Newman sets out to explain why a revolution occurred in France, but not England, using a multidisciplinary methodology. She investigates the origins of the French Revolution using demographic patterns, land-tenure and inheritance systems and comparative research.
Van Badham, the author of an insulting Guardian piece against Dick Smith, (Thursday 7 September 2017) parades the usual cliches about 'educating women' to deal with population growth, despite the obvious fact that although women in Australia still have relatively high rates of literacy, our population just keeps growing faster and faster. Not because Australian women are having huge families, but because mass immigration from overseas contributes 60% of Australia's population growth. How is education going to fix that, Ms Van Badham? [16 September 2017: See new footnote #5.]
Most people in Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere are educated to believe in a sort of chronological continuous improvement, which they know as 'progress'. This 'progress' explanation is used to excuse all kinds of costs imposed by change. (We also hear, 'Change is good'). But much coercive and costly change is caused by catering to overpopulation and overdevelopment, and both these ills are engineered by powerful people. Over the last 20 years in Australia, the mainstream media has represented the growth lobby by pushing rapid population growth as an economic norm, as an inevitable demographic fact, and has played its only card - the race card - against the many more rational objections.
With the rise of the internet, the beneficiaries of engineered population growth use crowds of trolls to defend these costs and the growth lobby's excesses on the internet, so that when critics of rapid population growth go to 'progressive' sites that push growth, they will get all kinds of flack. The trolls are designed to frighten questioners away. People should not be misled to believe that the nasty attacks on people who question population growth are sincere - they are too similar and irrational to be spontaneous - but they do need to be countered.
A recent and gross example have been a majority of comments on an article, "I get why you're angry, Dick Smith. The ABC ignores my ideas all the time," in The Guardian (Thursday 7 September 2017) about Dick Smith's ad against massive population growth. You can see these comments here: https://www.facebook.com/theguardianaustralia/posts/1487301447971603. Many are grossly defamatory. [Revisiting the site two days later, I discover that, thankfully, many of these awful comments have been unpublished by The Guardian.] The article itself, although it is apparently by a professional journalist, is sarcastic, coarse, superficial and ageist, characterising Smith as sexist, a white man abusing his traditional privilege, an elderly xenophobe having a 'brain fart'.
The author of this gratuitously insulting piece, Van Badham, then parades the usual cliches [1] about 'educating women' to deal with population growth, despite the obvious fact that although women in Australia have relatively good (if deteriorating) educations, our population just keeps growing faster and faster. Not because Australian women are having huge families, but because mass immigration from overseas contributes 60% of Australia's population growth. How is education going to fix that, Ms Van Badham?
Immigration is a factor totally ignored by the so-called Demographic Transition 'theory'. Speaking as a population scientist, I would say that Dick Smith is on the right track and Ms Van Badham is ignoring 60% of the equation. However you will find that most Australian 'population experts' - read professional 'demographers' and friends of the growth lobby - also fall for the Badham arithmetic mistake, although they are all more mathematicians and economists than scientists.[2] They fall for it because they do not test it and they do not read around it or anything not produced in English.
It was to educate people with open minds that I translated Etienne Van de Walle's: “French fertility in the 19th century,” which you can read here: /node/4247. Van de Walles was not the only French population historian and demographer to write about how France had 'its demographic transition' before industrialisation, right after the Revolution. The Anglosphere is known for ignoring theories that question its own tenets, however, so no-one hears about it.
One brave American population historian, Paul G Spagnoli, dared to write about this strange turning away from scientific method in the Anglosphere, which is so dominated by political and economic ideology. You can read his paper, "The unique decline of mortality in revolutionary France,"(1997) here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11619481. Almost no-one paid attention to this eminent bilingual historian's significant analysis, because it did not suit the anglosphere bias.
Seuil, France also published a multi-article review by population theorists which included Dupâquier and other notables, as Communications, 44, 1986. Dénatalité : l'antériorité française, 1800-1914., (1986).[3] The meaning of the title is "Fall in the birth rate: the French precedent, 1800-1914." There was both a fall in the birth rate and a fall in mortality, at the same time as there was a rise in marriages, a fall in age of marriage, and a decline in never-marrieds! Why? Well, the French used contraception - but they didn't need the pill; they used the sheath, withdrawal, and various pessaries. Contraceptives have been known forever,[4] but using them demands a will to do so. In the 19th century, as the state cracked down on use of contraceptives because they wanted more soldiers for war, bands of French activists went round the country selling them and teaching people how to use them, especially poor people in cities. (See Francis Ronsin, La Greve des ventres, Aubier, France, 1980.)
Prior to the French Revolution, France's population was either stable or grew very slowly. [5] Although forms of contraception have been available extending back into ancient history, this Ancien Regime population stability is thought to have been due to a different kind of population control, where quite high percentages of people never married, never had children, and where the average age of marriage was quite high (over 25 yrs old). People who did marry and have children averaged above 5 children and life expectancy was low, with many children dying in infancy.
The French demography historians, such as Jacques Dupâquier (who calls it a myth) and Henri Leridon, also question the so-called 'natural fertility' concept which Anglosphere demographers believe is demonstrated by the extreme fertility of the Hutterites. See, Bardet and Dupâquier, "Contraception: les Francais les premiers, mais pourquoi?" in the abovementioned Dénatalité : l'antériorité française, 1800-1914. Dupâquier and others refer to the power of endogamy in determining fertility opportunity. The French and most tribal people before colonisation, globalism, and the car, were endogamous. That is, they lived in villages (the equivalent of clans or tribes) where only rarely did anyone marry far beyond the village or tribe. Because of the small range of population numbers within a village or tribe this meant that, like a small game of musical chairs, not everyone would find a marriagable partner, either because they were too strongly related or because all possibles were already married or because they were outside their social class (homogamy).
Another brake on fertility was that lack of housing or a good income made people less attractive as marriage partners.
The advent of relatively cheap cars brought about a sudden jump in the marriage and birth rates in many countries because people could live in new houses in places that had previously been too far from work and ammenities and they found employment in the post war fossil fuel economy. Hence more people became marriagable. This was called the "Baby Boom." Trains had also made a difference to employment opportunities and the viability of living in once out of the way places. Boats early brought marriagable strangers closer. Planes exploded trans-ocean marriage/fertility opportunities. The latest accelerator of marriage and fertility opportunity is probably the internet which permits romances that are detached from real circumstances.
However the problem of mass immigration remains an accelerant of population growth that is rarely acknowledged, although those who make open borders policy know it well. They just don't talk about it. Just think of how colonisation and war, by exploding endogamous traditions and driving people from their historic villages and tribal lands to cities in search of work has affected India, China, Africa, the Middle East ... Think how it has affected Australia - once occupied by a much smaller lighter footprinted population for 60,000 years. How much difference will the wars pushing people from Africa and the Middle East and the politicians inviting them to enter Europe's almost stablising population make? How much more will the globalisation of everything and open borders accelerate all populations and anihilate all diversity?
The author of this article, Sheila Newman, is an evolutionary sociologist specialising in population, environment and energy resources. Relevant to the theory expressed here, she has published, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2012 See peer reviews and explanation here) and Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014 and she is currently working on the third volume in series, Demography, Territory, Law 3: Land-tenure and the origins of democracy in France. Her major thesis in Environmental Sociology, which included oil economics, was The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, 2002. For where to buy these see her bio here: /node/1882
[1] [My translation]: "In researching factors to explain differences in fertility between different states in India, two authors proposed analyses based on the same methodology, multiple regression, focusing on each state. Zachariah and Patel (1984) concluded that a small number of socioeconomic variables (with the level of education achieved by women at the top) explained 91% of variation in birth rates. Jain in 1985 concluded in a similarly convincing fashion (explaining 90% of variation) that it was due to three major variables: age at marriage, infantile mortality, and use of contraception. Thus, each one could boast of having identified the key variables to Indian fertility, but both lists of variables were completely unrelated! We can understand why: both lists were not independent and the socioeconomic variables identified in the first article affected the variables taken into consideration in the second. Source: Henri Leridon, "Théories de la fécondité : des démographes sous influence ?", Population 2015/2 (Vol. 70), p. 331-373. DOI 10.3917/popu.1502.0331, pp. 336-337.
[2] Henri Leridon, "Théories de la fécondité : des démographes sous influence ?", Population 2015/2 (Vol. 70), p. 331-373. DOI 10.3917/popu.1502.0331, pp. 334, 'Not theories but ideas.'
[3] Under the direction of the School of Higher Studies in Social sciences - Centre of Transdisciplinary Studies (Sociologie, Anthorpologie, Politics).
[4] John Knowles (Lead author), Report, "History of Birth Control Methods," Katharine Dexter McCormick Library and the Education Division of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 2012, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/2613/9611/6275/History_of_BC_Methods.pdf
[5] Note from Sheila Newman 16 September 2017: I originally wrote that the population of the Ancien Regime 'was also stable for a couple of centuries'; I am ammending this to take into account a revised opinion in France, which is that the population may have grown very slowly. Also, after the French Revolution, France's population did grow, of course, despite a lower birth rate, because of the reduction in the death rate, the increase in marriages and the decrease in celibacy. I have not yet adequately researched whether the role of immigration in increasing growth rates was significant during the Revolution. Note that most documents of the Ancien Regime (such as they were) were lost during the French Revolution and estimating population size during that time, and growth, is not very reliable. With regard to the recent ammendment from two or more centuries of population stability (rather non-growth, due to huge demographic crises such as recurrent epidemics, wars and famines (famines were often related to wars and the depredations of soldiers on local food crops) to 'slow growth'; it is difficult to find the origin of this 'recalculation' and one wonders if it was not a political or a population-theory decision where, on a basis that the leap from estimates of 18-20 or 22m French until 1750 seemed too sudden compared to the first modern census of 1801, which found 29,361,000 people in France. The alternative to this would be to re-guess the population of France under the Ancien Regime at around 25 or even 27 million. This would then run up hard against the 18m estimated by Vauban at the end of the 17th century. That estimate was based on poll taxes by household.
Note that the United Nations is made up of many associate members, and this event includes the National Bank as a sponsor. I am publicising it because Katharine Betts will be speaking at it, and she has a good scientific approach to the issues around the concept of an 'aging population'. The notion of a 'demographic transition is also controversial.
United Nations Association of Australia (Victorian Division)
Sustainability Leadership Series
#606060;TEXT-ALIGN:left;LINE-HEIGHT:150%">
Join us at our upcoming seminar, entitled
#0f5bb7" href="http://bit.ly/ageingpop?utm_source=United+Nations+Association+of+Australia+%28Victorian+Division%29&utm_campaign=f6d1760f69-Demographic+Transition+Seminar+Invite+Round%231&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4215701eff-f6d1760f69-" target="_blank">Demographic
Transition: Addressing the economic and social impacts of an ageing population: Is there a silver lining? on Thursday 13th November in Melbourne.
Held in partnership with National Australia Bank as part of our
#0f5bb7" href="http://www.unaavictoria.org.au/education-advocacy/masterclasses/?utm_source=United+Nations+Association+of+Australia+%28Victorian+Division%29&utm_campaign=f6d1760f69-Demographic+Transition+Seminar+Invite+Round%231&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4215701eff-f6d1760f69-" target="_blank">
Sustainability Leadership Series, this seminar seeks to discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with an ageing society.
It will notably cover how the Australian government together with the corporate and civil society sectors are addressing the impacts of our ageing population on workforce participation and productivity, on our financial and welfare system, including on pensions,
and on the provision of aged care and other social services. It will also consider the issue of age discrimination, particularly in the workplace, and how to change business attitudes towards older people.
#0f5bb7">Keynote speaker
#0f5bb7">Guest speakers
#0f5bb7">Facilitator
#606060;TEXT-ALIGN:left;LINE-HEIGHT:150%"> #0f5bb7">Seminar details
Date: Thursday 13 November, 2014
Time: 1.30pm Registration/Networking, 2pm-5pm Seminar
Venue: Hosted by National Australia Bank, The Academy (The Bowl Room), 500 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Registration Fees: Please note all fees are inclusive of GST but do not include Trybooking service fee ($0.30).
Business/Government: $180
Non-profit/Academia: $140
UNAA Members: $140
Student: $50
Registration deadline: 5pm, Tuesday 11 November
(Photo courtesy of Gallery of Beltway Schmoozers and Useless Tits)
Robert Engleman
Know-it-all
World Watch Institute
Washington, CP (City of Players)
Are you vexed by human population overshoot? Is 7 billion too much for you? Well you have come to the wrong place. If you want to find help to reduce our population from 7 billion, forget it, because we have already resigned ourselves to 9 billion. But if you want to settle for Plan B, then call our Help Line.
Call 1-800-LESTERBROWN
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“Hello, welcome to the World Watch Institute Help Line. All of our representatives are currently busy boring people on the Washington cocktail circuit with bland and ineffectual palliatives to overshoot so that the problems they are hired to solve remain unsolved. Please stay on the line because although your call is not important to us, your donation sure as hell is. We accept Money Orders, Visa or Mastercard and but not any criticisms of our underlying assumptions. However, criticisms of the Chinese One-Child-Per-Family Law which each year has saved humanity from an extra 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are welcome.We are insistent that all human rights must be respected except the right of our species to survive this century if survival means violating our current cultural and ethical guidelines. Things are bad, but not that bad. Just because we have increased our population by nearly 250% in the last half century is no reason to believe that emergency measures are required to deal with our emergency. It's incrementalism or bust baby.
To receive our automated reply to all of your inquiries press 1 followed by the number sign....... You have dialed "1", The World Watch Institute Help Line For Those Looking For Politically Correct and Inadequate Answers To Human Overpopulation Whose Solution Can Only Be A By-Product Of A Social Justice Agenda as approved by a panel of Hartmanite Feminists, Eco-Socialists And Monbiotists Who Couldn't Care Less How Many People There Are.....
Hello, I'm Bob Engleman and welcome to the World Watch Institute’s Demography-For-Dummies-In-A-Nutshell line.
Here it is stupid----- all we want you to know. The Conventional Cant which if repeated often enough will convince polite company that nothing you think is dangerous---to them or their funding sources. Are you ready? Now repeat after me:
Educate women, educate women, educate women.......
Voluntary family planning, voluntary family planning, voluntary family planning........
Women everywhere want only two children, women everywhere want only two children, women everywhere will want only two children....
Stopping at two will do, stopping at two will do, stopping at two will do..........
Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary, Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary, Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary........
If Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else, if Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else, if Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else.........
The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact, The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact, The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact............
Prosperity is the best contraceptive, prosperity is the best contraceptive, prosperity is the best contraceptive......
Sustainable development is not an oxymoron, sustainable development is not an oxymoron, sustainable development is not an oxymoron......
We must find a way to feed 9 billion, We must find a way to feed 9 billion, We must find a way to feed 9 billion......
The birth rate is dropping, The birth rate is dropping, The birth rate is dropping.....
Forget demographic momentum, forget demographic momentum, forget demographic momentum......
2 billion is sustainable, 2 billion is sustainable, 2 billion is sustainable.......And we can take our sweet time in getting there.......And we can take our sweet time in getting there....And we can take our sweet time in getting there......
Don't criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach......Don't criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach.....Don't Criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach........Spare your criticisms for the enemy......Spare your criticisms for the enemy.......Spare your criticisms for the enemy...
For further information, contact our foundation grant-makers who will supply you with all the politically correct solutions that we advocate to satisfy their stipulations.
PS If your concerns relate to climate change, please be advised that Bill McKibben can no longer be reached at 1-800-350.ORG . His new number is now 1-800-400.ORG because that was the only politically realistic number that he could negotiate at the present time. Note, he will not talk about over-population because it is irrelevant---all we need to do is find a way to "de-carbonize" an economy of 9-15 billion people. Appeals can be made to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at 1-800-1SKY350.ORG
If you find the forgoing offensive and unfair, then please phone in your complaint to:
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Hello, you have reached the 1-800--GETSERIOUS line. BTW, WTF are you playing at? This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill. We are facing the end of our civilization and/or human extinction---get it? The politically possible is not the ecologically necessary. So make the necessary possible---- or get off the stage. Are you in it for the game---or the result? Then go with the science and let the political chips fall where they may. EFA doesn't tell half the story. It is not about renewables, it is about NON-renewables. Forget for a moment about bio-capacity and start thinking about carrying capacity, the precarious carrying capacity of a global industrial civilization enabled by a diminishing supply of fossil fuels, metals and minerals. Start thinking about how we shrink the population fast enough so that the per capita share of this shrinking resource base does not become so low as to trigger civil massive unrest and global conflict. Can't be done? Fine. Then stop shopping your green delusions and half-measures, shut up and let logic and hard numbers do the talking.
The Emperor Julian codified the land-tenure laws which Napoleon later consolidated. The substitution of the Napoleonic code for the British inheritance system could help overpopulation and poverty.
July 11 was World Population Day, marking the day in 1987 when the world’s population passed five billion. This year’s theme in the UN is ‘Fight Poverty: Educate Girls.’
The third world countries that have natural increase problems began by their steady-state communities being disorganised through massive immigration - then called colonisation, now called industrialisation. The problems began with loss of land-tenure as entire peoples were disorganised and disoriented by having their traditional land removed from their control. Africa and India, for instance, had many stable populations for centuries, as testified by their high biodiversity and healthy natural systems at time of colonisation. The degradation of their natural systems has accompanied the destabilising of their human social organisation and overpopulation.
It was not until the 18th and 19th Century, with the imposition of the English political systems that these populations blew out. Polynesia, micronesia and Australia, colonised later, are succumbing later to the same failure of practical democracy.
The people of the original steady state societies lost their land to the colonisers and were encouraged to become wage-earners instead of self-sufficient. The new economy was initially agricultural and then manufacturing. Large landless families benefited both agriculturalists and manufacturers. Those without land were totally dependent on wages for their labour to survive and could not opt out of the labour market. Thus, people who for thousands of years had been self-sufficient and free, became servants.
Like the Americas and Canada, Australia is still being 'colonised'. The landless people who were forced to come here or who came voluntarily and displaced the aboriginal population are now losing their own access to land here, just like the Aboriginals. At the same time women here are being conned into having more children. It is becoming harder to get a decent education as well.
There is every reason to anticipate that this difficulty will increase.
Once the rot has set in, next thing to go are effective child labour laws. This is because if there is no ban enforced on children labouring, then large families are preferred to educated wives. Once children are a major source of income, mass-education withers away.
Here are some explanations for changes in human fertility since the beginning of agriculture.
In countries where effective labour laws prohibit the employment of children, those children become costly rather than income-beneficial.[ii] In those countries where working for wages is the main option for survival for many but where child labour is prohibited, then people who rely mainly or uniquely on wages will have fewer children.
Similarly, a woman who has education will be more valuable as an income-earner than as a child-producing wife in a society that prohibits child-labour. Where women earn less than men for doing the same job, in a society which needs skilled workers and prohibits child-labour, then this will be a disincentive for taking such women out of the workforce to have children. It will also be an obstacle to marriage because men's capacity to find work will be undermined by the cheaper but still skilled labour of women. In societies where monogamous marriage is the model for raising children, there are implications for marriage frequency. With children a high cost, only men with high incomes will be able to afford to take a wife out of the workforce to nurture children.
In countries where men can own and inherit land, but women cannot, (England from the 12th century until the 1920s) then lack of land is an incentive for women to marry for material survival, but women who can own land and earn a salary may experience their ability to earn as a disincentive to marriage due to the status and power of running their own lives.
A disincentive also operates in countries where, in divorce, either partner may acquire rights to the assets that the other brought to the marriage.
Some countries have facilitated the ability of women to work, raise and educate children outside marriage -- e.g. France. To this should be added the fact that French women also benefit from equal inheritance rights to men.
Although French women only recently (in the 1970s) regained the right to manage their affairs, this right, coupled with the government's duty to house, educate and assure an income to its citizens, enhances women's security and independence.
France also, through its inheritance system, makes French women more likely to inherit wealth than British women and many British men, who had almost no land inheritance rights until primogeniture was revoked in 1926.[iii] Even though all children may now inherit in societies based on British law, because there is no legal requirement that they inherit, there is still a profound tendency to disinherit children in those societies, through second marriages or due to their being the product of casual union, or based on ideology or a whim. (I often think of how the very rich Australian, Reg Ansett, disinherited his son, Bob, apparently excusing the inexcusable with an ideology that everyone should make their own way in the world, failing to take into account that different generations have very different prospects according to resource depletion and other changes.)
The legally enforceable inheritance rights of any French child, legitimate, illegitimate, issue of first or subsequent marriages is almost certainly a major factor in the lesser disparities between rich and poor in France and those other countries in Europe which benefited from the Napoleonic Code (a Roman law based system). It is noteworthy that Pacific Islands which have inherited the French system do not have the same rates of overpopulation, homelessness and economic poverty as the ones that were colonised with the English system. (Neither do those in Japanese waters, with the exception of those which passed into US ownership after the Second World War. The Japanese inheritance system also preserves land in families.)
Unfortunately the French situation of equity will be affected by changes to the Napoleonic Code introduced by President Sarkozi in 2008. Now it becomes possible for a spouse to make a serious claim on part of a deceased's estate where that estate previously went entirely to blood relatives.
The recent ability of technological societies to prove paternity is a new factor that could be exploited to access additional income for children whose mothers might otherwise be their sole providers. This could act to increase the fertility rate, but men might become more careful about impregnating women under these new circumstances.
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[i] Excerpt from my book in progress below on this subject.
[ii] Doepke, M., Growth and Fertility in the Long Run, Mimeo, University of Chicago, 2000, available in reduced form in Doepke, M. "Accounting for Fertility Decline During the Transition to Growth", Journal of Economic Growth, 9(3), 347-383, September 2004. The speed of the fertility transition depends on policies that affect the opportunity cost of education, namely education subsidies and child-labor restrictions. Doepke considered the case of two countries that started to grow at roughly the same time, but which had experienced very different government policies: (South) Korea and Brazil. Korea had a strong public education system, and child-labor restrictions were strictly enforced, while Brazil had an ineffective public education system, with little systematic enforcement of child labour restrictions. Doepke found, as his model predicted, that the fertility decline associated with development proceeded much faster in Korea than in Brazil.
[iii] The rule of primogeniture in England was not changed until the Administration of Estates Act of 1926.
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