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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.”     

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.     

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).     

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.     

Lesbians Bait the Military

This article analyzes the racial and sexual politics of the “don't ask, don't tell” storyline on Showtime's series The L Word. It situates The L Word within a political economy of media industry and policy advocacy organizations to argue that the show participated in a form of “policy-tainment” by producing critique of both existing government policies and the role of racial representations in oppositional political strategies, and finally exercising influence in policy networks.     

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.     

On Our Memory of Gay Sullivan: A Hidden Trajectory

ABSTRACT

This article examines psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's approach to the issue of homosexuality. Sullivan (1892–1949), well-known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, is believed to have accomplished a high recovery rate in his treatment of schizophrenia during the 1920s. Most of his patients, as well as Sullivan himself, were concerned about their “homosexual” orientations. He encouraged physical affection between male patients and male attendants, believing that it would free patients from their guilt for their “unconventional” sexuality. But he kept his compelling practice hidden, not bringing it into open discussion to confront the definition of homosexuality as “sickness.” This article traces the process in which the omission of the important aspect of Sullivan's practice began during his lifetime and continued in the scholarship since. In so doing, the article suggests a nuanced understanding of this important figure in the U.S. intellectual and cultural history of homosexuality.     

SHORT REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Adele E. Clarke , Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and “the Problems of Sex” Delia Davin , Internal Migration in Contemporary China Anton Kuijsten, Henk de Gans, and Henk de Feijter (eds.) The Joy of Demography… and Other Disciplines: Essays in Honour of Dirk van de Kaa William Petersen , Malthus: Founder of Modern Demography Eric B. Ross , The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty and Politics in Capitalist Development Nicholas Van Hear , New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.) , Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers     

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).     

Feminine Sexualities in the Chick Genre

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts.     

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.