POPULATION, SOCIETY, AND DEVELOPMENT INTS 4465

http://blackboard.du.edu/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_104127_1

CLASS SESSION TUESDAY 2-5PM, BCH 220

BLACKBOARD http://blackboard.du.edu/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_117283_1
INSTRUCTOR RANDALL KUHN
rkuhn@du.edu / 303.871.2061 / BCH 208D
OFFICE HOURS TUESDAY / THURSDAY 12-2, OR BY APPOINTMENT

Objectives and Overview

Population issues are the Swiss Army Knife of the foreign policy toolkit: in a pinch, they can be
handy for almost any purpose. If someone utters the sad cliché “Demography is destiny”, you can
be sure of three things: they know very little about the science or substance of demography, they
do not really believe that demography is destiny, and they have some hidden agenda. This course
will subvert the raw manipulation of demographic factoids with a critical understanding of the
moderate but significant role of population in determining the fates of our planet and society. In
the process, we may also gain a clearer picture of the ideology behind the clichés, and their often
dreadful consequences for human well-being.

Unfortunately, these goals demand that we first build a basic understanding of the science of
demography. As a methodology, demography is the study of vital events – birth, death, marriage,
and migration – and their effect on the size and composition of populations. The first five weeks
will cover demographic measurement and change. We will also attempt to connect the concept of
population composition (particularly in terms of age) to the production, consumption, and
exchange of resources and power within and between populations. In the closing weeks we will
apply our demographic understanding to a range of social problems including development,
environmental degradation, and conflict. Throughout the course we will explore the role of
identity and solidarity in shaping our supposed demographic realities, and how even our most
fixed categories are constantly being reshaped.

NB: I will be out of the country during Week 10. We will discuss ways to make up this time during
the first class session.

Grading
Take home Final Exam (40%): Because the class is mostly conceptual in nature, it is essential that
you be tested on your core understanding of demographic concepts. You will receive a take-home
final examination at the end of the final class, November 10. You will answer three essay
questions (out of a total of five options). Your answers will need to be thoughtful, concise, and
informed by the course readings and lectures. The exam must be returned by Friday November
13, 5pm. The exam should take about 10 hours of your time.

Problem sets (20%): Because demography is a numerical science, we must build upon a basic
understanding of demographic measures and methods. You will receive four problem sets during
the course. Each will account for 5% of your grade.
Case Study Presentation (20%): Each student must lead one of the weekly case study discussions.
This will include an organized, prepared presentation (power point optional) on the issue. The
presentation should encompass the nature of the question; any theoretical, ideological, or
methodological debates on the issue; and the relevance of the issue for policy or international
affairs. The presentation must relate the case study back to all relevant background reading
materials from the current or previous weeks. Finally, your presentation must motivate a class
discussion of the issue. Specifically, you should take the general case study questions found with
the readings and refine or reshape them around a specific set of policy, political, or diplomatic
questions. You will be graded on the relevance, substance, and creativity of your presentation.

Your presentations should last between 10 and 20 minutes.

(Graduate Only) Case Study Paper (20%): Case study leaders will be asked to follow up on the
case study discussion with a brief paper on the same issue. These papers should be based on your
original presentation, but would incorporate additional issues raised in the discussion, suggestions
from your professor, and background reading materials and lectures for all subsequent weeks.
This assignment will require attention to detail and discussion. You will be graded not only on
overall quality of presentation but on your ability to address concerns raised in the discussion and
in future weeks. I hope this will be a living chronicle of your learning experience.

NB: Because case studies take place throughout the quarter, the difficulty of grading for the case
study presentation and followup paper will slide based on the timing of your case study
discussion. In other words, if your case study occurs early in the quarter, you will be held to a
lower standard for your presentation but a higher standard for your paper. If your case comes
later, you will have a higher standard for your presentation but a lower standard for your paper.

Your paper should be about 6 pages unless you receive prior consent to do something longer.

Course Materials
All readings are available electronically in one form or another. Readings are available through
direct WWW links from the on-line syllabus (you must be on the Virtual Private Network). If you
bring your thumb drive to the first class I will give you a soft copy of every reading. You will be
expected to complete all readings listed on the syllabus including case studies.

Each week you will be asked to complete all of the general background readings as well as the key
papers for the case study (those with a * before the references). Methodological background will be
provided in the lectures and in the following primer. In the schedule I refer to this as Haupt.

Technical Reference: Haupt, Arthur and Thomas T. Kane. 2004. Population Handbook, 5th edition.
Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau.

Those searching for accelerated methods grounding should look to the following book

Preston, Samuel H., Patrick Heuveline, and Michel Guillot. 2001. Demography: Measuring and
Modeling Population Processes. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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September 15: Does Population Matter?

Technical Reference: Haupt, Chapters 1- 2.

Malthus, Thomas. 1798. An essay on the principle of population. Chapters 1-2. Reproduced by
Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 11 pages.

Engels, Frederick. 1844. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. First appeared in Deutsch
Französische Jahrbücher. Translated by Martin Milligan for the Collected Works. Transcribed by
director@marx.org (February 1996). Excerpted by Prof. Phillip Cohen, UC-Irvine. 6 pages.

Cohen, Joel. 2003. Human population: The next half century. Science 302:5648, 1172-1175

United Nations. 1999. The World at Six Billion. UN Population Division, UN Secretariat. Scan
pages 1-22 to familiarize yourself with population measures.

September 22: Population Size and Growth

Hand out problem set #1, due September 29.

Technical Reference: Haupt, Chapter 12.

Ehrlich, Paul R. and John P. Holdren. 1971. Impact of Population Growth. Science 171: 1212-1217.

Johnson, D. Gale. 2000. Population, Food, and Knowledge. The American Economic Review
90(1): 1-14.

Cohen, Joel E. 1997. Population, Economics, Environment and Culture: An Introduction to Human
Carrying Capacity. The Journal of Applied Ecology 34(6): 1325-1333.

Sen, Amartya. 2003. Population: Delusion and Reality. Asian Affairs On-Line., 18 pages.

September 29: Fertility and Reproduction

Problem Set #1 due. Hand out problem set #2, due October 6.

Technical Reference: Haupt, Chapters 3.

Mason, Karen Oppenheim. 1997. Explaining Fertility Transitions. Demography 34(4): 443-454.

Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2004. Contradictions in Nigeria’s Fertility Transition: The Burdens and
Benefits of Having People. Population and Development Review 30(2): 221-238.

Case Study: The State and Family Planning

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October 6: Mortality and Longevity

Problem Set #2 due. Hand out problem set #3, due October 13.

Technical Reference: Haupt, Chapters 5.

Caldwell, John C. 2001. Demographers and the Study of Mortality: Scope, Perspectives, and
Theory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 954: 19-34.

Sen, Amartya. 1998. Mortality as an Indicator of Economic Success and Failure. The Economic
Journal 108(446): 1-25.

McMichael, Anthony J, Martin McKee, Vladimir Shkolnikov, Tapani Valkonen. 2004. Mortality
Trends and Setbacks: Global Convergence—or Divergence? Lancet 363: 1155-1159.

Case Study: The Longevity Debate

October 13: Migration, Urbanization, and Globalization

Problem Set #3 due

Technical Reference: Haupt, Chapter 8, 11.

Massey, Douglas S. 1999. International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: The
Role of the State. Population and Development Review 25(2): 303-322.

Castles, Stephen. 2003. The International Politics of Forced Migration. Development 46(3): 11-20.

Mackenzie, Peter. 2002. Strangers in the City: The Hukou and Urban Citizenship in China. Journal
of International Affairs 56(1): 305-319.

Case Study: Immigration in the United States

October 20: Population, Poverty, and Development

Hand out problem set #4, due November 3

Simon. Julian L. 1989. On Aggregate Empirical Studies Relating Population Variables to Economic
Development. Population and Development Review 15(2): 323-332.

Ahlburg, Dennis A. 1998. Julian Simon and the Population Growth Debate. Population and
Development Review 24(2): 317-327.

Bloom, David E., David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla. 2003. The Demographic Dividend: A New
Perspective on the Economic Consequences of Population Change, Chapters 1-2, Page 1-44 (Note: the pdf
file contains the entire monograph).

Case Study: HIV/AIDS in Africa

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October 27: Population and Society

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2006. What's behind Ireland's economic miracle—and G.M.'s financial
crisis? The New Yorker August 28, 2006, 9 pages.

Hesketh, Therese and Zhu Wei Xing. 2006. Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and
consequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(36): 13271-13275.

Prewitt, Kenneth. 2000. The U.S. Decennial census: Political Questions, Scientific Answers.
Population and Development Review, 26(1): 1-16.

DeVotta, Neil. 2002. Demography and Communalism in India. Journal of International Affairs 56(1):
53-70.

Hollinger, David A. 2006. From Identity to Solidarity. Daedalus 135(4): 23-31.

Case Study: Aging in Developed Nations

November 3: Population, Affluence, and Environment

Problem set #4 due

Pebley, Anne. 1998. “Demography and Environment,” Demography, 35:377-389.

Harte, John. 2007. Human population as a dynamic factor in environmental degradation.

Population & Environment 28(4-5): 223-236.

Curran, Sara, Anuradha Kumar, Wolfgang Lutz, and Meryl Williams. 2002. Interactions between
Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Human Population Systems: Perspectives on How
Consumption Mediates this Interaction. Ambio 31(4): 264-268.

Case Study: Population and Climate Change

November 10: Population, Security, and Conflict

Krebs, Ronald R. and Jack S. Levy. 2001. Demographic Change and the Sources of International
Conflict. In Myron Weiner and Sharon Stanton Russell, eds., Demography and National Security.
Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 2001. Pp. 62-105.

Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. 1994. Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from
Cases. International Security 19(1): 5-40.

Hartmann, Betsy. 1998. Population, environment and security: a new trinity. Environment and
Urbanization 10(2): 113-128.

Bookman, Milica Z. 2002. Demographic Engineering and The Struggle for Power. Journal of
International Affairs 56(1): 25-51.

Case Study: Israel/Palestine Conflict

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Case Studies
1) Family Planning Policies

McNicoll, Geoffrey. 2001. Government and Fertility in Transitional and Post-Transitional Societies.
Population and Development Review, 27(Supplement):129-159.

Connelly, Matthew. 2006. Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period
Population and Development Review 32 (4), 629–667.

Greenhalgh, Susan. 2003. Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child Policy.
Population and Development Review 29 (2): 163–196.

McDonald, Peter. 2006. Low fertility and the state: the efficacy of policy. Population and
Development Review 32(3): 485-510.

2) The Longevity Debate

Carnes, Bruce A., S. Jay Olshansky. 2007. A Realist View of Aging, Mortality, and Future
Longevity. Population and Development Review 33 (2), 367–381.

Vaupel, James W. and Kristin G. v. Kistowski. 2005. Broken Limits to Life Expectancy. Ageing
Horizons 3: 6-13.

Aaron, Henry J. 2006. Longer Life Spans: Boon or Burden. Daedalus 135(1): 9-19.

3) Immigration in the United States

Martin, Philip. 2003. Mexico-U.S. Migration. Institute for International Economics, Washington,
D.C.

Huntington, Samuel. 2004. The Hispanic Challenge. Foreign Policy 141: 30-45.

Hirschman Charles. 2005. Immigration and the American Century. Demography 205(42): 595-620.

Frey, William H. 1996. Immigration, Domestic Migration, and Demographic Balkanization in

America: New Evidence for the 1990s. Population and Development Review 22(4): 741-763.

4) HIV/AIDS in Africa

Epstein, Brynn G. 2004. The Demographic Impact of HIV/AIDS. In The macroeconomics of

HIV/AIDS, ed. M. Haacker. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund.

de Waal, Alex. 2003. Why the HIV/AIDS Pandemic is a Structural Threat to Africa's Governance
and Economic Development. Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 27(2.): 6-24.

Rosen, Sydney, Jonathan Simon, Jeffrey R. Vincent, William MacLeod, Matthew Fox and
Donald M. Thea. 2003. AIDS is Your Business. Harvard Business Review 81(2): 80-87.

Hunter, Lori. 2007. HIV/AIDS and the Natural Environment. Population Reference Bureau.

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Young, Alwyn. 2005. The Gift of the Dying: The Tragedy of AIDS and the Welfare of Future
African Generations. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(2): 423–466.

5) Aging and Shrinking in Developed Nations

Demeny, P. 2003. Population policy dilemmas in Europe at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century.
Population and Development Review 29(1): 1-28.

Preston, Samuel. 1984. Children and the Elderly in the U.S. Scientific American 251(6): 44-49.

Peterson, Peter. 1996. Will America Grow Up Before it Grows Old? The Atlantic Monthly 277(5).

F. Landis MacKellar. 2000. The predicament of population aging: A review essay. Population and
Development Review, 26(2):365–397.

The Economist. 2007. Japan’s Changing Demography: Cloud, or Silver Linings.

The Economist. 2002. Half a Billion Americans.

6) Climate change

Reviews of The Skeptical Environmentalist (by Bjorn Lomborg). By Stephen Schneider, John P.
Holdren, John Bongaarts, and Thomas Lovejoy. Scientific American January 2002.

Meyerson, Frederick A. B. 1998. Population, Carbon Emmissions, and Global Warming: The
Forgotten Relationship at Kyoto. Population and Development Review 24(1): 115-130.

de Sa, Paul. 1998. Population, Carbon Emissions, and Global Warming: Comment. Population and
Development Review 24(4): 797-803.

Meyerson, Frederick A. B. 1998. Toward a Per Capita-Based Climate Treaty: Reply. Population and
Development Review 24(4): 804-810.

Wilbanks, Thomas J. and Robert W. Kates. 1999. Global Change in Local Places: How Scale
Matters. Climatic Change 43(3): 601-628.

Shi, Anqing. 2003. The impact of population pressure on global carbon dioxide emissions, 1975–
1996: evidence from pooled cross-country data. Ecological Economics 44(1): 29-42

7) Israel/Palestine Conflict

Toft, Monica Duffy. 2002. Differential Demographic Growth in Multinational States: Israel's Two-
Front War. Journal of International Affairs 56(1): 69-92.

Orenstein, Daniel E. 2004. Population Growth and Environmental Impact: Ideology and Academic
Discourse in Israel. Population & Environment 26(1): 41-60.

Spyer, Jonathan. 2004. Israel's demographic timebomb. The Guardian (UK).

Levy, Gideon. 2007. The threat of the 'demographic threat'. Ha’aretz.