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.     

Horace Greeley on Immigrant Quality

Immigration to the United States increased steeply through the middle decades of the nineteenth century: on a population of 17 million in 1840, immigrant numbers totaled 1.7 million in the 1840s, 2.6 million in the 1850s, and, notwithstanding civil war, 2.3 million in the 1860s. Coinciding with this mass inflow was a rise in anti‐immigrant sentiment, manifested in a nativist political movement (the Know Nothing party). Migrants of particular national origins were singled out for denigration, such as Germans and Irish and later (on the West coast) Chinese. In an 1870 essay simply titled “Immigration,” Horace Greeley, an ardent protectionist, broadly welcomed migrants of any nationality. “That population is a main element of national strength… can scarcely need demonstration,” he begins, and ends, in high rhetorical flight: “our immigration in the future [will] wholly eclipse and belittle the grandest realizations of the past.” But beyond sheer numbers he points to the significance of migrant quality. There are those whose “coming would add largely to our numbers, but nothing at all to our strength, our worth, or our happiness.” At a minimum, settlers must show willingness to work; artisans and mechanics are better acquisitions. Most valuable of all are those rare persons displaying high entrepreneurial skill and inventiveness. Horace Greeley (1811–1872) was the founder (in 1841) and for 30 years the editor of the New York Tribune, the first nationally distributed newspaper in the United States. His editorials, written in a clear and vigorous style, brought wide attention to his views on the causes he espoused—anti‐slavery, labor unions, tariff protection, women's rights, and many others. His generally reformist positions on social and economic policy are expounded in a late work, Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870), in which the piece on immigration appeared. The excerpt below is from pp. 317–320.     

Walt Whitman,Our Great Gay Poet?

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the critical debates around Walt Whitman's “Calamus” cluster, arguing that a “queer” reading of Whitman—one that does not see him as, for example, a closeted homosexual who censored his work for fear of being “outed”—is both historically accurate and politically efficacious. While previous efforts to reclaim Whitman as “our great gay poet” are understandable—particularly given critical readings of Whitman that denied the homoeroticism of his poems—today, a reading of Whitman as homosexual threatens to simplify our understanding of the history of homosexuality and to blunt the power of Whitman's poetry to continue to “queer” normative understandings of sex and gender identity categories and their relationship to politics.     

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.     

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.     

Alfred Marshall on the Growth of Population

Classical views of population, as expounded in the works of Smith, Malthus, and Mill, retained their influence through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—until sidelined, many would argue, by the marginalist revolution in economics. Oddly, Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), the major figure in that revolution, was, when it came to population, himself firmly in the classical tradition. He diverged from it in two main respects. Writing in the late nineteenth century he had of course to take account of Darwinian theory, with the potential implications it suggested for differential fertility. And, deriving from his interests in industrial organization and efficiency and in biological analogies in economics, he gave greater attention than his forebears to the possibility that returns to labor could routinely be increasing as well as diminishing. Marshall, the preeminent economist of his time, was for most of his career professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. His major work, Principles of Economics, was first published in 1890, and then in a series of revised editions over the rest of his life. The final—8th—edition appeared in 1920. (A “ninth” variorum edition was issued in 1961.) The Principles has been described, by G. J. Stigler, as the second greatest work in the history of economics. The contributions to theory and method warranting such praise, however, are chiefly in the later parts of the volume. Up to and including Book IV (The Agents of Production: Land, Labour, Capital and Organization), the reader is given the impression, according to Keynes, of “perusing a clear, apt and humane exposition of fairly obvious matters.” Certainly in comparison to the rest, these early sections were left fairly intact in their 1890 form over subsequent editions. But Keynes also remarks, in his lengthy obituary of Marshall, how deceptive that surface smoothness could be—and notes that Marshall “had a characteristic habit in all his writings of reserving for footnotes what was most novel or important in what he had to say.” The excerpts below are taken from Book IV, Chapters IV (§§1–2, 4–5) and XIII (§3), of the 1890 edition of the Principles. In the first, Marshall presents a brief, selective history of population doctrines up to Malthus, and then the doctrine “in its modern form”; in the second, from the concluding chapter of Book IV, he explores the applicability of the law of increasing returns—stated, earlier in the chapter, as: “An increase of labour and capital leads generally to improved organization, which increases the efficiency of the work of labour and capital.”     

Francis A. Walker on Restriction of Immigration into the United States

The desirable size and characteristics of current immigrant inflows into the United States, numerically larger than those experienced by any other country in history, are the subject of vigorous debate. This debate has striking antecedents, not only in its passionate intensity but also in the specifics of the arguments enlisted. Reprinted below in full is an especially articulate expression of anti-immigration sentiments and reasoning written by the eminent late-nineteenth-century economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker. It appeared, under the title “Restriction of Immigration,” in the June 1896 issue of Atlantic Monthly (Volume 77, no. 464, pp. 822–829). In the 1880s, as Walker notes in this article, more than 5 million foreigners entered US ports. Immigration was accelerating. The 1890 census recorded a total US population of 62.2 million; 9.2 million of these were foreign born. More than 97 percent of this immigrant population came from Europe and Canada. But the composition of immigrants by country of origin, hence by ethnic background, was changing, with southern and eastern Europe taking an increasingly larger share of the total. Regulations on the admissibility of immigrants did bar entry to some persons with personal characteristics deemed undesirable. Walker notes “gross and scandalous neglect” in enforcing even these rules, but his concern is not with the numerically small effect their strict application would entail. He argues for restricting immigration at large—for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation.” He recognizes that “the prevailing sentiment of our people [is] to tolerate, to welcome, and to encourage immigration, without qualification and without discrimination,” but seeks to refute the rationale underpinning those sentiments. To counter the notion that immigration represents “a net reinforcement of our population,” he sets out the thesis, perhaps most memorably associated with his name, that sees immigration as “a replacement of native by foreign elements”—because it is a cause of the diminishing fertility of the receiving population. He also rejects a second pro-immigration argument, that immigration is necessary “in order to supply the country with a laboring class…able and willing to perform the lowest kind of work,” which native-born Americans now refuse to perform. Such refusal, Walker argues, is the consequence rather than the cause of large-scale immigration. Walker's positive argument for restricting immigration emphasizes four factors. With the closing of the frontier, land is no longer free for new occupants; mechanization of agriculture now requires less labor for farm production; immigration creates a general labor problem, including unrest and unemployment, formerly unknown in America; and the character of new immigrants is inferior to that of the native population. Walker's main concern is with this last factor. In earlier times, “the average immigrant…was among the most enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous of the community from which he came,” and immigration was “almost exclusively from western and northern Europe.” With cheap railroad fares and ocean transport, this is no longer so. The new immigrants, increasingly from southern and eastern Europe, “have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time….They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government.” Immigration, thus, is menacing to America's “peace and political safety.” Communities are formed “in which only foreign tongues are spoken, and into which can steal no influence from our free institutions and from popular discussion.” On immigration, Walker concludes, “we should take a rest, and give our social, political, and industrial system some chance to recuperate.” Walker's advice was not heeded until the 1920s. Immigration to the US in the first decade of the twentieth century amounted to nearly 9 million. In recent decades there has been a resurgence in numbers, and in the decade of the 1990s immigration exceeded 9 million. With that influx came a reinvigorated immigration debate. In the arguments for restriction, immigration from Asia and especially Latin America now substitutes for that from southern and eastern Europe. Francis A. Walker (1840–97) had a distinguished career as a Union officer in the Civil War, reaching the rank of brigadier-general, as a civil servant in the federal government, and, most notably, as an economist and educator. He was superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 US censuses and served as professor of political economy at Yale (1872–80), president of the American Statistical Association (1882–96), first president of the American Economic Association (1885–92), and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1881–96).     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The US National Intelligence Council on the Changing Geopolitical Landscape

The National Intelligence Council, a body reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, draws on expertise from within and outside the US intelligence community to assess strategic developments bearing on national security. In addition to its classified reports (notably the National Intelligence Estimates) the Council also issues unclassified versions of some of its work. In December 2004 it released a report, Mapping the Global Future, the outcome of a year‐long study known as the 2020 Project, looking at geopolitical trends in the world over the medium term. Robert L. Hutchings, the NIC's then chairman, writes in a preface that this report “offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.” It differs from a preceding NIC exercise, Global Trends 2015 (2000), in the wider range of experts consulted—preparatory workshops were conducted in a number of countries—and in the heavier store it places on formal scenario development. While the underlying scenario‐building techniques employed are not spelled out in the document (some are described elsewhere on the NIC's website), four specific “fictional scenarios” are selected to enliven the report: Davos World—illustrating “how robust economic growth, led by China and India, … could reshape the globalization process”; Pax Americana—“how US predominance may survive the radical changes to the global political landscape and serve to fashion a new and inclusive global order”; A New Caliphate—“how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system”; and Cycle of Fear—proliferation of weaponry and terrorism “to the point that large‐scale intrusive security measures are taken to prevent outbreaks of deadly attacks, possibly introducing an Orwellian world.” (The quotes are from the report's executive summary.) The excerpt reproduced below comprises the section of the report headed “Rising Powers: The Changing Geopolitical Landscape,” omitting text boxes and charts. The summary table appended is taken from the beginning of the document. The full report is available at http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html .     

Factorial ecology: A critique and some suggestions

Studies in factorial ecology have typically used the principal factor procedure coupled with varimax rotation. Since it can be shown that the results one obtains vary according to the factor and rotation models he employs, and since there is no one “best” way of obtaining initial and derived factor solutions, it is proposed that future research in the area adopt an approach involving the simultaneous use of several different computing algorithms for obtaining initial solutions and both orthogonal and oblique rotation procedures to avoid the possibility that the results one obtains are not method-dependent. Ideally, the factor models employed should differ maximally with respect to the principles upon which they are based. If one finds a given factor regardless of the method he uses, only then can he assert with any confidencethat it is not an artifact of his method. Factorial ecologists are often interested in computing “factor scores”, but “true” factor scores are not uniquely computable; they can only be estimated. Since the proposed research strategy involves using either a component or an image model, in which the corresponding scores are exact and uniquely computable, the factor score problem is, in a sense, solved. Next it is suggested that, by using orthogonal solutions, factorial ecologists may be overlooking a very important piece of information—the correlation between the factors. There is some reason to believe that this varies from city to city, and may account for the fact that some factors which emerge in studies of Western cities are sometimes not found in cities elsewhere. Some comments are also made on the value of using census tract data, and on the availability of computer programs for different initial and derived factor solutions.     

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.     

Low Fertility,Socioeconomic Development,and Gender Equity

While new empirical findings and theoretical frameworks provide insight into the interrelations between socioeconomic development, gender equity, and low fertility, puzzling exceptions and outliers in these findings call for a more all‐encompassing framework to understand the interplay between these processes. We argue that the pace and onset of development are two important factors to be considered when analyzing gender equity and fertility. Within the developed world, “first‐wave developers”—or countries that began socioeconomic development in the nineteenth/early twentieth century—currently have much higher fertility levels than “late developers.” We lay out a novel theoretical approach to explain why this is the case and provide empirical evidence to support our argument. Our approach not only explains historical periods of low fertility but also sheds light on why there exists such large variance in fertility rates among today's developed countries.     

留守儿童的虐待风险及其治理策略研究

2016年以来我国政府陆续出台了专门的留守儿童保护政策以防控其虐待风险,那么当前留守儿童的虐待风险如何?虐待形成的创伤是否严重?虐待的成因是否得到了有效控制?本研究试图利用基于四川省Z市1 245名被访者的实证调查来回答上述问题。研究得出了三个结论:一是各类被调查儿童的虐待风险整体上较为严峻,双亲留守儿童的忽视率比普通儿童高18.8%~25.8%,单亲留守儿童的精神虐待率同比高17.4%~22.1%,而两类留守儿童遭受复合虐待的比例也同比高15.2%以上。二是虐待会导致各类儿童出现明显的心理问题与行为问题,每提升1个单位的虐待强度就会增加0.23~0.24个单位的抑郁度和0.25~0.62个单位的行为问题,留守儿童尤其是双亲留守儿童并未表现出比普通儿童更强的创伤适应性,"变色龙本性"和"伙伴群"的理论解释在中国数据中并未能得以证实。三是留守儿童与普通儿童的虐待成因有所差异,父母的抑郁性人格对于普通儿童的受虐风险具有预测力,婚姻冲突的外溢与暴躁性人格则对留守儿童的虐待防范威胁最大,而"压力释放"及"暴力循环"等学理解释则相对较弱。我国政府应增强留守儿童保护政策的落实能力,提升虐待创伤干预的专业性和制度化水平,积极纾解留守家庭的婚姻冲突。     

The Johannesburg Summit on Health and Sustainable Development

The World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 August‐4 September 2002. The meeting was a follow‐up to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 but with a mandate broader than that of the Rio conference: the Summit was to consider strategies toward sustainable development in all its dimensions. According to the opening paragraph of the Plan of Implementation adopted by the Johannesburg Summit, the Rio conference “provided the fundamental principles and the programme of action for achieving sustainable development.” But while reaffirming commitment to the Rio principles, the Plan states that it intends to “further build on the achievements made since UNCED and expedite the realization of the remaining goals.” A topic conspicuously missing from the deliberations of the Rio conference was population, even though rapid population growth has a plausible bearing on sustainable development and specifically on the problem of poverty, an issue at the center of the discussions concerning sustainability. It had been expected that Johannesburg would make amends for that omission. In the ten years between the two conferences, the size of the world's population increased by some 790 million persons. Of this growth, 754 million, or 95 percent, occurred in the countries the United Nations classifies as “less developed.” The population of these countries grew by 18 percent between the two conferences, as compared with a 3 percent growth in the more developed countries. The countries classified as “least developed“—a subset of the less developed countries consisting of 48 countries, predominantly African, with a 2002 population of nearly 700 million—grew during the interconference period by 29 percent. This record of population growth since the Rio conference may be supplemented by the projections of the United Nations up to 2050. The medium variant of these projections for the next 48 years envisages a slight population decline in the more developed countries and an addition of some 2 billion persons to the less developed group. For the least developed countries, the UN projects a population of more than 1.8 billion in 2050, some 164 percent larger than the current population size. Although the magnitudes of past population growth and its likely future dynamics are well known, they attracted very little attention at the Johannesburg meeting. The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, a concise political document issued at the closing of the conference along with the Plan of Implementation, pledges “to place particular focus on, and give priority attention to, the fight against the worldwide conditions that pose severe threats to the sustainable development of our people.” It then proceeds to specifics: “Among these conditions are: chronic hunger; malnutrition; foreign occupation; armed conflicts; illicit drug problems; organized crime; corruption; natural disasters; illicit arms trafficking; trafficking, in persons; terrorism; intolerance and incitement to racial, ethnic, religious and other hatreds; xenophobia; and endemic, communicable and chronic diseases, in particular HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis” (Paragraph 19 of the Declaration,). The Plan of Implementation, a 27,000‐word document, was the main product of the Johannesburg meeting. Apart from a mention of the Cairo conference on Population and Development, the Plan's treatment of population issues is confined to health. The relevant section—section VI, titled Health and sustainable development—is reproduced below in full. (Paragraph numbers have been retained.) It presents a statement of goals couched in general exhortative terms (“integrate,”“promote,”“provide,”“improve,”“develop”), and specifies some quantitative targets, notably to reduce “by the year 2015, mortality rates for infants and children under 5 by two thirds, and maternal mortality rates by three quarters,” and “reduction of HIV prevalence among young men and women aged 15–24 by 25 per cent in the most affected countries by 2005 and globally by 2010.” The full text of the Plan can be found at http://www.un.org/jsummitlhtmlldocumentslsummit_docsl21Q9_planfinal.htm     

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.     

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.