The Demographic Transition

Update: I’ve bumped this blog post to the top by changing the publication date. I have yet to find out how to make a blog post sticky on here. I’ve recently updated the list of references, which is fast becoming a real resource for anyone looking for information and sources about the demographic transition. Go have a look.

This is the landing page for my most ambitious non-fiction project to date. My writings on demographics are scattered all over this blog—though my master’s thesis is a baseline for a lot of my thoughts—and so, incidentally, is the work of my late friend Edward Hugh on the same matter. Randy McDonald has been stalwartly keeping the old Demography.Matters blog up to date, an effort which is badly in need of a new more modern and well-publicised platform.

I have been thinking about and studying demographics and population dynamics for well over 10 years, and this is my attempt to synthesise my thoughts. I will warm up with a simple account of the demographic transition, posted below, before moving on to the principal components of this process; mortality and fertility. I will then, eventually, examine how demographics drive economic processes, principally via the effect of ageing on growth and capital flows, expanding on the work that I have already done. I will post this work in piecemeal fashion inviting comments as I go along before combining everything into a coherent volume. When Google first introduced its Blogger platform it did so, I believe, under the banner of perpetual beta, a spirit that I agree with. I will post a final, and fully edited, volume eventually, but I also want to draw back the curtain slowly and gradually, if only to keep up the publishing cadence on this site. The meaning of “landing page” in this context is no more than a repository for the list of references and the individual chapters, both of which will be updated here as I go along. Each chapter, however, will have its own independent permalink too. As of September 2022, I am altering the format of the chapters below into one-column PDFs, based on suggestions from readers. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Chapters

1. The demographic transition

The study of demographics is a scientific chimera. In its crude form, it is nothing but a rudimentary scaffold providing a simple prism through which to view the evolution of human population since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Keyfitz (1984) laments that demography…

"…has withdrawn from its borders and left a no-man’s land which other disciplines have infiltrated".

This work is an attempt to step into this no-man's land and chart a course through it. In doing so, the aim is to unearth and give life to a multidisciplinary inquiry drawing on evolutionary theory, economics and sociology seeking to explain the progression of the human race over the past 200 years. I will start with a description and analysis of the demographic transition (DT) in its simple form, before breaking this process down into its two key components, mortality and fertility. The study of demographics is partly a story of how and why the human population got to where it is today, but it is also a story of where we are going in the future, and whether we can influence where we end up. It is a field investigating topics such the relationship between the sexes, women’s control over their own reproduction and the difference in realised economic outcomes between genders and ethnicities.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF. A 2nd edition was published in January 2022. This PDF has been re-posted as a one-column text in September 2022, with minor changes to accommodate the change in layout.

2. Mortality and Life Expectancy

The evolution of mortality through the demographic transition is as close as we come to a deterministic process in the analysis of population dynamics. Science and technology have become increasingly better at keeping people alive, a benefit that still seems to drive the human experience to this day. It’s possible to identify milestones through history such as the development of modern sanitation to defeat contagious air- and waterborne illnesses, the development of vaccines for specific illnesses, as well as overall technological development in the field of healthcare. It is a story about pinning down the causality between rising national income and technological development and the improvement in the human living condition in the past 250 years. Researchers still debate the relative importance and merits of specific drivers, but it’s possible to generalize, all the same. The story about of human mortality is contained in a few relationships, for the individual, between, and possibly within countries. It is a story about Nike swoosh-shaped, logarithmic and asymptotic curves, and the extent to which we observe deviations from such stylized relationships over time, and why.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF. This PDF has been re-posted as a one-column text in November 2022, with minor changes to accommodate the shift in layout, and more thorough editing.

3. The fertility transition and sexual selection

The evolution of population growth and structure is intimately tied to the most important decisions individual humans make through their life; when to have children and how many to have. The analysis of reproductive behaviour in humans draws on evolutionary theory and biology, cultural and social sciences, psychology and economics. It is a daunting task to collect all these threads into a coherent framework, but this is what I attempt to do in what follows, all the same. Broadly speaking, the literature treats human reproduction in three ways. In the first, which comes from formal evolutionary theory, reproduction occurs as a result of sexual selection, or more specifically the competition within the human species for a mate. 

This initial condition then gives rise to the second, and main, framework in which the decision on the number of offspring is treated as a resource allocation problem, giving rise to a trade-off between how many children to have, and how much to invest in each child. This model is widely explored in economics and evolutionary biology and theory. In the standard framework, families—or often women alone—solve this allocation problem given a set of external conditions. Generally, in this framework, an increase in resources leads to more children in a traditional society, but not necessarily in a modern post-transition economy. 

The third framework emphasises shifts in norms and culture to explain why fertility trends shift over time. Given that such changes often can be tied back to the same fundamental resource allocation problem mentioned above, it can be difficult to separate the second and third framework. That said, it is possible to imagine forces working independently through culture and norms to affect fertility decisions, a point emphasised by the softer social sciences and evolutionary psychology.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF.

4. The quantum effect of fertility

Whether you’re an evolutionary biologist, cultural sociologist or a neoclassical economist, the study of human fertility behaviour can be boiled down to an interplay between two immovable forces: the quantum and tempo effect. The first treats the fundamental question of reproduction; how many children to have, and how much resources to invest in each of them. In its simplest form, the quantum effect is the study of how much, if at all, women exert control over the quantity of offspring they produce. The extent to which they do—and almost all disciplines agree that they do in most social contexts—the analysis focuses on the conditions that determine the number of children, and how much resources that are devoted to each of them. It is an analysis of trade-offs, concentrated on the trade-off between the quantity and quality of offspring. How this balance is achieved represents one of the most crucial processes in the study of reproduction, aggregate fertility, and the demographic transition.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF. This PDF has been re-posted as a one-column text in September 2022, with minor changes to accommodate the change in layout.

5. The tempo effect of fertility

Global birth rates are falling, and the decline appears to be accelerating in one country after the other. Why is this happening? The previous chapter ended with the observation—by Kaplan et al (2002)—that increasing returns to investment in embodied capital for women, proxied by longer education and a higher rate of full-time labour force participation, could plausibly explain the emergence of sustained sub-replacement level fertility. In doing so, the paper connects evolution and anthropology—predominantly focused on the quantum effect of fertility—and the social sciences. The social sciences have been pondering birth postponement and sub-replacement fertility since the 1980s under the moniker of the second demographic transition, SDT, a term coined by Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa (1986) and van de Kaa (1987). At its core, the SDT is concerned with the same question that has been confounding evolutionary anthropologists. Why does fertility seem to be falling well below replacement level in one country after the other, and should we expect this to be a permanent state of affairs.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF.

List of references - As of March 2024

Amuedo-Catalina, Dorantes & Kimmel, Jean (2005) - The Motherhood Wage Gap for Women in the United States: The Importance of College and Fertility Delay, Review of Economics of the Household volume 3, pages17–48 (2005). Click here for the PDF.

Anderson et al. (2002) - The Motherhood Wage Penalty: Which Mothers Pay It and Why?, The American Economic Review Vol. 92, No. 2, (May, 2002), pp. 354-358 (5 pages). Get the PDF here.

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Ariès, P. (1980) - Two successive motivations for the declining birth rates in the West, in C. Höhn and R. Mackensen (eds.), Determinants of Fertility Trends—Theories Re-examined. Liège: IUSSP Bad Homburg Conference Proceedings, pp. 125–130. Also in Population and Development Review 6(4): 645–650.

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Becker, Gary S (1960) - An economic analysis of fertility, Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries pp. 209 - 240, Columbia University Press Get the PDF here.

Becker, Gary S & Barro, Robert J (1985) - Population growth and economic growth, in Workshop in Application of Economics, Chicago: University of Chicago.

Becker, Gary S & Barro, Robert J (1988) - A reformulation of the economic theory of fertility, Quarterly Journal of Economics 103 (1) 1988: 1-25. Get the PDF here.

Becker, Gary S & Barro, Robert J (1989) - Fertility choice in a model of economic growth, Econometrica 57 (2) 1989: 481-501.

Becker, Gary S & Lewis, Gregg H. (1973) - On the Interaction Between Quantity and Quality of Children, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 83 (March-April), pp. 279-288 (pp. 81-90 in version used here). 

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Becker, Gary S (1977) - An Economic Analysis of Fertility, NBER pp 209-240. Get the PDF here.

Becker, Gary S. O., Cinnirella, F. and Woessmann, L. (2010) - The trade-off between fertility and education: Evidence from before the demographic transition, Journal of Economic Growth 15(3): 177-204.

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Carr-Saunders, Alexander M. (1936) - World Population: Past Growth and Present Trends. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Demeney, Paul (1997) - Replacement level fertility: the implausible end-point of the demographic transition, in Caldwell (1997). Get the PDF here.

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Frejka, Tomas (2016) - The demographic transition revisited: A cohort perspective, MPIDR Working Paper WP 2016-012 l November 2016. Get the PDF here.

Frejka, T. and J.-P. Sardon (2004) - Childbearing Trends and Prospects in Low-fertility Countries, Volume 13, European Studies of Population, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. See link to book here.

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Frejka, T. and J.-P. Sardon (2009) - Contemporary childbearing trends in low-fertility countries, paper presented at the XXVI IUSSP International Population Conference, Marrakech, Morocco, 27 September–2 October

Frejka, Tomas; Sobotka, Tomáš; Hoem, Jan M; Toulemon, Laurent (2008) - Summary and general conclusions: Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe, DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VOLUME 19, ARTICLE 2, PAGES 5-14 PUBLISHED 01 JULY 2008. Get the PDF here.

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Galor, O. and Weil, D. N. (2000) - Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond, American Economic Review 90(4).

Galor, Oded (2011) - The demographic transition: causes and consequences, NBER Working Paper 17057. Get the PDF here.

Goldstein, Joshua R.; Kreyenfeld, Michaela; Jasilioniene, Aiva; Karaman Örsal, Deniz (2013) - Fertility reactions to the ‘Great Recession’ in Europe: Recent evidence from order-specific data, DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VOLUME 29, ARTICLE 4, PAGES 85-104 PUBLISHED 10 JULY 2013. Get the PDF here.

Goldstein, J., W. Lutz, and M. R. Testa (2003) - The emergence of sub-replacement family size ideals in Europe, Population Research and Policy Review 22(5-6): 479-496. Get the PDF here.

Gough, Magaret and Noonan, Mary (2013) - A Review of the Motherhood Wage Penalty in the United States, Sociology Compass Volume 7, Issue 4 April 2013 Pages 328-342. Get the PDF here.

Guinnane, Timothy W. (2010) - The historical fertility transition: A guide for economists, Center Discussion Paper, No. 990, Yale University, Economic Growth Center, New Haven, CT. Get the PDF here.

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Hopcroft, L. Rosemary (2021) - High income men have high value as long-term mates in the U.S.: personal income and the probability of marriage, divorce, and childbearing in the U.S., Evolution and Human Behavior 42 (2021) 409-417. Get the PDF here.

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Jennings, J. A., Sullivan, A. R., and Hacker, J. D. (2012) - Intergenerational Transmission of Reproductive Behavior during the Demographic Transition, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 42(4):543–569. Get the PDF here.

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Kanazawa, Satoshi (2003) - Can Evolutionary Psychology Explain Reproductive Behavior in the Contemporary United States?, The Sociological Quarterly Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 291-302 (12 pages). Get the PDF here.

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Lesthaeghe, Ron (2010) - The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition, June 2010 Population and Development Review 36(2):211-51. Get the PDF here.

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