POPULATION ISSUES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARYFOCUS edited by Leo van Wissen and PearlDykstra. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers,New York, 1999. No. of pages: xv� 287. Price: US59.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 306 46196 X.

This book highlights the results of a substantialprogramme of demographic research ± the PriorityProgramme on Population Issues ± sponsored bythe Netherlands Organization for Scienti®c Re-search (NWO) in 1990 and completed in 1998. Eventhe 287 pages of the book cannot do justice to thenumerous research projects funded by the pro-gramme; a review can only give a ¯avour of theachievement. But it does provide a convenient hookon which to hang some preliminary commentsabout the international position of demographicstudy in the Netherlands and its favourite topics.The book underlines how far Dutch demography

punches heavier than its weight. The contributionsof Dutch demographers to demographic theory andknowledge, especially to event history analysis andother methodologies and to concepts of recentdemographic and cultural change, have been outof proportion to the small size of the population ofthe Netherlands or of its academic community. Thisre¯ects both the excellence of the universityinstitutions where demography is studied, and alsothe seminal contribution made to demographic andrelated studies by the Netherlands InterdisciplinaryDemographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague.

Most of the nine thematic chapters in the book arebased on Dutch demographic material. Each isdensely packed, summarising work already pub-lished in dozens of papers and books. The intro-duction by the editors is perhaps the most wide-ranging and provoking of all. It raises serious issuesabout the nature and limitations of demography,proposed as an `object' science de®ned by subjectmatter of three behavioural domains (fertility,mortality and migration) and their manifestationsat macro-level of population. The resulting strengthof demography is an emphasis on measurementand number. The downside is weakness of theoryand explanation. According to van Wissen andDykstra (and I agree), demography has insuf®cientviews of its own about the basic mechanismsbehind human behaviour. Instead, other behaviour-al and social sciences hold the keys to relationsbetween demographic events and behaviour ofindividuals and systems. Life course ± event history± analysis is presented as a way to move demo-graphy beyond description to explanation, byorganising the transitions and trajectories of the lifecourse in a way that permits logical and essentiallyinterdisciplinary analysis of events and their ag-

gregation, including the effects of context and socialstructure and legal as well as psychological factors,and the effects of previous transitions and those ofother members of the family or household. Thebook's 287 pages are in some respects a hymn tolife-course analysis, presented as the new paradigmin demography and social science in general.Only a few of the many points of unusual interest

in the book can be noted here, by way of illustration.An admirable theoretical beginning presents anambitious model of man as a limited agent withonly partial knowledge and partial powers, withconsequences at best only partly intended. Thepolitical, cultural and economic context of humanaction is seen as offering resources (opportunities)as well as constraining human behaviour (rules).Human behaviour is the outcome of the interactionof preferences, opportunities and rules, and socialsystems continuously reproduced and changed byoutcomes of human action. Two dimensions arepresented as being crucially important in explain-ing change. The ®rst of these is the age dimension:life events and life-course analysis (microbiogra-phy). The second is the time dimension: historicalevents, changes in economy, technology, law andnorms (cohort analysis; macrobiography).Imperfections of rational choice are emphasised:

ignorance, mistakes, the inability to make choices.One of the more valuable consequences of Will-ekens' modelling is that it re-af®rms the importanceof randomness in human outcomes. At a time ofrelative eclipse of geography, space is re-af®rmedas being important. Resources are often ®xed(re¯ecting past patterns of investment); spatialmobility of individuals compensates and exploits.Spatial structure also contributes to inequality.Feedback systems ensure that areas with low®nancial and cultural capital will not attractinvestment, leading to further downgrading. Theethnic dimension is an important component here(although not treated empirically in the book).The adoption of the life course as a theoretical

framework makes microsimulation models essen-tial to handle individual-level uncertainty, in theview of these authors, as part of a shift indemography from formal analytical demographyto substantive/explanatory demography; fromelaborate, clear-cut mathematical models to under-standing demographic behaviour and social con-sequences of demographic change. More strongclaims include the following: population forecastsare the root of demography as a discipline; thecohort is still a strong concept; the theoreticalprimacy of the individual in transforming socialstructure. Household decision-making can be moreimportant than individual decision-making. This

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 245±256 (2000)

254 Book Reviews

affects residential location choice strongly, forexample, because of the growth in the number oftwo-earner households. At the national level,demography drives housing. At the local level,supply of housing drives demography throughresidential mobility; 80% of supply is the result ofmoves ± unintended consequences of individualaction.Two orders of social consequence of demo-

graphic trends are emphasised: direct effects ofthe changing size and behaviour of subpopulations(e.g. growth of one-person households). Second-order effects often have a time lag. Low fertility inthe 1960s with increase dependency burdens after2000. Here the second-order effect is the threat toreduce state pensions. The life course emphasis isclaimed to show that a wealth of information anddiversity of individual experience is hidden behindmany conventional measures, provoking the con-®dent, almost neo-Marxist claim that the `era ofhypothesis was over; now is the time to test them'.Life-course analysis emphasises the notion ofcontingency; what happens (e.g. on incompatibilityof family and career) depends on sex, event (weakfor cohabitation, strong for children), age orcountry. Lives are interwoven ± transitions of onefamily member (marriage, divorce) change thechances for the rest as well.Fertility in the Netherlands continues, it seems,

little affected by its context. Marriage withoutcohabitation is becoming rare, cohabitation withoutsubsequent marriage becoming common, while sofar no substantial increase in childlessness is visibleyet. Only 7% of women born during 1963±68intended to be childless. No single sequence offamily household formation is yet emerging, thuscreating the biggest diversity of personal experiencepossibly for centuries. An intriguing point wasmade that while cohabitation represented a lowerlevel of commitment as revealed by its doubledbreak-up rate, it does have the bene®t of removingthe need for high-cost search for partners when it isdif®cult to assess prospects. The welfare state haschanged the context of decision-making. It breaksthe link between family formation decisions andpersonal circumstances (more or less what Malthussaid 202 years ago, of course). Recent bene®treductions may have delayed family formation: atopic ripe for further exploration.Medicine added 3±4 years to the life expectancy

of the Dutch from 1952 to 1982. Simple assumptionsabout the problem of independence of death ratesby cause give the largest gains to elimination ofheart disease, while more complex assumptionsabout non-independence make progress againstcancer just as important statistically. In the past,

culture (religion) retarded the decline in infantmortality rates by affecting patterns of hygiene andbreast-feeding. Then, deaths fell strikingly from1970, especially IHD and accidents. Smoking was acrucial factor (not diet). Some worsening of mortal-ity was apparent among the 85-year-olds in 1980±90(chronic lung disease, mental disorders, diabetes).Reduction of smoking ®rst reduces costs of health-care, but in the longer term costs increase thanks tolonger survival. The life course perspective warnsthat differential mortality makes the Dutch welfaresystem slightly less progressive, leading higherincome groups to receive more than expected fromthe system.Special features of Dutch demographic tradition

are revealed by the book: research very wellplanned in a sequential fashion; much thoughtgiven to the intellectual framework; a high degreeof methodological innovation; emphasis on lifecourse and microsimulation and on the sense ofuncertainty in individual action; independence ofthe individual; limitations of demographic speci®-cation; linkage of detailed demographic analysis toproblems of ageing and spatial distribution andhousing; nationwide collaboration between a largenumber of scientists; and an obsession with plan-ning.No programme or volume (or review, for that

matter) can be perfect. In emphasising micro-approaches the research synthesised here seemedto be moving towards `demography without popu-lation'. What about an optimum population for theNetherlands, given former Dutch anxieties about(excess) population size? After all, everything else isplanned. If regional populations, why not the total?Malthusian notions ± feedbacks between popula-tion size and individual behaviour ± althoughconsidered, did not ®gure prominently. Nonethe-less, they arise whenever the issues of affordabilityand sustainability emerge. Is the end of naturalincrease and the eventual prospect of populationdecline of at least the Dutch part of the populationreally so unimportant that it deserved such rela-tively modest attention? In fairness, however, itshould be added that these issues ± populationageing at least ±have received much attention fromDutch demographers elsewhere and might havebeen thought not to need repetition in thisprogramme. It seemed surprising that no chapterwas devoted speci®cally to fertility, althoughfertility did make several guest appearances. Is thisbecause it is not yet subject to planning? The biggestproblems of understanding in demography of thedeveloped world are the reasons for the baby boomand bust and today's persistence of low fertility,including the reasons for delaying fertility and

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 245±256 (2000)

Book Reviews 255

choosing to remain childless. In this context, there ismuch interest elsewhere in period parity and otheralternative measures of fertility. Have Dutch demo-graphers already ®nally sorted all these things out?Or are they too much on the aggregate side to beconsidered in the brave new world of event historyanalysis? On the explanatory side, the culturaltheories of demographic transitions and contrastsbased on value shifts, to which Dutch-speakingdemographers have made the most importantcontributions, received no synthetic treatmentalthough alluded to on many pages.

In England our cuisine is accused of being `chipswith everything'. There is perhaps a danger thatDutch demography, as represented by this book,might be seen as `event history analysis witheverything'. The merits of life course versuspopulation level analysis are pitched strong. Forexample: `Demographic change (at the populationlevel or between cohorts) is the consequence of

changes in the lives of people and the under-standing of demographic change is contingent onthe understanding of life histories ¼ biographicchange provides the micro-foundation of de-mographic change. That point of view is acceptedby an increasing number of demographers. Popula-tion level theories and methods of analysis ofdemographic change are no longer adequate whenthat view is adopted'.

At the beginning of the scienti®c revolution,Anthony van Leeuwenhoek gave Europe a newwindow on the micro-world with his microscope atthe same time as Johannes Kepler revealed theheavens with his telescope. I hope Dutch demogra-phers too will turn their talents to the larger as wellas the smaller scale in the new century.

DAVID COLEMAN

University of Oxford, UK

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 245±256 (2000)

256 Book Reviews