| Dear Hiveans | Liebe Hiver | Queridos Hiveanos |
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| in the last weeks I read the book "The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World" by Dr. Paul Morland. Morland is an author and broadcaster who writes and speaks about population and the big demographic trends across the world, both contemporary and historic (source). | In den letzten Wochen habe ich das Buch "The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World" von Dr. Paul Morland gelesen. Morland ist ein Autor und Radiosprecher, der über die Bevölkerung und die großen demografischen Trends in der Welt schreibt und spricht, sowohl in der Gegenwart als auch in der Vergangenheit (Quelle). | En las últimas semanas he leído el libro "The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World" del Dr. Paul Morland. Morland es un autor y locutor que escribe y habla sobre población y las grandes tendencias demográficas en todo el mundo, tanto contemporáneas como históricas (fuente). |
| Here you find a summary of this very interesting book (goodreads). This post is a compilation of my favorite excerpts, with few comments of mine. | Hier ist eine Zusammenfassung dieses sehr interessanten Buches (goodreads). Dieser Beitrag ist eine Zusammenstellung meiner Lieblingsauszüge, mit wenigen Kommentaren von mir. | Aquí se encuentra un resumen de este libro tan interesante (goodreads). Este post es una recopilación de mis extractos favoritos, con algunos comentarios míos. |
The Human Tide is about the role of population in history. It does not argue that the great trends in population – the rise and fall of birth and death rates, the swelling and shrinking of population size, the surges of migration – determine all of history. Demography, it argues, is part but not all of destiny. The case is not made here for a simplistic, monocausal or deterministic view of history. Nor is the claim made that demography is in some sense a primary cause, a first mover, an independent or external phenomenon with ramifications and effects in history but not causes preceding it. Rather, demography is a factor which itself is driven by other factors, numerous and complex, some material, some ideological and some accidental. Its effects are varied, long-lasting and profound, but so are its causes.
Demography is deeply embedded in life. In a sense, it is life – its beginning and its ending. Population must be understood alongside other causal factors such as technological innovation, economic progress and changing beliefs and ideologies, but population does explain a great deal. Take for example the ideology and perspective of feminism. It is impossible to say whether the feminist movement prefigured demographic change and drove it or rather resulted from it, but we can chart how the two have worked together.
[…] it would be a mistake to substitute a demographic for a pseudo-Marxian view of history, replacing ‘class’ with ‘population’ as the hidden factor that explains all world history. To leave demography out, however, is to miss what may be the most important explanatory factor in world history of the last two hundred years. For millennia, the same bleak story could be told of steady population progress reversed by plague, famine and war. Since around 1800, however, humankind has increasingly managed to take control of its own numbers, and to stunning effect. Demography has gone from the slowest- to the fastest-changing discipline. Population trends no longer move at a snail’s pace, with occasional shocking interruptions like the Black Death. Fertility and mortality fall with growing speed and transitions which once took generations now take place in decades.
Why the year 1800 as a starting point? The answer is that the end of the 18th century and the start of the nineteenth mark a discontinuity in demographic history, a great transformation. Before this time humanity had experienced without doubt dramatic demographic events, mostly on the mortality side of the equation, such as plagues and massacres, but these had been sporadic rather than part of long-term trends. What long-term trends there had been, such as population growth in Europe and in the world more generally, had been gentle and punctuated with unhappy setbacks.
To get a sense of how completely revolutionary have been the changes of the last 200 years or so, it helps to have a long view of demography. When in 47 BC Julius Caesar was appointed perpetual dictator of the Roman Republic his domain stretched from what is now called Spain to modern Greece, as far north as Normandy in France and much of the rest of the Mediterranean, a region that today contains over thirty countries. The population of these vast lands comprised around 50 million people, which was about 20% of a world population of approximately 250 million. More than 18 centuries later, when Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837, the number of people living on earth had grown to something like 1,000 million, a fourfold increase. Yet less than 200 years after Victoria’s coronation, world population has increased a further seven times – nearly twice the growth in a tenth of the time. This latter multiplication is astonishingly rapid, and has had a transformative global impact.
| Incredible numbers. I was aware that the industrialization was accompanied by population growth but not by such an extent. | Unglaubliche Zahlen. Mir war bewusst, dass die Industrialisierung mit einem Bevölkerungswachstum einherging, aber nicht in einem solchen Ausmaß. | Unas cifras increíbles. Sabía que la industrialización iba acompañada de un crecimiento demográfico, pero no de tal magnitud. |
When Queen Victoria was born in 1819, only a small number of Europeans – around 30,000 – were living in Australia. The number of indigenous Australians at that time is uncertain, but estimates range from between 300,000 to 1 million. When Victoria died at the start of the 20th century, there were fewer than 100,000, while Australians of European origin numbered nearly 4 million, more than a 100 times as many as 80 years earlier. This transformation in the size and composition of a continental population occurred in the space of a single lifetime. It changed Australia completely and forever, and would have a significant impact beyond Australia’s shores, as the country came to play a major role in provisioning and manning British efforts in both world wars. A similar story can be told of Canada and New Zealand.
Modernisation is a sufficient condition of moving through or having moved through the demographic transition to low fertility and long life expectancy. It alone will ensure that the demographic transition occurs. Women with university degrees will not, in general, have 7 children. Office workers living in homes with sewage systems and having access to cars will live longer than did their peasant ancestors who toiled in the fields and relied for transport on their feet and, if lucky, their shoes. But full modernity is not a necessary condition for having made the demographic transition. As the 20th century progressed it was possible for a still relatively rural country with low levels of income and education to achieve low fertility rates and to lengthen life expectancy. Government-funded family planning, often assisted by international aid, and the provision of basic public health and medical facilities, again often internationally supported, can move demography ahead of modernisation. This is how a country like Morocco – where as recently as 2009 more than half of all women were illiterate – could have a fertility rate as low as 2.5 children per woman.
The growth of the population slowed and then went into a modest reverse in the 17th century as civil war and plague returned, but growth resumed in the early 18th century. Average annual population growth was around a third of one per cent in the first half of the 18th century and nearly a half of one per cent in the second half. So far so good, but also historically fairly normal. But this is the point at which things change forever and the human tide begins to flow along a completely new course. Population growth in England accelerated in the 19th century, exceeding an annual 1.33% on average despite large-scale emigration. Natural growth, excluding the effects of emigration, peaked at over 1.7% in the years 1811–25.
This was much faster than in any other period, whether the high Middle Ages before the Black Death or in the Merry England of the Tudors, and it delivered a far larger population than England had ever seen before. When a population – or anything else – is growing at 1.33% per annum, it doubles in around 50 years, then doubles again in the next 50 years, and that is what the population of England did during the course of the 19th century. Just as this revolution was getting under way, the ‘old regime’ from which it was breaking was at last being identified, by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was a country parson from Surrey, a prosperous county in southern England, who identified what he believed was an iron law of history. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, written, published and progressively revised between 1798 and 1830, he argued that a growing population would always outstrip the ability of the land to support it, which would lead inexorably to misery and death. In such circumstances, Malthus maintained, war, famine and disease would reduce population back to levels that the land could sustain. At that point, with numbers down and fewer people to share the available resources, the surviving people, reduced in number, would each get a larger share of what was available, enabling them to live a little better, live longer and bear more surviving offspring.
Comparing the populations and economies of Britain and France is informative. The data for the size of the economy is more contentious than that for the size of the population, but taking what is probably the best data available, the economy of the UK grew steadily from less than a third of that of France in 1700 to more than a third larger by the outbreak of the First World War. Relative to France’s economy, therefore, Britain’s quadrupled. Over the same period, the UK’s population went from less than half of that of France to around 15% more. So a good part of Britain’s economic growth relative to that of France must be attributed to the relative growth of its population.
| This gigantic population growth may explain the British Empire as it enabled both the emigration of settlers to "the New World" and the size of Britain's army. | Dieses gigantische Bevölkerungswachstum könnte das britische Empire erklären, da es sowohl die Auswanderung von Siedlern in die "Neue Welt" als auch die Größe der britischen Armee ermöglichte. | Este gigantesco crecimiento demográfico puede explicar el Imperio Británico, ya que permitió tanto la emigración de colonos al "Nuevo Mundo" como el tamaño del ejército británico. |
The great cultural historian Fernand Braudel said of the Spaniards that they could conquer but not grasp Central and South America. The suggestion is that although the Spaniards had a vast empire on paper, in practice they had little impact or control over much of it, even before losing most of it early in the 19th century. In large part this was because there were simply not enough Spaniards to make a real population impact on the lands they conquered, even if they succeeded – intentionally or otherwise – in wiping out large swathes of the populations who had been there beforehand.
…
It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this gave Britain a head start over its rivals. British emigrants settled in areas whose indigenous peoples, still following the population patterns described by Malthus, were easily outnumbered and pushed aside, sometimes brutally, by armies of newcomers who cornered resources such as land and water. Britain’s ability to escape Malthus’s constraints was the secret that allowed its people to wrest continental-sized territories away from their original inhabitants. It was the weight of numbers – combined with new industrial technologies – that enabled the British and their offspring to make their language, culture and political institutions the global norm.
The story of Australia is similar. In the hundred years to the outbreak of the First World War the European population of Australia went from fewer than 10,000 to more than 4 million, and again this number was made up overwhelmingly of emigrants from the British Isles. Nearly 200,000 came in the 1880s and nearly twice that number in the 1890s. This was a predominantly young population (immigrants usually are), encouraged to ‘open up’ the territory and incentivised by cheap land. Unsurprisingly, this meant a high birth rate and low death rate (typical of young populations), which in turn swelled numbers even more. Again as in Canada, the indigenous population, never very large to start with, was reduced to the status of statistical insignificance. By the early 1920s there were barely 3,000 indigenous Australians in the areas of most intense British settlement, namely Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. Throughout Australia as a whole, the people who little more than a hundred years earlier had had the continent to themselves represented barely 2% of the population. In contrast, over 80% of those born overseas had been born in Britain and the overwhelming majority of those born in Australia were born of British immigrant parents or grandparents.
What is noteworthy in all these cases is that although Britain had nominally held colonies in North America since the early 17th century and in Australasia since the 18th century, it was only once a population boom at home could fuel mass emigration that these territories came under meaningful control of Britain through a process of settlement. Without the population boom there would have been no mass settlement, and without mass settlement Britain’s imperial claims to these territories might have remained as insubstantial as those of Spain to most of Latin America. Equally, without mass settlement these lands could not have become the great granaries and providers of meat and other essentials to a global trading system of which a newly industrialised Britain was the heart. […]
As the 19th century progressed, Europeans continued pouring into the United States but from increasingly diverse parts of the continent. In the hundred years up to 1920, when serious immigration controls started to be put in place, it is estimated that more than 8 million came from Britain and Ireland, 5–6 million from Germany, 4 million each from Italy and Austro-Hungary, more than 3 million from Russia and 2 million from Scandinavia.
| I wonder about the consequences of this enormous emigration and how this settlement of other continents can only happen once. Will we see similar emigrations when space is explored and other planets will be (made) habitable? | Ich frage mich, welche Folgen diese enorme Auswanderung hatte und warum solch eine Besiedlung anderer Kontinente nur einmal stattfinden kann. Werden wir ähnliche Auswanderungen erleben, wenn der Weltraum erforscht wird und andere Planeten bewohnbar sind oder gemacht werden? | Me pregunto por las consecuencias de esta enorme emigración y cómo este asentamiento de otros continentes sólo puede ocurrir una vez. ¿Veremos emigraciones similares cuando se explore el espacio y otros planetas se hagan habitables? |
From the middle of the 19th century, when the average woman in England was still having around 5 children, there was a clear downward trend. By the outbreak of the First World War, the average woman was having just 3. The birth rate (births per thousand of the population) fell by a third – from 36 to 24 – between 1876 and 1914. Women who married in the 1860s had more than 6 births each; those who married in the 1890s had slightly more than 4; and those who married in 1915 had less than two and a half. [...]
In the 1870s barely one bride in ten was over thirty on her wedding day; by the Edwardian period (specifically 1906–11) the share was nearly twice as high. So fewer women of childbearing age were married, and many were now spending all or at least part of their fertile years outside of marriage, at a time when notions of respectability were becoming more widespread and fewer births were occurring outside marriage.
In short, although German families were shrinking by the time of the First World War, they were still bigger than those in Britain, and mortality was falling quickly. These two factors fuelled the population rise in the half-century or so before 1914. In addition, there was another major factor driving German population growth at this time, in sharp contrast to Britain’s: that is, falling emigration. British emigration had been higher to start with; in the 1880s, for example, it was twice the level of German emigration. But by the period immediately preceding 1914 it was nine times the level.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the demographic revolution which had struck Britain was widening its scope to Germany, Russia and beyond. As the tide began to ebb in Britain it was still flowing in Germany, and as it began to ebb in Germany, it was still flowing in Russia. Each of these successive tides was more pronounced than the last. Germany’s population growth was more rapid than Britain’s, but then it fell more rapidly. Russia’s population rise was more rapid than Germany’s but fell more quickly in turn. The reasons for this are clear. The pioneer moves tentatively along an uncleared path, while the better trodden the path, the more rapidly successors can follow. The techniques of public and personal health can be more rapidly adopted when they are understood, tried and tested. This means that death rates, the key driver of population growth, can fall more quickly. […]
The fertility slowdown certainly had the effect of reducing population growth but on the other hand, mortality was still falling in many parts of Europe, and this had the effect of propping up population growth. Life expectancy in England was just under 54 years at birth in 1910 and by 1930 had risen to over 60. Fewer people joined the population through birth, but fewer left through death.
After 1918, movement within the Continent became more widespread. This was mostly westward, and its preferred target was France, in part thanks to encouragement by the French government. Put simply, the west of Europe was freer and more prosperous than the east, and so it acted as a magnet. In 1931 there were more than 3 million European immigrants living in France – twice the number living in Germany and three times those living in the UK – a figure which represented more than 7% of the French population. The greatest sources were Poland, Italy and Spain.
| I can understand the wish to emigrate from East to West within Europe very well - as France and the UK are still freer than Germany or Poland. | Ich kann den Wunsch, innerhalb Europas von Ost nach West auszuwandern, sehr gut nachvollziehen - denn Frankreich und England sind immer noch freier als Deutschland oder Polen. | Puedo entender muy bien el deseo de emigrar del Este al Oeste dentro de Europa, ya que Francia y el Reino Unido siguen siendo más libres que Alemania o Polonia. |
The Soviet Union’s ultimate victory would have been less likely without the burgeoning of the Russian population and the slowdown in Germany’s. In the first 40 years of the century, Germany had managed an average of only a little over 0.5% population growth per annum, while Russia, despite the ravages of civil war and Communism, had experienced nearly 1.4% per annum. Thus while at the turn of the century the German population had been a little over half that of Russia, by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it was not much more than a third.
After the Second World War something strange happened. A generation of statisticians and social scientists living a century after Malthus had reasonably theorised and described the post-Malthusian world. Less well remembered than Malthus, the American Frank Notestein described what would come to be known as the ‘demographic transition’. Rather than existing in a state of eternal Malthusian constraint, a country would start with a high fertility, a high mortality rate and a small population, then its mortality would fall, causing the population to grow rapidly; next, fertility would decline, resulting in continuing but slower growth; and finally, fertility and mortality would be back in balance, with the population stable again but at a much higher level. […]
Yet births per woman were already falling before the First World War and continued to do so in the interwar era – the Great Depression of the 1930s helping to discourage childbirth and family formation. Unemployed men on both sides of the Atlantic, struggling to support their families, either delayed marrying and planning for children or, if already married and with children, avoided adding to their family. […]
A more compelling reason for the long duration of the baby boom is economic. Population growth and economic boom become self-reinforcing under the right circumstances. More marriages and more children meant a need for more homes and for more of the goods which were increasingly expected in or around the home – the fridge, the washing machine, the telephone, the television and above all the motor car. Providing for this demand in an era when the US still manufactured most of its own consumer goods fed back into the climate of optimism, further encouraging family formation and births. It was the golden era of the American corporation, of rising wages and job security, exactly the circumstances under which young couples were prepared to take the plunge, get married and start a family, or feel confident enough to have that extra child.
At the climax of the baby boom in the 1960s, the children born immediately after the war were coming of age while the last boomers were being born, and teenagers displayed a blend of adolescent rebelliousness and consumerist conformity; it was the period of student rebellions from California to Paris, of blue jeans, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This was a confident and influential generation because it was a large generation. When the young are much more numerous than the old, it is not surprising that conventions are increasingly questioned, challenged and in some cases overturned. The ongoing popularity of the culture of the 1960s testifies to the size of that cohort and to its continued impact, although today its members are less likely to be protesting for free love and against the Vietnam War and more likely to be protesting against a cut in pensions or a rise in the retirement age.
The scale of immigration in the post-war era now looks modest by comparison to the early years of the 21st century. In some twelve-month periods since 2000 more people were arriving in Britain than had been the case in the whole period 1066–1950.
While life expectancy in the Soviet Union after 1945 was paltry compared to what was achieved in the United States and, even more so, in Western Europe, as noted above, in the post-Soviet era the divergence widened. Life expectancy for Russian men fell from 64 in 1989 to 58 in 2001. This bears extremely poor comparison not only to what had been and was still being achieved in the West by way of lengthening life expectancy, but also in growing parts of the developing world. In the same year India, with a per capita income less than one-third of the Russian level, achieved male life expectancy of two years longer.
The gap between male and female life expectancy in Russia is exceptionally high. In 2008, when male life expectancy had recovered to the age of 59, the life expectancy of Russian women was 73, and the most recent UN data suggests that while male life expectancy is recovering it is still only back to where it was 50 years ago. The extraordinarily wide gap between male and female life expectancy in Russia (3 or 4 years is normal for most countries, but the latest UN data suggests more than a decade for Russia) indicates that Russia’s mortality problem lies essentially with its men. The most often cited problem related to low life expectancy is alcoholism. Here, although Russia’s alcohol consumption per capita is not much higher than that of some west European countries, in Russia it seems to be concentrated among men and in drinking bouts. Interestingly, a drop in alcohol consumption in the mid to late nineties was accompanied by a modest fall in mortality.
Another contributing factor to poor life expectancy is the fact that Russia’s suicide rate is one of the highest in the world; it was the cause of over 50,000 deaths in 2000. The atmosphere of morbidity in the immediate post-Soviet era was captured by one correspondent: „The deaths kept piling up. People – men and women – were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or ploughed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.“
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serb share of the population fell from 44% in 1948 to less than 33% in 1981 while the Muslim share rose from less than 33% to nearly 40% between the same dates. In Kosovo (unlike Bosnia-Herzegovina, located within the Serbian republic rather than being a separate republic within Yugoslavia), the Serb share of the population was already below a quarter in 1948 but by 1981 had reduced to barely 13%, the result not only of a lower birth rate than the local Albanians but also migration of ethnic Serbs to Serbia. Both these areas were sensitive so far as Serbian nationalists were concerned, the former being the area where Serb nationalists had triggered the outbreak of the First World War in 1918 by assassinating Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand; the latter being the location of a Serbian battle against the Turks in the 14th century which featured centrally in Serbian historic consciousness, and also the location of many medieval Serbian monasteries of historic importance. The aggregate population data partly disguises even more dramatic trends among the young: the share of under fourteens in the population of Serbia is half of that among Kosovars.
Yet the great irony of the One Child Policy was that it was almost certainly not necessary. This can be demonstrated in two ways: first by reference to historical trends within China, and second by contrast to other countries. […]
If ever there was a lesson that the human tide is best managed by ordinary human beings themselves and not by their self-appointed engineers, it is here. Given education, some level of opportunity and access to contraceptives, most men and women, but particularly women, are capable of making decisions in their own interests which also match the requirements of society, at least in terms of reducing fertility. Adam Smith’s hidden hand works in demography as well as in economics: individuals left to their own devices, if informed and enabled to make their own decisions, will tend to make decisions in their own interests which are in the interests of society, at least when it comes to the need for falling fertility rates. But it is unsurprising that Smith’s Marxist ideological enemies, who were running China, did not recognise it. The policy can be thought of as a ‘great leap’ in population control, the demographic corollary of the earlier disastrous policies in agriculture and industry: ‘The approach was guided by the Leninist notion that if the party exerted enough effort, every problem could be solved.’
| I also think that individuals are very much able to make decisions in their own and society's interest without governments interfering into that - by coercion or by incentives such as child benefit/allowance. | Ich bin auch der Meinung, dass der Einzelne sehr wohl in der Lage ist, Entscheidungen im eigenen Interesse und im Interesse der Gesellschaft zu treffen, ohne dass sich der Staat einmischt - sei es durch Zwang oder durch Anreize wie Kindergeld. | También creo que los individuos son muy capaces de tomar decisiones en su propio interés y en el de la sociedad sin que los gobiernos interfieran en ello, ya sea por coacción o mediante incentivos como las prestaciones o subsidios por hijos a cargo. |
The human tide takes some surprising turns. Nevertheless, in some ways its course is fairly predictable. The great surprise, taking the historic long view, was breaking out of the Malthusian trap, something that now seems almost universal, and the rich world has taken on global responsibility for aiding even the poorest to achieve this. Once out of the trap – with fast-falling mortality rates and fast-growing population – there is then a fairly standard process through which eventually fertility rates fall towards replacement level. After that, the bets are off; it is far from clear, for example, that the second demographic transition of personal choice, individualism and sub-replacement fertility will become truly universal. Perhaps we are simply too close to events to be able to see the new emerging pattern, as was Malthus in the early 19th century or those in the UK before the First World War, who lamented the fall of the national birth rate without realising that it would become universal. One of the most important factors in history at any one time is where in this transition different societies and cultures are.
In the middle of the 20th century, after centuries of being sidelined, colonised and subject to slavery, sub-Saharan Africans accounted for barely one person in ten on the planet; by the end of this century they are likely to account for one person in four. With Africa still poor and young, the pressure of migration to Europe will be strong. To date, most African population growth can be seen arising from people pouring into towns and cities. Once prosperity gets above a certain level, however, the prospect of looking further afield than the nearest mega-city for economic salvation becomes more realistic.
Whatever the future holds, of one thing we can be sure: that just as in the past, demography and destiny will continue to be entwined. Demography will shape the course of history as long as birth and death, marriage and migration remain the most fundamental events in our lives.
| I enjoyed the book very much as I am interested in both demography and history and as Morland has an entertaining writing style. | Mir hat das Buch gut gefallen, da ich mich sowohl für Demografie als auch für Geschichte interessiere und Morland einen unterhaltsamen Schreibstil hat. | Me ha gustado mucho el libro porque me interesan tanto la demografía como la historia y porque Morland tiene un estilo de escritura entretenido. |
Have a great day,
zuerich