The Demographic Transition and Population Growth

1
The Demographic Transition and Population Growth

• Families in societies weve discussed so far are
  both residential and economic units
• Population Growth can be understood from the
  perspective of
• families a function of the birth, death,
  marriage and migrations of their members.
• nations a function of fertility and mortality
  and migration of individuals

2
Regulating Resources

• In Europe, the equilibrium between economic
  resources and population was maintained through
  the regulation of marriage
• Western European marriage pattern
• late age of marriage (23 for women), low
  fertility
• neo local residence
• long generations
• non universal marriage (90 or less of pop)

3
Demographic Transition

• Traditional societies are characterized by
  high mortality and high fertility
• In between.the demographic transition, declining
  mortality, followed by declining fertility,
  leading to rapid population growth
• Modern societies are characterized by low
  mortality and low fertility

4
Demographic Transition
5
Surviving Childhood
6
Mechanisms.

• In Europe, some people couldnt marry because
  there werent sufficient resources to support a
  new household. There was a tendency for younger
  sons and daughters to be downwardly mobile
  poorer people had smaller families, suffered more
  health problems and died younger.
• In the mid 18th century, mortality fell.
  Epidemic disease became less lethal, and people
  began to live longer.

7
The World of Young People...

• What would happen if young people could find an
  economic livelihood independent of their parents
  and family of origin?
• The practice of fostering out children, of
  young people going into service to help the
  family, or to earn enough to marry, was an old
  one.
• Wage labor and proto industrialization grew in
  the countryside, making it possible for young
  people to find work outside of the parental home,
  say from age 15-25.

8
Continued

• Initially they worked for a yearly wage, or in a
  boarding and lodging arrangement, but
  increasingly earned cash income.
• Employers gradually moved employees and servants
  out of the house or to the margin of the
  household, and dispensed with obligations for
  moral regulation (cf. the Brun household).

9
Continued.

• In Europe, a new social class emerged from the
  ranks of both the poor and the peasantry or
  agricultural population namely proletarians, or
  workers who lived by wage labor, and did not
  own the enterprises they worked in.
• In frontier areas, including colonies like the
  American colonies, young people came as
  indentured servants, usually owing 4-7 years of
  work to pay for their passage (1600s and 1700s),
  and received rights in land to become farmers
  when they finished. See also this contract.

10
Impact...

• These new changes in the life chances of young
  people changed marriage patterns. First, some
  young people were out of the control of their
  elders and traditional methods of marriage
  arrangements. Such marriages were made by the 2
  families, involved courtship perhaps and
  transfer of property.
• What made young people obey their elders was the
  need for financial and economic resources that
  came with the marriage.

11
Impact...

• Once those financial and economic resources could
  be secured by the young people themselves,
  parents lost control. The result was a drop in
  the age of marriage, increased premarital
  sexuality as evidenced by out of wedlock
  conception, and reduced stigma to such
  conceptions. A conception could be legitimated
  by a marriage before the child was born. But out
  of wedlock births also rose.

12
Impact...

• All this led to a population boom in Europe from
  1750 to 1900, as the population grew from 163
  million to 408 million, even while 50 million
  emigrants left. Europe, North and South America
  went from having 23 of the worlds population in
  1750 to about 35 in 1900.
• The relationship between wealth and family size
  reversed. In societies before 1500 the rich had
  bigger families post 1850, the less well off had
  bigger families, because the children could leave
  home and find work and improve their economic
  situations.

13
Conclusion.

• The European marriage system, under appropriate
  circumstances, contributed both to economic
  growth, and to population boom.
• Malthus prediction did not come true.