Reinstatement of the US “Mexico City Policy”

On 22 January 2001, the third day of the new US administration (the day that also marked the twenty‐eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court decision that liberalized abortion). President Bush issued an executive order, taking the form of a memorandum addressed to the Administrator of the Agency for International Development on the subject of “Restoration of the Mexico City Policy.” The executive order reinstates the US policy promulgated at the International Conference on Population held in Mexico City in 1984 (see “Documents” in the September 1984 issue of this journal). The Mexico City policy was rescinded on 22 January 1993 when President Clinton took office (see “Documents” in the March 1993 issue of this journal). The full text of President Bush's memorandum as released by the White House is reproduced below.     

A Population Policy Rationale for the Twenty‐First Century

I propose that the primary goal of twenty‐first‐century population policies should be to strengthen the human resource base for national and global sustainable development. I discuss the shortcomings of the three dominant twentieth‐century population policy rationales: acceptance of replacement‐level fertility as a demographic goal; realizing a “demographic dividend” from the changing age structure; and filling the “unmet need” for family planning. I demonstrate that in all three cases the explicit incorporation of education into the model changes the picture and makes female education a key population policy priority. Population policies under this new rationale could be viewed as public human resource management. I argue that 20 years after the Cairo ICPD the international community needs a new rationale for population policies in the context of sustainable development and that a focus on human capital development, in particular education and health, is the most promising approach.     

Population in Literature

The treatment of population issues in modern fiction is examined under three headings: fear of population decline, fear of population excess, and fear of population professionals. Writings on population decline cover both the depopulation caused by too‐low fertility and science‐fictional scenarios of natural or human‐made demographic catastrophes. Population excess is chiefly portrayed through ecological dystopias, but includes also depictions of unchecked immigration from poor to rich countries. Population professionals as fictional protagonists range from villainous biomedical and social engineers to feckless family planning workers.     

“Population Invasion” versus Urban Exclusion in the Tibetan Areas of Western China

This article examines the confluence of local population transitions (demographic transition and urbanization) with non‐local in‐migration in the Tibetan areas of western China. The objective is to assess the validity of Tibetan perceptions of “population invasion” by Han Chinese and Chinese Muslims. The article argues that migration to Tibet from other regions in China has been concentrated in urban areas and has been counterbalanced by more rapid rates of natural increase in the Tibetan rural areas—among the highest rates in China. Overall, it is not clear whether there is any risk of population invasion in the Tibetan areas. However, given that non‐Tibetan migration to Tibet has been concentrated in urban areas, Tibetans have probably become a minority in many of their strategic cities and towns, and non‐Tibetan migrants definitely dominate urban employment. Therefore, while the Tibetan notion of population invasion may be a misperception, it reflects a legitimate concern that in‐migration may be exacerbating the economic exclusion of Tibetan locals in the context of rapid urban‐centered development.     

The United Nations on World Population in 2300

The Population Division of the United Nations biennially issues detailed population estimates and projections covering the period 1950–2050. The most recent revision of these estimates and projections, the 2002 assessment, was released in February 2003. At irregular intervals, the Population Division also publishes long‐range projections. The most recent of these, covering the period up to 2150, was issued in 2000, based on the 1998 assessment. On 9 December 2003, the Population Division released the preliminary report on a new set of long‐range projections, dovetailing with the 2002 assessment, that extend over a much longer time span: up to 2300 ( http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/longrange2.htm ). Unlike previous long‐range projections, which, apart from China and In‐dia, were prepared for large regional groupings only, the new projections are elaborated separately for 192 countries. Given the enormous uncertainties of the character of demographic trends over such an extended period, the information content of these projections is somewhat elusive. However, they are expected to be used to provide the demographic input for long‐range models of global climate change. Long‐range population projections also serve to demonstrate the unsustainability of certain seemingly plausible assumptions as to the future course of particular demographic parameters. In the present case, for example, the high‐fertility projection, reflecting a sustained total fertility rate at the relatively modest level of 2.35, by 2300 would yield a population of some 32 billion in the countries now classified as less developed. Or, in a yet more extreme exercise 0/reductio ad absurdum, maintaining constant fertility at present rates would result in a population size of some 120 trillion in the countries now classified as least developed. Apart from the “high fertility” and “constant fertility” models just cited, the projections are calculated for three additional instructive variants: “low fertility,”“medium fertility,” and “zero growth.” Underlying each of the five variants is a single assumption on mortality change: expectation of life at birth creeping up, country‐by‐country, to a 2300 level ranging between 88 and 106 years. International migration is set at zero throughout the period 2050‐2300 in each variant. Thus the projections are unabashedly stylized and surprise‐free, providing a simple demonstration of the consequences, in terms of population size and age structure, of clearly stated assumptions on the future course of demographic variables. Reproduced below is the Executive Summary of the preliminary report on the UN long‐range projections presented to a UN technical working group on long‐range projections at its December 2003 meeting in New York and slightly revised afterward. A full final report on this topic by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat will be published later in 2004.     

John Weyland on Encouragements to Population Increase

Modern worries about the economic and social consequences of low fertility and eventual population decline have led to numerous proposals for subsidy arrangements aimed in effect at “buying” healthy and potentially productive children. The most innocuous of such schemes, typically with welfare rather than population goals in mind, is the institution of the family wage—paying labor based on family size. The passage reproduced below, from John Weyland's Principles of Population and Production (1816), offers an early instance of such a scheme being argued for on demographic grounds. Weyland's account of the “artificial” encouragement of population increase begins with an artless analogy to managing a stud‐farm, but the stance is mercantilist rather than totalitarian and is leavened by a strong concern for the health and morals of the future citizens. That the state might wish to raise its population growth was of course contrary to Malthusian doctrine. The long and contentious debates on Britain's Poor Laws gave more prominence to the opposite goal: that of preventing births that threatened to become a charge on the community. Weyland, however, asserted that the tendency of population was to “keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence.” A prior population increase (to a level “just beyond the plentiful supply of the people's want”) was a necessary stimulant to productivity—indeed, was “the cause of all public happiness, industry, and prosperity.” (Modern versions of this view are found in the writings of Ester Boserup and Julian Simon.) Moreover, he argued, with urbanization came an inevitable fall‐off in population growth—reaching “a point of non‐reproduction” when around a third of the population lived in towns. Malthus responded to Weyland in an appendix to the fifth (1817) edition of the Essay: Weyland's premise, he wrote, is “just as rational as to infer that every man has a natural tendency to remain in prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” Weyland's book as a whole he dismissed in unusually intemperate terms: “It is quite inconceivable how a man of sense could bewilder himself in such a maze of futile calculations, and come to conclusions so diametrically opposite to experience.” More concisely, and specifically on the subject of the extract below, an entry in the Essay's highly distinctive index reads “Encouragements, direct, to population, futile and absurd.” John Weyland (1774–1854) was an English rural magistrate of independent means. He took an active part in the Poor Law debates of the early nineteenth century, arguing for payments under them to include child allowances. The full title of his major work is: The Principles of Population and Production as they are affected by the Progress of Society with a View to Moral and Political Consequences (London, 1816). There are modern reprints by A. M. Kelley and Routledge/Thoemmes Press. The excerpt is from pp. 167–175.     

Alvin Hansen on Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth

The driving forces of economic growth, according to the mainstream of classical economic thinking, are threefold: technological innovations, the opening up of new territories and discovery of new resources, and increase in population. In interaction, in an entrepreneurial market economy, these forces generate growth not only in the aggregate but also per capita. Evidence of their power was seen in the long stretch of rising living standards in the West over the nineteenth century, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle. However, the economic experience of the interwar years, and in particular the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the forces were largely spent and hence that future economic prospects were gravely imperiled. The Keynesian revolution in economics was a response to the evident malfunctioning of the capitalist economic system, although the policy recipes it offered (for increasing demand and investment to levels capable of generating an equilibrium consistent with full employment of productive resources, especially labor) by no means commanded unanimity. The most prominent American contributor to and spokesman for the new line of economic analysis—often called “the American Keynes”—was Alvin H. Hansen (1887–1975), who took up his professorship of political economy at Harvard in 1937, just after the appearance of Keynes's General Theory. In that post, which he held until his retirement in 1956, he was one of the most influential economists of the era as a theorist, policy adviser, and teacher. Hansen interpreted the economic problems of the 1930s not just as the manifestation of a particularly sharp cyclical downturn, but as evidence of secular stagnation caused by the closing of the economic frontier, sluggishness in technological innovation, and, not least, “a drastic decline in population growth.” This “stagnation thesis” is most succinctly set out in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Detroit, 28 December 1938, under the title Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth. The address is re‐produced below from the March 1939 issue of the American Economic Review. (The opening paragraphs of the address, and two paragraphs, immediately preceding the closing paragraph, in which Hansen discusses changes in US national income in the 1930s, have been omitted.) Hansen's analysis of the effects of declining population growth in many ways echoes the thesis set out by Keynes in his seminal Galton Lecture delivered to the Eugenics Society in 1937 (reprinted in the Archives section of PDR 4, no. 3): a demographic slowdown decreases opportunities for profitable investments and increases levels of attempted saving, hence pushes the economy toward a low‐growth equilibrium at which resources are underutilized and unemployment is high. Hansen puts special emphasis on demographically induced shifts in the composition of output. He suggests that, beyond its direct positive effect on investment and output, population growth also has an indirect enhancing effect on these factors by facilitating technological progress–contrary to the “older Malthusian view.” In his policy proposals Hansen was more interventionist than Keynes, advocating a more intrusive government role in the economy as a possible means of escaping the vicious cycle of low demand and high unemployment. As to government action to reverse demographic trends seen as deleterious, neither Keynes nor Hansen argued for policies to increase fertility, presumably because they saw them as both inappropriate and, in comparison to remedial economic policy measures, inefficient or unfeasible. The demands of the war economy in the years following Hansen's address took care of the employment problem, and the immediate postwar decades brought the stimuli of pent‐up consumer demand, an outpouring of technological innovations, a reopening of the economic frontier produced by a more liberal trade regime, and, also, an acceleration of population growth. The result was rapid overall economic growth and increasing levels of per capita income. Keynesian demand management played some role in this economic success story: by the end of the 1960s even US President Richard Nixon pronounced himself a Keynesian. But it offered no remedy for the stagflation that eventually followed. The growth‐promoting recipes favored in the last decades of the century (especially in the most successful developing economies) were anything but Keynesian: limited government, fiscal restraint, and globalization. Yet recent and anticipated demographic trends, especially in Europe—notably fertility decline and population aging—make Hansen, once again, interesting reading. Commitments of the modern welfare state for health care, retirement pensions, and job security command wide approval, but they have boosted governments' weight in the economy and made labor markets inflexible, unemployment high, and retirement early—developments that may increasingly impose a brake on economic growth and on improvements of living standards. Reform measures to ease these burdens are, in principle, straightforward, but their immediate social costs are heavy and their rewards are delayed, hence resistance to reform is strong and growing. This is likely to stimulate the search for alternative policies that offer politically more palatable tradeoffs—some of which may turn out to have an unmistakably Hansenian flavor. As to future population trends, Hansen, despite his reference to a “drastic decline in population growth” based on a comparison of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Western demographic change, envisaged a convergence to a stationary population or a tendency toward very slow decrease. Yet some economies are already locked into a demographic pattern that augurs sharper declines and more rapid population aging, enhancing the relevance of the issues posed by Hansen. In Germany, for example, in the absence of immigration, the population between ages 20 and 40 will decline from 21.6 million in 2005 to 16.3 million in 2025—a drop of 23 percent. Over the same time period, the population aged 60 and older will grow from 20.5 million to 25.8 million—an increase of 26 percent. Serious efforts to slow population decline and retard population aging by stimulating fertility would of course add another major burden to government budgets.     

On Integrating Immigrants in Germany

Immigration to Germany in the decades following World War II made the Federal Republic the host of the largest number of immigrants in Europe. The size of the population with an immigration background is on the order of 15 million, nearly one‐fifth of the total population. (Many of these are ethnic German returnees.) Although restrictive policies and a less dynamic economy in recent years slowed the annual number of immigrants and asylum seekers, the interrelated demographic influences of very low fertility, negative natural population increase, and population aging make continuing future immigration likely and, judged by influential domestic interests, desirable. Anxieties about inadequate integration of immigrants in German society are, however, apparently strongly felt by large segments of the native population. The “Grand Coalition” government that took office in November 2005 considers the formation of an effective policy of integration a high priority. On 14 July 2006 an “Integration Summit” was convened in the Chancellery with the active participation of representatives of immigrant groups. Chancellor Angela Merkel called the Summit “an almost historical event.” Reproduced below in full is a non‐official English translation of a government statement (entitled “Good coexistence—Clear rules”) presented to the participants at the opening of the meeting. Intended as a “start of the development of a national integration plan,” the statement highlights existing deficiencies of integration, especially problems with second‐ and third‐generation immigrants: lack of mastery of the German language, weaknesses in education and training, high unemployment, lack of acceptance of the basic rules of coexistence, and violation of the law. The importance of these issues is underlined by a demographic fact noted in the statement: by 2010 it is expected that in Germany's large cities 50 percent of the population under age 40 will have an immigrant background. The statement recognizes the government's responsibility to help immigrants learn German and become better informed about the country's laws, culture, history, and political system. In turn, it demands reciprocal efforts from migrants living permanently and lawfully in Germany. The original German text of the statement is available at the Bundeskanzleramt home page: « http://www.bundesregierung.d »     

David Riesman on Phases of Population Growth and Social Character

Probably the most widely read work of sociology in the United States during the past century was The Lonely Crowd, a nearly 400‐page study by David Riesman, written, according to the first edition, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. The book appeared in 1950, published by Yale University Press. The initial print run was 3,000; an abridged edition came out as a paperback in 1953 as a Doubleday Anchor Book. It eventually sold more than 1.4 million copies. (The book is still in print in a Yale University Press paperback edition.) Its intriguing title no doubt contributed to this phenomenal popularity, as did its readable and often informal style and its use of a time‐honored mode of social commentary, offering a statistics‐free exposition of the argument. The book bears no resemblance to what now passes for scientific analysis in sociology, but draws instead on erudition, historical learning, and personal observation and insight. But most of all, the explanation for the book's success is that Riesman's searching and sharp‐eyed examination of social trends in modern industrial society responded to a felt need for self‐examination in midcentury America. Actually, the title of the book was an add‐on; it does not appear in the text itself. The subtitle is more informative: A Study of the Changing American Character. Riesman defined “social character” as “the patterned uniformities of learned response that distinguish men of different regions, eras, and groups.” Making such distinctions imposes the need for a suitable categorization of historical stages with which a typology of social character can be persuasively associated. Riesman's chosen criterion for classifying societies and identifying such stages was demographic. His discussion sought to describe “possible relationships between the population growth of a society and the historical sequence of character types” and, specifically, to “explore the correlations between the conformity demands put on people in a society and the broadest of the social indexes that connect men with their environment—the demographic indexes.” In doing so, Riesman adopted the dassificatory scheme of classic demographic transition theory. Drawing on Frank Notestein's work, he distinguished three demographic phases: “high growth potential,”“transitional growth,” and “incipient population decline.” The three dominant social character types identified by Riesman, tracing a historical, although of course overlapping sequence, were “tradition‐directed,”“inner‐directed,” and “other‐directed”: they correspond to, indeed reflect, the three phases of population growth and its associated demographic‐structural characteristics. The excerpt reproduced below is from Chapter I (“Some types and character of society”) of the first edition of the book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). It provides a concise presentation of the study's conceptual scheme and of the argument seeking to validate it. (The 1953 paperback edition amplifies footnote 1 in the excerpt as follows: “The terminology used here is that of Frank W. Notestein. See his ‘Population—The Long View,’ in Food for the World, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (University of Chicago Press, 1945).”). David Riesman was born on 22 September 1909. His original field of study was law; his career as a lawyer included clerking for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Between 1946 and 1958 he was on the faculty of social sciences at the University of Chicago and after that, until his retirement, he served as professor of sociology at Harvard University. He died 10 May 2002.     

Science,Modernity, and the Making of China's One‐Child Policy

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual “population crisis” and that the one‐child policy was “the only solution” to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.     

2000年以来人口学研究国际前沿解读——基于CiteSpace对Web of Science数据库的文献计量

为探究国际人口学学科的文献特征与趋势,本文运用科学计量学的前沿研究方法,基于Web of Science数据库(2000—2018年)收录的人口学研究领域的文献数据,应用CiteSpace软件,就被引文献和主题词进行实证分析。结果表明,人口转变、国际移民、低生育率与生育行为是21世纪以来国际人口学最核心的学术研究分支;受教育程度、已婚女性、人口特征、年轻女性、年轻人、生殖健康等主题词是该领域的研究热点,具体来看,“代际问题”、“缓慢衰老”、“结婚与同居”、“生育意图和生育行为”、“移民融合”以及“女性雇佣和生育”等主题是近年来国际人口学界研究的前沿方向。     

Population Projections and Demographic Knowledge in France and Great Britain in the Postwar Period

This study examines how official national population projections—a key mechanism for the production and dissemination of demographic knowledge—contributed to differing interpretations of population and fertility trends in France and Great Britain in the decades following World War II, despite these countries' similar fertility rates during most of this period. Projections presented different visions of the demographic future in the two countries. In France, publication of multiple variants emphasized future contingency, with low variants illustrating future population decline due to prolonged below‐replacement fertility. In Britain, publication of a single variant, assuming near‐replacement‐level fertility rates, projected moderate growth. National population projections thus created divergent representations of the two countries' demographic futures: an ever‐present threat of population decline in France, and a reassuring image of stability in Britain. Two principal mechanisms that contributed to cross‐national differences in population projections—national demographic history and institutional configurations—are discussed.     

论“计划生育”的“善”与“恶”—《大国空巢》批判

人口质量的提高、“国家力量”的形成存在人口规模障碍,中国与西欧因人口状况的不同而走上了不同道路;“人口爆炸”是中国“百年屈辱”的总根源;老龄化并非衰亡,西方文明衰落,东方、伊斯兰文明兴起根本不会出现在可预见的将来。计划生育是道德的—在高层级、总体上直接就是“善”,低层级、部分的“恶”,也指向和被转化为高层级、总体上的“善”;自由生育则会把中国推向毁灭的深渊。作为“拾荒集”的《大国空巢》,只是被用来“砸”计划生育的一块“砖”。     

Environmental Degradation and Human Well‐Being: Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an elaborate international project set up in 2001 under UN auspices, aims “to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well‐being and to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well‐being.” It involves over 1,000 experts as panel and working group members, authors, and reviewers. Numerous reports are planned, covering the global and regional situations, scenarios of the future, and options for sustainable management. The first of these, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report, was issued in March 2005. The Report is organized around four main findings. The first two concern the past: what has happened and what it has meant for human welfare. The other two concern the future: what may happen and what might be done to improve matters. The time frame is the last 50 years and the next 50. Ecological change is assessed in terms of ecosystem services—the benefits humans receive from ecosystems. These include: provisioning services (supplying food, fresh water, timber, etc.); regulating services (climate regulation, erosion control, pollination); cultural services (recreation, aesthetic enjoyment); and supporting services (soil formation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling). Of24 services examined in the assessment, 15 are determined to be in decline or are being drawn on at an unsustainable rate. The welfare costs of these changes are disproportionately borne by the poor. Four world scenarios are developed to explore plausible ecological futures, varying in degrees of regionalism and economic liberalization and in approaches to ecosystem management. Under all of them the outlook is for continued pressure on consumption of ecosystem services and continued loss of biodiversity. In particular, ecosystem degradation “is already a significant barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals agreed to by the international community in September 2000 and the harmful consequences of this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years.” Remedy will be demanding: “An effective set of responses to ensure the sustainable management of ecosystems requires substantial changes in institutions and governance, economic policies and incentives, social and behavior factors, technology, and knowledge.” Such changes “are not currently under way.” The excerpt below, covering Findings #1 and #2 of the Assessment, is taken from the section of the report titled Summary for Decision‐makers. Most of the charts are omitted. Parenthetical levels of certainty correspond to the following probabilities: very certain, ≥98%; high certainty, 85–98%; medium, 65–85%; low, 52–65%. The full report is available at http://www.millenniumassessment.org . Finding #1: Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.     

Dudley Kirk on Population Changes and Prospective Power Relations after World War II: A View from 1943

The theory of demographic transition in its best‐known modern formulation was developed in the early 1940s by a small group of researchers associated with Princeton University's Office of Population Research, under the leadership of Frank W. Notestein. A notable early adumbration of the theory in print—in fact preceding the most often cited contemporaneous articles by Notestein and by Kingsley Davis—was by Dudley Kirk, one of the Princeton demographers, in an article titled “Population changes and the postwar world,” originally presented by its author on 4 December 1943 at the 38th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, held in New York. It is reproduced below in full from the February 1944 issue of American Sociological Review (Vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 28–35). In the article Kirk, then 30 years old, briefly discusses essential elements of the concept of the demographic transition. He characterizes trends in birth and death rates as closely linked to developmental changes: to the transition “from a peasant, self‐sufficient society to an urban, industrial society.” He sees the countries of the world as arranged on a “single continuum of development” and, correspondingly, on a continuum of demographic configurations. These countries, he suggests, may be divided into three broad groups: the first, with high mortality and high fertility, possessing great potential population growth; the second, “caught up in the tide of industrialization and urbanization,” hence exhibiting birth and death rates that are both declining but in a pattern that generates rapid population growth; and a third, with low fertility and low mortality, pointing toward the prospect of eventual depopulation. He describes the temporal and geographic process of material progress and demographic change as one of cultural and technological diffusion emanating from the West. But Kirk's main interest in this article is the effects of the patterns generated by economic change and the ensuing demographic transition on shifts in relative power—military and economic—within the system of nations, both historically and in the then dawning postcolonial era. On the latter score, even if occasionally colored by judgments reflecting perspectives unsurprising in 1943, such as in his assessment of the economic potential of the Soviet Union, Kirk's probing of the likely consequences of evolving trends in power relationships as shaped by shifting economic and demographic weights—issues now largely neglected in population studies—is often penetrating and remarkably prescient. His views on the implication of these trends for the desirable American stance toward the economic and demographic modernization of less developed countries—friendly assistance resulting in rapid expansion of markets, and trade speeding a social evolution that also brings about slower population growth—represent what became an influential strand in postwar US foreign policy. Dudley Kirk was born 6 October 1913 in Rochester, New York, but grew up in California. After graduating from Pomona College, he received an M.A. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1946. He was associated with Princeton's OPR between 1939 and 1947, where he published his influential monograph Europe's Population in the Interwar Years (1946) and, with Frank Notestein and others, coauthored the book The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union (1944). From 1947 to 1954 he was demographer in the Office of Intelligence Research of the US State Department, the first person having that title in the federal government. From 1954 to 1967 he was director of the Demographic Division of the Population Council in New York, and from 1967 until his retirement in 1979 he was professor of population studies at Stanford University. In 1959–60 he was president of the Population Association of America. Dudley Kirk died 14 March 2000 in San Jose, California.     

Oswald Spengler on Cosmopolis and Depopulation

Historians are professionally averse to grand civilizational themes, especially where predictions may be entailed. The German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose membership in the academic fraternity of his discipline has often been questioned, was an exception. His two‐volume magnum opus. The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922 (English translation, 1928), in its time attracted much public and professional attention. (It remains in print.) It presents an enormously ambitious tableau of universal history seen as the unfolding of the fates of eight cultures, with a focus on four main strands: Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Western. In Spengler's interpretation, imbued with cultural and historical pessimism, the West was exhibiting symptoms found in earlier civilizations in decline. “Civilization,” in Spengler's vision, was a stage that follows cultural flowering—creative manifestations of the culture's unique soul expressed in art and thought. Civilization's preoccupation is with the enjoyment of material comforts; the sequence from “culture” to “civilization” represents the very antithesis of progress. Spengler saw the West as having entered that latter phase in the nineteenth century: a phase in which, in the words of the synoptic chart appended to Volume 1 of The Decline of the West, “The body of the people, now essentially urban in constitution, dissolves into formless mass.” Urbanism, the emergence of “megalopolis,” or “cosmopolis“—the world city—is a distinguishing and crucial feature of that declining civilization. A passage (section V, including some translator's notes) from the chapter titled The Soul of the City in Vol. II of The Decline of the West, which has the subtitle Perspectives of World History, is reproduced below. It offers arresting characterizations of the morphology of urban forms and of the rise of the world city. As longer‐term consequences (for the West “between 2000 and 2200”) Spengler foresaw the “formation ofCeasarism”; “victory of force‐politics over money”; “increasing primi‐tiveness of political forms”; and “inward decline of the nations into a formless population, and constitution thereof as an Imperium of gradually increasing crudity and despotism.” As to demographic consequences, Spengler highlights the emerging “sterility of civilized man“—“an essentially metaphysical turn toward death.”“Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.”“Prudent limitation of the number of births” eventually leads to a “stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation.” Immigration apart, the time scale specified by Spengler for depopulation—“for centuries”—may be seen today as relatively cautious. Should Europe's current period fertility level—slightly below a TFR of 1.4—be translated into cohort performance, it would yield an intrinsic annual rate of population growth of roughly ‐1.5 percent. Within 200 years, such a growth rate would reduce a population to 5 percent of its original size. From The Decline of the West: Volume 2 by Oswald Spengler, translated by C. F. Atkinson, copyright 1928 and renewed 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.     

August Lösch on Population and Business Cycles

The German economist August Losch (1906–45) earned a permanent place in the history of economic ideas through his work on general equilibrium theory applied to a spatially distributed economy. His pathbreaking contribution in that field is synthesized in The Economics of Location (English translation 1954, first edition Die raumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft, published in 1939). Lb'sch's early theoretical and empirical work, however, was focused on the interaction of demographic and economic change, in particular the effect of population on economic fluctuations—in traditional terminology, the business cycle. His statistical investigations of the preindustrial era, reaching back to the seventeenth century, indicated that the dominant causal relationship went from the economy to population, a connection that much subsequent work also confirms. But his research on the history of German economic development under capitalist conditions showed primarily a reverse set of influences at work: from population, in particular from fluctuations in the rate of population growth, to the business cycle. This theoretical and empirical contribution, first published in German in 1936, is most accessible to readers of English in a paper presented in December of the same year at the annual meeting of the Econometric Society in Chicago and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in August 1937 under the title “Population cycles as a cause of business cycles.” Excerpts from this article—the opening paragraphs and the closing section titled “Explanation”—are reproduced below. Losch sees the relationship as mediated by changes in labor supply and consequent responses in building activity, demand for consumer goods, and, in particular, stimulus or else depressing influence on the capital goods industries as the rate of population growth increases or falls. He cautions that his empirical work supporting his proposition was limited to Germany and may not apply everywhere. He suggests, however, that the effect of immigration on the United States economy is probably congruent with the thesis.     

Abortion,Family Planning,and Population Policy: Prospects for the Common‐Ground Approach

For the past several decades those engaged in shaping the Program of Action documents at international conferences on population have muted their voices when the topic of abortion has been raised. In a desire to side‐step entanglement in a bitter debate over the morality of abortion, great care has been taken to define “family planning” in ways that explicitly exclude abortion. The “common‐ground” approach to treating abortion can be summarized in two directives found in all contemporary international population documents: “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning”; and all governments should work “to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and improved family‐planning services.” This article has three goals: first, to examine the appropriateness of these directives with respect to what is currently known about the relationship between abortion, family planning, and population policy; second, to trace how this “contraception‐only” definition of family planning became de rigueur at international population conferences; and third, to discuss the prospects for the emergence of a more appropriate “common‐ground” approach to abortion and population policy.     

Report of the Global Commission on International Migration

In December 2003, “acting on the encouragement of UN Secretary‐General Kofi Annan,” the Global Commission on International Migration was established as an independent body, consisting of 19 Commissioners co‐chaired by Jan O. Carlsson, former Minister for Migration and Development, Sweden, and Mamphela Ramphele, formerly the World Bank's Managing Director, from South Africa. The mandate of the Commission was to “provide the framework for the formulation of a coherent, comprehensive and global response to the issue of international migration.” The work of the Commission was assisted by a Geneva‐based Secretariat and a “Core Group of States,” eventually including 32 governments from all world regions, that acted as an informal consultative body to the Commission. (The United States, the most important host country to immigrants, was not among the 32.) In October 2005, in New York, the Commission presented its Report to Kofi Annan, the UN member states, and other interested bodies. The Report is also intended as an input to intergovernmental discussion of international migration issues at the UN General Assembly in the Fall of 2006. The Report, an 88‐page document, is accessible at « http://www.gcim.org ». That web site also provides access to extensive background materials on selected topics concerning international migration, regional studies of international migration prepared for the Commission, and reports of the regional hearings, consultations with “stakeholders,” and expert meetings held by the Commission. Reproduced below are three sections of the Report: its Introduction (titled “Dimensions and dynamics of international migration”) and two of its four Annexes: “Principles for Action and Recommendations,” and a compendium of data: “Migration at a glance.” Under the impact of globalization, international migration, long an important element of demographic change as experienced by individual states, has acquired increasing salience in international relations and in domestic politics. National sovereignty in deciding about immigration policy (probably the key determinant of contemporary international migration flows) remains an established principle in international law, subject only to treaty obligations to admit bonafide refugees. Increasingly in recent years, however, demands have surfaced to treat such policies as matters to be decided bilaterally between sending and receiving countries, or even to be regulated by an international or supranational body. (For earlier voices discussing this topic see the Archives section of this issue and the Archives section of the December 1983 issue of PDR:“On the international control of migration.”) Unexpectedly to some observers, the Report of the Global Commission fell short of recommending establishment of a new, WTO‐like, international organization within the UN system with responsibility for international migration. It recommends, instead, steps to be taken toward an Inter‐agency Global Migration Facility. Whether or not such arrangements will materialize and be influential, the Commission clearly sees international migration flows, primarily from less developed to more developed countries, as increasing in the future. While not quantified, this vision contrasts with the assumptions incorporated in the often‐cited projections of the UN Population Division, which envisage future net migratory flows as either constant in size or even decreasing. The Report's argument rests primarily on the perceived economic benefits of migration to both receiving and sending countries, fueled by persisting income differentials and by contrasting demographic configurations between migrants' places of origin and destination. It gives short shrift to arguments that question the economic gains of mass migration to receiving countries, or that see such gains at best as minor and likely to be counterbalanced by noneconomic considerations. Nor does the Report gauge the likelihood that heeding its strictures for a more welcoming treatment of migrants would increase the incentives to migrate.