Infant mortality in London, 1538-1850: a methodological study

A review of evidence on infant mortality derived from the London bills of mortality and parish registers indicates that there were major registration problems throughout the whole of the parish register period. One way of addressing these problems is to carry out reconstitution studies of individual London parishes, but there are a number of problems with reconstitution methodology, including the traffic in corpses between parishes both inside and outside of London and the negligence of clergymen in registering both baptisms and burials. In this paper the triangulation of sources has been employed to measure the adequacy of burial registration, including the comparison of data from bills of mortality, parish registers and probate returns, as well as the use of the same-name technique. This research indicates that between 20 and 40 per cent of burials went unregistered in London during the parish register period.     

Population estimates for Puerto Rico and the outlying areas: 1980 to 1987

This report estimates the population for July 1, 1980, to 1987 for the Caribbean areas of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin islands, the Pacific areas of American Samoa, Guam, and the commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The components of population change for these areas for the 1980-1987 period are also presented. Some highlights of the data follow. 1) All areas except for St. Croix and Puerto Rico are growing at a rate well above that of the US (7.4% from April 1, 1980 to July 1, 1987). 2) The Virgin Islands (population 106,100 in 1987) have shown the highest growth rate (9.8%) since 1980. Growth in St. Thomas and St. John (population 53,600) account for 72% of the total Virgin Islands growth. 3) St. Thomas and St. John together have a net immigration rate of just under 1%; St. Croix (population 52,400) had a net outmigration rate of almost 10%. 4) Puerto Rico (population 3,292,000) experienced a -7.1% net outmigration, and population increase of 95,000. 5) At 23%, Guam (population 130,400) has the largest % population growth; 21% of this growth is due to net immigration. 6) All 3 areas in the Pacific grew in the 7-year period; their overall growth rate was 23%, compared with 3% in the Caribbean areas.     

Community Amenity Measurement for the Great Fly-Over Zones

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative operationalization of amenities that does not privilege certain kinds of natural resources and climatic conditions and that can be used for assessing the quality of life in small towns. The amenity inventory presented here extends previous literature by including a broad range of amenities (natural resource, indoor and outdoor built recreational facilities, public and private services, and downtown amenities). The community level of analysis and small town focus are also unique. The inventory uses both secondary data from public sources and primary data that can be gathered by researchers or community residents. Therefore, in addition to the scholarly contribution of the inventory, the process of defining and assessing community amenities may be a valuable tool for building interpersonal relationships within communities, generating community spirit, and developing strategies for enhancing the local quality of life.     

Yet another inquiry into the trustworthiness of eighteenth-century London's Bills of Mortality

This is an enquiry into how eighteenth-century London's Bills of Mortality were compiled. It concludes that while they remain tolerably accurate in aggregate, particularly when considered over a number of years, they are liable to be very misleading if particular localities or parishes are considered. They are a record of registered burials-not deaths-of most of those who had been baptised as Anglicans, so they omit some burial grounds within London, and some dissenters. Crucially, they are most misleading guides to those who had died in one parish but whose family chose to have them buried in another. Several London parishes deliberately undercut their neighbours by charging lower burial fees to attract custom; others opened extra-parochial burial grounds. St Martin-in-the-Fields offers an example of the latter from 1806, but the scale of the new burial ground was not large and it was mainly confined to those who had died in the workhouse. Much more significant was the neighbouring parish of St Anne Soho, which at its peak period in the 1760s to the 1790s was alone handling the equivalent of between 2 and 5 per cent of all Anglican burials within the total area of London's Bills of Mortality. This was only one, though perhaps a particularly egregious, London parish, while the export of corpses to one's erstwhile 'home' parish demonstrates why the Bills cannot be trusted in their detailed geography, as well as providing a warning to all English population historians confronted with a sudden fall or rise in their burial totals.     

Kinship structures and survival: maternal mortality on the Croatian-Bosnian border 1750-1898

This is an analysis of maternal survival of up to 13,202 mothers following 56,546 births in south central Slavonia (Croatia) in the period 1714-1898, using automated family reconstitution of 23,307 marriages, 112,181 baptisms, and 94,077 burials from seven contiguous Catholic parishes. Physiological factors have the effects commonly expected. Maternal risk is increased by general economic and social conditions that are plausibly related to withdrawal of men's labour from family farming as a result of military mobilizations and growing levels of wage labour. Risk is decreased by membership in large patriarchal kin groups, but is increased by both the presence of classic rivals (husband's brothers' wives) and being married to a husband junior among his brothers. The analysis demonstrates the sensitivity of maternal survival to macrolevel changes in such factors as the collapse of feudalism, military involvement, economic stagnation, and monetization, as well as to microeconomic and micropolitical factors at the household and local kin-group level.     

The method of measuring probability of the annual fertility]

At the present time, under the guidance of national planning, population control is the most important theme of China's population policy. In order to realize the national goal of controlling population growth, family planning should be worked out at local levels. How to achieve a reasonable population planning norm at a local level is a very crucial problem in family planning work. Up to the present time, various methods have been used to measure the probability of the annual fertility. In his report, the author provides a new formula to calculate the probability of the annual fertility. Based upon this formula, we may calculate the number of planned birth for a certain year and its fertility. From the figure we may set a reasonable goal according to population policy and actual population components. This formula is suitable for use in annual planning, as well as short-term or long-term population planning.     

Wilhelm Roscher on Means of Promoting Population Increase

The assembling of a mass of historical detail to buttress policy argument was a feature of the nineteenth‐century German historical school in economics. At its best, this gave a healthy appreciation of institutional contingency and a skepticism toward deductive theorizing, in both respects contrasting with the disciplinary mainstream. More often, however, the detail overwhelmed a meager or derivative analytical text. The treatment of population by Wilhelm Roscher, a founder of the historical school, is of this latter kind—its interest lying mainly in the wealth of historical references contained in its swollen footnotes. The brief excerpt below, on measures to raise population growth, conveys its flavor. Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher (1817–1894) was for most of his career professor of political economy at the University of Leipzig. Among his many books were the five volumes of his System der Volkswirtschaft [System of Political Economy] (Stuttgart, 1854–1894). The first volume, Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie, appeared in 1854, and was steadily enlarged in size and documentation through many subsequent editions. (It was still in print, in its 26th edition, in the 1920s.) A two volume English translation by John J. Lalor, titled Principles of Political Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 1878), was based on the 13th German edition (1877). J. A. Schumpeter, in his History of Economic Analysis, remarks of Roscher that “There is hardly another economist of that period who enjoyed so nearly universal respect inside and outside of Germany.” Schumpeter's own verdict, however, was brusquer and less complimentary: Roscher “conscientiously retailed, in ponderous tomes and in lifeless lectures, the orthodox—mainly English—doctrine of his time, simply illustrated by historical fact.” Population—much of it retailing Malthus—is the subject of Book V of the Principles, comprising three lengthy chapters. The excerpt is pp. 347–354.     

Sidney Webb on the Penalization of Parenthood

The costs of educating and socializing children to take on adult roles in the economy and society are borne in part by their parents and in part, recognizing the substantial public‐good element involved, by the community or the state. The size of that public subsidy and how it is allocated across families of different incomes potentially affect decisions on childbearing—that, at least, is the assumption behind one category of measures seeking to raise fertility where it is very low. That the arguments underlying this area of social policy are of long standing is shown by the statement reproduced below by the prominent British socialist Sidney Webb. It is his evidence before the National Birth‐rate Commission, delivered on July 8, 1918. The Commission was set up in 1913 by the National Council of Public Morals, a self‐appointed group of prominent citizens. It issued a widely read report, The Declining Birth‐Rate: Its Causes and Effects, in 1916. However, the continuing drop in the birth rate (from 24 per 1000 in 1913 to 18 in 1918) led to calls for further investigation and to a reconstituted Commission. One of the terms of reference for this second deliberation was to consider “the economic problems of parenthood in view of the rise of prices and taxation and their possible solutions.” Sidney Webb's statement takes up this matter with characteristic clarity and conviction. Webb is exercised both by the overall deficit of births and, more particularly, by its disproportionate weighting among “the prudent and responsible, and those capable of foresight.” (This eugenic concern is spelled out more strongly in his 1907 Fabian Tract, The Decline of the Birth‐rate.) Various ways in which “the economic penalisation of parenthood might be mitigated” are considered, including free schooling, public housing, and abolition of the “marriage penalty” in income tax. But he puts most store in “some system of universal endowment of children during their period of complete dependence.” (In its subsequent report, the Commission declined to recommend any such scheme.) Webb's proposals prefigure many of the social policies later adopted in European welfare states—with at best seemingly modest influence on fertility. Sidney Webb (1859–1947) was a significant figure in the history of social democratic thought in Britain. He was an early member of the Fabian Society and one of the group that in 1895 established the London School of Economics. As a member of Parliament in the 1920s, he held ministerial posts in the first two Labour governments. In collaboration with his wife Beatrice, Webb was a prolific writer on social problems and policies—notably trade unionism, local government, and Fabian socialism. The text below is taken from Problems of Population and Parenthood [Being the Second Report of and the chief evidence taken by the National Birthrate Commission, 1918–1920.], London: Chapman and Hall, 1920.     

Subjective well-being and coping with adversity

This paper is concerned with identifying coping strategies which are effective in minimising the impact of adverse life events on subjective well-being and, in particular, on negative affect.Data are drawn from the 1983 and 1985 waves of the Victorian (Australian) Quality of Life Panel Study (N=734). Respondents completed a life events inventory (Henderson et al., 1981) and were then asked to identify the most adverse event they had dealt with in the last two years. They responded to a coping strategies inventory (Moos et al., 1984), indicating how they had dealt with this event.     

An Orsett census enumerator

Given the wide use of Victorian census enumerators' books (CEBs), it is surprising that so little is known about the background and ability of the enumerators who compiled them. For the most part they are anonymous persons with difficult handwriting and strange spelling. One such enumerator was the current author's grandfather, William Woollings of Orsett, Essex, who compiled the censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871 for one of the enumeration districts in the parish in which he lived. This article examines his qualifications for the task of census enumerator and attempts to find if his knowledge of and social standing in the local community affected the way in which he completed the census returns. Secondly, by comparing the three censuses that he compiled an overall assessment is made of the accuracy of his returns in the light of the difficulties that he experienced, and the improvements that were made over time.     

Evaluation of Alternative Cohort-Component Models for Local Area Population Forecasts

It is generally accepted by demographers that cohort-component projection models which incorporate directional migration are conceptually preferable to those using net migration. Yet net migration cohort-component models, and other simplified variations, remain in common use by both academics and practitioners because of their simplicity and low data requirements. While many arguments have been presented in favour of using one or other type of model, surprisingly little analysis has been undertaken to assess which tend to give the most accurate forecasts. This paper evaluates five cohort-component models which differ in the way they handle migration, four of which are well known, with one—a composite net migration model—being proposed here for the first time. The paper evaluates the performance of these five models in their unconstrained form, and then in a constrained form in which age–sex-specific forecasts are constrained to independent total populations from an extrapolative model shown to produce accurate forecasts in earlier research. Retrospective forecasts for 67 local government areas of New South Wales were produced for the period 1991–2011 and then compared to population estimates. Assessments of both total and age-specific population forecasts were made. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the forecasts constrained to total populations from the extrapolative model, with the constrained bi-regional model giving the lowest errors. The findings should be of use to practitioners in selecting appropriate models for local area population forecasts.     

Population and pavement: population growth and land development in Israel

This research examines land use change in Israel––an intriguing but understudied setting with regard to population–environment dynamics. While Israel is fairly unique with regard to its combined high levels of economic prosperity and high population growth, this case study has relevance for developed countries and regions (like the south and southwest regions of the USA) which must balance population growth and urban development with open space conservation for ecosystem services and biological diversity. The population–land development relationship is investigated during the period from 1961 to 1995 at three spatial scales: national, regional (six districts), and local (40 localities). There is a positive correlation between population growth and land development rates at the national scale, and while remaining positive, the strength of the relationship varies greatly at regional and local scales. The variation in population–land use dynamics across scales is used to garner insight as to the importance of geography, policy and historical settlement patterns.     

Is Local Financial Health Associated with Citizens’ Quality of Life?

Few studies have analysed the results of public management in terms of social welfare. However, the financial health of local governments is in decline, which means that they are no longer able to provide public services that require financial obligations. This generally results in a reduction in the quality/quantity of public services provided by local governments, thus affecting citizens’ quality of life, since the most important welfare needs are usually related to public services. This study is an original approach to understanding the importance of the financial health of local governments in relation to social welfare. We selected a sample composed of 76 Spanish cities for the period 2008–2010. The results show that citizens who live in municipalities with good financial health have a higher quality of life than others. In general, citizens from municipalities governed by right-wing parties with low political competition tend to have higher levels of quality of life.     

Three Poetry Books

In this article, I argue that Richard Matheson's (1954) vampire novella, I Am Legend, encodes the protagonist's, Robert Neville, traumatic recognition of his queer sexuality in its monstrosity (the unspeakability of male penetrability). Neville's identification with and desire for his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, are symbolically codified through three different registers: intertextual references to vampiric conventions and codes, the semiotics of queer subculture, and a structure of doubling that links Neville to the queer vampire. Although Neville avoids encountering his unspeakable queer desire, which could be represented only at the level of the Lacanian Real, he must still confront Cortman's obsessive exhortations for him to come out. Only when he symbolically codifies his abnormality in its own monstrosity, by viewing himself through mutant vampires' eyes, can Neville reconfigure the ethical relationship between self and other, humans and mutant humans-vampires. However progressive Matheson's novella is in its advocacy of minority sexual rights, it still renders capitalism's problematic relationship with queer subjectivity invisible. Although capitalism overdetermines every aspect of the social field and makes Neville's daily life possible in its surplus enjoyment, the fundamental antagonism (class struggle) in capitalism is obscured by the assertion of identity politics.     

The role of marriage in immigrants’ human capital investment under liquidity constraints

This paper presents a two-period human capital investment model, which is used to study the optimal investment decisions of credit-constrained married immigrants relative to single immigrants and native couples facing a perfect capital market. The model predicts that: (1) The comparative advantage in investment in local skills of one of the spouses may emerge from his/her higher growth rate of imported human capital. (2) The optimal investment of each spouse is non-increasing in the level of imported human capital of the spouse with the comparative advantage in investment, while it is non-decreasing in the level of imported human capital of the other spouse. (3) When two immigrants get married, the spouse with the comparative advantage in investment invests more than when he/she was single whereas the other spouse invests less.

U.S. births and limit cycle Models

Lee's (1974) formal demographic feedback models summarize the implications for births and age-structure of neo-Malthusian theories of baby booms such as those of Easterlin. For some parameter values, such models imply sustained cycles, so-called "limit cycles", in births. Frauenthal and Swick recently reestimated a continuous-age version of Lee's basic cohort model with U.S. series and, contrary to Lee's original findings, concluded that "limit cycles oscillations have been occurring in U.S. births." This article disputes their conclusion, ascribing it to an inconsistency in detrending procedures. Furthermore, it corrects Lee's original conclusion by showing that his alternative period labor-force feedback model, estimated from U.S. series, leads to cycles of implausibly long period. This article thus reopens the question of whether any feedback model could account for the observed cycles in U.S. births.     

Generationenabfolge – ein Faktor des Wandels in Modernisierungsprozessen. Shmuel N. Eisenstadts Beitrag zur Generationensoziologie

This paper will highlight to what extend Eisenstadt’s theory connects to the approach of historic generations. At first, his early comparative work “From Generation to Generation” is reconstructed. In this book, Eisenstadt presents a model of generations based on structural-functionalist assumptions; he conceptualizes the relation between generations and social change as a problem of system integration of specific age-groups on the one hand and the regulation of tensions between these groups on the other hand. Using the youth- and student movements as an example, this article shows how Eisenstadt’s interpretations change with the development of his theory. In the second part of this paper, it will be proposed how his approach can be developed further by interlocking his concept more closely with Mannheim’s theory of generations as well as other recent findings of socialization theory. It will furthermore be discussed, how his modernization theory has the potential to solve a theoretical problem inherent in Mannheim’s approach.     

On Estimating the Expectation of Life at Old Ages: Reply to Professor Coale

In 1758, an article containing the view that resources limit population growth was published in Copenhagen. This paper gives a short presentation of the author Otto Diderich Lütken's life and literary production. His radical views on the question of population are given, and a comparison is made with the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus. A brief account of his views on other economic issues is also presented. The literature concerning his writings is reviewed. A discussion of who influenced him, and of his influence on others, ends this paper.