In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Population and Poverty A Capitalist Trap? Global fertility decline has brought with it an idealization of the Western bourgeois family type,1 or what has been dubbed as “the early stopping, gender-balanced, child-centered nuclear family.”2 While the large family is seen as a throwback to an era marked by high death rates and poverty, the small family is heralded as a modern historical watershed. The decline of mortality and fertility across various parts of the globe over the last century and a half is widely regarded as one of the most important social transformations in human history. This process, referred to as the demographic transition, is believed to consist of three major phases: pretransition (a historical period of equilibrium marked by high mortality and high fertility), transition (a period of destabilization in mortality and fertility rates as mortality declines and fertility remains high), and post-transition (a period of near equilibrium in which fertility declines, initiating a low-mortality and low-fertility regime). The first wave of modern demographic transitions (as well as industrialization and urbanization) began in Europe and some parts of North America in the early eighteenth century.3 In most of Europe, mortality began to decline in 1800,4 and the fertility transition largely occurred between 1870 and 1960.5 Between World War II and the early 1960s, there appeared to be stability on the world demographic scene, with sharp and wide divisions between rich and poor countries.6 An important shift in the theoretical language used to describe the widening demographic distinctions between rich and poor countries also began at this time. As early as the eighteenth century, the interests of poor colonized people were not given much weight, except as subject peoples who needed to be brought to the same level of “civilization” as “superior” and more “evolved” Europeans. The responsibility for “civilizing,” “educating” and subduing “backward” natives the world over was glossed as “white man’s burden”—an idea premised on European racial superiority and power.7 Fertile Bonds 118 After World War II, colonial language and institutions were modified somewhat. Foreign “aid” was ushered in with Harry Truman’s Point Four Program. The terms “developed” and “underdeveloped” replaced “civilized” and “uncivilized,” respectively. The phrase “the Third World”—coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in the wake of the cold war—drew attention to the struggle of capitalist countries in the West to control newly independent countries in the global South. A cold-war binary coexisted with Sauvy’s tripartite scheme: the capitalist West, the communist bloc, and the Third World. The newly designated phrase “the Third World” was substituted for “savage peoples.”8 Today, the United Nations, one of the many agencies created in the aftermath of World War II, employs a similar classification scheme, distinguishing between “more developed,” “less developed,” and “least developed” countries. Not surprisingly, it is the “less” and “least developed” countries today that conform least to demographic transition theory’s projections of mortality reductions. Several countries have experienced a reversal in life-expectancy gains predicted by the demographictransition model. In sub-Saharan Africa, mortality actually rose in the 1990s due to HIV/AIDS, which has become the main cause of death. Countries in Eastern Europe and former territories of the Soviet Union have also experienced a decline in life expectancy over the past three decades, even prior to undergoing the arduous transition to a market economy.9 The classic demographic-transition model predicts that a decline in the death rate precedes a drop in the birth rate. Although the timing and pace of fertility decline varies considerably across countries and regions, there were clear-cut divisions between rich and poor countries in the 1960s. The total-period fertility rate (TPFR) of “more developed” countries was 2.7, while that of “less developed” countries was 6.0. Most variation was along a Northern-Southern Hemisphere trajectory. Japan and parts of Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe had a TPFR of less than 2.5. Only a few Southern Hemisphere countries of European descent (Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay) had moderately high fertility, with TPFRs from 2.5 to 4. However, the large majority of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia maintained very high levels of fertility (above 6.5).10 The first wave of demographic transition was gradual and involved a few hundred million people. By 1990–95, about three decades later, a dramatic change had occurred— fertility transition became a global phenomenon. The second...

Share