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A Concise History of World Population
The latest edition of this classic text has been updated to reflect current trends and implications for future demographic developments. The areas of Africa, international migration and population and environment have been strengthened and statistical information has been updated throughout.
318 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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November 6, 2021
Társasági rovat:
„Ma hajnalra virradóan megszületett Lady Társadalomtudomány és Lord Matematika második gyermeke, Demográfia. Bájosan göndör grafikonjai apjára ütnek, de a szülők reményüknek adtak hangot, miszerint nem lesz olyan retek unalmas, mint bátyja, Statisztika. A kisdedet a malthusiánus egyház templomában tartják keresztvíz alá, minden érdeklődőt szívesen várnak, aki nem ijed meg a diagramoktól.”
A demográfia, ha csak az alapjait nézzük, egyszerű tudomány. Fogjuk a születések számát, kivonjuk belőle a halálozásokat, és meg is van a növekedési ráta. Persze mindez nem légüres térben zajlik, hanem valamilyen környezetben, ami egyfelől biztosítja a létfenntartáshoz elengedhetetlen forrásokat, másfelől viszont olyan veszélyeket rejt, amelyek hajlamosak idő előtt megszakasztani szegény teremtmény élete fonalát. Minden élőlény arra törekszik, hogy növekedési rátája ne menjen át negatívba – a lemmingek stratégiája például az, hogy bitang sok utódot nemzenek, aztán drukkolnak, hogy közülük minél több érje el a reproduktív kort. (Ez az ún. „r-stratégia”, amit például a rovarok és a halak is alkalmaznak.) Nyilván a pici cuki lemmingek zömét megeszik a sólymok és a rókák, illetve elviszik a betegségek (mert ez egy iszonyú pazarló gyakorlat), de ha jön egy jó év, akkor hirtelen annyi lemming lesz, hogy térdig lábolunk bennük. Ekkor viszont a lemmingtársadalom beleütközik a források korlátozottságának tényébe. Hogy jóval kevesebb az ennivaló, mint amennyit az a ménkű sok rágcsáló a maga rágcsálóeszével kívánatosnak tartana. Ez egy kényszer, ami előhív egy választást – a lemmingek pedig megindulnak a tenger felé.
Na, az ember azért nem így működik – de vannak átfedések. Fajunk nem az r-stratégia híve, ő a K-modellt alkalmazza: viszonylag kevés utódot nemz, de azok felnevelésébe kirívóan sok energiát fektet. De a kényszerek és a választások a mi sorsunkat is irányítják. Itt voltak például vadászó-gyűjtögető őseink, akik szépen bekóborolták majd az összes kontinenst, élték a maguk kis neandervölgyi életét. Alacsony növekedési rátájuk volt, de hosszú időtávon ez is oda vezetett, hogy lassan beleütköztek a felhasználható források plafonjába. Malthus (és Ricardo) ezt nevezte a csökkenő hozamok törvényének: minél több az ember, annál kevesebb anyagi jav jut egyetlen személyre. Azonban történt egy váratlan dolog: a mezőgazdaság feltalálása. Az, hogy az ember letelepedett, és arra bazírozott, hogy nem megkeresi az ehető magokat, hanem ültetés útján újratermeli őket, forradalmi választás volt. Nem volt feltétlenül sikertörténet – egyes kutatások szerint a halálozás éppenséggel nőtt, elsősorban a járványok, és talán a táplálék egyhangúvá válása miatt -, de olyan változásokat indított be, amelyek beláthatatlan következményekkel jártak. Kialakultak a városok, a kultúra, formálódni kezdett az, amit civilizációnak nevezünk – de ebbe most ne menjünk bele, ez ugyanis a demográfust nem annyira érdekli. Őt az foglalkoztatja, hogy a letelepült életmód lehetővé tett egy bombasztikus bébi-bummot. Hisz amíg a vadászó-gyűjtögető számára a gyermek teher volt, akit cipelni kellett, addig a földművelő számára befektetés: hamar munkára lehetett fogni, és a letelepedett életnek hála felnevelni is egyszerűbb volt. Hiába tehát a megnövekedett halálozás, a születések száma még nagyobb ütemben nőtt, következésképpen a növekedési ráta is bedurrantotta a motort.
Csakhogy itt megint beleütközünk a Malthus-féle törvénybe. Nagyon úgy nézett ki, a dinamikusan növekedő népesség egyszerűen feléli a forrásokat, aztán szép csendesen éhen veszik – erről az írek tudnának is mesélni. Egyfajta egyensúlyi helyzetet kell felállítani, vélte Malthus, születésszabályozást bevezetni, mert különben mindenkinek annyi lesz. De aztán mégsem így történt. Ennek számos oka volt – az egyik a népességfelesleg kivándorlása a nagy üres területekre. (Mondjuk hogy mennyire voltak üresek, arról az indiánokat kéne megkérdezni.) A másik – és fontosabb – pedig az ipari forradalom, ami egyszerűen keresztülhúzta Malthus elméletét. Nem az történt ugyanis, hogy feléltük a forrásokat, hanem új forrásokat fedeztünk fel, és azokat sokkal jobb hatásfokkal kezdtük használni. A mezőgazdaság olyan terméshozamot produkált, ami addig elképzelhetetlen embertömegeket tudott eltartani, a találmányok pedig segítettek abban, hogy minden lehetőséget kiaknázzunk. Az orvostudomány szárnyalt, a társadalom is rájött, hogy higiénia is van a világon, aminek következtében a halálos járványok is visszaszorultak az emberi mélytudatba (bár időnként azért előkukkantanak). A növekedési ráta tehát sosem látott szárnyalásba kezdett, ahelyett, hogy behúzta volna a kéziféket – nesze neked, Malthus.
Itt tartunk most. A „nagy demográfiai átalakulás” közepén. A Föld népessége még mindig nő, az új malthusiánusok a források beszűkülésétől és az ezt követő összeomlásról prófétálnak, az optimisták viszont reménykednek, hogy megint megtaláljuk azokat a válaszokat, amelyekkel legyőzhetjük a kényszereket, mégpedig pont a növekedésnek hála, mert a növekedés egyben az innovációra való készséget is növeli – ahogy eddig is mindig történt. A növekedés üteme mindenesetre csökken, hisz úgy tűnik, a demográfia egyik törvénye, hogy a gyermekkori halálozás számának drasztikus visszaesése (ami nem függetleníthető a gazdasági fejlettségtől) előbb-utóbb a születések számának csökkenését vonja maga után. A nyugati országok már el is jutottak oda, hogy az alacsony születésszám miatt a népesség reprodukciója legfeljebb bevándorlással biztosítható – ez pedig, kombinálva a hihetetlenül magas átlagéletkorral, elöregedő társadalmat jelez. Aminek szintén megvan a maga hátulütője, de a demográfust momentán ez se érdekli. (Máskor talán igen, de momentán nem.) Valószínű, hogy előbb-utóbb a világ többi része is eljut erre a pontra, de addig megy a versenyfutás: feléljük-e előbb a forrásokat, esetleg megint kitalálunk valamit? Mit tudom én. A demográfus se tudja.
„Ma hajnalra virradóan megszületett Lady Társadalomtudomány és Lord Matematika második gyermeke, Demográfia. Bájosan göndör grafikonjai apjára ütnek, de a szülők reményüknek adtak hangot, miszerint nem lesz olyan retek unalmas, mint bátyja, Statisztika. A kisdedet a malthusiánus egyház templomában tartják keresztvíz alá, minden érdeklődőt szívesen várnak, aki nem ijed meg a diagramoktól.”
A demográfia, ha csak az alapjait nézzük, egyszerű tudomány. Fogjuk a születések számát, kivonjuk belőle a halálozásokat, és meg is van a növekedési ráta. Persze mindez nem légüres térben zajlik, hanem valamilyen környezetben, ami egyfelől biztosítja a létfenntartáshoz elengedhetetlen forrásokat, másfelől viszont olyan veszélyeket rejt, amelyek hajlamosak idő előtt megszakasztani szegény teremtmény élete fonalát. Minden élőlény arra törekszik, hogy növekedési rátája ne menjen át negatívba – a lemmingek stratégiája például az, hogy bitang sok utódot nemzenek, aztán drukkolnak, hogy közülük minél több érje el a reproduktív kort. (Ez az ún. „r-stratégia”, amit például a rovarok és a halak is alkalmaznak.) Nyilván a pici cuki lemmingek zömét megeszik a sólymok és a rókák, illetve elviszik a betegségek (mert ez egy iszonyú pazarló gyakorlat), de ha jön egy jó év, akkor hirtelen annyi lemming lesz, hogy térdig lábolunk bennük. Ekkor viszont a lemmingtársadalom beleütközik a források korlátozottságának tényébe. Hogy jóval kevesebb az ennivaló, mint amennyit az a ménkű sok rágcsáló a maga rágcsálóeszével kívánatosnak tartana. Ez egy kényszer, ami előhív egy választást – a lemmingek pedig megindulnak a tenger felé.
Na, az ember azért nem így működik – de vannak átfedések. Fajunk nem az r-stratégia híve, ő a K-modellt alkalmazza: viszonylag kevés utódot nemz, de azok felnevelésébe kirívóan sok energiát fektet. De a kényszerek és a választások a mi sorsunkat is irányítják. Itt voltak például vadászó-gyűjtögető őseink, akik szépen bekóborolták majd az összes kontinenst, élték a maguk kis neandervölgyi életét. Alacsony növekedési rátájuk volt, de hosszú időtávon ez is oda vezetett, hogy lassan beleütköztek a felhasználható források plafonjába. Malthus (és Ricardo) ezt nevezte a csökkenő hozamok törvényének: minél több az ember, annál kevesebb anyagi jav jut egyetlen személyre. Azonban történt egy váratlan dolog: a mezőgazdaság feltalálása. Az, hogy az ember letelepedett, és arra bazírozott, hogy nem megkeresi az ehető magokat, hanem ültetés útján újratermeli őket, forradalmi választás volt. Nem volt feltétlenül sikertörténet – egyes kutatások szerint a halálozás éppenséggel nőtt, elsősorban a járványok, és talán a táplálék egyhangúvá válása miatt -, de olyan változásokat indított be, amelyek beláthatatlan következményekkel jártak. Kialakultak a városok, a kultúra, formálódni kezdett az, amit civilizációnak nevezünk – de ebbe most ne menjünk bele, ez ugyanis a demográfust nem annyira érdekli. Őt az foglalkoztatja, hogy a letelepült életmód lehetővé tett egy bombasztikus bébi-bummot. Hisz amíg a vadászó-gyűjtögető számára a gyermek teher volt, akit cipelni kellett, addig a földművelő számára befektetés: hamar munkára lehetett fogni, és a letelepedett életnek hála felnevelni is egyszerűbb volt. Hiába tehát a megnövekedett halálozás, a születések száma még nagyobb ütemben nőtt, következésképpen a növekedési ráta is bedurrantotta a motort.
Csakhogy itt megint beleütközünk a Malthus-féle törvénybe. Nagyon úgy nézett ki, a dinamikusan növekedő népesség egyszerűen feléli a forrásokat, aztán szép csendesen éhen veszik – erről az írek tudnának is mesélni. Egyfajta egyensúlyi helyzetet kell felállítani, vélte Malthus, születésszabályozást bevezetni, mert különben mindenkinek annyi lesz. De aztán mégsem így történt. Ennek számos oka volt – az egyik a népességfelesleg kivándorlása a nagy üres területekre. (Mondjuk hogy mennyire voltak üresek, arról az indiánokat kéne megkérdezni.) A másik – és fontosabb – pedig az ipari forradalom, ami egyszerűen keresztülhúzta Malthus elméletét. Nem az történt ugyanis, hogy feléltük a forrásokat, hanem új forrásokat fedeztünk fel, és azokat sokkal jobb hatásfokkal kezdtük használni. A mezőgazdaság olyan terméshozamot produkált, ami addig elképzelhetetlen embertömegeket tudott eltartani, a találmányok pedig segítettek abban, hogy minden lehetőséget kiaknázzunk. Az orvostudomány szárnyalt, a társadalom is rájött, hogy higiénia is van a világon, aminek következtében a halálos járványok is visszaszorultak az emberi mélytudatba (bár időnként azért előkukkantanak). A növekedési ráta tehát sosem látott szárnyalásba kezdett, ahelyett, hogy behúzta volna a kéziféket – nesze neked, Malthus.
Itt tartunk most. A „nagy demográfiai átalakulás” közepén. A Föld népessége még mindig nő, az új malthusiánusok a források beszűkülésétől és az ezt követő összeomlásról prófétálnak, az optimisták viszont reménykednek, hogy megint megtaláljuk azokat a válaszokat, amelyekkel legyőzhetjük a kényszereket, mégpedig pont a növekedésnek hála, mert a növekedés egyben az innovációra való készséget is növeli – ahogy eddig is mindig történt. A növekedés üteme mindenesetre csökken, hisz úgy tűnik, a demográfia egyik törvénye, hogy a gyermekkori halálozás számának drasztikus visszaesése (ami nem függetleníthető a gazdasági fejlettségtől) előbb-utóbb a születések számának csökkenését vonja maga után. A nyugati országok már el is jutottak oda, hogy az alacsony születésszám miatt a népesség reprodukciója legfeljebb bevándorlással biztosítható – ez pedig, kombinálva a hihetetlenül magas átlagéletkorral, elöregedő társadalmat jelez. Aminek szintén megvan a maga hátulütője, de a demográfust momentán ez se érdekli. (Máskor talán igen, de momentán nem.) Valószínű, hogy előbb-utóbb a világ többi része is eljut erre a pontra, de addig megy a versenyfutás: feléljük-e előbb a forrásokat, esetleg megint kitalálunk valamit? Mit tudom én. A demográfus se tudja.
July 8, 2018
I was interested to read this directly after Global Economic History because together the two form a global history of the elements of secular cycles. As it turns out, this book is not nearly as good as that one, at least in its ability to maintain clear, thesis focused writing across a huge scope of subject matter. I don't know that I was ever to optimistic that this would turn out to be the application of something like Complex Population Dynamics to humans, but I was still a bit disappointed to see that the framing is almost entirely descriptive rather than scientific. This isn't from a lack of interest so much as, as far as Livi Bacci implies, a lack of definitive research. So there are couple examples, which I'll describe later, that do give a coherent mechanistic explanation for certain phenomena. Overall, though, the main point of the book is to explain important variables and processes in human demographics and show data illustrating how they have changed across time and space.
The introduction to humans in comparative ecological perspective was I thought pretty weak. The frustrating thing is that both dramatic changes in carrying capacity associated with revolutionary niche construction developments as well as even the demographic structural cycle itself are mentioned and more or less explained on their own terms, but neither of them are subjects of interest demographically. The ecological mechanisms of the enormous population changes the book describes are considered in some detail, yet somehow they end up feeling like afterthoughts to be fundamentally demographic processes going on. Like the focus is too closely on the trends of variables like mortality and fertility and age structure as proximate causes to ever really come to terms with ultimate causes. Similarly, the examination of Malthusian and Boserupian theories about the fundamental limitation of human populations is messy and inconclusive. Knowing what I think I know about secular cycles has come to make this conversation fairly annoying for me, and I was hoping that this book might shed some new light on it for me. The strange thing is that, by the end, it did. But in the section when it actually tries to address the topic directly, it doesn't include those insights at all. Instead, it draws a dichotomy between voluntary limitation of fertility and violence Malthusian mortality without providing any insight into how one solution comes to be adopted in some cases and not in others, and honestly not really investigating very thoroughly to discern whether the former was actually operatives in the examples he gives in the first place. Toward the end, he examines estimates of global comparison capacity and dismisses pretty much all of them as unrealistic. The idea that carrying capacity is a local limitation that can change over time but still very much influences short term demographics doesn't come up.
There are a couple of important variables that this survey picks up that weren't present in Population Dynamics. One is the age structure of the population. A major conclusion of the book is that the Industrial Revolution has not only increase the abundance of humans on the planet, but shifted them from a regime of high child mortality and evenly distributed adults ages with a relatively low life expectancy to a relatively long and predictable lifetime arc of education, productive work, and retirement. He raises the idea that this difference might have a strong effect on economic growth itself, independent of its effects on population growth.
Another element I was a bit surprised by is the emphasis on nuptiaity (ie age at and frequency of marriage). This is used as a proxy or summary variable for the differences in age and frequency of conception under natural fertility (i.e. before contraception). My intuition would be that changes in the fertility rate of this sort would have negligible impacts, changing the slope of increasing abundance a little perhaps, but not meaningfully altering the outcome. Apparently, though, there are some fairly substantial differences in this variable between cultures and over time. These don't seem at all independent of resources and stability--the highest population growth described in the book is in French Canada, caused in part by very high marriage rates and low age at first marriage, and associated with the early settlers of a huge new resource base.
The French-Canadian and the other case studies were among the most interesting elements in the book. I have read a decent amount about Native American demography, for instance, but I had never learned about the natural experiment that separated epidemic mortality from political mortality. The Guarani in Brazil were apparently protected from colonial exploitation by Jesuit missionaries to the extent that diseases were the only significant source of mortality inflicted by Europeans. And it turns out that they experienced relatively frequent epidemic crises while maintaining an overall growing population. This story finally put the pieces together for me to see the conquest of the Americas in a new light. In the disintegration phase of a secular cycle, mortality comes from all sorts of mechanisms. Diseases are one, but the most important in really driving down the abundance seems to be elite conflict, expressed as civil war and banditry. And what else was European colonialism but the spillover of surplus elites trying to maintain elite lifestyles at the expense of producing populations? In a sense, it is as important that Native Americans were "virgin soil" for European elites as for European diseases. The combination of the two continued to inflict mortality where populations might have been recovering from one or the other.
Much of the rest of the book reads like an extended Gapminder presentation. It explores first the demographic processes associated with the Industrial Revolution, then those operating in developing countries, and gives a prognosis for the future. The Industrial Revolution that was the one I was most hoping for a satisfying answer from. I didn't really get it. For the most part, he seems to assume that the dramatic increase in population growth was caused by medical discoveries that reduced mortality. He briefly considers the effect of increased food production on nutrition, but dismisses it as an unlikely cause. But then at another point he says that many European countries "made considerable progress [on increasing life expectancy] before the impact of medical discoveries is felt." So what happened there? This seems very interesting, why is it never investigated? Similarly, he implies one “cause” of decreased mortality could be the mysterious disappearance of the plague, not caused by any medical discovery but apparently through sheer ecological happenstance. What happened there? Do we really not know?
Most of these processes seem kind of obvious – medical discoveries eliminated much of child mortality and increased longevity, economic development was associated with decreased fertility, etc. There are some interesting "exceptions" that show how much variability there can be in these patterns. The identical life expectancies of countries as economically disparate as Cuba, Chile, and South Korea illustrate the power of context and political will to deviate from the path that European nations took, for instance. Arguably, it is only in the developing countries that we finally have the right combination of large, thorough data sets and the application of some but not other elements of economic modernization to start teasing out causal relationships in that demographic explosion. For instance, the reduction of fertility in the 20th century is initially explained as the result of contraceptive use. That suggests questions about the cultural differences that make contraceptives acceptable in some societies but not others. It brings up a familiar debate feminists have with religious conservatives about abortion and contraceptive access, as well as the legitimacy of Western feminists pushing those things on non-Western cultures.
As it happens, though, when you have data that includes not just fertility but also desired fertility, it becomes clear that contraceptive use is a bit of a red herring here. The driving variable, in Europe and elsewhere, is the number of children people wish to have. Access to contraception allows them to achieve that number without exceeding it in a way that cultural variations in nuptiality, etc., were never able to. But if people don't want to have fewer children, access to contraception won't significantly reduce the birth rate. That just begs the question: what determines how many children people want.
And here Livi Bacci provides an insight that I think finally moves the Malthusian conversation forwards. Desired number of children is not primarily cultural, but economic. It is a function of the expectations parents have about how much it will cost to raise a child, how much money they will lose spending their time raising a child instead of working, how much money a child will able to earn for the family, and to what extent they will need to rely on their children to care for them in old age. In Europe and America, all of those forces pushed toward smaller families at the same time that medicine and prosperity reduced mortality. But in countries where improvements in health and food technology have not been accompanied by economic development, rapid population growth has been prolonged. (Again, important to note that this is only true with contraception; without it, natural fertility can apparently only be reduced to a degree that is much higher than replacement rate. Interesting to contemplate what population trends in rich nations would have been like without it.)
This microeconomic interpretation of the Malthusian "choice" solution is very interesting. It implies that having children has perhaps been integrated as a part of niche construction itself, a coevolutionary partner of the grandmother hypothesis. That is, people have children not just to pass on their genes to their grandchildren, but also to support them as they age so that they can help their grandchildren pass on those genes. Like many things in niche construction theory, it's the sort of observation that seems like it doesn't add anything to our understanding until circumstances drastically change.
Before modern changes in mortality and fertility, family size ended up being around the same as what it is now. Women had more babies, but more of them died, so the average ended up close to the replacement rate. This wasn't achieved through any intentional measure to prevent overshoot; it’s just a consequence of parental evaluation of the social niche. It is ultimately very sensitive to environmental conditions, which is why the replacement rate comes about when new technological or spatial niches are filled. But it places an interesting barrier or lens between population and carrying capacity that bears further study. While Livi Bacci casts doubt on many mechanisms by which persistent population growth is hypothesized to impede economic development, it seems plausible that there’s a diversion between stable population/high consumption and rising population/low consumption outcomes going on here.
The amount of insight brought by this simple natural experiment is substantial, and it really makes me wish there were more of that kind of thinking in the book.
The introduction to humans in comparative ecological perspective was I thought pretty weak. The frustrating thing is that both dramatic changes in carrying capacity associated with revolutionary niche construction developments as well as even the demographic structural cycle itself are mentioned and more or less explained on their own terms, but neither of them are subjects of interest demographically. The ecological mechanisms of the enormous population changes the book describes are considered in some detail, yet somehow they end up feeling like afterthoughts to be fundamentally demographic processes going on. Like the focus is too closely on the trends of variables like mortality and fertility and age structure as proximate causes to ever really come to terms with ultimate causes. Similarly, the examination of Malthusian and Boserupian theories about the fundamental limitation of human populations is messy and inconclusive. Knowing what I think I know about secular cycles has come to make this conversation fairly annoying for me, and I was hoping that this book might shed some new light on it for me. The strange thing is that, by the end, it did. But in the section when it actually tries to address the topic directly, it doesn't include those insights at all. Instead, it draws a dichotomy between voluntary limitation of fertility and violence Malthusian mortality without providing any insight into how one solution comes to be adopted in some cases and not in others, and honestly not really investigating very thoroughly to discern whether the former was actually operatives in the examples he gives in the first place. Toward the end, he examines estimates of global comparison capacity and dismisses pretty much all of them as unrealistic. The idea that carrying capacity is a local limitation that can change over time but still very much influences short term demographics doesn't come up.
There are a couple of important variables that this survey picks up that weren't present in Population Dynamics. One is the age structure of the population. A major conclusion of the book is that the Industrial Revolution has not only increase the abundance of humans on the planet, but shifted them from a regime of high child mortality and evenly distributed adults ages with a relatively low life expectancy to a relatively long and predictable lifetime arc of education, productive work, and retirement. He raises the idea that this difference might have a strong effect on economic growth itself, independent of its effects on population growth.
Another element I was a bit surprised by is the emphasis on nuptiaity (ie age at and frequency of marriage). This is used as a proxy or summary variable for the differences in age and frequency of conception under natural fertility (i.e. before contraception). My intuition would be that changes in the fertility rate of this sort would have negligible impacts, changing the slope of increasing abundance a little perhaps, but not meaningfully altering the outcome. Apparently, though, there are some fairly substantial differences in this variable between cultures and over time. These don't seem at all independent of resources and stability--the highest population growth described in the book is in French Canada, caused in part by very high marriage rates and low age at first marriage, and associated with the early settlers of a huge new resource base.
The French-Canadian and the other case studies were among the most interesting elements in the book. I have read a decent amount about Native American demography, for instance, but I had never learned about the natural experiment that separated epidemic mortality from political mortality. The Guarani in Brazil were apparently protected from colonial exploitation by Jesuit missionaries to the extent that diseases were the only significant source of mortality inflicted by Europeans. And it turns out that they experienced relatively frequent epidemic crises while maintaining an overall growing population. This story finally put the pieces together for me to see the conquest of the Americas in a new light. In the disintegration phase of a secular cycle, mortality comes from all sorts of mechanisms. Diseases are one, but the most important in really driving down the abundance seems to be elite conflict, expressed as civil war and banditry. And what else was European colonialism but the spillover of surplus elites trying to maintain elite lifestyles at the expense of producing populations? In a sense, it is as important that Native Americans were "virgin soil" for European elites as for European diseases. The combination of the two continued to inflict mortality where populations might have been recovering from one or the other.
Much of the rest of the book reads like an extended Gapminder presentation. It explores first the demographic processes associated with the Industrial Revolution, then those operating in developing countries, and gives a prognosis for the future. The Industrial Revolution that was the one I was most hoping for a satisfying answer from. I didn't really get it. For the most part, he seems to assume that the dramatic increase in population growth was caused by medical discoveries that reduced mortality. He briefly considers the effect of increased food production on nutrition, but dismisses it as an unlikely cause. But then at another point he says that many European countries "made considerable progress [on increasing life expectancy] before the impact of medical discoveries is felt." So what happened there? This seems very interesting, why is it never investigated? Similarly, he implies one “cause” of decreased mortality could be the mysterious disappearance of the plague, not caused by any medical discovery but apparently through sheer ecological happenstance. What happened there? Do we really not know?
Most of these processes seem kind of obvious – medical discoveries eliminated much of child mortality and increased longevity, economic development was associated with decreased fertility, etc. There are some interesting "exceptions" that show how much variability there can be in these patterns. The identical life expectancies of countries as economically disparate as Cuba, Chile, and South Korea illustrate the power of context and political will to deviate from the path that European nations took, for instance. Arguably, it is only in the developing countries that we finally have the right combination of large, thorough data sets and the application of some but not other elements of economic modernization to start teasing out causal relationships in that demographic explosion. For instance, the reduction of fertility in the 20th century is initially explained as the result of contraceptive use. That suggests questions about the cultural differences that make contraceptives acceptable in some societies but not others. It brings up a familiar debate feminists have with religious conservatives about abortion and contraceptive access, as well as the legitimacy of Western feminists pushing those things on non-Western cultures.
As it happens, though, when you have data that includes not just fertility but also desired fertility, it becomes clear that contraceptive use is a bit of a red herring here. The driving variable, in Europe and elsewhere, is the number of children people wish to have. Access to contraception allows them to achieve that number without exceeding it in a way that cultural variations in nuptiality, etc., were never able to. But if people don't want to have fewer children, access to contraception won't significantly reduce the birth rate. That just begs the question: what determines how many children people want.
And here Livi Bacci provides an insight that I think finally moves the Malthusian conversation forwards. Desired number of children is not primarily cultural, but economic. It is a function of the expectations parents have about how much it will cost to raise a child, how much money they will lose spending their time raising a child instead of working, how much money a child will able to earn for the family, and to what extent they will need to rely on their children to care for them in old age. In Europe and America, all of those forces pushed toward smaller families at the same time that medicine and prosperity reduced mortality. But in countries where improvements in health and food technology have not been accompanied by economic development, rapid population growth has been prolonged. (Again, important to note that this is only true with contraception; without it, natural fertility can apparently only be reduced to a degree that is much higher than replacement rate. Interesting to contemplate what population trends in rich nations would have been like without it.)
This microeconomic interpretation of the Malthusian "choice" solution is very interesting. It implies that having children has perhaps been integrated as a part of niche construction itself, a coevolutionary partner of the grandmother hypothesis. That is, people have children not just to pass on their genes to their grandchildren, but also to support them as they age so that they can help their grandchildren pass on those genes. Like many things in niche construction theory, it's the sort of observation that seems like it doesn't add anything to our understanding until circumstances drastically change.
Before modern changes in mortality and fertility, family size ended up being around the same as what it is now. Women had more babies, but more of them died, so the average ended up close to the replacement rate. This wasn't achieved through any intentional measure to prevent overshoot; it’s just a consequence of parental evaluation of the social niche. It is ultimately very sensitive to environmental conditions, which is why the replacement rate comes about when new technological or spatial niches are filled. But it places an interesting barrier or lens between population and carrying capacity that bears further study. While Livi Bacci casts doubt on many mechanisms by which persistent population growth is hypothesized to impede economic development, it seems plausible that there’s a diversion between stable population/high consumption and rising population/low consumption outcomes going on here.
The amount of insight brought by this simple natural experiment is substantial, and it really makes me wish there were more of that kind of thinking in the book.
July 30, 2011
This book is considered one of the best references on population, and I can now understand why. It is a very even-handed and researched survey of our understanding of how world population has changed over time (as of 2000). The subject matter is wide ranging, though it does focus a lot on demographics. The causes of birth and death, quality of life and life expectancy are dealt with effectively, along with how they are related to my favorite subject -the interaction of population with resource availability and quality. I found refreshing the great pains taken by the author to present the sides of major issues, identifying his own preferences, and presenting the evidence and reasoning for each.
A newer edition is available; and judging by the timing, another one may be forthcoming in the next year or so. It will be interesting to see if there are major changes in the author's views in light of recent events.
A newer edition is available; and judging by the timing, another one may be forthcoming in the next year or so. It will be interesting to see if there are major changes in the author's views in light of recent events.
July 20, 2017
"In traditional rural societies, awareness of the problems created by demographic growth was probably more immediate than it is in modern society. The inhabitants of a village, valley, or region experienced directly the negative effects of new settlement in an area already demographically saturated, and, while less efficient than those of the present day, regulating mechanisms could gradually bring about the necessary adjustments. The expansion and integration of markets and the development of trade have contributed to masking from individual perception the link between natural resources (land, for example) and consumer goods. Hong Kong can grow out of all measure, importing agricultural products from the United States or Argentina, without any awareness of the connection between the grain or beef consumed and the rural environment which produces them. This sort of detachment is a necessary consequence of economic development, but it should be pointed out that as a result the direct link between the protagonist of demographic choice (the individual) and the producer of the forces of constraint (the environment) has been broken. This link is slowly being reestablished as the minority of individuals, institutions, and governments that now recognize the global nature and interconnectedness of environmental phenomena increases.
[...]
While modern society may be better equipped with regard to the regulation of mortality and fertility than societies of the past, the same cannot be said with regard to another mechanism of choice, namely migration. The peopling of the world has been accomplished by means of migration and settlement which has distributed population according to existing or potential resources. Emigration has also always been the principal route of escape from poverty and destitution. This 'freedom' of settlement, which in modern times has led to the Europeanization of temperate America and Australia, is today much impaired. In response to primarily political considerations, nations generally regard immigration as a marginal fact, acceptable only within a fairly rigid framework and in small numbers. Given the enormous national differences in wages and assets and the relative ease of mobility, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also the case that there exists no open and available territory to act as an outlet for demographic excess and to colonize with human population, plants, and animals. In addition, greater economic integration (for example, the increased value of international trade in relation to production) is accompanied by greater separation of peoples and ethnic groups; the creation of new national states, often bounded by unnatural borders, has led to the redistribution of ethnic groups, previously mixed, within well-defined political units; and a tendency toward segregation between groups is also frequent within national borders. So the effectiveness of an important tool of 'choice,' migration, has declined as compared to the past.
Our balance sheet, then, has both credit and debit entries, and it is not easy to calculate the bottom line, though the ability to control fertility, when it becomes universal, will constitute the decisive factor for controlling growth."
[...]
While modern society may be better equipped with regard to the regulation of mortality and fertility than societies of the past, the same cannot be said with regard to another mechanism of choice, namely migration. The peopling of the world has been accomplished by means of migration and settlement which has distributed population according to existing or potential resources. Emigration has also always been the principal route of escape from poverty and destitution. This 'freedom' of settlement, which in modern times has led to the Europeanization of temperate America and Australia, is today much impaired. In response to primarily political considerations, nations generally regard immigration as a marginal fact, acceptable only within a fairly rigid framework and in small numbers. Given the enormous national differences in wages and assets and the relative ease of mobility, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also the case that there exists no open and available territory to act as an outlet for demographic excess and to colonize with human population, plants, and animals. In addition, greater economic integration (for example, the increased value of international trade in relation to production) is accompanied by greater separation of peoples and ethnic groups; the creation of new national states, often bounded by unnatural borders, has led to the redistribution of ethnic groups, previously mixed, within well-defined political units; and a tendency toward segregation between groups is also frequent within national borders. So the effectiveness of an important tool of 'choice,' migration, has declined as compared to the past.
Our balance sheet, then, has both credit and debit entries, and it is not easy to calculate the bottom line, though the ability to control fertility, when it becomes universal, will constitute the decisive factor for controlling growth."
January 21, 2019
This is all new to me and much of it is a tad too technical for me. There were some fascinating tidbits, however (for example, apparently in the year 0 the world population was 252 million).
There were parts that reminded me of Yuval Harari (the paleolithic had a lower mortality rate than the subsequent neolithic age, mainly because the former was a hunter/gatherer society while the latter was a farming society, so viruses and sicknesses could spread), as well as Matt Ridley (in the short and medium term demographic changes cause problems, but in the long term they tend to get solved).
Also, I had always heard that the world population would peak at around 10-11 billion, and then, as fertility rates decreased worldwide, they would drop somewhat. Now I'm not as convinced.
On the other hand, parts of it were just outdated (it was written in 1989), and other parts seemed to be wanting. It mentions how, as societies tend to get richer the fertility rate seems to decline, although sometimes it doesn't (sub-saharan Africa's GDP / capita in the 1950's equaled that of France 100 years prior, but the fertility rate hadn't dropped accordingly) and so we can't be sure if an increase in population is good or bad for well-being (??). This seems to be confusing cause and effect. When countries have high fertility, as in bigger families, resources are used up more quickly, but when countries start getting better off, their population increases (through higher fertility in general, not bigger families, and through immigration), which tends to be good. As it mentions, 4 million people are more likely to produce a genius than 400 people. But once again, this isn't my field so maybe I missed something.
Some of my notes:
The diet of hunter-gatherers was probably more complete than that of settlers.
Malthus's theory becomes less compelling when taking into account industrial advances and technological innovation
Population growth can be both dependent and independent. e.g.: better land leads to more people moving there, but more people moving there can improve the land through new methods of cultivation.
Black death caused less vegetable consumption (fewer fields being farmed)
Long distance emigration occurred from countries with an increase in agricultural employment
There is no reason to believe that poor country fertility will decline to rich country levels, even once they attain the same level of richness.
Abortion was widespread and easily attainable in China in the 1970s.
There were parts that reminded me of Yuval Harari (the paleolithic had a lower mortality rate than the subsequent neolithic age, mainly because the former was a hunter/gatherer society while the latter was a farming society, so viruses and sicknesses could spread), as well as Matt Ridley (in the short and medium term demographic changes cause problems, but in the long term they tend to get solved).
Also, I had always heard that the world population would peak at around 10-11 billion, and then, as fertility rates decreased worldwide, they would drop somewhat. Now I'm not as convinced.
On the other hand, parts of it were just outdated (it was written in 1989), and other parts seemed to be wanting. It mentions how, as societies tend to get richer the fertility rate seems to decline, although sometimes it doesn't (sub-saharan Africa's GDP / capita in the 1950's equaled that of France 100 years prior, but the fertility rate hadn't dropped accordingly) and so we can't be sure if an increase in population is good or bad for well-being (??). This seems to be confusing cause and effect. When countries have high fertility, as in bigger families, resources are used up more quickly, but when countries start getting better off, their population increases (through higher fertility in general, not bigger families, and through immigration), which tends to be good. As it mentions, 4 million people are more likely to produce a genius than 400 people. But once again, this isn't my field so maybe I missed something.
Some of my notes:
The diet of hunter-gatherers was probably more complete than that of settlers.
Malthus's theory becomes less compelling when taking into account industrial advances and technological innovation
Population growth can be both dependent and independent. e.g.: better land leads to more people moving there, but more people moving there can improve the land through new methods of cultivation.
Black death caused less vegetable consumption (fewer fields being farmed)
Long distance emigration occurred from countries with an increase in agricultural employment
There is no reason to believe that poor country fertility will decline to rich country levels, even once they attain the same level of richness.
Abortion was widespread and easily attainable in China in the 1970s.
April 4, 2023
At times very fascinating. Learned a lot, supported with lots of graphics, makes it easy to compare&contrast and also to visualize.
March 13, 2024
This was fine. Can’t say it revolutionised my opinions about any of the topics it discussed, except from reminding me about how concerned people were about overpopulation in the past.
September 29, 2024
Solid introduction to demographic patterns in the long haul. Has a lot of fascinating case studies sprinkled throughout. Demography is often underdiscussed in general histories so this book is a nice corrective. At the same time, I believe those with an interest in economics will find it valuable too as the basic demographic models and their implications are all covered, in particular the ideas of Malthus and Boserup.
June 16, 2007
an anthropology professor recommended it to me years ago. i finally got around to reading it and was fascinated with not only the observations, but the also delivery. many times people bore easily reading history, but this book gives a compelling outlook on how people have evolved and how to measure and judge the evolution.
December 10, 2018
El autor de este ensayo planta preguntas sobre la expansión de la raza humana del planeta. Realiza proyecciones de décadas incluso de siglos de los pro y los contras del aumento de las poblaciones en la tierra. Un libro para todos los especuladores curiosos sobre el futuro.
October 13, 2011
I read mostly the chapter about disease and population, but the book is very good and worth reading :)
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