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.     

“Demodystopias”: Prospects of Demographic Hell

Dystopian fiction, stories envisioning dire human futures, originated with the novels of H. G. Wells and others a century ago. “Demodystopias” are a subgenre of dystopias where the imagined futures derive from demographic change, taken perhaps to an extreme: the population explosion, aging and depopulation, mass migration, global epidemics, and the eugenic possibilities of new reproductive technologies. This essay traces the genealogy of demodystopias over the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Their themes reflect the demographic issues of the day: fear of overpopulation in the “population bomb” era; later, threatened societal senescence or swamping by immigrants under ultra‐low fertility; new reproductive regimes under genetic engineering; and the geopolitics of demographic change. As with other dystopias, demodystopias seek to identify present‐day negative tendencies that might lead to a future theatrum diabolorum—and to pin responsibility for such an outcome on ourselves. Authors discussed include Margaret Atwood, Anthony Burgess, Günter Grass, Michel Houellebecq, José Saramago, Lionel Shriver, and Kurt Vonnegut.     

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers and the Prehistory of the IUSSP

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers, Secretary General of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP, 1928–ca. 1942), the precursor of today's International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP, 1947–present), was a central figure in population science during the 1930s. With his pro‐Nazi activism, anti‐Semitism, Red‐baiting, and failure to leave any intellectual mark of consequence, he is an idiosyncratic and in some ways unattractive subject. However, an examination of Pitt‐Rivers's role as Secretary General reveals a wealth of information about the IUSIPP as it lurched toward collapse. It casts light, as well, on the struggle for scientific legitimacy between eugenic racialists and reformers in the 1930s, a struggle in which he played a controversial and divisive role. Using a combination of newly discovered and old archival material, this article traces Pitt‐Rivers's involvement with the Union, the British eugenics establishment, Nazi population science, and far‐right British politics during this turbulent decade when demography emerged as an international discipline.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Population Density and Fertility in 22 Indian Villages

Do agriculturists in the Third World sometimes adjust to increasing population density by having fewer children? Over-time data (1961–1972) for 22 farm villages in India point to such a possibility. Cross-sectionally, villages with higher density tend to have lower fertility, even with controls for village caste composition, prior fertility, female literacy, and agricultural production. Similarly, the regression coefficient for village density is negative when the cross-sections are “pooled.” Population density apparently has an inhibiting effect on fertility in these villages.     

Is Lowest‐Low Fertility in Europe Explained by the Postponement of Childbearing?

In 2001, more than half of Europe's population lived in countries with a total fertility rate (TFR) at or below 1.3. Use of the adjusted TFR proposed by Bongaarts and Feeney, which takes into account the effects of the ongoing fertility postponement, changes the European fertility map considerably. All 27 countries analyzed had adjusted TFRs in 1995–2000 above 1.4. Thus, the “lowest‐low” fertility in Europe may be interpreted as a temporary consequence of the increasing age at motherhood. However, substantial regional differences in fertility level across Europe persist even when the differential pace of fertility postponement is taken into account. The estimated adjusted TFRs in Europe (1.63) and in the 25‐member European Union (1.71) contrast with the TFR levels of 1.40 and 1.46, respectively. These seemingly small differences have vastly different implications in terms of the potential long‐term pace of population decline.     

Relative cohort size: source of a unifying theory of global fertility transition

Using United Nations estimates of age structure and vital rates for 184 countries at five‐year intervals from 1950 through 1995, this article demonstrates how changes in relative cohort size appear to have affected patterns of fertility across countries since 1950—not just in developed countries, but perhaps even more importantly in developing countries as they pass through the demographic transition. The increase in relative cohort size (defined as the proportion of males aged 15–24 relative to males aged 25–59), which occurs as a result of declining mortality rates among infants, children, and young adults during the demographic transition, appears to act as the mechanism that determines when the fertility portion of the transition begins. As hypothesized by Richard Easterlin, the increasing proportion of young adults generates a downward pressure on young men's relative wages (or on the size of landhold‐ings passed on from parent to child), which in turn causes young adults to accept a tradeoff between family size and material wellbeing, setting in motion a “cascade” or “snowball” effect in which total fertility rates tumble as social norms regarding acceptable family sizes begin to change.     

Policies Addressing the Tempo Effect in Low‐Fertility Countries

The possible negative consequences of current low fertility levels are causing increasing concern, particularly in countries where the total fertility rate is below 1.5. Social inertia and self‐reinforcing processes may make it difficult to return to higher levels once fertility has been very low for some time, creating a possible “low‐fertility trap.” Policies explicitly addressing the fertility‐depressing effect of increases in the mean age at child‐bearing (the tempo effect) may be a way to raise period fertility to somewhat higher levels and help escape the “low‐fertility trap” before it closes. Reforms in the school system may affect the timing of childbearing by lowering the age at completion of education. A more efficient school system, which provides the same qualifications with a younger school‐leaving age, is potentially capable of increasing period fertility and hence exerting a rejuvenating effect on the age composition, even if the levels of cohort fertility remain unchanged. Such policies may also have a positive effect on completed cohort fertility.     

Reproduction,Compositional Demography,and Economic Growth: Family Planning in England Long Before the Fertility Decline

This article offers a radical reinterpretation of the chronology of control over reproduction in England's history. It argues that, as a result of post–World War II policy preoccupations, there has been too narrow a focus in the literature on the significance of reductions in marital fertility. In England's case this is conventionally dated to have occurred from 1876, long after the industrial revolution. With a wider angle focus on “reproduction,” the historical evidence for England indicates that family planning began much earlier in the process of economic growth. Using a “compositional demography” approach, a novel social pattern of highly prudential, late marriage can be seen emerging among the bourgeoisie in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is also evidence for a more widespread resort to such prudential marriage throughout the population after 1816. When placed in this context, the reduction in national fertility indexes visible from 1876 can be seen as only a further phase, not a revolution, in the population's management of its reproduction.     

The spread of primary schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa: implications for fertility change

In 1980 Caldwell hypothesized that the time of the onset of the fertility transition in developing countries would be linked with the achievement of “mass formal schooling.” This article applies Demographic and Health Survey data to assess schooling patterns and trends for 23 sub‐Saharan African countries, using the percentage of 15–19‐year olds who have completed at least four years of schooling as an indicator of progress in education. As background to that assessment, the article includes a review of the sparse literature on the links between children's schooling and fertility decline. The analysis strongly supports Caldwell's hypothesis with empirical evidence of the much stronger negative relationship between fertility decline and grade 4 attainment in those countries that have attained mass‐schooling levels than in those that have not yet achieved such levels.     

The UN Population Division on Replacement Migration

The most salient demographic trend pictured by the influential set of population projections prepared by the Population Division of the United Nations (a unit in the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs) is the continuing substantial increase—albeit at a declining rate—of the global population during the coming decades. According to the “medium” variant of the most recent (1998) revision of these projections, between 2000 and 2050 the expected net addition to the size of the world population will be some 2.85 billion, a figure larger than that of the total world population as recently as the mid‐1950s. All of this increase will occur in the countries currently classified as less developed; in fact, as a result of their anticipated persistent below‐replacement levels of fertility, the more developed regions as a whole would experience declining population size beginning about 2020, and would register a net population loss of some 33 million between 2000 and 2050. A report prepared by the UN Population Division and released on 21 March 2000 addresses some of the implications of the changes in population size and age structure that low‐fertility countries will be likely to experience. The 143‐page report, issued under the eyecatching title Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?, highlights the expected magnitude of these changes by the imaginative device of answering three hypothetical questions. The answer to each of these questions is predicated on the assumption that some specified demographic feature of various country or regional populations would be maintained at the highest level that feature would exhibit, in the absence of international migration, in the United Nations' medium population projections (as revised in 1998) during the period 1995–2050. The selected demographic features are total population size, the size of the working‐age population (15–64 years), and the so‐called potential support ratio: the ratio of the working‐age population to the old‐age population (65 years and older). The illustrative device chosen for accomplishing the specified feats of preserving the selected demographic parameters (i.e., keeping them unchanged up to 2050 once their highest value is attained) is international migration. Hence the term “replacement migration.” Given the low levels of fertility and mortality now prevailing in the more developed world (and specifically in the eight countries and the two overlapping regions for which the numerical answers to the above questions are presented in the report), and given the expected future evolution of fertility and mortality incorporated in the UN population projections, the results are predictably startling. The magnitudes of the requisite compensatory migration streams tend to be huge relative both to current net inmigration flows and to the size of the receiving populations; least so in the case of the migration needed to maintain total population size and most so in the case of migration needed to counterbalance population aging by maintaining the support ratio. Reflecting its relatively high fertility and its past and current record of receiving a large influx of international migrants, the United States is a partial exception to this rule. But even for the US to maintain the support ratio at its highest—year 1995—level of 5.21 would require increasing net inmigration more than tenfold. The country, the report states, would have to receive 593 million immigrants between 1995 and 2050, or a yearly average of 10.8 million. The extreme case is the Republic of Korea, where the exercise calls for maintaining a support ratio of 12.6. To satisfy this requirement, Korea, with a current population of some 47 million, would need 5.1 billion immigrants between 1995 and 2050, or an average of 94 million immigrants per year. (In the calculations, the age and sex distribution of migrants is assumed to be the same as that observed in the past in the main immigration countries. The fertility and mortality of immigrants are assumed to be identical with those of the receiving population.) The “Executive Summary” of the report is reproduced below, with the permission of the United Nations. Chapters of the full report set out the issues that prompted the exercise; provide a selective review of the literature; explain the methodology and the assumptions underlying the calculations; and present the detailed results for the eight countries and two regions selected for illustrative purposes. A brief discussion of the implications of the findings concludes the report. As is evident even from the figures just cited, immigration is shown to be at best a modest potential palliative to whatever problems declining population size and population aging are likely to pose to low‐fertility countries. The calculations, however, vividly illustrate that demographic changes will profoundly affect society and the economy, and will require adjustments that remain inadequately appreciated and assessed. The criteria specified in the UN calculations—maintenance of particular demographic parameters at a peak value—of course do not necessarily have special normative significance. Past demographic changes, with respect notably to the age distribution as well as population size, have been substantial, yet they have been successfully accommodated under circumstances of growing prosperity in many countries. But the past may be an imperfect guide in confronting the evolving dynamics of low‐fertility populations. As the report convincingly states, the new demographic challenges will require comprehensive reassessments of many established economic and social policies and programs.     

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.     

James Mill on the Growth and Limitation of Population

The brief passages reproduced below from James Mill's 1821 work, Elements of Political Economy, present an early analysis of total and net fecundity, a discussion of the scope and limits of government influence on fertility, and a reflection on the goal of a stationary population. In his preface Mill describes the Elements as “a school‐book in political economy”—it was in fact based on the lessons he gave to his then barely teenaged son—and he disavows any claim to originality. Moreover, the chapter on wages, from which the excerpts come, has been generally disdained because of its espousal of the discredited wage‐fund theory of wage determination. But Mill's treatment of population is as fresh and stimulating as it is concise. James Mill (1773–1836) is now known more as the father of John Stuart Mill—and as the designer of the latter's famously rigorous education—than for his own writing. Born and educated in Scotland, Mill moved to England, making his living as a journalist. On the side, he was writing what became a three‐volume History of British India (1817), which led to long‐term employment in the London office of the East India Company. Mill's thinking on economics was strongly influenced by his friendship with David Ricardo and on public policy by Jeremy Bentham. The group of reformist thinkers that surrounded him, known as the philosophical radicals, were protégés in the main of Bentham. Mill, like others in this group, was a proponent of family planning, albeit far more cautious on the subject than the propagandist Francis Place. “Prudence,” which for Malthus meant only delay of marriage, Mill took equally to cover control of marital fertility: it should comprise measures “by which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that children, beyond a certain number, shall not be the fruit.” In the last of the excerpts, offering an unapologetic vision of bourgeois leisure and affluence, he anticipates J. S. Mill's notable chapter on the stationary state (Book IV, Chapter 6) in the Principles of Political Economy (1848)—see the Archives item in PDR 12, no. 2. The text is reproduced from the 3rd edition of the Elements (London, 1826), this part of which is virtually the same as the first edition aside from some minor improvements in expression. The excerpts are from Chapter 2, Section 2, pp. 46–50, 57–59, and 63–66.     

The President's Council on Bioethics: Choosing Sex of Children

The ideology of eugenics as it arose in the late nineteenth century was concerned with the perceived negative effects of differential fertility on the “quality” and composition—variously defined—of future generations. Quality was to be raised by preventing or discouraging the “less fit” from propagating themselves and by encouraging childbearing among couples seen as carriers of desirable genetic endowments. Thus, this old‐fashioned eugenics was directed, at least by intent and sometimes in practice, to select among parents and influence their procreative behavior. The rules for such selection were typically decided, democratically or otherwise, on the advice of anointed “experts.” By the mid‐twentieth century these programs had come to be thoroughly discredited, both because they were seen to lack scientific validity and, perhaps especially, as a result of Nazi racial policies. Modern technological developments have given rise to, or created the realistic prospect of, a different, “grassroots” eugenics: parents voluntarily choosing qualities they would prefer their offspring to possess. Their right to do so would seem to be a straightforward extension of the principle, endorsed by numerous international declarations, that “all couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” Parents might exercise that right by seeking to improve their children's chances for a healthy and successful life or merely by following their own prejudices. But the application of this principle tacitly assumes that the aggregate outcome of individual reproductive decisions is in reasonable harmony with the collective interest. The technological means now available for parents to select preferred physical and intellectual characteristics of their children—to improve on the outcome of the natural genetic lottery—are rudimentary. Many of them are still in the domain of science fiction. But in one major instance the technology already exists: selecting the sex of children, especially through early determination of the sex of the fetus, which then may be followed by sex‐selective induced abortion. This option has become widely available in recent years. In societies in which there is strong preference for offspring of a particular sex—usually for boys— the result has been a marked deviation from the normal sex ratio at birth. The social implications of such uncoordinated individual choices are perceived as clearly deleterious, hence the practice of sex‐selective abortion is commonly outlawed even when abortion is otherwise permitted. Invoking a social interest that overrides the right of voluntary parental choice of course raises the question whether other untoward effects of socially unregulated fertility might also be grounds for circumscribing parental freedom of choice in childbearing. Socially undesirable patterns of childbearing could be defined as “non‐responsible.” In the United States, the President's Council on Bioethics, appointed in November 2001, is one of the many committees advising the US President on important social issues. The Council consists of 17 members, including noted scientists, physicians, ethicists, social scientists, legal experts, and theologians. It had the mandate, inter alia, to inquire into the human and moral significance of developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology and to explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments. The Council was chaired by Professor Leon R. Kass, a prominent bioethicist from the University of Chicago. Its report, under the title, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, was submitted to the President in October 2003. This massive document, which will also be published in book form by a commercial publishing house, is available online at: http://bioethicsprint.bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy . Reproduced below is a section titled Choosing sex of children from Chapter 2 of the report (titled Better Children,). It offers a penetrating analysis and commentary on issues raised by parental selection of children's sex.     

Chinese Reproductive Policy at the Turn of the Millennium: Dynamic Stability

In the 1990s, as fertility fell below replacement, China's state birth planning program began reforms, first to improve its state‐centric approach to birth limitation and then to incorporate some elements of a more client‐centered approach. In 2000 and 2001, as part of a regime shift toward “rule by law,” China both further institutionalized and further reformed the program. A March 2000 Decision and a December 2001 Law reaffirm the need for state planning of population and births but mandate a shift in both methods and goals. Methods should shift from direct to indirect regulation, reducing negative effects such as coercion and corruption and increasing positive benefits such as helping poor women develop. Goals should shift from just limiting births toward also delivering reproductive health services. Reforms are occurring also through supporting regulations and changes of procedure within existing regulations. These policies chart a new course for implementation over the next decade.