Population Growth and Economic Development in Japan

Today there is a plethora of pessimistic literature on the population problems of densely settled agricultural areas. It is matched, if not exceeded, in quantity by the optimistic writings of those who see economic development as a panacea for demographic ills. There is research, too, but the definitions of problems, the analytical approaches, and the conclusions reflect the cleavages of academic specializations. Demographers deprecate the realistic possibilities for economic development and so project present populations into future situations that must be catastrophic if the cynicism concerning economic expansion is justified. Economists analyze the potentialities for development and assume some mystical force in human reactions that automatically reduces rates of population increase as the material basis of living becomes more abundant. Analysis of the relations between population increase and economic development is notably deficient. The difficulty lies deeper than the naïveté of social scientists. That quantitative research for which they are prepared requires statistical materials, but those materials exist primarily for the advanced industrializing economies of Western origin. These are precisely the economies in which the relations between people and economy have been or are in process of being rationalized through controlled human reproduction. The techniques of the historian and the anthropologist must be combined with those of the economist and the demographer for the analysis of social, demographic, and economic relations within prestatistical cultures.