Abstract
The Widening of human capital—expansion and contraction are essentially driven by demographic forces, modified by factors of Deepening of human capital (a more familiar concept)—has not received the attention it deserves. Starting with the modest aim of exploring this, my paper came to the conclusion that this was insufficient. On reflection, the issue of widening of human capital opens up the peopling and development dimensions of the leading crises facing humanity: above all climate change. But, there are others—notably, social inequality, including down-stream effects such as inter-country and inter-continental migration, which is amenable to policy interventions. Another is the problem of age-structural shifts, which, by contrast, are inexorable and need management, but cannot be altered in direction. Suffice to say that they involve far more than structural ageing (%’s at older ages), the one dimension that has captured popular and media attention. In reality the causes and effects of structural ageing are misunderstood, and almost no attention paid to numerical ageing (increasing numbers at any age).
This paper draws heavily on my book, at a final editing stage: Peopling and Development in a Settler State: New Zealand 1769 to the 2010s
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Notes
- 1.
Forthcoming, Wellington, Victoria University Press. Easton very generously made a pre-publication e-copy available to me and gave me permission to cite from it, which I have done in my forthcoming book. As pagination was still tentative, I have cited chapters.
- 2.
Anglo-America; Australasia; Japan; plus, northern, western (including Austria) and Mediterranean Europe.
- 3.
In the book I am currently finishing, and in Pool 2015, I criticise this model as it applies to the colonial situation and indigenous minorities in developed countries and the way it was applied in the development decades. But that said, I must also agree with Malmberg and Lindh (2006) that this has been the most powerful model projecting world trends—the world has gone through the Notestein transition; my problem expressed below is that its policy elements were implemented with missionary zeal.
- 4.
Between 1978 and 2005 I was involved frequently in analysing and recommending strategies of population and development performed in statistical planning of Finance Ministry Units across the Third World. My work mainly in francophone or anglophone Africa. I co-authored major reports on this work for individual countries and for Asia and Asia-Pacific and sole-authored a global synthesis including also Latin America and the Middle East. All were published by United Nations agencies, without attribution, as is the normal protocol in some multi-lateral agencies (UNFPA 1989).
- 5.
Population as a factor of development emerged as an urgent issue after the publication of the United Nations 1960 projection series. They showed that unless population growth was curtailed severely numbers would double. The response was to turn to contraception as the singular means of slowing increases in growth (mortality was starting to decline yet fertility levels were still very high.) This would spur development, it was argued, and in turn would hold back the spread of communism, which American liberals of the day greatly feared. ‘Modernisation’ was seen as ‘advanced’ and ‘intrusions’ of a ‘social engineering’ sort should be undertaken to achieve this goal (Rostow 1960, Chap. 2).
- 6.
The use of the pill in this context was long restricted because of patenting rights that were lifted in the 1870s making these at long last available although still a somewhat more costly option. But, perhaps of more immediate importance was the introduction of tubal ligations, gradually replacing the widespread use of IUDs, as a day surgery procedure—even carried out on sheets in open fields in India and Nepal, where demand was such that women descended, then reclimbed, 100 s of metres from their mountain villages. But this still did not meet a new set of sexually active people—the young leaving rural villages for cities, and thus outside community control. A new generation of condoms, backed up by legal abortion where this was permitted, addressed some of this need.
- 7.
A commonplace view favouring zero population growth is misplaced. Clearly carbon footprints would decline, but the age-structures would become very distorted making development trends fluctuate wildly and, anyway, could be achieved only through massive social engineering. In this regard, China’s disastrous one-child policy is a cautionary tale about the perils of attempting to bring fertility down to low sub-replacement levels.
- 8.
The world as a whole is moving towards this level, and large areas are already at-sub-replacement.
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Pool, I. (2021). The Widening and Deepening of Human Capital. In: Cochrane, W., Cameron, M.P., Alimi, O. (eds) Labor Markets, Migration, and Mobility. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 45. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9275-1_2
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