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Population and Public Policy: Essays in Honor of Paul Demeny

2015; Springer Nature; Volume: 42; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.25336/p6161r

1927-629X

Susan A. McDaniel,

Employment and Welfare Studies

The essays in this edited book, a supplement of the journal Population and Development Review, represent a peer-reviewed selection from a large number of essays on the theme of population and public policy.Although the title hints that this may be a festschrift, it is not.The essays fall loosely into Paul Demeny's wide-ranging intellectual interests, but he and his work per se are not the focus here.Each of the essays is a state-of-the-art article that could fit well into the pages of the Population and Development Review.And each focuses, albeit broadly, on issues and challenges of population and public policy.The book opens with a substantive introductory reflection by Geoffrey McNicoll on "post-transition demography," where he builds a richly textured stage for the chapters that follow.His reflective essay goes far beyond his essay's title, much like this volume itself.McNicoll fruitfully trolls the intellectual past, including works by John Maynard Keynes and Oswald Spengler, as well as the future of generational and societal quality and environmental challenges.He presents an intricate tapestry that includes population but goes far deeper into social and economic contexts than demographers typically do.For instance, he organizes his chapter into four themes: generational succession, quality of society and life, mobility both social and geographic, and identity.This is a long way from the simple demographic focus on fertility, mortality, and migration.In the end, he quotes Demeny's 1986 "Presidential Address to the Population Assocation of America," which asks scholars, particularly demographers, to lift our ambitions above the humdrum to envision the kind of society we would like to be part of, and then to imagine how a demographic constitution would fit into it.A tall order indeed, but seemingly more worthy than perpetual handwringing about demographic abundance or decline that seem not amenable to policy levers.The book is then organized into six sections: Intergenerational relations; Low fertility, population aging and the body politic; Policy and programs in China; Policy and programs in Africa; Environment, technology and wealth; and Population theory and measurement.Each of the twenty chapters following the McNicoll introduction-many by well established and respected scholars from different disciplines and different parts of the world, offers new thought-provoking insights.For example, the two chapters in the intergenerational relations section (by Ronald Lee and by Nancy Folbre and Douglas Wolf) explore intergenerational transfers (IGTs) and the intergenerational welfare state, respectively.Lee takes us on a tour of the many ways IGTs have been fundamental to societies, and how population aging, a low fertility regime, and the welfare state pose challenges for IGTs.Folbre and Wolf look at the US "partial" (their term) welfare state, asking how it came to involve many IGTs, how public/private IGTs interact, and what would happen if public IGTs were privatized.They conclude that significantly more conceptual work needs to be undertaken before a framework of intergenerational equity can be called into play-with which this reviewer fully concurs (see McDaniel 2004McDaniel , 2008)).Both of these