Population, Fear, and Uncertainty : The Global Spread of Fertility Decline

The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. This eye-opening book looks at demographic trends in Europe, North America, and Asia-areas that now have low fertility rates-and argues that there is an essential yet often neglected politicaldimension to a full assessment of these trends. Political decisions that promote or discourage marriage and childbearing, facilitate or discourage contraception and abortion, and stimulate or restrain immigration all have played significant roles in recent trends.

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. He is the author of Dreams of Peace and Freedom and Remembering War, and coeditor of The Great War and the Twentieth Century. Michael Teitelbaum is a senior adviser at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York and Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is the author of The British Fertility Decline and coauthor of Political Demography, Demographic Engineering. Together, Winter and Teitelbaum have coauthored two previous books: The Fear of Population Decline and A Question of Numbers: High Migration, Low Fertility, and National Identity. Population, Fear, and Uncertainty is the third in their series of books on population change in historical perspective.