Status Anxiety and Demographic Contraction of Privileged Populations

Bibliographic Data

ID4989645
AuthorsRyan Johansson, S Ryan Johansson (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume13
Issue3
Pages439
Publication date1987-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePopulation and Development Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0098-7921 • E-ISSN: 1728-4457
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1973134
OpenAlexW3147365412
LanguageEN
Citations received41

In a world numerically dominated by countries whose demographic problems involve fertility that greatly exceeds replacement, theoretical treatments of the opposite condition have not attracted the attention they deserve.' Social scientists find it easy to document the specific demographic mechanisms that by the 1980s have led to below-replacement fertility in nearly all developed countries. But while it is generally agreed that involuntary sterility or subfecundity is not a major cause of the phenomenon, no consensus has emerged regarding the social and economic forces that account for voluntary below-replacement reproduction.2 Moreover, many social scientists seem to assume that below-replacement fertility is unique to the modem era-an epiphenomenon produced by the unprecedentedly urbanized, industrialized, literate, and socially liberated character of twentieth century populations living in highly intrusive welfare states. 3 This article questions this ahistorical orientation to conceptualization and theory by arguing that the impending demographic contraction of most European populations is simply the latest illustration, this time on a mass scale, of the fact that privileged populations whose member families are committed to the preservation of their relative status have a chronic tendency toward demographic contraction. The evidence for this claim rests on a reanalysis of the data long available for some of Europe's most privileged subpopulations over the past four centuries, all of which tended to resist the recruitment of newcomers and to decrease in size over the long run.4 In the case of traditional European privileged populations, their slow demographic decay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place even though patterns of fecundity and survival to adulthood gave them the potential for rapid population growth. But this potential was never realized because of

Anxiety · Contraction (grammar) · Demographic economics · Economics · Psychiatry · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Psychology

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