Wilhelm Roscher on Means of Promoting Population Increase

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Wilhelm Roscher, a founder of the historical school, is of this latter kind—its interest lying mainly in the wealth of historical references contained in its swollen footnotes.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

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.     

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.     

Robert Wallace on Population and Utopian Government

The two writers whose visions of a utopian future for humanity Malthus chiefly sought to puncture through his principle of population were Godwin and Condorcet. The objection Malthus had to both was that the prosperous and egalitarian society they envisaged would be undermined by the population growth it brought about. As Malthus himself acknowledged, this was not a novel argument: in the second (1803) edition of the Essay, he listed the authors from whom he had “deduced the principle”—David Hume, Robert Wallace, Adam Smith, and Richard Price. Wallace, the closest among these four to being a Utopian thinker, explicitly saw population growth as clouding the future: unlimited increase would impair prosperity, but efforts by the society to curtail it would require “cruel and unnatural customs.” Wallace's views of Utopia are set out in his book Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence, published in 1761. There are twelve “prospects” in all. The first is titled “A general view of the imperfections of human society, and of the sources from whence they flow”; the second presents a “model of a perfect government”; the third investigates the feasibility of this model; and the fourth adduces the proposition “The preceding model of government, tho' consistent with the human passions and appetites, is upon the whole inconsistent with the circumstances of mankind upon the Earth.” The remaining prospects go further into the natural world, the nature of happiness, and the afterlife. Prospects I and IV are excerpted below. Under a perfect government, “poverty, idleness, and war [would be] banished; the earth made a paradise; universal friendship and concord established, and human society rendered flourishing in all respects.” Yet paradoxically, such a society would be overturned “not by the vices of men, or their abuse of liberty, but by the order of nature itself.” This objection is enough to defeat the “airy systems” of the Utopians. Wallace calls for a middle way for government and society, “to set just bounds to every thing according to its nature, and to adjust all things in due proportion to one another.” He writes: “it is more contrary to just proportion, to suppose that such a perfect government should be established in such circumstances, than that by permitting vice, or the abuse of liberty in the wisdom of providence, mankind should never be able to multiply so greatly as to overstock the earth.” Wallace was born in Edinburgh in 1697 and died there in 1771. He was a presbyterian minister who held various offices in the Church of Scotland. In addition to the Prospects, his other major works were Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (1758) and Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times (1753). The latter included a vigorous rejoinder to Hume's argument (in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, published the preceding year) that the classical world was not more populous than the present. Wallace's argument for the populousness of ancient nations supported the view earlier put by Montesquieu—who arranged for a French translation of Wallace's book. Modern editions of Wallace's writings appear in the series Reprints of Economic Classics published by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.     

Benjamin Constant on Government Measures to Influence Population Growth

The present‐day political tension between social and economic conservatives on the proper role of government in social life has roots that go back to the Enlightenment. Social conservatives wish to see their views of morality embodied in legislation; economic conservatives—liberals, in the classical meaning of that term—oppose any such intrusion as an infringement on individual liberty. Among the classical liberals, such as Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Madison, should be numbered the Swiss‐born political philosopher Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). Constant's major political work, Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements (1810), is an eloquent defense of freedom and privacy. “There are things about which the legislature has no right to make law,” he wrote, “areas of individual existence in relation to which society is not entitled to have any will.” Population is adduced as one illustration, a case where government interference, even if well‐intentioned, is almost always for the worse. The outcome to be avoided, as he saw it, was depopulation. “All detailed legislation, the prohibition on celibacy, the stigmatizing, the penalties, the rewards for getting married—none of these artificial means ever achieves the purpose envisaged…” In sum, “When the vices of government do not put obstacles in the way of population, laws are superfluous. When they do, laws are bootless.” Constant had a varied career, including a long affair and intellectual collaboration with the prominent writer Germaine de Staël and a significant political role in postrevolutionary France. His own writings included well‐received novels and a five‐volume history of religion. He published a work with virtually the same title as the 1810 Principes de politique in 1815, overlapping in content but much shorter, focused on constitutional issues. For a long time this was the only version existing in English (it is included, for example, in The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant [Cambridge University Press, 1988]). A translation of the 1810 book, based on a modern French edition edited by Etienne Hofmann (Librairie Droz, Geneva, 1980), appeared only in 2003: Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, translated by Dennis O'Keeffe (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund). The extract below comprises the chapter “On government measures in relation to population” from Book XII (pp. 260–266), reprinted by permission of Librairie Droz.     

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.     

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.     

David Riesman on Phases of Population Growth and Social Character

Probably the most widely read work of sociology in the United States during the past century was The Lonely Crowd, a nearly 400‐page study by David Riesman, written, according to the first edition, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. The book appeared in 1950, published by Yale University Press. The initial print run was 3,000; an abridged edition came out as a paperback in 1953 as a Doubleday Anchor Book. It eventually sold more than 1.4 million copies. (The book is still in print in a Yale University Press paperback edition.) Its intriguing title no doubt contributed to this phenomenal popularity, as did its readable and often informal style and its use of a time‐honored mode of social commentary, offering a statistics‐free exposition of the argument. The book bears no resemblance to what now passes for scientific analysis in sociology, but draws instead on erudition, historical learning, and personal observation and insight. But most of all, the explanation for the book's success is that Riesman's searching and sharp‐eyed examination of social trends in modern industrial society responded to a felt need for self‐examination in midcentury America. Actually, the title of the book was an add‐on; it does not appear in the text itself. The subtitle is more informative: A Study of the Changing American Character. Riesman defined “social character” as “the patterned uniformities of learned response that distinguish men of different regions, eras, and groups.” Making such distinctions imposes the need for a suitable categorization of historical stages with which a typology of social character can be persuasively associated. Riesman's chosen criterion for classifying societies and identifying such stages was demographic. His discussion sought to describe “possible relationships between the population growth of a society and the historical sequence of character types” and, specifically, to “explore the correlations between the conformity demands put on people in a society and the broadest of the social indexes that connect men with their environment—the demographic indexes.” In doing so, Riesman adopted the dassificatory scheme of classic demographic transition theory. Drawing on Frank Notestein's work, he distinguished three demographic phases: “high growth potential,”“transitional growth,” and “incipient population decline.” The three dominant social character types identified by Riesman, tracing a historical, although of course overlapping sequence, were “tradition‐directed,”“inner‐directed,” and “other‐directed”: they correspond to, indeed reflect, the three phases of population growth and its associated demographic‐structural characteristics. The excerpt reproduced below is from Chapter I (“Some types and character of society”) of the first edition of the book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). It provides a concise presentation of the study's conceptual scheme and of the argument seeking to validate it. (The 1953 paperback edition amplifies footnote 1 in the excerpt as follows: “The terminology used here is that of Frank W. Notestein. See his ‘Population—The Long View,’ in Food for the World, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (University of Chicago Press, 1945).”). David Riesman was born on 22 September 1909. His original field of study was law; his career as a lawyer included clerking for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Between 1946 and 1958 he was on the faculty of social sciences at the University of Chicago and after that, until his retirement, he served as professor of sociology at Harvard University. He died 10 May 2002.     

Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions

In 1799 Malthus spent six months in Scandinavia. There he witnessed the extreme deprivation, misery, and mortality that were once the common accompaniments of a bad harvest. On his return to England he found that the topic of the day was the exceptionally high price of bread, which threatened both political turmoil and human suffering. In the event, suffering even among the very poor was far less than in Sweden, though the increase in the price of the chief bread grain was greater. Malthus was intrigued by this apparent paradox. In An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions, published in 1800, he resolved it using arguments similar to those developed recently by Amartya Sen in his exposition of the concept of “entitlements.” In spite of his principled opposition to the poor laws, Malthus conceded that their effectiveness in transfering purchasing power to those most in need was a major reason for the limited impact of the dearth.     

Malthus on norway

Abstract Malthus visited Norway in 1799 and his impression of the country's demographic experience was important in determining the character of the second edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He relied for the most part on non-statistical sources. This led him to exaggerate, e.g. the size of households, the number of unmarried farm servants and to miss important features, e.g. differences in marital age patterns, regional variations in fertility and nuptiality. The bias of his itinerary and of his main informants is also apparent. Statistical material not available to Malthus indicates that he was right to stress the late age at marriage in Norway but wrong to ignore the operation of the positive check. Mortality was frequently high in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Norway, much higher than Malthus ever realized. This destroys the symmetry, as well as the morality, of Malthus's exposition.     

Frank Fetter on Population Versus Prosperity

How population change affects human welfare was a central concern of economists during the decades that followed publication of Malthus's Essay. But from the middle of the nineteenth century, continuing for some one hundred years, population issues played a marginal role in economics, with leading figures of that discipline, particularly in the New World, turning their attention to the topic only episodically. The presidential address delivered by Frank Fetter to the American Economic Association in 1913 is a notable example of such attention. Frank Albert Fetter (1863–1949), much of whose career was spent as professor on the faculty of Princeton University, was a prominent economic theorist of the early decades of the twentieth century and author, among numerous other works, of the influential texts Principles of Economics (1904) and its two-volume successors, Economic Principles (1915) and Modern Economic Problems (1916 and 1922). Population was an early interest of Fetter's, as is shown by the topic of his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote, after studies at Indiana University, Cornell, and the Sorbonne, at the University of Halle (Versuch einer Bevölkerungslehre ausgehend von einer Kritik des Malthus'schen Bevölkerungsprincips, Jena: G. Fischer, 1894). His address to the AEA recalls that interest, looking back on the decade ending in 1910, a period of rapid population increase in the United States, fueled by heavy immigration. In the first part of the address, Fetter offers insightful comments on Malthus's novel humanitarian and democratic formulation of the population problem and on the contrasting demographic situation between Europe and the United States. But with the closing of the land frontier he sees American exceptionalism coming to an end, as the economic forces—abundant natural resources and progress in science and the “technical arts”—that heretofore counteracted the depressing effect of population growth on wages “have spent themselves.” At a time when the US population was about one-third of its present size, he argued that “we have passed the point of diminishing returns in the relation of our population to our resources.” Therefore “it is high time to revise the optimistic American doctrine of population.” To control “the fate and fortunes of the children of this and future generations,” the US would need a policy of conserving natural resources and retarding the increase of population. Of the two components of population growth—natural increase and immigration—only the latter is “controllable in large measure by legislative action.” Fetter thus devotes the second part of his address to a discussion of the effects of immigration on the American economy. His line of argument closely parallels an influential strand in the contemporary US debate on that issue. In the first decade of the century, the population of the United States grew by some 16 million and the number of immigrants was nearly 9 million. Fetter sees the potential for further immigration as nearly limitless, given an open-door policy. The motive to migrate to the United States would not cease “until real wages in America are leveled down to those of the most impoverished populations permitted to enter our ports.” Yet reducing American prosperity would afford “no permanent relief to the overcrowded lands,” as “natural increase quickly fills the ranks of an impoverished peasantry.” While unrestricted immigration is against the interest of the mass of the people, conflicting interests, ideas, and sentiments paralyze remedial action: individual or class advantage comes before consideration of the “larger national welfare.” Unless immigration is restricted, Americans may find “that they have bartered the peace and security of their children for the pleasures of a brief season.” The text of Fetter's address is reproduced below in full from American Economic Review, vol. 3, no. 1: Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, March 1913.     

Production functions and population theory

The persistence of the population problem in many developing countries' especially in Asia, must mean that the relation between population trends and productivity has to be kept continually under review. In recent years the economists' interest in this relation has shifted away from the Keynesian stagnation analysis, with its emphasis on the influence of population trends on the level and composition of consumption and investment, to a reconsideration of their influence on production. It is a striking testimony to the influence of Malthus that his theory is still under active consideration and that it frequently serves as starting point, as it does for Professor Belshaw, for an analysis of the economics of population. Divorced from its particular context, in which value judgements particularly distasteful to many commentators abound, and reformulated in terms of modern production theory, it clarifies the main issues, by showing what facts are required and what logic demands in order to provide a useful answer to practical problems of policy. Readers of the first two chapters of Professor Buquet's book will find ample confirmation of the sterility of much of the debate regarding optimum populations which developed largely from differences of opinion about definitions of “good” and “bad” economic criteria for policy than from faults in logic. The debate continues and the posthumous career of Parson Malthus still occasions even personal abuse! It would be difficult, however, to accuse Professor Belshaw of taking sides in the Malthusian debate. He takes the Malthusian analysis for what it is worth, shows where it fits the facts and where it does not, provides convincing evidence of a Malthusian problem in Asia by a skilful round-up of well presented statistics, and then, instead of committing himself to a forecast of what is likely to happen in Asia, he illustrates through the modern theory of production what are the pre-conditions for a removal of the population problem. This is surely a sensible procedure and contrasts favourably with the sibylline utterances of a number of distinguished amateur social scientists.     

Oswald Spengler on Cosmopolis and Depopulation

Historians are professionally averse to grand civilizational themes, especially where predictions may be entailed. The German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose membership in the academic fraternity of his discipline has often been questioned, was an exception. His two‐volume magnum opus. The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922 (English translation, 1928), in its time attracted much public and professional attention. (It remains in print.) It presents an enormously ambitious tableau of universal history seen as the unfolding of the fates of eight cultures, with a focus on four main strands: Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Western. In Spengler's interpretation, imbued with cultural and historical pessimism, the West was exhibiting symptoms found in earlier civilizations in decline. “Civilization,” in Spengler's vision, was a stage that follows cultural flowering—creative manifestations of the culture's unique soul expressed in art and thought. Civilization's preoccupation is with the enjoyment of material comforts; the sequence from “culture” to “civilization” represents the very antithesis of progress. Spengler saw the West as having entered that latter phase in the nineteenth century: a phase in which, in the words of the synoptic chart appended to Volume 1 of The Decline of the West, “The body of the people, now essentially urban in constitution, dissolves into formless mass.” Urbanism, the emergence of “megalopolis,” or “cosmopolis“—the world city—is a distinguishing and crucial feature of that declining civilization. A passage (section V, including some translator's notes) from the chapter titled The Soul of the City in Vol. II of The Decline of the West, which has the subtitle Perspectives of World History, is reproduced below. It offers arresting characterizations of the morphology of urban forms and of the rise of the world city. As longer‐term consequences (for the West “between 2000 and 2200”) Spengler foresaw the “formation ofCeasarism”; “victory of force‐politics over money”; “increasing primi‐tiveness of political forms”; and “inward decline of the nations into a formless population, and constitution thereof as an Imperium of gradually increasing crudity and despotism.” As to demographic consequences, Spengler highlights the emerging “sterility of civilized man“—“an essentially metaphysical turn toward death.”“Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.”“Prudent limitation of the number of births” eventually leads to a “stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation.” Immigration apart, the time scale specified by Spengler for depopulation—“for centuries”—may be seen today as relatively cautious. Should Europe's current period fertility level—slightly below a TFR of 1.4—be translated into cohort performance, it would yield an intrinsic annual rate of population growth of roughly ‐1.5 percent. Within 200 years, such a growth rate would reduce a population to 5 percent of its original size. From The Decline of the West: Volume 2 by Oswald Spengler, translated by C. F. Atkinson, copyright 1928 and renewed 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.     

Risikogesellschaft im Kleinformat

Since Becks “risk society” many sociologists think in terms of disembedding, disenchantment and reembedding. This macrosociological approach does not take into account that Goffman since 1956 began — under strictly microsciological auspices — to establish a research program on interactional risks. At the beginning, the term “risk” was not used prominently. But in his later works he concentrated openly on an “existentialistic” version of the risk structure of all our daily actions. He used a similar trias by focussing on risk awareness, orientational deficiencies, and compensation through rituals and frames. But he was relentless to pinpoint that and how our social constructions continue to be provisional ones. So we are bound to revise our order of interactions again and again.     

Johann Peter Süssmilch: A German Prophet in Foreign Countries

The clergyman Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707–1767), chaplain to King Frederick II of Prussia, deserves to be called the father of German demography and was recognized as such in his own lifetime in his country of origin and throughout Europe, except possibly in France and Italy. In his Göttliche Ordnung (1741 and 1761–2), he attempted to explain the regularity of vital phenomena as being due to divine intervention. His conception of a ‘divine’ order soon gave way to that of a ‘natural’ order. His life tables, though incorrect, continued to be used by insurance offices well into the nineteenth century. His views about the relationships between mortality on one hand, and fertility and nuptiality on the other led to controversies between Malthus, Sadler and other scholars. Later, his ideas were given a broader economic and social interpretation. Whether as the last representative of ‘primitive’ demography, or the first scientific scholar of the subject, he contributed to the triumph of political arithmetic throughout Europe.     

Charles Henry Pearson on the Decline of the Family

A common observation and frequent lament about family change in contemporary societies is of the shift of childraising responsibilities from parents to the state. This shift (and what might be done to reverse it) was a theme, for example, of James S. Coleman's 1992 presidential address to the American Sociological Association. In the new circumstances, said Coleman, “carrying the family's honor into the future is less important”; in many families adolescent children “are abandoned psychologically and socially.” The state, however, still has “strong interests in maximizing a child's value to society, or minimizing its cost.” A century before Coleman, Charles Henry Pearson, in the passage reproduced below from his book National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), wrote of the decline of the family in quite similar terms. He argued that state intervention was undertaken only reluctantly, a byproduct of changes in conjugal relations from arranged marriages to “marriages of inclination,” along with easier divorce, and consequent lessening of parental interest in the family line. The state, almost by default, needed to assert the public interest in the raising of children, even though its measures, notably compulsory education, further eroded parents' rights over their children and children's sense of duty and obligation to their parents. While Pearson mostly welcomed the gender equity and individualism he saw emerging, he regretted their effect on the family—on what he termed (metaphorically) “the religion of household life.” His prescient forecast was of “a state of things in which marriages will be contracted without reflection, and broken up without scruple, in which children will be cared for when they are young with, it may be, even more tenderness than of old, but with incomparably less anxiety to fit them for the moral obligations of life, and in which the claim of parents to be obeyed will cease with the children's need of support.” His conclusion: “Family life will be a gracious and decorative incident in the system of such a society; but the family, as a constituent part of the State, as the matrix in which character is moulded, will lose its importance as the clan and the city have done.” Charles Henry Pearson (1830–94) was a British historian who had a second career as an educationist and politician in the colony of Victoria in pre‐Federation Australia. Educated in London and Oxford, he was appointed professor of modern history at King's College, London. His early work included travel writings and a well‐received History of England during the Early and Middle Ages (1867). When his academic career stalled (partly because of very poor eyesight) he emigrated to Australia, where he became closely involved with educational issues. He was elected to the Victorian legislature and was for a time minister of education, able to put into practice his firm views favoring secular education. (See his remark below that Church‐run schools “have generally been strong enough to exclude competition, [but] not rich or enlightened enough to use their monopoly well.”) In 1892 he returned to England, and the following year published National Life and Character. This work, widely read and praised at the time, went through several editions over the next two decades. It essayed forecasts in various domains of society and politics, including a prediction (couched in elitist language) of the passing of the ascendancy of European peoples as other nations grew in numbers and strength (“We shall awake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside,…”). The excerpt is from pages 261–270 of Chapter 5, “The Decline of the Family,” in National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893).     

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.     

Edward Alsworth Ross on Western Civilization and the Birth Rate

A declining trend in fertility had taken hold in Western Europe, North America, and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, attracting much social scientific interest and public policy concern. Explanations advanced at the time—for example, in the writings of John S. Billings, Lujo Brentano, Arsène Dumont, Adolphe Landry, and F.W. Taussig—mostly posited multiple causes and in many respects anticipated the arguments subsequently made by the theorists of “demographic transition” in the 1940s and 1950s. A prominent figure who should be added to the names just mentioned is the American sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951). Ross's account of fertility decline is best captured in his article, “Western civilization and the birth‐rate,” American Journal of Sociology, volume 12, no. 5 (March 1907), pp. 607–632, which is excerpted below. Writing in a vigorous and fluid style, he gives weight to the lessening of class divisions offered by democracy, the “newly awakened wants” that crowd out children, the emancipation of women, the decay of religious authority, and the numerous elements of modern life that “enthrone reason over impulse” and hence make for enlightened foresight. In the parts of the article not reprinted, Ross discusses the then widespread worries about the implications of differential fertility—the possible dysgenic effects within nations and the prospective demographic marginalization of the West as a whole (requiring “the bristling frontiers between peoples and races” to remain in place until the economic gaps are narrowed). In an acute and prescient comment on Ross's article, published in the same issue of AJS, the demographer Walter F. Willcox (1861–1964) remarked on the prospect of the fertility decline going too far, with individual interests diverging from the interests of society:

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