Copyright © Gregg Lee Carter 2016

The right of Gregg Lee Carter to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6837-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6838-3 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, Gregg Lee, 1951- author.

    Population and society : an introduction / Gregg Lee Carter.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-6837-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6838-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)    1.  Population–Social aspects.    I.  Title.

    HB849.44.C37 2016

    304.2–dc23

                    2015031295

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the US by RR Donnelley

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

politybooks.com

For Jack, Betsy, and Lisa,

for their love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness…

The following individuals carefully reviewed Population and Society: An Introduction, for which I am greatly appreciative: Drs Walter F. Carroll (Bridgewater State University), William Egelman (Iona College), and Thomas W. Ramsbey (Emeritus, Rhode Island College). Dr William H. Kory (University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown) also reviewed Chapter 1, while Drs Paul Lokken and Antoine Joseph (Bryant University) reviewed parts of Chapter 5. Of course none of them bears responsibility for any errors of omission or commission that might have crept into my final manuscript.

The staff of Bryant University is cheery and always accommodating: Administrative assistants Joanne Socci and Sue Wandyes performed many valued support services. Bryant has a first-rate university library, with a uniformly excellent staff. Head reference librarian Laura Kohl was very helpful, as were her associates Jenifer Bond, Erica Cataldi-Roberts, and Cheryl Richardson. Extra special thanks to Ms Kohl's associates Mackenzie Dunn and Allison Papini, both of whom consistently assisted me in locating my most arcane reference materials.

Regarding translations and interpretations of selected details about Chinese society, I would like to thank my bilingual Bryant University colleagues Professors Yun Xiao, Hong Yang, and Chen Zhang, as well as Mr. Kongli Liu (Associate Director of Bryant's US–China Institute). I am grateful to additional Bryant colleagues Professors David Lux and Michael Bryant for their support in helping me receive a research sabbatical, a critical resource for allowing me to complete this book in a timely manner.

Lindsey A. Bailey and Pamela Wasserman at the nonprofit organization Population Connection (http://www.populationconnection.org) graciously helped me gain approval for my use in Chapter 2 of still images from the organization's highly respected video entitled World Population Growth. Pastor Matt Kottman of Disciples Church (Leatherhead, UK) graciously granted permission to use the photo of Mumbai in Chapter 2. The epigraph by Castles, de Hass, and Miller at the start of Chapter 5 has been reprinted with permission of Guilford Press.

At Polity Press, senior commissioning editor Jonathan Skerrett was enthusiastic and encouraging of this project from the start. Moreover, his editorial advice was measured and consistently helpful. Justin Dyer served as an excellent copyeditor.

Finally, on a personal note, I want to thank my wife, Lisa, for her unending encouragement, and my children – Travis, Kurtis, Alexis, and Davis – for their love and forbearance.

This book presents the field of demography from the perspective of social demography. In this approach, the classic concepts of demography are imparted – including theories and measurements of population size, distribution, composition, and change – while at the same time a stronger emphasis is placed than in a standard demography textbook on their connections to the culture, the economy, the polity, the society, and, ultimately, the choices individuals make in their everyday lives.

The present volume offers the basics, animates the sociological imagination, and throughout gives multiple demonstrations on how taking a demographic perspective can give us a better understanding of phenomena once thought to be largely the products of the culture, the polity, or the economy. Demography does not explain everything, of course, but there is a demographic component to the explanation of virtually all contemporary social problems, as well as in the genesis of many individual-level attitudes and behaviors. Many observers, many students, are unaware of this component and are often surprised at its power when it is brought into the discussion.

For example, what accounts for the rise and vitality of a women's movement in a particular society at a particular time in history? To wit, why the rise of the women's movement in the United States in the late 1960s? Why not the late 1940s or, say, the 1950s? There are volumes written on this topic, but a key part of the explanation resides in the demographic concept of the marriage squeeze. Women typically marry men of their age or a few years older – at least for their first marriages. The US baby boom after World War II produced some 5 million women in their 20s without traditional marriage partners (men of their age or slightly older) by 1970. How? Each year between 1946 and 1957, the number of births increased. When the women born in a particular year got out of high school or college and started looking around for good marriage material, they would have been searching for partners born a few years before them – when a smaller number of men had been born. Thus, starting in the mid-1960s, each year the pool of unmarried women began to grow. The applicable sex ratios (number of men per 100 women) for people in their 20s changed dramatically during the late 1960s. For example, in 1960, there were 111 men in the 22–6 age bracket for every 100 women in the 20–4 age bracket; by 1970, the comparable sex ratio had fallen to 84. Traditional female gender role aspirations (wife, mother, homemaker, and working only part-time to supplement the family's income) became unattainable for some 5 million young women – providing a key seed from which the modern women's movement sprouted.

This kind of analysis, bringing the demographic perspective to bear on a variety of contemporary social issues, appears throughout this volume. What gives these analyses coherence is how each emphasizes the ways in which demographic forces both reflect and limit individual choices. Although virtually no contemporary social issue can be truly understood without taking demography into consideration, the topics receiving the most attention in the present volume are (1) the social and individual determinants of fertility, mortality, and migration; (2) the social and individual impacts of changing levels of fertility, mortality, and migration; and (3) the impacts of overpopulation on the environment, and how changes in the environment, in turn, impact the human condition, especially regarding migration.

The sociological perspective and how major social institutions interact with demographic processes are central to the field of social demography and to this book. For example, the institution of the family has undergone dramatic transformations in the past half-century and these transformations are closely entwined with fertility, mortality, and migration. As developed in Chapters 2 and 4 during discussions of demographic transition theory, for most of human history, high death rates encouraged human cultures worldwide to have a “be fruitful and multiply” value orientation – with the clan, tribe, or society at risk of extinction if it did not adopt this orientation. This created a very long period, actually most of human history, of traditional gender roles – with women spending the bulk of their fertile years either pregnant or breast-feeding, and thus restricting their food-generating and economic productive activities to the home or very close to it (e.g., foraging nearby second demographic transitionChapters 24Chapter 3

is comprised of five main chapters, plus a substantial References section, and a detailed Index. Each chapter ends with a section, a set of , and an annotated list of . The ultimate goal is to stimulate the reader to better understand how his or her life has been, is, and will continue to be influenced by large and powerful demographic forces; and how, despite being a daunting undertaking, these forces can be reined in and controlled by the choices we make – as individuals, as well as by the group-level decisions we make in our families, neighborhoods, communities, nations, and international bodies.