On the Tasks of a Population Commission: A 1971 Statement by Donald Rumsfeld

In its most familiar form, analytic assessment of the impact of demographic change on human affairs is the product of a decentralized cottage industry: individual scholars collecting information, thinking about its meaning, testing hypotheses, and publishing their findings. Guidance through the power of the purse and through institutional design that creates and sustains cooperating groups of researchers can impose some order and coherence on such spontaneous activity. But the sum total of the result may lack balance and leave important aspects of relevant issues inadequately explored. Even when research findings are picked up by the media and reach a broader public, the haphazardness of that process helps further to explain why the salience of population change to human welfare and its importance in public policymaking are poorly understood. The syndrome is not unique to the field of population, but the typically long time‐lags with which aggregate population change affects economic and social phenomena make it particularly difficult for the topic to claim public attention. A time‐tested, if less than fool‐proof remedy is the periodic effort to orchestrate a systematic and thorough examination of the causes, consequences, and policy implications of demographic processes. Because the most potent frame for policymaking is the state, the logical primary locus for such stocktaking is at the country level. The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future was a uniquely ambitious enterprise of this sort. The Commission was established by the US Congress in 1970 as a result of a presidential initiative. Along with the work of two earlier British Royal Commissions on population, this US effort, mutatis mutandis, can serve as a model for in‐depth examinations conducted at the national level anywhere. Chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the Commission submitted its final report to President Richard M. Nixon in March 1972. The background studies to the report were published in seven hefty volumes; an index to these volumes was published in 1975. Reproduced below is a statement to the Commission delivered on April 14, 1971 by Donald Rumsfeld, then Counsellor to President Nixon and in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity. (Currently, Mr. Rumsfeld serves as US Secretary of Defense.) The brief statement articulates with great clarity the objectives of the Commission and the considerations that prompted them. The text originally appeared in Vol. 7 (pp. 1‐3) of the Commission's background reports, which contains the statements at public hearings conducted by the Commission. National efforts toward comprehensive scientific reviews of population issues have their analogs at the international level. Especially notable on that score were the preparatory studies presented at the 1954 Rome and 1965 Belgrade world population conferences. The world population conferences that took place in Bucharest in 1974, in Mexico City in 1984, and in Cairo in 1994 were intergovernmental and political rather than scientific and technical meetings, but they also generated a fair amount of prior research. The year 2004 will break the decadal sequence of large‐scale international meetings on population, and apart from the quadrennial congresses of the IUSSP, which showcase the voluntary research offerings of its members, none is being planned for the coming years. A partial substitute will be meetings organized by the UN's regional economic and social commissions. The first of these took place in 2002 for the Asia‐Pacific region; the meetings for the other regions will be held in 2003‐04. The analytic and technical contribution of these meetings, however, is expected to be at best modest. National efforts of the type carried out 30 years ago by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future would be all the more salutary.     

Population aging, health care, and growth

This paper constructs a small open two-sector (health care and non-health care) overlapping generations model and investigates how changes in the demand for health care induced by population aging influence the economy’s employment structure and per capita income growth rate. We show that population aging induces a shift in labor from the non-health care sector to the health care sector and lowers the per capita income growth rate. This paper also investigates public policy for child care and demonstrates the existence of an intergenerational conflict between current and future generations concerning public policy on child care.     

Population aging in Sub-Saharan Africa: The effects of development on the elderly

This paper describes the demographic trends in the elderly population in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1960 to 2020 using United Nations data and projections. The largest increases in the number of elderly in the 1980 to 2000 period will occur in South Asia and Africa. Each area is expected to increase approximately 87% in the number of persons aged 60 and over. During this period, Sub-Saharan Africa's elderly population will increase 82%, and is expected to increase 93% between 2000 and 2020, surpassing the total population increase during the latter period.Following the four perspectives Treas and Logue (1986) identified that may influence development policies and programs in developing countries, the Sub-Saharan African situation was analyzed in regard to social security, pension schemes, government policy, and institutional changes in the economy, education, health, and the family. Implications are discussed.I would like to extend my appreciation to the following organizations for providing financial support, substantive assistance, and/or administrative cooperation: The Department of Sociology, Kansas State University; The Rockefeller Foundation; The School of Social Work, University of Zimbabwe; and, the Zimbabwe Association of Pension Funds. However, the author takes full responsibility for any errors or misinterpretations.     

Population aging, health care, and growth: a comment on the effects of capital accumulation

In a recent paper, Hashimoto and Tabata (J Popul Econ 23:571–593, 2010) present a theoretical model in which the increase in the rate of dependence due to aging of the population leads to a reallocation of labor from non-health to health production and, as a consequence, to a decline in economic growth. We argue that these results rely heavily on assumptions of a “small economy” and perfect capital mobility, which tie down the amount of capital. In this paper, we proceed by analyzing the case of an economy in which the availability of capital is endogenously determined by domestic savings. We find that the new “capital accumulation effect” is opposite to the previous “dependency rate effect,” leaving the effect on economic growth ambiguous. In particular, if the former prevailed, population aging would foster economic growth, a result that finds support in recent empirical work.     

人口科学中新的研究领域:人口、健康与发展

21世纪 ,健康研究领域日益扩大并与相关学合作开展边缘学科的研究。事实上健康问题的研究与人口学研究结合已有了许多方面的实践 ,无论是基础医学研究 ,还是健康转型研究 ,都涉及到人口再生产模式转变与疾病模型的流行病学变化和健康危险因素的变化的关系的研究。本文分析了健康研究和发展的内涵 ,指出了人口健康研究与医学四组二元论的关系。同时 ,也探讨了在人口学领域中 ,进行健康研究的内容 ,并将国际社会提出的健康研究所面临的挑战做了初步的分析 ,期望对了解人口与健康研究的内容和发展有参考价值。     

Discussion of paper 'explanations of the fertility crisis in modern societies: a search for commonalities', Population Studies 57(3): 241-263, by John Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmayr

The contributors to this discussion were invited to submit comments, each from a different standpoint, on the paper by John Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmayr that appeared in the preceding issue of the journal. The invitation was issued with the approval of these authors, and the journal is grateful to them for allowing their paper to be used to generate debate on the issues they had raised. The discussion is followed by the authors' response to it.     

The female aging body: A systematic review of female perspectives on aging,health, and body image

While most body image research has focused on young female populations, evidence has shown that as few as 12% of older women are satisfied with their body size. Recent studies have also highlighted how anti-aging discourses are promoting unrealistic body norms, which have shown to contribute to poor body image and altered health behaviors. A systematic review of empirical studies focused on older women’s perspectives of health, body image, and the aging body is presented. Findings support that body image is a persistent, lifelong issue for women and should be considered when implementing healthy aging policies and practices.     

Population aging and environmental quality in OECD countries: evidence from sulfur dioxide emissions data

Recent literature has suggested that population aging may shape energy demand and related emissions. Recent scholarship also suggests that emissions play a role in contemporary climate change and, as such, understanding the effect of population compositional change has considerable environmental policy importance. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the macro-level relationship between population aging and emissions of sulfur dioxide. We extend a standard macroeconomic estimation function by including the age composition of the population. In doing so, we separate, for the first time in the literature on aging and the environment, the life-cycle dimension of the age structure from its cohort dimension. We utilize data representing a balanced panel of 25 OECD countries during the period from 1970 to 2000. Consistent with our expectations, we find that societies with a low proportion of young and a high proportion of senior citizens emit more sulfur dioxide. At the same time, our results suggest that a high proportion of individuals born before 1960 is positively correlated to national sulfur dioxide emissions. Our study contributes to understanding of past emission patterns in OECD countries and the findings may allow for improvements in future emission projections.     

世人瞩目的六普:轨迹、解读与思考

引言众所周知,与建国后历次人口普查相比,2010年第六次全国人口普查受到了国内外各方面超乎寻常的高度关注和重视,究其原因不外乎如下几个方面:其一,中国是世界,尤其是发展中国家的第一人口大国,全球关注改革开放30多年来在经济总量已成为世界第二大经济实体后的中国;同样也关注地球在即将进入70亿人口的关口前,经过数十年人口控制大国的人口现状及未来走势。其二,长期以来,国人一直将人口视作国情国力的一个重要组成部分,在我国快速工业化、信息化、     

The structure of subjective well-being in nine western societies

The structure of subjective well-being is analyzed by multidimensional mapping of evaluations of life concerns. For example, one finds that evaluations of Income are close to (i.e., relatively strongly related to) evaluations of Standard of living, but remote from (weakly related to) evaluations of Health. These structures show how evaluations of life components fit together and hence illuminate the psychological meaning of life quality. They can be useful for determining the breadth of coverage and degree of redundancy of social indicators of perceived well-being. Analyzed here are data from representative sample surveys in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the United States (each N≈1000). Eleven life concerns are considered, including Income, Housing, Job, Health, Leisure, Neighborhood, Transportation, and Relations with other people. It is found that structures in all of these countries have a basic similarity and that the European countries tend to be more similar to one another than they are to USA. These results suggest that comparative research on subjective well-being is feasible within this group of nations.     

利益群体、组织、制度和产权对城市人口管理的影响

中国是在８０年代中期开始发生大规模的人口流动,到目前已经十几年了,为什么在这么长的时间内还不能寻找出有效的城市人口管理体制,其最主要原因是缺乏从中国的社会结构去研究问题。在利益群体的利益冲突上缺乏协调机制;客观存在的组织寻租行为使得人口管理成为个别组织的利益;管理体制上的条块分别、城乡分割和劳动力市场分割也给人口管理带来困难;资源的产权不清晰是困扰城市人口管理的另一原因。