6).

gender role a social role considered appropriate for males or females (Chapter 10).

general fertility rate the total number of births in a year divided by the total midyear number of women of childbearing age (Chapter 6).

generational replacement a net reproduction rate of one, which indicates that each generation of females has the potential to just replace itself (Chapter 6).

gentrification restoration and habitation of older homes in central city areas by urban or suburban elites (Chapter 9).

geodemographics analysis of demographic data that have been georeferenced to specific locations (Chapter 4).

geographic information system (GIS) computer- based system that allows the user to combine maps with data that refer to particular places on those maps and then to analyze those data and display the results as thematic maps or some other graphic for- mat (Chapter 4).

georeferenced a piece of information that includes some form of geographic identification such as pre- cise latitude-longitude coordinates, a street address, ZIP code, census tract, county, state, or country (Chapter 4).

global warming an increase in the global tem- perature caused by a buildup of greenhouse gases (Chapter 11).

Great Migration describes the phenomenon of white and black migrants moving from southern states to northeastern and north central states between World War I and the 1960s (Chapter 7).

Green Revolution an improvement in agricul- tural production begun in the 1940s based on high- yield variety strains of grain and increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation (Chapter 11).

greenhouse gases those atmospheric gases (espe- cially carbon dioxide and water) that trap radiated heat from the sun and warm the surface of the earth (Chapter 11).

gross domestic product (GDP) the total value of goods and services produced within the geographic boundaries of a nation in a given year, without refer- ence to international trade (Chapter 11).

gross national income (GNI) the most commonly used index of a nation’s income, defined by the World Bank as the sum of value added by all resident producers plus any product taxes (less subsidies) not included in the valuation of output plus net receipts of primary income (compensation of employees and property income) from abroad Chapter 11).

gross national income in PPP (GNI PPP) gross national income expressed in terms of purchasing power parity (rather than the official exchange rates) (Chapter 11).

gross national product (GNP) the total output of goods and services produced by a country, including income earned from abroad (Chapter 11).

gross (or crude) rate of in-migration the total num- ber of in-migrants divided by the total midyear pop- ulation in the area of destination (Chapter 7).

gross (or crude) rate of out-migration the total number of out-migrants divided by the total midyear population in the area of origin (Chapter 7).

gross reproduction rate (GRR) the total fertility rate multiplied by the proportion of all births that are girls. It is generally interpreted as the number of female children that a female just born may expect to have in her lifetime, assuming that birth rates stay the same and ignoring her chances of survival through her reproductive years (Chapter 6).

health and mortality transition the shift from deaths at younger ages due to communicable dis- eases to deaths at older ages due to degenerative dis- eases (Chapters 3 and 5).

high growth potential the first stage in the demo- graphic transition, in which a population has a pat- tern of high birth and death rates (Chapter 3).

high-yield varieties (HYV) dwarf types of grains that have shorter stems and produce more stalks than most traditional varieties (Chapter 11).

historical data data derived from sources such as early censuses, genealogies, family reconstitution, grave sites, and archaeological findings (Chapter 4).

homeostasis population stability, meaning that the birth and death rates are equal and the age structure is unchanging (Chapter 3).

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511Glossary

host area the destination area of migrants; the area into which they migrate (Chapter 7).

household all of the people who occupy a housing unit (Chapter 10).

householder the person in whose name the house is owned or rented (sometimes called the head of household) (Chapter 10).

housing unit a house, apartment, mobile home or trailer, group of rooms (or even a single room if occupied as a separate living quarters) intended for occupancy as a separate living quarters (Chapter 10).

human capital investments in individuals that can improve their economic productivity and thus their overall standard of living; including things such as education and job-training, and often enhanced by migration (Chapters 7 and 10).

human resources a complement to natural resources and defined as the application of human ingenuity to convert natural resources to uses not originally intended by nature (Chapter 11).

hydrologic cycle the water cycle by which ocean and land water evaporates into the air, is condensed, and then returns to the ground as precipitation (Chapter 11).

illegal (undocumented) immigrants immigrants who lack government permission to reside in the country to which they have moved (Chapter 7).

immigrant a person who moves into a country of which he or she is not a native for the purpose of taking up permanent residence—an international inmigrant (Chapter 7).

impact (IPAT) equation a formula developed by Paul Ehrlich and associates to express the rela- tionship between population growth, affluence, and technology and their impact on the environ- ment: Impact (I) 5 Population (P) 3 Affluence (A) 3 Technology (T) (Chapter 11).

impaired fecundity a reduced ability to reproduce, defined as a woman who believes that it is impos- sible for her to have a baby; or a physician has told her not to become pregnant because the preg- nancy would pose a health risk for her or her baby; or she has been continuously married for at least 36 months, has not used contraception, and yet has not gotten pregnant (Chapter 6).

implementing strategy a possible means (such as migration) whereby a goal (such as an improvement in income) might be attained (Chapter 7).

incipient decline the third (final) stage in the demographic transition when a country has moved from having a very high rate of natural increase to having a very low (possibly negative) rate of increase (Chapter 3).

infant mortality death during the first year of life (Chapter 5).

infant mortality rate the number of deaths to infants under one year of age divided by the number of live births in that year (and usually multiplied by 1,000) (Chapter 5).

infanticide the deliberate killing or abandonment of an infant; a method of “family control” in many premodern and some modern societies (Chapter 6).

infecundity the inability to produce offspring, synonymous with sterility (Chapter 6).

in-migrant a person who migrates permanently into an area from somewhere else. This term usu- ally refers to an internal migrant; an international inmigrant is an immigrant (Chapter 7).

integration incorporating immigrants into the receiving society through the mechanism of mutual accommodation (Chapter 7).

intensification of agriculture the process of increasing crop yield by any means—mechanical, chemical, or otherwise (Chapter 11).

intercensal the period between the taking of cen- suses (Chapter 4).

intermediate variables means for regulating fertility; the variables through which any social fac- tors influencing the level of fertility must operate (Chapter 6).

internal migration permanent change in residence within national boundaries (Chapter 7).

internally displaced person (IDP) a person who is forced to flee from home but seeks refuge elsewhere in the country of origin (Chapter 7).

international migration permanent change of residence involving movement from one country to another (Chapter 7).

intervening obstacles factors that may inhibit migration even if a person is motivated to migrate (Chapter 7).

intrauterine device (IUD) any small, mechanical device for semipermanent insertion in the uterus as a contraceptive (Chapter 6).

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512 Glossary

investment demographics basing investment deci- sions at least partly on the analysis of projected pop- ulation changes (Chapter 1).

legal immigrants immigrants who have legal per- mission to be permanent residents of the country to which they have moved (Chapter 7).

life chances the probability of having a particular set of demographic characteristics, such as having a high-prestige job, lots of money, a stable marriage or not marrying at all, a small family or no family at all (Chapter 10).

life course perspective the idea that people’s live are embedded in specific times and places and that people are influenced throughout their life by events shared by other members of their age cohort (Chapter 10).

life expectancy the average duration of life beyond a specific age, of people who have attained that age, calculated from a life table (Chapter 5).

life span the oldest age to which an organism or species may live (Chapter 5).

life table an actuarial table showing the number of people who die at any given age, from which life expectancy is calculated (Chapter 5).

lifeboat ethic the population policy perspective that suggests that health assistance should only be offered to countries that have a reasonable chance of success in limiting population growth (Chapter 12).

long-term immigrant an international migrant whose stay in the place of destination is more than one year (Chapter 7).

longevity the ability to resist death, measured as the average age at death (Chapter 5).

male condom a thin sheath, usually of rubber, worn over the penis during sexual intercourse to prevent conception or venereal disease (Chapter 6).

Malthusian pertaining to the theories of Malthus, which state that population tends to increase at a geometric rate, while the means of subsistence increase at an arithmetic rate, resulting in an inad- equate supply of the goods supporting life, unless a catastrophe occurs to reduce (check) the population or the increase of population is checked by sexual restraint (Chapter 3).

marital status the state of being single, married, separated, divorced, widowed, or living in a consen- sual union (cohabiting) (Chapter 10).

marriage squeeze an imbalance between the num- bers of males and females in the prime marriage ages (Chapter 10).

Marxian pertaining to the theories of Karl Marx, which reject Malthusian theory and argue instead that each society at each point in history has its own law of population that determines the consequences of population growth (Chapter 3).

maternal mortality the death of a woman as a result of pregnancy or childbearing (Chapter 5).

maternal mortality ratio (MMR) the number of deaths to women due to pregnancy and childbirth divided by the number of live births in a given year (and usually multiplied by 100,000) (Chapter 5).

mean length of generation the average age at child- bearing (Chapter 6).

means of subsistence the amount of resources (espe- cially food) available to a population (Chapter 3).

mega-city a term used by the United Nations to denote any urban agglomeration with more than 10 million people (Chapter 9).

megalopolis see urban agglomeration (Chapter 9). menarche the onset of menstruation, usually occur- ring when a woman is in her teens (Chapter 6).

menopause the time when menstruation ceases permanently, usually between the ages of 45 and 50 (Chapter 6).

mercantilism the view that a nation’s wealth depended on its store of precious metals and that generating this kind of wealth was facilitated by population growth (Chapter 3).

metropolitan area an urban place extending beyond a core city; in the United States this refers to a core- based statistical area with at least 50,000 people (Chapter 9).

micropolitan area in the United States this is a core-based statistical area with at least 10,000 peo- ple, but less than 50,000 (Chapter 9).

migrant a person who makes a permanent change of residence substantial enough in distance to involve a shift in that individual’s round of social activities (Chapter 7).

migrant stock the number of people in a region who have migrated there from somewhere else (Chapter 7).

migration the process of permanently changing residence from one geographic location to another;

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513Glossary

one of the three basic demographic processes (Chapter 7).

migration effectiveness the crude net migration rate divided by the total migration rate (Chapter 7).

migration evolution the current state of migration, with the population largely urban-based and people moving between and within urban places (Chapter 7).

migration flow the movement of people between regions (Chapter 7).

migration ratio the ratio of the net number of migrants (in-migrants minus out-migrants) to the difference between the number of births and deaths—measuring the contribution that migration makes to overall population growth (Chapter 7).

migration transition the shift of people from rural to urban places (see urban transition), and the shift to higher levels of international migration (Chapters 2, 3, and 7).

migration turnover rate the total migration rate divided by the crude net migration rate (Chapter 7).

mobility geographic movement that is either not permanent, or is of sufficiently short distance that it is not considered to be migration (Chapter 7).

modernization the process of societal development involving urbanization, industrialization, rising stan- dards of living, better education, and improved health that is typically associated with a “Western” lifestyle and worldview and was the basis for early explana- tions of the demographic transition (Chapter 3).

momentum of population growth the poten- tial for a future increase in population size that is inherent in any present age and sex structure even if fertility levels were to drop to replacement level (Chapter 8).

moral restraint according to Malthus, the avoid- ance of sexual intercourse prior to marriage and the delay of marriage until a man can afford all the children his wife might bear; a desirable preventive check on population growth (Chapter 3).

morbidity the prevalence of disease in a population (Chapter 5).

mortality deaths in a population; one of the three basic demographic processes (Chapter 5).

mortality transition the shift from deaths at younger ages due to communicable diseases to deaths at older ages due to degenerative diseases (Chapter 5).

mover a person who moves within the same county and thus, according to the U.S. Census Bureau defi- nitions, has not moved far enough to become a migrant (Chapter 7).

multiculturalism incorporating immigrants into a host society in a manner that allows the immigrants to retain their ethnic communities but share the same legal rights as other members of the host soci- ety (Chapter 7).

natural fertility fertility levels that exist in the absence of deliberate, or at least modern, fertility control (Chapter 6).

natural increase the excess of births over deaths; the difference between the crude birth rate and the crude death rate is the rate of natural increase (Chapter 2).

natural resources those resources available to us on the planet (Chapter 11).

Neolithic Agrarian Revolution see Agricultural Revolution (Chapter 2).

Neolithic Demographic Transition the increase in fertility, not quite matched by an increase in mortal- ity, that occurred as societies settled into agriculture and which led to an increase in population growth as a result of the Agricultural Revolution (Chapter 2).

neo-Malthusian a person who accepts the basic Malthusian premise that population growth tends to outstrip resources, but (unlike Malthus) believes that birth control measures are appropriate checks to population growth (Chapter 3).

neo-Marxist a person who accepts the basic prin- ciple of Marx that societal problems are created by an unjust and inequitable distribution of resources of any and all kinds, without necessarily believing that communism is the answer to those problems (Chapter 11).

net census undercount the difference between the undercount and the overcount (Chapter 4).

net migration the difference between those who move in and those who move out of a particular region in a given period of time (Chapter 7).

net reproduction rate (NRR) a measure of genera- tional replacement; specifically, the average number of female children that will be born to the female babies who were themselves born in a given year, assuming no change in the age-specific fertility and mortality rates and ignoring the effect of migration (Chapter 6).

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514 Glossary

noncommunicable disease disease that continues for a long time or recurs frequently (as opposed to acute)— often associated with degeneration (Chapter 5).

nonfamily household one that includes people who live alone, or with nonfamily coresidents (friends living together, a single householder who rents out rooms, etc.) (Chapter 10).

non-governmental organizations (NGOs) private social service agencies that work to implement specific social policies (Chapter 12).

nonsampling error an error that occurs in the enu- meration process as a result of missing people who should be counted, counting people more than once, respondents providing inaccurate information, or recording or processing information inaccurately (Chapter 4).

nuclear family at least one parent and his/her/their children (Chapter 10).

nutrition transition a predictable shift in diet that accompanies the stages of the health and mortality transition (Chapters 5 and 11).

opportunity costs with respect to fertility, the things foregone in order to have children (Chapter 6).

optimum population the number of people that would provide the best balance of people and resources for a desired standard of living (Chapter 11).

oral contraceptives popularly known as “the pill,” a compound of synthetic hormones that suppress ovulation by keeping the estrogen level high in a female (Chapter 6).

oral rehydration therapy an inexpensive glucose and electrolyte solution that is very effective in con- trolling diarrhea, especially among young children (Chapter 5).

orphanage the practice of abandoning children in such a way that they are likely to be cared for by strangers (Chapter 6).

out-migrant a person who permanently leaves an area and migrates someplace else. This term usually refers to internal migration, whereas emigrant refers to an international migrant (Chapter 7).

overpopulation a situation in which the population has overshot a region’s carrying capacity (Chapter 11).

overshoot exceeding a region’s carrying capacity (Chapter 11).

parity progression ratio the proportion of women with a given number of children (parity refers to

how many children have already been born) who “progress” to having another child (Chapter 6).

per capita (per person) income a common measure of average income, calculated by dividing the total value of goods and services produced (GNP or GDP or PPP) by the total population size (Chapter 11).

period data population data that refer to a particu- lar year and represent a cross section of population at one specific time (Chapter 6).

period rates rates referring to a specific, limited pe- riod of time, usually one year (Chapter 6).

peri-urban region the periphery of the urban zone that looks rural to the naked eye but houses people who are essentially urban (Chapter 9).

physiocratic the philosophy that the real wealth of a nation is in the land, not in the number of people (Chapter 3).

planned obsolescence theories of aging based on the idea that each person has a built-in programmed biolog- ical time clock; barring death from accidents or disease, cells still die because each is programmed to reproduce itself only a fixed number of times (Chapter 5).

population (or demographic) characteristics those demographic traits or qualities that differentiate one individual or group from another, including age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, occupation, edu- cation, income, wealth, and urban-rural residence (Chapters 1 through 10).

population distribution where people are located and why (Chapters 1, 2, 7 and 9).

population explosion a popular term referring to a rapid increase in the size of the world’s population, espe- cially the increase since World War II (Chapters 2 and 3).

population forecast a statement about what you expect the future population to be; distinguished from a projection, which is a statement about what the future population could be under a given set of assumptions (Chapter 8).

population growth or decline how the number of people in a particular place is changing over time (Chapter 1).

population implosion a popular term referring (somewhat misleadingly) to the end of the popula- tion explosion, but more generally meaning a decline in population size (Chapter 2).

population momentum see momentum of popula- tion growth (Chapter 8).

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515Glossary

population policy a formalized set of procedures designed to achieve a particular pattern of popula- tion change (Chapter 12).

population processes fertility, mortality, and migration; the dynamic elements of demographic analysis (Chapter 1).

population projection the calculation of the num- ber of people we can expect to be alive at a future date, given the number now alive and given reason- able assumptions about age-specific mortality and fertility rates and migration (Chapter 8).

population pyramid see age pyramid (Chapter 8).

population register a list of all people in a country on which are recorded all vital events for each indi- vidual, typically birth, death, marriage, divorce, and change of residence (Chapter 4).

population size how many people are in a given place (Chapter 1).

population structure how many males and females there are of each age (Chapter 1).

positive checks a term used by Malthus to refer to factors (essentially mortality) that limit the size of human populations by “weakening” or “destroying the human frame” (Chapter 3).

postpartum following childbirth (Chapter 6).

post-transitional describes an era in a country after a transition when things stabilize demographically (Chapter 3).

poverty index a measure of need that in the United States is based on the premise that one third of a poor family’s income is spent on food; then calcu- lated as the cost of an economy food plan multiplied by three. Since 1964, it has increased at the same rate as the consumer price index (Chapter 10).

preconditions for a substantial fertility decline Ansley Coale’s theory as to how an individual would have to perceive the world on a daily basis if fertility were to be consciously limited (Chapter 6).

preventive checks in Malthus’s writings, any lim- its to birth, among which Malthus himself preferred moral restraint (Chapter 3).

primary metropolitan statistical area (PMSA) MSA within a CMSA (Chapter 9).

primate city a disproportionately large leading city (Chapter 9).

principle of population the Malthusian theory that human population increases geometrically whereas

the available food supply increases only arithmeti- cally, leading constantly to “misery” (Chapter 3).

pronatalist an attitude, doctrine, or policy that favors a high birth rate; also known as “population- ist” (Chapters 3, 7 and 12).

proximate determinants of fertility a renaming of the intermediate variables (defined previously) with an emphasis on age at entry into marriage and pro- portions married, use of contraception, use of abor- tion, and prevalence of breast-feeding (Chapter 6).

prudential restraint a Malthusian concept referring to delaying marriage without necessarily avoiding premarital intercourse (Chapter 3).

Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data a ran- dom sample of individual census records that have been stripped of personally identifying information (Chapter 4).

purchasing power parity (PPP) a refinement of GDP that is defined as the number of units of a coun- try’s currency required to buy the same amounts of goods and services in the domestic market as one dollar would buy in the United States (Chapter 11).

push–pull theory a theory of migration that says some people move because they are pushed out of their former location, whereas others move because they have been pulled, or attracted, to another loca- tion (Chapter 7).

race a group of people characterized by a more or less distinctive combination of inheritable physical traits (Chapter 10).

racial stratification a socially constructed system that characterizes one or more groups as being dis- tinctly different (Chapter 10).

radix the initial hypothetical group of 100,000 babies that is used as a starting point for life table calculations (Chapter 5).

rank–size rule a hypothesis derived from studies of city–systems that says that the population size of a given city in a country will be approximately equal to the population of the largest city divided by the city’s rank in the city-system (Chapter 9).

rational choice theory any theory based on the idea that human behavior is the result of individuals making calculated cost–benefit analyses about how to act (Chapter 3).

rectangularization refers to the process whereby the continuing decline in death rates at older ages means that the proportion of people surviving to

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516 Glossary

any given age begins to square off at the oldest ages, rather than dropping off smoothly over all ages (Chapter 5).

redistricting spatially redefining U.S. congressional districts (geographic areas) represented by each seat in Congress (Chapter 4).

refugee a person who has been forced out of his or her country of nationality (Chapter 7).

religious pluralism the existence of two or more religious groups side by side in society without one group dominating the other (Chapter 10).

religiosity the strength with which one adheres to religious beliefs (Chapter 10).

remittances money sent by migrants back to family members in their country of origin (Chapter 7).

residential mobility the process of changing resi- dence over a short or a long distance (Chapter 7).

rural of, or pertaining to, the countryside. Rural populations are generally defined as those that are nonurban in character (Chapter 9).

sample surveys a method of collecting data by obtaining information from a sample of the total pop- ulation, rather than by a complete census (Chapter 4).

sampling error error that occurs in sampling due to the fact that a sample is rarely identical in every way to the population from which it was drawn (Chapter 4).

secularization a spirit of autonomy from other worldly powers; a sense of responsibility for one’s own well-being (Chapter 3).

segmented assimilation a situation in which the children of immigrants either adopt the host lan- guage and behavior, but are prevented from fully participating in society by their identification with a racial/ethnic minority group, or assimilate eco- nomically in the new society, but retain strong attachments to their own ethnic/racial group (Chapter 7).

senescence a decline in physical viability accompa- nied by a rise in vulnerability to disease (Chapter 5).

sex ratio the number of males per the number of females in a population (usually multiplied by 100 to get rid of the decimal point) (Chapter 8).

sex structure see age and sex structure (Chapter 8).

social capillarity Arsène Dumont’s term for the desire of a person to rise on the social scale to increase one’s individuality as well as one’s personal wealth (Chapter 3).

social capital the network of family, friends, and acquaintances that increases a person’s chances of success in life (Chapters 7 and 10).

social institutions sets of procedures (norms, laws, etc.) that organize behavior in society in fairly pre- dictable and ongoing ways (Chapter 3).

social roles the set of obligations and expectations that characterize a particular position within society (Chapter 8).

social status relative position or standing in society (Chapter 8).

socialism an economic system whereby the com- munity as a whole (i.e., the government) owns the means of production; a social system that minimizes social stratification (Chapter 3).

socialization the process of learning the behavior appropriate to particular social roles (Chapter 8).

sojourner an international mover seeking paid employment in another country but never really set- ting up a permanent residence in the new location (Chapter 7).

spatial autocorrelation the concept that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things, based on Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography (Chapter 4).

spatial demography any analysis of population data that takes location into account by using geore- ferenced information (Chapter 3 and 4).

stable population a population in which the per- centage of people at each age and sex eventually sta- bilizes (no longer changes) because age-specific rates of fertility, mortality, and migration remain constant over a long period of time (Chapter 8).

standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA) a term used by the U.S. Census Bureau to define a county or group of contiguous counties that contain at least one city of 50,000 inhabitants or more and any contiguous counties that are socially and eco- nomically integrated with the central city or cities (Chapter 9).

standardization a method to calculate age-specific death rates for two different populations and then apply those rates to a standard population (Chapter 5).

stationary population a type of stable population in which the birth rate equals the death rate, so that the number of people remains the same, as does the age/sex distribution (Chapter 8).

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517Glossary

step migration the process whereby a migrant moves in stages progressively farther away from his or her place of origin (Chapter 7).

sterilization the process (either voluntarily— surgically—or involuntarily) of rendering a person permanently incapable of reproducing (Chapter 6).

structural mobility the situation in which most, if not all, people in an entire society experience an improvement in living levels, even though some peo- ple may be improving faster than others (Chapter 10).

subfecundity see impaired fecundity (Chapter 6).

suburban pertaining to populations in low-density areas close to and integrated with central cities (Chapter 9).

suburbanize to become suburban—a city subur- banizes by growing in its outer rings (Chapter 9).

supply-demand framework a version of neoclas- sical economics in which it is assumed that couples attempt to maintain a balance between the poten- tial supply of and demand for children, taking into account the costs of fertility regulation (Chapter 6).

surgical contraception permanent methods of con- traception, including tubal ligation for women and vasectomy for men (Chapter 6).

sustainable development defined by the Brundtland Commission as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the abil- ity of future generations to meet their own needs” (Chapter 11).

synthetic cohort a measurement obtained by treat- ing period data as though they represented a cohort (Chapter 6).

theory a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain a set of phenomena (Chapter 3).

total fertility rate (TFR) a synthetic cohort esti- mate of the average number of children who would be born to each woman if the current age-specific birth rates remained constant (Chapter 6).

total or gross migration rate the sum of in-migrants plus out-migrants, divided by the total midyear pop- ulation (Chapter 7).

transitional growth the second (middle) stage of the demographic transition when death rates have dropped but birth rates are still high. During this time, population size increases steadily—this is the essence of the “population explosion” (Chapter 3).

transnational migrant an international migrant who maintains close ties in both his or her coun- try of origin and his or her country of destination (Chapter 7).

tubal ligation method of female sterilization (sur- gical contraception) in which the fallopian tubes are “tied” off with rings or by some other method (Chapter 6).

unmet need as applied to family planning, the number of sexually active women who would pre- fer not to get pregnant but are nevertheless not using any method of contraception (Chapter 12).

urban describes a spatial concentration of people whose lives are organized around nonagricultural activities (Chapter 9).

urban agglomeration according to the United Nations, the population contained within the contours of contiguous territory inhabited at urban levels of residential density without regard to adminis- trative boundaries (Chapter 9).

urban area (UA) see urban cluster (UC).

urban cluster (UC) part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of a place considered to be “urban”; an urban cluster has 2,500–50,000 people (Chapter 9).

urban sprawl the straggling expansion of an urban area into the adjoining countryside (Chapter 9).

urban transition the shift over time from a largely rural population to a largely urban population (see urbanization) (Chapters 3, 7, and 9).

urbanism the changes that occur in lifestyle and social interaction as a result of living in urban places (Chapter 9).

urbanization the process whereby the proportion of people in a population who live in urban places increases (Chapter 9).

use-effectiveness the actual pregnancy prevention performance associated with using a particular fertil- ity control measure (Chapter 6).

usual residence the concept of including people in the census on the basis of where they usually reside (Chapter 4).

vasectomy a technique of male sterilization (surgical contraception) in which each vas deferens is cut and tied, thus preventing sperm from being ejaculated during intercourse (Chapter 6).

vital statistics data referring to the so-called vital events of life, especially birth and death, but usually

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518 Glossary

also including marriage, divorce, and sometimes abortion (Chapter 4).

wealth flow a term coined by Caldwell to refer to the intergenerational transfer of income (Chapter 3).

wealth of a nation the sum of known natural resources and our human capacity to transform those resources into something useful (Chapter 11).

wear-and-tear theory the theory of aging that argues that humans are like machines that eventually wear out due to the stresses and strains of constant use.

withdrawal a form of fertility control that requires the male to withdraw his penis from his partner’s

vagina prior to ejaculation; also called coitus inter- ruptus (Chapter 6).

world–systems theory the theory that since the six- teenth century the world market has developed into a set of core nations and a set of peripheral countries dependent on the core (Chapters 7, 9 and 11).

xenophobia fear of strangers, which often leads to discrimination against migrants (Chapter 7).

zero population growth (ZPG) a situation in which a population is not changing in size from year to year, as a result of the combination of births, deaths, and migration (Chapter 8).

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549

GEOGRAPHIC INDEX

Afghanistan age of husbands and wives, 202 ecological footprint, 465–466 infant mortality rates, 155f, 484 life expectancy, 159 maternal mortality, 8 polio rates, 148 refugees, 288 Taliban, and death rates, 8 urban evolution, 495–496

Africa, 48–50 abortion, 219 age evolution, 493–495 carbon dioxide emissions, 468t climate change, 460 communicable diseases, 160, 162, 166 contraception, 221 demographics, 8, 129 drought, 459 economic development, 439–440, 453 education, 403–404 family and household transition, 385 famine, 460 female genital mutilation (FGM) in, 202 fertility, 129, 202, 211–212, 224,

231, 233–234, 359t, 361–362, 426, 502

food production, 6, 456–457 global population trends, 48–50 governmental regulation, 500 green revolution, 454–455 HIV/AIDS, 163, 485 immigrants, origins of, 278t infant mortality rates, 155, 484 life expectancy, 147, 159 marriage, 215 maternal mortality, 166

middle east problems, 10–11f migration, 34–37, 273–275,

282, 286, 489 mortality rates, 359t, 360–361, 485 population growth, 9, 482–483, 502 poverty, 415, 439 real causes of death, 170, 196 skilled transients, 291–292 slavery, 44, 288–289 slums, 372–374 Spanish Influenza, 143 urban transition, 349–350, 351t, 495–496 waste, 455 wealth, 418 women, status of, 257, 392–393, 403–404 See also specific countries; regions

Albania, 359t Angola, 373f, 404t Argentina, 20, 44, 280 Asia, 34–35, 37, 39, 45, 63, 142, 147f, 163,

166, 202–203, 211, 219, 233, 267, 274–276, 278t, 282, 305, 315, 350–351t, 366, 379, 418, 453–454, 456–457t, 469, 484, 494–495

regions female genital mutilation (FGM) in, 202 fertility, 211–212, 215, 224, 231, 233.

See also East Asia; South Asia, Southeast Asia; specific countries; Western Asia

life expectancy, 147 migration, 267, 273–276, 278t.

See also East Asia; South Asia, Southeast Asia; specific countries; Western Asia

population trends, 48–54 sex ratios, 305–306 urban-rural fertility differential, 208–209 See also East Asia; South Asia, Southeast Asia;

specific countries; Western Asia

Note: page numbers followed by an “f” indicate figures; by a “t” indicate tables.

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550 Geographic Index

Australia, 13–14, 54, 94, 201, 232, 265, 273, 275–276, 289, 381, 437, 440, 465, 467, 489, 495–496

ecological footprint, 465, 467, 468t economy, 437f, 440 fertility, 232, 275–276, 495 Melbourne, 380 migration, 13–14, 54, 94, 265, 273, 289,

488–489 sustainable environments, 380–381

Austria age structure, 495 marriage, 76 migration, 275, 493 per person GNI PPI, 438t sustainable environment, 380

Bangladesh, 293, 349, 360t, 460, 482, 489, 500, 502

fertility, 37, 38t, 50–51, 56, 360t infant mortality, 155f–156, 360t migration, 276, 290, 460, 489 population size and growth, 37–38t, 50–51,

56, 373f, 482, 500, 502 remittances, 293 slums, 373f

Belarus, 46 Belgium, 468t Belize, 42, 373f Benin, 289, 359t, 373f, 404t Botswana, 162 Brazil

carbon dioxide emissions, 468t fertility, 44 income, 437f migration, 280, 289, 483 mortality control, 164–165 population size and growth, 37–38t, 43–44,

56, 311f slavery, 43–44 slums, 372–373f

Bulgaria, 280, 289, 331t Burkina Faso, 359t, 373f, 404t Burundi, 349–350t, 373f, 438t

Cameroon, 289, 359t, 373f, 404t, 500 Canada, 108–110t, 119–120, 194–195f, 423–424,

119–120, 128, 286–288, 423 abortions in, 219–220 age structure, 332 baby boom, 243 census of, 108–110t, 111, 118, 121, 135 contraception use, 200, 222

demographic surveys in, 128 ecological footprint, 465, 467–468t economy, 437f, 440 education, 403 ethnicity and race in, 42, 109t–112f, 423 fertility, 42, 194–195f, 224, 275–276 food, 458 gender differential in mortality, 141t green revolution, 454 health and mortality, 141t, 143, 145 health care, 145 history of, 42 Hutterites, 194–195f ideation, changes in, 201 income, 411 infant mortality rates, 155–156 life expectancy, 141, 145 marital status and patterns, 395 maternal mortality, 166 metropolitan areas, 365–366 migration, 14, 34, 42, 56, 258, 265, 276t,

273, 277, 279, 280–281, 286–288, 293, 316, 489, 493

per person GNI PPP, 437f, 440 population size and growth, 40, 42, 265, 500 poverty, 414 sex ratios, 307, 403 slavery, 289 status of women, 199, 201 top causes of death in, 161t Toronto, 366 urbanization, 36, 111, 346, 366, 368,

380–381 Vancouver, 380

Caribbean ethnicity, 423 infant mortality, 360t migration, 15, 267, 289 population size, 350–351t poverty, 415t slavery, 289 slums, 372–373f See also specific countries

Central African Republic, 373f, 404t Central America, 42–43

age structure, 495 environmental disasters, 471 ethnicity, 422 food, 457t population size and growth, 4, 42–43 See also specific countries

Central Europe, 82. See also specific countries Chad, 155f, 224, 313, 373f, 404t, 497

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551Geographic Index

Chile, Social Security system, 327–328 China, 13, 16, 20, 26–27, 29, 37–38t, 39,

50, 52–56, 61, 78, 96, 102, 104, 116, 130, 149, 152, 155f, 160, 163, 167, 169, 199, 218–219, 234, 238–240, 276f, 279, 282, 284, 289–290, 305–306, 318–323, 330–331, 333, 355–356, 443

abortions in, 221, 238–240 age structure, 53, 238–240, 319–320,

322, 444 Beijing, 356–357, 376t census of, 53 dams, 469 demographic dividend, 318–320 ecological footprint, 459, 465t–468t,

469–470, 542 family and households, 415t, 420–421 family planning program, 53–54, 78, 199,

238–240 famine in, 29–30, 240, 472 fertility, 16, 53–54, 199, 202, 236, 238–240,

305–306, 318–322, 488, 501 food production, 452, 454, 459, 476 Great Leap Forward program, 30, 78 HIV/AIDS, 485 Hong Kong, 222f, 356–357 household registration system, 356, 493 hukou, 356–357 income, 320–321, 436–439, 483 irrigation, 469 Marxist-Leninist roots, 78 migration, 116, 276, 279, 282, 284, 288,

323, 489, 493, 502 older population, 53, 320–321, 329–331,

333, 420, 494 one-child policy, 53–54, 199, 318–320 per person GNI PPI, 436–439 population policy, 279, 284, 355–357 population size and growth, 26–27, 29, 37–38t,

39, 50, 52–54, 276, 483, 494, 500 poverty, 372–373f, 415t, 443 remittances, 293 slavery, 289–290 slums, 372–373f urban transition, 355–357, 358 Wan xi shao family planning, 240

China, one-child policy, 53–54, 318–320 population size and growth, 53–54 sex ratios, 305–306 Shanghai, 356–357, 367t urban transition, 355–357, 367t wan xi shao campaign, 53, 239–240f

Colombia, 208f, 282, 360t, 379

Congo (Democratic Republic) 49–50, 162, 289–290, 359t, 404t, 500, 502

Brazzaville, 50, 359t, 373f education, 208f, 404t growth rate, 500, 502 Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo),

38t, 208f, 373f, 415t, 483 per person GNI PPI, 438t poverty, 373f, 415t

Costa Rica, 42–43, 149 Côte d’Ivoire, 289, 359t Cuba

Cuban, defined, 422 fertility, 46 migration, 282, 493 revolutions, 443

Czech Republic, 468t

Denmark census, 103 ecological footprint, 465f fertility, 193–194, 208–209 per person GNI PPP, 438t population registers, 103

Dominican Republic, 282, 360t. See also specific countries

East Asia, 52 Eastern Europe, 44–46

abortions in, 221 demographic trends, 78 fertility, 46 history, 62 migration, 274–275 mortality rates, 147 suicide rates, 64 See also specific countries

Egypt Cairo, 363, 367t, 498 census, 102 contraception, 215 crisis in, 10–12 education, 208f fertility, 48, 202 irrigation, 453 King Tut, 162 Middle Eastern problems, 10–11f migration, 273 mortality rates, 49, 155f, 172 population size and growth, 38t, 48–49, 498 poverty, 415t refugees, 288 urban transition, 359t

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552 Geographic Index

England, 237 baby boom, 243 baby bust, 236 census, 103–104, 113, 119 fertility, 234–237 infant mortality, 64 migration, 47, 262, 277, 281 urbanization, 347–348, 369 wages in, 235 See also United Kingdom

Estonia, 46, 468t Ethiopia, 38t

education, 404t fertility, 208, 359t population growth, 49–50, 483, 502 slaves, 290 slums, 373f

European countries, 15, 35–36, 40, 44–45, 47, 62–63, 129–130, 144, 146, 155, 199, 201–202, 243, 274, 395, 396, 407, 421, 423, 440, 472, 489, 494

abortions in, 219 age at marriage, 394–396 age structure, 47, 300–301, 317, 326,

328–331, 494 capital markets, effect on, 280 cigarette consumption, 169 communicable diseases, 161 demographic surveys in, 129–130 divorce rates, 400 ecological footprints, 465t education, 208f–209 expansion, 35–36 family units, 130 famines, 143 fertility, 46–48, 56, 85, 86, 88, 92, 200, 201–203,

209–210, 222, 226, 232–234, 236–237, 241, 243, 361, 395–396, 494

food, 457t gender equality, 199 infant mortality rates, 44–45, 64, 84, 359t–360t life expectancy, 147 medieval, 62–63, 142–143 Middle East crisis, 10 migration, 14, 15, 35, 44, 56, 258, 265, 274,

275–276, 278t–279, 282, 286–287, 292, 489 older population, 328–329, 331t population policy, 15 population size and growth, 27, 28, 31, 33–36,

40, 43–45, 54–55, 103–104, 121, 155, 441

poverty, 415t secularization, 201

slaves, 289 slums, 371–372 social security system, 328 son preference, 199 special demography, 131 urbanization, 36, 347, 351t, 359t–360t, 369, 371–372 See also specific countries

Finland, 209, 331t, 465, 468 France

cohabitation, 234 divorce rates, 400 fertility, 48 migration, 15, 48, 275–276f older population, 331t Paris, 137, 366 per person GNI PPP, 437f–438t population size and growth, 38t, 44–45 urbanization, 367, 375

Gabon, 289, 359t, 373f, 500 Gambia, 202, 289, 373f, 489 Gaza Strip, 10 Georgia, 46, 359t, 362, 415t Germany

census of, 104, 258 divorce rates, 400 fertility, 46–47 marriage age, 396 Middle Eastern problem, 12t migration, 274–276f, 277 older population, 331t per person GNI PPP of, 437f population size and growth, 38t, 45, 104

Ghana, 155f, 208f, 306f, 359t, 373f, 415t Greece, 27, 61, 286, 331t Guatemala, 42–43, 154f–155f, 360t, 373f Guinea, 359t, 373f, 404t, 438t Guinea-Bissau, 373f, 404t

Haiti, 155f, 289, 360t, 373f, 415t Honduras, 42–43, 360t, 373f Hungary, 274, 493

India, 50–51, 320–321 abortions in, 219 census of, 104 consumer class in, 20 demographic dividend, 320–321 ecological footprint, 465t, 468t family planning programs, 488 fertility, 50–51, 199, 231–232f, 236, 330t food production, 452, 460

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553Geographic Index

HIV/AIDS, 485 infant mortality, 50–51, 155f migration, 274, 276, 282, 288 older population, 330–331t per person GNI PPP of, 437f population size and growth, 50–51 poverty, 415t sex ratio, 305 sons, desire for, 199 status of women, 199

Indonesia, 51 ecological footprints, 464–465t, 468t fertility and mortality, 360t food production, 452 migration, 254–255, 276f older population, 331t population size and growth, 51, 320–321, 349, 360t

Iran, 491 crisis in, 10–11t ecological footprints, 468t, 471–472 fertility transition, 232f, 425 migration, 8, 491 population policy, 500 population size and growth, 38t, 52 refugees, 288 slums, 373f

Iraq, 11t–12, 155f, 373f refugee crisis, 490–492

Ireland, 45, 219, 423, 497 Israel

census in, 105 crisis in, 10–12 ethnicity in, 421 fertility, 425–426 Middle East problem, 10–11t migration, 274 population growth, 308f, 500, 501

Italy age transition, 307 demographic transition, 82, 103 ecological footprint, 468t, 472 family and households, 385 fertility, 45, 275 per person GNI PPP, 437f labor force participation, 407 migration, 4t, 14, 279, 286, 493 older population, 331t population size and growth, 38t, 44 sex structure, 308

Japan, 54 abortions in, 219 age structure, 444

agricultural production, 448 carbon dioxide emissions, 468t ecological footprints, 465t family planning programs, 499 fertility, 46, 199, 224 health and mortality, 141t infant mortality rates, 155 life expectancy, 330 migration, 15, 48, 488, 494 older population, 154f, 331 per person GNI PPP, 437f–438t population size and growth, 10–13, 37–39,

52, 54, 56 Tokyo, 366–367t, 464 urbanization, 36, 348–349

Jordan, 10–11t, 288, 359t, 491, 496

Kazakhstan, 46, 468t Kenya, 38t, 50, 352, 359t, 373f, 460 Korea (South), 282, 320, 330, 418, 437f, 468t Kuwait, 11t, 438t, 465, 468t, 491

Laos, 372–373f, 404t, 490 Latin America, 143, 145–147, 162, 273, 418

age structure, 494–495 ecological footprints, 454 education, 17 fertility, 129, 201, 203, 231–233, 487 infant mortality, 360t life expectancy, 145–147 mechanization per hectare, 454 migration, 14–15, 17, 34–35, 257, 267, 273,

278t, 280, 282, 292–294, 379 mortality decline in, 312, 360t older population, 312 population policy, 282, 500 population size and growth, 35, 39, 312, 350,

351t, 496 poverty, 415t slums, 372–373f urbanization, 350–351t, 357, 496 urban-rural fertility differential, 359t wealth, 418 See also specific countries

Latvia, 46 Lebanon, 10–11t, 105, 275–276f, 373f Lesotho, 293, 359t, 373f Liberia, 359t, 438t Libya, 10–11t, 12 Lithuania, 46

Madagascar, 359t, 373f, 438t Malawi, 359t, 373f, 438t

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554 Geographic Index

Malaysia, 20, 352, 421, 488 Mali, 155f, 359t, 373f, 404t, 497 Mauritania, 155f, 359t, 360, 373f, 404t MENA (Middle East and North Africa), 10–12,

286, 489, 495 Mexico, 42–43, 120–121, 128, 146, 252, 294,

323–324, 354–356, 391, 424 abortions in, 220, 395 age structure, 110, 307, 332 census of, 108, 109t–110t, 118, 120–121,

135, 332, 366 contraception, 222 crude death rate (CDR) in, 171, 224 demographic dividend, 323–324 demographic surveys in, 128 ecological footprint, 463–465t, 468t environmental disasters, 472 ethnicity and race in, 183, 421–422, 424 family and households, 391 fertility, 14, 43, 195, 219–220, 226, 231–232f,

247, 308, 323, 330, 487 food production, 451 gender differential in mortality in, 43, 166,

307, 330 Green revolution, 451 Guadalajara, 353–354 household surveys, 128 income, 437f–438t, 445. See also Poverty infant mortality rates, 155 life expectancy, 43, 141t, 145f, 146, 307, 330 maternal mortality, 166 metropolitan areas, 366–367t Mexico City, 367t, 380 migration, 4, 14, 43, 111, 113, 226, 247, 252,

269, 273, 275–276f, 282, 284–285, 307, 483, 489–490, 492–493, 498, 502

Monterrey, 353 older population, 307–308 per person GNI PPP, 437f–438t population programme, 380, 498 population size and growth, 38t, 42–43, 109t,

308f, 332, 339, 366, 380, 483 poverty, 293, 415t religion, 425 remittances, 293–294 slavery, 289 Tzintzuntzan, 354–355 urban definition, 346, 365 urban transition, 346, 352–356, 366–367t, 380

Middle East, 10–12 age structure, 493, 495, 503 baby boom, 16 carbon dioxide emissions, 468t

crisis in, 10–12 food production, 446–447 labor force programs, 273 migration, 47, 273–274, 286, 315, 492 population size and growth, 10–12, 26, 483, 502 poverty, 415t terrorism, 495 urbanization, 373f youth bulge, 489 See also specific countries

Moldova Republic, 46, 289, 293–294, 360t, 362 Morocco, 10–11t, 15, 404t Mozambique, 359t, 373f, 404t, 438t

Nepal, 289, 293, 360t, 373f, 404t Netherlands, 15, 104, 129, 437f, 468t New Zealand, 13, 54, 94, 232, 265, 440, 465, 496 Nicaragua, 42–43, 208f, 360t, 373f Niger, 221–222f, 359t, 361, 373f, 404t, 438t Nigeria

age structure, 307–308, 317 census of, 104–105 ecological footprints, 465t education, 208f, 404t ethnicity, 422–423 family and households, 195–196 fertility, 197, 231–232f, 359t infant mortality, 155f Lagos, 367t, 372, 380 mortality rates, 154f, 162, 198, 359t population programme, 500 population size and growth, 37–38t, 49–50,

483, 502 poverty, 372–373f, 380 remittances, 293 slavery, 289–290 slums, 372–373f

North Africa, 48–49, 233f, 359t, 404t, 415t See also MENA; specific countries

North America, 9, 13–14, 19, 40–42, 146–147, 163, 169, 210, 388, 395, 400, 476, 488–493

age structure, 495 divorce rates, 400 education, 109t, 183, 298f, 402–403 ethnicity, 420–423 fertility, 46, 56, 202–203, 218, 232–233f,

326, 394 food products, 448–449, 456–457t migration, 15, 241, 267, 269, 271, 275, 280–281,

292, 488–493, 502 older population, 326, 329, 418 population size and growth, 32–33, 35, 39,

40–42, 119, 121, 125, 135, 495, 497

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555Geographic Index

poverty, 415 son preference, 199 urbanization, 348, 366, 496 and World War II, 146–147, 243 See also specific countries

Norway, 438, 465t, 468t, 497

Oceania, 54–55, 233f, 351t. See also specific countries

Pakistan, 50–51 education, 208f, 403–404t fertility, 50–51, 360t history, 51 infant mortality, 155f migration, 15, 273–274, 276 population size and growth, 38t, 50–51, 482, 502 poverty, 380 sex ratios, 307 urbanization, 373f

Papua New Guinea, 54 Palestine. See Gaza Strip; West Bank Peru, 360t, 373f Philippines, 38t, 50–51, 155f, 269, 276f, 282–283,

288, 293, 360t, 373f, 452, 482, 489–490, 493 Poland, 38t, 171, 437f, 468t Portugal, 209, 331t

Qatar, 12t, 276, 438t, 465, 468t

Romania, 315, 498 Russia, 37–38t, 39, 44–46, 56, 64–65, 78, 108, 147,

168, 170, 194, 275–276, 279–280, 294, 331t, 348–349, 437f–438, 443, 465t–468, 485, 488, 493, 499

abortions in, 78 alcohol use, 170 ecological footprints, 465t, 467–468 fertility, 46, 192 HIV/AIDS, 485 homicide rates, 168 income, 437f–438t infant mortality, 155f life expectancy, 147, 170 migration, 194, 275–276, 279–280, 294,

488, 493 older population, 331t per person GNI PPP, 437f–438t pogrom against Jews, 280 population programme, 500f population size and growth, 37–38t, 39, 44–45, 56 slaves, 289–290 suicide rates, 168 Rwanda, 359t, 373f, 460

urbanization, 348–349 See also Soviet Union

Saudi Arabia carbon dioxide emissions, 468t gender equity, 392 history, 102 Middle East crisis, 10, 12 migration, 488 oil prices and, 273 per person GNI PPP, 437f population policy, 500–501 population size and growth, 12t, 496 water supply, 469

Scandinavia, 44–45, 143, 497. See also specific countries

Senegal, 289, 359t, 373f, 404t Sierra Leone, 155f, 160, 359t, 373f, 404t Singapore, 438t, 488 Somalia, 162, 202, 373f, 500 South Africa, 196, 373f, 468t South America, 43–44

infant mortality, 44 migration, 274 population size and growth, 43–44 See also specific countries

South Asia, 50 age structure, 495 carrying capacity, 476 education, 404t ethnicity, 423 famine, 460 fertility, 215, 232f, 426 food production, 452 gender gap in, 159, 392, 403 infant mortality, 360t, 484 per person GNI PPI, 440 population size and growth, 50, 349, 483 poverty, 415, 440 religion, 426 status of women, 159, 392, 403–404t urbanization, 495–496 See also specific countries

Southeast Asia, 50–51 cigarettes, 169 ecological footprint, 464 education, 404t HIV/AIDS, 485 infant mortality, 360t migration, 275 population programme, 500 population size and growth, 50 See also specific countries

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556 Geographic Index

Soviet Union, 38t, 78, 147, 274 fertility, 362 migration, 274–276, 284, 294 pollution, 467 See also Russia; specific countries

Spain, 14–15, 38t, 45, 63, 82, 85, 120, 143, 192, 237, 275–276f, 279, 282, 286, 396, 407, 424, 437f

census, 120 demographic transition, 82, 85 fertility, 45, 237, 275, 396 labor force participation, 407 migration, 14–15, 143, 275–276f, 279, 282, 286 out-of-wedlock births, 396 per person GNI PPP, 437f plague in, 63 population size and growth, 38t religion, 424–425

Sri Lanka, 149, 349, 421 Sub-Saharan Africa, 50–51, 349

abortions, 219 age at marriage, 215, 497 age structure, 494–495 CBR rates, 224, 241 climate change, 460 education, 404t and farmers, 454 female genital mutilation (FGM) in, 202 fertility, 193, 233, 359t, 361–362, 426,

487, 502 HIV/AIDS, 147, 159, 185, 485 infant mortality, 32, 50, 141t, 155, 162,

320–321, 359t, 484 life expectancy, 147, 159 maternal mortality, 167 mortality rates, 359t–360 older population, 329 population size and growth, 9, 37–38t, 49–50,

349, 482–483, 502 poverty, 9, 415t, 439–440 sex and gender differentials, 159 slavery, 289 slums, 372–373f status of women, 392–393, 403–404t subfecund, 193 transnationalism, 291–292 urbanization, 349, 373f, 495–496 See also specific countries

Sudan, 254, 276f, 373f, 394 Sweden

census, 103 ecological footprints, 456 fertility, 45 infant mortality rates, 155

life expectancy, 157 migration, 277, 423, 493 mortality rates, 358 older population, 331t per person GNI PPP, 438t population registers, 103

Switzerland, 14, 104, 438t, 465t Syria, 12t, 49, 148

environmental disasters, 471–472 migration, 490–491 population size and growth, 275–276 refugees, 288

Taiwan, 239 –240, 320, 444 Tanzania, 38t, 359t, 373f Thailand, 38t, 51–52, 373f Turkey, 38t, 48–49, 379, 437f

Uganda, 38t, 359t, 373f, 502 Ukraine, 46, 147, 293, 360t, 468t United Arab Emirates (UAR), 10, 12, 276, 465t, 488 United Kingdom, 14, 19, 38t, 44–45, 48, 145,

155, 183, 234–237, 247–248, 275–276f, 348, 437f, 465t, 468t, 497

age at marriage, 497 ecological footprints, 465t, 468t fertility, 234–237, 247–248 life expectancy, 145, 183 Liverpool, 181 London, 36, 64–65, 72, 122, 130, 132, 146, 173,

181–182, 347, 361, 366–367t, 372, 380 Manchester, 181 migration, 14–15, 48, 275–276f mortality rates, 155f. See also older population, older population, 19 per person GNI PPP, 437f population size and growth, 38t, 45 urbanization, 348 See also England

United States, 40–42, 105–110, 127–128, 267–268, 277–283, 322–324, 421–423, 490–492

abortions in, 201, 219 administrative data, 126 age structure, 15–18, 303, 306–309, 325–328,

331–333, 494–495 age/sex-specific death rates, 172, 174t–180 baby boom, 243–245, 326–328 baby bust/boomlet, 245–247 birth certificates, 122–123f birth rates, 82, 241, 243 California, 4, 20, 36, 74, 107–108, 114, 153,

192, 279, 316, 490–492 causes of death, 162, 166–170

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557Geographic Index

census, 100f, 104–111, 115–119, 121–122, 125–126, 133f–135

childlessness, 399 climate change, 460 contraceptive use, 215–218, 222 crude death rate (CDR) in, 41, 171–172 death certificates, 124f demographic dividend, 322–324 demographic surveys, 101, 118–119,

127–129 divorce, 399–400 ecological footprint, 75, 462–468, 474 economic development, 441, 443, 445 education, 17–18, 182–183, 208, 402–406, 429 El Cajon, 490–492 environmental destruction, concern for, 75 environmental disasters, 471–472 ethnicity and race, 115, 183–184, 420–423 family and households, 214, 385–386,

388–392, 428 farms, 362, 448 fertility, 191–193, 195, 200–201, 225t, 224–231,

241–247, 362, 487 food production, 448, 453–456, 459 health and mortality, 141f, 143–146, 149,

155f, 157, 162, 167–168, 312 historical changes in population, 241–247 historical sources, 131 homicide rates, 153, 168 immigration policy, 284–287 income, 109t, 127, 405–406, 410–414, 416,

432f, 437–437f infant mortality rates, 40–41, 155, 156–157 infecundity, 220–221 labor force participation, 406–410 life expectancy, 141t, 144–146, 151, 157–158, 430 life tables, 157, 173–177t Malthus and, 67–74 marital status and patterns, 184–185, 202,

214–215, 394–399, 401, 427 maternal mortality, 166 metropolitan areas, 363–365, 367t–369, 490 Middle East crisis, 12 migration from Mexico, 4, 14, 36, 113, 247,

252, 269, 273, 282, 284–286, 355, 383, 422, 490, 492–493

migration, 4, 6, 14, 17–18, 34, 36, 43, 56, 254–258, 260–261, 265–269, 272–275, 276f–283, 291, 293, 295–296, 315–316, 362, 489–492

neighborhood equity, 181 obesity, 149 per person GNI PPP of, 436–438t

politics, 112–114 population policy, 499–500 population projection for, 50, 335–338,

482–483 population size and growth, 3–4, 18, 34,

36–38t, 40–42, 55–56, 82, 100f poverty, 414–416, 430 refugees, 288, 291 registration of vital events, 122–125 remittances, 294 residential segregation, 184, 377–379 San Diego, 285, 492 sex and gender differentials, 159, 305–306,

392–393, 409–410 sex ratios, 224–229, 306 slavery, 289 social security benefits, 326–328 suburbanization, 374–379 suicide rates, 168 sustainable environments, 381 urbanization, 203, 344–346, 348–349,

351t, 353–355, 364–365, 371, 382 urban-rural fertility differential, 208f urban sprawl, 364–365, 367t Vietnam War, 16, 52 vital events, 122–125 wealth, 416–420 widowhood, 401 See also Hutterites

Uruguay, 44, 500

Vietnam, 16, 38t, 51–52

West Bank, 10, 12 Western Asia, 48–49

age structure, 494–495 education, 404t fertility, 48–49, 361 gender equity, 403 infant mortality, 359t–360t, 484 migration, 275 population policy, 500 population size and growth, 48–49,

483, 496 slums, 373f status of women, 202, 403 terrorism, 495 See also specific countries

Yemen, 10, 12, 373f, 404t, 415t

Zambia, 359t, 373f, 404t Zimbabwe, 359t, 380

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559

SUBJECT INDEX

Abortion, 32, 60t, 69, 78, 122, 135, 166, 194, 201, 213–214t, 215, 219–223, 234, 238–242, 245, 248–249, 305, 398, 488

Canada, 219 and China, 238–240 induced, 219–220 medical, 219 and population policy, 199, 238–240 rate, 219–220 ratio, 219 sex-selective, 199 surgical, 200, 217, 231, 236–237 in U.S., 219, 395

Abstinence, 32, 60t, 62, 69, 89, 214 –215, 221, 231, 234–235, 242

periodic, 216t, 218, 241 Accidental death, 169 Acculturation, 291 Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation (A.C.E.)

Survey, 117 Achieved characteristics, 388 Activities of daily living (ADLs), 109t,

301t, 333 Adaptation, 291, 305, 336–337 Administrative data, 101, 104, 125–127, 136 Administrative records, 126–127 Africa, fertility in, 193, 196–197, 202, 222–223 African Americans, 106, 115, 168, 183–184, 219,

377–378, 390, 398, 401, 421, 422 abortion, 219 education, 404t employment, 184 enumerated in Census, 115 family structure, 377–378, 390, 412 fertility, 219, 398 homicides, 168 income, 412–414 life chances, 401, 421

migration, 377–378 mortality, 183–184 out-of-wedlock births, 398 residential segregation, 184, 377–379 suburbanization, 377–378 urbanization, 351t, 377–378 wealth, 412–414

Age-adjusted death rates, 172 Age and sex structure. See Age structure Age at marriage, 394–396 Age cohorts, 90–91, 301–304 Age effect, 303 Age-period-cohort (APC) rates, 303 Age pyramids, 307–311f. See also Population

pyramids Age/sex-specific death rates, 171–172 Age-specific fertility rate (ASFR), 225t–229, 232f,

236f, 244f Age stratification, 300–301 Age structure, 12–13, 20, 93–95, 97, 295, 382,

385, 391, 417, 430, 440, 444–445, 493–495. See also Age structure measurements; Age transition

Age structure measurements, 299–301t, 304–306

age-period-cohort (APC) rates, 303 age pyramids, 307–311f, 313–314, 322f age-specific fertility rate (ASFR), 225t–229, 232f,

236f, 244f average age of population, 310, 313, 315 changing age structure, 15–18, 23, 92 and CBR, 223–224 death rates, 171–172 dependency ratio, 310, 313, 315, 318 growth rates by age, 312, 317–318 overview, 340–342 population projections, 334–335, 444–445 and sex, 299–301t, 340

Note: page numbers followed by an “f” indicate figures; by a “t” indicate tables.

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560 Subject Index

Age structure measurements (continued) stable populations, 309–310, 313–314f, 330f stationary populations, 309, 317 website resources for, 342

Age transition, 92, 94 application of, 317–324 demographic transition theory, 307–316 described, 299 evolution, 493–495 fertility, impact of, 93, 313–315, 444–445 future projections, 334–340 and migration, 315–316 mortality, decline in, 309–312 overview, 94, 340–342 and population aging, 324–334 projections by 2050, 494f website resources for, 342 See also Age structure

Aging, 13, 15, 19, 45–47, 52–53, 55, 129, 150–151, 237, 273, 295, 324f, 420, 489, 493–495, 497–498, 503. See also Age transition, individual aging; Population aging

Agricultural Revolution, 26–27, 96, 446–447 Agriculture. See Food AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Alzheimer’s disease, 161t, 167–168 Amenorrhea, 193, 220 American “apartheid” system, 378 American Community Survey (ACS), 108–110t,

118–119, 122, 127, 135, 256–258, 261, 316, 375, 397, 423, 490, 492

American Housing Survey, 127, 258, 263, 267 American Indians. See Native Americans Anchor babies, 282 Anovulatory cycles, 193 Antinatalist, 62, 98, 487 Apportionment, 106, 112 Aquaculture, 6, 451 Aquinas, Thomas, 60t, 63 Aristotle, 60t Ascribed characteristics, 388, 416, 424 Asians in U.S., 379, 493

education, 429 income, 417 mortality, 184 suburbanization, 351t, 378–379

Assimilation, 273–274, 290–291, 420–421 segmented, 292

Asylees, 255 Atmosphere, pollution of, 463, 466–468 Aquinas, Thomas, 60t Augustine, 60t, 62 Avian Influenza (“bird flu”), 166

Baby boom, 243–247 in Canada, 243 in U.S., 15–16, 18–19, 41–42, 193, 226, 229,

243–245, 322, 326–327, 342, 395, 406, 424–425

Baby boomers, and retirement, 16–17, 326–328 Baby boomlet, 244f–245

and African Americans, 193 in Canada, 42, 243 in U.S., 18, 41, 226, 229, 243–247

Baby bust, 41–42, 245–247 in Canada, 42, 243 in England, 236 European, 328 Mexico and Central America, 42–43 in U.S., 42, 244f, 245–247, 425

Backward population projection, 339 Base year in population projections, 337–338, 341,

355–356 Becker, Gary, 206 Besant, Annie, 73 Big Mac Index, 436–437 Bills of Mortality, 64, 122 Biological component of fertility, 191–194 Biosphere, 7, 476 Birth certificates, 122–123f, 125 Birth control, 60, 67, 69–70, 73, 75, 194, 201, 215,

217, 219, 235, 241–242, 395, 424, 476. See also Abortion; Contraception; Family planning

Birth rate. See Crude birth rate (CBR) Blacks, 106, 184, 221, 246f, 390f, 412–414, 417f, 422.

See also African Americans Black Death. See Plague Blake, Judith, 213, 218, 245 BNANA (build nothing near anyone) attitude,

364–365 Boomsters, 433–434, 477–478 Bongaarts, John, 213, 221 Borlaug, Norman, 451, 455 Boserup, Ester, 440, 447–478 Botero, Giovanni, 63 Bracero program, 284–285, 355 Bradlaugh, Charles, 73 Breadwinner system, 204 Breastfeeding, and fertility reduction, 220–221 Brundtland Commission, 473–474 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 473 Bush administration, 474 Business, demographics of, 2, 15–16, 18–20,

22–23, 90, 104, 110t, 131–132, 351

Cabot, John, 40 Caesar, Augustus, 62, 102

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561Subject Index

Caesar, Hadrian, 102 Caesar, Julius, 62 Cairo Conference. See International Conference

on Population and Development; World Population Conferences

Calhoun, John, 370–371 Caloric intake, 456–457t Cancer, 148, 159, 161t, 167, 169–170, 187.

See also Mortality, Cantillon, Richard, 89 Capital, 271, 290

defined, 435 and economic development, 238, 271, 279, 350,

352, 435 human, 20, 264f, 270, 272, 295, 388, 406, 426–428,

435, 444, 476–477 markets, 279–280 of nature, 470–471 social, 272, 295, 426–427

Capitalism, 76–78, 182, 271, 321, 348–349, 351, 353, 443–444

and age structure, 444 advanced, 349 in China, 321 evils of, 182 laissez-faire, 348 Marxian perspective on, 76–78, 182, 443 and urbanization, 348–349, 351, 353

Carbon cycle, 461–462 emissions by country, 466–468t

Cardiovascular diseases, 159, 160, 167, 169, 502. See also Mortality,

Carolina Population Center, 100f Carrying capacity, 26, 31, 446, 464–467,

475–477 Castration, 217 Catasto, 103 Causes of death, 154–159, 168–170

age differentials, 153–154 alcohol, 147, 152, 169–170 communicable diseases, 160–162 by country, 161t defined, 69 disease over the life cycle, 154–159 drugs, 168, 170 emerging infectious diseases, 163, 166 environmental factors, 164–165, 471–473 firearms, 168 HIV/AIDS. See HIV/AIDS infants, 154–156 infectious diseases. See Infectious diseases injuries, 160, 168 maternal mortality, 166–168

motor vehicles, 170 noncommunicable conditions. See Noncommunicable

conditions obesity, 149–150, 486f “real” 168–170 See also Mortality

Celibacy, 60t, 71, 214t Census metropolitan area (CMA) (Canada),

365–366 Census of population, 100–121, 125–126

Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation (A.C.E.) Survey, 117

in Canada, 42, 119–120 in China, 53 and combining vital statistics, 125–126 content error, 117–118 continuous measurement. See American

Community Survey coverage error, 111, 116–117 described, 101–102 demographic analysis (DA) for measuring,

116–117, 120–121, 126 demographic balancing equation, 116, 126, 136 differential undercount, 115–117 Domesday Book, 103 and drop in growth rate, 30f dual system estimation (DSE) for measuring,

116–117 and GIS, 134–135 historical sources, 41, 130–131 history of, 41, 101–105 importance of, 112–114 in India, 104 in Lebanon, 105 in Mexico, 120–121 in Nigeria, 104–105 overview, 135–137 persons included in, 110–111 progression of, 28t, projection for, 30t PUMS. See IPUMS sampling error, 118 in U.S., 105–111 website resources for, 137–138 World’s, 27f

Centenarians, 333–334 Central place theory, 352 Chain migration, 269–271, 273 Chaldeans, 490–491 Charles, Enid, 82 Checks to growth, 60t, 68–69 Child control, 211–212 Childlessness, 399

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562 Subject Index

Children, 2, 4–5, 13–15, 17, 18, 31–32, 40–54, 61–62, 68, 70–71, 76–77, 80, 84, 88–91, 93–95, 98, 106, 116–117, 130–131, 142, 144–145, 148–149, 162, 170, 190–191, 194–198, 200–204, 210–213, 221, 224–231, 233, 236, 238–239, 242–249, 301, 305, 313, 315, 318–320, 329–330, 338, 340, 374, 385, 388–391, 397–399, 407–408, 414, 416, 418–420, 424, 427–429, 485, 488, 497–498, 500–501

anchor babies, 282 armies of, in sub-Saharan Africa, 9 and GDP, 20 of immigrants, 266–267, 273–274, 282, 288–292,

323, 356 impact on migration decisions, 292 mortality rates, 309–310, 312, 360–362, 484f opportunity costs of, 206, 209, 237 racial/ethnic differences, family households

with, 390f as resource, 87, 198 as security and labor, 198 See also Family; Fertility; Fertility control; Fertility

measures; Fertility transition Children ever born (CEB), 208, 229,

248–249 Child-woman ratio (CWR), 223–224, 249 Chinese Diaspora, 276 Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882), 279 Chronic diseases, 149, 159, 167, 169. See also

Mortality, Cicero, 60t, 62 Cigarette smoking, 123f, 159, 169, 303.

See also Mortality Cities, 63, 182, 204, 344–345, 351–352, 361, 367t, 374,

379–381, 382 benefits of, 351, 368–369, 371 edge cities, 375–376 mega cities, 366–367t negative aspects of, 369–371, 374 primate, 352–354 suburban, 379–381 as sustainable environments, 379–381, 464 See also Urban evolution; Urbanization;

Urban transition Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), 258,

288, 297 Claritas, 132 Clark, Colin, 440 Clark, William A.V., 490 Climate change, 459–461

and food production, 459–460 impact of, 459–461

Clitoridectomy, 202 Club of Rome, 476 Cluster marketing, 131–132 Coale’s preconditions for a fertility decline, 199,

200–201, 230–232, 235, 247, 249, 264, 381

Cohabitation, 396–397 Cohort, 9, 19, 61t, 90–91, 248–249, 301–304,

307, 321, 337–339, 342, 376 age, 90–91, 301–304, 420 component method, 335, 337–339 Easterlin relative cohort size hypothesis, 61t,

89–91 fertility, 223, 229, 319 flow. See Cohort flow and historical events, 324 measures of fertility, 223, 229, 302f size effects, 90–91, 243, 245 synthetic, 223, 227, 229, 249 See also Baby boom, 327

Cohort component method of population projection, 337–339

Cohort flow, 301–304 Coital frequency, 214t Coitus interruptus. See Withdrawal Columbian Exchange, 63, 142–143 Columbus, Christopher, 142–143 Communicable diseases, 32, 92, 141, 146–147,

150, 156, 160–162, 166, 181, 185–186. See also Infectious diseases

Commuting, 376 Components of change method of estimating

migration, 252–253, 260, 263, 269 Components of growth method of population

projection, 336–337 Conception, 213, 214t. See also Contraception;

Family Planning; Fertility Condoms, 163, 237, 242 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat,

66–67, 70–71 Confucius, 60–61 Consumer Expenditure Survey, 436 Consumption unit, 387 Content error. See census Continuous measurement. See American

Community Survey (ACS) Contraception, 215–219

fertility control, 200, 212 higher levels of, 221–222f importance of, 221 and Jewish normative system, 425 methods, 216t, 217–219, 231, 236–237, 240 modern relationship with, 214–215, 396, 424

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563Subject Index

neo-Malthusians, 73 non-use of, 398 use of, 215–217 See also Family planning

Contraceptive prevalence, 221–223 Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys, 129 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of

Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 393 Core-based statistical area (CBSA), 363–364 Core countries, 353–354 Core-periphery model, 271, 353, 382, 434 Cornucopians, 433, 475 Countries, most populous, 38t Coverage error. See census Crime, 18, 369

migration as, 284–287 Crowding, impacts of, 369–371 Crude birth rate (CBR), 223–224, 241, 249 Crude death rate (CDR), 171 Crude net migration rate, 259 Cumulative causation, 272 Current Population Survey (CPS), 122, 127, 256,

258, 261, 266–267, 283, 396, 399, 411–412

Darwin, Charles, 67, 72, 75, 81 Davis, Kingsley, 35, 74, 82, 88, 197, 204, 214,

252, 300, 358 Death certificates, 122, 124f–125, 167–168 De Beauvoir, Simone, 304 De facto population, 111, 366 Deforestation, 7, 447–448, 450–451, 461–462, 471 De jure population, 111 Demographic analysis (DA), 116–117, 120–121, 131 Demographic and Health Surveys, 105, 128–129, 134,

197, 208, 221, 358, 361, 394, 403 Demographic balancing equation, 116, 126, 136 Demographic change and response, 61t, 74, 88–89, 92,

94, 98–99, 212, 235, 261, 264, 358 Demographic data, 64, 97, 101–138

administrative data, 104, 123, 125f, 126–130 census of population. See Census of population contrasts, 40–41, 54–56 geographic information systems. See Geographic

information systems (GIS) historical sources, 101, 130–131 mapping, 132–134 sample surveys. See Sample surveys sources of, 101–122

Demographic dividend, 13, 318 in China, 318–320 in India, 320–321 in Mexico, 323–324 in the U.S., 322–324

Demographic evolution, 91, 482–483 age, 493–495 El Cajon, California, 490–492 family and household, 496–498 fertility, 487–488 health and mortality, 484–486 migration, 488–493 overview, 482–483, 501–503 urban. See Urban evolution World policies, 498–501 website resources for, 503–504

Demographic overhead, 7 Demographic perspectives, 3–5, 21, 58–99

Malthusian, 67–75 overview, 59–60 over time, 69t premodern doctrines, 61–66 prelude to Malthus, 61t, 66–67

Demographic surveillance systems, 129 Demographic surveys, 127–130

Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation (A.C.E.), 117

American Community Survey (ACS), 108–110t, 118–119

American Housing, 127–128 Canadian, 128 Current Population, 127 Demographic and Health Surveys, 128–129 Demographic surveillance systems, 129 European, 129–130 General Social Survey, 128 Labour Force Survey (LFS), 128 Mexican, 128 Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), 129 National Health Interview Survey (NISH), 128 National Household, 119–120 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), 128 National Survey of Occupation and Employment, 128 Netherlands, 104 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, 105 post-enumeration survey, 115–116, 121 sample, 127–130 U.S., 127–128 World Fertility Survey, 129

Demographic transition theory, 61t, 81–99 age transition. See Age transition beyond, 91 change and response, 61t, 88–89 cohort size effects, 90–91 critique of, 84–85 decomposition of, 61t family and household transition. See Family

and household transition

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564 Subject Index

Demographic transition theory (continued) fertility transition. See Fertility transition health and mortality. See Health and mortality

transition impact on society of, 92f, 96 migration transition. See Migration transition modernization theory. See Modernization theory mortality transition. See Health and mortality

transition overview, 97–99 prelude to, 61t, 79–81 reformulation of, 85–88 and secularization, 86 stages, 83f, 92–96 theory of, 81–84 types of, 92 urban transition. See Migration transition;

Urban transition website resources for, 99 See also Demographic Evolution

Demographic windfall, 318, 320, 322 Demographics, 2–24

age structure, 15–20 of business, 2, 15–16, 18–20, 22 description of, 3–5 environmental degradation, 7. See also Environment,

degradation of fertility transition and reproductive health

linkage, 203f as foundation of life, 5–6 and globalization, 9, 13 housing and infrastructure, 7 immigration, 13–15 overview, 2 of politics, 7–13, 112–114 population to resources, relationship, 6–7 of social planning, 2, 5–6, 7–13 status of women, 21

Demography, 2–24 defined, 3 and environmental degradation, 7, 461–469.

See also Environment, degradation of and food, 6, 446–449 housing and infrastructure, 7 importance of, 5–6 overview, 3–5, 22–23 and resources, 6–7 and water, 6–7 website resources for, 23–24

Density, 32, 36, 55, 58f, 81, 345–346, 363–364, 366, 369–371, 376, 448

as criterion for metropolitan areas, 363, 366, 369–371 crowding in urban areas, 369–371

defined, 369 and nighttime lights, 1f and urban crowding, 369–371 of the World, 58f

Dependency ratio, 310–311, 315 Desalination, 469 Desertification, 7, 450, 461–462 Diabetes, 123f, 161t, 167, 169, 181 Diaphragm, 242 Dietary changes, 455–456 Differential undercount. See census DIME (Dual Independent Map Encoding) files,

134–135 Disability-adjusted life expectancy, 180 Divorce, 62, 95, 125, 211, 214, 385, 393, 395, 397–401,

407, 412, 418, 428, 430 Domesday Book, 102–103 Doomsters, 433, 477 Doubling times, 39, 354 Douching, 215 Drought, 459–460, 471–472 Drucker, Peter, 15 Dual labor market theory of migration, 271 Dual system estimation (DSE), 116–117 Dumont, Arsène, 80–81 Durkheim, Emile, 81

Earth Day, 75 Earth Summit, 474 Easterlin relative cohort size hypothesis, 61t,

89–91 Easterlin, Richard, 89–90, 205 Ecological footprint, 464–467 Economic development, 32–33, 44, 53, 78–80,

84–86, 88, 96, 165, 205, 210, 248, 317–318, 350, 352, 356–358, 361, 381, 402–403, 439–445, 453, 470–471, 477–479, 502

and age structure, 444–445 and cities, 379–381 economic growth compared, 435–436 and food, 446–449 overview, 439–440, 445 and population growth, 433–434, 439–445 and resources, 435–436 sustainable development. See Sustainable development

Economic growth, 20, 48, 66, 237, 243–245, 320, 327, 352, 435–437f, 440–441, 471, 474

World’s largest economies, 437f See also Sustainability

Ecosphere, 469 Ecosystems, 449–450, 475 Edge cities, 375–376

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565Subject Index

Education, 2–3, 5, 8, 13, 17–18, 47, 66, 80, 109t, 118, 127, 148, 182–183, 201, 208f–209, 220, 263, 270, 298f, 300, 356, 394, 402–406, 426–427, 429, 434–435, 474t, 476

compulsory, 84 and fertility, 13, 203–204, 206–210, 237, 248 gender equity in, 45, 183, 208–209, 237, 394,

402–406, 408, 427, 429–430, 443–444 importance of, 86, 402–403 and income, 155, 237, 248, 263, 378, 386, 388,

405t, 409–414, 417, 422, 429 and infant mortality rates, 155–156, 182–183, 185 and labor force participation, 386, 405–409, 430 and life chances, 388, 402–406 and mortality, 182–183 and secularization, 86 and wealth, 182, 263, 388, 405–406, 409,

417, 429 and women, 208f, 402–406

Ehrlich, Paul, 7–8, 74–75, 433, 457–458 80-20 rule, 265 El Cajon, California migration evolution,

490–492 Emergency contraception, 216t, 218, 231, 237 Emigrant, 255, 260, 276, 283 Enclave, 290–291 Energy use, 7 Engels, Friedrich, 76–77. See also Marxian perspective Environment, 7, 254, 364–365, 450, 461–474, 479

atmosphere, pollution of, 463, 466–468 biosphere, 476 deforestation. See deforestation degradation of, 7, 23, 69, 74–75, 164, 429, 436,

461–469, 471–474, 478–479 and disasters, 471–473 ecological footprint, 464–468 ecosphere, 469 ecosystems, 449–450, 475 and food production. See Food forests, role of, 449, 462, 471 global warming, 462–463 hydrosphere, pollution of, 468–469 lithosphere, pollution of, 7 and mortality control, 163–166, 447,

472–473 ozone layer, 463 and population growth, 470–471 smog, 380 soil erosion/pollution, 461–462 troposphere, 463 water supply, 468–469 website resources for, 480 See also Sustainable environments

Environmental change, 469–473 damage assessment, 470–471 disasters, 471–473, 479 overview, 469

Environmental degradation. See Environment, degradation of

Epidemiological transition, 141, 147. See also Health and mortality transition

Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus), 67, 68

Ethnicity. See Race and ethnicity Eugenics movement, 280, 421 Euler, Leonhard, 309 European expansion, 35–36, 55 European Fertility Project, 200, 226 Evolution (demographic). See Demographic evolution Exclusion, 279, 291 Expectation of life at birth. See Life expectancy Extended family, 87, 386 Extensification of agriculture, 447–451 Extrapolation methods of population projection,

335–336 Exurbanization, 374–377 Exurbs, 365, 377–378

Family, 3, 5, 9, 21, 36, 40–41, 45–46, 61t, 63, 67, 69–70, 73, 76, 84, 88–91, 97, 121, 167, 173, 182, 386–388, 427–428

building by fate, 190. See also Fertility transition building by design, 190. See also Fertility transition defined, 386–388 and elderly, 418–420 extended. See Extended family historical sources, 130 nuclear, 386 structure, 91, 95, 97, 104, 106, 109t, 209–211,

212f, 386–378 traditional, 204, 388, 391–392 See also Family and Household Transition; Family

planning; Fertility Family and Fertility Surveys (FFS) (Europe), 129 Family and household transition, 92, 95–96,

385–393 defined, 92, 386–388 diversity in, 388–392 and economic development, 402–403 evolution, 496–498 family structure, 388–392 evolution, 496–498 and gender equity, 392–393 household composition, 388–393 and life chance changes, 386–388 overview, 95–96, 385–386

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566 Subject Index

Family control, 212f–213 Family demography, defined, 386–388 Family households, 385–386, 388–391 Family planning, 43, 52–53, 86, 88, 131, 202, 235, 238,

240, 242, 488, 498–499. See also Contraception; Population policy; Sanger, Margaret

Family reunification, 269, 273 Famine, 27, 29–30, 53, 143, 149, 186, 190, 240f, 433,

459–460, 471, 472 in China, 29–30, 240 defined, 459–460 Irish potato, 143, 471 receding, 149 South Asia, 460

Fecundity, 191–193, 205, 214t, 218, 220, 248, 399. See also Infecundity

Female circumcision, 202 Female genital mutilation (FGM), 202 Female-headed households, 389f–390 Feminists. See also Gender equity Feminization of old age, 306–307 Fertility, 93, 189–250

and age, 313–314 biological component of, 191–194 children as security and labor, 198 Coale’s preconditions for decline in, 199–201,

230–232, 235, 247, 249, 264, 381 Control. See Fertility control current patterns, 237 decline in, 14, 18, 22, 29, 33–34, 41, 43,–49,

51–54, 56, 82, 84, 86–87, 93–94, 97–98, 191–192, 198–201, 231, 235, 241, 248, 308f, 318, 321, 324, 338, 395, 444, 487, 498

differential, 207–209, 220–221 by ethnic group, 246f evolution, 487–488 high fertility, explanations for, 191–195,

196–199 historical data, 196–199 ideational changes, 201–205. See also Fertility

transition intermediate variables. See Proximate determinants

of fertility, labor force participation in low-fertility countries, 46–48, 313–315 motivations for lower levels of, 46–47, 70, 73, 85,

97, 194, 199, 201, 205–211, 231–232, 235, 237, 239, 241, 249, 262

measuring. See Fertility measures need to replenish society

and older ages, 330f overview, 93, 190, 248–249 and mortality, 196–198

and population aging, 237, 243, 246, 248–249 proximate determinants of. See Proximate

determinants of fertility and religion, 199, 424–426 replenishment of society, 196–198 sex ratio, 199, 305–306 social component of, 194–195 and son preference, 198–199 and status of women, 8, 45, 89, 196, 198–200, 202,

204, 206, 231, 237, 267, 393–394, 426, 484, 487, 496–497, 503

total fertility rate (TFR), 189f, 198, 221–223, 227, 233f, 239–240f, 243–246f, 249, 259–260, 313, 315, 318, 322, 329–330, 338, 361–362, 487, 500–501

transition. See Fertility transition urban-rural fertility differential, 203f, 204,

359t–360t, 361–362 U.S. domestic policy on, 241–243, 499–501 website resources for, 250

Fertility and Family Dynamics Surveys, 199 Fertility control, 211–223. See also Birth control

abortion. See Abortion breastfeeding, infecundity and 220–221 contraception. See Contraception government views on, 501f interconnecting influences, 212f and marriage, 213–214 overview, 211–213 as precondition for fertility decline, 93, 199–201,

230–232, 235, 247, 249, 264, 381 proximate determinants of, 213, 221–223

Fertility intentions, 229–230 Fertility, lower-levels of, 95, 197, 221–222f, 242, 247,

407, 417, 423 innovation/diffusion and cultural perspective,

209–211 motivations for, 205–211 supply-demand framework, 205–211

Fertility measures, 223–230 cohort measures, 229 estimations, 338 fertility intentions, 229–230 Fertility rate. See General fertility rate (GFR) period measures. See Period measures of fertility replenishment of society, 196–198 stable population models, 314f

Fertility transition, 92–93, 189–197, 315, 339, 444, 488

application, 230–232 case studies, 234–247 in China, 53–54, 238–240, 305–306,

318–320

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567Subject Index

cultural perspective on, 209–211 current patterns, 237 defined, 92 described, 190–191 and education, 203f, 207–209 in England, 236f geographic variability in, 232–234 high fertility, explanations for, 191–199 ideational changes, 201–205 impact on society, 92f, 96 and income, wealth, prestige, 209, 248 in India, 199, 231–232f, 236 influences, interconnection of, 211–212 innovation/diffusion perspective, 209–211 means by which accomplished, 230–232 and migration, 202, 204, 228, 244, 248 opportunity costs, 206 overview, 209, 230–232, 237 as preconditions for decline in fertility, 93, 199–201,

230–232, 235, 247, 249, 264, 381 public policy, role of, 203f–204, 211, 232 regional differences in, 233–234 and reproductive health/rights, 202–204 supply-demand framework, 205–209 in Taiwan, 240f in United Kingdom, 234–237 in U.S., 225t, 241–247 See also Fertility

Fertilizer, 453–454 Filial piety, 418, 420 Food, 6–7, 10, 13, 23, 30, 32, 37, 60t, 63, 67–68,

70–72, 74, 76–77, 79, 98, 144, 152, 163–164, 185, 253, 267, 381, 414, 433, 446–449, 451–460, 464, 475–476, 478–479, 485–486

agricultural land, and population growth, 68–69, 164–165, 348, 450t, 502

climate change, effect on, 459–461 contaminants of, 170 demand for, 456–457 desert, 181 dietary changes, 19, 455–456, 459 and economic development, 446–449 economy food plan, 414 extensification of agriculture, 447–451 fast, 20, 181 fertilizers, mechanization, and pesticide use, 211,

454, 478 genetically modified foods (GMF), 453–454, 479,

545–546 green revolution, 454–455 high-yield varieties (HYV) of crops, 451–452,

453, 455

intensification of agriculture, 448–449, 451–453

irradiation, 455 irrigation, 450t, 451–453, 461, 469 number of people that can be fed, 457–459 pesticides, 453–454, 478 preservatives, 455 processed, 8, 149–150, 477, 485–486 shortages, 469. See also Famine waste reduction, 455 and weather, 459–461 See also Green revolution

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 446, 451–453

Food security, 452, 459 Forced migration, 288–290 Force of mortality, 170–171 Ford Foundation, 452 Forward survival method of estimating

migration, 261 Fosterage, 211–212 Fourth Age, 332

Gates, Bill, 180, 376, 416, 420 Gates, Melinda, 129, 180 Gender, 141t, 158–159, 166, 199, 304–306,

392–393, 403, 409–410 defined, 304 and fertility, 198–199 and migration, 260–261, 267 and mortality, 158–159, 171–172 programmes, 130 and sex ratios, 301t, 304–306 status of women, 392–393 See also Gender equity; Sex

Gender equity, 198–199, 304–306, 392–393

Gender gap, 306–307 Gender roles, 299–300 General fertility rate (GFR), 223–224, 249 General Social Survey (Canada), 128, 371 Generational replacement, 228–229 Generation X, 19, 41 Genetically modified foods (GMF),

453–455, 479 Gentrification, 376–377 Geodemographics, 132 Geographic information systems (GIS), 134–135 Gerrymandering, 113–114 Gestation, 123f, 213–214t Globalization, 9–13

labor markets, 13 patterns of migration, 274–277

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568 Subject Index

Globalization (continued) political and social dynamics, 9–13 See also IPUMS; Population growth

Global warming, 462–463 Godwin, William, 67, 71 Gompertz, Benjamin, 154 Graunt, John, 64–65, 125, 173, 361 Great Leap Forward program, China, 30, 78 Great Migration, 268 Greenhouse gases, 165, 462–463 Green Revolution, 451–455 Griswold v. Connecticut, 242 Gross domestic product (GDP), 293–294, 436 Gross migration rate, 258–259 Gross national income (GNI), 436–439

top ten countries per person, 438t Gross national product (GNP), 435 Gross rate of in-migration, 253, 259 Gross rate of out-migration, 253, 258–259, 268 Gross reproduction rate (GRR), 223, 227, 249 Growth rates by age, 312 Guest workers, 47, 111, 276, 291, 295 Guillard, Achille, 3, 73

Halley, Edmund, 64–65 Hardin, Garrett, 74, 75 Health and mortality transition, 92–93, 139–188

causes of poor health and death, 159–170 changes over time, 61t, 141–150 disease and death over the life cycle, 148–149,

153–159 defined, 140–141 evolution, 484–486 and fertility, 93 history of, 142–146 importance of, 95 improvements in, 148–149 inequalities in, 180–185 life span and longevity, 150–153 measuring mortality, 170–180 and obesity, 149–150 overview, 140, 185–187 website resources for, 187–188 See also Mortality

Health care industry, demographics of, 18 Henry, Louis, 130 High growth potential, 82–83 High-yield varieties (HYV) of crops, 451–452 Hispanics

census, 108, 421–422 death rates, 184 education, 429 ethnicity and race, 421–422

family and household transition, 390, 417f fertility, 220–221, 245–246f, 247 identity, 108, 422 immigration to U.S., 422, 493 income, 184, 417 infecundity, 220 marriage and patterns, 398 migration, 490–492 mortality, 184 Paradox, 184 suburbanization, 378–379 term usage, 36, 106–107, 184, 422 wealth, 417

Historical sources of data, 41, 130–131 HIV/AIDS, 9, 54, 147, 159, 161t, 162–163, 170, 185,

218, 237, 474, 485–486, 502. See also specific countries in the Geographic Index

Hollerith, Herman, 134 Homicide, 153, 168, 184. See also Mortality Homogamy, 400

educational, 404–405 religious, 404

Hopkins, Harry, 326 Householder, 387, 389, 417f Households, 5, 95, 102–103, 108, 110t, 117–119,

127–128, 205–207, 270, 272, 283, 376, 385, 496–498, 503

composition, 264–265, 364, 388–392, 440, 482 evolution, 496–498 family, 385, 387, 389–390f female-headed, 389f–390 See also Census of population; Family and household

transition Household economics, 407 House of Representatives (U.S.), 106, 112–114 Housing units, 7 Hukou system, in China, 356–357 Human capital, 20, 264f, 270, 272, 295, 388, 406,

426–428, 435, 444, 476–477 Human Development Report, 454 Human resources, 439 Hume, David, 65, 68 Hunter-gatherer societies, 26, 32, 44, 94, 142, 194 Hutterites, 194–195, 201, 226 Hydrologic cycle, 462, 469 Hydrosphere, pollution of, 468–469 Hysterectomy, 123f, 217

Ibn Khaldun, 60t Illegal immigration. See undocumented immigration Immigration, 13–16, 45–48, 54, 64, 120, 126, 252,

268–269, 273, 291, 295, 302, 307, 315–316, 375, 420, 440, 483, 493–494

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569Subject Index

assimilation model, 273, 290–292, 420–422 to and from Canada, 286–288 historic background, 41–42 illegal, 284–287 net, 338 numeric limits on, 280 restrictive laws, 34, 106, 244, 274, 279–280, 408 U.S. domestic policy on, 48, 277, 279–283,

286–287, 378, 408, 493 to the U.S., 277–282, 286–287, 323, 379 See also Migration

Immigration Act of 1882, 279 Immigration Act of 1965, 281, 285 Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, 281 Immigration Quota Act (1924), 280 Immigration Reform and Control Act of (IRCA), 286 Impact (IPAT) equation, 470 Impaired fecundity, 192, 399 Income, 3, 20, 74, 80, 87–88, 90, 109t, 121, 127,

143–144, 148, 155–156, 160–161t, 165f, 167, 182–185, 198, 205–207, 209, 244, 262, 270, 272, 275, 293, 295, 300, 320–321, 332, 354–356, 376, 388, 400, 407, 409–414, 430, 432f, 436–439, 445, 493

and children, 198, 204–205, 207 demographic dividend, 320–321 in developing countries, 415t ecological footprints by, 466–468, 470, 476 and economic development, 434–436, 440–442, 478 and education, 87, 144, 156, 415, 429–430 gap, 412–413 and fertility, 198, 204–205, 207, 209 gender disparities in, 392–393, 405–406,

410, 412 Great Recession, 410 and infant mortality rates, 154–156 and life chances, 401 and marriage, 127, 378, 427 and mortality, 148–149, 155–156, 160–161t,

167, 182–185 neighborhood disparities, 378–379 and old age, 418–420 per capita, 144, 432f, 434, 437–439 racial/ethnic disparities in, 390, 412–414 remittances, 294 and slums, 369 tax returns, 126 and wealth, 127, 301t, 416–420, 427 See also Gross national income (GNI); Purchasing

power parity (PPP); Poverty Incorporation of immigrants by host country, 291 INDEPTH network, 129 Individual aging, 324–325

Industrial Revolution, 28, 31–32, 55, 72, 96, 130, 143–146, 234, 271, 347, 349, 440–441, 447–449, 475

health and mortality in, 143–146 INEGI (Mexico), 121, 128 Infanticide, 62, 199, 211–212 Infant mortality, 40–41, 44–45, 50–51, 64, 84, 86,

154–157, 359t–360t, 370, 484. See also individual countries in the Geographic Index

Infectious diseases, 33, 142–144, 153–159, 160, 163, 165–166, 170, 185, 485

emerging, 163, 166 HIV/AIDS. See HIV/AIDS influenza, 143, 166, 185 malaria, 143, 161t–163, 186 maternal mortality, 158, 166 measles, 160–162 parasitic, 148, 164 plague, 142–143, 160 pneumonia, 160, 170 smallpox, 143–144, 148 tuberculosis, 160–161t, 186 West Nile virus, 166 See also Communicable diseases

Infecundity, postpartum, 213 Infertility. See Infecundity Influenza, 143, 166, 185 In-migrant/in-migration, 253, 259 Innovative/diffusion perspective on fertility decline,

209–211 Institutional theory of migration, 272 Integration, 291 Intensification of agriculture, 448–449, 451–453 Intercensal years, estimating population for, 126,

260–261 Intercourse, 70, 73, 89, 163, 194, 197, 202, 213–215,

217–218, 221, 223, 248, 351, 395–396 Intermediate variables. See Proximate determinants

of fertility Internal migration, 254–255

within the U.S., 267–268 See also Migration transition

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records as data source, 126, 258

Internally displaced persons, 288 International Business Machines (IBM), 134 International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 168 International Conference on Population

and Development (ICPD), 498 International Labour Organization, 409–410, 415 International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, 451 International migration, 254–274

chain migration, 269, 271, 273

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570 Subject Index

International migration (continued) characteristics of, 269, 272–274 children of immigrants, 15, 48, 54, 290, 292, 498 consequences of, 290–292 between countries, 268–269 cumulative causation perspective, 272 defined, 252 dual labor market theory, 271 explanations for, 263, 272–274 global patterns, 274–277 indices for, 258 institutional theory, 272 neoclassical economics approach, 270 network theory, 271 new household economics theory, 270 overview, 254–255 remittances as factor in, 293–294 societal consequences, 292–293 step migration, 269 and urbanization, 353–355, 362 and world systems theory, 271 See also Migration transition

International Planned Parenthood Federation, 242 International Rice Research Institute, 452 Intervening obstacles, 263 Intrauterine device (IUD), 216t, 218–219 Inverse population projection, 339 Investment demographics, 435, 448, 453–454 Involuntary abstinence, 214t IPAT equation. See Impact equation IPUMS, 121–122 Iraqui-origin Population, San Diego (1960–2012), 491f Irish potato famine, 143, 471 Irradiation, 455 Irrigation, 450t, 451–453, 461, 469 Islam, 48–49, 51, 62–63, 426

Japanese Exclusion Act (1924), 279 Jefferson, Thomas, 71, 153 Johnson administration, 413 Johnson, Robert Wood, 19 Johnson, Lyndon, 295

Kennedy, John F., 290, 499 Kgatla people, 196 Kinship unit, 386–387 Knowlton, Charles, 73, 215

Labor force participation, 406–408 and empowerment of women, 393, 406–408 and fertility, 198, 211, 237, 244

Lactation, 220–221 Language, 85, 109t, 291, 423–424, 492

as a barrier, 86–87, 423–424 in Canada, 109t–110t, 423 ESL, 492 home versus work usage, 109t Mayan, 424 in Mexico, 424 and migrants, 291 neo-Aramaic, 490

Laws, The (Plato), 61–62 Leasure, William, 85, 241 Lenin, V. I., 78 Leninist approach, 78 Lexis, Wilhelm, 302 Lexis diagram, 302–303 Life chances, 401–426

and education, 402–406 empowerment of women, 393 income, 410–414 labor force participation, 406–409 occupations, 409–410 and poverty, 414–416 and race/ethnicity, 420–424 and religion, 424–426 and wealth, 416–420 of women, 21, 406–410

Life course, 386, 393, 397, 401–402 Life cycle. See Life course Life expectancy, 2–4t, 21, 31, 42–47, 49–52, 54, 93,

140–147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157–161t, 162, 164–165, 170–171, 173, 178–181, 183, 186, 202, 204, 237, 249–250, 259, 306–307, 309–310, 313–315, 318, 326, 328–330, 338, 358, 401, 416, 418, 420, 429–430, 445, 456, 472, 485–486, 497–498, 500, 502

in Canada, 145f history of, 142–146 improvements in, 141t as measure of longevity, 151–153 in Mexico, 145f regional changes, 147f in U.S., 145f See also Mortality; Health and Mortality transition;

Disability-adjusted life expectancy Life span, 150–151 Life tables, 173–180

calculations, 173, 178–180 females, 174t–175t males, 176t–177

Limits to Growth (Club of Rome), 67, 476 Lithosphere, pollution of, 7 Living arrangements. See Family; Households Locke, John, 70–71

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Logarithms, 335–336 Longevity, 16, 19, 144, 150–154, 165f, 173, 186,

203f–204, 302, 304 actual, 173 biological factors, 151 life expectancy as measure of, 151–153 past statistics, 4t, 153 social factors, 152–153

Long-term immigrant, 255 Louis XIV, King of France, 103, 119 Louis XV, King of France, 65, 103

Malaria, 143, 161t–163, 186 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 66–77, 81–82,

88–89, 97–98, 199, 201, 241, 433, 445–447, 475, 498. See also Malthusian perspective

Malthusian perspective, 58, 67–79, 82, 88, 90, 97–98, 164, 358, 395, 433, 435, 442–443, 445, 447, 475, 477, 487

causes of population growth, 68–70 checks to growth, 60t, 68–69, 76, 80, 82 consequences of population growth, 70 critique of, 71–73 means of subsistence, 65, 67–68, 70 moral restraint, 60, 72–73, 75, 77, 88–89 neo-malthusians, 73–75 on Poor Laws, 71–72 positive checks, 69 on poverty, 60t, 68, 70–72 preventive checks, 69, 72–73 Principle of Population, 67–68, 71

Mandela, Nelson, 163 Mao Zedong, 30, 53 Mapping, demographic data, 132–134 Marital status, 184–185, 393–396

average age, 497f delayed, 393–396 importance of, 416–417, 426–428 as investment in children, 407 and sexual activity, 395

Marketing demographics, 18–19, 131–132 Marriage. See Marital status Marx, Karl, 71, 73, 76–80, 84, 88, 97–99,

182, 442–443. See also Marxian (or Marxist) perspective

Marxian (or Marxist) perspective, 53, 60t, 76–78, 97, 99, 442–444, 447

causes of population growth, 76 consequences of population growth, 76–72 critique of, 77–78 on poverty, 67–77 socialism, 78

Maternal mortality rates, 8, 158–159, 166 fertility transition, influence on, 212f in modern society, 309 ratio (MMR), defined, 166

Mayan civilization, 42–43, 332, 471, 475. See also Languages, Mayan

Mbeki, Thabo, 163 Mean length of generation, 225t, 228–229, 246 Means of subsistence, 65, 68, 70, 82, 98 Measles, 160–162 Mega cities, 366–367f Megalopolis, 269 Menarche, 192–193 Menopause, 192 Mercantilism, 60t, 64–65 Mesopotamian civilizations, 471, 490 Metropolitan areas, 363–368

defined, 363–368 residential segregation in, 377–378 and smart growth, 364

Mexican Migration Project (Massey), 272 Mexican-origin population in U.S., 247. See also

Hispanics Middle East, 6, 8, 10–12, 16, 26, 47–48, 96, 111, 166,

273–274, 286, 315, 317, 373f, 415t, 467, 483, 489, 493, 495, 502–503

Migradollars, 293 Migrants

flows, 256–259, 269–270, 272, 274–275, 282, 284–285, 290, 293, 375

internal and international, 254–255 projected net numbers by 2050, 489f stocks, 256–258, 274, 276, 290, 296

Migration, 34–36, 56, 92f, 251– 297, 304, 315–316, 340–341, 357–358, 362, 377, 488–493

by age, 266, 315–316 age structure affected by, 295 into and out of Canada, 286–287 consequences of, 290–294 decision-making model, 264f defined, 253–254 European expansion, 35–36, 275–276, 282 evolution, 488–493 and fertility transition, 24, 202, 204, 228,

244, 248 by gender, 267 global context of, 284–286 global patterns, 274–277 illegal, 284–286 international. See International migration measuring. See Migration measures numeric limits on, 280 overview, 294–297

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572 Subject Index

Migration (continued) “perverse laws” of, 277, 285–286 and population aging, 273, 295 purpose of, 315–316 reasons for, 262–266 replacement, 253, 274, 282 rural-to-urban, 268, 357–358 South to North migration, 35–36 Transition. See Migration transition into the U.S., 277–283 out of the U.S., 283 within the U.S., 267–268, 276f, 278t Urban revolution, 36–37, 55, 344, 368–379 website resources for, 297 See also Immigration; Internal migration; Migration

transition Migration effectiveness, 259 Migration evolution, 267–268 Migration measures, 255–261

components of change method, 252–253, 260, 263, 269

crude net migration rate, 259 forward survival method, 261 gross migration rate, 259 gross rate of in-migration, 253, 259 gross rate of out-migration, 253, 258–259, 268 indices, 258–261 migration effectiveness, 259 migration ratio, 260 migration turnover rate, 259 net migration, 259–261, 276f, 286–287 overview, 255–256 stocks versus flows, 256–258

Migration ratio, 260 Migration transition, 92, 94–95

between countries, 268–274 within countries, 261–268 defined, 92 demographic perspective, 94–95 described, 252–253 and economic development, 262 evolution, 493–495, 503 forced migration. See Forced migration overview, 94–95 population policies for managing, 274–275, 277,

281, 286–287, 295, 297, 490–492 redistribution from, 34–37 from rural to urban areas. See Urban transition

Mill, John Stuart, 79–80 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 7, 453, 474 Mobility

geographic, 101, 126, 418 residential, 258, 265

social, 81, 207–208, 235, 300, 425 structural, 327

Modernization theory, 352 cities, role of, 352

Momentum of population growth, 339–340 Moral restraint, 60t, 69, 72–73, 77, 98 Morbidity, 140 Mortality, 3, 50, 64, 156–158, 170, 181–183,

186, 205, 307, 309–310, 312, 340–341, 358–362, 369, 382, 396, 484f

African Americans, 183–184 age differentials, 153–154, 156–158, 311f age structure effects, 94, 171–174t, 178, 186, 309,

311f, 334, 337, 341 Asians, 184 Bills of, 64, 122 causes of. See Causes of death changes in rates

of See Health and mortality transition changes over time, 61t, 141–150 compression, 157–158 control, 163–166, 447, 472–473 decline of, 205, 309–312, 323 education differentials, 182–183 environmental impact, control of, 144, 152,

163–166, 170 and fertility, 196–198 force of, 170–171 gender differentials in, 158–159, 171–172 health and. See Health and mortality transition Hispanics, 184 history, in U.S., 144–145 and income, 148–149, 155–156, 160–161t,

167, 182–184 infant. See Infant mortality injuries, 160, 168 life expectancy. See Life expectancy life span, 150–151 longevity. See Longevity marital status differentials, 184–185 maternal. See Maternal mortality rates measuring. See Mortality measures; neighborhood

inequalities, occupational differentials, 170, 182 at older ages, 156–158 postponing death, 148–149 racial-ethnic differentials, 183 rectangularization of mortality, 333–334 rural, 182, 187, 358–362 sex differentials in, 158–159 social status differentials, 182–183 transition. See Health and mortality transition urban differentials, 181, 358–360t, 181 war, 146–149

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Mortality control, 164–165 Mortality measures, 170–172, 180

age-adjusted death rates, 172 age/sex-specific death rates, 171–172 crude death rate (CDR), 171 disability-adjusted life years, 180 life tables. See Life tables maternal mortality, 158, 166 projected child mortality rates (2050), 484f

Mortality transition. See Health and mortality transition Movers, 254, 263, 265, 268 Multiculturalism, 291–292 Multiple indicators cluster surveys (MICS), 129 Muslim, 15, 48, 50–52

and Christians, 491 fertility, 426 future projection for, 425 marriage and sex, 395 most populous nations of, 50–52, 395, 425 Prophet Mohammed, census by, 103 during the Renaissance, 63

National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), 128 National Origins Quota system, 280–281, 285 National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE)

(Mexico), 128 National Survey of Families and Households,

119–120 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), 128,

191–192, 214, 394, 424 Native Americans, 40, 246f–247, 422 Natural fertility, 211, 226, 234, 248 Natural increase, 358–361

component of urban transition, 358–361 Natural resources, 409t–410, 436, 439, 445 Neighborhood inequalities, mortality rates, 181–182 Neoclassical economics theory of migration, 270 Neolithic demographic transition, 32, 91 Neolithic Revolution. See Agricultural Revolution Neo-Malthusians, 73–75 Neo-Marxian, 434, 442–443, 477 Net census undercount, 115t Net migration, 259–261, 275–276t, 286–287 Net reproduction rate (NRR), 211–212f, 223,

228–229, 235, 248–249 Network theory of migration, 271 Net worth, 416–417, 419f–420 New household economics theory, 270. See also

Supply-demand framework NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitude, 364 Nomads, 254 Noncommunicable conditions, 161t, 167–168 Nonfamily/nontraditional households, 387–388, 391

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 374, 498–499

Nonsampling error, 111, 118, 136 Notestein, Frank, 82 Nuclear family, 87, 386 Nutrition. See also Food Nutrition transition, 149–150

Obama administration, 463, 474 Occupation, 3, 89, 109t, 128, 182–183, 185,

265, 281, 300, 301t, 378, 386, 388, 408, 409–411, 430

gender differences, 409t–410 and mortality, 170, 182, 396

Old, defined, 324–325 Older population. See Population aging Old-old. See Fourth Age One-child policy in China, 53–54 Operation Wetback, 285 Opportunity costs, 206, 209, 237 Oral contraceptives, 215–216t, 217–219 Oral rehydration therapy (ORT), 148, 156 Organizational inefficiencies, 458 Orphanage, 211–212 Out-migrant, 255, 259–260, 274 Out-of-wedlock births, 397–399 Overcoverage study, Canada, 120 Overpopulation, 67, 70, 75, 77, 79 Overruralization, 380 Overshoot, 475–477 Overurbanization, 380 Ozone layer, 463

Palestinian population, 10, 274 Parasitic diseases. See Infectious and parasitic diseases Parity progression ratios, 231 Per capita income, 144, 432f, 434, 437–439 Period data, measures of fertility. See Period measures

of fertility Period measures of fertility, 223–229

age-specific fertility rate (ASFR), 225t–229, 232f, 236f, 244f

child-woman ratio (CWR), 223–224, 249 and cohorts, 302f crude birth rate (CBR), 223–224, 241, 249 general fertility rate (GFR), 223–224, 249 generational replacement rate, 228, 242 gross reproduction rate (GRR), 223, 227, 249 mean length of generation, 225t, 228–229, 246 net reproduction rate (NRR), 211–212f, 223,

228–229, 235, 248–249 total fertility rate (TFR), 221–223, 227, 233f, 240f,

244f, 246f, 330f, 487f, 500–501

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Periodic abstinence, 216t, 218, 241 Peripheral countries, 271, 353–354, 381 Peri-urban region, 377 Permanent celibacy, 214t Pesticides, 453–454, 478 Petty, William, 64, 125 Physiocratic thought, 60t, 65 “The pill”. See Oral contraceptives Plague, 142–143, 160 Planned obsolescence, 150–151 Planned Parenthood Federation, 242 Plato, 60t–62 Pliny, the younger, 62 Pluralism, 291, 424 Pneumonia, 160, 170 Politics, demographics of, 15–21

age transition, 15–20 census, importance of, 112–114 and immigration, 13–15 women’s rights, 21

Political dynamics, 7–13 demographic contributions, 12 globalization, 9–13 MENA region, 11f Middle East crisis, 10–12 population, relationship to, 7–13 regional conflicts, 7–9

Pollution. See Environment Pollution crisis, 461, 470 Poor Laws (England), 71–72 Population aging, 324–334

age and sex structure of older population, 331t, 317, 324–325, 328–334

and birth rate, 45–47 centenarians, 333–334 current statistics for, 328–332 Fourth age, 333 geography of older population, 329–332 and migration, 315–316, 340–341 and mortality, 156–158 old, described, 324–325 and retirement, 326–328 social context of aging and life course, 302,

324, 333 statistics, 328–329 Third age, 332–333

Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 7, 74, 457–458 Population census. See Census of population Population characteristics, 3, 9, 18, 21. See also Family

and household transition Population conferences. See World population

conferences; individual conference; United Nations Population distribution, 37–38t

Population doctrines, 61–66 Population explosion, 27f–28, 41, 43 Population forecast, 41, 54 Population growth, 3–4, 9–13, 18, 26–57, 82,

100f, 104, 265, 275–276, 308f, 311t, 320–321, 339, 349, 360t, 435–445 482–484, 496, 500, 502, 498

age structure, 444–445 doubling times, 30–31 and economic development, 32–33, 44, 53,

435–445, 477–479 environmental impacts of, assessing global

variation in, 39–55 history of, 26–29 in Canada, 42 China, 52–54, 318–320 in East Asia, 52 environmental damage assessment, 470–471 in Europe, 44–45 global variation, 39–40 India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, 50–51 Indonesia and the Philippines, 51 Iran, 52 Japan, 54 in less developed nations, 6, 13, 19, 33, 35–37,

39–40, 45, 54, 56, 155, 190, 198, 208, 224, 236, 249, 318, 329–330, 349, 361, 382, 441, 498–499

in low-fertility countries, 46–48, 313–315 in Mexico and Central America, 42–43 middle latitudes, 39f and migration, 34–35, 315–316. See also Migration in Northern Africa and Western Asia, 48–49 in North America, 40–42 number of people ever born, 34 in Oceania, 54–55 overview, 55–57 rates of, 12, 29–30, 42, 55, 228, 273, 310,

336, 340, 435, 440–441, 444, 477, 482, 499–500, 502

reasons for rapidity of recent growth, 32–34 reasons for slow early growth, 31–32 and Socialism, 442–443 in South America, 43–44 South to North migration, 35–36 in South and Southeast Asia, 50 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 37, 49–50 theories of. See Population theories in U.S., 34, 36–38t, 40–43 urban revolution, 36–37, 55, 344, 368–379 Vietnam and Thailand, 51–52 website resources, 57

Population hurdle, 295, 435

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Population implosion, 43, 46–48 Population momentum, 27, 35, 52–53, 339–340 Population policy, 499–501

fertility levels, 501f global conferences. 498 government policies, 43–44, 47–48, 53–54,

61–66, 78, 238–239, 498–501 Population projections, 27f, 29, 33–34, 38t

by age structure, 334–335 backward or inverse, 339 cohort component method, 337–339 components of growth, 336–337 extrapolations, 335–337 momentum, 339–340 2015 to 2050, 483f

Population processes, 3, 21, 59, 101, 130, 137, 309, 354

Population pyramid, 308–310. See also Age pyramids

Population registers, 104, 122–125, 130 Population structure, 3, 5–6. See also Demography,

housing and infrastructure Population theories, 60t–61t, 440–442

prelude to Malthus, 61t, 66–67 premodern, 61–66 See also Demographic transition theory; Mathusian

perspective; Marxian perspective Positive checks, 69 Postcoital contraception, 218–219 Postnatal control, 211–212 Postpartum amenorrhea, 193, 220 Postpartum infecundity, 213 Poverty, 7–9, 51, 60t, 65, 68–73, 75–77, 79, 84, 97–98,

185–186, 205, 262, 294, 317, 355, 372–373f, 374, 380, 414–416, 430, 434–435, 439–441, 443, 454, 473–474

and life chances, 414–416 Mexico, rural areas, 355 Malthus on, 60t, 68, 70–72 Marxian perspective on, 67–77 and wealth, 416 World’s Development Report, 474

Preconditions for decline in fertility, 93, 199–201, 230–232, 235, 247, 249, 264, 381

Prestige, and fertility, 197, 206, 248 Primate cities, 352–354 Primogeniture, 199, 234 Principle of Population (Malthus), 67–68 PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), 132 Programme of Action, 498 Projections. See Population projections Pronatalist policies, 62, 98, 196, 197 Proximate determinants, 213

of family and household changes. See Proximate determinants of family and household changes

of fertility. See Proximate determinants of fertility of urban transition, 357–368

Proximate determinants of family and household changes, 393–401

childlessness, 399 cohabitation, 396–397 combination of determinants, 401 delayed marriage, accompanied by leaving parental

nest, 393–396 divorce, 399–400 out-of-wedlock births, 397–399 widowhood, 400–401

Proximate determinants of fertility, 213, 221–223 abortion. See Abortion contraception. See Contraception importance of, 221–223 infecundity, 220–221 intermediate variables, 214t marriage, 213–214 relative importance of, of fertility, 221–223

Prudential restraint, 72–73 PUMS, 121–122. See also IPUMS Purchasing power parity (PPP), 436–439 Push-pull theory of migration, 262–263, 296

Quesnay, François, 65, 103 Quota Law of 1921, 280–281

Race and ethnicity, 420–424. See also specific ethnic group

in Canada, 423–424 and census, 109t family households, differentials in, 390f and fertility, 246f in Mexico, 423–424 and migrants, 290 mortality rates, 183–184 multicultural model, 421–422 North American model, 420–421, 423 suburbanization differentials, 377–379 in U.S. census, 421–423

Racial discrimination, 388, 421–422, 429 Racial stratification, 390f, 422–423 Racism. See Racial discrimination Radix, 178, 228 Rank-size rule, 352–353 Rational choice theory (RAT), 87, 210 Rats, and effects of population density, 143, 370–371 Receding famine, 149 Reclassification component of urbanization, 362–363 Rectangularization of mortality, 333–334

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Redistricting, of Congressional seats, 108, 113–114 Refugees, 202, 254, 271, 275–276, 288, 291, 295,

471, 493 in Africa, 275 forced migration, 288 Iraq, crisis in, 490–492 post-World War II, 281 status, 3, 255

Regional conflict, 7–9 Relative cohort size hypothesis. See Easterlin relative

cohort size hypothesis Religion, 424–426

demographics of, 424–426 and fertility, 199

Religious pluralism, 424–425 Remittances as factor in international migration,

293–294 Renaissance, 31, 62–63, 103 Replacement migration, 253, 274, 282 Residential mobility, 258, 265 Residential segregation, 377–379 Resources, 2, 6–8, 12–13, 17, 22–23, 26, 28, 43, 46, 53,

60t–61, 70, 75, 89, 99, 122, 164–165f, 210–211, 252, 264f, 300, 340, 353, 381, 387, 392, 409t–410, 419, 429, 433, 439, 441–442, 445–446, 459, 461, 464, 466, 470, 476, 477

crisis, 447 economic growth and development, 165, 435–436 exploitation of, 476 family, 88–89, 93, 212, 387, 426 female labor as, 204 GNI and PPP, 7, 436–439 immigrants as, 45 inequalities of usage, 180, 300, 340, 470 human population, as ultimate resource, 198, 441 and migration, 22, 269, 277 natural, 2, 7, 28, 267, 409t–410, 436, 439, 445, 469 nonrenewable, 75 and old age, 444–445 relationship of population to, 6–7, 23, 46, 60t–61,

70, 74, 76, 79, 81, 164, 262, 447, 462, 476–477. See also Demographic transition theory; Malthusian perspective; Marxian perspective

social and political dynamics, 7–13 use and abuse of, 7, 434–435 See also Environment; Food; Human capital; Human

resources; Water Retirement, 47

age at, 47, 325, 328 “Chile” model, 327–328 paying for, in richer countries, 326–328

Reverse Record Check study, Canada, 120 Rhythm method, 218

Rockefeller Foundation, 451 Roman empire

census taking in, 102 decline, 27, 142 health and mortality in, 142–143 population growth, use of, 62 pronatalist doctrines in, 62

Roosevelt, Franklin, 326 Rural, 5, 7–8, 36–37, 55–56, 181, 351t,

359t–360t and children, 199 in China, 356 described, 181, 345–346 and differentials, urban, 95, 181, 429 and fertility, 199, 204, 239, 361–362, 392 living incentives in, 239 in Mexico, 354–355 mortality, 182, 187, 358–362 population increase, 92, 94, 253, 267, 294, 296,

350–351t, 358. See also Migration transition sustainability, 379–382 urban-rural fertility differential, 181, 357–358,

359t–360t, 362 Rural-to-urban migration component of urban

transition, 357–358. See also Urban transition

Sample surveys, 127–130 Sampling error, 118 Sampling for nonresponse, 118, 120 Sanger, Margaret, 242, 498 SARS, 163 Second demographic transition, 91–92, 385 Secularization, 86, 241, 426 Segmented assimilation, 273–274, 292 Segmenting, 19, 379 Senescence, 150, 333 Sex, 158–159, 163, 186, 199, 213–214, 218, 224, 226,

299–302, 304–306, 313, 315, 334, 337–341, 388, 396, 502

abortion, 199 and age, 18, 59, 96, 108, 109t, 117, 125,

171–172, 224, 295, 299–301, 306f, 308, 312, 317, 341

gender differentials in mortality, 158–159, 171–178, 182, 186, 309, 338–339

HIV and infections, 170, 486 ratios, 171–172, 304–307, 340–341, 418 See also Gender

Sex dimorphism, 304 Sex ratio, 304–306 Simmel, Georg, 369 Simon, Julian, 441–442, 458, 478 Slavery, 288–290

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577Subject Index

Slums, 371–374 Smallpox, 143–144, 148 Smart growth, 364–365 Smith, Adam, 66, 70, 74, 234, 449 Smog, 380 Snow, John, 132, 499 Social capillarity, 80–81, 97–98 Social capital, 272, 295, 388, 426–427 Social component of fertility, 194–195 Social dynamics, 7–13

demographic contributions, 12 globalization, 9–13 MENA region, 11f Middle East crisis, 10–12 population, relationship to, 7–13 regional conflicts, 7–9 See also Politics, demographics of

Socioeconomic differentials in mortality, 182–183

Social institutions, 67, 84, 86, 196–197 Social planning, 2, 5–22 Socialism, Marxist perspective on, 78, 442–443 Socialization process, 301 Social roles, 202, 299–301, 386 Social Security Act, 326 Social Security benefits, 325–327 Social status, 182–183 Societal consequences of migration, 292–293 Soil erosion, 450–451, 461–462 Sojourners, 254, 255 Son preference

as factor in high fertility, 198–199 and sex ratios, 199

Spatial demography, 3, 4, 12, 131–135 GIS and the census, 134–135 mapping, 132–134 overview, 131–132, 135–136

Spermicide, 218 Stable populations, 141t, 309, 313–315 Standardization, 172 Standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA), 363 Stationary populations, 309, 317 Statistics Canada, 119–120, 128, 346, 414 Steam engine, 448 Step migration, 269 Sterilization, 195, 213–214t, 216t–217. See also

Contraception Stolnitz, George, 83 Structural mobility, 327, 413 Subfecundity. See Impaired fecundity Suburbanization, 374–377 Suicide, 152–153, 168 Supply-demand framework, 205–209

Surgical contraception, 200, 217, 231, 236–237

Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 127, 416

Süssmilch, Johann Peter, 64 Sustainability, 433–473

and economic development, 439–445 and environmental degradation 461–469. See also

Environment, degradation of and food, 446–461 and human dimensions, 469–473 overview, 433–434 population, effect on, 432–473 and resources, 434–439

Sustainable development, 379–381, 473–477 and carrying capacity, 475–476 central ingredients of, 434 cities as, 379–381 defined, 473–474 dynamic equilibrium, 476 and fish catches, 415 future trends, 473–474 global trends for, 473–477 goals, 474t and low-yield farming, 455 overview, 433 and premodern humans, 475 and urban areas, 379–381, 464 See also Food

Synthetic cohort, 223, 227, 229, 248–249

Taliban, 8 Targeting, 19, 132 Target year in population projections, 335–336,

337, 341 Terrorism, 12, 49, 51, 317, 495 Third Age, 317, 324, 332–333 Thompson, Warren, 61t, 82 Three Gorges Dam, 254, 469 TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding

and Referencing) system, 134–135 Total fertility rate (TFR), 189f, 198, 221–223, 227,

233f, 239–240f, 243–246f, 249, 259–260, 313, 315, 318, 322, 329–330, 338, 361–362, 487, 500–501

Total volume (flow) of migration, 259 Toxins and toxic agents, 152, 170, 454 Traditional family, 388, 391, 497 Tragedy of the commons, 74, 433 Transients, 254, 291 Transitional growth, 82 Transnational migrants, 252–253, 291–292 Troposphere, 463

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578 Subject Index

Tubal ligation, 217, 488 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 104

Undocumented immigrants, 4, 14, 41–42, 47, 111, 113, 255, 258, 261, 282, 284–287, 295–296, 316

Unemployment rates, 279, 379, 406, 492 UNICEF, 129, 220 United Nations, 7, 10, 28–29, 33, 35, 46, 49, 54, 102,

129, 141, 156, 160, 162, 168, 195, 202, 221, 233, 240, 255–256, 275, 288, 306, 320, 323, 333, 338, 350, 356, 366–367t, 372, 380, 393, 409, 418, 436, 442, 454, 460, 473–474, 482, 484, 488, 498–499, 501

Conference on Environment and Development, 474 Economic Commission for Europe, 129 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),

164, 446 and food security term, 452 Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), 498 High Commissioner for Refugees report, 288 Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), 372 Intergovernmental Panel on Convention on Climate

Change, 460 International Conference on Population and

Development (ICPD). See International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)

Office on Drugs and Crime, 168 Population Division, 10, 28, 29, 46, 195, 275, 333,

345, 418, 460, 484, 499–500 Population Fund (UNFPA), 442, 498 population projections, 10, 29, 46, 195, 275, 333,

345, 418, 460, 484 Programme on HIV/AIDS, 162–163 Statistics Division, 102, 320 United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 129 UN-Water, 453 Working Group II, 460 World Commission on Environment

and Development, 473 See also World population conferences

Unmet need for contraception, 398, 426 Urban, 4, 36–37, 55, 56, 61t, 133f, 343f–349

agglomeration, 365–366, 367t area (UA), 346 cluster (UC), 346 crowding, 369–374 defined, 204, 347 described, 344–347 differentials, 181 and fertility, 202–203f, 204, 239, 361–362 hierarchy, and city systems, 352–354 life, 84, 182, 194 mortality, 307, 358–361, 382

patterns in, 349–352 place, 253, 344–346 reclassification as urban, 362–363 sprawl, 364–365 sustainability, 450, 464 world’s population, 343f, 351t, 496t See also Rural Urban transition

Urban evolution, 368–379, 482–485. See also Demographic evolution

future trends for, 482–485 overview, 368–369 projections by 2050, 496f residential segregation, 377–379 slums, 371–374 suburbanization, 374–377 urban crowding, impacts of, 369–371

Urban hierarchies, 352–354 Urbanism, 369–370 Urbanization. See Urban transition Urban revolution, 36–37, 55, 344, 368–379 Urban transition, 92, 94–95, 343–383

African rate of, 351t in China, 351t, 355–357 current patterns of, 349–352 described, 92, 344–346 and economic development, 350–352,

379–380 evolution, 494–495 hierarchy and city systems, 352–354 industrialized nations, 348f international urbanward migration, 362 in Latin America, 351t metropolitanization. See Metropolitan areas areas in Mexico, 354–355 natural increase, 358–361 overview, 94–95, 381–383 precursors to, 347–349 proximate determinants of, 357 reclassification as urban, 362–363 rural-to-urban migration, 357–358 sprawl in America, 364–365 sustainable environments, 379–381 urban-rural fertility differential, 181, 203f–204,

359t–362 website resources for, 383 World’s rate of, 350f

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 499

U.S. Border Patrol, 285–286 U.S. Census Bureau, 18, 106–108, 111–118, 127,

134–135, 172, 256, 258, 260, 283, 306, 334, 346, 362–363, 387, 409, 416, 483

U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 160

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579Subject Index

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), 126 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 126,

257–258 U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 279, 281,

285. See also U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service

U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 127–128, 169, 179–180, 183

U.S. Social Security Administration, 126, 283, 327, 414

Use-effectiveness, of contraceptives, 215–218 Usual residence, as basis of census, 111

Vacuum aspiration, 113f Vasectomy, 217 Visible minorities, 423 Vital events. See Vital statistics Vital statistics, 101, 122–127, 130, 135,

169, 184, 224, 248, 260 and combining census, 125–126 registration of, 122–125

Voluntary abstinence, 214t Voluntary infecundity. See Contraception Voting, 114, 133f

Wallace, Robert, 65, 68 Wan xi shao campaign, in China, 53, 239–240f Waste, 7, 146, 148, 152, 181, 381, 435, 446, 455,

457–458, 464, 471, 478 animal, 142 brine, 469 environmental dumping, 461 hazardous, 461 human, 146, 148, 181 non-degradable, 374 toxic, 7

Water, 6–7, 10, 12, 23, 132, 110t, 146, 220, 354, 433, 449, 453, 461, 468–469

cycle, 469 desalinated, 469 and disease prevention, 148, 164 efficient use of, 455 fresh, 469 groundwater, 462, 468–469 and irrigation, 453, 469 and politics, 469 pollution, 155, 170, 461, 469 purification, 152 salt, 458 and Saudi Arabia, 469 and slums, 372–373 supply, 379–380, 464, 468–469 and technology, 144, 156, 164, 180, 365, 368, 380

Wealth, 36, 60t, 64–66, 72, 77, 80, 149, 209, 265, 271, 276, 300–301, 326, 329, 375, 416–420, 429–430, 439, 441, 470, 477

in America, 430 described, 416 ecological footprints, 464 and elderly, 418–420 ethnicity and race, 417 and fertility, 199, 209, 248–249 flow, 87 IPAT formula, 470 landed, 102–103 and marital status, 416–417, 427 400 wealthiest people in the U.S., 411, 419t–420 net worth, 416–417, 419f–420 and older people, 418–420 and opportunities, 379 and society’s infrastructure, 152, 199 See also Gross national income (GNI)

Wealth flow, 87 Wealth of a nation, 60t, 65, 439 Wear and tear theory, 150–151 Weber, Adna, 152, 369, 374 West Nile virus, 166 Widowhood, 400–401 William of Normandy, 102 Winged bean (goa bean), 452 Wirth, Louis, 369–370 Withdrawal, 21, 215–217, 234, 242 Women, status of. See Gender equity World Bank, 7, 12, 160, 170, 180, 293–294, 403,

415, 434–436, 474 World Fertility Survey, 129 World Health Organization, 148, 156, 160, 166,

168, 170, 180, 219–220, 455, 485 World populations

cartogram of countries, 25f explosion, 27f, 28, 32–34, 41, 43 geographic distribution, 37–38 history, 26–29 past statistics, 4t, 31–32, 34 rate of growth, 29–31 size and growth, 39–40. See also specific countries

in the Geographic Index World population conferences, 498

Belgrade (1965), 498 Bucharest (1974), 498 Cairo (1994) 498 Geneva (1927), 498 Mexico City (1984), 498 Rome, (1954), 498 See also International Conference on Population

and Development (ICPD); United Nations

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580 Subject Index

World Population Plan of Action. See Programme of Action

World systems theory and cities, 270–271, 296 and economic development, 262 of migration, 271

World War I, 10, 143, 242, 268, 275, 277, 280, 377

World War II, 2, 9–10, 29, 33, 35, 39, 41–42, 44, 47, 49, 51, 91, 104, 115, 128, 134, 146–147, 149, 158–159, 186, 243, 303, 352, 377, 498

and African Americans, 377–379 baby boom after, 42, 193, 395 as demographic turning point, 146–147 and migration, 274–281, 283–284, 286–287, 489

and international migration, 274–281, 283–284, 286–287, 489

post-, 193, 229, 243, 268, 273, 329, 333, 377–378, 391–392, 395–396, 408, 412, 430

and smoking, 159 as turning point, 146–149, 186

Xenophobia, 277, 290, 371, 489

Year of the Fiery Horse (Japan), 313 Yoruba, 104, 196–197 Young-old, See Third age Youth bulge, 9, 20, 23, 48, 52, 90, 96, 252, 317–318f,

322–323, 489, 503

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Brief Table of Contents
Detailed Table of Contents
Preface
Ch 1: Introduction to Demography

What is Demography?��
How Does Demography Connect the Dots?
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 2: Global Population Trends

World Population Growth��
Geographic Distribution of the World's Population��
Global Variation in Population Size and Growth��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 3: Demographic Perspectives

Premodern Population Doctrines��
The Prelude to Malthus��
The Malthusian Perspective��
The Marxian Perspective��
The Prelude to the Demographic Transition Theory��
The Theory of the Demographic Transition��
The Demographic Transition is Really a Set of Transitions
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 4: Demographic Data

Sources of Demographic Data��
Registration of Vital Events��
Combining the Census and Vital Statistics��
Administrative Data��
Sample Surveys��
Historical Sources��
Spatial Demography��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 5: The Health and Mortality Transition

Defining the Health and Mortality Transition��
Health and Mortality Changes over Time��
Life Span and Longevity��
Disease and Death over the Life Cycle��
Causes of Poor Health and Death��
Measuring Mortality��
Health and Mortality Inequalities��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 6: The Fertility Transition

What is the Fertility Transition?��
How High Could Fertility Levels Be?��
Why was Fertility High for Most of Human History?��
The Preconditions for a Decline in Fertility��
Ideational Changes That Must Take Place��
Motivations for Lower Fertility Levels��
How Can Fertility Be Controlled?��
How Do We Measure Changes in Fertility?��
How is the Fertility Transition Accomplished?��
Geographic Variability in the Fertility Transition��
Case Studies in the Fertility Transition��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 7: The Migration Transition

What is the Migration Transition?��
Defining Migration��
Internal and International Migrants��
Measuring Migration��
The Migration Transition within Countries��
Migration between Countries��
Migration Origins and Destinations��
Forced Migration��
Consequences of Migration��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 8: The Age Transition

What is the Age Transition?��
The Concepts of Age and Sex��
Demographic Drivers of the Age Transition��
Age Transitions at Work��
Population Aging as Part of the Age Transition��
Reading the Future from the Age Structure��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 9: The Urban Transition

What is the Urban Transition?��
What are the Drivers of the Urban Transition?��
The Proximate Determinants of the Urban Transition��
The Urban Evolution That Accompanies the Urban Transition��
Cities as Sustainable Environments��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 10: The Family and Household Transition

What is the Family and Household Transition?��
Proximate Determinants of Family and Household Changes��
Changing Life Chances��
Does Marriage Matter?��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 11: Population and Sustainability

The Use and Abuse of the Earth's Resources
How is Population Related to Economic Development?��
The Bottom Line for the Future: Can Billions More People Be Fed?��
Environmental Degradation��
Human Dimensions of Environmental Change��
Sustainable Development-Possibility or Oxymoron?��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Ch 12: What Lies Ahead?

From Revolution to Evolution��
What Can Countries Do to Influence What Lies Ahead?��
Summary and Conclusion��
Main Points��
Questions for Review��
Websites of Interest��

Glossary
Bibliography
Geographic Index
Subject Index

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2. Preflight Ticket Signature