Reproduction and survival in an unknown world: what drives today's industrial populations, and to what future? The Hofstee Lecture 1998

Record

The 'unknown world' is today's population of the industrial and post-industrial countries. In the old European demographic regime, economy, (men's) wages, births and consequent population growth were related through the accelerator of marriage. A century of demographic transition has changed all that. The first transition to fewer babies and longer lives has been followed closely by a second one, evident now for nearly four decades. In the course of it old certainties on relations between the sexes, on family and on personal realisation have likewise lost their power. New constraints and new freedoms have not created uniformity; instead a perplexing variety of demographic response is seen within and between the world's fifty or so industrial countries. While few of these countries have birth rates even sufficient to replace themselves, some regions manage scarcely one birth per couple. In some societies many women choose to be childless; in others just as advanced, childlessness remains relatively rare. New freedoms to divorce, cohabit, reproduce outside marriage without stigma are not universally taken up. The new power of women over their own lives in the workforce, in household economy and decision making and in personal choice seemed to offer the key to the explanation , through new micro-economic models, to many of the new demographic and social changes. But these ideas are failing to account for the imaginative variety of human conduct. They have been challenged by concepts (by no means incompatible) stressing the autonomy of cultural influences on behaviour and the liberation of individual preferences, as societies have gradually satisfied more material needs. These too have proved no panacea. It is thereby difficult to account for the origins of change. The relationship, and the priority, between attitudes and values on the one hand and the economy on the other remain unclear. Neither can such notions cope with such fundamental questions as why intelligent educated adults in modern societies choose to have any children at all. Nor can they address quite separate demographic issues such as the ultimate limits to the apparently unstoppable reduction of death rates, even in extreme old age, the mechanisms behind large scale international migration or sustainable solutions to their consequences. Demographers may have to reach out for explanation to unfamiliar territory in psychology or in biology. This lecture, given at the invitation of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) at Het Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, in 1998, explores some of these problems and possibilities.

• Publication date: 1999-01-01
• Subjects: General statistics; Sociology; Economics