DEMOGRAPHYequilibrium size. Any permanent improvement in
food supplies due to technological advances would,
in Malthus’s theory, simply lead to a larger popula-
tion surviving at the previous level of misery.
Although there is good evidence that Malthus
understood his contemporary world quite well
(Lee 1980; Wrigley 1983), he missed the begin-
nings of the birth control movement, which were
contemporaneous (McLaren 1978). The ability to
limit births, albeit at some cost, without limiting
sexual activity requires important modifications to
the Malthusian model.
Questions of the relationship among popula-
tion growth, economic growth, and resources per-
sist into the contemporary period. The bulk of the
literature is in economics. A good summary of that
literature can be found in T. P. Schultz (1981), in
Rosensweig and Stark (1997), and in a National
Research Council report on population policy
(1985). A more polemical treatment, but one that
may be more accessible to the noneconomist, is
offered by the World Bank (1985).
Sharing the study of population size and its
change with Malthusian issues is a body of substan-
tive and empirical work on the demographic revolu-
tion or transition (Notestein 1945). The model for
this transition is the course of fertility and mortali-
ty in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The
transition is thought to occur concurrently with
‘‘modernization’’ in many countries (Coale and
Watkins 1986) and to be still in process in many
less developed parts of the world (United Nations
1990). This transition is a change from (1) a condi-
tion of high and stable birthrates combined with
high and fluctuating death rates, through (2) a
period of initially lowering death rates and subse-
quently lowering birthrates, to (3) a period of low
and fairly constant death rates combined with low
and fluctuating birthrates. In the course of part (2)
of this transition, the population grows very con-
siderably because the rate of increase, absent mi-
gration, is the difference between the birthrate
and the death rate.
In large measure because of anxiety that fer-
tility might not fall rapidly enough in developing
countries, a good deal of research has focused on
the fertility part of the transition. One branch of
this research has been a detailed historical investi-
gation of what actually happened in Europe, since
that is the base for the analogy about what is
thought likely to happen elsewhere (Coale and
Watkins 1986). A second branch was the World
Fertility Survey, perhaps the largest international
social science research project ever undertaken.
This project conducted carefully designed, compa-
rable surveys with 341,300 women in seventy-one
countries to investigate the circumstances of con-
temporary fertility decline (Cleland and Hobcraft
1985). In 1983, a continuation of this project was
undertaken under the name Demographic and
Health Surveys. To date, this project has provided
technical assistance for more than 100 surveys in
Africa, Asia, the Near East, Latin America, and the
Caribbean. For more complete information about
current activities see their web site at http://
http://www.macroint.com/dhs/.Scholars analyzing these projects come to a
fairly similar assessment of the roots of historical
and contemporary fertility decline as centering in
an increased secular rationality and growing norms
of individual responsibility.Detailed investigation of the mortality side of
the European demographic transition has primari-
ly been conducted by historians. A particularly
useful collection of papers is available in Schofield,
Reher, and Bideau (1991). For the United States, a
particularly useful book on child and infant mor-
tality at the turn of the twentieth century is by
Haines and Preston (1991).The utility of the idea of a demographic transi-
tion to understand population change in the devel-
oping world has, of course, been a matter of
considerable debate. A good summary of this lit-
erature is found in Jones et al. (1997).Territorial Distribution. Research on the terri-
torial distribution of populations is conducted in
sociology, geography, and economics. The history
of population distribution appears to be one of
population dispersion at the macroscopic level of
continents, nations, or regions, and one of popula-
tion concentration at the more microscopic level
of larger towns and cities.The diffusion of the human population over
the globe, begun perhaps as the ice shields retreat-
ed in the late Pleistocene, continues to the present
(Barraclough 1978; Bairoch 1988). More newly
inhabited continents fill up and less habitable land
becomes occupied as technological and social
change makes it possible to live in previously