John RennieShortDemography and the Making of the Modern World: Public Policies and Social ForcesNewcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2024. 171 pp.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In Demography and the Making of the Modern World, John Rennie Short aims to fill a gap between “on the one hand, demographers who like numbers but are uncomfortable with broader social and cultural theorising and, on the other, social and cultural theorists who tend to be uncomfortable with numbers and public policy analysts who tend to focus too little attention on demographic issues” (p.2). The book is framed as drawing on demographic research but without focusing on statistical modeling. Instead, the emphasis is on the social, economic and political implications of demographic trends, and the potential mediating role of public policy. The author aims to act as a conduit between professional demography and a wider audience to “reveal the demographic forces that shape our modern world” (p.1). The text is clearly structured, beginning with an outline of the demographic transition model before describing the experience of transition in industrial Europe. A series of chapters follows speaking to changing population size and structure: “The Growing Population,” “The Bulging Population,” “The Shrinking Population,” and so forth, approaching demographic development thematically rather than chronologically. The thematic approach allows the author to weave between different layers and levels in the interface between demography and wider social forces, keeping the narrative grounded on the implications for cultural, social and political change as well as assessing the efficacy of public policies. For example, in “The Bulging Population,” the discussion ranges from the economic potential of demographic dividends to the risks of youth bulges for social unrest and security, and to the implications of gendered population bulges for gender relations, with specific examples ranging from Europe and the United States to the Middle East and North Africa to Eastern Asia. The author is successful in using this example-led approach to emphasize the underpinning relevance of demography to wider social change and arguing for the fuller integration of population into the broader social and policy sciences. In the penultimate chapter, the author tackles “Demographic Narratives and Moral Panics,” building on the groundwork in earlier chapters to show how population anxieties grow and are politicized. While such panics are ostensibly underpinned by demographic pressures, the author shows that time and again real crunch points arise from the social and policy choices we make, not the demography itself: “The moral panic about ageing”—for example—“turns out to be less an unavoidable demographic crisis than an opportunity to rethink income redistribution and taxation policies” (p. 139). Likewise, anxieties about changing family values are less about changing demographic realities, and more about prevailing “social issues and political attitudes” (p. 144) such as ongoing legal discrimination against illegitimacy (p. 141). The author plays with the “demography is destiny” precept throughout the book, demonstrating the very real importance of population change, but showing we have powerful and potentially empowering policy choices. The book is engagingly written, with journalistic sleights to show the impacts of demography for individual people (often based on media reports), before zooming out to indicate broader cultural or economic implications and shifting between specific examples from different contexts. The examples are careful and generally balanced, although there is somewhat more focus on the United States, Europe, and Asia, than on other parts of the world, despite the acknowledgement of Africa as “demographically surging” (p. 159). Space given to discussion of climate and environmental change and its interactions with population is surprisingly sparse, especially given the forward-looking nature of the closing chapters. Occasionally, the thematic organization leads (necessarily) to repetition: the impact of age-structural change on economic growth needs to be tackled in the chapter on shrinking populations as well as that on ageing and in the section of the final chapter on global political economy too. The repetition means that chapters can be read as standalone entities, each ending with an executive summary and suggested readings. A small issue in an otherwise well-formatted book is that the figures have been imported in grayscale from open-source platforms and media repositories where the originals are in color, rendering legends sometimes hard to follow and fonts small (e.g., Figure 2.1, p.17; population pyramids in Chapter 5). This is a short, accessible and balanced book. Refreshingly, it has no driving agenda beyond demonstrating the importance of population trends, and how they can be influenced, mitigated, and exploited through the power of our collective actions. It fulfils its remit of offering social science students and policymakers a clear introduction to key intersections between population change and public policy.
DOI: 10.1111/padr.12699
Author: Sarah Walters
Institution: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405317217