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Portrait of America describes our nation's changing population and examines through a demographic lens some of our most pressing contemporary challenges, ranging from poverty and economic inequality to racial tensions and health disparities. Celebrated authorJohn Iceland covers various topics, including America's historical demographic growth; the American family today; gender inequality; economic well-being; immigration and diversity; racial and ethnic inequality; internal migration and residential segregation; and health and mortality. The discussion of these topics is informed by several sources, including an examination of household survey data, and by syntheses of existing published material, both quantitative and qualitative. Iceland discusses the current issues and controversies around these themes, highlighting their role in everyday debates taking place in Congress, the media, and in American living rooms. Each chapter includes historical background, as well as a discussion of how patterns and trends in the United States compare to those in peer countries.

This paper explores the role of gender equality over a long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized countries. Our unified cliometric growth model of female empowerment suggests that changes in gender relations are a key ingredient of economic development. The economy evolves from a Malthusian regime--with slow technological progress, low income and low fertility--to a Modern Growth regime, with high living standards and low fertility. The rise in technological progress, together with improvements in gender equality, generates a positive feedback loop that engages the process of human capital accumulation (economic transition) and triggers the demographic transition.

The world population will reach 7 billion in late 2011, a demographic milestone that is causing renewed attention to the challenges caused by population growth. This article looks at the last 50 years of demographic change, one of the most extraordinary periods in demographic history. During this period, world population grew at rates that have never been seen before and will almost surely never be seen again. There were many concerns about the potential impact of rapid population growth in the 1960s, including mass starvation in countries such as India, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and increased poverty in low-income countries. The actual experience was very different. World food production increased faster than world population in every decade since the 1960s, resource prices fell during most of the period, and poverty declined significantly in much of the developing world. The article considers the economic and demographic explanations for the surprising successes of this important period in demographic history. It also looks at regions that have been less successful, especially Africa, and at the lessons for dealing with the important challenges that still remain.

The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Furthermore, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways, based on separate instrumental-variable models that instrument fertility by sex ratios and education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg. Education in 1849 also predicts the fertility transition in 1880-1905.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that population shocks such as the repeated outbreaks of the plague affected the timing of the demographic transition. The empirical analysis uses disaggregate data from Germany and exploits geographic variation in the exposure to medieval plague shocks. The findings document that areas with greater exposure to plague outbreaks exhibited an earlier onset of the demographic transition. The results are consistent with the predictions of the unified growth literature and provide novel insights into the largely unexplored empirical determinants of the timing of the transition from stagnation to growth.

What are the origins of differences in the pace of the demographic transition across African societies, and how do these differences affect economic development? We address this question by analyzing the average and heterogeneous effects of colonial-era Christian missionary activity on human capital accumulation, fertility, and wealth in Nigeria. Our identification strategy exploits discontinuities in mission stations around the borders of some Emirates of Northern Nigeria where missions were restricted from operating by the colonial administration. We find that areas with greater historical missionary activity have higher levels of schooling, lower fertility, and higher household wealth today. The long-run effect of missions is not found in areas with early access to government schools, and is larger for population subgroups—women and Muslims—that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education. Importantly, we show that the restriction of missions in some Emirates of Northern Nigeria has led to a reversal of fortunes, wherein areas that were more institutionally developed in the precolonial period are relatively poorer today as a result of a slower pace of the demographic transition. The findings support the predictions of the unified theory of economic growth, whereby technological advancement leads to greater demand for education, triggering a fertility decline and resulting in higher incomes.

Is the world converging to a single demographic regime? Or are groups of countries following distinct paths through the process of demographic transition? The answers to these questions are pivotal to our understanding of the nature and mechanisms of population change. They are also key elements for deriving the assumptions that should underlie population projections. There has been considerable interest in global demographic convergence during the last decade, with most work drawing on statistical methods that are widely used in economics. This article takes a different approach to most of the existing literature, examining the fertility and mortality trajectories over time that various appropriately defined world regions have followed. The data suggest that five distinct regional histories can be traced in mortality, and three in fertility, and that global convergence has moved more rapidly and unambiguously in fertility than in mortality.

Adverse consequences of floods change in time and are influenced by both natural and socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth (‘normalized’) have been limited in temporal and spatial extent, leading to an incomplete representation of trends in losses over time. Here we utilize a gridded reconstruction of flood exposure in 37 European countries and a new database of damaging floods since 1870. Our results indicate that, after correcting for changes in flood exposure, there has been an increase in annually inundated area and number of persons affected since 1870, contrasted by a substantial decrease in flood fatalities. For more recent decades we also found a considerable decline in financial losses per year. We estimate, however, that there is large underreporting of smaller floods beyond most recent years, and show that underreporting has a substantial impact on observed trends. Flooding may cause loss of life and economic damage, therefore temporal changes need assessment. Here, the authors show that since 1870 there has been an increase in area inundated by floods in Europe, but a reduction in fatalities and economic losses, although caution that smaller floods remain underreported.

Advanced economies undergo three transitions during their development: (1) transition from a rural to an urban economy, (2) transition from low-income growth to high-income growth, (3) transition from high fertility and mortality rates to low modern levels. The timings of these transitions are correlated in the historical development of most advanced economies. I consider a nonlinear model of endogenous long-run economic and demographic change, in which child quantity-quality substitution is driven by declining child mortality. Because the model captures the interactions between all three transitions, it is able to explain three additional empirical patterns: a declining urban-rural wage gap, a declining rural-urban family size ratio, and most surprisingly, that early urbanization slows development. This third prediction distinguishes the model from other theories of long-run growth, and I document evidence for it in cross-country data.

BACKGROUND In the absence of high-quality data, the death tolls of epidemics, conflicts, and disasters are often estimated using ad hoc methods. One understudied class of methods, which we term the growth rate discontinuity method (GRDM), estimates death tolls by projecting pre-crisis and post-crisis total population estimates using crude growth rates and then subtracting the results. Despite, or perhaps due to, its simplicity, this method is the source of prominent death toll estimates for the Black Death, the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Chinese Famine, and the Rwandan genocide, among others. OBJECTIVE In this article, we review the influence and validity of GRDM and its applications. METHODS Using statistical simulation and comparison with better-validated demographic methods, we assess the accuracy, precision, and biases of this method for estimating mortality in absolute and relative terms. RESULTSWe find that existing GRDM estimates often misestimate death tolls by large, unpredictable margins. Simulations suggest this is because GRDM requires precision in its inputs to an extent rarely possible in the contexts of interest. CONCLUSIONS If there is sufficient data to specify GRDM well, it is probably possible to also use a more reliable method; if there is not sufficient data, GRDM estimates are so sensitive to their assumptions that they cannot be considered informative. CONTRIBUTION These findings question the empirical suitability of existing demographic and econometric work that has used GRDM to analyse mortality crises. They also underscore the need for improved data collection in crisis settings and the utility of qualitative methods in contexts where quantification using better-validated methods is not possible.