Emily Klancher Merchant

Contributors was published in DNA, Race, and Reproduction on page 237.

Climate change is among the most urgent challenges of our time. While often considered a problem for the natural and physical sciences, the humanities and social sciences have made equally important interventions into research on the reciprocal relationship between humans and our climate. Because demography occupies the intersection of the natural and social sciences, and because it deals specifically with rates of change in social and natural processes, we believe it can make valuable contributions to the pressing imperatives of understanding and addressing climate change and mitigating the harms it is already visiting on the world’s most vulnerable people. We also believe that climate change may afford demographers an opportunity to expand our capacity to think about time and space at finer scales, and to examine the relationships among the core demographic processes – mortality, fertility and migration – which have typically been considered in isolation from one another. Yet responsibly leveraging climate change to advance demography, and leveraging demography to advance climate science and policy, require a cognizance of history that will assist demographers and those who use our analyses in avoiding the replication of past harms and, we hope, the invention of new ones. Understanding the history of demography and of population-environment thought more broadly can help us challenge assumptions that have not served science or policy well in the past – such as the assumption that larger or faster-growing populations necessarily put more pressure on the environment, independent of structural conditions – and consider alternative theoretical framings that might lead to better scientific models and policy solutions.

Slouching Towards Utopia presents a whirlwind history of the political economy of the world during what J. Bradford DeLong calls the "long twentieth century" from 1870 to 2010. Yet it suffers from three problems that could be addressed through a deeper engagement with science and technology studies: technological determinism, economic absolutism, and economic realism. Technological determinism is the description of technological change as inevitable and proceeding according to its own logic. In Slouching Towards Utopia, DeLong presents technology as the primary driver of economic growth but never explores how technology itself changes. He explains that

This commentary expands on Burt's concept of downward causation to include any association between genomic variants and a given outcome that is forged through social practices rather than biochemical pathways. It proposes the social stratification of population, through which endogamy over a period of generations produces allele frequency differences between socioeconomic strata, as a mechanism of downward causation.

Over the past 40 years, the focus of demography has expanded beyond the causes and consequences of population growth (and how to stem it) into the causes and consequences of socioeconomic inequality and health disparities, giving rise to new data sources: large-scale longitudinal cohort studies. More recently, these studies have begun to collect a variety of biomarkers, including DNA and epigenetic measures. This chapter explains the three ways in which demographers have used genomic and epigenetic data (epigenetic dependent variables with socioeconomic independent variables, genomic control variables with biomedical dependent variables, and genomic independent variables with socioeconomic dependent variables) and the key findings from each type of research. It describes the shift from candidate gene studies to genome-wide association studies and explores ongoing challenges with using genome-wide association studies and the polygenic scores they produce in demographic research.

The articles in this special section focus on the use of computer programs and technology to input, store, analyze, and disseminate information about population and c information gathered from various census studies, statistics, and demographic studies. The articles in this issue engage with that history, exploring the impact of rapid technological change on demographic understanding and the parallel ways that the need to analyze population dynamics spurred the development of newtechnologies. Our contributors tell stories of how governments, social scientists, and private industry have perceived, utilized, and preserved demographic data using a variety of information technologies, and how they promoted the development of information technologies to suit their analytic needs. Their work provides a series of examples, in which innovations in computing technology are embedded in the analysis of population dynamics. These stories go beyond the process of counting the number of inhabitants of the United States, and reveal the variety of ways that our understanding of human population has been studied since the time of the U.S. Constitution.

Demography, the social science of population studies, has changed dramatically over the past forty years, responding to a dual crisis of funding and moral legitimacy that hit the field in the mid-1970s. This article uses structural topic modeling in conjunction with the Oral History Project of the Population Association of America (PAA) to examine how demography survived the crisis. It finds that demographers turned to a new source of funding, the National Institutes of Health, shifted their research focus from overseas population growth to domestic socioeconomic inequality, and transformed the PAA from an interest group for people concerned about population problems to a professional association for academic demographers. These three shifts turned demography into the field it is today.

As anthropogenic climate change threatens human existence on Earth, historians have begun to explore the scientific antecedents of environmental Malthusianism, the idea that human population growth is a major driver of ecosystem degradation and that environmental protection requires a reduction in human numbers. These accounts, however, neglect the antagonistic relationship between environmental Malthusianism and demography, thereby creating an illusion of scientific consensus. This article details the entwined histories of environmental Malthusianism and demography, revealing points of disagreement – initially over methods of analyzing and predicting population growth and later over the role of population growth in ecosystem degradation – and moments of strategic collaboration that benefited both groups of scientists. It contends that the image of scientific consensus in existing histories has lent support to ongoing calls for population control, detracting attention from more proximate causes of environmental devastation, such as polluting modes of production, extractive business practices and government subsidies for fossil fuel development.

The twentieth century saw unprecedented efforts to measure, analyze, and control the world's population. Particularly after World War II, population control and demography—the social science of human population dynamics—developed in tandem and largely through the impetus of U.S.-based philanthropies. This article explains how U.S. actors exercised power over population in sovereign nations throughout the Global South and how demographic theory came to shape population policy worldwide. It contends that U.S.-based philanthropies gained global traction for their population control projects by developing demography as an ally and then leveraging its scientific authority to put population control on the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government and on the nation-building and economic development agendas of countries in the Global South.