I want to move on today something rather different, namely not so much the pattern of fertility and the level of fertility and the trend of fertility,
but rather the setting of fertility and more broadly,
the circumstances under which men and women have lived together in in Europe over the last half a century or so.
Other remarkable transitions which have taken place over that time.
You'll recall that right at the beginning we started talking about the the so-called West European marriage pattern and the contrast which
that was claimed to have with the marriage patterns of Eastern Europe to the east of so-called Hindoos line and generally speaking,
with the rest of the world. Not to say that the rest of the world or east of Europe was homogeneous in any way.
Not to say that west of Muslim was homogeneous.
Nonetheless, there were there were distinct patterns in terms of later marriage, in terms of the nuclear family based household,
which seemed to be rather consistently different and arguably important for the social economic future of those different areas of the world.
Well, things, of course, are now changing. And we have seen in the last 50 years, certainly in my lifetime,
an extraordinary transformation, certainly in setting a facility in the popularity of marriage,
in the popularity of of alternatives to marriage, in conjunction with changes in the birth,
in conjunction with radical changes in social and behavioural attitudes and behaviour which follows from them.
And this this package of behaviour and this package of changing attitudes goes under the heading of the second demographic
transition and the transformation of the West European marriage pattern and the the the rise of the second demographic transition.
It's possible a journey into universality, according to its proponents, is one to talk about today.
This is one indicator of what's been happening to marriage in Western Europe, using England and Wales as the example,
what you see here is the change in the mean age of marriage from the nineteen
from 1889 and the far left over to this table of 1889 here of up to 2001.
Over here, the blue line, the median age of unmarried men at marriage.
And the red line is women ages, unmarried women who then called spinsters at marriage, as you can see right into the 1930s,
hovering around a median age of about 25 for girls and about 27, 28 for four young men.
In fact, if anything, increasing in means age.
So no decay of that aspect to the West European marriage pattern evident at all right up to the eve of the Second World War.
And you can see the unevenness here arising out of the the turmoil of the Second World War,
followed by the this remarkable decline in median age of marriage, going hand in hand with a huge popularity, new popularity of marriage.
95 percent of the people born around the time that I was born eventually got married.
Most unusual in Western European traditions. And then almost as soon as it appeared, by the time we get to the to the early 70s, it goes into reverse.
And we see this increase in the age of marriage, a hitherto unprecedented levels to about 30 or so.
Now over thirty four young men and approaching thirty for women.
Now, ten years after this graph is drawn, is gone even higher.
And that, of course, has gone up not just with a delay in marriage,
but also a reduction in the popularity of marriage and a transformation of the whole setting for family life and for reproduction.
This is generally mimicked over the rest of Western Europe and also in other parts of Europe as well.
Even more interestingly, what we see here is groups of countries, the unweighted mean of the average age of first marriage groups of countries.
These are for women. The blue line here is, is Scandinavia, as always, in the vanguard of social change in these respects,
mean age of marriage rising up to nearly 30 women higher than in in in Western Europe in green here.
This is north Western Europe. That's Britain, Belgium, France and other countries in that general area following very close behind.
Even in southern Europe, something similar has happened,
a later change over the changeover in Scandinavia started to happen in the 1960s, as you can see in southern Europe.
It didn't happen until until the 1970s, but still falling very much the same pattern.
And more interesting, perhaps, is what's been going on in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union.
You'll recall there was just this very surprising,
perhaps paradoxical fact that communism supposedly and regarded by many as being progressive, modernising, updating kind of procedure,
breaking old traditions and opening up possibilities for all kinds of new behaviour,
reinforced the traditional differences between Eastern and Western Europe.
As far as marriage was concerned, marriage remained near.
A universal marriage were made early on the communism. It was not, as you might have expected, sort of modernised in remade later and more optional.
And you can see here in the blue line, which is for Central and Eastern Europe and the Purple Line,
which is the former Soviet Union, that Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus and all that lot military marriage was actually becoming even even younger women over the course of the of the 50s and 60s and 70s,
right up to the end of communism.
So by the time we get to 1989, mediation marriage was just about 22 for both groups of countries, compared with 26, 28 in the rest of Europe.
Once communism evaporated, all that changed very radically,
something which will come back to later on because it's rather remarkably rapid change and it's also a kind of Springle,
these countries bounce back to the sort of level of media matters which they would have had decades earlier
if they had shared with the kind of patterns which Western Europe had been developing over that time.
More on that later, but certainly a major and very sudden transformation.
Hand in hand with a delay in marriage is a decline in the popularity of marriages are merely numbers.
Thousands of marriages in England and in the U.K., sorry, from 1951 to 2009, as you can see,
all marriages, the light blue almost halved, maybe down to to about 60 percent of the previous level.
First marriages down to about half of the previous level. And this time figure is in the population, which is increasing.
So the actual rate is declining even faster than these numbers would lead one to suppose.
A lot of these changes, the concomitant reduction in middle age in popularity of marriage, the increase in the mean age delay,
its avoidance of the accompanying patterns of cohabitation of of reproduction outside of marriage,
go under a bundle of patterns, both of behaviour and of underlying attitudes under the heading of the second demographic transition.
This is one of the most influential models and and ideas in contemporary demography, in particular to pioneers in the low countries.
Dirk Van de Car and Ron Lithographer. We'll hear a lot more.
They they observe these these empirical changes going on of an unprecedented kind in Western Europe, really starting in the 1960s,
and and developed a theory to explain not only what was happening, but also why it was happening, which is outlined in this graph here.
There's this undoubted empirical evidence of these very substantial changes in marriage, cohabitation, births, outside marriage, divorce,
new patterns of upbringing for children going from one kind of family to another rather than
being remaining with their biological parents for as long as their biological parents live,
for the most part, replaced by all this cohabitation and delay of marriage and all the rest of it.
And as far as they were concerned, also also going with the low fertility which followed the baby boom when marriage became less popular,
when the retreat for marriage began in the 1960s. That was also the beginning of the decline of the birthrate from the baby boom
peak of a reproduction rate above replacement level down to much lower levels.
Indeed, by the time we get to the 1980s, the so-called lowest low fertility, which we talked about before,
that is to say birth rates equivalent to less than one point three children per woman,
which of course, bring with them a very strong indications of a population decline and population ageing if they're to be continued.
They put this package of undoubted package of behaviour together with a theory
that this was driven by the spread of new attitudes and values in society,
which they felt were were fundamentally due to the rise in prosperity, to the rise of welfare,
to the accompanying increase in secular thinking and high levels of education,
which satisfied how satisfied earlier material needs and enable people to, as it were,
be emancipated and do their own thing to think about new ways of behaving,
not to be so bound by notions of duty to God and to parents and to peers and to society, but rather to,
as it were emphasised, the duty they had to themselves to to develop their own interests,
their own inclinations, without quite so much constraint from traditional pressures,
a set of attitude which they described as following Robert Englehardt, rather, using the rather unsatisfactory term of post materialism,
post materialist values, or the kind which went hand in hand with post terrorist behaviour in the form of new ways of family life,
new low levels of reproduction, according to the theories of Mazo and Engelhart, which say which they translated, as it were, into demographic terms.
These changes inevitably follow once a society became educated, a liberal, materially prosperous enough to devise welfare systems,
to insulate people, as it were, from the consequences of their own behaviour. And as such.
Insofar as development, economic development would be would become universal insofar as the development of secular,
more educated attitudes to life would go hand in hand with that with that prosperity.
All these patterns would eventually became become universal. What was, first of all, back in the 60s,
thought to be an innovation of progressive Scandinavians would in fact be something shared in the very, very long run over the whole world.
And there is certainly some evidence to suggest that this is exactly what's happening.
This is the model of the first and second demographic transition, the first demographic transition starting in the in the well in the 18th century,
as far as the death rate is concerned, in the 19th century, as far as the birth rate is concerned,
this marked reduction in the birth rate from a family size of five or six or seven
down to one of two or three reduction preceding reduction in the death rate,
an intervening period of population growth in green brought to an end as the birth rate fell to become similar to the birth rate.
And then after the beginning of the second demographic transition, these things continuing in ways not expected in the first demographic transition.
The first demographic transition was not unreasonably expected to restore a balanced position of more or less zero population growth,
which it started with back in the in the early 17th century or the 18th century.
That is not what happened. The natural rate of increase fell to below zero and as far as they were concerned, stayed there and would stay there,
that some replacement fertility was a natural concomitant of the the emphasis upon personal satisfaction,
personal realisation of individual needs, rather than the sort of duties which I've been talking about earlier on.
That was one aspect of the second demographic transition, which I thought was important.
They also felt that an increase in migration having been negative emigration predominating in
the first demographic transition to become a positive in the second demographic transition.
Well, we will see. This is a rather idealised version of the the underlying theoretical underpinnings of this second demographic idea.
Abraham Maslow wrote a very influential book in 1954 called Motivation and Personality,
and he felt that one of the one of the major aspects of human development over over centuries was the way in which human society,
human innovation had progressively mastered the various problems and needs which affected human beings,
taking them away from the kind of preoccupations which were more to do with mere survival,
which were shared with animals, the ones at the bottom, because you can't read it.
These are biological and physiological needs. Basic life needs food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
The daily life of the undergraduate, I suppose, but a lot in some respects,
all that different from the kinds of expectations and needs and desires of any animals and birds outside,
followed by safety, needs of protection, security, but more important, order, law, limits on behaviour,
stability of society, contracts and its enforceability and all the rest of it covid-19,
I suppose, in health and safety legislation leading to once those are satisfied,
then then more more humane as well rather than human emotional needs could come to the fore leads for for for family affection,
relationships, companionship,
easy friendship with people at work and neighbourhood and so on and leading up to to to as the most important need of all.
Once all these are satisfied, one's personal security is guaranteed.
You have to you can stop worrying about being being fed tomorrow, being employed tomorrow.
The rest of it self actualisation became important. You could start concentrating much more on your own personal development,
on your unique capacities, your unique ambitions to social self actualisation.
This is a very idealistic way of looking at Maslow's hierarchy.
As you can see, there's no reason why this should happen at once to some extent.
But I think you get the point that it's a kind of emancipation of human society from from basic worries moving on,
as are always worries, I suppose, into more personal concerns about about self actualisation.
This has been put into more empirical forms, more testable forms by Robert Englehardt in particular,
in a very influential book called The Silent Revolution Changing Values and Political Styles of Western Politics,
published in 1977, which have been succeeded by several other.
Volumes exemplifying this idea of providing lots more data for it, perhaps you've come across this already.
He was concerned with with measuring empirically, not just the spread of the behaviour which I've been talking about,
which is quite easily done through demographic and other sorts of information,
but also testing the opinions and values which went with it and which allegedly underpinned it,
measured in tools, all sorts of questionnaires which are now universally applied,
starting off with the European Values Survey, asking a whole battery of questions about attitudes and values,
which is now being developed into the World Values Survey,
which is a tremendous resource easily available from the net, showing that the spread of new values,
attitudes or the persistence of old ones in various countries of the world embracing more and more populations as time goes on.
He devised a rather simple questionnaire to test the extent to which people were
what traditional so-called materialist in their value orientation on the one hand,
and or post materialist, a progressive, more open minded in the others.
And this this questionnaire consisted of of contrasting pairs of questions.
And depending on which of the pair you answered, you will be ticked off as well as more materialist or more positively.
And here here are the first two simple ones. You were invited to ask whether you preferred the idea of maintaining order in the
nation or alternatively giving people more say in the decisions of the government,
fighting rising prices or protecting freedom of speech,
maintaining a higher rate of economic growth, and making sure the country has strong defence forces,
or giving people more say in how things are decided at work and trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful.
You get the picture. Asia has indeed been rather criticised as being essentially Telegraaf versus Gardian.
I imagine if you look at your own consciences and see which ones of these you prefer, then it may be apparent how that how that balances out.
Nonetheless, it has been very widely used, rather more questions than this.
Normally to try and put a population's individuals and countries on a somewhere on a materialist versus personal scale.
So the more the more of the blue questions that are answered, the more materialist the person or the population is judged to be,
the more green, the more materialist, and the more prone to to indulge in behaviour of the kind we've been talking about.
What Vandar Current Lazika did was to take these notions that the basic notions of Mazzello empirical and
testable refinements by Englehardt and his colleagues and turn them into a demographic interpretation
such that they felt that those who were more likely to to adopt a more peaceful terrorist approach
would be those more likely to approve of and indeed participate in cohabitation before marriage.
Delaying or avoiding marriage would be relaxed,
but having having babies outside marriage would not be concerned about the moral anyway aspects of divorce,
whatever their views might be on the practicalities, and would also take a, quote,
progressive, unquote, view about the acceptability of abortion, homosexuality,
the presence of foreigners in different countries and different people from different countries in their communities and all the rest of it,
and vice versa. And this is to a considerable extent what happens.
Here are some examples which which let's start with his colleagues collected a while ago from behaviour and attitudes in Belgium,
France, West Germany and the Netherlands. Quite a large sample of people aged 20 to 29 in your age group.
What they did was to compare the the values expressed by single men living with their parents who are scored as one in
each case compared with those of the same age who are cohabiting in this column and those who are married in that column.
Here are men and women. And you can see that if you look at traditional values like a belief in God,
you find that the married population is three times more likely than cohabiting population in the same countries,
in the same age group to believe in God, that those those are perhaps not surprisingly,
who are cohabiting are only one third as likely to believe in sin as those who are married.
Likewise, differences praying outside church and a curious reversal of belief in reincarnation.
Now, this is not reincarnation as at Easter time.
This is reincarnation, of course, in the. New Age form the sort of rope,
sandals and lentils and certainly Buddhist notion of reincarnation held only by a minority of people that are much more likely
to be held and held by by by the New Age enthusiasts who are cohabiting rather than more traditional folk who are married.
Interesting. Also contrast what justified comparing comparing this to a marriage with those of cohabiting.
So there's those who think that taking drugs is never justified.
That's often to be found amongst those cohabiting.
Predictably, perhaps those who feel that cheating the taxman is OK are twice as likely to be found in cohabiting couples than amongst the married.
Likewise, avoiding fines and even fighting with police appears to be thought to be more OK if your committing well is wrong.
The young of Belgium, France, West Germany and the Netherlands, perhaps here too.
I don't know. I don't know what you get up to on weekends, but it's not all that.
Curiously enough, certain other aspects of a broadly moral thought are not very different between the two groups.
There's general disapproval of littering, of lying, drink driving.
So it's a very particular aspect of behaviour which is which is contrasted by no means all aspects.
And it would be quite wrong to suppose that the one category is generally as well as moral.
Not at all. The empirical evidence for the trends in the total divorce of trend for the second
demographic transition are pretty unequivocal and all really begins in the 1960s.
You may know Batwoman's, they're not parents, Larkin's poet,
where he tells us that traffic congestion and sexual intercourse were invented in 1963 when
it's pretty much true this is the total divorce rate in various different areas of Europe.
The divorce rate is a Humalog of the total fertility rate.
You recall the total fertility rate is the number of babies you acquire over your fertile lifespan as you go.
If you if you experienced the age specific fertility rates of women at different ages at the same point in time,
how many babies would you acquire if things continue as they were?
This is the number of divorces you require if things continue as they were in the earlier question.
And if you are living in the early 1960s, then in most European regions you only have about a 12 percent chance of getting divorced on current rates.
By the time we get up to 2000, it's up to 40 or even 50 percent in Scandinavia and in Western Europe,
rather rather less, while slower change elsewhere are all moving upwards.
You notice that there isn't there in this group anyway any any major downturn.
It's all going the way that Lazaar romantical expected it would go, spreading from one region to another,
not necessarily by diffusion, but by the adoption of similar kinds of patterns of behaviour,
leaving behind the old stability of marriage and moving into a new area of substantial
instability and a considerable likelihood that marriages will will end in divorce.
Marriage in decline, this contrasts to birth cohorts of women, those who are born in 1935,
who who are marrying age in the mid 1960s and slightly later and the 1960 birth cohort.
Who are now who are now aged now, he's 52, who, of course, grew up in a different era sort of era,
you can see on the left hand side here in Sweden, it's down to almost half of proportion ever married.
And about 65 percent of those are women born in 1960 have married and probably even fewer of those whose cohorts are not yet complete,
much less change in Switzerland, substantial change in Finland, Austria, Denmark, France,
less so in Italy and and some of the other southern European countries which aren't on that diagram.
Likewise, the trends in the total first marriage rate,
the total first marriage rate is another one of these period synthetic cohort Humalog of the total fertility rate.
That is to say, this is the number of first marriages that you that you would pick up in the course of
your lifetime up to age 50 if you experienced the age specific first marriage rates,
which are prevalent in the country, are in question.
You may notice something peculiar about this, which is which may throw doubt upon the validity of the measure over here.
Back in the mid 1960s, we have total first marriage rates exceeding one point nought.
Now it will be immediately obvious even to the demographically uninformed, you can't have more than one first marriage each.
But that data, if it's just you are this is a very interesting and good example of the way in which tempo shifts in synthetic cohort period
measures can give you inflated results to your analysis this this impossible figure of more than one first marriage per person.
So this is these are women, I think arises because marriage is becoming more popular and was becoming earlier in the middle of the baby boom.
Forget that was where marriage was increasing. And of course, if you're squeezing more marriages into fewer years and previously was the case,
you're going to get if you sum them across different women,
you're going to get an inflation figure in exactly the same way as a total fertility rate was inflated by tempo
processes here just to say be deflated by tempo processes when things start being delayed and stretched out over time.
Anyway, you can see here that from marriage, the extremely popular in all the regions of Europe which are represented here,
Scandinavia, Southern European, blue, north, west, European, Purple, Central and Eastern Europe, green,
red for the former Soviet Union and orange for the former Yugoslavia, all very popular until until the mid 1970s.
And this precipitous fall begins later, much later in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union once more down to quite low levels.
Now, on the face of it, this would appear to suggest that on these marriage rates,
not much more than 50 percent of women are going to marry in the course of their lifetime,
at least up to age 50 and really want marriage by age 50, then the chances are not all that great will marry at all.
It's certainly got a lot lower,
but it's important to remember that just as as the acceleration of marriage inflated this rate over here back in the 1960s.
So the deceleration of marriage, the delay of marriage is spreading out.
A marriage over time is deflating the indicator. And the cohort rates, which are of course, not yet complete,
do indicate that this is a somewhat pessimistic, if that's the right word, view about the likely future.
It's probably going to end up a sort of 60 to 70 percent marriage in most
groups of countries rather than the 50 to 60 percent which these data indicate.
Another interesting point, just a file away, is that there does seem to be a limit to this gathering decline into a non marital state
in the sense that the levels of have flattened out since since since the early 1990s.
And there's no significant further decline visible in proportions marrying.
So it's much reduced, much delayed, which hasn't gone away.
And more recent data sustain that point of view as well.
Here is births outside marriage and other component of the second demographic transition and empirical package of new demographic behaviour.
Starting off back in 1955, you can see that between 60 and 80 births per thousand births outside marriage and I was births outside marriage,
sort of five to eight percent of the total,
which is very much an historically similar total to that which you saw in the 18th century, the 19th century.
In fact, in the 1950s, proportion of births outside marriage had fallen to the lowest levels seen for a very long time.
Partly, of course, because the advent of contraception made it much easier for those engaged in marital liaisons to suppress the
consequences of the partnership in a way probably much more important for them than for those who are married.
So very low levels of births outside marriage back in the 1950s, going hand in hand with very low rates of divorce, high rates of marriage,
a kind of golden age for traditional behaviour in this respect radically changed, as I mentioned, from the early 60s onwards, particularly fast.
Of course, predictably, in Scandinavia, Western Europe trailing along behind.
So this is English-Speaking. Well, this is this is the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in this respect, as in others,
behaving quite similarly to North Western Europe and Scandinavia, in particular, Western Europe,
following along Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union also increasing,
particularly after 1989 and the southern European trend lagging behind, still pointing in the same direction.
So all happening together along with increase in cohabitation.
The purple here are the proportions unmarried and ever cohabited amongst young men
and women aged 25 to 34 in various European Union countries around the year 2000.
On the left in Sweden and Denmark and France and Finland, as you might imagine, right over on the right is Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain,
the usual suspects in southern Europe, much more resistant to second demographic transition type behaviour,
although by no means ignoring it, as you can see.
And there is an association or sometimes quite a week, one between all these behaviours on the one hand, and personal religious values,
the post materialist score is on the vertical axis and proportion of the population of cohabiting is is on the right.
Not a strong correlation, but there are better examples than that.
Well, that seems to be pretty. Yeah, I just wondering if the values are an inevitable consequence of some kind of material level
and how do they explain the fact that like so what do they say about that kind of variation?
Well, I don't think this argument are not ignorant of the fact that there are important cultural differences
which which which encourage this kind of thinking in some societies and discourages in others.
One of the interesting you might say that Scandinavia, the north west Europe in particular,
were in biological terms, pre adapted to adopt these kinds of attitudes because,
of course, in family structure, they'd be more individually oriented in the past compared with Southern Europe and Eastern Europe anyway,
in the sense that much higher proportions of of families in Scandinavia and north Western Europe,
including Britain, back in the early modern period in the 18th century,
the 17th and 16th century,
were a nuclear family based where elderly parents were not usually living with a young young adult children and being looked after.
It certainly happened to a quite reasonable degree, but it was not the norm.
It was the norm in southern Europe. And you might expect that under those circumstances,
a more family oriented or family culture typical of southern Europe typically or most of the rest of the world,
would tend to be rather more resistant for all sorts of reasons to to accuse
of doing our own thing and ignoring your kin regarding their their opinions.
That examples are not very important. It doesn't work so well in southern Europe or in the Far East, as we will see on.
Some rather glib objections here that you might say you might wonder if it was really a second demographic transition,
but merely following on from the first in some way. Is it really demographic?
Is it really a transition? Does it does the whole package actually make sense, particularly the question of low birthrate?
So come on in a moment.
And also, is it the only way of explaining the radical changes in marital behaviour and so on, which you seen in different parts of Europe?
It seems to work better in some than in others. I hope I can show.
Nonetheless, as many have said, it remains probably the single most frequently cited and used model of demographic
change in Western Europe and the rest of the world at the present time. So it won't do to to try and rubbish it too much.
Some aspects of this may be regarded as merely the continuation of unfinished
business from the first democratic transition and in part a consequence of it.
So some, for starting with K 1991, have insisted.
A more interesting objection, perhaps, is that it doesn't deal with the central issues of demography.
It doesn't have anything directly at all to say about mortality and health.
It doesn't have anything directly to say about migration, which is the major driver of demographic change in most developed countries.
You may say, of course, that insofar as it correctly predicts very low birthrates,
then it may be indirectly predicting high levels of migration as a kind of compensating mechanism.
But that would be, I think, taking things a little bit far.
And therefore, it doesn't have a lot to say about population ageing or population decline as such.
Is it being too nit picking to ask whether it's really a transition?
Perhaps it may be too early to say.
Nonetheless, what we have seen is that it's created a huge element of diversity in those countries where it has become more popular, but it isn't.
These behaviours are not completely displaced. Traditional behaviour.
For example, even in Scandinavia, the proportion of births outside marriage has much exceeded 50 percent.
It's not inexorably going up, but you may have seen it in the previous graph.
The level was somewhat flattening out. So what's been happening is that in in the same countries, in the same populations, in the same communities,
in the same towns, even in the same streets, there'll be some people who will be married.
Some people will be cohabiting, some people with some certain kinds of values, certain people with other kinds of values.
And the more progressive ones, if you like, are not completely eliminating the traditional ones.
And this is a bit of a contrast. If that remains true with the first demographic transition,
the first demographic transition has become more or less universal in the sense that
almost no one has a family size of six or seven and the average is generally very low,
whereas that kind of convergence is not at community level as well as national level is not apparent yet.
In second demographic transition behaviour.
And this is an example of the variety of preferences for living arrangements, as in the 1990s, things have moved on a bit a bit further than this.
But just looking at the at the top line preferred living arrangements for in Austria, 18 percent felt that marriage is preferable.
Czechoslovakia, as it was then 64 percent. Italy, 76 percent.
Netherlands, 48 percent. That may simply reflect as less tolerant, Vanderkam would insist, a different level of acquisition,
a different rate of diffusion, and that eventually, in some decades time, those will be the same and not different.
Here's an example of tremendous variety in the United States, as you may, as you may possibly recognise at the bottom.
But no one. What you got here is a scoring by the his colleagues of second demographic behaviour transmission behaviour at the county level in the US,
a very ambitious exercise in statistics. Second,
demographic transmission behaviour being estimated by an index made up of the proportions who are reported
to be cohabiting and the proportion of births outside of marriage and some other variables I forget anyway,
the ones which are manifesting those things to a higher level.
I call it blue. The blue or you are the more likely you are to live in a country where these things are statistically common.
The redder you are, the more likely you are to be in a population where where most people are married,
where births outside marriage are very infrequent. And all of this, as you might imagine, is the great state of Utah.
Very rare indeed. This is the the central heartland of of conservatism, of the religious right, if I can impose a political notion upon it.
And here is the liberal progressive East Coast and a laid back California,
indulging in behaviour very much more similar to that of north Western Europe and Scandinavia,
and also much more similar to Canada up in the north,
where behaviour is somewhat different from that in the United States and certainly very different from from this.
This is a more conservative area here. So much so that some satirists have imagined that the future might look like that,
that Canada and California and the East Coast might might combine that leaving leaving the rest to a different way of looking at the world,
interestingly enough, and without wishing to divert too much this and flip back second,
this contrast here is alleged by some to have considerable potential political consequences, because while as we will see,
it is not the case that a favour for a second demographic transition behaviour
in terms of cohabitation and so on goes hand in hand with low birthrates, it doesn't.
It's the reverse. Nonetheless, within countries, the less our expectation is roughly expected.
And those, as might seem reasonable, those countries where you're doing our own thing,
where you're putting yourself first to caricature almost those values, are also the ones where birth rates are low and indeed birth rates are low.
In East Coast states, birth rates are low in the non Hispanic populations in California and elsewhere and tend
to be high here in so far insofar as there is a strong religious association there.
According to Eric Kaufmann, that's good news for religion insofar as religion is transmitted from parents of children with a
lot of leakage that will that will benefit the survival and spread of a strong religious values.
It will also have political consequences because these states tend to vote for Mr. Bush and not for Mr.
Obama insofar as as political prejudices and political tastes are inherited from from parents of children,
which they are, but with a very considerable leakage,
then it should be the Republicans have got a built in demographic advantage over Democrats, and in due course, the future may be red.
Now, there are so many other factors affecting politics.
This this is perhaps rather a far fetched notion that it is seriously advanced in some American political science circles.
There's a demographic problem with the Democrats have got to overcome by by by trying harder as well on the political front.
Is this transition just the political aspects of it, if the Republican came to office,
maybe in the top down investment increase, that you might want to be a role model like abortion or gay?
There may be increased political changes that change the demographics, but it's it's it's by no means impossible.
And in authoritarian states, of course, that has is exactly what has happened in Romania being the most dramatic example back in 1966,
I think in the United States politics, that it is inconceivable that something wrong were over, that that could happen.
Not the least, of course, because although Republicans tend to be more and more pro-life than Democrats, generally speaking,
nonetheless, is a very strong American tradition of of the state not interfering in various private matters.
And I thought that would that by itself would be the overwhelming factor which would prevent that happening,
quite apart from the obvious huge political problems, which would cause I to pretend to be a political scientist.
But that's just my view. I would not do any better than yours in that matter.
Is that a question or a stretch? OK, yes.
The transition is not meant to be irreversible. And again, there are small indications that there is a bit of a rebound going on here in terms of now
this is the total first marriage rate is actually creeping up a bit in these countries,
which I have carefully selected to make my point for me. But the increase is not great.
Nonetheless, it is there and we'll have to wait and see if it sustains birth rates can go up as well as down,
as you will recall, from from previous elections.
And again, those are a few carefully selected patterns showing a long term, although slow drift upwards.
There's also the question as to whether all aspects of this transition can be sustainable, particularly in an era of constrained economies.
And even more important, perhaps they are where all populations in the developed world are ageing,
some of them ageing very fast, and this is imposing absolutely unavoidable extra burdens upon the economy.
One of the ways in which the demographic transition behaviours can be sustained is because they can rely upon welfare.
If you've got a welfare cushion which protects you from what in previous decades or previous centuries would have been very dire,
economical consequences of having a baby outside marriage, getting divorced and so on,
then of course, it opens the field for for a wider participation in those behaviours.
If economies become constrained and the considerable welfare costs of that welfare support become more difficult to support,
partly because of adverse economic circumstances,
partly because of competing demands from the older generation, then that it may be that the welfare blanket will will become more moderated.
And it's certainly been revolts in the polling booth against the very,
very high taxation required to sustain the welfare state in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.
And probably know to socialist parties, which have had held sway for 40 years or so in Sweden and Norway,
have been from time to time thrown out of office in the last decade or more, partly as a result of concerns about the tax costs of the welfare system.
It's certainly a coherent concept in the sense that the divorce rate variable,
the cohabitation variable, the birth outside marriage variable all go together quite demonstrably.
Where they were it doesn't fit is in the very important dimension of the birthrate.
International comparisons nowadays show that those countries which have got the most marked manifestation of second demographic transition behaviour,
that is to say, hi births outside marriage, high levels of divorce, cohabitation and so on,
are the ones which have got the highest levels of fertility in the developed world, not the lowest,
which is exactly what you would expect with the contrary,
given that the the the importance of self realisation and what some people would call selfish behaviour or self oriented behaviour anyway,
which is supposed to be characteristic of the underlying values, if you are thinking about me,
you don't want to lumbered with babies for reasons we've got into in previous lectures.
But as you see here, the TFR around 2000 is high, close to two or even above it in those countries where where births outside marriage are.
Competition is common divorce, common, Iceland, Norway, France, Ireland, Denmark, Finland,
the U.K. and so on, very low down here, Italy, Greece, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and so on.
As I mentioned earlier on, statistically speaking, you can't get a TFR of one point,
one point seven or above unless at least 30 percent of births are outside marriage.
That's not a policy. Prescription is simply an empirical observation of contemporary demographic behaviour.
And that's gone hand in hand with the reversal of the international correlation between
women's workforce participation on the one hand and the birth rate over 20 years.
The underlying theory is, in some respects, perhaps a little a little shaky, I mentioned the criticisms made,
but it's not in any in any important way different from the conservative progressive axis of of social behaviour,
which social psychologists have been playing with for quite a long time, as indeed less tolerant than to call themselves state.
It is in some respects an underlying fashion and economic model of the the the capacity, the freedom of action, as it were,
to behave in ways which are described in these various indices, does rely upon a certain level of economic prosperity.
Without that prosperity, you go back down the magic, the scale as you start becoming more concerned with with day to day survival,
more concerned about your standard of living, more concerned with with other material things.
And indeed, they they themselves expected that if if there were major economic downturns,
then opinion would shift back towards a more materialist approach, at least temporarily.
And so in some respects, this is not a purely ideational model like most of these models.
It is related to other aspects of the way the world works and is in some respects
basically based fundamentally an economic model and not just an ideological one.
Finally, there's the question of whether one can find other explanations for behaviour,
which looks like that is the second demographic transition in Central and Eastern Europe,
for example, there was a temporary huge reduction in standards of living.
Once communism collapsed, the guaranteed wage disappeared, even though it might have been bogus,
as the old Soviet gybe was that we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
Nonetheless, there was guaranteed employment, there wasn't any inflation,
and a basic standard was sure that went temporary anyway out of the window once communism collapsed and wasn't replaced by a coherent alternative,
a way of dealing with the economy. And you can see these fat lines.
That's a graph of the real GDP or real net material product, as it was then called in Soviet times,
showing a tremendous dip in after 1989 to much lower levels than previously was the case.
And these are the births outside of marriage in central Eastern European countries,
Bulgaria, Estonia, Belarus, East Germany, Czech Republic at the same time.
So you see this huge reduction in central living happening at the same time as the second demographic transition indicator goes shooting up.
That's not what's meant to happen. It's meant to be a result.
If it is following the Mazlo Englehardt Lisagor model, it's meant to be a response of prosperity and security, not insecurity and problems.
And that's led many to suggest that one of the reasons why marriage has declined so fast versus a major
increase so much in Eastern Europe is is not entirely because there's no second demographic transition,
genuine behaviour. People nowadays are many more prosperous. But but also because in many parts of society,
there is very considerable aname that the Soviet period damaged or destroyed the previous religious
based approach to morality and replaced it with some what some called socialist morality.
When that disappeared, then it's left something of a moral vacuum and that is led to very radical changes
which can't possibly be explained in terms of prosperity in Eastern Europe.
Here's the number of births outside marriage in various European countries, Eastern European countries shooting up after that transition.
Likewise, we have curious patterns happening in East Asia.
It is certainly true that mediumship marriage is going up there from quite low levels.
These populations, Far East, if you like, a final line typically at very early ages of marriage, 20, 21, 22.
For women, those have increased substantially. But that seems to me to be better explained simply in terms of modernisation of a hugely educated,
hugely successful society which has overtaken the West in many indicators of survival and of individual prosperity.
I guess that's out of place. So I'll leave. That is certainly the case that a yes or an unheard of proportions of women never married.
That, too, is growing. Previously, the proportion of women never marrying was very, very low.
You see, amongst the Malaysian Chinese in 1960,
eighty three point eight percent had never married by by by by age thirty thirty four, only two point six percent by age 40 to 44.
And similarly in Taiwan, one point three percent. Japan, three point two percent or below 10 percent now.
By the year 2000, either approaching 10 percent or even in Bangkok, 20 percent.
Is this simply modernisation that they're delaying marriage and avoiding marriage and then
and or is it part of because of the much better possibilities of education and career,
or is it something to do with the spread of new values as well?
The.
The answer to that so far seems to be not much, because these are proportional births, outside marriages, which you'd have thought would have gone up.
Likewise, if that had been there's been symptoms of the second demographic transition behaviour and they're not the Cerillo.
This is a burst of marriage per thousand two thousand three thousand twenty four thousand forty four thousand two percent to four percent.
I haven't got much data, but this is for Japan. This is for Taiwan.
And that's for for Hong Kong. So very mixed messages from from the from East Asia.
So to conclude, while many aspects of the old West European system have gone, some have remained somewhat like a late marriage,
like delayed marriage, like proportions never marrying, are becoming common in areas where previously they were not common.
So in some respects, it's not dead becoming universal.
In other respects it has gone because the constraint of not having births outside marriage is is vanishing and such behaviour is very,
very common and universal. The transition is not complete.
It may not become complete and as I mentioned,
may end up with a situation of greater diversity rather than a complete switchover from one sort of pattern of behaviour and demography to another.
And in some areas, like in Central and Eastern Europe, like in the Far East, second, demographic transition models are only one possible example.
One possible explanation for what is certainly a very interesting transformation in behaviour and that I'm to stop.
Thank you very much.