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.     

Longevity Among Hunter‐ Gatherers: A Cross‐Cultural Examination

Post‐reproductive longevity is a robust feature of human life and not only a recent phenomenon caused by improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical advances. We argue for an adaptive life span of 68‐78 years for modern Homo sapiens based on our analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small‐scale hunter‐gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world. We compare patterns of survivorship across the life span, rates of senescence, modal ages at adult death, and causes of death. We attempt to reconcile our results with those derived from paleodemographic studies that characterize prehistoric human lives as “nasty, brutish, and short,” and with observations of recent acculturation among contemporary subsistence populations. We integrate information on age‐specific dependency and resource production to help explain the adaptive utility of longevity in humans from an evolutionary perspective.     

Well‐Being,Front and Center: A Note on the Sarkozy Report

The Sarkozy Report is a study commissioned by the French President on better ways to measure the level and progress of societal well‐being than conventional economic indicators such as GDP. Despite being prepared by prominent economists—the commission was led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean‐Paul Fitoussi—the Report rejects reliance on “production‐oriented” measures of progress in favor of a broader array of quality‐of‐life indicators, some of them subjective, and measures of the sustainability of well‐being into the future. These multiple dimensions of well‐being, it argues, should be used in policy decisions and welfare evaluations. The views expressed in the Report may portend a sea‐change in the way economists think about the benefits of economic growth.     

Two‐and‐a‐Half Cheers: A Review Essay on the International Migration Report 2002*

Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability Surjit S. Bhalla, Imagine There's No Country: Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in the Era of Globalization John Firor and Judith Jacobsen, The Crowded Greenhouse: Population, Climate Change, and Creating a Sustainable World Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters (eds.), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals     

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.     

The Effect of Couple Disagreement about Child‐Timing Intentions: A Parity‐Specific Approach

Using couple data from a longitudinal study conducted in Italy, a country with persistently low fertility levels, we examined the effect of partners' discrepant child‐timing intentions on reproductive behavior. We found that the effect of couple disagreement on subsequent fertility is parity‐specific and does not depend on whether only the male or the female partner intends to have a(nother) child. The disagreement tends to produce an intermediate childbearing outcome at parities zero and one, while the outcome is shifted more toward agreement on not having a(nother) child at parity two. The empirical evidence suggests that gender equality in reproductive decisionmaking is not driven by partners' equal bargaining power or partners' equal access to economic resources. The findings indicate that the predictive power of child‐timing intentions strongly improves if both partners' views are considered in fertility models, and thus support the adoption of couple analysis in fertility research.