Population and Development

by Tim Dyson

The demographic transition and its related effects of population growth, fertility decline and ageing populations are fraught with problems and controversy. When discussed in relation to the global south and the modern project of development, the questions and answers become more problematic. Population and Development expertly guides the reader through the demographic transition???s origins in the Enlightenment and Europe, through to the rest of the world. Whilst the phenomenon continues to cause unsustainable population growth with disastrous economic and environmental implications, the author examines how its processes have underlain previous periods of sustained economic growth; helped to liberate women from the domestic domain; and contributed greatly to the rise of modern democracy. This accessible and expert analysis will enable any student or expert in development studies to understand complex and vital demographic theory. About The Author: Tim Dyson is professor of population studies at the London School of Economics. He was educated in England and Canada, and has held visiting positions at the Australian National University in Canberra, the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, and the American University of Beirut. His research interests include world food and agricultural prospects, the causes and consequences of famines, the demographic basis of urban growth and urbanization, climate change and global warming, the demography and epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, and the past, present and future population of the Indian subcontinent. He is a past president of the British Society for Population Studies and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

284 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2010

About the author

Tim Dyson is Professor of Population Studies at the London School of Economics. Educated in England and Canada, he has held visiting positions at the Australian National University in Canberra, the International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai, and the American University of Beirut. A past President of the British Society for Population Studies, in 2015 he delivered the initial keynote address at the forty-eighth session of the United Nations Commission on Population and Development in New York. He has been interested in the demography of India since the 1970s, and has written extensively on the country's past, present, and future population.

Reviews

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing can be a bit dry and repetitive -- it is a very academic work -- but this is a fascinating book. This quote gives a good sense of the central thesis: "It is important to emphasize that the present argument is that if mortality decline occurs in a pre-transitional society, then the population will grow, fertility will decline sooner or later, and the society will eventually both urbanize and age. Thus while development processes (e.g. economic growth, the spread of modern education) and the overall context (e.g. the culture and institutions) will be significant in conditioning the details of the transition – including the extent of population growth – in the final resort such considerations are secondary. In short, the demographic transition has its own causal pathway.” (220) Essentially, once a decline in mortality rate occurs, a series of other demographic processes get set off and somewhat inevitably follow. Variation in rate of transition is due to other local factors, but this causal process is relatively independent of economic growth, and responsible for many important socio-political downstream effects. This is a really strong and bold thesis when you think about it, and Dyson goes to great length to defend it. That being said, I am not sure how convinced I am. For one, the initial domino of decline in mortality rates seems to be a little too simple in the way Dyson presents things. Because it is not just that there needs to be a decline in mortality rates, but that mortality rates must *continue* to decline across large swathes of the transition. In order to explain this, appealing to enlightenment ideas of science probably isn't enough, and more needs to be said about the back-and-forth feedback processes with economic growth. That style of critique extends to the other parts of Dyson's causal claims. I would need to do more critical thinking about comparative analyses and counterfactual possibilities to really get a grip on how persuasive they are, but I'm inclined to think he argues for the causal autonomy of these demographic processes a little too strongly (probably the most important one to clarify is the mortality decline-->fertility decline pathway). Needless to say, the book is ripe for interesting questions about the nature of historical causation and what types of causal explanations should be admitted. I also appreciate that it does have some real substantial predictions about the future. The degree to which sub-Saharan African countries and other still developing countries play out the other steps of the demographic transition will provide at least some test of the book's claims. As Dyson acknowledges, most of the speculation about the more downstream effects of the demographic transition on society/culture are incompletely explored (and I think even more ripe for debates about causality, and stripping human agency from explanation), but they are all intriguing and plausible. In general, thinking about demography in this way provides an entire framework for certain patterns of societal transformation that the other long-scale economic history approaches I have read do not. I'm not sure how to adjudicate between competing claims in such accounts (would need to do a lot more research), but this book left me convinced demography is a perspective worth greater consideration.

[Leonardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente libro. Aprendí en realidad cómo estudiar un país de otra manera. Una herramienta importantísima.