Buffy's Voice

This paper studies the narrative use of popular music in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) in order to open the primary television text to feminist analysis. Perhaps in no other way are the implications and contradictions of presenting BtVS's feminist narrative on television more obvious than that revealed in the analysis of the popular music soundtrack     

Endless Interrogation

This paper takes a revisionist look at the first episode of Prime Suspect (1991–2006)—hereafter known as Prime Suspect (1)— in what was to become a cycle of dramas, conceptualised, and in the first instance, written by Lynda La Plante, based upon the female Detective Chief Inspector character, Jane Tennison. Critical attention has hitherto tended to shift away from Brunsdon's (2000) ground-breaking work on Prime Suspect (1)'s “equal opportunities discourse” toward critiques which emphasise its noir, hardboiled and literary, traditions. The paper thus seeks to rehabilitate Prime Suspect (1)'s televisual—rather than derived—lineage, in an adapted form of dramatised documentary practice. By using insights drawn from Kristevan psychoanalytic analysis I undertake an analysis of the programme in order to demonstrate how the masculine police series drama genre may be not only intervened, but is ultimately deconstructed by, the abject female body.     

Pop,Porn, and Rebellious Speech

In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler contends that rebellious speech constitutes a “risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change.” With this in mind, this article examines the politics of employing and altering the language and imagery of “porn” in texts and multi-media performances of (post-)feminist (pop-)artists. The discussions about Elfriede Jelinek's novel Lust in the early 1990s exemplify the difficulties associated with transforming the language of pornography into rebellious feminist speech. The text received extensive media attention, but most critics felt ambivalent about Jelinek's attempt to create artificial, repetitious, pornographic speech and questioned the text's ability to foster any kind of “change.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the multi-media performances of Charlotte Roche and Reyhan Sahin aka Lady Bitch Ray again triggered discussions about feminism, pornography, body politics, and sexual expression. Their provocative pop-performances use multiple media outlets, TV, music, and electronic media. They are commercially successful and mainstream media understand them as challenging social conventions. This essay critically examines the politics of Jelinek's, Roche's, and Sahin's texts and performances and contextualizes the politics of their rebellious speech within discussions about social roles, gender, and sexuality.     

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.     

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.     

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 .     

Not Ready to Make Nice: Aberrant mothers in contemporary culture

The story of motherhood in popular culture has never been a simple one. Cross-cut by race, class, and sexuality (and, importantly, marital status), interwoven with changing psychological and biological theories and fantasies, tied up with nation-building and citizenship claims, images of motherhood remain both template and signpost upon which we project our desires for kinship and care and our most vexed understandings of womanhood and femininity. This essay examines fictional motherhood in an era of real-life Octomoms and presidential candidates. We argue that a new type of mother has emerged—particularly on TV—that presents a radical departure. From the suburban mom/drug dealer of Showtime's outré series Weeds to the vapid 1960s wife of Mad Men, aberrant mothers abound in contemporary culture. But, unlike aberrant mothers of earlier eras, these mothers are by and large heroines, unapologetically non-normative in their maternal functioning. The parenting is cursory at best and often downright neglectful, behavior that has typically resulted in sure death for Hollywood mothers of earlier eras. We examine these images as a challenge to normative familialism and rigid gender ideologies.     

From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll

On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonna's photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna's ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While longevity, experience and wisdom ensure that Madonna continues to be meaningful to nostalgic and new audiences alike, these attributes slide out of view as the focus remains upon her body, its femininity and its ability to ‘pass’ in a youth-centred popular music culture. In the wider context of a cultural, political and industry debate around the practice of releasing pre- and post-airbrushed images, the leaked photos are instrumental (albeit unintentionally) for interrogating the relationship between media and authentic ageing female bodies. This article offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and negotiation of Madonna's image, celebrity and marketing of the ageing female body.     

Pierre Bourdieu on Marriage Strategies

Societies, virtually by definition, are in the business of social reproduction. They maintain institutional forms and cultural patterns more or less intact, though not of course unchanged, as their individual members age and die and the young are acculturated and assume adult roles. Social reproduction also takes place at the family level—through the social and biological processes entailed in family succession— but there the outcomes owe much more to fortuity, to the luck of the draw. Nonetheless, families become adept at doing the best they can with whatever hands they are dealt—if need be bending the rules, hedging, bluffing, and coercing. How they do so is highly contingent on each society's circumstances and cultural repertoires, but traditionally marriage decisions offered the principal opportunities and held the major potential risks. The case study of family marriage strategies in a village of the French Pyrenees by Pierre Bourdieu, excerpted below, gives an exceptionally lucid and illuminating dissection of this domain of life—as it had persisted perhaps for centuries and into the 1950s and 1960s. Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a Béarn village of the Atlantic Pyrenees like that described. He held an appointment at the University of Algiers in the 1950s, during the years of colonial conflict leading up to independence, and his early research was on Algeria. From 1964 he taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and later also at the Collège de France as professor of sociology (succeeding Raymond Aron), and became one of France's most prominent public intellectuals—exercising an influence that would be virtually unknown among English‐speaking sociologists. His major interests, in some respects prefigured in the present study, concerned aspects of cultural reproduction, particularly how educational systems reproduce class and privilege. His major works include Distinction (1979), The Logic of Practice (1980), and The Rules of Art (1992). He died in January 2002 at the age of 71. The case study excerpted below was published as “Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction,”Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (Paris), vol. 27, no. 4/5 (1972). The translation, by Elborg Forster, appeared in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum. © 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. The excerpt is from pp. 122, 124–125, and 132–141.     

“It's Up to the Women”

In 1932, Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ) ran an extensive campaign, orchestrated by public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, to persuade American women to end the Great Depression through consumer purchases. Although the campaign failed, it is historically significant, illustrating how PR and magazines worked together to prescribe women's roles—a point little explored by feminist historians. While some women read the campaign hegemonically, others resisted its message, even adapting campaign language to suggest alternative plans. Foremost among these, I argue, was Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), whose 1933 book title, It's Up to the Women, is identical to the campaign's slogan. Attributed to ER alone, the slogan has been reprised in twenty-first-century Democratic presidential campaigns and used elsewhere. Patriotic shopping has also reemerged in recent crises. Although less important to feminists, FDR's (Franklin D. Roosevelt) famous “fear” line from his First Inaugural address resembles language in LHJ's campaign. Thus, the campaign can be seen not only as a site where the contested nature of women's roles was played out but one that illustrates how media language can be repurposed to shape changing cultural and political messages.     

(Mis)Perceptions Around Intimate Partner Violence in the Music Video and Lyrics for “Love the Way You Lie”

This paper utilizes content analysis to deconstruct depictions of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the music video and lyrics for Eminem's hit single featuring Rihanna, “Love the Way You Lie,” using a composite of six common myth-based beliefs around IPV. Findings indicate that the myths espoused within the music video and lyrics directly and indirectly blame the victim and minimize IPV. There is a need to critically analyze depictions of IPV in the media, as consumers may refer to these representations in order to place their own experiences into context.     

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 facts of life1

Two years before the appearance of Darlington's book, Louis I. Dublin published a volume with the same title. His Facts of Life were—sit venia verbi—“factual facts” from the number of people in the world to the dollar cost of World War II.     

Gender Monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts.     

The Emergence and Persistence of Queerness: Conversing Through Visual Culture Within a Generation

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors explore the work of becoming queer within the Millennial generation. Collaborative in nature, their investigation turns to three key popular-culture texts of the 1990s—Will & Grace, Rent, and MTV’s Spring Break—that were central to their then-emerging sense of self. Staged as an intragenerational conversation, the authors look to create space to unpack the connections, anecdotal by design, between popular texts and changing ideas of queer identity and community. Since neither author grew up within the confines of a gay ghetto—Boystown of Chicago, the Castro of San Francisco, the East Village of New York City—where they may have encountered and been enamored by the avant-garde queer subcultures so often praised in queer scholarship (for important reasons), they turn instead to experiences with popular culture that opened up lessons in becoming gay, in rural and Midwestern locales where queerness operated and emerged differently.     

“Nyota Uhura is Not a White Girl”

This essay examines the online debate surrounding representation of the Black/African character of Lt. Uhura in the 2009 prequel film, Star Trek. Some fans, particularly those viewing the film from a gender/race intersection, applauded her portrayal, while others, including many “slashers” who espouse a homoerotic reading of classic Trek from an ostensible gender/sexuality standpoint, disapproved—especially of Uhura's romantic storyline. Virtual observation and appraisal of these discourses demonstrate the adaptability of Patricia Hill Collins' intersectionality framework to studies of media reception, especially in terms of hegemonic and interpersonal domains of power and cultural studies notions of articulation. Accordingly, the investigation finds the first fan faction's rhetorical efforts more authentically and pro-actively oppositional.     

The Cinematic Quiet Girl from The Breakfast Club to the Badlands

This essay is intended to counteract the omission of the quiet girl from critical media thought and to recuperate her for film history and feminism. The quiet girl is a visible presence across numerous films and genres, from heartfelt melodramas like Corrina, Corrina to gruesome horrors like Carrie. Within these diverse texts, the quiet girl represents a consistent threat to authority. She keeps her thoughts to herself and, as such, just beyond the reach of other's surveillance, delineation and control. Her silences unravel the self-certainty of others and deny them access and closure. But, the threat the quiet girl poses is always in danger of being contained via her transformation into a more outgoing—that is, more knowable—version of herself. If all else fails, the quiet girl risks banishment or death. One text that circumvents the containment of the quiet girl, however, is Badlands. In Badlands, the girl protagonist's increasing silence over the course of the film coincides with her increasing freedom from male rule, suggesting the potential that silence holds for girls and feminism.     

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.