William Farr on the Economic Value of the Population

The modern theory of human capital came to prominence in economics only in recent decades, but its antecedents can be traced back to the earliest economic writings. The notion that human skills represent economic value comparable to that of capital was clearly articulated by the classical economists, notably by William Petty and Adam Smith. That improvement of skills and increase in the number of persons in whom skills are embodied are sources of economic progress follows from their conceptual clarification. Attempts to quantify the economic value of the population and assessment of the effect of mortality improvements and population growth were, however, later developments. Among the earliest contributions to such calculations, one by William Farr, published in 1877 and reprinted below, is particularly notable. Defining the economic value of a person as the discounted sum of expected future earnings, Farr arrives at a figure of £5,250 million (for 1876) “as an approximation to the value which is inherent in the people [of the United Kingdom], and may be fairly added to the capital in land, houses, cattle or stock, and other investments.” In addition to providing insightful commentary on the rationale and weaknesses of his calculations, he estimates the addition to that amount from population growth in the preceding four decades, discusses the impact of outmigration to the colonies and the United States during that time, and notes the dependence of the economic value of the population on the level of education, on the state of health of the population, and on people's longevity. William Farr (1807–1883) was perhaps the most influential British statistician of the nineteenth century. Although trained as a physician, in 1839 he accepted a post in the General Register Office and from 1842 to 1880 he served as Statistical Superintendent. During his long tenure he was the main force in the development and analysis of British vital statistics and in setting the foundations of modern epidemiology. He constructed the first British life table (based on deaths in 1841) and carried out a wide range of creative analyses of British mortality statistics, especially on mortality differentials, with an aim of promoting social reform. The most accessible route to his written output for modern readers is a posthumously published collection: Vital Statistics: A Memorial Volume of Selections from the Reports and Writings of William Parr (London: Offices of the Sanitary Institute, 1885). A reprint edition of this work was published under the auspices of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine (Metuchen, N. J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1975). The passage reproduced below (pp. 59–64) is an excerpt from the Registrar‐General's 39th Annual Report (1877), titled The Economic Value of Population. The topic was earlier treated in Parr's paper “The income and property tax,” Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London (March 1853), excerpted on pp. 531–550 of the book under the title Cost, and the Present and Future Economic Value of Man.     

A. M. Carr‐Saunders on Eugenics and the Declining Birth Rate

The emergence of the eugenic movement in the late nineteenth century reflected a concern with the perceived negative consequences of differential fertility for the quality of human populations. As theory, eugenics was based on little science and a good measure of racial and class prejudice. As an ameliorative program, even in its own terms, it was patently marginal, aiming as it did at discouraging reproduction among the unfit, as defined by medical criteria. By the 1930s, even to adherents of the faith, such “negative eugenics” seemed increasingly irrelevant as a response to the dominant Western demographic trend: a drastic fall of fertility, foreshadowing an absolute decline in population numbers. In the 1935 Gallon Lecture to the Eugenics Society, Alexander Carr‐Saunders (1886–1966), probably the best‐known British demographer of the interwar years, and also a prominent member of the Society, presented a vigorous critique of negative eugenics. The declining birth rate, he argued, no longer permits neglect of quantitative aspects of population, but calls for a positive eugenics: efforts “to raise the fertility of those who are not definitely subnormal until at least they replace themselves.” The specifics of the program he set forth, however, represent not a shift in emphasis but a clear break with eugenic concerns. He advocates a “scientific population policy,” the central thrust of which would be removing obstacles to and creating facilities for the fulfillment of the social duty of reproduction within a system of voluntary parenthood–measures widely espoused today in low‐fertility societies. With the omission of the closing sections, the lecture is reproduced below from Eugenics Review, 1935, vol. 27, no. 1.     

Ansley J. Coale on Increases in Expectation of Life and Population Growth

The rapid decline in mortality after the end of World War II, in combination with a much slower downward adjustment of fertility, resulted in an extraordinary acceleration of world population growth. In a contribution prepared for the 1959 Vienna conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Ansley J. Coale présented a concise and spirited exploration of the influence of mortality and fertility on the levels and patterns of growth and on the distribution of the population by age. Using the stable population model as his tool of exploration, Coale présents a comparative analysis of the implications of movements between stable states, making imaginative illustrative assumptions on changes over time and highlighting the often surprising and counterintuitive results of such calculations. The full text of this article, omitting summaries in English and French, is reproduced below from pp. 36–41 in Union Internationale pour I?étude scientifique de la population, Internationaler Bevölkerungskongress, Wien:Im Selbstverlag, 1959. Ansley Coale was one of the most prominent figures in demography in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1917 and was educated at Princeton University. He spent his entire professional career at Princeton, as a member of the economics faculty and in association with the Office of Population Research, of which he was director from 1959 to 1975. In 1967/68 he was president of the Population Association of America, and from 1977 to 1981 he was president of IUSSP. His many scientific works include Population Growth and Economic Development in Low‐Income Countries (1958), coauthored with Edgar M. Hoover, a book that was highly influential in shaping the international population policy agenda from the 1960s on—lately receiving renewed attention as a predictor of the “demographic dividend” benefiting economies as a result of the transition to low fertility. He was initiator and leader of the Princeton project exploring the causes of the decline in marital fertility in Europe, culminating in the 1986 book, coedited with Susan C. Watkins, The Decline of Fertility in Europe. His most lasting contribution to population studies, however, was in the field of formal demography, as both teacher and scholar. His research in this area is exemplified by the 1972 book The Growth and Structure of Human Populations: A Mathematical Investigation, and in the application of demographic models to the estimation and analysis of population data. Ansley Coale died on 5 November 2002, at the age of 84.     

The international union for the scientific study of population

The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population will hold its first official Assembly since the war, in Geneva, Switzerland, during the week of 27 August–3 September 1949.     

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.     

Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States

This article explores the relationship between eugenics and demography in the United States in the interwar era. In focusing on the founding of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems and the Population Association of America, it shows how early population scientists contested and negotiated the boundaries of the population field. The article maps the shifting focus away from biological interpretations of population dynamics toward the social, in part as a reaction to the rise of Fascist population research and policy. However, it also shows how social demography was closely intertwined with a “social eugenics” that attempted to ensure human betterment through methods more consistent with New Deal policymaking. This, the article argues, contributed critical intellectual and material resources to the development of social surveys of fertility behavior and contraceptive use, surveys that are more commonly perceived as having undermined eugenics through challenging the biologically deterministic assumptions upon which it was based.     

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.     

Bertil Ohlin on Population,Trade, and Territorial Expansion

The international economic problems of the 1930s–in the aftermath of World War I and the depression—at first sight have few resonances with the present day. The leading powers of the time protected their industries behind high tariff walls. Most of them possessed colonies or were intent on regaining those lost in the war. Restoration of the free‐trade regime of the decades prior to 1913, and creation of a new financial architecture to support it, seemed a remote prospect. In all kinds of ways the post‐World War II and especially the post‐Cold War world is in vastly better shape. Yet some of the themes of the earlier period remain relevant. The colonies are gone and territorial expansion is virtually inadmissible, but the options for dealing with international imbalances in factor supplies and factor prices are otherwise the same: international trade, capital flows, and migration. The insight that international trade and international movements of productive factors could be substitutes owes much to the work of the Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin. Ohlin's magnum opus. Interregional and International Trade (1933), building on earlier work of Eli Heckscher, developed what became known as the Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade. In its simplest form it described trade in a two‐region, two‐factor, two‐good economic system. With subsequent generalizations, the theory accommodated not just trade in goods but also movement of factors. Capital flows were principally of interest, but labor flows were formally analogous. The practical differences between the two, of course, were considerable: migration was not an acceptable mode of factor price equalization. Nor is it today, when worries about rapid population growth attach to poor countries rather than (as they did in the 1930s, if speciously) to industrialized states claiming lebensraum. Indeed, it is less so, since the population sizes of the sending countries are multiples of their 1930s levels and high migrant flows encounter resistance in the receiving countries. The passage reproduced below comes from a project on economic reconstruction and financial stabilization organized by the Carnegie Endowment and the International Chamber of Commerce. One output of this project was a volume International Economic Reconstruction: An Economists' and Businessmen's Survey of the Main Problems of Today (Paris: International Chamber of Commerce, 1936), over half of which consisted of a study entitled Introductory Report on the Problem of International Economic Reconstruction, by Ohlin. The excerpt is part of Chapter 7 of this report: The Problem of “Overpopulation,” Colonies, Markets and Raw Materials. Bertil Gotthard Ohlin (1899–1979) had a distinguished career as a politician as well as economist. He was a long‐time member of Sweden's parliament, in which he led the Liberal Party—mostly in opposition. During 1944–45 he was Minister of Trade. In 1977 he received the Nobel prize in economics (together with James Meade) for contributions to the theory of international trade.     

Population Policy Dilemmas in Europe at the Dawn of the Twenty‐First Century

The article discusses issues raised by persistent below‐replacement fertility in Europe. The continent's demographic predicament is highlighted by comparing age structures and relative population sizes between populations in and outside Europe—such as those of Russia and Yemen and those of an enlarged 25‐country European Union and a 25‐country hinterland to the EU in North Africa and West Asia—during the past 50 years and prospectively up to 2050, based on United Nations estimates and projections. Potential geopolitical aspects of the population shifts are considered. European policy responses to them are found largely wanting. With respect to the key demographic variable, fertility, explicit pronatalism is rejected by most European governments. A set of policy measures that commands wide support, with the hoped‐for side effect of raising birth rates, seeks to make women's participation in the formal labor force compatible with childrearing. The effectiveness of such measures, however, is likely to be limited. Continued below‐replacement fertility, higher immigration from outside Europe, negative population growth, and loss of demographic weight within the global population are safe predictions for the Europe of the twenty‐first century.     

D. V. Glass on the Problems of a Declining Population

During the past quarter century fertility has dropped below replacement levels in many parts of the world. According to United Nations estimates, in 2005 this was the case in 65 countries, comprising 43 percent of the world's population. In many cases, most notably in Europe and East Asia, the shortfall of fertility from the level that would be necessary in the long run to sustain a stationary population is substantial. In Europe, for example, the average total fertility rate for the period 2000–2005 was 1.4. Indefinite maintenance of such a level implies a shrinkage of the total population by one‐third over a generation–roughly every 30 years. Accompanying that rapid decline of total numbers would be an age structure containing a preponderance of the elderly, posing extreme adjustment difficulties for the economic and social system. Societies that wish to avoid radical depopulation would have to engineer a substantial rise infertility–if not to full replacement level (slightly more than two children per woman), then at least to a level that would moderate the tempo of population decline and make population aging easier to cope with. An additional counter to declining numbers, if not significantly to population aging, could come from net immigration. This is the demographic future assumed in the UN medium‐variant projections for countries and regions currently of very low fertility. Thus, for example, in Europe over the period up to 2050 fertility is assumed to rise to 1.85 and net immigration to amount to some 32 million persons. The UN projections also anticipate further improvement in average life expectancy–from its current level of 74 years to 81 years. This factor slows the decline in population size but accelerates population aging. Under these assumptions, Europe's population would decline from its present 728 million to 653 million by 2050. At that time the proportion of the population over age 65 would be 27.6 percent, nearly double its present share. Demographic change of this nature is not a novel prospect. It was envisioned in a number of European countries and in North America, Australia, and New Zealand in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Concern with the possible economic and social consequences generated much discussion at that time among demographers and social scientists at large and also attracted public attention. Possible policy measures that might reverse the downward trend of fertility were also debated, although resulting in only hesitant and largely inconsequential action. The article by D. V. Glass reproduced below is an especially lucid and concise treatment of demographic changes under conditions of low fertility and their economic and social implications. It appeared in Eugenics Review (vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 39–47) in 1937 when the author was 26 years old. Glass's line of argument is broadly representative of the main focus of demographic analysis in the mid‐1930s on aspects of population dynamics, applying the then still novel analytical tool of the stable population model. It also echoes the work of economists then witnessing the great difficulties capitalist economies faced in adjusting to structural changes in consumer demand and labor supply. While Glass addresses these issues primarily with reference to England and Wales, he sees the issues as affecting all industrialized countries. The Malthusian problem of relentless population growth he persuasively declares to be irrelevant for these countries. The Western world faces the opposite problem: population decline, a trend only temporarily masked by the effects of an age distribution that still has a relatively high proportion of women in the child‐bearing ages, reflecting the higher fertility level of the past. A stationary population, Glass cogently argues, is to be welcomed, and he considers the absolute size at which zero growth would be achieved relatively unimportant. In contrast, a continuous population decline would have “thoroughly disastrous” results in an individualist civilization and in “an unplanned economic system.” And, he concedes, somewhat quaintly, that sustained below‐replacement fertility would pose a great problem “even in a country in which the means of production were owned communally.” Glass's conclusions about the reversibility of low fertility are as pessimistic as those of most informed observers today. Still, he sees hope in a future “rationally planned civilization” that would “produce an environment in which high fertility and a high standard of life will both be possible.” In this context, high fertility means the level necessary to sustain the population in a stationary state. By present‐day standards the level Glass calculates as needed for long‐term zero growth is indeed fairly high: 2.87 children per woman. But that figure reflects the fact that, when he wrote, mortality up to age 50 was still fairly high and fertility occurred almost wholly within marriage; it also assumes zero net immigration. In the last 70 years much has changed in each of these three components of population dynamics, both in England and Wales and in the rest of Europe. Still, Glass's commentary remains highly relevant to the discussion of the problems of low fertility today. David Victor Glass (1911–78) was associated with the London School of Economics throughout much of his scientific career. He followed R. R. Kuczynski as reader in demography in 1945 and became professor of sociology in 1948. His work on demography, population history, and population policy had already made him one of the most influential demographers in pre‐World War II Britain. After the war he rose to international prominence through pioneering work on the Royal Commission of Population; through his research on historical demography, the history of demographic thought, and social mobility; and through founding, in 1947, the journal Population Studies, which he edited until his death.     

The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization: On the Cross‐Border Movement of People

The globalization of the world economy can be measured in terms of increases in international trade, greater levels of foreign investment and technology transfers, and the liberalization of financial markets. Accompanying and facilitating these trends have been institutional innovations and reforms, creating regimes under which international economic relationships can be managed and disputes resolved. The role of the World Trade Organization is an evident case in point. The rising scale of international migration can also be seen as a globalizing trend. Here, however, with the exception of the special case of refugees, there is no governance regime in place or in prospect at the international level. Occasional past efforts by UN agencies to stimulate formal discussion of what such a regime might look like have led nowhere: countries are simply unwilling to contemplate any weakening of their sovereign right to control entry. Proposing how to fill this perceived lacuna in the international system is one of the tasks on the agenda of the Global Commission on International Migration. The Commission, an independent body set up in 2003 by a small group of UN member states, plans to present a report to the UN Secretary‐General in mid‐2005. In the meantime, the subject has been explored by another group—the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization. This commission was set up by the International Labour Office in 2002. It was co‐chaired by Tarja Halonen, president of Finland, and Benjamin William Mkapa, president of Tanzania. Its 24 other members included economists (among them Deepak Nayyar, Hernando de Soto, and Joseph Stiglitz), politicians, and business and labor leaders, as well as a number of ex‐officio ILO representatives. After several meetings and an extensive series of consultations held during 2002 and 2003, its report, A Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All, was issued in February 2004. The report argues that the benefits of globalization must be more equitably distributed. To this end, the globalizing trends in the world economy should be matched by similar advances in social and political institutions. One of the features of the existing imbalance is that “goods and capital move much more freely across borders than people do.” In addition to the many other recommendations the Commission has for what it terms the governance of globalization are proposals on the management of international migration. “Fair rules for trade and capital,” the Commission argues, “need to be complemented by fair rules for the movement of people.” The long‐run objective should be “a multilateral framework for immigration laws and consular practices˙˙˙that would govern cross‐border movement of people,” paralleling “the multilateral frameworks that already exist, or are currently under discussion, concerning the cross‐border movement of goods, services, technology, investment and information.” The Commission's thinking on migration is in some respects reminiscent of the views of the ILO's first director, Albert Thomas, in the days of the League of Nations. Writing in 1927, Thomas envisioned, if only as a distant ideal, “some sort of supreme supernational authority which would regulate the distribution of population on rational and impartial lines, by controlling and directing migration movements and deciding on the opening‐up or closing of countries to particular streams of immigration.” (See the Archives section of PDR 9, no. 4.) The excerpt below consists of §428–§446 of the report, a section titled The cross‐border movement of people.     

An assessment of the own-children method of estimating fertility by birthplace in Australia

This paper examines the validity of the own-children method of fertility estimates derived from the 1991 Census by a detailed investigation of mortality assumptions, the presence of non-own children, age misreporting and undercount. A comparison of fertility measures derived alternatively from the census using the own-children method and from vital statistics for the period 1987–91 indicates remarkably similar rates for Australia-born women, and plausible results for long established migrant groups. The own-children fertility levels for some recently arrived migrant groups, however, were found to be misleading. It is suggested that the own-children method is useful for the study of differential current fertility in Australia. Revised version of an essay awarded the W.D. Borrie Prize (graduate section), 1997, and presented to the session: Advances in methods for the analysis of demographic data of the 23rd General Conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 11–17 October, Beijing. This paper is based on the author’s PhD thesis entitled:Fertility patterns of Australian selected immigrant groups, 1977–91.     

The United Nations on Levels and Trends of International Migration and Related Policies

Issues of international migration are drawing increasing attention not only from governments and their national constituencies but also from international organizations, notably from various components of the United Nations system. Better understanding of the causes of the flows of international migration and their relationship with development and answers to policy questions arising therefrom are, however, hampered by scarcity of up‐to‐date and reliable quantitative information concerning international migration. As a step toward remedying this gap, in March 2003 the Population Division of the United Nations issued a report, presumably the first of a series, titled International Migration Report 2002. A review essay by David Coleman discussing this publication appears in the book review section of the present issue of PDR. The bulk of this 323‐page document presents statistical profiles for more than 200 countries and territories and also for various regional aggregates. These summaries provide data or estimates (when available or feasible) on population, migrant stock, refugees, and remittances by migrant workers for 1990 and 2000, and on average annual net migration flows for 1990–95 and 1995–2000. These profiles also offer characterization of government views on policies relating to levels of immigration and emigration. According to the report, the total number of international migrants—those residing in a country other than where they were born—was 175 million in 2000, or about 3 percent of the world population. In absolute terms, this global number is about twice as large as it was in 1970, and exceeds the 1990 estimate by some 21 million. The introductory chapters of the report discuss problems in measuring international migration and summarize major trends in international migration policies since the mid‐1970s. An additional chapter reproduces a recent report of the Secretary‐General to the United Nations General Assembly on international migration. Reproduced below is much of the “Overview” section of the report (pp. 1–5). In addition to its published form (New York: United Nations, 2002, ST/ESA/SER.A/220), the full report is accessible on the Internet: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/ittmig2002/ittmigrep2002.htm     

J. R. Hicks on the Economics of Population

Sir John Hicks (1904–89), professor of political economy at Oxford University from 1952 to 1965, was one of the foremost economists of his time, making notable contributions to the theory of wages, general equilibrium theory, and welfare economics. He received (jointly with Kenneth Arrow) the 1972 Nobel prize in economics. Value and Capital (1939), his best-known book, is held as a classic; his 1937 exegesis of Keynes's General Theory has long been a staple of undergraduate economics. Population does not figure appreciably in his writings, although an almost offhand footnote attached to the concluding paragraph of Value and Capital suggests that it could have: “[0]ne cannot repress the thought that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population.” (He added: “If this is so, it would help to explain why, as the wisest hold, it has been such a disappointing episode in human history.”) In his late work, A Theory of Economic History (1969), however, the principal driving force in economic development is depicted as the expansion of markets. A sustained discussion of the topic of population by Hicks is contained in one of his earlier books. The Social Framework: An Introduction to Economics (Oxford University Press, 1942). Chapters 4 and 5 of this book treat “Population and Its History” and “The Economics of Population”; one of the appendixes is “On the Idea of an Optimum Population.” Chapter 5 and this appendix are reprinted below. The Social Framework was written as an introductory text, although its lucid style characterized all of Hicks's work. It covered both theory and applications with particular attention to the then novel subject of national accounting. Hicks described the book as “economic anatomy” in contrast to the “economic physiology” of how the economy works. Chapter 5 gives equal attention to under- and overpopulation, both seen as posing dangers. The Preface to the 1971 (fourth) edition of The Social Framework notes that the population and labor force chapters “have been rather substantially altered—to take account of the curious things that have happened in these fields (which one might have expected to be slow moving).” In 1971 he is more cautious than in 1942 about suggesting that slowing population growth might have been a factor in the 1930s depression, and readier to admit of countries where “a continuing rise in population, even while there is some continuing agricultural improvement, is likely to lead in the end to unemployment and destitution.” The appendix on optimum population was retained through all editions.     

Population growth,farmland, and the long-run standard of living

This paper studies the natural-resources element in the theory of population growth over the very long run. In the context of the stock of land and Malthusian crises in earlier times, the model shows how resources have become more available rather than more scarce, even as population and income have increased.The paper sketches a mechanism which, added to the Malthusian system, leads to entirely different conclusions than does the Malthusian system. Using the illustration of food and land, change in knowledge and hence in the stock of resources is made a function of the stock of knowledge and the price of resources. The speed of adjustment depends on the economic and social climate for the development of new knowledge. Population growth first raises food and land prices, which then stimulate the creation of new resources, eventually leading to less scarcity of resources and lower prices than originally prevailed.That is, population growth creates new problems which in the short run constitute additional burdens which, in the longer run, lead to new developments that leave people better off than if the problems had never arisen.This paper benefitted from being presented in earlier draft at a Population Association of America meeting, to the Economic History workshop at the University of Illinois, and to a seminar of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in New Delhi. We appreciate valuable comments on earlier drafts from Stanley Engerman, E. L. Jones, William McNeill, and two anonymous referees. Gunter Steinmann acknowledges financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation and a travel grant from Fulbright Commission.     

The United Nations on the Implementation of the Cairo Program of Action

Progress and challenges in implementing strategies on population and development were the focus of a Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly that met at UN headquarters in New York, 30 June-2 July 1999. Participating at the Assembly were representatives of nearly 180 governments, with some 150 of these, and a number of observers and nongovernmental organizations, making statements. The delegates reviewed and appraised the implementation of the Program of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development held at Cairo in 1994. The main topics discussed concerned women's rights, reproductive health issues, and abortion. The Assembly's work culminated in the adoption of a 106-paragraph statement titled Key actions…, formally issued as United Nations Document A/S-21/5. The document is reprinted below in full. It affirms the comprehensive approach to population and development issues articulated at the Cairo conference and identifies needs for further action. Also reproduced below is the address delivered at the Special Session by Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations. According to a popular lapidary characterization of the program adopted at the 1994 conference, that program concluded that “population is not about numbers.” Thus the Secretary-General's address is particularly notable for a clear affirmation of the importance of the quantitative dimension of the population issue. “[W]e have to stabilize the population of this planet. Quite simply, there is a limit to the pressures our global environment can stand.”     

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.     

The Global Science Panel on Population in Sustainable Development

The forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa (26 August – 4 September 2002) has been called by the United Nations to consider strategies toward sustainable development in all its dimensions. Hence, its mandate is broader than that of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio Conference). Population issues have previously been discussed in a separate series of World Population Conferences (Bucharest 1974, Mexico City 1984, Cairo 1994). With no new World Population Conference scheduled for 2004 and Johannesburg having a mandate that explicitly includes social and economic aspects, population as a key component of sustainable development should figure prominently in the deliberations. Yet, after the third of four preparatory meetings for WSSD (which ended in New York on 5 April), population considerations are absent from the planned agenda. A plausible explanation for this absence is bureaucratic: in most countries inputs to Johannesburg are being prepared mainly by environment ministries that have little experience in dealing with population questions. There may also be political reasons for not wanting to discuss population issues in Johannesburg. But, arguably, sustainable development strategies that do not take into account the diversity and the dynamics of human populations will fail. This is one of the conclusions of the Global Science Panel on Population and Environment. The Panel is an independent body of international experts from the fields of population and environment that was organized by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and the United Nations University (UNU). (Members of the Panel acted in their individual capacity, rather than representing their institutions.) After a ten‐month preparatory process, in April 2002 the Panel finalized a statement that summarizes its understanding of the role of population in sustainable development and outlines key policy priorities. The full text of this statement, titled Population in sustainable development, is reproduced below.     

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.     

Note on the accuracy of local population estimates

Mr. Silcock's article will be of interest to all concerned with local population data. It may be useful to supplement it by a brief account of the fuller examination of the local population estimates made in 1951 by the General Register Office, since this covered all 1472 administrative areas in England and Wales and could be made in more detail than was possible for a private investigator.

Any census, of course, provides information not available, at least in such detail, at other times or from other sources, and also serves as a base from which estimates for succeeding years can be derived. In addition, however, the General Register Office takes the opportunity of a census to try and assess the accuracy of the various types of current population estimates made by the Department. In the case of local administrative areas the comparison of actual and expected populations made after the 1931 Census is discussed in the Text Volume of the Registrar General's Statistical Review for 1930 (pages 100-102).