Demography

Modern demography seeks to characterize populations or subgroups of populations based upon statistical commonalities or differences between them. Clearly, some of these may be largely cultural (e.g., age of marriage, total fertility, socioeconomic status) or largely biological (e.g., resistance to particular strains of malaria, skin cancer risk, mean height), while others may be almost entirely cultural (e.g.,knowledge of contraceptive technology) or almost entirely biological (e.g., presence or absence of particular inheritable genes). The disentanglement of biology and culture in group characteristics has proved to be complex.

While human societies are always conditioned by demographic characteristics, thinkers such as Malthus or, later, Boserup have made sweeping claims for the fundamental role of population growth as the key independent variable. Malthus, famously, argued that population inevitably grew quickly to exhaust resources regardless of the rate of growth in the latter, due to the superior power of a geometric series compared to an arithmetic one. This flawed perspective was unfortunately used as the basis for population policies biased against the poor and aimed at protecting social surpluses for the upper classes. Many have long found this claim unconvincing both in its mathematical formulation as well as in its biological, sociological, and technological naïveté. Scientific claims mixed with an uncritical stance toward the power structure unfortunately characterized demographic writing long after Malthus.

Demographers, with few exceptions, have tended to be atheoretical or uncritical, from a social science perspective, and to decontextualize variables such as mortality rates and fertility rates or even to devise demographic models purportedly applicable to many times and places. By contrast, anthropologists and historians argued throughout the 20th century for the need to recognize the complexity of the interactions between demographic, epidemiological, cultural, political, and environmental factors.

Perhaps the most influential demographic model, that of the demographic transition (introduced in 1929 but tailored to address U.S. policy objectives in 1945), is a case in point. This model uses fertility rates and mortality rates as dependent variables, differentially impacted by a variety of other factors, to explain the major demographic growth displayed by many [Page 727]societies since the advent of modern public health as well as the recent arrival at very low population growth levels by, for example, Germany or Japan. The demographic transition models the change from high fertility rates and high mortality rates (close to static population levels) to high fertility rates plus lower mortality rates due to public health measures (leading to longer average life spans and rapid population growth). It then charts a period of increasing prosperity and state social security policies motivating smaller household sizes, leading to another equilibrium (again roughly static population) at lower fertility and mortality rates.

The model seems to fit the trajectory followed by many modernizing countries but falls considerably short, even at the statistical level, of a universal model for industrial societies, as the significant differences between German and U.S. demographic trends in the 20th century would suggest. What it most particularly lacks is any critical reflection on the necessity or current or future desirability of conformity to such a model. Barely below the surface of the model is the Malthusian assumption that U.S. concerns about a third-world population explosion are beyond criticism and that public health, economic liberalization, democracy, and family planning efforts will have their primary justification in slowing population growth in the poorer regions of the world. Predictably, despite the historical evidence that changing economic conditions caused demographic changes in Europe, the focus for poorer countries was placed on family planning. The forced sterilization campaigns in India from the 1950s to the 1990s were linked to this policy yet supported by the Indian government. The parallels between this view and the more overtly racist views of many demographers earlier in the 20th century largely obviate the differences.

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