Choice of Fertility and Population Pressure in Traditional Rural Societies

Abstract

Since Malthus’s “Essay on Population” (1798) classical economics regarded the theory of population as an integral part of political economy. Neoclassical economics maintained the interest in the question of population but, under the influence of utilitarianism, gave it a somewhat different direction. Level and growth of population took on more and more the character of exogenous variables which influence the outcome of the economic process but are no longer explained by means of the same analytical apparatus that was employed to understand the behavior of the endogenous economic variables. If the level or growth of population was considered the subject of rational choice, it was in the context of normative analysis where the choices are made by a fictitious benevolent dictator but not by the people themselves (see, e. g., Lane, 1977). In the non-normative long-run equilibrium models of neoclassical growth theory population was just assumed, with some remarkable exceptions (e. g., Meade, 1968), to grow at a constant exogenously given rate. Moreover, growth theorists did not, as demographers have been used to, pay attention to the different age cohorts of which the total population is made up. Mainly two developments in economic theory changed the picture completely: One was the explicit introduction of age cohorts or overlapping generations into models of long-run economic equilibrium by Samuelson (1958) which, though still treating population growth as an exogenous variable, revolutionized the analysis of intertemporal equilibria of economies with an infinite time horizon made up of finitely lived individual agents.