The Children of Eve: Population and Well-being in History by Louis P. Cain and Donald G. Paterson (review)

This book is intended to ease novices into the study of demography. It marks the extension of cliometrics, a term coined in 1960 to describe the application of rigorous economic analysis to long-term historical phenomena, to the fundamentals of demographic change.¹ The methods of cliometrics include the mathematical formulation of economic theory and its application to econometric methods. These indicators, which derive from the English- and French-language economic literature, are expressed at the national level. The bulk of the data analyzed relates to Britain, France, Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Norway.

The book explores the three major components of demographic analysis—mortality, fertility, and migration—and undertakes a less formal analysis of family size and body size. It also discusses demographic catastrophes, which it treats as exogenous to economic causality. It starts with the great demographic transition from regimes of high mortality and high fertility to regimes of low mortality and low fertility, which began in developed nations at the time of the Industrial Revolution and still continues in less-developed ones. Following contemporary practice, it divides the demographic transition into a mortality transition and a fertility transition.

On the basis of crude death rates, Cain and Paterson argue that the mortality transition occurred between 1850 and 1950 in developed countries (coincident with a substantial rise of real earnings in Britain) and that it began in rural areas before gradually spreading to large urban centers. After about 1945, urban areas became healthier than rural ones because of their superior medical and sanitary facilities. The fertility transition, based on crude birth rates, occurred slightly earlier—from around 1775 until 1930 in France, Britain, and Québec; from 1825 until 1950 in the United States (for both black and white populations); and from 1890 until 1930 in Sweden and Norway.

Cain and Paterson divide migration to these developed countries between long-distance travel and rural-urban relocation. The earliest long-distance migration that they discuss is the transport of black slaves from Africa to the Western Hemisphere between 1650 and 1800, and that of white indentured laborers from England to the American colonies during the late seventeenth century. Later, long-distance moves included those by British emigrants to the United States and the white dominions of the British Empire, which peaked between 1843 and 1910, and those by three other groups of European emigrants from Scandinavia (1851 to 1910), Germany (1871 to 1890), and Austria, Poland, and Russia (also 1871 to 1910). Cain and Paterson's treatment of rural-urban migration is largely limited to Britain (1750 to 1900). In the United States, they distinguish between white (1790 to 1990) and black (1880 to1990) migration to the cities. The proportion of black Americans living in U.S. cities began to exceed that of white Americans in 1955.

The authors report that family size in the United States fell from at least five members in 1850 to as little as one member in 1990. This change was accelerated by the increased incidence of divorce in the United States (and Britain) between 1960 and 1990. The population of developed countries also experienced unprecedented increases in height between 1950 and 1974 and in body mass index between 1976 and 2000.

Cain and Paterson consider catastrophes as exogenous to economics. They note four large epidemics—the bubonic plague between 1300 and 1700; the heavy mortality of Native Americans between 1492 and 1892, which they do not identify epidemiologically; the Spanish influenza of 1918/19; and the emergence of aids between 1990 and 2008. They argue that bubonic plague, by eliminating large numbers of Europeans during the fourteenth century, led to an increase in real wages in urban areas. In this case, demography influenced economics rather than vice versa.

Not unlike Fogel, Cain and Patterson write in the optative mood, viewing the operations of macroeconomic forces as...